Preacher Boy

by Gwyn GB

  Across town, Harrison’s flat covered the top floor of a converted warehouse in the Docklands. Sparsely furnished, with a big empty open space, wooden floors and large windows, it looked out over the Thames. It was one of the earlier conversions from when the docks had shut, and the area become derelict. A blend of ultramodern and traditional, which gave it a stylish vintage look. The flats were a lot bigger and cheaper back then, before the new Canary Wharf had been built and the financial crowd and trendy digital businesses moved in.

  There was just one side lamp on in the living space. The glow of the properties across the water, a twinkling light show on the surface of the river, provided a backdrop across one window-filled wall. In the open-plan kitchen, the timer on the built-in fan oven showed five minutes left. The cardboard sleeve of a Marks and Spencer meal-for-one lasagne on the side, accompanied by the soft hum of the oven, told of a dinner almost ready to be served.

  The walls, painted brick, carried artworks and ephemera. Only these weren’t so random as those in Harrison’s office. No eclectic mix of cult and religious icons. These had been carefully chosen. Images of an ancient people hunting buffaloes; black-and-white photographs of wrinkled, wise Native American faces; a headdress, colourful and bursting with spirit, amid the blank white space.

  In front of the kitchen was a dark-grey leather sofa and matching chairs with a glass coffee table. Harrison wasn’t sitting on the furniture; instead, he was cross-legged on the floor. On the table some herbs smouldered in a metal dish next to a photograph of a young woman. She looked to be in her early thirties, dancing and laughing at the camera. Long blond hair and a flowery dress. Hippie style.

  His eyes were closed. Hands rested on his thighs, palms upward. Not a muscle twitched. His breathing was so shallow and slow you could barely see his chest rise and fall.

  Harrison’s mind was focussed. As toned as his muscles. Winding down from one day and preparing for another busy one tomorrow.

  15

  In DCI Barker’s office, three half-drunk takeaway cups of coffee sat on the big meeting table, along with a bottle of spring water. Barker, Salter, and Dr Lane sat reading a report, the highlights of which were being read out by Dr Tanya Jones. Clearly none of them had caught enough sleep, but Jack’s eyes looked the worst. They were bloodshot, his face creased like a tired puppy.

  ‘The cause was asphyxia, most likely environmental suffocation. No marks on his neck. He just ran out of air,’ Dr Jones began. ‘They found nothing in Darren’s airways or lungs, and there were no other injuries to suggest he was forcibly held down, as you’d expect on a victim’s wrists or neck. It wasn’t a violent death. No signs of a struggle or defensive injuries of any form.’

  ‘That’s one small mercy,’ DCI Barker muttered.

  ‘He’d been dead between six and eight hours before we found him,’ Dr Jones carried on. ‘Which would put the time of death at just before or after midnight.’

  ‘So, he could simply have run out of air wherever he was being held?’ DCI Barker confirmed.

  ‘It’s looking like that. Certainly, it’s what Dr Aspey has concluded.’

  ‘He must have been kept in some kind of enclosed space. Anything to suggest where or what he was held in?’

  ‘Nothing unusual on his clothes, apart from what appears to be traces of teak oil. He’d eaten, but not much, and it was standard stuff, cereals and bread. All items that are easily obtainable. He was a bit dehydrated.’

  ‘So he did attempt to look after him, sort of.’ DCI Barker voiced her thoughts out loud. ‘And no evidence that he’d been gagged?’

  Tanya shook her head.

  ‘Teak oil could suggest a garden shed,’ Jack said. ‘But with no gag he’d have to be somewhere where he knew Darren couldn’t be heard if he shouted for help.’

  Sandra Barker nodded. ‘Perhaps he shoved him in a trunk or box of some sort when he went out. Throws up the possibility he might not have meant to kill him then.’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Tanya agreed.

  ‘So where did he go, or what was he doing while Darren was dying?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Indeed, and it’s worrying in itself, isn’t it? For Alex Fuller, I mean, because it could suggest the killer hadn’t completed whatever it was he’d taken Darren for. What about any other evidence, fingerprints from his captor?’ Barker questioned.

  ‘Only partials and we’ve no matches,’ Tanya said. ‘We’re obviously waiting on the DNA. I’m on their backs to turn it around fast. I’ve also got someone working full time on the Bible scriptures. All definitely put in after death. The writing is Darren’s. His mum sent in some samples and that fits with the condition of his right hand.’

  Jack gave a quick glance to Harrison, who was never one to gloat. While he felt Jack’s eyes on him, he didn’t look up. In all honesty, he’d been avoiding Tanya more than anything. Her perfume was in his nostrils, and he’d found himself wanting to look at her, but it wasn’t the content of what she was saying that grabbed him. Her lips carried a subtle rose-pink shimmer that made their soft fullness catch his eye, but it was her eyes he wanted to avoid. Their blue depths pulled him to her, plunge pools that made him want to dive straight in. It broke his concentration, and right now he needed to focus.

  ‘I’ve got a team on CCTV,’ said DCI Barker with a hint of desperation. ‘Both boys seemed to disappear into thin air. The killer has got to have made a mistake somewhere. Any thoughts, Harrison?’

  He shook his head, more disappointed in himself than anything else. ‘I’ve been to both the boys’ houses, spoken to the families, and looked in their rooms. There doesn’t appear to be any connection, no signs of prior grooming. These aren’t straightforward cases. They’re not sexually motivated or money motivated. I don’t believe he’s a psychopath. I think he’s a young man with a repressed character and personality disorder. His problems stem from childhood. He’ll be fairly quiet, keep to himself. Probably never had a proper relationship. He comes from a very religious home and lives fairly locally to the boys. I’d say he knows the CCTV black spots, and Fenton Woods was definitely the outer extremity of an area he’s comfortable with. As I said last night, these boys are likely to represent his own childhood. They look similar and most probably look as he did at their age. Something traumatic happened to him back then, and now it’s been reawakened by another trigger event.’

  ‘So we have a thirty-mile radius to search.’ Barker sighed. ‘Better get back to it then.’

  Harrison returned to his basement office, where Ryan was already munching his way through a family-size pack of bacon crisps.

  ‘Yo, boss. Wondered when you were going to show,’ Ryan greeted him.

  ‘Ryan.’ Harrison nodded and walked over to his desk.

  ‘I’ve got something new come in for you. Reports of some satanic graffiti at a cemetery, less than a mile from where Darren lived.’

  ‘Probably just kids. When?’

  ‘Last night,’ Ryan replied. ‘Nunhead.’

  ‘Nunhead?’ Harrison’s interest suddenly piqued. Ryan took the cue and handed him an iPad with the location and screenshots from the social media posts he’d been reading.

  ‘Probably not connected,’ Harrison replied. ‘But I’d better check it out. The killer could have been out and about late last night.’

  He scrolled through, handed the iPad back, and walked out.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Ryan shouted after him, but he smiled at his back. Harrison’s social skills could be better, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t appreciative.

  It didn’t take Harrison long to get to the cemetery. Much as he hated London traffic, he was adept at weaving in and out of it and spotting the tiniest gaps. Nunhead Cemetery sprawled across fifty-two acres, with huge Portland stone pillars that held cast-iron gates and railings all the way round the perimeter. Inside lay the remains of around 250,000 people, most of them buried from 1840 until they abandoned the site in 1969. It was Victorian London’s homage to its dead
at its finest, originally called All Saints’ Cemetery and one of the Magnificent Seven in the capital. Unfortunately for Nunhead, it didn’t boast Karl Marx or George Michael like Highgate, or Emmeline Pankhurst like Brompton, and it had fallen into disrepair, not reopening its gates or receiving attention until the 1990s. Harrison knew all this because he’d been here before.

  When he was at university, a few of them came to an open-air concert held in the chapel. It was a Gothic chapel with no roof, a victim of some vandal’s fire-raising during the neglected period, but it created the perfect dramatic concert venue on a summer’s evening. The evening was memorable, not for the concert, but because he realised it wasn’t his first visit. When they’d arrived, he’d got a strange feeling of having been there before. The symbol on the huge cast-iron gates, of an hourglass framed on one side by a devil’s wing and the other a wing of an angel, brought back a distant memory of him holding his mother’s hand as they’d passed it.

  Harrison and his university friends walked around the grounds. His friend, Sam, played the joker, frightening the girls they were with by jumping out from behind a stone angel or making bushes move in the darkness, when all that could be seen were the ghostly shapes of overgrown headstones. Harrison was older than the rest of the group by around two years, but a decade in maturity. The two years he’d lost, and the reason he’d lost them, were enough to age anyone. He knew most of the undergraduates found him boring. Too intense. He tended to hang around with the Taekwondo crowd or the studious types. That night his friends had been drinking, so they were out to have a laugh.

  The further Harrison walked, the more a feeling of unease had overtaken him. They’d wandered deep into the site where the restoration teams hadn’t reached. Past the catacomb to where the graves were overgrown and unloved. The others dared one another to tell ghost stories and spooky facts about the cemetery. Harrison tried to join in, but the wash of memories from his earlier visit there, and the riptides that dragged them from him took all his focus.

  Eventually they came across an area where the Gothic monuments melded into the undergrowth. An obscene prosthetic addendum to nature, decayed religious effigies intertwined with fresh green life. Here the feeling of déjà vu almost overwhelmed him. In his memory, everything was bigger; there had been others there besides him and his mother. The swish of black material, murmuring voices, a tension in his mother’s hand as she held his.

  Back then, in his university days, he’d still been angry. Not the all-consuming, self-destructive anger he’d felt at first, but an ember that stayed lit in his belly, waiting to be triggered. At Nunhead he’d found that trigger. He’d grasped hungrily at the snatches of memories it invoked, but his hunger frightened them away. He’d been too eager to see something that wasn’t and too blind to see what was. There were also things his mind wouldn’t let him see. A darkness his mother had run from. A darkness buried with the corpses all around him.

  What Harrison had remembered was that after that night he and his mother went to America and the endless dry heat and sun of Arizona. While they were there, that cool grey evening at Nunhead, with the smell of damp decay everywhere, came to him in snatches. Large holes existed in the memories, holes that frightened him in the darkness of his bedroom at night, and he’d resisted them. Gradually his mind buried it altogether, only to reawaken when he’d returned as an adult.

  Before then, graveyards hadn’t frightened him. If anything, they’d made him feel jealous—not of the living, but of the dead. He’d read the messages of love left by family members who grieved their passing. He’d placed his hand on the cold grey headstones and imagined he could feel the spirit of the grave’s occupant pulsing up from the ground and through the stone, like electrical currents that talked to him through touch. His loneliness had sought a little of their family love.

  He no longer felt jealous of the dead at Nunhead. Most of the Victorians, who’d long ago been buried with such ceremony, had no one left to mourn them. The angels and headstones might have looked impressive, but people just walked past, occasionally reading a name, wondering about a life they had no concept of. Forgotten. The generations had moved on, but the dead had nowhere else to go. Nunhead was a final resting club for the privileged, where once you could be sure of meeting the right class of person over the graveside, but now even the mourners were ghosts.

  Today, as Harrison walked in, quite a few people were strolling in couples. He thought how Nunhead had probably been quite an effective pickup joint in Victorian times. You’d be guaranteed to find a widow or widower, with a good inheritance, feeling lonely. More effective than many of the modern dating sites.

  He walked past the Gothic chapel and the lime trees that lined the gravelled path. Away from the neatly restored area and towards the section Ryan had mentioned earlier. That same feeling he’d had all those years ago ran down his spine. Grainy images flickered in his mind. Why did he feel drawn here? What happened that night that was different from all the other nights? Had his mother taken them to America to escape it?

  Harrison walked between two large, pillared mausoleums. One carried the downwards-facing Greek torch that represented life extinguished. That same symbol was at the gates—and in his memory.

  The gravel ran out, and he found himself walking on a dirt path. To one side was an open space where the sunlight lit up new gravestones of white and shiny black marble, machine etched with gold lettering. Modern graves, some well looked after. Then a neatly mown, boxed hedge section of white carved stones. All the same. All standing straight. Regimented. War graves. To his left it became dark. Thick undergrowth and trees crowded around ancient gravestones, barely discernible in the gloom. Green lichen camouflaged the headstones so only a pale ghostly shadow of them could be seen. Through a break in the trees, Harrison saw the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in the city below. Farther on, darkness settled on both sides. Occasional tombs rose from the undergrowth, overlooking clusters of shadowed headstones. It was here that Harrison found what he was looking for.

  The satanic symbols were easy to spot, black daubed graffiti amid the green lichen and pale weathered stones. Crude pentagrams covered faded words of tribute and love. He stopped and looked. It was too familiar. He knew this was the same area inside his mind, the same place he’d stood trying to pull the memories from his head that night of the concert. He had to concentrate, to disassociate himself from the emotions threatening to distract him. Harrison closed his eyes and focussed on his breathing. He was here to investigate, not reminisce.

  When he opened his eyes, he turned his attention to the ground. Leaves—golds, browns, reds, yellows—covered the ground, and there was evidence of several shoe prints. Straight edges on crushed leaves, broken twigs and underneath, the prints of trainers in the mud. Using a stick, he searched in the debris and found several cigarette butts. They were still bright, freshly dropped, not like the older weathered and discoloured ones he’d seen on the path earlier. They also looked like one of the cheaper brands, thinner, and the paper wasn’t such high quality. His suspicion was confirmed when he spotted a crumpled packet discarded in the bushes. The evidence and the graffiti itself confirmed his supposition that kids were responsible. Modern satanists used the inverted pentagram; this one was the correct way up, and there was a badly spelt slogan on one stone: ‘Satan takes your babys’. Teenagers with nothing better to do.

  As he stood there, a bearded man walked down the path purposefully, from the same direction Harrison had come. He stopped and looked at the graffiti.

  ‘It’s not the first time we’ve had this happen here,’ he said by way of a conversation starter to Harrison, who nodded. ‘Of course, no one saw anything. You a reporter?’ he asked as Harrison took a couple of photographs on his phone.

  He looked at the man. He judged him to be in his late sixties, perhaps even early seventies. Kept himself relatively fit and active and was used to being outdoors from the look of his clothes and skin. He also wore a badge that said,
“FONC, Friends of Nunhead Cemetery.” Someone who helped look after the place.

  ‘No,’ Harrison replied. ‘I work with the police in ritualistic crime,’

  The man’s face changed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Harrison said. ‘This is nothing serious.’

  ‘Just kids, I reckoned,’ the man said, as he came to stand next to him and looked at the large pentagram.

  ‘Yeah. Definitely not anyone who’s a serious satanic follower,’ Harrison reassured him. ‘They’ve not inverted the pentagram for one thing. Schoolboy error.’

  The man nodded. ‘I thought so. Ah, well, we’ll soon have it cleaned off. As I said, it’s not for the first time. I came by to make sure it was just surface damage.’

  Harrison nodded his goodbye and waited a few moments until the man left. Satisfied the graffiti was unlikely to have anything to do with Darren, he allowed himself a few personal moments. This was definitely the same spot he’d been before. What was it about this area? These graves? He read each headstone individually, looking for a clue to explain why he’d been there with his mother and why this area had now fallen victim to satanic graffiti.

  They were all ancient, Henry Joseph Brown, beloved son of William and Elizabeth Brown who died 3rd January 1902, aged 29 years. A column carved to be broken and represent a life cut short, said, In loving memory of Ronald Robert, infant son of Charles and Harriet, 1871. There was an Alice, beloved wife of Henry, who’d died in 1892, aged just 31. She lay there alone in her grave. Where was Henry, lying next to a new wife somewhere else in the cemetery? Or maybe he’d died a pauper’s death, wracked with grief. No one to mourn his loss and no marker to show his passing. Was one of these people linked in some way to an old satanic cult, perhaps? If anyone had been officially suspected of witchcraft, it would have been highly unlikely that they’d have been buried in consecrated ground. Perhaps they were victims. Harrison took photos of each gravestone with his phone. None of the names meant anything to him.