The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (21 page)

‘Shit,’ Pete said again.

‘But then it might not be that. There are some discrepancies there, I think, and I want to look at the case again. At
all
Mercer’s cases, in fact.’ Pete looked so distracted that I wanted
to emphasise the fact. ‘Because the 50/50 Killer is dead. The case is closed. It might be something else.’

‘So check. That’s the priority.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll get on to it. We already know that Matheson has never crossed paths with us before. But I can work through some of the old cases, see if anything leaps out.’

‘Yes.’ Pete ran his hand through his hair. ‘And then there’s the victim at the accident scene. We need to identify her.’

‘Priority number two.’ I nodded. ‘I know.’

I confess: I put it off slightly. Back in my office, I worked quickly through the various updates that had arrived in my tray first.

There was a fresh list of hospitals. Two thirds of them were crossed out now, representing the rapidly diminishing possibility that Charlie was simply a missing patient. She wasn’t; I knew that deep down.

The door-to-doors at the flats had turned up nothing. Nobody remembered seeing Charlie being dropped off, or the vehicle that might have brought her there. A woman who had been in the crowd at the grocery when she was found had come forward, but couldn’t tell us anything useful.

Priority number one, then.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I decided to go crazy, loading up every single investigation Mercer had been involved in for the eight years prior to his departure from the department, and working methodically through them.

There was no obvious connection in any of them. While looking at them collectively, though, it was immediately apparent that one case had dominated the latter years of Mercer’s long career. The 50/50 Killer investigation hung suspended through them, like a dirty black branch frozen in clear ice. Its tendrils seemed to touch the other cases: ever present; always active. It was there in the period of absence Mercer had taken from work following his breakdown, and it was there again
after his return, eventually providing the bookend that finally destroyed his career.

However unhealthy writing a book about it might be, I understood why it continued to haunt him, and he couldn’t let it go.

I scanned through the file.

It was impossible to read it all: with all the forensic reports, interviews, statements, photographs and footage, there were over two thousand separate records in the file. The process reminded me of my first day when, new to the team, I’d needed to familiarise myself with the main details quickly. They came back easily again now. Even after a year and a half, my memories of the investigation remained as sharp as the words on the screen.

I loaded up the section on the murder of a man named Kevin Simpson. On my first day, I’d overslept, and finally met the team at Simpson’s house, where he had been found burned to death in his own bathtub. He was the latest – but not the last – victim of the 50/50 Killer. I learned that the murderer spent months following and studying the couples he abducted and tortured. He was patient and methodical, learning the secrets of their relationship so that he could tease out the weaker strands, weathering and cutting them, eventually forcing one of the couple to betray the other.

I opened one of the photographs of the spiderwebs.

A normal person embarking upon such a study of others might have taken notes, keeping pages of details about his targets, but the 50/50 Killer had an entirely different way of visualising the information he gathered. On the wall in Kevin Simpson’s study – and, I learned later, the homes of all of his victims – he had drawn an intricate spiderweb pattern. At first glance, the designs all seemed random, and yet many of the lines had small checks over them, as though they had been crossed out, one by one, severing the supporting structure of the web itself. Later, we came to understand that this was how the 50/50 Killer visualised the relationships he tested, and that
the checks represented the manipulation and games he inflicted upon the couple. One strand at a time, he dissected and severed the love between them.

I skipped to the end of the file. The 50/50 Killer had died from head injuries just after dawn on 4 December 2013. Those injuries had occurred outside the house of John and Eileen Mercer.

Is this case the connection to him now?

There was no way to be sure. We had never discovered the killer’s true identity, and the official investigation had died with him. The only real links between it and Charlie Matheson now were the mention of the Devil and the patience required in both cases, and neither was conclusive. And there was another problem too – the discrepancy I’d mentioned to Pete.

I opened up the provisional timetable I’d started the other night and amended it.

Provisional timeline

3 August 2013 Charlie Matheson’s car crash

4 December 2013 Death of the 50/50 Killer

25 July 2015 Charlie Matheson reappears

Charlie had been abducted
before
the 50/50 case had concluded, which meant that whatever was happening here had started before that particular investigation came to such a dramatic end.

I stared at the screen for a little longer, then closed down the timeline and the case files I still had open. For the moment, I didn’t know how to pursue it.

The next thing was priority number two – the victim who had died in Charlie Matheson’s place on 3 August two years earlier.
You need to go back at least two years
, Mercer had said.
Possibly even further
. I’d go one better than that, I decided, pulling all the missing persons reports since the beginning of 2010, and then beginning to sort and work through the hundreds that arrived on screen.

It was a good job I did. Because hidden way back in the spring of 2010, I found myself staring at the photograph of a woman who looked a lot like Charlie Matheson.

A woman who had never been found.

Mark

Things nobody else could see

‘The hardest part is not knowing,’ Mavis Lawrence said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand that.’

She was sitting across from me in an armchair in the front room of her house: a small, fragile figure with her knees pressed together and her body bent slightly forward. Her husband, Harold, was standing beside her, clearly trying to appear strong and full of resolve. Stoical. He was failing slightly on that front, I thought. Dressed in old suit trousers, with his white shirt slightly untucked, he seemed hesitant more than anything, as though he wanted to reach out to his wife but didn’t know quite how any more. It looked like Mavis was hunched over something in her lap, a parcel of grief, and he no longer understood how to deal with it.

‘Well.’ He settled for touching her shoulder gently. ‘I think we do know, don’t we? Deep down.’

‘Not for sure. Not until she’s found.’

He took his hand away and walked over to the oak cabinet that rested along one wall of the room. There were trinkets on it – porcelain thimbles and bells; painted plates angled on rests – along with a handful of carefully framed photographs. Some were obviously of their missing daughter, Rebecca.

Mavis looked up at me.

‘You
haven’t
found her, have you?’

I was struck by the amount of hope in her voice, especially because it was obvious that the answer she wanted to hear was
no
. Her husband had been right: deep down, Mavis knew that the only way her daughter would be found would be dead. Until that day, Rebecca would continue to exist in a kind of quantum state, neither dead nor alive, and Mavis could allow herself to believe.

I chose my words carefully.

‘There have been no significant advances in the investigation into your daughter’s disappearance. What I can say is that the details surrounding it might have a bearing on a current investigation. At the moment, I’m not at liberty to reveal how.’

‘Oh God. You’ve found someone, haven’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t.’

While not strictly true, I could tell that Mavis was visualising shallow graves in forests, unidentified remains, and that was a world away from what we had.

It made me feel bad for the couple again, because what actual news would I ever be able to bring them? They had both spent the last few years expecting to hear the worst. That would be awful enough, but at least if they had their daughter’s body, they could bury her and gain whatever sense of closure that might allow. But if it turned out that Rebecca Lawrence was the young woman who had died in Charlie Matheson’s place, they wouldn’t even have that. The body had been cremated two years ago, the ashes scattered in a place that would hold no resonance for them. We might never even know for certain if it had been her in that crash, just take a guess at the probability. How could that ever be enough for them? The not knowing would continue for ever. There would always be the slightest of possibilities remaining to fuel the fantasy: to keep them both chained in place, as they were now.

‘I know it might be painful,’ I said, ‘but I was hoping you could talk me through what happened to Rebecca. The day she disappeared. The time beforehand.’

‘I ... I don’t like to think about it.’

‘I understand.’

Mavis didn’t say anything more. After a moment, I looked across the room at Harold, who continued watching his wife for a few seconds before turning to me.

‘Let’s go through to the kitchen, Detective.’

I sat down at the table in the kitchen, and watched as Harold Lawrence made coffee. My initial impressions of him had been slightly wrong, I thought. His wife might nurse her grief more openly, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned his own. It was there in the stoop of his shoulders and his weary gait: the sense that he was weighed down by things nobody else could see, and he didn’t know what else to do except carry them.

‘I’m sorry about my wife.’ He had his back to me, and I could see his bony shoulder blades against his shirt as he poured our drinks. They were so pronounced that it looked as though he’d once had wings. ‘Mavis has good days and bad days.’

‘There’s nothing to apologise for.’

‘Sometimes it’s like things used to be. And for a time we can both pretend. But it never lasts. It’s always there really. It comes back again. You catch yourself pretending, and then suddenly there it is.’

‘I understand.’ I hesitated. ‘I lost someone once too.’

Harold put my coffee down and looked at me.

‘Yes?’

‘In different circumstances. She drowned. I always knew she was dead, but her body was never found.’

‘Do you ever wonder ... ?’

‘If she might be alive somewhere?’ I shook my head. A slight lie, but not really. ‘I never believed that. I suppose it’s something I could never know for sure, but I always chose to go with the most likely option.’

‘Me too. Mavis ... not so much. Maybe it’s a male thing.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well. I’m sorry for your loss.’

I smiled sadly. ‘It was a long time ago now.’

How do you measure a long time, though? If I put my ear to my memories, I could still hear the sea. But it had become increasingly hard to recall images of Lise herself: her face; her mannerisms; the good times we’d shared. Many of the most important things had faded. Maybe in the end that was how you measured it. Not in months or years, but in the clarity of your memories.

Harold eased himself down opposite me. Despite his thin frame, the chair creaked slightly beneath him. It was a cheap set. While the living room seemed well kept, it was considerably messier in here. I got the feeling that nothing in the house had been replaced in a while, and maybe the stuff back through there had just weathered the years better.

‘Thank you for the coffee.’

He nodded, running his hands around his own cup.

‘It’s interesting what you said,’ he told me. ‘That you lost someone. It’s a strange word. We use it for when people die, but it’s not quite right, is it? When you lose something, it implies that you might find it again. That you might get it back.’

‘That’s true.’

Harold smiled. ‘And when you’ve lost something, it’s always in the last place you look. My father used to say that as a joke when I was a boy. But with people, there’s never a last place to look, is there? Unless you’re a religious man, Detective?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Neither am I. How could I be religious now? I wouldn’t want to meet the God that took my daughter away from me. But I don’t expect to find Rebecca again anyway. She’s not lost. She’s gone for ever.’

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Where possible, I always wanted to hear the story from a primary source. ‘And about Rebecca in general too, if you don’t mind.’

‘No, I don’t mind.’

He went through it all in detail, and I was glad. Maybe other officers wouldn’t have wanted to hear so much about
Rebecca herself, preferring to concentrate on the facts of her disappearance, but I wanted a good picture of this young woman. Not just the circumstances, but who she
was
. Because just as I was sure there was a reason why the people behind this had targeted Charlie Matheson, I was betting there would be a reason why they’d chosen Rebecca too. If she’d been held for three whole years before the accident, I doubted very much that her abduction had been simply down to a physical resemblance to Charlie.

For a grieving parent, Harold was remarkably candid about the relationship they’d had with their daughter. Rebecca was lovely when she was younger, he said, but grew distant in her teens, and it was a distance they never really managed to recover. They’d encouraged her quietly, always aware that pushing her in any direction would mean she’d push back in the opposite one.

‘Most kids leave the nest eventually,’ Harold told me. ‘With Becky, it seemed to happen much sooner. In her head, anyway.’

She did fine at school, but had few friends, and those she did connect with were not always the best influence on her. He couldn’t remember any names, but it was obvious he hadn’t approved. It was the usual teenage stuff, though, and it hadn’t affected her too badly; her grades were good enough that she’d secured a place at university to study child psychology. But she’d dropped out in her first year and returned home. After a brief period of soul-searching, she had got a job at a local nursery.