Slice

by David Hodges

  Oates shrugged. ‘Only the information you’ve just seen is available on our local box. The crime was categorized as “detected”, so you’ll have to go to the old archived microfiche records for more detail – if the case wasn’t wiped off the system when everything was computerized.’

  ‘I’ll have what’s here anyway – plus your country-house stuff.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  Fulton stepped back to light a cigarette and watched as the copies spilled out of the printer’s maw. ‘Do we have a full address and how to get there?’ he queried, leafing through them. ‘Just says Little Culham here.’

  Oates sighed again, casting a regretful eye at his cheese-and-pickle sandwich. ‘Place has gone now, guv,’ he replied. ‘What’s the point in an address?’

  Fulton’s gaze hardened. ‘The point, George, is that I want the address, OK?’

  Oates returned to the previous English Country House site, his skilful fingers producing another page, which he scanned quickly before printing it. ‘Place will be just a ruin now – tenanted by ghosts.’

  Fulton nodded. ‘Well, maybe it’s time to do a bit of ghost-hunting, eh? Even ghosts sometimes have a tale to tell.’

  chapter 13

  THE RUINS THAT had once been Drew House hid behind a seven-foot-high brick wall on the outskirts of Little Culham; only the nest of tall Victorian chimneys was visible from the road. Vandals had sprayed the green-and-gold sign with black paint, but the name was still just visible and, peering closer, Fulton was able to read the proud inscription underneath: ‘Free the mind and lighten the soul.’

  The rusted iron gates, though pulled across the entrance, opened easily on well-oiled hinges and he saw tyre marks in the track which cut through the trees. ‘Not as abandoned as you pretend, are you?’ he murmured to himself as he got back into his car.

  The track was at least a quarter of a mile long and it ended in a wide paved courtyard with a derelict fountain in the centre. The charred overgrown shell behind it would have delighted the location manager of any Gothic horror film; its empty windows staring at him coldly like the rotted eye-sockets of something unclean, and he shivered as he climbed out of his car and headed for the main entrance.

  Vandals had been here too. Crudely painted swastikas and obscene spray-can drawings plastered every available patch of bare stonework. Inside the building electric wiring hung down in liquorice-like festoons and ivy and other parasitic climbers sprouted from the broken floorboards and twisted their way up through the few remaining rafters, making their way out through the gaping holes in the roof.

  Glass crunched under his feet as he picked his way through the debris and the familiar sour smell he always associated with derelict buildings welcomed him like a poisonous miasma.

  He had no idea why he had come, no idea what he expected to find and as he made his way from room to room, he began to realize the futility of it all. Something had happened at Drew House a very long time ago, something undoubtedly connected with the fire which had consumed the building. But why had that ‘something’ driven a deranged mind to kill after a gap of fifteen years? And where did Cotter and Lyall fit into the puzzle? There were so many questions that needed answers. Yet there was nothing to see among the ruins, except darkness and decay.

  Pausing in a long corridor below a collection of blackened spars that had obviously once been a staircase, he lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall, thinking of the sinister note Phil Gilham had picked up in the sacristy of St Peter’s Church.

  REMEMBER DREW HOUSE? I SHALL NEVER FORGET IT!

  ‘Why won’t you forget it?’ he said aloud, jumping at the sound of his own voice in the silence. ‘What won’t you forget?’

  Then he stiffened to the sound of a loud ‘bang’, like a door slamming or something heavy falling over, which seemed to come from the back of the house.

  He eased himself off the wall and advanced further along the corridor, wincing every time he crunched glass or other debris underfoot, but grateful for the shards of pale sunlight probing the gloom around him, enabling him to negotiate the more dangerous obstacles ahead without using the torch he had brought with him.

  He found a large square hall, now almost completely open to the sky, which had no doubt once served as the dining room, going by the few remaining bench seats and tables that were still in evidence. Then, just beyond it, the kitchens, still with the shells of the rusted but dismembered gas ranges in situ. He paused to listen again, remembering his close encounter in Derringer’s flat and anxious not to be caught unawares this time – particularly if that meant getting another lecture from Phil Gilham on going it alone.

  He heard no further banging sounds as he ducked through the back door, but glimpsed a ghostly stab of light in the window of a small church on the far side of a derelict kitchen garden. He hesitated. Big and ugly as he was, he knew he was not invincible and just now he was breaking every rule in the book by not calling for back-up. But curiosity, coupled with pride in his toughie reputation, spurred him on regardless.

  The spectral light did not reappear as he crossed the garden. Reaching the church itself he began to ask himself if he had actually seen it at all or whether that momentary flash had been just a figment of his imagination or a trick of the dying sun.

  By the look of it, the grey stone building was as much a ruin as Drew House itself, even though it had at least escaped the fire that had engulfed the Victorian mansion. The stained-glass windows at the front – or south wall, according to the Ordnance Survey map he had brought with him (this church seemed to have been built facing in the traditional direction, unlike St Peter’s) – had been totally destroyed, probably by the bricks of the same vandals who had daubed their graffiti on the house walls. The ragged holes in the slate-tiled pitched roof also bore testimony, not only to the ravages of time, but the energies of other unscrupulous desecrators who had stripped away much of the lead that had once sealed the building against the elements.

  On the face of it there did not seem to be much to commend this pile of holy bricks and certainly very little to attract a casual visitor, save perhaps a wandering tramp or a teenage runaway looking for shelter. Yet Fulton’s nose had developed a significant twitch that he could not ignore.

  Trying the double doors in the entrance porch, he found that both opened with less resistance than he would have expected. He ran a hand down one hinge and smelled oil on his fingers. So, despite the apparent dereliction of the place, someone had thought it necessary to ensure ease of access, had they? Now that was interesting.

  The gloom inside the church seemed to be much more dense than that in the house and something – probably a bat – flapped past him and up towards the weak strands of sunlight filtering through the holes in the roof. He pulled out his torch and directed the beam down the nave, touching on the dismembered pews on either side and fastening on the elaborately carved rood screen within the chancel arch. Seeing nothing, he picked his way through small piles of debris, past the bare stone pulpit, and paused before the entrance to the choir stalls and chancel itself. The marble altar was still intact, though split in places, but the cross had long since gone and the branches of a mature tree now reached through the empty chancel window like a demon hand groping for prey.

  Silence, except for the nervous flapping of wings high up in the vaulted roof. He frowned, conscious, not for the first time over the last few days, of the rapid thudding of his heart. Something had been going on in here, something he had interrupted – he could feel it in his water – but what?

  Turning, he shone his torch back down the nave. Again, zilch. No lurking figures or signs of movement. Just the rows of pews, hunched up in the gloom like broken teeth. OK, so if there had been an intruder, where had he disappeared to?

  He trailed the beam along the south wall, picking out half-obliterated texts inscribed on inset stone tablets. He started briefly when a headless statue seemed physically to lurch into view from a dark corner. More sto
ne tablets on the north wall, with ivy cramming another empty window, but still nothing to suggest that anyone other than himself had disturbed the sepulchral stillness of the place for a very long time.

  He was about ready to give up then – ready to put his suspicions down to an over-fertile imagination and head back to his car – and he would have done just that had his curiosity not been aroused by a low archway just feet away, almost buried in the gloom of the north-east corner. Moving closer, he discovered a short flight of stone steps going down into the archway, no doubt affording access to some sort of chapel, but further progress was prevented by a large wooden chest, bound with iron, which blocked the entrance.

  The chest was obviously very old and though his knowledge of ecclesiastical things was pretty limited despite his background, he guessed that it had probably once been the church’s strongbox, containing the priest’s vestments and possibly such things as the churchwarden’s accounts and parish registers – now likely to be on sale at a car boot somewhere or forming part of a local historian’s illicit collection. Plainly, the box was empty, for it was missing its lid, and it struck him as a little strange for someone to have taken the trouble to drag the thing across the archway steps when they could quite easily have left it in the north aisle with the rest of the rubbish.

  It only took a few minutes heaving at the chest – which was still fairly heavy despite being reduced to a shell – for him to make his surprise discovery. The archway, it seemed, had once held a recessed door and the reason for its appearing so low was that it opened off a square paved area some six feet below the level of the church floor. Like many of the north doors found in old churches, this one had for some reason been bricked up, but someone had evidently decided to unbrick part of it. There was now a ragged hole in the base of the cement-faced stonework, a hole which would not have been visible from the aisle above even without the presence of the chest.

  The hole itself was large enough to crawl through, but he chose to check out what was on the other side before chancing his arm. The beam of his torch streamed down a second, much longer flight of stone steps, which dropped away at a forty-five degree angle into a heavy claustrophobic blackness laden with the earthy smell of the grave.

  He made a face in the darkness. The steps almost certainly led to a crypt, but if that was the case, why had someone taken it into their head to seal up the entrance door? Even more mystifying, why had someone decided to break it open again? Maybe he would find the answer when he got down there.

  Crawling through the opening on his hands and knees, he straightened up gingerly on the other side, expecting his head to connect with the roof, but to his relief he discovered that there were several inches to spare. Raising one hand against the wall to steady himself, he began a cautious descent, his torch thrust out in front of him as if it were the cross of an exorcist seeking to ward off evil spirits.

  There was a heavy wooden door at the bottom, which proved to be closed but unlocked, and although the iron ring that served as a handle turned easily enough, it released the latch with a sharp ‘crack’ that set a score of echoes reverberating and could not have announced his presence more effectively than if he had actually fallen down the steps.

  As it turned out, however, there was no one to announce his presence to, anyway, for the room on the other side of the door proved to be completely deserted, but any disappointment he might have felt over the absence of any intruder was instantly eclipsed by what he was confronted with instead. He had expected to find himself in a crypt, which was logical under the circumstances, but, whilst the place might originally have been constructed for the interment of the dead, it had more recently been adapted for an altogether different, more chilling purpose; a purpose clearly revealed by the nature of its contents. There were no tombs here any more, but what was in their place had the effect of anaesthetizing his brain with the blinding intensity of an acetylene flame.

  Phil Gilham had had just about enough of the musty gloom of St Peter’s church and the pious indignation of church warden, Ernest Clapper, who had arrived on the scene unannounced just after Fulton had left and had shown more interest in preserving the sanctity of his pile of stones than helping the police detect the murder of the incumbent minister. Not surprisingly, the hard-pressed DCI could hardly conceal his relief when the SOCO team arrived and Clapper was banished to the other side of the blue-and-white crime-scene tape, allowing him to be chauffeured back to the relative normality of Saddler Street police station in a local area car.

  But his anticipated appointment with the incident room’s coffee machine was kicked into touch when Ben Morrison waylaid him en route. ‘Derringer’s turned up,’ the DI announced through a wodge of pink chewing gum.

  Gilham felt a new rush of adrenaline. ‘Turned up where?’

  ‘Casualty Department, Middle Moor hospital.’

  ‘You mean he’s injured?’

  ‘Yeah, sounds like he got a pasting from someone. Anonymous call made to Ambulance Control who picked him up from a motel near Helmscott airfield. Been trying to fix up a private flight to Ireland with local flying school apparently.’

  ‘So he was doing a runner?’

  ‘Looks like it – and someone took exception to it.’

  ‘Is he badly hurt?’

  Morrison frowned. ‘Bit of a going over, I hear. Busted face, couple of cracked ribs, but not life-threatening. Hospital keeping him in overnight for obs.’

  ‘Do we have someone there?’

  ‘Yeah, local plod babysitting him for us.’

  Gilham glanced round the incident room. ‘So where’s the guv’nor?’

  ‘Dunno. Stuck his head round door a while ago to ask me to check some microfiche records, then cleared off somewhere. Been gone a couple of hours.’

  ‘Microfiche? That’s going back a bit. What records were those?’

  ‘Some fire – arson – place called Drew House. Said he wanted to look at statements, press reports and other docs.’

  Remembering the note he had found in the church, Gilham started. ‘A fire, you say? So the place was torched, was it? Now that is interesting.’

  ‘Is it? Buggered if I know why. Seems it happened around fifteen years ago so local box ain’t got much on it.’ The DI shrugged. ‘Not that archives could do any better. Hard-copy file has gone walkies and old microfiche records have been wiped. Just a copy of crime report on system now.’

  ‘I don’t like the smell of that.’

  ‘Nor will guv’nor when he finds out – especially as he already knows IO in case was Nick Halloran.’

  ‘What, the Nick Halloran? The one they called Corkscrew?’

  ‘The same.’

  Gilham made a face. ‘And you haven’t let Mr Fulton know about the file yet?’

  ‘Did me best. Mobile and home number, but no response. Control still trying to get hold of him.’

  ‘You mean he’s gone AWOL?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘So what the hell do we do about Derringer? Boss’ll want to see him first, you know that.’

  Morrison shrugged. ‘Your call, not mine.’

  Gilham wrestled with the implications of this for a few moments. ‘OK, tell control to keep at it. Then meet me in the car park. We’ll just have to go and see Derringer ourselves.’

  ‘Guv’nor won’t like it.’

  ‘Guv’nor’s not here, is he?’

  Morrison chewed furiously for a second. ‘Your funeral,’ he said and grinned. ‘Glad I’m only a DI.’

  The Marquis de Sade would have felt entirely at home in the crypt under Drew House’s small church. In the dank decaying atmosphere Fulton could practically smell the pain and misery of the pitiful souls who must have suffered here at the hands of their perverted tormentors.

  He saw the wire cage first: a sinister-looking device shaped like the torso and legs of a man, suspended from steel chains bolted to the roof. He didn’t need a history degree to know what it would have been used f
or and he jumped when it stirred slightly in the sudden rush of air that accompanied him into the room, as if the ghost of the last emaciated wretch who had been clasped in its cruel embrace was still present and mischievously trying to set the thing swinging.

  Moving cautiously round the room, his torch probing the Stygian darkness, he found other devices tucked away in alcoves and deep corners – among them, an oblong mediaeval style rack complete with rollers, chains and winding handle, an overturned brazier which had been burned right through at the bottom and a long wooden table fitted with a series of leather straps and set with rows of retractable iron spikes operated by a small wheel at one end.

  Exactly when the instruments of torture had replaced the tombs of the deceased was a matter of conjecture – if there had ever been any tombs in the crypt in the first place. Perhaps the Havers-Price family had installed the things themselves to satisfy some penchant for depraved thrills. And there again, perhaps not. He had no idea precisely how old the church was. The Internet write-up he had scanned in the LIO’s office had indicated that it pre-dated Drew House by several hundred years and though it was unlikely from the apparent condition of the devices that they had been in situ that long, they could still have been put here before the mansion was built.

  Whoever was responsible, however, they had obviously not felt it necessary to destroy the evidence when they tired of their depraved sport; no doubt because they had not thought anyone would ever break through the bricked-up archway and discover what they had abandoned anyway. As a result, everything had just been left to rust or rot away beneath the floor of the church, pulleys and chains silent, screws and bolts seized; a chilling legacy buried in the haunted blackness of a real-life chamber of horrors.

  He would have been content to leave things as they were, too; prepared to accept that what he had stumbled upon was nothing more than old history; an assortment of hideous relics of past sadism, which had no relevance to the present day or the current murder investigation. But then the beam of his torch penetrated further into the vault and he was confronted by cold reality.