I remember letting out a tiny groan. ‘Christ, I didn’t know…’
‘And how could you? It’s something we all tried to forget. We didn’t talk about Carol because of its effect on Mark. But I guess he could never forget her. In the end it killed him.’
I thought about my obsession with Madeline and how that had led me to considering suicide just to be with her. I shuddered.
Later that same day Trisha came round to the shop. She was in floods of tears, and we sat together on the sofa cuddling each other for a long time.
‘He was such a nice man,’ she said. ‘He tried to make us into a couple…’
I agreed. He was a nice man and I knew I would miss him terribly. He’d been a part of my life for decades, and now he’d been taken away from me in the most tragic of circumstances.
‘I could have helped him,’ I said to her. ‘Instead, I accused him of something really bad. I was too wrapped up in myself to help him.’ I felt such overwhelming guilt it gnawed at my insides like a rapacious animal.
‘He wouldn’t want you beating yourself up like this, Toby,’ she said, rubbing my arm tenderly. ‘He’d want you to get on and enjoy your life.’
I knew that. I could almost hear Mark telling me not to be so stupid, stop my blubbering and man up. I even smiled at the thought.
‘You’re right, he would,’ I said, sniffing and trying to pull myself together.
‘So how is your head?’ she asked.
I instinctively touched my head where the stitches were. It felt tender. ‘I was lucky not to have had my skull fractured,’ I said. ‘People have had it in for my poor head lately. It’s a wonder I’ve not been knocked silly.’
‘I heard the ruckus on the dance floor from backstage, but never for one moment thought you would be at the centre of it.’ She gave a brittle chuckle. ‘You never cease to surprise me, Toby Turner.’ She got to her feet and put her coat on. ‘I’ve got to be going now, Toby, but we’ll speak later, huh?’
I nodded. ‘So how was the visit to Glory Daze backstage?’
She curled up her nose. ‘It was OK, not as exciting as I thought it would be. There were a couple of girls there getting quite tipsy, but I thought it wasn’t for me so I left them to it. Rusty Steele was nice enough, though.’
The name snagged my attention. ‘Wait a minute – Rusty Steele, you say?’
‘Yeah. Rusty’s the keyboard player. He’s the band’s main man. His real name’s Richard Steele, but Rusty’s his nickname. Anyway, see you later, Toby. And keep your chin up.’ She left me alone to my thoughts.
Rusty Steele. Was that what Madeline had been trying to tell me before she was turned off by Farnham’s machinery like she was a radio? Rusty Steele didn’t refer to something, but someone. And even if it turned out to be the same Rusty Steele, why would she mention the keyboard player in a contemporary band? It didn’t make sense.
I was still struggling to comprehend it all when there was a loud knocking at the door. It was the postman. He held up a large parcel, and I suddenly remembered…
It was the parcel sent by Mark before his death.
I let it sit before me on my desk for a good half hour. I prodded it, pushed it, picked it up, rattled it. I stared at it, not knowing what to do with it. It was as if a tiny part of him had come back from the dead and it felt vaguely sacrilegious to think about opening it. Maybe I should pass it on to Joseph. He was his brother, after all.
But Mark had meant it for me, because he trusted me with it. Its contents had been important to him for some reason. And the only way to find out how important was to open it.
I took my penknife, sliced the tape and peeled back the brown paper wrapping. It was a plain, unassuming cardboard box. I flipped back the lids and began to remove the contents and pile them on my desk.
I took out the file containing the missing young women’s photographs which I’d first seen in his study. I admit at that point my heart sank. He had trusted me with his fantasy, and was even attempting to drag me into it. I placed the file on the desk. Next to it I put the folded map that turned out to be the one I’d seen taped to his study wall. Another map, this time of Europe. Cities in Germany, Amsterdam, a few others, had been circled in pencil. Curiously, the next item was an old cream-coloured book titled London’s Underworld. I opened it up. It was a first edition from 1950, heavily foxed and well-thumbed. Happy birthday, Ted. July 1951, had been written in biro on the first page. I raised my brow and lay the book aside.
I removed a plastic bag containing a number of photos. I opened it up and thumbed through them. There were quite a few, about fifteen or twenty, printed on a home printer by the looks of them. All of the photos were of the same two young men, either together or separately, and captured by using some kind of telephoto lens. It was patently obvious these guys hadn’t been aware they were being photographed. I looked at one man more closely than the other, because his face seemed so damn familiar, but in the end I had to put the photos back into the plastic bag, having failed to recall where I might have seen him.
The box contained a number of notebooks and a largish manila envelope. Lying under these at the very bottom sat a smaller box, carefully sealed in tape, and actually quite heavy. I slit the tape and opened the box. I was shocked with what slid out onto my hand.
Wrapped in clear plastic was a handgun. I let it fall to the desk with a loud clatter.
‘Jesus!’ I said. I never knew Mark possessed such a thing and it took me completely by surprise. What was he doing with it, the fool? Then my mind went back to what he’d said about killing his girlfriend’s murderer. ‘Don’t tell me you actually meant to do it,’ I said to myself. I shook my head. ‘You crazy mixed up idiot!’ I slid it back into its box, thankful that the gun was out of my sight.
I turned my attention to one of the notebooks, flipped through it almost casually, not really taking much notice. A piece of folded paper fell from between the pages. I opened it out. It was a photocopy of an architect’s drawing of a house or something. Not an entire house, I realised, just one floor of that house. The cellars, as far as I could make out. Two distinct rooms ringed in red felt-tip pen. There was no other information on it so with a shrug I folded it back up and was on the verge of closing the notebook and putting all the stuff back into the box when my eye caught fleeting sight of a name.
Rusty Steele.
I flipped through the notebook’s pages again but couldn’t find it. I must have imagined it, I thought.
But I stumbled across it again. Rusty Steele.
I held the page closer to my face. At the top of the page there was a word, underlined twice.
Benediction.
Beneath this there were four names, all male, and Rusty Steele’s was at the top.
I turned the page. Another underlined word headed the page.
Deliverance.
Five names listed beneath it. One belonging to a woman. Rusty Steele’s at the top.
The next page. The word Groundless.
And below it four names. Rusty Steele at their head.
I flipped a few more pages. At last I came to one that bore a very familiar word.
Glory Daze.
Four names below it. Rusty Steele at the top.
It struck me immediately what those seemingly random words on Mark’s map referred to. I wondered how I never saw it before.
They were the names of rock groups, and if the names below them referred to band members then the one person who had been in every one of the bands was Rusty Steele.
I grabbed the map of the UK, kneeled on the floor and spread it out before me. In moments I had photographs and pieces of paper strewn about the carpet. I slowly began to piece things together, much as Mark had done.
In every one of the towns or cities from which the girls had gone missing, one of the listed bands had played there. Coincidence? I checked the dates. Was it a coincidence that the girls went missing shortly after the groups had played in the cities and towns w
here they went missing from? If Mark had done his homework properly then somehow Rusty Steele was connected to their disappearances.
I breathed out a pent-up breath and shook my head in disbelief. But what was Rusty Steele’s part in things, and what exactly had happened to all those girls?
I desperately needed more information so I went back to the box, to the notebooks and other paraphernalia. I took the photographs out of the envelope, scattered them all over my map and began to look at each of them in turn. Some were photographs of the exterior of old clubs and pubs, dates scribbled on the back. Some were group shots, copies of publicity photos and photos from old newspapers. The names of each group had been pencilled in on the photo. Fortitude; Blandishments; Deliverance – and the thing that bound all the photos of the band members, circled in pencil, was the clearly recognisable form of Richard ‘Rusty’ Steele.
I didn’t know what the other photographs related to. One was a black and white picture of a woman and a man standing outside the door of some kind of building, but it was hard to say what it was. The man held the hand of a little girl, aged about six, I would say, her sulky face looking down at her feet as if she didn’t want to be on a photo; the mother had a baby in her arms. There was nothing on the back of the photo to give me any clues but it looked like it had been taken in the 1970s, judging from the fashions. But again there was something very familiar about the man and woman, something I couldn’t put my finger on. As if I’d seen them somewhere before.
I gave up in the end and picked up the old book. I began to read the musty pages. The volume was an edited collection of the writings of Henry Mayhew, from the fourth volume of something called London Labour and the London Poor. What the hell this collection of Victorian writings had to do with rock groups and missing women I did not know. The chapter headings dealt with Thieves and Swindlers, Beggars and Cheats and Prostitution in London. The sub-headings dealt with every conceivable permutation of vice, from Lucifer Droppers to The Choking Dodge, and a good many more, most of which remained a complete mystery.
I flipped through the thick, age-creamed pages and at last found some passages underlined in pen. For some time I was drawn into a dark world long-dead, and the nefarious activities of a criminal underworld whose base attitude to life and death and the preying on the vulnerable caused me to shudder. It caused me to shudder because the realisation hit me that the activities were not long-dead. They were very much alive.
It did not take me long to work out what had most likely become of the missing young women. They were being groomed and trafficked.
I remember gasping, wondering how in this day and age a practice that had been reported by Henry Mayhew in Victorian times could still be very much alive. But I knew it to be true. I’d seen similar reports on TV only recently, gangs being arrested in Northern cities.
And the Mayhew writings? When they were first published it was to shine a light on the hidden activities of London’s criminal underworld so something could be done about it. But in this instance, I had the feeling that in the hands of its original owner their purpose was not enlightenment. This volume of human depravity had perhaps been used as a handbook.
I looked at the inscription.
Did this book belong to Ted Burns? From the old Belle Vue hotel?
But Ted Burns and his wife were dead.
I admit I largely failed to fit all the pieces neatly together. It was so frustrating. But it was when I ran methodically through everything again, looking at each piece of paper, each notebook, the map and photographs, and trying to make sense of it all, that it hit me where I’d seen one of the two men taken with the telephoto lens. I looked closely at the photos and scrutinised the man with the curly hair, snapped as he hurried from some large town building or other.
It was Trisha’s new boyfriend, the one I’d seen on the photo she’d taken of him on her phone. The same curly hair, the same large nose.
What on earth was going on? What had he got to do with this?
Again, it took some time, but the answer slowly became very evident to me when I read the notebooks more closely. Whoever had been watching the two men and taking their photos had been keeping fastidious notes. Could the notebooks belong to the mysterious private investigator, the woman Mark called Carol?
But Carol was Mark’s dead girlfriend…
I shook my head. Whatever this person was called, someone had diligently put together all this information.
And out of the hand-scribbled pages a picture began to emerge and with it the knowledge that, unknowingly, Trisha had perhaps had a near escape.
I was in no doubt now; Mark really had been onto something big. Something big and positively dangerous. So dangerous that he might have been risking his life to uncover it.
If Rusty Steele really was at the centre of this racket then might he have been responsible in some way for Mark’s death? Might it be that Mark hadn’t committed suicide after all? In fact, had Mark been murdered in order to silence him, like Mark said they’d murdered Steely Jacobs?
And what of Steely Jacobs? Where the hell did he fit into this?
I gave a frustrated growl and put my hand to my throbbing head.
It was as I was glancing at the publicity shots of the various bands that my eyes hovered over the small print in the corner of one of the photos. It was of the band called Deliverance, Rusty Steele’s sultry looking face wearing sunglasses as he posed with other band members. His image had been circled in pencil. I squinted at the writing in the corner.
Starlite Promotions.
Where had I seen that before, I wondered?
I scuffed through other photos of some of the other bands. I found a photocopy of a newspaper clipping from a Leicester newspaper, dated December 1998. It was a review of the band called Benediction. I read the largely glowing report. It named the band members and promised big things for them. At the foot of the review was a contact phone number for the band’s management. Starlite Promotions.
I hurriedly checked some of the others. Starlite had managed all the bands.
I sometimes find truth is like a bluebottle. We know it’s out there, irritating us as it buzzes constantly around our heads, but no matter how we swipe at it we can’t hit it, and it remains just out of reach. My big fat bluebottle finally landed and I gave it a hefty swipe.
I was shocked with the bloody outcome.
Not only had Rusty Steele been in every one of the bands, Joseph’s one-man company had managed them, the same company now in charge of Glory Daze, as advertised on Trisha’s free tickets to the gig in Exeter.
It could only mean one thing. Joseph, working closely with Rusty Steele, had been running the entire network for a decade or more. Mark, in his hunt to track down his girlfriend’s killer, had uncovered the truth. Not only had Joseph been behind her death, he’d been behind the grooming and trafficking of many other young girls over the years.
That’s when some things began to fall into place for me. That’s why Mark had gotten so drunk the night I found him sprawled all over the carpet. He’d finally put everything together, and discovered his brother’s real involvement. He couldn’t take it for a while, tried to blot it out with booze, wanted to tell his friend but couldn’t. He’d never known his girlfriend’s killer had been so close to him all this time.
But before Mark could do anything, Joseph killed him. Maybe not personally, but he got someone to do it for him. He murdered his own brother to silence him.
Looking back, it is difficult to explain my emotions at that point. I had lost Madeline, and now I’d lost my best friend. I was grieving, and I was angry, and that anger bubbled inside me like a fiery, churning lava bed, great frothing geysers of painful rage rising up to sear my thoughts and burn revenge into my mind.
I picked up the small box again and slid out the gun. I took it out of its plastic sheath and held it in my hand. It felt cold to the touch. Cold and deadly.
I know I should have gone to the police immediatel
y with the box of information. But I wasn’t thinking rationally. The memory of Mark’s urgent pleading in the hospital, the last time I would ever see him alive, his face contorted by loss, grief and pain, appeared in my head like a burning brand. I needed to know whether all the crazy theories running around in my head were true. I had to know whether or not Joseph had been involved in Mark’s death.
If all the wild imaginings in my mind proved correct – because at that stage, though I was blinded by anger, I still thought of them as that, wild imaginings – then, I promised myself, I was going straight to the police.
But not until after I’d killed Joseph Boothman for murdering my friend.
20
The Rabbit Hole
The Bay hotel looked pretty much the same as when I’d last visited it. Curtains drawn, closed for business, a cold, empty shell. Not unlike me, I thought.
I pulled my car up out front, and slid the handgun into my inside coat pocket. The short drive to the hotel hadn’t dampened my resolve. Cooped up inside the car with only my morbid thoughts for company, I left the car feeling more determined than ever to get to the bottom of this. At the time, I put it down to revenge for the death of Mark; put it down to overwhelming grief, to all the emotions that such a thing brings out in a person. I put it down to being foolish enough to fall in love with the ghost of a woman I knew nothing about; for not being able to hang onto a real woman; for being useless at running a business and for not helping my friend when he needed it most. I put it down to all this and more.
In reality it wasn’t to be any of those things, but I couldn’t have known that at the time.
Getting out of the car with a gun in my pocket, all I could think of was that I was being driven by something totally irrational. A form of madness. I had no business doing this. It was for the law to decide what happened next. I was no vigilante. I wasn’t even a half-violent man. And yet I was drawn inexorably, powerlessly, towards doing something that was quite alien to me.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 36
