Lost Souls (22 page)

Jess’s journal and notes were spread out in front of Laura. They’d been checked for prints and there was only one set on them. Jess’s.

Laura picked up the one containing the pieces she had read that morning.

‘Cant see, can’t talk, can’t move. All I can see is red. I can hear someone though, it’s a man, and he is laughing. I’m hurting, and I try to get away, but I can’t move my arms, my legs. I turn my head to try and see, try to open my eyes, but there is nothing there. Just a red mist, but it seems dark, forbidding. I try to scream for help but there is just a noise I don’t recognise.’

Laura shivered and wondered whether Jess had known at the time that she was the woman in the dream. She looked at the other pieces of paper and saw that they were similar in style, but only one other sounded like it foretold her death. None of it made any sense, but Laura knew that there was something there that provided a clue. She sighed. She just couldn’t see it.

She picked up a small black book. It was about the
size of a pocket diary, but it was thick and worn. The spine was all ragged and sticky tape held it together at the top and the bottom. Laura opened it.

On the inside, in juvenile pink pen, were Jess’s name and a date: 21 December 1994. Underneath were the words
‘Dream Journal’
and a simple drawing of a flower. Laura thought about the date and realised that Jess would have been in her early teens, just making her way through puberty. Laura thought back to herself at the same age and remembered the turmoil of those years. The worries, the discoveries, the whole confusion of it all. She thought she could remember vivid dreams herself, often nightmares, a mind made too busy by hormones racing through her system. Jess must have started the journal when she thought her dreams were more than just normal.

As she started to read, Laura noticed that the entries were dated. They were like the notes she had read before, disjointed, but they were more obviously accounts of Jess’s dreams. As she flicked through, she started to notice that they had a theme: disasters and death. No happy dreams, or odd dreams, or even erotic ones.

Laura started at the front, a description of the first recorded dream.

Laura’s attention was drawn to the bottom of the page and
‘Kobe 17/1/95’
scrawled across it. The body of the text had been written in the same pink gel pen as the inscription on the inside cover, so Laura could tell that they were written at the same time. But the words
‘Kobe 17/1/95’
were written in ragged red biro.

Laura chewed on a fingernail. Was it someone’s name, or a message? Then she remembered, and she felt her mouth go dry. It was an earthquake, in Japan. She remembered the footage now, the images from shops as shelves collapsed, the buildings moving around like someone shaking a box. Thousands had been killed.

She thought about Jess, wondered how heavily this had all weighed on her mind. The dream had been vivid enough to scare her, but then not long afterwards it had come true. Had there been something in the dream Jess had missed that might have saved some lives? How would a teenage girl cope with that?

She turned through the pages and read abstract accounts of dreams. Nothing jumped out, but then her eye was caught by an entry the following year.

Laura put the book down. Jess believed she was having premonitions. Then she noticed the words
‘OKLAHOMA 15/4/95!’
written in large capitals along the bottom.

Now Laura could recognise the description of the Oklahoma bomb, when a truck rented by neo-Nazis took off the front of a federal building, killing workers and children. She guessed that Jess wouldn’t remember the fine details of the dream later that month when the bomb went off in Oklahoma, but the orange jumpsuit? That was a telling detail. Laura remembered the pictures of Timothy McVeigh being led away—it was the main image people still had of him, the defiant ex-soldier in chains. In some ways that must have been harder for Jess to cope with than Kobe, which would have happened anyway, a natural disaster. If there had been enough clues, the Oklahoma bomb could have been stopped.

But who would have paid any attention to a teenager from Lancashire?

Laura sighed and smiled to herself. She was starting to believe in this herself now.

She turned over the page and saw that the entries carried on. Not all of them had notes at the bottom, and many seemed not much more than the strange and vivid dreams of an imaginative teenager. But the ones with red annotations at the bottom were all events she recognised. Plane crashes. Earthquakes. Murders.

She flicked through the journal, trying to find something relevant to the case. There was nothing. The last page had an entry dated 16 December 2004.

Laura felt her breath catch. She didn’t need to read the note at the bottom to know that Jess had dreamt about the devastating tsunami that had struck ten days later.

She put the journal down and wiped her eyes. She felt tired, the words in front of her flooding her brain too fast, making it too hard to see what it was that troubled her. She felt that the answer to Jess’s murder was
in front of her, written down somewhere. But she had gone through everything and nothing seemed real. Maybe it was too cryptic, or something was relevant but all mixed up.

She shook her head. It felt like the answer was almost in front of her, tantalisingly close.

She looked up when Pete came into the room. He was holding pieces of paper.

‘I don’t think Egan liked me smiling,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to go and speak to all these people.’

‘Who are they?’

He waved the papers in the air. ‘Witnesses. Those people who rang in with information about Eric Randle and Kyle. We’ve got to go and speak to them, take their statements.’

‘I thought we were on Jess’s murder investigation,’ said Laura.

Pete gave a small laugh. ‘We’re part of the merged inquiry team that’s pretending it hasn’t merged.’

Laura opened her mouth to speak, and then stopped. An idea started to form, some glimmer of light in her head, glowing, getting brighter all the time.

‘You okay?’ said Pete.

She looked up at him, her eyes sharp now, focused. ‘Are there any more of these?’ she said, holding up Jess’s dream descriptions.

Pete shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Everything from her bedroom cabinet is there.’

Laura picked up the journal and turned it over in her hand. ‘This is full of dream descriptions,’ she said. ‘Ten years of them. I don’t think she wrote down every dream,
the book wouldn’t have lasted for ten years if she had—it must just be the important ones. And they are orderly. They are dated, and she went back to the ones she saw come true and made a note. She was going to some kind of support group when she died, so she still thought it was important.’ Laura held it up like a preacher. ‘These dreams were a big deal to Jess.’

Pete shrugged. ‘So what’s the problem?’

Laura opened the journal to the back page. ‘This one is full. Look,’ and she flicked through the pages so he could see. ‘Every page filled up.’

Pete began to chew on his lip. ‘Sorry, Laura, I’m not there with you yet.’

Laura’s smile widened. ‘If this one is full and ends back in 2004, where is the journal she was writing in before she died?’

A flicker of a smile crept over Pete’s face as he sat down and looked through the journal.

‘You might have something, but,’ and then he nodded towards the pieces of paper, ‘then again, maybe she got sick of keeping a journal so she used just any old piece of paper?’

Laura shook her head. ‘No. You saw how neat her house was. This journal is the same. Each entry dated. All the dates follow. She didn’t just open the journal at any old empty page. She went to the next one, so that it all followed chronologically. And don’t forget that she will have been writing these as soon as she woke up. No, this girl was orderly, neat.’

‘But what about the scraps of paper?’

‘She might have used those when she didn’t have her
journal with her. Maybe she was away from home when she wrote those, on holiday or something. She wouldn’t take her journal with her because it was too precious. What if she lost it?’

‘Do you think we should go back to her house to search for it, see if she had it hidden away somewhere?’

Laura looked doubtful. ‘It would only be in one place: next to her bed. She would have to be able to open it as soon as she woke up. And it’s not there now.’

Pete put the incident reports on the floor. ‘Are you thinking that whoever killed her took it?’

‘I think more than that,’ said Laura intently. ‘I think her killer went in there to get it.’

Pete furrowed his brow. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Because there must have been something in it that he didn’t want anyone to see?’

Pete sat back and exhaled. ‘Jesus fucking Christ. Dreams. Premonitions. This is Blackley, a crappy old mill town. It’s not
The X Files’

Laura grinned at him. ‘Do you remember why Eric Randle was there, at her house, at that time of the morning?’

Pete nodded and laughed. ‘He’d had a fucking dream.’ And then he pointed at the journal. ‘And you think that if Jess had written down something that made her killer get twitchy, maybe something her killer had done, or was planning to do, then her killer wouldn’t know exactly how much she had seen? Or would maybe see again in another dream? So she had to be silenced.’

Laura smiled, her dimples flashing. ‘I’m thinking something like that.’ She looked at the journal in her
hand. ‘There must be something in the missing journal that caused someone to get jumpy.’

Pete sat back and rubbed his face with his hands, as if he was trying to wake himself up. ‘So she dreamt of her killer?’ he asked.

Laura shook her head. ‘No. Why would she let him in if she had seen his face in her dreams as her killer? No, I think she dreamt about something else, and I think I know what it was.’

‘Go on.’

Laura raised her eyebrows, her eyes mischievous now. ‘I think she saw who was abducting those children.’

‘You’ve lost me again.’

Laura laughed.

‘C’mon, it’s not that difficult. Who is the one person that connects Jess and the abductions?’

Pete thought for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘Eric Randle,’ his eyes widening.

‘You’re getting there, Sherlock,’ said Laura. ‘And if there was a journal that gave a clue about the abductor, then it must rule out Eric as the abductor.’

Pete shook his head. ‘How did you get to that conclusion?’

Laura shrugged. ‘It’s simple: why would he go to all that effort to avoid detection and then call the police with some story about having a dream? If Eric had killed her, the last thing he would do is start talking about dreams.’

‘But that means something else is all wrong,’ said Pete.

Laura nodded. ‘I’m already there,’ she said, tapping
her head. ‘If the abductor wasn’t Eric Randle, then it was no suicide today. It was murder.’

Pete began to smile. ‘And do you know who was friends with both of them?’ he added excitedly.

‘Go on?’

‘Billy Hunt.’ Pete put the papers on the desk and then pointed to the door. ‘Time for a visit, Watson.’

I hadn’t been to the graveyard since I had arrived back in Turners Fold.

My father had died the year before. He had been a policeman, just an ordinary everyday bobby, one who needed nothing more than to do his job, take his pay, and look after his family.

I was an only child, and the family had got even smaller when my mother had died, taken away from me in my teens, cancer robbing her of the fizz that she had, a bounce that had carried her through her life. It toughened me up, but it destroyed my father. By the time he got through the grief, I had grown up and moved on, heading for London with my head filled with dreams.

I loved London—the buzz, the noise, the movement. But it wore me out. I missed the green spaces, the talk, the smiles.

My father had died trying to do what was right. He’d made an enemy he couldn’t fight and died for his trouble. Now I was walking towards his gravesite. I was feeling scared.

It was in a beautiful place, at the back of an old blackened church with castellated walls and a high slate roof.
Entry to the churchyard was through an old stone gate, and clematis climbed over like bright flops of cloth in summertime. Turners Fold was in the valley below, my new house on the opposite hill.

The day was clear and I could see for miles, the hills in the distance picked out in sharp relief. I could make out people moving about in the town below, just tiny shapes, and a tourist barge cruised along the canal in the middle of town. A hundred years earlier the town would have been under a pall of smoke, just the hills around clear. Now the industry had gone, the whole town came into view.