Black Rabbit Summer

  ‘… and when I put that into the CCA system,’ he was saying, ‘I found at least three incidents that shared some similarities, and quite a few more that might be worth looking into.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘What?’

  ‘You lost me there for a minute. What’s CCA?’

  ‘I’ve just told you. Weren’t you listening?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I smiled. ‘I must have drifted off or something…’

  ‘Maybe you’d better get some sleep,’ he said, giving me a concerned look. ‘I can tell you all about this in the morning.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’m not tired. I just wasn’t concentrating, that’s all.’ I smiled at him again. ‘I’m listening now.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, do you remember what I told you about the PNC?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘PNC. Police National Computer.’ Dad looked at my blank face and sighed. ‘I’ll start again from the beginning, shall I?’

  ‘Please.’

  I listened then as he told me how he’d gone into work that afternoon and his DCI had sent him up to an isolated room on another floor to keep him away from the investigation, and he’d spent the morning reading through case files and transferring data to computer records, and after a while he’d got so bored that he’d logged on to the Police National Computer and just started browsing around.

  ‘I wasn’t really looking for anything to do with all this,’ he told me. ‘But I suppose it was on my mind, and I didn’t think it’d do any harm to try a few things. So I started seeing if I could find any links to this case on the CCA system.’ He looked at me. ‘CCA stands for Comparative Case Analysis. It’s basically a national database application that can be used to compare and analyse crimes of a similar nature.’

  ‘You mean like serial killers?’

  He nodded. ‘Serial killers, serial crimes… it’s especially useful if you’re trying to find patterns between crimes committed in different parts of the country.’

  ‘But this isn’t –’

  ‘No, I know this case doesn’t sound anything like that, but as I said, I was just having a look, seeing if I could find anything.’

  ‘And did you?’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know… I might have found something, but I’m not sure if it means anything or not. You see, the system works by analysing certain aspects of a crime and seeing if they match the identifying aspects of other crimes. But the trouble with this case is that most of the identifying elements are too wide-ranging to be of any use.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I knew that if I put in quite general keywords – things like missing teenager, abduction, murder – I’d get literally thousands of matches, so I realized that I had to work out a way to narrow it down. I tried everything I could think of – time of day, time of year… I searched by age group, by town, by county… I even started putting in things like river, rabbit, celebrity – but none of it really got me anywhere. It wasn’t until I tried narrowing down the location even more that I finally started to see something.’ Dad looked at me. ‘In the last four years, fourteen teenagers have been reported missing after visiting a fairground.’

  ‘Fourteen?’

  He nodded. ‘Five of them either returned home later or were subsequently found to have simply run away, but of the remaining nine, six are still missing and three are dead. Two girls, one boy.’

  ‘How did they die?’

  ‘Two from strangulation, one from a knife wound. All three murders are still unsolved.’

  ‘Shit, Dad,’ I whispered. ‘That could mean –’

  ‘It could mean anything, Pete. That’s the trouble. There’s no pattern to any of it yet. None of the missing kids knew each other, none of them had anything in common, and there’s no obvious parallels between the three murders. The only thing that links all three cases is the fairground connection, and even that’s pretty shaky.’

  ‘Yeah, but if it was the same fair every time –’

  ‘It wasn’t. Two of the kids went missing from a Bretton’s Funfair, and another two disappeared after visiting a Funderstorm Fair, but on both occasions the fairs were in different towns, and all four cases occurred at different times. The rest of the kids all went missing from different fairs. Different fairs, different times, different parts of the country. So if there is someone out there taking all these kids, it’s probably not a fairground worker.’

  ‘Unless they move around a lot and work for different fairs,’ I suggested.

  Dad shrugged. ‘They’d have to work for a lot of different fairs.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not impossible, is it?’

  ‘I suppose not…’

  ‘And if –’

  ‘Listen, Pete,’ he said calmly. ‘Don’t get too carried away with this, OK? It’s all just conjecture at the moment, and there’s a pretty good chance that it won’t come to anything in the end. I’ve passed it on to John Kesey, and he’s going to try and get someone to look into it in more detail, but I don’t want you to start getting your hopes up too much.’ He looked at me. ‘Yeah, I know I’m contradicting myself – giving you the possibility of hope and then telling you not to get carried away with it… and I know that sounds really stupid. And maybe it is. But I just wanted you to know –’

  ‘The man with the moustache,’ I said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It could be him.’

  ‘What are you talking about? What man?’

  I looked eagerly at Dad. ‘When I was leaving the fair, I saw this creepy-looking guy hanging around the exit, and then later on I saw him going into Back Lane.’

  Dad frowned. ‘What do you mean creepy-looking? What was he doing that made him look creepy?’

  He was standing in the shadows, I thought, watching a vision of Raymond on a non-existent merry-go-round. An old-fashioned fairground organ was playing and I could hear the sound of children’s laughter and I could see Raymond sitting on a jet-black horse that wasn’t a horse but a horse-sized rabbit with shining black eyes and I wanted to join him on the carousel… I wanted us to ride those horse-rabbits together like two lost cowboys riding in circles…

  It was too late.

  ‘He had a moustache,’ I muttered.

  ‘That’s all?’ Dad said. ‘He was creepy because he had a moustache?’

  ‘No… he was creepy because… I don’t know. I mean, he wasn’t actually doing anything, he was just kind of hanging around, you know… lurking in the shadows, watching people as they left.’

  ‘Did you see him talking to anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you mentioned this man to anyone else?’

  ‘I told DI Barry.’

  ‘Did he take a description?’

  I shook my head. ‘He didn’t seem that interested.’

  ‘All right,’ Dad said, taking a pen and a notebook from his pocket. ‘What did this man look like?’

  All I could really remember about the man with the moustache – apart from his moustache, obviously – was that he was slightly odd-looking, slightly hunched, and that he’d reminded me of an over-concerned father keeping an eye out for his child… only there hadn’t been any children around. It wasn’t much to go on, and I wasn’t totally convinced that Dad was taking me seriously anyway, but I did my best to describe the man I thought I’d seen.

  By the time I’d finished, it was dark outside, and as I got up and went over to the window to close the curtains – yawning and stretching my arms – Dad got wearily to his feet and suggested that we both get some sleep.

  I nodded and smiled at him, stifling another yawn.

  He smiled back at me. ‘Are you going to be OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Well, try not to think about things too much. Just get your head down and get some sleep. You’ll probably feel a bit better in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah…’

  He nodded.
‘Goodnight, then.’

  ‘Yeah, ’night, Dad.’

  ‘See you in the morning.’

  I waited for him to shut the door, listened to his footsteps going down the stairs, then I took Eric’s phone out of my pocket and sat down on the bed. I flipped it open, turned it on, and muted the ringtone.

  I’d never felt more awake in my life.

  Twenty-three

  It didn’t take me long to get the hang of Eric’s phone, and the first thing I found out was that he’d deleted all his text messages. Of course, it was possible that his outbox was empty simply because he hadn’t sent any texts recently, but, knowing Eric, I somehow doubted that. He’d always been a text maniac. He couldn’t let a day go by without sending a text to someone.

  His inbox was empty too.

  I exited the message menu, opened up his phonebook, and started scrolling down through all the entries. Some of them were just abbreviated first names – Jo, Mart, Mich, Nic – while others were abbreviated first names with the initial letter of the surname – Ali F, Pet B, Rob S. The names that interested me the most, though, were the names that didn’t really look like names. There were three of them: Pyg, Amo and Bit.

  PYG I guessed was probably Pauly – Pauly Gilpin – but the other two, AMO and BIT, they didn’t mean anything to me.

  I selected the details of all three entries. They were all mobile numbers and they were all on speed dial.

  AMO and BIT…?

  I hit more buttons and checked out the Calls Received menu. The last ten calls were listed:

  10) VOICEMAIL

  9) PYG

  8) PYG

  7) AMO

  6) AMO

  5) AMO

  4) PYG

  3) VOICEMAIL

  2) AMO

  1) BIT

  Calls 2_10 were received between Sunday and today. The call from Bit was received on Friday. The day before the fair.

  The last ten dialled calls were:

  10) AMO

  9) AMO

  8) AMO

  7) PYG

  6) AMO

  5) PET B

  4) AMO

  3) PYG

  2) AMO

  1) AMO

  All these calls were made in the last two days.

  I sat there for a long time, staring at the phone, staring at the ceiling, staring at the phone, staring at nothing… trying to think, trying to work out if anything meant anything… trying to work out how to find out if anything meant anything, and what that might mean…

  If anything.

  Maybe none of it meant anything? I mean, so what if Eric had been in regular contact with Pyg, Amo and Bit? The calls to and from Pauly didn’t necessarily mean anything – apart from the fact that Eric had been lying to me when he’d told me he didn’t have Pauly’s number – and Amo and Bit…? Well, they could be anybody. They could be just friends of Eric’s, perfectly innocent friends who didn’t have anything to do with Pauly or Stella or Raymond…

  But I didn’t think so.

  Eric had been up to something with Campbell on Saturday night.

  They’d both been around when Stella had last been seen.

  Eric had lied to me.

  Campbell had twice warned me off.

  Pauly had been in touch with Campbell.

  Pauly had drugged the tequila…

  Black flies buzzing…

  Connecting disconnecting connecting disconnecting…

  I knew that it all meant something, and I knew that the key to it all – if there was a key to it all – was finding out who Amo and Bit were, and it was incredibly tempting to just dial their numbers and see what happened. But it was also kind of scary too. What should I say to them? What would they say to me? Would they know it was me? Would I know who they were? And what if one of the numbers was Stella’s and someone found out that I’d called it? How was I going to explain that?

  On the other hand, though, if I didn’t ring the numbers…

  I stared at the phone, emptied my head, and hit the speed dial for Bit.

  The line hummed for a few moments, then hissed, and then it went dead. Nothing at all. No tone, no message, no nothing. Completely dead.

  I tried Amo next, and this time I got an automated message: ‘This person’s phone is switched off. Please try later or send a text.’

  I closed the connection and hit the speed dial for Pyg. The line clicked in, the dial tone rang, and after a couple of seconds I heard Pauly’s voice in my ear. ‘Eric? Is that you?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Eric?’ Pauly said.

  I ended the call and switched off the phone.

  Pauly sounded worried.

  He sounded small.

  He sounded a bit like Raymond.

  And I hated him for that. How dare he remind me of Raymond? He was Pauly Gilpin, a conniving piece of shit, a sly little bastard who didn’t care about anyone but himself. He used people, abused people… he put drugs in people’s drinks. He was Pauly Gilpin, for Christ’s sake. How could he possibly remind me of Raymond?

  It was obscene.

  But it was true.

  And that hurt. Because it made me realize how much I missed Raymond, and how much I wanted him to be here right now. If only he was here, sitting with me in this room… I could talk to him. I could trust him. I could tell him things that I couldn’t tell anyone else…

  But he wasn’t here.

  I knew that.

  And as I closed my eyes to the whispered darkness, I knew that his ghost wasn’t here either. Ghosts don’t exist. The ghosts haunting me were chemical ghosts – hallucinations, flashbacks… I knew that. But I also knew that I’d heard Black Rabbit’s voice on Friday. In Raymond’s garden. When I’d sensed a soundless movement, and I’d looked down at my feet and seen Black Rabbit flopping past me and hopping back into his hutch…

  Be careful. Don’t go.

  I’d tried to convince myself that I hadn’t heard it, but I had. And that was on Friday. Before the fair, before the den, before I’d drunk any psycho-tequila.

  And that didn’t make sense.

  How could I be hallucinating before I’d taken the drug?

  Unless…?

  No, there were no unlesses.

  I’d heard Black Rabbit’s voice on Friday.

  Be careful. Don’t go.

  And again on Sunday.

  Take me home… bring me home…

  And Monday…

  Or was it Tuesday?

  It doesn’t matter.

  And now…

  In the silence of my head, I was hearing it again.

  You know who knows…

  My skin tingled.

  You know.

  I didn’t have to open my eyes to know that the porcelain rabbit was looking at me. I could feel its black eyes in the darkness, shining like moments of light, like saddened stars…

  The mother knows.

  ‘Whose mother?’ I breathed.

  See her dark eyes, her white skin… she knows.

  ‘Who knows?’

  You like animals, they make you feel good. She draws me on the black table to show him she knows him. You know who knows…

  ‘The fortune-teller?’

  She knows.

  It must have been some time around midnight when I tiptoed downstairs, opened the front door, and crept out into the darkness. Mum and Dad’s bedroom light was turned off, so I guessed they were sleeping, but I didn’t want to take any chances. So I’d turned off my mobile – and Eric’s too – and I didn’t stop walking on tiptoe until I’d opened the front gate and stepped out into the street.

  I didn’t look back to see if there were any police at the top of the road, I just turned left and walked briskly in the opposite direction, hoping that I looked perfectly normal. I wasn’t sneaking out of the house. I wasn’t following the advice of a black porcelain rabbit. I wasn’t going to see a fortune-telling woman whose dreadlocked son’s caravan was stained with the blood of a dea
d girl.

  Not me.

  I was just going for a walk, getting some fresh air…

  That’s all I was doing.

  The recreation ground was dark and silent when I got there. There were no flashing lights tonight. No crashing music, no screams of laughter, no whirling wheels or booming voices swirling around in the air. It was just a recreation ground at night, a blurred black emptiness stretching out beyond the padlocked gates.

  But it wasn’t completely empty.

  In the distant dimness I could just make out a faint gathering of lights, and around the lights I could see the greyed outlines of several vehicles. I couldn’t tell what kind of vehicles they were, but I was fairly sure that one of them would be Lottie Noyce’s trailer. Her son had only been released from questioning today, and the police were still checking his caravan, and they might want to talk to him again… so he had to be staying somewhere.

  As I clambered over the locked gates and began heading across the park towards the lights, I could see that the vehicles were parked in a rough semi-circle in the shade of some tall park trees. A generator was chugging away quietly somewhere out of sight. The ground was packed hard, rutted with wheel tracks, and I guessed this was the place where all the fairground vehicles had been parked on Saturday night. It was hard to imagine now, but this must have been the far edge of the fairground, the place where I’d seen Nicole and Luke staggering off into the darkness…

  It was all hard to imagine. The lights, the chaos, the whirling confusion… Nicole’s dead eyes as Luke led her off into the shadowed maze of lorries and trucks and vans and trailers…

  There’d been dozens of vehicles then, but most of them had gone now. All that was left – standing quietly in the green-grey darkness – were two trailer vans, a caravan, and a Toyota pick-up with a deflated bouncy castle in the back. Both of the trailers had lights in the windows, and neither of them had any markings.

  I suppose I was half-hoping that one of them might say Madame Baptiste on the side, or maybe Noyce & Son or something. But they didn’t. So I just stood there for a while, about ten metres away from the trailers, watching and listening, trying to work out which one of them belonged to Lottie Noyce. It was a pretty pointless thing to do. The curtains were closed, so I couldn’t see anything, and the only sounds I could hear were the soft chug-chugging of the generator and the whisper of a night breeze in the trees. But I didn’t seem to mind. I was quite content just standing there, soaking up the dark tranquillity of the park, breathing in the scent of the sleeping grass, listening to the silence…