Walking by Night

Book 3: DI Joe Plantagenet

by Kate Ellis

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Taking a short cut home beneath the ruined abbey in the centre of the city, a teenage girl reports stumbling across a body. She also claims to have seen a mysterious nun-like figure watching her from the shadows. But during the subsequent search, no body is found. The girl's inebriated state and her troubled history make the police sceptical, and only Detective Inspector Joe Plantagenet is inclined to believe her. Then a woman is reported missing, and Joe finds himself caught up in a complex investigation involving a production of The Devils at the local Playhouse. Could the play, with its shocking religious and sexual violence, have something to do with the woman's disappearance? Nothing is as it first appears.

Release date: February 1, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 289

Sample

Debby Telerhaye’s footsteps echoed in the fog like hammer blows as her tottering heels hit the stone pavement. She shuddered, hugged the thin jacket she’d bought in the sales the previous Saturday around her body and walked on, hurrying like a mouse who fears a cat is watching from the shadows.

The city was shrouded in fog, milky white and yellow where it blended with the sickly glow of the street lights. She could only see six feet ahead, and every so often she heard voices that sounded as if they were coming from some distant world. Debby hated fog. Fog conceals all kinds of wickedness.

She’d had a good time at the Abbott’s Head that evening: the music had been loud and the company raucous, up for anything. It had probably been a mistake to consume so many vodka shots, but she’d been caught up by the moment and the desire to follow her friends’ example. They’d urged her on. Come on, let’s have another. Let’s get hammered.

They’d been in a far worse state than she was, but they’d taken a minicab home. As she’d watched them clamber in, giggling, she’d wished she was with them. But they lived in the opposite direction so there was no chance of her sharing the ride, and she had no money left for a cab of her own because she’d put her last tenner into the kitty for the final round of drinks. She had to walk. There was no choice.

She’d just reached the corner of Marketgate when she stumbled on her vertiginous heels. She carried on walking, but by the time she reached the main road her ankle had started to throb so she stopped. As she came to a halt she heard a soft footstep echoing the sharp click of her stilettos. She turned her head, but when she saw nothing behind the blanket of mist she told herself that it had probably been her imagination and limped on.

He’d been watching her all night, sitting in the corner of the bar at the Abbott’s Head while she laughed with her friends. He’d heard their chatter growing louder with each drink they’d downed – and they had downed a lot over the course of the evening.

He’d been trying to make his pint last because he wanted to keep a clear head, and when she’d stood up to leave he’d drained the glass and followed her, careful to keep his distance. He’d seen her friends get into the minicab while she set off home alone. Vulnerable.

Some things were meant to be.

Debby crossed the road to the Museum Gardens, trying to ignore the pain in her ankle, and she felt her heart thumping as she braced herself to flee if she saw some silent vehicle bearing down on her. But the street was empty of traffic. Nobody in their right mind would drive on a night like this. She turned right and walked parallel with the railings, putting out a cold hand to touch them and finding the solid feel of the metal reassuring. The fog was denser now, and fear of getting lost in its enveloping embrace crept into her mind like mist seeping through an open window.

Her heels were slowing her down and her ankle was getting worse. She stopped to take off her shoes, feeling a sudden urge to run for home and flee this unearthly landscape where the familiar had turned frighteningly unfamiliar. But she wondered whether home was any safer, now that her mother had moved Sinclair in. He made her flesh creep. But her mother didn’t see it: she’d let him into her life because she feared being alone. There’s none so blind as the desperate.

As she bent to slip off her shiny beige stilettos, she heard the sound again. Footsteps that stopped a few seconds after hers, like a delayed echo. She was scared now, so scared that she ignored the pain when her unprotected feet met a patch of gravel. Someone had stopped when she had stopped. Someone was out there in that dense wall of mist. Following her; watching each move she made and assessing her vulnerability.

She saw Eborby’s main library looming up on her left, and she knew it wasn’t far to the undercroft, the only part of the medieval monastery of St Peter still standing after centuries of destruction and neglect. In its sheltering covered passageway lovers met and tourists wandered, but at this time the night people took over – the drug dealers and the up-to-no-good hangers about. But if she could slip inside and wait till her pursuer had passed, she might throw him off. To her vodka-fuddled brain it seemed like the perfect solution to her problem.

She limped into the undercroft’s dank passageway on tiptoe, her shoes dangling from her left hand and the cold numbing her feet, and to her surprise and relief the place was empty. As she flattened herself against the wall, her fingers came into contact with something soft and damp. Moss which felt like dead men’s flesh. She breathed in deeply, and when the chill, moist air hit her lungs she started to splutter, the noise sounding like gunshots in the silence. She covered her mouth with her free hand and waited, half expecting to see a figure looming at the end of the passageway but nothing happened. Perhaps the footsteps had been in her imagination. Or a trick of the fog.

Both ends of the tunnel-like undercroft were blocked by a wall of grey-white mist. But, even in the darkness, she could make out the shape of a huge stone Roman sarcophagus which stood against the stone wall, its mass looking vaguely industrial against the barrier of fog. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she opened the little denim bag she’d slung across her body to foil any passing muggers and, inside it, her fingers came into contact with the comforting shape of her mobile phone. But who would she call? Not her mother; telling her mother would be like telling Sinclair and that was a prospect she couldn’t face. Not the friends who’d abandoned her so blithely. Calling the police would be an overreaction, and she’d probably be charged with wasting their time. She felt tears welling in her eyes and a warm trickle of moisture running down her cheek. She’d read about people who’d died of exposure. But was being attacked, maybe raped and strangled, any better?

If she waited another five minutes, she reckoned it would be safe to leave her shelter. Hopefully, he’d think he’d lost her and give up, turn his evil attentions to some other unsuspecting girl on her way home after a night out. She crept further into the tunnel, fingering the phone that could be her lifeline if events took a turn for the worse.

Her ankle was aching now, and she was as sure as she could be that it was swollen. As she bent to rub it, her eyes were drawn to something lying on the ground near the other end of the passage, outlined against the ghostly light seeping in through the far entrance. At first it looked like a bundle of old clothes that someone had discarded, and she stared at it for a while before curiosity made her take a few halting steps towards it, glancing behind her to make sure her follower hadn’t appeared, looming against the fog. As her courage grew she took another step, then another, gasping as her bare foot came into contact with a tiny stone.

There was no sound in the blanketed silence apart from her own breathing. She was alone with the thing on the ground, and when she heard a soft sigh, she didn’t know whether she’d made the sound or whether it came from someone or something else. The thing on the ground, perhaps.

As she drew closer, she thought the shape looked human, but it was too dark to be sure. Someone asleep, maybe. A vagrant, sleeping rough. As her eyes adjusted she thought she could make out long dark hair falling like a mask where the face should be. And clothes; something long and dark which showed no flesh.

She suspected it was a woman, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch her; to feel cold cloth wrapped around dead flesh. Because her senses told her that this woman had become a corpse – a still, cold cadaver – and the sigh had come from somewhere else. Perhaps whoever had ended the woman’s life.

She looked round, fighting the panic that had started to overwhelm her, and out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a shape, half-formed in the swirling mist. It looked like a figure in long black robes. A thing with no face, there for a split second before the fog reformed itself into a white wall, and then it was gone, leaving only fear behind. She let out an involuntary scream and clamped her hand over her mouth. If it was a killer, the last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself. When nothing happened she told herself she must have imagined the figure. But those following footsteps and the body lying there on the ground were all too real.

Terror made her forget her pain as she tore through the undercroft entrance and out into the fog. She opened her mouth to shout for help but thought better of it. Instead, she fumbled for her phone with clumsy, panicked fingers, and when she dropped it she squatted down and felt around for it in the shadows.

There was no sign of the phone. But she needed to get away, so she abandoned her search and ran out, hardly aware that one of her shoes had slipped from her hand. It wasn’t far to the centre of the city, and the pubs would be throwing out now. There was safety in crowds, and she could summon help. As she crossed the road by the art gallery she narrowly avoided a bus that was driving too fast for the lack of visibility, but panic blinded her to danger as Boothgate Bar reared up in front of her out of the fog. She knew there was a pub at the other side of the city gate. If she could get there everything would be fine.

She staggered under the great stone gate, ignoring a small group of jeering men relieving themselves in the shelter of the archway, and spotted the welcoming golden glow from the Mitre’s leaded windows to her left.

She stumbled in through the open door, and when she screamed, the bar fell silent.

He knew she hadn’t seen him. How could she? But something had spooked her.

She’d tried to hide from him in the undercroft, thinking he’d be fooled. With all that drink, she hadn’t been thinking straight, and her fuddled brain had underestimated him. She’d almost made it too easy for him – until she’d torn out of there and made for the city centre.

But there’d be another time. He could find her whenever he wanted.

Over the years Joe Plantagenet had become used to drinking alone, to sitting in the corner watching his fellow drinkers and imagining their lives. The passivity of enjoying a quiet pint of Black Sheep made a welcome change from police work. In his local he didn’t have to solve anybody’s problems.

He looked at his watch. It was time to go. If he had any more he’d wake up with a hangover and be plagued with a headache all day which was the last thing he needed. Besides, he’d promised his boss, DCI Emily Thwaite, that he’d be at the police station early because she had a meeting with the superintendent and she needed him to deal with the morning briefing. He drained his glass and stood up.

He took his glass back to the bar, earning himself a nod of thanks from the landlord. Then he zipped his leather jacket and walked out into the night. The fog outside hit his lungs as soon as he stepped out of the pub doorway, and he began to cough. Eborby was prone to fog, always had been since the Roman invaders decided it was the perfect location for their military headquarters in the north of England. He wondered what those soldiers from Italy and the warmer parts of the Empire had made of the Yorkshire weather. Probably not a lot.

The wall of white cloud was so thick this time that a stranger to the city would have had difficulty finding their way around. But this was terra cognita to Joe. He could find his way back home to his flat in the shadow of the city walls blindfold. It had been built in the 1990s, but he’d always felt that the proximity of history more than made up for the soulless architecture.

Fog plays strange tricks with sound, and the shouts and screams seemed to be feet away. Without a second thought he moved towards the sounds. Even off duty his policeman’s instincts drew him to trouble. After a few moments he realized that the noise was coming from a pub a few doors down the street: from the Mitre, a cosy place he’d almost chosen for his evening drink, but when he’d poked his head round the door he’d found that his favourite corner had been taken so he’d walked down to the Cathedral Vault instead.

The entrance to the Mitre stood out, bright and welcoming in the mist, but Joe knew from the sounds drifting out of the pub that something was amiss. His first assumption was that there’d been some kind of drunken altercation, although the Mitre’s landlord, in Joe’s experience, ran a tight and law-abiding operation. But it was a female voice that rose above the rest, terrified and close to hysteria.

Joe straightened his back and strode into the pub. Inside, the drinkers, a mixture of regulars he recognized and tourists in search of Eborby’s quieter night life, sat staring at the main event – a motherly barmaid and the landlord ministering to a girl who was sitting between them on a bar stool with a glass of something comforting in her shaking hand.

‘What’s happened? Is she OK?’ Joe asked as he approached the little group.

The landlord, a small, wiry man with a hairstyle that reminded Joe of a monks’ tonsure, turned towards Joe, a ‘what’s it to you?’ expression on his round face. Joe, realizing that although he’d been in there countless times the landlord had no idea what he did for a living, pulled his warrant card from his pocket and showed it discreetly to the man.

The landlord’s attitude changed in an instant. He looked round the bar and lowered his voice. ‘She came rushing in here as if the devil himself was after her. She says she’s found a body. My wife’s already called your lot, but they’ve not arrived yet. That was over ten minutes ago,’ he added reproachfully.

Joe squatted down and brought his face level with the girl’s. She was in her late teens, he guessed. Slightly overweight, with long brown hair that had frizzed in the damp air. She had a small nose and a rosebud mouth, and she looked a wreck. Her thick make-up had smeared, leaving dark tracks of eyeliner and mascara running down her cheeks. Her clothes, inadequate for the chill of the night, had bunched up, showing a long expanse of thigh. Her tights were intact up to her ankles, but the feet were torn, revealing filthy, bleeding flesh beneath. A single beige stiletto lay discarded on the floor.

‘Hi, love. My name’s Joe. I’m a policeman. What’s your name?’

She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Debby. Debby Telerhaye.’ She sipped her drink, and Joe saw her hand was still trembling.

‘Debby, can you tell me what happened?’

It took a few moments for the answer to come. ‘I went for a drink with my mates in the Abbott’s Head, and while I was walking home I got the feeling I was being followed.’ She paused to take another drink. ‘Anyway, I was scared so I nipped into the undercroft; you know, the old building by the library.’

‘I know it. Go on.’

‘Well, I thought I’d shaken him off, and I was going to carry on walking home when …’

She stopped speaking, as though what she was about to say was too painful to contemplate. Joe knew that if he tried to rush her, she’d clam up altogether. This needed patience.

After a long silence she began to whisper. ‘It was dark and with the fog … I thought I saw something on the ground.’

‘What?’

‘I thought it was a bundle of clothes at first, but then I saw it was a woman. I didn’t touch her.’

‘So you don’t know if she was dead or just unconscious?’

‘I was sure she was dead but …’ Her eyes met his. ‘Do you think she might have been alive?’

Joe didn’t answer. He didn’t want to make the girl feel bad about fleeing the scene rather than calling an ambulance right away. He touched her hand, a gesture of reassurance, and retraced his steps to the doorway. Standing in the entrance, he took his mobile phone from his pocket to make the call that would, hopefully, hurry things along. Although, on such a foggy night, the patrols on duty would undoubtedly have their hands full.

He got through to the control room and explained who he was and what had happened. A couple of minutes later he had a call from the patrol who’d just arrived at the undercroft. They were about to conduct a search.

Joe turned and went back into the pub. It was just a matter of waiting.

Driving in such thick fog was bloody dangerous, Sergeant Una O’Kane observed to the young PC sitting, arms folded, in the passenger seat. She’d seen countless nasty RTAs when people went too fast for the conditions. As she said the words a van loomed in front of her, seemingly out of nowhere. She hit the brake pedal and swore loudly.

When she reached their destination she pulled the car off the road. It would be tempting fate to park on the road so that some idiot could canon into them. Una had never had an optimistic view of human nature.

They climbed out of the car, and Una’s young colleague put on his cap. ‘Who reported it?’ he asked.

‘A lass on her way home from a night out. She thought she was being followed by some weirdo, so she hid in the undercroft in the hope he’d go past. Stupid thing to do, if you ask me,’ she said with a snort. ‘What if he’d seen her go in? She’d have been cornered in there. At least out on the street she’d have a fighting chance of someone passing by.’

‘Did he corner her?’

‘No, but … Well, I wouldn’t have done it.’

‘’Course you wouldn’t, Sarge.’ He could have added that it would be a brave weirdo who’d follow Una O’Kane, but he was too scared.

‘Let’s see this body, then.’

‘Shouldn’t we call for backup? The pathologist and—’

‘Let’s see what we’ve got first. We don’t want to call out the whole team only to find that it’s only a drunk sleeping it off.’

Una went ahead, flashing her torch into the mouth of the undercroft. It lit up the rough stone walls and the vaulted ceiling of what had once served as a storage area for the long-destroyed abbey. As either end was open, it was little more than a passageway joining the Museum Gardens to the library area. Una swept her torch over the ground and shook her head.

If there had been a body, it wasn’t there now.

Joe was tempted to call the patrol to find out what was going on, but he stopped himself. They’d ring him as soon as there was news.

Debby had been taken into the back room behind the bar by the landlord’s wife, a no-nonsense bottle-blonde who, Joe sensed, was beginning to lose patience with the girl, who’d consumed at least three double measures of liquid comfort since she set foot over the threshold. Joe had told her she should wait for the patrol to come and take a statement, but after half an hour he was becoming restless. The girl needed to get home. She’d told him she lived with her mum, so at least she’d have a shoulder to cry on when she got back.

He’d already suggested that Debby should call her mum, but she’d seemed reluctant, saying she’d be fine to get home by herself. The landlord’s wife took the same size in shoes, and she’d lent her a pair of old and sensible loafers, so the walk wouldn’t be a problem. Joe told her the patrol car would take her back, but this suggestion was met with a disapproving silence and a ‘no thanks’. He wondered why she’d refused and concluded that she might have had an unpleasant encounter with the police in the past. But he wasn’t going to interrogate her. When the body was found she’d have to answer plenty of questions whether she liked it or not.

He looked at his watch. It was almost midnight, the pub was empty and the staff wanted to go home. Joe was almost losing patience when his phone rang.

The female voice on the other end of the line announced herself as Una O’Kane. Sergeant. ‘No sign of a body here,’ she began. She sounded relieved. ‘No blood or drag marks either. Either the girl was seeing things after a night on the sauce or she panicked when she saw some vagrant taking a nap.’

‘She seemed pretty sure it was …’

‘It could have been someone trying to scare her. Might have been some comedian’s idea of a joke.’

If this was a joke it wasn’t funny, Joe thought. And Debby certainly wasn’t laughing. She still looked shaken, sitting staring at her hands as the landlord’s wife tidied up around her.

‘Have you searched the area?’ Joe asked.

‘Of course,’ the sergeant answered, as though the question had been a particularly stupid one. ‘There’s nothing suspicious.’

‘She said she dropped her phone there. Did you find it?’

‘Yes. I’ll take it back to the station, and she can pick it up tomorrow. Why don’t you tell her to go home and sober up?’

Joe ended the call, and when he entered the back room, Debby looked up expectantly.

‘That was the patrol. They’ve found your phone, but there’s no body in the undercroft. Are you sure that’s where you saw it?’

‘Yes. I told you. I’m not lying. I saw it.’ There was no uncertainty in her voice.

‘OK.’ He raised his hand in appeasement. ‘Let’s get you home. It’s on my way so I’ll walk with you. I can explain what happened to your mum if she’s worried.’

‘There’s no need,’ she said, with an anxiety which suggested to Joe that she found the prospect of a policeman talking to her mother more alarming than the ordeal of discovering a corpse. But he was probably wrong. The girl was exhausted. People say odd things when they’re in that state.

‘You will let me walk with you? I don’t like just leaving you.’

She hesitated, but one look at the landlord’s wife’s impatient face decided her. ‘OK.’ She slipped on the old shoes. They fitted, but she shuffled out as though walking caused her pain.

Joe wondered whether to support her arm, but he feared the gesture might be misinterpreted. In fact, he knew it was probably foolish to be alone with a vulnerable woman like that. But he’d done a lot of foolish things in his time, so what was one more?

They walked slowly, and when their arms brushed by accident, Joe flinched at the contact.

‘What do you think you saw?’ he asked when they reached the main road.

‘A body. I think s. . .