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

by Will Harker

  I left the car in the street and headed back towards the chiringuito. It was a short stroll and the sandy boardwalk was soon under my feet. Up ahead, a perfect beach was dotted with colourful parasols. Kids rocketed past me, skipping bare soles off the baking planks while grandparents trundled behind in electric scooters. It all seemed a world away from the horror of Bradbury End, and at that moment, I was tempted never to return.

  Haz and I could find a cheap apartment in a place like this. We could while away our days in the sun, drinking wine, swimming in the sea. Here, without the shadow of the case hanging over us, we could reforge those old links. I shook my head. A nice dream, but I had an obligation, not only to Campbell, whose money I had taken, but to the victims of a killer who wouldn’t stop until his design was complete.

  A killer who, it seemed, was not Lenny Kerrigan. At least, Kerrigan hadn’t been involved in the first murder, but did that rule him out entirely? We’d considered the idea of him as a paid accomplice; a distraction arranged by the murderer to keep me off my game. Well, now we knew he needed money, what if he’d been recruited after he left prison? I could certainly see him in the guise of the Englishman who’d bought the dodgy car from the scrap dealer over the border. But that meant the killer had anticipated my involvement in the case and, back when Agatha Poole was murdered, I was still in prison myself. The scenario just didn’t work.

  At the sound of my name, I looked up. Harry, sitting under an umbrella on the chiringuito’s terrace, waving and smiling like I was the best surprise he could have hoped for.

  “That didn’t take long,” he said as I sat beside him. “How’d it go?” I wrinkled my nose and he held up his palm. “Right. Sorry. I know you don’t like the idea of me nosing into your shady private eye world.”

  He meant it playfully, but I could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  After lunch, we went for a stroll along the beach. Although my mind occasionally strayed, picturing Agatha Poole walking barefoot through these shallows, Harry kept me mostly in the moment.

  “I’m sorry this is just a flying visit,” I said. “Maybe one day we can come back. Spend some proper time here together. Or anywhere. Your choice. It’s just…”

  I stopped and turned to him. We had left most of the holidaymakers behind and, wading into the surf, had found a sandbank that stretched far out into the sea. I brushed the fringe from his brow.

  “I’m not sure where we are right now.”

  He shrugged, his hands finding my hips. “Let’s take things slowly, yeah?”

  “Of course. But Haz, if we really are starting something here, then I need to ask why.” The idea of pushing him away when I’d only just found him again almost made me stop, but if we wanted to move forward then this had to be faced. “Did you think I wouldn’t understand? Harry, he was such a good man and he was in so much pain. That last weekend we went down to see him together, he told us he didn’t want to go on. I remember holding you afterwards and… It was an act of mercy, Haz. Of love. Of course, I understood that. Of course, I did.”

  Tears shimmered in his eyes. “I knew you understood.”

  “Then why did you push me away?”

  That was when he broke. And that was when I knew. Knew beyond any doubt that, despite Garris’ misgivings, Harry had nothing to do with these murders. His heart was too big. It was as simple as that.

  “Because you saw,” he said. “Because you always, always saw. You knew as soon as I came back to the flat that night. I told you I’d been at college all day but you did your thing and you saw right through me. My clever boy.” He took my hand and kissed the bowl of my palm. “I didn’t have to say a word, did I? And then half an hour later when we got the call, the pity in your eyes.”

  “So if you knew–?”

  “It wasn’t about that. I didn’t ever think you’d judge me for it.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because you saw what I’d done. The only one who saw. And being with you every day, I’d have to see it too. And I couldn’t live like that. This gift you have, Scott, this ability to peel back the layers and get to the truth of people. Don’t you know that when you do that, it forces people to see themselves? The lies we tell so that we can cope with the reality of what we are, under that scrutiny it’s all stripped away. Can you imagine how frightening that is for people who have things to hide?”

  I could imagine it. Harry wasn’t the first loved one I’d alienated this way. Once they got to know me, childhood friends had tended to shy away. I’m not sure any of them could have articulated it the way Harry had, but on some level, they’d known this truth about me.

  “Then why do you want to be with me now?” I asked.

  “Because I’ve come to accept what I did. In the aftermath, with all the grief and trauma, I couldn’t. But now, seeing you again?” His smile was so sad. “I want you in my life. It’s as simple as that.”

  But it wasn’t that simple. He didn’t know all of who I was, and I didn’t know all of the secrets he was hiding from me. Secrets kept for my own good, so he thought—to help me, to save me. Secrets kept for the best of intentions. But secrets that would have saved lives, if he’d revealed them then.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  SECRETS DIDN’T CONCERN ME THEN. Sitting in the departure lounge of Faro Airport, our hands locked together, not even the case troubled my thoughts. Although I still had confessions of my own to make—about my life before joining the force, about the things that had happened to me up at HMP Hazelhurst—it felt like the final barrier between us had broken down and we could truly start again. In fact, it wasn’t until Harry mentioned his name that I remembered I’d meant to ask him about the historian, Gerald Roebuck.

  “I heard from him the morning of the library demo,” Harry said. “Badgering about some research materials he’d loaned to the local archive. He wanted them returned before the branch closed down. I think he was getting back from visiting his sister this afternoon.”

  “That’s perfect,” I said. “I could really do with talking to him about the Matthers’ house and a couple of other bits and pieces. Could you text him and set up a meeting tomorrow?”

  “Why not now?” Harry shrugged. “He may be obsessed with the past, but he’s still got one foot in the twenty-first century. We’ll Zoom him.”

  While Harry set up the video call, I grabbed us a couple of coffees from the ubiquitous Costa. By the time I returned, he was chatting away to a man who looked like a cross between a dishevelled wizard and an old-time bank manager. Gerald Roebuck’s ratty grey beard flowed down to the midriff of an immaculate pinstriped suit. Catching sight of me, he flashed out long white fingers, nicotine-stained up to the second knuckle, and beckoned, as if to usher me through the screen.

  “You’re a Jericho, aren’t you?” he wheezed. “Yes, my friend Harry here has been telling me all about you. Fascinating history from what I can gather. Culturally almost unique. A Traveller detective indeed. I would consider it a great boon if you would deign to share your experiences for my records?”

  I took the seat next to Harry and handed him his drink.

  “I’d be delighted, Mr Roebuck, but isn’t your collection mainly focused on Bradbury End?”

  “And the immediate locale.” He nodded. “But my boy, don’t you know? You are of Bradbury End. Your illustrious ancestor old Slip-Jointed Jericho perished in our river, and so we lay claim to you. Bradburians are like the mafia in that regard, you may try to escape us, but we keep pulling you back in!” He pointed a yellow talon at the screen and hooted like a jackal. “Anyway, in his short time among us, Harry here has been a perfect godsend for my researches, and so I am more than happy to help out his special friend.”

  Haz leaned in and whispered. “I’ll go and look at the planes. Enjoy.”

  “Isn’t he a peach?” Roebuck winked. “If only I were thirty years younger and a hundred times prettier. Scandalous, the way he and the girls have been
treated.”

  “You don’t approve of Mr Hillstrom and Mr Carmody’s plans for the town?” I said.

  The wizard’s face darkened. “Carmody I can understand. He would have been a parasitical leech wherever he decided to suckle. But Hillstrom? His roots go deep in this community. Now he would tear it all up in the name of commerce.”

  “But he must have some sense of the town’s heritage,” I said provokingly. “He’s supported these commemorative events for the Travellers Bridge tragedy, hasn’t he?”

  “Pah. Have you yet encountered the oaf?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you know as well as I that Marcus Hillstrom is about as cultured as your average jackbooted vandal. Indeed, I have my suspicions—and they are only suspicions, mind you—that he’s a hand in all this anti-mosque nonsense taking place tomorrow. Oh, you won’t see him among the mob, of course, but I’m pretty sure that, behind the scenes, he’s stirred the poisonous pot.”

  “Why would he?” I asked. “If his ideology is just concerned with money?”

  “Money comes from power, Mr Jericho. Power comes from the ability to make people believe that you, and only you, can keep them safe. That, in turn, requires a villain or, even better, villains. Disorder in the streets might serve the purpose of an ambitious man. Don’t believe for a moment that Hillstrom sees his political apotheosis in the mayoralty of Bradbury End.”

  “And it seems he’s even willing to sacrifice his ancestral home,” I said.

  “The Matthers’ house?” Roebuck considered. “Technically that hasn’t been in Hillstrom hands since Delia Matthers inherited it from her husband’s family in the 1970s. But yes, the principle stands. Marcus would yank out his granny’s gold fillings if it would profit him. And ripping up half the forest for this new supermarket will profit him and his cronies a great deal.”

  “What do you know of Mrs Matthers?” I asked. “I heard she emigrated to the States after the fire.”

  “You do have a wide-ranging interest in our town history, don’t you?” he said curiously. “Not just the Travellers Bridge tragedy but now the Matthers incident?”

  “I saw the house when visiting the bridge,” I told him. “It intrigued me.”

  “Well, I knew him.” The historian sniffed. “The boy, Jonathan, I mean.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. A peculiar little thing. I was working at the library myself back in those days. I believe it was the only place his mother would allow him to visit unsupervised. I got the sense that, following her husband’s death, she developed a morbid certainty that her son would also depart this earthly plane and leave her quite alone. In any event, she kept him close at all times. I sometimes wondered…”

  A troubled look entered his heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  “If the child had set the fire deliberately. Not in anger, not in defence of his mother, not even to frighten away those teenagers throwing stones at their home. But in an attempt to escape the place. To escape her.”

  “Maybe to escape the view from his bedroom window?” I suggested. “The story of men and women drowning in that river would give any child nightmares. Or perhaps become an obsession.”

  Roebuck bristled. “We do not use the ‘o’ word in cases of historical fascination. Jonathan Matthers wasn’t obsessed, he was… captivated, shall we say? We would occasionally discuss it together when he came into the library, and yes, he did tend to request the same materials over and over. Lonely boys have their pet projects, Mr Jericho. There is nothing unnatural in that.”

  Not unless he grew up to murder three people because of it, I thought.

  “The tragedy of the Jericho freaks has always had its students,” Roebuck continued. “Every few years, I get researchers through the door of my museum buzzing with curiosity. It possesses a grim allure, you must admit. That Grand Guignol sensibility suggestive of gaslight and Victorian intrigue. I mean, the Dog-faced boy, the Balloon-Headed Horror, the Fat Woman of Wimbledon. It hardly seems real, does it?”

  His words chimed oddly with what both Garris and I had said about the case—that sense of unreality, of something artificially engineered.

  “This Campbell fellow who contacted our Harry, for instance,” Roebuck went on. “A new one, I think. I’ve certainly never heard of him.”

  “He was a professor of history at Cambridge,” I said.

  Roebuck looked like he’d just swallowed something unpleasant. “A professional historian? How unromantic.”

  “I was wondering if I might pay you a visit tomorrow, Mr Roebuck?” I said. “I’ve got a few questions concerning the tragedy and perhaps the Matthers family too.”

  “Well.” He cocked his head to one side. “I had wanted to go to the fair tomorrow. See if I could interview one or two of the older generation for my archive.”

  “I can provide all the introductions you’d like.” I smiled.

  “Perfect!” He clapped those long white hands together. “Then shall we say after lunch? Harry can give you the address. I do have some work to do in the morning on the flood of ’83, but otherwise–”

  “Mr Roebuck, what is that?”

  As he turned slightly, I’d glimpsed something on the wall behind him. A rectangle of stone with names carved into it. A slab the same size and bearing the same typography as the commemorative plaque on Travellers Bridge. He glanced over his shoulder.

  “Oh yes, of course, that might interest you. You’re aware of how the new bridge was financed after the tragedy?”

  I nodded. “A subscription was taken up, wasn’t it? Local townspeople encouraged to contribute what they could.”

  “That’s right. However, it was thought only proper that the five families who donated most to the construction ought to receive some special recognition. This was originally intended to appear alongside the commemorative plaque with that rather odd quotation from Horace. ‘The mind intent upon false appearances–’”

  “‘Refuses to admit better things,’” I murmured.

  “Quite. I mean, there has always been prejudice against travelling people throughout history. I suppose the quote was intended to reference this. A sentimental embrace of the shunned victims of the tragedy by the town in which they’d perished. A commitment that Bradburians would honour their memory by keeping open and tolerant minds.”

  “Not working out too well, is it?” I said, thinking of the anti-Islam placards staked into those crew-cut lawns.

  “No indeed,” Roebuck acknowledged. “In any case, our Victorian mayor, Hillstrom reportedly had second thoughts about the additional plaque. Everyone had contributed what they could, you see, and just because some had deeper pockets than others? Well, it smacked of vanity and so the idea was abandoned.”

  “But the plaque had already been carved?”

  He nodded. “An interesting curio, it came into my possession a year or two ago.”

  I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. “Can you focus your camera on it for a moment? I’d like to read the names of those contributors.”

  “Certainly.”

  He moved out of shot and, lifting the camera from whatever mount it sat in, crossed the room and held it up to the plaque. Unlike the one on the bridge, this had not suffered a century and a half of exposure and so the lettering stood out, sharp and clear. I read:

  IN HEARTFELT APPRECIATION TO THE FOLLOWING BENEFACTORS:

  GIDEON HILLSTROM

  WILLIAM McALLISTER

  DANIEL POOLE

  MARGARET FIELDING

  STEPHEN ROEBUCK

  I felt my heart in my throat. Here it was at last—that elusive connection between the five victims. Rereading the names, I had no doubt that somewhere in Adya Mahal’s family tree the name ‘Fielding’ would appear. Descendants of all the five major benefactors of Travellers Bridge. And here too the identity of the final victims: Marcus Hillstrom, present-day mayor of Bradbury End and the
man who now appeared onscreen before me, speaking words I did not hear.

  But there was something else too. A passing comment made to me at the very beginning of the case. Now, with these names ringing in my head, I plucked it from my memory. What had Jodie said?

  “Don’t start getting obsessed with conspiracies cooked up by old showmen…”

  I focused again on the screen.

  “Mr Roebuck, I need to ask you.” I took a deep breath. “Has it ever been suggested that the drowning of the Jericho freaks wasn’t an accident? That it was deliberately planned somehow? That the townspeople of Bradbury End came together that day and plotted to murder the Travellers?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE SINS OF THE FATHERS shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations.

  Apart from their vast weddings and funerals, attended sometimes in their thousands, showpeople are not great churchgoers. Still, faith and superstition run in their blood and the old aunts will sometimes pass scraps of half-remembered scripture between each other. This passage had been a favourite of my Aunt Millie and would often be quoted at any joskin punter who stepped out of line.

  It rang now inside my head.

  “There was talk at the time. Rumours. Hearsay,” Roebuck said, settling back into his chair. “None of it was proven. Gideon Hillstrom himself is on record as saying they were a wicked calumny. I must admit, it always seemed fanciful to me, but even today some of the older residents of Bradbury will tell you that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew it to be true.”

  I stared at him. “That the entire town–?”

  “No, no.” He waved a hand. “Certainly, the townspeople had never welcomed the arrival of the Travellers, but a conspiracy that large would have been unthinkable. No, it was believed that a small inner circle of… and that they… the old bridge… requiring repairs for decades and so weakening a few crucial points… child’s play… my own ancestor, Stephen Roebuck… a master builder… thought to be complicit…”