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

idly through the book when I saw that the title page had become stuck to the inside cover. The paper was brittle, crinkled, and I imagined something sticky must once have been spilled over it. Carefully, I edged a thumbnail between the leaves and began to tease them apart. Most of the page came away undamaged, so that I could make out an inscription scribbled in faded ink beneath the title:

For Darrel, in the hope that I can do the same for you as I did for Genevieve. Here’s to the future, kid! SB.  

What had Darrel said he’d done after reading the book? “I started making notes, following things up, putting out feelers... I signed with a manager, and within a year or two, I’m packing theatres up West…” An ambitious young man, he had wanted to emulate Genevieve Bell, and so of course he would have sought out the publicist who’d made her famous. Sebastian Thorn, now one half of EverThorn Media and co-owner of global TV sensation Ghost Seekers. An experienced promoter and enabler of psychics.

And in the mind of a killer perhaps, a creator of witches.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The face of her sister’s former publicist was before me when Evangeline Bell answered my call. She sounded exhausted. I wasn’t surprised. It was almost four in the morning.

“Yes? Who is this?”

“Miss Bell, I’m sorry to disturb you. I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t think it was important. This is Scott Jericho.”

I heard a rustle of covers, the click of a lamp. Evangeline cleared her throat. “Mr Jericho. Has something happened? Please don’t tell me another—”

“I hope not,” I said. “I’m connecting a couple of dots and I need your help. You told me that, after Gennie started coming to the attention of the press, the family was contacted by a publicist. You said his name was Rose?”

“Oh,” she sighed wearily. “Something like Rose. A smart, smooth-talking, oily sort of man in his forties. My mother said he reminded her of one of those sharp-suited spivs you see in old war movies. He ditched Gennie as a client as soon as she started to withdraw from the big public events. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

“Might his name actually have been Thorn?” I said. “Sebastian Thorn?”

There was indeed a touch of the old-fashioned spiv in the man smiling back at me from my laptop. Thorn’s photo on the EverThorn Media website showed a jowly, hawk-faced sixty-something, receding hair slicked back, a white pencil moustache, teeth almost as luminous as his younger partner’s. But despite the twinkle, there was a hardness in those eyes that made me think of Nick’s description. The old guy’s like a bulldog protecting his pup.

“Thorn, of course,” Evangeline muttered. “A creepy old man, although I suppose back then he wasn’t all that old. Still, anyone over twenty-five is ancient to a pair of teenage girls. He seemed to like getting in between the two of us and wrapping his arms around our waists. ‘A thorn between two roses,’ he’d laugh. I suppose that’s how I got the name mixed up. God, our mother just used to sit there tittering as he did it. She’d never say a word against anyone who brought money into the house.”

I thought of that confused, bedraggled woman emerging from the bushes of Cedar Gables, wittering about her missing scarf and bedsheets and underthings. Whatever the faults of her past, Patricia Bell’s dismantling mind seemed punishment enough.

“How did he first hear about Gennie’s abilities?” I asked.

“Word had started to get out by then,” Evangeline said. “First through our cousin’s spiritualist friends, then the internet chatrooms, then pieces in the local paper that were eventually taken up by the national press. I remember it was around that time I really started to get frightened. Things were getting out of hand, you see? Our silly game had taken on a life of its own. Of course, when he turned up at the house, Thorn denied he’d heard of Gennie through any of those sources. He said her name had been passed to him by his contacts in the spirit world.”

“Wait,” I said. “You mean he claimed to have psychic powers of his own?”

“That’s how he started, I believe,” Evangeline said. “As a medium.”

So not only a creator of witches, I thought, but a witch himself.

“He was furious when Gennie finally said she wanted to stop. As far as he was concerned, she was the goose that laid the golden egg. But, as fragile as she seemed, my sister could be remarkably obstinate when her mind was made up. Not even our mother could move her.”

“And what about you?”

“Truly, Mr Jericho? With all that publicity and press attention, I was just glad that she’d never been found out. She had at least twenty more years of blissful ignorance before Dr Gillespie tore that fantasy away from her.”

“Just one more thing and I’ll let you get some rest,” I said. “Would your sister have kept Sebastian Thorn’s home address?”

“I shouldn’t have thought so, but if you’ll hang on…”

I heard the phone clatter onto a table and then the muffled sound of bare feet on carpet. Then nothing for a long time except the buzz of the line. I’d just started to feel my eyes droop when a shriek cut through the stillness.

“Eve! Eve! Where have you been? The birds are back in the cellar, peck-peck-pecking. You said you wouldn’t leave again. Can’t you hear them? Enough to wake the dead.”

And then Evangeline’s voice, hoarse with weariness: “I’m here, Mother. I haven’t gone anywhere. Now get back to bed and I’ll bring you a hot drink.” A clump, a cough. “Mr Jericho, are you still there?”

“I am. And I’m sorry, Miss Bell, it sounds like you get little enough sleep without strangers calling you at all hours.”

“I don’t know how Genevieve coped with it.” She sighed. “I suppose eventually I’ll have to start looking into some kind of home for