The Gemini Effect, page 12
So, glancing around a final time to make sure nobody was watching, she got up and left.
Left, knowing exactly where she was going.
And who she was going to ask for help.
He’d been delighted to see her, the same as last time.
“Inspector!” Marvin Hole said when she found him in the library that late afternoon. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
“Hello Marvin.”
“Actually, I prefer Vinny,” he told her with a big smile.
“Then I’m Deborah. I-I’m not really with the police anymore, you see.”
Vinny flapped a hand. “Oh, I know that. It’s just how Dad used to refer to you, and I sort of… But Deborah. Right, yes.” He was a bit like a puppy dog, Marvin – Vinny – she found, the more time she actually spent with him. Very friendly, extremely eager to please.
“I don’t want to interrupt your work,” she said, looking around her to see if anyone else was watching. They weren’t. “It’s just that you said, if I ever had the time…”
“The research. Yes, yes of course! Oh, don’t worry, I pretty much finished my cataloguing for the day this morning. They’re happy for me to take breaks down in the archive, as long as the work gets done.”
“Excellent, thanks Mar— Vinny.” It suited him more than his father’s name, and she soon found herself calling him that without even thinking about it.
“Okay, so follow me then.” He took her through the library, a route she recalled from last time, down a set of steps into the records section – flicking on the lights – to the archive that had been his father’s pride and joy. “Dad made quite a dent in it, scanning things in, and I’ve been doing my best to continue the good work, but there’s still so much to do. Hasn’t helped that this particular topic has been occupying my time of late.” He turned then and tapped his nose. “Our topic.” Vinny trudged on, taking her past dusty books on shelves and some open under glass. There were microfiche machines down here, a couple of photocopiers, but mostly it looked the same as she remembered. “It was down here, in these archives, that Dad uncovered most of the stuff about Norchester’s history. You know about the rituals and all that?”
Deborah shook her head. “Rituals?”
Vinny laughed. “Yeah, the reason why Norchester has more than its fair share of twin births. It’s not a fluke, didn’t happen by accident. Do you know you’re almost forty percent more likely to conceive twins here than anywhere else in the world? Even higher than the African country of Benin. They have nearly 28 twin births per one thousand.”
Deborah was beginning to see that she’d come to the right place. And it definitely explained a few things about her own sons. “You’re saying that has something to do with some old rituals?”
“Oh yeah, almost definitely. A lot of people dismiss that kind of thing as mumbo-jumbo, don’t they?”
“Most people,” she admitted. But not her. Not anymore.
“And the majority of people don’t even know about that side of Norchester’s past. There was a concerted effort in fact to wipe it from the history books by the Church, lumping it in with all that witchfinder nonsense from the seventeenth century. But it goes back much further than even they realised, almost to the beginnings of Norchester, when the place was just a tiny settlement. To a particular tribe who worshipped a god who was a twin himself, and who wore many faces – though never more than two at a time. A bit like the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, duality and doorways, Janus. Some say our fellow was the descendant of a man – as legend has it – who could absorb the power of other creatures. A man who once absorbed a wolf he came across in a cave when he was sheltering from the elements. The First Wolf, which gave him the ability to shapeshift. It’s where the notion of werewolves first came from, according to a few sources.”
Deborah let out a whistle. She wasn’t one for mythology and legend, just knew bits and bobs from her research as the original case was unfolding – derived from books she borrowed out of this very library; information about Castor and Pollux, especially. But even she had to admit this particular one was a doozy.
“Here, check it out.” Vinny scanned the shelves, snapping on a pair of latex gloves as he did so, the noise making Deborah jump. He mouthed an apology, then reached down one particular leather-bound volume with patterns on the outside. It looked like the one that called up demons in the movie with the chainsaw-handed guy. He placed it on a special foam cushion resting on a nearby table, then pulled a light cord to switch the bulb over. Everything went red, like a darkroom, and he carefully opened the book. Using tweezers, Vinny turned the pages as Deborah watched, fascinated, over his shoulder. She couldn’t understand the writing, but the pictures told this particular story for her.
One showed a group of robed figures, hooded figures, dancing around a fire, holding hands. Another depicted a priest of some kind, with a chain around his neck, a symbol dangling from it – two horizontal parallel lines joined by two vertical ones, the sign of the Gemini – drawing a knife across the palm of his hand. Yet another showed symbols on the ground, patterns not unlike the ones on the bound book, while a further one displayed an altar with two identical people on it, that same priest with the Gemini chain standing above them – wearing a rudimentary mask now with two faces – about to plunge a dagger into their hearts.
“They did all of this on what they called sacred ground, in one particular location. Nobody really knows the exact place. Dad and I were trying to find it for years. The real power was in the sacrifices, as you can see. Sometimes they even killed members of their own family, the ultimate offering. Ah, here, this is why.”
The final image Vinny stopped on was a representation of the god he’d been talking about. Huge, muscular, and naked. The artist had drawn faces on the skin, all over that body from the neck downwards. Screaming faces; trapped faces. She had a flash of something, a memory – memories she’d pushed down, buried – and had to look away.
Burning, blackened flesh. Then that same skin healing, faces underneath, constantly shifting, in a perpetual state of flux. Two sets of eyes opening, two lots of teeth shining white as this person grinned.
“Oh yes. Now you understand. I am The Gemini… I am The Gemini!”
Deborah felt woozy, her vision swirling. She staggered backwards, head pounding once again.
Past and present, starting to blur.
Running into each other.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Oh, hey, are you all right?” asked Vinny, realising what was happening.
Deborah couldn’t answer, couldn’t even speak.
He reached for her, steadying her. “I think we should get you sat down,” he said. “Do you need water or anything?”
Deborah gazed at him, then gave a half-nod. Vinny led her away from the book, a bit further down the corridor.
“I’ve got water in my office.” He tittered. “I call it my office, it’s basically a broom cupboard they let me use down here.” Keeping hold of her to make sure she didn’t keel over, he unlocked a door and led them inside, snapping on another – much brighter – light.
In this small room there were a couple of computers on a wooden desk, a huge scanner next to them; clearly where he digitised the old texts. An office chair was pushed under the desk, but there was another cushioned one behind it which Vinny led Deborah towards and lowered her onto. He rushed off to the side where there was a mini-fridge, which he opened and took out a bottle of water. Vinny proffered it to her. “Here you go.”
Deborah took it gratefully, digging around in her handbag for her painkillers – knocking a couple back with the water, and ignoring the fact Vinny was watching her. “I’m… I’m okay,” she told him.
He nodded. “Oh, I have coffee, tea? Would you like—”
“Tea would be lovely,” she replied, then watched as he bent into the fridge and took out a half-empty milk bottle, opening the top and sniffing it before pulling a face. “Black’s fine,” she told Vinny and he gave a relieved smile.
As he went over to another table and turned on the kettle – Deborah couldn’t see a sink in here, so she assumed he used the bottled water when he wanted a brew – she looked around her. The dull thumping in her skull was dying down a little, allowing her to focus on the walls and what was plastered to every spare inch of them.
She noticed the newspaper clippings first, recognised some of them, yellowing with age: headlines like ‘POLICE NO FURTHER WITH MURDER CASE’ and ‘FAGIN ROW DEATH, POLICE BAFFLED.’ But later ones as well: ‘CANAL VICTIM IDENTIFIED AS HALEY ARCHER’, ‘TWINKLE STRIKES AGAIN, CITY LIVING IN FEAR’.
It did nothing to take her mind off what she’d seen out there, the flashbacks to those underground cells – the culmination of that particular murder spree – coming back sharper and sharper. There were photos on Vinny’s walls too: of Mason; of her. Some from the papers, same as those reports, but one she recognised from when she’d spoken to the media for the first time about the case outside that old factory on Fagin’s Row. Some kind of screenshot from the news reports.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking.” Vinny was suddenly beside her and she started, but then he gave her the tea in a nondescript white mug with a chip in it.
“T-Thank you. Ah, what am I thinking?”
Vinny chuckled. “Conspiracy Theory, right? Mel Gibson.” Him and Rosy’s old movie-obsessed assistant Eugene would make a good pair, thought Deborah.
“Can’t say I’ve ever seen it,” she confessed.
He giggled again. “I told you it was a bit of an obsession for Dad, and I’ve kind of picked up the pieces. It was more than any other members of our family were willing to do. I wanted to do him proud, y’know?”
Deborah nodded.
Vinny walked around in front of her, folding his arms. “What happened back there, if you don’t mind me asking, Deborah?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then simply shook her head. “I-I don’t know,” she lied.
“Something to do with that image? You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this, Vinny.” It was one of the reasons she’d bailed the first time, but then Deborah remembered why she was here. She needed help, and the SCI were cutting her out again. She sighed. “Okay, yeah. Things are a bit hazy still about what happened at the end of everything. But you’re right, that did spark something.”
Vinny nodded firmly. “I thought so. The Geminites used to—”
“Wait, hold on a second. The what? The Geminites?”
“It’s what they came to be called. Followers, worshippers of The Gemini.”
“Worshippers… Holy shit,” she breathed.
“Those were some of the rituals in that book they used to try and consecrate this ground, the settlement that eventually became Norchester.”
“Consecrate. You make it sound like a religious thing.”
“It was, to them. Holy shit indeed.” He giggled again at that, then said more seriously, “They were paving the way eventually for his return.”
“Like… like Jesus, you mean.”
“I guess. There are certain parallels.”
There were no bloody parallels as far as Deborah was concerned. But she could see what he was getting at, people still thought that the Saviour would come back eventually. These nutters just believed that would be in the form of The Gemini. “So, let me get this straight. They were performing these bizarre rites, sacrificing people—”
“Sacrificing twins, to be specific,” Vinny broke in.
“Right, yeah. It was in the picture. Twins. To make sure that if you conceived in Norchester you had more chance of giving birth to a twin yourself?”
“That’s about the size of it. In the hopes that someday the one, true Gemini would rise, and then he’d have a fertile hunting ground.”
“Hunting ground? Dear God.” Deborah took a sip of the tea, which was more than a little brackish. “But Maxwell Craine was killing people – killing twins – all over the place. They still haven’t located half of his victims.”
“Maxwell Craine wasn’t his real name. He was adopted, taken away from this place when he was only a baby.”
“While…” She refused to say the name. “While his brother grew up here.”
“Adopted by the Masons,” Vinny confirmed. “You should read his diary sometime. The Gemini’s, I mean. It’s fascinating!”
“You’ve got—”
He nodded. “I’ve been doing a bit of research into the family line, which you can trace right back to the beginning of all this activity in Norchester centuries ago.”
“You’ve been… hellfire, this is all…”
Vinny pulled out the chair at the desk and moved the mouse to bring his computer to life. He typed in a password, then started bringing up folders. “Here, look. Their mother was only a teenager, fifteen, sixteen, when she was violently raped. Gina Carlyle her name was.”
“Raped?” So the Gemini twins were conceived in violence, thought Deborah. It certainly explained a lot. And their mother was only a little older than Izzy… Dear Lord.
“Yeah. You can’t really blame her for giving up her kids. Whether or not they intended to send the Alpha so far away, I don’t know. Maybe not. He found his way home again, anyway. But the whole thing was arranged, orchestrated. From beginning to end,” Vinny continued. “By the Geminites. She was murdered not long after the adoptions went through. They were getting rid of loose ends, I suppose.”
Deborah put down her tea. “Loose ends? Who else knows about all this?”
“Not many people. Took us a while to dig it all out, but there are places on the dark web where you can—”
“Do the authorities know?” Deborah rose, rubbing her head. Trying to stop the thumping from coming back.
“You mean the SCI?” Vinny asked.
“You know about them?”
He gave another shrill laugh. “Oh yeah, ’course. How they tried to stop the X killer is a classic. Charles Mansfield and all that.”
“The X…” Deborah walked around in the small space. “But do they know about all this? How much do they know?”
“I’m not sure,” Vinny admitted. “Probably not as much as me and Dad, I have to say. Especially if they asked you to come back to fill in the blanks.” He spun the chair around. “I mean, that’s why you’re here, right Deborah?”
She stopped in her tracks. “What?”
“Why you came all this way, from the coast. From Armitage Bay? Leaving Wendy, Izzy, Jack and James behind?” He stated it all simply, like it was common knowledge. “It’s happening again.”
Her mouth fell open.
“They’re not the only ones happy to see you, though,” Vinny went on. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Deborah’s head was beginning to spin again. “Wha—” Something in that water, that awful-tasting tea? It was then she realised where her jaunt in that small space had taken her. To a curtain. A partially pulled curtain. Something was poking out from behind it; she didn’t want to see, but needed to at the same time.
Reaching out, she grabbed it, yanked it back.
Behind there was a dummy, a mannequin. The kind you might find in any shop window, the kind she’d seen walking around the shops the other day, before she ended up here. Before she’d even met Marvin Hole’s son. But on this one was a suit, dark clothing. Pitch-black. It was a bit like the outfit a cat-burglar might wear, designed so that they could sneak about. On its hip was a tool belt, with compartments: the sort Batman might favour. The mannequin itself was wearing a mask, which reminded Deborah of something.
Reminded her of the mask Anton Craine had once worn when he was pretending to be The Gemini to throw them off the scent. Two masks stitched crudely together, to give the effect of two faces. Just like the priest had been wearing in that picture when he was murdering the twins.
And hanging on the wall right alongside all this was It. The It. His weapon, the dual-pronged fork. The same weapon that had ended so many lives, before and after she came along. Stolen, presumably along with his remains. Along with all this other crap.
Stolen by Vinny – or someone working with him?
“Shit,” she breathed. “Shit…”
“Deborah.” He was standing now, behind her. She didn’t have long. And didn’t have much of the element of surprise left.
She threw herself backwards, hitting him, unbalancing him. Shoving him sideways, and making for the door – which she hoped he hadn’t locked again behind them. She’d assumed this place was locked up because of all the research, the Conspiracy Theory material that would make his colleagues think twice about him. But it was actually locked because this was his lair, his underground lair – same as the cells were for the original Gemini.
The copycat. Whether he was for real or not, whether he was… like The Gemini – probably not if he needed a mask – didn’t matter.
He was dangerous. And she was down here alone with him.
Deborah tugged on the door handle.
It didn’t budge.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Deborah!”
She heard him call out to her from behind, righting himself. He’d be on her in moments. She tried the handle again, the sweat on her hands making it hard to grasp. It shifted, finally, and she flung the door open, flung herself out through the gap.
“Deborah! Deborah, wait! Come back!”
Fuck that, she thought, shaking her head to clear it. Trying to shake loose whatever drugs he’d given her. Running, stumbling. Almost falling to the floor.
Red. That’s all she could see. Redness, like Hell. Like—
The blood, so much blood. It had been at all the crime scenes where the twins had been killed – murdered by The Gemini. Dead now himself, but with pretenders to the throne.
The man ‘pretending’ to be Marvin Hole.
Pretending to be so much more besides.
She was down here in Hell, with him. The killer they’d been trying to catch this time. Fulfilling her promise to Patricia Bailey, regardless of the cost to her own family’s lives.
Left, knowing exactly where she was going.
And who she was going to ask for help.
He’d been delighted to see her, the same as last time.
“Inspector!” Marvin Hole said when she found him in the library that late afternoon. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
“Hello Marvin.”
“Actually, I prefer Vinny,” he told her with a big smile.
“Then I’m Deborah. I-I’m not really with the police anymore, you see.”
Vinny flapped a hand. “Oh, I know that. It’s just how Dad used to refer to you, and I sort of… But Deborah. Right, yes.” He was a bit like a puppy dog, Marvin – Vinny – she found, the more time she actually spent with him. Very friendly, extremely eager to please.
“I don’t want to interrupt your work,” she said, looking around her to see if anyone else was watching. They weren’t. “It’s just that you said, if I ever had the time…”
“The research. Yes, yes of course! Oh, don’t worry, I pretty much finished my cataloguing for the day this morning. They’re happy for me to take breaks down in the archive, as long as the work gets done.”
“Excellent, thanks Mar— Vinny.” It suited him more than his father’s name, and she soon found herself calling him that without even thinking about it.
“Okay, so follow me then.” He took her through the library, a route she recalled from last time, down a set of steps into the records section – flicking on the lights – to the archive that had been his father’s pride and joy. “Dad made quite a dent in it, scanning things in, and I’ve been doing my best to continue the good work, but there’s still so much to do. Hasn’t helped that this particular topic has been occupying my time of late.” He turned then and tapped his nose. “Our topic.” Vinny trudged on, taking her past dusty books on shelves and some open under glass. There were microfiche machines down here, a couple of photocopiers, but mostly it looked the same as she remembered. “It was down here, in these archives, that Dad uncovered most of the stuff about Norchester’s history. You know about the rituals and all that?”
Deborah shook her head. “Rituals?”
Vinny laughed. “Yeah, the reason why Norchester has more than its fair share of twin births. It’s not a fluke, didn’t happen by accident. Do you know you’re almost forty percent more likely to conceive twins here than anywhere else in the world? Even higher than the African country of Benin. They have nearly 28 twin births per one thousand.”
Deborah was beginning to see that she’d come to the right place. And it definitely explained a few things about her own sons. “You’re saying that has something to do with some old rituals?”
“Oh yeah, almost definitely. A lot of people dismiss that kind of thing as mumbo-jumbo, don’t they?”
“Most people,” she admitted. But not her. Not anymore.
“And the majority of people don’t even know about that side of Norchester’s past. There was a concerted effort in fact to wipe it from the history books by the Church, lumping it in with all that witchfinder nonsense from the seventeenth century. But it goes back much further than even they realised, almost to the beginnings of Norchester, when the place was just a tiny settlement. To a particular tribe who worshipped a god who was a twin himself, and who wore many faces – though never more than two at a time. A bit like the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, duality and doorways, Janus. Some say our fellow was the descendant of a man – as legend has it – who could absorb the power of other creatures. A man who once absorbed a wolf he came across in a cave when he was sheltering from the elements. The First Wolf, which gave him the ability to shapeshift. It’s where the notion of werewolves first came from, according to a few sources.”
Deborah let out a whistle. She wasn’t one for mythology and legend, just knew bits and bobs from her research as the original case was unfolding – derived from books she borrowed out of this very library; information about Castor and Pollux, especially. But even she had to admit this particular one was a doozy.
“Here, check it out.” Vinny scanned the shelves, snapping on a pair of latex gloves as he did so, the noise making Deborah jump. He mouthed an apology, then reached down one particular leather-bound volume with patterns on the outside. It looked like the one that called up demons in the movie with the chainsaw-handed guy. He placed it on a special foam cushion resting on a nearby table, then pulled a light cord to switch the bulb over. Everything went red, like a darkroom, and he carefully opened the book. Using tweezers, Vinny turned the pages as Deborah watched, fascinated, over his shoulder. She couldn’t understand the writing, but the pictures told this particular story for her.
One showed a group of robed figures, hooded figures, dancing around a fire, holding hands. Another depicted a priest of some kind, with a chain around his neck, a symbol dangling from it – two horizontal parallel lines joined by two vertical ones, the sign of the Gemini – drawing a knife across the palm of his hand. Yet another showed symbols on the ground, patterns not unlike the ones on the bound book, while a further one displayed an altar with two identical people on it, that same priest with the Gemini chain standing above them – wearing a rudimentary mask now with two faces – about to plunge a dagger into their hearts.
“They did all of this on what they called sacred ground, in one particular location. Nobody really knows the exact place. Dad and I were trying to find it for years. The real power was in the sacrifices, as you can see. Sometimes they even killed members of their own family, the ultimate offering. Ah, here, this is why.”
The final image Vinny stopped on was a representation of the god he’d been talking about. Huge, muscular, and naked. The artist had drawn faces on the skin, all over that body from the neck downwards. Screaming faces; trapped faces. She had a flash of something, a memory – memories she’d pushed down, buried – and had to look away.
Burning, blackened flesh. Then that same skin healing, faces underneath, constantly shifting, in a perpetual state of flux. Two sets of eyes opening, two lots of teeth shining white as this person grinned.
“Oh yes. Now you understand. I am The Gemini… I am The Gemini!”
Deborah felt woozy, her vision swirling. She staggered backwards, head pounding once again.
Past and present, starting to blur.
Running into each other.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Oh, hey, are you all right?” asked Vinny, realising what was happening.
Deborah couldn’t answer, couldn’t even speak.
He reached for her, steadying her. “I think we should get you sat down,” he said. “Do you need water or anything?”
Deborah gazed at him, then gave a half-nod. Vinny led her away from the book, a bit further down the corridor.
“I’ve got water in my office.” He tittered. “I call it my office, it’s basically a broom cupboard they let me use down here.” Keeping hold of her to make sure she didn’t keel over, he unlocked a door and led them inside, snapping on another – much brighter – light.
In this small room there were a couple of computers on a wooden desk, a huge scanner next to them; clearly where he digitised the old texts. An office chair was pushed under the desk, but there was another cushioned one behind it which Vinny led Deborah towards and lowered her onto. He rushed off to the side where there was a mini-fridge, which he opened and took out a bottle of water. Vinny proffered it to her. “Here you go.”
Deborah took it gratefully, digging around in her handbag for her painkillers – knocking a couple back with the water, and ignoring the fact Vinny was watching her. “I’m… I’m okay,” she told him.
He nodded. “Oh, I have coffee, tea? Would you like—”
“Tea would be lovely,” she replied, then watched as he bent into the fridge and took out a half-empty milk bottle, opening the top and sniffing it before pulling a face. “Black’s fine,” she told Vinny and he gave a relieved smile.
As he went over to another table and turned on the kettle – Deborah couldn’t see a sink in here, so she assumed he used the bottled water when he wanted a brew – she looked around her. The dull thumping in her skull was dying down a little, allowing her to focus on the walls and what was plastered to every spare inch of them.
She noticed the newspaper clippings first, recognised some of them, yellowing with age: headlines like ‘POLICE NO FURTHER WITH MURDER CASE’ and ‘FAGIN ROW DEATH, POLICE BAFFLED.’ But later ones as well: ‘CANAL VICTIM IDENTIFIED AS HALEY ARCHER’, ‘TWINKLE STRIKES AGAIN, CITY LIVING IN FEAR’.
It did nothing to take her mind off what she’d seen out there, the flashbacks to those underground cells – the culmination of that particular murder spree – coming back sharper and sharper. There were photos on Vinny’s walls too: of Mason; of her. Some from the papers, same as those reports, but one she recognised from when she’d spoken to the media for the first time about the case outside that old factory on Fagin’s Row. Some kind of screenshot from the news reports.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking.” Vinny was suddenly beside her and she started, but then he gave her the tea in a nondescript white mug with a chip in it.
“T-Thank you. Ah, what am I thinking?”
Vinny chuckled. “Conspiracy Theory, right? Mel Gibson.” Him and Rosy’s old movie-obsessed assistant Eugene would make a good pair, thought Deborah.
“Can’t say I’ve ever seen it,” she confessed.
He giggled again. “I told you it was a bit of an obsession for Dad, and I’ve kind of picked up the pieces. It was more than any other members of our family were willing to do. I wanted to do him proud, y’know?”
Deborah nodded.
Vinny walked around in front of her, folding his arms. “What happened back there, if you don’t mind me asking, Deborah?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then simply shook her head. “I-I don’t know,” she lied.
“Something to do with that image? You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this, Vinny.” It was one of the reasons she’d bailed the first time, but then Deborah remembered why she was here. She needed help, and the SCI were cutting her out again. She sighed. “Okay, yeah. Things are a bit hazy still about what happened at the end of everything. But you’re right, that did spark something.”
Vinny nodded firmly. “I thought so. The Geminites used to—”
“Wait, hold on a second. The what? The Geminites?”
“It’s what they came to be called. Followers, worshippers of The Gemini.”
“Worshippers… Holy shit,” she breathed.
“Those were some of the rituals in that book they used to try and consecrate this ground, the settlement that eventually became Norchester.”
“Consecrate. You make it sound like a religious thing.”
“It was, to them. Holy shit indeed.” He giggled again at that, then said more seriously, “They were paving the way eventually for his return.”
“Like… like Jesus, you mean.”
“I guess. There are certain parallels.”
There were no bloody parallels as far as Deborah was concerned. But she could see what he was getting at, people still thought that the Saviour would come back eventually. These nutters just believed that would be in the form of The Gemini. “So, let me get this straight. They were performing these bizarre rites, sacrificing people—”
“Sacrificing twins, to be specific,” Vinny broke in.
“Right, yeah. It was in the picture. Twins. To make sure that if you conceived in Norchester you had more chance of giving birth to a twin yourself?”
“That’s about the size of it. In the hopes that someday the one, true Gemini would rise, and then he’d have a fertile hunting ground.”
“Hunting ground? Dear God.” Deborah took a sip of the tea, which was more than a little brackish. “But Maxwell Craine was killing people – killing twins – all over the place. They still haven’t located half of his victims.”
“Maxwell Craine wasn’t his real name. He was adopted, taken away from this place when he was only a baby.”
“While…” She refused to say the name. “While his brother grew up here.”
“Adopted by the Masons,” Vinny confirmed. “You should read his diary sometime. The Gemini’s, I mean. It’s fascinating!”
“You’ve got—”
He nodded. “I’ve been doing a bit of research into the family line, which you can trace right back to the beginning of all this activity in Norchester centuries ago.”
“You’ve been… hellfire, this is all…”
Vinny pulled out the chair at the desk and moved the mouse to bring his computer to life. He typed in a password, then started bringing up folders. “Here, look. Their mother was only a teenager, fifteen, sixteen, when she was violently raped. Gina Carlyle her name was.”
“Raped?” So the Gemini twins were conceived in violence, thought Deborah. It certainly explained a lot. And their mother was only a little older than Izzy… Dear Lord.
“Yeah. You can’t really blame her for giving up her kids. Whether or not they intended to send the Alpha so far away, I don’t know. Maybe not. He found his way home again, anyway. But the whole thing was arranged, orchestrated. From beginning to end,” Vinny continued. “By the Geminites. She was murdered not long after the adoptions went through. They were getting rid of loose ends, I suppose.”
Deborah put down her tea. “Loose ends? Who else knows about all this?”
“Not many people. Took us a while to dig it all out, but there are places on the dark web where you can—”
“Do the authorities know?” Deborah rose, rubbing her head. Trying to stop the thumping from coming back.
“You mean the SCI?” Vinny asked.
“You know about them?”
He gave another shrill laugh. “Oh yeah, ’course. How they tried to stop the X killer is a classic. Charles Mansfield and all that.”
“The X…” Deborah walked around in the small space. “But do they know about all this? How much do they know?”
“I’m not sure,” Vinny admitted. “Probably not as much as me and Dad, I have to say. Especially if they asked you to come back to fill in the blanks.” He spun the chair around. “I mean, that’s why you’re here, right Deborah?”
She stopped in her tracks. “What?”
“Why you came all this way, from the coast. From Armitage Bay? Leaving Wendy, Izzy, Jack and James behind?” He stated it all simply, like it was common knowledge. “It’s happening again.”
Her mouth fell open.
“They’re not the only ones happy to see you, though,” Vinny went on. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Deborah’s head was beginning to spin again. “Wha—” Something in that water, that awful-tasting tea? It was then she realised where her jaunt in that small space had taken her. To a curtain. A partially pulled curtain. Something was poking out from behind it; she didn’t want to see, but needed to at the same time.
Reaching out, she grabbed it, yanked it back.
Behind there was a dummy, a mannequin. The kind you might find in any shop window, the kind she’d seen walking around the shops the other day, before she ended up here. Before she’d even met Marvin Hole’s son. But on this one was a suit, dark clothing. Pitch-black. It was a bit like the outfit a cat-burglar might wear, designed so that they could sneak about. On its hip was a tool belt, with compartments: the sort Batman might favour. The mannequin itself was wearing a mask, which reminded Deborah of something.
Reminded her of the mask Anton Craine had once worn when he was pretending to be The Gemini to throw them off the scent. Two masks stitched crudely together, to give the effect of two faces. Just like the priest had been wearing in that picture when he was murdering the twins.
And hanging on the wall right alongside all this was It. The It. His weapon, the dual-pronged fork. The same weapon that had ended so many lives, before and after she came along. Stolen, presumably along with his remains. Along with all this other crap.
Stolen by Vinny – or someone working with him?
“Shit,” she breathed. “Shit…”
“Deborah.” He was standing now, behind her. She didn’t have long. And didn’t have much of the element of surprise left.
She threw herself backwards, hitting him, unbalancing him. Shoving him sideways, and making for the door – which she hoped he hadn’t locked again behind them. She’d assumed this place was locked up because of all the research, the Conspiracy Theory material that would make his colleagues think twice about him. But it was actually locked because this was his lair, his underground lair – same as the cells were for the original Gemini.
The copycat. Whether he was for real or not, whether he was… like The Gemini – probably not if he needed a mask – didn’t matter.
He was dangerous. And she was down here alone with him.
Deborah tugged on the door handle.
It didn’t budge.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Deborah!”
She heard him call out to her from behind, righting himself. He’d be on her in moments. She tried the handle again, the sweat on her hands making it hard to grasp. It shifted, finally, and she flung the door open, flung herself out through the gap.
“Deborah! Deborah, wait! Come back!”
Fuck that, she thought, shaking her head to clear it. Trying to shake loose whatever drugs he’d given her. Running, stumbling. Almost falling to the floor.
Red. That’s all she could see. Redness, like Hell. Like—
The blood, so much blood. It had been at all the crime scenes where the twins had been killed – murdered by The Gemini. Dead now himself, but with pretenders to the throne.
The man ‘pretending’ to be Marvin Hole.
Pretending to be so much more besides.
She was down here in Hell, with him. The killer they’d been trying to catch this time. Fulfilling her promise to Patricia Bailey, regardless of the cost to her own family’s lives.
