IT WAS OVER two hours to drive to Liverpool, but it was a bright day, the sky scrubbed blue and fresh, a handful of white contrails appearing as they made their way out of Cumbria. Ashley had woken up that morning full of foreboding about that day’s interview, and the purple diary peeking out of her bag hadn’t helped her mood. Once she was in the car with Freddie, she at least felt like she had some backup. Today’s mission might be unwise, but she wasn’t attempting it alone. Freddie was driving, his phone in the well between them recording his words.
‘… making Dean Underwood one of the most infamous criminals in the north of England. He might be only tangentially connected to the Gingerbread House Murders, but I could hardly turn down the offer to talk to him. Already, this series has taken me in directions I could never have predicted. The discovery of Robbie Metcalfe’s remains happening while I was in England, a handful of miles from the location. A violent altercation with the father of one of the children – an incident I wish I could have prevented. The delightful company of noted psychic Ashley Whitelam.’
He stopped and gave her a quick grin.
‘That’s probably not the right tone, is it? Ahem. And the company of noted psychic Ashley Whitelam, who has provided a unique perspective on the case. What will we hear from Dean Underwood himself? Will it also cast a new light on the Gingerbread House Murders, or will we be listening to the ravings of a mentally ill man? How will Ashley herself react to the man who was the cause of so much misery in her early life?’
He stopped again. ‘Do you mind me bringing this up?’
Ashley looked out the window. The hills of Cumbria had flattened, sinking back under the earth. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘Now that we’re on the way to Ashworth, I’m pretty curious myself to see what the old weirdo has to say. I can’t hide from it forever.’
Freddie nodded and pressed a button to stop the recording, then turned the radio on low. The slow beats of something weird on BBC Radio 6 seeped out into the car.
‘For what it’s worth, I think you’re very brave, Ash. You’re directly confronting a childhood trauma and letting other people in on that moment. That’s quite a thing.’
Brave. She thought of Magda, sitting in her house that was so full of children yet so empty too. Ashley thought of herself, night after night, listening to her brother give her information on people who were trying to confront their own trauma while her family made money out of it.
‘There are plenty of people braver than me,’ she said.
* * *
The weather held as they came into Liverpool, and by the time they arrived at Ashworth Hospital, the car was almost too warm. For a few moments, Ashley and Freddie sat in the parked car while the radio spoke in a low voice about a potentially record-breaking storm that was apparently arriving in the north of England in a few days. Storms seemed impossible when the sun was turning every damp surface and puddle into shimmering gold.
‘Ready to do this?’ asked Freddie.
Ashley shrugged. ‘As I’ll ever be.’
They got out of the car and went into the reception area. After a quick chat with the receptionist to sign them in and check their identities, they were taken to a bright, window-filled room with chairs and tables and a small counter selling hot drinks and prepackaged sandwiches. In the corner of the room, a Heedful One waited, its dark shape flickering and lapping at the wall. Ashley eyed it warily.
‘Have we come to the right place?’
Freddie raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Yeah, it’s a lot nicer than I was expecting.’
They found a table and sat. A few minutes later, a short wiry figure appeared at the door, his grey hair falling untidily to his shoulders. Despite his hair and beard, he was dressed well – dark jeans, a shirt under a navy jumper, soft loafers. He came into the room slowly, as though waiting for something to jump out at him from one of the tables. He was accompanied by a middle-aged woman in a blazer, her glasses perched on top of her head. When she saw them, she came over, bringing Dean Underwood with her. She eyed Ashley and Freddie suspiciously, as though she thought them the dangerous ones.
‘Here you go, Dean,’ she said, still looking at them. ‘Come and get me if you need anything, all right?’
And then, without a word to them, she left the room, and Dean Underwood sat down at their table.
‘Mr Underwood,’ said Freddie, his voice smooth and professional. ‘How are you?’
Ashley swallowed hard. Could this really be Underwood, the man who had haunted her nightmares for years after the trial? He looked so small and so frail.
‘Thank you for agreeing to speak with me.’ Underwood spoke in a soft rasp, as though his voice were sore and it pained him to form words. ‘I …’ He glanced up from under his eyelashes, his dark eyes on Ashley. ‘I’ve wanted to speak to you for years, Ashley. I mean, Miss Whitelam.’
Ashley blinked. On the drive over, she had spent a long time imagining what she would say to him at this moment, yet when it came time to actually speak, she felt like her lips had been sealed shut. She put her hands on the table and didn’t reply.
Freddie didn’t let the silence grow. ‘Eighteen years ago, Mr Underwood—’
‘Call me Dean, please.’
There was a fraction of a pause before Freddie continued. ‘Eighteen years ago, Dean, you broke into Red Rigg House and set several fires there late on the evening of the tenth of April. At your trial, you claimed that you were unaware that a group of children from across the country were staying in the house that night, in the dormitory directly above the places where you set your fires.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Underwood said quickly. ‘I would never have done it if I’d known kids was there. You’re saying “claimed” like I made it up, but it’s true. I never meant to hurt those kids.’
Freddie was unperturbed. ‘Thirty-nine children and one teacher died in the fire that night. Of the children that had been staying at Red Rigg House for the weekend, only Ashley here survived. You, Dean, were later picked up by the police in the woods backing onto the property, suffering from some smoke inhalation and mild burns.’
‘I didn’t know they was there,’ said Underwood again. A muscle in his jaw flickered under his skin. ‘Would never have done it otherwise.’
‘You did know we were there.’ The words were out before Ashley realised she intended to speak. ‘I saw you in the woods! And I know that you saw us too, me and Malory both. How could you have missed that there were forty kids running around the estate?’
Dean Underwood lowered his head.
‘You said that in the trial, Miss Whitelam, but I don’t remember it. I wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time. I had been drinking for days. Drugs too.’
He stopped talking. From somewhere behind them, a man was buying a sandwich from the counter and asking for a coffee.
‘Perhaps we could approach this from another angle,’ said Freddie, his voice calm and smooth again. Ashley felt a sharp stab of unreality; if she closed her eyes and listened to Freddie speak, she could be at home, watching the news on an American TV station perhaps. ‘Dean, what has your time here at Ashworth been like? It’s a hospital with an interesting reputation.’
‘It’s had its troubles,’ said Dean. He glanced over his shoulder at the door, as if expecting the woman with the glasses to be waiting for him. ‘But the last six years or so have been better for me. I’ve been improving, the doctors say. So because of my good behaviour and that, I’ve been able to spend time outside.’
‘I’m sorry, you’ve been able to do what?’ Ashley leaned forward in her seat. The Heedful One shifted, moving slowly down the wall away from her. ‘They’ve let you out?’
‘Conditional day release,’ Underwood said, a petulant tone to his voice for the first time. ‘I can leave Ashworth and go to Liverpool, and at night I come back and sleep in the secure unit. It’s all above board! What happened was eighteen years ago, and with drugs and therapy, I’ve made a lot of progress.’ The way he said it made Ashley think he was repeating what other people had told him, more than once. ‘Eventually, they hope that I will be able to live independently, with a parole officer checking on me week to week.’
‘This is fucking madness.’
The man with the sandwich glanced over at them sharply as he made his way to his own table.
Ashley lowered her voice. ‘You mean to tell me you’ve been out and about all this time, allowed to go wherever you like?’
‘I am ill,’ Underwood said, petulant again. ‘I need treatment, not punishment.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Ashley.
‘All right.’ Freddie leaned forward a little, putting his bulk between them. ‘I feel like we need to get back on track here. Dean, perhaps you could tell us why you wanted to speak to us today.’
Dean Underwood cleared his throat and looked away. Ashley took the opportunity to study his face – this face that had haunted her dreams for years, the face that sometimes still caused her mother to wake up screaming in the night. During the long and agonising trial following the fire at Red Rigg House, Ashley and her family had sat no more than ten feet away from the man who had set fires in a building where forty children slept, and Ashley had found it difficult to look away from him. He had been forty-nine years old then and had looked at least ten years older; now that he was in his late sixties, he looked thin and somehow wasted, a collection of rags that had been put through the washing machine too often. His good clean clothes only seemed to emphasize his frailty and weakness. There’s no need to be afraid of him now, she told herself. As small and slight as I am, I think even I could throw him across this room.
And then another smaller, more deeply hidden voice replied: And what has he been up to for the last six years? They haven’t been watching him closely enough.
‘When I was little, I had an older brother named Neil.’
Ashley glanced at Freddie – what was this tangent now? But Freddie just shook his head: Hear him out.
‘We lived in a village on the western side of Red Rigg House. You wouldn’t know it; it’s gone now. The buildings that were left were turned into holiday homes for rich people, but we were happy enough there. This was in the late fifties, early sixties, you understand. Me and Neil, we used to roam all over the lakes – hiking up hills, to other villages and towns. We’d go fishing. It was quieter then. Neither of us had much taste for school, so we stopped going. People didn’t care about it so much then, you see, but maybe because of that neither of us had many friends, so we was each other’s best friend.’ He stopped, swallowing hard, then continued. ‘Neil was three years old than me, and he was my best friend.’
‘What happened to your brother, Dean?’ prompted Freddie.
‘He started playing there, by the house.’ Underwood’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘On the lands. They had lots of rabbits there, in the lands around the woods, and Neil liked to trap them. He was always clever with his hands like that. He used to make the traps himself and bring home the meat for dinner. Lord Lyndon-Smith, he didn’t seem to mind, not as far as we could tell. We never got chased off. But I started to dislike the place, all the same. I hated it after a while.’
‘Why?’ asked Freddie.
Here Underwood shifted in his chair, rolling his shoulders as if he had a cramp. A strange kind of energy seemed to sink into him. From across the room, Ashley noted that the Heedful One had begun to creep towards them; something about their conversation was attracting it.
‘I don’t know, not really. I wish I could tell you.’
Ashley had the distinct sense he was lying or holding something back. Don’t try and kid a kidder, pal, she thought.
‘I had nightmares sometimes about the hill. About the fell.’ He shifted again, and when he looked up, he was looking directly at Ashley. A creeping kind of heat began to crawl across her neck, under her arms. ‘Did you ever have nightmares about it, Miss Whitelam? I did. I had so many, and I would wake up screaming. My dad would give me a slap and tell me to stop being such a silly sod.’ He paused. ‘That wasn’t the right way to handle it. I know that now, because of my doctors.’
‘What were the dreams about, Dean?’ asked Freddie.
‘I was on the fell at night. It was cold, and I was afraid of the ground under my feet, as though I was treading on something I shouldn’t. Or I would look down and see the house at the bottom with all its lights lit up at the windows, like it was watching me. Sometimes …’ He stopped and pushed his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘Sometimes I could hear Neil calling me in these dreams, and he was frightened, really terrified, and that was the worst of all because he was my big brother, you see? He wasn’t scared of nothing.’
‘What has this got to do with anything?’ said Ashley.
‘I’m getting to it,’ said Underwood. ‘I was too scared to go to Red Rigg House any more. That’s what I told Neil, that I didn’t want to go no more, and he was angry with me, really angry. We went about exploring like we always did, but sometimes Neil would leave me behind, or get up early to go without me, and I knew that he was going to Red Rigg. I was scared for him, but I couldn’t have made him do anything he didn’t want to do.’ He took a big, watery breath. ‘And then, in the summer, 1965 this was, one day he didn’t come back. And he always came home for his tea, whatever else was going on. So we knew it was bad.’
‘1965?’ asked Freddie.
Ashley knew he was thinking of the Gingerbread House Murders, but surely a disappearance over fifty years ago was outside the realm of those crimes.
‘The police weren’t interested,’ Underwood continued. ‘Said my brother was of an age to run away – he was thirteen, he didn’t care for school. He’d probably gone to Manchester they said, or even got a train south. He’d be in some big city somewhere.’
Ashley was reminded uncomfortably of Eleanor Sutton. So many missing kids.
‘I knew where he’d be though. He had gone to Red Rigg House without me that day, so I went myself. I walked all over the grounds, shouting for him, looking for Neil, even though the mountain was looming over me and I was stiff with fear the whole time. I don’t know how to describe it. Like I was doing the looking, but something else was doing the hunting.’
He stopped talking. He rubbed his face with one gnarled hand. ‘Do you think I could have a cup of tea?’ he asked, looking at Freddie. ‘I don’t do a lot of talking these days, and this is wearing me out.’
Freddie jumped up. ‘Certainly. I’ll be right back.’ He paused the recording.
While Freddie went over to the tea counter, Ashley found herself sitting in an uncomfortable silence with Underwood. He was fidgeting still, and beyond his right shoulder, she could see the Heedful One, like a restless shadow.
‘You don’t look so different, you know,’ he said eventually, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘From when I saw you in court, all those years ago. Such a pretty little girl.’
She glared at him. Heat prickled across her skin. Freddie was still at the counter, chatting lightly as the woman there filled three cups with hot water.
‘I know you saw me,’ she hissed back. ‘In the woods.’
He glanced at Freddie’s phone, as if to check that it wasn’t recording.
‘Perhaps I did,’ he said softly. ‘How could I miss two pretty girls in the trees? But how was I to know there was so many of you, aye?’
‘You’re a liar,’ Ashley said hotly. ‘We’ve no reason to trust anything you say.’
‘But you know I’m right,’ he said. ‘About the house. I can see it in your eyes.’
‘I’ve got no idea what you’re on about.’
He leaned forward over the table. ‘You have nightmares about it. About Red Rigg.’
‘Of course I bloody do! I nearly died there because you tried to burn it down.’
Underwood shook his head, frustrated. ‘When I saw you in the woods with that other girl, you were telling her that you didn’t like the mountain. It gave you the creeps, because you knew it was evil. I need to hear you say it. I need to know I’m not the only one that thought it.’
‘You’re out of your mind. Do you want me to tell you that Red Rigg is evil so you feel justified in murdering thirty-nine kids? Do me a fucking favour.’
‘No.’ Underwood rubbed a hand over his sunken cheek. ‘No. I was right about that place, and you know it.’
Ashley opened her mouth to ask what he was raving about, but Freddie reappeared at that moment with three steaming mugs of tea. He put them down on the table, then dropped a little cascade of sugar packets between them all. Once he was back in his seat, he started recording again.
‘I’ve read about the 1965 disappearance of your brother, Dean,’ said Freddie. He had his notebook out on the table, and he turned a page, looking for some scribbled note. He seemed unaware of the tension between Ashley and Underwood. ‘But he wasn’t found on the Red Rigg Estate.’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t involved!’ Underwood’s dark eyes glittered dangerously. ‘They moved the body, that’s all. Easy as anything, moving a body.’
‘You found the body of your brother, didn’t you, Dean?’
Underwood’s mouth worked as though he were chewing something bitter. He quickly took a sip of his tea. The frantic energy had returned to him, making his fingers tremble. The Heedful One that had been hanging behind him moved forward, rushing over Underwood, catching him in its shadowy net. It was as though Underwood himself had become part of the Heedful One; in the bright and cheery room, he sat in a pool of darkness. Ashley leaned back in her chair, alarmed.
‘Yeah, I found him,’ Underwood was saying.
‘What had happened to him?’
‘Bad things,’ whispered Underwood. ‘He’d been torn to pieces.’
The Heedful One that had covered Underwood surged forward. Although Ashley instinctively moved her chair back, it caught her anyway. The café-like room seemed to fade away while another scene took its place. All of a sudden, she was cold and small; her feet were sore and her legs ached. She felt a cold breeze that tasted like the end of summer on her tongue. She was tired and knew that she would have to get back before their mum noticed that she was missing too. She was following a hedge, crossing the walkways and heading home, empty-handed.
And then she saw the mess in the grass.
It was Neil, but he was so broken, it was hard for her to understand what she was looking at. His stomach was open, as though he were an overly ripe peach that had dropped from a height, and his eyes were gone – later, she knew, they would say that Neil’s eyes had been eaten by crows and other carrion birds, but she didn’t believe that for a second – and his face looked blindly up at the sky. Big parts of his legs were gone. His clothes were a deep, sodden crimson, and his skin was as white as snow. There were beetles in his guts.
Then the images drained away, and Ashley was sitting back in the small café, her tea still hot under her fingers. Freddie, she realised, was staring at her while Dean Underwood continued to talk. The Heedful One was gone.
‘… There were others, not that anyone talks about them, and I’m telling you, it’s something in that house. Someone. The place itself is evil. When I was looking for my brother, Lord Lyndon-Smith came out and told me to leave, his eyes all cold. Years we had been going there, hunting rabbits and playing in their woods, not a dicky bird from them, and then out of nowhere he wants me off his property. Because he knew too.’
‘Is that why you burned Red Rigg House down?’ asked Freddie, his tone neutral. ‘Because you believed the house was … haunted?’
Underwood hissed through his teeth. ‘You’re mocking me, but I’m right.’
Freddie moved his head in a noncommittal gesture. ‘Do you believe that your brother’s death is connected to the children that are being murdered now, Mr Underwood? Neil died over half a century ago. How likely is it that the same person that’s snatching children in 2022 is responsible for what happened in 1965?’
‘Person has got nothing to do with it,’ hissed Underwood. ‘What I saw wasn’t the work of anything human.’ He pointed a finger at Ashley, jabbing viciously. ‘And she knows it too.’
Ashley shivered. The Heedful Ones weren’t human, but if what her grandmother had believed was correct, they had been once. So why did they show her Underwood’s brother, torn to pieces? Why did they lead her to Robbie Metcalfe? And why did they save her from the fire at Red Rigg House, all those years ago? It all came back to the house. To the mountain.
‘I’ve had enough of this.’ Ashley stood up. Dean Underwood looked up at her, wincing as though she had hurt him somehow. It only made her angrier. ‘Carry on if you want, Freddie. I’m going to wait outside.’
* * *
Freddie joined her less than fifteen minutes later. She stood by his car, smoking one of her emergency cigarettes. The wind was picking up, throwing dead leaves against her ankles.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
She took one long drag, letting the nicotine hit make her slightly woozy, and then she dropped it onto the concrete and extinguished it in one practised movement with her shoe.
‘Hey. I could have wanted a drag on that myself,’ Freddie said mildly, and she smiled despite herself.
‘You? I’ve never met a more obvious nonsmoker. What else did he say? Anything of use?’
Freddie came and stood next to her, leaning against the car too. His arm brushed hers, and she let herself lean into it, just a little.
‘Not really.’ He sighed. ‘More ravings about how there’s an evil presence at Red Rigg House. He talked about his life after Neil died, and that was pretty sad, to be honest with you. His parents were torn apart by it, and his dad died of a heart attack a couple of years later. Dean ran away from home and lived on the streets in Manchester for a while, got into drugs in a big way as well as petty theft. He said that there are whole years of his life that he’s lost track of. And then, in the early 2000s, he found a shelter that helped him get sober for a while, and that was when he really returned to thinking that someone at Red Rigg was responsible for his brother’s death. He became fixated on it. Obsessed. He came up with this plan that he could burn the whole house down and end it, and around about the same time, he fell off the wagon.’ Freddie looked out across the car park, frowning. ‘The rest you know. Some of what he said was interesting, though. A child disappearing and turning up dead – not dissimilar to the Gingerbread House Murders.’
‘You can’t think it’s the same murderer,’ she said. ‘It was so long ago. How old do we think our killer is?’
Freddie shrugged. ‘I said it was interesting, not that it made sense.’
‘You’re missing the point.’ Ashley turned to look at him, pushing the vision of Neil Underwood from her mind. ‘Dean Underwood has been allowed to come and go from this apparently useless place for the last six years. The same period of time that the Gingerbread House Murders have been happening. And he has killed before.’
‘Very different MO,’ said Freddie. ‘Going from arson to kidnapping, feeding, and dismemberment?’
‘He did know the kids were there, Freddie. They were out there playing tennis in the courts while he was creeping through the woods. He could hardly have missed us.’ She licked her lips; smoking always made her mouth dry. ‘It would make sense, wouldn’t it? In a twisted kind of way. A boy finds the body of the brother he idolized, violently butchered and left in the middle of nowhere. Something like that, it breaks you. So, by the time he’s older, he’s convinced himself that someone at Red Rigg House is responsible. He fully loses it and tries to burn the whole place down. And it just so happens that now that he’s been given free rein, children are turning up butchered again.’
‘I admit, it does make a twisted kind of sense.’
‘Listen. I am going to stay at Red Rigg House in a couple of days. Come with me. You’ll get a look at the place Dean Underwood claims is evil, and I’ll get a bit of moral support. What do you say?’
He grinned. ‘It’s a date.’
* * *
After dinner that night, Ashley went to the bottom of their garden again, walking down to the hidden bench with darkness pressing on her from all sides. She had DCI Turner’s card in one hand, and her phone in the other. Freddie had not been especially taken with her theory that Dean Underwood could be behind the gingerbread house murders, but all night the thought had tugged at her, a dog worrying at a rag: he was damaged enough, he had history with the area, he even had a weird fixation with Ashley herself. Of course he had come back out of the woodwork when she was all over the news. It was probably him who had sent the parcel of meat. There was no telling what he could do.
The wind picked up, scattering pine needles over her shoulders, stinging against the bare skin of her hands. She picked up the phone and dialled Turner’s number.