The Silence

by Luca Veste

  I added the thirteenth marker in the woods at that damn music festival. Even if Mark Welsh wasn’t really considered a victim, it felt wrong to leave him off.

  The room seemed smaller somehow, as if something unearthly had entered and settled in the air. Before, I had thought only of it all in an abstract way. I knew the man was a killer and we had stopped him. Now, seeing the red markers on a map made it all the more real.

  There didn’t seem to be any sort of pattern, but I noticed you could almost draw a straight line up the west side of the UK. No single place. The dates began decades earlier, moving forward in time sporadically. At least one every two to three years.

  I looked at the one closest to home. Andrew Pennington. A twenty-six-year-old man from Liverpool, who had been reported missing by his girlfriend. I had a vague memory of the name, but I didn’t recognize the face. I looked at the reports in the Liverpool Echo online, but after a few articles, there wasn’t much else to see. His girlfriend was in the final article, a picture of her sitting next to a storm lantern housing a red candle. The headline didn’t bury the lede.

  Local Missing Man Linked to Candle Man Myth?

  The article contained a few links back to the internet forums I’d already searched, but also contained a statement from Merseyside Police.

  A force spokesperson said, “We are aware of the rumors surrounding Andrew Pennington’s disappearance and its link to a story that has been swirling around the internet since its inception. The myth of a supposed serial killer has been thoroughly looked into and is not a part of our inquiry at this time. We urge anyone with any information about Andrew’s movements in the days before or after his disappearance to please contact us…”

  I wondered what was stopping them from finding the information it had taken me only a couple of hours to find and was shared between so many people online. I guessed they had done the same as me and discounted many of the cases they found, that all it looked like was a myth to them.

  Or they knew and didn’t want to admit they couldn’t find him.

  What I had wasn’t much. Not enough for a court or anything—not that it’s possible for a dead man to be put on trial.

  The first year on the list I’d made was 1996. There were also names I couldn’t confidently add that were much earlier than that. I looked at all the information I’d collected, saw what little it amounted to, and sat back in my chair, wondering what to do next.

  While a voice inside me screamed to shut the computer down and forget all of this, another part of me knew I couldn’t do that.

  This wasn’t going to end with me ignoring it.

  Instead, I created an account on the forum, posted a few messages, and waited.

  Twenty-Seven

  It was black outside. Cold. Clouds in the sky that looked angry and filled with dark hate. As if they were waiting for me to step outside, so they could unleash hell upon me. I tried breathing deeply in and out again and remembering it would only be rain. Standing at the doorway, looking at the path that led to my car, parked only yards away.

  That path suddenly looked longer. My car even farther away. The street was quiet, the only sound a distant wind chime tinkling in the distance.

  I made myself step forward and was outside.

  Behind me, the door was still open. Ready for me to go back. Change my mind and retreat. I don’t know how I kept moving, but somehow, I did. I pulled the front door behind me, and the noise of it shutting echoed around the street. I breathed in again and began walking. Pushed open my gate and unlocked my car with the fob in my hand.

  There was a noise from my side. A shift of feet on the pavement. I turned to look, but there was nothing there. An empty street, dull light emanating from the streetlight a few yards away. An almost amber yellow. A noise again, and I could feel my heart rate increase. Beating against my chest, I could almost hear the pound of it.

  Someone was out there.

  I didn’t know where that thought came from, but it was suddenly stark in my mind. Eyes watching me, unseen, hidden from view. Lurking in what was now a multitude of shadows outside my front door. I heard the scrape of shoes against concrete again and forced myself to walk around the car to the driver’s door and crouch. Waiting. My breaths were coming in short bursts, and I willed them to quiet.

  I leaned against the car, looking left and right, watching for any movement. The feeling of being watched lingered, as I peered into the gloom of the evening.

  Nothing moved, nothing shifted. The only noise I could hear was traffic in the far distance, blown toward me on a wind that increased in strength the longer I stayed there.

  I waited for another noise, but none came.

  Waited for someone to walk past. A stranger. Didn’t know me, didn’t know what I was doing.

  Couldn’t know.

  After a minute or two, I shook my head and let myself into the car. Sat down in the driver’s seat and placed my hands on the steering wheel. Adjusted the rearview mirror and saw nothing in the reflection. Checked the side mirrors and got the same result.

  It was my mind playing tricks on me. That was all. Still, I could almost feel those eyes out there on the street.

  Watching me.

  I shook the thought from my head, turned the key in the ignition, and started driving.

  I had something more important to concentrate on.

  Charnock Richard services on the M6 was only a half-hour drive from my house, located between Junctions 27 and 28. I remembered passing it on a drive up to the Lake District that Alexandra and I had done a couple of years previously—making jokes about a guy called Richard who wrote his name down wrong when they were opening it up.

  The memory made me smile as I drove in and parked in a bay. The parking lot was deserted—only a couple of other cars in the place. I wondered which one was the man I was going to meet, if he was already there.

  I noticed my hands shaking a little as I took them from the steering wheel and picked up my phone. This was the safest option I could think of when I’d arranged to meet up with someone who I didn’t know existed until a few hours earlier.

  A highway truck stop that would still be open this late at night. Nice and public, but quiet enough that we wouldn’t be noticed.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. Tried to control the butterflies taking flight in the pit of my stomach. Opened them again and got out of the car before I could change my mind.

  The parking lot was quiet, almost in complete darkness. The only light was emanating from the large building that lay at the side. A large sign saying Welcome Break in green and white adorned the outside of the glass-fronted entrance, but there wasn’t much that was welcoming other than the fast food outlets advertised as being inside. Automatic doors opened slowly as I approached them, the noise from inside muted and discomforting. The only greeting an array of slot machines, blinking and flashing red and yellow lights. A couple of big men in high-visibility jackets were standing over the machines, pressing buttons and placing money in them.

  I took the escalator that was in front of me up to the bridge, where the various eateries were situated. It crossed over the highway, but I couldn’t hear the traffic from inside. Bored-looking workers stood behind tills at either end. I ordered a Coke Zero and didn’t have to wait long.

  He approached me, thankfully. I wasn’t sure I would have recognized him from the description he’d given me.

  “Dave?”

  I stood up and shook his proffered hand as he took the seat opposite me. Made another mental note to remember the fake name I’d given him over the phone earlier. “Thanks for meeting up with me on short notice, Peter. And at this time of night.”

  “No problem at all,” Peter replied, shaking a few sugar packets into a large coffee. He was bigger than I’d been expecting—around six foot four inches, I guessed. As big around his chest and
waist as he was tall. He pushed glasses up his nose and placed the lid back on his Styrofoam cup. “Got to say, this all feels a bit like some kind of spy movie.”

  “I doubt James Bond visits many highway truck stops,” I said, keeping up the pretense that this was all a normal way of doing things. I pulled out a notebook and pen I’d found in my desk drawer. It had been filled with blank pages, but I opened it to the middle to give the impression I had more notes than I actually did. “Just to reiterate, this is all anonymous. I won’t use your name in anything I do, unless you want me to?”

  “No, I’d prefer to stay out of any of the stories, if possible. I don’t want him coming after me, know what I mean?”

  I nodded, writing down a few words. I’d told him I was a journalist working on an exposé of the Candle Man and the police’s ignorance or denial of his existence. It wasn’t a difficult lie to tell and gain attention—there had been a few similar pieces over the years, after all. “Tell me when you first heard about this story.”

  Peter made a show of looking into the distance and really thinking about his answer. I got the feeling he wasn’t asked for any sort of opinion in his offline life. Online, he was prolific on the message boards for the pages I’d gone through. He seemed to be first to respond on every post. He was the first person I’d made contact with earlier that evening and his speed of reply had made me sure I could set something up to meet him that night. I needed to do something, my ability to just sit around and wait finally cracking.

  “Far too long back to remember, but I really got into it about five or six years ago now,” Peter said, nodding to himself as if it was a sure answer. Even despite the year disparity. His voice was a mix of Mancunian and what I suspected was Preston. “I had heard of these killings, but it wasn’t like I knew anything about them other than what some of the newspaper headlines said and that. Even those have died down a lot lately though.”

  “What made you want to investigate it further?”

  “Well, there’s a whole bunch of threads dedicated to unsolved crimes on the net, right? I was always posting theories and stuff on those, but it wasn’t like we ever got any answers for the most part. And they always seemed to be in America—the JonBenét Ramsey case, O. J. Simpson, or that whole Making a Murderer series. Then, someone sent me a link to this thread about the Candle Man and it just really appealed to me.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, this one wasn’t about an actual murder or crime that took place and was unsolved or whatever—this was about whether a murderer actually existed or not. That was exciting, you know. I couldn’t ignore this thing, and I’ve been working on it ever since.”

  I nodded along and made notes that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else reading them in my dummy notebook. Tried to ask questions I thought a journalist would ask, but I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. Thankfully, it didn’t seem like Peter knew either. We talked back and forth for a little while, as he explained the creation of subthreads and communities, which I didn’t really understand but pretended to be highly interested in. He spent a few minutes droning on about a split in the camp a few months back, that was probably the most exciting thing to him and the others online. I was starting to worry I’d made the wrong decision in meeting him at that point.

  “So, to get back to it,” I said, as he paused for a second or two during a long monologue about characters I didn’t have any interest in. Some internet spat or something that obviously still mattered a great deal to him but made me wish I was drinking the same coffee he’d ordered. “At what point did you truly believe you’d discovered a serial killer that wasn’t being acknowledged by the police?”

  “Oh, a while ago now. When the red candles were first discovered.”

  “And you never believed the line that it was just coincidence?”

  Peter shook his head and laughed. “There’s no such thing as coincidence in unsolved mysteries. Everything has meaning. That’s how we work.”

  “What do you think about this Candle Man story then…any theories?”

  “Of course,” Peter replied, leaning toward me, all sense of joviality leaving his expression. “I think the kill count is even higher than we think. And I don’t think he works on his own.”

  Twenty-Eight

  There was a pause, as a worker wiped and cleared a nearby table. A couple entered the restaurant area and moved past us, to the farthest fast food operator. Someone left, leaving only a single other person in the place.

  Outside the windows, sparse traffic trundled north- and southbound on the M6.

  “You don’t think he was working alone?”

  Peter shook his head. “It makes sense, even if most of them don’t agree with me. I just can’t see how one guy can do all these murders and get away with it. I think it’s a group of people.”

  “There hasn’t really been a reported link to any crime in the past year though,” I said as I finished my drink and slid it away from me on the table. “Does that not strike you as odd? Especially if there’s a group of people doing this.”

  “That’s only if you believe that there haven’t been any murders. This group is good. There’s no bodies found—only missing people. It has taken us years to identify some victims, so it could be that we just haven’t caught up yet. There’s a few possible ones out there, but nothing confirmed for me. I’m guessing you’ve seen the maps and stuff?”

  I nodded at his response and let him continue.

  “Yeah, well, there’s two pockets of multiple victims—farther north, encircling the Bowland forest and that. Over in the Peak District. In the Highlands. And farther down south near Shropshire, Brock Hope, and the Cotswolds. You can draw a circle almost around those places and see what’s happening. But there’s loads more in other places. It could be that these woodland areas are just where all the bodies are buried, with other victims being taken there or whatever. Or, if you believe my theory, there’s a network of people—killers, I should say—who are all working together and have their own patch, so to speak.”

  “Why do you think no bodies have ever been found? Wouldn’t that suggest we’re trying to give stories to these missing people, rather than just accepting they’re missing?”

  “Remember what I said about ignoring coincidences?” Peter said, leaning back in his chair, making it screech in protest. His barrel chest strained at the buttons on his checked shirt. “It’s much easier for the police and that to make us believe all these people just disappear for no reason. Much better than the idea that a serial killer is out there and they can’t find him. Or, should I say, them.”

  I pretended to write down more notes, but I was desperately trying to think of the next question. I wanted to know so much more than I did, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to ask. “Do you have any theories about who it could be? If there’s a main guy or anything?”

  “I have a few, but they’re all based on psychological profiling, stuff like that. Probably not even close to the truth. I think it started with one guy and just became bigger and bigger. Or I’m wrong, and it’s a much smaller group. That’s if the number of victims is smaller than we think it is. After all, it is possible that some people have just gone missing. That does happen.”

  “I heard it’s something like a quarter of a million people a year who do just disappear.”

  “Yeah, but that’s a bit of a misdirection,” Peter said, puffing his chest out and pushing his glasses up his nose again. “Most of them turn up within a day or two. Can you really be called missing if you only go off radar for twenty-four hours? I’m not so sure about that. The more interesting cases are the ones that don’t come back. At all. And there’s loads of them.”

  The word interesting jarred me. I’d seen the killer’s work. Close up. I wouldn’t have called it that. I chose my next words carefully. “Who do you think it is? Do you have any suspects?”

&
nbsp; Peter chuckled softly, a nice sound in the confines of the truck stop and given the subject matter. “I wish I did. I’d be a lot more famous than I am online if I’d worked that out.”

  I couldn’t hide the disappointment as my shoulders slumped a little.

  “All I can say is that I’m convinced that there’s more to this story than even we know about on the threads. For all we know, it could just be a coincidence and there really is no Candle Man. It’s been over a year since the story really blew up, but you know, with you coming around to me now and the other guy a few weeks back, I think there’s going to be huge interest regenerated in the case. At some point, the police are going to have to listen.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, frowning at the mention of someone else Peter had supposedly spoken to. “What other guy is this? You haven’t mentioned anything.”

  “Oh, I just figured you knew,” Peter replied, seeming to be genuinely surprised by the question. “Yeah, it was some guy who was asking similar types of questions to yours. Said his name was Richard something. I met up with him, but all he wanted to know was who I thought it could be and whether I knew more than I was letting on. I don’t, obviously, but he was a bit intense about it. Not friendly, like you. I suppose journalists have to have a thick skin or whatever, but it wasn’t like it made me more willing to talk to him or anything.”

  I had wondered if maybe Alexandra had spoken to the guy before, but this was something else. Maybe I’d just stumbled into a good lie to speak to Peter, but I didn’t think the timing was… Well, it was Peter who had told me about coincidences. “What did he look like?”

  Peter scratched at his face, looking away from me and actually thinking about his answer this time. “Like, dirty blond hair, bit curly. About your height, maybe a little taller. Scruffy beard, which was odd I thought, because he seemed in shape and still earned some looks, if you know what I mean. If he kept it trim or shaved it off entirely, he could have probably been a bit of a ladies’ man.”