by P. R. Black
‘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.’
&
nbsp; ‘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.
4
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 th
en.’
‘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.’
