I shrug her coat half off, and lift up her thick jumper and dark vest. My gaze moves inch by inch over the upper torso, taut stomach muscles from regular workouts, searching out the labels on the clothing and lingerie. The skin across the top of the woman’s right shoulder is odd and I cannot work out why until I force myself to stroke the cold flesh and shudder. I glance at Sam, lest he think me a ghoul but he merely nods as I photograph the skin, the labels, and finger the material of all her clothes. I ease her boots and socks off, examine and record her feet and hands once more to be sure of rapidly forming conclusions.
Sam hands me down a strong stick and I do a cursory prod of the liquid three feet or more to the ditch bottom, hoping to find the woman’s bag, purse or mobile phone, but it is a forlorn hope. A thorough drag or dredge are the only way. If those items are here at all.
In the cold darkness, I am done. It needs all the precision of official procedure now, and to render this woman some dignity by removing her from this desolation. Should I just slip away over the fields to my car three miles hence and let Sam call in the death as though I was never here?
‘Even the fields have eyes and ears in Ancaster County,’ goes the saying, long proven true. Someone will have seen or heard me even in this forsaken spot. Not least Albion House has a security team on duty around the clock and close circuit television cameras guarding its high walls; lenses which have likely already filmed me even though I could see no cameras actually trained outwards as I arrived. Perhaps they even also recorded what happened. Whoever investigates will check.
In any event, Sam needs support. I phone in the finding of the dead body. The warmth of initial sympathy dies in a second, once the dispatcher hears my name, checks my phone identity. Curt. A PC will attend; I should stay on scene till then. The connection is cut. They will not hurry, I know, on principle because I am involved. On principle? The motto of Ancaster County Police, repeated ad nauseam whenever it can be hung out there, is: ’Respect, Honour and Serve All.’ The public relations agency involved in creating this gem of a sound bite presumably knew ‘all’ meant those who were rich or powerful or had leverage. It does not include me, supposedly one of their own, or the poor or the majority of ordinary folk.
2
It happened once. Long ago. I am sure it did. It must have done. Why else would it haunt my paltry sleep, each, every single night these past seven years? It was reality. Once. It is not merely dream. It still exists for me, now.
Innocence so pure, the trusting loving cry of ’Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ touches, tears at my heart. An idyllic December day, air crisp and even, sun a soft round orb huge and low resting on the nearby hills, sculpting patterns of orange and pink into the purest of blue skies.
The three of us – wife Bess, myself, and Grace our two-year-old, ‘me almost three Daddy’ - enjoy a winter’s day as a family with Christmas in the air. Our roots already deep in our white Georgian cottage, local community, local town of Merian in the Ancaster Wolds. A Sunday roast dinner and the tradition of hours playing outside. Layered up with warm clothes, off we go. The church bells peal, the distant echo of the choir wafts around us as mouths purse practising ‘Silent Night, Holy Night.’ Bess will play her flute solo in the actual concert two weeks hence. With my croak of a singing voice, I will diplomatically mime and hold Grace high so she can see proceedings in the small village church that will be overflowing.
Sat in her small moulded yellow lorry, Grace – and her ever present little bear, ‘Tom Ted’ - careers on rides almost without end, up and down our private lane. Perched within as the driver, she clings to the robust plastic steering wheel, gurgling in anticipation, urging me ever onwards as I push the toy and her to the top of the slight hill. Another run is not possible I tease - ‘out of petrol’ - before I finally release her to cry with joy during the fifty-yard gentle hurtle down to the waiting arms of her mother below. Every trip I run beside her, just in case she tips out, ever anxious to protect her from the world. While I can.
Gambolling with abandon is our new black and white Springer Spaniel, named Ovid only that morning as Bess and I agree that like the Roman poet he has achieved instant ‘metamorphoses’, transforming our lives already with his gentle presence. Grace constantly cries ‘Od, Od.’ The dog’s kind expression, glossy coat and friendly wagging tale are already dedicated to her service. His head gently caresses her when the lorry overturns once and he provokes laughter rather than the tears we fear.
‘Birdies Daddy, birdies,” Grace exclaims as a flock of fieldfare swoop majestically over to roost in the trees at the far side of our meadow. As I watch a pair of smaller birds leave them to feed in the hedgerow near us. Redwings, the smallest thrush, a blaze of orange and red on their flanks, dark green of back, creamy stripe above. I am entranced and signal hush to enjoy our luck. I whisper that there are only a few pairs in the whole country, and all three of us huddle together and scarcely breathe as the birds hop, flutter and peck at the black berries of our mistletoe and red of the holly before they finally re-join the protective collective.
Kite flying in a malicious wind is hilarious, threatening to lift all three of us away. Darkness gently caresses as we crave warmth then, creating a white flour storm in the kitchen as we break eggs, pour milk and mix the sweet soothing flour to cook delicious hot creations and tantalising aromas.
Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ from the ‘Four Seasons’ portrays a man skidding across ice, chill octaves descending on the second violins and sweet violas as we scoff our scones laden with rapidly melting butter and home-made jam before a crackling open fire in the hearth of the lounge. We end gyrating to Bess’s favourites - the heavy rock Christmas music of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra in performance of ‘Deck the Halls’ and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, as the frenzied beat rolls on.
Calm comes around the white stand-alone bath, as deep suds and a steamy cloud envelop Grace with the aroma of coconut as we gently wash her. As always, the flotilla of small yellow floating ducks has to be seriously serenaded. Towelling and powdering Grace down Bess and I then place her gently in her cot bed, kissing her cheek. The routine of the soothing rhythms of her favourite picture book, ‘Each Peach Pear Plum,’ and nursery rhymes galore bounce out in unison then. Before our hands entwine as we watch Grace’s eyes flutter to sleep with time stretching out seemingly without end.
The night light illuminates her bedroom with a warm orange glow as she noisily snuffles and turns herself over with a smile at some thought all of her own. Standing there, the thought comes unbidden. I will know nothing better than this day.
Freshly showered Bess and I lay on our bed together, lights low. Staring out at the darkness, I see my own reflection in the window. Dark hair crumpled above what Bess calls ‘ruggedly pretty features.’ Strong black eyebrows, firm nose, and she tells me ‘enticing lips’ with my eyes mild or piercing blue, depending upon my mood.
I love her voice, know many of the patients at her practice feel better just at hearing her speak. Soft and lilting, it is the sound that drew me to her instantly that first time we met when we were just five years old - even before I could actually see her in the busy school yard. The voice matches her captivating face, with our soft yellow wallpaper and lights sparking flames now in her golden-brown eyes. The mass of burnished bronzed hair is soft and heavy, setting off her white skin. Her slender figure, ever elegant and graceful, is of a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, accentuated now by the simple white dressing gown she is wearing.
She insists we do the test. Her silver wedding ring hangs by a thread over her bare stomach and we pray for movement. Suddenly, the ring zings rapidly from side to side and joy is unconfined. I pull her close, rejoice in the new life we shall enjoy.
‘Candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; with jellies soother than the creamy curd, and lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon, manna and dates, in argosy, transferr’d.’ Keats description of supper sounding like the most erotic of sex in his ’The Eve of St Agnes.’ The sweet
pleasure also of ‘azure-lidded sleep’.
I tell Bess of this thought as her head lays on my bare chest later. Tears suddenly seep from her, their drops burning me for a moment like acid. Yet before I can ask what is wrong, there comes the soft smothered call of ‘Daddy’ on the listening intercom as Grace turns over in her sleep.
We both rise instantly to go to her even as a bright light explodes to blight all and the funeral knell begins without as the new baseline thrum of my existence.
***
Nightmare trashes my dream these past seven years. My every sinew is bent, every nerve rent. Rank and sour is the air. Rabid rats roam, mice tumble in multitude, seething over me as I lay prone in darkness, clad in rags, besmirched, broken. Slashes of deepest red flash distant, die, crashing noises assail my ears and being. Slime sputters liquid from the cracked walls in my trench, the rocky floor clots with blood and rotten flesh, the stench infecting lungs, eyes, tongue to my very being.
Mouth choked full of rusty nails, eyes distorted and unseeing, ears in agony from unceasing explosions, still I hear my daughter’s voice scream in pain and terror. Limbs bayoneted, I cannot move. Battalions of bats whine around my head. Ignorant creatures of the night long signifying the devil, they swoop, sharply prod and pierce flesh with surgical flapping. My eyes always adjust. Shapes on a shelf above are owls wisely observing, waiting on worse they know is to come. A proud fox, warily watches with huge yellow eyes from a low corner.
A wild army of tiny snapping animals and insects leap out from the walls’ marrow, a banshee sown of evil, ogres screaming blind fury. They bite, bruise, retreat, rear again, howl once more.
My wife’s wild screams, ‘Cal, Cal,’ join the cacophony. Grace in terror, ‘Daddy’ echoes and recedes. A shadow of menace holds my silhouetted family in its grasp far distant as red lightning cracks and fades, as do they, still screaming anguish, Somehow I half rise, hurl myself towards their voices only to crash into an endless void where I am falling and flailing in an abyss of blackness. To crash, limbs wracked, amidst wet dust and ashes, dead and done, as black unconsciousness overwhelms. Every night, I dream my dream, endure this horror, and die a little more.
***
Time has no meaning. Sharp red embers of sound and colour sliced into me. The insistent ringing stopped, suddenly an empty silence. Once, twice, thrice more the slash of noise, always to cease as my hand groped towards I know not where.
The last time I succeed. Two small portraits, my family once, fall like feathers from my lap to the floor. I awoke as always sprawled across my desk. Digital numbers in the blackness winked three a.m..
“Caleb?” urgently asked a deep male voice on my phone. I could find no response.
“Wek your sen up boy, yer naeded. Squad up to forehead.”
Squad? I am hot, cold, lost, fighting for breath and hearing, all at once. A minute of silence. ‘Squad’, it comes, a local word for mud, but what has that to do with me?
Am I awake? Is this a new part of my nightly nightmare? There is no escape. Sleep seldom comes for long. Each night I work fruitlessly at my files for hours after work, and then often wander the dark countryside in the early morn to exhaust myself so I can find some slumber if no actual rest. Always, always these past seven years, the sleep of reason brings forth Goya’s monsters of fox, bat, owl and evil creatures. As in the Spaniard’s great work, I am a man slumped at my desk. I dream of my old life, then descend into blood red insanity, where I know not if I will ever awake again, whether to everyday life or the asylum.
And yet, I knew this voice, a friend perhaps. I managed a grunt. He has found a body in a ditch.
Impatient at my lost silence, he repeated the news, told me where, says, “Them roads, slaape wi’ ice, soa mind ‘ow ya goa.”
I stammered that he should report the body, call 999. ‘Slaape?’ The Ancaster word for slippery. Only the sound of a gusting wind in trees came down the phone line then. Ominous, before he pronounced, pity deep and liquid in his voice
“Nay lad, you alone, yer needs to see it first Caleb. Touches you, yours. Trust me. Deep trouble. Agen.”
3
Two hours ago, I heeded Sam Aystrup’s call, disabling the GPS on my car and phone, driving ten miles, hiding my BMW in a copse down a disused lane, walking three miles in darkness across fields. Now I am examining a crime scene with a dead woman lying in a ditch and the official police team on their way, I hope. After I cover the body with a plastic sheet Sam provides, he pulls me up.
It is gone five a.m., dawn still hours off but cocks already crowing. As a black 4 x 4 pick-up truck, double headlights and a row of spotlights mounted atop its roof blazing into our eyes, cruises menacingly past. Windows tinted, its registration numbers are obscured by mud. A local heading for work early, or a gang of hare coursers who plague the area this time of year?
Dark gloom literally swallows it up and we listen as it travels on and away. We have work to do before the police arrive and I would rather nobody observed.
Nothing moves in the frosty silence. Sam’s hand on my sleeve is reassuring. We are tied by the strongest of invisible threads. Even as snow falls and freezing mist claws we turn to our tasks while tender images of yesteryear flicker across my mind.
I was almost three. Sam cuddled me close with one hand, supporting his wife on one side and my mother on the other. His vast cheeks were a pitted stream of tears that I dabbed with my little hankie as I gazed without understanding. A bleak grey midwinter day as now, my earliest memory, my father’s funeral.
Sam has been the nearest thing to a father that I have known ever since. A country man, direct and honest, not inclined to panic, exaggerate or even speak unless it is necessary. ‘Nowt to say, say nowt lad.’ To me he is England’s green and pleasant land of Ancaster County. An elemental giant, with native hills and fields for bones and forests for his face stubble. Chesterton? I flick the thought away, enough of quotations, a life cannot be lived through books.
We are connected back way before we or my parents were born. Sam’s parents and my Dad’s mother and father were farmworkers and lifelong neighbours in a pair of tithed cottages, nestling in the hills of a D'Eynscourte Estate farm in this very valley. Sam and my father Frank were born within days of each other in bedrooms where they could tap the shared wall, be heard by the other and soon communicated with their own code. Family folklore says Sam heard my father’s cries at birth a week after he himself arrived in the world. The two were inseparable, best friends for their lifetimes, just like their parents and grand-parents before them. My father left for University, returned newly married to live in a nearby village and work as a secondary school teacher in Merian, but the friendship never faltered. Sam took over his parent’s cottage, worked the same land as generations of Aystrups before him, married childhood sweet heart Janet and raised his son, Henry, who duly became my close friend too.
Growing up my widowed mother and I exchanged weekly visits with the family for Sunday tea. Sam thrilled me with stories of my father and their boyhood antics. We never spoke of it but my mother felt this gave me a normal family life of sorts and a link to my Dad. Sam also made a never-ending game of passing on his almost elemental feel for the country rhythms of birds, insects, animals, trees, bushes, flowers, rivers, streams, the weather, local myths, superstitions and dialect. He loves his county and regaled Henry and I as boys with stories and knowledge of the Celts, Vikings, Danes, Romans, Normans, Anglo Saxons and modern incomers from Europe who all were either marauders or peaceful settlers welcomed to our ancient lands and its rich dark soil.
The images flicker on in my mind film. Of Sam making a trolley of a wooden box with wheels for Henry and I, and cycling with us weekends without end up country hill and down dale. Memories of where I stand hand in hand with Sam, his wife ‘Mrs Janet’ as I always called her (my mother forbade Auntie for some reason), Henry and my Mum. At the seaside, in stately homes, parks and gardens, at village fetes, harvest festival suppers, church service
s, school sports days, even holidays to France and Italy, and on many a trip and picnic to anywhere and everywhere in my county and beyond.
My mother Marion was always steadfast that she would find no one as good and certainly none better than my father so why bother, and besides, her first concern was me. Hence Sam was always the nearest thing I have ever known to a father and I love him unconditionally as such.
My helplessness made me all the angrier when he lost first his job, then his home and way of life, then Henry and soon after, Mrs Janet of a broken heart. ‘Bitter pastoral’ is the rural life indeed as Ancaster folk morbidly say.
***
Sam helps wipe the ditch ooze off me and get me out of my scene of crime outfit and wellingtons. I watch him squat on his haunches at the road side then, while his huge hands deftly fill his briar pipe with tobacco from a small leather pouch. His fingernails are thick and mottled, the colour of tortoise shell. Grey hairs grow out of his ears and nose, more wisps escape from beneath his flat cap. His dark blue overalls are large, but the ribbed grey fisherman’s jumper beneath barely contains the mounds of hard muscle in his arms, shoulders and chest that thrust against them in the six foot three frame of this gentle giant who I have never heard even raise his voice.
He is aware of me looking at him and nods even as he views the starlings wheeling above us once more and stuffs his pipe to stick out of his top pocket. We both ignore the gently falling snowflakes that land and meld together. I see him but once a month of late and know it must cause him pain when once we were so very close. His wife and son dead, I and my mother are all he has beyond a one room flat overflowing with fading family photographs in Merian town. A countryman now without a shred of garden, only a brick wall beyond his window on a noisy crime ridden estate.
Bitter Pastoral_A DCI Caleb Cade Crime Thriller of rural Ancaster County. Page 2