The Christmas Killer (33 page)

As Jake crossed the day ward to the door, he knew he was in serious trouble. Father Ken had everything – not just Jake’s mother, but secrets about Jake himself. Secrets that kept Jake bound up in whatever sick wild goose chase he was involved in. Briefly he considered calling it all in. But just as quickly he realized he could not do that. He was on his own now. In legal terms his actions tonight amounted to obstruction of justice. If he explained, he might escape a custodial sentence. But his career was over.

Jake told himself to worry about that once he had his mother back.

He had to move quickly, get out of the window while the guard was still sitting at his station, and get the hell clear of the grounds. But he didn’t do that. He felt an urge to stay and let the ghosts find him.

There was one ghost in particular that he wanted to meet. The ghost of the long-dead man who shared his face. So instead of turning back down the hall he’d come along, he turned right and continued deeper into the building, looking for the stairwell that led to the
basement. He took a left, checked round the corner for the guard, then ran down the corridor. He passed large wards on either side. At the end of the hallway he took a right then a left. The basement door gaped open in front of him. He hadn’t made a single wrong turn on the way.

He hesitated at the top but he knew he had to go down. Maybe here he would find the answers that would chase away this maddening familiarity.

He began to climb down into the darkness, his torch showing the way in front of him, but it was a penlight and lit little of his surroundings. There were a few rooms down there, but Jake was drawn towards one in particular. It was an office, and the door was closed. It was the first closed door he’d come across. Gently he pushed the handle, but it was locked.

He put his shoulder to the door and gave a speculative push. It creaked. There was some give there. The wooden frame was rotten from damp. Even though he was all the way down in the basement, he didn’t want to risk the noise of a kick. So he shoved as hard as he could, easing the pressure at the final moment when the door gave.

His penlight revealed row upon row of metal filing cabinets. He pulled on one drawer, and the tray of files slid out easily. He pulled out a file at random and flicked through. It was a medical report on one of the patients. He scanned the tags – they were alphabetical. This should be easy.

Tonight he would get his answer.

He went to the first cabinet. He guessed third drawer down, and he was right. He found the AS, AT, AU and AW files. AU – he ran his finger over the dusty tags until he found AUSTIN. His heart began to pound in his chest. He could hear it.

There were three files with the name Austin.

AUSTIN, Catherine.

AUSTIN, Gerald.

He held his breath. Surely the next file would bear the name Jake … But it didn’t.

AUSTIN, Jeanette.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he pulled out the file and opened it. On reading the first page, the relief flooded through him.

His mother had been a nurse! It made perfect sense. In spite of himself, Jake smiled, almost laughing with relief. That had to be why he recognized the place, even if his memories had taken on an infuriatingly spooky form: his mom had worked here. Of course his mother’s old workplace was familiar to him. He wasn’t losing his mind. He had never been a patient. He was going to be all right.

At some point he would have to ask his mother why she had never mentioned that they had lived around here before, especially when Jake had announced he was transferring to Littleton. But he would ask her that question, and many more, after he had saved her from Father Ken.

Jake tucked the file under his arm and pointed the
penlight towards the door. He walked out of the office feeling lighter and more sure of himself than he had in days. He was going to fix everything – catch the killer, save his mother, explain to Asher what he’d done. This was going to work out. He could feel it.

As he walked through the basement towards the stairwell, the torch beam caught a sign on one of the doors. He looked.
WARDEN.

This was once Fred Lumley’s office.

The door was unlocked, and he pushed it open. All the furniture was gone, but like upstairs no one had bothered to remove the pictures from the walls. There was a large oil painting on one wall opposite where Jake assumed the desk used to be. He shone the light on the painting and almost dropped it. What he’d seen hit him like a physical blow.

He steadied himself, holding the penlight like a gun as he walked towards the painting. The picture showed a man standing in an office, shelves of books behind him. One hand rested on the back of a chair, and he stared out of the canvas. He was dressed in formal trousers and a collared shirt with no tie.

Jake was looking at a painting of himself.

He reeled as a storm of images assaulted his mind: images of spraying, spurting blood just like his nightmares.

Jake screwed his eyes shut, an instinctive reaction – but that just brought the mental images into sharper focus.

I’m fucking losing it!

He forced himself to look at the other pictures on the walls. A few photographs remained. Most of them were in black and white, and faded. One showed happy people in groups on a lawn, another showed what looked like a graduation.

He was drawn to one of the pictures: a black and white framed photo of two men at what looked like an event in the asylum grounds. One was the man who looked like Jake, the other was a much younger Father Ken. The caption beneath read, ‘Warden Fred Lumley, with Father Kenneth Laurie’.

Father Ken was smiling.

So you
were
here.

Suddenly Jake heard a creak, and a loud voice called, ‘Who’s down there?’

He killed the torch and waited. The silence was probably only a matter of seconds, but to Jake it felt like an hour.

The security guard was more conscientious than Jake had thought, and soon he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.

Jake silently slipped the photo from the wall and shoved it into his mom’s personnel file. He waited until the guard had got all the way down to the basement. He kept a close eye on where he knew the doorway to be and the hall beyond. Right on cue a swell of pale light illuminated the hall, sweeping in a crazy arc.

And then a second one joined it – two guards.

The torch beams bounced off the walls of the office. One of them caught an old mirror and bounced back, and for a moment Jake saw two men in dark suits, lights held in left hands, guns in their right. This wasn’t the guard doing his rounds; they were FBI. It seemed they had not abandoned the asylum for Christmas after all. Jake had miscalled this one badly.

He kept low, waiting for his chance. The lights swept the room. At the point where both torches were pointed away from him Jake sprang, rushing between the agents and hitting them both with his shoulders as he passed. It hurt, but he knew one of the agents had been put on the ground. The other was still on his feet, but had dropped something – hopefully his gun. Jake bounded up the stairs, trusting his instinctive knowledge of the asylum to guide him. He wasn’t going to risk turning on his own torch.

He got through the door at the top, and could hear the first of the FBI men already on the stairs. Down the corridor he ran at full speed. There was nothing to trip him – he remembered that from earlier. Down past the day ward, turn, then into the classroom.

The window was still open. He was out and running across the grass towards the perimeter fence. But he could hear the two agents emerging from the building. He was through the gap in the fence now and running the hundred yards towards his car. From the shouts of the FBI guys, he put them at thirty yards or so behind. As he ran Jake fumbled in his pocket for his keys. He
was at the car, and the key hit the lock first go. He was in; the engine turned and caught. Jake hit the gas, and he was off, keeping his face low so that the two agents – who he could see running towards where his car had been – couldn’t make him out.

He was safe. If he didn’t lose his way on the minor roads, he was home free.

But the Feds had his licence-plate number.

Father Ken was not answering his mobile. Jake had tried four times already, and the lack of a response was driving him crazy. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he carried the dust and grime of the asylum with him. He knew he looked like shit: the reaction of the colleagues, those who had drawn the holiday short straw, when he got to the station told him so. They avoided him. No one approached his desk. It was like there was a sign hovering over him warning them away.

Time was ticking; it would not be long before the FBI traced his numberplate and came looking.

He took out the photograph he had taken from Lumley’s wall the night before. It was dirty and he could barely make out the details. The two figures in the foreground – Lumley and Father Ken – were clear, but the others were obscure. Jake took out a tissue and rubbed the glass.

It seemed to be some sort of a presentation day or craft fair. Behind and around the two smiling men was a group of people, both children and adults. Some were
holding artwork; others were smiling awkwardly; a few seemed uninterested, looking the wrong way. The style of the clothing, as well as the long hair and moustaches of the men, dated the photo to the era of Jake’s childhood.

Some of the people in the photograph were clearly staff. One was a nurse, a heavyset black woman with a large Afro. She looked young, about twenty. Her face felt oddly familiar to Jake – a friend of his mom’s? – but, try as he might, he couldn’t remember who she was.

Jake opened his desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass. He looked at the woman carefully but still could not make the connection. Then he spotted she was wearing a name tag. He couldn’t make out what it said. He removed the back of the frame and took out the photo. He placed it under his desk lamp. Now it was slightly clearer. He looked through the magnifying glass and adjusted it until the badge was as clear as he could make it. Now he could just about make out the name.

JEANETTE AUSTIN.

He sat back in surprise.
What? Why is she wearing my mother’s name tag?

Jake stood up. He needed to clear his head, to think. He was suddenly very aware of the fact that he hadn’t eaten in he didn’t know how long. He hadn’t even had a coffee since getting to the station. A jolt of caffeine might get him thinking clearly.

He went into the small canteen off the detective bureau, but no one had made coffee that morning. Christmas. So he walked into the main recreation room of the station. It was about twice the size of his sitting room at home, with comfortable chairs scattered around and two coffee tables. There was a counter with a coffee machine, a cupboard full of mugs and plates, and a small fridge. The room also had a television on a stand. It was showing a replay of a preview of the annual Christmas Day football game. A cleaner whose name Jake didn’t know was relaxing with a magazine.

Jake took the remote from the table and switched to CNN.

‘Hey, I was watching that!’ said the cleaner.

Jake raised the volume. The cleaner went back to her magazine, muttering something about cops being ‘full of themselves’.

The TV news rotated through an entire cycle while he watched, and then returned to the second story of the day: the Chase Asylum killings.

‘In an overnight twist, the manhunt for Fred Lumley has turned into a homicide investigation,’ the anchor said.

‘FBI experts have done a facial reconstruction of an adult skeleton found at the Chase Asylum, and have confirmed that the adult male is former warden Fred Lumley, who disappeared more than thirty years ago. Until this find, Lumley was wanted for questioning in connection with the deaths of at least two children at
the institution, which closed down three years ago and is now due for demolition as part of wide-ranging plans to regenerate the towns surrounding Indianapolis.’

The screen switched from the anchor to the FBI reconstruction. Jake winced as the picture filled the screen. It was the photofit that the FBI man had emailed over yesterday, the one that looked just like him.

‘Hey, Detective,’ laughed the cleaner, looking up from her magazine. ‘Do you have a twin we don’t know about?’

Jake didn’t answer. He just took his coffee and returned to his desk. There was something he needed to be sure of. His mother’s file was in the drawer beneath the photograph. He took it out and began to read it. But everything was wrong. His mother was never five feet nine tall. She never weighed one ninety-five.

And she was never black.

Maybe there were two Jeanette Austins, or maybe the files had been tampered with. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Jake had no idea.

If Jeanette Austin wasn’t his mother, then who was?

And who the hell am
I
?