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

to Purley you dropped a couple of the masonry nails from your bag and was then spotted lurking in the trees.”

“Poor mother.” Genevieve sighed. “It might have been easier in the end to kill her, too. But as selfish and manipulative as she was, she did love me. I think even in her addled state, she remembered how she’d exploited me as a child. Trying her best to go along with my plan might have been her way of making amends.”

She stepped up onto the circular revolve of the ride and began moving among the gondolas, swinging them gently on their casters. In that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of the shy, playful child she had once been.

“You weren’t just seen in the trees,” I said, following her onto the platform. “I was speaking to Christopher Cloade at the fair when he glimpsed you over my shoulder.”

I thought back to that look of stark terror that had washed over the preacher’s face. Then his words, almost a whisper, “So it’s true. What they say about Purley…” A woman he knew by sight, who he believed had been brutally murdered, now stood looking back at him. A phantom returned.

“I could tell straight away what he thought.” Genevieve laughed. “It was the same ridiculous thing Darrel Everwood would come to believe. You know, Mr Jericho, there is no fool on earth like a man desperate to wallow in his own fantasies.”

“And of course his belief became useful to you,” I said. “You already had the perfect alibi for these murders. After all, who in their right mind would suspect the first victim? But why not take this chance to muddy the waters even further? You began turning up outside Cloade’s home at night, showing yourself to him in the street, slipping in among his homeless congregation. Haunting him. Then, seeing me waiting outside the schoolhouse to interview him, you took the opportunity of leaving your bloodied gloves on the altar.”

She gave me an oddly bashful look. “He came to me after the podcast with Dr Gillespie had been aired. Caught me at my moment of crisis, waving his pamphlets, evangelising, saying he could save my wayward soul. He even got some money out of me before he left. Afterwards, when I came to my senses, I wondered if I should add him to my list: Evangeline, Tilda, Sebastian, Darrel, and Christopher Cloade. But that pitiful man wasn’t part of the legacy I needed to eradicate. Still, I thought he deserved a good scare for his impudence, and he made a rather enticing suspect, didn’t he?”

“The legacy you needed to eradicate,” I echoed.

She blinked at me. “Of course. Why else do you think they all had to die?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“As soon as you discount the ritualism of the murders, you not only see that the identity of the first victim becomes the crucial question, but that the motive must be linked to that question as well,” I said. “Who was the most likely person to bear a grudge against Evangeline Bell?”

“Grudge?” Pausing behind one of the gondolas, she stared at me. “You think it was only that? Some pathetic resentment I harboured against my sister?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

She took a moment, closed her eyes, appeared to gather herself. “Remember me saying that I had always been a consummate little actress? That was true. In the plays we’d sometimes invent for our father before his death, Eva was the narrator while I played all the parts. Even as a child of eight, I had a flair for it, pulling on a mask and inhabiting other lives. It was how Eva knew that I could pull off that original trick and make Miss Grice believe that I was communicating with the dead. I was a quick study, as I told you, picking up the dramatic flourishes used by the clairvoyants who visited the house, learning how they threw their voices and contorted their features while apparently possessed. Of course, I didn’t realise then that I’d be playing the role of a medium for the rest of my life.

“What I gave you in my performance of Eva, Mr Jericho, was an idealised version of my older sister. The one I wished and longed for. A failed protector who’d tried her best to save me. A remorseful soul tormented by what she’d done. In reality, Evangeline regretted nothing. In fact, after she had come up with the ‘joke’ of fooling our cousin, she realised that the trick had to be sustained. Our lives had been transformed overnight, remember. No more endless domestic chores, no more drudgery, no more earning our keep. We had become honoured guests at Cedar Gables. But I was just an eight-year-old kid who might give the game away at any minute. To maintain our new lifestyle, it therefore became crucial that I start to believe in my powers.”

She looked down at her palms for a moment, flexing her fingers, perhaps picturing those black lace gloves that had been so much a part of her life.

“You have to understand, a young mind is pliable,” she said. “Its understanding of reality is a day-to-day exploration of ideas, constantly evolving and shifting. There are no set laws, no boundaries, no absolutes. We’d been visited by Tilda Urnshaw, who showed us how to create the illusion of psychic powers but who also claimed that I did possess some latent paranormal ability. Eva seized on this. She began to suggest that perhaps we hadn’t played a prank on Miss Grice after all. That although that had been our intention we had, in fact, unlocked gifts already there. We should continue to use the tricks Tilda had taught us, just as a convenience, but there was no doubt, she said, that I was a very special young lady.

“Those were the kindest words my sister ever said to me. Over the coming months, she began to reconfigure my reality, changing the very idea