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

John blinked at me as if coming out of a daze. “Not my fault?” he said through clenched teeth. His body started to shake, tears flicking from the corners of his eyes. “She was my daughter. It was my job to watch her, always.”

“No.” I took hold of his arms, steadying him. “It was your job to care for her and love her, and you did that. You’re still doing it, both of you. But chasing after Everwood, trying to make him pay for the shitty thing he did, that isn’t helping Debbie or yourselves.”

Anne smoothed her husband’s hair from his brow. “Listen to him, love.”

“But we should’ve been watching her,” he insisted. “It was me who told her to go and play outside. She didn’t even want to. Said she was enjoying playing tea parties with her teddies in her room. But she was such a demanding girl and we’d hardly any time to ourselves and I only—”

“We were having sex when she was taken,” Anne said. “For the first time in weeks. Just a moment to ourselves, and then afterwards…”

I nodded. In their minds, the act that had brought their daughter into the world had then taken her from it. I could easily picture the days and weeks that followed. I’d seen it a dozen times in similar cases—a maelstrom of unspoken recrimination battering at what they had imagined to be the solid walls of their marriage. When the diversions of police and media interest faded and they found themselves strangers, pottering around in a house full of ghosts, then a frosty word, an icy look could easily insinuate itself into tiny fissures until slowly, slowly those walls began to break apart.

That was, until the mixed blessing of the physic exploded into their empty life. The little candle they’d passed between each other, sheltering it even as they drifted apart—Darrel Everwood had threatened to blow it out for good. To leave them utterly in the dark. And for a time, he’d succeeded.

Without a word, one morning Anne Chambers had handed over the safe-keeping of that flame to her husband. She’d seen him off to work and then, perhaps taking one last look inside her daughter’s bedroom, had gone and drawn herself a hot bath, removing a blade from her husband’s razor and laying it on the side of the tub. I didn’t believe that John had accidentally forgotten his briefcase and returned home just in time. Where the people we love are concerned, we’re all detectives, to a greater or a lesser degree, and sometimes, just sometimes, we’re lucky too. I think John Chambers had noticed something that morning before he left for work—a passing clue that had made him turn back.

“You told Anne that this was your fight now,” I said. “To hold Everwood to account, to make sure no one suffered again like you had. It was a project you could work on together, a mission to live for. And a way to unload a little of that awful guilt you carry.”

“And I’m tired of it, John,” Anne told him. “We have our hope again, don’t we? It’s enough.”

“But I don’t believe it,” he cried. “That old woman, how could she know anything?”

“You visited my aunt on the night she was killed,” I said. “Do you remember what time that was?”

“It was just after eight o’clock,” Anne said. “That bodyguard of Everwood’s had thrown us off the fairground earlier but we came back.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d read an interview with Darrel Everwood’s ex-fiancée, the one in which she said he was a fraud. She mentioned a book about a celebrity psychic from years ago that had prompted him to get into the racket. That was the word she used, ‘racket.’ She said he’d had no interest in the paranormal until he read about this woman’s life and saw how much money she’d made from it. He knew he could use the skills he’d learned as a magician to replicate most of the psychic’s tricks.

“Anyway, the interview piqued my interest. It took a while, I had to do a little digging in old newspaper articles, but eventually, I found the name of the woman and the book—Hearing the Dead: The Story of Genevieve Bell. Again, it took some time, but I finally tracked down a copy and saw the name of your aunt mentioned in one of the early chapters. We thought,” she glanced at John, “I thought, if we could consult the medium who’d inspired the original Genevieve Bell then we might get a real psychic’s opinion on what had happened to Debbie.”

“The original Genevieve Bell,” I murmured. “Did you try to contact her too?”

Anne shook her head. “We tried writing but she never answered. By the time we thought of actually just turning up at her house, she was dead.”

“How did my aunt seem to you during the reading?”

“Very calm. Very kind.” Anne frowned. “But resigned, in a way. As if she’d made up her mind to accept something.”

I nodded, recalling Tilda’s words from the night before her death. Whatever happens, it’s nobody’s fault. I want you to remember that. Had she known what was coming for her? And if she had, might she have accepted her fate as some kind of justice?

“Did you notice anything unusual in the tent or outside it when you left? Anyone hanging around, maybe?”

John shook his head. He seemed more composed. “I don’t think so. But then almost everyone except us was in costume—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, Frankenstein monsters, superheroes—we would’ve been the ones who stuck out like a sore thumb. Might even have saved us a few quid on the gate if we’d bothered to dress up.”

“My dad announced the half-price costume concession that morning,” I said slowly, then turned my attention back to the Chambers. “And afterwards, when you heard about the murder?”

“We were terrified,” Anne said. “After Debbie’s disappearance, we’d naturally come under police suspicion. All parents do in such cases, I think. Plus,