October skies

‘I’m good… you know, keeping busy.’

Rose fiddled uncomfortably with a tress of her hair. ‘You asked me to call.’

The email had come through an hour ago; two perfunctory and polite lines from Julian suggesting they should quickly hook up and update each other on their progress.

‘Uh, yeah. I just wanted to see what you’re up to and let you know how things’re going from my end.’

‘Uh-huh. So…’

‘So shall I go first or do you-?’

‘No, er, fine. You go first and update me, if you like.’

Julian coughed. ‘Okay. Well, good meetings so far. We’ve got Sean on board. He’s putting together a deal as we speak. And with the BBC signing on, it’ll make it a shitload easier to sign up another partner.’

‘That’s great.’

‘So, money soon shouldn’t be quite such an issue. What else? Oh yeah, I spoke to Dr Griffith. You remember Tom?’

‘The shrink we interviewed for Uncommon People?’

‘That’s the fella. He’s doing very well with his book, by the way.’

‘Lucky Tom.’

‘He’s really hooked by this. Wants to do something with us.’

‘Okay. He’s not going to hijack it, is he?’

‘No. But he may be a useful, authoritative talking head. It really depends whether we do a straight documentary, or a docu-drama, which is what Sean is suggesting. Anyway, Tom’s convinced Preston is some kind of whacked-out religious nut-job.’

‘That’s hardly a difficult diagnosis.’

Julian laughed. ‘Nope. But he made some very interesting comparisons with other similar whacked-out nuts from history. It’ll make for a good angle to play around with. Plus his reputation carries some authority. If he’s happy to say Preston’s a sociopathic killer prepared to murder all his followers just to satisfy delusions of destiny, then-’

‘He said that?’

‘Yup.’

Rose felt the skin on her arms tingle. ‘Oh my God.’

‘It is kind of creepy, isn’t it?’

She wondered whether to confess to Julian exactly how spooked she was beginning to feel about the whole thing.

‘What we may have, according to Tom, is one of the earliest, most detailed accounts of a serial killer going about his business, courtesy of our good friend Lambert.’

‘Julian?’

‘Yeah?’

‘It gets better.’

Better or… weirder?

Rose didn’t like the fact that the story was beginning to get to her.

‘How so?’

‘I’m almost certain one of the Preston party emerged from the hills,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve been following up on some of the Blue Valley folklore. There’s an account of a survivor who emerged the spring after Lambert’s diary entries, emaciated, at death’s door, and quite out of his mind by the sound of it. ’

‘Who?’

‘Well, that’s the mystery. It was a man. They called him the Rag Man. He never gave a name. They nursed him back onto his feet and he left Blue Valley early April 1857. Then I picked up his trail in a town called Fort Casey, about forty miles north-west, where he attracted some attention. He entered the town and a curious reporter tried to collar him for an interview.’

She read the article to Julian.

‘That’s really quite weird,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘But how can we be sure it’s someone from the Preston party?’

‘We can’t. But Blue Valley, Pelorsky’s Farm, was well off the beaten track for emigrants. The only people back then that they encountered were trappers and traders and occasional Indians. It’s too big a coincidence that a starving white man emerged from the mountains a few months after those people got caught by the snow, don’t you think?’

‘Hmm.’

‘And that article was dated mid-April. So it would fit the timescale of someone making forty miles westward on foot.’

‘You know, having a mysterious survivor emerge from the mountains and into enigmatic obscurity would really add a lot to our story.’

‘It certainly would,’ she replied.

‘Whoever it was.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If that person survived… what if that man had children?’

‘It would be one helluva coup to track down a descendant and interview him or her.’

‘Yes,’ said Julian. ‘Look, we’ve got quite a few names from Lambert’s journal: Keats, Weyland, Preston, Bowen, Larkin, Zimmerman, Stolz, Stolheim… to name just a few. It would be worth a shot, if you’re up for it, to comb through the archived press of the time, like you did in Fort Casey.’

‘That’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

‘Maybe. But we could filter this down a bit. If this Rag Man was headed north-west, there were only a few destinations for him back then, weren’t there? I mean, you had Portland, Astoria and Fort Vancouver. None of those settlements would have been that big back then, perhaps only a few thousand. If we ran all the names mentioned in Lambert’s journal through their local press archives, their parish records, we might get a hit.’

‘True.’

‘And I’ll help you with this, as soon as I join you out there. Meantime, I’m going to follow Preston’s trail. I mentioned to you there’s a guy out there on the internet who’s set up a page on Preston?’

‘Yeah, I saw your mail.’

‘There’s an email address on his page. I’m going to see if we can squeeze him for some detail.’

‘Be careful, Jules,’ Rose blurted.

‘Uh?’