Innocent Graves

by Peter Robinson

  Stott would have preferred DC Susan Gay. Not because she was prettier than Hatchley-he didn’t find her attractive in that way-but because she was smarter, keener and a lot less trouble.

  Like now. Left to himself, Stott would have skipped lunch, or bought a take-away from one of the cafés on North Market Street. The morning had been a waste of time; they had found no leads in the sex offender files, and all Stott could find out from immigration about Jelačić was that he was an engineer from Split, who had come to England two years ago. And since then, he had worked at a variety of odd jobs, never lasting long in any one place. Short of going to Croatia himself, Stott thought, it didn’t look as if it would be an easy task getting hold of a criminal record, if there was one.

  At least out here, near the crime scene, he felt he had a good chance of scoring some success. Somebody had to have noticed a stranger in the area, fog or no fog. Or a car parked where it shouldn’t be. St. Mary’s was, after all, an upper-crust area, and people who could afford to live there were very wary of strangers. And Stott was sure that a stranger had murdered Deborah Harrison.

  They were standing in the rain outside the Nag’s Head at the north-west corner of Kendal Road and North Market Street, diagonally across from St. Mary’s Church, and Stott was ready to do just about anything to shut Hatchley up.

  It wasn’t the kind of pub you’d expect in such a wealthy area, Stott thought: no thick carpet, polished brass and gleaming wood, pot of mulled wine heating on the bar. In fact, it looked distinctly shabby. He guessed it was probably a traveler’s pub, being situated at such an important junction. In one form or another, Kendal Road ran all the way from the Lake District to the east coast and Market Street was a major north-south route. The locals would have their own tasteful pubs hidden away in the residential streets. Either that or they drove out to the country clubs.

  There were about six people in the lounge bar. Stott noted with distaste that the room smelled of smoke and beer. This certainly wasn’t his kind of pub, if there were such a place. He far preferred churches. Pubs, as far as Stott was concerned, were simply breeding grounds for trouble.

  Pubs were where fights started-and he had a couple of scars from his beat days to prove that-they were where crooked deals took place, dodgy goods traded hands, places where drugs were openly sold, where prostitutes plied their filthy trade, spreading disease and misery. Close all the pubs and you’d force the criminals into the open, right into the waiting arms of the police. At least that was what DI Barry Stott thought as he turned up his nose in the Nag’s Head that lunch-time.

  Sergeant Hatchley, on the other hand, looked quite at home. He rubbed his ham-like hands together and said, “Ah, this is better. Nowt like a bit of pub grub to take away the chill, don’t you think, sir?”

  “Let’s make it quick, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir. Alf! Over here, mate. Let’s have a bit of service. A person could die of thirst.”

  If there were a landlord Hatchley didn’t know by name in all of the Eastvale-nay, all of Swainsdale-Stott would have been surprised.

  When Alf finally turned up, Stott waited while he and Hatchley exchanged a few pleasantries, then ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. Alf raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  “I’ll have one of those bloody great big Yorkshire puddings full of roast beef, peas and gravy,” said Hatchley. “And a pint of bitter, of course.”

  This seemed to please Alf more.

  Pint in hand, Hatchley marched over to a table by the window. Through the streaked glass, they could see the rain-darkened trees in the park and the walls of St. Mary’s church across the intersection, square tower poking out above the trees.

  The drizzle hadn’t kept the ghouls away. Here and there along the six-foot stone wall, people would jump up every now and then and hold themselves up by the fingertips for a glimpse into the graveyard.

  A group of about ten people stood by the Kendal Road entrance. Journalists. One of them, a woman, stood talking into a microphone and looking into a video camera wrapped in a black plastic bag to protect it from the rain. Someone else held a bright light over her head. Yorkshire Television, Stott thought. Or BBC North. And newspaper reporters. Pretty soon they’d be doing re-enactments for “Crimewatch.” Banks was right; the vultures had come.

  “We haven’t had much of a chance to get to know one another since you got here, have we, sir?” said Hatchley, lighting a cigarette. “And I always find it helps to know a bit about one another if you’re going to work together, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” said Stott, inwardly grimacing, trying to sit downwind of the drifting smoke. It didn’t work. He thought it must be one of those laws, like Sod’s and Murphy’s: wherever a non-smoker sat, the smoke was going to come his way, no matter which way the draft was blowing.

  “Where are you from, sir?” Hatchley asked.

  “Spalding, Lincolnshire.”

  “I’d never have guessed it. Not from the accent, like.”

  “We moved away when I was just a boy.”

  “Where?”

  “All over the place. Cyprus, Germany. My father was in the army.” Stott remembered the misery of each move. It seemed that as soon as he had made friends anywhere, he had to abandon them and start all over again. His childhood had consisted of a never-ending succession of new groups of strangers to whom he had to prove himself. Cruel strangers with their own initiation rights, just waiting to humiliate him. He remembered the beatings, the name-calling, the loneliness.

  “A squaddie, eh?”

  “Major, actually.”

  “Pretty high up, then?” Hatchley swigged some beer. “Where does he live now?”

  “ Worthing. He retired a few years ago.”

  “Not a dishonorable discharge, I hope, sir.”

  “No.”

  “Look, sir,” said Hatchley, “I’ve been wondering about this here inspector’s exam. I’ve been thinking of giving it a go, like. Is it easy?”

  Stott shook his head. All promotional exams were tough and involved several stages, from the multi-choice law test and the role-playing scenarios to the final oral in front of an assistant chief constable and a chief superintendent. How Hatchley had even passed the sergeant’s exam was a mystery to Stott.

  “Good luck,” he muttered as a pasty-faced young woman delivered their food and Stott’s pot of tea, which was actually just a pot of lukewarm water and a teabag on a string to dunk in it. And they were stingy with the ham, too. “About one in four get through,” he added.

  How old was Hatchley? he wondered. He couldn’t be older than his mid-thirties. Maybe five or six years older than Stott himself. And just look at him: unfit, a bulky man with hair like straw, piggy eyes, freckles spattered across his fleshy nose, tobacco-stained teeth. He also seemed to own only one suit-shiny and wrinkled-and there were egg stains on his tie. Stott could hardly imagine Hatchley going up before the chief for his formal promotion dressed like that.

  Stott prided himself on his dress. He had five suits-two gray, two navy blue and one brown herring-bone-and he wore them in rotation. If it’s Thursday, it must be herring-bone. He also wore his father’s old striped regimental tie and, usually, a crisply laundered white shirt with a starched collar.

  He always made sure that he was clean shaven and that his hair was neatly parted on the left and combed diagonally across his skull on each side, then fixed in place with spray or cream if need be. He knew that the way his ears stuck out still made him look odd, especially with his glasses hooked over them, just as they had when he was a young boy, and that people called him names behind his back. There was an operation you could have for sticking-out ears these days, he had heard. Maybe if it wasn’t too late he’d have his ears done soon. A freakish appearance could, after all, be detrimental to one’s career path. And Barry Stott felt destined for the chief constable’s office.

  Hatchley tucked into his Yorkie with great relish, adding a gravy stain to t
he egg on his tie. When he had finished, he lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke with a sigh of such deep satisfaction as Stott had never encountered before over a mere physical function-and an unpleasant one at that. One of nature’s true primitives, Sergeant Hatchley.

  “We’d better be getting along, Sergeant,” he said, pushing his plate aside and standing up.

  “Can’t I finish my fag first, sir? Best part of the meal, the cigarette after, if you know what I mean.” He winked.

  Stott felt himself flush. “You can smoke it outside,” he said rather harshly.

  Hatchley shrugged, slurped down the rest of his pint, then followed Stott towards the door.

  “Bye, Alf,” he said on the way to the door. “I hope our lads didn’t catch you serving drinks after hours last night.”

  “What lads?” said Alf.

  Hatchley turned and walked towards the bar. “Police. Didn’t they come and ask you questions last night? Whether you’d seen any strangers, that sort of thing?”

  Alf shook his head. “Nah. Nobody in last night. I shut up at ten o’clock. Filthy weather.”

  By the time Stott got to the bar, Hatchley seemed to have magically acquired another pint, and his cigarette had grown back to its original length.

  Stott swallowed his anger.

  “Were you open earlier?” Hatchley asked.

  Alf snorted. “Aye, for what it were worth.”

  “Any strangers?”

  “We get a lot of strangers,” he said. “You know, commercial travelers and the like. Tourists. Ramblers.”

  “Aye, I know that,” said Hatchley. “But how about yesterday, late afternoon, early evening?”

  “Nah. Weather were too bad for driving.”

  “Anyone at all?”

  Alf scratched his stubbly cheek. “One bloke. He had nobbut two pints and a whisky and left. That were it.”

  “A regular?”

  “Nah. Don’t have many regulars. People round here are too stuck-up for the likes of this place.”

  Stott was beginning to feel frustrated. This Alf was obviously a moron; they would get nothing useful out of him. “But you said you hadn’t had any strangers in lately,” he said.

  “He weren’t a stranger, either.”

  “Who was he, then?”

  “Nay, don’t ask me.”

  “But you said you knew him.”

  Alf looked over at Hatchley and gave a sniff of disgust before turning back to Stott and answering. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “I said he weren’t a regular, but he weren’t exactly a stranger, either. Different thing.”

  “So you’ve seen him before?”

  Alf spat on the floor behind the bar. “Well, of course I bloody have. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? He’d have been a stranger if I hadn’t seen him before, wouldn’t he?”

  Hatchley took over again. “All right, Alf,” he said. “You’re right. Good point. How often have you seen him?”

  “Not often. But he’s been in three or four times this past year or so. Used to come in with a lass. A right bonnie lass, and all. But not the last few times.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No. He always stuck to himself.”

  “Any idea where he lives?”

  “Could be bloody Timbuktu, for all I know.”

  “Are you saying he was African-English?” Stott cut in.

  Alf gave him a withering look. “It’s just a saying, like. Summat me mother used to say.”

  “What did he look like?” Hatchley asked.

  “Well, he were a tall bloke, I remember that. A bit over six foot, anyroad. Thick black hair, a bit too long over t’collar, if you ask me. Bit of a long nose, too.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No more than to serve him and make a few remarks about the weather. He didn’t seem to want to talk. Took his pint over by the fire and just sat there staring into his glass. Muttered to himself now and then, too, as I recall.”

  “He talked to himself?”

  “Well, not all the time. And not like he was having a conversation or anything. No, he’d just say something once in a while, as if he were thinking out loud, like you do sometimes.”

  “Did you hear anything he said?”

  “Nay. He were too far away.”

  “Did he have any sort of an accent?” Stott cut in.

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Did you know Ive Jelačić, the sexton over the road at St. Mary’s?”

  “Nah. He drank at t’Pig and Whistle.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Landlord, Stan, told me, after it was in t’papers, like, about him and that dodgy vicar.”

  “Did you ever see Mr. Jelačić?”

  “Only from a distance.”

  “Could this have been him?”

  “Could’ve been, I suppose. Same height and hair color.”

  “Do you know if this customer had a car?”

  “How would I know that?” Alf rubbed his chin. “Come to think of it, he looked more like he’d been walking. You know, a bit damp, short of breath.”

  “What time was this, Alf?” Hatchley asked.

  “About five o’clock.”

  “What time did he leave?”

  “Just afore six. Like I said, he had nobbut two pints and a double whisky. One for the road, he said, and knocked it back in one, then he was out the door.” Alf mimicked the drinking action.

  Stott pricked up his ears. The timing worked, assuming the girl had been killed on her way home from the school chess club. Was that the way a person might act before raping and murdering a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a foggy graveyard? Stott wondered. A dram of Dutch courage? He tried to remember what he’d learned in the criminal psychology course.

  The trouble was, you could justify just about any sort of behavior if you were talking about a psycho. Some of them liked to sit and have a beer and a fag before a nice little dismemberment; others liked to buy a box of chocolates or bunch of flowers for their mothers. You could never predict. So maybe the killer would have dropped in at the Nag’s Head. Why not? Maybe he just needed to sit there for a while, have a little chat with himself about what he was going to do?

  “Did you see which direction he went?” Stott asked.

  “Nay. You don’t expect me to chase outside after my customers and see which way they’re going, do you?”

  “What was he wearing?” Stott asked.

  “Orange anorak. Expensive type, by the looks of it. That Gore-Tex stuff. Lots of pockets and zips.”

  “Can you remember anything else about his appearance?”

  “I’m not good at describing people. Never was.”

  “Do you think you could work with a police artist?”

  “Dunno. Never tried it.”

  “Will you give it a try?”

  Alf shrugged.

  “Sergeant,” Stott said, “go and see if you can get a police artist out as soon as possible, will you? I’ll wait here.”

  It was almost worth suffering the stale smoke and booze atmosphere of the Nag’s Head for another hour or so to see the expression on Sergeant Hatchley’s face as he trudged out into the rain.

  II

  They had made love in every position imaginable: sideways, backwards, forwards, upside down. They had also done it in just about every place they could think of: her bed, his bed, hotels, a field, his cramped Orion, up against a wall, under the kitchen table. Sometimes, it seemed to last forever; other times, it was over almost before it began. Sometimes, the foreplay went on so long Rebecca thought she would burst; other times, they were overtaken by a sense of urgency and didn’t even have time to get all their clothes off.

  This time, it had been urgent. Afterwards, Rebecca lay on the bed of a hotel room in Richmond panting for breath, covered by a film of sweat. Her skirt was bunched up around her waist, her knickers down, still hanging around one bare ankle; her blouse was open at the front, a couple of the buttons
torn off in the heat of the moment, and her bra was pushed up to expose her breasts.

  Patrick’s head lay against her shoulder. She could feel his breath warm against her skin. Both their hearts were beating fast. Rebecca rested one hand over his broad, strong shoulders, and with the other she stroked the hair over his ear, felt the stubbly down at the back of his neck, where it had been recently cut. It wasn’t love-she knew enough to realize that-but it was one hell of a fine substitute.

  But all too soon the sense of shame and melancholy that always came to her after sex with Patrick began to descend like a thick fog, numbing the nerve-ends that, only minutes before, had thrilled to such exquisite pleasure, and guilt began to overwhelm the vestiges of her joy.

  Patrick moved away and reached for a cigarette. It was the one thing she disliked, his smoking after sex, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him not to. He also put his glasses on. She knew he couldn’t see a thing without them, but sometimes she laughed because he looked so funny naked except for his glasses.

  “What is it?” Patrick asked, clearly sensing something was wrong. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”

  “Of course I did. You know that. I always do…with you. No…it’s just that I feel so…so damn guilty.”

  “Then leave him. Come and live with me.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Patrick. Just imagine the scandal. Schoolteacher shacks up with minister’s wife. You’d lose your job, for a start. And where would we live?”

  “Oh, don’t be so practical. We’d manage. We’ll get a flat in town. I can get another job. We’ll move away.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “No. No. No.”

  “Why not? Don’t you love me?”

  Rebecca didn’t answer.

  “You do love me, don’t you?” he persisted.

  “Of course I do,” Rebecca lied. It was easier that way.

  “Then leave him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You don’t love him.”

  “I…I…don’t know.” Rebecca did love Daniel. Somewhere inside her, the feeling was still there, she knew: battered, bruised, half-evaporated, but still there. She couldn’t explain that to Patrick.