HE WILL FIND YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist

by Charlie Gallagher

  ‘What do you need?’ the leading officer said, but his attention soon shifted to the bundle on the ground.

  ‘Do what you can to help. And we need to swap car keys.’

  ‘Mine are in the ignition,’ Vince said. The officer handed a set of keys to Vince with no further questions.

  ‘Since we can’t get out, we’re taking the car at the back!’ Vince shouted to Maddie. She stood by the back door of the car in which they’d arrived. Her head dipped out of view and then she reappeared with her radio. She ran quickly to the rearmost marked police car and Harry and Vince joined her. Vince had to reverse for a good distance to a point where it was wide enough to turn around. As the car whined back up the road, Harry reached up to turn on the interior lamp and its harsh white light exposed the amount of blood on him. It coated his hands, ran up his arms, and was splattered on his chest and lap.

  ‘You okay, boss?’ Vince said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s not mine. Are we all okay?’ There was a pause before anyone answered.

  ‘We’re okay,’ Vince said, ‘but we need to find this piece of shit.’

  ‘I know where he is.’ Maddie’s voice rasped from the background. ‘I’ve been getting messages from his sister. She must have a way of tracking him — his truck at least.’

  ‘Tracking?’ Harry turned to her.

  ‘Yes.’ She lifted heavy eyes. They were fixed open, part-glazed. She looked close to breaking, as close as Harry had ever seen her.

  ‘She must have been tracking us, too. That’s how she knew which way we needed to turn. When I said to go straight on it was because she told me. I got a message. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t explain in case you wouldn’t follow. I’m sorry, Harry, I’m still blundering on. I got caught out — it must be me she’s tracking. I’ve been lapse. And we didn’t get her back, did we? Rhiannon, I mean.’ Harry could hear the desperation. He wanted to tell her not to worry, that people made mistakes, that everything was going to be okay. He couldn’t. The images from those two kids laid out on the road were still fresh in his mind and he didn’t believe it himself.

  ‘No. But she wasn’t the one lying out on that road. We still have a chance. Where is he?’

  ‘At the back of the café. A few miles out. The truck has stopped but there’s access on foot that way apparently. From mapping it looks like there are fields between it. No roads.’

  ‘And she’s tracking the truck, not him?’

  ‘So she says.’

  ‘He’s heading back to the café. On foot. That would make sense. He knows everyone will be out looking for his vehicle.’

  ‘He can’t know we’re close or that we know who he is, then? Maybe his sister is telling the truth?’

  ‘A good liar will always stick as close to the truth as they can.’ Harry ran his hand over his head. ‘But, like you said, we don’t have anything else. Take us back to the café, Vince. I’ll call up and get whoever’s left to be in the area.’

  ‘You don’t want to go in en masse?’ Vince asked.

  ‘No. Right now he might not be expecting us. Drop the car short, somewhere out of sight, and we’ll walk in.’

  Vince revved hard to pull away pinning Harry to his seat. ‘We might be walking in, Harry, but this piece of shit ain’t walking out. I’ll tell you that now.’

  ‘I might need you to hold back, Vince. Your uniform might spook him. I need to know what’s going on before I start announcing us as police.’

  ‘You’re joking right! I ain’t missing out on all the fun!’

  ‘And there’s my other reason, Vince. Just get us there. You’ll be the first person I call when we need to take action.’

  ‘You mean when the fun starts?’

  Harry sniffed. He reached up to turn off the interior light and got a good look at the red staining up his arm.

  ‘This isn’t what I would call fun.’

  Chapter 33

  Harry and Maddie moved briskly across the broken surface of the café car park. Vince had parked the car up just a few metres short, just before the end of a thick hedgerow. He would be seconds away if he was called. Harry and Maddie both had radios in their coat pockets and also had their standard kit: an extendable baton, a pair of handcuffs and an irritant spray. It suddenly didn’t seem much as they strode into the unknown.

  The café was eerily quiet. Harry slowed up to take it fully in. He could see inside now. The lighting didn’t look right; only the middle of the room was lit as if the rest of the lights had been turned off. It wasn’t how he would expect it to look if it were open. He approached the door. Sure enough a Closed sign hung against the glass.

  ‘This place is twenty-four-seven, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maddie said.

  Harry peered through. He could make out the figure of a woman sitting at a table facing the door. She was in the only area that was lit. Her eyes were down and she was playing with her hands. Harry pulled at the door. It was locked but the sound made the woman jump as if she was suddenly plugged into the mains. She gathered herself together, stood up, and straightened her apron. She walked slowly towards them but struggled with the door, it took her a little while to open it. Harry tried his best to stay calm, to stay patient. He could tell that Maddie was doing the same.

  Finally, the door unlocked and the woman made her way back to sit at the same table. Harry moved after her. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. He could sense Maddie stood off his right shoulder. The woman was back to looking at her hands where they rested in the middle of the table.

  ‘I . . . I don’t lock it often . . . Sorry!’ She lifted her eyes and flickered a smile.

  ‘You need to talk,’ Harry said. The empty café had a strange atmosphere but his growling tone seemed to fill it instantly.

  ‘I know that. I don’t quite know where to start.’

  ‘Where’s Rhiannon?’ Maddie cut in. Harry shot a hard look at her. This woman had the upper hand. Harry didn’t like that and he sure as hell didn’t want to be reinforcing it. They needed to be measured.

  ‘She’s here, on this site, but you need to understand. You need to know everything before you can help her.’

  ‘Is she okay?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘She’s okay. She’s not far from here but you need to understand if you want to get close. Even then I can’t promise anything. He’s getting more and more unpredictable.’

  ‘What do we need to understand?’ Harry said.

  ‘That I still have some control.’

  ‘Control? What do you mean?’

  The woman sighed. ‘There’s so much . . . I don’t know—’

  ‘The beginning. The short version. But make me understand.’ The woman looked terrified. Harry thought that was genuine at least. ‘Let’s start with who you are . . . Michelle Garner . . . is that right?’

  The woman nodded. ‘We’ve never been a normal family — whatever the hell that means!’ She tried a chuckle but it sounded cracked and brittle. She took a short while to get her thoughts in order. ‘But we’ve always been a family. You know . . . together thick and thin. They tried to split us up more than once when my mum was alive. It didn’t work. She knew that when she died they would try again. And they did. I couldn’t let that happen. I told her I wouldn’t let that happen. It was the last thing I said—’

  ‘What did you do?’ Harry’s tone was a little warmer. Just enough he hoped to encourage her.

  ‘My brother . . . he has issues — his mental health. He always has. If he were born now it might not be such an issue, but he’s thirty-four. When he was a kid, no one understood him. They put him on a million different types of medication. Every doctor had a different idea, a different diagnosis. Schizophrenia was the most popular, but nothing they did seemed to help him. Anxiety, acute paranoia . . . we’ve heard them all. Now they say he has a Personality Disorder.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Well, it means there is nothing anyone can do for a start. Mark sees the world differ
ently. And his place in it? He sees that different too.’

  ‘And how is that?’

  She finally lifted her eyes to meet with Harry’s. ‘He wants the same as you and I, deep down. I understand him. I’ve always been the only one who could. He has things that are important to him, just like we all do. He has needs and frustrations, just like we all do. And he wants to be liked — loved even — and part of something . . . Just like we all do. Once I understood that, I understood him. Imagine if you saw the world different to every one of the seven billion plus others you shared it with.’

  ‘He’s a murderer.’ Harry lifted his arms and laid them on the table. He had zipped his waxed jacket up to hide the clump of blood on his chest but now he pulled up the sleeves to show the bright red staining on his white shirt. Michelle’s eyes fell to it and she bit down on a bottom lip that still quivered while Harry continued. ‘This is the blood of a young man lying out on the road, sliced down to the bone so he would bleed out. He’s dead. Your brother killed him — his girlfriend, too. That cannot happen to my colleague and I suggest we are running out of time.’

  The woman’s hand rose to cover her mouth and she sobbed a little behind it. ‘I never wanted him to hurt those kids. They were just teenagers messing around. I knew Mark wouldn’t like that. I knew the boy was in danger from the off.’

  Harry pushed his jacket sleeves back down. He needed her to be able to focus.

  ‘What did you want, Michelle?’

  ‘To keep my family together. Mark was always the problem. He caused issues at home; he was a threat to my little brother when he was born. No one knew how Mark would cope with that. He was okay, but only because I was pulling his strings, telling him it was all okay. Alex is our half-brother. He has a different dad. Mark doesn’t understand things like that. He doesn’t cope well.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I made him see Alex for what he is. Half our brother is still our brother. I played on the fact that our mother loved him so much. It was easy enough. But his dad, our stepdad . . . I could never get Mark to even acknowledge him.’

  ‘Alex turned up in the middle of my city covered in someone else’s blood. His dad’s blood. Your brother killed him, didn’t he?’

  Michelle nodded. ‘He just got out of control.’

  ‘Tell me about that?’

  ‘Someone got hold of Mark — or some group at least. He used to spend all his time online, playing games or watching videos. A lot of it was disturbing stuff. He could never hold down a job, he’s never made a friend in his life. He wouldn’t even know how to talk to a girl! But he wanted all these things, just like we all do. He just wanted to fit in, but he was never going to be able to do that. Someone got hold of him. They told him they were part of some organisation, like an underground organisation with members all over the world. Like the Masons, you know, but a lot darker. They asked him to join. Sold him the benefits and he fell for it hook, line and sinker. He’s always been the type to fixate and this became it — became his everything, his obsession.’

  ‘Organisation?’

  ‘They have a name — something about the left-hand path. It’s linked to devil worship but they don’t actually believe in the devil. It’s complicated, but basically you have to prove you can live like the devil would. The thinking is that if the devil was a real thing, if he were alive today, he would be in charge because he would take what he wanted and he wouldn’t be held back by the sort of things that we would. Like being part of a society with rules that looks after the weak. Does that make sense? It all sounds so ridiculous out loud!’ She snorted a little and gave a strained smile.

  ‘Carry on.’ Harry was stern. This was all sounding familiar after what he had read of the Jarod Logan investigation, but he wanted her to explain what she knew.

  ‘I really don’t know how to explain it. My brother has been walking around with his left hand bleeding for nearly six months. Every day he digs at his palm with some piece of metal. It’s all part of the commitment apparently. It’s idiotic. But it was more than just some symbolic self-harm. These people were getting him to do things. Expressions of loyalty they called them. At first it was silly things like shoplifting or running up behind someone and slapping them. He had to get evidence of what he was doing on his mobile phone and he would send it off. It was done over something like a messenger app that was all encrypted. Some of the stuff he was sending and the people he was talking to . . . I could see they were going to get him into a lot of trouble. His tasks were . . . escalating, the things they were telling him to do getting nastier. He punched some pensioner to the ground then kicked him. He looked like such a frail old man. This was just in the High Street and in the middle of the day. He was going to get himself arrested and that was where our troubles had come from before. When mum died, Social Services had already been back in touch. They were already saying that I wouldn’t be able to cope when I said I would be Alex’s primary carer. We were on a six-month trial period. Mark was living with us and he was out punching pensioners to the floor! It wasn’t going to end well. Either Alex was going to get taken away or Mark was going to prison. Either way I wasn’t keeping my promise to mum.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about what your brother was up to. Fine details, too. Did he confide in you about all this?’

  ‘No. I cloned his phone a while ago, before all this started even. I know what you’re going to think about that. I know you won’t understand. You can’t. I was trying to keep him out of trouble. To do that I had to know who he was talking to, what he was looking at. It was so simple to do . . . I could see everything he was seeing on my own handset. I saw this thing escalate so quickly! So I stepped in. It wasn’t hard at all. His contact wasn’t using a real name and there were no personal details. Anyway, I had seen everything that was said between them. I just approached him using another fictional name and I said there had been a security breach, that the phones had been compromised and they both needed to change their names. I told Mark he should ignore anyone else. This group used odd language — distinctive. It was easy to talk like they did. Whoever had been in touch with him lost interest almost instantly — so quickly that it just confirmed to me what I suspected from the start . . . that this organisation didn’t even exist. It was just one person — maybe just some kid winding my brother up for fun for all I knew! I was the only one left communicating with Mark and he really believed I was this organisation.’

  ‘So if this negative influence stopped, how did we get here?’

  ‘I lost control. I planned on phasing it out, moving him onto something else if I could . . .’ Her eyes flicked between him and Maddie as if she was choosing her next words very carefully. ‘Then I saw an opportunity. There was this one social worker . . . she had it in for us from the start. As soon as my mum died, she came for Alex. She wanted to put him into care. Mark was waiting for a task, so I thought I would give him one more. He was just supposed to rough her up, scare her a bit . . .’ Michelle was suddenly racked with sobs. Harry sat back. The outburst was sudden. ‘He drowned her!’

  Harry didn’t say anything; he wanted her to continue. He did his best to remain impassive.

  ‘He made it look like she did it herself. I saw the photos. These people — or this person . . . when they had Mark do one of his tasks, he had to send proof. He would send a before and an after. I think he just walked her into a lake. He’d made her write out a note. He sent a picture of that, too. I don’t know how he did that. How do you make someone do something like that? I wouldn’t even know where to start.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ Harry said.

  ‘I was panicking, as you can imagine. The whole idea was to get him out of trouble and now he was responsible for someone’s death! My mum hadn’t been gone long — there was so much to sort out. I just didn’t know where my head was. I still had access to her bank accounts. She had savings. I took everything I could and I told the letting company that we were leaving. I just too
k the money and I moved us all away. I don’t know . . . maybe I thought I could run away from everything. I bought into the café down here. It was just an opportunity that seemed to be the right distance away. The only thing Mark had ever done for work was selling a few loads of firewood. He used to know a lorry driver who delivered cut wood in bulk and he would chuck Mark some to sell. That driver came through the café here and he told me they were looking for an investor. It seemed to make sense. I put mum’s savings into buying a share of the café. It gave me a job and a place to live upstairs. I bought Mark a lorry so he could carry on with the wood business but he quickly lost interest.’

  ‘Because he wanted to carry on with expressing his loyalty to what he thought was some underground organisation?’

  ‘It was all he cared about. Whoever had first got hold of him had filled his head with what he could achieve if he was part of this group — or rather how he would never achieve anything if he wasn’t. And he was convinced that he’d get accepted sooner if he escalated quickly — he was desperate to prove himself. They’d told him there was extra kudos for recruiting others so he started trying to pick up contacts through online gaming or just on social media.’

  ‘How many did he recruit?’

  Michelle’s head dropped a little. ‘Two.’

  ‘Any more? Only you don’t look too sure?’

  ‘Two, only two. I just didn’t want to be telling the police all this. All I’ve been trying to do for the last eighteen months is trying to keep a lid on him. And here I am . . .’

  ‘What two?’

  ‘What two? You mean who? I didn’t get names — I didn’t want to know.’

  ‘So how do you know there were only two?’

  ‘Because of his phone. He found them the same way someone found him, through video games. But then he would contact them on his phone via a messenger app. He was now the one setting them tasks and they were sending their own pictures as evidence. But he would meet up with them quite early on, before the tasks got too bad and once they had proven themselves with some minor stuff. He’s never trusted anyone. He would meet them here. It was tearing me up. I saw these people come in here to meet him for the first time and they had no idea. But I did! I knew exactly what was waiting for them, what was expected of them.’