Mitchell, D. M.

by crime The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery

  Simon was in the drawing room, clutching the crumpled letter. He was disconsolate, as if someone had taken a dagger to his very soul. ‘She may still return,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m not allowing any of the things to be packed away.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Hell, if she doesn’t want the wedding we don’t need it. Why, Thomas? Why has she left me? She told me she loved me, she told me she was happy, and I believed her.’

  I said I could offer no explanation. It was quite bizarre. He then rambled on about her being abducted, forced to write the letter; she’d been kidnapped, and her jewellery taken as well. That was the reason, no matter how preposterous it appeared. He was clutching at any explanation he could.

  ‘Find her for me, Thomas,’ he asked as evening drew in on us. He had calmed down somewhat but he looked desperately beat up. ‘I don’t care what it takes, how much money, how long, just find her for me.’

  I didn’t take him seriously at first. ‘What if she doesn’t want to be found?’ I speculated.

  ‘You were the best detective on the force. If anyone can find her, persuade her to come back to me, then that man is you. Help me, Thomas. I’m begging you, as a friend.’

  I did not have the heart to disappoint him. I caved in to his ardent request. ‘You may not like what I find,’ I warned.

  ‘I don’t care. I simply want her back, good or bad. I’d give all this,’ he said, pointing loosely at the walls around him, ‘in exchange for her. She’s my life. I cannot live without her.’ He went to a cabinet and took out two photographs, which he held out for me to take. They were of Evelyn, sat in the Shelter by the glazed arched window where I’d first seen her. ‘They are copies, old boy.’ He looked on them as if his very soul would crumble into dust. ‘In case you need them.’ When he handed them over he turned his back on me, perhaps to hide the moistness in his eyes. ‘Find her for me, Charles. Return her to me, that is all I ask.’

  Yet it was not that simple. During my short stay all hell broke loose. Simon’s son, David, came with news of a servant’s discovery. It transpired that many more things had gone missing alongside Evelyn. Apart from a significant amount of the former Mrs Lambert-Chide’s jewellery, there were many other valuable objects, including two small watercolours by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in truth the Victorian paintings had fallen out of favour with the art-buying public and were not worth a great deal in themselves, but in total the haul was worth many, many thousands of pounds.

  ‘I told you she was a bad egg, father,’ said David Lambert-Chide, wearing a corrosive I-told-you-so sneer. ‘Well, I’ve called the police. They will soon put a stop to this woman’s wicked ways. She was obviously part of a gang, had been planning this for ages. They knew exactly which pieces to target. Preparing for a wedding? She was all along preparing to fleece you, father, taking you for a jolly old ride.’

  Simon, naturally, refused to believe the evidence of his own eyes. And true to David’s word a veritable sandstorm of police officers descended upon Gattenby House, swirling around every hallway and corridor and filling the house in their search for evidence.

  Simon did not want me to leave, even though I thought it wasn’t my place to be there in the midst of all this family angst. He took me into his private chambers. ‘Thomas,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what this is all about, but I don’t care a jot about the damned jewellery and paintings. I want you to find her, as you promised.’

  ‘But the police will soon find her,’ I said. ‘There are enough of them on the case, after all.’

  ‘Damn the police! She is innocent!’ he fired at me. Then his eyes softened. ‘They are looking for a thief. You are looking for a woman. Please, Thomas, for an old friend. Promise me you’ll try to find her. You are better than the whole of Scotland Yard. If anyone can locate her, then I know you can.’

  We parted on the shaking of hands and an agreement that I would try my best, which seemed to calm him down somewhat, though I feared for his health, even at that stage in the game. I came away from Gattenby House with a heavy heart.

  And so events took a queer turn. I began my long search for Evelyn Carter as promised. And this is where there came that inexplicable link with the long-deceased Jimmy Tate. It transpired the woman whom Simon had fallen in love with was not the real Evelyn Carter.

  It gave weight to David Lambert-Chide’s accusations. It was part of a grand swindle. The Evelyn Carter whom his fiancé claimed to be had died thirty years previously.

  * * * *

  3

  Pipistrelle

  Elldale, Derbyshire

  May 1958

  He sat on the edge of his bed, a fourteen-year-old boy on the verge of uncertain manhood, staring at the old wooden trunk lying on the floor in front of him. There were hefty bands of metal at the trunk’s corners, more ribs of metal enveloping it in a brutal embrace, a monstrous medieval-looking padlock securing the lid. Dust motes circled it, as if intrigued.

  This box, this mere container, was all that was left of his grandfather; the only physical testament to a life once lived. His house, sold, lived in by others; his clothes, given away to the poor; his small and worthless collection of seaside pottery sent to the local tip; his meagre life savings shared out and quickly spent. All that remained of his grandfather, Thomas Rayne, one-time soldier, one-time famous detective, one-time dotty old man, all but forgotten and living alone in his quiet suburban semi, was this battered, scarred and scuffed old trunk pasted with fading labels from faraway places.

  Charles Rayne rested his bandaged chin on his bandaged hand without thinking and winced at the pain. Today had been particularly bad, his skin afire, the weeping lesions and sores each as painful as if someone had been stubbing cigarettes out on his flesh. It was at times like this that he wondered what crime he had committed to be singled out for such punishment. Yet he was aware that today’s punishment was something he’d brought on himself, because he had dared to step out into the sunshine. He’d been unable to take the sight of closed curtains, knowing that outside the summer sun shone strong, and a sort of madness had taken over his fourteen-year-old mind. He went for a walk onto the moor; clambered up the huge natural rock edifice that was Mam Tor, to stand breathlessly on top of the high, sheer cliff of shifting black shale and feel the wind buffet him, as if it said he should not be there and tried to force him back down.

  Tears stung his eyes, the bright light at once blinding, beautiful and terrifying. Hope Valley lay stretched out like a model far below. Hope Valley. How ironic. He should not do this; everything inside him was screaming for him to turn back and take shelter inside the safety and gloom of his curtained bedroom. He knew he would suffer for this. But he didn’t care. He desperately needed to see the green of the summer grass, the pure blue of the sky, to witness birds wheeling freely many hundreds of feet below him, unconstrained by walls and fear. He didn’t care if he shrivelled up and died. Life had become pointless. He might as well jump from the cliff and end his suffering.

  Charles Rayne was unlike other boys of his age. He was unlike anyone he knew. He could not go out in daylight.

  There was a time – it seemed so, so long ago now – when he was normal, like any other kid, nothing special to separate him out. Then at ten years old it was as if a switch had been flicked on inside him. His body began to rebel. The skin on his face, arms and legs blistered as if he’d been attacked by a blowtorch, and he fell dreadfully ill. For a while they feared for his life, and struggled to find a reason for what was happening to him. They bathed his ruptured skin and scratched their collective heads. He was obviously allergic to something. What had he eaten? They banned certain foods to no avail. Eventually it dawned on them; he could not go out in daylight. When they kept him inside, sheltered from even the tiniest chinks of light, he recovered. Never fully; his skin remained sensitive to the touch and was prone to blistering without reason. But now they knew any exposure to daylight caused a reaction. For young Charles that wasn’t the worst of it. H
e screamed the first time he went to the toilet and saw his urine had turned a deep red, almost the colour of a fresh bruise. He thought he was dying.

  So Charles was kept indoors, his mother employing private tutors who had to work by the light of lamps. He could no longer go out onto the high moors that surrounded the village of Elldale, or play in one of the many freezing streams that gushed down the craggy hillsides. Instead, he played with his friends in a strange twilight world, till they exchanged this gloomy netherworld for the lure of the outside. They gave his condition a fancy name – porphyric hemophilia. Some people weren’t so sure, but they felt they needed to label it with something. He was bounced eagerly from one specialist to another by his mother, desperate to find a cure and secretly blaming herself for her son’s condition. She even briefly considered it was something to do with eating too much beetroot whilst she’d been pregnant with him, hence his purple urine, but they reassured her politely that it wasn’t so. It didn’t entirely convince her and she remained riddled with guilt.

  He became something of a medical curiosity, told that one in half a million people might suffer with some form of the condition. It did not make him feel better; it made him feel he’d been purposely singled out, imagining God’s giant index finger reaching down through puffy white clouds and a booming voice saying: ‘This is the boy. Let’s make it him!’ He was forever being prodded, poked, swabbed, injected, stripped, bandaged, and talked about as if he weren’t in the room. Then they took him to that horrible room, laid him gently on the bed, his reassuring mother almost tearful and saying it was for his own good. They attached something to his head, put something in his mouth and told him to bite on it. He had no idea what was happening. The electric shock sent his body into convulsions. It appeared to last an age and then he passed out. But it did not make his condition any better.

  And yet he endured all this because he wanted to be cured of the thing and to go out and play in the sunlight with his friends again. He became so lonely it screwed up his insides. That’s when he became attached to his grandfather Tom.

  He was one of the few people to visit him, brought over by his mother for the occasional dinner. He liked Grandad Tom. They shared an unspoken bond. Grandad Tom lived all by himself. His wife had died a long, long time ago and he had never remarried. He’d once been a famous detective, his mother (Grandad Tom’s daughter) said, speaking of him as if the man were long-dead. She would often ask her son to excuse his grandfather’s erratic and often eccentric behaviour, putting it down to age and something not being quite right up here, pointing with a flash of her delicate finger to her delicate temple. His visits were reluctant, on his part, and dutiful on hers. He was always in a hurry to get off back to his house and his research, to his special ‘project’ as he liked to call it, and he would not settle because of its constant demands on his limited attention.

  ‘He does go on about the dratted thing,’ his mother sighed. ‘Can’t he simply give it a rest, just once? It’s not so much to ask.’

  ‘The old man’s not been himself for a long time,’ defended Charles’ father carefully. ‘At least he’s happy,’ he said. ‘It gives him something to do, to concentrate the mind upon. That’s no bad thing, considering.’

  ‘He’s so obsessed with the thing,’ she said. Charles noted how she always sounded upset and angry all at once. ‘He lets the thing prey on his mind when he should have let it go. After all, there’s nothing he can do about it now, is there? Some things are never resolved. That’s a fact of life.’

  ‘Well the old boy thinks he has an answer to the case, finally,’ his father chuckled, ever the umpire in these things and wanting to see fair play all round.

  ‘An answer? The answer he refuses to tell anyone about? He shuts himself away with his dusty old books and maps and things and every day he steps further and further away from the man I knew and loved. Doesn’t he know I have enough troubles with him upstairs? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair!’

  And so the conversation downstairs would ebb and flow, bubble into hearing one minute and drop into a simmering, formless moan the next. She didn’t realise, Charles thought, how easily they could be heard through the thin downstairs ceiling. He remembered how his grandfather would sit on the bed beside him, whilst below her mother hammered out her feelings, her frustrations, her fears. He would show no sign that what was said upset him, or that he even listened or understood. Instead he’d tell Charles about his project, and Charles had a willing ear.

  ‘I’ve got most of the answers, Charlie boy,’ he’d say. ‘Most but not all. Got a way to go yet, a few more leads to follow, but this will make me when I publish it. They won’t say I failed ever again, because I’ll have the answer, and boy, is that answer going to knock them dead!’

  And young Charles Rayne would simply listen to him. He didn’t pass any judgements on the old man. How could he? He loved him, and he never made a big fuss out of the fact he had to sit in a room with the heavy curtains closed; never really seemed to notice. Once, though, he did pause in talking about his project and, looking querulously about him, said:

  ‘Strange thing, old chap, having to sit here like you do in the gloom, and only venture outside in the dark.’

  ‘I’m used to it,’ Charles lied.

  ‘Nothing wrong with coming out at night, Charlie boy. Nothing wrong at all. Pipistrelles, they come out at night.’

  ‘Pipistrelles? What are they?’

  ‘Bats, old chap. Little bats. You’re my little Pipistrelle,’ he said, snaking an arm around his shoulder. He thereafter called him this whenever they met. Privately, of course, never in front of his mother and father. It was their little secret.’

  ‘They think me mad, old chap,’ he confided in Charles one day.

  ‘Who would think that?’

  He gave a sideways nod of his head to his mother and father downstairs. ‘They think me a bit batty. A bit batty, eh, Pipistrelle?’ They both laughed at the pun. ‘But not a bit of it. Marbles quite in order. Still playing with a full deck, eh, lad?’

  The next thing he knew his grandfather was dead, and Charles Rayne was devastated, overcome with debilitating grief, plunged into dark loneliness with his loss. He wasn’t even able to go to the funeral. That’s when he couldn’t take it any longer; he had to get out, into the sunshine, into the fresh air. He did not want to be a bat. He wanted to be human again.

  They thought he would die. He wished he would, for now there appeared not a single reason for him to go on living. As he lay in his shadowy, fevered limbo, he once again heard his mother expressing her upset and anger all at once, this time over him. What had she done to deserve this, he heard her rant one evening? Charles felt for her, but he could offer no answer. Some things, after all, are never resolved.

  Then the trunk was delivered to his room. ‘Your grandfather wanted you to have this,’ his mother said. He noticed she could not look straight at his bandaged face, and averted her gaze as she placed the hefty keys to the trunk into his bandaged hand.

  ‘Thank you, mother,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, his lower lip splitting as he spoke. He dabbed away the blood with his hand. The bandage came away marked with a scarlet dash. He saw how upset this made her.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said hurriedly and left him staring at the trunk.

  It was a full half hour before he inserted the key into the huge padlock and lifted the lid. The smell was the smell of his grandfather. There was his army uniform, his medals, a leather binocular case, his battered old trilby. Beneath these everyday items he found notebooks, many of them tied together with string into blocks, each of them numbered and dated. And at the very bottom a number of dusty old books and rolled up maps. He also discovered a quantity of brown cardboard files, these too carefully dated and numbered. They contained press cuttings, pages ripped from books annotated with his florid scribbles in red pencil, photographs, notes, more press cuttings, pieces of paper with nothing more on them than
strange symbols. He was drawn to two photographs of a very pretty young woman sat outside in a sort of arbour, the sunlight gilding her smooth cheeks, bouncing off her shining hair. He was instantly captivated by her, and he fell in love immediately. A young man’s love. On the back of each was the name Evelyn Carter. Who was she? Who was this mysterious woman with the enigmatic smile and faraway eyes?

  He sifted through more paper and he knew at once that this was his grandfather’s prized project.

  He lifted out the topmost set of bound notebooks, titled rather grandly The Unpublished Memoirs of Detective Inspector Thomas Rayne of the Yard.

  As he read them he soon came across the case of the Body in the Barn and was drawn into the gruesome tale. And beyond – far beyond, for he realised that the remainder of the trunk’s contents were given over to this single case. For weeks he sifted through the memoirs, the copious notes, the cuttings, the articles, and finally gasped at the enormity of what his grandfather had uncovered, at what he was suggesting.

  From that moment, Charles Rayne knew what he must do. He must take what his grandfather had started and make it his life’s work, to finally put to rest the mystery of The Body in the Barn, no matter how extraordinary the findings. And like his grandfather before him he sank down into his work, till it absorbed him fully and he heard his mother say one evening:

  ‘He’s obsessed with the thing!’ Sounding both upset and angry all at once.

  * * * *

  The Lunar Club

  Elldale, Derbyshire

  1972

  He was reminded very much of the H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine; the very beginning of things when the time traveller invites his learned friends around to his house so he can reveal the secret of his experiments. Recall the exciting and bizarre tale of his adventures. Gain their confidence.