Death Unholy

by Phillip Strang

  ‘We don’t like strangers.’

  ‘Not even police officers?’

  ‘There’s no crime here. What are you here for?’

  ‘Are you aware of a body being discovered in Cuthbert’s Wood?’

  ‘We’ve seen the lights up there.’

  ‘You’ve not answered my question. Do you know an Adam Saunders?’

  ‘Maybe we do.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘We mind our own business. I suggest you do, as well.’

  ‘We’re police officers. We ask questions, look for answers. Once again, did you know Adam Saunders?’

  ‘He was up at the cottage.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘As I said, we mind our own business. We don’t ask unnecessary questions.’

  ‘May I have your name?’

  ‘Why? I’ve told you all I know. I suggest you leave and soon.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’

  ‘I meant nothing by my comment. It’s late, and I don’t want you to have an accident.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘It’s not a threat, just advice.

  ‘Vic, I think we should leave,’ Dallimore said.

  ‘Your friend’s right. It’s best if you leave.’

  The group in front of the two police officers parted, and Oldfield and Dallimore moved through it.

  Once on the other side, Dallimore spoke. ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘I believe that if there were no police up at the top of the hill, we would not have left that village.’

  ‘Are you meaning they would have prevented us?’

  ‘Yes. I believe they would have killed us.’

  ‘Whatever you’re involved with, you and Yarwood, count me out. I’ll go back to driving my patrol car.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it has to be taken to conclusion. We can’t have villagers threatening the police.’

  ‘Are they pagan worshippers?’

  ‘It seems likely.’

  ‘But then we shouldn’t have been walking through the village at that time of the morning.’

  ‘I agree, but you saw their reaction when I told them we were police officers.’

  ‘Hostile.’

  ‘Precisely. It’s hardly the reaction of law-abiding people.’

  Chapter 22

  The first thing Jim Hughes did after he came out of Cuthbert’s Wood was to warm himself in Clare’s car.

  ‘What did you find out?’ Clare asked.

  ‘It’s murder. He’d been hit by a branch across the back of the head.’

  ‘Did that kill him?’

  ‘He was probably unconscious, but no. He drowned.’

  ‘Why murder?’

  ‘Firstly, the branch did not break off a tree and smack him in the back of the head. The angles are all wrong, and we’ve checked the branch. It had fallen down sometime in the past. Secondly, it needed pressure to hold his head under the water. Almost certainly the branch that hit him was then used to hold his head under.’

  ‘And the murderer?’

  ‘We’re still looking. There’s another set of footprints near the body, but we’ll need to eliminate all of you first, and that’s going to take time.’

  ‘The body?’

  ‘We’ll remove it in the next four to five hours. Our people will be here for some time yet, and then we need to check the cottage. I assume Oldfield has crime scene tape around the place.’

  Clare thought he had, although she had not heard from him for some time. She phoned him.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Oldfield replied. ‘We’ve just met the locals.’

  ‘Friendly?’

  ‘Not at all. Mind you, it’s hardly the time of morning for socialising.’

  ‘They came to the cottage?’ Clare asked.

  ‘No. We’ve been into Avon Hill.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘We’ve just seen the car we followed from the graveyard.’

  ‘The mysterious woman?’

  ‘That’s the one. Did you get an address?’

  ‘Yes. There should be a record of who owns the house.’

  ***

  ‘What were the policeman looking for?’ Edmund Wylshere asked in the Avon Hill pub after the body of Adam Saunders had been discovered.

  ‘They were just walking through,’ Albert Grayling, a short, red-faced man, said. He was behind the bar, his usual position as the publican of the small, quaint pub. It should have been on the list of Britain’s oldest pubs, but it wasn’t. Apart from the locals, and the occasional person passing through, it had not announced itself to the world: no gourmet meals, no speciality brews, no selection of wines. It was what it was, a traditional old English pub. If you wanted a pint of beer, a ploughman’s lunch of freshly baked bread with a slab of cheese and pickled onions, then the place was ideal, but apart from that, the pub was barren. However, it was where the elders met when there was something to discuss, and at those times it was by invite only.

  ‘They’ll be suspicious,’ Wylshere said.

  ‘It was one in the morning. We had a right to challenge them,’ Grayling said.

  ‘We need to make plans,’ another of the elders said. ‘What’s our approach when they come here?’

  ‘We don’t do anything to raise their suspicions.’

  ‘But how? They know enough to arrest your wife.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Wylshere asked.

  ‘That’s what my sources tell me.’

  ‘But they’ve no proof.’

  ‘Can you trust your wife? There are others who are losing their faith.’

  ‘Adam Saunders did,’ another elder said.

  ‘Cuthbert’s Wood has dealt with him,’ Wylshere said.

  ‘You always intended for him to die, didn’t you?’

  ‘Our secret is all that is important.’

  ‘And his father?’

  ‘He is ready to talk. It is time to request their help.’

  ***

  Tremayne realised the situation was becoming critical. He had not been pleased on hearing that Oldfield had been into Avon Hill. If, as he believed, the community in that small enclave at the end of a narrow, winding road were responsible for Adam Saunders’ death, then it was a foolhardy action.

  Research by Yarwood had shown that cults around the world existed and that rational people could, and had been, seduced by a charismatic leader. Here, that leader appeared to be Dr Edmund Wylshere.

  Tremayne had met the man on a few occasions and had not seen anything special about him. From what he remembered, the doctor had been competent and had dealt with his problems satisfactorily. Apart from that, there was no special allure, no magnetism that would have induced him to follow the man, but Tremayne knew that he was a cynical police officer who dealt in facts, not phantom spirits.

  The visit to Avon Hill, Tremayne felt, should be delayed by a few days while all the facts were collated. And now, according to Yarwood and Oldfield, Charles Saunders was willing to talk. There had been others who had known the secrets but had not wanted to reveal them, and they had ended up dead. He wondered if Adam Saunders had been one of those. Sure, he had only been fifteen, but he had been bright, his academic record showed that, and Tremayne could not believe that a pupil at one of Salisbury’s best schools could have been coerced by a cult to keep quiet.

  After the previous night up at Cuthbert’s Wood, both Yarwood and Oldfield were late arriving at the police station the next morning. Tremayne called them into his office. He was in a positive frame of mind.

  ‘We’ve got them,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you think that?’ Clare asked. She was still tired. It had been five in the morning before she had finally made it home.

  ‘When is the father coming in?’ Tremayne asked.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Yarwood replied. ‘They’ve removed Adam Saunders’ body from the crime scene. It’
s now with Pathology.’

  ‘They’ll not find any more of interest,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘You’re basing that on Hughes’s report?’

  ‘This time I am. The youth was murdered. That’s good enough for me. Any signs of other persons?’

  ‘There’s another set of footprints close to the cottage-side entrance to Cuthbert’s Wood.’

  ‘Do we know who it is?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘The group you met in Avon Hill?’ Tremayne asked Oldfield.

  ‘One of them could be the murderer.’

  ‘And you don’t know who they were?’

  ‘They weren’t friendly’

  ‘What did you expect? One o’clock in the morning wandering around a village.’

  Oldfield realised that it was going to be a full day. If Charles Saunders was willing to talk, the first one to do so, then the team at Bemerton Road Police Station would be working late that night, probably into the early hours of the following morning.

  ‘And after you showed your police ID?’

  ‘The same as before. They didn’t want us down there.’

  ‘We still need to call in Harriet Wylshere,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘But where’s the proof?’ Clare asked.

  ‘There’s none, it’s circumstantial, but she fits the profile.’

  Jim Hughes arrived in Tremayne’s office at eight-thirty in the morning. By that time, Oldfield was on his way to see Charles Saunders. None of the team placed much faith in the man opening up about what was going on in Avon Hill. As Tremayne saw it, if Charles Saunders admitted to knowledge of what happened in Avon Hill, then he was probably complicit in the murder of Mavis Godwin, the disappearance of Trevor Godwin and, by default, the murder of his son.

  If Adam Saunders had died because of a fear that he might talk, then that also implied that his father was a target.

  ‘Adam Saunders was hit a total of three times by a branch,’ Hughes said.

  ‘Why three times?’ Clare asked.

  ‘The first two could have been no more than low hanging branches, although one had knocked him over. Also, he had a sprained ankle.’

  ‘Sprained ankle?’ Tremayne asked.

  ‘Yes. The first time he fell over, he caught it on the exposed root of an old tree. After that he was limping, at least for a while.’

  ‘How long was he in that wood?’

  ‘As far as we can tell, about twenty minutes.’

  ‘But you can walk from one side to the other in no more than eight.’

  ‘As I’ve said before, if your lot had not marched up and down like Grenadier Guards, then it may have been easier, but we found his footprints elsewhere. He was effectively walking around in circles.’

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘Scared witless more like,’ Hughes replied.

  ‘Not you as well?’ Tremayne said.

  ‘Are you joking?’ Hughes replied.

  ‘Then what?’ Clare asked, sensing the antagonism between the two men.

  ‘The generator failed when we were in there.’

  ‘And?’ Tremayne asked.

  ‘Pitch black, couldn’t see a hand in front of your face.’

  ‘You had torches.’

  ‘Of course, but for a few seconds we did not.’

  ‘Unpleasant?’ Clare asked.

  ‘To put it mildly,’ Hughes said. ‘The darkness was intense, the sort of thing that gives you nightmares as a child.’

  ‘You’re not a child,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘That’s what I figured. If I can finish.’

  ‘My apologies.’

  ‘As I was saying. It was pitch black when the lights went out. The tree canopy had blotted out the night sky, and as Clare will remember, there were no stars that evening, only clouds.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Clare said.

  ‘Adam Saunders, after being hit by the first branch, did not have a torch, only the light from his phone.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He had broken his torch. It wasn’t working when we found it, although it was only the battery that had dislodged.

  ‘Anyway, he had no light other than from a phone, and they’re only useful for finding your keys in the dark. They’re hardly good enough to find your way out of a dense and overgrown wood. With no reference points, it’s easy to get lost.’

  ‘I would have just kept heading in the same direction,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘You would have, but you’re an older man, not easily taken in by tales of evil spirits.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Children are fascinated by the subject. Yarwood’s younger, she’ll remember.’

  ‘Scary movies, tales under the blankets on sleepovers with friends.’

  ‘Precisely. And if Adam Saunders had that as well as a dose of whatever goes on in Avon Hill, he would have been hearing noises that weren’t there, seen shadows that were only the vegetation.’

  ‘Are you confirming that the first two branches were accidents?’ Tremayne asked.

  ‘That appears to be the case. The third, however, is a different matter.’

  ‘Explain what you mean.’

  ‘The branch had been lying on the ground not more than twenty feet away from where the body was found. It is clear that someone picked it up and then hit Saunders around the back of the head with it.’

  ‘A lot of force?’

  ‘Sufficient for the youth to have been unconscious on hitting the ground.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘The branch was used to hold his head under water.’

  ‘Adam Saunders would not have been aware that he was drowning?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘But wouldn’t someone else in the wood have made a lot of noise?’ Clare asked.

  ‘You’d think so,’ Hughes said.

  ‘Not again,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘What I am saying is that either Adam Saunders was half-deaf or he was so scared that he imagined that the noises he heard were what he feared the most.’

  ‘Pagan gods,’ Clare said.

  ‘That’s what I’d reckon. He believed he was in their realm and that it was them.’

  ‘When in reality it was a mortal again,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘No question that whoever killed him was of this world, and from Avon Hill.’

  ‘Provable?’

  ‘We traced the footprints down as far as the cottage.’

  ‘Did you go down into Avon Hill?’

  ‘Not with the crowd that was forming.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘From Adam Saunders’ cottage to the lane leading down to Avon Hill is not far. The footprints were clear enough until then.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘As I said, a crowd was forming. Once they’d figured out what we were doing, they started marching up and down the lane with muddied boots and brooms.’

  ‘Why?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Get real, Yarwood. They were destroying the evidence,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Hughes said.

  ‘Is there any way to identify the killer?’ Clare asked.

  ‘This is what we can tell you,’ Hughes said. He had made himself comfortable on the chair in the corner of Tremayne’s office. For once, the man had been civil to him. ‘The murderer was left-handed.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘The person was standing to the right of the youth. It’s not conclusive, but I’d say there’s a better than ninety per cent possibility that he was using his left hand.’

  ‘Remember that fact, Yarwood,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Judging by the angle that the branch hit the back of Adam Saunders’ head, I’d say that you’re looking someone between five feet six inches and five feet nine inches.’

  ‘Weight?’

  ‘Approximately one hundred and sixty pound
s.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Soil impaction close to the murder site. Forensics conducted tests and came to that conclusion.’

  ‘As soon as we’ve dealt with Charles Saunders we need to start making some arrests, or Moulton will have me out of here.’

  ‘You’re joking, guv?’

  ‘It’s either him or me, and I don’t fancy my chances. Besides, Hughes has given us our first concrete lead.’

  ‘And we know the car that the woman in the graveyard used is in Avon Hill. We have to thank Oldfield for that.’

  ‘His visit has certainly stirred them up. They’ll be prepared for us when we arrive.’

  ‘They’ve always been prepared,’ Clare said.

  ‘That’s the truth. How and why I’d like to know,’ Tremayne said.

  ‘Harriet Wylshere?’

  ‘We’ll deal with what we have first off, and then talk to her after.’

  ‘How long before Oldfield is here with Charles Saunders?’

  ‘Within the hour. They’ve got to deal with the identification of Adam Saunders’ body first,’ Clare said.

  Chapter 23

  For seven hundred years Edmund Wylshere’s family had held sway over a small and isolated, and until recent years a naïve and uneducated, community. But now the younger generation was not so easily swayed, and it had taken a combination of fear and discipline to maintain control. Those who believed were, in the main, in their fifties and older. The inner group, no more than six, were always the most devout, and then there were another twenty who could be trusted, but the membership had been declining.

  Adam Saunders had not been the only one beginning to doubt. Even his own daughter, Edmund Wylshere knew, was starting to question the old ways. Whereas some still showed him the necessary respect, most did not, not even Charles Saunders, a boring accountant, the son of a subsistence farmer, whose education had come by way of the devotees’ financial assistance and the Wylsheres’ benevolence. And now what had happened? His son had died, a necessary act, and Charles Saunders was about to talk to the police.

  Edmund Wylshere, secure in the manor house which had been in the family for centuries, contemplated the possibilities. If he stayed, the police would eventually find out the truth, and not even those that he made offerings to could hold the strength of the police at bay indefinitely.