Killing Jericho: A Heart-Stopping Thriller (The Scott Jericho Crime Thrillers Book 1)

by Will Harker

  “And all at once, they are in the river. Half a dozen, screaming and scratching and clawing for the sky. But not a one ever came out again, and the body of old Slip-Jointed Jericho himself was never found…”

  Now, hearing the tale referenced by a stranger, I experienced a jolt of mixed emotions. Anger first—rage that a piece of my childhood had been polluted by this pervert’s lips. Hot on its heels came curiosity—how had Professor Campbell heard of such an obscure story? Then, that once-familiar stirring I hadn’t experienced since my final interview with Lenny Kerrigan. A puzzle had forced itself upon me and, unlike the ones with which Garris had tried to intrigue me, this mystery wasn’t a collection of abstract facts gathered into one of his files, but a living thing so far unexplored.

  “Please,” the nonce whimpered, “don’t let me fall. I’ll do wh-whatever you want.”

  I hauled him over the ledge and threw him to the floor. There came a prim snap, a finger perhaps, but in the moment he didn’t seem to notice. I dropped onto my haunches.

  “What’s your name? Don’t lie, I’ll know.”

  He nodded, not a trace of guile left in him. “Jeremy. Worth.”

  “Jeremy.” For the first time in a year, I took a Moleskine notebook from the back pocket of my jeans and opened it to a fresh page. It was a habit I couldn’t shake, keeping the book on me. In the old days, I’d maintained a scrupulous Major Investigation Book for every case I worked. Disclosable to the defence, these logs are carefully penned with personal reflections unheard of. I decided then that this would be a very different kind of journal, and at this moment I’m quoting directly from its pages. “Write down your name, address, phone number, email.”

  “Listen,” he pleaded, backing across the floor until his shoulders found the leather sofa. “I don’t need to be part of this. All I was asked to do was pass on a message. I don’t even know who this professor is or what he wants with you. I’m not important.”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong, Jeremy. You’re very important. So important that one day a young ‘friend’ of yours might scribble a note and then take himself to the edge of a tall building. Then I will feel very guilty for dragging you back from the brink and allowing him to fall. But that’s not ever going to happen, is it?”

  He shook his head, bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth as the pain of his broken finger finally pierced through the adrenalin.

  “No, because you know I’m clever, don’t you? Speak up, no stammering.”

  “Yesss,” he fizzed.

  “Good. Now, I don’t think you’ve acted on those impulses of yours, not yet anyway, but you’re building up to it. What are you? Twenty-four, twenty-five? That means you have some qualms.” I squatted forward, fixed him with my eyes. “Keep hold of those qualms, Jeremy. Nurture them every day, because from here on out, I’ll be watching you. I don’t want to hear that you’ve even glanced sideways at a primary school, are we clear? Now, you might be thinking, how can one man possibly keep constant tabs on me? Well, first, I used to be a copper, and although they don’t like me much anymore, I’ll be passing on your details and asking them to keep an eye on you too. Second, you’ve just seen something of how my people work together. There are sections of us all over the country, Jeremy, and wherever you go, we’ll be passing your door sooner or later. They have keen eyes too, so you know I’m speaking the truth when I say one slip, just one, and I’ll hear about it. Then it won’t be a matter for the police. Nod if you understand.”

  Although, for the most part, what I told him was bullshit, he lapped it up, like some awestruck disciple who’d just received a testament in stone.

  “So write down what I asked. You’re right-handed, aren’t you?” I glanced at his ballooning finger, already fat as an overcooked sausage. “Use your left as best you can.”

  Moaning, he held the page open with his elbow and made nursery letters with his undamaged hand. When he was done, I scooped up the book and slipped it back into my jeans.

  “This professor got hold of you through a friend,” I said. “Does he know where I can find Campbell?”

  “You don’t have to go through him.” Jeremy panted against the pain. “I have an address. Don’t you get it? The professor wants you to find him.”

  A paedophile dispatching a paedophile with a nonsensical message about an old fairground legend. It sounded like something that came into the incident room during the early days of an investigation, the fantastical theory of one of the usual hotline crazies. Did Jeremy Worth know more than he was telling? With a twist of that purpling finger I might have double-checked, but instinct told me the well had run dry. Truth was, I’d already inflicted needless pain when a few questions and well-placed threats would’ve been enough. So why the brutality?

  Rebirth can be a violent process, I suppose.

  “Tell me.”

  “Ralph Campbell,” he muttered. “Falls House, Clerihew Lane, Cambridge.”

  “You ever seen Campbell?”

  “No. I got a letter from him but I lost it. He gave me the keys to the flat, a photo of you from the newspaper, and some money, that’s all. He’s probably just some fucking lunatic.”

  “Probably.” I nodded, and turning away, headed to the door.

  “Travellers Bridge,” he called after me. “‘I got curious and looked it up online. Took a bit of finding. But all that happened over a century ago, didn’t it? So what can Campbell mean by saying they’re dying again?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, my hand on the handle. “I don’t think it’ll amount to much.”

  But I didn’t believe that, not even then.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  SAL WAS WAITING when I got back to the trailer. In the interim, she’d had access to the pit and had worked a minor miracle. Plates that looked like they had calcified around the time Vesuvius threw a fit gleamed in a dish rack I didn’t know I possessed. Most of my clothes had been taken away, presumably for washing or incineration, and my books were arranged as neatly as possible beside my bed. The bed itself was stripped bare, the carpet hoovered, the windowsills de-bugged. On the kitchen counter, my meds—mostly prescription—had been lined up like denouncers at a Communist show trial.

  “You didn’t have to do this,” I said, lurching up the step. I was already feeling woozy and wanted her gone. Those little pill boxes were calling to me.

  “Had to.” She draped a soiled tea towel over the tap. “Chernobyl wanted its record back as the world’s most toxic shithole. Where have you been, Scott? Don’t tell me you went after Kerrigan?”

  “No. It was something…” I went and sat on the bed, fingertips trailing the spines of my books: Updike, Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, Housman, Fleming, Conan Doyle. Old books, some of them my mother’s, others stolen from a variety of libraries long, long ago. “Sal, you remember Travellers Bridge?”

  She frowned, and a glimpse of the redheaded tomboy who’d chased me under clotheslines strung between trailer doorways peeked out. She’d grown into a small, slim woman who carried the disappointment of her years in strands of grey and premature crow’s feet.

  “Course. We used to scare ourselves silly with that old ghost story.”

  “It was just a story, though, wasn’t it?”

  “Why are you asking about this now? Is it the fête? Don’t start getting obsessed with conspiracies cooked up by old showmen, Scott…” She lifted a hand to my forehead and brushed back a tangle of curls. “You look better. Better than even a few hours ago. What’s happened?”

  I took her wrist and kissed the inside of her palm. “What fête?”

  “Uncle Scott! Look what I’ve brung you.”

  Jodie tottered up the step, her arms laden with a fresh pile of shirts. I got to my feet and took the laundry from her. When I placed her gift carefully onto the bed, she jumped up and threw her arms around my neck. I laughed, a sound so rusty I think it frightened her.

  Dressed in a corn-coloured blouse and soap
-scented dungarees, she was the exact replica of her mother at that age. A cheeky snub of a nose banded with freckles, brown eyes flecked with green, sunset-red hair. I’d never met her father. He was from a circuit up north and, unlike most travelling men who, for good or ill, stick doggedly with the mother of their children, he’d abandoned Sal as soon as she’d shown him the positive test strip.

  At around that time I’d been getting out from under a nasty bit of trouble. With mobsters on my back who made Al Capone look like Truman Capote, I hadn’t thought it prudent to pay a visit to my pregnant best friend. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  Unsettled by my laugh, Jodie sized me up with all the unflinching directness of her mother. Then she asked Sal’s permission to go and play and, with a flick of her braid, we were left alone.

  “She’s been imagining you for years,” Sal smiled. “All those stories I told her about us in the old days. She’s built up this picture and–”

  “Reality’s a fucker, eh?”

  “Not always. Make an effort.”

  I nodded.

  Under the bed, I found a pair of black ankle boots. Changing my red check shirt for a freshly laundered white one, I pulled them on. A light charcoal blazer, crumpled but fairly non-toxic, completed the finest wardrobe I’d worn since being sent down. I ducked my head to the mirror over the sink, grabbed a comb and made the usual pointless effort to bring order to the briar. Then I tapped my pocket for the phone I hadn’t charged in over a year.

  “Sal, can you lend me your mobile, just for today?”

  She handed over the Nokia with all the startled acceptance of a bank teller filling a pillowcase. It was only when I took my car keys from the hook beside the door that she came to her senses.

  “Scott, what are you doing?”

  I paused on the step, my back turned to her.

  “I have a case.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I HAD COMPANY ON MY TRIP to Cambridge. By the time the summer storm broke and the rain pummelled the road, the Malanowski children were with me—Sonia, the eldest, in the passenger seat, Pietro and Tomasz leaning over the headrests. The motorway gleamed, eel-slick, the wipers of my ancient Mercedes making feeble work of the deluge.

  I tried to ride out the hallucination, but my ghosts were insistent. The boys in the back flickered in the rear-view mirror and made faces at me, tongues poking through fire-nibbled lips, thumbs waggling in the fleshless sockets of their ears. Then Sonia was scolding her brothers and, like the good children they were, they rustled back into their seats.

  “Never mind them,” she said. “They just don’t understand, that’s all.”

  I’d only heard Sonia’s voice once before, on a DVD of a school poetry recital played during my trial—Beware the Jabberwock, my son; the jaws that bite, the claws that catch. Despite her vocal cords being caked with smoke and seared to a crisp, she spoke now in the same warm, slightly accented tones that had echoed around the courtroom and made some of the jurors weep.

  Tap-tap-tap went the scalded hand on mine. I dared a sideways glance and saw a Halloween smile.

  “The boys are much younger than me, Scott. They don’t get that adults just keep making the same mistakes over and over. But it’s good that you’re going to try. The caravan was becoming very gloomy and we’re enjoying the road trip ever so much. Just don’t promise things you can’t deliver. You promised our dad that you’d put Mr Kerrigan behind bars and that didn’t work out too well, did it?”

  Behind me in the fast lane, a lorry blared its horn and flashed its beams. I toed the brake and drifted across the carriageway, dropping to a pensionable thirty miles an hour. When I looked again, the children were gone.

  I hadn’t driven much since leaving jail and the idea of a PTSD flashback striking at a coasting speed of seventy hadn’t occurred to me. I gripped the steering wheel hard. Back at the fair, Zac had given my jalopy a jump-start from his swish little refurbed ’67 Beetle (a present from the hated father, perhaps) while Sal assaulted me with a scattergun of questions. I’d kept my answers vague. I didn’t want her involved in something I hadn’t yet got a handle on. Zac, meanwhile, regarded her with marked jealousy, glances that did nothing for my ego and only made me feel sad for the kid.

  My turning flashed out of the semi-darkness and I pulled the Merc into the loop of the exit. The car rumbled over a motorway bridge and plunged straight onto a B-road that was little better than a country lane. In the boot, a dozen or so of my mother’s books crashed against each other while those cluttering the passenger footwell jounced like pioneers on a buckboard wagon.

  I peered through the rain as the satnav wittered in my ear. Five hundred yards to go. I slowed to a crawl, scanned the narrow road. Fields rolled out on either side, furrows melting under fists of rain.

  Suddenly, Falls House seemed to rear up out of the landscape, like one of the mechanised skeletons in old Tommy Radlett’s ghost train. Sweeping right, my headlights flooded down a gravel driveway and hit the yellow Ketton stone of the house. The car rumbled to a standstill as I parked up. The front portico had a crenellated roof and a Gothic arch which sheltered the iron-banded oak door. A few green-mouthed gargoyles vomited rainwater from the eaves while a coat of arms, robbed of its heraldic devices by the years, dripped forlornly over the entrance.

  The door swung smoothly inwards at my knock. A small, round-shouldered woman of about sixty, dressed almost entirely in black, stood on the threshold. As my eyes adjusted to the light in the hall, I saw that the left side of her face was badly burned. Like us, like us, phantom voices chattered in my head.

  “Mr Jericho?” she said, the undamaged side of her face lifting into a generous smile. “Please come in out of the rain.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Miss Barton.” She nodded as if I’d asked her name. “We were hoping to see you a little sooner than this, you know.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “I’m afraid you have.”

  I glanced around the hall. A high-vaulted, dark-panelled room with a long, uncarpeted staircase, it was a paederast’s idea of heaven. Almost every scrap of wall was covered with canvasses depicting the classical male form, doe-eyed, cupid-lipped, lightly muscled, and sporting tiny, hairless nubs between their legs. On plinths stood a half-dozen similar forms, this time in marble, their bodies stuck between the adult and the child. In a few pieces a naked older male was depicted, his solicitous pose innocent enough to the ancient eye. In fact, they would all be relatively inoffensive if they’d been dotted around a gallery, but the sheer number and insistence of them made the room revolting.

  “You know what he is, of course? Yes, you’ve met his messenger boy, so you must.” Miss Barton fingered a small golden cross that lay against her chest. “I get down on my knees and pray for him nightly.”

  “Any luck with that?

  “Mercifully, yes. These days he’s practically incapable.”

  “You don’t sound like you approve of your employer, Miss Barton. Why do you stay?”

  “I was his nanny when he was a little boy. Old bonds, I suppose.”

  “And do you know what he wants with me?”

  She smoothed the crucifix against her stiff white blouse. “There isn’t much that goes on in this house I don’t know.”

  And with that, she led the way out of the hall and down a wide, wainscoted corridor. Having made his point, the professor didn’t seem bothered about continuing his theme in the rest of the house. That, at least, was a mercy. We reached a door inlaid into the wall and Miss Barton knocked and turned the handle.

  “Would you like something to drink, Mr Jericho?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Miss Barton nodded. “I’ll bring you a whisky and soda.” She gave me a final lopsided smile and pushed open the door. “Just in case.”

  “Mis–ter Jer–i–cho! Why have you kept me waiting, sir?”

  I followed Mi
ss Barton into the library, where she busied herself at a sideboard, returning seconds later with my drink. Then she inclined her head towards the fireplace and, dress whispering across the plush purple carpet, left us alone.

  Aside from a portrait of a Georgian general that made Genghis Khan look friendly and approachable, this room was hardly decorated at all. By the light of the fire and a solitary standard lamp, I could read a few of the titles of the books which stood in the floor-to-ceiling shelves, the whole collection apparently concentrated on the mid- to late-Victorians. I ran my tongue over my teeth and turned to the man in the wheelchair.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Campbell?”

  Seated beside the fire, a book face-down on his blanketed lap, Campbell’s startling blue eyes looked up at me.

  “Professor, please,” he said. “Well now, you can take that disapproving look off your face for a start. My crimes were discovered years ago, Mr Jericho. I was drummed out of my profession, incarcerated, and now I have no impure urges at all.” Lifting a thin arm, he smacked the heel of his hand against his groin. “Chemical castration did wonders to drive out my demons.”

  “And yet you still haven’t got a single mature cock on your walls,” I said.

  A pantomime of distaste played across his gaunt features. “Forthright. I know that’s the showman’s way, except when the spiel demands otherwise. All that outside in the hall,” he flicked a birdlike claw, “why it’s art, sir. You’re not a philistine, are you?”

  “I used to be a policeman,” I shrugged. “I’d call it grounds for interview.”

  “What a mercy then that you brought your career to such a stunning conclusion. Please.” He inclined his body to one side, slippered feet swaying a little, and took out a mobile phone. “Be my guest. I’m sure your former brethren would be delighted to hear from you, especially Inspector Garris.”

  I looked at him. “How do you know about me?”