Home Before Dark (25 page)

A long white strip of joined-up cabins tucked into a fold of
wooded hills, the Mountain View motor inn was just across
the state line into Massachusetts, twenty minutes by car from
Norfolk. Campbell parked his silver Toyota Camry outside
number fifteen and sat for a moment, listening to the radio.
He remembered Ed Lister saying the murder webcast had
a classical music soundtrack . . . and that there was someone
who played the piano in the virtual mansion. He made a note
to ask him if the repertoire included any Mozart. The taste
of dead flies, he guessed, would be a constant.
His room was ski-lodge basic, faux-pine panelling widi an
oil painting of Alpine pastures over the bed and a single
window on the back that looked out on another parking lot.
It would do for a night. He had a shower and changed his
clothes, then called Grace Wilkes, only to learn she was out
of town visiting her sister in Waterbury. Campbell left his
numbers for her to call.
She’d be back Wednesday. Three days from now. He sat
down on the king-size bed and thought about how he was
going to break the news to Kira. As of this morning she
hadn’t been able to find anyone to mind Amy while he was
away, which meant she’d have to stay back from her job at
the hospital all week.
On the way to the airport, he’d tried to explain to Kira
how important it was that he follow up the synaesthesia lead
that after all she’d given him. He reminded her about the
huge bonus Ed Lister had promised to pay him if he found
Ward. But she just said she had 'a bad feeling’ about this
case and begged him to drop it.
He felt sure she already sensed the storm that was about
to hit them.
It was only luck that Kira hadn’t found out yet about the
money he owed. He’d managed to intercept the last bank
statement, but if she happened to look in their joint savings
account she’d know at once they were cleaned out. He decided
not to call her just yet. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted
to have on an empty stomach.
A couple of miles back on Route 44, Campbell had seen
signs for an 'authentic’ diner in East Canaan. He found the
old caboose without any trouble in a disused railway yard.
Sitting up at the black marble and stainless steel counter (the
interior had most of its original 1940s fittings) he ordered a
cheeseburger deluxe with a side of chilli. They didn’t have
Mountain Dew so he drank Seven-Up.
When the food came he ate slowly, enjoying every mouthful.
He finished off with a slice of cherry pie and coffee, and
only then – not wanting to let the image of the blood-spattered
mezzaluna spoil his dinner – let his thoughts drift back over
the Skylands tragedy and the conversation he’d had with Joel
Stilwell.
He was pretty sure the old doctor had seen through his
story about epilepsy research. Maybe he’d made it too obvious
that his interest in Ernest Seaton didn’t stop at the boy’s
medical history. In a small, tight-knit community he had to
assume news of his curiosity to learn what had become of
him would travel. On the other hand maybe that was no bad
thing.

By the time he got back to the Mountain View, it was too
late London-time to get Ed Lister on the phone. Sitting on
the floor in a lotus position, the TV tuned to the sports
channel so he could watch the highlights from Wimbledon,
Campbell wrote up his notes and e-mailed his client a
cautiously optimistic progress report of his investigation. He
described briefly the horrific events at Skylands and suggested
that the nine-year-old Ernest Seaton’s story certainly fitted
the background of a delusional stalker – he could be the
person they were looking for.
Campbell knew there was a strong possibility his e-mail
would be intercepted and read by Ward. The recent contact
the killer had made with Ed – using his daughter’s screen
ID to send him cryptic messages – was probably just a
decoy so that he could gain access to his computer at
Greenside. He suspected that Ward had always had some
kind of electronic surveillance in place.
It was a risky strategy, one that for tactical reasons he
couldn’t share with his client, but if Ward discovered they
were onto him it might just force him into making a mistake
and flush him out into the open.
He reached for his cell to let Kira know he’d arrived safely.
He wanted to tell her about the humming bird, the flash of
red lightning at its throat. But then the thought struck him,
what if the loan sharks hadn’t believed him when he told
them he had to leave town for a few days on a job? What if
they figured he’d made a run for it, and decided to send
Cholly round to Wild Palms Manor? The nice old guy in the
lizard-skin boots … ringing their doorbell. He imagined Amy
letting him in.

240
241

I
I
For a moment Campbell felt tempted. At the diner, he’d
picked up a brochure for Foxwoods, 'the world’s largest
casino’, just down the road in southeastern Connecticut – he
could jump in the car, be there in an hour, hour and a half
tops. 'With your credit score? They wouldn’t even let you
play the slots,’ his Gamblers Anonymous voice mocked. 'You
can eighty-six that idea, pal’ Campbell let out a groan and
flipped open his cell.
He had until Friday to get the hundred thousand.

42

Ward lay in the dark with his eyes open. He heard a long
screech of brakes in the distance, and imagined a car speeding
downtown going through a stop light. He waited for the
sound of impact that never came, trying to find a way back
to sleep.
It was 4.45 a.m., the sky just starting to lighten, when he
gave up. He got out of bed and pulling on a robe, made his
way barefoot through the dark divisions of the loft guided
by a faint ultramarine glow coming from the mail-server
computer, which he kept on 247. He sat down at his workstation
and stared for a moment at the monitor, following
the procession of sea creatures across its full-size
LCD
screen.
He watched as the manta ray swam across his screen and
flapped off into the murky depths, then dismissed the graphics
with a touch of the mouse. After rapidly performing the
necessary functions, using keyboard shortcuts, he checked
his mail.
Or rather, he checked Ed’s mail. Quarter to ten in London,
Monday morning. He’d be at the office by now, most likely
online.
From a list of accounts, each one identified by a different
username, Ward brought up the mailbox titled pops.homebe foredark.net.kg,
which was currently dedicated to receiving
blind copies of any traffic in and out of Ed Lister’s computer.
There were altogether six intercepts – three outgoing e-mails
which looked like business, two website requests of little interest
and one incoming from Campbell Armour, the private
investigator hired by Ed to find out who killed his daughter.
No’ contact so far with 'Adorablejoker’ – her screen-name
made him cringe. He wondered if Ed realised she had others.
Ward had seen a copy of Armour’s 'progress’ report and
on the whole it made reassuring reading. The attempt to
profile him as a cyber-stalker, 'just reeking with symptoms’
was laughably inept, and could only work to his advantage – the diagnosis was so wide of the mark, it meant they had
to be looking for someone very different. He took exception
though to one comment Armour had made. He’d described
him as 'damaged goods’. Ward never liked the phrase and it
irked him that some geeky wunderkind with no qualifications
outside computing science could make that kind of assumption.
He detected Kira’s hand.
He opened Armour’s message, sent last night at 11.01 p.m.
EST
, and downloaded the attached document headed
'Update’. He read the first paragraph and felt a sudden tightness
at the centre of his chest. It announced the detective’s
safe arrival in Norfolk, Connecticut.
Ward became very still.
He had been expecting a tap on the shoulder sooner or
later. But how could Armour have gone, almost overnight,
from knowing nothing about him to getting so close he could
feel his breath lift the hairs on the back of his neck?
The little slope had snuck up on him . . . Jesus, he hated
that.
He rolled out of his seat, wincing as he put weight on the
ankle he’d twisted on the railroad track at Linz, and limped
over to the windows; he stood staring out at the livid sky.
The rooftops thrown into silhouette, left the caustic taste of
battery terminals on his tongue.
Without warning, the cloak of invisibility, which had
protected him all his adult life, had been snatched from his
back. How the hell had he found Joel Stilwell? The report
didn’t mention why the detective had flown up to Norfolk
to see the old man, which suggested he’d already discussed
the reason with Ed Lister. Yet, in his brief reply to the e-mail – 'Thrilled by your news. Congratulations on a remarkable
breakthrough. Just to be able to put a name (and soon, let’s
hope, a face) to the monster changes everything’ – Ed makes
it clear this is all a revelation to him. He’s never even heard
of Skylands.
Well, of course the sonofabitch would deny all knowledge. He read the note again and felt another surge of anxiety,
as he realised the extent of his exposure. Doc Stilwell,
Skylands, the Seatons, Grace Wilkes . . .
Relax, buddy. There’s no way in the world they can bring
it back to you. Ed Lister’s the one walking the tightrope here.
You need to assess the situation calmly, then plan your next
move. Ward? Are you even listening?
He stretched his fingers, opening them, closing them.
This was the price he was always going to have to pay for
rejoining the world. He took several deep breaths, went over
and sat back down at his work-station. Before he could make
any decision he needed to verify that the detective was where
he said he was when he sent the message.
After extracting the IP address from the header on
Campbell Armour’s e-mail, Ward fed the numbers into a
Traceroute program, which would tell him where the message
originated. In a second he had the route path, the city and
country location of the servers the message had passed
through on its way from Armour’s computer to its destination
point in the UK. The map on his screen gave him the information
he needed. When he sent the e-mail, the detective
had been hooked up to a network provider in the town of
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, not far from the border with the
northwest corner of Connecticut. Less than twenty miles
from Norfolk.
The program couldn’t pinpoint an address, but it only took
Ward a few seconds to Google 'accommodation’ in the
Norfolk and Stockbridge areas and run off a list of local
motels, inns and BBs. Then he swung around in his chair
and picked up the printout of Armour’s e-mail. The contact
number he’d given Ed Lister matched the third motel on the
list – the 'Mountain View’ in Great Barrington.
A lid-muscle started to dance in Ward’s left eye; he trapped
it under a finger like an insect and held it till the tic stopped.
It only happened when he was tired.

There were no windows in what he called his quarters. A
curving wall of green-tinted glass tiles separated the sleeping
area from the rest of the loft, allowing some daylight to
filter through. It gave the bedroom, meagrely furnished
with a chest of drawers, wooden chair and an antique press – all reclaimed from the street, out of choice rather than
necessity – a permanently sickly hue. Ward slept on a narrow
single bed that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a
monk’s cell.
He tasted soot on his tongue, the bitter and indelible taste
of the past.
He had misgivings about going home again, revisiting the
historical location of images and events that never faded.
What happened a quarter of a century ago remained as vivid
for him as if it was yesterday. Ward had the synaesthete’s
not-always-lucky gift of total recall. He could remember
conversations he’d had as a child, prose passages he’d read
only once, the precise location of objects in a room, floor
plans and furniture arrangements, the order of books on a
shelf, where every kitchen utensil 'lived’ and had to be put
away in its proper place.
He had a picture in his head of the mezzaluna lying on
the draining board.
The next forty-five minutes he spent in the bathroom working
out with weights until the sweat began to bead and the
veins stand out on his forehead and shoulders. He doubted
Ed Lister was as strong as he was in the arms. In London,
Ward had watched him leave the house every morning to
run in Hyde Park. Ed had looked a little stringy. But he liked
the fact that the man who could have become his father-in
law kept himself in shape – it was one more thing they had
in common.
Showered and shaved, Ward chose from his conservative
wardrobe a faded oatmeal and rust madras shirt, tan chinos
and an old pair of Timberland hiking boots – clothes that he
thought would blend in with the rural Connecticut he remembered.
Then he repacked the rucksack he’d taken with him
to Europe.
He ate slowly a light breakfast of kefir and fruit with a
book, The Soul of the White Ant, by Eugene Marais, propped
in front of him. He’d decided to drive, hire a car and drive
up there, following the Taconic Parkway north – he knew the
way.
He would be home in a couple of hours.

43

Waiting for the Norfolk Library to open its doors, Campbell
Armour sat across the street in his parked Toyota, observing
a scene that was familiar to him mostly from watching old
Hollywood movies as a boy growing up in Hong Kong. The
quaint, prosperous little New England town nestled in a green
bowl of hills, trees full of blossom and birdsong, smiling
natives going about their day as if they had all the time and
not much of a care in the world – it looked almost too good
to be true.
Apart from the cars and clothes, Campbell thought, the
town would have appeared much the same – just as peaceful
and wholesome with its white-spired Congregational church,
clapboard Colonials and old-fashioned stores – on that July
day twenty-seven years ago when Ernest Seaton was found
cowering in the broom closet at Skylands, his face smeared
with blood as if he’d been anointed in some savage rite of
initiation.
A mid-brown police cruiser with the windows down crawled
past for the second time, the bulky state trooper at the wheel
throwing a glance his way from behind a pair of Aviator
shades and nodding. Campbell raised his can of Mountain
Dew to the dude, took a sip. He could see what Dr Stilwell had meant about this being the kind of place that would have
done its best to 'contain’ the Seaton tragedy. It had an air of settled exclusivity that made him feel uncomfortable.
In town he’d sensed people looking at him as soon as his back was turned.
At a few minutes to ten, a battered Ford pick-up pulled
into a parking space outside the ornate red barn that had
been purpose-built as a library in Victorian times. A tall
woman wearing blue jeans and an expensive linen jacket with
a rope of grey hair hanging down her back, got out and
trotted up the steps to the entrance porch, keys in hand.
Campbell gave it some time, then followed her into the
building.
'How can we help you today?’
The girl with the grey plait was sitting behind the front
desk. Up close she looked younger than he’d imagined. Her
name-tag read Susan Mary Billetdeaux.
'You’re welcome just to browse, if you like.’
He glanced around the library’s lofty wooden interior with
its stone fireplace and armchairs and paintings of wildlife
scenes on the walls over the bookshelves; a solitary computer
in an alcove the only concession to the modern age
Campbell cleared his throat. 'I dunno. You have microfiche?
I’m looking for back issues of the Litchfield County
Times for nineteen seventy-nine, July and August.’
Susan Mary smiled. 'Anything in particular you’re looking
for? We don’t keep complete sets so you might do better
searching by subject.’
He thought for a moment. He’d failed to find the archives
of the local paper online. He saw no reason not to be upfront
with her.
'You could try under murder or suicide,’ Campbell said,
watching her face for a reaction. 'The family was called
Seaton. He was a dentist, killed his wife then shot himself.
They lived out near Colebrook.’
'Well, that should narrow it down.’ She smiled again slowly,
as if she was amused by him, or by his unusual request. It
was obvious she hadn’t heard of the story.
'You’re not from around here, Susan, are you?’
She shook her head and the plait switched. 'New York.’
“Me neither.’
'I sort of figured that.’
They both laughed. He followed her over to the reference
section and watched her pull one of a dozen cloth-bound
scrapbooks from the shelves and open it up on a reading
table. Flipping through pages of yellowing press cuttings, she
found what she was looking for and swivelled the book around.
'Here you go.’