The Killing Circle

pushed against the wall, forces my knees to graze hers.

“What I’m interested in learning is any background information that might—”

“Hold on. Just hold on,” she says, putting her hands behind her head, a manoeuvre which offers me an unfortunate view of her armpits. “How’d you find me?”

“I’m a reporter. Was a reporter. We have access to information others don’t have.”

“They fire you, or you quit?”

“Pardon me?”

“You said you was a reporter. That’s the past tense, am I right?”

“They fired me. But it was for the best.”

“It’s all for the best.”

“I understand that Angela was put into the foster system when she was a child,” I continue.

“You mean was she taken from me? Yes.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“I can hardly remember it. My life was…busy then.”

“Nevertheless, I’m aware that of late you have made some efforts to locate her.”

She shows her teeth. A stretching of lips that appears more like the response to a dentist’s command than a smile.

“I’m not as old as I look,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve got much time left. So, you start looking back, and thinking, ’Well, nothing I can do about that shit now.’”

“And did you manage to contact her?”

“Nah. I’m out of the picture. Which I get, you know?”

She sits forward enough that her face slides into the light of the reading lamp behind her. All premature lines and poison spots.

“What was she like?” I say. “When she was young?”

Her hand crawls up her chest to grip the oxygen mask hanging there. “She was innocent.”

“Aren’t all children?”

“That’s what I’m saying. She was just like any other child.”

“That’s the past tense.”

She fits the mask to her face and takes a breath. The mist against the plastic obscures all her features but her eyes. And they blink at me, clouding over.

“She suffered,” she says.

“How?”

“Loneliness. She was left alone. I sure as hell weren’t in any shape to be taking care of her.”

“She liked to read.”

“She liked to write. Diaries. Piles and piles of stuff.”

“What were they about?”

“How do I know? I was just glad she had something.”

She pulls the oxygen mask from her face and I can see that she won’t hold up much longer. Just sitting and remembering draws fresh sweat to her cheeks.

“Angela’s father,” I say, glancing at the door.

“I haven’t spoken to that sonofabitch in twentyseven years.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Look in the penitentiaries. Least that’s where I hope he is.”

“What did he do?”

“What didn’t he do?”

“Was he violent?”

“Something he couldn’t control, then didn’t want to control. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Tell me.”

“What he done…what he…with his own—” she says, coughing for air it will take the rest of the day to catch. “It’s a thing I don’t even want to talk about.”

“It’s important.”

“How could anything to do with that man ever be important?”

“It might help me find your daughter.”

She looks up at me and I can see that there’s no strength left in her. But she’s still a mother. Even in her, even now, there’s the useless wish for everything to have been different.

“Killing,” she says, teeth clenched so hard I can hear the chalky scrape of bone against bone. “Little children. Girls. He killed little girls.”

Before I left Michelle Carruthers’ trailer and stumbled, sun blind, to my Toyota, she had given me Angela’s father’s name. Raymond Mull. Which rang a bell the moment she said it, though specifically from where, and specifically for what, it took until I was able to get back to Toronto and start working my computer in the Crypt to discover.

Angela’s mother was right. Raymond Mull was a killer of little girls. He was charged for the murders of two of them, in fact, a pair of thirteenyearolds who went missing almost two decades ago. Roughly the same age that Angela, if she is thirty today, would have been then.

What follows from this? Nothing, perhaps. Or possibly everything.

If Angela was a thirteen-year-old contemporary of the murdered girls, it supports the interpretation (along with her missing toes) that she actually was the narrator of her fictionalized journal. Further, given Raymond Mull’s relationship to her, it’s probably true that he was the direct inspiration for the Sandman. In her story, she even had Jacob, her foster parent, suspect as much when he stated he believed it was the girl’s father who was selecting victims. In the real world, odds are that Raymond Mull was the original terrible man who did terrible things.

What I discover next, however, suggests I wasn’t the first member of the Kensington Circle to figure this much out.

A search on the media database I still have a password for left over from my National Star days finds dozens of stories on Raymond Mull’s trial. There’s photos of him too: bearded, eyes set too close together, but otherwise his face absent of expression. He doesn’t look like Angela, but they share this. A half-thereness.

Judging from the initial reports covering Raymond Mull’s trial, his conviction was viewed as a foregone conclusion. The Crown’s evidence included work tools—saws, drills, hunting blades—found in his motel room. And he was identified by witnesses as being in the area over the preceding weeks, following students home from school, standing outside the convenience store where kids stopped for candy. His long list of previous convictions said little of worth about his character.

And yet none of this could prevent the case ending in an acquittal. The tools could render no blood samples from which to make positive DNA matches with the victims. The police argued this was only because Mull had been careful in cleaning them, and that even without blood, there was enough to connect him to the crimes. On this, the court disagreed. Without calling a single witness, the defence filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the Crown failed in making a prima facie case. All that was left to the prosecution was to nail Mull for previous parole violations, which they did. His sentence was nine months.

Which means that, barring no other subsequent incarceration over the last eighteen years, Raymond Mull is a free man.

But what strikes me even more than this is the location where the murders took place. Whitley, Ontario. The same place where Conrad White and Evelyn drove their car off the highway.

It could just be coincidence. But I don’t believe that it was. Evelyn and Conrad White’s shared curiosity over Angela’s story had led them to Raymond Mull, to Whitley. That’s what they had been up to all the time I’d come to assume them to be having a May-December, teacher-student affair. They were searching.