Dead petals, p.25
Dead Petals, page 25
Now he knew what it meant.
After he’d purchased the desk, he’d had it restored. He re-read the old yellowed sticker. This was the company he’d called to do the restoration work for him. He’d used a small, local firm he’d found in the business pages or online somewhere.
WMarsden & Son.
Carpentry and Furniture Restoration.
Marsden had come to the house to collect the desk himself. A tall man with a thin, pale face, aged perhaps sixty or so. His white hair was crewcut, the fringes tinged with the yellowy-brown stains of a chain-smoker. He was an earthy type with a broad northern accent and had been accompanied by a younger lad, who Gary had assumed was the ‘son’. The lad was pale and gangly like his father, but quiet. Gary didn’t remember him speaking at all. Marsden had ordered him about with a sharpness of the tongue that made it clear he didn’t have much patience with him.
The two of them had carried the desk from the garage and loaded it into the back of a white van. A couple of weeks later, Marsden called to tell him the desk was ready and looked beautiful, if he did say so himself. They’d brought it back at the weekend because it was the only day Gary could spare to supervise the delivery, and inspect the work, before paying for it.
Gary had been more than satisfied. Marsden had done a masterly job and the desk was indeed beautifully restored and finished.
For a few extra quid’s worth of enticement, Marsden had agreed to carry the heavy desk up to the study,
Charley must have been eight or nine at the time and had been running in and out of the bedrooms and along the landing; laughing and giggling with some friends who were over. Gary had told them to calm down and stay in Charley’s room until they’d finished moving the desk.
“Kid’s,” Gary had laughed in that good-humoured parental-tone.
Marsden had just smiled and nodded. “They’re doing no harm.”
The son never uttered a word and constantly avoided eye contact. Gary got the idea Marsden was the overbearing kind of father who could stifle a child, who would stifle a child. Maybe quick to criticise and slow to praise. Maybe the type who believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child.
The boy had been no child though. Probably in his late teens or early twenties. He had moved with a slowness, but jumped to his father’s instructions.
When the desk was in position, Marsden sent his son to bring up the drawers and fit them onto their sliders. Gary had paid the man and been given a handwritten invoice for the work. Marsden voiced his thanks, folding the money and slipping it into the breast pocket of his work shirt. When the lad had a bit of trouble fitting them, Marsden had told him to get out of the way and did it himself.
Gary had never thought about them again. Until now.
The zigzags were clearly a reference to Marsden. There was no way it could be a coincidence. But what did it mean? Why had the girls shown this to him? What did they want him to know? That Marsden was their kidnapper? Could the man who restored this desk be the Goldilocks Killer? Could it all be that closely interlocked?
Then he remembered the night the phone had rung in the early hours and he’d heard that faint sobbing on the line. He’d called back through the redial service and when the other party had picked up, he’d answered, “Hello, Marsden?”
Gary shivered, and his stomach lurched.
Hello, Marsden.
WMarsden.
WM
Zigzag.
He’d spoken to the Goldilocks Killer that night and he hadn’t even known it.
His stomach rolled again and he had to grab the wastepaper basket so he could puke up old whisky and bile. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the vomit sour and burning his throat. The call of more alcohol was difficult to resist, but he needed a clear head. He needed to think.
He went to the bathroom, washed his face and swilled the sourness from his mouth. The reflection staring back at him from the mirror was shocking. Sallow complexion, dark rings under his eyes.
What have I done to myself?
He fell back against the wall and slid into a sitting position on the cold tile floor as the enormity of it all settled on him.
Did he actually have the name of the Goldilocks Killer?
The man who had kidnapped and killed at least one young girl and probably five more?
The man who had murdered Charley?
You don’t know that!
That stubborn part of his mind still protested.
“You don’t know that,” he whispered in agreement.
But the corridor was narrowing, the possibilities diminishing.
This isn’t about Charley, he insisted to himself. This was about something else, something that he didn’t fully understand.
It all stemmed back to Emma and the day she was murdered. Emma must have been killed by the same man who had kidnapped the other girls, or it didn’t make any sense.
Sense? There was sense to be made of this?
Nevertheless, it was likely that they were all murdered by the same man, and that Emma had somehow brought his other poor victims with her. They wanted justice for their murders. They wanted Marsden caught.
No, they don’t, a small voice spoke up from the back of his mind. They want more than that...they want revenge.
Why did he think that? He had no basis for it...except...
Those girls...they’re angry.
But that didn’t mean they wanted him to...
He shook the rest away and considered what he could realistically do with this information. He could take it to the police, though explaining how he came by it might be difficult.
The ghosts of the dead girls in my house told me.
Would they take him seriously? Or would they think him crazy and waste more time investigating him?
The idea of finding where Marsden lived, and going there himself surfaced for a moment, floated briefly and turned over in the moonlight like the pale belly of a whale. It was a crazy idea. The kind of thing that happened in movies.
But you’re considering it.
At the height of the investigation, Chloe had asked him for a list of people or companies who had worked for them in the last three years. Gary kept records in perpetuity, and so had found the invoices for jobs he’d had done. There had been a new boiler, retiling of the bathroom, some landscaping, replacement of two blown double-glazing units, and obviously all the people he’d hired for Charley’s birthday party.
Marsden’s restoration work had not been among the companies he’d given to the police. That meant it must have been further back than three years since he’d hired them.
He returned to the study and opened the filing cabinet drawer where he kept all his old invoices. He kept them in green suspension folders, each folder neatly labelled with the year. He found the one from 2010 and searched through it. He spotted it almost immediately, the W and the M masquerading as a red zigzag. A printed invoice with handwritten details:
Restoration and finishing of one
William IV Mahogany desk - £500.
The handwriting was a childish, half-print, half-script and the address was scrawled along the bottom of the page.
Gary retrieved his Mac from the floor and set it atop the filing cabinet. He loaded up Google Maps and typed ‘Riverside Gableton’ into the search field. The site immediately honed into the area and displayed it as a coloured gradient map. Riverside was a flat piece of land sitting inside a loop of the River Ribble. He moved the pointer to the ‘Satellite’ button, changing the map to aerial photographs of green fields, trees and bushes. A thin, brown string of a road, not much more than a dirt path, wound through the greenery and led to a cluster of structures that resembled farm buildings. He hovered the pointer over the central building, hoping for a popup giving more information, but nothing appeared. He dragged the little man who gave you a street level view of the area and dropped him onto the dirt road, but no street level views were available. That probably meant it was a private road.
He sat back and viewed the overall area again. The buildings were on their own, with just that single road leading in and out.
Private. Isolated.
He moved the zoom slider toward the plus sign, enlarging, but blurring the image a little as it lost some resolution. Set at angles to the main building, were a couple of large outbuildings—barns maybe—or storage. There were also two small vehicles parked out front, along with a large, white transit van.
Gary pressed the ball of his thumb against his teeth and gnawed at the skin. Then something caught his eye. He stopped gnawing and leaned forward. Between the farmhouse and the van was a blurry little smudge that was most certainly a person.
Was that him? Was it Marsden?
The blurry image chilled him.
He moved the slider toward the minus sign again, widening the view. His eyes skipped around the image, following the roads until he found his own house. He zoomed in some, centring the image so that the house fitted in the top left of the screen, the farmhouse in the bottom right.
He checked the scale line and estimated the Marsden farm was around seven kilometres away.
So close.
Maybe he could fabricate a story for the police. He could tell them how Marsden had looked at his eight-year-old daughter like a sex-starved mongrel, and how he must have waited a further four years before returning to kidnap her. It sounded unlikely. Would the police believe him enough to send a couple of officers out to question him? Hadn’t the Yorkshire Ripper been questioned multiple times, yet remained free to murder more women?
He looked at the map, and the idea of going to the farmhouse himself surfaced again.
Seven kilometres.
He could be driving down that dirt path in twenty minutes.
Maybe less, at that time of night.
And what would you do when you got there?
Maybe snoop around and find evidence to tie Marsden to the missing girls. Compelling evidence that would convince the police that Marsden was the man they were looking for. For a second, he imagined himself at the house, creeping around outside, peering through windows and searching the out houses.
Maybe he could even get inside.
Stop it!
It was ridiculous.
And yet it wasn’t.
The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to take control. He’d been out of control for such a long time.
He could knock at the door and if Marsden answered he could claim he had furniture he needed restoring and thought he’d drop by to discuss it. Not a good time? No problem, I’ll come back when it’s more convenient.
But when he envisioned the scenario and the exchange, it was far more chilling. What if Marsden knew who he was? Maybe he’d be attacked. The farmhouse appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, there’d be no one to see or hear.
The better choice, the safer choice, would be to hand this over to the police. No matter how it sounded, they would still have to investigate it.
His head was starting to hurt from overthinking.
He walked out onto the landing and looked at Charley’s room. Were they in there now, watching him from that vertical slash of darkness between the door and the jamb? Were they listening to him?
He leaned against the wall.
“Okay. What do you want me to do?” he asked.
The room stood silent and still.
“I don’t know what you want me to do. Tell me what you want me to do.”
The door slowly opened wider, the hinges creaking.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you, but what can I do?”
The door slammed hard, making Gary jump. He stood in the middle of the landing facing Charley’s room.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he asked angrily. “You want me to call the police?”
The door wrenched open and slammed shut, opened and slammed, opened and slammed, as if by a kid having a tantrum. In fact, exactly like a kid having a tantrum.
Gary’s heart thumped in his ears and his face grew hot.
“You want me to go then, is that it?”
The door clicked softly and opened, just a crack.
“You want me to go alone?”
The house was silent.
Gary closed his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Though he went to bed at a little after three, Gary woke early, from what seemed like the best night’s sleep he’d had in months. The sleep had been uninterrupted and dreamless, sliding through his mind like a silky black ribbon.
After showering, he went out on the patio, shaking a bag of cat food and calling for Mister Whiskers. The cat was nowhere in sight, so he washed out his dishes and filled them with fresh food and water, setting them out at the edge of the patio. He tried to eat a little breakfast, but his stomach was turning itself inside out at the thought of what he was going to do. A shot of Scotch would have gone down well, but alcohol was out of the question. He drank coffee instead.
He needed to keep his wits about him. Things could go bad today.
You don’t know anything, he told himself. You don’t know what might happen.
What if it was true though?
He would be walking into the lion’s den. Putting himself in harm’s way. There was no escaping that simple truth.
You’re just going to scope it out. That’s all. Maybe the evidence will be right there in plain sight. These girls want you to help them, would they really put you in danger?
Maybe.
After all, those girls…they are angry.
Children could be incredibly selfish. And these were dead children, angry at being snatched violently from life. Who knew how their minds worked?
They’d made it clear that they wanted him to go, and go alone, but he was still considering taking someone with him, and there was only one person he could trust.
Lance.
Friends come and go, but Lance had been there almost from the start. At every milestone. Through good and bad; thick and thin. Gary remembered how he’d called Lance on the day Charley went missing and how he had said ‘I’m on my way’ without even knowing what was wrong.
Gary could easily spin Lance a yarn if he wanted to. Hell, he could probably tell him the truth about the ghosts and the hauntings and Lance would still go with him.
Lance would put himself in harm’s way.
And that was why he couldn’t ask. He couldn’t ask because Lance would go with him, no matter what.
And what if it went really bad?
Gary couldn’t be responsible for putting his friend at risk. If anything happened to Lance, he’d never forgive himself.
Perhaps he should leave a note then, or send an email in case it all went wrong? There was every chance it could go wrong.
His attention was drawn to the knife block. He walked over and drew the chef’s knife almost all the way out, resting the point in the slot. The steel blade gleamed.
He tried to imagine what it might feel like to stab a man in the chest with it and found he couldn’t.
The phone rang.
Gary removed the knife from the block and took it with him to the phone.
“Hello, Gary? It’s Trixie.” Her voice was quick and breathy.
“Glad you could join the party,” Gary said.
“What?”
“Nothing...bad joke.”
“What’s happened?”
“Happened?
“You know what the zigzag means.”
Gary closed his eyes and laughed. He didn’t mean to, it just came naturally, unexpectedly. He thought about all the times he’d made fun of Trixie, both to her face and behind her back. He’d always been so positive, so one hundred percent sure, she was full of shit. At dinner parties he used to cringe whenever she started on about spirits and auras.
All the time he had been wrong about her.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
“I thought you didn’t know anything about any zigzags,” he said.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Well, I did, but it’s complicated.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed.
“I have to know what the zigzag means, Gary. I need to know. It’s driving me insane.”
“It’s not a zigzag.” He could feel her holding her breath for the answer. “It’s a set of initials.”
She gasped, the sort of sound you make when seized by the answer to the question that has eluded you for the longest time.
“Of course it is,” she said. “A W and M joined at the hip. A zigzag. I can’t believe I didn’t see it.” Then came the obvious question. “Whose initials are they?”
Gary thought about sharing the details with her. She was, after all, probably the only other person in the world he could share them with, without them thinking he’d lost his mind.
This wasn’t for her though. This was for him. The angry squatters in Charley’s bedroom had made that clear. It was time to wrap this up and see it through.
“Trixie, I just want you to know I’m sorry for all the times I made fun of you, all the times I tried to make you look small.”
“All the times you were a dick, you mean?”
Gary smiled and tried to imagine that patronizing, yet alluring, look at the other end of the phone. “Yeah,” he said. “For all the times I was a dick. I’m sorry.”
“Never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“Neither did I, but a lot has happened in a very short space of time.”
Trixie seemed to understand he was getting ready to hang up on her. “Whose initials are they, Gary?” she asked again.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because…” he began, but didn’t really know how to reply.
“Is it the man who took Charley?”
Gary gripped the phone tightly, the earpiece pressed hard against his ear.
Is it the man who took Charley?
Is it?
The reality of what he was going to do slid across the surface of his mind like a razorblade. He’d thought that going to the farm might be dangerous, but realistically there was no ‘might’ about it. Marsden was a murderer. A serial killer. If he had the slightest hint of why Gary was there, he would be in serious trouble.
