Preacher Boy

by Gwyn GB

  High-rise flats were his worst nightmare. It was an attitude born of his mother’s free spirit and the lifestyle they’d had when he’d been a child. To him they were claustrophobic cages. He struggled to live in London as it was. The people, the noise, the fumes, and the never-ending concrete. He’d only come here to study, but somehow, after his mother’s death, he’d stayed. Perhaps it was because he’d nowhere else to go. At one point he’d toyed with the idea of going back to Joe in Arizona. He’d been the closest thing to a father to him, but he’d not wanted to impose. Joe had married and his wife was expecting. Harrison knew he loved him. There’d been nobody else in the world who would have flown thousands of miles to the UK to hunt Harrison down and get him back on the right track. He knew he owed Joe his life, and he never forgot that.

  Once he’d got his own head sorted, that had been the catalyst to him wanting to study psychology. Trying to understand the human mind and what drove people like Desmond Manning became an obsession to him. He’d excelled at it. Stints at various prisons and correctional institutes soon led to his reputation spreading. It was his knowledge of cults and religions which gave him such unique experience. One thing led to another. He’d ended up being recruited by the Met Police because they’d got the budget and the need, but he’d found himself going all over the UK of late and that suited him just fine.

  It was all a long way from his childhood. They’d lived with Joe on an Indian reservation. Before then his mother had wandered from one commune to the next, trying out Buddhism, earth living, and all manner of alternative religions, in an attempt to find her spiritual awakening. She’d lived on a Greek island and travelled to India, and somewhere she’d met his father and he’d been born. Harrison had no idea who his father was, or where he was from. His mother and he drifted from place to place, looking for whatever it was she was seeking. Her desperate need to fill a void and find a place where she felt at home was what drove her. He thought she’d found it in America. They’d stayed there longer than she’d ever stayed anywhere, and they’d been happy years. A time where there were no boundaries to anything–a huge great land full of learning and opportunity.

  He never understood why it had all gone wrong. Neither did Joe. One day Harrison had been running through the hot desert tracking snakes and gophers, and the next he was on a plane to the cold, wet, miserable UK. He’d arrived home to find his mother sobbing, packing their belongings, and pleading with Joe to understand. Even at a young age, he’d been able to see that Joe couldn’t. He couldn’t either. They’d gone back to live in the commune run by Desmond and Freda Manning. His mother left more than Joe behind. She also left her smiles and laughter in America. They were dark days that had ended her life and nearly ended his.

  Harrison pushed those thoughts from his mind. This was not what he wanted to think about right now. What he needed to concentrate on was the search for a little boy. He had to get under Cameron Platt’s skin, work out what motivated him and where he might have gone.

  The front door of the flat still showed traces of the grey aluminium dust forensics used to gather fingerprints. It also sported a new enhanced lock fitted to prevent any trophy hunters or media from gaining access. Last thing they needed was the caretaker or someone giving ghoulish tours to anyone who would pay. Harrison put on the full forensic suit, gloves, and overshoes, and used the key that DCI Barker had given to him.

  The floor of the flat was no longer crunchy underfoot from the flies, but their squashed bodies lay everywhere, testament to the weeks that the corpse of John Jacob Platt had sat in his armchair. In places there were stepping plates protecting the areas that SOCO deemed important evidence.

  The curtains were open, probably to allow the team to air the room after the initial analysis and the body was gone. Or what was left of the body. Harrison had seen the photographs. The natural decomposition aided by fly maggots had done a good job. The stench of a body in decay still lingered, soaked into the carpets and the upholstery of the chair he had sat in. The putrid rot of cadaverine and putrescine, with the sickening egg stench of hydrogen sulphide and a hint of sewage from the skatole. Just some of the gases and liquids produced during the putrefaction of a corpse.

  He’d tried the light switch but got nothing. Stood to reason that they’d been cut off. Who would have been paying the bills? The open curtains allowed a pale wash of illumination into the room. The surrounding flats, streetlights, and general white light which leeched from offices, ensured enough visibility for him to reach the lamps forensics had rigged up.

  Before he ventured out of the hallway, Harrison stood still and grounded himself. He needed to concentrate, needed every one of his senses working and focussed. He had to put himself into the mind of Cameron Platt, see what he saw without his own personal take on it all. Harison stood for five minutes, feet planted, getting his breathing and consciousness under control. Clearing his mind. Only when he felt the power of all his faculties alive and working together, did he open his eyes and look around him.

  He stepped forward into the living room.

  SOCO had marked various things in the flat with yellow numbered markers. Where the body had sat in the armchair, was a black stain that seeped into the carpet around it. Harrison wasn’t interested in the chair. He looked first at the surrounding carpet, crouching down and using his iPhone light to look in detail at the carpet fibres. He knew this room had been full of forensic officers all afternoon and into the evening. There was likely to be very little in the way of signs for him to be able to read, but he found some.

  It was probably helped by the fact the carpet was filthy, years of dust and dirt stacked between the fibres provided a cushion to crush. What was blatantly clear to Harrison, was that a path had been trodden and worn around the armchair. It was definitely around the chair in its current position, which was not its original placement. First, nobody would plonk an armchair in the middle of a room facing a door with his back to a window, and second Harrison could see the marks embedded in the carpet from where it had originally sat for what was probably decades before. This position and the path around it were new.

  He stepped back and surveyed the entire room. The walls were covered in crucifixes, pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. They hung on a faded pale green and white wallpaper that looked like it had once depicted fronds of plants and maybe even flowers. The pattern of the wallpaper was barely visible, because where there weren’t religious pictures or icons, there was graffiti quoting passages from the Bible. Written in black marker pens, the writing had a fervour to it. Jagged points on the upper loops of the letters, but not the straight slashes of temper. The letters were small, which indicated Cameron’s reclusive nature and they mostly slanted to the left. He’d clearly used a fair amount of pressure to write the words. These weren’t hastily scribbled, they were placed carefully with passion.

  ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burnt, and the flame shall not consume you.’

  ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.’

  Harrison could imagine it was when his father had just died. They were all messages of redemption and the passage into the afterlife with God and Jesus.

  The writing wasn’t uniform, though. As Harrison looked at each section, there was a clear deterioration. There were whole passages where the letters would slant both left and right within the same word. To the untrained eye it looked like the writer had perhaps struggled to control the pen on the awkward to reach surface, but to Harrison they showed a person who was losing their grip on reality. Other letters also showed a tremor, an indicator of the stress Cameron’s mind was under. Where the writing deteriorated, so too did the tone of the Bible passages.

  ‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the begi
nning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.’

  ‘Flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.’

  As Cameron ran out of wall space he was cramming in as much as he could. ‘Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.’ And ‘The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his father.’ Harrison was sure that last one had been doctored slightly, that it should say mother.

  He took some photographs. He’d run the writing by a graphologist, but from what the passages said and how the writing changed, it was a clear indicator of the state of Cameron’s mind.

  Harrison could imagine Cameron Platt, walking around the body of his dead father, quoting passages from the Bible, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, until maybe the stench got too much; or because he had another purpose.

  Cameron’s mental deterioration was clear to see, but why take the boys, and where to?

  This room couldn’t have been more different to the two homes he’d visited over the last couple of days. In both, he’d seen love and warmth. Surfaces that carried images of happy family life. Colour and joy. Here it was a bleak monochrome facsimile of a home, stripped of its humanity. If this was the life Cameron was brought up in, then he would have had a lonely childhood. Harrison knew his mother had left and his father was strict and loveless. That in itself would have led to the potential for psychological harm. It was well documented that those who were abused as children, were more likely than those who hadn’t, to either be abusers themselves or to graduate towards abusive relationships. This flat screamed emotional neglect. Harrison felt some pity for Cameron Platt, but he doubted he was a particularly likeable personality. Now, he could at least understand his mental struggle.

  That still didn’t explain why he chose Darren and Alex. If they’d both come from broken homes, then perhaps it could have been that he thought they needed a father figure, but that wasn’t the case. Harrison needed to keep looking.

  There were two bedrooms leading off from the sitting room. He went into the one on the left first. It was devoid of character. More pictures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and just one photograph—the first he’d seen of the living—a rotund, balding man shaking hands with a man in a suit, who was giving him something. Harrison looked closer at the image. It was outside a factory and it looked like he was being handed a glass plate. He took his own photograph of it.

  Elsewhere in the room there was little else to see. A well-read Bible on the bedside cabinet. A couple of pairs of shoes. On a chair, a pile of clothes which had obviously been worn and were dirty. With his gloves on, Harrison looked through drawers and the wardrobe. His sense was of a man devoid of human emotions and needs, a man who lived just for his God. His God was a cruel God, the God of the First Testament, of fire and brimstone and an eye for an eye, not the forgiving gentleness of Jesus. The character of the father was clear to see in this bedroom.

  Across the other side of the lounge was another identical sized room. Again sparsely furnished, nothing to give away the character of the person who had lived there. There were no photographs on these walls and no Bible. He knew one had been found in the corpse’s mouth and it made sense that if Cameron had been using it to read from that it was his which was now in the forensics lab. There was, however, one other book on the bedside table. It was a Haynes manual for a van, the same make and model as the post vans. Harrison picked it up and flicked through it. He shook it. Nothing fell out, but when he held it again, it fell open on a diagram of the chassis. Cameron must have planned to snatch the boys. Worked out how he would disguise the van and carried out the work on it at the lock-up while still living at the flat.

  What did that do to a human mind to return home each day and be greeted by the rotting corpse of your father?

  The wardrobe contained very few clothes. It didn’t look as though Cameron had taken many, if any, with him–wherever he’d gone–because there weren’t even empty coat hangers left. Shoved on the top shelf, he found overalls covered in paint from his days at the paint shop.

  There were no aftershaves, no deodorants. There was barely anything at all on top of the chest of drawers in the room, besides a hairbrush and a mug which had once held a cup of tea but now displayed a scientific extravaganza of mould.

  Harrison stood for a moment and looked around, then he lifted the mattress.

  Nothing.

  He was about to let it drop back when he noticed something. There was a piece of loose thread at the end of a faint line in the mattress material. Could that be a slit sewn up? It was barely noticeable.

  Harrison tipped the mattress up and felt the area. Underneath the fabric, he could feel something solid. He took a photograph with his phone for forensics and then pulled at the thread so the faint line became a gash in the material and gaped open.

  They were slightly mildewed, but inside was a selection of old exercise books with the name ‘Cameron Platt’ on the front covers. There were seven in total. Harrison looked through them all and every single one was filled from cover to cover with writing, but it was the same sentences. ‘I am evil.’ And ‘I must renounce Satan,’ written over and over and over again. Where he hadn’t said this, he’d copied out passages of the Bible.

  Harrison took more photos with his phone and then left the books with the mattress. He’d let Tanya know to send someone from her team to log them.

  Harrison checked in the other usual places that people hide things, but the investigators had already done that and nothing else came up.

  It was a sad room. No mark of its former occupant at all apart from that writing from childhood. Was it instigated by his father or was it just Cameron who believed himself evil?

  Harrison carried on his tour, this time into the open-plan galley kitchen area.

  The cupboards were mostly empty, barely any cooking or eating tools and not much at all in the way of food, bar some spilt pasta and a sachet of tomato ketchup.

  The fridge was a similar situation, empty except for a mouldy milk carton that only had a tiny drop of milk in it, anyway.

  Harrison peered into the waste bin. The first thing which caught his eye was a glass plate at the bottom of the bin covered in other rubbish. It was the plate from the bedroom photograph, only it had already been damaged. There were large, badly glued cracks across it. Clearly someone had broken it and then tried to mend it—badly.

  The rest of the rubbish in the bin comprised old food cans, bread wrappers, and a couple of church newsletters. St Mary’s seemed to be their preferred spiritual home. Harrison made a mental note.

  Now he’d made his observations, Harrison needed to get into Cameron’s mind and under his skin. He switched off the forensic lamps to return the sitting room to its dim, street lighting. For a few moments he stood in the gloom, allowing his eyes to get used to the darkness. Then he started to walk around the armchair in which the body had sat. As he walked, he looked at the graffiti on the walls, ‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.’

  Round and round he walked, just thinking and soaking in the atmosphere of the flat.

  He looked at what Cameron had seen. Listened to the silence. The distant tinny sounds of other people living their lives. TVs on, people laughing, shouting, and talking. The loneliness. The fear. Fear of the God who could at any time strike him down and send him to the pits of hell. He had no one to talk to except a rotting corpse. As the days had worn on, the putrefaction of his father’s body would have seemed like evil at first, seeping from his eyes, nostrils, and mouth, and then bursting out from within. The dark clouds of flies were the Devil’s host arriving to feast on his soul. What would Cameron be thinking? A lon
ely child in a loveless family environment. His forays to the prostitute would be preying on his mind. He had sinned. God saw everything. Perhaps at the end he was also hungry. He would have avoided human interactions. His own stomach would have felt empty just as his father’s bloated.

  Cameron was a man seeking redemption. Trying to put right some of what he had done wrong in God’s eyes.

  It was while he stood there in the gloom, thinking through Cameron Platt’s possible whereabouts, that he heard footsteps approaching the front door.

  He stopped breathing as he strained to hear. There was a jangle of keys, then one was inserted into the lock.

  His heart jumped.

  Could Platt have returned to his home, come back to his father?

  Harrison was about to lunge towards the door to confront him, when it started to open. In that split second, reality returned, and he realised it couldn’t be Platt because they’d changed the locks. In the next split second, he realised he was going to give whoever his colleague was, a mighty big fright because he was stood there in the dark.

  Harrison lunged towards the forensics lamps to turn them on, just as the silhouette of Dr Tanya Jones was lit up in the doorway. His mind split in two. One half transfixed by her attractive figure, while his other half attempted to prevent the woman from having a heart attack.