First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © P.R. Black, 2019
The moral right of P.R. Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781789543070
Aria
c/o Head of Zeus
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
www.ariafiction.com
For Claire
Copyright Page
Welcome Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Acknowledgements
About P.R. Black
Become an Aria Addict
The night before they died, the two girls and their little brother shared the biggest room in the cottage.
Pillow fighting had long since given way to tired contemplation over cocoa as the candlelight flickered.
Becky Morgan lay back, one hand behind her head, the coconut smell of the sun cream lingering on her wrist. On the first night of their holiday, this was the best kind of tiredness. It made you impatient to be asleep, greedy for another day of fishing for sticklebacks with their nets, stone-skimming competitions, trailing their fingers in the water by the side of the boat, and considering ladybirds ambling across the backs of their hands and butterflies drifting just out of reach. It was the kind of tiredness that stopped short of exhaustion, but promised deep sleep.
Her younger brother Howie read the comic their dad had bought him on the ferry, his blanket pressed against his mouth – a gesture from infanthood he’d carried into his fifth year. He looked very seriously at Becky, and said, ‘Is the man outside staying with us?’
‘What man?’ Becky said.
‘The man who was hiding at the bins.’
‘There’s no man,’ Becky said, suddenly alarmed.
Clara sighed. At 13, she was the eldest of the Morgan children, and, in her opinion, the cleverest and best-looking. ‘He sees bogey men everywhere, don’t you Howie?’ she said. ‘The other week there was a skeleton in the freezer.’
Becky raised an eyebrow. ‘And was there?’
‘Oh yes. We pretended it was ice cream. Dad ate the lot. He was none the wiser.’
‘Could just be a ghost,’ Becky said, a wicked gleam in her eye.
‘Ghost? Where’s the ghost?’ Howie said.
The bedroom door opened slowly, startling them.
‘Goodness me,’ their father said, chuckling. ‘You all look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
‘Is there a ghost?’ Howie asked.
‘’Course there isn’t.’ Their father wore an open dressing gown over striped blue and white pyjama bottoms, knotted at the front, and a T-shirt that struggled to contain his paunch. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. And if there was, I’d give it a bloody fright and a half.’ He ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘I hope your sisters haven’t been telling you silly stories.’
‘It was the Middle Child’s fault,’ Clara sniffed. ‘Pure and simple. She’ll give that boy a complex.’
‘I suspect the Elder Child might have a little something to do with it, too,’ said their mother. She stood behind their father in the hallway. She was dressed for bed, and her long chestnut hair flowed over the shoulders of her nightgown. She reminded Becky of a vampire in a creaky old Hammer horror movie she’d stayed up to watch one night – lovely, but uncanny. She might smile and give them all a fright. ‘Come on, now. Lights out. We’ve got another big day tomorrow.’
*
A hand touched Becky’s shoulder in the middle of the night, startling her awake. She sat upright, disorientated for a moment in the unfamiliar room. It was lit only by a sliver of moonlight, keen as a razor through a crack in the curtains.
Howie stood by the side of her bed.
‘What’s up?’ Becky said, rubbing her eyes.
The little boy spoke in a whisper, and his face was stricken in the moonlight. ‘Becky… There’s the man.’
‘Don’t be daft. Go on back to bed, now.’
‘For god’s sake…’ mumbled Clara from the other side of the room, shifting beneath the sheets.
‘Becky… There is. There is a man,’ Howie insisted, his voice louder.
Becky sighed. ‘Shut up, Howie. There are no ghosts. Come on – back to bed. You’re not getting in here with me, if that’s your game.’
‘But there is a ghost. He’s beside the wardrobe. I see him. Look!’
The little boy pointed.
And there, beside the wardrobe, breathing deeply through his mask, knife glinting, stood the man.
The man let himself into Becky’s room, etched against the door, all in black. It was a tall, slim figure, without no definition other than the rudiments of the human shape. It seemed somehow less than shadow – a kind of anti-light, an anomaly.
In her bed, Becky wheezed at this apparition, fists clenched in the dark.
As before, the figure only ever gazed at her. Faceless, hands by its sides, it gazed down upon her.
Becky gave a low, mournful cry.
When the black hole in the face began to resolve itself into a mask, Becky finally screamed, and woke up.
The figure dissolved, absorbed into the gloom. There was only her room, in the dark, and her pounding heart. She groped for the nightlight switch, but her fingers were not quite awake yet, either, and the lamp slithered from her fingers and rolled across the floor. She kicked off the covers and stood, tense, her breath whining at the back of her throat. She felt the room spin in the darkness and had to catch her balance against the back wall, palms braced. Finally, she found the light switch.
Empty room. Nobody there. As ever.
She started her routine by checking her pulse, then her breathing, counting slowly. In, then out. She imagined the tension leaching from her shoulders, melting down her arms and dripping off her fingertips. Slow, steady breaths, and then the world settled back onto its axis, turning at the right speed, in the right direction. Her heartbeat became less erratic, more settled. Becky felt the sweat cooling on her back.
Then it was into the bathroom for a glass of water. The low-pitched light was perfect for these moments, less of a slap in the face with the click of the cord. She drew a glass of water and dared to look herself in the face, as if she might see cuts and bruises suffered as she slept. This was part of the process, staring herself in the eye. It was then that she saw the tears on her cheeks. She went with it, sobbing as quietly as she could, allowing the feelings to bleed out along with the tension.
She sat on the edge of the bed, occasionally wiping away the tears and blowing her nose. Her phone showed 03:32.
Becky sipped at the glass of water, then muttered, ‘There goes sleep. Thanks again, mate. Thanks a lot.’
She settled down under the covers, knowing that there was no man – nor ghost, for that matter – in this flat, not here, not now. Just to be sure, she felt underneath the mattress for the knife handle.
*
Dr Fullerton was a compact, bearded man, his face still constrained by the one chin and his waist unusually trim and tight for someone in their late fifties. ‘Three times a week at the gym,’ he was fond of telling his patients. ‘There’s some good mental health – your starter for ten.’
He smiled kindly at Becky, sat opposite him. His consulting room was small, but not uncomfortably so, and the soft leather armchair swaddled her. ‘How’s your week been, first of all?’ he asked.
‘Not so bad. Just the one dream.’
‘Last night, I take it?’
‘Yes. Are you now a fully qualified mind reader?’
‘Not quite. But you’ve yawned four times already.’
‘What can I say? It’s very cosy in here.’
‘Tell me about your dream. Anything new?’
Becky clasped her hands. ‘Nothing to report. Night terror. Sleep paralysis, the usual deal. The door opens. The guy comes in. He stands and watches me. I wake up gasping and thrashing like a landed fish. I feel for my knife. Then I lie awake with the light on and my eyes on the door, like a 6-year-old.’
Dr Fullerton nodded. ‘What you’re experiencing might be a typical night terror, in typical circumstances. But your experiences haven’t been typical.’
Becky shrugged. ‘That’s why I’m here, I suppose. Lucky old you.’
‘Has anything happened during the week to stress you out?’
‘Not really.’ She sighed. ‘I guess there’s one guy at work. He started a couple of months ago. A rising star. Tipped for the top. And by that I mean, an arsehole. Younger than me, annoyingly. Well spoken, but rude. Expensive suit. Seems like he drifted into journalism for larks, while he waits for his inheritance.’
‘Yes, I think you mentioned something along those lines last time.’
‘Do you remember that I told you he seemed nice enough, but had the potential to be a pillock?’
Fullerton studied his notes. ‘This was the lad from Scotland?’
‘That’s him, yes. Well, he went for the “pillock” option. Started throwing his weight around in a matter of days. Picked on the weak point, which was clearly the woman. He gave me a dressing down in front of the office this week for a report I filed on a bus drivers’ strike. “Not enough flavour,” he said. “I know you can do better.” He might as well have sent me away with a slap on the arse and told me to make the tea.’
Fullerton frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound very professional to me.’
‘It isn’t. But everyone looked the other way. When you get a new big dog on the floor, everyone falls into line. I asked for a meeting to discuss what happened.’
‘Good. How did it go?’
‘He keeps pulling out. I’ve half a mind to collar him in front of the office. But it was a couple of days ago. You know that way? I froze. The moment’s gone.’
‘How did you react to what he said? Once you got home?’
Becky gave a wan smile and swirled a plastic cup of water. Her hands were steady. ‘Not by drinking, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
‘I am pleased to hear it. Are you ready to talk about the reconstruction?’
Becky took a sip. ‘Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘It’s bound to bring back a lot of feelings. Bad ones. Trigger points, and worse. How do you feel about being on television?’
‘I see it as an ambition achieved. My friends always said I’d appear on Crimewatch one day. Though strictly speaking, I won’t actually be on television. I’ll be pixelated, like I’m behind frosted glass. And someone will be saying my lines for me – an actor. Hopefully Stephen Fry, or Patrick Stewart. Someone rrrich, and fruity.’ She rolled her ‘r’s for effect.
Fullerton snorted. ‘Mariella Frostrup for you, surely?’
‘You old flirt. Really? I’m almost flattered. But yeah, I won’t really be on TV. It’s not like I’ll be front and centre of the broadcast. Though I had considered it.’
‘What good would that have done?’
‘It might bring him out of cover.’
Fullerton gazed at her. ‘What makes you think he would do that?’
‘I’m unfinished business. No one forgets the one that got away. It’s the same for killers as it is for the rest of us.’
‘Don’t you think that might be dangerous?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m only doing it because it might lead to a positive result. I hope so. You do get these breaks in cases, years later. You hear about it. That kid who was snatched in Lincolnshire… Those two potholers in the Lake District… The killers don’t stay ghosts. Not with forensic science, these days. Sometimes, the people who do these things get caught.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘I accept its unlikely, in my case. If they catch my guy, it’ll probably be from a random positive result from a DNA test. Something that sets off an alarm on a database, after his second cousin twice removed gets pulled over for bald tyres. But I’m confident I’ll see him in a courtroom one day.’
Fullerton considered his next question carefully. ‘Have you thought about how you might feel if you see him again, if they do catch him?’
‘Relieved, for a start. Goes without saying that he’s dangerous.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yeah. A little bit disappointed.’
‘How so?’
Becky bit the inside of her mouth. ‘Well, if they catch him, he’ll end up in a nice cell. Maybe he lives in a hovel right now. Maybe he lives under a bridge. He’s getting old, that’s for sure. If he gets caught, he’ll get to be comfortable. Might end up in a nice jail in the Netherlands. With a view of a canal, or an art gallery. People would be safe, though. That’s something.’
‘Have you thought about revenge?’
She sat forward. ‘Asking me if I’ve thought about revenge is a bit like asking Godzilla if he ever thinks about Tokyo. Yeah. I’ve thought about revenge. Wouldn’t be human otherwise, would I?’
‘Violence?’
‘Humane violence. A nice orderly lynching, they used to call it. A bullet to the head. Something clean. Not violence like… like what he did. That wouldn’t be justice. He’d deserve it, that’s for sure. But it’s not something I could do. Not many people are capable of that. There aren’t many people on that shelf. So no, I don’t think about killing him.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
She made no response to that.
He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re almost out of time.’
‘Said the working girl to the parson.’
‘Nice imagery.’ He smiled, kindly. ‘I'll be on call tonight, Becky, if you need me. Out-of-hours, for one night only. No payment necessary. Any issues resulting from that programme, you let me know about them.’
‘You’re never usually this worried about me.’
‘Your problems are never usually aired on national television, when you’ve spent twenty years trying to deal with them. It’s bringing what happened very close to the surface.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Have you got company tonight? Friends… work colleagues?’
Becky shook her head.
‘It might be an idea to spend the evening with someone. Especially if you insist on watching the show.’
‘It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.’
‘Quite. Just making sure you know. Any other questions today?’
‘Yeah. What shoe size are you?’
He raised his feet, displaying a heavy pair of deep-tread shoes, with large heels. She wondered at the psychology of a therapist’s need to wear thick-soled shoes to appear taller, and smiled.
‘I'm a ten,’ he said. ‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Just curious. You’ve got kinda big feet.’
Becky drained her gin and tonic, fished out the lime and sucked on it. The bar was chrome-plated and poorly lit; everything shone, but without any real brilliance. It reminded her of a dingy public toilet. It was Monday-night-quiet, and the big screen in the corner was turned over from a football match, at her request. There were no complaints from the sparse clientele. Becky braced her elbows on the bar’s uncomfortably clinical surface, waiting for her part of the show.
On screen, the presenter perched on the end of the desk, clipboard held loosely in his hand.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we have a special report on the twentieth anniversary of one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in the modern era. We take you back to a fine May day, in the South of France. A family of five have just arrived at a holiday cottage in the picturesque Grange aux la Croix valley. An idyllic spot… but one which would bear witness to unspeakable horror.’
Becky gestured with her glass towards the barman. He frowned and reached for a fresh tumbler.
Back on the big screen, the image dissolved into a long shot of deep green pasture with a white cottage at the bottom right.
‘11th May 1999. And the Morgan family have arrived for a holiday in the south of France at the picturesque cottage, Les Deux Chevaliers.’
Becky smiled at the parade of figures on-screen. It was them, but not them. A boy with fashionably unkempt hair and modern trainers, young, but still much too old to be Howie. He was followed by a tall poppy of a goth – Clara. This girl had a stud through her nose, red streaks in her hair and thick black eyeshadow, which Clara never had. But the vintage Mötley Crüe T-shirt – Shout at the Devil, with pentagram, slashed above the navel – was correct and proportionate.
The man representing her father was way too stout, while the woman playing her mother was too plain, although the hair colouring was a perfect fit.
The on-screen Becky looked a little too young.
‘I guess I was 11,’ she muttered, handing the barman some cash and sipping a fresh G&T.
Then Becky – the real Becky – appeared in silhouette, with her face pixelated out. The text at the bottom of the screen read, ‘Actor’s voice’.
‘It was a beautiful day,’ said the actor. ‘We’d been out on a boat, and it seemed like we had the whole world to ourselves. But… we didn’t.’
The next shot established that it was night time. The cottage was brightly lit, as seen from a distance. Then a dark figure stepped in front of the camera, blocking out the light.
Becky nearly spilled her drink.
At that moment, someone sat down on the stool next to her, his face a beige smudge on the brushed chrome bar. Becky ignored him, watching the ersatz Morgan children saying goodnight to their mother and father.
‘Artistic licence,’ she muttered. ‘Mum didn’t wear pyjamas.’.
The man next to her scratched his chin and said, ‘Oh, strewth. I remember that case. Horrible. Family that got done in France, wasn’t it?’
Becky glanced at him. He was in his late thirties, chubby, with a fringe combed down at both sides to disguise the slow retreat of his hairline. He still had today’s work clothes on – a battered jacket, his tie loose, top button undone.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Nasty one, wasn’t it?’
He supped at a pint of beer. ‘Hell of a case. Ritual thing, they reckon.’
‘Spoilers!’ She gripped his forearm. ‘Wait and see.’
On the TV, blue light flooded the children’s bedroom. The music swelled, as the same dark figure blotted out the light. The young Becky woke up to Howie tugging at the sleeve of her pyjama top. ‘Becky… there’s a man,’ the boy said.
On-screen Becky looked up. Her eyes widened in shock.
The real Becky looked down at her drink, focusing on the surging bubbles. She had made a pact with herself earlier not to look at the mask and had no intention of breaking it.
The man on the stool next to her sucked in breath through his teeth. ‘God almighty. Imagine waking up to that. Terrifying.’
Becky looked up. They had cut to another long-shot of the house, with all the lights down. A muffled scream echoed out across the moonlit fields.
‘It doesn’t look like much fun,’ Becky said, then swallowed the G&T in one gulp. She turned to the man. ‘If you were thinking of asking, I’ll have a gin and tonic. If you weren’t… then shut up.’
The man blinked for a few seconds, then grinned. To her surprise, he ordered two G&Ts.
On-screen, it was daytime, and a young girl was seen running from the trees into a clearing. She was still wearing her pyjamas, which was another example of artistic licence, though Becky had to give the director credit for the blood spatters.
There, in the clearing, was a teenage boy, walking a dog. The dog barked at the young Becky’s approach.
‘Help!’ the girl cried. ‘Somebody help me!’
The presenter’s voice returned, as images of Becky’s real family were shown, culled from family albums. Smiling photos, happy photos. One of her mother and father taken at a wedding they had attended a few years before Howie was born, the clothes, hairstyles and make-up jarringly old-fashioned. The reds, yellows, oranges, blacks and browns in the analogue photos were bleached out, the fine grain lost. All that remained was blue.
‘Four members of the Morgan family were murdered the next morning, after an ordeal that lasted hours,’ the presenter said. ‘Eleven-year-old Becky Morgan was able to escape and find help, despite being pursued through the forest by her attacker – a situation that almost doesn’t bear thinking about.
‘The rest of the family were sexually assaulted, tortured and finally stabbed to death in an attack which was described by local police as ritualistic. Despite a Europe-wide manhunt that lasted years, the killer was never caught.’
The camera returned to the present-day, pixelated Becky. ‘I still dream of the night it happened,’ the actress said. ‘I’ll never forget that man standing over the bed, and the things he did to us. There are times when I wished he’d killed me too.’
The man on the bar stool beside her placed down a G&T. ‘Here you go, smile-a-while.’
‘“Smile-a-while”, did you say?’
‘Yes.’ The man grinned. ‘Don’t take it so hard. It was a joke, love.’
‘Well, your joke’s not very funny, “love”,’ she said. ‘You might need a new scriptwriter.’ She snatched up the fresh drink, spilling a good deal of it down her chin.
‘Oops, missed the target. Here.’ The man offered her a napkin from the bar.
Becky dabbed it against her chin. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.
‘Long night, eh?’
She held up her hand. ‘Just a minute, please.’
On-screen, the presenter spoke to a big-boned, cherry-cheeked man in a mismatching suit jacket and trousers, all flesh and girth and clearly uncomfortable under the studio lights.
‘We join Inspector Thomas Hanlon now. Inspector, you’re in charge of the cold case review. Clearly this is a horrifying incident that’s ruined so many lives.’
‘Yes indeed,’ Hanlon said, gravely. ‘And I’d just like to say thank you to the brave young lady who survived the incident for agreeing to talk about what happened. A lot of the details are too upsetting to describe, even at this time of night, and we can only imagine what she went through as a girl of just 11.’
‘Let’s turn to the perpetrator – who is it we’re looking for?’
‘I’m afraid that clues are few and far between, which is why it’s taken so long to find him. He never showed his face, but what we can say is that the man we’re looking for was around six feet tall or more, well-built, and probably aged between 25 and 40 – certainly a young, fit man. That means he’d be between 45 and 60 today, of course. He had a strong accent – not English, and, we think, not French, but perhaps Eastern European.’
The presenter faced the camera. ‘I apologise to viewers in advance, as this is a particularly distressing detail. But we have to talk about the mask.’
Becky looked away.
‘Yes,’ said Inspector Hanlon. ‘As far as we can tell, it was this mask.’
‘We should stress, this is an artist’s interpretation,’ the presenter added.
‘Yes. This object seems to have been created by the killer himself. We believe it’s made of real bone, attached to some dark cloth. It’s nothing that was available in fancy dress shops, but it is just possible that someone, somewhere, might remember a man buying this mask from a specialist shop.’
‘It’s difficult to imagine what that poor girl must have gone through.’
Becky toasted the TV screen. ‘Don’t have nightmares,’ she said, remembering the final words uttered by the presenter who hosted an earlier series of Crimewatch.
On-screen, the presenter said, ‘Inspector, what more can you tell us about what the killer was wearing?’
‘When he arrived at the cottage, he wore all-black clothing. The only other clue we have is that he had size-fourteen feet, going by footprints left at the scene. He was wearing these shoes…’
The man beside Becky said, ‘I bet he wasn’t wearing all-black clothing when he got going. He might have kept his shoes on, though, for a quick getaway.’
She glanced at him for a moment – and then he was wearing her G&T.
Rivulets meandered down his jowls like tears, and a sliver of lemon clung to his chin like a slug on a bannister losing its fight with gravity.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he spluttered.
‘Hey.’ The barman pointed at her. ‘You’ve had enough, love. Out.’
‘I was just going. Love.’ Becky lurched to her feet, clinging to the counter until her shoes found purchase, and then strode out the door.
The bar was set in the basement of a refurbished tenement block, and Becky had got halfway up the stairs to street level when the man who’d sat beside her gripped her shoulder. She gasped and clung onto the railings to avoid falling backwards.
The man’s hair was still plastered to his forehead with her gin. He looked like a young boy grotesquely groomed by his mother for church.
‘I dunno who you think you are, freak,’ he snarled, ‘but you’re lucky I don’t kick you up and down this street.’
Becky jerked her shoulder clear of his grasp and hurried up the rest of the stairs. The man followed. On the even ground, she spun to face him. He did not stop.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said.
‘Touch you? I wouldn’t dream of touching you. Miserable cow.’ Still, he came forward, teeth gritted. Something glinted in his hand. When she realised that it was his own half-finished G&T, primed and ready to throw, fear gave way to rage. Becky lunged.
The heel of her hand smacked into the centre of his face with a flat, ugly crunch. His glass of G&T tinkled back down the stairs as he gaped in stupefaction, blood gushing from his nose.
Becky gripped him by his dog-eared lapels, spun on her heels and hurled him against the railings.
The man clattered into the ironwork then pitched backwards, flat-out on the pavement. After a second or two he sat up, blinking, blood glossing his lower jaw and drenching his shirtfront. The railings were still reverberating.
Across the street, someone shouted, ‘Hey!’
Becky turned, and began to run.
Becky rose as a scuba diver might, in order not to pop her lungs. She had a cotton wool mouth and a cattle tongue, and her brain suppurated with that slow-pulsing pain that signalled a hangover – a good one.
The white, sparse walls of her own bedroom surrounded her, so that was something. She was alone, and that was something else.
A sound had woken her; low, steady peals, muffled like everything else in her universe. Her alarm? Surely it was way too early for that, barely even full light beyond the gauzy curtains. As she groped for her phone, pain jolted her wrist, and with it came familiar feelings of dread and shame. That kind of pain usually meant there had been a fall, or perhaps a push – with a fist attached. She checked her knuckles; they were unscabbed, and so was her face, although there was a slight twinge at the uppermost arch of her right eyebrow.
She found her phone under her pillow. It was silent, but the pealing sound continued. Not from her phone, then. Abruptly, the tones shut off. Then the floorboards creaked outside her door.
After a knock, a figure stepped inside, indistinct in the morning’s gloom, as if filtered through a smokescreen.
Becky’s cry choked in her throat. She was not asleep, nor was she paralysed. She sat up as if on a spring, and the edge of her fingers found the knife handle in a well-practised move. She tore the blade from underneath the mattress.
Lights flared in her head as she leapt from the bed. The quilt clutched at her ankles and she stumbled, giving the shadow face enough time to resolve itself – not into a mask, but a face she knew.
‘Christ almighty! Becky, it’s me!’
Becky stumbled, dropping the machete.
‘Aaron!’
‘You off bushwhacking, Becky?’ the man spluttered, indicating the machete. ‘What the hell have you got that for?’
Her head spun, and throbbed. ‘It goes with my pyjamas. Never bloody mind! What are you doing here?’
‘Take it easy, it’s okay.’ Aaron raised his hands. ‘I stayed over.’
‘What for, exactly?’ Becky wore a long nightshirt with a big-eyed cartoon pig stencilled on the front. She still had her underwear on. This, too, was a good thing, although it pointed towards someone other than herself undressing her for bed. She grabbed a dressing gown from the back of a chair and threw it over her shoulders.
Although she was decent, Aaron Stilwell averted his eyes anyway. He was dressed for work and seemed to have had a shave and a shower. His forehead was a little too big for his hair and his cheeks had filled out in the six years they’d known each other. A cute little pot belly, which he was absurdly touchy about, hugged the waistline of his working trousers.
‘I take it you don’t recall last night’s fun and games, then?’ he asked.
‘Do I want to?’
But she did. The ugly collision between the heel of her hand and someone’s face. She could have sworn she felt his flesh ripple with the impact. Jesus. Jesus. She covered her face with her hands.
‘Come on,’ Aaron said. ‘I’ve got some coffee. See how we go.’
*
Aaron had made himself busy in her kitchen. While not quite going so far as to break out the bleach, he’d certainly tidied away the dishes that inhabited a vicious cycle of table-sink-draining board. The overflowing bin had been emptied, too.
Best of all, he’d drained the swamp of ancient grounds in the coffee machine and made a fresh pot. Becky poured a cup, took a sip, sighed, and said, ‘Aaron Stilwell: the house invader who tidies up for you.’
‘You asked me to stay over, Becky. Not like that,’ he added, quickly.
‘Like what, then?’
‘Seriously? You don’t remember any of it?’
‘Humour me. Take it from the top.’
‘All right. We’ll start with the drunken phone call. Something about “mincing some guy through the railings”. You remember that?’
‘Yeah, that bit I understand.’ She massaged the joint of her wrist and hand. What if he was dead? Had he hit his head on the way down? Becky must have read dozens of horribly similar police releases over years and years of Sunday morning shifts. One punch, then down and out. Head, meet pavement. Game over. You threw a punch after a night on the pop, all of a sudden, you were a murderer. She literally writhed in her seat with dread and shame, clutching her stomach.
‘Okay. So I came out to The Flutterby, where you said you’d be. You weren’t there, but the bartender frowned when I described you and mentioned that the chap on the doors had escorted you out. I noticed a potted plant near the ladies’ had been split in half. There were some footprints in the loose soil which may have matched your own. It felt like Cinderella, just in an evil parallel universe.’
Becky shrugged and sipped her coffee.
‘From there, the tale gets more interesting. You had mentioned McGlashan’s, and that it was lame. This is when I followed a hunch, guessing correctly that you’d already transferred from there into Bingo across the road.’
‘Bingo? What the hell is that?’
‘You know it, or you must have gone past it a few times. Bell Street. Pink neon. Eighties retro style, or trying to be. Most of the bar staff weren’t even born then.’
‘I think I’ve got you.’
‘Now picture the scene. You’re talking to two guys at the bar just as I walk in. They’re playing Duran Duran. “The Reflex”. One of the two guys with you is singing it at the top of his voice. His eyes are all pupils, no whites that I can see.’
‘I get the feeling you’re building up to some kind of grand finale.’
‘And here it comes. You spot me coming across the bar, and you say something to one of the two guys. These guys have that look of two people who had just landed after being stuck on an oil rig for a fortnight. Or maybe they’d just got out of jail. Anyway, before I can even open my mouth to say hello, the smaller one comes over to me and says, “I’ve heard all about you. Get stuffed, or you’ll get your head to play with.”’
Becky’s stomach roiled. It wasn’t just the coffee. ‘Colourful phrasing.’
‘Fortunately you could still run, by this point, and proceeded to the nearest convenient exit. I decided this was a superb idea and followed you, double-time.’
Becky frowned, and pointed to her eyebrow. ‘So how did I get this bruise, then?’
‘Oh, I haven’t finished the story yet. So finally I get you back to the car. You’ve taken your shoes off, and insist on throwing them in the back of the car before getting in. So I humour you, and then you click open the boot. You start rummaging around in there, trying to open my bag… and you smack your head on the edge of the boot. You’re not unconscious… well, not quite, but your head is in the boot, and your backside is stuck in the air like a bloody peacock. It’s at this point, while I’m trying to lift you out by the legs, that the police take an interest in our adventures.’
‘Oh god. Aaron… I don’t remember any of this. I’m sorry, it was an unusual night for me. There was stuff going on in the background.’
‘You kept saying something about a mask. And you shouted at the policeman, something about taking twenty years to sort out something so simple. You’re lucky you didn’t get jailed. I talked them out of it. They seemed amused, more than annoyed. It’s just as well they hadn’t spoken to anyone in Flutterby. So finally, I got you back here. And for the record, you got yourself undressed. Well, you paraded around in your knickers until I dug your nightshirt out, truth be told.’
‘Nothing you haven’t seen before,’ she mumbled.
‘By the time you calmed down and got to sleep, it was 2 a.m. So I crashed out on the couch. Luckily, I know to bring an overnight bag when you call me up in the middle of a lapse.’
‘“Lapse”. I don’t like that word.’
‘It’s an excellent chapter title for last night’s farce. As good as I can think of.’ A high colour had crept into his normally pallid cheeks, and he fiddled savagely with his cufflinks. ‘Look, I’m not going to lecture you. But I think you should come back to meetings with me.’
‘I’m fine, Aaron. Honestly. I feel better already. I had a bad night. I should probably have gone home after work, but I came off the rails. Part of me wanted to come off the rails. I started and couldn’t stop. You know the drill.’
Aaron drained his coffee and threw on his suit jacket. He fished around in his pocket. ‘Here. They’ve got a new number. In case you decide to go back without me.’
‘I told you – I’m not into the praying and spiritual stuff. Does nothing for me. Plus… I’m in control.’
‘Not from where I was standing. Are you joking?’
She let that stand.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘You got work today?’
‘I do. I’ve got to give the boss the good news.’.
‘Are you sure this is the right thing for you? All that dead time?’
‘Without a doubt,’ she said coldly. ‘And it won’t be dead time, I can assure you. I’ll be busy.’ She checked her watch. ‘Why are you up so early, anyway?’
‘So I could make sure I’d got you into some sort of fit state. This is old territory for me, remember.’
Becky bit the side of her mouth. ‘Thanks, Aaron.’
He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. ‘De nada. Take care. Give me a call. Think about coming to the next meeting. You’re always welcome. And good luck with the boss.’
As soon as he was gone, she switched on her laptop and checked her work emails for something from the police. She knew how it would be worded, its banal rhythms:
A 45-year-old male was found unresponsive in the street at approximately 10.30 p.m. He is believed to have suffered an assault, and was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. Officers are looking for a woman aged in her late twenties to early thirties, five foot eight, with long shoulder-length dark hair…
But there was nothing. He’d got up. He’d let it bleed. He’d gone home. Perhaps he’d had some explaining to do to his wife. And perhaps, if there was some grand plan in the universe, no harm had truly been done.
‘But that is that,’ she whispered to herself. She spread her fingers and watched them shake. ‘That is definitely that, for now. That’s you and me finished, Mr Gin.’
With a little bit of time to kill and a pressing need to think about something other than what had happened the previous night, she crossed to the back room. There was no bed in there, just a table and chairs and an extendable lamp bent out of shape. Dominating one wall was a map of Europe. On the desk lay a folder filled with printouts from the international news wires and even newspaper cuttings. She had circled one printout, taken from the AP wire two days before.
Russian police draw blank over Gursky family disappearance.
MOSCOW: Mystery surrounded the disappearance of the Russian oligarch Maxim Gursky and his wife and daughter as they drove to an airport 150 miles outside Moscow. Gursky, a controversial figure who made his fortune in steel and other commodities before expanding into pro-Russian media channels, had been driving with his family a short distance from his rural retreat to an airfield where his private plane was ready to take him to a media awards dinner in Stockholm. But Gursky, 51, his wife, Emelda, 34, and daughter Bella, 12, never arrived, and no trace has been found of the high-spec Mercedes they were travelling in. Rumours abound that Gursky had Russian mafia connections. Other commentators have theorised that Gursky had become overly critical of the Russian government of late, with some wondering if the media baron was pushing for a regime change, culminating in a possible tilt at the presidency himself. However, police have said that there are some indications that Gursky had been suffering from depression, and notes that were left at the family home hinted at a possible tragedy.
Next to this was a scanned copy of an old newspaper cutting. The scan was so good that the ingrained texture of the yellowed newsprint had been faithfully represented in the printout. It was only a short news-in-brief paragraph.
Family horror in Orkneys
Police have ruled out foul play in the case of a family found dead at their remote home in the Orkney Islands. Officers said they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the case.
She double-checked a locator graphic on her phone, then turned to the map of Europe. She took a coloured pin and stuck it in the rough location of the Russian disappearance.
There were several of these, now, dotted around Europe. Becky studied the map for a moment more, then gathered her things for work.
*
The girl refused to take her hands away from her eyes. Covering her face was the first thing she had done when he had taken the bonds off. She had made no attempt to escape from the room – only to escape the sight of him.
They were in a portable builder’s cabin. He had lit some candles, eschewing the brutal strip-lighting.
Outside the window, torchlight flickered, lending the dark trees a febrile animation. Worse than that was the sound; a suggestion of music or singing.
He drew up a seat and sat in front of the girl. ‘Are you thirsty?’ he said.
‘Where’s Mama?’
‘Mama’s safe, now,’ he said. ‘She is in good hands.’
She pressed her hands tighter against her eyes and shook her head. ‘Are you going to hurt me?’
‘I’m not sure. That depends on how you answer my next question.’
Slowly, the girl peeled her hands away from her eyes. Then she flinched.
The mask leered at her from the gloom, its rotten yellow surfaces burnished by the candlelight. ‘How would you like to go on an adventure?’
Becky had expected a day of general calamity while her hangover remained on life support, but the Skype connection on her computer at work was pixel-perfect.
Andrei from the wire service in Moscow was younger than Becky supposed, with short spiky hair, glasses and a thick-lipped smile. He might have looked perfect as a student in the mid-eighties; she could see him on a bicycle, trailing a scarf.
‘Becky! How nice to see you!’ He waved. ‘Always nice to put a face to an email address!’
‘Ah, likewise. I’m not bad, Andrei. Nice of you to agree to this.’
‘Not a problem. You want to know a little more about Mr Gursky?’
‘Colourful character, I take it?’
‘That would be correct. Well, he has always been involved in the steel trade, so he has always been linked to unsavoury people. Mafia, in particular. But he enjoys the spotlight. Many feel he would have a natural home in politics. Always presentable. A confident man, that’s what we would say.’
‘Lots of enemies, then?’
‘Oh, for sure. It would be odd to get to that position in life and not upset anyone.’
‘The police don’t seem to have any leads or clues.’
‘No, and that does seem odd. It’s as if they want Mr Gursky to go away.’
Becky tapped her notepad with her pen. ‘This is why I wanted to talk to you about him. I always hear rumours of allegations that he was involved in criminal activity – but there’s never been anything concrete. Can you say what some of these were? I promise it’s off the record.’
‘Well…’ Andrei looked uncertain. ‘Mr Gursky is… or maybe was, we should say… extremely litigious. So no stories made it out either at home or abroad. But Mr Gursky was apparently linked to human trafficking, prostitution… there were hints that he was into darker things, still.’
Becky sat up. ‘Darker things?’
‘Again, I must say, this is the stuff of gossip in a bar. There were rumours that he had very odd tastes. That he was involved in some sort of sex ring, very dark things, murders, even. He is a very rich, very media-conscious, very charismatic white man, so as you can imagine this opened up many opportunities for exploitation over the years, were he to be involved in anything like that.’
‘Yeah, we’ve had a few of those sorts in our country.’
‘There was nothing to link him to any of the rumours, and something mentioned in silliness has a way of turning into a full-blown rumour by word of mouth, even in the digital age. There was a story about a pay-off for a girl from Volgograd, but it disappeared quickly enough. I have to say we never found anything of a sinister nature whenever we investigated him. That’s not surprising, as any inquiries about Mr Gursky tended to hit a brick wall. There is very little about him in any public records – tax offices, employment invoices, things of that nature. When you have billions in the bank, it’s quite simple to click your fingers and make anything awkward or unsavoury disappear.’
‘Strange that his family vanished along with him. Any chance they’ve simply tried to escape? Maybe there were financial problems he had to get away from, legal issues…?’
Andrei shook his head. ‘None that we know of. He was flirting with political ambitions, but making him disappear would have been an outrageous move – too much even for our current government. They would have engineered something they could easily deny, like a plane crash, if that was the motive. A disappearance is a big question mark no one wants to have hanging over them.
‘Also, we think that if Gursky and his family were going to vanish, they would probably have taken the private plane that was fuelled up and waiting for them – there would have been nothing to stop them. Once they were out of Russia it would have been a simple matter to disappear from there. But they didn’t. It seems a strange way of going to ground. Surely the first priority would be to leave the country. I think they were abducted, Becky, and we probably won’t see them again. As to why – who knows?’
‘One other question for you, Andrei, and it may seem a little strange – are there any monuments in the area where Gursky disappeared?’
‘Monuments? What do you mean?’
‘Ancient things – like cairns, stone age settlements, or standing stones?’
‘Not that I know of. There’s a lot of forest though. Unspoiled forest, apart from the road. Going back thousands of years.’
*
Becky carefully punched in the number she’d taken from the book of general contacts in the library section.
A calm, sober voice with a very heavy accent answered on the second ring. ‘Five-three-two-one.’
‘Hi there, would I be speaking to Chief Inspector Colin Raeside?’
‘Retired, yes. Who am I speaking to?’
‘Ah, hello, just the man I am looking for. You don’t know me, but my name’s Becky Hughes. I’m a journalist, and I’m researching a story that took place on the island.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Yes. It relates to the Sloan family. Would that case be familiar to you? It was way back in 1984.’
‘Sloan?’ There was a slight faltering in the voice, the first sign that Becky was talking to an old man. ‘Sloan, you said, is that right?’
‘That’s right.’
There was a deep sigh. ‘Listen, there’s not much to be said about the Sloan family. I get these calls, now and again, and I’ve never appreciated one of them.’
‘You were the senior investigating officer on the case at the initial stage, is that right?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘So you knew the island well, and a lot of the people on it?’
‘I’m an Orcadian. Born and bred,’ Raeside said, stoutly.
‘As they died on your patch, you must have known about the Sloans, then?’
‘Not much. I think Mr Sloan might have contacted us once about the young dafties tearing up and down the road on moto-cross bikes, and we put a stop to it. That was all.’
‘You didn’t meet them socially, maybe at church, or a community event?’
‘No. The islands are funny that way. Some people come here so they can be cut off. That’s the goal. And you get people going the other way – teenagers who’ve grown up here, desperate to leave, to get to the mainland, to start a life where there’s more people. The Sloans didn’t just come to Orkney for peace and quiet. They wanted to get away from everything – down to their neighbours. I gathered that Mr Sloan was some kind of survivalist. Thought a nuclear war was coming, and he could ride it out up here with us. Growing his own food, keeping his own livestock. Only it didn’t work out.’
‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Just what you read from the inquest, no doubt,’ Raeside said, tartly. ‘Something went badly wrong. What was left of their four walls would tell you if they could, nobody else. Maybe Mrs Sloan decided that life wasn’t for her, and she wanted out. Maybe the kids weren’t adjusting. Or maybe it was this great big time bomb that had always been ticking away in his head. We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that he murdered his family, then killed himself.’
‘No sign it might have been any outside agency? Made to look like murder-suicide?’
‘Oh, love, the amount of times I’ve heard that one. You think we’d have missed that? You reckon we’re still to discover forensics up here, or something? It was open-and-shut. There was no one else around. Sloan lost the plot, that’s all there is to it. I’m tired of people trying to link it to something it wasn’t. It’s happened before, up here. I hope to Christ it never happens again.’
‘There wasn’t any suggestion of wife-swapping, something going wrong there? Murky, organised stuff among the islanders? That’s the rumours I heard.’
‘Fairy stories. People making something out of nothing. They see an island, they meet islanders, they imagine things. There’s no truth to that at all.’
‘Officers from the mainland took over the investigation quite soon afterwards, didn’t they?’
‘Yes,’ he said, as if from behind the teeth. ‘And our conclusions were identical.’
‘It’s been very difficult to get hold of the final report from the fatal accident inquiry.’
‘Well…’ Raeside coughed. ‘It’s true there were elements that people didn’t want to get out. That was on the grounds of taste and decency. The sheriff at the time made an order not to release certain details, but there’s nothing unusual in itself about that.’
‘What details exactly?’
‘The sheriff ordered them sealed, so they’re sealed. Now, there were some politicians who would rather have kept the whole thing quiet. No use upsetting people, giving the islands a bad rep, that kind of thing.’
‘Who were they?’
‘It doesn’t matter. They didn’t succeed. The inquiry’s conclusions were correct. They tallied in with ours. Whatever you’re trying to find here, it simply isn’t there.’