Into the Darkness Read online

  I parked next to a muddy old Ford Fiesta, and as I exited the car, I heard a radio playing in one of the stables and someone talking.

  I walked towards the noise and called out a ‘Hello?’

  Stepping inside the doorway, I found a young woman, mid-twenties, dressed in jodhpurs and a T-shirt, drinking from a mug and talking to a young man who was busy fiddling with his phone. There were bales of hay stacked up and some riding equipment hanging on the walls.

  ‘Hello,’ I said again.

  The girl jumped and dropped her mug. It bounced over a pile of hay and splattered tea up her riding boots. The guy jerked his head up and then stood, his hand reaching for a pitchfork propped up next to one of the hay bales.

  ‘Who are you?’ the guy said, pitchfork now in hand, ready to use as a weapon.

  I held my hands up in a placatory gesture, then slowly retrieved my warrant card from my pocket and held it up to him. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Carter. It’s not surprising what happened to the Jamesons has made you both jumpy but you can put that down. I just want a chat with you.’

  The girl exhaled a relieved breath and fanned her face. ‘I didn’t want to come up here today. Usually, I come on my own but after what’s happened next door I made my brother come with me.’ She glanced nervously at him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

  ‘Jenny. Jenny Fullerton. This is Adam.’

  Adam put the pitchfork on a hook along the back wall and said, ‘Sorry about that.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s understandable, under the circumstances.’

  ‘I heard they were shot!’ Adam said. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Unfortunately, that’s correct. Were either of you here the day before yesterday?’

  ‘I was here,’ Jenny said.

  ‘And what time was that?’

  ‘Um . . . I came in the morning. It would’ve been about seven until ten. I was mucking out and stuff. Then I came again about two. I stayed until about four.’

  ‘Did you pass any vehicles when you came and went? Or see or hear anything suspicious? Notice anyone hanging around?’

  ‘No. I didn’t see anyone at all. I was out riding a couple of the horses in the afternoon so I was up and down the lanes. Never saw another car or person at all, actually.’

  ‘Did you hear any gunshots?’

  ‘No, nothing. In the morning when I was here, I had the radio on, though.’

  I glanced around. You couldn’t see the lane from here, so even if a car had been to and from the Jamesons’ house, if Jenny was in or around the stable block at the time she wouldn’t have seen a thing.

  ‘How long have you been renting the stables?’

  ‘A few years. Emily Simms is in a home now and her son’s got it up for sale but he said I could carry on renting it off him until he sells it. I’ve been looking at other places, but they’re a lot more expensive. I’m hoping whoever buys it will let me stay.’

  I looked at the horses in the field. Still at the far end. Good. ‘Are they all yours?’

  ‘No, only one’s mine. I just look after them for other people.’ She bit her lip and said, ‘Do you think they’ll come back? The people who did it? I’m here on my own most of the time and I’m scared now.’

  ‘I doubt it, but it would pay to be cautious at the moment.’

  ‘You can pay me to be your bodyguard.’ Adam grinned at Jenny.

  ‘Did you know the Jamesons?’ I asked her.

  ‘No. Only to wave to when I saw their Land Rover.’

  ‘So you can’t think of any reason someone would want to kill them?’

  ‘God, no!’

  ‘They must be crazy, the people who did it,’ Adam said, pulling a disgusted face. ‘Shooting a poor old couple.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s just wrong.’

  ‘OK, thanks for your help.’ I handed Jenny a business card. ‘If you think of anything else, then just give me a call.’

  ‘Sure.’ She pocketed the card. ‘I hope you catch them.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I muttered. It wasn’t just wrong. It was barbaric.

  THE VIGILANTE

  Chapter 14

  I phoned Corinne on the short drive back to her street to update her. Disappointment flooded her voice, but then it was replaced by hope. Because if we hadn’t found a body, then there was a possibility Toni was still alive and OK. She told me Laura was coming to the house at 5 p.m. so I had a couple of hours to carry out enquiries with the neighbours.

  Parking outside Corinne’s house, I looked up and down the street, searching for any signs of CCTV cameras that the residents might have, but saw nothing obvious.

  I walked across to Bert’s house and spotted him inside, still sitting at the front window, watching my approach.

  I waved as I headed up his path and waited for him to open the door.

  It swung open slowly as he manoeuvred his wheelchair back. He had short grey hair, alert blue eyes, and was unshaven. He wore a T-shirt that showed off arms toned from pushing himself around. The lower half of his body betrayed the damage to his legs, wasted and stick-thin in black jogging bottoms. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Hi. I’m a friend of Corinne’s. I’m helping her find out what’s happened to Toni. She said you told her you’d seen Toni leave the house at one p.m. on the day she disappeared.’

  He pressed his lips together in a solemn smile. ‘Yes, that’s right. I take it there’s still no news?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. Can I ask you exactly what you saw?’

  ‘I already told the police,’ he said. There was something in his voice – defensive, perhaps?

  ‘It would help if you could tell me, too. They’re not doing much to find her. And as I’m sure you can appreciate, every second counts when a young girl goes missing.’

  ‘Well, yes. Of course.’ He coughed into his fist, and I wondered if he was stalling for time to think. ‘Corinne’s been lovely to me. She gets me shopping and whatnot. I’m happy to help any way I can. Toni was a lovely girl, too. She used to come over and help do some cleaning for me and check I was OK. And she didn’t want any payment, either. Not like a lot of youngsters. She was sweet. I liked her.’

  ‘Was?’ Past tense. Was that significant?

  He shook his head slightly, eyes watering. ‘Is. Slip of the tongue.’

  ‘So, what exactly did you see?’ I prompted him.

  ‘Well . . . I just saw Toni leave the house. That’s what I told everyone. I don’t know what else I can say.’

  ‘And it was definitely one p.m.?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dead on? Not five past or ten past?’

  ‘Exactly one p.m.’

  ‘That’s very specific. How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because the news starts at one p.m., and it was playing the opening music when I saw her.’ He scratched his forehead with one hand and then clenched it in his lap, but not before I’d noticed a slight trembling in his fingers. An effect of his disability, or nervousness?

  ‘And then what? Which direction did she go in?’

  He leaned his torso forward and pointed around the door frame, up the road to his right. ‘That way.’

  Which was the direction Toni would’ve gone to reach the cutting. ‘Did you see anyone else hanging around? Anyone watching her? Following her? Or anything else suspicious?’

  He thought for a minute. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What about before that day? Did you ever notice anything strange?’

  ‘No. Just the usual comings and goings of the street.’ He rubbed a hand up and down the armrest of the wheelchair.

  ‘Do you know what Toni was wearing?’

  ‘Jeans and a black T-shirt with a butterfly on the front. She had the red rucksack she always carries to college. And she had black trainers on.’

  Again, it was very specific. The kind of specific from someone who spent his life watching out of his window because his accident had left him without much of a life of his own? Or
for another reason entirely? Something about him was making my senses alert. Just because he was in a wheelchair didn’t mean he was harmless. I scanned the hallway behind him, searching for any possible sign Toni had been there, her backpack perhaps. There was a small table topped with a couple of letters, an envelope and a set of keys, an umbrella propped up next to it, but nothing else. I looked at his hands and arms for scratch marks but there were none. ‘And what happened when she left the house? Did she seem scared or nervous at all?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She shut the door behind her and just kind of hurried up the road.’

  ‘Do you have any CCTV cameras?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘OK, thanks for your help.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I hope you find her,’ he called out to my retreating back.

  I visited the other houses in the street but no one had seen Toni and none of them had any security cameras that might’ve caught something useful.

  As I arrived back at Corinne’s doorstep and knocked on the door, Lee rang.

  ‘I’ve got one of my guys checking facial recognition on local CCTV cameras and we’ve found something interesting.’

  My heartbeat quickened. ‘What?’

  Corinne opened the door, saw I was on the phone and ushered me inside. She hovered beside me, chewing again on the skin around her thumbnail, which was already red raw with dots of blood seeping to the surface.

  ‘There’s nothing from the day she went missing, but the day before, Toni was caught on a camera in the High Street. She went into the library at 14.52 p.m. Left at 15.45 p.m. I took a look at the library’s CCTV cameras and she used one of the computer terminals.’

  I wondered why Toni had gone there to use the Internet when she had her own laptop with access at home. It was possible Toni’s laptop had stopped working for some reason, but why not use Corinne’s in that case? And if it wasn’t working, why take it with her when she left the house two days ago? Or was she taking it to be repaired? Unlikely, since she hadn’t mentioned to her mum it wasn’t operational, and Toni didn’t have her own income to pay to get it fixed, so surely she’d have asked Corinne for some money. Toni also had a smartphone with Internet, which, according to what Lee had found, had been working perfectly at that point, so there was only one possible reason that was front and centre in my head: Toni had been doing something secret she didn’t want Corinne to know about. That could also explain why the page from the notebook had been torn out – because she didn’t want her mum to find it. ‘I don’t suppose you know what she looked at?’

  ‘I got into their servers, checked the usage for the time period, and I’ve got Toni’s browser history for you.’

  I sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Toni was using Google. First of all she entered the following search: missing girl, long hair, cat tattoo. I’m guessing she didn’t get any kind of hits she wanted because a few minutes later she searched: missing woman, leopard tattoo, which took her to some more links. A Facebook page titled “Missing and Tattooed”, dedicated to trying to trace missing people from their distinguishing tattoos. She browsed the page for a while but I don’t think she found what she was looking for.’ He paused for a moment, and I detected something worse coming. ‘Then she typed in: are red rooms real?’

  Unease prickled at the base of my spine because I’d heard the term before. It was the modern-day version of a snuff movie. A live-stream video of the torture and murder of someone for the entertainment of all the sadistic people out there in the world who wanted to watch. Some people said they were a myth, but I knew that wasn’t true. A year ago, police had caught an infamous paedophile and murderer who’d live-streamed pay-per-view videos of torture and murder from his house in the Philippines. Investigators had said his crimes were so horrific, they wanted to bring back the death penalty. John Crimper had run a website called ‘Child Fun’ and carried out sexual abuse, torture and murder on young children, including babies – filming and selling it to paedophiles around the world. He’d finally been arrested following a five-year manhunt. I’d also heard rumours over the years of other red rooms that involved adult victims.

  ‘Shit.’ I sat back in my chair as if someone had punched me in the chest. My mind raced, working out possible scenarios as to why a teenager would suddenly be looking up missing girls and red rooms. ‘Did her search bring up anything she clicked on?’

  ‘Yeah. Plenty of hits. Mostly community discussion pages. Some people saying they’re all staged or fakes. Some about a hoax that was going round a few years ago of a terrorist being tortured and killed in a red room. Some from people claiming they’ve seen a real one. Another about the investigation into John Crimper and his arrest. A lot of people asking where they can find one.’

  ‘Toni was going to study criminology and psychology. She wanted to get a job helping child victims of abuse. I found a notebook with a lot of notes relating to that kind of stuff. It could be she was doing some personal research for her upcoming degree coursework, but the Internet search for a missing woman with a tattoo seems pretty specific to me.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. Which made me think that somehow Toni had heard about an actual red room that involved a girl with a tattoo, so I tried searching everything I can get access to, including international law enforcement agencies. So far, I’ve found nothing relating to a girl or woman with any kind of animal tattoo who was reported missing, nor any kind of significant crime involving a female with a tattoo like that.’

  The cogs of my brain turned as he spoke. ‘She could’ve stumbled across mention of it on the Internet.’

  ‘True. But I’ve been searching keywords and can’t find anything that matches that scenario. I’m just about to check the IP history for her home address to see what her browsing was like. I have a hunch I want to check out, but I wanted to give you a sitrep first. I also did a few preliminaries. Toni’s bank account hasn’t been touched since she left. There’s only a hundred quid in there anyway and she made no withdrawals in the days before she disappeared.’

  ‘OK, thanks, Lee. Can you do one more thing for me? There’s a neighbour, Bert Williamson, who lives at number 12. Can you check him out? Something seems a bit off with him. His body language is ringing alarm bells.’

  ‘Will do. Speak soon.’

  I hung up, wondering what Toni had found that had prompted those Internet searches. Instinct told me that Corinne was right. Toni hadn’t run away. It wasn’t a random abduction, either. Toni had found out something about a red room and a missing girl and that had made her act scared and jumpy, out of character, in the days before she disappeared. Toni was used to the sickness of dark minds with her interest in criminology – serial killers, rapists, murderers. She wanted to make it her career, so I didn’t think she’d scare easily, which meant whatever she’d discovered about a red room wasn’t a hoax or staged. She’d seen it for real. Online somewhere. Maybe Toni was worried whoever ran the site could find out what she’d seen and who she was through her digital footprint online, which must’ve been why she’d used an anonymous library terminal to try to search for a girl with a tattoo reported missing. Because that’s who she’d seen in a red room. She was double-checking, gathering facts, researching, just like the fastidious notes in her notebook previously, making sure it wasn’t a hoax, before she . . . Before she what? What happened next when she left the house?

  One thing was certain, though. If Toni had found a red room, the people who did something so inhumane and twisted wouldn’t want just anyone finding out about it. And if she had inadvertently divulged her digital identity to them, then they’d stop at nothing to keep her quiet.

  THE DETECTIVE

  Chapter 15

  DI Nash phoned as I got back into my car. I saw ‘Ellie’ flash up on screen and debated whether to send it to voicemail or not. Would she be able to recognise the self-doubt creeping into my voice? But she hadn’t just been my boss for years, she was also a
good friend – maybe my only one – and I’d missed her since she’d moved to London.

  ‘Hi, Ellie,’ I said, staring out of the windscreen. ‘How’re things?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty good. Well, better than good, really, all things considered,’ she gushed down the phone, which was strange because she wasn’t a gushy woman. She was straight-talking and intelligent and strong. Stronger than me. Her husband and fellow police officer, Spencer, had been killed four months ago in a hostage situation that went tragically wrong. She was getting over Spencer’s death by throwing herself into setting up a new department. I’d procrastinated and wallowed in grief for a year and still I felt the weight of indecision crushing me, like I was wading through treacle. ‘It’s been manic, organising everything, but I’m getting there. We’ve had some amazing applications for the detective constable roles, and I’ve been interviewing all week. I think you’ll be happy with the team I’ve selected.’

  ‘Right. That sounds . . . good.’ My fingertips tapped the steering wheel.

  ‘Two weeks and we’ll be up and running, but I’ve got our first referral already. Some intelligence about a suspected trafficking ring of pangolins.’

  ‘Pangolins? What are they?’

  ‘They’re the most trafficked mammal in the world you’ve never heard of. Worth a fortune, poor things. Used for Chinese medicine.’

  ‘Hmmm. Interesting case.’ I tried to muster up some excitement but couldn’t seem to get animated about animal trafficking when people were being trafficked in such high numbers, too.

  She paused on the other end of the phone for a moment. I heard chattering in the background and a phone ringing. ‘You’re having second thoughts about the job, aren’t you?’

  I sighed. She knew me too well. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.

  ‘What is it? Talk to me about it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I sighed again. ‘Lots of things, but nothing I can really name. Or maybe it’s everything. Maybe I’m just not good at change.’