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

died,” I told him. “Part of my job is fairground security, patrolling the site, that sort of thing. I was passing when Deepal told you what had happened to Tilda. You seemed upset.”

“Did I?” He pulled the little espresso cup from the tray, downed its scalding contents without flinching, and immediately refilled. “Well, it was a shock, I suppose.”

“Did you know my aunt, then?”

“Know her?” The machine clanked, gurgled, dribbled into the cup. “Not personally. I’d heard of her, of course.”

“From where?”

Throwing back the coffee, he moved to the rear of the trailer, returning a few moments later with a tattered, well-loved paperback. I recognised the book immediately—a dandelion-yellow cover with black, curling font and a photograph on the front of a teenage girl, her gloved hands raised in a defensive posture. Everwood handed the book to me almost reverently.

“You know what my ex has been saying about me?” he asked, dropping into a chair. “Well, the only part of her bullshit story that’s even vaguely true is that I did read Genevieve Bell’s book, and yes, you could say it inspired me. Not to fake my psychic abilities, but to help people. That was what Genevieve did, right up until the day she died. Used her God-given gifts to comfort grieving families and to let them know there is something beyond all this pain and misery.”

“So you were never a children’s party magician?” I asked, slipping the book into a gap between two crocodile-covered cushions.

“I was, as it happens. So what if I once made a living entertaining a load of snotty-nosed brats? I was too young then to realise I already had a gold mine up here.” He tapped his temple. “I’d always heard voices, right from when my mum kicked me down the stairs when I was a nipper and I hit my head on the skirting. Concussion, two days in hospital. After that, our flat was spook central. Saw me granny first, sitting in her old chair by the window, smoking them little Russian cigarettes that had ended up killing her three years before. I could even smell the fucking things, so don’t tell me I’ve made all this up. You ask Deepal, ask Nick, ask any of them.”

The espressos were clearly having an effect. I held up a soothing hand. “I believe you, Darrel. Don’t forget, my aunt was a psychic too.”

Mollified, he shuffled back into his chair. “Sorry. No offence. It’s just, when you’re surrounded by haters, it’s hard to relax. What was I saying?”

“About how the book inspired you?”

“Right.” He rubbed his hands together. “So my mum died when I was eighteen—drunk herself to death, at last, the nasty cow—and from then, I was pretty much on me own. The magic stuff was ticking along, nothing special. Then I read the book, and I saw how this little girl, who could do the same things I could, had made a mint out of it. I started making notes, following things up, putting out feelers, and before you know it, I’ve got my first psychic gig lined up. I signed with a manager, and within a year or two, I’m packing theatres up West and there’s even talk of my own TV show.” He started laughing—a high, hysterical, hyena-like chuckle. “I bless the day my mother booted me down them stairs. Must have dislodged a psychic screw, so Seb Thorn says.”

I wondered if his partner-manager knew very well what effect that injury might have had on his client. Almost every psychopath I’d ever met had suffered some form of head trauma in their early years. Hearing voices wasn’t an unusual symptom.

“The one thing I didn’t cotton onto was how it all ended for Genevieve,” Everwood went on. “How the public attention got too much for her and she had to hide herself away. There was a lesson there, if only I’d listened.”

“And it was in the book that you first heard about my aunt?”

He nodded. “Tilda Urnshaw. She was like the Obi-Wan to Genevieve’s Luke Skywalker.” He cackled. “I was looking forward to meeting her.”

“You knew she travelled with us?”

“I’d looked up the fair’s website when we did the deal with your father. The show’s going to look spectacular, by the way. Introductory drone shots of the fair, then zooming in on the house, the Ghost Seekers theme kicking in. Always something creepy about a carnival, isn’t there? And then a haunted house is the Halloween double-whammy. Anyway, I saw Tilda’s name and photograph on your website. Recognised it straight away from that chapter in Hearing the Dead. I was even thinking of paying her a visit the night we arrived, just as soon as Nick got back from his patrol.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Course not. She was dead or dying by then, wasn’t she?”

“But you didn’t know that. It was roughly another hour before the police arrived. You could’ve got Nick to walk you over to the tent.”

“Had second thoughts, didn’t I?” he sniffed. “It was bloody cold out.”

“Why did you come here so early?” I asked. “The rest of the production team aren’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow morning, are they?”

“I always show up before the rabble descends,” he said. “All the noise and confusion and radio signals from the crew interfere with my psychic frequencies. I like to attune myself to the haunting before the show goes live.”

I didn’t detect any obvious play-acting on Everwood’s part. I wondered, hammy as his onscreen persona was, did he actually believe all this? Just because Dr Gillespie was convinced that, unlike Genevieve, Darrel was a conscious fraud, that didn’t mean his assessment was accurate. It may have started that way, but as Evangeline had described in her sister’s case, a psychic’s idea of themselves can change over time. It might even be psychologically necessary to protect their sense of self-worth.

“Going back to your reaction to Tilda’s death,” I said. “You certainly looked very distraught.”

“I was.” He said it in a wondering sort of tone, as if