There was a small landing, a bathroom, an empty box room, and a surprisingly large main bedroom. And when I opened the bedroom door and stepped inside, I knew straight away that this was where Ray Bishop lived. Up here … this was his home. I didn’t even need to see it, I could sense it, feel it — a brutal vitality that sapped the air from my lungs.
I closed the door behind me and shone the penlight around. The walls were black, the paint seemingly applied with no care at all. It looked as if someone had simply rushed round the room, slapping on paint until the walls were more black than white. The only window, facing the street, was covered with a single heavy black curtain. There was no bed, just a blanket on the floor. The blanket was surrounded by a mess of scattered objects: syringes, phials, tissues, a spoon, a carton of milk, crackers, soda bread, yoghurt, cheese, nuts …
‘Christ,’ I whispered, stepping cautiously around the mess and sweeping the penlight around the room again.
The entire place was lined with wall-to-wall shelves stacked with all manner of extraordinary things: ropes and wires and chains, small wooden boxes, metal boxes, plastic boxes, cardboard boxes, baskets, tins, box files, piles of papers, pornographic magazines, newspapers, books, photographs, DVDs, knives, belts, axes, straps, tubes, packets of pills, small glass bottles …
It was like a nightmare haberdashery.
As I moved round the room looking at these things, my heart was beating hard, sucking the air from my throat, and I could feel the race of adrenalin imploring me to get out — go, right now, get out of here, get OUT!
But I couldn’t leave yet.
I had to keep looking.
I didn’t know what I was looking for … I was just looking.
It wasn’t pleasant. The pornographic DVDs and magazines were sick with dull-eyed people doing fucking awful things … unnatural things, things that had nothing to do with sex, just violence. In the corner of the room, there was a small desk tented with a khaki blanket, and beneath the blanket was a computer screen, scanner, and printer. The monitor surround was painted black. I couldn’t bear to go anywhere near it. I scanned the shelves again, looking at tongs, clips, dolls, masks, protein powder, clubs, execution stills, a leather-bound black bible … and right in the middle of all this madness, I came across a black-and-white photograph in a cheap cardboard frame. As far as I could tell, it was the only framed photograph in the whole room. It showed two teenage boys standing in front of a large grey house. They were both dark-haired, both pale-skinned, both unsmiling, both dressed in V-neck jumpers. I picked up the photograph and looked closer. In a granite block over the door of the house, I could just make out the words PIN HALL. I looked at the two boys again, quite certain now that I was looking at Mick and Ray Bishop. Mick was slightly taller than Ray, and although he was only a year older than his brother — about fifteen at the time of the picture, I guessed — it was clear that he was the dominant one. Standing just in front of his brother, his body tensed, staring hard at the camera … it was almost as if he was guarding him from the unseen eyes of the future, the eyes on the other side of the camera, the eyes of people like me.
As I turned my attention to the image of Ray in the photograph, I realised that the look on his fourteen-year-old face was almost identical to the expression I’d seen earlier that evening, when Mick had been scolding him about something outside the pub. The disdain, the emptiness, the lack of emotion …
It was unnerving.
I put the photograph back on the shelf and carried on looking. There were lots of books: Spinoza, Voltaire, Unamuno, Genius, Skinned, Leviathan, How We Die, The Fabric of Reality, Killing for Company, Varieties of Religious Experience, The Character of Physical Law, Infinity and the Mind, Three Steps to Hell. There were strange little ornaments: painted skulls, tiny skeletons, disturbing sculptures. There were things in jars: dead insects, pickled mice, embryos, divining bones … all kinds of untouchable and unknowable things. They held a silence and a sense of aged stillness that reminded me of exhibits in a small-town museum … but this was a museum that no one was meant to visit, a museum of a twisted mind. These exhibits were not meant to be seen.
After what seemed like an hour or so, but was probably closer to twenty minutes, I came across a small wooden chest hidden away at the back of a wardrobe. At first, I didn’t understand why I felt drawn to it, why it felt different to all the other objects in the room … but after crouching down in front of the wardrobe and thinking about it for a while, I slowly realised that — unlike everything else — the wooden chest wasn’t on display.
It was hidden away.
Out of sight.
I paused for a moment, wondering what that could mean … then I reached in, lifted out the chest, and opened it up.
It was filled with what, at first sight, seemed like nothing much at all, just a haphazard collection of random objects … bits of nothing: a shoe, a hair band, a broken watch, a pink cardigan, some rings, bracelets, a purse …
And a necklace …
A silver half-moon on a silver chain.
Anna Gerrish’s necklace.
I don’t know how long I sat there, crouched on the floor of that sickening room, staring into that box of gruesome souvenirs … and that’s what they were, I realised. Souvenirs. This man — Ray Bishop, Charles Raymond Kemper, Joel R Pickton … whatever he wanted to call himself — this man had killed Anna Gerrish. He’d picked her up in his car, overpowered her, stabbed her, killed her, he’d discarded her body at the side of the road … and he’d taken her necklace. As a souvenir. To remind him of what he’d done.
As I looked down into the box, I wanted to be wrong. I didn’t want to believe that all those bits of nothing weren’t bits of nothing at all, that they were bits of people, girls, women … all of whom were probably dead.
Killed.
Murdered.
‘Fuck,’ I heard myself say.
There were so many of them …
Did Mick Bishop know? I wondered. Did he know that his brother was a serial killer? Or was he only aware that Ray had killed Anna Gerrish? I took a pen from my pocket and cautiously lifted the silver necklace from the box. It was proof, I knew that. Proof that Ray Bishop had killed Anna Gerrish. But what could I do with it? Who could I trust with it?
I was still asking myself these questions when I heard a car pulling up outside.
I froze for a moment and listened hard. I heard the engine stop … then nothing for a few seconds … and then the sound of a car door opening and someone getting out. I knew it couldn’t be Ray Bishop, because Cal would have called to warn me if he was coming back, but still …
I had to make sure.
Dropping the necklace into my pocket, I quickly got to my feet, went over to the window and pulled back the edge of the heavy black curtain. For a second or two, I tried to convince myself that the car parked outside the house wasn’t a white Toyota Yaris, and that the man heading up the path below wasn’t Ray Bishop … but I knew I was only wasting my time.
‘Shit,’ I said, as I heard him putting his key in the door.
The first thought that raced through my head was — what the hell was Cal doing, letting Ray Bishop come back without letting me know? But as I heard the front door opening, I quickly realised that there were more pressing things to think about. Ray Bishop was downstairs. Ray Bishop killed people. And any moment now, he’d be coming up here.
I heard the front door closing.
I wondered, briefly, if there was any chance at all that I could reason with him. I imagined him downstairs, standing in the hallway, perfectly still, sensing the presence of a stranger in his house.