‘Let go of the woman, Sharon,’ Joseph said. He lifted the gun.
‘She’s got to die. You know that, Joe,’ she said, her voice softening. ‘You know that.’
‘Like Mark had to die? Like Steely had to die?’
‘It’s like a deep cut, Joe. It hurts, but we have to cauterise it to stop the bleeding. That’s what I’m doing. I’m stopping the bleeding. We can come out of this OK, Joe. Trust me.’
The gun wavered. I felt my senses starting to return, a little strength percolating through my legs. Blood dripped down to spatter my shoe.
‘I don’t know what to do…’ Joseph cried weakly, his drunken eyes blinking slowly, his body swaying like a tree in a stiff wind.
‘You have to trust me, that’s what you have to do,’ she said calmly, ‘like you’ve always done.’ And she said it like she was serving tea and cakes to her guests. The old Sharon had returned and it was completely at odds with the room, the stench, the needle in her hand, Madeline lying helpless on the bed, and Joseph with a gun pointed at her. ‘You love me, Joe, don’t you?’
For a moment the words didn’t appear to make sense to him and he stared dumbly at her. ‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Then do as I say. Take Toby out of here into the next room. We’ll deal with him later. Let me take care of the woman.’
‘I loved Mark, too…’ he said, almost under his breath.
Sharon’s face hardened. ‘Mark was always a problem for us. He brought it on himself. He should have let things lie.’
‘I loved him, Sharon. He was my kid brother.’
‘But you love me more, Joe. Now do as I say and stop blabbering.’
She lifted Madeline’s arm again. I saw Madeline stare at the needle hovering over her white skin, saw her attempt to draw her arm away, but she was too weak. She looked at me.
What gave me the additional strength, I do not know. Perhaps it was the sight of Madeline’s pleading eyes. Perhaps it was love. But I dashed to my feet and threw myself at Sharon, bowling her onto the bed. She screamed as she fell across Madeline, and lashed out instinctively with the needle. It sank into my shoulder, but I didn’t feel the pain, not immediately. I grabbed Sharon’s flailing arms and threw her to the floor, my blood splashing onto her twisted face.
‘Shoot him!’ Sharon yelled at Joseph. ‘Kill him! Kill him!’
I grabbed the metal pole that Sharon had let fall by the side of the bed and I lay over Madeline, my body acting as a protective shield. I stared across the room at Joseph, my breathing quick and painful. ‘You’ll have to kill me first,’ I said. I would not have her taken away from me. Not again.
He stood still, looking from me to Sharon and back again. He pointed the gun at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to me, lifting the gun and aiming it directly at my unprotected chest. ‘But you have to understand I love her. I love Sharon.’
‘Joseph…’ I said.
‘I love you, Sharon,’ he said.
She smiled warmly. ‘I know you do, Joseph. I know you’ll do what’s best.’
He nodded and pulled the trigger.
Sharon gave a muffled shriek as the bullet hit her in the stomach. She put a hand to the wound, blood pumping out between her clawed fingers. She looked up at Joseph, a look of confusion on her pained face.
Another shot, deafening in the confines of the cellar, hit her in the chest and she collapsed into a heap.
Silence crashed in on the room. A tiny wisp of smoke spiralled from the gun’s barrel. Joseph looked at me. The gun was pointing in my direction again.
‘Get her out of here,’ he said.
‘Joseph…’ I began.
‘Do as I say. Get her out of here.’
I wrapped the sheet around Madeline and lifted her from the bed. She snaked weak arms around my neck. I could feel the brush of her lips on my skin, her breath hot on my cheek. I carried her up the stairs, reeling as I went, my legs threatening to buckle. I stopped at the top of the stairs and looked down. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
He waved me away with the gun and I went out through the door.
I heard a gunshot.
I knew Joseph was dead.
I carried Madeline to a sofa and gently laid her down, covering her nakedness with a sheet. I stroked her hair tenderly, I couldn’t help it, and while her eyes were closed I studied her face, every minute detail. I telephoned for an ambulance and the police, then went to get Madeline a glass of water. I held it to her lips.
‘Who are you?’ she said, a little strength returning.
‘My name is Toby Turner. I run a bookshop…’ I realised how silly that sounded, given the circumstances.
‘You saved my life, Toby Turner,’ she said, coughing on the water.
‘It was nothing, really,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘She was going to kill me,’ she said. Then her face clouded over. ‘They said Mark was dead. Is that true?’
I told her it was. ‘Who killed him?’ I asked. ‘Was it Joseph?’
She shook her head. ‘It was someone else that carried it out, others from the network. They have people who do that kind of thing. But it was Sharon who ordered it. Joseph was nothing more than a gopher. She’s been running the entire operation. She had Steely Jacobs killed too.’
She tried to sit upright, but I placed a resisting hand on her shoulder and forced her back down. ‘You’re too weak, still,’ I said. ‘So tell me about Steely Jacobs. I haven’t worked out why they killed him, or what his connection was to all this. What is his involvement with the body I found on the beach?’
‘Steely Jacobs was working for the Burnses. He needed the extra cash to fuel his drug habit, so he used his band, The Hangdogs, to pick off women suitable for grooming and trafficking. He’d take them to his caravan, which was stuck out on the edge of a field, nice and quiet so he could do what he needed to do.’
‘Which was?’
‘To begin the initial grooming of the girls. Getting them drunk, giving them drugs. Some were suitable, others were not. They used this as a first stage. When and if a girl was ready they’d transfer her to the cellars of the Belle Vue hotel where they’d go through a very similar process to what happens here.’
‘But Ted and Marie Burns…’ I began.
‘Were very nice people. Who would suspect them of anything underhand? They made a small fortune out of the business. Tucked away into a quiet Dorset backwater, it was the ideal place to get the girls ready for shipment all over Europe.’
‘And the murdered woman, Shelly Morden? How does she fit into all this?’
‘Back in 1978 something went wrong. She must have escaped the Belle Vue, or tried to. I believe she was caught, beaten and presumed dead. The Burnses handed Morden’s body over to Steely Jacobs to dispose of. Promised him an extra big payout when he initially refused to get involved. Trafficking was one thing, but murder was another crime entirely, or at last it was in his eyes. Anyhow, he didn’t have a choice, because he was already in too deep. So with a body to dispose of he dug a grave in the field near the caravan and put her in it, but not before knocking out her teeth just in case she was ever found. DNA testing was still unknown back in 1978 so he thought he’d done a good job of eliminating something that might have been used to trace her identity through dental records.’
‘But she was still alive when she was put into the grave. When she had her jaw busted…’ I grimaced at the horrific thought.
‘Only just. She can’t have lasted long. And that should have been it. The woman would never have been found. The Burnses presumed Steely had disposed of Morden’s body far away, and didn’t know it was in their own back yard, so to speak. What no one expected was the land to erode away so fast. A number of unexpectedly big landslips later and the Burns family had to give up the hotel and let nature take its course, the old hotel finally falling from the cliff and being destroyed. But the Burnses set up in another and carried on where they left off. They bought this place. The Bay hotel.’
‘
What? The Burnses ran this hotel?’
‘For a while, until their untimely death in the car accident. But their children took over.’
‘Children?’
‘Sharon Boothman was their daughter. Rusty Steele was their son.’
I felt the wind had been being knocked out of my sails. ‘Their daughter?’ That’s why the couple in the black and white photograph in Mark’s box looked so familiar, I thought. It was of the Burnses standing outside the Belle Vue hotel. The girl was Sharon, the baby boy being Richard Rusty Steele.
And the people in the photo had been so familiar because I saw Sharon Boothman reflected in their seemingly harmless looking expressions.
‘Somehow the children had become involved in their trafficking. Who knows, maybe it’s something in the Burns’ genes, maybe they corrupted their children at a very young age, effectively grooming them, too. When their parents died their children carried on the family business, so to speak. Rusty – who took the stage name Steele, incidentally, as some kind of sick in-joke, possibly a reference to Steely Jacobs and his role in the original setup – set up a band of his own. He’d learnt how to play keyboards from his father, and he knew all the tricks of the trade, and not just musically. They began to groom girls and used The Bay hotel as a base for their operations.
‘They recruited a new band member, Joseph Boothman. He fell for Sharon, and gradually she sucked him into her sick world and started to use him, too. He soon became a front for her operations, his name heading the management company called Starlite Promotions, but she was the real force behind it. The cycle that ended with the death of Ted and Marie Burns started all over again. But Joseph inadvertently falls for one of the young groupies that hang around the band – a teenager called Jeanette Gardener. She somehow finds herself getting close enough to Joseph to learn what’s going on. Who knows, maybe Joseph confessed everything to her. By the time Mark came onto the scene and met Jeanette in 1999, Sharon had already decided the teenager was too dangerous to keep alive. Before Mark could learn anything from her she was murdered. Mark taking the brunt of the initial blame for her murder was unintentional, but it served their purpose.’
‘But Mark never forgot Jeanette, did he? He was still in love with her and he was determined to find out who murdered her.’
Madeline nodded. She looked tired, as if about to fall asleep, but she forced her eyelids open. Forced herself to speak to me. I could tell she needed to get this off her chest.
‘He hired me to dig deeper into some of the things he’d already managed to uncover. The finding of the body on the beach accelerated events. Steely Jacobs never expected the body of Shelly Morden to be discovered. When it was he got nervous. So nervous I reckon he wanted to confess to what happened. He felt sure eventually the tracks would lead to him, and he didn’t want to be blamed for a murder he didn’t commit. Maybe the guilt had been eating him up for thirty-five years, too. He appeared pretty cut up about things when I tried to speak to him. Of course, Sharon and Joseph knew all about Steely’s involvement with her parents and the Belle Vue, but they didn’t worry about him unduly. They always felt he’d have no option but to keep quiet. Except now his actions were getting disturbingly erratic. He visited the site of the discovery quite a lot. Even visited you, I believe. They were worried he’d go to the police or, at the very least, someone would make the link between him living in a caravan whose location was suspiciously close to where the body must have been buried. He’d confess everything and it would all be over for Sharon and Joseph. It would lead the police directly to The Bay. Steely Jacobs had to be disposed of before this could happen.’
‘And Mark…’ I said. I lowered my head. ‘I inadvertently told them about Mark gathering all that information on the missing girls.’ I looked at her, horrified. ‘I let them know he was onto something. That’s why they killed him.’
She shook her head. ‘They knew what he was up to already. He wasn’t killed because of what you told them. They were going to do that anyway. But if anything it made them act faster.’
‘I was a fool!’ I said. ‘I should have known. I should have worked it out.’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Was it you I saw waving and yelling at the club in Exeter?’
I frowned. ‘So it was you? But the colour of your hair…’
‘I was wearing a blonde wig. This is out of a bottle, by the way…’ she said, putting a lazy hand to her hair. ‘I really am blonde.’ She smiled weakly. ‘I saw you but I had to ignore you. I didn’t know who the hell you were and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. You could have ruined things for us.’
‘You could have been killed, too,’ I said.
She ignored my concern. ‘Our plan to get me inside almost worked too well. Now I know how easily women can be sucked in, and how brutally systematic and cruel the business really is.’
‘Why endanger yourself like that?’ I said, shaking my head at the thought of how close she’d come to dying.
‘It was the only way to be sure. It was my idea to offer myself up as bait to try and get inside their operation. We both needed to know we could put an end to their business.’
‘It’s a business that’s been going on for far too long,’ I said flatly. ‘I saw the book…’
Her lips were straight and pale, her face serious. ‘You mean Mayhew’s studies?’ she said flatly. ‘The book belonged to Sharon’s father, Ted Burns. Maybe it was reading this that set him on the road to grooming and trafficking women. Maybe he simply took pleasure from knowing that such practices are older than we think. It’s sad that women are still being bought and sold, shipped all over the world like cattle.’ Her voice had a hard edge to it now. She released a breath and sank her head into a cushion. ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.
‘The ambulance will be here soon,’ I said. ‘And the police. Try to rest. Close your eyes.’
She did so. ‘Don’t leave me alone,’ she said quietly.
‘I won’t.’
‘I’m so cold,’ she said, shivering.
I made sure the sheet was tight about her. ‘You’re pumped full of drugs. It’s not going to be easy getting them out of your system. It’s going to be bad for you, for a while.’
‘Make sure they don’t come back for me,’ she said.
‘They can’t, they’re dead.’
‘Make sure…’ she said. Then she grinned. ‘But I guess I can always trust a man who is good with a gun…’ she said drowsily.
I had to smile inside. I hadn’t the faintest idea how to use the weapon. I’d been bluffing the entire time. I wasn’t even sure if the thing had been loaded.
Unfortunately for Sharon and Joseph, it turned out it was.
Madeline’s hand slipped out from under the sheet and took hold of mine. She gave it a squeeze. ‘Thank you for saving my life, Toby Turner…’ she whispered.
‘Don’t think anything of it,’ I said. I looked down at her. She looked so peaceful. ‘You’re safe now.’
But she didn’t hear me. She was asleep.
22
Hello
Summer finally rolled away the clouds of that cold, extraordinarily crazy winter, and with its warm breath it tried to breathe new life into me. But it had little effect. The tourists swarmed into Lyme Regis, filled the streets with holiday spirit. My business did OK that year. Autumn came and the tourists began to retreat. Winter was around the corner again. I went to Monmouth Beach, to the place where I found the bones. People strolled along the shore, threw sticks and balls for their dogs, searched for fossils, walked hand-in-hand and talked about the future. Life went on, but not for me. My future ended the moment Madeline was lifted into that ambulance.
There were arrests, a trial – it’s still going on, and will be for some time – the grooming and trafficking network was slowly dismantled, but I knew it wouldn’t end there. Someone else would pick up from where Sharon and Joseph left off, because they always did. In his heart, Mayhew kn
ew that when he wrote about it all those years ago. I saw Madeline briefly, during the trials; we passed in an oppressive looking corridor as we were hurried from one place to another, and I saw her give evidence.
Trisha was initially shocked and upset at finding out she’d almost been drawn into a grooming ring by the man she thought was the best thing since sliced bread. But she got over it when she did a few interviews on TV and radio and appeared in the newspapers. The last I heard she was dating a sound man from a camera crew. He really was a sound man, she told me, delighted she’d made a joke.
Of course, I dwelt on the strange circumstances that catapulted me into all this, and especially the inexplicable haunting of me by a woman who turned out to be very much alive. I dwelt on them, but it did me no good, my life seemingly ripped up into shreds and tossed to the breeze. I had no idea in what order it would come back together, if it ever would.
And I missed Mark.
His death had affected me deeply. In desperation I asked Gabrielle Norton if I could attend one of her club’s séances to see if I could contact him. She advised against it, but I insisted. It was a waste of time. He didn’t appear which made me angry. I took it out on the assembled members, branding them charlatans and fraudsters, and nothing Gabrielle could do would calm me down. I grew angrier with each passing day. In the end I went to see the doctor.
The tablets appeared to be working. I could at least speak to customers without snapping their heads off. But the bookshop had lost its magic. I put it up for sale.
I began this tale by telling you there were two things that I never thought would happen. Well I will end by telling you there were to be two more things I never thought would happen.
I never thought I would see Madeline again.
But I was wrong.
It was now the middle of November.
I felt a cold current of air hit me as I sat at my desk, and I cursed the customer who had left the door open. It was bitter outside and the ancient heating system inside Page Turners was struggling. I had taken to wearing two jumpers and two pairs of socks. I had a portable fan heater working overtime and it had started to feel a little warmer, but the sudden downward change in temperature caused me to groan in frustration.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 38
