The Perfect Victim

by Corrie Jackson

  I closed my eyes. ‘What happened?’

  Dominic didn’t speak for a while. When he did, his voice was flat. ‘Lizzie was furious with him. She hated it when he drank. She got sick of it and found comfort in a guy she met at the hospital.’

  I turned to face him. ‘Lizzie cheated on Charlie?’

  Dominic gave a sad smile. ‘First woman ever to do it. When you look like Charlie, girlfriends generally count their blessings. Anyway, he found out that night. They rowed, he lost his temper.’

  ‘So that’s the reason he stopped drinking.’

  Dominic took another swig; his face was sweating. ‘Never touched a drop again. Became the model husband. To Lizzie, anyway. Doesn’t look like he extended the same courtesy to Emily, does it?’

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘If Charlie’s so unhappy why doesn’t he just admit the marriage isn’t working?’

  ‘I have no idea. Charlie’s been so secretive lately. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s the baby thing. As the world now knows thanks to Emily’s blog, she’s miscarried three times. Charlie isn’t that much of a shit that he would leave his grieving wife.’

  ‘So he just cheated on her instead.’ The words came out of nowhere. I was shocked at the bitterness I felt.

  ‘Listen to me, Sophie. Charlie’s a good guy. Deep down he’s–’ Dominic’s voice cracked. He bent down to zip up his rucksack and I saw him wipe his eyes. ‘He’s a good guy. I just . . .’

  Dominic slung his rucksack over both shoulders and stayed like that, gaze on the ground for the longest time. When he eventually turned to face me, his eyes were pink-veined and wet.

  ‘You know what keeps me awake at night?’ he said. ‘Lizzie drowned because Charlie wasn’t paying attention. Soph, what if we weren’t paying attention to Charlie, and he drowned too?’

  I stared at Dominic, the dread building in my chest. ‘Dom, you don’t actually think Charlie might have done this?’

  Dominic kissed me on the cheek and hurried away without a backwards glance.

  13

  ‘Brace yourself, Kent.’ Spencer Storey leaned over my desk and drummed his fat fingers on my computer. ‘My brother-in-law works for Bournemouth CID. Owes me a favour. He just called to say Charlie used his credit card last night.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Global Bank on Orchard Street.’

  I stared at Spencer, trying to quell the queasiness in my stomach. ‘But Charlie knows police can track ATM use.’

  Spencer shrugged, his beard was flecked with foam from his morning coffee. ‘People get desperate. You know that. Charlie will have grabbed a wad of cash, but it’s been four days. My brother-in-law says Dorset Police are scouring CCTV of the area. Net’s closing in. He thinks an arrest is imminent.’

  ‘Spence!’ Lansdowne’s booming voice reverberated down the office and Spencer stiffened.

  ‘Fucking now what,’ he muttered, sloping off towards Conference Room 3 where Lansdowne was waiting with a face like a rabid Pitbull.

  I lay my head back against my chair, still haunted by the look on Dominic’s face.

  Ten minutes later, I’d called Charlie’s stepdad Gordon and Emily’s friend Sinead. Both went to voicemail. I felt itchy, boxed in by dead ends. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Five o’clock. The time was dissolving into nothingness as it always does when I’m in the thick of a story.

  Why was Charlie in Bournemouth? He grew up there; it was such an obvious place for him to go. But if you know an area well, you know where to hide. Dominic’s words rang through my mind: Charlie got good at making himself invisible. But where would he go? He was a mess, he was vulnerable. As I stretched my arms above my chest, something flickered in a distant part of my brain. I rifled through the piles of paper on my desk until I found the brown file Adam had given me; the one with my name tacked to the front. Opening it, I ran my eyes down the Bournemouth Bugle’s article on Christ Clan until I found the quote from its leader, Hector Marlon.

  ‘My goal is to help society’s cast-offs, to give them a safe place to turn.’

  Why had Charlie been researching Christ Clan? Why had he drawn my attention to it? Was he trying to send a message? Dominic had mentioned Charlie’s childhood brushes with God but did that stretch into adulthood? I couldn’t remember a single time Charlie mentioned God, but I was learning a lot of new things about Charlie. I fired off a quick email to Jeff Johnson, the journalist who wrote the piece, asking for five minutes of his time, then settled in to read the rest of the article.

  The original Christ Clan was formed by local man Laurence Marlon in the mid-eighties. Marlon, a former teacher, believed himself to be a direct descendent of Jesus Christ. Thanks to his charismatic personality, members flocked to join his religious group. At its height, 750 members, mostly young and male, lived on the forty-two-acre commune in rural Dorset. Rumours of abuse, both physical and psychological, spread and, in 1987, Mark Miller, a teenage member of Christ Clan was hospitalised after suffering severe injuries. The following year, the body of a female member, Samantha Hartley, was found in a stream on the commune grounds. She was believed to have overdosed and drowned. Marlon fled before police could question him, and Christ Clan closed in December 1988. Reports that Marlon absconded to Spain are unconfirmed. When asked if he has stayed in contact with his father, Hector Marlon remains tight-lipped.

  The repackaged Christ Clan, which launched in 2012, displays its motto: Love, Strength, Sacrifice on the–

  My phone buzzed on my desk. It was a Twitter alert from the TV news programme, London Today. I read it once, then re-read it in disbelief. I jumped up, looking around for Mack and Kate, but only Rahid was there, hunched over his desk.

  ‘Rahid, check this out.’

  ‘What?’ He was furiously scribbling in his notebook and didn’t look up. I darted across to his desk and shoved my phone in his face. Moments later he stared at me with wide eyes. ‘Are you kidding me?’

  I looked at the tweet again.

  @LondonToday LIVE on the 6 p.m. show: Emily Swift, wife of prime suspect in #SabrinaHobbs murder

  I started pacing up and down. ‘Spence says Dorset Police are confident about an arrest.’

  Rahid frowned. ‘You think that’s why London Today have pulled Emily in?’

  ‘Well, the timing fits.’ I glanced at the congealing pizza slice that lay half-eaten in his in-tray. ‘You finished with that?’

  Rahid shrugged, his eyes back on his notebook. I grabbed the pizza and took a bite. It was cold and chewy but it tasted good, and I needed something to line my stomach before the next call.

  The phone almost rang out, but Durand answered, sounding breathless. ‘If you’re ringing about the Sabrina Hobbs story, I’m not the DCI you need–’

  ‘Sam, why have London Today got Emily Swift on in fifteen minutes? Has Charlie been arrested?’

  Durand sounded weird, distracted. ‘I have no idea. I’m not in the office.’

  I paused. In all the years I’d known him, Durand had rarely taken time off. Even when his wife, Jen, left him in November, he barely broke step. I thought back to the first time I saw Durand after I heard about the marriage breakdown. The Met held a press conference to update the media on a burglary gang who were smashing their way through London’s high-end jewellery stores. Durand looked the same. Handsome face, auburn hair. But his eyes were blank, and he stumbled over his words a couple of times. I was going through my own personal torment. Tommy had died three weeks earlier, and I was seeing the world through a thick layer of glass. Still, I knew Durand well enough to spot a man in pain. So I sent him a bottle of Scotch and a CD of Gloria Gaynor’s hit single, ‘I Will Survive’, with a scribbled note:

  Turn this up to eleven. Sophie x

  A few days later, a padded envelope landed on my desk. Inside was the empty whisky bottle and a note that read:

  I’m surviving. Thank you. Sam x

  I picked the varnish off my nails, watching the sugar-pink flakes settle on my de
sk. Should I push Durand? Let him know I was there for him, like he’d increasingly been for me? I didn’t want to overstep, and I certainly didn’t want to jeopardise our working relationship. Yeah, right, your ‘working’ relationship. An image of Durand’s grey eyes slid into my head and my insides tightened. I shifted my weight. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  I opened my mouth to speak when I spotted Mack and Kate filing out of Conference Room 3, their expressions grim. They were followed by Spencer, Rowley and Lansdowne.

  I forced myself to focus. ‘Rowley is about to launch me off the roof for missing the story about Charlie assaulting his first wife, Sam.’

  There was a pause. ‘How well do you know Charlie?’

  ‘Clearly not as well as I thought.’ I flicked my nail against the desk, not sure what to say, but not wanting to hang up. Just knowing Durand was there made me feel better.

  ‘Look, the last I heard, there was some debit card activity and a possible sighting,’ he said. ‘If an arrest has been made, it hasn’t filtered through to me yet.’

  I heard a thud in the background and a woman’s voice calling his name. ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you had company.’ An odd feeling twisted in my stomach.

  ‘Sophie . . . listen. I’ve got to go.’

  The line went dead and I stared at the phone trying to make sense of the heaviness in my chest.

  I distracted myself by ringing Emily’s number but it went dead after two rings. Great, so now she’s screening me.

  Mack and Kate appeared by my desk and I could tell by the way Kate was fidgeting with her sleeve that she was building up to telling me something.

  I pushed Durand out of my head and took a breath. ‘What is it?’

  Mack perched on the side of my desk, tension pulling the corners of his eyes. He picked up my pen and twirled it round his bony fingers. ‘Rowley got a heads-up an hour ago that Emily is going on TV.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ve just seen the Tweet. How much do you reckon London Today forked out for her?’

  ‘Sweet FA. Ugh, there’s mould growing in my mug.’ Kate picked up her coffee mug and examined its contents, her nose wrinkling in disgust. ‘Emily called London Today, set it up herself.’

  I stared at her. ‘What? Why?’ Kate flicked a glance at Mack, and opened her mouth to speak but I saw him shake his head. A sick feeling tugged my stomach. ‘Guys, what’s going on?’

  My phone vibrated and I glanced at the number. ‘Shit, this is the Bournemouth Bugle reporter, I need to take this.’ I pressed the phone to my ear. ‘Thanks for calling back, Jeff.’

  ‘What’s this about, then?’ Jeff’s voice was gravel-low.

  ‘Christ Clan. More specifically, the article you wrote about the original organisation and Laurence Marlon. It was a great piece.’

  ‘Why the interest from the dizzy heights of the London Herald?’ he said, and I heard the murmur of a TV in the background.

  ‘I have a possible crossover with another story I’m working on. Was there anything you dug up that didn’t make the feature?’

  Jeff coughed down the phone. ‘Put it this way, you read the watered-down version. My Editor was a pussy. Too scared to libel anyone. The things I uncovered, it could have changed everything for me.’

  I nodded, debating how to handle the enormous chip on Jeff’s shoulder. ‘That must have been galling after all your hard work.’

  Jeff growled. ‘Don’t fucking patronise me, love. I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive. Just because I haven’t got my feet under the desk at a national paper–’ He dissolved into a hacking wet cough that sounded as if it was coming from the depths of his stomach.

  I waited, cursing myself for reading him wrong, then decided to try the opposite tack. ‘Shall we cut to the chase, Jeff?’ I heard the flick of a lighter and the sound of him inhaling on a cigarette. ‘You responded almost immediately when I emailed you. And now you’re giving me the runaround. So I assume you want something; something you think I can deliver. Why don’t we stop wasting our time, and you tell me what it is so we can get on with it?’

  Jeff gave a hoarse laugh. ‘You’re a piece of work.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that before.’

  ‘He never believed the things I found out, you know. The Editor.’ He coughed, then spat it up. ‘Guess how old he was. Go on, guess.’

  ‘Jeff, I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘Twenty-fucking-two. Can you believe it? The Board decided the Bugle needed some fresh blood. I’ve had fungal infections older than that weasel.’

  I shook my head exasperatedly. ‘You want a wider audience? Well, here I am. What did you dig up?’

  ‘Things I’d rather forget.’ The sound of cigarette smoke flowing out of Jeff’s mouth; another cough. ‘You know what’s so evil about Christ Clan? The leader, Laurence Marlon. The Shepherd, they called him. He went out of his way to target vulnerable young kids. Kids who had no place else to turn.’

  ‘What are we talking?’

  There was a pause. ‘You seen that film The Hunger Games? Christ Clan made that look like a garden party. Marlon used to pit the kids against each other. Think cock fights, but with half-starved kids. He was a sick man. Sadistic and bored. To understand him, you have to go decades back. He started a religious group called the Saviours of Christ. He believed he was the Second Coming and he was put on earth to procreate. Got himself a harem of women, planned to flood the earth with hundreds of mini-Marlons. But there was one flaw in his plan.’

  ‘He wasn’t the Second Coming,’ I said, arching an eyebrow.

  Jeff snorted. ‘Make that two flaws. Marlon was virtually impotent. Couldn’t impregnate a woman to save his life. Apart from the time he conceived Hector; the toe-rag who’s set up a new Christ Clan on Rockwell Road. Just what the world needs, by the way. Anyway, Marlon senior didn’t cope well with his failing manhood; it wasn’t long before he was taking it out on the world. On women, especially. Seems it was everyone else’s fault except his.’

  I fiddled with the phone cord. ‘So what happened to this cult?’

  Jeff coughed again. ‘Depends who you talk to. Marlon went underground for a while, then resurfaced in the eighties. Set Christ Clan up in 1984. Only this time the angle was all about purifying your soul, or some bollocks. Marlon believed people were put on this earth unclean and the only way to regain God’s love, was to purify their souls. And, don’t doubt that when he meant God’s love, he meant his own.’

  I heard the snap and fizz of a bottle being opened.

  ‘There were three stages of baptism: water, fire, blood. The purest souls were cleansed by all three. According to my source, it started out as symbolic but the more twisted things got in the commune, the more literally Marlon took it. He came to believe that true purity could only be gained by sacrifice.’ Jeff took a long gulp and belched. ‘If you ask me, it was just an excuse to fuck around with indefensible kids. Most thought it was a small price to pay for a roof over their heads and a hot meal. Some of them ended up in bad shape.’

  I glanced down at Jeff’s article. ‘Tell me about the two kids you named.’

  Jeff sniffed wetly. ‘Mark Miller. I tracked down his dad, Les, but he wouldn’t speak to me. Used to knock Mark around. But that was nothing compared to what happened to him at Christ Clan. He was beaten to a pulp. Hospitalised. Samantha Hartley wasn’t so lucky.’ He paused, letting that sentence sink in. ‘Police said her death was accidental but that’s bullshit. I think she was killed by someone at Christ Clan.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kate and Mack deep in conversation. Every so often, one would glance my way. What was going on? ‘So why was there never an investigation?’

  ‘Because no one would speak out. Police didn’t have the budget or time to look into a bunch of homeless drug addicts. I only know this much because I got to someone fifteen years after Christ Clan closed, and only then it was because his quotes were off the record. My editor wouldn’t run them, ca
lled him an “unreliable witness”, the fucking foetus.’

  My mind was working overtime. ‘Why are you so sure that Samantha Hartley was murdered?’

  ‘Because I did my homework. Marlon believed the fastest route to the Holy Grail was through sacrifice.’

  I glanced down at the article again. ‘You think someone sacrificed her?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she ended up dead in a river. And there’s something else about her death–’ He stopped, and I heard him talking to someone in the background. ‘Listen, I have to go.’

  ‘Wait.’ I hadn’t even asked him about Charlie. ‘Jeff, please. We need to finish this.’

  A hacking cough, then silence.

  I threw my phone onto the desk, but before I could work through the conversation in my mind there was a loud bang as Rowley’s door was flung open.

  ‘News Fuckers!’ Lansdowne bellowed across the room and we all jumped. ‘The boss’s office. Now.’

  As we scurried across the newsroom, I caught Spencer’s eye and he jokily mimed slitting his throat. I heard someone yell out that London Today was about to start and the wall of TV screens on my left flickered to an identical picture of the credits rolling on a cookery programme.

  Rowley was sitting behind his enormous desk, his eyes glued to the TV that hung on the opposite wall. Lansdowne was sprawled out on the black leather sofa, his shirt half untucked from his trousers and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He reeked of cigarettes. When the smoking ban was enforced, Lansdowne learned to smoke cigarettes twice as fast. On a particularly stressful day in the newsroom, he’d been known to smoke two at once in the alleyway behind Premier News.

  Lansdowne gave us a thin smile, gesturing to the sofa next to him. ‘I’ve got a special treat for you today, folks. A front-row view of your latest fuck up.’ He swung his beady eyes towards me. ‘Sophie, aren’t Swifty and Emily your mates? Why the hell isn’t she coming to you with this? We should be fu—’