Silencing the Dead

by Will Harker

  As if on cue my phone rang. I’d received another half-dozen texts from Haz overnight, his tone increasingly concerned. In the end, I’d relented and messaged back, saying that I was fine but that I needed some time to myself. This prompted another stream of worried texts. Although he’d never asked about the details, he had seen me at work during my last investigation, and what he’d seen clearly concerned him. Scott, I don’t know what’s happening. Sal’s told me a little, but I know she’s holding things back. I need to see that you’re OK. And we need to talk. About everything. Take care and call me when you can.

  But the call right now wasn’t from Haz. It was Garris. He must have seen the morning news reports concerning a murder taking place at a travelling fair. Rejecting the call, I turned off my phone and headed down the scarlet-pebbled drive towards Cedar Gables.

  I’d pulled together a rough history of Genevieve Bell from a few online newspaper and magazine archives. Following the early death of their father from a heart attack, Genevieve and her sister Evangeline, two years her senior, had been left almost destitute. Together with their mother, Patricia, they had been forced to seek the help of a distant cousin—a widow with a strong interest in the supernatural. This relative had invited the Bells to come live with her. It seemed that soon after the move, Genevieve had started hearing the voice of her deceased father. Other odd occurrences followed—objects moving of their own accord, ectoplasmic emanations glimpsed by the residents of the house—all seemingly focused on the eight-year-old.

  By the early 90s, word of Genevieve’s gift had spread beyond her aunt’s small circle of clairvoyant enthusiasts and into the forums of a burgeoning online paranormal community. This led to reporters picking up the story and a growing public interest in the child who spoke to the dead. Genevieve had spent a little under five years in the spotlight before the glare became too harsh. For the past two decades, this timid, retiring woman had become a virtual recluse, living alone with her mother and providing private séances to a few trusted clients.

  A photograph from the height of her fame showed the Bell sisters standing together in front of their cousin’s modernist mansion. Genevieve, the smaller child, dark-haired, large-eyed, shied away from the camera, her hands raised in an almost defensive gesture. She was wearing the slightly oversized, black-lace gloves I’d seen in the photo from Dr Gillespie’s interview. Beside her stood the more assertive figure of Evangeline, not dissimilar in looks, but with copper-coloured hair and a defiant tilt of the chin. Her right hand was draped protectively around her sibling’s narrow shoulder, and despite her being little more than a child herself, I pitied whoever was on the receiving end of that fearsome glare.

  I had almost reached the house when a dazed figure came stumbling out of the conifers that bordered the drive. A woman in her mid-sixties, her snowy hair snagged with foliage, her nightdress muddied and torn. This must be Patricia Bell, the dementia-afflicted mother who had found her daughter murdered. I stepped forward and caught her as she stumbled onto the path.

  “Have you seen my hat, young man?” she twittered at me. “And my scarf? And my underthings? And my bedsheet’s gone missing too. And my daughter. No. No. Silly me, I keep forgetting. So many things. Do you forgive me?” I started to say something when she bounced onto her tiptoes and cried, “Here’s my daughter now. Eve… Evah! Woo! Over here! See, I remember things sometimes. I’m just having a nice chat with Mr…?”

  “Scott,” I smiled. “Jericho.”

  “Mr Scott, I’ll remember that.”

  The copper of her hair a little faded by the years, Evangeline Bell came storming out of the house. Reaching us, she pulled her mother roughly away before fixing me with a look reminiscent of that old photograph.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here? Speak up then.” Turning to the grinning woman beside her, she started picking the bits of leaf and twig from her hair. “Good God, Mother, I turn my back for five minutes and you’re wandering again. How ever Gennie coped with you all these years I’ll never know.”

  “Gennie?” She looked puzzled. “You mean Genevieve? She’s gone now. Dead and murdered, they say. But we know, don’t we?” Patricia gave me a knowing wink. “She’s still here, she speaks to me, she’ll never leave. Never. She was always my favourite, you know.”

  I saw Evangeline’s lips tighten, perhaps biting back bitter words.

  “Do you also possess your daughter’s gift then, Mrs Bell?” I asked. “You feel that Genevieve is still with you?”

  She shook her head, an expression of utter bafflement lengthening her features. “Eva, I want to go inside,” she said. “It’s so cold out here.”

  “And I want you gone, Mr Jericho, or whoever you are.” Evangeline looped her arm around her mother’s waist and started back towards the open door. “We’ve had enough of reporters lurking about, asking their insolent questions. Have the decency to let us grieve in peace.”

  “But I’m not a reporter,” I called after them. “I’m here because another woman has died. Please, I only want a few minutes of your time. It was my aunt, you see?”

  Ushering her mother over the threshold, Evangeline paused. “I’m very sorry for your loss, of course, but this is surely a matter for the police. I can’t see how us speaking about my sister could help you.”

  “I only wondered if you might have known her?” I said.

  I could feel the delicacy of the moment. If I so much as took a step forward it might feel like an intrusion too far and redouble her resistance. So I stayed where I was, even as she started to close the door on me.

  “Her name was Tilda Urnshaw,” I called out. “She was a fortune teller and medium. Perhaps you or your sister—?”

  She spun around, a look of horror on her face. “Tilda? Dear God. Tilda? But why would anyone…?”

  It took a few seconds for Evangeline Bell to recover herself.

  “Let me settle my mother down and then we can talk. I did know your aunt, Mr Jericho. Both Gennie and I met her when we were children. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Tilda Urnshaw none of this might have ever happened.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We sat together on a bench in the grounds of the house, the stripped white branches of an aspen quivering above us, the bright chuckle of an unseen stream reaching up from the valley. I held the mug of tea Evangeline had made for me in both hands, taking what warmth I could from it. Before us, the glazed rump of the house showed a mirror image of the frosted wood. Somewhere upstairs, Patricia Bell lay sleeping.

  Evangeline took a drag on her cigarette, unconsciously rubbing the small port-wine stain that marked the back of her hand. “Filthy habit, I know,” she said. “Gennie absolutely hated it. Our father had been a heavy smoker, you see, and it may have contributed to the heart attack that killed him. And if he hadn’t died and left us penniless? Well, then perhaps we’d never have come to Cedar Gables, never have made our silly plan to ingratiate ourselves with our cousin. Never met your aunt.

  “By the way, what I said just now about Tilda? I didn’t mean to imply that any of this is her fault. It’s just if, as the police suggest, this madman is killing people because he has some kind of grudge against psychics? Acht,” she shook her head, “it’s a pointless game. Trying to track the path that led us here. In the end, who can say where any blame might rest?”

  “Miss Bell, I think that, like me with my aunt, you’re only trying to make sense of what happened to your sister.”

  She sighed and picked a speck of tobacco from her lip. “What sense can ever be made of it?”

  “To the killer, there will be a logical pattern,” I said. “However crazy it might appear to us.”

  She gave me an appraising look. “What exactly are you, Mr Jericho? A psychiatrist?”

  “I used to be a detective,” I said. “And if you can help me, I’d like to use whatever skills I have to find the person who did this.”

  “My sister was always a victim,” she murmured, perhaps more to hers
elf than to me. “A victim of my mother, of our cousin, of the media, and those who wished to exploit her. Of her own inability to stand up for herself. I tried to protect her as much as I could when we were kids, but Gennie was a difficult person to help, especially when she started to believe that the game we’d invented was real. But the way in which she was made a victim in death? That was an insult. The degradation of an innocent soul.”

  She threw the cigarette butt into the trees and turned to face me. “What can I tell you that might help?”

  “First, I’d like to know how you met my aunt. The police seem to believe the killer is choosing his victims at random, but now that we’re aware of a connection, it might help to trace him.”

  “Do you know anything of our story?” Evangeline asked. When I told her the few facts I’d discovered online, she nodded. “As far as starting points go, it’s not a bad summary. Unbeknown to my mother, our father had made a number of bad investments in the months before his death. When those investments failed, we found ourselves destitute. A cousin came to the rescue. A busybody who enjoyed playing the role of benefactor to her poor relatives. She moved us in here and it was soon made clear that we were expected to earn our keep, our mother as an unpaid cook and us children as skivvies, to be seen and not heard. Bear in mind, I was about ten at the time, Gennie eight. We scrubbed and polished, vacuumed and dusted like proper little Cinderellas.

  “I think my mother was suffering from some kind of acute depression. In any case, she never raised any objection to how we were treated and Miss Grice, as our cousin insisted we call her, was a very forceful personality. But for such a strong-minded, practical woman she had one surprising weakness. A complete gullibility when it came to the supernatural. Clairvoyants were always in and out of the house, taking money off her by the fistful.

  “Gennie and I used to laugh ourselves sick about it. We’d sneak downstairs sometimes and watch their séances through a crack in the living room door. Even to us children, it was obvious how these fakers pulled their tricks—artificial voice boxes and tape recorders wedged between their knees, fishing wire hooked around their fingers to make the tablecloth jump, strands of luminous gauze tucked away in their cheeks and then dribbled out to look like ectoplasm. Child’s play, and yet our cousin ate it up.

  “Well, I thought, if it’s child’s play why don’t we give it a go? I was the leader, you see. The big sister always ready with any new game or prank. And little Gennie would just follow along in my wake, doing everything I told her…” She paused and pressed the side of that livid birthmark to her mouth. “That’s what doomed her, if anything. My stupid games.”

  “You told her to pretend she could hear your father’s voice?” I said.

  “Gennie had always been a consummate little actress,” Evangeline confirmed. “With a bit of practice, we figured out how the clairvoyants threw their voices so that it seemed as if someone was speaking from the other side of the room. We were nervous as hell the first night we tried it out. I remember running into Miss Grice’s bedroom and shaking her awake, screaming, trembling, saying that a spirit had taken control of my sister. Straight away I could see that we’d be all right. The excitement in her eyes! The hunger to believe.”

  “And Gennie’s performance convinced her?”

  “Convinced her and my mother. I think on some level, Mother knew we were inventing the whole thing, but the rewards that soon started landing in our lap made her a willing accomplice. She’d had it easy with my dad. Fur coats, fine dining, cruises around the Med. I honestly believe she’d have grasped at anything to get a fragment of that old life back.

  “About a week after we started our game, my cousin invited one of her favourite mediums over to the house. Tilda Urnshaw. I’m not sure how Miss Grice first met your aunt, but I know she held her in high regard. My sister and I were scared out of our wits. We could fool our cousin, but a true psychic? Miss Grice set us up in the living room and Gennie went through some routine we’d rehearsed, speaking in tongues, throwing her voice, the usual nonsense. Afterwards, Tilda didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she asked if she might have an hour alone with Gennie and me so that she could gauge our psychic frequencies. Miss Grice agreed and left the room.

  “As soon as the door closed, Tilda came out with it. She knew what we were up to. She’d visited the house before, and although she felt that my sister did indeed possess some latent psychic ability, it was not pronounced. That said, she’d seen how our cousin had treated us in the past and how much our situation had changed. She wanted to help us if she could. And so, for the next hour, she instructed us in what she termed ‘fake dukkerin’—what I believe Dr Gillespie might call ‘cold reading’ techniques—as well as a few other tricks of the trade.

  “She didn’t use these herself, she’d said, but they would help maintain the illusion we’d already created. It was all about effects, smoke and mirrors, set dressing. As part of this, she reached inside her bag and brought out a pair of long, black lace gloves. She then taught my sister to mimic the paranormal ability of psychometry. That is the skill of obtaining information about a person or object by touch alone. Genevieve was to say that the talent induced headaches and hence the need for the gloves so that she wouldn’t be continually bombarded with psychic images. Set dressing, you see? All to bolster our story.

  “When the hour was up, we knew as much about fraudulent psychic techniques as anyone. Thereafter, our lives changed completely. We were no longer charity cases but honoured guests, showered with every luxury. Our mother too. For a few years, it was heaven. We were the Bell sisters, inseparable.

  “Gennie was lauded by every clairvoyant Miss Grice ushered into her parlour. But as her fame began to spread outside Cedar Gables, so my sister started to change. You have to understand, it happened gradually over months and years, tiny incremental alterations in our relationship and Gennie’s idea of herself. I’m not sure when I finally realised that she now believed, utterly and completely, that her talents were real.”

  Listening to Evangeline, I suddenly flashed back to what I’d said to Harry about Aunt Tilda. “She’s been playing this role all her life, remember. I don’t even think she knows she’s making it up.” I wondered how many mediums began and ended this way.

  “Miss Grice died from a stroke when I was nineteen,” Evangeline continued. “By that time, my little sister had become our cousin’s favourite pet. Cedar Gables and all the Grice wealth was left in trust to Gennie. But by then, things were already falling apart. The press had got wind of the child who spoke to the dead, and after a couple of years of unrelenting publicity, my sister suffered a kind of breakdown.

  “I tried to talk to her. Tried to make her remember how the whole thing had started—just a silly game helped along by a well-meaning fortune teller. But Gennie had lost herself in a world of shadows. Her entire self-worth was tied up in the identity I had helped her forge. Even though she’d begun to shun the spotlight, she couldn’t let go of this crucial truth about herself, and for the next twenty years, she maintained absolute belief of her psychic gifts.”

  The wind stirred in the valley below, whistling among the rocks, crackling the frosted trees.

  “Until she was shown that it wasn’t real?” I suggested. “The podcast with Dr Gillespie, when he demonstrated to her how she did her tricks?”

  Evangeline’s eyes narrowed. “Why couldn’t he have left her alone? You’re right, Mr Jericho. I believe it was that moment that shattered my sister completely. All those years of self-deception crashing down upon her in a single, devasting moment. And then she saw the news about that man, Everwood, and the claims that he was a fraud and that he’d been inspired by her own story. She told me how responsible she felt for that. How guilty, that we’d perpetuated another generation of liars. You know, I think in the end, she was so miserable, so desperate, she probably welcomed death.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “But why would Gennie feel responsible for Darre
l Everwood’s lies?” I asked.

  “Because of the book,” Miss Bell said. “At the height of her fame, we were contacted by a publicist called Rose, I think—it’s so long ago, I can’t be sure of the name. Anyway, he wanted to represent Gennie. He’d already lined up a lucrative book deal with a major publisher. By this time, Miss Grice was dead and my mother eagerly signed the contract on our behalf. Hearing the Dead: The Story of Genevieve Bell is pretty much forgotten now, but in its day, it was a bestseller.”

  “Some old book inspired him to get into the medium business,” I murmured, remembering something Nick had told me. “So after your sister was humiliated by Dr Gillespie on the podcast, she learned that Darrel Everwood had taken inspiration for his career from her book?”

  Evangeline nodded. “That’s what she told me. Although I’d moved away in my early twenties, we’d always tried to stay in touch at least once a week. But in that last month, she was on the phone with me multiple times a day. Everything I’d been trying to tell her for the past two decades—the memories she’d buried, the truth of how it had all started—all of it was suddenly crashing down on her. She realised she’d spent her entire life unconsciously deceiving people. And now, as she read about a children’s magician who’d picked up her book in a charity shop and coveted her celebrity, she began to feel a suffocating sense of responsibility.”

  Evangeline plucked out another cigarette and lit up. “I think that’s how the preacher got his claws into her.”

  I stared at her. “What preacher?”

  “Oh.” She waved the smouldering tip. “Some ranting nutcase who came delivering pamphlets about a week after the podcast aired. Gennie happened to answer the door to him and they fell into conversation. He was a young man, apparently, and so had no idea who she was. But what with Gillespie and Everwood fresh in her mind, she was more than ready to hear how wicked and depraved she had been. But there was hope, of course! That’s the one carrot these godly men always hold out. Just make a small donation to my church and I’ll pray for your blighted soul.”