Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ready to read books .TXT) 📗

“I can see that idea is a great comfort to you,” I said, leaning in. “Two years ago, was it? About then anyway. Yes, the wear on those glasses and the studied way you’ve starved yourself, all in search of penance. Well, maybe it was that at first. Now you enjoy the suffering, don’t you? The daily denials and the howl of your stomach. I bet you’ve forgotten all about the child.” I gripped him by his frayed collar and shook the smile from his lips. “I know a convicted pervert when I see him. So get your scrawny arse off my ground, or I’ll take those pamphlets and force each and every one down your throat. Understand?”

I released him and he staggered back, clutching his works to his chest.

“I am needed here,” he practically shrieked at me. “This is an evil place. Not only the celebration of this pagan festival, not only the gambling and debauchery of your carnival, but in the very earth.” He turned towards the silently watchful house. “A rectory, a haven for men of the Word, now corrupted. A house fit only for demons and those who seek their counsel. Like the witch of Endor, whom Solomon sought out and—”

“Exodus chapter twenty-two, verse eighteen,” I said. “You know it?”

“Of course.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in that scraggly throat.

“Tell me then, are you into scaring old ladies as well as little kids, Pastor?” I asked. “Because if you are—”

I stopped mid-threat. The mix of fear and defiance had drained away from Christopher Cloade. Now a new and starker terror appeared to take hold of him. A bright blue vein sketched itself along his temple while those bulbous eyes grew even larger in their sunken sockets. Most of the pamphlets fell from his grasp and were taken up by the wind, promises of hellfire set to dance. I turned and glanced over my shoulder to where I believed his gaze was focused. Just the usual bloody-lipped vampires and white-sheet ghosts, and a little distance off, Nick Holloway escorting a dowdy-looking couple from the site. The same couple I’d seen last night—the small, weary man and the harassed woman in her green anorak.

“So it’s true,” Cloade said, his voice almost a whisper. “What they say about Purley…”

He didn’t spare me another glance but twisted clumsily on his heel and moved quickly in the direction of the gate.

Dismissing his ramblings, I headed the same way, towards Nick and the couple I now recognised from the news reports of the time as Mr and Mrs Chambers, parents of the missing child, Debbie. As I followed them, Nick talking firmly but gently to the pair, I wondered if Darrel Everwood had at last found his excuse not to come to Purley. After his baseless assertion that Debbie had been murdered and buried close to the family home, and then Mrs Chambers’ attempted suicide, Everwood had received that mild threat from the father—that if they should ever meet, the medium would be sorry. On TV this morning, a publicity-primed Darrel had been forced to show enthusiasm for the event, but here was his opportunity to call the whole thing off.

At the gate, Mr Chambers pulled his arm roughly away from Nick. The latter held up his hands while some angry words were thrown at him. Then Chambers looped his arm around his wife’s waist and they both trudged off towards the carpark. Still unnoticed, I stepped a little nearer as Nick took out his phone.

“Deepal? Yeah, it’s them again,” he said. “They’re practically stalking him now, aren’t they? Although, I can’t say I blame them. If I had a kid that had gone missing and some twat said something like that… Yes, Deepal, I know he’s jittery as fuck, but… No, no sign of Gillespie yet. And you say you’re gonna be here with Darrel in, what, five minutes? Cool, I’ll meet you up at the house. Oh, one last thing, the interview Gillespie did last night on the telly. Remember when the presenter mentioned that medium—the one Gillespie humiliated on the podcast…? That’s right. Well, the funny thing is, I reckon Darrel knew her too. He mentioned her name to me anyway…”

I’d lost sight of the Chambers but Cloade was still there, lingering by the gate, looking back at the fair with an expression I could only describe as haunted.

“She didn’t just die, though, did she?” Nick was saying. “I looked it up before I went to bed. The poor cow was murdered.”

He ran strong, freckled fingers through his hair.

“And not just murdered, neither. Butchered, so they say.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Genevieve Bell. I remembered that tiny, broken voice from the podcast, insisting that her talent was genuine and that the dead had spoken to her since childhood. Something else from the interview then flashed into my mind. Gillespie saying that Genevieve’s death shouldn’t be sentimentalised because in life she had victimised others, and then his boast that he would stop at nothing in his crusade to wipe out superstition.

Returning to the fair, I followed Nick’s example and used my phone to look up some of the online reports concerning the tragedy. As ever with a murder case properly managed, the Major Investigations Team in charge had fed the media only the barest crumbs. Perhaps twenty years ago, when Genevieve Bell had been at the height of her fame, this would have been different. Then, journalists might have dug deeper for any juicy titbits concerning the killing of a celebrated teenage psychic. But as I read about her life and death, it became clear that Miss Bell had long since retreated into obscurity, and so the scant facts offered up by the police were all that had been reported.

These amounted to: the battered corpse of a thirty-nine-year-old woman had been discovered by the victim’s frail mother in the early hours of Thursday morning. Due to Mrs Bell’s advancing dementia, there had been a significant delay in contacting the