find is related to the gruesome discovery at the church round the corner. How this ties in with Peter Garnier, if indeed it does, they are at a loss to understand. A copycat abduction is the most likely scenario but the murder and mutilation of the woman’s body doesn’t fit into any pattern of Garnier’s activities. That the two incidents are not related is a very real possibility and, again, inside sources have confirmed that the killing of the woman as part of a ritualistic murder involving Satanism or some kind of devil worship is being very seriously considered. It wouldn’t be the first time that children have been used in gruesome rituals in this country.’
The picture on the television changed to old footage of police processing a crime scene on the banks of the Thames, but the reporter’s voice went mute as Gloria Williams thumbed the button on the TV’s remote control. She watched the TV for a moment or two longer, the reflected light dancing in her immobile eyes. The she blinked, stood up and turned to face away from the screen.
Her lounge was carpeted in a rich red and green pattern. It was cluttered with small tables and bookcases, green plants on every available surface that wasn’t covered with magazines, books, sketch pads. Behind her was a long wall running from the left-hand side of the room where a window overlooked the West Hampstead Pizza Express. It was entirely covered with photos, newspaper cuttings – some yellow with age, some extremely recent – with a map blown up and marked with pins and string, and at the centre of it all a photo of a man in police uniform who was holding a small dark-haired girl in his arms. A girl with scared brown eyes.
Gloria put the fingertips of her right hand to the young girl’s mouth and lights danced in her eyes once more.
Angry lights.
*
Tim Radnor had never been a strong man. Neither mentally, physically nor emotionally.
He was thirty-nine years old now, five foot eight tall, weighed just over ten stone and had thin mousey-coloured hair. He was single, with no partner, and had been in the same job for over fifteen years: kitchen assistant in a large public school. A simple enough job that required simple routines. He had never been ambitious and enjoyed the repetitiveness and security of his job. He was neither well liked nor disliked at his place of work – he minded his own business and people pretty much left to him to it. Once a month he would visit an ageing German prostitute called Olga in Shepherd Market. She had cracked skin like an old handbag and the face of an antique doll painted over her features. The crudely drawn lipstick and thick mascaraed lashes were almost a caricature in their clumsy representation of a sexuality long since faded. Miss Haversam as Miss Whiplash. But Tim liked her that way and had been visiting her for over twenty years. He would pay her one hundred pounds in cash for a specialised service that would leave him feeling demeaned but released from the inner demons that consumed him. Released at least for a while. At other times he used the internet to satisfy those desires that tormented him in his dreams and during every waking day. Desires that he kept under control but could not stop. He didn’t act on them as others did. He never had. Except once. And even then he hadn’t taken part.
He was not to blame.
He had never been to blame.
Tim was a victim. He knew that himself best of all. He knew that what was happening to him now was just as unfair as what had happened to him all those years ago. Just as unfair … and he was just as powerless to stop it happening now as he had been then.
As a child he had been one of the first children in the class to get measles, or mumps, or flu. Or whatever sickness was going. At nine years old on his first trip away from home at Scout camp he had not excelled at, nor taken great joy in, the kind of physical exertions that the other kids had revelled in. On the long rope slide, for example, he had fallen off two-thirds of the way down. It hadn’t been a long fall but he had landed in muddy ground and twisted his ankle slightly. In truth, he’d exaggerated the nature of the injury, as he was wont to do, and limped his way tearfully to the others, their taunts and laughter in no way unusual for one of Tim’s mishaps. He exaggerated his limp as an excuse not to have to go down the rope slide again and to provide a good reason not to go on the hill walk that was planned for later on that afternoon. If he had had his choice in the matter he would never have gone on the weekend in the first place. But his mother had insisted and pleas to his father, as ever, had fallen on deaf ears. In all things his mother had the final word and so Tim had gone to Scout camp like every nine- year-old boy should have been delighted to do. ‘And stop your moaning,’ his mother had said.
So he had stayed at the campsite while the other members of his troop had gone trekking in the woods and up the nearby hill.
A responsible adult had had to stay behind, of course, and keep an eye on him.
Except that the adult that stayed behind hadn’t been responsible. Hadn’t been responsible at all.
All these years later Tim still blamed him. And it wasn’t just the humiliation and degradation he had felt. It had
And had failed.
Tears pricked in his eyes as he felt the cold metal entering him; he felt his flesh tearing and gasped with the relentless thrust of the weapon. His face was suffused with blood now, his eyes wide with the pain of it, with the fear of what was to come. With the injustice of it all. His hands were tied to the bedstead in front of his kneeling form. His mouth sealed with duct tape so the scream that was boiling in his lungs was contained. The tears running down his cheeks now every bit as useless as they’d been all those years ago.
Tears at the injustice of it all. He had never taken part after all. He had just watched and taken photos.
There was a raspy metallic sound, a loud click, and Tim’s heart hung in stasis. And then there was just a rainbow of colour for him. He didn’t see, or feel, or hear, or make excuses any more.
His neck and lower jaw made a pattern on the wall above his bedstead like a Rorschach ink blot painted by Hieronymus Bosch.
And then there was silence.
*
Light slanting on the mirror, golds, greens, fractured white light dancing on the glasses, on the glass shelves, on the leaded-light window that looked through to the doorway leading into the bar. And sound surrounding him like a warm fog. Like a coat. Heat from the log fire burning under a copper hood. Irish voices raised in song, and it’s no nay never, hands slapping on tables. Money spent on whiskey and beer. Delaney knew how that was. He’d been the wild rover, sure enough. It was all supposed to have changed. Maybe deep down you never can change, not at the heart of you. You had to want it, wasn’t that what they said? He looked at the bruised knuckles on his right hand
