At nine o’clock that night, Brook rapped on the front door of his cottage and marched into the steamy warmth of the kitchen. The delicious smells told him to expect a meal with bacon and onions.
‘Dad. You finished early.’
‘I’ve got an early surveillance tomorrow,’ he replied. ‘And I haven’t finished work tonight.’ He showed her the DVD. ‘I’ve got homework.’
‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ she said, pulling on a large glass of wine. ‘Good film — is this to do with your case?’
‘It is.’ Brook picked a glass from the drainer and poured out some red wine. There was only half a glass left in the bottle. He spied another open bottle of Merlot already breathing. ‘You know the film?’
‘Picnic? It’s beautiful but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Is this about the missing students?’
‘Did it make the news?’ asked Brook.
‘Something on Hicksville FM. And the press conference was on local telly.’
‘Good. Maybe we’ll get some sightings. What are we eating?’
‘Bacon and pearl barley hash,’ she grinned. Brook noticed she seemed a little unsteady on her feet. ‘My own recipe.’
‘Sounds great,’ said Brook, taking a sip of wine. He peeled some notes from his wallet and dropped them on the table. ‘That should cover groceries for the next few days.’
‘Da-ad. You don’t have to.’
‘Yes, I do. I get off easy. No shopping, no cooking, no washing up. I don’t even provide the wine glasses.’
Terri laughed and began serving up.
Twenty minutes later, Brook and Terri were stretched out contentedly in front of his small TV, watching the opening titles of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Brook nursed his wine but Terri seemed to be throwing it down with gusto.
‘How did your writing go today?’
‘Okay,’ she replied, declining to provide details. Brook waited in vain, before turning back to the film. As he’d found out that morning, the film opened with the lines from Edgar Allan Poe, which set the tone for the story to follow. Gradually Brook became absorbed in the story of the mysterious disappearances of three Australian schoolgirls at Hanging Rock and, the best part of two hours later, watched the end credits roll.
‘What are you up to, Adele?’ he said quietly. He looked over at the sleeping form of his daughter on the sofa and smiled. He mulled over the film in silence until he’d finished his wine then stood to switch off all the appliances.
On his way to the kitchen, he sat on the edge of the sofa and brushed Terri’s hair. She responded by shifting her position for greater comfort but as she moved, the sleeve of her top rode up her arm.
Brook’s veins turned to ice when he saw the deep scars on her wrist and he found himself catching at a breath that wasn’t there. After what felt like an eternity staring at his sleeping daughter, he stood, finally able to unlock his eyes from the gnarled skin of the old wound, and crept into the kitchen.
Instead of going to bed, he sat at the table and poured himself another large glass of wine, while the questions tumbled in, one after another. When? Why? His mind was racing but the rest of him was numb.
‘Dad.’
Brook looked up. Terri walked through the door rubbing her eyes open.
‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘You should get some sleep.’
Terri blinked herself awake and stared at his face. Her father looked as if he’d had his insides kicked out. She followed his gaze to her arm and saw the sleeve riding up her wrist. She pulled it back down over her scars.
‘Dad. .’ She was unable to continue. Instead she sat down opposite her father and took a pull on his wine, her eyes searching unsuccessfully for his.
Brook sat as though in a trance, much like Jim Watson earlier, unable to say the simplest three-letter word. Finally Terri rummaged in her handbag, pulling out her cigarettes, lighting one with a shaky hand.
Brook opened his mouth to complain but nothing came out. Instead he lit a cigarette of his own and exhaled with a shuddering sigh. Eventually he managed to say: ‘I have no right. I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me. Whatever prompted. . well, at some level or another, I have to take the blame. I wasn’t there when you needed me.’ Self-loathing flowed from Brook’s every pore.
‘Dad. .’
‘In fact, I wasn’t there at all, was I?’
‘It’s not your fault, Dad. It just happened.’
‘Does your mother know?’
Terri nodded.
‘What happened?’ Brook felt a sudden dread overwhelm him as the answer arrived before the question was fully formed.
Terri took another sip of Brook’s wine. ‘It was over two years ago. I was depressed.’
Brook closed his eyes in bitter confirmation. ‘You tried to commit suicide after your stepfather died.’
Terri’s eyes blazed suddenly. ‘His name was Tony, Dad. And he didn’t die. He was murdered, remember?’
‘Oh, I remember perfectly,’ retorted Brook. ‘There aren’t many Good News days in this job. That was one of them.’
‘How can you say that?’ Terri began to cry. ‘Whatever you think about him, he was still a human being.’
‘He betrayed your mother. He betrayed you.’
‘He didn’t betray me!’ she shouted. ‘I loved him and he loved me.’
‘He took advantage of you when you were fifteen years old. That makes him a rapist and a criminal in my book. How can you sit there and defend the way he preyed on you?’
‘I loved him, Dad. What can I say?’
‘Anything but that,’ snarled Brook.
‘It’s the truth. After my eighteenth we were going away together. Mum would’ve understood.’
‘Understood?’ Brook laughed. He could sit no longer. He scraped back his chair and paced to the front door, opening it to let out the smoke. ‘You were under-age, Terri. All she would’ve understood was that she’d married a pervert who’d stolen her daughter.’
‘He wasn’t a pervert.’
‘He broke the law.’
‘Love doesn’t obey laws.’
‘Don’t hand me the same claptrap you did five years ago. The law is there to protect you from yourself because you weren’t old enough to understand love!’ Brook took a deep breath and wrestled for control. ‘And clearly you still don’t or you wouldn’t sit there and justify what he did,’ he added quietly. ‘This is pointless.’
Terri laughed bitterly. ‘My exact words as I drew the Stanley knife across my wrists.’ Brook clenched a fist. He saw the sneering mask of certainty in her eyes give way to insecurity. She was too old to man the barricades of unswerving teenage conviction.
‘Funny.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘I was okay for the first six months after he. .’ She took a quivering puff on her cigarette. ‘I had Mum to look after. I had my A-levels. Then one day it all fell in on me. The life we’d planned. The way it was taken from us. So I decided to take the easy way out.’
‘The easy way?’ Brook scoffed. ‘Young, beautiful, smart, plenty of money.’ He spat out the next words. ‘I mean, Christ, how much easier do you want it?’
‘Easy enough so the world will know my pain without me having to express it,’ she shouted back without flinching.
Brook turned away to breathe in the fresh summer air. A minute later, he turned back and found her eyes. ‘Even if I say I’m sorry, even if I accept the value you placed on your relationship with that man. .’ He hesitated.
‘What?’
‘What do you think? Terri, you’re educated, for God’s sake. You must have known, no matter how bad the pain became, that one day it would pass. But to try and kill yourself. .’
‘A permanent solution to a temporary problem?’ She smiled weakly at him. ‘I knew. But maybe I didn’t want it to pass. You see, I’d found my immortal love with Tony. No one could ever take him away from me. But if, one day, the pain stopped, then that love was lost. It is lost,’ she added sadly. She looked up at him. ‘How’s your pain these days, Dad? Living out here on your own with your jam jars. No one to talk to. No one to share.’
Brook turned back to the breeze blowing through the door. ‘We get by.’
‘And no doubt your education helps you make sense of it all,’ she mocked.
Brook took a final drag at his cigarette before flicking it out into the night. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a curse. It magnifies everything until it’s a hundred times worse. It disconnects me from so much, from so many people.’ He sighed. ‘I know what you’re thinking, how it must look. Here on my own, I don’t live, I exist. Is that what you want me to say? Okay, I admit it. I live out here in the back of beyond, with my jam jars and my empty fridge and my cigarettes.’
‘My cigarettes,’ said Terri, able to smile now the air was clearer.
‘Your cigarettes,’ he conceded. ‘And yes, there’s not a day goes by when I don’t question. .’ He shook his head. ‘I know it’s the logical, educated thing to do when life becomes mere existence. But logic is cold and life is about passion.’
‘And is your life about passion, Dad?’
Brook turned a baleful eye on her. ‘It is tonight.’
‘So we’re supposed to just plod on even when we can see no point in living.’
‘No point? What could be more pointless than being dead forever, without the kernel of hope that somehow there’s something beyond, some afterlife? Education has robbed me of even that puerile vanity.’
‘But at least you can choose your time. You’re in control.’
‘Believe that if you want, Terri, but you don’t choose and you’re not in control. On the contrary, you’re a prisoner of your own weakness. Even at my age. But for a teenager it’s worse. You think people would see, you think they’d take you seriously. You’re wrong. All people would see is confusion and fragility, a failure of will. And your cowardice to face up to life.’
‘Maybe so, but they’d also see the pain, Dad. They’d see you were hurting and that they missed it, that they should try harder next time. See, you can improve people when you go, make the world a better place.’
‘By taking “the easy way out”.’
‘It’s not easy, Dad.’
‘It’s easier than what I have,’ he said quietly.
Terri blinked at the emptiness in her father’s voice. He took a breath and turned back to the soothing void of the night.
‘Then you do understand,’ said Terri finally.
‘Understand? Oh, sure I understand the narcissism, the sheer egotism of such an act. But I could never excuse it,’ he said, swivelling round to jab a finger at her. ‘Never. Don’t you get it? No matter what you achieved in your life, every second that you lived would be held up against your decision to destroy yourself, every setback you faced totted up in your own personal suicide column. The manner of your death would define you. That’s how you’d be judged.
‘Do you think if I killed myself tonight, people would admire me for taking a logical decision? No. They’d pity me because my mental illness got the better of me. Or my divorce tipped me into depression. Or my failure to catch a criminal had driven me to despair. Every good thing about my life would be invisible set against those personal demons.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘I look away — look out not in, Terri. Forget who you are and go outside, take a walk tomorrow and see for yourself. Walk down the river path and listen to the water. Climb to the top of a hill and just sit down and look around. Feel part of something — something big, something wonderful and, yes, sometimes hard and sometimes cruel, but still something.’
Terri took another sip of wine. ‘I know what I did was wrong, Dad. But you’ve forgotten what love can do to you.’
Brook lowered his eyes in defeat. She had him over a barrel. Affection, human contact — these concepts were strangers to him. ‘I wonder if I ever knew,’ he said to the night. ‘I’ve been so lonely at times. All I have left is the strength to endure.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘And you.’
‘Good job I didn’t die then,’ she joked. Brook allowed her a thin smile but it didn’t last and Terri looked away.
‘They’re dead, you know,’ she said softly, a moment later. ‘If not now, then soon. The website is the hook. It hits all the right buttons. First the violence — perhaps sex, tomorrow. Make sure everyone’s watching them, talking about them, analysing their pain. Like they probably analysed Miranda’s pain and the other girls who disappeared on Hanging Rock. That’s where they got the idea, isn’t it? That’s when they realised they didn’t have to continue suffering.’
Brook shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But you’re wrong — they’re not dead. It’s a game. Adele, the girl who reminds me of you, she’s smart, she’s got things to say.’
‘Maybe she’s already said them.’
‘I don’t think so. Not yet.’
‘Is she smart enough to do what I did?’
Brook looked into Terri’s eyes, then down at her wrists. ‘Let’s hope not.’
Terri sat in silence, sipping her wine. Brook checked his watch. ‘I should go to bed.’
‘Tell me about The Reaper, Dad.’
Brook turned to her. The second elephant was in the room and she’d spotted it. ‘What about him?’
‘Who was he?’
‘Haven’t you heard? I never caught him. He’s still at large.’
‘I mean, what did he do? What was it like finding all those. .?’
Brook looked across at her. ‘Bodies?’
Terri nodded.
Brook was silent. ‘It was terrible,’ he said finally — Brook’s first lie to his daughter. At least, the first he could remember telling. Nineteen-ninty. Twenty-one years ago and he could remember it like yesterday. He’d felt nothing. Standing beneath the corpse of a child hanging from a rope, then the year after, a young girl tied to a chair on its side, throat cut from ear to ear. It had left him cold. No, it was worse than that. He’d felt excitement at the first one. It was just a case, another puzzle. Who and why? He’d seen too much, even as a mere thirty year old in the Met. He was dead inside, hollowed out. Looking back, that was the problem, the first step on the road to his breakdown.
‘Go on.’
‘It’s a matter of public record, Terri. I’ve got a book you can read. .’
‘I want you to tell me.’
Brook drained his glass. ‘He killed families. Cut them up in their own homes. He did it quickly and efficiently and without pleasure, like it was work, something he had to get done.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’d decided that society would be better off without them. They were always petty criminal families who made other lives a misery. He figured that no one would miss them, no one would mourn their passing. Know what? He was right.’
‘North London was the first, correct?’
Brook nodded imperceptibly. ‘Harlesden, 1990. Sammy Elphick and his wife and boy.’
‘You remember their names after all this time?’
Brook just smiled at her without showing his teeth. ‘The year after, Floyd Wrigley and his girlfriend were. . killed. Their daughter Tamara had her throat cut.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Ten or eleven.’
‘God. Is that what started it?’
‘My breakdown? It’s hard to say. But it was a difficult time. You’d just been born, yet I was spending every waking hour looking for The Reaper. I became obsessed.’
‘Didn’t you have any suspects?’
Brook refilled his glass. ‘No.’ His second lie.
‘And then you had your breakdown?’
Brook sighed. ‘When your mum and I. . I came to Derby to get away, to find some peace.’ He managed a bitter laugh.
‘But The Reaper followed you to Derby.’
‘Not at first. But yes, he followed me here.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ A hat-trick of lies. To his own daughter.
‘And two more families died.’
‘Yes.’
Terri appeared satisfied, but Brook knew she was preparing the ground or soon the elephant in the room would be shattering the windows. ‘Tony was murdered three years ago. Just before that last family were slaughtered in Derby.’
Brook looked her in the eye. ‘I know.’
Terri continued, staring off intently as though at an invisible script. ‘The police interviewed me after Tony’s murder. They were very interested in you. They said you had no alibi. They said you had motive — because of Tony and me. They said you came down to Brighton five years ago and assaulted him. You’d found out about our. . affair.’ She swallowed. ‘Is that true?’
‘Affair,’ he sneered. ‘Adults have affairs.’
‘Is it true?’ she persisted.
Brook could see his daughter was short of breath, anticipating the answer to a question long in the forging. ‘Yes, it’s true. I went to Tony’s office. I was only going to threaten him, warn him off. Guess I lost control. Two years later, after he was murdered, they came to Derby to interview me. I was an obvious suspect.’
Terri said nothing but her mind was in turmoil, willing her on, willing her to stop.
Brook put her out of her misery. ‘You can ask me.’
She took a sharp intake of breath and sought the right words. They were deceptively simple. ‘Did you kill him, Dad?’
Brook smiled now. No more lies. He looked her straight in the eye. ‘No.’
When Terri trudged back to the sofa, it was nearly two in the morning. Brook finally dragged himself up the stairs an hour before he had to set off back into Derby for his shift in Leopold Street. He didn’t sleep, didn’t even undress, just lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. Eventually he hauled himself back down the stairs to leave, slipping the new Poe anthology into his pocket.
On his way out, he spotted a note on the table.
Dad, you said this Adele was a poet and she bought the Edgar Allan Poe anthology the day she disappeared. But if she’s anything like me she’s been thinking about things for a long time. Have a look at the other books in her room. She would read poets who actually killed themselves and wrote poems to that end. They’d probably be women e.g. Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Just a thought.
Glad we had a chance to talk and don’t worry.
You’re my immortal love now.
Love you. T x
Brook felt a childish rush of pleasure. He was loved. He glanced across at the closed door behind which his daughter slept. He wanted to sneak in and check she was safe and warm, as he’d done when she was a baby. Brook would sit for hours next to her cot just watching her, feeling the exquisite dread of the protector, the bulwark against the horrors of the outside world beyond the nursery door. He’d failed her; let her fall into the clutches of Tony Harvey-Ellis. Maybe he had another chance.
DS Morton rolled down the window. ‘You’re early, sir.’
‘Couldn’t sleep. All quiet?’
‘As the grave.’ Morton yawned.
‘Go and get a few hours’ sleep, Rob. Busy day tomorrow.’ Morton raised an eyebrow. ‘Today,’ Brook amended with a smile.
‘What time do we start at the college?’
‘Nine-thirty.’
Brook manoeuvred his BMW into the tight space left by Morton. He poured a tea from his flask and texted Noble to have SOCO gather all the artefacts like books and posters from Adele Watson’s bedroom. He wanted another look at her Sylvia Plath book.
He opened his anthology of Edgar Allan Poe, rereading ‘A Dream Within a Dream’ then skimmed through some of the other works. He alighted on Poe’s most famous long poem, ‘The Raven’, and read it thoroughly, all eighteen verses, alighting on the lines,
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;
’Tis the wind and nothing more!
Brook woke with a start, strange lights dancing around in his head. When he was able to fully open his eyes, he saw the reason why. Emergency lights were flashing across the road. He jumped from his car and ran towards the derelict house, shielding his sleep-deprived eyes from the blinding glare. He could make out a figure, walking unsteadily towards the rear of an ambulance, and quickened his pace.
‘Phil,’ shouted Brook. ‘Is that you?’
The hunched form of Phil Ward turned. He screwed his eyes to try and focus on Brook.
‘Damen?’ he slurred, swaying from side to side. The uniformed ambulanceman was helping him find the bottom step of the vehicle.
Brook drew to a halt. ‘What happened, Phil? Are you okay?’
‘He’ll be fine,’ said the man in uniform, not looking at Brook. ‘He’s just had a bad fall.’ He eased Phil carefully up the first step and on to a padded bench.
‘Where are you taking him?’ asked Brook.
‘The Royal,’ answered the man, closing the first door.
Phil gazed glassy-eyed at Brook, his head sagging, his eyes bleary with drink. ‘Zat you, Damen?’ He sat inside the ambulance, brought his hand to his mouth and took a long draught of barley wine.
Brook froze in realisation and he turned just in time to see a gloved hand holding something black and hard describe an arc towards the top of his head. The lights this time were multicoloured as Brook’s knees buckled and he fell to the pavement. He managed to stay upright long enough to watch the burly figure close the second door on a bewildered Phil, before plummeting to the ground with a thud.
Brook heard footsteps and tried to look up through the lights but blood had trickled into his eyes. He could just see the black shoes standing beside him and tried to store more information, but he couldn’t focus. Then he felt liquid splash over him, burning into his eyes and soaking his clothes. Whisky. When the bottle was empty the man placed it in Brook’s hand and the lights went out completely as he fell, spinning head first, into a bottomless black pit.