“Thank you, Laura, that’s always nice to hear,” he says, his teeth flashing at her. “It’s available now and if you buy it today through my website you’ll receive a ten percent discount, or twenty percent if you buy two. It does, as you well know, Laura, make a wonderful gift.”
“It certainly does, Jonas. I know if I had a man in my life I’d certainly be buying one for him,” she says, and it doesn’t take a psychic to see she’s interested in him. “It appeals to everybody.” I roll my eyes and can’t decide between reaching for the remote or a vomit bag, and during my indecision she throws another line at Jonas and it’s an interesting one. “Now, you were telling me before the show you know something about Emma Green, the young Christchurch girl that’s gone missing.”
“Yes, yes, a very sad case I’m afraid.”
Well that’s the only thing he’s ever gotten right.
“Christchurch is becoming renown for that kind of thing,” she tells him. “In fact, the police now refer to the city as ‘Crime’ church.”
“As well they should,” he says, and that’s the second thing he’s gotten right. He’s on a roll. That means I should hear him out.
“What can you tell us about Emma going missing?”
An image of Emma Green comes up on a big screen in the background. She’s smiling. There are extra arms and shoulders to the sides, friends or family cropped out of the picture. The photo looks recent. There’s some generic greenery behind her, a tree or some shrubs.
“Not missing,” he says, “she was abducted.”
“And you think she’s still alive?”
Jonas looks glum at the same time still managing to show his teeth. It’s a look he must have practiced in the mirror, back when he was selling used cars and telling his customers there was nothing he could do about the faulty water pump on the car they just bought. Copies of his book are standing on a small coffee table between him and his host, a bunch of flowers behind them, everything arranged just so.
“Unfortunately no,” he says, playing the percentages. That’s what psychics do. They read the situation and go with the statistics. A young girl goes missing in Christchurch, then the statistics say she’s been abducted. They say she’s dead. And assholes like Jonas Jones come along and use that to promote their new book. The plane of consciousness he’s on with these in-tune readings of his has his bank balance on it too. I turn off the TV before he can say another word.
I sit back down in front of the computer and go through the same information I found last night. Pamela Deans was fifty-eight years old, and for the last three years worked at the Christchurch Public Hospital. Before that, she spent twenty-five years working at Grover Hills, a mental institution built outside of Christchurch during the First World War. Joshua Grover was a businessman who made most of his money importing mining equipment into the country back when people were flocking to the south island searching for gold. Grover had three sons, the oldest was nineteen years old when he killed another schoolboy. The problem was Grover’s son had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. Back then there was no room for sympathy in the justice system, and Grover fought hard to keep his son alive but failed, and for the first time since making his money Grover found there were some things that couldn’t be bought. What he could do was make a difference. Within months of his son being hanged, he petitioned for and finally won the right to build a mental institution where people like his son could be contained. He was granted the right, as long as the institution was well outside the city limits where the mentally ill could be swept under the carpet. Over the years it became one of a handful of institutions, all of them flourishing until, over the last few years, one by one they were shut down, the costs too high and the funds to run them put to use elsewhere by the city council, money spent on trees, on roads and recycling, money being spent trying to solve the teenage drinking epidemic rather than being spent on keeping the mentally dangerous at bay. Patients were kicked to the curb and told to fend for themselves, many with nowhere to go, all of them with instructions that no matter what, they must keep taking their medications. They spilled back into society, those who went on to kill would wind up in jail, but of course it was always too late, the damage was done.
For a quarter of a century Pamela Deans worked with these people, and then three years ago Grover Hills closed its doors and hung up a Closed for Business sign.
For nearly thirty years Cooper Riley has studied serial killers and murderers. Along with psychology, he has taught about them at Canterbury University for fifteen years. Some of the cases he speaks about happened here in Christchurch. He studied people who were mad, and Pamela Deans looked after people who were mad.
The connection this morning is just as thin as last night-but it’s all there is.
I ring Emma Green’s boyfriend, tell him that I don’t have any news yet about Emma, and then ask him if he knows anything about Grover Hills.
“Like what?”
“Have you heard of it?”
“Yeah, it closed down a few years ago, right?”
“Right. Has Professor Riley ever mentioned it?”
“Not really. I think it’s something he covers in later years if you start moving from psychology to criminology.”
“Do you know if any classes in the past took any field trips? Anything like that?”
“I doubt it,” he says, and I doubt it too. Nobody would take a class field trip to a mental institution. “He’s missing, right? Professor Riley? Somebody took him and burned down his house.”
“Yes.”
“It’s connected to Emma?”
“Yes.”
“Did he kill her?”
I think of the photographs, Emma Green naked and bound in a chair but still very much alive. “You sure he never mentioned Grover Hills?”
“It’s only my first year with him, and we’re only two weeks into it, and we’re only doing psychology one-oh-one, not criminology. You should ask one of the other lecturers, or a past student, or you should get hold of his book.”
“His book?”
“Yeah. There’s a rumor Professor Riley was writing a book about killers in Christchurch. You know, the crazy ones, sociopaths and multiple killers. He’s an expert in that kind of stuff. If it’s true, he’d be writing about people who might have ended up in Grover Hills.”
“Where can I get a copy?”
“You mean if there really is one? See, that’s part of the story. He never got it published. It was kind of a joke for some of the students. Professor Riley acts like he knows everything there is to know, but he couldn’t get a publisher to sign him up. We figured that meant he didn’t know enough.”
“Do you know anybody who’s ever seen it?”
“No. But I don’t even know if he really wrote one. Could just be one of those urban legend type deals. But if he did write one it must be on his computer or something, right?”
“Right,” I say, thinking about the lump of plastic his home computer has become.
After I hang up I call Schroder. He lets it ring half a dozen times before picking up.
“Look, Tate, I’m glad you called,” he says. “I’ve been thinking hard about this, and the way things are running now, it’s best you leave things to me. I know it’s about finding Emma Green, but it’s also about getting a conviction. Having you running around, that puts any conviction at risk.”
“I thought you were going to keep me in the loop.”
“It’s beyond that, Tate.”
“And Natalie Flowers? Have you spoken to her parents?”
He sighs, and I think he’s about to hang up, but instead he carries on. “We’ve spoken to her mother. The father died a month after Natalie went missing. The mother says it was from a broken heart. She said that if nothing bad had happened to Natalie, then she would have gone to her father’s funeral, but she never did. You remember the Melissa Flowers case?”