Killing Jericho: A Heart-Stopping Thriller (The Scott Jericho Crime Thrillers Book 1)
Page 8
Theories as to the killer’s MO, guesswork about possible connections between the victims were fine as far as they went, but I needed a concrete base for my investigation. As Garris might say, I had to start with first principles. What was the wellspring of these murders? The deaths of the Jericho freaks. That meant heading back to where it all began.
I was about five miles outside of town when my phone rang. I hit the hands-free.
“Mis-ter Jer-i-cho.”
“Mr Campbell.”
His tone was flat, like someone giving a half-hearted impression of the paedophile professor.
“I thought you’d like to know, your first day’s payment has been transferred to your account.”
“About that,” I said. “I’ve already incurred a few expenses.”
“Text me,” he said airily. “Miss Barton will see to it.”
A beat. I thought he’d be keen to hear what progress I was making but the silence stretched on.
“You didn’t mention the local council had invited my father to set up his fair at Bradbury,” I said. “A big event to mark the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, and all of this coinciding with the murders?”
“Indeed,” he yawned. “Quite the coincidence.”
“Isn’t it just.”
A virtual pin appeared on my satnav—a pulsing BRADBURY END moving ever closer. “Do you believe in such coincidences, Mr Campbell?”
“Why shouldn’t I? History is littered with them. Mark Twain’s birth and death coincided precisely with the appearance of Halley's Comet; less than a year before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, his brother saved the life of Lincoln’s son in a near-fatal railway accident. Even for an atheist such as I, the sweep of history can sometimes suggest a designing intelligence.”
“Policemen don’t like coincidences,” I said.
“Good job you’re not a policeman anymore then, isn’t it?”
I ignored the jibe. “According to my father, the town council booked the fair a year ago. Six months later, McAllister is turned into Charlie Buckley. Could it be one of the organisers, do you think? The mayor, Hillstrom, is descended from the guy who ordered the rebuilding of the bridge. And then there’s his dogsbody, Carmody.”
“A dogsbody making a dog-faced boy?” Campbell tittered. “Anything is possible, I suppose.”
“Three down, two to go,” I said, more to myself than the professor. “I think he’s going to speed up. The anniversary is in, what, five days? He’ll want his masterpiece in place by then.”
“Yes, yes,” Campbell yawned again. “I’m sure you’re right. Godspeed, Mr Jericho.”
The line went dead.
I stared at the phone. The sudden and utter disinterest of a man who had virtually pleaded with me to investigate his pet mystery was another puzzle to add to my growing collection. Perhaps, having handed over the case, Campbell’s passion for it would only be reawakened when—and if—I solved it. It was an idea, but not a very satisfactory one. I filed it away with those vague promises of Kerrigan’s, “One day soon you’ll wake up and realise just how well I’ve played you.”
No more distractions. On now, to Bradbury End.
The town sat in the bowl of a forested valley. A sign marking the outskirts provoked a wry smile: A Place with a History! No fucking kidding. I toed the brake and the car wound down into quaint, meandering streets. The fair and its wide loads wouldn’t have an easy time of this—garden walls bulged out into the road while corners jagged at switchback angles. Still, Travellers were used to negotiating tight spots and I was sure the cosy façade of Bradbury End would survive unscathed.
Victorian villas in pastel shades; little old ladies at the bus stop, twittery as fresh-hatched chicks; men with sergeant major moustaches walking droopy-eyed dachshunds; a village post office with an honest-to-God red phone box outside; the local pub, The Old Cock Inn, not a hint of a satirical dick graffitied onto the flaking sign over the door. Everything achingly, almost artificially, English, like a Hollywood cliché of bygone Britannia.
Except, not quite.
A placard planted proudly in an immaculate lawn screamed:
NO SHARIA! BRITAIN FIRST!
Protest the new Mosque in Bradbury!
Something my dad said last night came back to me, “They have new bogeymen now.” He was right. Hate never goes away; it just moves on to fresh targets. Tired of the novelty of the fair on their common, Travellers would once have been blamed for whatever ills were besetting the community and, taking the hint, would pack up their amusements before they could be run out of town. Now we were probably viewed as a harmless eccentricity, as British as that unmolested phone box.
It took a few laps of the town to find what I was looking for. Spotting the homely redbrick building at last, I pulled my trailer up to the curb and got out. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the sound of a cricket match in a nearby park—all is well in Bradbury End. I looked over at the library.
My heart slammed into my throat.
A man stood in the doorway. A figure from my past, a face I had tried to forget.
When I’d last seen Harry Moorhouse, he had just murdered his father.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HARRY’S GAZE HAD FOUND my trailer, a frown crumpling his brow, when an army of middle-aged women crowded in around him, beaming and cooing. I caught snatches of their outrage, “Never thought I’d see the day”; “We’ll be here first thing with our placards”; “If Mr Hillstrom and his cronies on the council think they can close our library, they have another thing coming”. Harry soothed and encouraged, winning the adoration of all, but then he’d never needed words for that.
I’ve met many men with kind smiles, some masking horrors you wouldn’t believe, but Harry’s – open and generous – was a true reflection of his soul.
It was his kindness that had made me love him.
It was his kindness that had made him a killer.
◊ ◊ ◊
IT WAS THE END of my first term at Magdalen and I was huddled up in my old donkey jacket by the fire of The Eagle and Child. The pub was packed to the rafters that night: rugger-buggers hogging the bar and spilling more lager than they drank; tutors clubbed together, tired and demob-happy; townies in the corners, nursing their ales and resentments. I guess it said something about me that, despite the squeeze, no one asked if they could share my table.
I’d arrived in Oxford with such hope, a lamb to the intellectual slaughter. My dad drove me, helped carry my cases through echoing cloisters and up winding staircases to my room that overlooked the river. He barely said a word. Just sniffed and glanced around, as if all this medieval beauty was no more than he’d expected. We shook hands, a thing we’d never done before, and he muttered something about seeing me at Christmas. In my imagining of this moment, I’d had him wipe away a tear and tell me how proud my mum would have been. None of that; just a rough handshake and he was gone.
But still, I was here. I’d fulfilled the expectations of a dozen teachers (the ones who came and taught at the fair during our travelling months and those that welcomed showman chavvies into their schools over the winter) and become the first person in my family to go to university. My mum had given me my love of stories, my teachers had instilled a passion to dig beneath the narrative, now I could be among people who felt the same way I did about books.
That was the dream. It lasted until the end of my first week. Tutors tore my essays to pieces, my observations in class were laughed at. It seemed that loving literature wasn’t enough; if you wanted to justify that love, you must dissect it until, staring down at the corpse of the book you’d once worshipped, all you could see were its defects. And if the geniuses I’d revered as a teenager—Austen and Dickens, Hardy and Eliot—were so flawed then what hope was there for my own poor scribblings? And so I’d stopped volunteering opinions in class and dismissed any idea of joining the college’s creative writing club.
All I wanted to do was talk to them about their world—a place in which books and paintings and art could provoke a tear and you’d never be mocked for it—but they had plenty of friends to discuss such things with. They wanted to hear my story while all I longed for was to escape it. And so I created a persona for myself, brittle and brooding, until, at last, they stayed away.
Some had stopped by my room before leaving for the break. A timid knock, a whispered Merry Christmas, the odd question, “Are you going back to the fairground for the holidays?” But aside from a few special events, most fairs are packed up for the winter, the Travellers heading for their yards where, for a few short months, trailers are swapped for static chalets.
My dad would’ve been at ours, spinning yarns with Sam Urnshaw and Tommy Radlett and the rest. We’d stopped calling each other after the first few weeks, defeated by the challenge of trying to bridge a gulf neither of us could understand. Sal Myers still phoned and updated me on all the news: one of the aunts had broken a hip; there’d been a ruck with some locals at the season-end fair; she’d met a Traveller from up north and they might start seeing each other. How was I doing? Had I made friends with all the other brainiacs?
I stared into the rich amber of my pint. I knew I wasn’t suited to Oxford, that it made me miserable, that I didn’t like who I was becoming here. But to go back to the life with my tail between my legs? That would be admitting that my dad and his friends were right: that Travellers had no business in a place like this.
Back then, they didn’t know that it wasn’t just a love of books that made me different, and that going away had been a chance to explore other parts of myself too.
In all that self-pity, I hadn’t realised that the pub had fallen silent. I looked up to find the lights dimmed and a group of carollers taking up position on the other side of the fire. Even the rugger-buggers had settled, sipping their pints as quietly as overgrown babies taking the bottle. Firelight danced across the choir, old and young, grey-haired and fresh-faced, so close I might have reached out and touched them. I sat back in my chair, thoughts of Magdalen and ruined dreams forgotten. A boy my age had stepped forward and started to sing.
I wanted to turn away, to hide the tears streaming down my face. It was a Christmas hymn but not one I’d ever heard before. And whether it was his sweet soprano, the simple emotion that animated his features, his beauty, or some combination of all three, he somehow spoke to all my hopes and disappointments.
Afterwards, I lingered until the last drunk had offered his congratulations and the other carollers had left. Then I slipped in beside him at the bar. It didn’t occur to me then that he’d been waiting for me to say hello.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
He turned and nodded. “I wondered when you would. A pint of Batemans, please.”
I signalled the barman. “You were really good,” I said. “Amazing, in fact.”
“Is that your considered appraisal?”
“If you can’t take a compliment,” I muttered.
“Hey.” He placed his hand on my sleeve. “I’m sorry. Thank you.”
And he smiled. A warm, open, teasing kind of smile. He was smaller than me, but then most guys are; smooth, delicate features, jade eyes and mouse-brown hair, cheekbones that went on forever. He nudged his shoulder into my chest.
“Am I forgiven?”
“We’ll see,” I smiled back. “What’s it called, by the way? That first one you sang?”
“Quem pastores laudavere? It’s an old German carol. ‘He whom the shepherds praised’. Are you a man of faith…?”
“Scott.”
“Scott.”
“Not in anything much.”
He lifted his hand to my face and ran his thumb under my eye, as if brushing away a tear. “Maybe you believe in more than you think.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing at all. We took our drinks back to my table and sat there talking until last orders. Then we headed to a late-night bar he knew, found another table and talked some more. When the bouncer kicked us out at 5 a.m. we took our talk to the ancient streets and, eventually, Folly Bridge where we perched until dawn.
I told him who I was, where I came from, what I’d hoped for in Oxford, and he told me about himself in return. A grammar school kid from the Home Counties, as respectably middle class as they came. He was studying musical analysis at Somerville. He was openly gay, out to his friends and family, a cherished only son, and lived for music. It only occurred to me later that, as probing as he’d been about my life, the hard persona I’d used to keep others at bay hadn’t made an appearance. The more I spoke to him about the fair and my alienation from it, the easier my words became.
“Take a breath,” he soothed. “Tell me.”
And I did. Everything except for what had happened to my mum the year before.
At last, he slipped his small hand into mine. Down by the university boathouses, doors were being opened and practice crafts launched onto the misty river.
“Time to say goodnight, lonely Traveller,” he said.
I pulled him close. “You mean good morning…”
I did go back to the yard that Christmas. It was awkward with my dad, but it had been awkward with him for years and we soon fell into old patterns of meaningless small talk. But I was different. Sal noticed it straight away; I could never hide anything from her. She pressed her forefinger to my nose and beamed, “You’ve found someone. Who is he?” She knew even then, before I’d told anyone on the ground about my sexuality.
The holiday passed with aching slowness and, within hours of being back in Oxford, I was at his door at Somerville.
“Happy New Year, lonely Traveller.” He grinned.
I wrapped my arms tight around him.
By the end of January, we were living together. By February, I knew I loved him. In March, nervous as hell, I told him so, and he gave me a wink and wondered why it had taken me so long. He loved me too, he said. With Harry beside me, I settled down to my studies. I still didn’t enjoy them, but if it meant staying in Oxford—staying with him—I’d work my arse off. Those were the happiest months I’ve ever known—a bright island in a sea of darkness.
At Easter, I met his father and saw immediately what Harry did not—or would not—acknowledge. The man was dying. By summer, the reality of his father’s pain couldn’t be denied and within weeks Harry had acted upon it. After that, everything changed.
◊ ◊ ◊
THE ARMY OF WOMEN dispersed and Harry came down the library steps. It was lunchtime and he was probably heading into town for a sandwich.
Heart raging, I stepped into his path. “Hello, Haz.”
He looked up and, in that moment, didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.
“Hello, Scott,” he said, his tone resigned. “I suppose you’re here about the Jericho deaths?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“THE MURDERS?” My mind reeled. How on earth could Harry Moorhouse know about the random killing of three unconnected people? In all our talk of my life on the fair had I ever told him the story of the Jericho freaks? And if I had…
No. Not this tender man I had loved. He’d killed, yes, but there are degrees of murder, and his was as far away from the psychotic savagery of the monster I hunted as could be imagined. But still, how did he know about the case and what was he doing here?
“Murders?” Harry frowned. “I thought the drownings were accidental. Nothing I’ve seen in the re
search suggests anyone deliberately targeted the showpeople.”
Relief washed over me. “You’re talking about the bridge collapse.”
“Of course. What did you think I meant?”
He smiled, but it was a confused and guarded version of the smile I’d known.
“Nothing. Never mind.” I shook my head. “But what you said just now, it sounded like you’ve been expecting me.”
“For about a month or two.” He glanced at the building over his shoulder. “We get quite a few people contacting the library service, asking if we can help with their research. Mostly it’s amateur historians, bored retirees looking into their family tree, that sort of thing. Just occasionally something interesting lands in our lap. This ex-Cambridge professor got in touch a while back about the Travellers Bridge tragedy. Said he was fascinated by fairground history and wanted to know more about what had happened to the Jericho freakshow. I didn’t…” Colour sketched itself across his cheeks. “At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved. Professor Campbell happened to mention that you might be helping him out at some point and I–”
“Did he know about us?” I asked.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why would he?”
“Coincidences,” I murmured. They were becoming practically Dickensian—disparate threads of my life winding together around this case. But, as Campbell had said, coincidences do happen and if I fixated too much on them, I might start seeing patterns in things that weren’t there.
“Why did you stay involved?” I asked.
Harry shrugged. “If you were researching for Campbell, I knew we were bound to run into each other sooner or later. After all, here was where you’d always begin, and not just because of the research. I don’t think we ever visited a town where you didn’t drag me inside the local library.”