Battle trailed his hand through a stand of tall grass as they walked. It seemed to Mitch that the detective was trying to discern any secrets the woods might hold through his senses of sight and touch.
A secret that makes the foxglove blush pink, Mitch thought, paraphrasing the damned journal. He wondered if Battle knew something about these woods, if he suspected that there might be something here that Michael Walker was trying to hide.
“Of course, you don’t know about the girls,” the detective said, as if reminding himself. “It’s common knowledge around here but your mother took you away when you were nine. You wouldn’t know anything at all about it. How silly of me.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about what?” Mitch asked. As they walked, his eyes were drawn to every stand of pink foxglove they passed. There must be hundreds of them in these woods. The sight of them made him angry. The one clue in the journal that mentioned a specific place was actually no more helpful than any of the vague ramblings found elsewhere in the book.
“When your sister went missing in 1987, she wasn’t the first girl to vanish from this area. She wasn’t the last either. We’ve had our fair share of mysterious disappearances over the years and they don’t always make the national news. Those that did were soon forgotten by the rest of the world. Disappearances don’t sell papers, you see, not like murder anyway. Not gruesome enough. It’s all too vague to be a good news story. Now, if there’s a body, then there’s a good story for your average newspaper reader. A body is something tangible. Bodies sell papers because the readers can picture them in their minds.”
Mitch was surprised to hear that Sarah’s disappearance was just one in a long line of vanishings. “How many girls have gone missing? You must have suspects if this has been going on for a while.”
“The length of time this has been going on for is part of the problem. It’s difficult for me to convince my superiors there’s a link between a girl going missing in 1974 and the same happening in 1999. The extended time period also makes it harder to investigate the links. The police force’s personnel changes over time, of course, so by the time the next girl disappears, the officers who worked the previous case have all retired or moved on to pastures new. Not to mention witnesses moving away from the area or dying. It makes it hard to follow up leads that might prove a connection.”
“It’s been going on that long?” Mitch asked. “Since 1974?”
Battle nodded. “In the winter of 1974, two sisters, Evie and Mary Hatton, went missing from Blackden Edge. Evie was ten, her sister eight. Do you know Blackden Edge, Mr. Walker?”
Mitch shook head. “I’m not from around here, remember?”
“It’s in the Dark Peak area. That’s an area mostly north of here. The landscape is wilder up there and there’s a lot millstone grit in the soil, which means the land gets saturated in winter and becomes bogs and moors. Evie and Mary lived in one of the villages in the Dark Peak area and one winter’s evening, they went out after tea and were never seen again. The police never found their bodies. A couple of weeks later, some weekend ramblers were walking along Blackden Edge and one of their party found an earring in the shape of a star. It was brought to the police station and confirmed by the girls’ mother to have been Evie’s.”
Battle looked up at the sky through the overhead branches. “The girls vanished without a trace apart from that earring. That was thirty-four years ago, and to this day no one knows what happened to them.”
“The police didn’t have any leads?” Mitch asked.
“There were some rumours in the village that the girls were being sexually abused by their father so he was looked at very closely but he had a cast iron alibi for the night of their disappearance. He was sitting in a cell in the local police station after causing a drunken disturbance in the pub. So that all came to nothing. And then, just a year later, another girl disappeared from the same area. I’m surprised you don’t already know about it but you’d only have been three years old at the time and I suppose your parents weren’t exactly bursting to tell you the news while you were still a child. It isn’t the kind of thing that comes up at the family dinner table.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mitch said.
“In 1975, another girl went missing from the Blackden Edge area. Her name was Olivia Walker.” Battle paused and then added, “She was your aunt.”
13
One of These Things
“My aunt?” Mitch couldn’t believe what he was hearing. As far as he knew, he didn’t have an aunt. His mother had no siblings and his father only had a brother, Silas.
“Your father’s sister,” Battle said. “Olivia. I take it from the look on your face that you’ve never heard of her.”
“Never,” Mitch said.
“She was the youngest of the three siblings,” Battle told him. “Two years younger than Silas, five years younger than your father. By all accounts, Olivia was a quiet child. From the witness statements I’ve read, it seems that she kept herself to herself. In 1975, when she was sixteen, she left Blackmoor House, on a winter’s night just like the Hatton sisters, telling her mother that she was going to a schoolfriend’s house. She never returned. Despite the thorough investigation that was carried out at the time, the schoolfriend Olivia mentioned was never tracked down. According to everyone the police interviewed, Olivia had no friends. The girls at school thought she was strange and avoided her.”
“Nobody ever told me about her,” Mitch said. “I never knew she existed.”
“Well, perhaps now you understand why your mother did a runner when Sarah disappeared. First your father’s sister goes missing, then his daughter. She probably thought she was next.”
Mitch remembered the way his mother kept them constantly on the move, never staying in one place for more than a year, avoiding contact with the neighbours, keeping him off school. Was she trying to protect them because she believed Michael Walker would come after them if he knew where they were?
“The police found Olivia’s jacket hanging on a fence post near Blackden Edge,” Battle said. “So, of course, you can imagine what happened next. Everyone started talking about the Blackden Edge Murderer. With Evie and Mary going missing the year before, it was inevitable that rumours of a serial killer would spread from village to village. No one dared go out after dark. They believed a bogeyman wandered Blackden Edge, waiting to snatch young girls.”
“Did the police have any suspects?” Mitch asked.
“No. They checked the known criminals in the area, particularly sex offenders, but nothing came of it.”
“What about my father?”
“The entire family was looked at closely but nothing came of that either. The police had no reason to believe the boys or their parents were involved.”
“But that doesn’t mean they weren’t,” Mitch said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Battle conceded. “And you have to remember that the family was extremely wealthy and held a lot of sway in the community. Frank Walker, your great-grandfather, was good friends with anyone who held any power—political or otherwise, and that included people at the highest levels of the police force.”
“So you think there was corruption involved?”
Battle spread his hands. “I don’t know. I wasn’t even a copper then so everything I’m telling you now is what I’ve read in the case files. I do know that when Josie Wagner was murdered in 1977, the detectives handling the case were told there was no reason to include the Walker family in their investigations. As far as the then-chief was concerned, the Walkers had been cleared of all wrongdoing and that was that.”
“Murdered,” Mitch said, feeling as if he’d fallen down a rabbit hole and was in an alternate world. Why had his mother never told him about any of this? She must have known. It was as if she’d been lying to him his entire life for not revealing important information that could be linked to Sarah’s disappearance.
“Josie Wagner was a young nurse who went hiking along Blackden Edge,”
Battle said. “She wasn’t from the area, so she’d probably never heard anything about the killer. Besides, it was two years after Olivia’s disappearance and everything had been quiet since then. Josie’s naked body was discovered at the Edge. She’d been strangled.”
Mitch felt sick. If the person who’d abducted Sarah was the same one who’d murdered Josie Wagner, did that mean Sarah had been strangled too? And if Josie Wagner had been found naked… “Had she been raped?” he asked.
“No,” Battle said, “there was no evidence of rape. Josie’s killer wasn’t motivated by lust but by something else. Sexual frustration, perhaps. Or anger towards women.”
“What do you mean?”
Battle stopped walking and turned to Mitch. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Mitch thought about it. “Do you think the person who murdered Josie Wagner is the same person who took Sarah?”
Battle nodded. “I think it’s possible, yes.”
“Tell me,” Mitch said, steeling himself for whatever Battle was going to say next.
“Josie hadn’t been raped but she had been sexually mutilated. A knife had been used on her breasts, stomach, and between her legs.”
“I see,” Mitch said flatly. He couldn’t let his thoughts go to the dark place to which they were travelling. If the same person who’d taken Josie Wagner had also taken Sarah…
“After Josie Wagner, everything went quiet,” Battle said quickly. Maybe the detective had sensed the direction of Mitch’s thought process and was trying to pull Mitch out of it. “For ten years, at least. Tales of the Hatton sisters’ disappearance and Josie Wagner’s murder persisted, of course, but in time the Blackden Edge Murderer passed from reality into local folklore. Parents told stories of the murderer to keep kids away from Blackden Edge at night, that sort of thing. The police continued their investigation but no arrests were made.”
“But they must have had suspicions” Mitch said.
“Not really. They rounded up the same people as they’d done in the case of the Hatton sisters the previous year but no one was implicated in the killing.”
“And ten years later, Sarah vanished,” Mitch said.
Battle nodded. “I worked on your sister’s case. You probably don’t remember me coming here and asking questions. It was my guv’nor, Gordon Farley, who was the lead detective on the case. I was just a young Detective Constable working my first case for the CID.”
“I remember very little from that time.” Mitch was going to say more, about how memories sometimes flashed into his head that had very little meaning to him but seemed to suggest a troubled childhood, but his eyes had seen something next to the trail that made his breath catch.
“Are you all right, Mr. Walker?” Battle seemed genuinely concerned. He put a hand on Mitch’s shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Mitch said, turning away from what he’ seen so Battle wouldn’t realise what it was.
He was too late. Battle’s eyes followed the direction Mitch had been looking and he said, “What lovely flowers.” Stepping off the trail, he went over to the patch of foxglove and touched one of the flowers. “Digitalis, I believe.”
“You know your flowers,” Mitch said. “Most people call it foxglove.”
“I probably don’t know as much about them as you do, Mr. Walker, given your profession, but I know that the crushed-up flowers of this little beauty are used to make heart medicine. And I’ve read enough Agatha Christie novels to know that too much of it is a poison that stops the heart completely.” He looked closely at the stand of flowers he was touching and at the others in the area. “These look different to the others. I expect that’s why they caught your attention.”
He looked at Mitch with a searching expression. Battle wasn’t stupid; he knew seeing these flowers had affected Mitch.
Mitch cursed his own overreaction. He’d been casually inspecting each stand of foxglove they’d passed, looking for something that might indicate which stand was the one mentioned in the journal. When he’d seen these flowers nestled in the shade of a wych elm, the certainty that these were the foxgloves from the book had startled him.
“They’re a hybrid variety,” he said. “Not wild like the others. That’s why they have that unusual yellow stripe on the petals.”
“I see,” Battle said, stroking a flower with the tip of his finger. “They’re very vivid, deeper pink than the wild ones.” He stood up, frowning. “I wonder how they got here.”
“The only one way a hybrid species could be here,” Mitch said, sure he was telling Battle something the detective already knew, “is if someone planted them here.”
“Seems an odd thing to do,” Battle said. “Your father wasn’t much of a horticulturalist judging by the state of the garden at the house, so why would he plant flowers out here in the woods?”
“If my father planted them,” Mitch said. “It could have been anyone.” He had no doubt that his father had planted them but he didn’t want Battle to become too suspicious about the foxgloves. He was sure that there was something buried in the earth beneath the hybrid flowers and he needed to be the one to discover it.
If Battle started digging around and found something odd, the entire police force might come swooping into the woods and either cover up evidence or start a half-assed investigation. Mitch couldn’t let either of those things happen. He was determined to find out what happened to Sarah himself, without interference from people who might be trying to protect his father.
“Yes, it could have been anyone,” Battle said, staring at the foxgloves. “But these woods are part of the Edge House property so it would be strange for someone else to be planting flowers here.” He continued to stare at the flowers, seemingly considering something. Then, he snapped out of his reverie and looked at Mitch. “Shall we head back to the house? I’m sure the officers will have dusted everything they want to dust and are probably waiting to take your fingerprints.”
As they retraced their steps, Battle said, “Mr. Walker, are you sure there isn’t something you know that could aid my investigation?”
Mitch wanted to trust Battle because the detective obviously had a keen mind and would be a big help in finding out what happened to Sarah. But Battle was working against a huge disadvantage; he was tied down by red tape. If Mitch told him about the journal, it would probably end up locked away in an evidence room somewhere and he’d have no chance of cracking its code. He couldn’t relinquish the journal until he knew its secrets.
“There’s nothing,” he told the detective.
Battle sighed. “Very well. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
Fifteen minutes later, Battle and the officers had left, along with Mrs. Jenkins, a pale woman in her sixties who had insisted that nothing was missing from the house and she had no idea what Mr. Walker had kept locked away in the safe.
Mitch strode along the trail that led into the woods, this time with a shovel in his hands.
As soon as he reached the stand of hybrid foxgloves, he started to dig. The ground was still damp from yesterday’s rain and the shovel blade sank easily into the earth. As he dug, Mitch felt both elation and trepidation. After thirty years, he was finally doing something proactive in his search to discover what had happened to his sister. But he was also aware that what was unearthed here could be her body.
If that happened, if he found her remains here beneath the wych elm, he would call the police. His search for her would be over and he could give her a proper burial. He’d still need to find out why her life had been cut short after only seven years and he’d still need to know who had killed her.
The answer to that last question would be obvious, though. If Sarah was buried in the woods near Edge House, in a grave marked by a stand of foxgloves mentioned in the journal, it was obvious. But why would Michael Walker kill his young daughter? It didn’t make any sense. The only answer Mitch could come up with was that his father had been mentally unstable. Some of the rambling passages
in the journal certainly supported that theory.
After carefully digging up the hybrid foxgloves, Mitch placed them to one side. If he found something here that wasn’t Sarah’s body but a piece of a puzzle that meant he had to keep searching, he would replace the foxgloves so it looked like they’d never been disturbed. He knew Battle was suspicious of this place and he didn’t want the detective to know he’d been digging here. Battle would begin asking questions he didn’t want to answer.
With the flowers out of the way, Mitch put his back into the work, removing shovelfuls of earth quickly. He had to dig around the elm’s thick roots when they got in his way but other than that, the ground succumbed easily to the shovel blade as it sliced into the soil.
Sweat formed on Mitch’s face. He fell into a rhythm, a rhythm he was used to from thousands of hours of digging his clients’ gardens. Working the shovel efficiently, he concentrated on his task and not what he might find in this hole. He’d deal with that when he had to. A swarm of gnats attacked his face, some drowning in beads of his sweat, others swatted by a quick hand. He dug until the hole was deep enough that he could stand in it. When he stood in it, he was waist-deep in the earth. Still, he continued to dig.
Then he found something.
The shovel slid into the earth. Mitch lifted the load of soil and flicked it out of the hole. As it landed on the ground, he heard a dull metallic clang. He scrambled out of the hole and rushed over to the discarded earth. A small, square metal tin lay on the ground. Its surface was pitted and rusty. It was closed.
He picked it up and turned it over on his hand. There was something metallic inside, rattling around as the tin moved.
It was an old tobacco tin. The label was a faded orange colour and the words Grand Cut and 2 oz. Net Weight were visible. Around the edge of the lid were the words “Insert Coin in Slot Below Lid Here and Twist to Open.” An arrow pointed to a slot in one of the rounded corners of the tin, directly below the lid.
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