Dying Games (Jefferson Tayte Genealogical Mystery Book 6)

by Steve Robinson

  With the window now fully open, they were able to see inside a little better, although on such a dull day, it was still difficult to make out any detail beyond the first few feet. Tayte poked his head inside and was thankful that he couldn’t hear the sound of buzzing flies, or smell the sickly putrid stench that would have drawn them to this place had there been a dead body decomposing nearby. Instead, the air had a dry, musty odour to it that made him cough.

  ‘Dust,’ he said. ‘Everything’s covered in dust.’

  ‘Here, give me your foot,’ Rudi said. ‘I’ll help you up.’

  Tayte’s brow knotted. ‘Help me up?’

  ‘We have to go inside. In for a penny, and all that.’

  Tayte knew his brother was right. They had come this far and they still hadn’t seen enough to know whether this was the right place or somewhere else they could dismiss. He sighed, suddenly wishing he was elsewhere, yet knowing he had to go in.

  Rudi squatted down and cupped his hands. ‘Come on, before someone sees us.’

  Tayte shook his head as he put his briefcase down. He put his hands on to the window frame, ready to pull himself up, then he put his left foot into Rudi’s hands. Before he knew it he’d swung his other leg up and was sitting awkwardly half in and half out of the window.

  ‘You’re coming in after me, right?’

  Rudi shook his head. ‘We can’t leave the window like this. I’m going to put the board back and keep watch.’

  ‘That’s just great,’ Tayte said under his breath. Then he swung his left leg inside and lowered himself down on the other side.

  Rudi already had the board in his hands. ‘You can use the torch on your phone to see by,’ he said as he began to lift the board up. ‘Knock when you’re ready to come out again.’

  Tayte took a deep breath, nodding. ‘Look after my briefcase,’ he said, and then he was in darkness.

  Standing inside Vincent Blackhurst’s former marionette shop, Tayte could already feel goose bumps on the backs of his arms. He wasted no time getting his phone out to switch on the torch, which cast a wide silvery beam over the room and its contents. The dust he’d seen from the window was everywhere, giving the place an eerie glow, muting all the colours. He shone the light down at his feet to see where he was going, and he was immediately puzzled. Unlike the rest of the room, the wooden floor was relatively clean. It told him someone else had recently been here, and he supposed that whoever it was must have wiped the floor before leaving to hide his tracks.

  ‘The Genie,’ he said under his breath.

  Tayte moved further in. There was a large round table in the centre of the room, on which he saw an assortment of some of the larger novelty items that had once been for sale. Around the table were rotating racks containing some of the smaller products. To his left, towards the front of the old shop where the main boarded-up display windows were, he saw a fully dressed window, just as he imagined it must have looked decades ago.

  He went closer and took in the faded, dusty outline of a magician’s top hat, complete with a white rabbit poking out from the top. Around it were packs of playing cards and several ready-made magic tricks. To the other side of the window display he saw some of the novelty and joke items, such as a set of wind-up gnashing teeth, transparent red and blue water pistols, and a number of face masks. Taking pride of place in the centre of the window was a handful of once colourful puppets, suspended by their strings in various poses. Everything Tayte saw suggested to him that very little, if anything, had been touched since the shop last closed its doors to the public.

  Turning back into the room, he began to wonder why. Surely whoever had bought the shop from Georgina Budd after her son lost interest in it wouldn’t have just abandoned it when it failed to turn a profit? He supposed the new owner could have died, but what of their relatives? Why hadn’t it been sold on to someone who wanted to make better use of it? A thought occurred to him then that made perfect sense.

  What if the new owner was none other than Donald Blackhurst?

  There were ways to buy property without putting your own name on the deeds. Georgina had said that the property was no longer in the family, but perhaps she hadn’t known it was her cousin, Donald, who was behind the purchase. How better to preserve a place that held such special childhood memories than to buy it yourself? It would have been easy for Blackhurst to bring that one special person here: Cathy Summer. It would also explain the state of the place today, because Donald Blackhurst had been incarcerated for the past thirty years, with no chance to visit.

  Tayte went over to the shop entrance, where he fully expected to see a pile of old mail, but there was nothing. He recalled then that he’d been unable to open the letterbox from the outside, which explained it. He wondered how a building could go unoccupied for so long without questions being asked, but he supposed the basic services had been cut off a long time ago, keeping bills to a minimum, and that any local council taxes due were being paid via direct debit ad infinitum, or by someone else. Perhaps Donald Blackhurst wasn’t so completely alone in the world, after all. If this was his property, he considered that perhaps someone was helping him to keep it going. That’s if it was owned by Donald Blackhurst at all, Tayte reminded himself. It was all mere speculation that just happened to fit.

  Moving to the back of the shop, where he saw an old-style till behind a small shop counter, Tayte began to wonder what he hoped to find. If Cathy Summer’s remains were here, he was sure it would take more than a quick scan of the place to make such a discovery. He was rapidly concluding, however, that one thing was certain—Jean wasn’t here. At least, not in this room. The place was already beginning to give him the creeps, so it was with some reluctance that he was about to go through the doorway at the back of the shop, to see what lay beyond, when a sound startled him, setting his nerves further on edge. He spun around, a flush of adrenaline surging through him. He could hear laughter, muted as if coming from another room—only it wasn’t coming from another room: it was in that room with him. It sounded jolly, yet maniacal, repeating over and over like a laughing-policeman toy whose pull-string voice box had broken.

  Cautiously, Tayte retraced his steps, listening intently as he went, in an attempt to locate the source of the sound. Part way towards the display window he stopped, sure that it was coming from the table in the centre of the room. He shone his light over it. There were more puppets hanging from the ceiling over the middle of the table, and there were several boxes, colourfully painted beneath their layers of dust. He bent down and leaned his ear to them, convinced the laughter was coming from one of them. He opened one. It was empty. Then he opened another and caught his breath as a jack-in-the-box puppet shot up at him, almost hitting him in the face. His heart rate shot up with it as the laughter became instantly louder. It was a telephone ringtone. Fixed to the puppet with elastic bands was a mobile phone, its display glowing brightly. On the display he saw an alert that told him there was an incoming video message.

  Tayte was breathing rapidly. He closed his mouth and swallowed drily as he reached for the phone, uncertain of what further surprises lay in store for him. He freed the phone from the jack-in-the-box puppet and accepted the incoming message. A video began to play. The timestamp told him it had been recorded several weeks ago. It began with a close-up of a grotesque mask—a woman in a white lace bonnet with exaggerated features painted with garishly bright make-up to match her red nose and cheeks. The image began to zoom out. It revealed a spotted light-blue dress and a white apron. The character was Judy, from a Punch and Judy show. She was tied to a chair in a small, dimly lit room, and in her lap was a board on which was written ‘BXCB 378569’.

  Jean?

  There was no way Tayte could be sure it was her, but as this was clearly another clue from the Genie, surely it had to be. The timestamp worried him, though. The video had been recorded soon after he’d returned to England to look for her. It was almost three months old. But what did that mean? Obviously th
e video had to be pre-recorded; the Genie could have no way of knowing when he would turn up, but if he was too late—if Jean was dead—why bother to send it now? He drew a deep breath, and at the same time he felt suddenly light-headed to think she really could still be alive after all this time, especially if this message meant that he now had a chance to save her.

  The video was still playing, and now Tayte gasped as someone else came into view. The similarly grotesque figure was dressed as Punch. First the mask came in close to the camera, and then as the figure backed away he saw the unmistakable red jester’s motley and tasselled sugarloaf hat. The figure stood to attention beside Judy for a few seconds, one hand on the chair, the other behind his back. Then in a flourish Punch produced a long, broad-bladed knife and held it to Judy’s throat.

  Tayte felt his palms become clammy as he watched Punch move around behind Judy, rocking the blade from side to side, causing it to catch the light from the video camera. Judy was shaking her head now. She began to struggle, but it did her no good. With his free hand, Punch reached down towards Judy’s lap and flicked away the message board. There was another message behind it.

  ‘You have twelve hours,’ Tayte said under his breath as he read it. After which time, as was evidently clear from the video, whoever was sitting there in that Judy costume would die.

  The video ended abruptly, and Tayte felt both elated and relieved to know that Jean was probably still alive, yet he was terrifyingly afraid that he wouldn’t be able to save her.

  Twelve hours . . .

  He checked the time. It was approaching midday, which meant he had until just before midnight. There was no time to waste, now that the countdown had begun. He wondered then what had triggered it. The Genie had to know he was there in order to send the video message at just the right time, telling him that the Genie had to be watching. He shone his light around the room again, now looking higher up towards the ceiling, and there in the corner by the display window was a small video camera, far too modern to have been installed when the shop was in use.

  Tayte dashed back to the window he’d entered by and knocked on the board, eager now to leave. He had to get started on this latest deadly puzzle the Genie had set for him as now it seemed that Jean’s life was once again at stake.

  Sitting in a pair of paisley silk pyjamas in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel two hundred miles away, Michel Levant closed his laptop and let out a long, satisfied sigh. The IP camera he’d had one of his more unscrupulous associates install at Vincent Blackhurst’s former marionette shop, with its discreet night vision, had worked perfectly, alerting him to Tayte’s presence, signalling the recommencement of the game. He only wished the camera had sound so that he could have heard Tayte’s surprise when the jack-in-the-box had popped open.

  Levant was over the disappointment he’d felt that night at Beachy Head, where he’d been watching Tayte personally, waiting in his car in the hope that this time Tayte would not come back down from the cliffs—that this time he would read about the American’s tragic suicide over a cup of herbal tea with his morning newspaper. He was also over the displeasure of knowing that he hadn’t quite managed to drive Tayte to self-destruction through the cleverly constructed and executed series of genealogical puzzles he’d devised, causing the piece-by-piece ruination of Tayte’s life through the destruction of everything he held dear. The game was back on, and Levant was confident that the grand finale he now had in mind would be an even more satisfying end to Jefferson Tayte’s life.

  He threw his head back into the settee’s soft cushions and stared up at the chandelier as he thought back over the few months since Tayte had come to England in search of the woman he loved. How pathetic he thought Tayte’s attempts had been, when for so long he had missed the clue he had placed right under his nose. But Michel Levant was a patient man. Had he not been so patient—had he tried to hurry Tayte along with some other clue—he would have missed the pleasure of watching him suffer day by day from the loss of his bride-to-be.

  He thought about the man he’d seen walking down from Beachy Head with Tayte that night, and it did upset him that, for all his contacts, he still had no idea who he was. Not that it really mattered. If this man had helped Tayte get back into the game, then good for him. He was someone to be thanked, otherwise the game’s grand finale might never be realised, and now that it was so close he felt child-like in his eagerness to see it play out.

  Levant smiled to himself. How he had waited to settle the score between them. Tayte had upset his plans when they first met in London over a year ago. The American had lost him a small fortune, and had almost got him caught in the process—and if Levant had been caught he would have been imprisoned, which was something he could never face. To strip away the finery of life, particularly the life he had become accustomed to, was to take the life itself as far as Levant was concerned. When he’d first met Tayte, the American had little more than his reputation to lose. Now he really had something special, or rather someone special in his life, whom he would soon die for.

  Levant’s smile broadened. He couldn’t wait to test the power of love, but first there were more preparations to be made—the final preparations. He stood up to get dressed, thinking that Tayte would not want to waste a second trying to solve the last clue in time, and he truly hoped he did. He was the Genie after all, the game master, and he wanted his game to be played out to the end.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The inevitable rain had begun to pour by the time Tayte and Rudi were clear of the old marionette shop. Having followed a sign for the town centre, they found shelter in a welcoming cafe that smelled of sugared doughnuts, although Tayte didn’t imagine they were selling many today. It was lunchtime, and the place was all but empty, thanks to the inclement weather and the time of year.

  ‘Are you going to tell me now?’ Rudi asked impatiently as they sat down at a table somewhere in the middle of the cafe, away from the entrance and the draught. ‘What’s got you so excited? What did you find?’

  ‘I found it was the right place,’ Tayte said. ‘We need to let the police know that Cathy Summer’s remains could be concealed there.’

  ‘How do you know it’s the right place?’

  Tayte produced the mobile phone he was meant to discover and navigated to the video message. He handed it to Rudi. ‘It was inside a jack-in-the-box. Watch the video. It has to be Jean in that costume. It was recorded a while ago, but I think she could still be alive.’

  ‘I told you to never give up hope, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m glad you did.’

  ‘Are you going to tell the police about this message, too?’ Rudi asked. ‘That you think it’s Jean?’

  Tayte shook his head. ‘Not yet. The police can’t solve this. The FBI couldn’t, either. They brought me in because they needed an expert in the field of genealogy. I’m best placed to work this out, and apart from Jean and her family, I’ve got the most to lose if I fail. Calling the police in now would slow things down for sure. We only have twelve hours. By the time I’d explained everything it could be too late for Jean.’

  Rudi nodded in agreement. As he began to watch the video message, Tayte took his laptop out from his briefcase and connected to the cafe’s free Wi-Fi, ready to get started on the Genie’s latest clue.

  Rudi paused the playback and looked up at Tayte. ‘Do you know what BXCB 378569 means?’

  ‘Yes, I do. That’s the easy part. It’s a birth registration number.’

  ‘And what are you supposed to do with it?’

  ‘That, I imagine, is going to be the hard part. The Genie would know that someone in my profession would recognise the reference. It’s what it points to that’s important.’

  ‘Don’t you mean who it points to?’

  ‘Perhaps. I need to see a copy of the birth certificate this number references, but unless the Genie has left a trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow online, that’s not going to be easy. I’ll probably have to
contact the General Register Office to find out.’

  ‘You can’t just run an Internet search?’

  Tayte shook his head. ‘The searchable archives and indexes are mostly name driven because that’s what people know—the names of their relatives. For England and Wales, you use names and dates to identify GRO index reference numbers in order to obtain the various birth, marriage, and death certificates for the individual you’re interested in. It’s usually only once you have a copy of the certificate that you know what the birth, marriage, or death registration number is.’

  ‘I see,’ Rudi said. ‘And what then?’

  ‘Then the challenge really begins. As with all the previous clues, the game’s all about discovering the place and cause of death of someone in the victim’s ancestry. This time the victim is Jean, but which ancestor’s death is the Genie planning to replicate? That’s what this birth registration number should ultimately lead us to.’

  ‘If we can work it out.’

  ‘Yes, and in less than twelve hours,’ Tayte reminded himself.

  A waitress came over to their table and they ordered hot drinks: a coffee for Tayte and a pot of tea for Rudi.

  Rudi tapped the menu. ‘Are you ordering food?’

  Tayte shook his head. ‘Maybe later. I don’t have much of an appetite.’

  Smiling at the waitress, Rudi said, ‘Just the drinks for now, thank you.’

  As Rudi bowed his head and continued to watch the video message, Tayte turned back to his laptop. He thought he’d try a general search for the birth registration number first, just in case there was a reference to it online, as was sometimes the case when other genealogists and family history enthusiasts made their own research public. No matching results were returned and he figured the Genie had probably set this opening clue up as a time-waster, knowing Tayte would have to call the GRO for more information, and that it would be a challenge in itself to get to see the birth certificate the registration number related to in time.