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

at the end of the table so that we could all see. Behind it, a silent big screen played along in time. From multiple tables nearby, I could hear excited chatter as other diners followed our lead and crowded around their phones and devices. The buzz was palpable and I wondered if Gillespie’s sceptical documentary would be generating the same kind of reaction. For all the doctor’s showmanship, I doubted it. The unromantic reality of the real world could never compete with the promise of ghosts. Perhaps, in the end, that was the only sane explanation for these killings.

I looked down at the phone in my hand. When the show was over, I would have to decide how the case played out. Sam Urnshaw had wanted Tilda’s murderer delivered up to private justice—an instinct that I’d once thought jibed with my own rage and desire to see the guilty punished. But Sal had urged me not to lose myself in the hunt. My dad hadn’t made his view known but had seemed to trust my judgement. I already knew what Harry would say. As for myself, I was undecided. Would I end up calling Tallis or the killer?

The sound kicked in on Billy’s tablet and my gaze returned to the screen.

Everwood was standing in the Victorian sitting room where, not many hours ago, Miss Rowell had confided her secret. Much of the clutter had been cleared away so that the only furniture remaining was a single high-backed armchair. The lighting was subdued, the glow of a fire in the grate providing an atmospheric flicker. The medium was dressed in a red silk smoking jacket with a mustard-coloured cravat tied around his throat. A bold choice of costume that provoked snickers from Billy.

“The time has come,” Darrel said, his intense gaze focused down the camera. “As many of you know, the entire Ghost Seekers team and I are grieving the loss of one of our own. Just today, our friend and colleague Sebastian Thorn was ripped from this world in the most violent and despicable way imaginable. Our dear Seb, who for decades has been an advocate and champion of powerful and gifted psychics. But I am here tonight to tell you… He is not lost to us.”

I could hear hysteria in Everwood’s voice, keen as razor wire. It even seemed to be infecting his limbs, small shudders animating his hands and shoulders.

“He’s doing it,” the girl beside me squealed. “The possession thing!”

I thought back to the clip they’d played on breakfast television. Everwood in the darkened passage of a Scottish castle, shuddering and whining as the spirit of some long-dead laird spoke through him. In the ghostless environment of Purley Rectory, I wondered which fictional personality he would claim had taken control of his body. Perhaps one suggested by a killer, whose very existence, I now realised, accounted for Darrel Everwood’s newfound enthusiasm for the event. In his manic and paranoid state, he must not have only accepted that existence but embraced it as a vindication of his life’s work.

“Some of you watching will also be m-mourning the pr-premature deaths of loved ones,” he said, his words suddenly stilted. Halting. “Muh-others, fathers, s-sons, daughters, ch-children, all taken from you before their time. Well, take heart. I have suh-een the dead returned! Not just in spirit. But b-body.”

“Oh, this is priceless!” The impish girl and her friend both had their phones out and were busy scrolling. “He’s trending already. Hashtag: Darrel is losing it. Hashtag: Everwood is the real deal.”

“I will pr-prove to everyone that death is not the end,” Everwood went on. “Here in the most h-haunted house in Britain, I call upon the veil to be t-torn aside and for the dead to appear. Let the wuh-world see you as I have seen you. The doubters. The scoffers. The sc-sceptics. Their time is over and ours has begun.”

Suddenly, he dropped into the highbacked armchair, and the spasms which, until that point had been no more than tiny jerks and twitches, intensified. He raised his hands to his face, his fingers closing into frozen claws. His lower jaw jutted outwards, the bottom shelf of teeth projecting in front of his top lip, and then roving side to side in a strange rhythmic motion. Eyes horribly wide, he appeared to be fascinated with the hands that remained bunched up in front of his face. Then a huge convulsion shot through his body like an electric current. His legs appeared to stiffen until his heels rested on the floorboards and his shoulders arched into the chairback.

“I don’t like it,” a child whispered behind us. “Daddy, turn it off.”

The girls at our table exchanged glances and even Billy looked a little unnerved.

Our attention returned to the screen. A long, low whine was projecting from the throat of Darrel Everwood. His head began to thrash up and down as if he was violently agreeing with some imperceptible spectre standing before him. Then his eyes rolled white in their sockets and that jutting jaw fell open, yawning wider and wider, stretching to an almost impossible degree. With his chin resting against his chest, those straining lips appeared grey and bloodless.

“He’s trending number one in the UK,” the girl murmured. “But that little kid’s right. I don’t like it either.”

Neither did I.

Because suddenly I realised what was happening here. I’d seen it once before in a case Garris and I have investigated a few years ago. Not a common method of murder these days, but the odd instance cropped up from time to time. In that case, a wife had been forced to ingest a lethal quantity of rat poison. We’d received a tipoff and arrived at the house an hour after she’d swallowed the stuff. Everything was done to save her but there was no known antidote for this particular toxin.

I pulled out my phone and fired off a text to Tallis: STOP IT RIGHT NOW. NOT AN ACT. EVERWOOD POISONED WITH STRYCHNINE.

Onscreen, the medium