by Will Harker
The image kept freezing, the historian’s words breaking up.
“I’m losing you,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“Bad connection… Come by tomorrow as plan… We can talk then.”
“Mr Roebuck, listen to me: it’s possible that you’re in danger. Mr Roebuck?” I got up and started to walk about the terminal, trying to find a stronger signal, but the three bars on Harry’s phone indicated the problem wasn’t at my end. “I’m investigating a case and I think someone might have taken this conspiracy theory at face value. I know it sounds far-fetched, but please humour me. This person might blame the descendants of the original… Mr Roebuck?”
The historian cupped his ear, shook his head, and ended the call.
“Fuck,” I muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I glanced at my reflection, a haunted form in the huge black windows of the terminal building. On the tarmac beyond, planes drifted into allocated spots while shuttles ferried passengers to-and-fro. Fifteen minutes until our gate closed. I took out my phone and brought up Sal’s contact.
“Sc—huh–ott?” she said, battling a yawn. “What’s going on? What time is it?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. “Is everyone there OK?”
“Course. Are you in Bradbury End? Jodie says she has a big clue for you in her crime report or whatever it is you told her to do. Honestly, she’s been like a mini Miss Marple ever since you left, running around and jotting things down in her notebook. And she’s not the only one desperate to see you. Zac won’t stop asking me–”
“I’ll pop by tomorrow,” I promised. “But listen, remember when we were speaking about the Travellers Bridge story and you said something about conspiracy theories cooked up by old showmen? What did you mean?”
“Oh God,” she yawned, “you’re not still chasing that old fairy tale, are you?”
“Sal.”
“Urgh. Fine. Just let me get my brain in gear.” I heard a rustle of covers and pictured her sitting up in bed. “Right, so I remember this time when I was a kid listening to one of the aunts telling the story. We’d all heard it a million times by then, so I wasn’t paying too much attention. But suddenly she adds this new bit that I’d never heard before. You know the Travellers were heading to Bradbury to help with the hop picking, right? OK, the story goes that some of the locals didn’t much like the idea. Every year the Travellers arrived and undercut their wages. Blah-blah-blah.”
I nodded. This wasn’t a new complaint—a few extra pennies earned during the harvest had always supplemented the showpeople’s living. Despite the fact there was hardly any evidence they actually depressed local wages, the accusation was always thrown. Again, this was a myth that had now been transferred from Travellers to immigrants—outsiders taking jobs, undermining incomes.
“On top of that,” Jodie continued, “you know how joskins always view us? An invasion, a nuisance, whatever. Unless we’re offering them cheap rides and candy floss, they don’t want us around. Well, the story goes that this particular year the uproar got out of hand, even before we arrived. Farmworkers were downing tools, shopkeepers refusing to sell to anyone who sympathised with the showmen. Even the local gavver said he couldn’t guarantee the safety of the town. Basically, everyone was in the mood for a good ruck.”
“Panic is catching,” I said, thinking of the anti-mosque demonstration Kerrigan and his crew planned on attending tomorrow.
“Right. Anyway, the Bradbury End bigwigs apparently started to feel the heat. Some of these people were large landowners and they didn’t like the idea of us camping in their woods either. Over a couple days, it all reached a boiling point. Citizens pressuring the mayor and the town leaders until they cracked. The old bridge which we always came over had been almost falling down for years anyway. It only needed a little bit of tinkering.”
I shook my head. “But that’s insane. How could they know the bridge would fall only when the Travellers were on it?”
“I didn’t say I believed it,” she said. “But come on, Scott, we’ve had even worse than that done to us over the centuries. And then there’s that saying they put up on the new bridge. Something like: if you’re determined to see people in a certain way then you’ll never get past your prejudices. The aunt who told me the story interpreted that as an admission of guilt. Once they’d seen what they’d done, they realised how wrong they’d been.”
Even if the story of the conspiracy wasn’t true, some in both communities—Travellers and Bradburians alike—had believed it. I’d once imagined a showman himself becoming fixated on the story, but what if it went deeper than that? What if this was all some twisted revenge fantasy? Payback for the Jericho victims enacted on the descendants of the original conspirators? That might mean the killer was a member of my father’s fairground.
Whatever the truth, at least I now had the connection.
“Thanks, Sal,” I said. “I’ll be sure to see you and Jodie tomorrow.”
“Scott, what is this all ab–?”
I cancelled the call and checked the time. Six minutes until our gate.
I went back to Harry’s phone and tried Roebuck again. The number you are calling is temporarily unavailable. Please try later or send a text. I composed a quick message—Call me first thing tomorrow. Urgent. Scott Jericho—and added my number. I then briefly considered calling my dad for Hillstrom’s contact details. As he would be the fair’s main point of contact on the council, Dad was bound to have it. But how could I explain why I needed it without going into details that would seem fantastical?
I could call the Bradbury End police, of course. Calmly and methodically set out the reasons why I believed two of their prominent citizens were in danger of becoming the fourth and fifth victims of a hitherto unsuspected serial killer. I mean, they were bound to take seriously the rantings of a disgraced CID detective, especially one who had just avoided a charge for assault on the deputy mayor. I sighed. The truth was, I still had very little evidence to back up any of my theories.
The only option left to me was one I really didn’t want to take.
I thumbed Garris’ contact. While the call connected, all I could picture was some overly-cheery hospice bedroom, bright floral wallpaper with matching bedspread, as if these imitations of life could somehow balance out all the death. The room softly lit, a plugin air-freshener spritzing at discreet intervals, a half-open door through which a nurse takes the occasional glimpse. The figure in the bed still breathing and the husband sitting beside her hasn’t raised the alarm. Yet. The nurse walks on to the next door. And into this peace, the shriek of my call.
I almost felt relieved when it went to voicemail. At the prompt, I galloped through my message, outlining the victim connection and my concerns for Roebuck and Hillstrom. Then I apologised for calling at all and hoped Harriet was peaceful. Peaceful? Jesus Christ. Feeling like the worst piece of shit, I hung up.
A hand on my arm. “They’re calling our flight. Scott, is everything OK?”
For one dark moment, I caught my reflection again in those vast windows. Only it wasn’t my face mirrored there and it wasn’t the terminal stretching out around me. It was McAllister’s trailer, then Agatha’s apartment, then Adya’s bedroom. And a figure all in white, its wings spread wide, feathers arrayed like a fan of shining blades. A phantom, an anti-Christ, gripping its wrist as blood seeped through its clenched fingers. Maskless now, it looked back at me and grinned. It was my father, it was Sam Urnshaw, it was Sal and Jodie and a hundred aunts—a carousel of Travellers’ faces.
I made my excuses to Harry and lurched to the nearest bathroom. There, I locked myself into the first cubicle and swallowed two benzos dry. By the time our names were being called over the Tannoy, I’d finally stopped shaking.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I LEAPT FROM AN OCEAN OF SLEEP, immediately alert as my eyes drank in the unfamiliar bedroom. It took a moment to remember where I was and how I
’d got here. Arriving home in the early hours, we’d hesitated on the driveway, our bodies squeezed into the narrow space between my trailer and Harry’s front door. We’d stumbled over our goodnights until, all at once, his lips were on mine. The next thing I knew, he’d unlocked the door and we were crashing into the hallway, shedding clothes as we went.
Now, I eased my arm from under his head and pulled back the sheets from my naked body. Haz slept on, his brow furrowed, while I hunted out my phone from under the bed. It wasn’t until I swiped the screen and saw the time that I realised we’d slept away most of the morning.
“Shit,” I muttered.
Grabbing his dressing gown from the back of the door, I slipped as quietly as I could into the hall. Here, where twists of our clothes still littered the floor, I checked my voicemail.
“Hello, Scott.” I knew straight away from his tone what had happened. For once Pete Garris’ famous impassivity had abandoned him. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you last night. It’s Harriet… She’s gone.”
“Fuck.” I rested my head against the wall; kicked at my discarded jeans that lay like sloughed snakeskin at my feet. “Ah, Pete.”
“I wasn’t even with her,” he continued. “I had been, all bloody day and night. I just slipped out for two minutes to grab a cup of tea and… Well. One of the nurses here said that’s often the way it goes, almost as if they wait for you to step out of the room. I don’t know. Sounds like bollocks to me, but you know my views on this kind of thing. She’s isn’t in a better place, Scott. She isn’t anywhere at all.”
He inhaled, and I could tell he was back on the fags. After Harriet had got her diagnosis he’d quit, wracked with guilt that he might have given her the lung cancer that had otherwise seemed such a puzzle to him. She hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in her life, not even an experimental puff as a teenager. And so, by the Occam’s Razor method of investigation he had always sworn by, the simplest explanation was that he was her murderer.
“I know you’ll want to send flowers or some such nonsense. A donation to the hospice would be appreciated. The name’s St Hilda’s. Anyway, I’ve been in touch with the CID lads responsible for Bradbury this morning. The problem is, even with your theory about the victim connection—and I agree that you’ve probably found it, by the way—as far as actual evidence of a serial killer is concerned, we’re still on flimsy ground. There’s the letter carved into each victim, of course, and the uniqueness of the staging, but that aside…” Another sucking inhalation. “Well, I’ve alerted them to a possible threat against Hillstrom and this man, Roebuck. I kept it vague for now, but they’ll want something more concrete in due course. Maybe the time’s come for you to hand it over as we discussed. I know that’s not what you want, but I honestly can’t see any other way of progressing things.”
He was right, I didn’t want the case taken from me. Not now. In an earlier call, Garris had thought that something was about to break in the investigation. I sensed that too. The moment of crisis was approaching and I needed to be there when the curtain fell.
I kept thinking back to that frightened little boy in Isla Canela and how, whatever reassurances I’d given him, his nightmares would always be haunted by that murderous figure in white. I knew the length of that kind of shadow. It might reach far into his future, stalking him, undermining him, always lurking in the crevices of his life, ready to spring out until finally he would be forced to take action against it—booze, drugs, self-harm, suicide. That was the legacy of this killer, of all killers—not only their intended victims but a hundred other lives, shattered and unmade.
A monster like that deserved to be punished, didn’t he?
I deleted Garris’ voicemail and opened up Google. Understaffed and underfunded, I knew how long it might take the Bradbury police to swing into action. I still didn’t have a direct contact for Hillstrom but the local government website gave his secretary’s number. After ten minutes of teeth-grinding Muzak, she picked up.
“Town hall.”
“Hi, yes, this is Scott Jericho. I’d like a quick word with the mayor, if that’s possible?”
“Mr Jericho from the fair?”
Not technically lying, I answered: “Uh huh.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr Hillstrom has meetings all morning and will then be in the council chamber until after four. Could I get him to call you back then?”
“That would be great. I just need to give you a different number from the one you might have on file.”
I read it out and she laughed. “You sound a lot younger on the phone, Mr Jericho.”
“Probably all this invigorating Bradbury End air,” I said and ended the call.
In meetings all day. That meant Hillstrom was safe enough for now. I opened my contacts again and dialled Roebuck. It went straight to voicemail.
Behind me, the bedroom door opened and I felt arms loop around my waist.
“You better not be calling your secret boyfriend,” Harry said, his head against my shoulder. “Or I might just have to have your caravan towed.”
I turned and kissed him. He pulled away, telling me he hadn’t brushed his teeth, and I pulled him back saying his bed mouth tasted just fine. We stayed that way for a few minutes until he shivered and I offered him his dressing gown. I found my bag in the hall and pulled on some joggers and a T-shirt.
Heading to the kitchen, he asked, “Are you doing anything today?”
“I’ve got one or two things on,” I said casually.
He went to the sink and started filling the kettle. “I just wondered, if you weren’t busy…?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Maybe you could take me to the fair? You always promised back in Oxford that one day you would.”
I had promised. Over and over. Like almost every non-Traveller I’d ever met, once I’d told him about my background, Harry had become immediately and persistently intrigued. That old allure of the fair, of getting to glimpse behind the curtain, working its magic again.
“If you really want to,” I said, taking a seat at the breakfast bar. “They should be built up and open by now.”
“Scott, if you’d rather not–”
“No. It’s fine. I’d like you to meet them.” Would you? whispered that traitor’s voice at the back of my mind. Sure, most Travellers are now OK with gay people, but prejudice is like the cancer that had just destroyed Pete Garris’ life—it thrives in the dark and is hard to kill. “You’ll just have to take some of them as you find them,” I said. “They mean well.”
And so it was settled that we’d head down to the heath after breakfast—which was, by the time we’d eaten it, more like an early lunch. I took a quick shower and, while Harry dressed, dropped my bag off at the trailer. There I went straight to those little packets and swallowed a pick-and-mix variety of pills. My hands had been shaking again and, although I didn’t want my thoughts slowed by the drugs, I couldn’t afford cold turkey distractions either. By then, it had become a delicate balancing act.
Harry popped his head into the trailer. “Ready?”
“Yeah,” I said, turning away from the shelf. “I just need to make a quick diversion on the way.”
The streets were so snarled with traffic there was no point in taking the car. It was opening day and a lot of people seemed to be en route to the fair, but this wasn’t the only group heading into town.
Spilling off pavements, lurching into the road, cutting between startled families, dozens of men and women with their inevitable placards: KEEP BRITAIN PURE! NO TO SHARIA! As Harry had predicted, these weren’t all the usual far-right suspects like Lenny Kerrigan and the Knights of St George. Among them was a smattering of middle-class Bradburians—friends, neighbours, library-goers. Otherwise decent people who had drunk freely from that poisonous pot Gerald Roebuck suspected Mayor Hillstrom of stirring.
Harry clasped my hand determinedly. This elicited a few jeers and wolf whistles from the skinheads while t
he other protestors, those without Nazi tattoos, looked at us almost apologetically. I didn’t allow them the comfort of an understanding nod. As far as I was concerned, you’re judged by the company you march with.
Partway down the hill, Harry turned us into a street lined with ugly Edwardian houses. More placards were planted here, but at least the chanting had faded to a dull drone. Number 29 was pretty much as I might have expected the historian’s home to look. A scrap of neglected lawn led up to three muddy steps and a peeling front door. Roebuck’s curtains were drawn and a panel of glass in the door nearest the handle had been broken. Seeing this, I asked Haz to wait by the gate.
“Why? Do you think something’s wrong?”
I managed a carefree shrug. “I’m only saying hello.”
But that broken pane worried me. The shards hadn’t been cleared, which meant it was recent. Whatever the state of Roebuck’s housekeeping, he wouldn’t have left it like that. Crossing the lawn and mounting the steps, I had just lifted my hand to the door when it was wrenched open and a strange blade came jabbing out of the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I SIDESTEPPED THE JAVELIN’S dull edge and, gripping the shaft, pinned the weapon against the door. The figure inside the hall tried to yank it backwards but either I’d surprised him or else he was weak as a kitten. In any event, it stayed where it was. Harry shouted something from the gate and I heard running footsteps behind me. I had to end this and fast. When the door swung as if to close, I kicked it inwards again and a startled yelp sprang out of the gloom. In the same moment, his grip on the javelin vanished.
I was about to push my way inside when Harry grabbed my shoulder.
“Scott, wait!”
“Stay back,” I told him. “You don’t understand what going on here.”
“Nor do I!” came the voice from the hall.
I rolled my eyes. I should’ve known. Would that calculating killer who’d left each crime scene as immaculate as a forensic analyst’s workbench really have tried to murder me with a spear in broad daylight? It was so ridiculous I almost burst out laughing.
