‘Hey, Frankie,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you show me the town? I want to check it out.’
She shot a glance at Ryan. ‘I’ve just come from there.’
‘I know but—’
‘You want to hang out with us, sweetheart?’ Connie asked. ‘While your dad does whatever it is he wants to do?’
‘Sure. That would be nice. Thank you.’
Now I was torn. I wanted to spend time with Frankie. But it was pretty obvious she wanted to stay with Ryan.
‘Maybe I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘I can go into town another time.’
‘Dad. It’s cool. You don’t need to babysit me.’
‘That told you,’ said David with an annoying smirk. ‘You go and do whatever it is you want to do and Frankie can hang with us.’
Now I felt like I had no choice.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you back at the cabin at one.’
I watched them walk away in the direction of the resort, then headed along the path around the clearing. As my daughter and the Butlers vanished from sight, a gloom came over me, as if the sun was no longer able to penetrate the trees and the path on which I walked was dark. Now that I was alone, what David had said about being able to feel the energy of what had happened here came back to me. I could sense it. An imprint in the air, the memory of an evil act stamped upon this place.
I hurried away from the clearing as quickly as I could.
Chapter 6
Later, I found out that Frankie and Ryan had gone into Penance to look for an internet connection. Now I was doing the same – because the idea I’d had in the clearing was starting to excite me. There was, I was sure, a story here worth writing about. Firstly, there were the murders. A pair of unfaithful schoolteachers bludgeoned and strangled on a school trip. The ritualistic nature of it. A shocking crime, but not one that had ever, as far as I knew, been reported in the UK – and I didn’t think the popularity of Connie’s podcast had reached our shores either.
Then there was the ongoing mystery. Everett Miller was apparently guilty but had never been found. Where had he gone? Was he still alive, living under a new identity? Had someone helped him get away? Had he gone on to commit more murders? There were enough questions there to pique the curiosity of anyone with the slightest interest in true crime.
Finally, there was the element that, I believed, really gave this story an edge: the opening of the resort and the influx of dark tourists, many of them obsessed with this case they’d learned about on a true-crime podcast.
I had never written a crime article before, nor any investigative journalism. But the idea excited me. This could be the new start I had been desperate for. Because, after clinging on for a long time, even through the horrific period of my divorce from Sarah, I was finally facing up to the truth. My career was dead.
Music journalism was all I’d ever wanted to do. I started in the early nineties, when the UK music scene was in rude health and there were numerous publications who were willing to pay decent money. For a few years, I lived the dream: being flown to LA and New York to follow British bands on tour; hanging out with rappers, and joining in the hedonistic rituals of rock stars who wanted to be seen to be living it large. Parties, awards ceremonies, private jets with record company execs, an endless supply of CDs and concert tickets.
But every boom is followed by a bust. At the same time that illegal file sharing started taking huge bites out of the record industry, the internet did the same to the music-magazine business. No one needed to wait to find news or reviews any more. And everyone was now a writer, willing to fill the Web with their opinions for free. Suddenly, publications that had been household names for decades were closing down. Others merged, or moved online. I watched as half my friends lost their jobs. It was like a virus ripping through a community, taking out the weak and strong alike. The business I had loved, lived and breathed was ravaged.
Suddenly, I too was part of a great army of freelancers, battling for a dwindling number of paying jobs. And as supply outstripped demand, prices went down and continued to drop. For years, I scraped by, living from commission to commission. A few stars who I’d befriended in the nineties gave me work writing sleeve notes for retrospective box sets. A book I’d written about David Bowie was republished after his death. I had an incredible collection of memorabilia – a platinum disc signed by Depeche Mode; a leather jacket worn by Courtney Love – which I reluctantly auctioned off. The stress made me drink and, I confess, act like a morose arsehole. I resisted Sarah’s pleas that I retrain and get a proper job. I refused to move on and, eventually – nearly three years ago – Sarah moved out, taking Frankie with her.