The Taken: DI Erica Martin Book 2 (Erica Martin Thriller)

by Alice Clark-Platts

  ‘The church . . .’ Martin said. ‘Were other members of the church involved in this abuse?’

  ‘I’m not aware. If there were, I was not aware of it,’ he replied, a look of disgust creeping across his face.

  ‘Was Violet abused by her father?’ Martin asked.

  ‘No,’ Jonah sounded certain. ‘He loved Violet. He wouldn’t have hurt her. He was vile, Inspector, but perhaps not that vile.’

  Martin glanced over at Jones, thinking through what Simpson was saying. Egan had said that Tristan Snow and Simpson had fallen out about ten years prior to Violet even being born. Was the priest just maliciously shit-stirring, Martin wondered, in accusing Snow of abuse? Was this the revenge of an old man for something that Tristan had done to him long ago? They had to tread carefully here. If the abuse had been systemic within the church, involving such a well-known figure, the ramifications were huge.

  ‘You must realize, Mr Simpson, that this is a very serious accusation. You’re alleging that children were being abused by Reverend Snow while they were in his care. If what you say is true, how many children were affected? Was it just Mercy, or were others involved?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t be sure. But I’m certain there were more,’ he said.

  ‘Was the church the kind of place where behaviour of this kind would have been tolerated? Ignored?’

  ‘No. We were a normal, loving church,’ Jonah answered, his back rigid. ‘We held services to worship, marriages, funerals, sermons, Sunday School . . .’

  ‘Sunday School?’ Martin cut in. ‘Lots of children attended that, did they?’

  ‘Children came from all over the area. It was popular, yes. Parents too hungover, too disinterested to bother. We taught them, Bible lessons and the like. The children did arts and crafts, played in the loft.’

  Martin considered this, doodling a picture on her pad of a barn with children inside it. ‘Would the children have special sermons? Just for them?’

  Jonah lifted his eyes to the heavens.

  ‘What is it, Mr Simpson?’

  He ran a hand over his face. ‘There were occasions . . .’

  Martin waited. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet that Martin and Jones had to crane forward to hear him. ‘We would have ceremonies. In the church. We had one with Mercy. A kind of communion, if you like. To welcome her into the community.’

  Martin’s mind was racing. There was so much to ask. Each layer of this case revealed yet more secrets, untruths, misrepresentations. ‘This ceremony . . .’ she asked. ‘Was it private? Or were the congregation involved?’

  ‘We were all there.’

  ‘And what happened at it?’

  ‘We said prayers. We asked for forgiveness. We banished evil spirits.’

  ‘Banished? As in an exorcism?’

  Jonah searched the ceiling with his eyes. ‘It’s a label.’

  ‘Well, was it? Was Mercy subject to a child exorcism? Was she considered to be possessed?’

  Jonah shifted in his seat, his chin still down on his chest, his shoulders hunched. He reminded Martin of a wide-feathered vulture. ‘It’s easy for those who don’t understand to try and put things into boxes,’ he said. ‘You say the words child exorcism and a certain image is conveyed. A vision that society finds uncomfortable; that you both consider uneasy.’ He waved his hand towards Martin and Jones. ‘And yet, much of it was done with great love. With respect and care.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Martin said, something inside her darkening, gearing up. ‘So what happened to Mercy? After all of this took place? Where is she now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Inspector. Life went on. The church went on.’

  ‘Did Mercy stay in Blackpool? Or did she leave, do you know?’

  ‘I saw her once, not long ago. She was coming out of the corner shop near to me. She looked different.’ He fluttered a hand across his head. ‘Her hair was different. Shorter, I think. I called to her, across the street, but she didn’t hear me perhaps. I went after her. To see, you know, how she was. To tell her . . . that I regretted certain things. That maybe, I should have spoken up . . .’ His voice trailed away, his hands twisting around themselves in neverending circles.

  Martin said nothing, waiting for more.

  ‘I reached out, took her by the arm, and then she looked at me.’ Jonah pushed his teeth down on to his lower lip. ‘She looked at me with such revulsion it made me breathless. “Mercy,” I said to her, “Mercy, please.” But she was so bitter, so shrivelled. “There is no Mercy for you,” she said. All of her beauty was gone. It had all . . . been taken. “Mercy has gone. Don’t ever call me that again,” she said. And she was right,’ Jonah rubbed stained and blemished fingers over his eyes, shuddering a little in his seat. ‘She couldn’t offer Mercy any more. She was tainted and she knew it. She was right.’

  Martin shot a glance at Jonah. ‘You’re saying that she changed her name?’ she asked, her heart beating faster, ignoring her disgust at what he was implying. ‘Mercy changed her name?’

  Jonah had covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Mr Simpson? This is very important. Did Mercy Fletcher change her name after she left the Deucalion Church?’

  He nodded reluctantly. ‘I believe she did, yes.’

  ‘Do you know what her new name is?’

  ‘I did know . . . someone told me once. But I forget . . . it’s gone from me I think . . . No I don’t remember.’

  Martin exhaled softly. There was still hope. Still hope that the address they had for Mercy was, in fact, correct, and her neighbours didn’t know who Mercy Fletcher was because that wasn’t her name any more. Martin paused for a moment, digesting this news, aware of the hum of traffic outside the room, of that heavy cadence that envelops an interview, the way its rhythms wrap their way around its participants. As if she were choreographing a dance, she changed tack.

  ‘You’ve said you don’t speak to your daughter, Mr Simpson,’ she said. ‘But how about your grandchildren? Do you know them?’

  Jonah’s shoulders visibly stiffened. ‘Violet? Yes,’ he answered.

  ‘And the twins, Peter and Michael . . . they died before Violet was born, didn’t they?’

  ‘Sarah was pregnant with them when I left the church initially. When I returned, about three years later, they had sadly been killed.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about how they died?’

  ‘I wasn’t there.’

  Martin shifted on her chair. Nothing to be gained from him about the boys’ death, then. ‘Do you know where your daughter is now?’ she asked lightly, glancing down at her pad of paper.

  Jonah’s face turned beady. ‘What do you mean? Is she missing?’

  Martin bit the inside of her cheek. The priest’s response was genuine. He didn’t know where she was. ‘When you first left the church,’ she continued, ignoring his question, ‘back before Violet was born. Why was that? You told Sean Egan . . .’

  ‘I know what I told him,’ Jonah interrupted. ‘Tristan Snow was a difficult man. A treacherous man.’

  ‘Treacherous?’

  ‘He was not a true man of the cloth. He cared only for money and notoriety.’

  ‘And you?’ Martin put to him. ‘Are you a true man of the cloth?’

  His lips turned up slightly, moist; a look of pure cold blood. ‘For everyone who exalts himself, will be humbled and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve never understood that quote,’ Martin said, leaning backwards on her chair. ‘I mean, all it seems to say is that the only reason for being pious and self-effacing is to get a whole load of credit for doing it. Kind of defeats the point, don’t you think?’

  Jonah said nothing, his eyes cast in stone upon her.

  ‘Anyway,’ Martin said. ‘Whoever was the bees’ knees in the church, it seems from what you’ve relayed to the press that a schism took place. I think you knew about the abuse. You knew that Tristan Snow was assaulting members of his church, of his co
ngregation. I think you threatened to tell someone. And then, you were seen as a loose cannon.’ She studied his face. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? I think you warned Snow. But . . .’ Martin processed her thoughts as she spoke, ‘. . . what happened? What did he do to make you leave? To not say anything?’

  Jonah’s eyes closed, picturing the past. He was silent for a while before speaking. ‘The night it happened, she stood there . . . Sarah. She stood there, in front of them all. She was calm, composed. I couldn’t believe what she was doing. Tristan was behind her but . . . but, he said nothing. It was all her. Nourishing him, feeding his narcissism.’ His head twisted back and forth as if trying to loosen a yoke, a thorny halter of memories. ‘She said I was a drunk,’ he hissed. ‘That I liked young boys. Awful, dreadful things fell thudding from her mouth like clods of dirt.’ His hands reached up from his lap towards the heavens, his face rumpled, closed shut in distress.

  Martin’s consideration of this emanated from her; it hung in the air above them, beating its wings. ‘Was it true?’ she asked.

  ‘What does it matter?’ he answered. ‘It’s benign now, isn’t it?’

  Martin thought fast, her understanding of him catching up with what he displayed. ‘What she said . . . drinking; the boys. Those things were a cancer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonah spat. ‘Cancerous things. None of them true. None of them.’ His eyes were squeezed shut but a pearl of salt water escaped. He drew in a long breath. ‘What could I do? Even if I denied it, no one would believe me. Once those things are uttered, they have a life . . . they breed. She was pregnant, she was his wife . . . she was unimpeachable.’

  Martin waited in silence until at last, Jonah’s eyes opened wide, sparking hot life, exposing his unending lack of peace.

  ‘She was a horned snake, biting at my horse’s heels. She brought me down. She was behind it all.’ He shook his head as if still baffled by it. ‘I thought once that she was Medusa, her serpents writhing from her head, to catch, to kill. But then . . .’ he looked directly at Martin and she felt a sudden stab of pity for the old man, his fingers gnarly and rough, stretching out into nothing.

  ‘Then, what?’ she asked.

  ‘But then I knew I was wrong. She was Medea. She betrayed me, her father. For him.’

  Martin looked him. He was breathing heavily, his eyes rheumy and pale. ‘So why come back, after you were cast out?’ she asked. ‘Why were you still hanging around the church when Mercy Fletcher came along?’

  ‘Because there was nowhere else to go,’ Jonah said, his voice tepid like stale water. He closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest.

  Martin leaned back in her seat as a knock at the door came. Jones got up quickly and opened it, murmuring to the person outside. She came back inside, whispering into Martin’s ear.

  ‘They’ve tracked down the hire car, Boss. We need to go.’

  Martin leaned over to turn off the recording equipment and stood to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ Jonah called out, his face calm, a smile floating across his lips. ‘Inspector Martin,’ he sang, holding them in the balance as Martin stopped by the door, her back to Jonah. ‘I might remember. That name you wanted.’

  ‘Mercy’s name?’ Martin said, turning back to him, a feeling of disgust stealing through her. The man was just here for attention. He didn’t want to help. He just wanted to punish. To make other people suffer as he did.

  ‘Yes. Ah . . .’ He frowned, his eyes closed, put his head on one side. ‘What was it? It’s so hard to remember you see?’

  ‘You can give the name to the desk sergeant when you go, Mr Simpson,’ Martin said, her voice cut with rage. She wasn’t going to indulge this manipulation. They had to get moving and find Sera and Violet.

  ‘Vicky,’ Jonah blurted, his attempt to keep Martin in his sights now clear as day. ‘She took her middle name, Victoria. And then she married.’

  ‘Her married name, Mr Simpson? Her full married name?’

  He smiled again, glanced at Martin’s white-knuckled grip on the door handle. ‘It’s important to you, is it Inspector?’

  Martin said nothing. She would give him three more seconds.

  ‘Sneddon,’ Jonah exhaled eventually with undisguised glee at having kept them in his thrall, however briefly. ‘Her name is now Vicky Sneddon.’

  43

  Martin parked her car opposite the squat building that grandly entitled itself the Prince Bishop Assembly Rooms. The police back-up cars waited for their pickings like sleek and silent panthers a short distance up the road.

  The building was barely the size of a grocer’s shop, its front garden twisted with ivy and the grey fluffed-up heads of dying dandelions.

  ‘There’s the hire car,’ Martin said, as she pushed open the gate. Jones glanced at it before looking down at an old stone tortoise sitting inside the garden, seeming to stare up at her with its sleepy eyes. They pushed their way through the weeds up the path to a door panelled with grimy glass set in the beige pebbledash of the walls. To the right of the building, a garden tap dripped incessantly on to a patch of newer concrete splatted higgledy-piggledy among the path stones.

  Unable to find a bell, Martin rapped on the glass. Waiting a few seconds for an answer that didn’t come, Martin signalled to Jones to take the left-hand side while she moved around to the right of the building. The greenery was fiercer there. A bramble caught in Martin’s shirt as she tried to sidle between the wall of the building and a fence marking the boundary. Noticing a window, she stood on tiptoe to try to see into the gloom.

  The hall was empty. Cans and flyers littered the ground, a toilet bowl lay randomly in the middle of the floor, but there was no one inside. Martin frowned. She looked around some more. At the back corner of the building, there seemed to be a hole in the ground. She moved forward awkwardly through the brush. As she neared the back, she realized that the hall was actually on two levels and that it had some kind of cellar. Martin stumbled over a pipe that emerged ghoulishly, unbidden from the earth. She steadied herself, grasping for the wall of the building. Crouching down, she could see that the space she’d thought of as a hole was actually a well leading into the basement. It had stone steps, now broken away from the wall, which had once led down to a door. The door and its accompanying window were boarded up.

  Martin hesitated, anticipation popping inside her, that familiar buzz of adrenalin that she felt when she was on the right trail. Something told her to turn down her radio, to approach in silence. Making up her mind in an instant, Martin jumped gently down into the hole.

  Violet had lain in the dark for too long. Her breathless heartbreak at her mother leaving her alone had, in the cramped and airless space she lay in, gradually hardened into something more recognizable as sheer bloody anger. Thoughts that she normally kicked out of her head and never acknowledged came thick and fast here in this dense soup of blackness.

  She loved her mother with all of her being; she had been unwittingly shunted in her loyalties to her by the narcissistic bullying of her father. She could never understand why her mother had stayed with Tristan. Ever since Margate and Mercy and what had happened afterwards, Violet had fostered a hatred of her father that was now so much a part of her, she couldn’t remember herself without it. His touch repelled her. His eyes, his voice, the way he broke the sacrament. When she tasted wine, she wanted to be sick.

  Her faith in God had splintered at the same time as she realized that her father was evil. That splintering had eventually ripped wide open, a jagged tear that left her on one side of love, and God on another. God had nothing to do with her. He had nothing to do with Tristan, come to think about it. He was as insubstantial as the papier-mâché Oz head she had dreamt about all those hours ago.

  A phantom.

  Violet had bided her time. Now she was eighteen, she could leave. But the love for her mother held her captive; she had to stay to protect her. That love. Violet moved her head from side to side on the concrete floor in frustration. And now her mo
ther had bloody well gone, abandoning her to this . . . prison. It was . . . unbelievable.

  At least she could be grateful that Sera had untied her hands before she left. Violet managed to elbow her way up to a sitting position, but her stomach cramped so violently all of a sudden that she was almost thrown back on the floor. She lay there, breathing, waiting for the cramps to pass. She needed to lean against something to give her some purchase; see if she could untie her ankles.

  When the cramping seemed to have abated for a few minutes, Violet slowly made herself roll across the ground. She could barely see anything in the dark, but with effort she managed to shove herself alongside one of the cellar walls. She leaned against it, breathing heavily. Her stomach twisted again as she bent down towards her ankles, the pain sending sparks into her vision, making her feel dizzy. The knot was too tight. She couldn’t undo it. She gave a small sob of frustration. Why was she here? Where had her mother gone? She thought about Sera, her quiet, unflinching eyes. The way her hands would stroke her back. Another sob shuttled up in her. No. She wouldn’t cry. As much as she loved her mother, she had something of her father in her, after all.

  Feeling around the ground with her hands, she felt something hard and metallic. It was a bracket of some sort. She found, again, the rope that bound her ankles. Her head continued to throb but she ignored it, rubbing the bracket against the rope fibres. Slowly, slowly. Careful now. It was going to take a long time. The bracket edge was dull and the rope was thick. That’s okay, she thought. I have time.

  It was then that she heard a noise smack into the black stillness of the cellar.

  Someone was trying to get in.

  44

  Sera sat wearily in a patch of sunlight on the ground, somewhere . . . she didn’t know where any more. She had never felt so tired. Everything in her was draining away down some terrible plug hole. Since the boys . . . since then, she had built a fortress around her a mile thick, topped with blazing arrows drawn back, ready to fire should weakness threaten to suffocate her. But now . . . she couldn’t even muster the energy to work out any kind of next step, any kind of plan.