Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  “So when did Sanay come back?” Bill asked carefully. He felt he couldn’t press the elves in the way he would have a human witness. “Obviously after January, but how many women were there this time? Presumably he wasn’t on his own at that point?”

  This time it was Pelydryn who answered. “I was on watch that time. It was only a moon’s cycle after Helyglys saw the terrible killings, but what I saw was very different. The man who tried to help the women and who Bose later killed was there, and so was Sanay. But not Bose, and there was no violence this time. They got three women out of the thing on wheels, but they seemed in a daze already. Then the other man got something that looked like a needle and put it into each girl’s arm.” She paused thoughtfully. “I do not think he would have done it, though, had Sanay not been watching him.”

  “Why do you say that?” Bill asked curiously.

  “Because he kept looking to Sanay – and this was the time when Helyglys made herself known to Sanay and learned his name, though after he had left that place.”

  “Really?” Bill was surprised at that. “You managed to appear to him when he was moving away from here?”

  Helyglys tutted impatiently, but Pelydryn calmly explained, “He stopped and lit something which he then sucked the smoke out of. At that point he was down at the bottom of the track. Helyglys could not fully interact with him, you understand, because it was not the right time of the moon cycle for her to have access anymore than it was for me. But she could speak to him and plant ideas into his mind. Ideas that made him think that he had met her already, and that they had ...erm-hem, interacted, shall we say?”

  As Bill grinned at her delicate description, Helyglys sniffed in disgust. “All I had to do was plant the merest seeds into his mind and he twisted them to his own perverse beliefs. As if I would disrobe for a foul creature like that!”

  It was all Bill could do not to laugh out loud, both at the thought of Helyglys’ disgust at even so much as taking her clothes off, and at the way Sanay himself had created the myth of a relationship which had lured him to his death. Clearly very little of what he had implied to his brothers had actually happened, and that again made a big difference in Bill’s mind as to how guilty the elves were of something which might loosely be called entrapment. If more than half of that had only ever been in Sanay’s mind, then there was far less guilt to be attached to Helyglys when his brain had evidently spent much of its time behind his flies.

  However Pelydryn was adding, “The other man...”

  “...He was known as Tufty – long story, but it wasn’t his real name, just the one he was known by.”

  “Oh! ...Well then, Tufty was subsequently left alone with the bodies of the girls – and I did notice that these were even younger than the ones who had died before.” She stared off into space as if seeing the scene in front of her once more. “He picked each of them up very gently, and then took them to one side. When he put them down he laid them out most carefully. I can only presume that he was echoing some funeral rite of your people?”

  “He was.”

  “And then he knelt down in front of them and clasped his hands in front of himself, and began reciting something. He seemed to stumble over the words, as though he was trying to remember them from a long time ago.”

  Bill felt a surge of pity for Tufty welling up. God, what a terrible cleft stick to have been caught in. He couldn’t have ever predicted that he would end up like that when he first went to work for Bose. “Could you show me what you saw in the same why as your sister did?” he found himself asking Pelydryn.

  He saw her start of surprise, but then the beautiful yet deeply sad smile as she said, “Yes.”

  In total contrast, Pelydryn flowed very gently into his consciousness, hovering on the edge of what Bill realised must be his own very personal territory. Compared to her sister, she had only come as close as she needed to for him to be able to share the memory. And instantly he was with her in the darkened quarry, the place lit by the headlamps of Tufty’s truck, and the three women laid out just where Bill had seen them himself some months later. This time, though, Tufty himself was kneeling at their feet, and Bill was deeply touched to realise that somewhere in the dim recesses of Tufty’s brain there had remained some memory of burials orientating east-west, because as he knelt there, there was a hint of dawn coming up behind him, which was the way the women were facing – had they been able to see anymore. That was the point when Bill heard Tufty saying,

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven...” and then stumbling over the next line.

  It brought a lump to Bill’s throat, and he vowed to check on whether Tufty had gone to a church primary school, because that was the older version of the Lord’s Prayer, taken from the King James Bible, not the modernised version. And Tufty would only have come across that, with its art and thous instead of are and yous, in an old-fashioned church or church school. Certainly there was something very childlike about the way Tufty knelt there with his hands clasped

  “You are moved by his prayer?” Pelydryn’s gentle thought cut across his own.

  As they separated, Bill had to clear his throat before answering, “Yes. It’s a very, very old prayer, and it’s probably the only one that you could come even close to describing as universally known. Sadly, these days it’s not in such common use, but back even when Tufty was a child – which is a long way after when I was at school – most children would have come across it as something they recited most mornings before they went off to be taught to read and write.” Again, no point in trying to explain school assemblies as they had been a few decades ago. “Poor Tufty, he really was trying to do the best he knew how. It was probably the only prayer he’d ever learned. He must have been in quite some emotional distress to have dragged that up from his past, but then the more I’ve learned about this case, the more I’ve thought that he must have been nearly as much of a victim as the women.”

  “Why do you say that?” Tarian-derw asked, obviously mystified.

  That made Bill sigh deeply. “Sadly, there are some areas within the places where our people live in huge numbers that are poor. Oh dear, I suppose you don’t really understand that, do you? Erm... let’s just say that the people who live there have very few choices. They live in terrible houses, eat food that has little goodness in it, and find it very hard to be able to leave, because in the world as I know it, you have to have a particular kind of wealth to do a lot of things. Not spiritual wealth or emotional wealth of the kind you might value, but a very material kind, and it gives those who have it a lot of power over those who don’t. So the child that Tufty once was wouldn’t have had many choices as to what kind of man he became, but by the sound of it, he tried his best. That he then found himself in that horrible situation actually isn’t his fault. After all, you saw that Bose killed him when he tried to change things – and he may have long suspected that that might happen.”

  Tarian-derw looked shocked. “You mean he lived knowing that his own tribe would turn on him?”

  Bill nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. He wouldn’t have known the day, much less the hour of his death, but he would have been aware of the dangers of going against a man like Bose. He was struggling with the decision to help the women and save their lives, and yet knowing that to do that he might end up dying alongside them.”

  “Then I pity him far more knowing that,” Tarian-derw declared. “Had I known that, then I might have laid him out as befitting one slain in battle.”

  “Ah! About that...”Bill said cautiously. “Listen, I know you have all acted out of higher intentions, but I have to tell you something. If you do this with anyone else, will you please remove the bodies? You won’t have been remotely aware of this, but if some ordinary person had happened to come to the quarry before I did, there was a very good chance of the whole area getting searched in depth and by far more men than you saw. It happened that I knew enough to be able to guess who Bose and Tufty were, but they and the other bodies lay in
the area looked after by men other than me and my friends.

  “Consequently, those other policemen would have begun a very detailed search all over the surrounding hills, and they would have found Bose up where you first left him, which would have looked even stranger to them than it did to me. You see, they would believe that a very dangerous man, or men, had then killed Bose and was on the loose and needing to be stopped. And if they encountered you, they would not understand what or who you are, which would at best be deeply disturbing and unpleasant for you, and at worst might result in one of you getting badly hurt or even killed – or at least if getting metal bullets fired into you could kill you in the way you saw Bose doing to the women.

  “So I’m begging you, if by some horrible twist of fate you come across another man who is treating innocent victims as badly – and I pray that you won’t – then would you take their body to some deep dark place where they won’t be found. I don’t mean necessarily fully into your world, but you must be aware of deep places like mines where men have hollowed out the earth, but no longer go to?” There was no point in asking them not to act. Clearly their moral compass was a lot more finely tuned than most people would recognise, and they would feel obligated to act to save innocents. All he could do was ask them to disguise what they did.

  “For instance, you left Bose propped up against the crab-apple up the hill from the quarry. Well up until he’d been discovered, I don’t think anyone other than me would have made the apple-tree connection. But he was so far from where anyone would have expected him to be, that if he’d either been found before Sanay, or even after him, then it would have triggered ...I mean caused a serious manhunt across this whole area, and I think that’s something you would really not want.”

  All four of the elves looked surprised at that, clearly never having thought that others would have seen their actions in quite that light.

  “I’m not saying that you will,” Bill hurriedly added. “I think it’s been the most shockingly awful set of coincidences that you had Bose’s gang disposing of their unwanted girls within a few miles of where Damien Farrah was raping his victims, and that’s before you add in the unfortunate Mulligrew daughters, and Justin Pickersleigh preying on children. In all my years of keeping the law, I can honestly say that I’ve never come across a cluster like this.” Best not to say that such disparate cases would likely never have been connected in a crime-ridden city. “So please, will you promise me that you will? For your sakes.”

  Somewhat hesitantly, all four elves nodded their agreement, and Bill knew that that was the best he could hope for. He was also aware that by now they were heading into the early hours of the next day, and he really needed to drive home and try and get some sleep before his morning shift. However, the last thing he wanted to know for now was the end of the story at the quarry.

  “I’ll need to leave you soon,” he began, “but can you tell me the sequence of events at the quarry after you saw Tufty with the women? And when did you start to suspect Justin Pickersleigh – that’s the man with the little girls.”

  Pelydryn picked up the narrative. “The man Bose came with Sanay and another in little under another moon cycle, and again he used that thing that shots metal bits at them to kill them. By this time we were all watching this place, because with Damien having died, we knew we had no need to watch for him, but that it is also why Claerwyn was alerted to the children’s cries a little south of there. We feared that there might be more of the same men, you see.”

  “But he wasn’t,” Claerwyn said in disgust. “He was weak and twisted, and his soul was a poor warped thing. I found him lurking around at about the time when the man you called Tufty died. I had no idea what he was doing, but there was a dark aura around him that said he was up to no good. Sadly the time when he took the two girls was at a point when I could not act, and although he took the next child at a point when I could, I had just been about to enter the cottage when I heard him crying and pleading with her to wake up. At that point I felt her cross the veil and she was gone, so there was nothing I could have done to save her.”

  That was interesting, Bill thought. It implied that the child had died of some other cause. He must remember to ask Carol about that.

  “It was then a simple matter to lure him to me,” Claerwyn was continuing. “Unlike what Helyglys and Pelydryn endured, his desires were both simpler and yet stranger, as though he had no experience of what to do with a woman. He had ideas, which I picked up on, but they seemed to be oddly detached, as though he had watched someone else doing them but never himself.”

  Again, an interesting take on Pickersleigh. Had he actually been a virgin? Was the whole thing with the girls some strange sort of initiation for him? It made Bill wish he could go and consult a decent psychiatrist on that point, but if he presented the whole case, it would be him in the chair being analysed, not Pickersleigh. Instead he asked,

  “So did you find it a lot easier to deal with Pickersleigh than with Sanay?”

  “Oh very much so,” Claerwyn declared. “I only had to imply things to him and he would do them, whereas Helyglys would think she was drawing Sanay to a point where she could trap him, and then he would go off at a strange tangent.”

  Helyglys was nodding. “It was as if his mind was sometimes hazy. It was very strange. Other times he was quite lucid.”

  And suddenly Bill knew why that might be. “Did you notice an odd smell about him on the times when he was behaving oddly? Something almost herb-like?”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s a plant that’s not from around here. He was smoking it – you know, lighting it up and breathing it in. That’s what made him so erratic.”

  Helyglys nodded thoughtfully. “I did wonder if it was connected. It certainly made him far more difficult to control. Sometimes I would set up meetings and he would not arrive; others he would come but would be so disorientated it was hard to try and direct him in the direction I wanted; and then there were a few times when he was totally in control, and those were the times when he fought my instructions the most. It says everything about him that I first set the trap for him in the spring, and yet I only trapped him a full moon cycle after Claerwyn did the man-child.”

  “Thank you, that clarifies a lot for me,” Bill said. “There’s just one more thing and then I really must go. Could I possibly just speak briefly to Grace and Hannah?”

  Chapter 22

  “IS THAT NECESSARY?” Tarian-derw asked dubiously.

  Bill nodded. “I think it is, if only because I have to ask them what they want done about this place. I could send a message with you, but you won’t really understand what I’m telling you, so they won’t necessarily grasp why it’s important.”

  Pelydryn was obvious won over because she turned and vanished. It took about ten minutes before she returned, time in which Bill got Tarian-derw talking about his sword, and found that it was indeed bronze. This time when Pelydryn came, while she stepped through it was as though she was holding a door open into another place. Beyond it was a world rich in colour, even at night, and standing there were too rather frightened looking women, clutching each other’s hand.

  “Having come through to us, they cannot step back into your world,” Pelydryn explained, “but they can see and hear you.”

  “That’s all I need,” Bill confirmed, walking across to them until he could feel a tingling sensation from the portal opening. “Grace? Hannah? I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Bill Scathlock and I’m a police detective. Do you understand that?”

  They both nodded, but seemed too scared to say anything.

  “Okay, then. Now I’m sure you already know that your father is dead.” Again there were mute nods. “Well people have been looking for you,” and he saw their terror immediately rising. “No! It’s okay – they can’t find you! Nobody can, not now you’re with the elves. You’re totally safe with them. Even I can’t touch you, and you can see how close I am.”

  Mercifully
, that seemed to reassure them, because Bill had been worried that they would simply turn on their heels and run from him. “Now the thing is, that dreadful old farmhouse where you were kept, and the land that belongs to it are going to get sold. Had you still been here, you would have been able to do as you wanted with it.”

  “Burn it!” the taller of the two said softly but with intense hatred. “Burn it to the ground!”

  “Are you Hannah or Grace?”

  “I’m Hannah,” she said, her local accent incredibly broad in a way that Bill only heard these days from the very old, but given that they’d probably heard nobody other than their parents in over a decade, that wasn’t surprising.

  “Okay, Hannah, I can’t actually burn it for you, but you can be sure that whoever buys it will pull the place down and build something new. I’m no builder, but even I can see that it’s beyond restoration. Now I have no control over who buys it or what they decide to do with it, but I wanted you to know about this in case you come here with the elves and you hear the heavy machinery that will come to do the demolition.

  “But beyond that, you need to know that this wood, and the one a bit up the hill from here, are going to be sold as separate pieces of land. Again, I have no control over what any buyer will want to do with either wood. They may fell the trees...”

  “Nooo!” wailed Grace instantly. “Not the trees! They mustn’t hurt the trees!”

  Bill tried to make calming gestures, but Claerwyn had to slip through to the other side to comfort her. However Grace proved hard to console, even though Bill tried to point out that it was only a possibility, and in the end Claerwyn led her away. Yet that still left Bill needing to ask of Hannah,