by Steven Dunne
But these became more infrequent with the advent of digital photography and Bert’s reluctance to own a computer.
‘What do we want one of those for?’ he’d said.
‘So Pete can send pictures of Michael and Jessie,’ she’d reply. ‘And there’s something called Skype, Bert. It allows you to speak in person and we could see them on the screen while we talk.’
‘Must cost a fortune.’
‘It’s free.’
‘Aye, well. If he wants to send pictures, he can post them.’
And that had been that. Since then, she’d had to wait until the once-a-year package at Christmas to see images of their grandchildren.
‘Edith,’ said the voice.
She opened her eyes and licked her lips, still able to taste the alcohol in her mouth. ‘I’m thirsty.’
‘Here.’ She straightened up to drink the glass of water and saw Bert stirring in the chair next to her.
‘Are you all right?’ he croaked, his voice strained.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘You had a little sleep,’ said the voice. A hand took the glass of water from her.
‘Did I? Wouldn’t that have been the best time?’
‘Course not. Defeats the object. The music’s ready. The photographs, too.’
Edith looked down at the framed photograph on her lap. It was of her son and daughter-in-law with Michael and Jessie when they were little. She smiled and stroked the image with her liver-spotted hand. ‘This one’s my favourite.’ She looked up earnestly. ‘Can we hold hands?’
‘I’d be upset if you didn’t.’
Edith rested her hand on the arm of the chair and Bert covered it with his own shaking one. He tried to speak and lift himself out of the chair, but his face twisted with the effort.
‘No,’ he whispered, sinking back on to the foam cushions. ‘This isn’t right.’
‘Calm yourself, Bert,’ said Edith. A second later, the soft violins of Barber’s Adagio filled the room with solemn lament. ‘This is your favourite.’
Bert began to agitate more vigorously. ‘No, stop …’
Edith squeezed his hand. ‘Settle down, Bert, there’s no time.’
‘But Mother …’
‘No, Bert. For once just stop fussing. And do your tie up.’
‘But …’
‘Your tie, Bert. You want to look smart.’ She watched him fiddle with shaking hands, forcing the knot further into his gnarled old neck. She smiled at his efforts and a tear fell. He finished tightening the tie and returned his hand to hers.
‘How do I look?’
‘Like my handsome boy.’ He grinned at this, false teeth shifting in his jaw. ‘Remember the first time we met, Bert?’
Bert’s mouth creased in recollection. ‘Schott’s dance hall. Just after the war.’
‘That’s it, my love,’ said Edith. ‘Do you remember our first dance?’
His face softened with a love that didn’t need to be expressed. ‘A bossa nova.’
‘It was.’ Edith chuckled. ‘And remember how you cut in on Reggie Kane?’
‘That ten-bob millionaire. He could barely keep his hands off yer, pinching yer backside like that, the slimy bugger.’
‘I know,’ giggled Edith. ‘My bottom was bruised for weeks.’
The intensity of the strings heightened.
‘I love you, Bert.’
‘Love you, Edith.’
Their tender gaze was distracted by a mechanical click, and a pair of muted explosions accompanied the flash of ignition as the bullets tore into them. The two old people looked vaguely startled, then lay back with a sigh of escaping breath.
Three
Tuesday 1 November
DI Damen Brook sipped his fourth tea of the day as the rain beat down outside his cottage. From the kitchen table, his daughter’s opened pack of cigarettes caught his eye, butts lined up like a row of handsome guardsmen. But, having emptied the ashtray, the lingering smell of stale tobacco doused any yearning he might harbour to reopen the door on his addiction. He closed the packet and dropped it in a drawer.
The three empty wine bottles, however, he left on the kitchen table, determined to deploy them as a conversation starter. In the three nights of her visit, he and Terri had got through nine bottles of wine, and Brook knew for certain that he’d consumed no more than four glasses in total.
After draining his tea, he slipped the blanket from his shoulders and padded to the door to look out beyond the porch to the early-morning blackness beyond. There was little to be seen beyond the dry-stone wall at the other side of the steep little back road that wound its way up from the centre of the village to his cottage.
Low cloud covered Hartington, and though Brook wasn’t averse to yomping for hours in the rain, he knew Terri wouldn’t be so keen, even assuming she woke from her slumbers any time soon.
Brook glanced at his watch. Nearly seven o’clock. He’d normally be out on his regular morning walk by now. In summer, between cases, that would involve a quick six miles following the banks of the Dove, turning off at the Manifold Valley stream then back to his cottage on the high roads along Reynards Lane. In the winter, nothing so fancy, and if he was on a case he might be pushed to get around the duck pond and back.
He washed up and made another tea, taking his first sip as the letter box rattled. A moment later he dropped the bills on the table and examined the cheap envelope forwarded from his PO box.
It wasn’t the familiar writing that caused him a flutter of anxiety but the thickness of the envelope. As part of an inducement to force a confession from a beaten opponent, and to bring closure to the families of victims, Brook had made a promise to play postal chess with an incarcerated serial killer, Edward Mullen. Too wary to provide an address, either electronic or geographic, he had insisted the games be conducted by letter, and only then with the filter of a post office box.
But today, squeezing the envelope, he could feel it contained more than the habitual slip of cheap notepaper detailing a next move and an additional series of provisional moves dependent on Brook’s anticipated response. Very occasionally there’d been a line or two of text having a sly dig at the underhanded way Brook had ensnared his prey, but nothing too bitter. Unusually, Mullen was perfectly at ease, having swapped a house he dared not leave and couldn’t maintain for a secure prison cell and three squares a day.
Mullen was an unprepossessing soul – meek and mild-mannered with a gentle but tortured intelligence – and to look at him it was difficult to accept that he was the Pied Piper, a serial killer who had abducted children and buried them alive in a home-made packing crate.
The children were abducted over the course of decades and died a slow and agonising death, no one around to hear their plaintive sobs for help. But Mullen didn’t kill for kicks. He killed for company. For himself, yes, but also for a childhood friend who had died young at the hands of his own sister. For a while he’d scratched out a living as a medium and claimed, when caught, that he could see the ghosts of murder victims, clinging to their killers. Thus, each dead child represented eternal companionship for Mullen, and he was content to rot in Wakefield Prison with his coterie of young victims by his side.
But today was different.
Brook held an ear to the living room door. Terri was still snoring gently on the couch so he made his way to the tiny office, where a small square table supported a computer and a chessboard, the pieces scattered in mid-struggle.
He sat with his tea and opened the envelope, the note with his opponent’s next move falling to the floor. He left it there while he opened out the two sheets of A4.
Inspector Brook,
I hope the screw that checks the outgoing mail has become so used to the routine of our little diversion that they’ll pay no mind to my monthly missive and allow these thoughts to reach you unmolested.
Forgive the presumption, but I didn’t know who else to approach. It has been a couple of years since you put m
e in here, and living out my days in blissful seclusion from other inmates has left me plenty of time for reflection – when I’m not busy with my entourage of friends and acquaintance from across the divide, you understand. How is your little band of other-worldly companions, by the way? Do you think of them near you, reaching out to you in the dark from beyond the grave for reason and comfort? Do they rob you of your sleep?
I digress. From our many (mostly enjoyable) conversations, I was convinced – despite your expressed cynicism and the deceitful way you outflanked me – of your moral probity and desire to get to the truth of a case. For that reason, I thought I’d lay out something that happened to me a month ago and which may interest you.
In my section of the isolation block up here in Wakefield, as you may or may not be aware, there are four cells – mine and three others. As far as I can tell, two of them are used on an occasional basis to inflict solitary confinement on the dolts who can’t seem to accept their situation. A few days of sobbing and wailing and some sporadic rowdiness usually gives way to deeper introspection, at which point they are deemed calm enough to be moved back into general pop.
At other times the temporary inhabitants of IB are those in immediate danger of reprisal after they’ve stolen drugs or fags or been the object of sexual violence from another inmate. These cons tend to be much quieter, and though they are understandably not keen to draw attention to themselves, I can usually pick up their self-pitying snuffling. (Really, the amount of grief caused by sex and drugs in this place is baffling, since inmates are theoretically helpless to acquire either. V. tedious.)
Now I want to be clear that the dullards cooling their heels in IB wouldn’t normally be of interest to me despite their occasional requests for conversation and a sympathetic ear. I prefer my own company, as you know, and have never yet been minded to answer entreaties from neighbouring cells.
However, this changed recently when I discovered that the third cell in the block, one I assumed to have been empty since my arrival, is in fact occupied and has been for several months. This was a surprise, because every time I’d been escorted to the yard for my solo perambulation, the door to Cell 3 had been closed and the grille steadfastly shut. I did wonder why, when the other two cells are invariably left open to freshen the air for the next resident.
Well, now I know. The cell was occupied all along, and yet, oddly, I’d never heard a peep from its inmate, never a groan or a scream in the night, no face pressed to the grille seeking the solace of companionship craved by every other deadbeat who lands in IB.
About a month ago, at the hour of my sky gazing, I was on the way to the yard when I noticed for the first time that the cell door was open, I assumed for cleaning.
But when I paused to glance inside, I saw a young man sitting cross-legged on the floor. His eyes were closed almost in meditation and he paid me no attention. Nor was he interested in the prison guards, who I now realised were tossing his cell, which they’re prone to do from time to time in the block. God knows what they expect to find when we have limited access to the rest of the inmates, but I suppose they have their procedures.
I was able to stop and watch for only a second before my own guard moved me on, but as I turned to continue to the yard, the young man opened his eyes and stared back at me. His gaze was cold and dead, and to my surprise, I recognised him. It was Luke Coulson.
Doubtless you know the name, even though I know it wasn’t your case. I followed the trial with great interest earlier in the year – I still have the press cuttings – because Black Oak Farm is near Findern, a village where I liked to walk as a teenager when my family first moved to Derby. You’ll remember Coulson was convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit rape and murder at the farm. The owner, Monty Thorogood, and his wife Patricia were killed with a butcher knife and their daughter Reardon beaten and sexually assaulted before she escaped to raise the alarm.
At his trial, his brief suggested that Coulson went along to the farm at the suggestion of Jonathan Jemson, a former boyfriend of Reardon and an old school friend who had a history of petty crime. According to counsel, Jemson told Coulson they were going to the farm to burglarise the safe on behalf of Ray Thorogood, Reardon’s wayward and debt-ridden brother, a young man who had apparently argued with his parents on numerous occasions about money.
Well, you know the upshot. Coulson was convicted of murdering Reardon’s parents, as well as his co-conspirator, Jonathan Jemson, after which he ransacked the house for as much cash and jewellery as he could find before making his escape in the family Range Rover. After he was caught the same day, investigations began to lay bare the full extent of Ray Thorogood’s plan to murder his family and inherit the family fortune.
According to text messages sent between Jemson and Ray, Coulson was to be recruited as a plausible fall guy to be blamed for the slaughter of the Thorogood family. The fact that he’d had a schoolboy crush on Reardon was the carrot to get him to the farm. For the plan to succeed, Jemson was supposed to dispatch the parents and then Ray’s sister. Coulson had to die at the scene and Jemson would make it appear that he died from injuries sustained in a struggle with Reardon but only after he’d struck the fatal blow against the poor girl.
Then Jemson would set an ‘accidental’ fire, destroying any evidence of his presence, before escaping, leaving the dead Coulson to shoulder the blame as an obsessed lone killer. Ray would inherit a fortune and subsequently compensate Jemson from the proceeds.
A brilliant conceit in many ways, but one the jury didn’t completely buy into. It didn’t help that Coulson refused to testify on his own behalf, even though his brief argued that his client was in fact Reardon’s saviour. According to his version, Coulson walked in on Jemson in the commission of a rape and as a result became so enraged that he murdered Jemson to save Reardon from harm.
Of course the prosecution could point to the fact that Coulson was already covered in blood when he killed Jemson, having just savagely murdered Mr and Mrs Thorogood. Failing to mount a defence, or even deny his guilt, Coulson was duly convicted of all three murders.
A fascinating tale of slaughter and mayhem, the kind you usually hear about in America, taking place in sleepy Derbyshire. Three people dead, a young girl sexually assaulted and traumatised and a feckless brother on the run in Spain, if the papers are to be believed.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with me. Do you remember my gift? Of course you do. All those child murderers I brought to justice, their accumulated victims standing beside them, reaching out from an unquiet grave to demand answers. I see the baggage a killer carries with him through life, Inspector. I see my friend Billy with the new companions I harvested for him. I see his murdering sister, ageless, always by his side with her own coterie of demons, and the company is a great comfort when I wake.
You’re shaking your head, aren’t you? Perhaps you’ve forgotten how easily I could identify your own special companion, stranded in purgatory, waiting for you to explain yourself. Would you like to know who haunts Luke Coulson? Don’t pretend you’re not interested. Let me waste no more of your valuable time – the official account of the murders is completely wrong. Your DI Ford, who let me slip through his fingers, has triumphed again. Luke didn’t kill the Thorogoods. He did kill Jemson, of that there is no doubt, but he didn’t slay the mother and father because they’re not with him, bound to him in eternity looking for an explanation for the violence done to them. Somebody else killed the Thorogoods, Inspector, and it appears they’ve got away with it.
So why am I telling you all this? I hear you ask. Because you’re the Great Detective, Brook. I know you care about justice and can’t rest until you have all the answers, and the mere thought of you enduring all that angst and torment pleases me enormously. I look forward to when you’re finally in the cell next to mine and you can tell me all about it.
Well there you are. A mystery befitting your talents – something for you to get your teeth into and hopeful
ly distract you from our little tussles. My latest move is enclosed and you know where we are if you want to talk further. I won’t hold my breath. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of office politics to prevent you poking your nose into a colleague’s case. From the little I saw of DI Ford, his arrogance and conceit were in direct contrast to his talents as a detective. The least you should do is come and talk to Coulson and try to winkle out his version of events. I know from personal experience how good you are at getting people to talk.
And if you do happen by, bring a bottle of you know what. The warden may not like our little arrangement but he’s never threatened to dishonour it thus far. Sweet dreams.
Edward
Brook’s mobile began to vibrate and he was happy to toss the pages on the table. It was Detective Sergeant John Noble.
Brook hesitated. ‘I’m on leave, John.’
‘Enjoying yourself?’
‘Very much,’ lied Brook.
‘How’s Terri?’
‘She’s fine,’ he lied again. ‘She asked after you.’
‘Oh?’
‘I told her you were fine.’
‘Not sure you’ve got this small talk thing off pat yet.’
‘And on that note,’ prompted Brook.
Noble hesitated. ‘Two more bodies. Similar scene to last month’s double homicide in Breadsall. Shot through the heart.’
‘Where?’
‘Boulton Moor. Eastern edge of the city, near the A50 link road.’
‘I know where it is. What of it?’
‘Don’t you want to know details?’
‘If it’s the same as last month, I’m assuming it’s a gay couple, tied up and killed in their home,’ answered Brook.
‘So you have been following it.’
‘There was something on the radio.’ Brook looked towards the darkened lounge. No hint of Terri stirring. ‘Why are you ringing me, John? If there’s a clear link to the Breadsall killings, that’s Frank Ford’s case. Not mine and not yours.’
