Christopher stood in the hall nodding his head looking very pleased with himself.
“Daddy can we play?”
“Ooh, let me sort myself out darling, then we can have a little play.”
Christopher skipped down the hall and ran to his room.
Claire was standing at the end of the hall with a big smile on her face.
“Welcome home lovebirds.”
She hugged Maria and turned to Campbell and kissed him on his cheek. Campbell gave her the flowers and Claire told him how lovely they were and that he shouldn’t have.
“Are you guys hungry?” asked Claire, as she walked to the kitchen.
“I’ve made some sandwiches if you are.”
She brought the plate of sandwiches into the lounge and placed them on the table.
Christopher ran into the lounge shouting for sandwiches.
They sat in the lounge and talked about the weekend. Maria stood up and read the engagement cards which were on the table.
Christopher ran out of the lounge and came back seconds later waiving a piece of A4 paper which was covered with random colourful crayon scribbles.
“Card for mummy and daddy,” he said as he pushed it in Maria’s face.
“Someone’s been creative whilst you were away. He wanted to make you both an engagement card.”
Claire stayed at the flat until Christopher was in bed. Maria read him a story and Campbell sat in the corner of his bedroom pulling faces behind Maria’s back which made the little boy laugh.
“Is daddy being silly?” asked Maria.
“My daddy’s funny,” replied Christopher.
After the kisses, hugs and tucking in was done they shut his bedroom door and quietly stepped across the hall into the lounge.
“Well, how was he?” asked Maria.
“Same thing,” replied Clare.
“I love my grandson so much, he’s a wonderful little boy. He’s so loving, happy and polite. I can’t believe he’s the same boy at night.”
“I know,” nodded Maria.
“Is there nothing else that you can do?”
“Look mum, we’ve been over this before. It seems that I had the top man in the country on the case and he couldn’t work it out, so where else can I turn?”
Campbell stood up and walked to the kitchen as Maria watched him leave the room.
“Push the door shut mum.”
Claire lent over and nudged the door with her hand and it slowly swung shut.
“Campbell thinks that we should take him to a hypnotist.”
“Surely Christopher is far too young for that hocus pocus?”
“That’s what I thought, but apparently he’s not.”
“And what good would hypnotising him do? It’s not like you want him to stop smoking.”
“I’m not sure.”
Even though they had been speaking quietly, Campbell could hear what they were saying from the kitchen.
He came back to the lounge as Claire was getting ready to leave.
“Thank you Claire, I couldn’t have taken Maria away without your help.”
He hugged his prospective mother-in-law.
“You’re a good man Campbell, and you’re good for Maria.”
“I know,” he replied in his soft southern Irish accent. He smiled at her with a sparkle in his brown eyes.
Claire pushed him away and laughed.
“Campbell, put my mother down, she needs to go home,” laughed Maria.
Maria stood at the door and waved to her mother as she drove away. When Claire’s car was out of view she closed the door and returned to the lounge. Campbell was unpacking the cases in the bedroom.
“Leave that, I can unpack tomorrow, whispered Maria as she crept into the room. She put her arms around him and pulled him to the bed. He fell on top of her and kissed her on the lips. Maria kicked a small half empty case off the bed as he kissed her neck. She ran her hands under his shirt and held on to his back as his kissing became more loving. Maria was softly moaning with passion……..
“Ughh ughh ughh ughh ughh ughh ughh ughh ughh.
Christopher was chanting again.
“Talk about a passion killer,” said Campbell as he rolled onto his back.
Maria lay next to him and stared at the ceiling.
They lay in silence as his chanting formed into words.
“Set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free.”
“I’ve not heard that one in a few months,” said Campbell in a tired voice.
Maria sighed.
“Set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free.”
Campbell turned and looked at Maria. The evening sun shone through the window between the slats in the blinds. He admired her beauty in the half light and wondered what was going through her mind as a tear formed in her eye. He was used to seeing tears, and lately there had been more of them.
“Set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free - set me free.”
Maria stared blankly at the ceiling. She drew a breath and turned to him. His face was silhouetted by the sun breaking through the half closed blind. He waited in anticipation for her to say something
“Campbell…….”
She paused before continuing, “Call the hypnotist…….and do it tomorrow.”
Campbell nodded and Maria closed her eyes.
Chapter seventy seven
Truro, Cornwall
Monday 7th May 2012
Daniel Boyd didn’t do heights and hadn’t planned on being halfway up a ten metre ladder whilst cleaning the office windows of Cornwall County Council in Truro.
In truth, Boyd hadn’t planned anything during the past eighteen months he’d been living in Cornwall. He seemed to have stumbled across jobs that paid just enough to keep him going.
His car washing job came to an abrupt end when the business closed down. There was no big announcement, no discussion, it had just stopped.
One morning Boyd strolled over from the porta cabin that he’d called home for the last three months and saw that Don Mudge had not arrived to open up shop.
Cars were queuing to be washed but there was nothing Boyd could do but apologise. The keys to the cleaning equipment were locked in Mudge’s office and Boyd stood around the forecourt looking like a lemon.
After a week it was clear to Boyd that Mudge had upped sticks and fled. Boyd knew that his boss had cash flow problems and assumed he’d fled from his creditors.
Over the months Boyd had picked up and lost many temporary jobs, including labouring, door security, dishwashing and speedboat hire. His favourite work had been during the summer when he’d spent a few months picking fruit. He enjoyed the outdoors and the weather had been particularly good that season.
“Stanley, you’ve missed a bit,” yelled Boyd’s latest boss.
His newest employer was an obnoxious man called Tony Dawes. He had a huge head and wore glasses which were so thick they gave the impression that his eyes were floating in the air. He played trumpet for the Salvation Army and had a permanent red welt on his lips due to his constant trumpet playing.
Boyd stayed clear of the man and only associated with him when he was working. He’d stuck at the job despite loathing Dawes and hating heights, because like all of the other jobs he’d found, it was work that paid him in cash.
As far as the Inland Revenue was concerned, Boyd had disappeared from the face of the earth and had been replaced by the odd job man Stanley Jarrett.
He rented a cheap, grubby bedsit that wasn’t much bigger than a cupboard. It boasted a Baby Belling tabletop cooker and a wardrobe. It was better than the porta cabin because it had heating and a bathroom which was only across the hall, as opposed to the other end of the street.
The downside of living there was his neighbour. A Neanderth
al of a man called Jon Lightfoot. Lightfoot by name, but definitely not by nature. The bulky bald-headed man never smiled and stomped whenever he walked. Lightfoot’s bedsit was the same size as Boyd’s, but it sounded like he was permanently on a sponsored walk. Boyd wondered if Lightfoot’s bedsit was a Tardis. Bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.
Boyd’s neighbour was also fond of nineties indie rave music and let the whole of west Truro know by blasting it out until the small hours. Boyd had once, and only once, knocked on Lightfoot’s door to politely ask him if he wouldn’t mind turning his music down ever so slightly. Lightfoot’s response was to lift Boyd by the neck and carry him back to his room and drop him unceremoniously on the floor. After this Boyd had acquired a pair of ear defenders which he nabbed from a council worker who had stopped digging the high street for his ten thirty tea break.
The ear defenders were an improvement, but they didn’t stop the boom boom boom of the bass vibrate his teeth as he lay in bed. Boyd had been late for work on several occasions as the ear defenders blocked out his alarm clock.
Boyd had kept out of trouble and, other than taking the ear defenders, he’d steered clear of crime since moving to Cornwall. He’d hardly given any thought to the violent murder he’d committed nearly two years earlier and lived a remorseless life.
But the night before he’d had a dream. A very vivid and strange dream. He didn’t dream very much these days because of the noise coming from the bedsit across the hall, but that night the Neanderthal had not been at home. Boyd assumed he was annoying other people elsewhere in Truro with his late night music.
Boyd had dreamt he was in court and was being tried for the murder of Ben Walker. His dream had been so realistic that he could smell the musky odour of the court room and his back ached as he sat on the hard wooden pew. The judge and the jury were all children. Not one of them had been older than three. Other than him, there were no adults in the court room.
The prosecution, who was a small girl wearing a silk gown with a flap collar and long closed sleeves, called the main witness. The court usher pushed a white Silverline pram to the front of the court. The hood was up so Boyd could not see the infant in the pram, but could see a baby’s hand waving a small grey cuddly toy in the style of a cat with floppy legs.
The witness in the pram was sworn in and Boyd was surprised to hear that the baby in the pram had the voice of an adult.
The promise from the witness boomed around the wood clad court room.
“I promise before Almighty God that the evidence which I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
The dream continued with the baby witness detailing what had happened the night of the murder. The baby with the grown up voice recalled everything that happened. Memories that Boyd had forgotten were resurfacing in the strange dream.
The jury were about to deliver their verdict when Boyd was jolted by an abrupt bleeping sound. He opened his eyes as he woke to the sound of his alarm clock.
“Saved by the bell,” he whispered, as he reached to switch off the alarm.
He knew it had only been a dream, but it troubled him, and he wondered if it was supposed to signify something.
The following day he’d kept looking over his shoulder and was paranoid about getting caught.
That evening he sat alone in a pub and had a few drinks before returning to his grimy bedsit.
He wasn’t looking forward to sleeping as he didn’t want the dream to return and to hear the verdict of the jury of children. For the first time he wanted the Neanderthal to play his music in the hope that his sleep would be so light that dreaming would be impossible.
At ten thirty the Neanderthal cranked up his music as Boyd lay on his back and endured the noise. He didn’t sleep. Instead he stayed awake the whole night thinking about the dream and what it could possibly mean.
He was almost two hundred miles away from the hill in Badock’s Wood but, like Carla Price who was way up in Darlington, there was no escaping from the mystical power of the strange Bronze Age burial mound.
Chapter seventy eight
Thomas Judd’s Hypnotherapy Practice
Bristol
Wednesday 9th May
Campbell sat alone in the small office. The bookshelf was neatly packed with books on law, psychology and counselling. He spotted one book which grabbed his attention called Therapists in Court. He was about to walk over to the shelf and take a closer look when Tom Judd entered the room with two mugs of coffee.
---------------------------------------------
Judd was a tall wiry man in his mid-fifties. He had thinning, sandy hair and wore horn rimmed glasses. He oozed confidence and had an ability to put people at ease.
Judd had been fascinated by hypnosis since he was seven. He’d been on holiday with his family in Southport and one evening the family entertainment included a stage hypnotist. The young boy was mesmerised by how volunteers from the audience could be invited up to the stage and within minutes were performing the most ridiculous acts.
From that day Judd read as much as he could on the subject. Being only seven years old, he found a lot of what he read difficult to understand, but by the time he was eight he was able to use the power of suggestion to make his school friends do simple things that amazed them.
This was just the beginning of Judd’s future as a hypnotist. By the time he’d left school he already had a reputation as the strange young man who could get you to do anything.
When he was seventeen he’d secured a job as a warm up act at a strip club. The audience would often call for him to return to the stage for an encore. Darren, the club manager had never seen anything like it. Warm up acts were always booed off stage so the leering audience of grubby men could get the girls onto the stage earlier. But Judd was different, the audience seemed to prefer to watch him than see the performing girls. Or perhaps it was that many of the girls Darren employed were past their prime.
Darren took a chance and replaced one of his regular strip nights with Tom Judd’s own show. The gamble had paid off and the hypnosis nights were a success. The audience numbers doubled and were no longer ogling men, it consisted of husbands and wives, boys with their girlfriends. It had become a family show.
Word had got around and Tom had requests to perform at other venues around Bristol. Darren stepped in as his manager and was taking a crafty thirty percent of his fee.
It didn’t take very long for Tom to work out that he had no need for a manager as the bookings were coming in thick and fast. Darren and Tom had fallen out several times over the amount of fee Darren was taking. Luckily for Tom, no contract had ever been drawn up between them as their agreement had been based upon a handshake.
On Tom Judd’s eighteenth birthday he walked away from Darren and swore that he’d never work for anyone other than himself.
He’d spent many years, and had made good money, as a stage hypnotist but there came a time when he became restless and decided to move away from the lighter side of hypnosis and concentrate on using his abilities to help people.
When he was twenty six Judd had qualified as a professional hypnotherapist and had an outstandingly high success rate in curing clients of a list of phobias which included fear of snakes, cockroaches, spiders, flying, dentists, driving, tunnels and speaking in public.
Word of mouth quickly spread and he was helping his clients stop smoking which was ironic as at the time Judd was a heavy smoker, who had no intention of giving up. He was obsessed with smoking and even collected paraphernalia on the habit. He had scrap books of adverts from the nineteen seventies and collected lighters, roll up machines and loved all the different flavoured cigarette papers.
Eventually it dawned on him that smoking was taking over his life and he decided it was time to give up. By using self-hypnosis he’d given up within three days and hadn’t touched a cigarette since. A friend had given him a cigarette and a match in a glass fronted wooden box with ‘In Ca
se Of Emergency Break Glass’ written on it. Judd kept it and placed it on his office wall as a reminder of his smoking days.
In two thousand and nine he qualified as a Forensic and Investigative Hypnotist and was employed by the police to use Forensic Hypnosis as a way to get evidence during hypnosis that could be used and accepted in court.
---------------------------------------------
Campbell thanked Judd for the coffee.
“I would normally charge a consultation fee, but as you know my brother I‘ll let you have this for free,” said Judd with a look which denoted he was the boss.
Campbell wasn’t sure whether he liked the man, but as Judd’s brother had spoken highly of him and the testimonials on his website were good, he decided to hear the man out.
They discussed Christopher’s sleep talking and RMD. Campbell had brought along his laptop to show the videos that he and Maria had made.
Judd watched the videos and Campbell saw the expression on his face change from one of nonchalance to concern.
“Please could I have a copy of these files?” he asked as he lowered the screen of the laptop.
“Why would you need them?”
“They would help me prepare for the hypnotherapy session, which would give me a better chance of curing Christopher in the first batch of sessions.”
Campbell nodded reluctantly.
“Just as long as they don’t surface on YouTube.”
“Of course they wouldn’t, besides I have my professional reputation to protect.”
Judd fumbled through a draw of odds and ends and found a USB drive. He plugged it into the side of Campbell’s laptop and copied the files.
“What Christopher is doing may seem extreme, but at the end of the day he’s only talking in his sleep,” said Judd as he waited for the video clips to slowly transfer to his USB.
“But why do you think he’s coming up with such grown up stuff?”
“I can’t answer that, and if your man in London didn’t work it out I’m sure I can’t either,” Judd paused before continuing, “but it’s my guess that Christopher has heard things, either on the television, or the radio, or perhaps he’s just overheard conversations, and these sentences have lodged in his subconscious.”
The Hill - Carla’s Story (Book Two): A Paranormal Murder Mystery Thriller. (Book Two) Page 2
