Deadly Burial

by Jon Richter

  ‘Er… yeah, yes, I’m fine. I’m just going through the camera footage again.’

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘What do you think?’ He smiled defeatedly.

  She smiled back. ‘Look, I’m sorry about before. I… what I said was out of order. I know you aren’t spying on me. And I know I sound insecure, and pathetic. I just… this job means so much to me. For years I was too dependent on someone, and he let me down. Now I’m used to looking after myself, and Wells is trying to take it away.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he replied. ‘I understand. And you know the best way for us to get back at him? It’s to solve this thing.’

  She nodded, entering the room and slumping into a chair. ‘But we’re not getting very far on that front I’m afraid. Adams is still AWOL, and we found out Wheeler lives alone in Ilfracombe – and there’s no sign of him at his home. And I’ve had five separate calls from reporters this afternoon, asking why we released Penman within a day of arresting him so publicly.’

  ‘Forget all that. We just need to concentrate on the motive, because that’s what we don’t have. Do you think Dixon killed Schultz?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Okay, so why?’

  ‘Because Schultz did something to make him angry.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  She screwed up her face in concentration. Before she could answer, her phone rang. The frustration was clear in her voice as she answered.

  ‘Mason. Oh, hi Mum… right… well, have you taken any tablets or anything? Yeah… yeah work is fine… No, I’ll set off now… Are you okay to put Holly to bed? I’ll be there soon. Bye.’

  She hung up, looking exasperated.

  ‘My mum is feeling ill. She’s looking after Holly, as usual, so I’m going to have to head back there.’

  ‘That’s okay. We can talk later on the phone, maybe?’

  ‘Yeah… you’re right though, talking is exactly what we need to do… we need to just go through this step by step.’ Her face brightened suddenly. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’

  Sigurdsson blinked, taken aback. ‘Er… to your house?’

  Mason’s smile widened. ‘I’ve got some beers in the fridge, and Holly will be in bed anyway. I can see my mother off and then we’ll get back to the case. You can get a taxi back to the hotel later?’

  ‘Well… okay, yes, let’s do that,’ he responded, feeling once again like a teenager who had been invited to a movie by a girl he had a crush on.

  It took them only a few minutes to drive from the station to Mason’s house, the same modest terrace he’d seen earlier that week. As they approached, Mason pointed out her mother’s house just a few doors down.

  ‘She moved here at the same time I did. I know she was lonely after my dad died, but I think she did it more because she knew I needed help. With Holly, you know?’

  Sigurdsson nodded as the car pulled up outside Mason’s red front door. There was no front garden, just a tiny space containing bare earth, separated from the pavement by a low wall and a gate. The house next door didn’t have a gate, and Mason simply walked through that gap rather than bothering to open her own. Sigurdsson opened the gate and shut it behind him, giving her a look, and she laughed as she inserted a key into the lock.

  The door opened into a small hallway not dissimilar to Stacey Wainwright’s; but where the wrestler’s house had been messy, this was spotlessly clean and tidy. Mason took his jacket and hung it on a coat hook next to her own.

  ‘Well, I’m going to go up and see Holly and get changed out of this uniform, but let me get my mum off home first,’ she said, leading him into the living room. The small space was dominated by a huge, comfy-looking sofa, upon which sat a tiny, red-haired woman watching the news on the small television set in the corner.

  ‘Hello Mum,’ Mason said as the woman looked up. ‘This is my colleague, DI Sigurdsson. He’s assisting me with a case.’

  ‘Oooh, right, okay, well I suspect you’ll want me out of the way then,’ replied the lady, who looked no older than her mid-fifties, although her hair colour was clearly artificial. ‘I’m really sorry to drag you home love, I know you’re very busy, but I just feel dreadful today.’ As if to accentuate the point, she extracted a tissue from the handbag in her lap and blew her nose noisily.

  ‘Don’t worry Mum. Sigurdsson here will walk you home!’ Mason turned to grin at him.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, it’s only a few doors away, and it’s chilly out there,’ Mason’s mother replied.

  ‘That’s all right, it’s no problem at all Mrs Mason,’ said Sigurdsson, smiling.

  ‘Oooh, he’s polite isn’t he?’ the lady giggled. ‘Much nicer than that big one who sometimes comes here. I’m sorry love, it’s not Mrs Mason, I’m Mrs Jones, but please just call me Sylvia.’

  Sigurdsson felt his cheeks redden as he apologised.

  ‘Don’t worry at all, young man. Well, come on, I’d better get to my sick bed.’ She extended her arm for him to escort her. Mason rolled her eyes and followed them back out into the hall, watching them from the doorway as they stepped out into the mist-shrouded evening.

  ‘So what do I call you? Simpson, was it?’ Mason’s mother asked as they proceeded down the street towards her house.

  ‘Please, Mrs… Sylvia, just call me Chris.’

  ‘And you work with my daughter?’

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure she’s very pleased to have some more help. She loves that job, you know. I sometimes tell her she should be at home with her daughter a bit more often, but I know how it is these days. It would be easier if she had a nice boyfriend around to help her, but who’s going to want to go out with someone who has children already, and divorced?’

  She seemed to be giving him a pointed look, and Sigurdsson felt his face flush once again as he mumbled something in response. When they reached her front door, she rummaged in her handbag for what seemed an age before finally finding her keys. Sigurdsson felt relieved when she was safely inside and he could say goodnight. He hurried back towards Mason’s house.

  She had left the door ajar and he could hear her shower running when he stepped inside, so after hanging his jacket back on the same peg he wandered into the living room and took a seat on the voluminous couch to wait for her. The room was dimly lit by a low wattage bulb, but Sigurdsson could see that it had been tastefully decorated in pastel tones, the same colour scheme extending into the back room where a dining table was made up for one person to eat; Mason’s mother had presumably laid the table ready for her daughter’s return.

  So if her mother was called Jones, was Mason her previous husband’s name? It seemed strange to him to retain the name of a man she apparently detested, but perhaps she didn’t want to confuse her daughter by changing her surname at such a young age. He wondered about the reasons for their break-up – Mason’s comments had perhaps hinted at domestic violence. He couldn’t imagine someone bullying the fierce, tough policewoman that he had grown to respect over the last five days. And he didn’t want to; he didn’t want to think about her delicate features bruised and swollen, her fiery spirit downtrodden. There he went again, daydreaming about her like a lovelorn schoolboy. Grow up Chris!

  ‘So did my mum interrogate you?’

  Mason walked into the room, rubbing her short hair with a towel. She was dressed in jeans and a fluffy jumper of some sort, both of which seemed to be loose and comfortable yet still somehow perfectly fitted to the figure underneath. She looked absolutely fantastic.

  ‘Err, no, well, yes, sort of… it was a bit like I was a boyfriend you’d just brought home.’

  ‘Ha!’ she guffawed, and Sigurdsson couldn’t help but feel slightly put out. She wandered through the back room and into the kitchen, where Sigurdsson could hear a fridge closing and two bottles being opened. She returned to the living room with a couple of Coronas, having discarded the towel somewhere.

  �
�Here you go. I’ll make us something to eat in a minute.’ She sat down next to him, and Sigurdsson sipped his beer, trying to think of something to say.

  ‘Weather’s a lot better outside,’ he commented mundanely, immediately regretting it.

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘instead of cold and wet, it’s back to its usual self: cold and misty.’

  He nodded, feeling uncomfortable as silence fell. Then he remembered Mason’s daughter, upstairs in bed.

  ‘Is Holly okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Awww, yeah, she’s asleep already. She’s been really good lately, not getting up in the middle of the night or anything. I was really worried about moving and whether it would be confusing for her, but I think she was so young when we came here she hasn’t really noticed, you know?’

  ‘How long ago did you move here?’ He had turned to look at her, battling to keep his eyes away from the swell of her breasts beneath the sweater, painfully aware that she quite possibly had nothing else on underneath.

  ‘Four years ago,’ she replied. ‘Donald had retired and Mitchell didn’t want the promotion, so this vacancy opened up, and Thom still wasn’t co-operating with the divorce at the time, so it just made sense to get away. It was like… a new start for me. It wasn’t just the divorce… I’d been off work with post-natal depression. Wells had just taken the job as DCI back then. I think he’s never forgiven me for that.’

  Sigurdsson looked aghast.

  ‘Forgiven you? You didn’t do anything wrong! Lots of mothers suffer from post-natal depression.’

  She shrugged. ‘I know. I suppose I… I just feel like I was such a terrible mother for that first year. I felt… empty inside. Like I had this career, but my personal life was such a mess – a couple of years before that I’d been this twenty-something policewoman who liked going out on the piss, and suddenly I was nearly thirty and I had a husband and a child and a house…

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, her tone suddenly changing as a mischievous smile appeared on her face, ‘I’m supposed to be the secretive one! Let’s talk about you. I know you don’t have a wife or kids, but do you have a girlfriend back home? I bet you can’t wait to get back to her after a week in this shithole.’

  Sigurdsson shook his head. ‘Nah, there’s no one. I went out with a girl a few years back. We were engaged and everything, after only six months. Silly, really. The marriage never happened and it all broke down. I haven’t held down a long-term relationship since. I’ve just been… more focused on work, I suppose.’

  She nodded, sipping her beer. ‘Yeah… when you’ve put a lot of energy into something and it doesn’t work out you just feel… like a spent force. Any love I’ve got left, it’s for Holly now.’

  Sigurdsson smiled. ‘She’s lucky to have a mum like you.’

  He had expected her to make some dismissive response, to rattle off some self-deprecating list of her parental failings, but instead she just smiled back at him and said, ‘Thanks.’

  Jesus. Was he supposed to try to kiss her, right now? Was this it, the moment to just lean in and take the enormous risk, not just of rejection but in this case quite possibly of a karate chop or a headbutt? When he thought about it, he hadn’t kissed a woman for years… it just wasn’t the sort of thing that came naturally to him, the flirty witticisms, the dating, the whole traumatic process that was supposed to culminate in this moment, the unmissable opportunity to just take her in his arms and feel her lips press against his –

  ‘I suffer from panic attacks,’ he blurted out. ‘That’s why I wasn’t in bed, when Tall Paul broke in. I was in the bathroom, having a bloody seizure. I… don’t know why I’m telling you this!’ He felt his face reddening.

  ‘No, it’s okay, Chris. I’ve told you about all my bloody problems! I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Do they… is it often?’ Her expression was of genuine concern.

  ‘It’s kind of hard to predict. There isn’t really a logical reason behind them. That night for example, you and I had just been in the bar together.’

  ‘Oh god, am I that bad company?’ she smiled.

  ‘No, no… I’d had fun, I was relaxed. But then I got back to the hotel and… like you said, I overthink things.’

  ‘Have you always suffered from them?’

  This was the moment. He never talked about this. About his difficult childhood. About Marcus. Did he trust this woman enough? Did she really want to be his friend, or just his colleague?

  He took a swig of beer, and decided to just talk.

  ‘I was the clever kid at school, you know? The swot. The smart arse. It was a C of E primary school, and I was already questioning everything, even then. The teachers must have hated me. I sat there in assembly every day, saying prayers and singing hymns, and I was thinking “I don’t think I’m buying this”. I suppose Heaven is a great concept for kids, in some ways. As long as you’re well-behaved, you have nothing to worry about, and you’ll live in paradise forever. But if you don’t believe in it, and you’re a bit of a deep thinker, or whatever… you can get quite obsessed with what happens when you die. So yeah, I was this kind of awkward child, bullied, shy, caught up in all this worry.’

  She listened patiently as he continued.

  ‘When I went to high school I thought it would change. You know, I’d be a smaller fish in a bigger pond, get overtaken by others, meet people who would surpass me and I could just… fade into the background. But I was still the clever kid, still getting picked on one minute and then begged for help with homework the next. I found the best way to subvert this was to just… round off the edges a bit. Be friendly, self-deprecating, blend in with the crowd. All normal survival stuff at school, I suppose.

  ‘But then Marcus died, and it all got much worse.’

  ‘Who was Marcus?’

  ‘My little brother. He was seven years younger than me, and he was six when it happened.’

  ‘Oh god, Chris, I’m sorry. What happened?’

  ‘He was run over. I was there when it happened. He just ran away from my mum, into the road, and a car hit him. He was probably killed instantly. I just remember… seeing it. The precise moment his life stopped. The moment he changed from being Marcus into being just a bag of bones and guts, squashed underneath that car.’

  ‘That must have been terrible for you. And your mum.’

  ‘It was the end of the world for her. Her baby was dead, and it was her fault, as she saw it. She just… shut down completely. She was virtually catatonic for months. My dad tried to hold the household together, but it must have been like trying to hold a pile of dust in his hands.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I became more and more obsessed with death. I read about Heaven and Hell and the afterlife, all the different religions, about reincarnation and the soul and the idea of a great cosmic consciousness that everyone re-enters when their earthly body passes away. I didn’t believe any of it. I became more and more convinced that death was just like… before you’re born. Nothingness. And I was terrified of it. I’d seen Marcus… snuffed out, in the blink of an eye. And I know this sounds so selfish… but I didn’t want it to happen to me.’

  ‘Is that when the panic attacks started?’

  He nodded. ‘And the OCD. I was obsessed with risk management, with cleanliness. I didn’t want to go outside if I could possibly avoid it. I was constantly on edge. I managed to get through my A-Levels, but then I was too scared to go to university. And my mother probably didn’t help – if anything she encouraged me to stay at home. She didn’t want to lose her one remaining child. So I stayed at home, hiding in my room, reading and playing computer games. I wasn’t really eating anything. I was more like a ghost than a real person.’

  ‘But your mum recovered?’

  ‘Yes… but then she got cancer. So I spent most of my twenties looking after her while my dad worked. It was like being face-to-face with death every day, exactly the thing I was the most terrified of. It was… hard.’<
br />
  ‘I’m really sorry Chris. Everyone deserves their youth, their childhood.’ She fell silent for a moment, and he wondered if she thought he was a lunatic. Then she brightened. ‘But look at you now! You’re strong, confident, a great detective – you must have gotten over all of that somehow.’

  He shrugged. ‘After she died, I suppose I transitioned from looking after her to looking after my father, while he grieved. I did all the housework while he went to work. I knew he needed help with the mortgage, so I wanted to find a way to leave the house. I did CBT, took medication, SSRIs. I ended up getting an admin job. I remember how proud he was, and how much I enjoyed us both heading out to work every day, like a little team. I liked to think of us both putting on this mask of normality every day…’

  As though they were lined up next to each other in jars by the door

  ‘So when did you join the police force?’

  ‘I was twenty-eight. When I told my dad, he cried, and asked me why.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Sigurdsson looked at her, smiling sheepishly.

  ‘I said I was sick of protecting myself, and I wanted to protect other people too.’

  ‘Well I think you’ve done a great job re-inventing yourself, Chris. You should be proud, like your dad.’

  ‘Thank you. I don’t know why I told you all this, but… I’m glad I did. I like… being with you, Carin.’

  She didn’t respond to that, but her eyes were locked on his, and suddenly there was a sensation of flames around his face, and they were both leaning slowly towards each other, their eyes closing, lips parting.

  Mason’s phone rang from the hallway.

  ‘Shit, sorry, just a second,’ she muttered, leaping up to answer it.

  Feeling his face burning, Sigurdsson listened to her half of the conversation.

  ‘This is Mason. Yep, he’s with me, we’re just going over a few… what? Oh, shit. We’ll be right there – wait, no, I’ve got Holly here, my mum’s ill… fuck… I’ll figure something out. See you soon.’

  She returned to the living room, looking dismayed.