The Deep Secret Read online

  The Deep Secret

  David Robinson

  Copyright © 2013 by David Robinson

  Cover Artwork by mangojuicy

  Design by Crooked Cat

  All rights reserved.

  The Deep Secret: 978-1-909841-23-9

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Publishing except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Publishing Ltd. 2013

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  The Author:

  A Yorkshireman by birth, David is a retired hypnotherapist and former adult education teacher, now living on the outskirts of Manchester with his wife and crazy Jack Russell called Joe (because he looks like a Joe).

  A devout follower of Manchester United, when he is not writing, he enjoys photography, cryptic crosswords, and putting together slideshow trailers and podcast readings from his works.

  By the same author

  The Handshaker

  The Deep Secret

  Voices

  The STAC Mystery series:

  The Filey Connection

  The I-Spy Murders

  A Halloween Homicide

  A Murder for Christmas

  Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend

  My Deadly Valentine

  The Chocolate Egg Murders

  The Summer Wedding Murder

  Costa del Murder

  The Deep Secret

  1

  Felix Croft put down the handwritten sheet of A4 paper, leaned back in his chair and gazed out from the balcony of his apartment across the short stretch of sea to the island of La Gomera. From somewhere behind the apartment block, the sun had risen into a gin clear sky and Gomera shone a glorious brown in the morning light. It would be another day of thirty-forty degree temperatures.

  He watched the hydrofoil from Los Christianos making its way across the twenty-mile stretch of Atlantic Ocean, its hull gleaming in the early sun, and the passengers, holidaymakers mainly, looking back on Tenerife. At that distance, the cone of Mt Teide would dominate the skyline and many a digital camera would already be pointing towards it from the deck of the hydrofoil.

  He brought his gaze back and down to the dual carriageway immediately below him, where a local bus pulled into a stop outside the five-star hotel opposite. Several people got off. Croft recognised one as a receptionist from the apartment complex in which he lived. He checked his watch, 8.20am. Back in England, anyone that late for work would be running to get there, but not this girl. She ambled across the road as if she had all the time in the world, black hair flouncing around her tanned features, sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead. She waved to someone directly below Croft; someone he could not see; one of the greeters or waiters from the parade of restaurants that ran along the street, he guessed.

  Above the tops of the low-rise apartment complexes opposite, he could see the boats and yachts in the harbour, some of them millionaires’ playthings, rocking gently on the calm waters of the marina. Greeters were already out in front of the line of restaurants along the harbour side, and several sun worshippers were already ensconced on their loungers on the small beach.

  Adjusting his position slightly, looking to his left, Croft gazed down over the pool area of the complex in which he had his apartment. The sun rose late in the subtropical Canary Islands. It had barely crested the roofs of the far blocks, and the ice-blue water of the pool, mirror-calm in the windless, triangular enclosure, looked even colder in the shadows.

  Not all of his fellow residents were permanent. Unlike Croft, some owners rented out their studios and apartments to holidaymakers, reserving just a few weeks for their own use. It was seen as a useful side income, which effectively paid for the owners’ time on the island. Even before he moved here permanently, Croft had never done so. Apartment 401C was reserved for his use only.

  A few people were placing their towels or robes over sun loungers, preparing for their daily dose of ultraviolet. In the past, he could never understand the insularity of visiting a foreign land to simply laze about round a pool with other Brits, but that was before…

  He shut his mind to the thought before it could properly evolve. All that was a year and a half ago, and two thousand miles to the north. It was no longer a part of his life.

  And yet, he could not ignore it. For all that it belonged to a former Felix Croft, it was with him every day. Twenty or more men and women lay beneath the hard soil of Northern England, all victims of Gerald Burke, The Handshaker: the man whose evil had done so much to destroy the underlying values of Croft’s life, including his love of England and all things English.

  Here on Tenerife, he had no such worries. The pace of life suited him, the general indolence and year-round ambient weather induced a sense of tranquillity. And unlike his fellow Brits, he had no return journey to cast a cloud on the sunshine, no work to return to. In the year since he had arrived on the island, he had written no more than a few thousand words of his next book, and it suited him. He worked when he felt like it, and not when someone demanded.

  A glint in the sky above Gomera signalled another aircraft approaching Reina Sofia airport. Another crowd of holidaymakers from Great Britain or mainland Europe coming for their week in this subtropical paradise. And as they arrived, so a plane load would fly off home. Croft did not have their problem. He would never go home. He had nothing to go home to.

  But for all their distance, those memories, those nightmares would never go away. There were reminders with him even here. Whenever he thought of Trish, the woman he had loved, robbed of her mind by Burke’s torture, the anger, the fury would return. Whenever Detective Inspector Millie Matthews, the dusky-skinned, vibrant and independent police officer who had worked with him to bring Burke to justice, visited him here on Tenerife, her presence would bring unwanted memories of those frightening days.

  It would never go away. There was no closure. All he could do was suppress his angst in the calmer pace of life on the Island of Eternal Spring.

  A knock on the apartment door snapped him from his mental idling. The maid entered. “Hola, Señor.”

  “Hola.”

  While she busied herself sweeping, mopping, tidying the apartment, Croft looked again on the first page of Graham Burke’s manuscript.

  It was a surprising and not altogether welcome intrusion into his idyll. Another reminder of the horrors he (and Trish) had suffered, and the atrocities he had helped uncover.

  The parcel had arrived twenty-four hours previously, the postscript to a telephone call from the University of North West England, his former employer, where it had originally been delivered a week earlier. After some negotiation, Croft had agreed to pick up the one hundred-pound bill for forwarding to the Canary Islands and when he read the accompanying letter, he had been astonished.

  Printed on a grandiose letterhead, from W. T. Harper, Solicitor, Commissioner for Oaths, with an address in Bath, it read:

  Dear Mr Croft

  Please find enclosed a handwritten manuscript, entitled The Secret of The Deep Secret, produced by the late Mr Graham Burke, also known as The Great Zepelli, father of my client, Mr Gerald Burke.

  As you are aware, my client was impr
isoned for the whole of his remaining life for the so-called Handshaker murders. He has accepted his sentence, and he feels that you could make better use of the enclosed manuscript than he.

  Mr Burke therefore wishes for you to accept the enclosed document in the spirit in which it is offered.

  Yours sincerely…

  And it was signed with a flourish, William T Harper.

  Croft’s immediate reaction was suspicion. Why would Gerry Burke send anything to him? Their hatred was mutual, and if Croft had any regrets about his handling of Burke, it was that he did not take the opportunity to finish him off in the ruins of Cromford Mill on that cold, November morning almost two years ago. It would have been so easy. Another two minutes and the whole mill would have been demolished by explosives, crumbling around Burke… and Croft… and Trish. That final thought had dictated Croft’s actions. She did not deserve to die, but saving her meant letting Burke live to face justice instead of eternity.

  And Burke had made no bones about his hatred of Croft. He detested the whole Croft family.

  Why then would Burke present him with this document? Contrition? Remorse? Croft doubted it. Gerry Burke had raped, tortured and murdered numerous women, and never showed even a hint of repentance.

  Putting aside his suspicions, he sat on the parcel for a day, mulling over the possibilities while he basked in the sunshine, wined and dined in his favourite restaurants. Inevitably, he knew he would look at it.

  Document, it transpired, was an understatement. By his reckoning there were some three hundred pages, all covered in The Great Zepelli’s small, cursive handwriting. Dipping into the pages at random, words, some underlined, others double underlined, leapt at him, and he had to forcibly remind himself that Zepelli had written it in prison, while serving ten years for fraud and deception (a sentence Croft’s father, appearing for the prosecution, had helped secure) and he would have had access only to notepaper and pen. In 1979, word processors, if they existed at all, would not have been available to the general public, let alone the prison community. Underlining, single and double, was an author’s accepted method of indicating words to be italicised or emboldened.

  Croft, who produced his own academic and general works on a laptop computer, could not help but admire Zepelli’s persistence.

  The work, if it was genuine, was undoubtedly valuable. As The Great Zepelli, Graham Burke had enjoyed an unrivalled international reputation as an illusionist, escapologist and master hypnotist. Any manuscript written in his hand would be worth a small fortune.

  That merely called into question his son’s motives for keeping it secret. A retired local government officer, Gerald Burke had lived in virtual penury on the Winridge Edge Estate in Scarbeck. Why? When he had been sitting on something as valuable as this?

  The question only brought Croft full circle. Why, then, send it to him now?

  With no answer to the question, he picked up the first few pages once more.

  ***

  C Wing, Walton Prison, 1979.

  I put together this manuscript from memory. That does not, however, mean there will be many inaccuracies. Apart from the war years, I have spent my whole life on the stage, delivering various acts to an appreciative public, and I have developed not only skills in escapology and a mastery of hypnotism, but also an eidetic memory.

  There are certain segments which I have had to dramatise. They were not my experiences, but those of my old and trusted friend, Julius Reiniger. Likewise, there are those sections where it will be obvious that neither Julius nor I were present. My account of these incidents is based upon reports received from other parties. Franz Walter’s meeting with Anna, for example, is taken from a conversation between Walter and Julius, as is the later meeting between Walter and Hauptmann Lehrer. Captain Stokes related his discussions with senior military personnel to me. This does not mean the descriptions are inaccurate. Merely that they are second or third hand, and not eyewitness accounts of what happened.

  Apart from these areas, everything happened as I have described.

  Notwithstanding the adversity, no, enmity of our first meeting, Julius became the best friend I ever had, and it was to me that he entrusted The Deep Secret, a method of inducing instantaneous deep hypnosis with a single look, a single touch, not a word spoken, and without the compliance of the subject.

  Such total control over the minds of our fellow men has been the desire of the power hungry since the dawn of time, and I make no excuses for numbering myself amongst them. I would not be here in this cell if I had not felt the urgent need for that power.

  And yet, the professionals, the psychiatrists, the psychologists, those men who have made the study of the human mind, brain, consciousness, their life’s work, say that such control is no more than a wild fantasy, the basic fodder of the science fiction storyteller. I tell you that it is not a fantasy, it is not a daydream. It is a reality. It affects less than one percent of the total population, and its efficacy depends upon many factors, but it is nevertheless real for all that. I know, for I used this and other secrets taught to me by Julius, to debauch myself for many years. Moreover, I did not employ it purely for sexual gratification. For almost thirty years, it provided me with a source of income, taken from the rich and not so rich, few of them any wiser to account for their loss.

  The Deep Secret is well-guarded, known only to a few men. Master hypnotist, Franz Walter, passed it to my dear friend Julius who, in turn, passed it to me as a mark of his gratitude for having helped him in the dark days of war and post-war austerity.

  I feel the weight of my years pressing in on me. I am fifty-eight years old as we look at the calendar, but I have lived many lives in those short years, risked life and limb so many times, taken too many highs, stressed my body too many times. Angina plagues me, the cold of my prison cell aggravates my condition. I am not long for this world.

  Who then, should inherit The Deep Secret from me?

  My son, Gerald, is my natural heir and successor. With my fortune sequestrated by the authorities, I have little to leave him, and The Deep Secret would prove a fitting heirloom. But even now, he is not yet ready for it. The testosterone, which is a natural part of the Burke gene, and which manifests in sexual greed, matures in Gerald in uncontrollable fits of rage, and such fury is not the natural bedfellow of The Deep Secret.

  Who, then, can I leave it to? There is no one.

  For that reason, I have chosen not to spell out the secret. It is hidden in the code below, the key to which is in this manuscript.

  IFTL HN EIBSENS R TGTNHI

  CEO IGW NAISY LEN NY GNKE

  BRIU NX OMOAO G NEEG NACH

  WL MM LJRP MO ILAQ TIOGNI

  EIAADAN ARN A OSTI ETS NT

  FRVEH USU IU TLHAM NNR IR

  EAM RJATE ELW P TSSA YIKA

  PTNCIN RJ ASL IGT AS MINP

  LWEJ CSE GO RIO APH U NUGS

  SPE AUCA AE ISOBORO IHOT

  RAP ISL DHAO I PPD BRTOHI

  IM LSREESDS UAES N MAICA

  TUL NIEG GHNT RNU AEWITD

  JSYK TOHT R MEMSA OEV WAW

  ITE T NYNTN DSK LBKZN ESE

  DHL QNHU CA OAA ORWH R TSK

  TRO YEEB EN FS IUY UOH RLM

  RDEANN VDUN H BTAD IO IIT

  F CYI DGUE ONLP TORQMISI

  ESF CAE HRSA C MUGNN OA NA

  I want my son to have this. I want my son to inherit what should rightfully be his, to enjoy the fruits of The Deep Secret. But there is no space for manoeuvre on the matter. He is not ready and he will never be ready until he can calm the fury that blazes inside him, a fury that has already seen him transgress the law many times.

  A father who truly loves his son will stand by him no matter what his sins, but a father who truly loves his son will also wish to see that son mature into the man he should be. If my son does not mature, he will not take his rightful inheritance, but The Deep Secret will live on, granted to the individual who can calm himself and realise the space to work out the puzzle. />
  Be you Gerald Burke or some hitherto unknown individual, you have my very best wishes and a note of caution in the form of an old adage. Be careful what you wish for.

  Graham Burke, The Great Zepelli.

  ***

  Croft put down the pages.

  The Deep Secret: that mythical means of inducing instant deep hypnosis, and establishing total control over the subject. First claimed by Franz Walter in 1920s Heidelberg, the subject of debate ever since, it was anathema to Croft. He had been a professional hypnotist for almost twenty years; he had made his millions from the use of hypnotism to assist in simple matters like analgesia, smoking, and weight control. Before coming to Tenerife, he had spent almost a decade at the UNWE researching the psychic possibilities of hypnosis. In all that time, he had never seen a single, verifiable instance of instant somnambulism.

  And yet, on these opening pages, Zepelli insisted it was a fact. Zepelli insisted he had learned it, had used it, and, like Franz Walter, like Julius Reiniger, had abused it.

  “Adios, señor. Lunes.”

  Despite having lived on the island for many months, Croft still tended to think in English, then translate, and it took him a moment to realise the maid was telling him she would not be there tomorrow, Sunday, but would see him on Monday.

  Croft bid her a courteous adios and once more looked out over the smooth waters of the Atlantic. But while his eyes registered the sparkle of the morning sun and the departure of the maid, his mind was two thousand miles away, in a lifer’s cell in Hattersley prison, near Nottingham.

  What was going through Burke’s head when he instructed his lawyer to forward this manuscript? Croft doubted the philanthropy claimed in the covering letter. He had been in court the day the jury delivered its guilty verdict and the judge ordered a whole of life tariff. Led from the dock, Burke had sworn vengeance.