Wychwood Page 22

  “And what about George Baker, the other boy who lived with the Graves at the time?”

  “He was a quiet one,” said Mrs Brown. “At least after Thomas went.”

  “What do you mean?” said Elspeth. She sipped at her tea. It was lukewarm, but she drank it out of politeness.

  “He idolised Thomas. They’d been in a children’s home together before they moved in with the Graves, and they were as thick as thieves. Little blighters, they were, always causing mischief together. They gave us all the runaround, to be honest. It’s not surprising that James Graves used to bark at them all the time, or give them a good clip round the ear now and then.” She took a long draught from her teacup. “After Thomas ran away, though, George was never the same. He retreated into himself, wouldn’t come out of his shell or socialise with other kids.”

  “That’s not unusual, though, is it? For a boy from a disturbed home who’d lost his friend? Surely it was just his way of coping?”

  “Well, the Graves didn’t know what to do with him, really. That was the problem. Things got a bit tense, and came to a head one day when Patricia came home and found him dissecting a dead bird on the kitchen table.”

  “A dead bird?” said Elspeth.

  “Turns out he’d been bunking off school, shooting them down with his catapult and then opening them up with the kitchen knives. When James came home there was hell on earth, as you can imagine, and that’s when I got the call. They’d had enough. Couldn’t deal with it anymore. They shipped poor George back to the care home, and dusted their hands of him.”

  “Poor child,” said Elspeth. The image of the boy with the dead birds seemed to stick in her mind. “Had they always been like that with him?”

  “Not always, no. I think at first Patricia wanted him to be her son. That’s the mistake she made, you see. She thought it would be easy – bring them in, mother them. But these boys weren’t ready for a new mother. They’d been bounced around through social services for years, and they’d grown calloused and hard. What they needed was stability, discipline. What they got was Patricia Graves insisting they call her ‘Mother’, and James, who’d never really wanted them in the first place. No wonder they were confused.”

  “I read the police file, and all the transcripts of the interviews that took place after Thomas disappeared. George changed his story. At first he said that Thomas had had a run-in with James. But later he went on record to say that he’d lied.”

  “Like I said, he was a bit of a strange child, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t half a truth in there, somewhere. James was a hard man, and he was always berating those boys. Not that they didn’t deserve it, mind.”

  Elspeth could hardly believe the matter-of-fact way in which the old lady was reporting all of this; the nonchalance in the face of what could have amounted to child abuse. She supposed the world really had been a very different place in the late seventies, with a very different view of child protection. “What happened to George?” she said.

  “Well, that’s the one bit of good to come out of all this,” said Mrs Brown. “George was sent off to an institution, and whatever they did to him there, they worked miracles. He came out of that place a new child. He changed his name, flourished at his new school, and earned himself a scholarship. I seem to remember hearing he’d gone on to become some sort of posh professor at the university.”

  Elspeth felt her pulse quicken. The reference to dead birds had been enough to set her mind racing, but now this. “You don’t happen to know what that new name was, do you?”

  Mrs Brown shook her head. “No, sorry, love. There were so many other kids. But you might ask Rebecca. She might know. I think she still lives around these parts.”

  “Rebecca?”

  “Rebecca Wood. One of the neighbourhood kids at the time. They were good friends for a while. They used to play out in the woods together, running about, making up stories. After Thomas went, though, she wouldn’t have much to do with George. I think it got to her a bit, too, like it got to all of us. She was too young to understand, of course, but George seemed to take it pretty hard. In the end he lost the only two friends he had in the world. No wonder the poor boy cracked.”

  Rebecca… It seemed like too much of a coincidence. “Did she marry?”

  “I have no idea. I expect so. She was always a pretty little thing.”

  That had to be it. The girl, Rebecca Wood, was Rebecca Williams. The woman she’d seen in her gym the previous night with her skull caved in.

  And George Baker, the foster child who had lost everything… he was Byron Miller. That explained the flowers, the wreath with the strange quotation.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” she said, placing her teacup and saucer gently back on the tray. “But I don’t suppose I could use your loo?”

  “Of course, love. Down the hall, through the kitchen, first door on the left. You’ll forgive me for not showing you the way. My old hips, you see?”

  Elspeth nodded, and grabbed her handbag. She hurried down to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath. She grabbed her phone from her bag, and thumbed through until she found the photograph of the card.

  She peered at it for a moment, committing the words to memory: ‘THOSE THAT KNOW THE MOST MUST MOURN THE DEEPEST. GEORGE’

  Then, her fingers trembling, she typed the quotation into the search engine on her web browser. The hit came back almost immediately. It was a partial line from Manfred, a poem by Lord George Gordon Byron.

  Byron.

  * * *

  When this was done, he would call for The Fool, and lead him on towards the final sacrifice in the Wychwood. Then the Carrion King’s legacy would be complete. The five sacrifices would all have been made, and the last three tethers to his miserable past would be gone – all in the manner in which the story dictated.

  Soon, he would traverse the underworld, imbued with the power he had sought since those very first days with the pigeons and the ravens and the crows. And he would find Thomas’s soul, and breathe fresh life into him, and undo what had once been done.

  He saw the woman, standing over her tea tray, and he willed her to glance in the mirror, to fix her hair like she so often did, to let her vanity be her undoing.

  She turned, and her eyes flitted across the surface of the silvered glass. He seized his chance, and locked them there. For a moment she stood, unmoving, agitation growing upon her face. Then, like a puppet master trying out a new toy, he shifted his arm, and the woman in the mirror traced his movements, dropping her teacup to the floor.

  With a smile, he forced her to reach over to the little lace-covered table by her armchair. Her fingers closed around the letter opener.

  * * *

  Elspeth felt as if she wanted to throw up. She splashed some cool water on her face, trying to decide what to do.

  Byron Miller was the Carrion King murderer. He had to be.

  Even now, she could imagine his grinning face, sitting in The Reading Stop, calmly reciting his stories.

  But how the hell did she even begin to explain it? There was nothing but circumstantial evidence to link him to the deaths of Patricia Graves and Rebecca Williams. The forensic reports had shown nothing. Nor was there any evidence he had been at the scenes of the apostle murders, apart from Rose’s, but hundreds of other people had been there too. Yet it all seemed to add up. Just like the Carrion King in the story, the people who were supposed to care for George Baker had turned their backs on him as a boy, made him a pariah. He’d gone on to reinvent himself, to gather knowledge of the mythical and arcane, taking the Carrion King as his role model. And then, just like the character in his stories, he set about murdering people he identified with the apostles, and also meting out revenge upon those who, in his eyes, had wronged him – Patricia Graves and Rebecca Williams.

  She had a sudden dawning sense of horror. The Carrion King had sought vengeance upon the ealdorman through the use of a mirror – by taking control of his reflection. Just like
she’d seen in the play. Was that how Miller had killed Patricia Graves? Is that how he’d caused her to stab herself to death in front of her bedroom mirror? She could hardly believe she was even entertaining the notion, but it seemed to make a horrible kind of sense: the lack of forensic evidence, the fact the pathologist had said the wounds looked self-inflicted, the bloody handprint on the mirror. And Rebecca Williams, too – she’d been lying in front of the mirrored wall in her gym.

  But how could it be real? It was ritual magic. Ancient, pagan magic. It couldn’t really work, could it?

  She had to take it all to Peter. She had to make him see what was going on. He’d probably think she was mad, but there was no other choice.

  Elspeth dried her face and hands and collected her things, then hurried back to the sitting room. “I’m afraid I have to go now, Mrs Brown,” she called, popping her head around the door. “Thank you for your time. You’ve been incr—” She stopped abruptly.

  Mrs Brown was standing in the middle of the room, staring into the mirror over the mantelpiece, a silver letter opener held to her own throat.

  “Mrs Brown?”

  She had her back to Elspeth, but Elspeth could see her expression in the mirror, grinning and malevolent. Her teacup was on the floor by her feet, broken where she’d dropped it.

  “Mrs Brown?” she said again, cautiously edging into the room. “What’s going on?”

  She didn’t reply, but turned her head so that her reflection could meet her gaze. She looked sinister, unhinged, not at all like the woman she’d met just a short while before. Elspeth felt the hairs on the nape of her neck prickle in fear. What was she doing?

  “Mrs Brown, I think you should put the letter opener down, now.”

  Elspeth continued to edge into the room, slowly circling around to the side of the woman, ready to rush in and tackle her if she made a sudden lunge with the letter opener. It was shaped like a tiny sword, and the blade was making a depression in the soft flesh of her throat, just on the point of breaking the skin.

  “You’re scaring me now, Mrs Brown. What’s all this about?” She could hear the tremor in her voice. “Is this about George Baker and Thomas Stone? What’s going on?”

  Elspeth had come around the side of Mrs Brown now, and she could see the sweat beading on her brow. She looked panic-stricken, and she was clenching her jaw, the muscles working back and forth, as if it were taking a supreme effort just to stop her arm from plunging the letter opener into her throat. It looked almost as if the arm had a terrible will of its own, and she was fighting it with every ounce of her being.

  Her hand was trembling, but otherwise she was perfectly still, locked in a strange, ungainly position.

  Elspeth glanced at the mirror again, and the reflection grinned back at her, malign and self-satisfied. She knew then what had happened. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even begin to understand it, but somehow, Byron Miller was exerting a kind of malign influence over Mrs Brown. This was how he’d brought about the deaths of Patricia Graves and Rebecca Williams. Like the Carrion King before him, he had seized control of their reflections, and had used them to commit murder. It was just like the myths, like the ealdorman in the play. And now he was doing it again.

  Elspeth wasn’t about to let Mrs Brown succumb to the same fate.

  Slowly, out of sight of the reflection, she reached down and slipped off her shoe, grateful, for once, that she’d decided to wear heels that morning for the funeral. She clutched the shoe in her hand so that the metal-tipped heel was pointing down, and then kicked her other shoe off so that she wouldn’t stumble. Then, careful not to make any sudden movements, she inched closer to the fireplace.

  She tried not to think about what might happen if her plan didn’t work. She glanced at Mrs Brown. The strain was evident on her face. She couldn’t hold out for much longer. It was now or never.

  Elspeth took a deep breath, and then brought up her arm, leaping at the mirror and bringing the heel down as hard as she could against the glass.

  The mirror erupted around the site of the impact, a spider’s web of fracture lines moving out like a wave as the glass splintered into tumbling shards, raining down upon the mantelpiece, jabbing at her bare feet.

  She fell back, dropping the shoe, turning to see Mrs Brown had collapsed to her knees, the letter opener lying on the polished floorboards before her amongst the shimmering fragments of glass.

  Elspeth rushed to her side, dropping to her knees beside her and grabbing her by the shoulders. Slowly, the woman turned to regard her with confused, watery eyes. “What? What’s happening to me?”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs Brown,” said Elspeth, tears pricking her eyes. “I’ll send for an ambulance right away.”

  * * *

  He glowered in rage at the mirror upon the stump, which now reflected back nothing but the surrounding trees and his own fearsome visage. He resisted the urge to destroy it.

  The girl had ruined everything.

  He got to his feet, kicking angrily at the dirt, destroying the circle he had so painstakingly drawn in the soil.

  If the old woman lived, his passage to the underworld could not be completed. He paced back and forth, opening and closing his fists, working his jaw.

  No. He could still have his way. If he killed The Fool now, then he would just have to lie in wait for his next opportunity. Millicent would pass another mirror soon enough, and he would be waiting. He’d find another chance. He was so close.

  For now, though, he had other work to do. He finished clearing away the evidence of his ritual, and quit the woods.

  The Fool was waiting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Come on, come on!”

  The trilling ceased for the umpteenth time, and clicked over to voicemail. Elspeth stabbed at her phone and cut off the recorded message of a woman, brightly telling her, “The person you are calling is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.”

  She ground her teeth. She’d been calling Peter relentlessly, but his mobile was ringing out.

  The ambulance and police were already here, and Elspeth had calmly explained to them what had happened – that she’d come back from the loo to find Millicent holding a letter opener to her own throat in the mirror. She explained that the woman had seemed transfixed by her own reflection, and that the only way to shake her out of it had been to smash the mirror.

  The female police constable had eyed her strangely and written everything down, but it was clear from Mrs Brown’s behaviour that something wasn’t right. The experience had befuddled her, and she was having difficulty coming to terms with what had happened. To be fair, so was Elspeth.

  The ambulance crew had checked Mrs Brown over, and concluded that she needed to be taken in for assessment. Elspeth was free to go – but all she wanted to do was speak to Peter, to tell him what had happened and explain everything she’d learned from Mrs Brown.

  She’d been replaying their meetings with Miller in her mind’s eye. The smug fool had laid it all out for them, and they hadn’t even seen it. He’d told them everything – his entire plan – dressed in a mantle of ancient mythology. Worse, she knew it wasn’t over. Miller had been clear – the Carrion King couldn’t meet his full potential until all of his apostles had been sacrificed and all those who had wronged him had seen his vengeance wrought upon them.

  She’d saved Mrs Brown – for now – meaning he’d already failed at the latter task, but it was possible he’d try again. It didn’t seem in his nature to give up.

  Additionally, that left The Fool, the final apostle. Whomever he had chosen to represent the Carrion King’s final sacrifice still had to die for Miller’s story to be over.

  Her phone buzzed, and her eyes flicked to the screen. It was Peter. She jabbed at the button.

  “Ellie? Sorry, I’ve been in with DCI Griffiths, going over everything from last night.” He paused, and she could imagine him frowning. “Are you okay?”

  She took a deep br
eath. “Peter, I’m at Millicent Brown’s house in Chipping Norton. She’s just tried to kill herself—”

  “God – I’ll get someone there straight away. Is she okay?”

  “No, no. The police are already here, along with the ambulance. It’s all over, and she’s okay. But, Peter…”

  “What is it?”

  “She did it in front of a mirror. It was… it was like she was transfixed, and couldn’t stop herself. Just like in the stories, like that scene in the play. I had to smash the mirror to stop her…” she broke off, fighting back a sob.

  “Oh, Ellie. Look, I’ll come and meet you. I can be there in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “There’s more, Peter. Patricia Graves, Rose, Michael Williams, it’s all linked. It’s Byron Miller. He’s the one behind the Carrion King murders, and the other deaths.”

  “Byron Miller? Ellie, where’s all this coming from?”

  “Look, get here quickly. I can explain. Byron Miller isn’t who we think he is. He’s George Baker, the Graves’ sother foster son. He’s orchestrated all of it.”

  “Alright, give me the address and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  * * *

  Peter’s expression was unreadable as he sat in silence in the driver’s seat of his car, listening to her outline her story. She told him about everything she’d learned from Millicent Brown, showing him the picture she’d taken of the card at the funeral and the results of her brief Internet searches.

  She walked him through the relationship between George Baker and Rebecca Wood, the story about the dead birds, how Mrs Brown had explained that George had gained a scholarship to Oxford and gone on to change his name.

  Finally, she explained how she thought Miller had affected the murders of Patricia Graves and Rebecca Williams, and attempted to murder Millicent Brown. It seemed ridiculous to say it aloud – that he’d used some bizarre occult practice to temporarily bind those people to his will – but how could she deny it after what had happened inside?