Fade to Black (8 page)

“Allie! You must see this!”

She was holding a battered green photo album, open at the centre. Allie could see photographs plastered over the pages at random angles.

“Check this one out,” her mother said, pointing to one of the smaller photos on the right page.

Smiling, Allie studied the photo. It was a birthday party shot with a highly decorated cake, displaying a big ‘10’. It showed Allie sitting at an old outdoor furniture setting, perhaps at the back of a hotel. She remembered now. It
was
a pub, but where? She saw that her Mum and Dad, Jo and Robert were huddled behind her for the photo and her childhood best friend, Isabelle, leaned on her right shoulder.

Everyone wore outrageous hats and Allie had on her silly ‘photo face’— all teeth and crinkly eyes. Hotel patrons were looking on and some were obviously singing happy birthday to her. Seeing Isabelle was sobering. She had died not long after the photo had been taken. A water skier had run over her while she was swimming with Allie in a lake not far from Glastonbury.

“Whose idea was it to drag all this out?” she asked Jo.

“Mum’s. I couldn’t stop her! Look at your face!”

Allie couldn’t help laughing. She peered more closely at the photo. Her laughter died on her lips. She studied the photo for a long minute, unaware that everyone else in the room had fallen silent.

It was unmistakable. The tall, dark man in the photograph, the one standing off to the side and definitely not singing with the other strangers, was the man she had seen that day, stirring his coffee at a table at the Feather’s Inn.

His daughter’s reaction to the photo was not lost on David St. Clair. In fact, the album had been introduced into the evening at his bidding. His wife had played her part well, digging out the album right on cue. David St. Clair had understood Suzie’s reluctance to be involved, but he was confident she’d understand what had to be done and why. He knew now, without any trace of doubt, that his daughter’s life was about to change into something unimaginable to her, but he could not tell her, at least not yet. There were rules to be observed and he dared not break them. He had already run it too close.

Allie was about to tell everyone what she’d discovered when something stopped her. Something
strong
. Instead, she pretended to study the photo until she regained her composure and was able to summon her happy face.

“Funny stuff!” she proclaimed.

“God, you had me going there for a minute!” said Jo. “What was all that silence about?”

Allie laughed it off and said she hadn’t seen a photo of poor Isabelle for a long time and it had brought back sad memories. This was accepted with understanding looks and everyone drifted back to the living room, except Allie and her father. Allie explained to her mother that she'd be there in a minute.

Once they were alone, she looked pointedly at her father, but he immediately held up his hand, walked to the desk, and picked up the book he’d previously plucked from the bookshelf.

“Don’t say anything, Alison. Just read this, ok?”

“
Ok? You
know
who I saw, don’t you?”

“I know
what
you saw, yes. We can’t speak of it, not yet, anyway.”

Something stirred in her subconscious. She knew something about this, but couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“Tell me this, then, if you can
.
Where was the photo taken?”

It was a smart question—just the one he’d been hoping for.

“Glastonbury.”

*****

Jo and Marcel dropped Allie back at her Putney flat. It was 11:45 p.m. She had hardly spoken during the drive from Belgravia. She was tired, but that was not the reason for her near silence. The conversation she’d had with her father kept pinging off the walls of her brain. Questions ate away at her about Glastonbury and that man in the photo. She hadn’t recognized him at the Feathers Inn, but she sure as hell had been jolted by his gaze. She must have met him all those years ago at the birthday party—and clearly, he had been involved in their lives in some way—but there was something else to it, she was sure.

The big question was how come he looked exactly the same at the Feathers—he should be twenty years older than he was when the photo was taken, but her fleeting look at him earlier that day suggested he had not aged a day. She felt in her handbag for the book that her father had given her. She had not mentioned it to her sister. Again, this seemed a secret subject, one strictly between her and her father, yet he hadn’t actually asked her not to say anything.

She bid farewell to Jo and Marcel, promising to ring them about lunch on Sunday. She grappled with the two locks on her front door, the deadlock sticking a little. She rushed, eager to get inside and check out the book. She hadn’t had the chance to even read the title. Throwing her light switch, she made for the couch, reading the book title as she went.
The
Promise of Maewyn Sucat
.

She looked inside and saw it had been self-published by her father in 1982—a year after her birth. There was no printer’s name or acknowledgements of any kind. Simply a oneline foreword written by her father:

This book is dedicated to the St. Clair family, past, present and future. The burden of responsibility remains. David St. Clair, August 16, 1982.

Bit short and sweet
, she thought. It was unlike her father not to take the opportunity to write something expansive.
The burden of responsibility remains? Let’s not take ourselves too seriously
, she thought. There was a further note at the bottom of the same page, a quote:
Vinculum infinitas.
She’d have to look up ‘vinculum’, but infinitas obviously meant ‘forever’.

The first page was headed
461 A.D.
Interesting, the same year her father had just mentioned as the year the Glastonbury ‘lights’ had first been recorded. She flipped through the book. It was not written in her father’s usual style. It was sparse and clipped, lacking the flowery language he would normally employ. She realized she hadn’t read anything of her father’s for years. The little book was barely a hundred pages. She noticed there were lots of scribbled asides and hand-drawn maps. An elaborate sketch of the Tor took up an entire page.

The ring tone on her mobile phone startled her. She quickly grabbed the little phone out of her cavernous handbag, the display alerting her that the call was from Police Operations.

She identified herself, then listened intently. She made a couple of notes, answered a question, and hung up, staring at the floor for a moment, digesting the information she had been given. The body of a young woman had been found in a laneway off Earl’s Court Road. The PC said that the Scene of Crime team had been dispatched. The PC had hesitated and then said that according to the initial report, there were aspects of the scene that were ‘disturbing’. Allie assumed this meant ‘beyond the ordinary’. They were all disturbing in her book.

Operations had asked whom DCI St. Clair would like to attend the scene. She advised that Detective Constable Mathew Connors was on call. Allie had written down the exact address of the crime scene and decided to check it out as well, even though it was after midnight. Earl’s Court wasn’t far away from her apartment—maybe fifteen minutes, maybe less at this time of night.

Excitement and dread coursed through her in equal measure. She trusted DC Connors, but did not want the first case on her watch to be mishandled. She cursed that she had not arranged to bring a pool car home. It was a perk of the new job, but she’d forgotten about it when she had been talking to the guy from administration earlier that day. She threw her father’s book on top of her desk and looked out her window as she ran for her motorcycle gear. It was raining.

Chapter Seven

Earl’s Court, Thursday 12:20 a.m.

Twenty-six-year-old DC Mathew Connors made a sound like a fur seal as his beef curry from earlier in the evening involuntarily heaved from his stomach, splattering down into the darkness of a drain hole. The murder at 21 King’s Lane was unlike any he had seen. He had greeted the grim-faced SOCO moments earlier with a cheery ‘good evening’ and immediately regretted it. Sergeant George Houghton had been ashen-faced and Mathew knew he had attended many, many crime scenes in his thirty-something years on the force. George had wordlessly led Mathew down the winding lane, pointed to the corner, and walked away.

Sweating and heaving, Mathew now knew why George hadn’t lingered. Wiping his mouth with his now sodden, stained handkerchief, he backed away from the scene. He ducked under the blue and white barrier tape and hurried back out into the steady rain. He reached the point where the lane intersected with Earl’s Court road, across from the normally busy Tube Station. He needed to breathe cold, wet air and regain control. Images from the lane raged through his brain. He looked up, startled, as DCI St. Clair coasted her motorbike to a halt beside him. He hadn’t expected her.

The rain fell heavier. Allie St. Clair maneuvered her bike under the canopy provided by the now closed Chinese restaurant bordering the lane. Fixing the stand and stowing her helmet, she peered down the length of the cobbled-stoned lane to the arc lights at the end. She looked at Mathew Connors, who had not spoken.

“That bad, eh?”

He retched again. “Christ almighty,” he squeaked. St. Clair felt the stirrings of real concern now. Connors was young, but he was an experienced officer. She decided to abandon any further attempt at conversation.

She approached the tape, but was intercepted by Sergeant Houghton, his right arm extended towards her. “Are you sure you want to go down there, girly?”

Girly?

Fortunately, Allie knew George well and he had always called her that. It had ceased to be offensive years ago, particularly after they had worked on a number of cases in which George had proven a compassionate, competent officer. He was, at base, a kind man who had no pretensions to advancement and no time for ‘yuppy bullshit’ as he called it. He was old-school, honest and a complete chauvinist, as were most of his contemporaries.

“I have to look, George. Connors is badly shaken… I guess you noticed that?”

“He has every reason,” George said, looking away. “It’s the worst I’ve seen. Can’t say any more than that. We’ve got a complete maniac at work here.”

Allie nodded her understanding and bent under the tape that George finally lifted for her. At first, she could see nothing as she rounded the elbow bend and looked into the darkened corner of the lane. She peered hard at the space, trying to make some sense of it. Three rusted drums, overflowing with garbage and some crushed and empty boxes of plastic takeaway containers—presumably refuse from the restaurant on the corner, stood to one side. Rags and general detritus awaiting collection from the city’s garbage men lay strewn across the rough surface of the lane. She lifted her gaze. Her breathing stopped.

Above head height and against the chipped, red brick wall that formed the end of the lane, below a blue tarpaulin that had been erected as a temporary shelter against the cold rain, a dark-haired, naked girl had been crucified.

Allie jumped as a voice behind her offered her a torch. George.

The shrinking little girl inside her almost pushed it away; she didn’t want to look at the bad thing on the wall. Wordlessly, she took the torch and after a deep breath, flicked it on. The torchlight gave the scene a macabre, jaundiced glow. She slowly moved the beam over the body.

Revulsion and pity coursed through her in equal measure. The girl had been crudely gutted. Her entrails hung out of her belly cavity in pink and blue lumps, a liquid glistening on their surface. Thick, sticky blood swirled over the wall behind her and a trickle from a ragged wound in her groin formed a black pool at her feet.

The girl’s too-black hair hung in sodden spaghetti strands framing her pinched, bloodless face. Black, weeping eye sockets stared uncomprehendingly out at the squalid surroundings. Allie involuntarily stepped back a pace, looking behind her as she heard glass crunch under foot. She steadied the torch once again on the girl and it hit the red, glossy lipstick smeared exaggeratedly over lips, which now stretched around a mouth locked forever in a rictus scream.

No tongue could be seen. Allie breathed fast and shallow, her body’s defense against rising bile. The torch flickered, then came back on, illuminating the girl’s thin, pale arms that had been spread—pulled to dislocation—to mimic the classic crucifixion pose. Fat, rusty metal spikes protruded from a line of jagged holes in her upper arms and chest, pinning and suspending her near the top of the brick wall. Her feet were lashed together with a type of dark twine.

Allie stood staring, her mind still fighting an almost overwhelming urge to run out of the lane. She forced herself to stay, calming slightly after a minute, her thoughts finding order. Rainwater dripped from the tarpaulin, which struggled to hold the incessant rain at bay. Slowly, she noticed little things about the horrific scene–the things so often overlooked on first examination, particularly when a complete horror show took center stage. The girl still wore a silver necklace, but a line on her left wrist betrayed the recent presence of a watch.

Carefully, Allie picked her way around old fruit boxes and crumpled cans. Up close to the suspended body, there was not yet the strong odor of decay. Peering at the girl’s left side, she confirmed what she had expected to see, a stab wound. Directly under the feet that hung a meter off the ground, a half-full bottle of wine stood, its label turned to the wall. Another biblical symbol.

Something pricked at the periphery of her senses. She played the light from the torch into the dark corners and down the adjacent cobbled lane to where it abutted a tall, concrete office building. Something pushed against her skin, something she could not see.