Last Rites (20 page)

Mason nodded and Kate wandered off into the kitchen.

More shots of the school grounds. Pictures of Walston. Some more pictures of the surrounding countryside. Mason sucked in a weary breath and reached for more pictures from the bottom of the box. He turned over the first few and found some of the cottage. In one of them, Usher was standing outside the front door, still wearing the emotionless expression he’d sported in the pictures Mason had first looked at. In another he was standing with his arms folded at the bottom of the garden with a panoramic view of the countryside leading down to Walston behind him. Mason noted that the sky behind his predecessor was purple, deep red slashes of cloud across it like cuts on bruised flesh. The picture, he reasoned, must have been taken just before nightfall.There were several more like that, all showing Usher standing with folded arms with his back to the garden wall but with the sky growing progressively darker. Mason frowned, not even sure why this succession of snaps should nag at him.

‘Jesus,’ he murmured as he uncovered the next picture.

It was a dead dog. He frowned as he surveyed the image then looked at the next. Another shot of the same dead dog.

Its throat had been cut so savagely that its head had almost been severed, that much was clear from the picture. So too was the fact that it had been disembowelled. Cut open from chest to genitals, its intestines spilling out from the riven carcass like bloodied party streamers.

There was something familiar in the background of the picture, something that drew Mason’s eye from the vile image of the eviscerated dog. The carcass was lying close to a stone wall and, as he looked more closely, he could see that it was the wall at the bottom of the cottage garden. From the amount of blood that could be seen on the ground around the dead dog it appeared that the unfortunate creature had been killed and mutilated in the cottage garden.

The next shot confirmed this.

Clear for all to see as he stood over the butchered dog, his arms folded and his face expressionless, was the figure of Simon Usher.

48

Frank Coulson paused for what seemed like an eternity before reaching out to touch the door handle to his daughter’s room.

He swallowed hard and turned it, stepping inside, closing it behind him as he slapped on the light.

He’d been dreading this moment but he knew that he could put it off no longer. The last time he’d been inside this room his daughter had been sitting at the little desk pushed up against the far wall, seated there tapping at the keys of her laptop. He’d popped in to tell her that her dinner was ready and they’d ended up talking for five or ten minutes about her work that day. It was a small, inconsequential memory, he mused, but now it was all he had left of her.

Coulson gritted his teeth, knowing that what he was about to do was going to take as much strength as he’d ever been forced to summon before. He crossed to her desk and switched on her laptop, seating himself at her desk. Was this, he wondered, where she’d been sitting when she decided to kill herself ? He closed his eyes tightly, trying to force that image from his mind. He spoke her name softly under his breath as he opened his eyes and as he did he noticed that her mobile phone was lying on the desk too. He picked it up and flipped it open. There were more than a dozen messages.

Never to be answered now, he thought with a painful stab of realisation.

His right hand was shaking slightly and he clenched his other into a fist, holding it in that position for so long that his nails dug into his palm. He grunted, satisfied that the trembling had subsided.

Coulson wasn’t an expert in modern technology, the nuances of such teenage necessities as texting and e-mail were lost on him but he was sufficiently versed in the workings of a computer and a mobile to find what he sought. He flicked the requisite buttons on the mobile and found the entry marked PHONEBOOK.

Once it appeared he reached into his pocket and pulled out the card he’d taken from the small bouquet of carnations at the cemetery earlier that day. He held it before him and, again, considered the name.

ANDREW LATHAM

And the message.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES. HA HA.

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Why would anyone leave that kind of message on a grave?

He scrolled through the names entered in the phonebook of his dead daughter’s phone. He found Latham’s number immediately.

There was a lilac-coloured notepad on the desk and Coulson wrote the number on the top sheet with a blunt pencil he found close by. He would, he promised himself, ring the number later. He wanted to speak to Latham. Find out how well he’d known Amy. See what he had to say for himself. Coulson told himself that he’d make the call after he’d ensured that his wife was safely tucked up in bed. She was downstairs now, sitting helplessly in the living room. If he could only persuade her to take some of the tablets the doctor had given her then perhaps she would sleep. Once he’d seen her safely into bed then he would make the call.

Coulson quickly scrolled through the rest of the names in the phonebook to see if there were any more he recognised.

There weren’t. Not even the very last one.

Frank Coulson had no idea who Simon Usher was. He turned his attention to the laptop.

49

‘Two questions,’ Mason murmured as Kate Wheeler looked sheepishly at the photo of the slaughtered dog. ‘Why did he do it and who the fuck did he ask to take a picture of it?’

Kate didn’t speak, she just shook her head slowly, eyes still fixed on the photograph.

‘A normal guy,’ Mason murmured. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘I wouldn’t have said that if I’d seen these, would I?’ Kate countered, irritably. She regarded a fifth picture of the dead dog that had been taken from closer range.‘Sick bastard.’

‘From what Usher looks like in the pictures, how long ago would you say these were taken?’

Kate took one from him and traced one nail over the outline of Usher’s face.

‘Weeks,’ she offered, returning the picture to him.

Mason looked at the next series of pictures. There were more of Usher standing in the garden, this time without the butchered dog. There was, however, a large patch of dark fluid on the grass at his feet.

‘He killed the dog here by the look of it,’ Mason muttered. ‘Was it his? Did he have a dog?’

Kate shook her head.

‘Perhaps I should ring the police,’ Mason insisted.

‘What for?’

He looked incredulously at her.

‘A guy kills a fucking dog in his own back garden then disappears and you don’t think there’s anything suspicious?’ he demanded.

‘For a start off we don’t know if the two events were linked. I doubt that he left this school and this job because he killed a dog and, even if he did, he hasn’t done anything the police would be interested in.’

‘The slaughter of a dog. You don’t think that would be of any interest to them?’

‘Peter, just wait a minute. Look at what you’ve got here. You find some stuff in your cellar, left behind by a man who taught at this school just before you arrived. A man who has left his job but not given anyone a forwarding address. Among his personal belongings you find some photos. Some very unpleasant I grant you but, even if you put all those things together, what exactly have you got? What is so sinister about that collection of events?’

Mason regarded her evenly for a moment, her words registering.

‘He butchered a dog,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’d call that pretty sinister. And then he got someone to take photos of him standing over it.’

‘Weird, yes. Sick, yes. But no more,’ she insisted.

‘Do you think we should tell the headmaster? Let him know what kind of man Usher was?’

‘Why? What good will it do? What will it matter? Usher’s gone. He’s left. What he did when he was here isn’t important.’

‘It might be to whoever owned that dog.’

‘Well, that’s something else we’ll never know, isn’t it? We don’t know who the dog belonged to and we’ve got no way of finding out. What’s more, I’m not sure we’ve got any right to.’

Mason sucked in a deep breath and leafed through several more of the pictures.

‘Leave them, Peter,’ Kate urged.

‘I want to have a look through the rest of them,’ he insisted. ‘Just a quick look.’

‘Well,’ she sighed, getting to her feet, ‘if it’s all the same to you, I won’t sit here watching you while you do it. If you find anything else then tell me tomorrow.’

Mason got to his feet, dropping some of the pictures. ‘I have to go anyway,’ she told him.‘There are a couple of lesson plans I need to go over before the morning.’

He walked her to the front door and opened it for her.

‘Thanks for helping me tidy up and unpack and all that,’ he smiled.

‘My pleasure,’ she told him. ‘If I were you, I’d forget about whatever Simon Usher used to get up to and concentrate on your own life.’

‘Thanks for the advice.’

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on one cheek. Mason smiled as she turned and hurried away up the path towards her waiting car. As he watched her pull away he reached up with two fingers and gently touched the part of his cheek that she’d kissed. He heard the sound of her car engine receding down the driveway and he closed the front door. Perhaps she was right. He should dump all the photos back into the box where they’d been found and put the whole lot where they belonged, hidden away in the cellar.

Mason nodded to himself.Yes, that’s what he’d do. Just one more quick look through the pictures and then he would.

As he walked back into the sitting room he switched on the lamp he’d placed beside the television and the room was bathed in a dull yellow glow. He didn’t bother to close his curtains.

He may have thought differently had he known he was being watched.

50

Frank Coulson saw the name Andrew Latham listed in the contacts section of Amy’s e-mail account. He made a note of the address next to the phone number he’d already scribbled down then he clicked on the portion of the screen marked inbox.

More messages that would also never be answered, Coulson thought, looking at the eighteen messages displayed before him. He recognised many of the names beside the messages. Friends of Amy’s, many of whom had been at the funeral earlier that day. He’d been struck by how many friends she’d had, touched by how many had come along to pay their respects.

He moved the cursor to the first message, wondering if he should actually open it. Even though his daughter was dead, this felt like an invasion of her privacy and the thought that she wasn’t going to burst into the room screaming at him for meddling with her personal effects only served to hurt him more. He would have given anything in the world to have her burst in now yelling at him, demanding he leave her room. One single tear welled in his left eye and rolled down his cheek.

‘I’m sorry, princess,’ he whispered under his breath.

He clicked on the first message and opened it. Dated the morning after his daughter had taken her own life it had been sent by a girl called Charlotte Stone. Coulson remembered her. Pretty girl with long dark hair. She worked as a waitress in a café in Walston. She’d been friends with Amy since primary school and she’d been at the funeral that day.

Why has he done this to you? I told you he was a bastard. I think we should have word with him. They’re all the same at that school . . . Spoiled rich brats.

Love Charlie.

Coulson ran a hand through his hair and opened the next message. Like Charlie’s first communication, this one was also dated the day after Amy’s death.

I looked at what Latham did on those websites. He is such a fucking bastard. You have got to stop seeing him. I know it’s none of my business but you can’t let people treat you like that. Especially not Latham. He is a pig.

Love Charlie.

The third message was junk e-mail. So was the fourth and the fifth was notification that Amy’s order of a pair of brand-new skinny jeans had just been despatched. Coulson scrolled down and found another message from Charlotte Stone.

I know you’ve already seen it and I looked at the videos he posted on Youtube and that porn one. What a fucking sick bastard. Call me. I rang earlier and left a message. We need to talk.

Love Charlie.

He read two more messages from Charlotte Stone, both of them listing names of websites that Amy should look at. He had no idea why.

Now Coulson began to cry, the tears coursing down his cheeks as he sat at his daughter’s desk. He made no attempt to wipe them away but merely clicked on the websites mentioned in the e-mail. It didn’t take him long to find them.

By the time he’d watched the films with his daughter in, he was sobbing uncontrollably. But, as well as sorrow, Frank Coulson was enveloped by the most intense anger he’d felt for many years.

He glared at the name of Andrew Latham, his teeth gritted furiously together.

51

Andrew Latham took a sip from the can and scanned the screen of his laptop, checking what he’d written.

He nodded approvingly to himself and got to his feet. He took a couple of steps across his room and eased up the volume on his stereo. He looked at the selection of CDs beside the unit, selecting the one he would play next.

It was then that his phone rang.

Latham checked his expensive watch and saw that it was almost eleven fifteen.

The phone continued to vibrate on the desk, set on silent as it usually was.

Latham returned to the desk and picked it up. He didn’t recognise the number but flipped it open and accepted the call anyway.

For long moments he didn’t speak and it seemed like more of an afterthought when he finally opened his mouth.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Is this Andrew Latham?’ the voice at the other end of the line asked.

‘Who wants to know?’ he enquired, not recognising the voice. It was someone much older than himself, that much he knew but otherwise he was oblivious of the identity of the caller.