Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ereader ebook .txt) 📕

I gripped the handle and slid back the door.

Garris straightened up from where he’d been pruning the marigolds. His gaze, lifeless as it seemed to me now, flicked across my face.

“So, are you satisfied that I’ve been behaving myself, Detective?” When I didn’t answer he bent again, and plucking a faded petal, popped it into his mouth. “Calendula officinalis. Give ’em a patch of blue sky and a drop of sunlight, these beauties will flower whatever the month. Perfectly edible too.” He nudged his boot against a clump of dirt. “Of course, the right kind of nourishment in the soil helps tremendously.”

I looked down at the marmalade hue of the flowers. The fascist murderer Lenny Kerrigan had died horribly, limbs snapped and twisted into strange new formations, yet some remorseless part of me still resented the beauty of his grave.

“Come now, Scott,” Garris said. “Petulance doesn’t suit you. If I’m going to continue to permit these unannounced spot-checks, the least you can do is to be civil.”

Clasped in the pockets of my trench coat, my fists twitched. “You’ll permit them,” I said. “Whether I’m civil or not.”

He chuckled. In the old days, before I’d discovered his true nature, Garris had rarely laughed. “I’ve seen you watching the house, you know? Hunkered down in a different car each time, keeping your weary vigil. Random days of the week, all in an effort to catch me out. I assume you borrow the cars from your fellow Travellers? I must admit, I miss my visits to the fair, nattering away to your father and all the old showpeople. Perhaps one day—”

“You ever set foot on any of our grounds, I’ll bury you neck-deep in that flowerbed,” I said. “And let the fiercest of our juks have at your face.”

“But not my pal Webster, eh?” he replied evenly. “How is that good boy?”

He smiled a self-satisfied smile. But there were limits to even my old mentor’s cleverness. He thought I’d been clumsy in my efforts to surveil him. He ought to have known better. If I’d used my own car to keep watch on his movements, he’d have known straight away something was amiss. By taking the apparent precaution of different vehicles on different nights, I’d allowed him the satisfaction that he’d seen through my plan. A smugness that had, in turn, lulled him into a false sense of security. It was stretching my income to breaking point, but the private detectives who monitored Garris in my absence provided the reassurance I needed. He rarely went out and received no visitors. I was as certain as I could be that his urge to kill had not been reawakened by his recent activities. But it was a temporary solution. I couldn’t go on paying the detectives forever.

“You’re very uncommunicative these days, my boy.” He sighed. “Remember those chats of ours in the Three Crowns when you’d dazzle me with your insights? And it wasn’t all business, was it? After the third or fourth pint, you would confide in me as a friend. I really did value your confidences, you know.”

I almost laughed. “So much so you used them against me.”

He blinked. “Not against you. To help you. I can’t understand why you still refuse to see that.”

“Of course you can’t. Because you’re a monster. You killed five people because you thought it would save me. And do you want to know the worst part? It did save me.” I turned my face to the cold blue sky. “And now I have to live with those deaths on my conscience. I know you’ll never wrap your head around what that means, but you should know that barely a night goes by when I don’t wake up screaming. That’s the life you’ve given me.”

He nodded, wiping his palms down the front of his shirt. “That sounds unpleasant. But even the worst nightmares fade in time. And really, what was the alternative? I remember one of those boozy midnight chats, after all of our cases had been put to bed and we’d moved on to more philosophical subjects. We agreed, did we not, that this is it?” Creaking to his haunches he picked up a morsel of dirt and crumbled it between his fingers. “Earth to earth, and not a hope of heaven. You have a dual soul, Scott. The romantic who loves his books and stories and the realist who sees life as it truly is. Like me, you’ve witnessed people die. Watched as the light goes out of their eyes. Have you ever detected even a hint of something beyond?” He chuckled again and dusted off his palms. “If I hadn’t set you the puzzle of the Jericho freaks then all you’d be right now is a name on a gravestone.”

He was right. This was my philosophy. Even the ghosts of the Malanowski children had been nothing more than echoes of my guilt. Spectres now supplanted in my mind by new figures. But in the real world, there were no lost souls crying out for vengeance and no justice except that which we make for ourselves.

“How are you, Scott?” he asked, straightening up again. “Seriously, I remain concerned for your welfare. There’s a certain look in your eye that worries me. Because you’re bored, aren’t you? And in your case, boredom leads to uneasy thoughts.”

He tipped the brim of that absurd straw hat, and with his eyes, followed a smoky contrail across the sky.

“I really think it’s time you found another puzzle.”

CHAPTER TWO

I’d felt like killing him then. Because he was right. For a few months, I’d thought that Garris’ terrible sacrifice on my behalf had truly reawakened me to the world, and that in finding Harry again, I had also discovered an anchor that would keep me tethered to it. From now on I could do without puzzles. Could do without the lure of injustice and violence that demanded the wicked be punished and the innocent saved. Because Haz’s