The hungry dark, p.8
The Hungry Dark, page 8
12
THE NEXT MORNING, Ashley made a point of getting up especially early. She showered, dressed, then headed downstairs to the kitchen. Her mother was still in her dressing gown, and she visibly startled to see Ashley already fully dressed.
‘What are you doing up at this time?’ she said, her eyes widening. ‘Is something wrong? Do you feel all right? I imagine you had nightmares all night, with what you saw yesterday.’
Ashley took a piece of toast from her mother’s plate and swept some blackcurrant jam over it quickly. Helen Whitelam was very insistent on three meals a day, although she herself barely pecked at food.
‘I’m fine, Mum, just got a lot on today.’
‘Indeed you have.’ Her father loomed in from the living room. He was dressed too, a charcoal grey waistcoat over a crisp white shirt. ‘We’ve interviews this morning, Ash, and the Bluebird Inn has called about having you back for an impromptu “evening with”, can you believe it? When they were such snooty bastards about the event last time.’
‘I don’t want to do interviews, Dad.’ Ashley took a few bites of toast and chewed rapidly. ‘I don’t want to do any of that.’
‘What? This is a prime piece of publicity, Ash. You will not be wasting it. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Publicity?’ Ashley put the slice of toast down on the counter, her fingers trembling slightly. ‘I found a dead kid, Dad.’
‘Ashley!’ her mother said sharply.
‘Have you forgotten that part?’ Ashley could feel her cheeks getting hot. Her father was scowling, the fingers of one hand picking at the strap of his expensive watch. ‘I actually walked into the woods, and I saw … I saw …’ All at once, the colour seemed to be draining out of the day. She leaned against the sideboard and took a deep breath, even as her mother fluttered around her anxiously. ‘I’ve been questioned by the police, Dad, because they think I have something to do with a dead kid. Don’t you think I deserve a … a sick day or something?’
‘You are in the business of the dead, Ashley,’ her father said evenly. ‘It’s the business we’ve all been in since you—’
Ashley cut him off with a strangled laugh. ‘Unfuckingbelievable. I’m going out to get some fresh air.’ Now that she felt like she could move without falling down, Ashley strode past her parents to the hallway and snatched her car keys off the telephone table by the front door. Her father was following, making her think of an angry old bear roused from sleep.
‘Your first interview is at ten,’ he said, his voice raised. ‘I will expect you back here at nine thirty so we can go over what you’re going to say. Nine thirty sharp.’
‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ Ashley muttered, before slamming the front door behind her.
* * *
Ashley drove out into a grey, damp morning, the clouds hanging heavy over the glowering hills. She passed near the road where she had found Robbie Metcalfe, noting the bright yellow police tape across the turning, and the men and women standing around in uniforms, drinking from flasks of coffee. There were no Heedful Ones to be seen there now. She turned her face away and kept her eyes on the road ahead.
She reached Birkrigg Common just as the day was starting to grow lighter, and in the small parking area, she spotted Freddie Miller immediately. Firstly, his was the only other car there, and secondly, there was just something so obviously American about him. He leaned against the bonnet of his car with his arms crossed over his chest and a wry smile on his face. He was tall, wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, and his curly brown hair was a little long on top; the boisterous Cumbrian wind pushed it and pulled it in all directions. Despite the drabness of the day, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and Ashley could see well-defined muscles on his forearms and biceps. When she got out of the car, his face broke into that ‘aw shucks’ grin she had noted from his website.
‘Miss Whitelam?’
‘It’s me.’ Next to him she felt incredibly shrimpy and underfed, as if she’d been raised in the dark like a mushroom. ‘Freddie, right?’
‘Thanks for meeting me,’ he said, before extending his hand.
Half amused and half charmed, Ashley shook it, noting that his hand was warm and dry.
‘You must have had a pretty awful day yesterday.’
‘I did actually, yeah.’ She gestured to the grass beyond the parking area. It was already possible to see the standing stones. ‘Do you want to go and look at the stones? You may as well, while you’re here.’
‘Sure, that would be neat.’
They walked out over the grass, the bright strip of Morecambe Bay glittering in the distance. The stone circle was a small one, and Ashley felt a strange sense of defensiveness building in her chest as they neared them. Surely he would be expecting Stonehenge. He came from the land of Disney World, after all.
When they reached the stones, he stopped and looked at them in a considering way. He nodded. ‘They do have their own atmosphere, don’t they?’ he said. ‘I looked them up, and I’m sure you already know this, Miss Whitelam, but they could be as old as 1700 bc. Isn’t that incredible? And here they are, just sitting out here.’
‘In the middle of nowhere.’ Ashley smiled. She was pleased that he had gone to the trouble to look them up. ‘Please, call me Ash. And thanks for coming out here. I know it’s a bit … unorthodox.’
Freddie shrugged. ‘I’ve done interviews in weirder places, I promise. Although I don’t think the sound quality will be especially great.’ The wind chose that moment to pick up again, bringing with it the cries of a herd of nearby sheep.
‘Ah. Well, actually, I’d rather you didn’t record me this time.’ Ashley pushed her hair out of her face. She’d been in such a rush to get out of the house she hadn’t tied it back, and now she was regretting it. ‘Can we just, I don’t know … talk for a bit first? I’m not sure about any of this.’
Freddie had his phone out in his hand, but he put it back inside his jacket.
‘Of course, Ash. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.’
Ashley nodded. She couldn’t decide if she found his politeness annoying or endearing. ‘Tell me about the podcast. And why you wanted to talk to me.’
‘Well, for a start, I wanted to do more than interview you.’ He seemed to realise what he’d said a fraction too late, and as one hand went to straighten his glasses, she noted a faint pink blush to his cheeks. ‘What I mean is, I would like you to work directly with me on this series of the podcast.’
Ashley blinked. ‘You want me to what?’
He grinned again, his face lighting up. ‘Ash, when I work on a case – I know what that sounds like. I don’t mean to make out like I’m a detective or anything like that – when I work on a story like this, I like to find a deeper way into it. A unique angle. Right? It gives Murder on the Mind a selling point that other podcasts don’t have. For a previous series, for example, I did some in-depth episodes on the Zodiac Killer. Have you heard of him?’
‘Yeah.’ Ashley shifted from foot to foot. She could smell rain in the air. ‘I saw that creepy film, anyway.’
‘Right. So anyway, I found this group of code nerds in San Francisco – people who enjoy solving puzzles and ciphers and such. That was the thing about the Zodiac, he sent these weird puzzles to newspapers for people to solve. So, I took them all through the case myself, and I asked them what they thought about it, what sort of person they thought the Zodiac Killer was. I got them to look at the ciphers and see what they could get out of it. They had a good time.’ He smiled lopsidedly. ‘It gave the podcast extra colour.
‘Another time I did a ten-episode stretch on all the people that had gone missing on the Appalachian Trail. I ended up walking a portion of the trail myself, with this incredible older lady who had walked it five times. She knew everything there was to know about it. Yeah, she was a real character.’
‘So you think I’m a real character too?’
He nodded, pushing his curly hair back from his forehead. The wind came in a big rush across the grass, and with it came a spatter of cold autumn rain.
‘I think you’re perfect. For the podcast.’ The rain came again, harder this time, the wind pushing them both so insistently that Ashley stumbled, and they both laughed. ‘Do you want to go and sit in the car for a minute?’
‘Yeah, it’s getting a bit hairy, isn’t it? We can sit in my car.’
Inside the Parma Violet, Freddie looked almost comically large, his hair brushing the ceiling and his knees bent. He looked around the interior with real pleasure though.
‘I sure do love this car.’
‘So, you think I’m perfect for Murder on the Mind?’
He nodded, becoming serious again. ‘Thanks to what happened yesterday, you’re connected to the Gingerbread House Murders.’
‘Hmm. Not the most reassuring thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry you had to experience that.’ He looked at her then, incredibly earnest, and she felt something tighten in her chest. Earnestness was not something she was very familiar with. ‘Really, genuinely sorry. As glad as I am that Robbie Metcalfe’s family have a body to bury, I’m sorry that you’ve experienced something none of us should.’
‘Yes. Well. Thank you.’ She shifted in her seat.
‘So you found the missing child. But it’s more than that. You live here, in Cumbria. You make your living from communing with the dead. Am I right?’
‘We call them spirits.’ With them both in the small car, the windows had misted up, erasing the wet green world outside.
‘Talking to spirits, right.’
‘Do you believe in it?’ she asked quietly. ‘Do you believe in what I do?’ She found she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to say yes or no.
‘I’m open-minded,’ he said easily enough, which Ashley noticed wasn’t really an answer. ‘I’ve spoken to people with … unusual talents before, for this podcast, and I can definitely say you have a better claim than most of them. And there was the incident at Red Rigg House in 2004.’
Ashley looked at him sharply, and he winced. ‘I’m sorry, it’s part of my work to do this kind of research. Your life has been linked to tragedy before, is my point.’
‘You could say that.’
‘And I think you might be a deeply intuitive person. Intuition is a fascinating phenomenon. I’ve seen it over and over when I’ve been making the podcast – someone will just get a feeling about something, a tiny detail that sticks in their head and won’t leave them alone, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed to break the case. If you’ll agree to come on the show, we’ll talk more about how you actually found Robbie Metcalfe, but I think it’s got to be some breed of intuition.’ He took a slow breath. ‘If I’m talking a load of garbage, tell me now and it’s no harm no foul.’
Ashley sat for a moment, looking out over the steering wheel at the blank fog of the screen. Could the Heedful Ones be thought of as intuition? They certainly seemed to know things she didn’t.
‘So what are you asking me? Really?’
‘Look into this case with me, for the podcast.’ He turned in his seat to face her. That faint blush across the tops of his cheeks was back. His eyes, she noticed, were green, like sea glass. ‘You’re already involved. What I’m suggesting is that we work together. We’ll look at the other missing kids, what happened to them and where they were found, and as we go, you will tell me what you’re thinking and feeling about it all. That’s it.’
‘I’m not a detective either,’ she said. ‘I might not have anything useful to add at all.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ he said quickly. ‘But either way, it gives me the extra angle I’m looking for. What do you say?’
* * *
Ashley spent the rest of that day in a tiny pub she knew of called the White Stag, eating sandwiches and drinking cold drinks. Her phone rang several times, at one point so insistently that she turned it off. When she got home, the house was quiet, no sign of either her mum or dad, but there was a big wicker basket on the kitchen table, covered in clear plastic and topped with a large red bow like a bouquet of flowers. Inside it, she could see a large selection of sweets – kid’s sweets, like Curly Wurlys, refresher chews, bags of brightly coloured sherbet and big swirly lollipops. There was a card on the basket, a message printed on it in a cheerful typeface.
For Ashley Whitelam. Eat up!
‘Jesus. What a weird thing to send.’
She pulled the cellophane off and dug around in the sweets. At the very bottom, there was something large and flat wrapped in tissue paper. Feeling scared but unsure why, Ashley tore the paper off and dropped it on the floor. Inside, there was a large gingerbread man, with eyes and a smiling mouth in bright red icing.
CHAPTER
13
HI, EVERYONE, AND welcome to the Murder on the Mind podcast. Longtime listeners will know that I like to do what I call interludes in between the main meat of the episodes. These are little vignettes, if you will, that provide context and colour for the stories we’re investigating, and let me tell you, the pieces we have for the Gingerbread House Murders are some doozies. I don’t want to sound like some terrible tourist here, but England’s history is impressive. And weird. So let me tell you a little about Red Rigg Fell, the mountain that sits just behind the house where Ashley Whitelam, my guest for this series, had her disturbing experience in 2004.
There are the ruins of a small, ancient copper mine on the northern side of the fell. The people of the Lakes are fond of the area’s history, and there are many places here designed to teach you about it – visitor’s centres, guided walks – but you won’t have heard of this mine. It doesn’t appear on any maps, and the societies that preserve the history of mining in Cumbria … well, if they do know about it, they have decided to pretend it doesn’t exist. But if you go and look in the right place you can find traces of it: holes in the ground, something that looks like it could have been the foundation of a tower. The traces of human work on this land are scratches on glass – faint, but impossible to remove.
The mine was opened in the late 1500s. A man called Sackloc came from Germany to supervise it, and miners lived with their families in cottages they built themselves, scattered around the hem of the fell. One of the families was the Milligans: John Milligan and his wife, Mary, and their two sons, David and Wesley. Wesley was too small and scrawny to go down the mine just yet – he would have to at least gain his twelfth year, his mother thought, before he could do that. But David went with his father, every day, to the beginnings of that excavation. Picture it: dark and cold and wet, the weight of a mountain hanging over your head.
Before gunpowder, before dynamite, mining was done by hand, a slow and backbreaking process, yet Sackloc was glad to have the project. It wasn’t coal mining, which was considered much more dangerous because of the bad air that could wait for the unwary, trapped deep in the ground. No, the great difficulty with the copper mine was the water, the wet; with the River Keckle so close, and Green Beck not so far, the risk with the copper mine was always collapse, or drowning.
Young David Milligan hated the mine. He knew it the moment he first stepped on that craggy hill and saw the beginnings of the tunnel. He hated the shape of the fell, how it loomed against the sky like some great lousy animal, not asleep but waiting, and when his father first took him into the coffin level – that was what they called those first access tunnels – David felt as though someone had indeed walked over his grave.
Now David was a good boy, eager to help his father and his family. He did not want to shirk his duty, and was even less keen to admit that the place scared him, but when they returned from their work on that very first day, he told his mother and father that he did not want to go back. ‘Let me do anything else,’ he told them. ‘Let me go to any other mine, but not that evil place.’ His mother struck him and called him every name under the sun, but his father, who had some idea of how terrifying the places of the underground could be, told his wife to leave the boy alone. He told David that he understood his fear, but that he’d get used to it. ‘Soon,’ he said to David, ‘being underground will be as normal to you as strolling down the lanes to church.’
David was quiet. He didn’t think his father understood at all. Not really.
But he was a good boy, so he went back with his father the next day to continue the work. Inside the hill, he was always a little frightened, with the rock seeming to weigh down on his head, and somehow the wet ground always looked to be moving just out of the corner of his eye, but he did his best not to think on it too deeply. They worked for months, scratching deep into the rocky flesh of the hill, burrowing like ticks, and the deeper they got, the harder the going. Other men – men of forty and fifty years – also began to distrust the mine. They reported strange noises, deep in the tunnels: knocking, where there was no man to knock, and sometimes a deep kind of slithering, as though something large was moving very slowly deep inside, dragging itself across the stone. The men who had come up from Green Beck village to work in the mine began to mutter that the place had a dark history, but Sackloc, being a sturdy German Lutheran, would hear no such superstition.
And one season there came a long period of rain. Nothing strange about that, you should understand, not up here in the north of England, but it went on and on. It was dangerous to work in the mine when the weather was so heavy, so work stopped for a good long while. Days and weeks passed, with the rain a great grey curtain, breaking the banks of the River Keckle and Green Beck, blurring the edges of Blindscale Tarn, sending fingers of smoky damp into every creaking cottage at the foot of that mountain. Eventually it stopped, and Sackloc, by now desperate to resume work, ordered the men back in. Much too soon, as it turned out.
When the roof of the mine caved in, John Milligan was at its mouth and young David Milligan – who had turned fifteen years old two weeks before – was deep inside, along with ten other men. There was a rumble, John would tell his distraught wife later, and a kind of cough, as though the hill itself convulsed. Then, a wall of strange-smelling air came out of the access tunnel, before a terrible crash of falling rocks and timber.
