Urban Myth (16 page)

I
decided not to tell Nicole that I thought I saw a man near the woods. In all probability I’d imagined it. So there was no need to make the situation even more alarming for her.

When I came back into the house she and Michael were in the living room. Nicole was on the sofa reading through the guest folder that Nathan Slade had left for us.

I spent a couple of minutes making grovelling apologies to them for my outburst at the table. They forgave me without hesitation,
sympathetic
to my excuse that the stress over Tina was getting to me.

I didn’t press Michael on what he thought he saw from his bedroom window during the night. How could I? I’d just had a similar
experience
myself. Plus, I was suddenly too tired to risk upsetting him again. In fact, the tiredness was overwhelming. I found myself wiping my hands across my face to dispel the grogginess. But it didn’t really help. My eyelids felt like ton weights and my movements quickly became sluggish.

‘I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s feeling drowsy,’ Nicole said. ‘You look like you’re struggling to stay awake too.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand why.’

‘Well I feel like I’ve been injected with a powerful anaesthetic. What the hell is the matter with us?’ She turned to her son, adding, ‘How do you feel, Michael?’

The boy had parked himself in the folds of the armchair. His face was pasty and drawn and we both watched as he blinked several times and then closed his eyes.

‘I’m tired,’ he said in a soft, fragile voice.

This can’t be right, I told myself. How could we so quickly be consumed by fatigue? And it wasn’t the first time it had happened.
Ever since we had arrived I’d felt almost as though I was being sedated. I’d put it down to jet lag and perhaps the country air, but maybe there was more to it. As I looked at Nicole and Michael, both slipping into unconsciousness, a disturbing thought snapped into my mind.

I rushed into the kitchen. Our soup bowls were still on the table. Was it possible the soup had been drugged? At any other time the idea would have seemed preposterous, but in the context of what had been happening here I found it quite conceivable that Nathan Slade’s
homemade
concoction was not all it appeared to be – along with the rest of the food and drink he had left for us. After all, it was usually following a meal that we had drifted into a state of somnolence.

I opened the refrigerator and took out the storage carton containing the rest of the soup. There was a handwritten label on the cover which read ‘Chicken Soup’. I opened it and sniffed at the thick, creamy liquid. There was nothing unusual about it. But that meant very little since knock-out drugs were usually odourless and colourless.

Stifling a yawn, I checked through the contents of the refrigerator: bottles of white wine, butter, cheese, cold meats. Then I went through the cupboards. I did not find anything suspicious until I examined an unopened tin of baked beans. My eyes homed in on a tiny hole in the top. It was slightly bigger than a pin-prick. I’d never seen anything like it before and wondered if it was a manufacturing error or the result of a sharp object being inserted into the tin.

I quickly checked all the other tins and food packages and was shocked to find that the same tiny puncture mark appeared in almost every sealed item. I then checked the wine bottles. They were all screw tops and every one had been twisted open, just like the bottle we’d opened earlier.

I went into the living room to tell Nicole, but she was already fast asleep on the sofa, purring like a cat through her open mouth. I sat beside her, my lungs heaving rapidly in my chest. I didn’t know what to make of the discovery, but the obvious conclusion to draw was that our groceries had been spiked with some powerful sleep-inducing agent. But why would someone do that? What sinister motive lay behind it?

My mind churned, searching for answers to those questions and a
whole bunch of others. I knew I ought to ring the police, but getting up to find my phone seemed like too much of an effort suddenly. I felt vaguely ill as well as exhausted. A dull, leaden weariness pulled at my muscles. I found it impossible to concentrate. My thoughts started
spinning
without orientation. Finally I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Closing them was such a relief. The darkness washed over me and those anxious thoughts gradually shimmered into fragile dreams.

N
athan Slade was a striking looking individual – both with and without his clothes on. In the police photograph on Temple’s desk – taken after his arrest for indecently assaulting a young woman – he had a cascade of iron-grey hair that spilled over his shirt collar. His jawline was glazed with stubble and as he stared into the camera his dark brown eyes were intense and menacing.

But in the pornographic DVD that was playing on Temple’s office TV, Slade looked different as well as older. He wore his long grey hair in dreadlocks and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark-framed glasses with yellow-tinted lenses. His body had not worn well since his birth fifty-seven years earlier. His skin was pale and sagging in places and he had a large beer belly that he was clearly trying to suck in.

Temple watched as Slade used a whip on Genna Boyd’s bottom, lashing her flesh until red welts appeared. His teeth were bared the whole time in an ugly, lascivious grin. She moaned and cried out but at the same time kept begging him for more and he was only too happy to oblige. After a while he discarded the whip and mounted her from behind as she leaned forward over the kitchen table at King’s Manor.

It made for repulsive viewing and Temple could only stick with it for a couple of minutes. Then he switched it off and lit a cigarette. He had never understood those who derived pleasure from receiving and inflicting pain. But there was obviously something in it, since
sadomasochism
had seen a huge growth in popularity thanks largely to the internet. He had often wondered if all that pain and humiliation was simply an outlet for anger and self-loathing.

He sat back and thought about Nathan Slade. He was obviously a
ghastly pervert with an unhealthy sexual appetite, convicted of
kerb-crawling
and indecent assault. A regular user of prostitutes and a keen voyeur. But was he also a killer? Did he stab Genna Boyd to death as part of some erotic fantasy – like the one he was playing out on the DVD? And was it possible that he had killed her on camera, so he could show it to other sexual deviants?

These questions and more were piling up inside the detective’s mind. He needed answers and he needed to start making sense of what had been happening. He still had no idea why Genna had contacted Jack Keaton to warn him off coming to King’s Manor. And he did not know if there was a connection between her and the strange goings on in the house, as reported by the family. It was frustrating – and worrying – because the longer the investigation went on, the less chance they had of getting a result.

He stubbed out the cigarette in the waste bin and called Angel, partly to be cheered up by the sound of her voice, but mainly to find out how she was getting on.

She was back at the hospital, waiting for Genna’s mother to wake up from a sleep. They had spent several hours searching her flat for the mysterious package that Genna had entrusted to her, but they hadn’t found it. So Angel was going to talk to Miss Boyd in the hope that she would eventually remember where she had put it.

Just as he put down the phone, one of the detectives entered his office with some news. Slade’s ex-wife, whose name was Audrey Wilkinson, had been traced. She was living in Poole, a coastal town forty-five minutes by car from Southampton.

‘At bloody last,’ Temple said.

T
he sound of screaming woke me. I sat upright on the sofa. Shook my head to clear it.

It was dark in the living room, but my eyes were drawn at once to a bright, flashing light. It took a moment for my brain to register that it was the TV. On screen a young woman let out another shrill scream as she fled from a man in a black balaclava.

Relieved, I dragged my gaze away from the TV and scanned the shadows that cluttered the room. Everything was as I remembered it before I fell asleep, except that Michael was no longer in the armchair. Nicole was slumped next to me on the sofa, her head resting in my lap, her legs draped over the armrest. My watch said 7 p.m. We had been asleep for several hours. I felt dehydrated, and a dull pain loitered behind my eyes.

I got slowly to my feet, careful not to wake my wife. Three steps took me to the TV. I reached down and switched it off. I could then hear the soft pull of Nicole’s breathing and the creaking of floorboards as Michael moved around upstairs.

And then it all came flooding back to me; I was thrust back into the hideous reality that was King’s Manor. Tina was still missing, it was likely that we were being systematically drugged, and we were
effectively
trapped in a house that seemed to have a life of its own.

I felt a sickness in my stomach as I went into the kitchen. The light was on. I filled the kettle and flicked the switch. I was reaching for the coffee jar when it suddenly occurred to me that it might be
contaminated
. Shit. What in heaven’s name were we supposed to do?

The ceiling above me continued to vibrate as Michael stamped across the floor upstairs. I wondered what he was doing and how long he had been awake. I needed to tell him not to eat or drink anything else. We couldn’t risk it.

As I moved towards the door, Nicole startled me by appearing in the doorway, bleary-eyed and yawning.

‘I feel like shit,’ she groaned.

‘Join the club,’ I said.

She squinted at me, trying to focus. ‘Is Tina back?’

I shook my head and moved up to her, put my hands on her
shoulders
and looked into her face. There was a ravaged expression in her eyes and her cheeks were flushed.

I kept my voice calm as I laid it out for her. Told her what I suspected about the food and drink. The soup. The wine. Everything that had been left for us.

‘I’m convinced we’ve been drugged since we arrived,’ I said. ‘That’s why we’ve been so tired. Why we keep falling asleep.’

Her tongue moved across her lips, barely moistening them.

‘But who would do that?’

‘It has to be Slade. Who else could it be? But don’t ask me why because I don’t know.’

I could feel her shaking, tremors through her entire body.

‘I want you and Michael to leave,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here and wait for Tina to come back. Go to a hotel. I’ll call the police. They can take you and help me get the Discovery started.’

A moan of despair issued from her throat. ‘But I don’t want to leave you, Jack. We should stay together.’

‘We can’t. You’re not safe here. As soon as Tina is back I’ll join you.’

She squeezed her eyes shut, held her breath.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Where is Michael?’

‘That’s him walking about upstairs,’ I said. I paused for a second so she could hear his feet thumbing across the floorboards above us. ‘I’ll go fetch him and then call the cops. You sit down and get yourself together.’

I legged it upstairs, calling Michael’s name as I went. But I got no response. I expected him to be in his bedroom, but he wasn’t. I checked the other rooms. All of them. When it got to the point where I was looking in cupboards and under beds the blood in my veins started turning to ice.

I examined every window upstairs – they were all closed. Which begged the question:
Who had been walking around up here?
I hurried
downstairs, calling Michael’s name and searching every room and cupboard. But he was nowhere.

‘What’s wrong?’ Nicole said, her voice almost a shrill cry. ‘Where’s Michael?’

‘He’s not in the house,’ I told her.

‘But I don’t understand. He’s upstairs. We just heard him.’

‘There’s nobody up there. I checked everywhere.’

Shock seized her features. ‘Are you telling me he’s disappeared like Tina?’

‘I’ll check outside,’ I said. ‘He must have gone for a walk.’

‘We would have seen him. He would have had to pass us.’

‘Not if it wasn’t him we heard upstairs,’ I said.

She scrunched up her face. ‘Then who did we hear?’

I rolled my shoulders.

‘We need to call the police,’ Nicole said.

I picked up the house phone. No dialling tone as per usual. I felt like smashing the handset against the wall, but I managed to hold back, telling myself I needed to stay in control. We both looked around for my cell. It was Nicole who found it on the table in the kitchen.

‘Oh my God there’s another message from Tina,’ she said.

I took the phone from her, opened the message.

Michael is now on the other side with me. Don’t call the cops. You will see us both later tonight
.

Nicole looked at me, her eyes bulging fearfully. I wanted to say something, but my face froze over and I couldn’t move. Nicole stood there, trying to take in what was happening, her face slowly draining of blood. After an empty, endless moment, she finally broke down, her body shaking with huge, ugly sobs. I took her in my arms and held her tight against me. I shared her despair and her fear. But for me there was also something else – a strong feeling that reality itself was dissolving around us like a slowly fading light.

T
emple drove to Poole via the A31, which cuts through the New Forest. During the day the views are spectacular, but he had delayed his departure from Southampton so all he could see was an inky black canvas on both sides of the road.

Audrey Wilkinson’s son had told him over the phone that his mother would not be home until 7.30 p.m. She’d apparently spent the afternoon visiting a friend in Weymouth. Temple explained that he wanted to talk to her about Nathan Slade. He said he couldn’t go into details on the phone but would be there at just before eight.

He had used the time to pore over all the reports from the detectives on the team. There were transcripts of interviews with porn artists who had worked with Genna Boyd, and with some of the men who had paid for her escort services, but nothing leapt off the page at him. Several of the men were now being subjected to further investigation, but Temple still regarded Nathan Slade as their main suspect.

He was surprised it was proving so difficult to run him down. He had not given a forwarding address to the post office and had not set up new accounts with any of the utility companies. So maybe he had gone to ground, or even left the country, following the unexpected discovery of Genna’s body. If indeed he was the killer then he would have been expecting her remains to rot in the ground.

Temple felt sorry for Jack Keaton and his family. Of all the hundreds of holiday lets in the area they’d had the misfortune to pick the house owned by Nathan Slade and as a result, they had become somehow embroiled in whatever was going on. He refused to accept that the strange events that had ruined their trip had anything to do with the paranormal, despite what Damien Roth had said about the house. But the family had certainly been spooked by something.

He made a mental note to call Keaton when he got the chance to see if the daughter had turned up safely. If not then perhaps her
disappearance
was indeed a cause for concern after all.

Audrey Wilkinson was short and plump with silver hair pulled back into submission. Her face looked broken by the years and her eyes were red-rimmed and threaded with veins. She was in her mid to late fifties and wearing a brown cardigan over black, loose-fitting trousers. Her shoulders were bunched, tension apparent in her posture.

Her son, Tom, had answered the door to his first floor flat behind the harbour in Poole. He was about thirty-five with a round face, small eyes and a pinched nose with a strong bridge. He had introduced Temple to his mother after explaining that his father was her first husband. They had divorced ten years ago.

‘If they had stayed together she would never have met that scumbag,’ he’d said.

Miss Wilkinson made Temple a cup of tea and offered him some biscuits. She was a quietly spoken woman with tiny, irregular teeth. She waited until all three of them were seated in the living room before asking why the police wanted to talk to her about her ex-husband.

‘We’re trying to trace him and I wondered if you could help us,’ Temple said. ‘His home in the forest has been let out to a family of
holidaymakers
and he hasn’t given them a forwarding address.’

She looked bemused. ‘I haven’t seen or spoken to him since our divorce came through a year ago.’

‘Does he have another property? Perhaps a house or flat he could be staying in?’

‘Not that I know of. We were married for only two years. All of our money went into King’s Manor. It’s his business as well as his home, although I heard from friends in Burley that he’s been struggling to fill the rooms and has kept costs down by closing for weeks at a time.’

‘What about relatives or friends? Could he be staying with someone?’

Her lips twisted in a wry smile. ‘Nathan has no siblings and no friends, Inspector. He’s very much a loner, and with good reason. He doesn’t like people and those who meet him tend not to like him.’

‘The man’s a sleazeball,’ Tom said. ‘What kind of trouble is he in?’

‘None at the moment,’ Temple said, ‘but his name has come up during the course of an investigation.’

‘Well I hope he’s done something wrong and you nail him for it. He almost turned my mother into a nervous wreck.’

‘Is that so, Miss Wilkinson?’ Temple asked.

She chewed the inside of her cheek for what seemed like a long time. Then she said, ‘I married in haste, Inspector. I’d been single and lonely for seven years after my first marriage broke down. Luckily I still had a home – I got the house in Ringwood in the divorce
settlement
. There was no mortgage but I had to carry on working as a cleaner to make ends meet. That’s how I met Nathan. He wanted someone to clean his house on a regular basis. It was a full time job. I answered his newspaper ad and he took me on.’

‘So you started cleaning King’s Manor?’

She nodded. ‘I enjoyed it at first. It’s a lovely place and at that time business was brisk. Nathan was good to me and generous. He was married before, many years ago, but his wife died. I think he was lonely too. Anyway, we really hit it off.’

‘So what started out as a working relationship grew into something more.’

She slowly exhaled. ‘He was very attentive. He showered me with compliments and gifts. He’s also different to most other men in both his manner and appearance. Some say he’s an eccentric. I think that’s what I liked most about him. He was fun to be with at the start. Unpredictable.’

‘So what happened?’

She smiled again, but this time it was an expression of sadness. ‘After we had been together for about four months he asked me to marry him and like a fool I said yes. After the wedding he pressured me into putting my house on the market. When it was eventually sold he used the money to pay off the mortgage on King’s Manor without telling me. It was a considerable sum. I should have been more concerned but I was too wrapped up in the joy of a new life with a new man.’

She suddenly turned her gaze away from Temple and directed it out the window. In her face he saw the anguish of resurrected pain.

‘It became clear that the bastard just wanted to get his hands on my mother’s money,’ Tom said. ‘What she didn’t know at the time was
that the bank was threatening to repossess King’s Manor. Slade was in the shit financially.’

Miss Wilkinson turned back to Temple and found her voice again. ‘He changed almost overnight. He lost interest in me and started treating me badly.’

‘In what way?’

She swallowed. ‘He was cruel, Inspector. And often violent. He hit me on a number of occasions. During one argument he went out into the garden and picked up a grass snake that was nesting there and brought it back into the house. He then threw it at me, knowing I hated them. I was terrified.’

‘I didn’t know about any of this until she left him,’ her son said. ‘I urged her to go to the police but she wouldn’t.’

‘I didn’t see the point,’ she said. ‘Nothing would have been done.’

‘So what, in the end, made you leave him?’ Temple asked.

She gnawed on her lip for a moment, then said, ‘I discovered some things about him that were distasteful. It made me realize that he has a serious problem.’

‘What did you discover?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. It’s a private matter and I want it to stay that way.’

‘But it might have a bearing on our investigation.’

‘I very much doubt that.’

‘What if I give you my word that what you tell me will remain
confidential
?’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t know you, Inspector. Why should I trust you?’

Temple decided to try another tack. ‘Look, would it help if you knew that Nathan Slade is the prime suspect in a murder inquiry?’

Miss Wilkinson’s mouth fell open and she glanced nervously at her son.

‘You may have heard about the woman who was found dead on Cranes Moor a couple of days ago,’ Temple said. ‘Well, she was a
prostitute
and a frequent visitor to King’s Manor. That’s why we need to find out as much as we can about Nathan Slade.’

Tom Wilkinson took his mother’s hand and told her that it was time she opened up and revealed what she knew.

‘You’ve got to stop being scared of him,’ he said.

His mother took a long breath and nodded. ‘Very well. It started when I found out that he was paying for sex with prostitutes – he made the mistake of leaving a used condom in the back of his car. When I confronted him he admitted it, but promised to stop. Stupidly I gave him the benefit of the doubt. A few weeks later I became suspicious again and when he was out I started looking around the house for evidence. That’s when I came across the first hidden camera.’

Temple frowned. ‘Camera?’

She nodded. ‘In the master bedroom at the Manor there are two wardrobes with mirrors on the doors. I was going through Nathan’s wardrobe when I noticed a steel panel attached to the inside of the door. It was about the size of a breakfast cereal box and it was attached with four screws.’

‘Had you never seen it before?’ Temple asked.

‘No I hadn’t, but then I’d never had cause to search his wardrobe before. Anyway, out of curiosity I started to examine it and then decided to get a screwdriver and find out what was underneath.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘I discovered that there was a hole in the wardrobe and through it, a small spy camera fixed to the inside of the box was looking out into the room.’

Temple was puzzled. ‘But didn’t you say there was a mirror on the door?’

‘That’s right, but it was a two-way mirror. I was able to look right through it but from the outside it looked normal.’

Temple knew a bit about two-way mirrors, which are also
sometimes
called one-way mirrors. They have them in police interview rooms and there are plenty for sale on the internet. They work because they’re partly reflective and partly transparent. When one side of the mirror is brightly lit and the other is dark, it allows viewing from the darkened side but not vice versa.

‘I then started looking around the rest of the house,’ Miss Wilkinson went on. ‘And to my utter disgust I found cameras in all of the rooms. They were hidden in light fittings, smoke detectors, wall clocks and behind other two-way mirrors.’

‘So are you saying that your husband was using them to spy on guests?’

‘That’s exactly what he was doing. And it had probably been going on for years. He was making recordings and storing them on his computer.’

There had been quite a lot of well-documented cases of landlords and hotel owners rigging up rooms with tiny spy cameras. Temple recalled the case of a peeping Tom hotelier in Manchester who was jailed for six months for spying on guests after installing micro cameras in their rooms. And there was the case of the private landlord who hid cameras in three of his flats – all of them connected to his computer. In fact, this sort of voyeurism had seen spectacular growth thanks to the availability of cheap surveillance equipment on the internet. Plus, there were literally hundreds of websites running hidden camera footage. Some of them even claimed to show ‘live feeds’ from spy cams in hotels and private dwellings.

‘Tell the inspector what you found in the garage, Mum,’ Tom said.

Temple waited with bated breath as Miss Wilkinson stared into her lap for about half a minute before speaking. Then she lifted her head and asked, ‘Have you been to the property, Inspector?’

Temple said he had.

‘Then you would have seen the double garage next to the house. It has a large loft and that’s what Nathan uses as his office. You reach it by pulling down a retractable staircase from the ceiling. He always kept the garage locked but I knew where he hid the key. So after finding the cameras I went up there and saw computer monitors that were linked wirelessly to the cameras in the house. From there he could watch and record everything that was going on.’

‘The ultimate voyeur,’ Temple said.

‘Exactly. For me it was the last straw. But when I told him I knew he just said I should keep my nose out of his business. I said I was going to tell the police and he warned me that if I did he would release on the internet dozens of hours of intimate recordings showing me having sex with him. So I said I wouldn’t report it and he agreed to a divorce. He insisted on keeping the house but gave me a sum of money and I got away from him as quickly as I could.’

An image from the DVD flashed in Temple’s mind: Slade whipping
and then mounting Genna Boyd. That sick smile and those absurd grey dreadlocks. It caused bile to rise in his throat.

‘So that’s why I hate the man,’ Tom said. ‘He put my mother through hell. I’ve begged her to let me report him but she fears he’ll carry out his threat to release the footage and she can’t face that.’

Temple leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘Do you believe that your ex-husband is capable of murder, Miss Wilkinson?’

She didn’t even have to think about it. ‘He’s a brutal man, Inspector. There’s no question in my mind that he would kill someone without even flinching.’