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

bring myself to turn back and start making apologies. That would only lead to more discussion on a subject that made my heart ache. Fortunately, a diversion was ready and waiting on the driveway to the rectory. Everwood’s Bentley appeared to have suffered another puncture and he was standing to one side of the car with Deepal Chandra while John Chambers screamed in his face. Meanwhile, Mrs Chambers hovered behind her husband, making ineffectual attempts to pull him away.

“Do you have the slightest idea what you’ve done to us?” Chambers asked, a spray of spittle flying from his lips. “To our family? To my wife? Show him, Anne.” When Anne Chambers tried to resist, he dragged her forward so that she stood almost toe-to-toe with Everwood. The psychic shrank back. “Go on, show him.”

Both Everwood and Deepal looked on, horrified as the grieving mother’s coat sleeves were pulled up and her scarred forearms displayed. Even from a distance, I could see those intersecting tracks glinting in the pallid autumn daylight. Mrs Chambers flinched while her husband raged on and Deepal took out her phone.

“You ripped our hope away,” he said. “Tore out the last of it so we had nothing left. Even if we didn’t believe what you said about Debbie, everywhere we looked—the papers, the telly, the internet—there you were, insisting over and over, dead dead dead dead. No one should ever do such a thing to people who are suffering like we are. People who’ve lost something so precious. It’s cruel. Inhuman. And why did you do it, eh? For a few column inches, for another scrap of attention to feed your fucking ego? You deserve to burn in Hell for that, Darrel Everwood.”

Chambers started to lunge forward, and reaching the group at a run, I caught him under the arms and hauled him back. He was a small man, almost weightless, and I wondered if the stress of the past six months had eaten away, not only at his nerves but his body. He felt like a bundle of loose bones under that waterproof jacket, a frame on the point of disintegration.

Dragging him towards the carpark, I shouted back at Deepal, “Don’t call the police. Let me handle this.”

Anne Chambers threw the PA a pitiful look. “Please. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

Meanwhile, Everwood appeared to be watching me closely.

Near the opening to the avenue of trees, I released John Chambers. He spun around to face me, almost tripping over his own feet so that I was forced to catch him again before he fell into the mud. It made me ashamed to do it, as if I’d stripped away some vital layer of his dignity. Anne hurried to his side and clutched at his arm, pulling him back when he tried to confront me.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “What gives you the right—?”

“My name’s Scott Jericho,” I said. “And believe me, I have no sympathy for Darrel Everwood, but nor do I want to see you arrested. I used to be a detective and I’d like to help you, if I can.”

Anne looked at me with such hope in her eyes I almost had to turn away. “Do you think our daughter could still be alive?”

“I think…” These broken people—they’d been tormented for so long by a psychic’s guesswork—at least I owed them the truth. “It’s very unlikely.” I sighed. “But you’ll have been told all the statistics. Keeping Debbie alive this long would have become too much of a risk for whoever took her. I’m so sorry.”

As her husband crumpled against her shoulder, Anne turned a defiant gaze upon me. Despite initial appearances, she was by far the stronger of the two.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “I know you are. She told us that our girl was alive and that, if we could hold on just a little longer, we’d see her again.”

“Who told you?”

“The fortune teller.” She lifted her face to the washed-out sky and her smile became so radiant I thought I caught a glimpse of the young mother she’d once been. “She asked us to call her Aunt Tilda. She promised that I’d hold my little girl in my arms again. That on All Hallows’ Day, Debbie would find her way back to us, through water and wood, until the red eye guided her home. She wanted us to know that Darrel Everwood was wrong about Debbie—wrong about everything.”

Anne looked over to where the psychic remained, staring back at us.

“The dead do speak,” she insisted. “But not to him. They never did.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Standing there, looking at Debbie Chambers’ shell of a father and a somehow still hopeful mother, I remembered Everwood’s accusation that this couple had murdered their daughter and that their subsequent hounding of him was simply a campaign designed to divert suspicion.

I’d met many child-killers in my time on the force. They ranged from the worst sadists imaginable to the most devoted of parents who, nursing a terminally-ill child, had been unable to bear its suffering any longer. But in the Chambers’ pain, I didn’t sense the callous inhumanity of the former, nor the poignant peace that had settled over the latter.

These people were tortured with doubt, with questions, with what-ifs, with shadows on the wall that wouldn’t let them rest. Just like Miss Rowell seemed to project her sense of anger and betrayal onto Darrel Everwood for the sins of her husband, so the Chambers used him as a target for their guilt. He was their poppet, if you like, an effigy they could stab at when the trauma of what they’d done became too much. That he deserved all of their venom wasn’t the point.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I told them. “You couldn’t have watched her every second of every day. John, Anne, listen to me. I’ve known men like the one who took your daughter. He’d have become fixated on her, stalked you as a family, learned your routines. He’d have