A Dark and Secret Place Read online

  “He’s a serial killer, not Tom Cruise. We’re not monsters.” He gave her a smile that was more eyebrows than teeth. “Just remember, you can leave at any time. He can’t reach you and you’re not on your own. And, you know, see if you can get him talking. But don’t provoke him. Don’t deliberately lead him toward conversations that you can’t handle. And if I tell you to leave the room, do so immediately.”

  “Right. Great. Anything else?”

  “You’ll be fine. If you’re ready …?”

  Heather nodded, not quite trusting herself to say anything that wasn’t sarcastic. DI Parker led her into a small room with pastel yellow walls. Inside there were a pair of burly looking prison guards, watching her with interest. And sitting at a wide table, was Jack in the Green, the Red Wolf. Michael Reave.

  She had been preparing herself for him to seem pathetic, smaller in real life and somehow pitiable—or at least, she had been hoping for such. But in the flesh, he seemed even more vital and threatening. He was tall and broad across the shoulders, his black hair dusted with salt but still thick, and although he was pale he looked healthy enough. He was wearing a simple white T-shirt and a pair of black tracksuit bottoms—socks but no shoes—and there was a pair of handcuffs around his wrists.

  “Michael, we’ve brought you a visitor.”

  Reave had been looking at the table, and as he lifted his head, Heather had the strangest sense that he was bracing himself for something. And indeed, as they made eye contact, an emotion flitted across his unshaven face that she couldn’t identify. She watched him blink several times as she sat herself down opposite him. DI Parker stood nearby, his arms crossed over his chest. There was a small black box on the table which she took to be a recording device of some sort.

  “Mr. Reave, thank you for speaking to me today.”

  She had an envelope with copies of the letters, which she placed on the table.

  “You’re Colleen’s girl.” It wasn’t a question. He spoke with a soft northern accent that ordinarily she would have found appealing. “She had a little girl.”

  “She did. I’m Heather, Mr. Reave, and my mum …”

  He twitched, as though she had struck him. “Michael. It’s Michael, to you.”

  For reasons she couldn’t name, the hair stood up on the back of her neck, and she found herself looking at his hands—big powerful hands, scarred across the knuckles. Despite all her bravado and her certainty that she was going to ace this like some big-time journalist, the idea of being on first name terms with a serial killer had turned her stomach to ice, and she couldn’t think of anything to say at all. Bizarrely, it was Michael Reave that saved her.

  “I’m sorry, lass,” he said. “I mean, I was sorry to hear about your mum.”

  Heather nodded, contemplating the strangeness of being offered condolences by a serial killer. It all seemed too outlandish to be true; her mother’s body crushed against rocks, decades of correspondence with a convicted murderer. This small, yellow room and the man who sat in it. She cleared her throat and shifted in the chair, trying to ignore the compulsion to shiver.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I hadn’t seen much of her over the last few years, but it’s been a bit of a shock.” She knew that DI Parker hadn’t told Reave how she had died—his idea was that hearing it from Heather might provoke some sort of reaction. “She took her own life.”

  Michael Reave nodded slowly, not looking away. There wasn’t a trace of surprise on his face at all, and all at once Heather was glad she had had the guts to face him. He had to be linked to it all. There were answers to uncover here.

  “You don’t seem shocked?” When he didn’t reply, she continued. “Did she tell you she was going to do something like that? In her letters?”

  “No, lass,” Reave’s eyes were steady, his gaze not leaving her face. “But life is hard, and some people get … all torn up by it.”

  “Torn up is an interesting choice of phrase.” Heather felt rather than saw DI Parker shift behind her. “Mr. Reave, can you tell me anything about why she killed herself? Judging from the letters, you knew her quite well.” The idea that he might know the answer, that he could make her mother’s death neat and somehow understandable, and yet could choose to withhold the information from her … was unbearable. She took a slow breath, focusing on what was in front of her. What had her editor Diane told her, years back, when she’d been an assistant on the paper, fetching coffees and taking lunch orders? Ears and eyes open, always, Heather. That’s the first part of your job.

  Michael Reave tipped his head slightly to one side, regarding her with something that looked suspiciously like pity.

  “You’re her girl. I reckon you’d have a better idea than me, what was going on in your mum’s head.”

  Heather nodded slowly, conceding the point. “Fair enough. It’s hard to lose someone that way though, with all these unanswered questions hanging over you. Maybe it’s the hardest way of all.”

  Michael Reave said nothing. His eyes, she noticed, were a deep dark green; the color of pine needles against snow.

  “Why did my mother write to you?”

  “She was a friend. A good friend.”

  “You knew each other for a long time?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose we did.”

  “I had no idea.” Heather forced herself to smile, although it felt strange and small on her lips. “Such a long correspondence, and she never once mentioned it to me. I … perhaps you can help me understand that?”

  “Everyone has secrets, lass.” He was still watching her, so closely her skin was crawling. “It’s hard for kids to understand, I reckon, but even parents hide stuff sometimes. Your mother had a life before you were born, Heather.”

  Her name on his lips felt like a threat. Heather looked down at her hands, suddenly desperate to get the conversation away from her.

  “Did you confide in my mother, then? Was she that sort of friend? You see, the mum I knew never had any interest in crime, or murders. She wouldn’t even watch the news because it was too depressing. So why was she talking to you?”

  “She was my friend. An old friend. And I have no one else to talk to here, lass.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that.” An expression of surprise flitted over his face briefly, and she felt like she’d won a small victory. “Not now that your name is back in the news. Surely lots of people want to talk to you about the murders happening up north?”

  He smiled slightly, and tugged gently at the chain between the handcuffs, so that they clinked together. “I know nothing about that. How can I? I’ve been sitting in prison longer than you’ve been alive, I reckon. How old are you? Everyone looks young to me now,” he nodded toward DI Parker, “like that one. He hasn’t even started shaving and there he is, giving me the evil eye.”

  “Once I start, I’ll be sure to ask you for tips,” said Parker dryly.

  “Ok then,” Heather leaned forward, catching Reave’s eye again. He smiled slightly, and she had to suppress a shiver. There was something in the way he looked at her; like a magpie that had spied something shiny in the grass. He was pleased by her, and she didn’t know why. “What about your own past? Can you tell me about the old murders, instead?”

  He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms out in front of him.

  “Shall I tell you a story?”

  Heather sat up straighter in her chair. Where was this going?

  “If you like, Mr. Reave.”

  “Michael, please.” He touched his hand to his mouth, hiding his expression for a moment. “Once upon a time, there was a brother and a sister whose mother died, leaving them in the care of their stepmother, who was secretly a witch. She beat them and let them starve, so the brother and sister ran away, far into the countryside, where they hoped to find their own happiness. But it was a hard journey, and they didn’t think to take anything with them, so soon they were so hungry and thirsty they could hardly think straight. Eventually, they came to a stream, a
nd they bent to drink from it, but just before they did the girl heard in the babbling and running of the water a voice, and the voice said, ‘whoever drinks of me will become a tiger. Whoever drinks of me will become a tiger.’”

  Heather blinked. The strangeness of the situation and his words were making her feel like she was sleeping through a particularly unsettling dream.

  “Mr. Reave … I’m not sure …”

  “The witch, you see, had cast a spell on all of the streams. The little sister said, ‘oh brother, do not drink from that stream, or you will become a tiger and eat me.’ The brother agreed to wait, but when they came to the next stream, she heard the water again, and this time it was singing ‘whoever drinks of me will become a bear. Whoever drinks of me will become a bear.’ Again, the sister told her brother not to drink, and this time he agreed reluctantly. ‘We’ll have to drink soon,’ he told her, ‘or we’ll die.’ Eventually they came to a third stream, a wide and welcoming one full of sparkling clear water, and they fell to their knees desperate with thirst, their lips all cracked and their mouths all dry. This time, the little girl heard, ‘whoever drinks of me will become a wolf, whoever drinks of me will become a wolf.’ She begged her brother, and pleaded with tears in her eyes, but there was no stopping him this time. The boy drank the water, and became a wolf, and he tore his sister into pieces.”

  There were a few beats of silence, into which one of the guards coughed. Behind Heather, DI Parker sighed very quietly.

  “Huh. What a charming story.” Heather cleared her throat. “Mr. Reave, I’ll be honest, telling stories about little girls being eaten isn’t the best way to convince anyone of your innocence.”

  Michael Reave chuckled, his face lighting up in apparently genuine amusement. “I know. Most of the old stories, the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, sound like they were written by murderers. That story was called Brother and Sister, and it was one of the ones your mum collected. She had loads of them, copied out of old books or written from memory.”

  “My mum?” Heather half smiled in disbelief. “There’s no way. Mum didn’t like me watching television after 9 PM. All the picture books I had when I was a kid were about flower fairies worried about their pet unicorns. You must be thinking of someone else.”

  But even as she said it, she was thinking of the torn crumpled page on her mother’s dressing table. And the book, the old book she had rescued from under the sofa and discarded.

  Michael Reave shook his head slowly, still smiling. “You wanted me to tell you about your mum, didn’t you? She loved those stories. Back then, she loved the countryside like I did—wanted nothing more than to be under the sky, to walk in the woods. Those stories were, for her, a link to the time when that’s just what we did. When we were rightly afraid of the forest, and we knew the rhythms of the world. My point is, there’s likely a lot you didn’t know about your mum, lass. That’s what people are like. Lots of layers, some of them darker than others. Your mum, she was good at hiding things. Better than anyone.”

  Heather realized that she had her hands clasped together tightly under the table; tight enough that her fingers were turning white. With some difficulty she untangled them. Her memories of the day at the mortuary seemed very close, as though she might turn to her right and see a cold white table, the cold white faces of the morticians. She squeezed her hands into fists under the desk, concentrating on the dull pain of her nails digging into her palms.

  “The countryside, that’s right. In the letters you talk about a place where the two of you lived for a while, a sort of hippy commune up north. I thought that sort of thing died out in the sixties, but it sounds like it went on for some years. Is that where you met? What can you tell me about it?”

  Michael Reave looked down at the table. All of the animation that had entered his face while he had told his grim fairy tale seemed to seep away.

  “I don’t see why I should talk about that. It’s all ancient history.”

  “Why not? Everyone getting back to nature, escaping the rat race and so on. In the letters you call it Fiddler’s Mill. What was it like?”

  He turned his head to look at the far wall, just as though there was a window there he could look out of.

  “I think I’m done,” he said quietly. “I think I want to go back to my cell now. No more talking for me.” Heather blinked, surprised by his sudden change of attitude. As DI Parker touched her shoulder, inviting her to leave, Michael Reave met her eyes one last time. “Did you understand the story, Heather? Do you see what the sister should have done?”

  Heather didn’t answer.

  “She should have drunk the water, too,” he said.

  * * *

  DI Parker offered her a lift back since he was going that way anyway, and she took it gladly, pleased to be avoiding buses as the skies turned dark with rain. The interior of his car was untidier than she’d expected of a police officer—hollow McDonalds cups, empty Tupperware, a few screwed up chocolate bar wrappers—and she spotted a faint pink flush cross his cheeks as she chased a plastic bottle top off her seat. It was sort of adorable.

  “Sorry about the mess,” he said, grimacing faintly as they pulled out onto the rain-slicked roads.

  “Don’t worry, you should see my place.” Heather paused, both amused and horrified by the way the sentence seemed to hang in the air between them. Inviting him back to my place already. Bloody hell. “Do you have a siren hidden in here somewhere? Zipping home like I’m in The Bill would mean this day wasn’t a total write off.”

  DI Parker grunted. “Those things are literally for emergencies, Miss Evans. And listen, don’t take it so badly. You did well in there today.”

  “I did?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a start. It’s certainly the most I’ve ever heard him say to someone. He’s interested in talking to you, and we have to hope that will open up some new threads. Maybe he’ll let something slip. I’d like to put you back in there, if that’s all right with you.”

  Heather glanced out the window. Raindrops had turned the outside world into something uncertain, smeared with red and yellow lights. Despite her description of the session as a write off, she had to admit that it had been fascinating; both Reave and his unsettling confidence, and the morsels of information he had dropped about her mother.

  “It’s quite the thing, speaking to … someone like that. If you saw him in a pub you wouldn’t look twice, yet I can feel he’s holding stuff back. Stuff about my mum.” She looked at Parker briefly, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “Hark at me, been in one interview and I think I’m Miss Marple, right?”

  DI Parker gave her a brief lopsided smile.

  “Anyway. He’s scary, Inspector Parker, but the fact that he’s been talking to my mother all these years, that there’s this whole side to her I knew nothing about, and then she commits suicide out of nowhere …” She shook her head slightly. “And this new killer. Did you already check out Fiddler’s Mill? I mean, back in the day.”

  “It was searched when Reave was arrested. As best they could, anyway—it’s a big piece of land. And Lancashire CID had another look when they realized the link with these new disappearances. It’s all very different now, you’d hardly know there had been a commune there.” Parker tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “The information on Reave’s background is incredibly sparse. Everyone who might have known him when he was a child is dead now, and there’s hardly any record of him from those years, and nothing from adulthood. There’s a birth certificate, enrolment in an infant’s school, and then he seems to just drop off the face of the earth.”

  Heather pursed her lips, taking this in. “He has got to know something. When do you want me to go back?”

  “Give him a day or so to think about it, but otherwise, as soon as possible.”

  “You really think it could help? With the current murders, I mean?”

  “There’s every chance Reave has vital information.” Parker drummed his thumbs against
the steering wheel briefly. “Whoever this new person is, we think he has a personal tie to Reave. The murders are just too similar.”

  “Stuff only the killer could know, things like that?”

  He snorted a little and pushed a hand back through his hair. Abruptly Heather could see how tired he was, and how young. Certainly no older than she was.

  “I can’t really comment on that, but yeah. The original Red Wolf killings were, well, uniquely weird. Michael Reave is a particularly strange monster, and it’s a very good thing that he’s in prison. But whoever this new guy is? He has certainly done his research.” He cleared his throat, apparently realizing he was being unprofessional. “Anyway, Elizabeth Bunyon and Sharon Barlow weren’t found in London, of course, but our biggest source of information so far is sitting in a cell at Belmarsh. I’m liaising with Lancashire CID on this, giving them all the assistance we can but …” Outside, a set of traffic lights turned green, and for a moment the car was filled with the sound of purring engines. DI Parker apparently drove faster when he was agitated. “Serial murderers are their own kind of unpredictable.”

  “You’re sure it’s a serial killer? Is he taking souvenirs?”

  “What is it you do for a living again, Miss Evans?”

  “Uh, well. I’m a writer.”

  “Oh.”

  She laughed. “Just bits and bobs, you know. Freelance. Copywriting mostly …” She smiled. “Film reviews sometimes. A lot of proofreading at the moment.”

  “Well.” He looked thoughtful now, and Heather got the impression he was talking something through out loud, almost as though she wasn’t there. “He’s taken a lot of time over the bodies, and there are things—things that were not released to the press about the original Red Wolf murders—that strongly suggest he intends to keep going.” He cleared his throat, looking faintly embarrassed again. “I studied criminal psychology. Wrote some pieces about serial murder. The Green River killer, Shipman. Bits and bobs, like you say.”