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

“To the killer, there will be a logical pattern,” I said. “However crazy it might appear to us.”

She gave me an appraising look. “What exactly are you, Mr Jericho? A psychiatrist?”

“I used to be a detective,” I said. “And if you can help me, I’d like to use whatever skills I have to find the person who did this.”

“My sister was always a victim,” she murmured, perhaps more to herself than to me. “A victim of my mother, of our cousin, of the media, and those who wished to exploit her. Of her own inability to stand up for herself. I tried to protect her as much as I could when we were kids, but Gennie was a difficult person to help, especially when she started to believe that the game we’d invented was real. But the way in which she was made a victim in death? That was an insult. The degradation of an innocent soul.”

She threw the cigarette butt into the trees and turned to face me. “What can I tell you that might help?”

“First, I’d like to know how you met my aunt. The police seem to believe the killer is choosing his victims at random, but now that we’re aware of a connection, it might help to trace him.”

“Do you know anything of our story?” Evangeline asked. When I told her the few facts I’d discovered online, she nodded. “As far as starting points go, it’s not a bad summary. Unbeknown to my mother, our father had made a number of bad investments in the months before his death. When those investments failed, we found ourselves destitute. A cousin came to the rescue. A busybody who enjoyed playing the role of benefactor to her poor relatives. She moved us in here and it was soon made clear that we were expected to earn our keep, our mother as an unpaid cook and us children as skivvies, to be seen and not heard. Bear in mind, I was about ten at the time, Gennie eight. We scrubbed and polished, vacuumed and dusted like proper little Cinderellas.

“I think my mother was suffering from some kind of acute depression. In any case, she never raised any objection to how we were treated and Miss Grice, as our cousin insisted we call her, was a very forceful personality. But for such a strong-minded, practical woman she had one surprising weakness. A complete gullibility when it came to the supernatural. Clairvoyants were always in and out of the house, taking money off her by the fistful.

“Gennie and I used to laugh ourselves sick about it. We’d sneak downstairs sometimes and watch their séances through a crack in the living room door. Even to us children, it was obvious how these fakers pulled their tricks—artificial voice boxes and tape recorders wedged between their knees, fishing wire hooked around their fingers to make the tablecloth jump, strands of luminous gauze tucked away in their cheeks and then dribbled out to look like ectoplasm. Child’s play, and yet our cousin ate it up.

“Well, I thought, if it’s child’s play why don’t we give it a go? I was the leader, you see. The big sister always ready with any new game or prank. And little Gennie would just follow along in my wake, doing everything I told her…” She paused and pressed the side of that livid birthmark to her mouth. “That’s what doomed her, if anything. My stupid games.”

“You told her to pretend she could hear your father’s voice?” I said.

“Gennie had always been a consummate little actress,” Evangeline confirmed. “With a bit of practice, we figured out how the clairvoyants threw their voices so that it seemed as if someone was speaking from the other side of the room. We were nervous as hell the first night we tried it out. I remember running into Miss Grice’s bedroom and shaking her awake, screaming, trembling, saying that a spirit had taken control of my sister. Straight away I could see that we’d be all right. The excitement in her eyes! The hunger to believe.”

“And Gennie’s performance convinced her?”

“Convinced her and my mother. I think on some level, Mother knew we were inventing the whole thing, but the rewards that soon started landing in our lap made her a willing accomplice. She’d had it easy with my dad. Fur coats, fine dining, cruises around the Med. I honestly believe she’d have grasped at anything to get a fragment of that old life back.

“About a week after we started our game, my cousin invited one of her favourite mediums over to the house. Tilda Urnshaw. I’m not sure how Miss Grice first met your aunt, but I know she held her in high regard. My sister and I were scared out of our wits. We could fool our cousin, but a true psychic? Miss Grice set us up in the living room and Gennie went through some routine we’d rehearsed, speaking in tongues, throwing her voice, the usual nonsense. Afterwards, Tilda didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she asked if she might have an hour alone with Gennie and me so that she could gauge our psychic frequencies. Miss Grice agreed and left the room.

“As soon as the door closed, Tilda came out with it. She knew what we were up to. She’d visited the house before, and although she felt that my sister did indeed possess some latent psychic ability, it was not pronounced. That said, she’d seen how our cousin had treated us in the past and how much our situation had changed. She wanted to help us if she could. And so, for the next hour, she instructed us in what she termed ‘fake dukkerin’—what I believe Dr Gillespie might call ‘cold reading’ techniques—as well as a few other tricks of the trade.

“She didn’t use these herself, she’d said, but they would help maintain the illusion we’d already created. It was all about