CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Prepared to Die
Peter Dudgeon
For Mum, who knows a skeleton when she sees it.
CHAPTER ONE
July 5th, 2011. Three years before …
For Shirley Davenport, this was a special day. It wasn’t often she got chance to spend time with her Grandson, Matthew, and here they were at Chester Zoo on a gloriously sunny day, about to get an aerial view of the rhinos who’d been temporarily quarantined.
It was a little after half past eleven in the morning and crowds were light, for peak visiting time. Thirty people or so milled or walked behind them. Some sipped Coke and munched Walkers crisps. Babies and leg-swinging toddlers were pushed around in buggies.
To get the best view of the rhinos you peered over the concrete ledge above a sparse, seldom-used concrete enclosure. Matthew needed some help to see, as you had to be at least five feet tall to look over the ledge. So Shirley lifted him, with a hand under each armpit of his denim jacket. He was bulking out quickly. It was clear he was going to take after his hulk of a dad. Shirley’s arms had never been good, but since her sixtieth birthday they’d grown weaker with every passing year. She was sixty-five and not looking forward to turning seventy.
Down below a baby rhino slept. A bird’s eye view of its mother’s back, as it aimlessly circled the enclosure, spoke of the beast’s enormity. It struck Shirley, not for the first time, that perhaps such a gargantuan creature shouldn’t be caged.
Her arms quickly shook with Matthew’s weight.
“Can you see them Nanna? The baby’s having a nap.”
She grunted in exertion and, lowering him, said, “Yes honey, I saw them too. And we call them calves, not babies. Just like they call cows’ babies.”
“I know, I know,” replied Matthew as if thinking, I’m not stupid you know.
Shirley's wrist was grabbed tightly and her arm yanked with such force she thought it might come away from its socket. In that moment she forgot about Matthew by her side, whose wide-eyed face crumpled and sprung tears.
A thrusting palm to her chest bone pushed Shirley back against the concrete rim of the enclosure. The palm belonged to a woman, a stranger. The woman lifted a gun from its resting position by her hip. She pressed the cold, silver barrel up into the base of Shirley’s chin so hard that, when Shirley finally attempted to speak, she could only manage a glugging noise.
“Shut up,” said the woman, a sharp-dressed city type, who appeared to be in her twenties. She had a neat blonde bob and wore a hot pink blouse beneath her sharp, charcoal suit. Instead of all the useful thoughts that might have come to Shirley, she simply thought, she’s not exactly dressed for the zoo.
The woman stared intensely. She was so close that Shirley smelled floral perfume with breath-mint overtones. The stranger’s green-grey eyes were wide, intense, yet glazed.
“Climb up now.” She slapped the top of the concrete perimeter the way you might slap the sofa to encourage a dog to settle.
“Why?” Shirley asked in a weak voice, as the basic, incredulous facts of what was happening crept into knowing. She vainly glanced around over the woman’s shoulders, searching for security guards.
“Now!” the woman screamed at her, “Or your grandson is going to see me blow your brains out. Move.”
Shirley obeyed, turning with her shaking hands raised, before reaching up to grip the ledge. She tried to pull herself up, but those weak arms were stopping her. “I can’t!” She was sobbing.
“Yes you can … and you will.”
Shirley felt a shoulder under her backside. This woman was so strong. Shirley’s knees scraped against the concrete, through her dress’s thin material, as she made her assisted climb. And just like that, she was on top of the enclosure’s edge, swaying to keep balance like a reluctant tight-rope walker.
With her back to the forty-foot drop, Shirley got a good view of the ensuing panic. Mothers were screaming and running with their toddlers in their arms. A couple, walking hand in hand with matching Darth Vader T-shirts and dripping ice creams, stood motionless, looking at each other as though one of them should do something. But no one came to Shirley’s rescue.
Her persecutor looked down at the rhinos - a view Shirley daren’t take in case vertigo swept in. Her next instruction was shouted, “Walk six yards that way.” The stranger flicked the rough direction intended with the barrel of her gun and Shirley shuffled as instructed, crying uncontrollably.
“That’s it, now stop.”
“Please, please whatever it is you’re thinking of doing … don’t. I have children, grandchildren, they need me.”
Her attacker’s fixated gaze softened. But it only lasted for an eighth of a second. She shoved Shirley’s knees with a determined grunt. No arm-swirling or twisting was going to stop the inevitable. Shirley fell into the enclosure, landing with a crunching thud.
Fortunately for Shirley her head hit the concrete floor and the world became a dark, odourless one.
As she’d landed her legs had hit the leathery belly of the rhino calf. Onlookers, from various angles, cowering behind hoardings, litter bins and anything else that provided cover, watched aghast as the Magnum-toting city type smiled, placed the gleaming gun - it looked far too big for her well manicured hands - under her chin. A momentary look of indifferent inevitability crossed her face.
She pulled the trigger.
A crack rang out and birds scattered, flying, fleeing their hiding places as the woman crumpled to the floor like a deflated balloon.
Meanwhile, below, Shirley’s fall had disturbed the Rhino calf whose anguished cries sounded as though they’d come strai
ght out of Jurassic Park. The sound grabbed its mother’s attention and some thirty stone of muscle and folds of skin turned towards the intruder. The rhino appeared confused, standing still for a moment, before trotting towards Shirley’s body. It dipped its face then used its horn to shove Shirley against the concrete wall. Her body rolled like a flaccid doll, until the wall stopped it. An angry flex of the rhino’s neck was accompanied by another pre-historic wail and a crackle of breaking ribs. Shirley became impaled on the horn. It passed through her rib cage, her lungs, and her summer dress. The horn’s tip ground noisily against the enclosure wall. The rhino lifted her and let out a wail which sounded like a complaint: someone stuck this damn woman on my face and they better come in and take it off quickly or there’ll be hell to pay. At that, the screaming and running infected the whole zoo neither those on the Rhino’s level, nor those above able to comprehend how such a perfect day had transformed into a waking nightmare.
CHAPTER TWO
3 years later.
It was a few minutes after eight p.m. when Sebastian Fallon’s red-handled chisel took a chunk from the baby’s cheek.
“Shit. You useless bastard. ”
He took hold of his right hand with his left, kneading its palm. His thumb attempted to drive out cramp and the shakes. It was no good. He’d been at it too long, over doing it.
Sebastian attempted to put the mistake from his mind. Perhaps a nick in one face would be negligible once dozens of others came back into view. He took a step away from what was once his grandmother’s oak dining table, rubbing his lower back and assessing his carving progress underneath the focused, low-slung circular ceiling light.
Solo dining had rendered the table obsolete. He hadn’t eaten dinner in company for, what was it, maybe eight years, perhaps longer. That Molly girl had been his last guest and even she hadn’t stayed for dessert, the ungrateful bitch. So, since his days of entertaining were over, the table had become redundant. Until the epiphany had come: he could transform it into something he did need.
The trap he’d fallen into throughout his distant youth, as he sought instant gratification, was getting his kicks online. This was, as it transpired, ultimately unsatisfying. Worse, it was traceable. An oak table needed no IP address, had no browsing history, and therein lay its beauty. He could create without fear of recrimination.
Sebastian had, at first, resisted hammering his chisels into the tabletop. You had to ruin a few cheap ‘canvases’ on the way to creating a masterpiece. He looked at his first attempts now, a jumbled pile of logs in the dark corner of the dining room, leaning against the tattered flock wallpaper: discarded, imperfect children's faces and hands reaching out of ragged oak rings, as though aching to escape. Despite their imperfections, their ugliness, he felt a melancholy towards them, a sense of fatherhood.
He braved to look at the tabletop’s sea of intermingled, overlapping children’s bodies. Despite their undoubted beauty, it wasn’t good enough. One of them was now imperfect. He was fighting the desire to upend the table, to shove it against his other discarded carvings and march outside to fell a tree, when a knock came from the kitchen door.
Sebastian froze. No one but the postwoman had knocked on that door since Molly. Even the Jehovah’s witnesses didn’t bother him all the way up there; his reputation and the overgrown, winding driveway undoubtedly putting them off. He looked down at his once white apron, now made more of wood shavings and dried blood than cotton.
Should he answer? The thought crossed his mind to ignore the knocking. Then it came again, louder and for longer - a series of urgent thuds. Sebastian pulled the stiff apron off over his head. Wood particles rained down on his scalp and the tabletop, dusting the children’s faces like powdery snow. He turned his head to one side and stooped, resting his cheek on the table’s cool edge to blow sawdust away from the crevices between his cherubs. The resulting cloud settled on the floor, thickening the blanket of wood shavings which covered the carpet.
That knocking again, more frantic than any knock he’d ever heard.
Is the world about to cave in or something?
Sebastian’s fingers ruffled sawdust from his unkempt wiry blonde mop as he made his way out of the dining room and down the hall towards the kitchen at the back of the house. The hall was lit only by the lazy glow from the dining room’s open door. Replacement of the last light bulb in the hall’s tacky chandelier was four months overdue, but who was there to tell Sebastian how to prioritise his day? Since his grandmother’s death - no one.
His hunched, seven-foot frame shuffled down the hall in the semi dark. The urgency belonged to the caller, not to Sebastian. Although he was now as curious as he was irritated.
The back door, at the far end of the kitchen, was wood-panelled and opaque, saving the caller’s identity for now. The door was swollen against its frame as it always was in the winter rain and he had to yank it hard. When he saw who was calling, Sebastian let out a huff of disappointment.
“Oh, it’s you. What’s the urgency? Hey, did I say you could come in? Christ you look like shit.” His visitor was silent. “What are you doing here? … You gone fucking mute or somethin-”
Sebastian’s eyes registered the carving knife’s glinting blade just a fraction of a second before it was plunged and twisted through his sweat-stained T-shirt, bisecting his diaphragm.
CHAPTER THREE
Retired Detective Inspector Daniel Sheppard didn’t often cross his wife, Alison, but they had fought bitterly over her demands for a traditional open-casket wake. Alison had won the battle. Consequently - less than two miles from Sebastian Fallon’s undiscovered corpse - Daniel welcomed mourners from the hall, loitering there by a frameless mirror. He had no desire to take a final look at Alison’s face, her thinning hair and waxy cheeks or any other part of her body which was laid out in their dining room amongst Alison’s friends’ gawping children.
Alison was gone, her body and soul divorced. He didn’t believe, like she did, (correction - had) that the two would one day be reconciled. When Daniel died, he wanted to be cremated, not left as a feast for maggots and God knows what else.
Just after her thirty-ninth birthday, Alison had been diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. She’d lived just ten more years. Bad luck not being sufficient explanation, the medics proffered possible causes of her condition. She’d been hit by a virus in the winter of two thousand and six, which left her bed-bound for weeks. The medical theory was that antibodies, attempting to fight the virus, had inadvertently attacked and scarred her nervous system. Nobody really knew the virus’s origin. Alison put it down to being pricked badly whilst gardening. She was convinced a humble rosebush had twisted all their life plans. She’d often said this, her words chased by a cold chuckle.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
“Won’t you pay your last respects Daniel?”
“They’re already paid, Reverend Father.”
Reverend Jacobs wasn't duty bound to be at the house before the requiem funeral mass, but he was a friend of Alison’s and she’d requested his presence at her wake. In his neatly ironed white robes he gave a knowing, patronising smile and squeezed Daniel’s shoulder.
“I understand. God bless you Daniel. We know how much you did for her.” He left Daniel then, swishing off towards the dining room, surely full of respectful smiles and mingling handshakes for the mourners. Daniel was glad the Reverend was there; it took some pressure off him. He wished the day to be over and for the peace of an empty house.
Daniel and Alison’s home was in Blaine, a sleepy village eight miles east of the almost-as-sleepy market town of Louth. Blaine was twelve miles west of the Lincolnshire coast. It was one of those rare villages to have more churches than pubs: one pub, two churches. And, to be precise, one of those was a chapel - a Methodist chapel which Daniel infrequently visited. He suspected he might be visiting there more often, now that Alison had passed.
Two hours later at St Hughs church, Daniel watc
hed on, a hymnbook with gold-edged leaf in his lap, as Reverend Jacobs swung incense over Alison’s casket. The reverend stepped up to the pulpit, and spoke without script. The congregation’s tears and winter coughs occasionally threatened to penetrate the Reverend’s words, but his voice boomed and won out, "We should not fear death even when our closest loved ones pass away. For they are now, like our shadows, always part of us. On dark days it may feel as though they've deserted us. But on the lighter days, days which will inevitably come, like shadows, they return. Always connected to us, out of our grasp, yet undeniably with us."
The church, Alison’s second home, was packed. It didn’t hold many people, forty at the most. Roughly half were her friends, regulars at St Hughs, the others knew her from the theatre; she’d loved amateur dramatics.
Both of Daniel’s close friends were in attendance. One sat to Daniel’s left: Ted Edwards, ‘DCI Edwards’ at work. He’d always insisted his birth name was Ted, but Daniel suspected it was Edward, having once visited Ted’s eccentric parents. They’d called him Edward all evening. Daniel could only imagine the teasing he must have suffered in the playground.
Without needing to, Edwards was dressed in his full navy uniform, his cap nestled between his calves. Daniel suspected Edwards was taking his new position as Chief Inspector a little too seriously; a civilian’s funeral hardly demanded the uniform.
Charlotte Torrence sat to Daniel’s right, next to the aisle, using a tissue to wipe her eyes and blowing her nose with poorly attempted discretion. Her hitching breaths shook the ancient, creaking pew. The mahogany casket encasing her friend’s dead body was in easy reach.
Charlotte had been a friend to Daniel and Alison for as long as he could remember - she’d met Alison at University. Charlotte was a key part of them moving from Wales to Blaine shortly after Alison’s diagnosis. Daniel recalled Alison saying, ‘I want to be near the people who love me the most … and as far away from my parents as possible.’ ‘The people who love me the most,’ was code for ‘Charlotte.’ As for Alison’s parents, their absence today was an annoyance but no surprise. A part of him was relieved.
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