The Silence

by Luca Veste

  I’d already left her alone once. I couldn’t do it again.

  My phone was still blank with notifications, no word from Alexandra or returned call from Michelle. I tried calling her again but got the answering machine before it even rang for the umpteenth time that morning.

  There were ways of finding the whereabouts of where a phone was last switched on, but I didn’t have the resources for that. I imagined once the police took Michelle’s mum’s worries seriously, that would be checked out first. Or they might find her body in the meantime. It hadn’t been too long before Stuart had been found.

  It was thinking about Stuart that led me to pause. If this was connected to the Candle Man, someone who had killed for years without discovery, it didn’t really make sense that he allowed Stuart’s body to be found. All of the Candle Man’s victims were never discovered. That was why his identity was so easily dismissed and argued for in equal measure.

  That would mean this new killer was someone who saw no reason to abide by the original’s rules.

  The computer was on before I was sitting at my desk, and I went back to research, looking at the same message boards and online threads. I was looking for something I couldn’t explain to anyone who could walk into the room at that point, but I knew it was there. I just had to find it.

  An email from Peter stared at me from the new inbox I had created the night before. I tried reading the various posts on the web instead of reading Peter’s email, but when I’d read the same sentence three times, I knew I had to read whatever Peter had written. I could no longer ignore it.

  I had to accept that I suspected Peter was connected to all of this. Putting a face to that—spending time in his company—made the whole thing more real for some reason. I wasn’t happy with that.

  I clicked on the email and read.

  Dave,

  Good to meet up with you last night. Hope I gave you some good stuff for your article. I’ll keep trying to find out more for you—would be good if I could be known for identifying the Candle Man! That would be some newspaper piece you’d have on your hands. You didn’t mention what publication it was for…I’ve had a look online and can’t really find your name as a byline on any stuff. May have got it down wrong though. You know how it is.

  All the best and see you soon!

  Peter

  I wanted to delete the message instantly but managed to control my urge. I wondered if the Google search on the fake name I’d given him had really been done after we had met. Or whether he had known throughout the meeting that I was lying.

  Of course, if he was connected to what was happening to our group now, he would have known I was lying all along.

  For what reason? Why would he meet you?

  The only answer I could think of was he was trying to find out how much I knew. I decided to start making notes, hoping that would help clear the fog that was forming in my head the longer I sat there. When I was finished, there wasn’t much that made any sense at all.

  The places Peter had mentioned stood out: Bowland forest, which was north, Shropshire, Brock Hope, and the Cotswolds, all south.

  Brock Hope was the obvious place.

  The music festival we had visited the year before had been where this all began for us. I looked on Google Maps after I spent a minute or so trying to remember the journey down there. All that came to mind was singing songs from our childhood and laughing.

  Probably the last time I’d properly laughed was that weekend. It wasn’t until the thought struck me that I realized how I had taken that for granted in life. Now, everything was just a little more gray.

  I searched for Brock Hope and missing people. Every item was regarding the lad who had vanished from the music festival. Mark Welsh. Eighteen years old, only two weeks before his nineteenth birthday. I punished myself looking and reading through the old articles, learning nothing about the lad that I didn’t already know. I remembered doing this same thing a year earlier and the way it made me feel then. If anything, it had only become worse since.

  The picture of his mum, holding his photograph probably sitting on the sofa of her living room. I pictured her now—sitting in a quiet house, waiting for the phone to ring or a knock on the door. Knowing that it had been too long and that even though she could never be totally sure, there was no real chance of him being alive.

  I ignored the stab of guilt.

  The knowledge.

  I tried to find other missing people in the area, but didn’t get much joy. I imagined Alexandra had the same problem when she was looking into this aspect of it. The Mark Welsh story had overtaken anything else in the area—the salacious rumors about drug taking, the fact that he was incredibly photogenic, the story of his wholesome family background and plans for university.

  He shouldn’t have been in those woods that night.

  There was a thought, sudden and stark in my head.

  If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be in this position now.

  It’s his fault.

  That did not make me feel good. I shook it off, attempting to ignore the fact that I’d really just thought that about someone who had been an innocent victim. It wasn’t his fault that he’d crossed paths with a serial killer. It wasn’t his fault that we had disturbed the murderer and not even in time to save him.

  I wondered about Stuart meeting the man I’d met from the internet forum. What the reason for that could be. Same as mine, maybe? As simple as that?

  Did he want to know how much information was out there? Real information.

  I shook the thought away.

  The cursor key in the search box blinked at me accusingly, and I began to type.

  Faking your own death

  Far too many search results.

  Identifying a body when found on train tracks

  Not many results that didn’t concern actual cases on that one. Someone identified by a fingerprint. Most just reporting that the body had been identified or next of kin had been informed. I kept on until I remembered the tattoo of Stuart’s.

  That’s how Stephanie said he’d been identified.

  How easy is it to tattoo

  I was going crazy. Stuart was dead. Occam’s razor, I thought. I was looking for something that was never going to show itself.

  I was in the denial stage of grief. That was all.

  Missing Dead Brock Hope

  I went through pages of Google search results. I narrowed the terms and tried to shorten the dates. Then, I found something.

  Months after Mark Welsh had dominated the news in that area, it was there.

  The story was brief in detail, and I couldn’t find any follow-up to it. Simply a local newspaper story that didn’t even seem to be a lead news item. A single mention and then it was gone.

  Not even the Reddit forums had this case listed, it seemed. It just wasn’t a story that had generated all that much interest, I guessed. Not after reading the story anyway.

  Local Farmer Search Called Off

  Wednesday 16th May 2019

  The search for missing local farmer William Moore has been suspended with no further evidence found. Moore, 62, has been missing for an undetermined amount of time. He was last seen a number of months ago, and due to his secluded nature, it has proven difficult for police to ascertain when he may have disappeared.

  Moore was a keen fisherman, according to a police spokesperson, and his disappearance may be linked to another discovery some months back of fishing gear near a particularly dangerous spot on the River Severn.

  His son, George, owned the farmhouse where they both lived until recently. However, he has been unable to help police with their inquiry. Sources believe William got into difficulty at the coastline, and they believe this may be the best explanation at the present time. The small farmhold was only a few miles’ walk from the popular fishing des
tination, and searches along the route have proven unfruitful.

  It was just as I’d been thinking, somehow. A local farmer, who didn’t seem to have any ties to other people. No quotes from family members or friends. I imagined a loner, who lived with his son.

  George.

  I tried to make an estimate of the ages. If he’d had his son when he was young, it was possible that the man who called himself Peter was him. Something didn’t seem right about that though. Peter’s accent had sounded genuinely northern. I imagined those who talked from that area would sound a little Bristolian. Or west country. I wasn’t sure.

  There was a good chance Peter had been faking it, of course.

  A further search got no other hits for the farmer, who now seemed my best lead. If I could call it that.

  I messaged Chris.

  I think I’ve found CM. I have a name. He had a son. Call me.

  Then, I opened my dummy email account in the name of Dave Richards—the supposed journalist’s name I’d created—and emailed Peter.

  Or whatever his name was.

  I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms when I was done. Closed my eyes and nodded my head in time to the music coming softly from the speakers on my desk and worked out what to do next.

  Michelle could be there now. Back in Brock Hope.

  I was about to stand up when my phone began sharply ringing. I picked it up, expecting to see Chris’s name, but instead, it was Alexandra’s.

  Thirty-Three

  Alexandra sounded fed up, tired, and angry. Or none of those things and my read on her wasn’t as good as it had once been.

  It had been a long time since we’d spoken two days running.

  “So we have a name for him. I’m not sure what we do now.”

  “Neither do I,” I replied, stifling a yawn and reaching for the coffee on my desk. The glass it had been sitting in was stone cold, so I paused before tipping it down my throat in one large gulp. I almost gagged on it, but the action was enough to give me a jolt. “It has to help us though, right? At least we know what we’re dealing with now. It’s a way of finding Michelle.”

  “You think it’s the son who has been leaving candles in Stuart’s and Michelle’s houses and the reason we can’t get ahold of her now?”

  “Doesn’t it seem the most likely option?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the most likely reason is that Michelle is finally getting some sleep—which you should too, by the way—and there are no candles being left for us to find. That’s probably wishful thinking though.”

  I bit on my lower lip to stop myself from telling her about Nicola’s visit that morning. She’d asked me to wait until she’d told Chris, which I was happy to do for as long as it made sense. It was something that I wouldn’t be able to keep to myself for long—not with Michelle now missing and my fears seemingly realized.

  “Alexandra, you can’t ignore this,” I said once I’d calmed myself. “There’s just too much going on that doesn’t make sense otherwise. Look at everything. Stuart looking into and meeting the same weird guy I did, then being found dead a week or so later. The one-year anniversary that only we in this group know about, suddenly Stuart is dead and Michelle is missing. Both of them have red candles in their houses, in the same type of metal storm lantern that we found in the woods. It’s some coincidence.”

  “I understand,” Alexandra replied, but it didn’t feel like she was ready to change her mind as quickly as Chris had. “I’m just saying there’s no reason for us to go half-cocked into something we don’t fully understand yet.”

  “We’re all going to meet up,” I said, still refusing to be drawn into an argument neither of us was going to win. And making a decision not to tell her what I’d decided to do next. “Later on, if that’s okay with you?”

  “It’s not like I have much else going on right now. Other than trying to work while my so-called friends try to convince me a mad serial killer has come back from the dead to get his revenge.”

  I turned that over in my mind. I’d never believed in ghosts or vengeful Freddy Krueger types, but it would explain certain things.

  Maybe I was going mad.

  No. It wasn’t mad. What was mad was thinking Stuart had faked his own death.

  “I’ll let you know what time,” I said, ignoring the weird part of my thoughts that were suddenly conjuring up villains from horror films. “Probably be here, but I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine.”

  I ended the call, placing my phone back on my desk and looking at the screen again. Somehow, the man we had killed suddenly having a name didn’t make any of it easier. I wasn’t sure why it might have, but I was looking for anything at that point.

  I looked at the time. Just past ten thirty.

  Turned over the decision I had made in my mind and looked at its pros and cons. I knew it wasn’t a good choice, but I wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing, while I waited for the rest of them to wake up and realize we couldn’t sort this out on our own.

  Maybe they just needed a push in the right direction.

  Maybe I was just tired and not in the best frame of mind to make any sort of logical decision.

  I opened up the Maps app on my phone and tapped “Brock Hope” into the search bar. Pulled on my jacket and left the house after standing at the doorway for twenty minutes.

  I was getting quicker.

  It was a three-hour drive according to the expected drive time on the Maps app, but once I was on the quiet country roads in Wales, it didn’t take that long. I arrived just before two o’clock, stopping off in the last village I saw to pick up a coffee—downed as soon as it wouldn’t scald my mouth—and a sandwich, which remained unopened on the passenger seat.

  The place seemed to be both familiar and strange. Each road seemed to look the same—narrow and bordered by overhanging trees that made it darker than it should have been at that time of day. The roads dipped and bent in odd ways, as they wound through countryside that hadn’t been designed for this kind of travel.

  My phone cut the music quieter for a second, telling me to turn right. I was glad it was still talking, as the music I was streaming kept cutting off as the cell signal dipped in and out. It was still working well in the villages, but once out on some of the country roads, it was intermittent.

  It seemed like a bad omen.

  The farm hadn’t been named in the news report I’d read, but I’d decided on the nearest one I could find to the approximate area where the music festival had been held. I could see the GPS counting down the minutes until arrival, while a voice inside my head tried to bring me back to reality.

  What are you doing? Turn around, go back, and find a different idea. This is stupid.

  I continued to do what I’d done for the previous three hours. Ignore it.

  The countryside was like another world to me. I’d lived my whole life in a city, and even though we had hidden woodland areas, I’d tended to only see housing estates and the waterfront. This was a world of different rules and ways of doing things, I’d always thought. The kind of place where, if you hadn’t grown up there, you’d always be treated like an outsider. From the windshield, I watched as the road almost seemed to disappear into a lake of greens and browns. Golden squares of pasture, held together by thickets of hedges that kept the modern from the old.

  To anyone else, it was probably considered scenic, beautiful, picturesque, but to me, it was just grass and mud and space that wasn’t being used in the right way.

  I was often wrong about that type of thing.

  The road became narrower again, as my GPS informed me we were approaching the destination. I couldn’t see any change outside, but as the yards clicked by, I could finally see a sign.

  Mentmore Farm.

  It was as good a place to start as any, I thought. I hadn’t considered if thi
s was the place—whether a serial killer had raised a child there—but it hit me again.

  What the hell was I doing?

  I pulled the car to a stop and checked the front of the farm. A sign offering fresh eggs and potatoes was attached to the fence that ran along the outer wall. The farmhouse itself was only a short walk from the road, so I moved over as far as I could and then got out of the car. Pocketed my phone and looked at the place.

  It wasn’t the home of William Moore. That much I could ascertain pretty much instantly. There was a more familial feel to it as I approached the entrance. Then, I stopped myself and wondered what the hell I was thinking. I didn’t know anything about the man. I didn’t know if his farm was that man’s or not. It was my own mind creating the idea that he would have lived in some sort of dark, foreboding place.

  A mind that was cracking with each passing moment.

  I was about to turn around and leave when a shout made me stop dead.

  “Hey, are you looking for someone?”

  From behind another wall, a face popped into view. It was a woman in her fifties, short, graying, dark hair and green coat that looked like it had been new when I was a child. As she got closer, I could see she was holding a basket of something.

  “I was just looking for eggs,” I said, smiling and hoping I looked somewhat normal. “I saw the sign and thought I’d pull over.”

  “No problem at all,” the woman replied, still looking me over and sizing me up. “You’re not from around here.”

  It wasn’t a question, and I guessed even if my accent was local, she would have said the same thing. “No, just down here looking up some old friends. Thought it would be nice to pick up some local produce on the way.”

  The woman frowned a little, and I didn’t think she believed me in the slightest. Still, business from people passing by at that time of year must have been slow, as she seemed to shake it off quickly and beckon me toward an area to the side of the main building.

  “A dozen or half? We also have potatoes, tomatoes, plenty of other things. My husband is out in the fields now, collecting more produce, but there’s still a lot of choice here.”