The Demons Beneath, page 17
‘Please tell me it’s fake, Patrick. It’s so bloody creepy. I can’t bear to think about that being real.’
‘We passed this thing through every test we have, looking for anything odd at all. I’m not going to lie, we struggled.’
‘Shit, what does that mean?’ Amelia burst out.
‘It means that we don’t really know. Logic and reason tell us it has to be fake. The things that are shown in the video are preposterous, not possible in real life. That said, we couldn’t find anything to prove that it was staged either. It seems likely that it was done with … I don’t know … practical effects. People behind the scenes pulling the strings, probably literally, but still…’ His voice petered out.
‘Fuck, Patrick, I need evidence against them, not more things to cast doubt over the case. We don’t have anything that can pin Delamar and Spindler to the murder, beyond the fact that they were there at the time.’
She was exasperated. How on earth did everything they have seem to point to the supernatural being more real than fake?
‘Do we know who the people in the video are, at least? Can we track them down and talk to them?’
‘Unfortunately not. We don’t know who apparently conducted this exorcism, and the woman in the video, Margaret Johnson, died in the late 1970s of liver failure.’
‘So that’s it?’ Amelia asked, defeated, unable to hide her disappointment. She reached out and broke off a piece of the Dairy Milk bar open in its wrapper on Patrick’s desk. He frowned but didn’t say anything, and she gave him a ‘thank you’ shoulder hunch as she chewed.
‘Well, no, hence why I was waiting for you. I know you wanted an answer about the video, so that was partially it, but Detective Inspector Graves asked me to look into two calls that he and Palmer received in the early hours of this morning.’
‘What calls?’ Amelia asked suspiciously, taking another piece of chocolate without thinking. Patrick pushed the whole bar over to her and she took it without hesitation. She needed the sugar. She had not heard anything about any weird calls, and her mind flashed back to Daniel snapping earlier.
‘They both got a call at around three in the morning, from unknown numbers. I don’t know what the calls concerned, but they were adamant that I find out where they came from – I think because they may relate to this case, somehow. Anyway, Porter and I did some digging, went through the records and such. The calls came from burner phones.’
‘Does that mean we can’t trace them?’
‘A mere burner phone can’t stop me, Amelia. We got the numbers – that wasn’t hard, but it also wasn’t helpful. What may prove handy is that the calls came from two different phones, both bought at the same time from the same store, and they are very likely the same model too. The shop is in Brent Cross shopping centre.’
He gave her the name of the shop.
‘And it will have CCTV!’ Amelia said a bit too loudly. A few heads turned to her. ‘Patrick, I could kiss you! Okay, I’ve got to go, thank you.’ She flew out of her seat, newly energised, but kept hold of the Dairy Milk as she headed to find Daniel.
He barrelled into the warehouse and pulled the heavy metal door closed. Stefan Coen took a deep breath and fell back against the wall, his lungs burning and his calf muscles on fire. He hadn’t stopped running for over an hour in his attempt to get the hell away from the police. The panic that had flooded through him when they had turned up on his doorstep had been like a fire under him, and instinct had taken over.
A lot of people were after Stefan Coen. He didn’t know how it happened, but everything seemed to be snowballing. He’d always been in trouble, that was nothing new, but charm and luck had, time and again, pulled him through. He knew how to play people, was highly adept at getting what he wanted and worming his way out of tricky situations. At least, he used to be. The past few months had signalled a worrying turn in his fortunes.
If anyone asked Stefan when the turning point was, he’d have struggled to pinpoint an exact moment, but one name had certainly become a painful thorn in his side. Glint. He found it laughable that no one had cottoned on to who Glint was. That fucking smug prick Marvin Summers was so obvious – at least, Stefan thought so. The guy was always going on about how he idolised Glint’s work and his style, how he envied the riches Glint had won from all that mystery bullshit.
But when had Stefan’s lightbulb moment been? Marvin had been more than simply pissed off when an arts and culture journal had shredded the enigmatic Glint, criticising the ‘wizard behind the green curtain’ effect. The journal had lambasted Glint as a cheap, tacky facade to make up for less than stellar tattoo work. Not six weeks after Stefan witnessed Marvin having an apocalyptic blowout at the audacity of the writer, Glint was mysteriously ‘killed off’ at a convention. Stefan wouldn’t have been surprised if Marvin had started the fire himself.
At first he didn’t care. He had never rated either Marvin or Glint. But then Marvin started going on about the money that he had apparently inherited, all the plans he had. Stefan owed big money to more than one person – and he saw an opportunity. He’d been plotting the best approach to bribe Marvin, threatening to reveal him and Glint as a sham and score a payoff in the process.
It was supposed to have gone smoothly. He’d planned to confront Marvin at his house, maybe giving him a light roughing-up. Stefan had dealt with the sort before. Marvin was a gentrified idiot and Stefan knew he would be a pushover. He’d give Stefan a wad of cash and tell him to beat it. Maybe Stefan would even be able to get a few more thousand if he threatened Marvin again. The royalties alone that Marvin was getting would ensure he wouldn’t want the truth coming out. But that was not how things had panned out. They had fought, things had been broken, Marvin had literally kicked Stefan backwards across his sitting room. Stefan had pulled out a gun, not even thinking about what he was doing, with no intention of shooting Marvin, but the gun had gone off. The bullet had gone wide but Marvin had charged, almost knocking Stefan out, dragging him out of his house. By the time Stefan’s vision had cleared, Marvin was on his bike, no doubt heading for the nearest police station. Stefan had given chase. He couldn’t go back to prison; Marvin had to be stopped.
The rest had been a daze. He didn’t even think he had clipped Marvin’s bike, but the ensuing crash was proof enough. As life had taught him to do, Stefan had fled, ditching the battered truck near a scrapyard. He had been on the run ever since. He had no money to pay off the heavies, was terrified of being found out by the police. And then shit, suddenly people he knew were being murdered.
When the detectives had turned up in Mile End, that familiar panic had set in, taking over Stefan so much, he’d felt like he was possessed. He knew the charges for manslaughter; there was no charming his way out of that. When the second detective inspector had appeared from nowhere, blocking his escape route, he’d done the only thing he could think of. He pulled the trigger and ran.
He caught his breath as he made his way across the warehouse, past the makeshift chairs and shredded old sofa. The place was a dump but it did the job well – a safe hideout in a place no one would ever bother looking. There were loads of empty units in Deptford and he’d taken one that no one seemed to own. Barely anyone knew about it; he’d had a few hook-ups there with half-blitzed junkie girls, but they didn’t count.
After playing around with a socket point in the warehouse Stefan had managed to get electricity in a few places, effectively stealing it from a neighbouring unit. He’d bought a cheap-ass mini-fridge off Gumtree and – bada-bing, bada-boom – chilled drinks. He retrieved a can of Carling and slumped on the sofa, shuffling over to avoid a spring busting through the fabric. After a few swigs and another few deep breaths he started to relax and plot his next move. Hiding out for a while was an option. He’d only attempted to kit out one room of the warehouse but it had a small working bathroom left behind from whatever it had been before, and two rooms up a metal staircase that had presumably been offices or something similar. A couple of empty files and old receipts were all that remained. It was hardly cosy, but it would do for a while.
Stefan closed his eyes for a moment, savouring the cold beer, then he heard footsteps.
‘You’re a hard person to find, Stefan Coen,’ came a voice from behind him. He spun around. Beer sprayed out across the back of the sofa when he registered the glinting machete in the intruder’s grip.
Chapter Nineteen
Constable Alan Mitchum felt like the dogsbody of the department. Whenever someone had a job they weren’t interested in doing, they called good old reliable Alan – and for some reason he always said yes. This was partly because confrontation made him nervous. His mother had been prone to tantrums that could last for days, and he had grown into an adult who had an almost pathological need to please. Then there was the fact that he had no real aspirations in life; he had a tendency to coast.
Alan had never really known what he wanted to do. He had floated through secondary school with average marks across the board but no real aptitude for anything, and this had led to similar in his work life. His problem was, he got bored easily, couldn’t focus on anything for long, yet he had little idea of what would keep his attention. An online employability test his mother had forced him to take had suggested that he needed some structure when it came to a job: a career with specific, achievable goals. He had joined the police force with only average interest. He was as surprised as anyone to find he enjoyed it, that it was a profession that engaged him. Six years on, however, he had made barely a whisper of progression, and he suspected this was why people gave him the important, but straightforward, jobs they didn’t have time for. A number of colleagues and superiors had mentioned his lack of ambition. Sometimes this didn’t bother him. Today, however, he had been rushing from pillar to post doing nothing of great importance – in his opinion. He had been in his car for most of the day, only stopping for a late lunch consisting of a beef burrito and a sugar-free Pepsi. He was swiping left and right on Tinder as he ate, relishing the break, when the call came in. He had to go and check on some woman, apparently to make sure she and her family were okay, then sit outside her house until his shift was over, when another officer would take up the duty. That seemed easy enough.
After scoffing his food he made his way to the address in Haringey, drifting through the afternoon traffic for what felt like an eternity. He hated driving in the city – was not a fan of driving at all, in fact – but he made it to Green Lanes unscathed.
Alan was used to doing house visits. In fact, he had done two already that morning. As he approached the front door of this house, though, he felt that something was off. Not sure what it was, he pressed the doorbell and waited. Nothing happened. No one answered, and he could hear no movement inside. He knocked on the door, which opened slightly.
‘Goddammit,’ he muttered. He had a sixth sense for things being out of place, not quite right. The door being open backed up his gut instinct that something was wrong. The woman was supposed to be home, that was what he had been told. There was supposed to be a kid too. He pulled his radio off his shoulder and buzzed in.
‘Natasha? This is Mitchum, I’m at the place and there’s no one here. Front door’s unlocked too. You sure they’re supposed to be in?’ He was hoping Natasha would say there was a mistake. He didn’t want to have to go into the house, at least not by himself. Front doors left open in London was never a good sign.
‘One second, let me check.’
Alan took a step back onto the pavement as he listened to the tapping of a keyboard on the other end of the call. The house seemed totally still. It unnerved him.
‘Hey, Alan – yep, she’s supposed to be home. She was called a couple of hours ago, according to the log, told that someone would be round. If the door has been left open, there’s a good chance something is wrong,’ Natasha said, her voice lowering. ‘She’s involved in a potential serial murder case. I take it you haven’t gone in there? Do you need me to call for assistance?’
Alan thought about that for a moment. Half of him wanted to wait, but it dawned on him that could be an opportunity to prove that he was more than a dogsbody. Wasn’t it about time he seized such a moment?
‘No, it’s okay, I’m pretty sure the place is empty. Stay on the line, though, okay?’ Holding his radio in his left hand, he stepped back up to the house and pushed the front door with his right. ‘Hello? Anyone home? This is Police Constable Mitchum, I believe you were expecting me.’
‘Anything?’ Natasha asked.
‘Nope. Hello?’ he called again, leaning in through the door. He waited a few more seconds before stepping over the threshold and into the house.
‘There’s no one home, Natasha, and I think we need to call this in. The house has been turned over. Someone must have come looking for Cassandra Salinas, and recently.’
The words hit Daniel like spears to the chest. He struggled to form a response, his mind racing to make sense of it.
‘I don’t … I don’t understand. How can this be? How is it possible? Are we seriously just going to let this happen?’ He sagged against the wall of Superintendent Peter Hobbs’ office, the cold of the concrete seeping through his shirt. The man looked pained, not relishing delivering the bad news.
‘I just spoke to them. They were just here, for Christ’s sake, in the building! We had them!’ Daniel raged, his voice louder than he knew was professional, but out of his control. He simply couldn’t believe what he was being told.
‘Except we didn’t, Graves, that’s the whole problem. I know how hard you’ve been working to connect them to the death at the Morris household, but there’s simply no presentable evidence. It’s all speculative. We can’t charge people with murder based on opinion.’
‘Oh, come on, you can’t possibly believe they’re innocent. Are you going to tell me a demon did it after all? The veil between this world and hell opened up and out popped one of Satan’s minions to unleash death on an innocent family?’ Daniel threw back.
‘Please don’t take that tone, Detective. You know as well as anyone that it doesn’t matter what you or I think. It’s the evidence that needs to speak volumes and I’m sorry, but you just don’t have enough on Delamar or Spindler. And now that missing girl Mary Ross has turned up, safe and sound after having thrown a tantrum and run away, there was no way I could convince the CPS to be swayed.’
‘Swayed on what, exactly? It’s not like I’m asking to arrest them, but we need more time. I know they did it; I just need the smoking gun.’
‘Swayed on that, exactly that. Time. With the press harassment that Delamar and Spindler are being subjected to, the libel printed in the national press, and the fact that we’re being pushed to make statements about the case – how could we be seen to be trying to hold people as suspects who have no more than a circumstantial connection to the death? You know the public often distrusts the police, and all these stories about supernatural goings-on are making things worse. The press know we don’t have enough evidence or we would have gone ahead with a criminal prosecution.’
Daniel threw his hands up. ‘Really? Circumstantial? You know I’m not big on swearing, but fuck that! They were at that house conducting an exorcism – a bloody exorcism! And at that exact same moment the father of the family dies under very suspicious circumstances? If they didn’t do it, who the hell did? Then there’s the fact that Sergeant Harding has found evidence connecting Delamar to previous cases of so-called demonic activity where people have died. How can that possibly be dismissed?’
Daniel sat down in the free leather armchair opposite Peter’s desk, ran his fingers through his hair and took a deep breath.
‘Okay, look. I know we don’t have anything that can truly, without a doubt, prove that they did it, but what about the leads we’re currently looking into? Surely they count for something.’
‘They do, if you manage to turn up some real evidence, but until then we have nothing to justify prosecution, and without that our hands are tied when it comes to restricting either Delamar or Spindler. Even if we had arrested either of them at the scene, we’d be out of time by now and we wouldn’t be able to charge them, which would reflect even worse on the department.’
‘Because that woman is playing us. Don’t you find it a little odd that she’s suddenly being so co-operative? That she and Spindler came to us directly to clear their names? I was in that room, speaking to them, I heard all that crap about the press hounding them, ruining their names. I bet you any money she’ll be making a statement to the same bloody outlets within an hour about how they were victimised, that it’s not their fault that their beliefs aren’t shared by the Met. It’s the type of crazy shit the press go wild for. They did something stupid, too public, too outlandish for their own good, and now they’re snaking out of it, using the strange aspects of the case to distract attention and cover up the truth.’
