Innocent Graves

by Peter Robinson

  The air around the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was warm and still, the only sounds the drone of insects and the occasional car along Kendal Road or North Market Street. The angel continued to gaze heaven-ward. Rebecca wished she knew what he could see there.

  Sober, this time, and feeling a little self-conscious, she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak out loud. But her thoughts flowed and shaped themselves as she stood there feeling silly. She wondered what the policeman, Chief Inspector Banks, would think of her.

  The police had claimed that Owen Pierce had killed another girl. That meant they also believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. There could be no way out for him now, Rebecca thought, not with public feeling as strong as it was against him.

  But he had visited her at the vicarage only that Saturday afternoon, full of talk about his innocence, the need for support and understanding. She couldn’t get over that, how convinced she had been. Was that the behavior of someone who was intending to go out later that night, pick up a teenage girl and murder her? Rebecca didn’t think so. But what did she know? Experts had done studies on these kinds of people-serial murderers, they called them-though she didn’t know if having killed only two people qualified Owen for that designation.

  She had, however, seen enough television programs about psychopaths to know that some could appear perfectly charming, live quite normal lives outside their need to kill. Ted Bundy, for example, had been a handsome and intelligent man who had killed God knew how many young women in America. Watch out for the nice, friendly, polite boy next door, the message seemed to be, not the raggedy man with the cruel eyes muttering to himself in a corner.

  A fly settled on her bare forearm and she stared at its shiny blue and green carapace for a moment before brushing it off. Then she looked up at the angel again. If only he could make things clear for her.

  Perhaps the police had arrested Owen only because they still believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. Maybe they had no real evidence that he had killed the other girl. She didn’t know why she should care so much. After all, Owen was still practically a stranger to her-and for a long time she had believed him to be a killer. Why should she be so upset when it turned out that he really was? She still couldn’t help feeling that he had let her down somehow, silly as the idea was.

  “Why?” she asked, surprised to find herself speaking out loud at last, face turned up to look at the angel. “Can you tell me why I care?”

  But she got no answer.

  She already knew part of the answer. Talking to Owen, taking him under her wing, had been a test for her. In a way, his presence had challenged her faith, her Christian feelings. For when it came to Christianity, Rebecca was a humanist, not one of these cold-fish theologians like some of the ministers she had met. Perhaps a better existence did await us in heaven, but to Rebecca, Christianity was useless if it forgot people and the here and now. Faith and belief, she felt, were no use without charity, love and compassion; religion was nothing if it focused entirely on the afterlife. Daniel had agreed. That was why they had done so well together. Up to last year.

  “Why am I telling you this?” she asked the angel. “What do you know of life on earth? What is it I want from you? Can you tell me?”

  Still the angel gazed fixedly heaven-ward. His expression looked stern to Rebecca, but she put that down to a trick of the light.

  “Am I to be a cynic now?” she asked. “After I put so much faith in Owen and he turns out to be a killer after all?”

  Again, she didn’t hear any answer, but she did hear a movement coming from deeper in the woods. The area behind the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was the most overgrown in the entire graveyard, all the way back to the wall at Kendal Road. The oldest yews grew there, and the wild shrubbery was so dense in places you couldn’t even walk through it easily. If there were any graves, nobody had visited them for a long time.

  It must have been a small animal of some kind, Rebecca decided. Then she remembered that she had told the police and the court that the cry she heard that November evening could have come from an animal. When she really thought about it, she knew it never could have. She had simply refused to acknowledge, either to herself or to anyone else that the scream she heard was the last cry for help of a girl about to be murdered. This sound, too, was too loud to be a dog, a cat or a bird. And there were no horses or sheep in the graveyard.

  She took a step towards the back of the mausoleum, aware as she did so that this was where Deborah’s body had been found. “Is anybody there?” she called out.

  No answer.

  Then she heard another rustling sound, this time closer to the North Market Street wall.

  Rebecca turned and wandered thigh-deep into the tangled undergrowth. She felt nettles sting her legs as she walked. “Is anyone there?” she called again.

  Still no answer.

  She paused and listened for a moment. All she could hear was her heart beating.

  Suddenly to her left, through the trees, she saw a dark figure break into a run. It looked like a man dressed in brown and green, but she couldn’t be certain because of the way the colors blended in with the background. Whoever it was, he couldn’t get over the high wall before she caught up with him. His only alternative was to head along the wall to the North Market Street gate. If she hurried, perhaps she could catch a glimpse of him before he got away.

  She turned back towards the back of the Inchcliffe Mausoleum and the gravel path. He was to her right now. She could hear him running towards the gate.

  Before she could get out of the wooded area, something snagged at her ankle and she tripped, scratching her knees and hands on thorns. It only delayed her a few seconds, but when she got to her feet and ran past the mausoleum along the gravel path into the open area, all she saw was the wooden gate slam shut. She stood there and cursed whoever it was. When she looked down, she saw she had blood on her hands.

  III

  Avoiding the Queen’s Arms, which everyone knew was the Eastvale CID local, Banks spirited Stott along Skinner’s Yard, down to the Duck and Drake on one of the winding alleys off King Street. The cobbled streets were chock-a-block with antique shops, antiquarian booksellers and food specialists, all with mullioned windows and creaky wooden floors.

  The Duck and Drake was a small, black-fronted Sam Smith’s house with etched, smoked-glass windows and a couple of tatty hanging baskets over the door. Inside, the entrance to the snug was so low that Banks felt as if he were crawling under a particularly tight overhang in Ingleborough Cave.

  The snug was also tiny, with dark wood beams and whitewashed walls hung with hunting prints and brass ornaments. They were the only two people in the place. The bench creaked as Banks sat down opposite Stott with his pint of Old Brewery Bitter and his ham and cheese sandwich. Stott hadn’t wanted anything at all, not even a glass of water.

  “What is it, Barry?” Banks asked, chomping on his sandwich. “Off your food? You look bloody awful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Stott was pale, with dark bags under his eyes and a two-day stubble around his chin and cheeks. His eyes themselves, behind the glasses, were dull, distant and haunted. Banks had never seen him like this before. Normally, you could depend on Barry Stott to look bright-eyed and alert at all times. Not to mention well groomed. But his suit was creased, as if he had slept in it, his tie was not properly fastened, and his hair was uncombed. He looked so miserable that even his ears seemed to droop.

  “You ill?”

  “As a matter, of fact,” said Stott, “I haven’t been sleeping well. Not well at all.”

  “Something on your mind?”

  “Yes.”

  Banks finished his sandwich, took a sip of beer and lit a cigarette. “Out with it, then.”

  Stott just pursed his lips and frowned in concentration.

  “Barry, are you sure it’s something you want to talk to me about?”

  “I have to,” Stott replied. “By al
l rights, I should go to the super, or even the CC. God knows, it’s bound to get that far eventually, but I wanted to tell you first. I don’t know why. Respect, perhaps. It’s just so difficult. I’ve been up wrestling with it all night, and I can’t see any other way out.”

  Banks sat back. He had never seen Barry Stott so upset, so consumed by anything before, except that day when Pierce was found not guilty. Stott was a private person, and Banks wasn’t sure how to handle him on a personal level, outside the job.

  Was this a private, intimate matter, perhaps? Was Stott going to admit he was homosexual? Not that it mattered. Banks knew for a fact that two of the uniformed officers at Eastvale were gay. So did everyone else. They came in for a bit of baiting now and then from the more macho among their colleagues, who weren’t entirely sure of their own sexuality, and for a certain amount of righteous moral disapproval from the one or two Christian fundamentalists in uniform. But Barry Stott? Banks realized he didn’t even know whether Stott was married, divorced or single.

  “Is this off the record, Barry?” Banks asked. “I mean, is it something personal?”

  “Partly. But not really.” He shook his head. “I can’t understand it myself. I was so sure. So damn certain.” He banged the table. Banks’s beer-glass jumped. “Sorry.”

  “I think you’d better just tell me.”

  Stott paused. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned the lenses of his glasses. In the background Banks could hear the radio playing Jim Reeves singing “Welcome to My World.”

  Finally, Stott put his glasses back on, nodded and took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “I suppose the most important thing is that Owen Pierce is innocent, at least of Ellen Gilchrist’s murder. We have to let him go.”

  Bank’s jaw dropped. “What are you talking about, Barry?”

  “I was there,” Stott said. “I know.”

  Christ, what was this? A murder confession? Banks held his hand up. “Hold on, Barry. Take it easy. Go slowly. And be very careful what you say.” He almost felt as if he were giving Stott a formal caution. “Where were you? King Street? Skield?”

  Stott shook his head and licked his lips. “No. Not either of those places. I was outside Owen Pierce’s house.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Watching him. I’ve been doing it ever since he got off.”

  “So that’s why you’re looking so washed out?”

  Stott rubbed his hand over his stubble. “Haven’t had any sleep in a week. Soon as I finish at the station, I grab a sandwich, then head for his street and park. If he goes out, I follow him.”

  “All night?”

  “Most of it. At least till it looks like he’s settled. Sometimes as late as three or four in the morning. He doesn’t go out much. Most nights he gets drunk and passes out in front of the telly.”

  “And he hasn’t spotted you?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t taken any great pains to hide myself, but he hasn’t said anything.”

  “But why, Barry?”

  Stott smoothed down his hair with his hand, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I got obsessed, I suppose. I just couldn’t stop myself. I was so sure of his guilt, so certain he’d beaten the system… And I knew he’d do it again. It was that kind of crime. I could feel it. I wanted to make sure he didn’t kill another girl. I thought if I watched him, kept an eye on him, then either I’d catch him, stop him or, if he knew I was onto him, he wouldn’t be able to do it again and the tension would get unbearable. Then maybe he’d confess or something. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  Banks stubbed out his cigarette. “But why, Barry? You’re a good copper. Brainy, diligent, logical. You passed all your exams. You’ve got a bloody university degree, for Christ’s sake. You’re on accelerated promotion. You ought to know better.”

  Stott shrugged. “I know. I know. I can’t explain it. Something just…went in me. Like I said, I thought if I watched him long enough I’d catch him one way or another.”

  Banks shook his head. “Okay. Let’s get this straight. You were parked outside Owen Pierce’s house on Saturday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time?”

  “From about five o’clock on.”

  “Until?”

  “About two-thirty in the morning, when he turned the lights off. He didn’t go out at all except to buy a bottle of something at the off-license around nine o’clock.”

  “You’re absolutely certain?”

  “Positive. The curtains weren’t quite closed. I could see him clearly whenever he got up. He was watching telly in the front room, but every now and then he’d get up to go to the toilet, or pour a drink, whatever.”

  “And you’re certain he was there all the time? He didn’t sneak out the back and come back?”

  Stott shook his head. “He was there, sir. Between the crucial times. Definitely. I saw him get up and cross the room twice between eleven o’clock and midnight.”

  “Are you sure it couldn’t have been anyone else?”

  “Certain. Besides, his car was parked in front of the house the whole time.”

  That didn’t mean much. Pierce could have stolen a car to commit the crime, and then returned it, rather than risk using his own and having his license number taken down. When that thought had passed through his mind, Banks had experienced another irritating sense of déjà vu. He had felt the same thing the other day while going over the case files. It couldn’t really be déjà vu, because it wasn’t something he had already experienced, but it came with the same sort of frisson.

  “What happened then?” he asked.

  “He must have fallen asleep in front of the telly, as usual. I could see the light from the screen. It changed to snow at one fifty-five, when the programs ended, but Pierce didn’t move again until two-thirty. Then he drew the curtains fully, turned out the lights and went upstairs to bed. That’s all.”

  “That’s all. Jesus Christ, Barry, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “Of course I have. But I had to speak out. I’ve been struggling with my conscience all night. I could have spoken up yesterday and saved Pierce another night in jail, but I didn’t. I didn’t dare. That’s my cross to bear. I was worried about the consequences to my career, partly, I’ll admit that, but I was also trying to convince myself that I could have been wrong, that he could have done it. But there’s no way. He’s innocent, just like he says.”

  Banks shook his head. “I don’t see how we can cover this up, Barry. I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

  Stott sat bolt upright. “I don’t want you to cover it up. As I said, I grappled with my conscience all night. I prayed for an answer, an easy way out. There isn’t one. I’ll speak up for Pierce. I’m his alibi. I’ve abused my position.” He reached in his inside pocket and brought out a white, business-size envelope, which he placed on the table in front of Banks. “This is my resignation.”

  IV

  Owen was confused. The Magistrates’ Court had bound him over without bail, as he had expected, but instead of being en route to Armley Jail, he was back in the cell at Eastvale. And nobody would tell him anything. Wharton had received a message from one of the uniformed policemen just as they returned to the van after the court session, and he seemed to have been running around like a blue-arsed fly ever since. Something was going on, and as far as Owen was concerned, it could only be bad.

  He ate a lunch of greasy fish and chips, ironically wrapped in Sunday’s News of the World, washed it down with a mug of strong sweet tea, and paced his cell until, shortly after one o’clock, Wharton appeared in the doorway, waistcoat buttons straining over his belly, a scarlet crescent grin splitting his bluish jowls.

  “You’re free to go,” he announced, thumbs hooked in his waistcoat pockets.

  Owen flopped on the bed. “Don’t joke,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I told you.” Wharton came close to what looked like dancing a little jig like Scrooge on
Christmas morning. “You’re free. Free. Free to go.”

  Had he gone mad? Owen wondered. Had this new arrest been the straw that broke the camel’s back? By all rights, it should be Owen going mad, not his solicitor, but there was no accounting for events these days. “Please,” Owen said putting his fists to his temples in an attempt to stop the clamor rising inside his head. “Please stop tormenting me.”

  “He’s right, Owen,” said a new voice from behind Wharton in the doorway.

  Owen looked up through the tears in his eyes and saw Detective Chief Inspector Banks leaning against the jamb, tie loose, hands in his pockets. So it wasn’t a dream; it wasn’t a lie? Owen hardly dared believe. He didn’t know how he felt now. Choked, certainly, his head spinning, a whooshing sound in his ears. Mostly, he was still confused. That and tearful. He felt very tearful. “You believe me?” he asked Banks.

  Banks nodded. “Yes. I believe you.”

  “Thank God.” Owen let his head fall in his hands and gave in to the tears. He cried loud and long, wet and shamelessly, and it wasn’t until he had finished and started to wipe his nose and eyes with a tissue that he noticed the two men had left him alone, but that the cell door was still open.

  Gingerly, he walked towards it and poked his head out, afraid that it would slam on him. Nothing happened. He walked along the tiled corridor towards the other locked door that led, he knew, upstairs, then out to the world beyond, worried that it wouldn’t be opened for him. But it was.

  Banks and Wharton stood outside, in the custody suite, and Owen now feared he would be rearrested for something else, still anxious that it was all some sort of ruse.

  When Banks approached him, he backed away in apprehension.

  “No,” said Banks, holding his hands out, palms open. “I meant it, Owen. No tricks. It’s over. You’re a free man. You’re completely exonerated. But I’d really appreciate it if you would come to my office with me for a chat. You might be able help us find out who really did commit these murders.”