by Helen Phifer
She shook her head. ‘You’re scaring me, Ben.’
‘Oh, and do not take Dan with you or tell him what you’re up to. He’ll be straight down the corridor to Tom’s office to drop us all in it before I’ve had time to drink the coffee you’re going to make for me, take my word for it.’
Smiling, she walked out and headed straight to the brew station to make him a drink. If Ben were a real drinker, he’d be pulling a bottle of whisky out of his bottom drawer and taking a nip.
As it was, he preferred coffee and needed to get himself together, ready to speak to Gary Marks again.
As he stared at the monstrous red brick building in front of him, it occurred that he’d been here only once before in the fifteen years he’d been a detective, and now he was walking into the visitor’s entrance to HMP Manchester for the second day on the run. His phone rang and he looked down to see Amy’s name.
‘Boss, the guy from the pub checked out; his partner, Saffie, said she vividly remembers having to watch two episodes of Mindhunter with him, even though she doesn’t really like it, and then they went to bed.’
‘I’m sure he said he watched it because his girlfriend likes it.’
‘Maybe he was embarrassed to admit it to you, especially when you were asking him about a murder. I’ve checked into Gary Marks’s background, and he had two children at the time he killed his wife in 1999. A boy and a girl. According to the intel reports made at the time, the younger of the two, his daughter, witnessed her mum’s murder; the boy was asleep. They were split up and placed into care.’
He let out a whistle. ‘Morgan?’
That would explain the nightmares and insomnia; if she was repressing the memories from back then, her adoptive mum’s suicide could have been the catalyst that brought them back to the surface. But did this make her a killer? He still found it hard to believe she could have anything to do with this.
‘Not according to this. They were called Skye and Taylor, but that doesn’t mean whoever adopted them didn’t change their names to protect them. It would make sense; if they were still known as Skye and Taylor Marks they would always be hounded by the press. Every time he was up for appeal, or his crimes were talked about, it would remind the public about his kids. That’s a terrible thing to have hanging around your neck for the rest of your life.’
‘Where’s her brother now?’
‘That’s the thing, no one knows. There’s nothing on the system about them after they were taken into care, except for a couple of non-violent domestics between Stan and Sylvia Brookes who adopted Skye and changed her name to Morgan. Taylor dropped off the face of the earth.’
‘Please can you go visit Child Services? Tell them this is urgent, a matter of life and death. We need to know where Gary Marks’s children were sent. Names, addresses.’
‘Do you think she knows?’
‘I couldn’t say, but this is going to devastate her if she doesn’t.’
The line went dead, and he wondered if she had learned about her past, if that was the catalyst that could have set her off on a murderous spree.
Stop it, Ben, you need to believe she’s innocent and prove it. If you give up on her, then you might as well give up on your entire life.
He checked in and went through the same routine as yesterday. Amy was right: he should have had someone here with him, but there was no one apart from her he trusted with this and he needed her back at home, holding the fort. The corridors smelt like school dinners and his stomach let out a silent groan, a reminder to feed it at some point. So consumed with disbelief since he’d spoken to Declan, he hadn’t even thought about food. The guard pointed to the chair and ran through the rules again. It was a different one today, so he listened and thanked them when they had finished; as impatient as he felt, they were only doing their job and he respected that.
The room was silent. The only noise was the ticking of a large clock, placed so high on the wall that it couldn’t be pulled down and used as a weapon. He could feel the pulse of his heart as it beat in synchronicity to the tick tock. Ben felt as if it were counting down the minutes to some huge, impending disaster. Bending his head, he clasped his hands together. Was it too late to pray for a bit of divine intervention, for him to be totally wrong about all of this?
The door scraped open and Marks was led in, again a guard either side. He waited until he was sitting opposite, studying him. He didn’t see any resemblance to Morgan, but that didn’t mean anything.
‘Thank you for agreeing to speak to me again so soon, Gary.’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, I wasn’t particularly busy, my diary is a little empty these days. Where’s your pretty sidekick? I was kind of hoping to see her again.’
A ripple of disgust made Ben shudder. Did he know that could be his own daughter he was talking about? God he hoped not.
‘She’s on her day off. I’m not going to lie; things have taken a turn for the worse since I was here and I need your help. Yesterday I asked you how your DNA could have been left behind at a crime scene.’
‘You did and the answer is still the same, it wasn’t me. They don’t let me out for day trips to the lakes no matter how well I behave.’
‘I appreciate that, but realistically, the only way that could happen was if someone who was a close relation to you and shared many of the same DNA characteristics you do, left it there. I’ve been doing some digging and discovered you—’
The laughter that filled the room threw Ben off guard. He looked at Gary Marks, who had tipped his head back and was laughing so loud even the guards were staring at each other in surprise.
‘What’s so funny?’
He clapped his hands on his thighs and shook his head, composing himself. He still had a ridiculous grin across his face.
‘This, all of this. I get it now. One of my kids has taken a leaf out of my book and turned to a life of crime. That’s why you’re so interested. I never saw this coming not in a million years. It’s a bit of a revelation to be honest. You discovered what? That I fathered two bloody children I never wanted in the first place, that I went back home after each attack and played happy families. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the kids’ fault they were born. It was that bitch Janet’s. I told her I didn’t want any, so what did she do? A couple of months after we met, she went and got pregnant; told me it was an accident, but I didn’t believe her. I found myself stuck with her; I was having a bit of a bad time. You see I had these urges, these fantasies, and they were getting harder to control. I realised that Janet with her neat three-bedroom council house might be able to help me. I tried, I did, and then Taylor was born, and I realised I quite liked the ugly ball of screaming baby. That threw me for six; I hadn’t expected that to happen.’
‘You were a good dad, you stayed around?’
‘I was a fucking brilliant dad. I couldn’t up and leave Janet. She had started acting all weird and didn’t want to look at the kid despite her demanding she was keeping him in the first place. The doctors called it baby blues and gave her some pills.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘We did play at happy families for a year or so. I was too tired working then coming home to take over looking after Taylor, that those feelings I’d been having kind of went away a little, making it easier to live a normal life.
‘Then she did it again; she told me she was pregnant again. I looked at her like she was the stupidest woman on the planet. I told her she was an idiot, that she didn’t bother with Taylor, so how the hell was she going to manage another, and she cried for hours. Said that she felt better and maybe this time it would be different. There was no way she could have an abortion.
‘I tell you I was raging that night. I left the house and went out looking for trouble, for a fight, for anyone to even look at me the wrong way. I wanted to strangle her with my bare hands.’
Ben was absorbing all this information. He stared at Marks.
‘Janet had the baby?’
Marks tutt
ed loudly. ‘Yeah, the stupid cow.’
‘How did you feel about this one?’
Marks was no longer smiling. He was staring at Ben with those cold, calculating eyes.
‘I think you can guess. It didn’t help matters, not for me anyway. Janet seemed to get her shit together though, said she’d always wanted a baby girl and loved her more than Taylor. How do you work that out, eh?’
Ben realised that Morgan’s arrival had been the catalyst which had sent Marks from having sick fantasies to carrying them out.
‘So which one is it?’
Ben didn’t answer straight away. He was still trying to process what he knew.
‘I’d hedge my bets on it being Taylor. I don’t think Skye deserves the credit; I mean this is clever, right? What’s going on is a credit to whoever is doing it. They left DNA at a crime scene they knew would link back to me? That’s genius; I’d like to meet them, shake their hand and tell them their old man is proud of them.’
It struck Ben that if Morgan was the killer, she would have had to have known Gary Marks was her father and he didn’t think she had the slightest idea. When they were here yesterday, she hadn’t given the impression she knew about him. It had to be Taylor. He needed it to be Taylor because he didn’t think he’d be able to get over this if it was Morgan. The betrayal would be worse than anything.
A voice in his mind asked, even worse than losing Cindy?
‘Tell me, Gary, do you think your children know about you? Have they ever been to visit you and ask why you killed their mother and raped three innocent women?’
‘Fuck you, she deserved what she got. They all deserved it; they had it coming to them.’
Gary Marks jumped up so fast the chair overturned with a loud clatter. Both guards rushed to grab him. He fought with them, his face an angry shade of red.
Ben could see a vein throbbing in his temple, pulsating with explosive energy. He jumped up and looked around for the emergency button, dashing across the room and slapping his hand against it. He stood watching as Gary Marks fought with the guards. He could hear the thundering of Magnum boots against the tiled floor in the corridor as they rushed towards the room. Marks realised he was greatly outnumbered and stopped fighting. He let his body go loose. Ben watched as he was dragged from the room, his shoulders hunched over and head hung low.
One of the guards led Ben back to collect his stuff.
‘You sure managed to get under his skin. I’ve never seen him like that; he’s usually a model prisoner.’
‘Sometimes the truth hurts a lot more than you expect it to.’
FORTY-FOUR
Morgan went home. She was drained and needed to figure out how to find Gary Marks’s sister. She may be able to tell her more about her early years and where Taylor was now. It all came back to Taylor, the brother she never knew existed. Did he kill Gabby? And Stan? There was no way she could go back into work to check on the address system; she’d already pushed that to the limit. Technically, she wasn’t doing anything wrong; she was still trying to figure out who killed Gabby Stevens. That she’d stepped straight into the middle of some horror story that just happened to be her life wasn’t her fault. This whole thing was so unfair. It hit her then, the weight of the revelation from the social worker, and she had to sit down. All those bad dreams, the woman with the red hair… they weren’t dreams, they were repressed memories. Isaac had told her to write them down: was he in for the surprise of his life when she went back for her first appointment. It would probably take years to sort out this train wreck.
She decided to phone him, because she needed to speak to someone about it and wasn’t sure she should be spilling this much information to anyone at work. She dialled his number and he answered on the first ring.
‘Hello, Morgan.’
‘Hi, how did you know it was me?’
He laughed. ‘I’m psychic; actually, I asked Amy for your number because it came up as private the last time you rang. It’s not that exciting.’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose it makes sense. I found out some stuff, quite a lot of stuff actually, and my head is a complete mess.’
There was a pause and she could tell he was walking around. ‘Hang on, let me shut the door.’
‘Sorry, is this a bad time? I can ring back.’
‘No, it’s fine. So what kind of stuff?’
She wondered if she should be telling him this, then realised what was the point of having a therapist if she couldn’t talk to him? It kind of defeated the whole purpose.
‘I’m adopted; I found out that I have a biological brother I know nothing about. My birth mum was murdered in the nineties and Stan, my adoptive dad who I had no idea wasn’t my real dad, was murdered yesterday. It’s all such a complete mess and I don’t know what to do about any of it.’
‘Morgan, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say about any of this, well not on the spur of the moment. Where are you? Are you on your own?’
‘I’m supposed to be stopping at Ben’s, but I’ve nipped home.’ She realised she didn’t feel comfortable telling him every little detail, because where she was had nothing to do with any of this.
‘Good, I don’t think you should be on your own. Let me see, I can see you tomorrow if you want? We can bring your appointment forward.’
‘Thanks, that’s kind of you. I’m not sure. I don’t know what to do about any of it. Sorry to have bothered you; I needed to get it off my chest.’
‘Well I’m here to talk, if you need to. Let me know and I’ll see you after my last client even if it’s just coffee and a chat.’
‘Thanks, Isaac, that’s very nice of you. I better let you get on, bye.’
‘Bye, Morgan, and take care.’
She ended the call. Stripping off her work suit, she changed into her staple of black leggings and a black sweatshirt that said ‘Tired and Needy’. Never was there more appropriate attire. She was exhausted, mentally and physically, not to mention she felt sick at the revelation that her father was both a murderer and rapist who had killed her mother in front of her. How was she supposed to get over that? It didn’t matter now: she had to compartmentalise it and get on with her investigation. When all this was over and she’d proved to Ben she had nothing to do with it, there would be time to grieve for Stan, her real mum and the life she lost.
It struck her that when she’d met her biological father yesterday, he’d come across as okay and not at all what she’d expected. Once more, she scoured the Internet looking for a mention of Gary Marks’s family; the tabloids were her best bet. They thrived off stories like this and would have covered the trial in depth. Scanning the articles there was no mention of a sister, so she began to look for photographs of the court case. No idea who she was looking for, but it was worth trying.
As the screen filled with images from outside the court, she enlarged them, looking for anyone or anything that might stand out. About to give up, she spotted something in the left-hand corner of a photograph of Marks being led into the court; he’d turned to look at someone. Twisting her head, she saw an older woman standing there, her gaze fixed on Marks, and realised she looked vaguely familiar. Enlarging it even more, she stared and then she realised: it was the woman from the quirky cottage in the woods. Ettie.
It struck Morgan, as she was driving to the outskirts of Grasmere, that she only knew how to find Ettie Jackson’s cottage by cutting across the Potters’ garden. There must be an entrance to the woods where she wouldn’t have to trespass. Pulling over, she began searching for directions on her phone and it struck her that she didn’t even know the name of the woods. Typing ‘Easdale Road’ into Google Maps, she waited for the area to load and then zoomed in until the woods appeared on the screen. Covel Wood, that was it; but even if she found the entrance, she could walk for hours and not find the cottage. She was going to have to go through the Potters’ garden.
She began driving again and before long she reached the entrance to their drive. Pulling onto the gra
ss verge, she wondered if anyone was home. Instead of walking up the long drive, Morgan cut straight through the trees. Head down, she was almost jogging as she followed the sound of the rushing water. Glancing up at the house, it looked empty. She said a silent prayer for Olivia Potter as her gaze fell on the tree where she’d first found her body. She didn’t think she would mind her using her garden as a shortcut while trying to unravel her crazy life and catch another killer.
Hopping over a mossy, drystone wall which bordered the woods, Morgan landed on a pile of twigs that cracked underneath her feet. It sounded as if a gun had been fired and the birds nearby took flight squawking in fright. Morgan had to steady her own breathing. She picked her way through the trees, hoping she was heading in the right direction to Ettie’s cottage. It occurred to her that once again no one knew where she was; if she got lost, she could end up wandering around for hours and a lot of good that would do her. She stood still, closed her eyes and waited until she had her bearings. All she had to do was walk uphill following the wall. If she could find the part where it had collapsed, she was heading in the right direction. As she walked uphill, the drystone wall got higher. She remembered the part of the wall where there was a pile of loose stones on the floor. Turning to face the woods, she saw the narrow path leading to the cottage. It was almost overgrown, but it was there. These woods made her feel as if she was in a different time and place and she wished she was. It was soothing and peaceful; maybe she needed a house in the woods away from people. It struck her then, who would she need to hide from? The only family she had left didn’t know her. She would never spend time with her real father, and the brother she never knew existed was highly likely the killer she was hunting. Rounding a corner, she saw the cottage with its lilac door and beautifully planted front garden.
The door opened and Ettie smiled at her. Arms across her chest she nodded. She heard a loud swooping noise as the biggest black bird Morgan had ever seen swooped down and landed on the picket fence a few feet away. Startled, she stepped away from it.
