She slapped him hard across the back of the head and his face swung to look at her, momentarily stunned. ‘Enough of that! God, Hell? Pah!’ she faced the window, her arms folded defiantly. ‘I spit on God! The God that took my beautiful son away from me, to punish me, and in his place he gave me that!’ she said, pointing at the room where Annabel sat waiting to play her game. ‘That freak of nature, that detestable, slobbering child.’ She grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and took a long, noisy swig. ‘I never told you how he died, did I, My beautiful boy?’
Douglas was facing his own demons. Remorse, as sharp and as painful as a saw blade dragged across his heart. He hadn’t expected it to be so. Perhaps the alcohol had greased the door that allowed its entry. Even so, he could not stem his shaking hand when he thought about the body of his brother, his lower face and throat blown away by the shotgun, lying in a canvas bag in the shed outside ready to be interred somewhere. But he found he did not have the strength to carry out the task just yet. He could not face the sight of that ghastly lump of canvas and the dark plates of blood that stained it.
‘He was only six years old. We were in a park, Silas and I,’ Helen continued. ‘My son’s name was Robert – Robbie for short. My little Robbie. He loved the swings and roundabouts. Silas and I were very much in love. We spent a lot of the time in those days still very besotted with each other, holding hands, staring at each other, laughing, giggling at silly jokes. Such is love.’ She breathed a trembling sigh down her nose, sat down by the fire and thrust a poker at the logs, more to occupy her hand than anything. The sparks rose like her fiery memories. ‘Our attention was too much on one another that day. It can’t have been more than five minutes that my attention was diverted. Silas was telling me something or other, something vitally unimportant, as it usually was, and I was so in love I hung on every meaningless word. When I turned to look for Robbie I could not see him amongst the other children. I remember standing there, not quite understanding what was happening. He had to be there. There was nowhere else for him to go. Yet he had vanished. Taken from under our very noses whilst we were occupied in our own puerile, futile little world of love.’ Her eyes began to mist over, reflecting the crackling flames. ‘They found his body six weeks later…’ She let the poker clatter on the stone flags by the fireplace and Douglas looked up. ‘He was no longer my beautiful little boy Robbie. He was a cold, mangled, empty carcass.
‘I blamed Silas for it. Oh, I know he didn’t make it happen, did not do those terrible things to my boy. But he made me love him so much I wasn’t there for my son when he needed me. If only I hadn’t been so intent on watching him speak I would have seen what was happening to Robbie, and I could have prevented it. Time does not heal everything, Douglas. Like a hot meal that once was sustaining and filled with delight, time makes it go cold and tasteless. That’s what it did to our love. And I thought, why? Why did God punish me? What had I done to ever deserve such a thing?
‘Then I got pregnant with Annabel, and a little of the warmth returned with the prospect of another child. Silas and I gradually started to mend the rift that had grown between us as we prepared for the arrival of the baby. In those days we did not have any means of determining the sex. Silas once tried hanging a wedding ring on a piece of cotton over my stomach, to see which way it would spin. The signs were that we’d have a boy, and I clung to the hope that it would be another little Robbie. But instead I gave birth to Annabel. Her head was crushed with forceps and she came out bloodied and ugly and I remember screaming at the nurse to take her away from me.
‘You see, God was still punishing me, making sure I could never be happy ever again. A drooling halfwit of a child that would remain forever a halfwit. To pour salt on my wounds that same God gave her a gift no one could ever foresee. I remember when Annabel was thirteen years old, and I first saw little Robbie, standing there in the room with us, as real as you and I standing here now. I wept with joy. Such joy! But he wasn’t there. It was her. It was Annabel who made it so cruelly real for me. Yes, God was twisting the knife in deeper when he gave her that gift. It took us some time to figure out what she was doing, the skill she had in being able to reach into people’s minds and make them see what they wanted to see. To put them into a trance, to hypnotise them with just a glance. To her it was a game.
‘But over time no one was safe from her games, and we couldn’t trust her as to when she might invoke one. We both suffered at her hands. The visions were so, so real… Our world shrank as we had to keep her away from other people more and more, and in order to protect ourselves we tried making her wear sunglasses, which she would tear from her face. So I made her a hood and fastened her arms so she could not remove it whenever we were in her company. We took her to see a specialist, who, I remember, smiled at us disbelieving, till he saw his dead grandfather in his office and sobbed like a baby. So that’s what our wonderful God did to me. He took away my beautiful boy and gave me a monster.
‘Somehow the story of Annabel leaked out, maybe through the specialist, we would never know, and the gutter press ran a story. Oh, it never made the major papers, the headlines, because it was another of those lurid tales that get lumped alongside flying saucers and sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, but it was another instance where God was having a laugh at my expense.
‘It was Silas who suggested Connalough Point. It was an outlandish idea – buy a deserted island. He was hoping to find privacy, to save our marriage at the same time. Somewhere for his daughter to escape the publicity and potential ridicule, somewhere she could roam without a bag on her head. His beautiful daughter.’ She laughed hollowly. ‘His beautiful, gifted daughter! That’s what he used to call her. Beautiful! How could he? She is an ugly aberration.’
Helen Blake, fell silent. The fire hurt her eyes. The memories hurt her brain. ‘But the marriage was a sham. I hadn’t loved Silas in years. When we came here I thought I would die with the loneliness, and the hatred towards Silas that had been building up in me. Then I met you, Douglas…’
She glanced at his slumped form. Heard him snoring, his head lying on the table in the puddle of whiskey. She rose from her chair, stood behind him. Gave him a meaty thump between the shoulder blades. He jolted awake, looking erratically about him. ‘What the fuck…’ he barked.
‘It’s time to fetch the Carmichaels,’ she said evenly. ‘Send Hector over there. I’ll prepare Annabel.’
He placed his large, work-scoured hands on the table, used them as pistons to force himself upright. He shook himself to try to shake away the dregs of sleep and whiskey. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.
‘And have you taken care of Silas?’
‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘Stop all this moping over your brother, Douglas and get your act together. You know we have to clear this island of all evidence once and for all. Everything.’
‘I know,’ he grumbled. He steeled himself. ‘Hector!’ he called upstairs. ‘Hector, get your arse down here. It’s time!’
‘Can you trust him?’ she said.
He eyed her. ‘He wouldn’t dare put a foot wrong.’
‘We can’t have any weak links.’
‘I trust him,’ he said.
‘I hope so, for your sake.’
Hector clattered slowly down the stairs. His face was sullen and he did not look at his father.
‘Fetch them,’ said Douglas. ‘And Hector..’
‘Yes?’ said the youth from the door.
‘You’re my son. Don’t let me down.’
Hector nodded and trudged into the hall. He paused by the keys hung on the wall, reached up and took a set before his father could see him.
* * * *
22
Death Warrant
Sylvester Copeland raised his cup of strong black coffee, watching the TV though a veil of steam. His face didn’t betray the slightest connection between the events unfolding on the screen and him.
The murdered woman’s name was Rose MacDonald, the
police spokesman said. Thirty-six years old. Unmarried, no children. It was a despicable thing to do. In spite of the many safeguards put in place to help protect vulnerable people working for estate agencies, Miss MacDonald had been found drowned at a remote property that she had been showing to a client. Police had managed to trace the car used by the murderer to a car hire firm. The drivers licences provided in order to hire the car had been false, both paper and card copies. Police are still trying to trace the man involved and warn other estate agencies to be on their guard until the man is apprehended.
He smirked. Good luck with that, he said, putting down his coffee and hitting the red button on the TV remote. He swivelled his chair round to face the laptop screen. This was the best part. Sat at the laptop hitting keys. He was just finishing off transferring funds from the Donovans’ various accounts, sucking them dry like some kind of virtual vampire. Leaving behind the empty husks of a life. It had been a difficult one this time, getting at the various funds from the information supplied from Connalough Point, hiding the transfers through a web of ghost accounts. But it would amount to eighty-thousand pounds in total. They’d had better, but it wasn’t to be sniffed at.
It was the weirdest but most lucrative setup he’d ever been involved in, and he’d been involved in plenty before his sister Helen approached him and told him she had something he might be interested in. He went to Connalough Point to see her, as arranged – what a dump. Why they’d chosen to live out there he’d never know, but they’d bought the place for a song. ‘A fucking island, sis! You’ve bought a fucking island!’ he said when she first told him. ‘You wouldn’t get me living on that thing; I’d go stark raving bonkers within a week.’
As it happened he went to prison, sent down to serve out two years for fraud, sitting alone in a four-walled, cramped dump of an island all of his very own, cast away into a sea of vice and depravity. But it was inevitable, he thought; people get caught, it was the risk that came with the business. And he did think of it as a business. Making a living. He’d always been good with figures, with computers, but he loathed the tiresome, unfulfilling accountancy jobs his skills channelled him into. So he made a little extra on the side from unsuspecting clients, then set up an accountancy business of his very own. He loved the challenge of digitally swiping their cash from under their noses, got a pretty good life out of it, too. Jag, nice flat in London, the usual stuff. They trusted him, because he looked and sounded trustworthy. That was another skill, to be whoever he needed to be, so that what people saw was what they wanted to see. But one lapse in concentration that led to just one wrong key being hit, and it was as if someone had turned a spotlight on his misdemeanours. They banged him up for it.
He got out early for good behaviour. That’s what they wanted to see and he gave them it. He learnt how to lay bricks, become a builder, and they praised their system for reforming him, because he said that’s what he wanted to do when he got out; get down to some hard graft, work for a living with his bare hands. Pillocks. He was the one who was laughing last, because he’d set up self-employed as a builder to act as a front to his real business. Digital fraud was just too strong a lure. But he had to be careful and opportunities were thin on the ground. That’s until Helen approached him.
She had never approved of his wayward ways. In fact they’d never really spoken to one another in years. She never visited him in prison, not once, the bitch. So he was surprised when her urgent request to meet on the island surfaced. And he was even more surprised by what she had to offer.
Silas was unaware of the real reason his brother-in-law was on Connalough Point. Mending old rifts, she’d told him, but she could feed that sucker any line she liked and he’d fall for it, because he was still besotted with her, even though it was plain she didn’t think much of him. That freaky kid of theirs – well, she wasn’t so little but she looked and acted like it – she gave him the creeps. He remembered seeing her when she was a baby and he’d brought a bottle of cheap plonk ‘to wash the baby’s head’ as they say. But he thought it would have been better to have smashed the bloody bottle over it, if he had to be honest. The ugliest bitch of a baby he’d ever clapped eyes on. He never really saw her growing up, because they lost contact, but he happened upon them when Annabel was about fifteen years old. She was kept locked away in another room all the time he was there, and that’s when Helen explained all about her.
Jesus, he said. They were sitting on a goldmine; she could go on stage, make them a heap of money, but Silas, the bastard, threw him out, called him an insensitive slimeball; said Annabel was his little girl, not a cash cow. Said he knew the real reason he was there was to suck more cash from them, and that he wasn’t letting a bent penny fall into his filthy little hands. He never forgave him for that. He wasn’t broke, for one thing.
It took something to swallow his pride when he met Silas again on Connalough Point; say he was sorry for what he’d said, for the bastard he’d been, but that he was a changed man and had a reputable building business all of his own. He was going straight, and Silas liked that. What he didn’t know was how Helen and the Macleod brothers had been hatching a plan so fucking weird it was tasty. It was obvious Helen had been screwing the older brother, Douglas. He wasn’t the best looking of men, had the manners of a mule and stank to high heaven of fish. But they were kindred spirits, after a fashion. They had a business proposal, they said, and they needed another, reliable arm to take care of the financial aspects on the mainland. Someone with his time-honed skills. Well, he leapt at it, didn’t he? He wasn’t exactly in a position to ignore such an offer.
What he did find surprising was that it was his sister Helen who had dreamt the whole thing up and was pushing for it to happen. He didn’t know she had it in her, the sly old cow!
‘I don’t know, sis,’ he said as they all huddled around a table while Silas was away, ‘fraud’s one thing; murder and fraud is another.’ But the more she talked the more he thought it could actually work, and they’d be very wealthy because of it. That sort of swung the balance for him. And anyhow, they only planned to do it for a short time. Helen wanted to be free of Silas, have her own money behind her, get a new life away from her clinging husband and freaky kid. But more than that, she wanted to give God one in the eye for what he’d done to her. That was obvious. But what the hell, he didn’t believe in a fucking God so what did he care what her motivations were? It all stacked up and made financial sense. That was the accountant in him coming to the fore.
They had this guy they used on the mainland called Anthony Collier, an ex-copper running a one-man business as a private detective, who was willing to source certain people; people who had lost loved ones, who might be so desperate to contact them they’d do whatever it takes, no matter how bizarre it sounded; people who also had few friends, wouldn’t be missed. He’d approach them, do the sales pitch on Connalough Point, send them over, at every step disguising where they’d gone, brushing over their movements so no one would know where they went, if anyone was there to notice anyhow, and it was his job to ensure there wasn’t.
Once there they’d meet Annabel. They’d already primed her to believe it was just another game to play. First to hypnotise them and make the sitters think they were seeing the ghost of their dead relatives, or whoever they were blubbering over, but then during the sitting to ask prearranged questions of them that would gradually, over a number of visits, reveal the various account numbers and passwords that would give him unique access to everything he needed to sponge them dry. Totally fooled into believing they were attending séances they had no idea the real purpose was to drain them of information. Once they had enough for him to work with, Douglas and Alex would do the dirty work of bumping the sitters off and disposing of their corpses.
‘And Silas,’ he asked?
‘Leave him to us,’ said Helen. That suited him just fine; the guy would get what was coming to him for throwing him out like that. But she was reluctant, he could sense that. ‘We
’ll use the lighthouse,’ she said vaguely. ‘Don’t worry about him.’
It was all a crazy idea, but it worked a treat for a couple of years. That was until Anthony Collier got greedy and started demanding more, or else. That was the trouble with going outside the family, he said to Helen. That was always a weak link in any business chain. So Anthony Collier had to go, they decided, and he was the one voted to do it and take over his vacant position.
He was a big guy, this Collier; big and mouthy. They met up at his house, shared a few bevies, then said he needed to go to the loo for a piss. He ran the bath taps. Filled up the tub. Patiently waited till Collier was blind drunk, went to the loo to empty his very full bladder and crept up behind him and dunked the bastard in the bath. He fought like crazy, and at one point he thought it was a bad idea. An idea he’d picked up from an inmate whilst inside, which he’d put into his top pocket in case he ever needed it. But eventually the last bubbles of air were forced from Collier’s lungs and his bloated face stayed on the bottom of the bath, eyes round and wide like a fish’s. Ironic, that is, he thought. He then undressed him, put his soaked clothes into a black bin liner, mopped the floor dry, squirted bubble-bath into the bath, arranged the flannel, soap and shampoo, and the final touch was to put a drained bottle of wine by the bath. The sad git had drunk himself into a stupor and then accidentally drowned in his bath. He accessed Collier’s computer, destroyed every file that might lead anyone to Connalough Point, and downloaded a few illegal porno pictures of little boys just for hell of it to throw the coppers off the scent. He took the bag of clothes home and destroyed them. Job done.
He slipped into Collier’s role quite easily. Gave him something else to do other than sit at a computer. But then he gets the call that someone called Susan Carmichael knows all about them, wants to come to Connalough Point. Told them that Collier had sent her. Even had his password. But they all knew Collier was dead, so how the hell had she found out about them? Someone had opened their big mouth. But what if it was a smokescreen? What if the police or someone else were onto them, and this was just the start of investigations? He was tasked with finding out, but all he discovered was a grieving woman who’d lost a daughter to a druggie scumbag called Eddie Hull. It didn’t stack up. So he did a check on the couple. They were worth a few quid, especially the woman. They didn’t have any close family, nor a close network of friends, so he suggested they get them to Connalough Point and get rid of them, not forgetting to get access to the woman’s accounts first.
THE SOUL FIXER (A psychological thriller) Page 17
