'Hutton!'
Try to prise it open again, but it's not breaking apart yet. Toss the shovel up onto the ground, then wedge my feet against the sides of the pit and lean forward. Grab the wood, start pulling it. Immediately hands cut and splintered, pain jags into them. Ignore it, rip wood.
A large piece lifts up from the middle, bend it perpendicular, then push it back with my feet. A ten, twelve-inch gap opens up. Three torches shine into it. With the rain and the confused light it's not all immediately apparent, but I know what I'm looking at, and soon enough, those other three see it.
'Hutton?' says Taylor.
The urgency has gone from his voice. Now he's questioning.
In the dark and the rain and the convergence of torches there's a mat of long hair, bones, skulls, one lying on top of the other, a faded dress, a faded cardigan.
I know the dress. I know the cardigan.
Oh, I'm crying now. Not just the rain. On my knees, on a broken coffin lid. In the dark.
'Hutton!'
46
Sitting in Taylor's car. The rain has stopped. Fuck. Wouldn't you know? Doesn't matter.
Cup of coffee. Voices outside. Windows steamed up. Soaking, cold, hands circled around the coffee, hoping the warmth travels up my arms. Shaking slightly, tissues wrapped around cut fingers, but slowly pulling myself together.
More of our lot have arrived. Mrs Buttler has been alerted. Lights are being set up prior to a proper excavation of the grave taking place. Only been a few minutes. Fifteen maybe. Twenty. Look at the clock. Realise I've lost track of time. 20:37.
Car door opens and Taylor gets in. Doesn't have coffee. Puts the key in the ignition, but doesn't start the car.
'You need to go home,' he says.
'The girl,' I say, before he asks the question. 'The girl who gave me the book. I told you about the girl. That's her in the grave.'
He looks sharply at me.
'What? When did she die?'
OK, that was a bad start. Straighten myself out. This is no place for ghosts and absurdity and whatever the fuck this is. I don't know who gave me that Book of Daniel, but it wasn't her. She's dead, and has been for over forty years.
'There's been a girl haunting me. In my head. Can't explain it, but, you know, if anything, it's probably because I've been so fucked up. I don't know, I've been open to this kind of thing. Whatever that is.'
More coffee. Keep talking. Don't let him ask questions.
'Baxter, the old guy, the old minister, he said, find the girl. You need to find the girl. I checked back. Old records, missing persons, murders. Discovered that the vicar, Forsyth, he'd been married in the fifties, sixties, had a kid. The kid vanished. Never seen again. His marriage fell apart, he came to live here. I found the wife, she showed me a picture of the missing kid. It was the girl in my nightmares. I'd seen this grave, I just knew that's where she'd be.'
'What's her name?' he asks.
That's good. A request for basic information, taking for granted everything else. I can't handle disbelief.
'Daisy Compton. It's her. I recognize the dress.'
'You think... I don't know, what do you think?' he says.
'He killed her. Who knows why? Maybe it was an accident, maybe he was abusing her and she was going to talk. Who knows? He buried her in a graveyard, and then got a position in this town to watch over her. And he was going to make damn sure no one ever sold this land and dug up the grave.'
'Fuckity,' he says.
Fuckity?
More coffee. Finally turn and look at him. Getting back to normal. He's helped me by not expressing incredulity at how I came to be scraping away at a coffin lid in the pouring rain and the dark.
'You still have him in custody?'
He shakes his head. 'Let him out...' checks the clock '... more than four hours ago.'
'We need to go and see him.'
'You need to get home.'
'We need to go.'
He starts the engine.
PULLING UP OUTSIDE the old fella's house. Looks like a small light on in the hallway, nothing else showing. Wonder if he's taken the opportunity to leg it, yet why would he?
'What was going on with him and Cartwright?' I ask, breaking the silence of the previous few minutes.
'He was part of Cartwright's plan,' says Taylor. 'That's all. Asked them both separately about it. They obviously had no opportunity to confer. They said the same thing. A grand conspiracy. Think they just enjoyed, God, I don't know, the intrigue. Made them feel like they were in a Dan Brown novel.'
Stops the car and we get out. The air is damp and cold, but no rain.
'So it could have been this guy who killed the other four, just as much as it could have been Cartwright?'
He nods.
'Did you let Cartwright go?'
'Yep. Just didn't have enough to charge him, so we had to. Connor was spitting.'
Up the garden path. Ring the bell, wait in silence.
Turn away, look across the road. Curtains closed, can practically hear the televisions of the street blaring out their mindless crap.
Taylor tries the handle and the door opens. He gives me a glance and walks in. We pause in the hallway. Little sign of life other than the small lamp, but looking down we can see the timer plug behind it, meaning it will have come on automatically.
'Forsyth!' he calls out.
Looks up the stairs, then he mutters, 'Fuck,' and pushes open the door into the front room.
Reverend Forsyth is dead, a single spike hammered into his eye socket.
The room feels cold, and for the first time in a while I'm aware of my soaking, dripping clothes.
47
Three hours later. Almost midnight. Standing over Forsyth's dead body. Taylor and I have just arrived and Balingol has been doing his thing.
The spike has been removed from the eye. A dark, bloody, empty socket looks back at us. Have barely seen Taylor since we found the body. I stayed with the stiff and headed up the on-the-ground investigation. He legged it over to Cartwright's joint to speak to him, possibly to re-arrest him.
Naturally enough, this time the man had alibis coming out of his ears. He'd just been released from police custody. It was pretty inevitable that his wife and more than one other member of his family would be there to meet him, then take him home for a cup of tea and a biscuit.
Then Taylor had the job of informing Mrs Faraday that we might have found her daughter. We don't know for sure, yet. It wasn't like the body we found was obviously identifiable from the picture the woman had shown me earlier, or from the girl that had walked through my nightmares for the past couple of weeks. We should be able to complete formal identification tomorrow.
Forsyth. A single spike in the eye. The words from Daniel are just sitting there in my head. How does that happen? I only read them once or twice.
'Same sedative as previously administered?' asks Taylor.
'Indeed,' says Balingol.
'Anything other than the obvious?'
'Doesn't seem to be. Single spike to the eye socket, and as you can see here...' and he indicates the spike, which is lying on a small table next to the cadaver, 'it's long, fairly blunt and quite thick. Hammered in, I imagine. Might have caused the victim a peculiar sensation or two before he expired.'
Expired. Nice. Like a parking permit.
Feels cold in here. My clothes have not really dried out. Beginning to get shivery. Need to go home, get out of these. Dreaming of a warm shower.
'Time of death?'
'I think, quite possibly within an hour of him being released.'
Taylor lets out a long sigh. It's unavoidable. If he hadn't released him, he wouldn't be dead. Although, of course, the only reason to have kept him would have been because of some belief that he was the killer, which he very clearly was not. Unless, of course, he was part of a team, and someone else is tying up loose ends.
'There's a pattern to these, is there?' asks Balingol.
Tayl
or looks at me.
'"I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things."'
They look at me. The words are just there, in my head. I don't know how.
'This was the little horn, you think?' says Balingol, having come to terms with the fact that someone unexpected was spouting badass biblical shit.
I nod. Taylor, however, is still regarding me as a curiosity. He turns back to Balingol.
'You had a chance to look at the girl?' he asks.
I look round. Hadn't noticed it when I came in, but there she is, the small figure on the other side of the room, shrouded in white.
Shrouded in white, and impossibly sad. Jesus.
I wonder if I'll see her tonight.
Shiver again, rub my arms, once more try to throw melancholy out of sight.
'You look cold, Tom,' says Taylor. 'You should get home.'
'Will in a minute.'
'Blow to the head,' says Balingol. 'That's what I took from a cursory glance. If you don't mind, I think I might go home and do a more thorough investigation in the morning. Maybe I'll get Dr Baird to look at it.'
'Of course,' says Taylor.
He turns away, rubs his eyes, looks at the door. Is he expecting Connor to walk in here any minute, demanding answers and action?
'Fuck,' he mutters. Voice low. Balingol gives him a glance, a raised eyebrow, then pulls a sheet over the top of the Reverend Forsyth's body.
'See you in the morning, Bill,' he says.
Balingol replies without speaking. Taylor starts to walk to the door and I fall in behind.
'You get home, Sergeant.'
'You too.'
'Just going to tie up a few things at my desk. You need to get a shower, get into bed, or you'll be coming down with the flu, some shit like that. We don't want you off sick when you get suspended, now, do we?'
A bitter laugh from me. Nothing from him. We walk out the building in silence.
I GUESS THIS WAS HOW it had to be when I finally came home, when I finally came to sleep in my own bed for the first time since she'd been there. Knackered and drained, no thoughts of alcohol or depression or of the woman I'd decided was the love of my life. No thoughts. Just needing to tumble into the shower, fall into bed.
Walk into the flat, close the door behind me. Jacket on a peg in the hall, walk into the sitting room. Don't turn on the lights. As ever the room is illuminated by the lights from outside. The thought creeps back into my head. Will the girl be here?
She'd wanted me to find her body, right? That was all. She'd wanted to be found, so that her mother could bury her. The thought of her drifts away.
I walk into the middle of the room and stand in silence. Looking out the window. Suddenly my brain, which has been switched off, begins to wake up. But I wish it wouldn't. It has nowhere to go tonight, other than sorrow, the great weight of sadness. All this death, love found and immediately lost, that haunting little girl. And where are we for it all?
One more dead body, one less suspect.
The reflection of the red light on the phone blinks in the window. Have that feeling that comes over me sometimes, the feeling of such desolation that nothing could make it worse. It's never a thought I regret. Usually my mind is so low, so fucking low, that things can't get any worse.
I walk over to the phone. Grace watches me. One new message. I press the button, the crackle of the answering machine fills the room with such a sad sound. Any sound would be sad. The room demands silence.
'Hey...'
Oh, God. The voice jumps happily out into the darkness. Philo. I more or less fall onto the sofa, the crippling punch to the midriff taking the feeling from my legs, from the rest of me.
'Just got in. Thought I'd leave you a message. Another one. I know, you'll be thinking I'm one of those weird...' She laughs. There's a nervous buoyancy about her voice. 'You know... Anyway, it was lovely... gosh, you know that. I'll stop going on. There's some things I need to sort out. I'm involved in this thing, this stupid thing, with... about the churches, bringing the churches back together. David'll be so pissed off if he finds out. Well, that's what I thought. Anyway, I think he might know. He's coming over shortly. That might be the end of me and the church.' Pause. I stare at the red light. 'A lot of things might be coming to an end. Hey, look, I'll see you in a couple of days, OK. You can talk to me.' She laughs again. 'Just wanted to say... you know, just called to say... oh, God, I can't say it after that!' More laughter. 'I love you, Sergeant. There! Said it. OK, OK, I'm going. See you. Bye!'
Click.
48
Walk back into the office. Still pretty busy for after midnight. Morrow at his desk. Gives me a glance, looks a little longer than is probably polite, nods, head back down.
What's there to see? Dried-in rain, sweat and tears. No jacket.
Straight to Taylor's office. The boss showing no sign of going anywhere. He looks up, a small shake of the head when he sees it's me.
'Your dedication is admirable, Sergeant...'
Close the door behind me, cut him off with the obvious fact that I'm not here to chew the fat. Take my mobile out my pocket. Knowing no other way, I put it on record and held it beside my land line while I replayed the message.
Hearing it the second time wasn't so bad. Had already started putting the walls up. This third time will be a breeze.
'Philo Stewart left me a message the other day, after she got home from my place. I only just listened to it.'
'So, not long before she died?'
I play the recording. Listening to it, but without hearing it. One of those. I know what it says.
He lets it run through, then asks me to play it again. This time I don't even listen. I could recite it, could probably have recited it after the first time I'd heard it. Her voice, soft and funny and insecure and nervous. Her voice, saying words. That's all I hear now.
'David, we presume, is the Reverend Jones down at St Stephen's?'
Nod.
'How would he get to hear about the gang of five? Or six, if we count the dead vicar.'
'That's a lot of people to keep their mouths shut,' I say. 'Who knows what kind of agendas any of them had?'
'The most obvious one to have told him would've been Mrs Stewart, but that message there suggests otherwise, doesn't it? You met this guy?'
'Spoke to him last Sunday.'
'What d'you think?'
'He reminded me of Hitler.'
He makes some sort of rueful acknowledgement of the analogy, then gets to his feet.
'Bugger it, Sergeant. It places him at the scene of one of the crimes. The guy's a suspect. Let's get on to him.'
Taylor heads to the door. Stops as he gets to it, his fingers poised on the handle. Looks at the floor before he says anything. I know what's coming, head it off at the pass before we get into some shit about how I'm feeling.
'I'm fine,' I say.
'You sure?' he says, looking up.
'Come on. Work to do.'
Then Taylor is out the door, me in his wake.
HALF AN HOUR LATER, seven of us sitting in the small operations room beneath that tangle of whiteboards, a bunfight of names and lines and connections. Middle of the night, nobody tired.
Taylor has just entered, having previously given everyone the instructions to get what they could on Reverend Jones and bring it to the table. Pulls out the seat, sits down.
'We've got definite information that places Jones at one of the crime scenes. Enough to get him in here, enough to be able to get his DNA and hope we can also tie him to, at the very least, the scene of Mrs Christie's death. Not enough for court. What else have we got?'
Looks at DI Gostkowski, the first to his right.
'Phone records?'
'Of course,' she says. 'Of the previous four victims, the only one to have called the
Reverend Jones was Mrs Stewart, but that makes sense, as she ran the Bible study group at the church. There were eleven calls in the last two months between them. Nothing from any of the other three. Now, this is interesting. There was a call from a mobile phone, the owner of which we have been unable to identify, to Mrs Stewart on the day of her death. This same number also called the Reverend Forsyth several times over the last few weeks.'
'Bingo,' says Taylor, his voice low, the word barely audible. Not looking at her, scribbling in his notebook.
'If we can tie that phone to Jones...' she says. 'All the better, in fact, if we get a warrant to search his house and find the phone itself.'
'That'd be great. Still not enough in itself, of course, but it certainly has value.'
He nods at Morrow. Morrow shakes his head.
'Nothing from the correspondence of Mrs Henderson. She wrote to him, often, but he never replied. Haven't been able to dig up any connections between the others. I'll need more time with regard to Forsyth. Get onto it in the morning.'
Another nod from the boss. Eyes move onto Eileen Harrison. Hey, the gang's all here. Yep, there are seven of us. There's an adjective to go with that, but I can't quite think of it. The Something Seven... No, it's gone.
Shit. Mind is going. Tired. That's all. Tired with the long day, tired with the feeling of cold and damp, tired with the effort of not thinking about the girl and her body rotting in an unmarked grave for the last forty-seven years, and the strange fact that the grave wasn't unmarked, that there was a quote added to the headstone, and how did that happen? And tired, more than anything, or maintaining the denial, from not thinking about the phone message from Philo, of not thinking about what she said at the end, those three words which she said to me, that I never got to say to her, tired from forcing myself to think of that phone message as evidence rather than the heartbreaking, crushing weight that it actually is.
I stare at the table. People talk. This is how it's been for much of this investigation, after all, isn't it? The inquiry has been continuing, and I've been on the periphery. What's my job supposed to be? My overall job? I have the daily duties as part of an investigation, the go and speak to him and look at the next thing and check whatever piece of paperwork. But it should also be on me to have Taylor's back when it comes to overall perspective. Keeping tabs on everything. Complete overview. I'm his right-hand man on that. I really ought to know everything.
DS Hutton Box Set Page 76