THE UNWILLING SON an absolutely gripping mystery thriller that will take your breath away

by Jane Adams

  But it was the moment of transition that choked the breath from her. As she walked by and as he turned, she caught a glimpse of his narrow, pale-skinned back. The skin was red with blood oozing from it as though someone had carved it into a half-dozen or so complex designs. And as Irene tried to look closer, the bloody wounds began to coalesce to form the faces of children cut deep into the young man’s back.

  * * *

  Tina finished the design and placed him between the mirrors so that he could judge the effectiveness of the results. Needle art worked in a delicate technique called water shading, which allowed a subtlety of tone and a silvery gradation through the greys that gave the young faces the life and expression that had now been denied them.

  He nodded, satisfied. He rarely said much to her, it wasn’t his way. He would bring the picture she was to use, explain how he wanted the work carried out and leave the rest to her. He never flinched, even when she worked close to the bone, and he never commended her on her work, though she knew that he was satisfied. That he returned time and time again told her that. But this was to be the last time.

  ‘I can’t do any more for you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t.’

  He had expected something like this. He said nothing, his back to her so that she could cover the new face with cling film held in place with masking tape.

  He pulled on his shirt and turned to face her as he fastened it.

  ‘You think that I’m the murderer.’

  She laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you’re afraid that I might be.’

  She said nothing but she was clearly willing him to leave and wishing they were not alone.

  ‘Why this? you’re thinking, if I didn’t kill them. Psychopaths collect trophies. This is my trophy; Is that what you’re thinking?’

  She shifted uncomfortably. He was between her and the door. Her gaze fell on the telephone sitting on the desk. He picked it up and handed it to her.

  ‘Phone the police,’ he said. ‘Tell them about me. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘They’ll want to know why I didn’t tell them before.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  She bit her lip and turned away without answering.

  He left so quietly that it was several moments before she realized he’d gone.

  * * *

  Ray and Beckett stood in the incident room with a large-scale map spread on the table in front of them. Its twin hung on the wall, bright pins marking the sites of abductions and recoveries, past and present. They had laid this map out flat, trying to visualize the streets and the derelict lots as the killer might be seeing them. With Ray’s help and a second, older map, Beckett attempted to superimpose the Mallingham of eleven years before onto this new one. So far it had given them no clue.

  Outside the crowd had increased, the ranks of journalists swelled now by ordinary people. Families mostly. They had stood in silent vigil overnight but the morning had seen a change in mood. The chanting had begun about an hour before and could be heard even through closed windows: ‘Find him, find him.’ Ray was unsure whether they meant the killer or the missing child. The words growing louder then drifting back almost to a whisper, an ebb and flow of sound, sometimes falling silent for a moment before someone took it up again.

  Inside the room Beckett and his assembled team did their best to ignore it, but it was the kind of input that the mind found impossible to shut out and Ray knew that before long tempers would become frayed and nerves would be stretched to breaking point.

  Emma Thorn and two others had been talking quietly together on the opposite side of the room. Emma spoke for them.

  ‘Why the change in pattern? As you said, Lee was discreet. Self-contained almost. This one seems to need to advertise. It’s as though he’s saying, “Look at me. You can puzzle all you like, try every way of looking at this, and you still won’t understand me.”’

  ‘That’s pretty much what the profilers have come up with,’ Beckett said. ‘They believe that this man sees himself as invulnerable. We can’t catch him. Lee didn’t see himself that way.’

  ‘Lee knew he would be caught,’ Ray said quietly. ‘He didn’t care. His only concern was that he completed the ritual. And when he failed, he still kept that wish alive. Whoever it was must have known Lee and what he was doing, and, according to the beliefs of the cult, waiting for his death as a signal to begin again was quite logical. Lee would be free to supervise, no longer locked away in prison, which means our main suspects have to be among those who were in the cult eleven years ago. Bryn and Irene included, I suppose. Quite a few of Farrant’s lot. Others probably that we don’t know about.’ He moved over to where the photographs of Simon’s bedroom had been pinned to a board. ‘This is more than exhibitionism. It’s triumphal. To me, he’s saying, “I have the last piece of the puzzle and you can’t stop me carrying things to their conclusion.” This man is gloating.’

  ‘And if he needs Katie?’

  Ray frowned. ‘I think he already has Katie,’ he said. ‘I think we — I — gave her to him that day out at the chapter house.’

  ‘But if you’re right and the motorcyclist is the boy who saved her life, how does that fit in with him possibly killing her now?’ Emma argued.

  ‘It makes perfect sense in a way,’ Beckett said, following the train of Ray’s thought. ‘Lee failed and those who knew what he was trying to do either chose to die or were killed. Probably by Morgan. Maybe he was in on it and didn’t want to be implicated. Maybe he truly was appalled by what Lee had done and convinced his associates that they deserved to die. Frankly, I’m keeping an open mind on that. The boy, maybe he had his own reasons for wanting Lee to succeed. I don’t know.’

  ‘Sounds complex,’ someone commented. ‘I don’t get all this religious stuff. Give me a straightforward domestic any day.’

  There was a ripple of grim laughter. Domestics were never straightforward and no one liked playing peacemaker between warring partners.

  ‘Why did Katie go with him?’ Beckett questioned.

  ‘Impulse,’ Ray said. ‘I don’t believe she thought it through, but I do believe that something about the man told her that he and the boy who had saved her life were the same person. He’d saved her once, he’d been there. I don’t think she’d any option but to go with him, not having come so far. He had the answers she was looking for, including, I think, the most important one.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I think Katie wants to know who she is,’ Ray said. ‘She loves her foster family and thinks of them as Mum and Dad, but even the most contented of kids still need to find their roots.’

  ‘And we’ve no clue?’

  ‘We don’t even have complete lists for eleven years ago. Members came and went. A hard core stayed, but even the lists of permanent members are sketchy and there’s evidence that many of the records were destroyed. Most of what we knew about those living at the original house came from two old ladies who lived just down the road. They’re both dead now and even then their memories were a little unreliable. They got the new inhabitants mixed up with the original family.’

  ‘One more thing I don’t get,’ Beckett said. ‘If Bryn and Irene out at Sommers House are right and Lee believed that he was ushering in some new messiah, why was there no claimant?’

  ‘Would you want to admit that three children had been killed because of you?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking that. It’s more that I would have expected someone to point the finger.’

  ‘Maybe anyone who knew for certain was already dead. Maybe the claimant was dead. If Morgan was out for vengeance, or justice, or simply wanted to cover his arse, you’d have assumed the claimant would have been among the first of his targets.’

  Beckett nodded. ‘Maybe. We’ve had people interviewing the New Vision lot, but they’re about as much help as a lorryload of monkeys. They know nothing. They want to forget Lee and all he stood for. They talk about Morgan as
some sort of martyr who died to cleanse the group of its impurities and they don’t have a good word to say for Martyn Shaw. Beyond that, well . . . I’d like to see their faces if we prove that Morgan didn’t die that night.’

  ‘Have you had anyone else go out to Sommers House?’

  ‘Two of the locals went on our behalf, just to check things out. That was earlier this morning. Reckon they were made welcome and that the kids climbed all over them, wanting to play with the handcuffs.’ He smiled. ‘I think they went in there expecting to see pictures of Satan on the walls and pentacles drawn on the floors in virgin’s blood, not to be offered tea and cake.’

  Ray nodded. ‘I’m wondering if we’ve played this wrong,’ he said. ‘I thought I was giving them good advice, but I’m not so sure now.’

  ‘What are you thinking? That we should let the media into Sommers House?’

  ‘It might be a way of defusing some of the tension,’ Ray said.

  ‘You think the Sommers lot would agree to it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I think it’s worth talking about. Once there’s no mystery, some of the pressure might come off.’

  ‘And it could backfire painfully, depending on the tone of the reporting. The public don’t want to read that Sommers is as innocent as a convent. Listen to them out there. They want justice and they want blood, and if we don’t put an end to this soon I don’t think they’ll be too particular whose blood they get.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Katie had been alone all day and when Nathan returned she was so relieved to have company that she forgot to be afraid of him.

  ‘Where have you been? I thought they must have caught you.’

  ‘Would you care?’ he asked. ‘Or would you just be afraid that no one would find you?’

  ‘Would you tell them?’ Katie asked anxiously. ‘If you were arrested, would you tell them I was here?’

  ‘Arrested for what?’

  She shrugged. ‘You know.’

  He said nothing and as she blinked he had shifted across the room, slipping off his jacket. He went into the little kitchen and began to prepare food for them both. Katie had begun to realize that much of the food he brought home was for her. He ate little, merely picking at his plate.

  She followed him into the kitchen and took up position beside the door. ‘What are you?’ she asked again.

  He hesitated, his gaze wandering back out into the curiously decorated basement. ‘I don’t know,’ he said softly. His eyes finally came to rest upon her face and she was struck by how rarely he chose to look right at her. When he did it was almost painfully intense.

  ‘He made me into something else,’ Nathan said. ‘But what he did wasn’t complete. While he was locked away like that he couldn’t finish it. Now he’s dead in this life and he’s sent his soul out to finish what he started. Finish making me into that other thing. He said I was an avatar. Like a messiah. The link between mankind and the angels. He said that it was a kind of evolution and that one day we would all be like this. The way he said that I was meant to be. But he and Daniel Morgan argued. Morgan said that I wasn’t right, that I wasn’t pure enough, but Harrison Lee went ahead anyway. He said that Morgan was wrong and finally Morgan agreed with him. I think Morgan had tried something like this already, but Lee said that he had failed.’

  He hesitated again and then he led her back through to the main room and stood her beside the makeshift altar.

  ‘Seven is a sacred number. The number of movement and transformation. Three boys then and three boys now, that makes six.’

  ‘And the seventh?’

  Katie thought she could guess the answer.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Bryn, Irene and the others sat in the meeting room and listened to Irene talking about her dream. During the day she had thought about it a great deal and sought interpretation, and she had now become convinced that the dream was a message and that the young man represented the one chosen by Lee to be his successor. That through this man, Lee was committing the murders.

  ‘You think that he’s a real person?’ Mitch asked. ‘Why not some kind of archetype? That makes more sense. The embodiment of your fear and ours. It doesn’t follow that he’s a real individual.’

  ‘I know it’s hard for you,’ Amy said to Irene. ‘That for those of us who were around then this has a personal side to it. But Irene, we had nothing to do with Lee killing then and we have nothing to do with what is happening now. Lee was insane. I agree with Mitch that you’re dreaming because you’re afraid, not because you’re receiving messages. You know what the Prophet tells us, that we should look for all logical explanations first. Only when we’ve sifted through those can we accept that there might be something else.’

  ‘And even then, the Prophet tells us it only seems supernatural because we don’t yet know the mechanics,’ Mitch added.

  ‘I know that,’ Irene said impatiently, ‘but Lee sent his soul.’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Mitch said gently. ‘But equally, maybe this is someone jumping on the bandwagon. Lots of murderers have copycats. But even if he did and you’re right, all the more reason to distance ourselves. Whatever community Lee had been a part of, he would still have been an evil man. The Prophet told us we should start again and reject all of that. I thought that’s what Sommers House was about. Making a new start, the best, most loving and positive community possible.’

  Irene was clearly not convinced, though the murmurs from the rest of the community told Mitch that they agreed with her. Most of them were young, had been children or teenagers when Lee had broken the first community. They had come here to join the Eyes of God as it now was and loved their home at Sommers. They didn’t want all of this dragged up again. Their families were worried about them already and the effect that all of this was having on the children was exactly what they had come to Sommers to avoid.

  There was clearly something else on Irene’s mind and it occurred to Mitch that Bryn had been unusually silent throughout the session. She was about to speak to him when Irene began to talk again.

  ‘I was very close to Morgan, you all know that. When we began to suspect what Lee might be doing he said that we must all atone for it.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Bryn snapped uncharacteristically. Usually he was the most softly spoken and patient of men.

  Mitch looked at them both, aware that everyone in the room shared her puzzlement.

  ‘He and the others killed themselves because of Lee?’ asked Mitch. ‘I know there were rumours, Irene, but surely . . .’

  ‘I heard,’ someone else commented, ‘that other arrests might have been made. Accomplices of Lee’s. Is that true?’

  Bryn got to his feet and crossed to the heavily curtained window. He lifted the drape aside, just a fraction, and peered out before letting it fall. He shook his head.

  ‘Lee acted alone,’ he said, ‘but there were others of us who suspected, right from the outset. Maybe we could have stopped things.’

  ‘And you did nothing?’ Mitch had not meant to sound so shocked.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said with a touch of asperity. ‘Irene and I, we knew that Lee believed in the power of a particular ritual. I don’t know where he got the idea from, it certainly wasn’t part of the original teachings, and, though Lee talked about it as a kind of alchemy, all the talk of the purifying power of fire and the transformation of the alembic, nothing I have read in the literature was exactly like he envisaged. Morgan argued with him for a while, but Harrison was very persuasive and after a while . . . I think even Morgan gave in to it.

  ‘Lee wanted to bring in what he saw as a new age. Summon the new avatar. We all thought he’d gone crazy, but there were others willing to follow him. Morgan was not so careful of his membership as Martyn has been. There were those who had fled to us because they could not cope with the real world. The thought of tearing down reality and rebuilding something mystical was what appealed to them. The powerless craved power, even
though they couldn’t even handle what went on in the everyday world. They thought they could wield and control the kind of pseudo-magic that Lee was selling them.’

  ‘Bryn and I, we went to Morgan,’ Irene went on. ‘He told us not to worry, that he could calm things down and make Harrison Lee see the error of his ways.’ She laughed harshly. ‘We didn’t know that by that time Morgan believed in everything that Harrison was doing. We’d gone to him for help, not knowing that he’d become a part of the problem.’

  ‘But why kill the children? I don’t understand that,’ Mitch said.

  Irene looked uncomfortable. ‘Innocent blood,’ she said. ‘They were, he said, old enough to feel the first stirrings of adolescence but not to have done anything about it. “The fire has been kindled in the blood, but does not yet burn too bright.” Those were his words, Mitch, but we didn’t understand what he meant. Not until afterwards. He took the blood, purified it, transformed it. The little girl, I don’t really understand why he needed her, she was far too young . . .’ Colour rose to her cheeks and she looked away.

  ‘You think that Morgan . . . or Lee . . . Irene, are you telling me Lee considered raping this child before he murdered her?’

  ‘No! Of course not,’ Irene protested, but her expression told Mitch that she suspected that very thing.

  ‘The mystic sister,’ Bryn said softly. ‘The bringing together of male and female, fire and water, all of the elements.’

  Mitch shook her head. ‘Alchemical teaching is about a meeting of equals, Bryn. Not about the rape and murder of little children. It’s about the purity of the individual soul, not the making of some . . . monster.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘You knew all this?’ she demanded. ‘You knew all about this, suspected what might be going on, and you said nothing? Three children died, and now at least two more. Irene, why didn’t you go straight to the police?’