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

Everwood’s but without the mockney accent, came through the loudspeaker. “Deepal, you fuck! Has anyone seen them? Those sad-eyed bastards are turning up everywhere I go—the house, TV studios, even my bloody local. Now Nick tells me they’re here, lurking around the gaff like a pair of gloomy-faced fucks, and all because I said their daughter was dead. Well, it’s been six months, hasn’t it, so where the fuck is she? I’ll tell you this, you can bet your sweet arse it was them two weirdos that killed her, and now they’re stalking me to divert suspicion. In fact, I bet they’re all in it together—them and Gillespie, conspiring to make me look mad. You better sort this out, Deepal, or you’re fucking fired!’

Deepal rolled her eyes and tucked the phone into her pocket.

“Slightly paranoid?” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” she said diplomatically.

“He’s talking about the Chambers, isn’t he? They were here earlier. Nick had to show them off the ground.”

She looked at me. “So maybe not paranoid? The truth is, they have been making a nuisance of themselves for a while now. I know, I know.” She held up her hand to an objection I hadn’t voiced. “They’ve lost their daughter. Allowances should be made. But Darrel has actually been pretty patient with them.”

“And it wouldn’t look good if he took out a restraining order?” I said.

“That too,” she conceded.

Coming towards us down the road, I spotted Miss Rowell. The housekeeper of Purley gave me a sharp nod of acknowledgement before hurrying on her way with a clipped, “Late for my bus.” She looked more than usually dishevelled tonight, tweed jacket buttoned awry, muddy splashes at the knee of her skirt. Glancing back, I caught sight of her running a finger inside that elastic band she wore around her wrist. She seemed more focussed on it than where she was going and ended up almost colliding with a group coming the other way.

I wanted to question Deepal more about Everwood, but arriving at the carpark, her phone rang again and she hustled off in the direction of the house. In any case, I had to report to my dad. I eventually found him fixing a loose caster on one of the Waltzer carriages. When I said I didn’t think we’d have any more trouble from Gillespie tonight, he nodded and told me to go grab some food.

Queuing up at Lyla Jafford’s catering truck, it struck me that I hadn’t checked for any messages from Haz. Not since my run-in with Christopher Cloade. It shamed me to admit it, but the human drama of the night—all those seemingly random connections—had fed the puzzle addict within me, so that even Haz had been driven from my thoughts. Instead, I’d wondered about the paedophile preacher, with his religious antipathy to superstition that so strangely mirrored Dr Gillespie’s rational convictions. And then Miss Rowell’s uncharacteristically hurried flight down the road, as keen to be away from Purley and the fairground as the Chambers were to remain. The housekeeper and the grieving parents unknowingly united in their contempt for Darrel Everwood. Everwood, who may have known Genevieve Bell, a woman murdered so brutally as to be unrecognisable…

My head snapped around, towards the side ground and the distant shape of the fortune teller’s tent. In the next instant, I was running, no longer the graceful showman sidestepping punters, now shoving them out of my path. I ignored their startled cries. All I could hear was the drum of my heart and the slap of my boots in the wet earth. Closer, closer, the red-and-white canvas of the tent. The doorway flaps, sealed but unguarded. No sign of the chap my dad had sent to keep watch. It would be all right, I told myself. There was no reason to be afraid. And yet, in my mind’s eye, I pictured again that little wax poppet with its caved-in skull.

The doll, like Genevieve Bell, without a face.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The sign hooked onto one of the door ties, I knew from my earliest childhood. The wood, chipped and weathered, the letters repainted a hundred times: MADAM TILDA’S ON HER TEA BREAK. BE BACK SOON! Next to that faded inscription, a scatter of bright red flecks. I pulled my hand into my sleeve, and unhooking the sign, laid it as carefully as I could on the ground. I was then forced to use my bare hands to pull apart each of the tightly knotted ties until the canvas doorway fell open. Already knowing what I’d find—wanting more than anything to be wrong—I stepped inside the tent.

It was an abattoir.

That was how it struck me right away. The copper tang of freshly spilled blood. Pints and pints of it, pooled in the divots of the groundsheet that covered the uneven floor. Little rivers still finding channels down which to run. A glimpse of hell, fragranced with incense and illuminated by the soft light of veiled lamps. And there, collapsed face-up to the right of the circular table, the source of it all—a small, round-shouldered woman whose hair had only just been turning grey in her seventy-third year.

I say face-up.

There was no face.

I had attended hundreds of murders, suicides, road traffic collisions in my career on the force. I’d seen death in all its tortuous spectrum. Still, I had to turn away for a moment, to hold down my stomach and hold back my tears. Later, I could let this nightmare haunt me. Later, I could give way to grief and fury. Now, I owed it to Tilda to take in the scene as completely as I could. To pick out whatever clues might lead me to her killer.

I slipped my hands into my pockets, that bit of crime scene preservation training coming back to me. Free hands are apt to wander and leave traces. Tucked safely away, they curled naturally into fists. Then I closed my eyes for a moment, took a breath through my mouth, and let my