by Will Harker
I stuffed the bill into my pocket and tapped my father’s door. He had a good-sized chalet at the yard in Kent where he wintered, but for travelling, he kept his simple Colchester, a model pushing forty on whose now-threadbare sofa I had been born. Much less grand than the big Sipsons and Baileys owned by other well-to-do Travellers, Dad kept the Colchester because it was, in his words, “a showman’s trailer, not some joskin’s place on wheels.”
“In if you’re coming,” he barked.
The ’chester was in semi-darkness, a single lamp burning on a side table at the end of the locker settee. Unlike most of her generation, my mother had taken the plastic covers off her sofa on the promise Dad would never sit there in his overalls. Now, dressed in immaculate day clothes, he muted the TV and held out his hand. The gesture caught me off guard. Grasping my wrist, he turned my hand palm up.
“Been to Cambridge?”
I shook my head. “How–?”
“Time you’ve been gone and the word right there.” I looked at the faded imprint on my hand—irchang—and understood. My hands were often closed into fists and the receipt had sweated its impression. “Birchanger services. Got fuel on the way back. Must have.”
“Why not on the way there?”
“It’s still just about readable.”
He nodded at the chair opposite. From my mother, I’d inherited my strong features, from my father, black curls and a broad-shouldered body that dwarfed the armchair. Truth be told, my dad had a face only a mother could love, and I’m not entirely sure my own mother had loved him all that much. It had started, so the aunts told me, with a whirlwind romance, a pull of opposites, swiftly followed by a long, bitter trench of reality. I often wonder what might have become of them if I’d never been born. Divorce, I guess. Certainly, she’d still be alive.
“So you’ve found trouble,” said Dad, leaning forward, spade-like hands between his knees. “Or trouble found you.”
“You reckon?”
He got up and lumbered to the kitchen area, poured a glass of milk, and returned. For a moment, I wondered if he was going to hand it to me, a bedtime drink for his boy. Sitting again he cradled it to his chest.
“You’re talking to me.” He took a long gulp and cuffed the white from his salt-and-pepper moustache. “That old gavver of your’n has been over quite a lot. Not a bad old joskin, all told. Had him up here for a brew a few times. He left you a bit of work yesterday, asked after you. So is this his business, or have I got that Nazi fucker to thank for you being up and about?”
“It’s nothing to do with Kerrigan,” I assured him. “It’s a case I’ve taken on. Private client.”
“How’s the posh?”
“Not bad. Enough to dent my overdraft, maybe.”
“I told you, I can sort that right now–”
“No.” My father’s weathered face corrugated. “And I don’t need any help with Lenny Kerrigan, if you were thinking of going after him.”
“I’m not stupid,” he grunted, “but sometimes my feelings do get the better of me. Say, I hear of a gorger who comes roaring onto my ground, disturbing the peace.” He spread his hands. “What am I to do? Now, I know a thing or two about this one, and even if I didn’t, that snide little swastika tattoo tells me everything worth knowing. What I have right here is a bit of filth who’d be better off in his box forty years ahead of time. I’m not saying I’d go that far, maybe not even as far as my boy saw fit–” And here the mask fractured for an instant. Was it pride? If it was, I didn’t want it. “But we have ways of calming such a rabid animal right down.”
One of the first books I ever stole from a library was a children’s history of the great Romans. I remember sitting on my narrow bed, reading by the light of the fair, the faces of long-dead philosophers and dictators strobing before my eyes. I knew then that my old man had the tongue of Cicero and the balls of Caesar, and I’d loved him for it. That was ten years before I became his Brutus, betraying him in the only way he could never really forgive, by leaving the life.
“Stay away from Kerrigan,” I said. “I can deal with him.”
He nodded. “That much is clear.”
I fished in my jeans and took out the handbill. “I want to know about this.”
“Had those sent out weeks back,” he said. “Why the sudden interest? You want to run a ride there? I can get you a cushty little set of jets that’d rake it in at a special event like Bradbury End.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“It’s the case. It might have something to do with this. The town.” I tapped a finger against the bill. “I’m not sure how, not yet, but there’s a connection.”
He gave me an appraising look, the kind of Cicero glance that could size up a punter at fifty yards and calculate his net worth to the nearest grand.
“Something dangerous? If there’s a threat to us, I want to know.”
“It’s nothing like that,” I said and wondered at the lie. Right then, I could feel the tale-spinner inside me, the liar who had tried to win friends at a dozen different schools by inventing humdrum backgrounds. Anything to stop the name-calling before it started: pikey, gypo. Now I let it convince me that I was telling the truth: a random assortment of people had died, there was no threat to the Travellers. “You don’t have to worry.”
A beat. A lone dog barked and Webster answered like a sergeant major demanding order in the ranks.
“Can’t ever play it straight, can you? Just like your mother. Leave it out,” he said when I stirred, “she was my wife and I can speak as I like. So what do you want to know?”
“How was the booking arranged?”
“We were contacted about a year ago by the governors down that way. Blokes called Carmody and Hillstrom. Far as I can tell, Carmody’s the errand boy and chief licker of Hillstrom’s fat arse. They approached us asking if we’d consider bringing the show back to Bradbury. You’re looking pale, what’s up?”
“Hillstrom? Gideon Hillstrom?”
A superstitious dread washed over me. In that moment, with the trailer painted dusky by lamplight, it seemed almost credible that the same Victorian bridge-builder and mayor of Bradbury End had somehow reached across the centuries and set us all to dance. Wasn’t this a ghost story, after all? Serial murderers with a fetish for symbolism are usually a sorry lot, barely more sophisticated than a pimply goth with a hard-on for true crime and death metal. Yet, this case had a care about it that made the whole thing hardly seem real.
Dad reached for his coat, flipped out his wallet, and handed over a gilded business card. “First name’s Marcus, not Gideon.” Marcus Hillstrom, OBE. Leader of Petershire County Council. “First class div, I reckon.” I thumbed the overly embossed honorific and thought my dad was probably right.
“So what’s the story?”
“Why the fête, you mean? Probably just a gimmick to give the local economy a boost. Nothing draws ’em like a fair.” He razzle-dazzled his hands, his moustache stretched over the hump of a piss-taking smile. Truth was, the whole business had been living on borrowed time for decades. In a world of on-demand thrills streamed straight into your lap, how could the rickety charm of a travelling fair compete? “We agreed on a flat fee for the whole thing,” he continued. “Free round-the-clock rides for the punters. Special events are where the posh is now. You take sweet Fanny Adams with a pay-by-the-ride fair these days.”
“Must’ve cost them a bit,” I said.
“Local businesses’ll pitch in, I suppose. The same respectable kinds that would’ve run us out of town once upon a time.”
“Does that mean we’re respectable?” I half-smiled.
“We’re tamed is what we are. They’ve got new bogeymen to hate now: asylum seekers, starving immigrants trying to earn a crust.” He stretched his long legs, hip bones cracking. “Anyhow, Hillstrom said they wanted to mark the anniversary and that his lackey Carmody had found us online. Said
the tragedy had become something of a legend up Bradbury way. Not that all of them want us there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some vote in the council,” Dad sniffed. “Few of the bigwigs were against it. Thought it was maudlin to look back when the town could be spending money on new projects. Must say, I agree with that. Dwelling on the past never did anyone much good.” He shot me a pointed glance. I returned it as levelly as I could and watched it sway, without defeat, to the framed photograph of my mother that hung above the three-bar fire. “Anyway,” he looked up, “can’t see how this is any business of yours.”
“Nor can I,” I said, getting to my feet. “Not yet. Look, I’ll be heading off to Bradbury End tomorrow. Can I take the trailer?”
His nose wrinkled. “That old Eccles? I can parny further than that shitbox’ll take you. Let me make a few calls and I’ll set you up with a brand new–”
“The Eccles’ll be fine,” I said, hand on the door. “And I promise, I’ll tell you if things get messy. No trouble will come to the ground if I can help it.”
I was almost out of the trailer when he muttered after me, “You give that boy Zac a few quid when you’re done with him. He’s not a bad lad.”
I stiffened. “And he’s not a whore.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
His words ghosted with me down the steps. Webster snuffled my palm; whimpered as I left him behind. I padded over mussed-up grass and rain-drenched duckboards, saw a light flicker behind a blind, heard gameshow applause from the TV of an insomniac aunt. Any one of these people would open their home to me right here and now, loan me their life savings if I asked. I glanced down avenues of trailers, laid out with the mathematical precision of master Travellers, and wondered what horrors I might soon bring to their door.
CHAPTER TEN
MY HAND TREMBLED AND SCALDING coffee splashed across the dead woman in the makeshift bathtub. The sagging, incinerated sockets of Agatha Poole’s eyes stared back at me, almost reproachfully from the photograph. Glancing around the roadside diner, I snatched some paper napkins from a dispenser and blotted away the spill.
I took a breath. Concentrated on my heartbeats. Felt them settle. Then I sorted the crime scene shots back into their manila file. I knew why my hands were so unsteady, why the back of my neck was sticky and damp, why my right leg pistoned under the table like a pneumatic drill. It had nothing to do with the macabre details I’d been pouring over for the twentieth time that morning. In fact, there was something emotionally distancing about the gothic imagery of these staged murders—the dog-headed McAllister, the electrically-cremated Agatha, the self-cannibalised Adya Mahal—a sense that they were somehow unreal, like waxworks in a chamber of horrors.
No, it was the withdrawal symptoms that ate my nerves. For the first time in almost two years, I had slept well. No need to seek out meaningless sex to exhaust myself, no need to double down on my Zopiclone prescription. In dreams, I had turned over the puzzle I’d been set by Campbell and found myself waking at dawn, relaxed and eager to begin. It had taken the violent and senseless deaths of three innocent people to give me this respite from my demons—make of that what you will.
But although my mind had hit a kind of reset, my body still craved the daily dose of meds that had held it together for so long. I knew it was dangerous, not to say distracting, to go cold turkey, but I also knew that I couldn’t afford a brain fogged by sleeping pills and benzos. Two more lives were at stake and, if I had a hope of saving them, I needed to stay sharp. I’d just have to ride out the next few days as best I could.
That meant ignoring my ghosts too.
Sitting back in the red leather of the booth, I caught sight of plump legs kicking against the backboard. Blackened morsels flaked away from their shoes and fell like dark snow upon the sticky linoleum. I didn’t look across the table. I laid my palms flat on the case file and closed my eyes against Sonia’s words.
“How funny that you think you can save anyone,” she said, her voice sorrowful rather than unkind. “Oh Scott, you can’t even save yourself.”
I let them whisper and laugh and fade away.
“More coffee, love?”
I blinked up at the waitress, a busty grandmother in a peppermint uniform that clashed horribly with the red, white and blue hokeyness of the American-themed diner. She freshened my cup and sashayed away, a theatrical wink for all and varicose veins that went on for days.
Back to the case file. I took out my notebook and started scribbling. Scorch marks on the rim of the tin tub in which Agatha had been transformed into a crude caricature of Maria Landless, the Electric Lady. Burn points at which frayed wires rather than the teeth of electrode clamps had been attached. Other small details in the photos and reports—clean edges to the flesh stuffed into Adya’s mouth, indicating a non-serrated blade; no autopsy report yet on Adya, this time remade as Marguerite de Bellefort, the Fat Woman of Wimbledon, but from the amount of blood in her mouth, she must have been alive while her flesh was fed to her. Only lightly bound, so some sedative was probably administered.
All of this—the care, the preparation—tallied with something else suggestive in the police reports: no forensic evidence. Not a hair, not a fingerprint, not a scrap of the killer’s DNA to be found at any of the three locations. Did this mean a seasoned predator was at work? I felt it in my bones—despite the savagery of the crimes, a clinical calmness shone through, as if the deaths were not an end in themselves but sketches working towards a larger design. Even with these incomplete flourishes, however, I already believed I had a feeling for the mind working behind them—he had come to his victims with a clear purpose and he had achieved exactly what he intended. No more, no less.
But if this wasn’t his first rodeo then what might it suggest about his previous crimes? The recreation of the Jericho freaks was a fixed idea. It had five potential victims and set conditions in which he had to operate: the pattern would always be dictated by the historical tragedy. I know it might sound ludicrous to talk about a psychopath in such terms, but my experience of these monsters told me I was right. Once established, serial killers follow their rituals obsessively, even to the point where it might endanger them.
One of my cases had involved a child murderer who always left a particular brand of baby’s blanket clasped in his victim’s fist. He must have known we would eventually track him through the purchase of the item but, for him, the compulsion had outweighed any sense of self-preservation.
Could we then say this killer had a thing for restaging historical tragedies? Was that his overriding MO? If so, he had not yet been detected and finding him through a deep-dive into unsolved cases would be both time-consuming and difficult, especially as I had no access to police databases.
I sighed and took a swig of coffee. So many alleyways to explore, so many potential cul-de-sacs to get lost down. Once I could have aired my theories with Garris, got his no-nonsense take on my fantastical hunches. I allowed myself a half-smile, thinking back to all those post-shift beers in The Three Crowns where we’d pour over current cases before lapsing into more general chatter. One thing I know my mentor would have come back to was the connection, or lack thereof, between the victims.
They must be connected or else why did the killer not simply target random people in Bradbury End? That was the natural locus of the crimes after all. Unless he didn’t want the murders to be connected too early. That might suggest he had a link to the victims that could expose him.
But something about this idea didn’t sit right. There was a connection between McAllister, Poole, and Mahal, something impersonal but significant that I was missing. I sensed it like a word dancing on the tip of my tongue, and strangely enough, I felt that the link had already been made. Not by me or Campbell, but in something someone had said to me recently…
I gave it up. I could chase the idea around for hours and get nowhere. Best to wait and let it come to me.
My
phone pinged. A text from Zac: Sal told me you’ve gone on ahead to Bradbury. Thanks for saying goodbye. You’re a fucking arsehole, Scott.
“And you’re a good judge of character, Zac,” I murmured.
Truth be told, I had deliberately avoided him this morning. He was a good kid, as my dad had said, and deserved a lot better than some washed-up thirtysomething with anger management issues and delusions of being haunted. If I gave him a couple of days, he’d come to his senses.
And so I’d washed and dressed early, before even the juks had stirred, and crossing the dew-dappled fairground had stopped only to drop Sal’s phone back to her. She’d opened the door to her trailer, bedheaded and blurry-eyed.
“Scott? Jesus, what time is it?”
I knew she’d have been up past midnight, minding her candy floss stall. By way of apology, I handed her a steaming cup of tea.
“Thanks for the loan,” I said, slipping the phone into her dressing gown pocket. “I’ve got mine charged up again. I’m heading off to Bradbury End early, so I guess I’ll see you there?”
“Wait. What? You’re going where?” She shook her head, tumbles of red hair burnished by the dawn. “Scott, what’s going on? Last night you were tearing off somewhere, talking about a case, and now you’re heading to the next fair days ahead of schedule?” She beamed. “Have you worked out something with your dad? Are you running a ride there? Oh God, it’ll be just like the old days! We can set up next to each other, make fun of the joskins–”
I laid a hand on her arm. “It’s not that. I do have a case, and somehow it’s connected to Bradbury End.”
She frowned. “Wow. That’s quite a coincidence.”
“Isn’t it?”
She must have caught something in my tone. “Just what is this? You’re up and about at the crack of dawn, washed and dressed, looking vaguely human.”
