by Rob Campbell
“Lester recruited me straight out of university,” Dylan began. “Talk to enough colleagues at Lester’s, and they’ll tell you a similar story.” He took a sip from his black coffee and returned the cup to its saucer.
“I wasn’t having much luck in hunting down my first job before I answered an advert for a position with The Hawkstone Foundation.”
“The Hawkstone Foundation,” I repeated. “So, Lester’s organisation does have a name after all.”
“It’s what he calls the charitable arm of his business – nothing to do with his obsessive hunt for his pieces of heaven,” Dylan clarified. “Anyway, the job sounded intriguing: research into electromagnetic imaging and the like, and with no better offers, I signed up.”
“To do what?”
“Well, that’s the real question, isn’t it? Nothing at first. There was what the foundation called ‘the induction period’. I quickly realised that this was no ordinary job,” he said knowingly. Dylan took a quick look around as if to check that nobody would overhear what he said next. “You’ve seen the data centre, I presume?”
I thought back to the large building situated at the end of a path through the back of Lester’s garden and nodded eagerly.
“I spent the best part of a fortnight there, along with my fellow inductees. The first week consisted of a series of aptitude tests that seemed to have no connection to the ‘electromagnetic imaging research’ position advertised. Stranger still was the personality profiling: questions such as do you believe in the paranormal? Have you ever been in trouble with the law? What are your thoughts on evil spirits and life after death? What are your thoughts on luck? Do you believe in pre-ordained destiny or do you make your own luck?”
“Heavy stuff,” Monkey commented, transfixed by Dylan’s unfolding tale.
“Right,” Dylan agreed. “But based on what we know now,” he added, pointing around the table to indicate the three of us, “it makes a bit more sense.”
He ran his finger around the rim of his cup, sighing wistfully. “Still, I didn’t question the job too much; it paid well, and I was interested to see where it would all lead. At the end of the induction period, most of the others were let go, but I finally got an introduction to the famous Lester Hawkstone.”
“What? You hadn’t met him until this point?” I asked, surprised.
Dylan shook his head slowly. “Nope. Before that point, everything had been handled by his selection team.”
“He employs a selection team?” How many people did he actually have on the payroll? Maybe that’s why he couldn’t afford to pay us. “What happened next?”
“Lester congratulated me on succeeding during induction week and informed me that if I was prepared to sign a confidentiality clause, he would give me an immediate five-thousand-pound salary increase. Naturally, I accepted, and he set me to work on a secret project.”
Monkey stared in awe at Dylan. “Secret project? Sounds amazing.”
Dylan laughed at that. “Well, it’s not secret to you two, is it?”
“So, the secret project was his hunt for the pieces of heaven?” I asked.
“He gave me a brief history of his coin, explained the good luck/bad luck thing and constantly warned me about the Wardens of the Black Heart.”
“Did you see the book?”
“The one about Abernathy and the séance at Durham University? Yes. It’s fair to say that I was fascinated.” He shook his head as if not quite believing everything that had happened. “I can still remember the first time I read those pages. Demons, messages from beyond, objects that are blessed and cursed. It was a hell of a tale: like reading Lovecraft for the first time, only this was real life!”
“You believe that it’s all true? I mean, the supernatural stuff?” Monkey pressed.
There was a pause before Dylan answered. He looked like he was struggling for the correct words. “Let’s just say that the jury’s out on that one,” he replied eventually.
“What did you do for Lester, then?” I said, trying to get the story back on track. I was keen to find out what was so important that Lester would pay Dylan a salary for, and more to the point, why they’d had such an acrimonious parting.
“Research mostly. Searching newspapers and online articles for clues to where lucky or cursed objects might be found. I even got to hunt down a few minor objects and bring them in. Eventually, I got bored, and I asked Lester if I could be more involved in the search for the actual pieces of heaven themselves.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He wasn’t keen, and aside from keeping an eye out for news stories that might be related, he and his reverend friend shut me out.”
“That can’t have been easy.”
Dylan sighed heavily. “It wasn’t. By this stage, I was fascinated with Donald Kinloss’s book. I kept asking the Reverend if I could look at it.”
“He was okay with that?”
“He wouldn’t let me take it away, but he had no problem with me looking at it.” The Reverend had made the same offer to us. Maybe I should have taken the opportunity for a closer inspection of the book.
“I just kept questioning how a séance in the mid-eighteen hundreds could lead to such an obsession in the present, and I badgered Lester to give me more information and allow me to spend more time looking into the subject. Naturally, he refused, warning me to concentrate on my job. This carried on for a while until finally, he told me, in no uncertain terms, to let the matter lie. I received a formal warning from my supervisor.”
“So that was that then?”
“Not quite.” Dylan smirked like he was about to spill some secret. “I continued my research in private, looking into the background of the other attendees of the séance noted in Donald Kinloss’s book. I began to cross-reference this with other occurrences in Durham at the same time and was shocked to find out that a doctor was brutally murdered within days of the date mentioned in the book.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t think it was a coincidence, but just when things were getting interesting, I became convinced that people were spying on me at the data centre.” Dylan’s voice dropped to a whisper again. “I started to become paranoid. I wasn’t in a good place mentally. The long hours, Lester’s continual refusal to give me more demanding tasks.”
This was getting more intriguing by the second. Lester had said something about having to let Dylan go for the sake of his health. Was I seeing proof of this first hand? “What made you think that people were spying on you?”
“You know, the usual stuff. Funny looks from my colleagues. Whispered conversations that stopped whenever I showed up. I knew they were talking about me, but nobody would tell me anything.”
“So, what did you do?” Monkey asked.
“I didn’t give up, if that’s what you mean. There was something worth discovering here, and I wasn’t about to let a few funny looks stop me. When I next headed back to Newcastle, I decided to get professional help.”
Monkey gave his best embarrassed look. “Professional help?”
“Monkey!” I said, surprised that he would quiz Dylan further on the subject of his crumbling mental health.
Dylan, seeing the looks on our faces – me angry, Monkey wondering what he’d done wrong – started to laugh. “Oh, I see. You two thought I’d gone a little crazy.” He took another sip of coffee, swilling it around his teeth. “I didn’t mean that kind of professional help. No, based on some reading at the archives in the library, I’d found significant evidence of a number of unusual occurrences in the Durham area throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, and I wanted to run it past somebody with inside info.”
At this point, I was pretty sure that Dylan had lost the plot. What kind of person would have inside info on events in Durham over a hundred years ago?
“My grandfather was a recently-retired detective with the Northumbrian police force. Using his contacts, I was able to gain access to the police archives and made
a startling discovery: on a winter’s day in 1885, a tearful Mrs Jane Turnbull, accompanied by her local vicar, requested an interview with the police. In the interview, she confided her fear that her husband, Professor Daniel Turnbull, was possessed by the devil, and recounted in gruesome detail how he had murdered a doctor, twenty-four years earlier in 1861.”
My blood ran cold. Daniel Turnbull. The name meant something, but I couldn’t think where I’d heard it. However, I knew exactly what the year 1861 meant.
“The séance in Donald Kinloss’s book. Didn’t that take place in 1861?” I asked.
“In Durham?” Monkey added.
“Right on both counts,” Dylan confirmed with a sly smile. “Plus, if you’d spent the same amount of time perusing the book as I had, you’d know the name Daniel Turnbull. He was one of Abernathy’s fellow professors at the séance.”
He was right – that’s where I knew the name from, when Lester had shown us.
“Does Lester know all of this?” I asked.
“If he does, he didn’t mention it to me,” said Dylan bitterly.
The idea of a professor at the University of Durham becoming possessed by the devil shortly after he attended a séance made me feel sick to the stomach. Much like I’d felt last year when Lester and the Reverend had started bombarding us with tales of dark deeds and first brought the idea of the Wardens of the Black Heart to our attention, my gut reaction was that this kind of stuff only happened in films. But with each new revelation, a murky picture was beginning to emerge that suggested a nightmarish truth.
“Turnbull’s wife. What did she say to the police?” I was afraid of what the answer might be.
“According to the police records, she told them that her husband ripped out the heart of some random man that he met on the streets of Durham. The police did have an unsolved murder case involving a doctor on file. In the case notes, the detectives were initially confused as to the motives: a well-respected doctor, the attacker did not take his victim’s expensive Swiss watch, and they left his wallet full of cash. He'd had his heart removed and his medical briefcase stolen. A witness who saw him shortly before said that he was definitely carrying a briefcase. They interviewed her husband but couldn’t find any hard evidence to take the case further. However, they noted her comments all the same, where they remained on file.”
Once again, I glanced around the café, glad that it was almost empty. A year ago, if somebody had told me that I’d be sitting in my local café discussing barbaric murders with a stranger, I’d have thought that they were mad. Now it felt like it was me that was losing my grip on reality. It worried me on the deepest level that this kind of conversation, with this kind of person, was becoming the norm.
“When I got back to work, I felt invigorated with all of this new information that I’d discovered. Surely the fact that the name of a suspected murderer tied up with events described in the book that Lester treated like a gospel would carry some weight with him. I looked forward to the day when the others who worked at the data centre would look at me in awe and not whisper about me behind their hands.” Dylan had a look of fierce determination in his eyes.
Thinking back over what Dylan had said, I was still puzzled. “I thought you said that Lester didn’t know about any of this.”
“He doesn’t. Once again, he wasn’t interested. In fact, this time, he told me that he was tired of my attitude and sent me on my way.”
“He sacked you?”
“Just like that.”
“What did you do after that?”
“First, I told him he was making a big mistake, that he didn’t know what he was doing. Then I set about solving the riddle on my own. If Lester wasn’t going to give me the chance, I’d make sure that he knew that he’d made a big mistake when he’d crossed me.”
That didn’t sound too healthy. I decided there and then that crossing Dylan Fogg was probably not a great idea. “And did you solve it?”
“Yes and no.”
Of course. Nothing was ever straightforward anymore. “How do you mean?”
“I got my grandfather’s help and, with a few more favours and a bit more digging in the police case files, I became interested in a series of fires at factories in 1912. In one case, a security guard had had his heart removed. The police believed that one of the fires was started to cover up the murder. They talked to a witness who described a suspicious man leaving the scene carrying a briefcase. His description matched that of Professor Daniel Turnbull, who they’d interviewed about the old murder case involving the doctor, years earlier.”
I performed a quick calculation based on the dates we’d been discussing. “But if this Turnbull was a professor at the time of the séance in 1861, how old would he have been in 1912?”
“Based on the records I was able to uncover, at least ninety-two.”
“Ninety-two? Did he murder people with his walking stick?”
Dylan nodded in agreement. “I know – shocked me when I found out. Sadly, that’s where the trail went cold. By the time that they found out where Turnbull had gone, it was too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
“He’d booked passage to America on the Mauretania. By the time the police found this out, he’d already disembarked in New York.”
“So, he’d escaped?”
“On the loose, somewhere in America,” Dylan said enigmatically.
Nobody said anything for a while, Monkey and I brooding on what had been said, Dylan finishing the last of his coffee, which by now, must have been stone-cold.
“Why did you come to Culverton Beck, Dylan?” asked Monkey, out of the blue.
“I saw that story in the paper: Strange Days in Culverton Beck.”
“Neil,” I spat, remembering Mick’s volcanic outburst because one of his reporters had passed on salacious gossip to a national newspaper.
“When I read about millionaire playboy, Lester Hawkstone,” Dylan continued, “and a story about a lost coin, a couple of teenagers and the rumoured theft of a priceless piece of art, I thought that it was something I should investigate. I assume that you two were the teenagers mentioned?”
“Guilty as charged,” I replied.
Dylan looked at Monkey and then back to me. “And I thought that I had some secrets.”
“So, now we know a fair bit about each other. Where do we go from here?”
Dylan held my gaze for a while before glancing at Monkey. From where I sat, it seemed very much like he didn’t know what the next step was. Either that or he was calculating some gambit and was looking for the best way to sell it to us.
“Honestly? I don’t know,” he said finally. “Let’s trade numbers, and we’ll keep in touch. I’ll keep on looking for Abernathy’s painting, and you two do whatever it is that you do.”
* * *
The owner of the Beanfeast Café was pulling down the shutters at the end of another Saturday when Dylan headed off down the high street, leaving Monkey and me to say our goodbyes.
I’d been so fascinated by Dylan’s account of events that, as was becoming the norm, it wasn’t until much later, when I began to fit the pieces together in my head, that I realised something was bothering me.
In addition to the letter that Josiah Abram had left in the care of St Stephen’s Church, he’d also left the painting, The Truth. The whereabouts of this painting was unknown, as it had been long before Monkey and I had become involved in Lester’s search. But why did Abram have it in the first place? Had Abernathy, fearing for his life and fleeing the Wardens of the Black Heart, somehow passed the painting onto Abram? Did the two artists know each other? Then there was Daniel Turnbull. Had he really gone on a killing spree after the séance described in Donald Kinloss’s book? Had he continued killing into his nineties, as the evidence of Dylan Fogg’s investigation suggested?
It was increasingly difficult to think such matters through without considering some possibility that could only be dreamed up in a Hollywood movie
or some adventure story. Despite silently admonishing myself for even considering such a fanciful explanation, consider it I did.
Were John Connor Peregrine Abernathy and Josiah Abram part of some artistic conspiracy to keep certain works of art out of the hands of the Wardens of the Black Heart? And if so, was Lester Hawkstone part of this group?
Once again, the questions kept on coming, with little or no hope of any resolution anytime soon.
Chapter 17
Monkey was waiting outside the library when I got off the bus. It had been a dull day at college, and I was looking forward to a more rewarding time at the Recorder office. For a change, this wouldn’t simply be a visit to catch up on the local gossip. Tonight, we had some serious research to conduct, and I was hoping that Anja could help us.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?” Monkey asked.
“Not exactly, but I’ve heard Anja mention it a couple of times, so she must have an account.”
“Okay, let’s go,” said Monkey, setting off towards the office.
“Before we do, I’ve been thinking about what Dylan said.”
Monkey stopped, waiting for me to catch up. “Which bit?”
“Remember when he was talking about the Durham murders? He mentioned the fact that the suspect was spotted hanging around with a briefcase.”
“That’s right. I bet you couldn’t help thinking of Gooch when he said that,” he said with a grin.
“Right. But did you notice that Dylan didn’t make a big deal of it?”
“How do you mean?”
“What I mean is, he didn’t try to tie it to Gooch – which you or I might have done if we were explaining it to somebody.”
Monkey’s brow knotted up in confusion. “You’ve lost me.”
“All I’m saying is that Dylan didn’t say ‘you know about Charles Gooch’ or ‘I think the briefcase is significant’ or… I don’t know… something like that.”
“Right,” agreed Monkey, his tone indicating that he could see my reasoning. “Unless he doesn’t know about Charles Gooch and his briefcase.”
