Dark Corners Read online

  DARK CORNERS

  Alex Walters

  Also by Alex Walters:

  Trust No One

  Nowhere to Hide

  Late Checkout

  Murrain's Truth (short stories)

  Candles and Roses

  Writing as Michael Walters:

  The Shadow Walker

  The Adversary

  The Outcast

  DARK CORNERS

  Copyright © Michael Walters 2016

  Michael Walters has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes.

  Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions or locales is completely coincidental.

  For Helen

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  SAMPLE CHAPTERS – CANDLES AND ROSES

  About Alex Walters

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Now

  What did he remember? He remembered a song.

  Between the salt water and the sea strand.

  That was where the child’s body was found. The thin twisted limbs half-buried in the moist sand. The soft pulse of the incoming tide against the pale skin. The foaming waters stained pink with drifting blood.

  They had described it to him, over and over, until the imagined image of the child’s body was burned into his mind. And the image was forever linked with the words his mother had sung to him, as a lullaby, every night before he slept. He remembered that, vividly. Remembered her soft soprano voice breathing the words as if weaving a spell to ward away all harm.

  He remembered that, though he’d been little more than a baby. It was almost all he did remember of his mother. The voice and the spell that failed.

  He recalled that, but he didn’t remember the body. He had told them that. He had kept telling them that. But they hadn’t believed him. They had kept describing the body. Kept describing it until he was no longer sure what was memory and what was dream.

  So what did he remember? He remembered the child's scream.

  He'd been in the woods, on the damp ground, his back against one of the wind-blown oaks, listening to one of his dad’s old tapes on the Walkman he’d got for his last birthday. He’d been sitting there for ages, as bored as he’d been every day on that endless holiday. Playing the same three or four tapes over and over until he’d stopped hearing the music or words. Waiting for the clouds to break, for the sun finally to appear. Waiting, really, just to go home.

  At least, that was what he told them. That was what he thought he remembered.

  But they told him that couldn’t be true. They told him what had really happened. What he'd done.

  All he could do was nod, and say yes, and wonder how his life could have changed so suddenly, so unexpectedly. Wonder how he couldn’t have known, couldn’t remember. Wonder how his mother’s whispered spell could have failed so completely.

  Even now, everything that came before remained lost, but the child’s scream was burned in his memory. Some nights he woke to the soft sound of his mother’s voice crooning in his head. But more often he woke with that scream still echoing through his skull. In those first moments before he was fully conscious, he was always certain the echoes had faded only just as he opened his eyes. He lay in the darkness, haunted by the past, half-expecting the anguished voice to resume, before slowly dying into silence, just as it had in that distant, damp summer.

  It was as if the scream had woken him, then as now. Now, he would lie in the unexpected silence, trying to piece together whatever dreams might have preceded the sudden awakening. But the memories were stubbornly out of reach, wisps of thought that slipped from his consciousness as he tried to grasp them.

  It had been the same then, all those years before. When they'd questioned him about what had happened, what had preceded that awful discovery, he could offer nothing. Only fragments of imagery—the green canopy of trees, the wash of the sea, the cool softness of the sand. That, and a slowly-growing sense of dread. The knowledge that, whatever he might remember, something had happened, something bad, and he must be the one responsible.

  Between the salt water and the sea strand.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Now

  DCI Kenny Murrain stood on the hilltop, at the edge of the road, staring down into the valley. It was late afternoon on a fine spring day, and the low sun sent his elongated shadow down the grassy slope into the shadow of the woodland. Behind him, the western edge of the Pennines ringed the skyline.

  He was hoping for something up here, some feeling or sensation he could use, that would give him some direction. But so far there had been nothing, no trace of the familiar electricity. Just a mental silence as empty as the blue sky above.

  The young boy's body had been found just outside their jurisdiction—they were just over the border into Derbyshire here—but the Derbyshire Police had been fully co-operative and sent over all the requisite paperwork so he’d been able to confirm the details. As far as he could judge, they’d handled the scene and the follow-up with the same thoroughness Murrain would have expected of his own colleagues.

  The remains had been discovered by the farmer who owned the fields on this side of the road. Murrain could see the roof of the farmhouse on the far side of the trees, a thin plume of white smoke rising from its chimney. He'd make his way over there later and introduce himself. The farmer had already given a statement detailing how he’d stumbled across the body while out checking the fences that bordered his land.

  One question was why here. It was a remote enough spot, admittedly, the first stretch of open moorland after leaving the densely-packed stone cottages of the village below. This might be the spot you’d pick if you were in a hurry, panicking about what you’d done or what you were going to do next. But it was, in every sense, close to home. Close enough that they perhaps couldn’t yet even be absolutely sure this was even the crime they suspected. It was unlikely, given the circumstances, but it was still conceivable that the whole thing was just a dreadful accident.

  For Murrain, it was also an odd coincidence.

  Three years earlier, he'd been standing—well, not quite on this exact spot, but a half-mile or so further up the same road, gazing into this same valley. Then, as now, he'd been speculating as to how a dead body had ended up among that stretch of woodland. In that case, there’d been less doubt about the accidental nature of the death, though some uncertainty as to the cause. Ryan McCarthy had been an experienced motor-cyclist, the bike itself in good condit
ion, and it had been a fine, dry night. Even though he’d been with colleagues in the pub earlier in the evening, there’d been no trace of alcohol in his body. In the end, there'd been insufficient grounds to justify further investigation, and the inquest had recorded McCarthy's death as accidental. The case was still theoretically open on the off-chance that some further information might emerge. Fat chance of that now, Murrain thought.

  He had stood then as he was standing now, hoping to feel something. It had been a little earlier in the year, the air a little warmer, but otherwise a similar clear, sunlit afternoon, a soft wind rippling the moorland grass. He’d stayed here for an hour or so, eventually trudging down the hillside to the spot where the bike had come to rest. But—nothing. Another of the many occasions when his supposed gifts had let him down. Or perhaps not, he told himself. Perhaps the absence of any intuition, any sensation, had simply confirmed the truth—that McCarthy’s death had indeed been another unfortunate accident.

  Was that the same conclusion he should draw now? It was possible. Young Ethan Dunn had gone missing five days earlier. He'd disappeared at some point in the short walk from the main road where the school bus had dropped him off up to his parents' house in the small new-build estate at the bottom end of the village. The walk was no more than fifty yards up a straight road visible all the way from the Dunns' front windows. Ethan’s distraught mother had told Murrain that, up to this year, she'd always walked down there to meet the bus. But Ethan, having reached the grand old age of eight, had demanded more independence and insisted on walking up by himself. Most days, his mother said, she continued to watch him through the window as he approached, ready at the door to meet him. But that day she’d lost track of the time and had been a few minutes late approaching the window.

  At first, she’d assumed the bus was late. Then she began to worry it had broken down or not turned up. She'd phoned the school but the reception had been closed, her calls transferring to voicemail. After another few minutes, she’d walked to the end of the avenue to peer down the main road into the village. The traffic seemed no heavier than usual, but there'd been no sign of the bus.

  Eventually, anxiety beginning to gnaw at her, she’d phoned another mother who lived further out into the hills. And received the confirmation that escalated the anxiety into a clutch of cold fear. Yes, the bus had been and gone, and, yes, the mother’s own daughter had arrived home safely at the usual time.

  For another five minutes, Mrs Dunn had stalked up and down the avenue calling Ethan’s name as if the boy might have hidden himself away somewhere among the rows of box-like houses. She’d returned home and begun frantically phoning around the parents she knew, hoping against hope that Ethan might for some reason have decided to go to play with one of his friends after school. She’d known even then there was no point to this. Ethan would never have gone to a friend’s without telling her. Fifteen minutes later, having exhausted all the names she could think of, she called her husband at work. Without hesitation, he’d called the police.

  Murrain had become involved later that evening when it was becoming increasingly undeniable that something bad had happened to Ethan. At first, the police had largely focused on calming Mrs Dunn while working pragmatically through the possible explanations for Ethan’s disappearance. They’d contacted the school and the head-teacher and obtained a contact-list for Ethan’s class, systematically calling each parent to check whether, against the odds, Ethan had made some unexpected after-school detour. They confirmed that Ethan had caught the school-bus as usual and that, as far as any of his friends could remember, he’d alighted at the usual spot. When the police made contact with the bus-driver he recalled Ethan getting off. The driver remembered he’d had to stop the bus ten or fifteen yards further down the road because a van had been illegally parked in the usual pull-in. As the evening wore on, and it was increasingly clear that there was no straightforward explanation for Ethan’s absence, CID became involved and serious questioning of witnesses began.

  Murrain had been duty officer that evening and had pulled the case even though, as a missing person enquiry, it didn’t strictly fall within his remit. Child disappearances were different—more urgent, more sensitive—and Murrain’s team was already investigating recent reports of attempted child abductions across the south Manchester area.

  They made frustratingly little progress in the first twenty-four hours even after the reports went out on the local TV news. It was a night of following up supposed sightings, gathering witness statements from Ethan’s friends and neighbours, conducting door-to-door enquiries through the village, tracking down and checking local CCTV coverage including footage from the school-bus which confirmed definitively that Ethan had travelled and alighted at his usual stop. The next morning, at first light, they began a search of the countryside adjacent to Ethan’s home —the hillside and woodland behind, the river Goyt and its banks on the opposite side of the main road. In those early hours, the river had been a key focus. Although no-one put the assumption into words, an abduction was seen as less likely than the possibility that Ethan had come to grief in the steep drop down to the river.

  They found nothing. It had been later that afternoon that Murrain had received a call from the Derbyshire force, with whom they’d been liaising on checking CCTV and vehicle reports in the neighbouring villages. A child’s body had been found by a local farmer out carrying out fencing repairs on his land just a few miles up the road. Murrain had immediately felt the physical shock, the pulse of energy through his veins, that told him that he at least needed no more formal confirmation of the body’s identity.

  Now, three days later, he was standing on this windy moor-side, gazing down into the green shade of the woodland, hoping to recapture that feeling. He'd been up here on the day, of course, liaising with the officers from the Derbyshire force who were overseeing the management of the scene. He'd hoped to feel something then, but any sensations were lost in the bustle of police vehicles and white-suited SOCO officers.

  Ethan had drowned in the stream that ran through the woodland to the Goyt below. There was bruising to his face and head, but no other evidence of physical or sexual assault. The drowning might conceivably have been accidental—it was possible to construct scenarios that could have resulted in the boy tumbling headfirst into the steam—but the pathologist’s view was that the boy had been forcibly held under the running water. Even if the drowning had been accidental, there was still the question of how the eight-year old came to be here, several miles from home in the midst of this bleak moorland. There was no doubt that this was now a murder investigation.

  Murrain stood for a moment longer, drinking in the view, seeking that re-connection. Then he made his way back up along the dry-stone walling that marked the boundary of the farmland to where he’d left his car at the roadside. Somewhere below, he heard shouts and the sound of dogs barking. A moment later, a new-looking 4x4 came tearing up the rough driveway from the farm buildings, scattering gravel. Murrain watched as it pulled on to the main road without pausing for any oncoming traffic and then sped out, well above the speed limit, down towards the village.

  Curious, he climbed back into his car, pulled back on to the road and turned into the farm entrance, slowing as his tyres hit the uneven hardcore. His battered Toyota was less well designed for this terrain than the 4x4.

  As he approached the farm buildings, a stocky figure emerged, his hand firmly wrapped around the lead of the German Shepherd dog barking angrily beside him. Murrain pulled to a halt and opened his window.

  'You can bugger off an' all,' the man said, angrily. 'Before I let go of Buster here.'

  Murrain held out his warrant card. 'Police.'

  The man stared back at him, not obviously mollified by this revelation. 'Right,' he said, finally. 'Thought you were another of those buggers.'

  Murrain climbed out of the car. 'Who were they?'

  'Journalists,' the man said. 'Well, journalist and a photographer. Some n
ational rag. Not the first we’ve had down here.'

  'It’s a big story. If you have any more trouble, give us a call.'

  The man snorted. 'Like you’ll be here in a flash. Took you two days when we had a break-in.'

  'This your place?'

  'Yeah.' As if he’d decided he’d goaded Murrain enough, the man suddenly smiled and held out his hand. 'Pete Tanner. Impoverished sheep and dairy farmer.'

  Murrain smiled back and shook the proffered hand. 'DCI Murrain. I’m the officer in charge of the enquiry.'

  'Poor little bugger,' Tanner said, presumably referring to Ethan Dunn rather than Murrain himself. 'I was already interviewed by two of your blokes. Gave me quite a grilling.'

  'I know,' Murrain said. 'I’ve read the notes. They were from the Derbyshire force. I’m GMP.' He waved a hand in the direction of the valley below. 'Kid was from down in the village, as you’ve no doubt heard. Greater Manchester jurisdiction.'

  'Ah.' Tanner looked concerned. 'Does that mean I’ve got to go through the whole rigmarole again?'

  'Not at the moment. I just came down to introduce myself.'

  Tanner squinted at him. 'You were here the other day, though? After they found the body. I remember you now.'

  Murrain knew he cut a memorable figure—tall, heavily-built, slightly ungainly, with a mop of tightly curled greying hair—but was surprised Tanner had noticed him among the melee. 'That’s right. But I left my Derbyshire colleagues to run the show. Didn’t want to tread on their toes.'

  'Assumed you’d come back because I’m a suspect.' It wasn't a question.

  Murrain hesitated. Tanner was right, of course, at least about his being a suspect. As the individual who’d discovered the body, he was bound to be on their list. But he’d been able to account for his time since Ethan Dunn’s disappearance, either with his wife or members of the farm staff, and he’d been out working with a young labourer when they’d stumbled across the child’s remains. So unless something emerged to call his alibis into question, he wasn’t high on their list. 'We have to eliminate all possibilities, obviously,' he said, after a moment. 'But I don’t think you’re seriously in the frame, Mr Tanner. I just came down to say hello and maybe have a little look around the site before it gets dark.'