Dying Games (Jefferson Tayte Genealogical Mystery Book 6)

by Steve Robinson

  His call only rang twice before it was picked up. He found himself speaking to a young woman in the editorial department who introduced herself as Amber. Her tone was clipped and somewhat unnatural-sounding, Tayte thought, as if she were putting on what she considered to be a posh phone voice.

  ‘Hi, my name’s Jefferson Tayte,’ Tayte said. ‘I’d like to speak with a reporter who works for your newspaper if that’s at all possible. His name’s Joshua Evans.’

  ‘Joshua Evans?’ Amber repeated.

  ‘That’s right. I believe he was working on a story about one of the patients at Broadmoor Hospital a few months back.’

  The line was silent for a few seconds. Then Amber said, ‘Are you’re sure he works for the Bracknell Times?’

  ‘That’s what I was told.’

  Silence again. Then, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t find any employees called Evans in the system.’

  Tayte sighed. ‘Perhaps he left the newspaper recently. Can you check?’

  ‘One moment please.’

  The line was silent again, this time for close to a minute. When Amber came back she was apologetic again. ‘No one by that name has worked for the Bracknell Times in the last twelve months,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid you must have been misinformed. Perhaps he’s freelance or maybe he works for another newspaper.’

  Tayte’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He knew he couldn’t have misheard the name of the newspaper, or the man’s name. He could still vividly recall the member of staff at Broadmoor Hospital telling him. ‘Maybe that’s it,’ he said, going along with the suggestion, but thinking that whoever had gone to see Donald Blackhurst must have lied about his identity. ‘Thanks for your time,’ he added, then he ended the call.

  Turning to Rudi, he said, ‘The newspaper has no record of a Joshua Evans working for them. Not now, or within the last year.’

  ‘That’s odd. Maybe the hospital made a mistake.’

  ‘It’s possible, but I’d imagine such a high-security establishment would be very thorough when it comes to recording visitor information.’

  ‘So, if Joshua Evans didn’t work for the Bracknell Times, who was he?’

  ‘That’s another very good question,’ Tayte said, considering that the man who had gone to see Donald Blackhurst in recent months might not have been a journalist at all. Maybe he was the real Genie, the mastermind behind everything that had happened, having gone there to hatch the rest of his deadly game.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was mid-afternoon and raining heavily by the time Tayte and Rudi were back in Eastbourne. They were sitting opposite one another at a table by a window in the back room of Joyce’s house, both looking out through a layer of condensation over a small garden. It was colourful for the time of year, trying in vain to bring cheer to an otherwise gloomy month. It had turned colder over the last few days, and now the rain drove icy sleet against the window. Tayte watched it slide down the glass, lost to his thoughts as he wondered what to do next.

  ‘What do you usually do when you’re stumped?’ Rudi asked, breaking the silence that had settled over them since Joyce had brought them both a hot drink some time ago.

  Tayte drew a deep, contemplative breath. ‘I grind it out,’ he said. ‘Sometimes for days, even weeks, on end. I go digging in the archives. I go back and talk to my client’s family members in the hope that I’ll see or hear something new that might open another line of investigation.’

  ‘Well, since that newspaper reporter turned out to be bogus, we’ve run out of people to talk to,’ Rudi said. ‘What about these archives? Can they help?’

  ‘Maybe, but we have to know what we’re looking for.’

  ‘We’re looking to find out what Blackhurst did with Jean’s sister, because the Genie plans to replicate her death.’

  Tayte gave a sombre nod, thinking about Jean again and whether or not Cathy Summer’s death had already been replicated. He still couldn’t shake the idea that three months was too long for there to be any hope of finding Jean alive. ‘That’s the big question,’ he said, ‘but as Blackhurst isn’t going to answer it for us, we need to look for some stepping stones.’

  ‘Stepping stones?’ Rudi said, raising his brow.

  Tayte nodded again, more enthusiastically this time. ‘We need to take smaller steps toward our goal. Answer some other, smaller questions in the hope that they’ll lead us to the bigger answer we’re ultimately looking for.’

  He stared at the sleet on the window again as his thoughts turned back to their conversation with the retired detective who had worked on the Blackhurst case. He recalled that Wendholt had told them Cathy Summer was the only victim Blackhurst hadn’t given up. He reconsidered the reasons Wendholt had given.

  ‘All we have to go on for now is what we’ve heard so far,’ he said. ‘And most of what we’ve learned about Blackhurst has come from Jean’s father, my research, and Philip Wendholt. He told us that of all Blackhurst’s victims, Cathy Summer looked the most like his sister. That’s the reason why Blackhurst has never given her up.’

  ‘Cathy was special to him,’ Rudi said.

  ‘That’s right—special. So we could be looking for somewhere that was special to Blackhurst and his sister before he killed her. Wendholt suggested that Blackhurst took these girls because in his mind he felt he was bringing his sister back, undoing the terrible thing he’d done. For a time, he felt as if he were with his sister again, so maybe he took them to places he and his sister used to go.’

  ‘It’s logical,’ Rudi said. ‘Although, I should think the police would have checked all the places Blackhurst frequented.’

  ‘I’m sure they would have, but they could only have checked the places they knew about. This goes back to when Blackhurst and his sister were children, years before he abducted his first victim. What if there was someplace extra special to them both back then, a happy place and time where Blackhurst might take the one child who looked so much like his sister that, according to Wendholt, you’d be hard pushed to tell them apart?’ Tayte paused and smiled at Rudi. Then he reached down into his briefcase and pulled out his laptop. ‘I think that little stepping stone just gave us our new line of investigation.’

  It was barely after four in the afternoon, but beyond the window it was already growing dark thanks to the short winter daylight hours and the heavy clouds that continued to drench the already sodden land with yet more rain. Tayte stared at his laptop in contemplation of how best to go about finding such a special place in Donald Blackhurst’s childhood; a place, perhaps, where fond family memories had once been made with his sister. The birth, marriage and death indexes were his usual starting point, but this search was somewhat different from his usual routine, and apart from knowing the names of Blackhurst’s immediate family, his parents and his sister, he had little else to go on. Building an accurate family tree for Blackhurst would take time, and on this occasion Tayte didn’t feel that it was the right way to proceed, given that he didn’t exactly know what he was looking for.

  He looked up over his laptop screen at Rudi. ‘I think a general search for the Blackhurst family name is going to be the best place to start,’ he said. ‘Maybe I can find a connection to someone or somewhere that way.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Not really, unless you brought your laptop with you.’

  Rudi shook his head. ‘All I have is my phone.’

  ‘It’s probably a little small for this kind of work,’ Tayte said. ‘It’s too bad Emmy and her sister aren’t hooked up to the online community, or maybe you could have borrowed one of their laptops.’ He slid his mug across the table and gave Rudi a coy smile. ‘I could use another coffee.’

  Rudi stood up. ‘So my status has been reduced to tea boy, is that it?’ he said in good humour as he collected their mugs.

  Tayte winked at him. ‘Just think of the greater good, Rudi. Keep that coffee coming.’

  As Rudi left him to it, Tayte turned back to his laptop, thin
king that he’d quickly Google ‘Blackhurst’ in case any pertinent connections to Donald Blackhurst came back, but by the time Rudi returned with their drinks, he knew he was wasting his time. Rudi pulled a chair up alongside him and sat back with his drink.

  ‘That doesn’t sound very promising,’ he said in response to the long sigh Tayte gave as he too sat back in his chair and sipped his drink.

  ‘Too much data,’ he said. ‘I need to narrow it down. Maybe there’s something in the newspaper archives I started looking at while we were waiting to see Blackhurst.’

  He brought up the British Newspaper Archive website, where he’d previously read about Blackhurst’s family background. The fast-growing archive boasted access to over sixteen million pages covering two hundred years of history. Because of the serial killer’s notoriety, the search still returned too much data as far as Tayte was concerned. He’d read some of the articles already, which helped, and he’d glanced over others to some degree, but there were so many more that were new to him.

  Time to grind it out, he thought as he selected one of the articles and began to read, hoping that sooner or later something would stand out. An hour quickly passed, and he soon wished he had a bag of Hershey’s left to munch on. Rudi had fallen asleep in his chair, no doubt from boredom and the hypnotic patter of rain at the now black window.

  Most of the articles Tayte read were understandably about Donald Blackhurst’s crimes and his family background. The case was so widely reported in the press during Blackhurst’s reign of terror that Tayte soon found himself going over familiar information in one newspaper and then another until his eyes began to tire. He was about to go and make himself another mug of coffee, not wanting to disturb Rudi, when he saw something that made him sit up.

  ‘Touchdown!’ he said, loud enough to wake Rudi from his slumber.

  ‘What is it?’ Rudi said, suddenly at Tayte’s elbow.

  ‘A pretty obvious connection if you ask me. It’s just the kind of thing I’ve come to expect from all the previous puzzles I’ve had to solve.’

  ‘What have you found?’

  Tayte tapped a single word buried within the article he’d been reading.

  Rudi leaned closer. ‘Puppets,’ he said, raising his eyebrows as he made the connection.

  Tayte nodded. ‘This particular article is about an interview Blackhurst gave soon after he was sent to Broadmoor. It reads much like parts of our conversation with Blackhurst earlier, in that he tells the reporter, again in answer to an unrelated question, that he and his sister liked puppets.’

  ‘So, maybe he’s been leaving clues as to what he did with Cathy Summer all along, only no one picked up on it.’

  ‘It’s possible. It might still be nothing, but my instincts tell me it’s worth exploring.’

  ‘We’re all his puppets,’ Rudi said. ‘That’s what he told us as we were leaving. All whose puppets?’

  ‘If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Blackhurst was referring to the man who had gone to see him, and if that was the Genie, as I now suspect it was, then Blackhurst could see him as the man who was pulling all the strings in this sick game he’s playing. Maybe he told Blackhurst all about it in exchange for information about Cathy Summer and it excited him enough to talk. Or maybe the Genie was fed the same line about liking puppets and he went ahead and worked the rest out for himself, as we’re now doing.’

  ‘Either way,’ Rudi said, ‘it seems that Blackhurst’s visitor was persuasive enough to have him pass on that message as we left. Assuming for now that’s what it was.’

  Tayte agreed. ‘I think this could be the connection to Blackhurst I was supposed to find, but what to do with it?’

  ‘A puppet show?’ Rudi offered. ‘We’re looking for somewhere that was special to Blackhurst and his sister. Maybe they used to visit somewhere as children.’

  ‘Or someone,’ Tayte said, thinking that every puppet show had its puppet master.

  Rudi nodded. ‘So, I suppose the next step is to look into puppet shows?’

  ‘That’s right. Follow the clues and see where they lead, and this particular clue takes us to the entertainment industry. There are some key publications we can look at. Back home we have Variety magazine, but here in the UK we need to look at The Stage. It’s been going since the late 1800s, and fortunately, they have a comprehensive online archive.’

  Tayte brought up another browser screen and was soon looking at the website for The Stage archive. He clicked the search button, selected to view all clippings and entered the keyword they were interested in: puppet. The search returned results dating from 1950 to 2005. All were advertisements of some kind, many of which were from puppet theatres looking for puppeteers to drive hand puppets and marionettes. There was one for an international puppet festival in 1963, and another for Puppeteers’ Day in 1983. Tayte’s eyes scanned through every one of them, but he was unable to make a connection.

  ‘Isn’t there anything further back?’ Rudi asked. ‘There’s a big gap between 1880, when it says the archive begins, and 1950.’

  ‘I think it’s because I’ve only searched for puppet. I’ll try another term—marionette.’

  He clicked the back button and entered the new keyword to search for. This time the results dated further back, and once again there were several advertisements, this time more for marionette shows than for puppeteers. As he scanned through them he read about the Marionette Follies from 1946, and the DaSilva Marionettes from 1964. Tayte read through each one, growing more and more disheartened as he came closer to the bottom of the results page. Then he found something that set his pulse racing.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, enthusiastically tapping the screen as his skin began to tingle. He was looking at an advertisement for a marionette theatre, dated 1937. At the bottom of the advertisement was the proprietor’s name.

  ‘Vincent Blackhurst,’ Rudi said, reading the name aloud. His face was suddenly beaming. ‘That’s it!’

  Tayte was now smiling along with him. ‘1937 is long before Donald Blackhurst and his sister were born, of course, but maybe the theatre was still there when they were growing up. It would appear to have been owned, or at least run, by one of Donald Blackhurst’s ancestors—his grandfather or a great-uncle, perhaps.’

  ‘There’s an address in Broadstairs,’ Rudi said. ‘I’ve heard of it. It’s a seaside town in Kent that I read about during my English literature studies.’

  ‘Broadstairs,’ Tayte repeated. ‘A puppet show at the seaside.’ He was still smiling. ‘Now that must have seemed like a very special place to visit as a child.’

  ‘Yes, but I shouldn’t think the theatre’s still there. The building perhaps, but puppet theatres have long been out of fashion.’

  ‘I think we need to go there first thing in the morning and take a look,’ Tayte said. ‘But before we do, I want to learn some more about Vincent Blackhurst, particularly whether he still has family living in the area. I’d like to prove his relationship to Donald, just to be sure. If Vincent is part of the same Blackhurst family, maybe one of his relatives will recall the young Donald Blackhurst. We may even be able to find out whether he used to visit Broadstairs with his sister.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hindered by the morning rush-hour and the lack of a fast motorway, it took Tayte and Rudi around two and a half hours to drive the eighty-mile journey from Eastbourne to Broadstairs the following morning, having passed through umpteen towns and villages, often on painfully slow single-lane carriageways. The heavy rain of the previous evening had thankfully stopped, but the overcast sky remained to set another dreary outlook for the day. It was after ten o’clock as Tayte pulled into a kerbside parking space on Western Esplanade, as close as he could get to the walkway that led down from the cliffs to the harbour. His hopes of arriving any earlier had been dashed by both the traffic and the hearty breakfast Emmy and her sister had insisted he and Rudi ate before they left.

  A chill breeze greeted them off the gr
een-grey sea as they got out of the car, causing Tayte to pull his jacket collar up. He didn’t like wearing a coat because he often felt too warm with one on, whatever the weather, and he never knew what to do with a coat when he wasn’t wearing it. It was just something else to carry or remember not to leave behind whenever he went out, although today, Rudi’s lime-green waterproof mountain-jacket seemed like a good idea.

  ‘Don’t you want your lovely warm scarf?’ Rudi called to him from the other side of the car, grinning as he held it up.

  Emmy had loaned it to Tayte that morning, and he hadn’t wanted to offend her by refusing to take it. It was baby pink with little white sailboats embroidered on it. He hadn’t planned to wear it, but now he was here in that bitter winter wind, he was glad to have it, whatever the colour. He raised his hand and Rudi tossed it over the car roof for him to catch. As they set off down the walkway in search of the address they were looking for, he wrapped it twice around his neck and tucked the ends snugly into his jacket, not caring what he looked like, or that he now smelled of English Rose perfume.

  Tayte had his briefcase with him. Rudi had a map of the town that he’d bought at a petrol station just outside Broadstairs when they stopped for fuel. On it he’d marked the approximate location of Vincent Blackhurst’s marionette theatre, and he was studying the route as they made their way alongside the metal railings that fringed the edge of the cliff, overlooking Louisa Bay.

  ‘It should be just along here,’ Rudi said. ‘Before we come to Victoria Gardens.’

  Tayte could see the gardens up ahead. Before them, to his left, the view seemed far from promising. He was looking at a series of balconied apartments that overlooked the sea, four storeys high. It was clear from their modern design that the existing properties had been recently redeveloped.

  Rudi stopped walking. ‘It should be right about here,’ he said, looking up at the apartments.

  ‘There hasn’t been a puppet theatre here in a while,’ Tayte said, sounding disappointed if not surprised that such real estate had since been turned into profitable sea-view apartments.