Preacher Boy

by Gwyn GB

  In the kitchen she ran a glass of water for herself from the tap. She wasn’t always the best at watching her hydration levels. There would be times when she’d go for hours without a drop to drink, and it would only be when her throat and mouth were too parched to talk, that she’d remember she had drunk nothing. She’d also not eaten anything, besides chocolate, since lunchtime and it had now gone 11 p.m. Sam had long ago given up on texting her to ask if she’d be home for dinner. They’d come to an agreement that if she turned up then great, dinner was always between six-thirty and seven-thirty, and if she hadn’t appeared by then, he would make a plate up for her. When she looked in the fridge, her dutiful husband had done just that. A portion of what looked like steak pie sat with some new potatoes and vegetables. When Sam had first started doing this for her, the plate had just been covered with a sheet of cling film, but as the months had turned into years, he’d bought her a special lid, a bit like you get on a hotel room service dinner.

  Sandra Barker took her dinner out and looked at it before replacing the lid and returning it to the fridge. She’d take it into work tomorrow and have it for lunch instead, she was too tired to eat.

  Slowly she climbed the stairs, being careful not to disturb anyone. The door to their bedroom was slightly ajar, and so she peeked into the dark room. She could see Sam sleeping, hear his slow rhythmic breathing. She would sleep in the spare room again tonight, avoid disturbing him. Only who was she kidding, it was less spare room and more her room now. What had once been an occasional occurrence had become the norm. It wasn’t that they’d fallen out of love, or that their relationship had gone wrong. It was just he’d got used to her not being around. Besides, Sam snored, and that was a recipe for disaster when it came to getting a much-needed good night’s sleep.

  Then there were the nights when her day job seeped into her dreams. The violence. Bright reds and harsh lights crashed around inside her head and prevented her from resting. She would wake at the slightest noise. Heart pounding at a thousand knots, with a sweat on her skin. The day haunting the night. On those occasions, she’d need to turn on the bedside light. Sometimes she’d have to get up and go watch a bit of inane television before her brain could switch off again. It was hard to do that when you were in the same bed as someone without disturbing them. This arrangement worked for them both.

  By the time she’d been to the bathroom and changed into some pyjamas, Sandra didn’t care about anything except putting her head onto the soft pillow in front of her. She hoped sleep could bring her some respite and get her ready for another busy day ahead.

  Across town in the Docklands, Harrison Lane was still not in bed. Guns N Roses were playing, Sweet Child O’ Mine, accompanied by the rhythmic pounding and whirr of his treadmill. Harrison was pushing himself hard. Sweat poured from his naked torso, his muscles bulked and accentuated. His skin shone and his breath came and went in ferocious bursts. There was a look of steely determination on his face. He didn’t drop his gaze, just kept running and running and running.

  In front of him were two photographs. The first was the woman in the flowery dress, his mother, and the second was the one that Alex Fuller’s mother gave to him.

  He kept running, even pushed up the speed on the treadmill. There was pain on his face, his chest heaved with the exertion, but still he kept on pushing.

  It was only when he’d nothing left in him, when his muscles threatened to betray him and trip him up, that he slowed to a walk before bending over, hands on knees, and tried to find his breath. His entire body grasping for oxygen. At last, he knew he would be able to sleep. He stretched his muscles and finished the bottle of water. Then, with one last glance at the two photographs, he flicked off the lights, headed to the shower, and ultimately bed. He was asleep within fifteen minutes.

  Running until exhausted helped Harrison. Perhaps it was the sheer physical shut-down that took his body into reset mode and allowed him to brush aside clutter. Or maybe it was the quality of sleep which gave him clarity. Either way, it worked. Harrison woke up the next morning with a clear vision of the way forward in his mind. He knew where Cameron had gone.

  32

  It was early, not quite 8 a.m., but DCI Barker had already called a team briefing with her lead investigators. DS Salter, Sergeant Evans, DCs Oaks and Johnson, were all in her office at the conference room table. In front of them was a pile of croissants and takeaway coffees.

  Sandra thought Jack looked slightly better this morning. Still had the bags under his eyes, but he looked a little less haggard than he had of late.

  ‘Good night?’ she asked him, without going into any detail in front of the rest of the team.

  ‘Much better, thanks,’ Jack replied. It had been much better too. Marie was trying to communicate now, to express what she was feeling, and they’d both felt more relaxed than they had done in weeks. Perhaps the drop in tension had been picked up by Daniel, because he’d slept through as well. His alarm had woken Jack up for the first time in ages, rather than the baby monitor or Marie getting out of bed because she couldn’t sleep. The relief was palpable.

  Tanya hurried into the room.

  ‘Sorry I’m a little late. Got held up by a problem on the Tube,’ she explained.

  ‘We’ve not started yet.’ DCI Barker smiled at her and noted that even she looked more tired than usual. This case was taking its toll on all of them. She hated to think what state her own face was in. ‘Help yourselves, you lot.’ She gesticulated at the croissants and coffee. ‘You’re not usually so shy.’

  ‘I was waiting to see if the new evidence involved John Platt and his remains first,’ said Jack. ‘I’d rather have my croissant after looking at any images of him if that’s okay. Still haven’t got the smell out of my nose.’ He said it with humour in his voice, but they all understood the sentiment. After attending a body like that, it usually took a couple of days for your nose to forget the stench. It permeated into the membrane of your nostrils and wouldn’t budge, no matter how many times you blew your nose or took a shower.

  ‘So, what have you got for us?’ DCI Barker addressed Sergeant Evans now. He’d texted her late last night to say something had come to light in the evidence they’d collected from Cameron’s flat.

  ‘Well,’ smiled Evans in his warm Welsh lilt, as he reached for a croissant, ‘I might have to keep you in suspense until I’ve eaten all the croissant.’ He had a box next to him and he opened its lid, taking out several bagged items of evidence. He put them on the table in front of them and took a bite of his croissant while the rest of the team took them in.

  DCI Barker picked up what looked to be a woman’s purse. It was old-fashioned, not something you’d get in the shops now, and it had cash in it and an old credit card. Then she looked at another bag, a passport with the name, Joyce Elizabeth Platt, on the front. She opened it to see a thin, pale woman staring back. She didn’t seem to have an ounce of joy in her face, DCI Barker saw nothing but sadness staring back at her.

  ‘The wife’s?’

  Evans nodded with his last mouthful of croissant. DCI Barker passed the items round the table.

  ‘We found her passport, purse with her driving licence, all hidden at the back of John Platt’s wardrobe. Tanya’s team has already gone over them, just his fingerprints and that of an unknown. Nothing from Cameron.’

  ‘So what you thinking?’

  ‘We’re thinking that it’s mighty odd for her to have left all her money and ID behind. Would have been more difficult than it is nowadays to get replacements, and we don’t think she had any work, or a career with which to support herself. We can’t, in fact, find any trace of Joyce Platt, or Joyce Wilson as she was, after 1976. No medical records, no renewed passport or driving licence. She simply disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  ‘What about parents or siblings?’

  ‘She was an only child. Father was an alcoholic and looks like the mother had enough to deal with. Both now deceased.’

 
‘I interviewed a woman last night,’ interjected DC Oaks. ‘Dr Lane had spoken to her. She was at school with Cameron Platt when his mum disappeared. She said that her mum, now unfortunately in a care home with dementia, always maintained that John Platt had killed his wife and got rid of her. Said that was a widely held view at the time, but nothing ever happened.’

  ‘No police investigation?’ DCI Barker questioned.

  ‘I’ve checked and there was an anonymous tip-off received. They looked into it, but there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. John Platt said she’d left him for another man, and that was that. They marked it down as malicious gossip and dropped it,’ added Evans.

  ‘And we’re absolutely sure that she hasn’t just surfaced, that Cameron isn’t with her somewhere living under an assumed name.’

  ‘As certain as we can be, Ma’am, I’ve tried every database I can think of. Unless she assumed a false identity.’

  DCI Barker sat back in her chair and let the latest information soak in.

  ‘Okay, so we have a potential cold case to look into and the prime suspect is also dead. We have to park that one right now, the priority has to be the living and most particularly young Alex Fuller.’

  ‘Indeed, but it could help explain his state of mind though?’ suggested Jack.

  ‘Any evidence that he’d seen this stash of his father’s?’ DCI Barker asked Evans.

  ‘Obviously can’t be sure but as there were none of his fingerprints on it and they were found well-hidden at the back of the father’s wardrobe, I’d say not.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said DC Oaks, ‘what the witness did say, was that Cameron told her his dad said his mum leaving was his fault. There’d been some argument the day she disappeared, and it involved Cameron. She couldn’t quite remember, but felt that his parents argued quite a lot about him. His father was very strict and his mother less so. She used to defend him when his dad got too heavy. Wasn’t averse to knocking her around either.’

  ‘That tallies with her medical records, which show a couple of times when she allegedly fell down the stairs,’ added Sergeant Evans.

  ‘After the argument between his parents, Cameron woke up the next morning and his dad said his mum had left because she couldn’t stand having to deal with Cameron’s bad behaviour any longer.’

  ‘That also fits with something Harrison found at their flat last night,’ Tanya spoke now, and then realised that she’d just admitted she’d seen him last night. That made her colour slightly at the thought of their meeting. She pushed it out of her head and tried to remain professional. ‘Sewn into Cameron’s mattress were several exercise books which look like they date back to when Cameron was at school. He kept calling himself evil.’

  ‘The father put it all on him.’

  ‘And that’s not all,’ said DC Oaks. ‘Take a look at this photo of Cameron. It was at a school event just before his mother disappeared.’

  He showed an image on his phone to the rest of the team.

  ‘So he’s definitely picked boys that resembled him,’ DCI Barker said. ‘We need Harrison in here to give us an idea of what this could mean.’

  She took her mobile out of her pocket and tapped in a text to Harrison, while her team reached for the rest of the croissants.

  ‘What about forensics on the flat?’ she looked to Tanya now.

  ‘So, going to be difficult to determine cause of death with John Jacob Platt. It looked like cut and dried natural causes with the cancer diagnosis, despite the bizarre way in which the body was dealt with post-mortem. However, Dr Aspey found some marks on his rib cage that are consistent with him being stabbed in the chest. We’ve got the knives from the flat and are cross-referencing those with the blade marks on the ribs. Going to be incredibly difficult to tell if they were caused before or after death. We might simply never know. Estimated time of death is around four to six weeks. We should have a slightly better idea in the next twenty-four hours or so. That ties in with his doctor’s prognosis for the cancer. Obviously don’t yet know if either Darren or Alex’s DNA is in the flat, but there’s no evidence so far that they were there.’

  ‘Right so, where are we on the search?’

  Sergeant Evans cleared the evidence bags back into the box and opened up a laptop.

  ‘We’re nearly done with all the places we had on the list. Nothing. No sightings, no CCTV, no sign of the van, or Cameron and Alex. Nothing since the day Alex went missing.’

  Everyone in the room had frustration etched on their faces.

  ‘He could be bloody anywhere by now, who’s to say he would have stuck around the area once he knew we found Darren?’ Jack looked downcast.

  ‘Where else would he go?’ his boss asked, less to him and more as an open question to herself.

  The sound of strident footsteps heading towards her office door made her look up. Dr Harrison Lane was coming their way, and he looked like he had something to say.

  ‘That was quick,’ she said to him.

  He didn’t bother with any perfunctory greetings or to explain he’d already been on his way over before she’d texted him. He just launched straight in.

  ‘We’ve been focussing on the wrong man,’ he announced, ‘ensuring all the officers in front of him gave their full attention. ‘It’s the father who’s the key to where Cameron is now. The writing on the wall in the flat, the Bible pages we found with Darren, all about his relationship with his father.’

  Harrison had some papers in his hands and started to quote from them. ‘You are of your Father the Devil, and your will is to do your Father’s desires. That’s what he got Darren to write out time after time. He stayed with his father’s body for weeks in that flat after he’d died.’

  ‘How can you be sure about that?’ asked Salter, always one for the facts.

  ‘From the wear on the carpet around the corpse, he’d been walking round and round him repeatedly for what must have been hours, days on end. Plus, the food wrappers in the bin—the last use by date was about two weeks ago and before that there had been consistent food waste.’

  Tanya nodded in agreement.

  Everyone was silent, not because they disagreed, but because they were allowing the information to sink in. Tanya was looking at the imposing figure of Harrison with another thought on her mind. His handsome face was the most animated she’d seen it. Usually it didn’t communicate any emotion or the slightest inkling of what he was thinking, but this morning it had lit up.

  ‘He chooses the boys because they represent his seven-year-old self,’ Harrison continued. ‘He believes he is evil, that he drove away his mother, it’s what Platt Senior had told him. He’s teaching the boys like his father taught him, trying to cleanse their souls and save them. He doesn’t want their lives to be ruined like his was. Doesn’t want them to turn to sin, like he did. It was a love/hate relationship by Cameron towards his father. He probably feared him, but also craved his approval. He tried to rebel against the overbearing strict upbringing which came from John Platt’s more extreme religious views. Hence why he ended up with a Bible in his mouth. Part of Cameron hated his dad and the religion he adhered to. Part of him believed every word. He’s torn, but for him it’s like he’s helping his seven-year-old self by taking the boys.’

  Harrison looked around the table at the faces which stared back at him. He lingered a moment longer on Tanya’s. Her eyes seemed to draw him into her. She looked beautiful this morning and was wearing a fuchsia pink top that accentuated her colouring. Harrison forced his eyes away from her face.

  ‘We were just coming to a similar conclusion with regard to why Cameron had taken the boys,’ said DCI Barker, who hadn’t missed the look between Tanya and Harrison. She’d think about that a bit later. ‘We also think the father may well have killed his mother. But how does this lead us any closer to finding where they are?’

  ‘We need to be looking at something connected to his father and Cameron’s childhood, not to his adult life. The death was
the catalyst, but there is something from his past, something that has driven him back to his childhood while he sat alone with that body.’

  ‘Wait a minute… Alone…’ Jack was suddenly animated and dashed out of the office to his desk where he looked something up on his computer.

  The others waited. Harrison stayed standing but he could feel Tanya’s eyes on him and it took all his willpower not to turn round and look at her.

  ‘There was an interview with a former neighbour,’ Jack said as he walked back in the room. ‘Used to live next door but moved across to another block. Mentioned something about his dad working security in a factory on night shifts and Cameron being left on his own. They used to hear him crying every night. Yes, here it is. A woman who had lived next door for a few years but asked for a transfer because she disliked Platt Senior so much. Shame she didn’t try to help his son,’ he added then quoted from the interview transcript. ‘ “He used to turn the electricity off, so the boy was completely in the dark. Said he’d left the lights blazing all night and it was costing him a fortune”.’