The House Guest - Mark Edwards Page 0,40

brow. ‘I don’t know. Would she and the others want it to look like you’d both gone missing? And if Eden was planning to have someone come and take your body, why didn’t she remove you while you were unconscious? They could have finished the job.’

I shuddered.

‘No, I think she only intended to knock you out. No offence, but she probably thought it was safe to leave you alive because she didn’t think you’d be capable of tracking Ruth down. Of getting anywhere at all.’

I let what he’d said sink in.

‘You’re going to have to prove her wrong, son,’ said Callum.

Chapter 19

‘I need to prove that Eden exists,’ I said the next morning, after a restless night on the sofa. ‘Do you have any photos of her?’

‘No,’ Callum responded. He looked a lot less tired than I felt. He’d already been out and had come back with coffee and breakfast. ‘I’ve tried to get one a few times but it’s harder than you’d think, secretly photographing someone. I got a couple of blurry shots of the back of her head and that’s it.’

‘Sinead didn’t have any?’

‘Not that I could find. I guess Eden doesn’t like having her picture taken.’

‘Except she took a photo with me,’ I said. ‘In the bar. We took a few, in fact.’

‘Then she deleted them off your phone.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Did you notice any CCTV cameras there? In the bar?’

I thought back, trying to picture that night. But who notices CCTV cameras?

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, you’d better get down there and find out.’

‘Aren’t you going to come too?’

‘Can’t. I’ve set up a meeting with a local journalist. She’s an expert in cults.’

‘Cults?’ It was the first time the word had come up. I realised we had been skirting around it.

‘Yep. Apparently this reporter knows everything there is to know about the subject, so I’m going to go have a chat with her. See what I can find out. She’s upstate so I’m going to be gone a while.’ He paused. ‘If you search for cults and secret organisations online, there are dozens of them. Hundreds. But the one we’re looking for . . . there’s no trace of it.’

‘Maybe your contact on Facebook was making it all up.’

He squeezed his empty coffee cup, crushing it. ‘It exists. I’m sure of it. And if anyone knows anything about it, it’ll be this woman.’

Alison’s Starting To Happen, the bar I’d visited with Eden, didn’t open until lunchtime, so I spent the morning at Callum’s, researching cults on my laptop. The word had a chilling power, conjuring up images of religious fanatics living in communes and compounds. The Jonestown massacre. The sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Charles Manson and the butchering of Sharon Tate. They preyed on lost people who were searching for something to belong to, looking for meaning.

Yeah, whispered a voice in my head. Like Ruth.

I closed the computer. Again, I had to push through my disbelief and try to accept what seemed to be the likely truth. Eden belonged to a cult and had taken Ruth. The question was, why? Why target Ruth? Had she come to Jack and Mona’s house with Ruth as her target? That had to be the case; it couldn’t be random. But how did she know about Ruth? Again, the answer seemed obvious. Ruth was an actress. She was known in certain, small circles – the theatre world and the kind of people who watched arthouse horror films. Had Eden targeted Ruth because of her role in the movie? That made sense, except Eden had acted like she’d never seen The Immaculate before. Her emotional reaction, her surprise at the events in the film, had seemed genuine – although I already knew Eden was a practised liar. A convincing actress in her own right. And that made me wonder if she was in fact an actor, if she was part of theatrical circles too.

Then there was the other big question. How had she known we were at Mona and Jack’s house, and that they were away? Eden had seemed to know about the Cunninghams. She knew details about their lives. Or was I imagining that? Had she used generalities, like a medium conning gullible audience members? Or had she parroted back facts we had told her? Perhaps everything she had known about Mona and Jack could be found on their social media accounts.

In fact, Eden could have found out that we were house-sitting for Jack and Mona through