The Silent Dead: A gripping crime thriller with a stunning twist

by Graham Smith

  Beth threw on some clothes and ran out to her car. The sooner she went through the latest misper reports, the quicker she’d be able to get down to Lonsdale Castle and see the crime scene for herself.

  Sixty-Four

  Lonsdale Castle was full of loom and menace as the early morning sun streamed through the missing windows in its towering walls. Like both Arthuret Hall and Highstead Castle, it was a shell of a building. Unlike the other two, it had already benefitted from a hefty financial investment.

  The main house was grand and imposing despite being little more than a collection of walls, but the surrounding areas were manicured. The grass at the front of the house was shorn like a bowling green and the stone walling at the front of the lawn was in good repair.

  A CSI tent had been erected at the front of the house, and there was a knot of police vehicles at the foot of the ramp leading to the main door.

  Beth joined O’Dowd and Thompson as they struggled their way out of their protective suits.

  Thompson’s face was grim and severe, but next to O’Dowd’s, it looked as if he’d just won the lottery.

  As she gazed over to the CSI tent, a squat man emerged and made his way across the footpads. He passed a greeting or two to the CSI team who were scouring the lawn.

  Short of a few cigarette butts and a sweetie wrapper or two, Beth didn’t expect them to find anything. Even what they did find wouldn’t be of much use. This was a public area; the detritus could have been there a month or more and Beth was sure the Dragon Master was too clever to have left anything lying around.

  ‘Get suited up, Beth. Go and have a look for yourself. Maybe you’ll spot something we haven’t.’

  Beth did as O’Dowd ordered and made her way towards the CSI tent. Halfway there she met Dr Hewson.

  ‘You going for your own look?’

  Beth nodded. ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘No worse than the others, but…’ He paused to pull a face. ‘Look, decomposition is never good, but I’d sooner deal with a rotting, stinking corpse than the body of someone who doesn’t look as if they’re old enough to drink, let alone die like this.’ He waved a hand towards the tent. ‘Do what you must, DC Protégé, just make sure you catch this man soon. This can’t go on.’

  Beth kept her eyes on the footpads until she was at the tent. She pulled back the opening and stepped inside. In front of her was the body of a young woman. A rope had been tied around the two pillars of the house’s portico and the woman’s arms had been attached to it with a series of cable ties.

  From her back sprouted a pair of wings. They were the largest Beth had seen thus far. They must have belonged to a buzzard or maybe even an eagle. Unlike the wings on the other victims, these weren’t folded, they were spread as if the bird was gliding on a light breeze.

  All of these details were unimportant. What really mattered was the girl. She was naked and her body was white and pale in front of Beth. The only marks on her skin were put there by a tattooist who obviously didn’t care about the quality of the work, or spelling.

  Her small breasts stood proud and both nipples were pierced. The girl’s face was a mess, her mouth was blackened and the lips scorched. Even the tip of her nose showed signs of heat blistering. It told Beth that the Dragon Master had found a substance that burned longer, or had worked out the right amount of accelerant to insert into his victims.

  As well as decreasing the time between his kills, the killer was also increasing the audacity of his murder sites. He’d gone from the cellar of a deserted house to a well-used venue in Arthuret Hall and was now using the front lawn of a busy tourist attraction. Every kill was an ‘improvement’ on the last one in terms of the prolonged fire breathing, and the wings affixed to the victims’ backs were growing in size.

  Beth looked at the girl’s fingers and saw no sign of anything lodged under her nails. She supposed Dr Hewson would have claimed it, but so far as she was concerned, she still had to look.

  Applying gloves over her own hands and then inspecting the girl’s nails, Beth saw they were covered in chipped nail varnish and there was an innocence to the primary colours that told of someone in the transition from child to adult. She might have her nipples pierced and own a number of bad tattoos, but she still seemed childlike in a way. This more than anything else disturbed Beth and made the tent feel claustrophobic.

  She didn’t know why she did it, but Beth took another look at the girl’s mouth. It was open in a charred scream. Something made Beth pull out her mobile and switch the torch app on.

  When she shone it into the girl’s mouth, she saw a tongue that resembled a piece of overcooked bacon. There in the middle of the tongue was the thing she’d half-seen but not registered before.

  It was a tongue stud, but instead of being silver and shiny, it was twisted and grotesque. Whatever accelerant had been used on the girl, it had burned long enough and hot enough to distort the stud through her tongue. At the corner of her mouth, jammed between the girl’s top and bottom molars, was a small block of wood similar to the one used on Nick Langley. Like that one it was blackened and charred.

  This new-found horror was too much for Beth. She stepped outside the tent and took in a few deep breaths.

  When she had control of herself, she looked around her. Other than the presence of the police, there seemed to be no change to the landscape. Birds flew overhead, sheep and cattle grazed in the fields, and there was a tractor chugging along a lane.

  As she kept gazing, she noticed a tree-lined avenue stretching two miles into the distance. It led from the centre of the portico to the horizon.

  The more she stared along the avenue, the more Beth came to understand the reason why the girl’s body had not been placed in a cellar. The positioning of her body in the portico was symbolic. It represented the killer’s emergence from the shadows. The girl wasn’t just elevated to a position in the house, she was at the front gate, looking down the drive. She was master of all she surveyed, no longer was she someone to be kept hidden below stairs, she was front and centre, ready to greet visitors, deal with problems and control her domain.

  Except that everything which applied to the girl was also relevant to the Dragon Master. She was his representative, his envoy. He was communicating to the police that he was in charge. Even the choice of murder scene, the deposit site, spoke of grandeur. Lonsdale Castle used to be one of the mightiest seats in Westmorland, as this part of the county was once known, and throughout history it had played host to kings and queens, supplied members of parliament and controlled vast swathes of the area.

  There was almost a challenge in the Dragon Master’s actions, as if he was goading the police, showing off his superior intelligence and worth. He had flirted with them by leaving his third victim where it could easily be found and had then retreated back to his haven for the fourth. Yet this fifth kill was the boldest of them all; to Beth it seemed that the Dragon Master wasn’t killing his victims in random places but that he was choosing deposit sites with care.

  In the same way that puzzles unfolded for her, as patterns emerging from the darkness, Beth could see clearly in that moment that the Dragon Master believed he had a right to kill. He was more than just a twisted killer, he thought he was better than everyone else, and that none of the inferior people he met could possibly understand the message a great man like him was sending. He’d emerged from the cellars and he was now master of all he surveyed. His wings were unfolded and he was ready to soar, to look down on others. The Dragon Master was rising from the depths of burned buildings like a phoenix from ashes to encompass all before him.

  As she made her way back to O’Dowd to share this theory, it was all she could do not to run along the footpads.

  The DI’s mood hadn’t improved and there was no sign of Thompson. Beth supposed he’d either been sent to look into something, or he’d invented a reason to get away from O’Dowd.

  ‘Whatever you’re looking so smug about better help me catch this killer.�
� The reprimand came with a mouthful of stale smoke and staler alcohol. When Beth took a closer look at the DI she saw bloodshot eyes and an increased level of emotion.

  By the time she finished sharing her ideas with O’Dowd, Beth noticed a lessening of the antagonism, although there was no less distress in her eyes.

  Then she got it. The picture became clearer as she put herself in the DI’s brogues.

  ‘Oh God, she reminded you of your daughter, didn’t she?’

  Beth led O’Dowd a few paces away from the various cars so they could talk without being overheard.

  ‘You have no idea, Beth.’ O’Dowd was fighting back tears. ‘It’s not just that poor lass. I’ve been up all night with my Neve.’

  ‘Was she ill?’ A realisation struck Beth with the force of a wrecking ball. ‘Oh no. She didn’t lose the baby, did she?’

  ‘No.’ O’Dowd’s head dipped forward as she shook it. ‘She didn’t lose the baby, she had it aborted. Not only is my little girl silly enough to get herself pregnant, she’s also silly enough to go off and have an abortion without discussing it with anyone.’ As O’Dowd paused to sniff, Beth saw a pair of heavy tears tumble to the ground. ‘You were right the other day when you said we would cope. We were looking at ways to cope. But then my Neve stamps down on the situation with all her customary impulsiveness.’ O’Dowd’s head lifted so she could look at Beth. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, that maybe in the long term, her having an abortion is the best solution for everyone, but I was brought up in a Catholic household. My faith may have lapsed, but I still believe in the sanctity of human life. And I think what she’s done is wrong. Does that make me sound like a bad mother?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  On the one hand, Beth felt for O’Dowd, but she could readily imagine the DI berating her daughter about the pregnancy. Neve would have been terrified that she’d ruined her life. Her mother’s rants would have reinforced that thinking, so she’d taken matters into her own hands and had the baby, and ergo the problem, removed.

  The flip side of this was that O’Dowd was clearly anti-abortion. Therefore the DI now blamed herself for the termination because of the pressure she’d heaped onto her daughter.

  It was a situation that would require time and a lot of understanding to resolve. Both mother and daughter had lost something with the abortion. It was vital that they didn’t lose each other as well.

  O’Dowd sniffed again and dabbed at her eyes. ‘It’s my fault. If I’d been more understanding about her getting pregnant she wouldn’t have done it. She’d have kept the baby and in a few months I’d have been a grandmother. No.’ Another shake of the head. ‘I’d have been the best grandmother a child could ever hope for. And now, now it’s all gone because I was too hard on her. Because I scared her half to death with tales of how tough it would be, how much her life would change. It’s my fault; I as good as performed the abortion myself.’

  ‘Bollocks. You did what any parent would do. She’s a big girl and she made her own decisions. The first one was rolling the dice by having unprotected sex, the second was in deciding to take the action she did.’ Beth fixed O’Dowd with a sympathetic but hard look. ‘I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but if she was anything like me at that age, she’d have ignored every word that came out of your mouth. Yes, it’s shit that her decision has broken your heart. But it’s her life and she has to make her own mistakes. Trust me. Having an abortion isn’t something you ever get over. You look at the calendar and remember your due date. You never forget the date you went to the hospital for an operation to kill the embryo growing inside you. And to manage your guilt, that’s how you always try and think of it, as an embryo, not as your child. You don’t forget that you chose to have the life of your first child ended because you were terrified that you wouldn’t cope, that you’d not be able to give a child everything it deserves from life.’

  Beth had to turn away from O’Dowd so the older woman couldn’t see the tears filling her eyes. It had been seven years since the day she’d visited the clinic, but she regularly found herself thinking about the child she’d never given birth to. On the anniversary of the clinic visit she would buy a bouquet of flowers and leave them on a random grave in Penrith’s Beacon Edge Cemetery. It was a small gesture that she knew she did to salve her conscience.

  ‘You had an abortion?’

  ‘Yes, I did. Now, please, for your daughter’s sake, take a walk over to where no one can hear you, phone your daughter and tell her that you love her. Believe me, you have no idea how much she needs to hear that from you.’

  Amazingly, O’Dowd followed her instructions, while Beth turned away and took a few steps in the opposite direction to distance herself from the growing crowd of CSI technicians.

  She hadn’t meant to reveal her past to O’Dowd. It had all taken place years ago. She’d been a naive sixteen-year-old who’d believed that she wouldn’t get pregnant just doing it the once without a condom.

  She’d been wrong. As soon as her period was four weeks late, she knew she had a decision to make. At the time her modelling career was starting to take off, and she had only just begun putting money away for the time when she joined the police. She hadn’t been ready to be a mother and at the time wasn’t confident that she’d be able to become one. She’d chosen to have an abortion because she was convinced that she’d fail her baby in every possible way once it was born.

  Even so, she often wondered what the child would have been like if she’d not made the choice she had.

  Other than the people at the clinic, O’Dowd was the only other person who knew about it. She’d kept her pregnancy and abortion a secret through shame and selfishness. The whole thing had been traumatic enough, without her parents weighing in with their opinions. With her mother battling depression, there was no way she could throw an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy into their lives.

  Before Beth returned to the crime scene she took a few minutes to compose herself. While thoughts of the abortion she’d had, and the latent feelings of guilt associated with it were never far away, O’Dowd’s news had brought everything to the surface. The DI’s reactions were the ones she’d known her parents would have had if she’d told them. Her mother never mentioned children to Beth, but she’d seen the way she’d shot envious looks when her neighbour had enthused about her grandchildren.

  Sixty-Five

  The man stretched out his limbs and settled into the office chair. The building was abandoned; it was perfect for his purpose. It was far enough away from the car showroom that he couldn’t be seen by the naked eye; it was also to the south which meant he didn’t have to worry about the sun glinting off the lenses of his binoculars and betraying his position. As a precaution against being seen by anyone in the vicinity, he’d climbed up to the old textile mill’s first floor and positioned the chair a good ten feet back from the window he was looking out of.

  He focussed his binoculars and took a careful sweep of the car showroom until he picked out Sarah Hardy. After adjusting the zoom, he was able to appreciate her beauty once more. She’d dressed in a way that made her allure reach new heights. The dress she wore was a simple flowing summery one. It was tight across Sarah’s upper torso and chest but below that it flared out. As she walked across the forecourt he could see it catch in the breeze and wrap itself around her graceful movements.

  Everything about her suggested that she was happy about something. Her smile didn’t fade, even when there was no one to smile to. She made constant checks of her watch and it was only then that her smile threatened to fade.

  The man was pleased she was in a good mood. As beautiful as she was, the natural glow from her happiness made her even more desirable.

  He didn’t like where his guesses as to the cause of her happiness were taking him though. The obvious one was that she was looking forward to something. It may well be a holiday or something equally innocuous, but he didn’t think so. She was too happy and she checked her watch too often.<
br />
  In his mind there could be only one reason: she had a date.

  This wasn’t a problem for him. He wanted her to be happy, to enjoy life and experience the indescribable joy of feeling loved.

  His concern was the man she would be joining on the date.

  He wanted to question this man the way a father would grill a daughter’s new boyfriend.

  Would he place her on a pedestal? Promise never to hurt her? Support her? Most of all, would he treat her like the angel she was?

  Sixty-Six

  Beth dropped the wrapping from her lunch into the bin, shut out the chatter from Unthank and Thompson and focussed on her spreadsheet. She’d got all the basic details into the appropriate columns and was inputting the lesser-known facts. Nothing had leapt out at her so far, but she was sure that the key to the case would lie in those pages. All she had to do was get the details down and then cross reference them.

  The job was a boring one, but that didn’t bother her. She thrived on picking over mundane details. For her, it was crucial to learn as much about the victims as she could. Once she knew their likes and dislikes, she could gauge their temperaments and look for commonalities.

  As the stream of data filled the screen, it became clear to Beth that while there were a number of possible overlaps between any two of the four identified victims, there was nothing to link all of them together.

  ‘We’ve got an ID on our girl. She’s Caitlin Russell, eighteen years old, from Liverpool. I’ve checked her out, she’s had three arrests for common assault and two for possession of narcotics. Her family are well known to the local police. To quote the PC I spoke to “she’s a right little charmer from a family full of them”.’ Thompson’s voice was layered with sorrow, and Beth wondered if he was thinking of his own teenage daughters. ‘Still, I don’t suppose she deserved what happened to her.’