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

by Will Harker

  I handed the printout back to Garris.

  “Broadway and the London stage is probably a bit of a stretch,” he said. “If he’d been that famous, I would have found him easily enough online. Roebuck really had to go digging for that hidden treasure. But a career as an actor is suggestive, don’t you think? Anyway, I’d guess that, when the father died back in the ’70s, he must have left his wife and child pretty well off. False documents good enough to fool the police don’t come cheap”

  I shook my head. “He was the one who started me on the case. Pete, listen, we’ve said before how obsessive these murders seem. How the killer’s main motivation isn’t necessarily the individual deaths but the accomplishment of the complete design. The full recreation of the Jericho freaks. Why would he imperil that by hiring a detective to investigate his own crimes?”

  Garris took a moment to consider his answer. “We assumed that some overall design was his motivation, but we don’t know that for sure. What does ring true is the idea that this whole thing is like a story. It has the feel of something fabricated. And if it is a story, well then, every good yarn needs both its hero and its villain. Who better to play the part of crusading detective than a descendant of old Slip-Jointed Jericho himself? Can’t you see the irresistibility of that idea to a man who had been obsessed by the tragedy since boyhood?”

  I shook my head again. The painkillers were starting to fog my thoughts. Everything Garris was saying tallied with my initial suspicions about the child whose bedroom window had overlooked the bridge, and then there was Roebuck’s confirmation of Jonathan Matthers’ morbid interest in the tragedy. But still, there was something wrong with this picture. And it wasn’t just the obvious objection that I now put to Garris.

  “His disability. There’s no way he could have killed McAllister and the others. He couldn’t have even climbed the stairs to Adya Mahal’s flat.”

  Garris looked at me almost pityingly. “He’d researched you, remember? You told me about that strange presentation he gave before getting down to the murders. He knew all about your background and what had happened with the Malanowski kids and Kerrigan. He created a persona for you to deduce, one that might appeal to your strong sense of justice: a man who hurt children but who, unlike Kerrigan, had been punished for it. A punishment that would satisfy the rage inside you. And being satisfied, you bought the lie. I don’t think anything happened to him in prison, Scott. I think he acted the part of a man who had suffered a vicious attack and because you saw what you wanted to see, you fell for it. I think Jonathan Matthers is perfectly capable of these murders.”

  “His books,” I murmured. “He told me he’d bought new ones when he came out of prison because he couldn’t bear the thought of how the police had handled them during his arrest. He hadn’t read a single one, had he? ‘Professor Campbell’ doesn’t exist.”

  Garris folded his arms over his stomach. “These killings always had a touch of the theatre, didn’t they? The way they were staged?”

  “We said he might have killed before,” I reminded Garris. “That there was that sense of experience and calculation at the crime scenes.”

  “It’s possible. We’ll have to notify the police in any location Matthers resided. See if there are any unsolved murders that coincide with his time living there.”

  But again something didn’t chime with me. “A paedophile murdering adults?” I said.

  “It’s an unusual MO, I grant you,” Garris conceded. “But we’ll know more once we interview him. In the meantime…” He creaked to his feet, a hand in the small of his back. “You concentrate on getting better. I’ll notify my contact in the local CID tonight. If the hospital releases you in the morning, it might be useful for us to meet with him tomorrow and get a forensics team down to Roebuck’s. But only if you feel up to it. And Scott?” That hooded look again. “I meant what I said before. You leave him to us now. Your part in this case is over.”

  As soon as Garris vanished behind the curtain, I ripped the securing tape from the back of my hand. Then, pinching the end of the cannula between thumb and forefinger, tore the needle out of my vein. The pain was so minuscule next to the shriek of my ribs I barely noticed it. Luckily someone had left a pack of cotton wool on the cupboard by the bed and, pulling it open with my teeth, I pressed a wad to the puncture point. The bleeding stopped within a couple of seconds.

  In the cupboard, I found my boots and a travel bag containing toiletries and a change of clothes. I guessed Harry must have brought them from my trailer. I pulled on a pair of jeans, a fresh T-shirt and jumper, every movement sparking some new agony. My phone I discovered in the bag’s side pocket along with my wallet. By the time I’d laced my boots, I was a little breathless.

  Sitting on the bed, I thumbed the killer’s contact.

  “Mis-ter Jer-i-cho,” came that piping voice. “And what can I do for you?”

  My hand tightened around the phone until the casing squeaked. “Are you at home, Professor?”

  “Where else would I be on a night such as this?”

  “I’m going to pop over in about an hour,” I said. “I think you deserve an update on the case.”

  “No need, sir. You can perhaps email me your report at a later date.”

  “One hour,” I said, and cancelled the call.

  No one tried to stop me from leaving the hospital. The nurses on the ward seemed busy enough with the patients demanding their attention to pay much heed to one avoiding it. In fact, it was only when I reached the taxi stand outside that anyone challenged me.

  “Sure you’re all right to be going home, mate?” asked the cabbie as I groaned my way onto his backseat. When I asked if he could take me all the way to Cambridge and back for double his usual fare, his concern seemed to vanish. Giving him the address, I added two further requests:

  “Get me there as fast as you can and please don’t talk on the way.”

  The storm had quieted during my unconscious hours, though dark clouds remained, dragging their swollen bellies across the moon. As we swept out of town, the drowned fields on either side of the road glinted like spilled oil. It made me think again of the killer from my dream, his face a blank and howling void.

  Did Jonathan Matthers’ face fit that emptiness? Were his the eyes that had watched me from beyond the railway crossing? Physically, he fitted that lean, gangly form quite well. And so was Garris right? Had I let myself be deceived because the terrible fate he claimed to have suffered in prison satisfied my brutal instinct for justice? I had been abused and degraded inside a prison myself and so wasn’t it fitting that someone whose crimes dwarfed my own should endure a much worse fate? One that I might also project onto Lenny Kerrigan.

  And yet.

  As a final puzzle piece, Matthers would not slip neatly into position but had to be hammered home. I closed my eyes. Bit my lip against the pain blooming through the failing opioids in my bloodstream. As the miles and minutes flew by, I tried to turn Matthers this way and that, to force him to yield to the role Garris and I had imagined for him. But he would not yield. Instead, I kept catching whispers in the darkness of my mind, like dissenting voices shouting from another room.

  “This the place, mate?” the cabbie called over his shoulder.

  I glanced down the long drive to the looming hulk of the house. At that moment my phone chirruped—a missed call from my dad. I guessed the hospital must finally have realised they were a patient short and contacted my next of kin. I put the phone on silent.

  “Wait for me here,” I said. “I shouldn’t be too long.”

  “Be as long as you like. But why don’t you let me drive you up there? Honestly, mate, you look like you’re about to drop.”

  But I didn’t want the taxi’s headlights announcing my arrival. First, I wanted to get a peek at Jonny boy and his dear old mother.

  I was almost at the house, one hand cradling my ribs, the wind wrenching at me, when a volley of barking cut acro
ss the fields. I stopped dead. Some lonely dog, perhaps alerted by a stranger’s scent. I suddenly thought of Webster and the curious incident of how he had remained silent when the killer came for him in the night. Could I imagine that loyal fairground juk going off willingly with Jonathan Matthers?

  Matthers, who I now saw through his study window, standing freely in front of the fire, his hands stretched out to the flames. Matthers who walked to the decanter on the sideboard and poured himself a drink. Matthers who nevertheless could not walk because DCI Pete Garris, my mentor, my friend, had told me he couldn’t. Garris’ words came back to me:

  “Got a big compo pay-out after some other prisoners managed to corner him in his cell and cut off his nuts… Gave him a pretty brutal kicking afterwards which resulted in some spinal damage.”

  Those details hadn’t been part of Matthers’ fake identity. What Garris had told me concerning the attack upon him in prison had come from Pete’s research into the incident. Details he claimed to have gathered from official sources. But if they had been fabricated then only one person could have invented them.

  I felt the ground shift beneath me. Felt the world tilt. Felt the final puzzle piece slip smoothly into place. I should have seen it back at the hospital but my pain and the opioids had dulled my thinking. Now the truth about Peter Garris came crashing down and, with that truth, a way to verify it.

  Taking out my phone I quickly looked up the number and called.

  “St Hilda’s Hospice, how may I help?”

  My throat was so dry I could barely get the words out. “I want to make a donation,” I said. “In memory of a patient who’s just passed away. Is that possible?”

  “Of course. I’m so sorry for your loss. May I have the patient’s name?”

  “Harriet,” I almost sighed the word. “Garris.”

  I heard the clack of a keyboard. A short, murmured conversation. Then:

  “I’m sorry, we don’t appear to have had a patient of that name. Are you sure–?”

  “No,” I said softly. “You wouldn’t have. Because Harriet Garris doesn’t exist.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I DIDN’T SEE IT ALL AT THAT MOMENT, but I saw enough. And what I saw planted a new pain deep inside me. A pain keener than any physical hurt inflicted in that alley back in Bradbury End. During all those boozy after-work chats in The Three Crowns, I’d felt that I had found not just a colleague but a friend. More than that: a father to stand in for the one who had never understood me. True, there had always been a certain reticence on his part, a professional distance bordering on the emotionless, but this? This, I had never imagined.

  What Peter Garris really was had struck me at almost the same moment as my realisation that he’d invented Jonathan Matthers’ prison injuries. It was then that I remembered the conversation in my trailer. The one during which we’d picked over the file and speculated on the nature of the killer. In his analysis, Garris had been describing himself:

  “If our man fits the typical profile, he’s likely to be a loner without a family or normal home life, although he may give the illusion he has one.”

  And what an illusion Harriet Garris had been. A painfully shy woman, kind but reclusive, living in the shadow of her forthright and accomplished husband. A husband who, in his undemonstrative way, had loved her so much he’d even taken pride in those amateurish watercolours of hers. A caring, nurturing soul who had written homely letters to Garris’ disgraced protégé. Letters I had answered, scrawling my thanks onto prison notepaper.

  Had he enjoyed reading them, I wondered? Had he laughed at their expressions of pathetic gratitude?

  I stepped towards the house, ran my knuckles across the brickwork, grating them until they bled. That anger Maxine Thierrot had seen inside me was kindled again. All that time Garris and I had worked together, all the praise he’d heaped on my intuition and insights, all the monsters we’d hunted down and put behind bars, I had never seen that the most heinous of them all walked beside me. Oh, but he must have taken such sweet delight in that.

  I drew my hands away, flicked my blood against the stone. I could feel the hunger for those little packets back in my trailer. Part of me wanted to blot out this hateful truth; part of me wanted to rage against it. I tried to calm both instincts. Tried to focus. Questions remained: why would he kill these people? Why would he attempt to frame Jonathan Matthers? What’s the purpose of it all?

  Again that conversation in the trailer came back to me. Perhaps there was no purpose other than a deranged killer’s sick game. What I had always interpreted as professional reticence was in all probability the heartless void of a true psychopath. A cold-blooded predator who, in order to disguise himself, had learned to mimic human emotions while feeling nothing himself. I’d met more than my fair share of such men; to creatures like these, the infliction of pain is purpose enough.

  Pain—the Jericho victims’ and my own. He had killed them in mockery of me, of the life I’d been born into, of its legends and traditions. In that sense he was like Zac’s father; the parent who sneered at their child’s achievements. Only unlike Zac’s father, he had pretended to be proud of mine. Wondering what I had done to make him despise me was a pointless exercise, I knew. The rat’s maze of a psychopath’s mind defied any empathic logic. But still, I wondered…

  Enough. I’d ask him myself before the night was over. First, I needed to speak with Mrs Matthers and her son.

  I didn’t have to knock. The iron-banded oak door swung open at my approach. That guilt-ridden, round-shouldered nanny I had first seen fussing with her crucifix and giving dark hints about her employer greeted me again.

  “My dear Mr Jericho,” she said. “What on earth has happened to you?”

  I closed the door behind me.

  “The question is, what has happened to you, Miss Barton. Or do you prefer Mrs Matthers?”

  “Who?” She clutched at the golden cross lying against her breast. “I’m sorry, I don’t under–”

  Mocking applause echoed out from the corridor beyond the paederast’s gallery.

  “Bravo, Detective! Bravo! So you have penetrated our secret. How ever did you guess?”

  Jonathan Matthers came striding into the hall. He still appeared painfully thin but gone was the strangely ageless professor tucked up in his chair. This figure was immediately more vibrant, animated by a sort of manic energy. His speech was different too. No more of that lisping haughtiness but a lazy American drawl. Only his lips appeared the same, sporting that faintly violent rouge.

  He circled the hall as I spoke, occasionally pausing to admire one of those prepubescent statues, occasionally skipping, once or twice stopping to lay a hand against his mother’s burned cheek. She meanwhile remained impassive.

  “There was always something that didn’t ring true about your performance,” I said.

  That brought him to a halt. He pouted. “All the world’s a critic. So tell me, darling, what fault did you find in our dear Professor Campbell?”

  “His disinterest,” I shrugged. “All that hyper-excitement while you were briefing me about the murders, all that desperation to attract my interest and get me to take the case. Then, as soon as I did, complete indifference. Not even a scrap of curiosity about my progress, despite the fact you were paying me a frankly ludicrous fee. Someone tonight presented you to me in the role of a dark storyteller, manipulating me like a character in a murder mystery, yet surely if that were true you would be hanging on every development. But no, you had no interest because you already knew the solution to the mystery.”

  Jonathan squealed and clapped his hands as if I were a magician who had just pulled a rabbit out of his hat. “Very good, Detective! But not just because I knew the solution to your petty mystery, but because I wasn’t interested. I assume you know all about my childhood in Bradbury End? Well then, I will admit to a passing fascination with that tawdry tale of the drowned freaks. How could I not? Incarceration
forces one to find hobbies in one’s immediate environment.” He cast his mother a sour glance. “She’d never let me out of her sight, you know? And so yes, I became interested in the tragedy. Even plagued some pitiful old bore at the library with questions about it. But honestly, until Inspector Garris darkened our door, I hadn’t thought about it in years. Other interests came my way as I grew.”

  He winked at me and I felt my bloodied fists twitch.

  “How did Garris find you?” I asked.

  “He said we were perfect, didn’t he, Mother? Perfect! He’d been researching the Travellers Bridge tragedy, you see, and came across our story. Said we were ideal for a small drama he was contemplating. He gave me my character of Professor Campbell and mother the role of Miss Barton. Not a born actress,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “but she did quite well, I think. He briefed me all about you, too. I must say, he’s a most unnerving fellow, but undoubtedly the best director I’ve ever had. Told me how to push your buttons without going too far. Warned me that if I did, I might end up like that Nazi chap you put in the hospital.”

  “When did he first contact you?”

  “Oh, I forget.” He waved an airy hand. “Six months ago, was it, Mother?”

  Delia Matthers gave a silent nod.

  “And he blackmailed you into all this?”

  Another wink, this time accompanied by a titter. “He discovered I’d been naughty again. We left the States a couple of years ago, just after I got out of prison. I won’t go into all the details, doubtless you’d find them sordid. Suffice to say, I’d been on tour with a production of Joseph—my Pharaoh was the talk of Seattle—when some of the children in the cast started bleating about my conduct. Anyway, we decided on a fresh start back in the home country. Truly, Mr Jericho, I’d intended to mend my ways, but the flesh is weak. During his research into us, Mr Garris discovered certain slips in my online behaviour and threatened to expose me if I refused to play along with his game. Bearing in mind my previous conviction, that would have meant a lengthy prison sentence.”