The Heights
Page 28
‘You wouldn’t manage on your own. What you going to pay the electric with?’
Kate folded her arms. She wasn’t going to let on how uncertain she felt. ‘I’ll get a job. Or there might be some money. From Dad.’ She wasn’t sure about that. The solicitor had mentioned the house but that was about it.
‘You won’t get a job. You don’t know how to do anything.’
‘And you do?’
Luke shrugged. ‘I know more than you.’
‘Then come with me.’ Kate hadn’t intended to say that but it was perfect, wasn’t it? ‘We’re family. It’s your mum’s family home too really. And when she gets out of… well, when she comes back she can come to stay too. It’ll be perfect.’
Luke looked at her for a second. ‘No, it won’t.’
‘What?’
‘It won’t be perfect. Nothing’s perfect. And if my mum comes back she’ll have some loser in tow. It’ll be just the same as before.’
‘You’d rather stay here.’
Luke stared around the grey living room. ‘Course not, but running off over there won’t be any better. Nah. You’re on your own.’
Kate folded her arms. She could see it in her head. Her and Luke would be like a proper family, and then Aunt Isabelle. She could rebuild everything that had gone away. ‘Well, I think you should come.’
‘Think he should come where?’
Heathcliff was standing in the living-room doorway. His clothes looked too big on him. It was the first time she’d noticed that. She thought of him as a big man but his height distracted you from the way his shirt hung shapeless around his ribs. ‘Back home with me.’
‘This is your home now.’
Kate swallowed. ‘You’ve been very kind,’ she said, because that was what you were supposed to say. ‘But the Grange is where I live. The solicitor says the house will be mine now.’
‘You should be here with your family.’ Heathcliff stepped towards them, towering over the couch. ‘Luke’s staying here, aren’t you?’
Luke nodded.
‘And he wants you to stay.’
Another silent nod from her cousin.
Heathcliff continued. ‘Think about it. That big house. Just you. On your own. Nobody to look after you.’
Kate thought about that.
‘We’ll have Harry take you over there to get the rest of your things and you can stay here as long as you need.’ He paused. ‘Maybe you’ll be ready to go back there in a bit.’
Kate nodded. In a bit. That was reasonable. There was no need to rush.
Harry watched his cousin standing stock-still on the doorstep of her old home. Key in the lock. Not turning. Not moving. ‘You gonna go in then?’
‘In a minute.’
‘What you waiting for?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s just… I mean, have you ever been back to where your dad died.’
Harry nodded. ‘Loads of times. You can cut through to get to the pub. It’s just a place.’
‘Yeah. Well, you didn’t actually see him, did you?’
Harry didn’t reply. It wasn’t something he ever thought about – except very rarely, when he was awake late at night, listening to Heathcliff talking to a ghost.
She turned the key slowly. ‘Do you miss him?’
‘Not really. He were a drunk.’
He followed her up the stairs. She marched through a door that had a set of four pink sparkly letter tiles hanging across it: K-A-T-E. Harry stopped in the doorway. The room inside was like summat for a princess. Bright white wardrobes with a full-length mirror covering one door. Rows of books and ornaments on shelves across one wall. The windowsill hidden under an array of soft toys. Kate paused. ‘I don’t play with them or anything. They’re old. And, like, stupid.’
She pulled a purple suitcase from underneath the bed and started throwing clothes from the wardrobe in. ‘What do I need?’
Harry shrugged.
‘Should I bring going-out stuff or just everyday things?’
‘I dunno.’ Harry had never had more than one type of clothing. It were just clothes, wasn’t it?
She kept folding and stuffing until the case was full.
‘Right.’ Harry started along the landing.
‘Wait.’
He stopped. She was standing in the door of her bedroom, clutching the case in front of her. ‘What?’
‘I’m coming back here, aren’t I?’
‘If you want. I suppose.’
She nodded. ‘I am. This is just for the time being. I’m definitely coming back.’
Chapter Forty-Five
2008
‘So you saw Edward Linton not long before he died?’ Lockwood asked.
The priest curled his lip. ‘I did.’
‘And how did he seem?’
‘Godless.’
He didn’t make the sign of the cross, but it almost felt as if he had.
Lockwood resisted the urge to stuff the good father’s crucifix somewhere he’d struggle to retrieve it and took a breath.
‘Let’s get back to the facts. Exactly when did you have this conversation with Edward Linton?’
Father Joseph dropped his gaze to the floor. ‘I couldn’t say exactly.’
‘Give me a ball park.’
‘2006. Probably.’
The ramming of the crucifix was looking like an increasingly attractive option. The priest had contacted him. He had things Lockwood ought to know, he said. About Edward Linton and what happened to him. Lockwood had read the file. Accidental overdose. Accidental overdose could very easily be a euphemism for something else, especially if the coroner saw a young girl who’d lost both her parents and didn’t see much benefit in pouring salt into the wound.
It didn’t look like murder, but none of it did. Heathcliff must have hated Edward Linton back when he married Cathy, but this was years later. No one held on to that sort of hate for so long. But he’d come, and so the priest had better have something more than a half-remembered conversation that might have been months before Edward Linton died.
‘You’ve got to do better than probably.’
‘It could have been later.’
‘Or earlier?’
The priest tutted under his breath. ‘I couldn’t say.’
‘I see.’ That was enough. Lockwood started to get to his feet, as if to leave.
‘His state of mind wasn’t right,’ the priest offered.
‘How do you mean?’ He settled back down into his chair.
‘He didn’t know I saw him, but he was kneeling by the grave, talking to her.’
‘To her?’
‘To Cathy.’ The priest’s face darkened. ‘That girl. She was like a drug to the pair of them. Led them both to mortal sin she did.’
Lockwood raised one eyebrow at the priest’s insinuation. In the eyes of the Catholic church, suicide was a mortal sin. So was adultery. Not to mention incest. Then there was murder…
Lockwood’s days blurred one into another. He sat at the desk looking at the files in front of him. Another set of questions. Another dead end. Another round of rumour and innuendo, but nothing concrete, nothing he could build a case on. He’d been here too long already, but what was there for DCI Lockwood when he got back to the Met? Only a few weeks to retirement so he wasn’t going to be handed any juicy cases. Six weeks of routine missing persons and paperwork if he was lucky. And whatever the files said, he’d come too far to walk away without a result this time.
He dropped the folder he was holding back onto the desk, and went to the generously titled kitchenette to make a drink. He didn’t recognise the man already dropping a teabag into the least-chipped mug.
‘DCI Lockwood?’
Lockwood nodded. ‘Sergeant…?’
‘Wells. The PC’s off on a course so I’m covering my old beat for a change.’
‘Your old beat?’
The sergeant nodded. ‘Ten years here. Started in ‘95 when there were still a proper station. I’m up at Bee
ston now.’
‘So you’ll know some stories?’ Lockwood could hardly believe he was asking. The last thing he needed was more gossip. More rumours.
‘Stories about your case, you mean?’ The sergeant pulled another mug from the shelf and flicked the kettle back on. ‘Tea?’
Lockwood nodded. ‘Milk, no sugar.’
‘Well, the lad dying was after my time.’
‘But you remember the family?’
Sergeant Wells laughed. ‘There’s coppers round here been pensioned off with stress from that family. Course I remember.’
‘Anything that’s not in the files?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘I doubt it. And you’ll have talked to the social worker? And the doc?’
‘Yep.’
‘There was one thing…’
Lockwood leaned back against the wall and sipped his tea.
‘It were just a story, mind. I’ll be buggered if there’s owt to it.’
‘So…’
‘Well, I heard a story that when Mr Linton died, they opened up the plot to put him in by his wife.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘Well, more on top of her really, I suppose.’
Lockwood winced but he knew what the man meant. Space in these old graveyards was at a premium.
‘Well, they dug down to put him in the day before the funeral, but then that night…’ His voice tailed away. ‘And this is only a rumour, mind. But that night, they reckon, Heathcliff was down there.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Well, trying to get to her. To Cathy. He was still obsessed with her.’
Which seemed to be the only thing anyone round here was sure about. ‘Did he…?’ Lockwood wasn’t sure how to frame the question. ‘Did he get to her?’
The sergeant swallowed the rest of his tea. ‘I don’t reckon so. I mean, they nail the lids down pretty good, don’t they? And it were December. Bit chilly for getting up to stuff in a graveyard, if you ask me.’
‘But that would be an offence, wouldn’t it?’
‘Interfering with a grave? I reckon so. Wouldn’t fancy explaining it to the CPS, mind. And it were only a rumour.’
‘Where did you hear it?’
‘The old C of E vicar. He’s gone now, though. Retired in January and straight off to the Costa del Whatnot. That Father Joseph would know I bet. He’s got fingers in every pie.’
Another conversation with the bitter old priest was the last thing Lockwood wanted, but he was getting nowhere. He needed something he could bring Heathcliff in on, get him in an interview room, apply a bit of pressure, finish this thing once and for all. He marched out of the community-policing office and across town to the old Catholic church. There were grills across the lower windows here now, but, even so, places like this didn’t really change with time. So long as there was a trickle of believers to keep the place going, Father Joseph and his like would be there to dole out the hellfire and Hail Marys.
The church door was open. Inside the place looked empty until Lockwood spotted one woman sitting on her own at the right of the church. Another woman came out of a small door, and the first woman took her place. Father Joseph must be hearing confession. Did Heathcliff Earnshaw ever take his seat in the booth? Lockwood doubted it, but wouldn’t that be something. The things the dried-up old priest must know.
He walked down the centre aisle and took a seat a couple of rows back from the confessional booth. At the front of the church, Christ stared down from his crucifix. Lockwood averted his eyes. It was all right for him up there. If he didn’t deliver what people expected, he could claim he was moving in mysterious ways. Serious case reviews weren’t supposed to move in mysterious ways. They were supposed to either get some bugger arrested, or decide that the original officers had done a stand-up job and everything was fine. Lockwood wasn’t ready to do either. His head, and the files, said there was no way of proving there was even a crime to investigate. But his gut still said Heathcliff was a bad one. He’d been bad all those years ago when Lockwood had been trapped in that van with a nail bouncing around the walls. He’d been up to something all those years he’d disappeared off the face of the world. Kids from towns like this got themselves rich through football, music, drugs and crime, and he didn’t think Heathcliff had been anywhere near the first two. And he was bad now. He’d seen it with those kids that lived with him. The fear. And that was the two who’d survived. The girl’s face came into his head. She was pretty in a way. They always were, the girls who stared out at him from incident boards. And he didn’t get to save them very often. Nice upstanding citizens just didn’t gather dead bodies around them at the rate Heathcliff Earnshaw did. And they certainly didn’t try to dig them up again once they’d been buried.
The door to the confessional swung open and the woman came out. She was younger than Lockwood had noticed from the other side of the church and prettier. She turned towards him to edge along the pew in front. He smiled, what he hoped was a warm, friendly smile. She dropped her gaze and scurried away. He heard the door of the church creak shut behind her as she left. A couple of seconds later the priest appeared. ‘Mr Lockwood?’
‘DCI Lockwood.’
The priest nodded towards the booth. ‘There are no ranks when we stand in penitence in front of the Lord.’
‘I’m not here to confess.’
The priest raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m told people find it helpful. A weight off their shoulders.’
‘No. Thank you.’ Lockwood let the silence sit for a second. He’d told plenty of people the same thing in interview rooms. Come clean. It’ll be a weight off your mind. If you tell me the truth, then I can help you. And I wouldn’t want to confess anything to you, he thought, eyeing the priest. Information was power in a town like this, and the priest knew secrets. ‘I actually wanted to ask you a few more questions.’
‘More questions?’ The priest sat down in front of Lockwood, twisting in his seat to face him. Lockwood supressed a smile. He’d have done it the other way round – taken the pew behind, to force the other man to turn uncomfortably to talk to him.
‘There were allegations, I believe, about Heathcliff Earnshaw and Mrs Linton’s body.’
The priest had the good grace to make a face, but the disgust didn’t quite make it to his eyes. ‘The vicar had to chase him away, I believe.’
‘Do you remember anything specific?’
‘Well, when the grave was open for Mr Linton’s funeral, I heard he went down there and dug with his bare hands at the hallowed earth. Desecration. Clawing at her coffin lid. Trying to get to her mortal remains.’
The old priest’s eyes gleamed in the dim light of the church. Lockwood struggled to hold back his disgust.
‘The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them. Their sins are cords to bind them fast. And God shall punish them for their evil ways.’
Lockwood had heard enough. The old priest was just a dirty old man getting his peculiar brand of thrills from a tragic story.
‘Heathcliff is the devil’s spawn.’ This time the priest did cross himself. ‘Out there on the blue hills he is still, day and night, shouting her name. That used to be somewhere the kiddies would go and ride their bikes. Not any more. Not with him prowling around like the spectre at the feast.’
The blue hills. Lockwood’s ears pricked up.
A visit to the doctor after the priest wasn’t any more enlightening.
Yes, Edward Linton had taken an overdose. Yes, the drugs were prescribed by Dr Sangupta, but the verdict was accidental, so no blame could be ascribed, now could it?
Lockwood had nodded and queried his way through the self-serving story he’d known the doctor would spin. What everyone seemed to agree on was that Edward Linton had been alone when he died and that his pills hadn’t been tampered with at all. He’d just taken more than he was supposed to. Lockwood decided he needed to get back to focusing on what he was here to do.
He left his car parked by the doctor’s and walked up the hill onto the Heights estate.
Everything about this place pulled him back to the past. He remembered the hard faces of the miners. He remembered being spat at by a little old lady with a blue rinse who looked like she wouldn’t say boo to a duckling. Everything about the estate reminded him that his sort hadn’t been welcome here then, and everything people said about time healing all wounds was wrong. Twenty years passing had done nothing to make the Heights feel like a safe place to be a copper.
He kept his head up, glancing around, making clear to anyone who might have had an eye on him that he was aware of his surroundings. At the top of the hill he paused. There it was. Everything about this case seemed to lead back to this house. But he wasn’t here for the house. Today he was here to look at something else.
He continued walking past the houses, onto the back lane, and up into the countryside beyond. The blue hills were nothing like he’d pictured them. He seen photos, of course, but the way the locals talked about the place he was expecting majestic peaks rising up behind the town. There was nothing like that. The hills were made of slag from the pit and from the open-cast mines further out from town. The rubble had built up over a hundred years or more. Over time weeds and then grass had taken hold, making the old slag heaps look like natural hills dropped into the landscape by a careless creator.
In recent months a gravel path had been laid up the front of the hills and one side had been shored up with wire crates packed with rocks and stones, making this a safe place to play again. Lockwood walked up the path and surveyed the town below. You could see it all from up here – the old town, what was left of the Heights, the new houses all around the Grange, both churches. You could see everything without ever being a part of it. He’d been to a lot of crime scenes over the years, mostly houses. The very worst things people could do tended to be done on chintz-covered lounges. Was this even a crime scene? Maybe what had happened here was just an unfortunate accident. Heathcliff’s kid had come out to play in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was exactly what didn’t make sense. Kids didn’t come out to play when the rain was lashing down as it had been that night. Kids stayed in and watched TV or played their Playstations or whatever it was these days. Something must have made that kid come up here. Something. Or someone.