Kissing the Demons (5 page)

The conversation was sporadic. Since they'd moved into the house and the camaraderie of that first year in hall of residence had vanished, they'd tended to circle around each other like suspicious cats. After a while they stopped talking altogether. Until Jason broke the silence.

‘You know we've always said this house is spooky? Why don't we have a seance? It'll be a laugh. And we can finish off this booze while we're at it,' he said, reaching for a can of lager.

‘No way,' said Caro, irritated.

‘You're not chicken are you?' Jason began to make clucking noises and Matt took a swig of lager, resisting the urge to give his housemate a punch.

Caro looked at Matt for support but he merely shrugged and Jason seemed to take this for consent.

‘Where's that Scrabble game? We can use the letters. Come on. If there is something dodgy about this house we might find out what it is.'

Soon Jason had organized everything with uncharacteristic efficiency. He arranged a circle of letters on the table and placed an upturned glass in the centre while Caro watched, tut tutting from time to time and refusing to have anything to do with it. The adult watching the children at play.

Jason lit a couple of candles that stood, half used, on the mantelpiece and switched off the light, making ghostly whoops. Matt sat opposite him, a little uneasy at being swept along with Jason's enthusiasm. But it was all nonsense, he told himself. So what was the harm?

Jason lowered his voice. ‘Is there anybody there?'

‘Oh for heaven's sake . . .' said Caro from the comfort of the sofa.

But Jason took no notice of her. He repeated his question.

Then suddenly the glass twitched beneath their fingers and began to move in a straight line towards one of the plastic letters. O. Then B, then E.

‘You're pushing it,' Matt said with a nervous giggle.

‘I'm not.' It could have been Matt's imagination but he thought Jason's confident bluster had gone.

‘Play nicely, children,' said Caro as if she was bored with the whole thing.

‘Shut up,' Jason snapped. ‘It's spelling something out.'

Caro stood up, her attention captured at last.

The glass suddenly began to move at speed so that the two touching fingers almost lost contact. And when it had finished spelling out the name ‘Obediah Shrowton' it shot off the table and smashed into pieces on the floor by Caro's feet.

At eleven thirty there was still no sign of Pet.

Matt knew that he wouldn't be able to sleep. As well as his increasing unease about Pet's absence, he kept thinking of the seance. Obediah Shrowton seemed a strange name to come out of someone's imagination, but there, alone in his room, he felt reluctant to consider the alternative explanation. At first he'd been sure that Jason had been pushing the glass but then he'd seen the look of disbelief on his face and felt the force tearing the glass away from his finger. Something had happened that neither of them could explain and it was only Caro who remained sceptical – but then her finger hadn't been on that glass.

He picked up his mobile phone and tried Pet's number again. The action seemed futile but at least he felt he was doing something. Caro had agreed that if she wasn't back by Sunday night they should report her missing but she had said, with her characteristic reasonableness, that if she had decided to go off with some friends or some new lover for a few days, reporting her absence officially would only make them look stupid. He hadn't argued. His head told him Caro was right. But some inner voice still whispered that something bad had happened . . . that things were getting beyond Caro's ordered control.

He held the phone to his ear, expecting to hear the usual disembodied voice telling him to leave a message on Pet's voice mail. But when he heard the ringing tone, he sat up straight, holding his breath. The phone was switched on. Maybe Caro's unimaginative assumptions had been correct after all.

The tone stopped.

‘Hi. Pet? Where have you been? We've been worried about you.'

Matt was quite unprepared for the sound on the other end of the line. The almost incoherent and terrified words ‘please' and ‘no' followed by a faint, muffled yelp, like an animal in pain.

Then the line went dead.

FOUR

E
mily groaned and turned over as she heard her husband, Jeff, get up and make his way downstairs. He was going to get breakfast as he always did on a Sunday. She told herself she was a lucky woman . . . although sometimes it didn't feel that way.

She could hear noise downstairs. The boys had switched the TV on and were probably sitting, mesmerized on the sofa munching on something unhealthy. But she had neither the time nor the inclination to do anything about it.

She lay there going over everything she had to do that day. After what she considered to be her well-deserved lie in, she would meet Joe and they would call at the address Jenks had given them for Jasmine, his alibi. Jasmine, unless they had a remarkable stroke of luck, would be long gone but there was always a chance that someone, an elderly neighbour or a landlord perhaps, would be able to provide a clue to her whereabouts. And if that failed they'd try the university first thing on Monday.

She put her hands behind her head and lay there with her eyes closed. Jeff had opened the window so she could hear church bells ringing in some distant tower. She had always liked Sundays – until police work took over and Sunday became a day much like any other. But at least today the case they were working on lacked the usual urgency. Those two girls had been missing for twelve years so it would hardly be a race against time to find them.

When the phone on the bedside table began to ring she looked at it with distaste for a few moments before picking it up.

‘Oh bloody hell, Joe, what do you want?' she said as soon as she heard the voice on the other end of the line. ‘I'm having a nice lie in here. Can't it wait till later?' She knew Joe well enough by now to know that he wouldn't take offence . . . unlike some.

‘Someone's just called the station to report a missing person. Female student at the university.'

‘Can't uniform deal with it?'

‘Wait till you hear the address.'

‘Go on,' said Emily, suddenly alert.

‘Thirteen Torland Place. The address Jenks gave us for Jasmine.'

Emily swung round so that her feet met the floor and stood up. It was time to get dressed.

‘What did you want to go and do that for?'

Jason's lips had arranged themselves into a sneer but Matt stood his ground. They stood facing each other either side of the kitchen table while Caro positioned herself at the end, looking from one to the other like a tennis umpire.

Matt opened his mouth, trying to think up an answer. Since the strange call, the cut off cry of pain, he had lain awake worrying about Pet, the scenarios in his tired brain becoming ever more dire and disturbing, and at eight thirty that morning he had rung the police to report her missing. Now, over tea in cracked mugs and barely tanned white toast, he felt that perhaps he'd been a little hasty. But Jason annoyed him so he stood his ground.

‘I think she's in trouble,' he said, glancing at Caro whose expression gave nothing away.

Jason's full lips twitched upwards in a knowing smirk. ‘I reckon she's with some new bloke. What you heard was probably a cry of pleasure. She probably rolled over on to her phone and it got switched on by accident at the moment of ecstasy.'

Matt squared up to his opponent. ‘Pet's not a slapper.'

Jason gave a knowing chuckle and Matt resisted the urge to punch him in the mouth.

‘Shut up. You're like a pair of fucking kids,' said Caro, the umpire. ‘Does it matter whether or not Pet screws around? The question is, is she in trouble at this moment?'

The answer was silence. Both Matt and Jason knew Caro was right. If Pet was in any sort of danger, the last thing she needed was for her housemates to be bickering about the niceties.

Matt spoke first. ‘Well I've reported her missing now and they've got her details. They said it was too early to worry but then I said it was really out of character and I told them about the phone call and said it sounded as if she was being hurt. They said someone would call round.'

‘Probably some uniformed plod with a notebook,' said Jason. ‘They won't do anything.'

Matt felt his fist clenching but he told himself to let it go. He found it hard to believe that he'd actually liked Jason in their first year in hall of residence. He'd liked Caro and Pet as well. They'd all got on so well. Until they'd moved into number thirteen and everything had started to fall apart.

‘Anyone fancy a beer?' Jason said, making for the fridge.

‘It's too bloody early.' Caro stared at him. ‘And where's your share of the electricity bill? You promised to transfer the money into the house account.'

Jason raised a grubby hand. ‘I told you before, I've got a bit of a cash flow problem at the moment but I'll ring my dad tonight. He'll pay up. No worries. Since he left mum for the tart, he's been very generous with the readies.'

Caro grunted. They'd all heard the saga of Jason's parents' broken marriage and his father's infatuation with a younger woman at work. He'd moved in with the woman and had assuaged his tender conscience by throwing cash at the problem. This hadn't gone down well with his wife and three teenaged children and Jason had no qualms about turning the situation to his advantage.

‘Well I need that money by Tuesday.'

She was about to leave the room when Jason spoke. ‘I think we should look up Obediah Shrowton on the Internet . . . see if he existed.'

‘OK, if it'll stop you going on about it.'

Without a word Caro marched out of the room and returned half a minute later carrying a laptop case. She cleared the table of breakfast debris, took the computer out of its protective case and placed it carefully on the Formica surface.

When the thing had woken up she typed in the name Obediah Shrowton and waited, the others huddling round her in anticipation.

Matt watched the words appear and he heard Caro swear softly under her breath.

Obediah Shrowton was a murderer. In 1896 he killed five people at a house in the Bearsley district of Eborby. And he lived at thirteen Valediction Street. Wherever that was.

‘Well at least it isn't here.'

The young woman who opened the door of thirteen Torland Place had short dark hair and the businesslike manner of someone who normally wears a suit to work. Today she was wearing neatly ironed jeans and a plain white T-shirt but she was the sort who would never really master the casual look.

Emily held up her warrant card and recited her name. Joe watched the young woman's face and saw that she had merely raised her eyebrows in mild surprise. No worry, no panic. It was almost as though reporting a missing person was a routine matter, something that happened every day.

‘Well, I must say you're very quick off the mark,' she said. ‘I didn't expect such good service. My name's Caro Smyth, by the way.' She stuck out her hand and Emily shook it. Joe was rather surprised to see that the nails were ragged and bitten; somehow they didn't fit with the efficient persona Caro presented to the world. But we all have our hidden side. ‘You'd better come in. I told Matt that it was far too early to involve the police but he seems really worried. I think she's just met someone and gone off for the weekend but . . .'

‘So you share this house with the missing girl, Petulia Ferribie?'

Caro was about to lead them inside but she turned and focused her intense gaze on Joe, looking him up and down, as though assessing his suitability for the task. Joe guessed that she didn't have a high opinion of men; Emily, being one of the Sisterhood, had received no such examination.

‘That's right. There are four of us. This way.'

Joe looked around. He had known many places like it during his student days in Manchester: large semi-detached houses built in the last decade of the nineteenth century with high ceilings, and shabby paintwork. Like many student houses he had seen, someone had made misguided alterations in the nineteen sixties, ripping out original features and installing cheap coloured bathroom suites and hideously coloured chipboard kitchens on the smallest possible budget. At one time these measures would have been termed improvements but now nobody pretended any more.

Caro opened the first door on her right. ‘The police are here.' She announced. She didn't sound too happy about it. But, Joe thought, few people do.

They followed her into the room. A young man was sitting at an old, bulbous legged table, drumming his fingers nervously on the stained wooden top. He was medium height with short ginger hair and had the pale, slightly puffy look of a student who survived on lager and pizzas with too little exercise. He stood up as they came in, fingering the hem of his washed-out T-shirt nervously.

‘I'm Matt Bawtry,' he said, his voice a little high pitched. ‘I reported Pet missing. Nobody's seen her since yesterday morning and . . . Well, it's out of character. She's never gone off like this before.'

Joe heard a muffled snort from the direction of the doorway and turned to see another young man enter the room. He wouldn't often have described a man as beautiful but this one could have served as a muse for any variety of Italian Renaissance artists with his dark curls, warm brown eyes and flawless, slightly tanned complexion. He wore skin tight jeans and a thin cotton shirt and underneath the mask of cynical bravado, Joe sensed an underlying tension.