by Steve Mosby
‘All right.’
Stanley walked to the table, poured himself a glass of water and took a sip. Then he moved to the microphone again, cupped his hands together and rocked back on one heel slightly. Okay, let’s introduce our first act this evening.
He looked at the stage to his left, frowning into the space there. Silence settled on the theatre for a few seconds.
Then he broke it, talking quickly.
‘This is good. Straight away, I have an older gentleman here. He’s quite tall, and he’s smiling a lot. A friendly chap.’ He smiled back at the spirit. ‘And I like him. He’s saying William, Will or possibly Bill. Does that mean anything to anyone?’
I figured the odds were fairly good, and William was immediately claimed by a couple sitting a few rows down from us. I could only see the backs of their heads, but it was easy to guess a lot of what Stanley was going to say, and why.
William would most likely be connected to the woman, I thought, because she’d been the one to put her hand up. And from the couple’s age, he would probably be her father. I’d go for ‘father figure’, myself, because it covered more bases. At some point, the spirit would gesture to his chest, indicating that was the way he’d passed. It was a safe bet - people don’t die from breaking a leg - and he’d probably also say he’d been ill for a while. Even if his death turned out to have been from a sudden head injury, it was always possible the doctors had missed something. The point is, you can’t really argue with a ghost, can you?
Stanley worked through these and more, and had the advantage over me of being able to see the woman’s responses as well as hear them. With every confirmation or slight look of confusion, he tailored his comments accordingly, relaying banal and general information the woman had given him right back to her.
What was your old phone number, Will? I wanted to ask.
Your National Insurance number?
None of that mattered, though, because the woman was being told what she wanted to hear. Her father was at peace. He was still with them. Every day, he smiled and was proud of them. He could hear them when they spoke to him.
Harmless lies. I felt myself growing more angry with every word.
My dislike aside, I had to admit he was smooth and professional. As a magician, I was impressed. I noted three solid hits against more than twenty misses, and yet William’s daughter would probably go away amazed at how accurate he’d been. And that was all down to his expertise - Thom Stanley was successful because he managed to obscure the fact he got almost everything wrong. He glossed over mistakes so quickly that even I was hardly sure he’d made them. And I was counting.
The evening carried on in a similar vein for half an hour, and the anger became diluted by boredom. Then Thom Stanley pinched his fingers against the bridge of his nose, looked across the stage, and said the words I’d been waiting to hear. Rob and I had been mentally crossing our fingers about this moment for the last two weeks.
‘Okay. I have a young man with me now. Very clear. His name is Andrew, and he’s pointing over in this direction. I believe it’s you, sir, and you, madam.’
We were going to have an article. I clenched Sarah’s hand a little. She clenched it back.
‘It’s Nathan and Nancy, isn’t it?’
He was talking to an elderly couple down the front. The woman nodded, and Stanley smiled at her.
‘Lovely to see you both here.’
He knew their names already, of course. I knew them too: Nathan and Nancy Phillips, who were regular subscribers to the Anonymous Skeptic. They occasionally volunteered their services to help us out with take-downs, and we’d figured they would be ideal for tonight’s little adventure.
‘It’s your son, isn’t it?’ Stanley said. He turned back to the empty stage. ‘His name’s Andrew. Brown hair. He’s smiling too. And my word, he’s a strapping lad!’
The audience laughed; the Phillipses smiled at each other.
‘He was, yes,’ Nancy said.
Stanley knew their names already because the Phillips were on his client list; they’d booked a private appointment earlier this year, which they’d acted as though they were very pleased with. That’s how these things work - there would be strangers in this audience, but I imagined there was also a large contingent that Stanley had already met and talked with in the past. Needless to say, that made it slightly easier for him to guess right. In magic terms, we’d call them stooges - people who are in on the act - but this was slightly different. The sympathetic people in here didn’t realise there was a trick to be in on.
To my and Rob’s immense delight, Thom Stanley had visited Nathan and Nancy again last week, giving them a free consultation and tickets for tonight’s performance. The audience didn’t know that, of course, and so he could use their names, along with the details they’d given him, and act as though he was getting this information from the spirit.
‘Andrew says he knows it’s not easy, but he’s asking you not to worry about him.’
‘That’s such a comfort.’
‘He’s pointing to his stomach too. That makes sense?’
They nodded again.
‘He’s such a young man.’ Stanley frowned. Then: ‘Oh - he’s saying ‘‘it’s gone now, Mum’’. It was cancer, wasn’t it? Yes, he’s nodding now.’
‘It was cancer, yes.’
‘He’s saying it’s gone now. He wants you to know he’s not in any pain.’
Stanley’s voice was soothing and full of reassurance, like a therapist. If I hadn’t known the truth, it would have been surprisingly easy to imagine there really was a young man standing on the stage, invisible to everyone but him.
Unfortunately, Nathan and Nancy had never had any children at all, never mind one who’d died. When Stanley had visited them, almost everything they’d told him about ‘Andrew’ had been a bare-faced lie. The one - noble - exception was his appearance, which Stanley would be basing on the photograph he’d seen on their mantelpiece. A tall guy. Medium-length, sandy-brown hair. Average build: not all that strapping, really, but then parents like that, don’t they? A slightly shy smile. To put it another way, a picture of me.
Thom Stanley carried on talking about Andrew for nearly ten minutes, and my distaste for the man grew stronger with every moment. We already had enough to cause him severe embarrassment, but there was one further path he could take, one that would utterly ruin him, and I found myself willing him on.
‘Andrew’s also telling me something about a necklace?’
Bingo.
He stood up and walked back to the stage, looking confused by the message. ‘He’s saying it’s gold, and he’s holding his chest. Is it a heart? A necklace with a heart on it?’
Nancy Phillips nodded quickly. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘He thinks you’ve lost it?’
‘Yes!’
‘Well, Andrew says not to worry. He’s been keeping an eye on you, and he says you should check the landing upstairs. A bookcase - does that make any sense? He says it’s near a bookcase there.’
You piece of shit, I thought.
Towards the end of Stanley’s visit to their house, he’d excused himself and gone upstairs to use the toilet. We’d set up a hidden camera in the bedroom and left the door tantalisingly open. The camera had captured him entering the room and quickly removing a necklace from Nancy’s jewellery box. After he’d left, we found it down the back of the small bookcase on the upstairs landing, where he must have casually deposited it on his way to the bathroom.
As we watched the footage afterwards, Rob and I hadn’t been able to believe our eyes. It was strangely beautiful. We knew about such methods, of course, but still felt like deep sea divers who’d just captured some rarely-seen jellyfish on film.
Oblivious to what he’d just done, Stanley walked back to the stage. Then he closed his eyes and scratched his forehead, looking troubled. We were meant to think someone else was coming through, but apparently with more difficulty than the others.
/> You absolute piece of shit.
He opened his eyes and peered across the empty stage.
‘Oh.’
Then took a step back.
‘I don’t like that.’
My first thought was that it was a strange thing to say. The expression on his face was misjudged too. He looked almost horrified - as though whatever spirit he was seeing was unexpectedly frightening.
Where are you going with this? Surely he was smart enough to realise people wouldn’t appreciate their dead relatives looking scary?
The audience shuffled, a little unsettled by the performance. He had gone very pale and appeared to be listening intently, wanting to look away from whatever he was seeing but unable to do so.
I had a sudden premonition that he was going to ask about a ‘Julie’, and I shivered as he turned back to us, all the earlier reassurance and comfort gone from his face.
He cleared his throat.
‘Does the name Tori mean anything to anyone?’
Chapter Fourteen
Thursday 1st September
‘This is what I called you about,’ the tech officer said.
Currie leaned on one side of the desk, Swann on the other, both of them bathed in green light from the monitor. Seated in between them, the techie clicked twice on the mouse. The screen changed to show the list of text messages sent from Julie Sadler’s phone over the last three weeks. The four at the end were the messages that followed her death:
You let her die.
The six before that were the same two lines, repeated again and again:
Hey there. Sorry for silence. Am fine, just busy. Hope u r too. Maybe catch up sometime soon. Julie
It was more or less the same wording as they’d found in the previous murders. The assumption was that the killer had stored the ‘I’m okay’ message in Julie’s phone, and then forwarded it to anyone who contacted her in the meantime.
Currie gestured to the complicated series of numbers at the side of each message, which related to the GPS location of Julie Sadler’s mobile phone when the text was sent. ‘These have all been traced already,’ he said.
‘That was what I wanted to see you about.’
The techie double-clicked on one. The new window took a second or two to open. When it did, they were looking at a satellite photo.
‘This one is the same as all the others,’ he told them. ‘He turned the mobile on in a very quiet neighbourhood, sent the text, then switched the phone off again.’
Currie looked at the area laid out on the screen. For each of the sent messages, the tech team had isolated the position of Julie Sadler’s mobile phone to within a few metres. They were looking at a stock photograph of the landscape from above. It was mostly fields, with a couple of small streets curling in from the side.
Knowing the exact location the killer had been at certain times generated equal amounts of work and frustration. Because he avoided anywhere with cameras, all they were left with was the small hope that a resident might have seen something. There was little chance they’d remember anything from such a specific date and time - nobody had yet - but they still had to be interviewed, tying up more of the team.
And Currie had actually come to hate these overhead GPS views for another reason. They were infuriating, because he knew the killer had been right there. In most murder investigations, all you had was a single scene, the one where the crime had taken place, but this case kept providing them with the killer’s exact location at other times. They had access to his whereabouts. It felt unfair that he could still elude them so completely, as though he was showing them his face, but then turning quickly away before they could look. Too damn smart.
‘No CCTV nearby,’ the techie said.
‘No.’ Currie was impatient. They had already been through this. ‘He’s too clever for that.’
‘Maybe not as clever as you think.’
‘What do you mean?’
The officer didn’t reply, but minimised that window and then clicked on the second message from the top. The new window loaded slowly.
‘Are you saying we’ve caught him on film?’
‘We have. Although don’t get your hopes up just yet.’
Currie wanted to shake the man. Don’t get your hopes up.
After a second, the new screen appeared: another aerial snapshot. This one appeared to be a section of the city centre. The middle of the screen was filled with a large grey square.
‘The old shopping centre in town,’ Currie said. Although that was actually giving the place way too much credit. It was more of a wide, covered walkway, with shops all along to either side. Currie dimly remembered there had been repeated calls for surveillance cameras to be installed throughout, because of skateboarders. It had never happened.
The techie said, ‘He sent the text from inside, just after midday on Friday, when he knew the centre would be very busy.’
‘There’s no CCTV in there,’ Currie said. ‘Some in the stores, maybe, but none on the concourse itself.’
‘No, there isn’t. But there are only three entrances.’ He zoomed out a little and moved the mouse pointer between the top, bottom and side of the centre. With a single click of a button, several small yellow circles were overlaid on the satellite picture, and then he sat back, proud of himself. ‘We have cameras on all three of those streets.’
Currie leaned in, estimating distances in his head. The cameras to the top and bottom were very close. The one to the side looked further away, but it was still possible it would have caught something.
‘They cover all the ways in and out?’ he said.
‘All the standard ways. The ramps and steps.’
Currie thought it over. There were probably a hundred other routes the killer could have taken, in theory - back doors on the shops, perhaps - so none of this would prove anything. But at the same time …
‘You can pull the footage from all three entrances for, say, an hour either side of the text message?’
‘Yeah. Unless he went in earlier and hung around?’
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ Swann said.
Currie nodded. ‘Too much chance of being remembered. Plus, it would imply he knew about the cameras. So why not just go somewhere else?’
He caught his partner’s eye, and saw the faintest glint there. Conclusive or not, it was likely they had the killer on film. If they took an hour from either side of that text message then three separate cameras gave them six hours of material. They could sit down, watch it, and when it finished they would have seen the killer in the flesh.
They were still holding each other’s gaze.
‘But why go somewhere with cameras?’ Currie said. ‘He’s always been careful before.’
‘Might work there?’
‘It’s possible. Or maybe there was something he couldn’t get out of. He wouldn’t have done it from there if he didn’t need to.’
Swann smiled, and Currie could read his partner’s mind.
Or maybe we got lucky and he finally made a mistake.
He stood up and put his hands in his pockets. Of course, despite the buzz in his chest, there was no way they were going to have time to sit down and watch six hours of footage right now.
Still, there were ways around that.
‘Okay, we’ll need an hour either side, from each camera.’
The techie nodded. ‘Yep. That’s easy enough.’
Currie smiled.
‘Don’t get your hopes up just yet,’ he said.
At eight o’clock they left the tech officer to sort the footage. Where it was possible, Currie explained, he wanted stills from the surveillance films, labelled with times and sorted into categories. If he asked to see men with dark hair, for example, he wanted to be able to click through a series of photographs. It would be a tedious and time-consuming task. The techie had looked a little crestfallen.
‘Everyone?’
‘No, no,’ Currie told him. ‘Just do the men for now.’
/> After they were finished there, Swann drove home to catch some sleep, and Currie went back to the incident room. He sat down, absently picked up a pencil and stared through the whiteboard that covered most of the wall. Photos of the four dead girls were tacked along the top, while the rest was filled with details of the murders written neatly in black or red marker pen.
On the surface, he was trying to make sense of what was there; deep down, his thoughts were occupied with other things.
Since his encounter with Mary Carroll last week, the things she’d said, the way she’d reacted - they kept coming back to him. He hadn’t expected it to go well, of course: he’d known enough about the case in advance to appreciate there was no ‘good news’ he could take that would provide any real comfort. But, perhaps stupidly, he had wanted to reassure her a little. To let her know that whatever her father had done in the past, and as repulsive a man as he might still be, he was far less of a threat than she obviously imagined.
His visit had only made things worse, and it still bothered him. Even knowing Frank Carroll had been electronically tagged, and that it was impossible for him to have committed the crimes, she’d been adamant that he was responsible. On one level Currie understood it; he’d seen what she’d done to her leg, after all. The abuse she’d suffered might have ended ten years ago, but it was never a finite thing: not a case of stop and start. It was ever-present. And so it was entirely natural for her father still to loom large in her mind. A broken old man casting a huge shadow through a trick of perspective. But …
You have no idea what my father is capable of.
That was true.
He tapped the pencil against his teeth a couple of times - then swivelled the chair round to the desk and slid out the details he’d printed from Frank Carroll’s online case file. Skipping past the photographs of Mary and Frank, he looked for the contact number for the detective who’d handled the investigation. There it was. Dan Bright. The area code was for Richmond.
He dialled it now, then glanced at his watch as he waited. The chances were slim, but—
‘Richmond PD. How may I help?’
‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to speak to Detective Dan Bright. Is he available?’
