The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (20 page)

He watched as Leland passed along the row and entered the off-licence at the far end. Groves counted. Leland was inside for just under two minutes. When he came out, he walked back the way he had come, in the direction of his house, now carrying a plastic bag.

‘Spirits of some kind,’ Sean said.

Groves nodded. Provisions for the night, he guessed. Just before Leland reached the end of the row of shops, a figure detached itself from the dark bushes beyond the off-licence and began following him.

‘You don’t even see him there.’ Sean sounded full of wonder. ‘Even though I knew to look this time, I still didn’t spot him waiting.’

Groves didn’t say anything, but it was true that, until the moment he revealed himself, the man might as well have been part of the darkness – or perhaps not even there at all. And yet he must have been standing there the whole time. Waiting. They would need to expand the time frame, of course, to try to find the moment he’d arrived, and hope it gave them a better shot at identifying him.

There was certainly little chance of doing so from this. The man walked purposefully after Leland, but all it was really possible to tell was that he was dressed entirely in dark clothes, carrying some kind of bag over his shoulder. His face was completely obscured; he had a hood up, and kept his head down, turning away from the light where necessary.

‘He knew the camera was there,’ Groves said.

‘Certainly acting like it.’

There was a sense of professionalism to the man that was hard to pin down. It made Groves think of a soldier. Perhaps it was to do with the way he moved, or simply the fact that he managed to stay as dark and obscured as he did. Even when the light hit him, it seemed to reveal less than it should. The way he kept his head turned made him a man without a face.

He’s used to moving in darkness
, Groves thought.

It was irrational, but it felt true.

He looks like he’s never seen unless he wants to be
.

Sean leaned away. ‘Let’s get as good a freeze-frame as we can. Then we shake down Leland’s friends. Each and every one. Coffee?’

‘Yeah,’ Groves said. ‘Although I think I’ve already inhaled a day’s worth of caffeine from your breath.’

‘You’re welcome: you looked like you needed it. Be back in five. Don’t start without me.’

‘I won’t.’

Sean left and closed the door.

You looked like you needed it
. Groves certainly felt like he did. After the phone call last night, he had found it difficult to sleep, turning the strange events of the evening over and over in his head in a fruitless attempt to make sense of them, and failing. The scarred homeless boy had given him a phone, and on that phone he’d received a message that related to his dead son. There was no way it could have been a coincidence, and yet he couldn’t work out what it meant. Was it a more advanced version of the taunting phone calls and letters? If so, it seemed a bizarre and random form of escalation, and the message itself had not been as hurtful and poisonous as it might have been.

At the same time, he couldn’t think what to do about it. He had the phone with him now – a solid pressure he could feel in his trouser pocket – but it wasn’t turned on. He was keen to preserve the battery life, and had been only checking for voicemail messages at intervals. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what else he could do. He certainly wasn’t going to waste departmental resources attempting to trace the call. For the first couple of years, he’d reported the messages he’d received on Jamie’s birthday, dutifully logging them, but nothing had ever come of it, and in the end he’d stopped. There had been a strange kind of relief then, at keeping them to himself. They were personal, and passing them on to the department had always felt a little like he was handing over his responsibility for them: giving them to someone else to deal with. This felt similar. For some reason, when it came to the phone, he was reluctant to talk even to Sean about it.

God will be with you
.

He took the mobile out now and turned it on.

Waited.

Nothing. He turned it off again.

Despite his promise to Sean, he decided to start without him. For now, he focused his attention on the drugs angle. Edward Leland had been low-level, yes, but it was still possible they’d find something there. When you dealt and used, it was inevitable that you’d meet bad people along the way, and transgressions could easily end up being punished. And if any of those individuals had become familiar with Leland’s apparent sexual inclinations, maybe it wouldn’t have taken quite so much of a transgression for them to turn on him.

He called up Leland’s case file onscreen, with the list of names that Angela Morris had provided for them scribbled on a notepad on the desk. She’d given a grand total of seven, and had stressed that only a couple of them were dodgy, the others more like casual acquaintances. Not that she’d necessarily know, of course, and they’d work them all anyway. For now, though, Groves wanted to see if there was any correlation there with Leland’s criminal record. He scanned through to the list of Leland’s convictions.

It made for depressing reading. His first offence had been at the age of thirteen. Drunk and disorderly; public affray; damage to property. He had received a caution. A pattern established itself through his teens, with a further three arrests, until he was sixteen, when drugs entered the picture and he was found in possession of a reasonable quantity of cannabis.

Groves knew the type already, or imagined he did, at least. It brought back memories of some of the kids he’d grown up with: hanging around in the local parks and on street corners; older brothers taking orders and bringing boxes of alcohol. Because his father had been both a policeman and deeply religious, Groves had been excluded from all that, and at the time he’d resented it. Despite his own religious leanings, the things the other kids got up to had somehow felt natural and correct, and they
pulled
at him to the extent that, stuck inside of an evening, he would look out of his bedroom window and sense a centre of gravity trying to drag him out there.

Most teenagers did it, of course, and most came out the other
side okay. But some didn’t, and Edward Leland was one. He left school with barely a handful of qualifications and little in the way of an obvious future.

His eighteenth birthday had culminated in his being arrested in possession of a small quantity of heroin. A step-change, that. And from there, it had been a slippery slope with a downhill trajectory. He was arrested for dealing in his early twenties and served six months. More drunk and disorderlies afterwards. A longer stretch for dealing six years ago. Since then, he appeared to have been clean, although Angela Morris thought he had at least been using again at various points during that period.

Her words came back to Groves now.

He was so lovely when we were younger. Troubled, but lovely
.

He clicked back through to the beginning of the file. It contained no record of the sexual abuse Morris alleged Leland had suffered as a child. Of course, that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. He might have reported it and not been believed, or he might have felt there was nobody he could report it to at all. Both situations were depressingly common.

While it didn’t excuse what he had done, and what he had possibly become, it made it difficult for Groves to hate him the way that Sean presumably thought he should. Everybody’s life was a story that began without them, and for some people, the constraints of that beginning made it difficult to change the ending. Despite Angela Morris’ obvious shortcomings, she didn’t seem like a bad person, and she had seen something in Edward Leland. It seemed important to Groves to remember that what he was reading onscreen right now was not the man himself, but a list of the bad things he had done. There would have been a lot more to him than that.

He scrolled back down, intending to click through for greater detail on Leland’s convictions, cross-referencing any additional names he found with the list Morris had provided. They’d all need following up. He started with the last conviction, and was busy writing down the names of the three other people arrested alongside Leland when he saw it.

SIMO

He paused, then slowly looked down at his hand.

The tip of the pencil was pressed tight against the paper. Not so hard that it had broken, but enough to leave a concentrated dot of black at the bottom of the O.

He forced himself to finish.

SIMON CHADWICK.

He looked at the screen. The name was right there, as plain as day. Leland’s arrest that day for dealing had taken place in Chadwick’s flat on the Thornton estate.

Simon Chadwick, the man with the mental age of a child. Who was so easily taken advantage of by the unscrupulous people he came into contact with. Edward Leland had been one of his associates.

Groves checked the date.

It had been just over a year after Leland’s arrest at Chadwick’s flat that Groves had knocked at that same address and Laila Buckingham had been found, tied up and close to death, in the back bedroom. Another two years until his own son had been taken in turn, presumably by people who had been associated with Chadwick.

People who were interested in children.

People who had never been found.

Groves stared at the screen until it began to feel more like he was staring through it. As though he wasn’t in his body any longer.

People like Edward Leland?

For a moment, he was completely still, and then he realised his hand had started to tremble slightly. This was too much of a coincidence after the phone call last night, even though there was no reason to assume that was even connected.

Or maybe it was simply just too much.

What would you do, if you found the people responsible?

Arrest them, he’d always thought. Make them face justice. He remembered Edward Leland’s tortured, burned body and tried to feel the sympathy he’d felt previously. It was still there,
but he found that he couldn’t lock on to it properly now. The emotion felt like a lost child with nobody’s hand to hold.

Arrest them
.

The thought became urgent. If Leland
was
one of them, perhaps there were others here, amongst his associates.

Perhaps—

The door opened, Sean pushing it with his foot, a cup of coffee in each hand and a pack of crisps between his teeth. Out of instinct, Groves minimised the window. But even as he did, he recognised the guilty impulse that had made him do it, and the realisation tore at him inside. More than anything, he wanted to find the people responsible for Jamie’s abduction. But if he had a personal connection to the case, he would have to step aside; he would be
made
to. If anything came to trial, they couldn’t risk the appearance of bias or impropriety. He wasn’t going to be able to hide from that just by minimising a window.

As Sean put the coffee down beside him, he opened the window again.

‘You started without me,’ Sean said glumly.

Groves gave him a sad smile. The wrench he felt inside himself was almost impossible to bear, but he was a good man, a good detective, and he knew it was the right thing to do. He tried to tell himself that it was a minor loss in the grand scheme of things. He’d survived larger.

‘Yes.’ He gestured at the screen. It hurt. It hurt badly. ‘And I think you’re going to be finishing without me.’

Mark

The Devil

When I got back to the department, I saw there were a few updates from the investigation, but I went straight through to Pete’s office to debrief him on my latest interview with Charlie Matheson.

It was a precarious situation to deal with. While she remained a victim, and had clearly been through a great deal, there was no denying that we now had to consider her a far more unreliable witness than before. There was something she wasn’t telling us. At least to some extent, she was cooperating with the people we were trying to find.

As I explained all this to Pete, the frown on his face deepened. It reached the point where he almost seemed to be in physical pain at what I was telling him.

‘She’s been lying to us?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not lying. I think everything she’s told us so far has been true – or true in her own mind, at least. To begin with, I think she was confused, maybe as a side effect of any drugs they used on her. That’s why she asked for mercy at first, rather than Mercer. But she’s clearer about things now.’

‘And not telling us everything.’

‘That’s right. She’s choosing to tell us what she’s been allowed to tell us by the people who took her. She’s terrified of one man
in particular. But she also wants to do what she’s been told. She wants to go back there.’

‘Stockholm syndrome,’ Pete said.

‘Possibly. I think there’s something else, but I don’t know what. Regardless, she’s not going to tell us anything she’s not allowed to, not without Mercer there.’

‘And what is she not telling us?’

‘The sins that she’s wearing.’ I explained what Charlie had told me about the reasons behind the scarring. ‘It’s connected to where she was on the day of her accident. But again, she won’t tell anyone but Mercer about it.’

‘Christ. I want an officer stationed at the hospital. Don’t worry – I’ll sort that one out.’

‘It gets worse.’

‘It can’t.’

I took a deep breath and told him about Charlie’s brief description of the man who had cut her face. While what had been done to her was horrible enough, it was what she’d called him that bothered me most now.

‘She said he was the Devil,’ I said. ‘That’s what the man told her. She was dead and in Hell, and he was the Devil.’

Pete was silent.

Then: ‘Shit.’

I nodded. Charlie had been told to ask for Mercer, and there had to be a reason for that – most likely a connection to a past case. The 50/50 Killer had always worn a devil mask during his attacks. Even though the man was dead – killed a year and a half ago – and Charlie had described the Devil as an old man without a mask, there was an obvious connection, although not one either of us wanted to contemplate. The wounds from that case had barely healed. Reopening them was going to hurt. For Mercer, in particular, it could be catastrophic.