Dark Peak

by Adam J. Wright

  Mitch frowned. Was his father saying there were women buried beneath a grave of daisies in a glade? It was infuriatingly obscure.

  He repeated the passage over and over in his head. It didn’t give up its secrets.

  Mitch slammed the journal shut. He wouldn’t give up, couldn’t give up, but he needed to leave the words alone for now and come back to them again with fresh eyes tomorrow.

  He heard a noise outside and went to the window to see a blue Mini park next to the Jeep. It was the same Mini he’d seen at the church and it was Elly Cooper who got out of it.

  He sighed. He thought he’d made it clear to her what he thought of a publisher trying to profit from the tragedies of the missing girls. He went to the front door and opened it. She was already just outside it, her hand reaching for the lion-head knocker.

  “Hi,” she said with an uneasy smile.

  “I told you at the church, I’m not interested in helping you write your book,” he said. “I can’t stop you doing whatever you think you have to but I’m not going to be a part of it.”

  “Forget-me-not,” she said.

  “What?” He’d heard what she’d said, he just wasn’t sure he could believe it.

  “Forget-me-not. That’s what the killer refers to your sister as. A forget-me-not that never blooms. I can see from your face that you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I…yes, I know what you’re talking about. But how do you—”

  “So, are you going to invite me in?” she asked, pushing past him.

  He turned to face her in the foyer. His mind was reeling. How did she know what was in the journal? It had been locked away in a bank vault. Was there another copy somewhere and had she read that? Did it have different clues to his version?

  “You’ve read the journal?” he asked.

  “Yes, I—” she began, then looked confused. “What? No, I’ve read the letter.”

  “What letter?”

  She paused, narrowing her eyes. “What journal?”

  He sighed. Maybe it was time to show someone else the journal. He wasn’t getting anywhere with it on his own. And if Elly had a letter that mentioned Sarah and forget-me-nots, maybe it was the key to deciphering the journal.

  “I’ll let you see the journal if you show me the letter,” he said.

  She shot him a wicked grin. “I like the sound of that. You first.”

  “Follow me,” he said, leading her into the living room.

  “Is that it?” she asked, pointing at the journal on the coffee table.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  She reached into her back pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper. She held it up. “I think we have a lot to talk about. A cup of tea would be nice.” She gave him the sheet of paper.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, heading to the kitchen, unfolding the paper on the way. While he made a cup of tea for her, he read the poem. He’d seen most of these lines in the journal. The others were probably in there too somewhere, he just couldn’t remember them.

  He was disappointed that this letter didn’t contain any new information. But it did seem to be more focused than the journal because these lines were scattered throughout the journal yet when put together, they formed a poem about the girls. There was even a line about the heart necklace he’d found.

  “Shit!” He ran from the kitchen to the living room. The necklace was sitting on the coffee table right next to the journal.

  When he opened the door, Elly was sitting on the sofa. The tobacco tin was open on the table and the necklace was dangling from Elly’s hand, the gold heart swaying slightly.

  “This is Josie Wagner’s necklace,” she said. “You need to tell me everything.”

  20

  Two Hands

  An hour later, Elly stood by the living room window, looking out at the lawn of Edge House while Mitch made more drinks in the kitchen. The clouds were beginning to darken, promising rain. Mitch had told her how he discovered the journal in Michael Walker’s safe deposit box and how he’d later followed a clue from it and found the heart necklace.

  In exchange, she’d told him everything she knew from her research. He hadn’t known any of the Walker family history and had listened with interest.

  She’d flicked through the journal while Mitch was speaking and had seen the landscape and botanical sketches, as well as the portrait of Sarah Walker and the lock of hair taped to the page. She’d read some of the descriptions of walks in the countryside and visits to certain flowers.

  Those passages had been written with a deliberate vagueness. The writings were so obscure that even if Michael Walker were still alive and arrested for his crimes, the journal would never stand up as evidence in a court of law. And that was probably the point of writing them in such a manner.

  The lock of hair taped to the page didn’t actually prove anything, even if it turned out to be Sarah’s. Lots of parents kept locks of their children’s hair.

  The foxglove line had led Mitch to Josie Wagner’s necklace but the other sections of the journal, the ones that led to the bodies of the victims—if that was what they actually led to—were wilfully obscure.

  The journal’s outward appearance of innocence bugged Elly. Not because of its coyness in describing actual places, although that annoyed the hell out of her, but because the manner in which Mitch had found it didn’t make sense.

  “What I don’t understand,” she told Mitch as he came back into the room and handed her a second cup of tea, “is why the journal was locked away. It was obviously written in such a way that it wasn’t a signed confession or anything. So why did your dad lock it in a safe deposit box?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “According to my cousin, who’s the manager at the bank, he seemed perfectly normal when he took it into the bank. She didn’t say he seemed nervous or anything so I don’t think he was afraid of someone finding it. He probably just thought the bank was a safe place for it.”

  “Your cousin? Are you related to everyone in this area?”

  “It seems like it sometimes. When I saw you at the graveyard, I wondered if you might be some distant relation.”

  She laughed. “A red-headed stepchild, maybe.”

  Mitch grinned. It was the first time Elly had seen him grin and she liked it. He seemed to be wound up most of the time so it was good to see him relax, if only for a second.

  Before the journal was taken to the bank,” Mitch said, becoming serious again, “I think it was locked away in the safe upstairs. The house was broken into recently and the thieves seemed particularly interested in the safe. But it turned out to be empty. According to the housekeeper, nothing is missing from the house so it looks like the safe was the target.”

  “Oh,” Elly said, turning back to the window so he wouldn’t see in her eyes that she already knew about the break-in, that she’d entered the same way as the thieves. “It sounds to me like someone was trying to get their hands on the journal. Someone who wanted to use it against your dad. Maybe they wanted to blackmail him.”

  “But the break-in happened after he was already dead,” Mitch said.

  Elly sipped the hot tea and wondered why someone would want the journal badly enough to break into Edge House. How had they known about the journal in the first place?

  “Wait a minute,” she said, going over to the coffee table where the photocopied letter and the journal sat side by side. She opened the journal to a random page and looked from it to the letter and then at Mitch. “The handwriting’s different. Whoever wrote the journal didn’t write this letter to the police. Look, they’re totally different.”

  He picked up the letter and ran his eyes over it. “Maybe he disguised his handwriting when he wrote the letter?”

  “No, it isn’t that,” Elly said. “It’s a different person altogether. Okay, new theory.” She paced the room while she thought it out. “Your father had an accomplice. The journal was kept here under lock and key and after your father died, t
he accomplice feared that someone—namely you—would eventually open the safe and get their hands on it. So he broke into the house to get it.”

  Mitch seemed to be thinking it through. He gazed at the journal and at the letter. “It seems unlikely, two murderers working together like that. How would they have met? They wouldn’t have just bumped into one another in a coffee shop. ‘Hi, I’m a murderer.’ ‘Oh, cool. So am I.’ It doesn’t sound plausible.”

  “It happens all the time,” she said. “Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Fred and Rosemary West. These people are drawn to each other.”

  “So why did the accomplice send this to the police in the year 2000?” Mitch asked, holding up the letter.

  “Maybe he slipped up. He wanted to gloat about their crimes, so one day, just after they killed Lindsey Grofield, he wrote the letter and posted it.”

  Mitch looked unconvinced. “No, I don’t buy it. It’s possible but it just doesn’t sound right. And it doesn’t explain why my father moved the journal from the safe to the bank vault. By moving it there, he was essentially giving it to me because he’d named me as his beneficiary.”

  “But he wasn’t planning to die,” Elly said. “He probably thought it would languish in there for years.”

  “Well, he was wrong about that,” Mitch said. “He died two days later and now here it is back in the house.”

  “What do you mean two days later?”

  “My cousin told me my father took a manila envelope to his safe deposit box two days before he died. It had to be the journal because that’s all there was in the box and it was inside a manila envelope.”

  Elly groaned inwardly. Why hadn’t she been told this before? The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. “He knew someone was coming after the journal,” she said. “That’s why he put it in the bank. And that’s why he died two days later.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see? It all makes sense. Your dad put the journal in the safe deposit box because he knew someone wanted it and he needed to keep it out of their reach.”

  Mitch frowned at her. “Or maybe he just thought the bank was a better place to keep it.”

  “And then, two days after thinking that, he died?” she asked. Pointing at the foyer beyond the open door, she said, “What if he didn’t fall down those stairs? What if he was pushed?”

  “By the accomplice?”

  “Maybe they had some kind of argument. The accomplice might have wanted to send another letter or gloat about their crimes in some other way. There was a clash of personalities. Your dad was more reserved, killing quietly and keeping everything under wraps. The accomplice was more hot-headed, seeking notoriety for his crimes. What if that clash escalated into murder?”

  Mitch was nodding slowly. “It sounds possible.”

  “So one of the Blackden Edge Murderers is still out there somewhere,” Elly said. She looked through the window at the shadows beneath the trees that surrounded the house and shivered. “We need to make sure no one knows we have that journal. Because somebody wants it badly enough to kill for it.”

  The redhead who arrived at Edge House in a blue Mini has a face I recognise. She stands just inside the window, looking out over the lawn, unaware that I’m out here in the shadows beneath the trees. I try to remember where I’ve seen her before. She’s not from around here, that much I know. So why does she seem familiar?

  When the question begins to frustrate me, I push it aside and instead assign her a flower. Because of her red hair, a field poppy comes to mind. But I don’t know anything about this woman and the comparison seems weak because it is based purely on physical appearance. The flowers I choose for my girls are carefully selected in a way that goes beyond mere hair colour.

  The Hatton girls were bluebells in every aspect of their being. Heads hung in shame, eyes on the ground beneath their feet, never looking up to the sun.

  And Lindsey Grofield was a daisy because she was just the opposite. Instead of keeping her head down, she was always snooping into other people’s business. So the daisy is apt because it looks like a wide open eye. Lindsey’s eyes were open at the end, just like daisies, staring in surprise.

  Josie Wagner was a cuckoo flower, of course. What else could she be after what she did?

  My hand has clenched so tightly that my nails dig into my palm. I open my fingers slowly and look down at the crescent-shaped marks in my flesh.

  Forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply, I calm the emotions boiling up inside me. I need to keep my focus steady. Mitch’s arrival has already unnerved me and the appearance of this unknown yet familiar woman makes me nervous. The fact that they are both in Edge House only makes me more anxious.

  I shrink back into the shadows when the front door opens and the redhead leaves, keys jangling in her hand as she heads towards the Mini. Mitch stands at the open door, watching her go. As the woman climbs in behind the wheel, she gives him a little wave. He waves back at her like a schoolboy waving at his first crush.

  The redhead starts the car and drives away, a slight smile on her lips. If Mitch is anything like the other Walker men, that smile will soon be slapped away for good.

  Perhaps he isn’t like the others. Perhaps this redheaded woman will never fear the unreadable expression that crosses a man’s face before he clenches his fists into twin battering rams. Or the sneer of cruelty that curls his lip just before he takes what he wants by force.

  I laugh at myself for even considering that Mitch could be different. The rage and need are in his blood. They flow through the family tree like bile drawn up from the roots.

  He goes back into the house and closes the door.

  I wait in the shadows a little longer before turning my back on Edge House and making my way along the trail that leads through the woods. The air is fragrant, scented by the wildflowers that thrive here. My own addition to the abundance of flora lies farther along the trail, growing beneath a wych elm. I’ve tended the plants there for years, replanting when necessary and nurturing the seeds until they grow into the bright pink abundance of flowers that mark the place where I buried Josie Wagner’s heart.

  It isn’t her real heart, although that would be poetic. It’s the necklace she wore the night she went to Blackden Edge. The moment I saw it, I knew it would be my trophy. Unlike my other girls, Josie didn’t deserve to be buried beneath a covering of flowers. I left her body where the police would find it and took only the tiny gold heart to remember her by.

  The foxgloves are the flowers I visit the least often. Remembering Josie Wagner is painful and I only come to the place where I buried her necklace when I want to think about what I did to her. Sometimes I need to remember.

  When I see the wych elm, I hurry along the trail, but as I get closer to the site, I can tell it’s been disturbed. The foxgloves have been dug up and moved. They sit on a pile of freshly-dug soil while the place where they were—where the heart was—is nothing but a hole.

  This time, I don’t calm myself when I feel the anger boil inside me. I dig my nails into my palms, squeezing my hands into tight fists. It has to be Mitch who has done this. He’s found the heart and taken it.

  That means he has the journal.

  That thought arrives with cold clarity. Mitch has the journal.

  Has he talked to the redhead about it? Has he called the police? Perhaps the redhead is a police officer and she’s taken the journal to the station.

  This won’t do. This won’t do at all.

  I turn away from the hole and make my way through the trees to the place where I parked my car by the side of the road. It’s over half a mile away because I didn’t want to park too close to Edge House, but the journey gives me time to think.

  I need to find out who the redhead is.

  I need to know where the journal is.

  By the time I get to my car, I’m still boiling with rage. The sky is beginning to darken with storm clouds. I get into the car as the first spots of rai
n begin to fall.

  I don’t want to go home yet.

  I start the engine and drive. At first, I drive aimlessly, turning in a random direction when I come to each intersection. But after twenty minutes, it becomes clear where I’m going.

  I’m heading north into Dark Peak.

  The landscape on either side of the road gradually changes from woods and rolling farmland to high peaks and rain-sodden moors. The ruggedness of the land excites me. Anything could happen in these wild places. A person could wander into this landscape and never be seen again.

  The road gets steeper as it ascends a hill. Up ahead, I see someone walking by the side of the road, head bowed against the rain, working hard to trudge up the incline. As I get closer, I see it’s a girl. Her jacket is bright red, her walking trousers black, the same as her damp hair, which I can now see is plastered to the collar of the jacket.

  She wears a blue-and-grey rucksack and in her right hand is a walking pole. She sinks it into the grass by the roadside with each step she takes before flicking it ahead of her, ready for the next. She needs to take extra care because the grass slopes away sharply on either side of the road. If she fell, she’d end up on the moors with a broken leg or neck.

  As I come alongside her, I slow the car and open the window on the passenger side. Her hair is stuck to her face so she brushes it away to look at me. Her eyes are blue and friendly, without a trace of fear.

  “Terrible weather,” I say, as if she hasn’t noticed. “Have you got far to go?”

  She offers me a sheepish smile. “I’m not sure. To be honest, I’m a bit lost.”

  Yes, you are, I think. The image of the empty hole in the woods by Edge House has been stuck in my mind the entire time I’ve been driving, making me seethe with anger. I manage to keep the emotion out of my voice and smile at the girl. “Where are you trying to get to?”

  “I’m trying to find the Little Nook B&B. Do you know where that is?”

  I nod. “It’s four or five miles up the road. Do you want a lift?”