by Roz Watkins
‘Pathologist said he died within the last few hours. And SOCO have been up.’ He nodded towards a white-swathed man peering at what looked like a pile of vomit at the base of the cliff.
‘Who’s been sick?’
‘The dog. Seems to have eaten something nasty.’
‘The dog?’
‘That’s how they found the body. Bloke lost his dog. Searched everywhere for it. Eventually heard noises up there.’ Ben thumbed at the gap in the rock. ‘Climbed up, saw the body, found the dog licking something.’
‘I hope it wasn’t tucking into the corpse?’
‘It was a Labrador, so I don’t suppose it would have turned it down. But I think it was the plastic wrapper from a cake or something. Looks like it might have been poisoned.’
‘Is the dog okay? Where’s the owner? Has someone taken a statement from him?’
‘It’s all here for you. They’ve gone to the vet, but the dog seems fine. Only ate a few crumbs, he thought.’
‘Interesting location for a body,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been kind of fascinated by cave houses.’
Ben inched towards the cliff and touched the rock. ‘This area’s riddled with caves. Not many of them were ever lived in, of course.’ He hesitated as if wondering whether to say more, given that a corpse was waiting for my attention.
‘I’d better press on,’ I said, although I wasn’t looking forward to getting my bad foot up the stone steps. Besides, there was something unsettling about the black mouth of the cave. ‘What were you going to say earlier? When I said it was creepy?’
Ben laughed, but it didn’t go to his eyes. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I grew up round here. There was a rumour. Nothing important.’
‘What rumour?’
‘Just silliness. It’s supposed to be haunted.’
I laughed too, just in case he thought I cared. ‘Well, I don’t suppose our man was killed by a ghost.’ I imagined pale creatures emerging from the deep and prodding the corpse with long fingers. I forced them from my mind. ‘I was told the dead man smells of almonds. Cyanide almonds?’
‘Yep, slightly. You only really get the almondy smell on a corpse when you open up the stomach.’ Ben’s stance changed to lecture-giving – legs wide apart and chest thrust forward. I hoped he wasn’t going to come over all patronising on me. I wasn’t even blonde any more – I’d dyed my hair a more intelligent shade of brown, matched to my mum’s for authenticity. But I was stuck with being small and having a sympathy-inducing limp.
‘Yes. Thanks. I know,’ I said, a little sharply. ‘So, do we have a name?’
Ben glanced at his notes. ‘Peter Hugo Hamilton.’
‘And he was dead when he was found?’
‘That’s right. Although I’ve seen deader.’
‘Can you be just a little bit dead?’
Ben folded his arms. ‘If there are no maggots, you’re not that dead.’
‘Okay, I’ll have a look.’ I edged towards the steps and started to climb. A few steps up, I felt a twinge in my ankle. I paused and glanced down. Ben held his arms out awkwardly as if he wanted to lever my bottom upwards, a prospect I didn’t relish. I kept going, climbing steadily until I could just peer into the cave. A faint shaft of light hit the back wall but the rest of it was in darkness. I waited for my eyes to adjust, then climbed on up and heaved myself in.
A musty smell caught in my throat. The cave was cool and silent, its roof low and claustrophobic. It was the size of a small room, although its walls blended into the darkness so there could have been tunnels leading deeper into the rock. A tiny window and the slim door cast a muted light which didn’t reach its edges. I pulled out my torch and swooped it around. I had an irrational feeling that something was going to leap out of the darkness, or that the corpse was going to lunge at me. I scraped my hair from my clammy face and told myself to calm the hell down and do my job.
The dead man lay at the back of the cave, his body stretched out straight and stiff. One hand clutched his stomach and the other grasped his throat. I shone my torch at his face. Scratches ran down his cheeks and trickles of blood had seeped from them. The blood gleamed bright, cherry red in the torch light.
A trail of vomit ran from the side of the man’s mouth onto the cave floor.
I crouched and looked at his fingers. They were smeared red. Poor man seemed to have scratched at his own face. Under the nails were flecks of green, as if he’d clawed his way through foliage.
Resting near one of the man’s bent arms was a book – The Discourses of Epictetus.
A plastic wrapper lay on the stone floor. I could just read the label. Susie’s Cakes. Dark chocolate and almond. I lowered myself onto my hands and knees and smelt the wrapper, wishing I hadn’t given up Pilates. I couldn’t smell anything, but I didn’t know if I was one of the lucky few who could smell cyanide.
I stood again and shone my torch at the wall of the cave behind the man’s body. Water seeped from a tiny crack in the cave roof, and in the places where light from the door and window hit the wall, ferns had grown. Some were crushed where it looked as if the man had fallen against them, and others had been pulled away from the cave wall.
I felt a wave of horror. This was a real person, not just a corpse in an interesting investigation. He was only about my age. I thought about his years lost, how he’d never grow old, how his loved ones would wake up tomorrow with their lives all collapsed like a sinkhole in a suburban garden.
I breathed out slowly through my mouth, like I’d been taught, then stepped closer and pointed my torch at the area where the ferns had been flattened. Was that a mark on the stone? I gently pulled at more ferns with my gloved hands, trying to reveal what was underneath. It was a carving, clearly decades old, with lichen growing over the indentations in the rock like on a Victorian gravestone. It must have been completely covered until the dying man grasped at the ferns.
Something pale popped into my peripheral vision. I spun round and saw a SOCO climbing into the cave house. His voice cut the silence. ‘We found a wallet with his name and photo driving licence. And a note. Handwritten. It said, P middle name.’ He showed me a crumpled Post-it, encased in a plastic evidence bag.
‘Has the back wall been photographed, where he pulled at the ferns?’
The man nodded.
‘Okay, let’s see what’s under there.’ I pointed at the marks I’d seen in the rock.
Together we tugged at the ferns, carefully peeling them off the cave wall.
The SOCO took a step back. ‘Ugh. What’s that?’
We pulled away more foliage and the full carving came into view. My chest tightened and it felt hard to draw the cold cave air into my lungs. It was an image of The Grim Reaper – hooded, with a grinning skull and skeletal body, its scythe held high above its head. The image was simply drawn with just a few lines cut into the rock, but it seemed all the more sinister for that. It stood over the dead man as if it had attacked him.
‘Hold on a sec,’ the SOCO said. ‘There’s some writing under the image. Is it a date?’ He gently tore away more ferns.
I crouched and directed my torch at the lettering in the rock. A prickling crept up my spine to the base of my neck. ‘Not a date,’ I said.
The SOCO leant closer to the rock, and then froze. ‘How can that be? That carving must be a good hundred years old – the writing the same – and covered up for years before we cut the foliage back.’ His voice was loud in the still air, but I heard the tremor in it. ‘I don’t understand… The dead man’s initials?’
I didn’t understand either. I stepped away from the cave wall and wiped my face with my green-stained gloves.
Carved into the stone below the Grim Reaper image were the words, ‘Coming for PHH’.
Author’s note
Most of this book is the product of my fevered imagination. However, the keeping of pigs in tiny cages is not.
In the UK, over half of sows are kept in ‘farrowing crates’ from up to seven days before they
give birth until the piglets are weaned at around three or four weeks of age. The crates are sized such that the mother pig cannot turn around, reach to nuzzle or lick her piglets, or even lie comfortably. The floor is usually hard and slatted, even though a mother pig has a strong motivation to build a nest before giving birth. The crate also prevents the mother pig from being able to move away from her piglets or push them away, for example if they bite her teats.
If you eat pork but would prefer not to support this, look for products labelled ‘organic’ or ‘free range’. If you choose ‘outdoor reared’ or ‘outdoor bred’, the sows are not kept in crates, although the pigs they give birth to are still kept indoors for at least some of their lives. Compassion in World Farming has good information – https://www.ciwf.org.uk/your-food/meat-poultry/pork-and-bacon/
UK pig farming has a long way to go, but it is better than in much of the rest of the world. In many countries, it is common for a pregnant sow to be kept in a sow stall (also called a ‘gestation crate’) for the whole of her sixteen-week pregnancy. A sow stall is a metal cage – usually with a bare concrete/slatted floor – which is so narrow that the sow cannot turn around, and she can only stand up and lie down with difficulty. Larger pigs cannot even lie on their sides as they sometimes like to, and must lie on their fronts. Sow stalls were banned in the UK in 1999, with a partial ban enforced in the EU from 2013. Unfortunately, following the UK ban, supermarkets increased imports of low-welfare meat from other countries, putting UK producers in an impossible position unless consumers specifically chose higher-welfare meat. It is unclear what will happen in the future, but it is likely to be even more important to check carefully what you are buying.
Acknowledgements
Writing the acknowledgements gets harder with each book. So many people have helped me in so many ways and it’s all hugely appreciated, but I can’t mention everyone.
Massive thanks to everyone at Marjacq, especially my fantastic agent, Diana Beaumont. The longer I work with her, the more I realise how incredibly lucky I am!
Thank you to my brilliant editor, Emily Kitchin, who has had huge input on this book, making it so much better, and who never says anything is too weird or taboo (well, not so far!) Also, to my excellent copy-editor, Anne O’Brien, and the whole HQ team, including Lisa Milton, Janet Aspey (the right Janet), Lucy Richardson, Lily Capewell, Joe Thomas, Melanie Hayes, and all the others who work tirelessly to support our books.
Again, Jo and Ducky Mallard were indispensable on the CSI side of things and are always (perhaps worryingly) happy to speculate on how to commit a perfect murder. Seriously, you do not want to get on the wrong side of these guys. And thank you to the other wonderful police people who’ve helped me, including but not limited to Paul Callum, John Tanner, Phil Blood, and Claudia Musson, who helped with detail but also understood that I have to leave out the boring bits! Any inaccuracies are totally mine.
The Doomsbury writing group have kept me sane(ish) and helped me laugh about the ups and downs of publishing, so huge thanks to Sophie Draper, Fran Dorricott, Jo Jakeman, and Louise Trevatt. Louise may not have written her book (yet) but her work saving dogs from the meat trade in South Korea is truly inspirational. It’s sometimes depressing not being able to save them all, but if more people were like her, the world would be a much better place.
All my friends have been brilliantly supportive, including Ali and the lovely Paws (RIP), who inspired Hamlet, and all the rest of the Alderwasley crowd (thank you, Jane, for offering to get me an inside view of an abattoir, and sorry I couldn’t quite face it!) Also Chris Scott, Sally Randall, Ruth Grady, Emma Goodchild, Sarah Breeden, Susan Fraser, Estelle Read, Corrine Baker, Keren Hill, Helen Chapman, Gemma Allen, and Alex Davis and the people I met on his courses, including Glenda, Peter, Ray and Carl.
Thank you to Sir Richard FitzHerbert of Tissington Hall for being the first person (and I hope not the last) to send me a message saying, ‘You must see my cesspit’. It was indeed a fantastic place for disposing of things. Also, the patent attorney community have continued to be hugely enthusiastic, especially with suggestions for future victims (trade mark attorneys and solicitors seem popular). Thanks also to the wonderful clicker-trainer community, whose creative approaches to problem-solving inspired one of the more unusual parts of this book! And huge thanks to the wonderful Compassion in World Farming for fact checking my author’s note.
The crime writing world is famously supportive over a drink or two and in online groups. Thank you to all the writers who are such fun to be around and who also took the time to read and comment on my first two books – there are too many to mention but you know who you are. Likewise, the incredible book bloggers who do so much to support authors, and those who are involved with book groups in the real world and online, and those who take the time to post reviews – it really does make a huge difference. These include (among others) Jacob Collins, Kate of ‘For Winter Nights’, Vicki of ‘Cosy Books’, Noemi Proietti, Julia Wilson, The Book Doctor, Abby Slater-Fairbrother, Rosie McCall, Ruth de Haas, Tina Pritchard, Pam Gough and Beccy Bagnall.
Also, my local bookshops, especially Waterstones Derby, Meadowhall, Sheffield and Chesterfield, and Scarthin Books, my local libraries plus the wonderful one in Newport, Pembrokeshire, and also Radio Derby for thinking of me when you need vital contributions like being pedantic about apostrophes.
Thank you to Rob for supporting this unexpected and at times overwhelming career change (and no, Craig is not based on you – well, not entirely), my mum and dad, Julian and Marina, and Katia and Maxim for ongoing periodic sidewaysing of my books.
Finally, thank you to my readers, who’ve been so enthusiastic and encouraging. It’s been heartening (and yes, a little bit stressful) to be asked so many times when this one is coming out! Thank you for choosing to read this book – I really hope you enjoyed it.
About the Publisher
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