by S J Bolton
‘Gillian, no!’ called Evi, a fraction of a second before Harry realized what the girl was about to do.
‘Oh, dear me,’ muttered Rushton, pushing himself to his feet.
Gillian had removed the lid of the urn and upended it. The ashes were pouring out, creating a small cloud above the table. Harry could hear hard objects falling on to the wood. Something grey, about two inches long, fell on to the carpet near his feet.
‘This is not Hayley!’ yelled Gillian. ‘I would know.’
Evi was next to Gillian on the carpet. One arm was around the younger woman’s shoulders, the other had taken hold of Gillian’s hand, was trying to hold it back, stop her from hurling the ashes around the room.
‘It’s OK, I’ve got her.’ Harry’s hand touched Evi’s for a split second, then he was lifting Gillian up and taking the empty urn from her hand. She relaxed instantly and turned to face him, sobbing against his shoulder. God in heaven, what had he started?
‘Don’t touch that please, Dr Oliver,’ Rushton was saying. Harry turned his head, aware of Gillian’s hair clinging to his face. Evi, still kneeling on the floor, had picked up the urn and looked as though she were about to sweep the ashes back inside it. ‘I’ll do it,’ Rushton said, taking the urn from her.
Four heads turned as they heard the front door opening and footsteps climbing the stairs. Taking a firm hold on Gillian, Harry managed to coax her back to the sofa. He pushed her gently down and then turned back to Evi. She was still kneeling on the carpet. Not waiting for permission, he put his hands on her waist, lifted her and helped her back to the armchair she’d been sitting in.
‘Thanks,’ she muttered. Her bottom lip seemed to be shaking. Behind her, he saw Gwen Bannister, Gillian’s mother, standing in the doorway, taking in the scene. Rushton had begun clearing away the ashes. Gillian was sobbing again, her head on her knees, her blonde hair trailing to the floor. Evi had picked up her bag and was fumbling inside it. Harry half expected the newcomer to turn and leave.
‘Detective Rushton, I’d like to give Gillian something to make her feel better,’ said Evi. ‘Have you any more questions for her?’
‘Not for now,’ replied Rushton. ‘I’m going to take these ashes away with me, have them re-tested. From what I can gather, three years ago the tests just confirmed they were human bones. I think we need a bit more certainty than that.’
‘Perhaps Gillian can rest for a while,’ suggested Evi, who was trying to stand up again.
Gwen crossed the room and took hold of her daughter’s hand. ‘Come on, love,’ she said, pulling Gillian to her feet. ‘Come and have a lie down.’
As the two women disappeared into Gillian’s bedroom, Harry breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Do you need Gillian to identify the pyjama top?’ he asked. He knew it was in Rushton’s briefcase, bagged and labelled.
Rushton shook his head. ‘I don’t think she’s a reliable witness, do you? What about the woman who made them? Did you say it was Christiana, Sinclair’s eldest?’
Harry nodded. ‘So Jenny told me. The pyjamas were made for Lucy. She thought they were too good to throw away and a few years after Lucy died she gave them to Gillian for her daughter.’ Harry stopped. Clothes made for one dead child had been given to another. Both had ended up in the same grave.
‘What a ruddy mess,’ said Rushton, who seemed to be sharing Harry’s thoughts. ‘Right, I’d better get up to the Abbot’s House. See if I can find someone there who’s still coherent enough to talk sense.’
‘I’ll come too,’ said Harry. ‘At least to the church. I need to find out exactly what state the churchyard’s in. My archdeacon is going to need a report. What about you, Evi?’
Evi glanced towards the bedroom door. ‘I really should stay for a bit,’ she said.
‘Will you phone me when you’re done?’ asked Harry. He gave her a quick smile and turned to leave. Rushton followed him out, with the remains of a dead human in his arms.
55
‘HAVE YOU BEEN IN TOUCH WITH MEGAN CONNOR’S parents?’ asked Harry, as he and Rushton walked towards the Fletchers’ house. At the top of the hill, the mist was thicker. It almost seemed to be seeping out of the stone, hanging in corners and under roof gables. It carried the scents of the moor with it; he could smell wet earth and, in spite of all the rain, a trace of wood smoke from the previous night.
‘Aye, they’re on their way,’ nodded Rushton. ‘Live in Accrington now, moved away a couple of years after it happened. I’m seeing them in an hour. Wish I had more answers to give them.’
Harry could remember seeing news coverage of the Connors’ tearful appeal for their daughter’s safe return. It had been the lead story on the evening news for several days. The police search had spread the breadth of the country and sightings of Megan had been reported as far afield as Wales and the south coast. And yet she’d been not half a mile from where she went missing.
‘What I’m struggling with,’ said Harry, ‘is that the pathologist was so positive the two girls we think were Megan and Hayley couldn’t have been in the ground for more than a few months. So their bodies were kept somewhere – for six years in Megan’s case, three years in Hayley’s. They were both local children; common sense would suggest it was somewhere round here.’
On the Fletchers’ driveway were several police officers, and a short distance away was another, more casually dressed group that Harry realized with a sinking heart were journalists.
‘Be with you in a second, people,’ called Rushton to the police team. ‘You’re asking me if we carried out a proper search when Megan went missing, is that right, Reverend?’
‘Sorry, I don’t mean to…’ The journalists had spotted them, were starting to edge around the police tape in their direction.
‘The answer is yes, we most certainly did,’ said Rushton in a low voice, glancing at the reporters. ‘We had over fifty officers here at one point, and most of the town turned out to help. We didn’t just search the town, we searched the entire moor. Every ruin, every water-pumping station, every bush and pile of rocks. We used cadaver dogs that are trained to home in only on decomposing flesh. They found two fresh corpses. One was a rabbit, up in that old cottage that belongs to the Renshaw family. The other was a domestic cat. They’re trained to leave animal remains alone, so it didn’t hold us up too much.’
‘So how…?’ Harry left the question hanging.
‘We also had a chopper fly over the whole area, with equipment that can detect the heat of a rotting body. It found us a badger, a deer, several more rabbits and a peregrine falcon missing one wing. No little girls.’
‘DCS Rushton…’ One of the reporters, a young man in his twenties, was peering around a woman constable, trying to get a better view of Harry and Rushton.
‘So I’m inclined to think that if the dogs and the chopper and half the county of Lancashire traipsing around the place didn’t find Megan, it’s because she wasn’t here when we did the search. Hayley, of course, we didn’t look for, because no one knew she was missing.’
Other than her mother, thought Harry. One of the detectives from the post-mortem was walking towards them. It was the older and more senior of the two, the one with thinning hair and invisible eyelashes. The one who was called something like Dave or Steve.
‘Give me two more seconds please, Jove,’ said Rushton.
Jove?
‘One of the questions I’ll be asking now is why no one spotted little Lucy’s grave being disturbed. Although until your friends the Fletchers built their house here, that particular part of the graveyard wasn’t directly overlooked. Someone working quietly, at night, being careful to cover their tracks, well, I can see how they might have got away with it. And if they were blessed with fog like this, they could probably have gone about their business in broad daylight.’ He turned back down the hill and faced the reporters.
‘Press conference at three, ladies and gents, I’ll be happy to talk to you then,’ he called. ‘Right, my lovely lad
s,’ he said, squaring his shoulders and addressing his colleagues. ‘What have you got for me?’
The thin-haired detective, whom Harry had just learned was named after a Roman god, took Harry’s place at Rushton’s side and indicated that they should walk back up the hill towards the churchyard. Harry and the sergeant he remembered from the postmortem followed. No longer in surgical scrubs, the sergeant’s powerful build was more evident. His trousers stretched tightly around his waist.
‘You’ll get a better view up here,’ Jove explained, as they walked through the entrance and along the church path. Harry couldn’t see the top of the tower. Even the crests of the higher archways were lost in grey mist. ‘They’ve taken the awnings down for as long as the rain holds off,’ he continued. ‘Trying to take advantage of the daylight.’ He looked up. ‘Such as it is.’
‘Anything else shown up yet?’ asked Rushton. The four men were walking fast, passing the church and turning towards the tented area close to the wall. A uniformed constable stood guard at the doorway.
‘Other half of the pyjamas,’ said Jove in a low voice. ‘With some evidence of blood-staining. They’ve been sent to the lab. So have a couple more bones. Couldn’t tell you what they were, but they looked tiny. Oh, and you know the grave on the right-hand side of the collapsed one, as you look at the house, belongs to a family called Seacroft?’
‘Aye,’ encouraged Rushton.
They’d arrived at the police tent. The constable stepped back and allowed them inside. Harry was the last. The polyurethane walls only covered three sides. He could see directly down into the Fletchers’ garden. Three crime-scene investigators were working down there. Two of them seemed to be carrying the stones that had been dislodged from the wall over to the edge of the garden. A tiny stone statue of a child had been placed among them. The blinds in the house windows were still drawn.
‘Well, the coffin can be seen now,’ said Jove. ‘There you go, nice bit of oak panelling. We didn’t spot it last night, but most of the side is in plain view, as you see.’
Harry looked at wood, stained with damp, crumbling in places. ‘We can’t leave it like that,’ said Jove, ‘so we’re going to lift it and get Clarke out here to have a look. Anything suspicious and the whole lot goes down the lab.’
‘Very good,’ said Rushton. ‘We need to do the same with the other side. Has someone filed an exhumation request?’
‘I think so, sir, but I’ll check.’
‘There’s a massive cellar beneath the church,’ said Harry, unable to keep quiet any longer. ‘Cold and dry. The sort of place you might expect to produce mummified bodies. It’s been shut up for years. Did you search it when you were looking for Megan?’
‘We did.’ Rushton gave a nod. ‘Sinclair unlocked it for us. All the old sarcophagi were opened up. We took the dogs down too. Not a sniff, if you’ll pardon the expression. They did get quite excited in the church itself for a while, on the steps leading up to one of those old bell towers.’
‘And?’ prompted Harry, turning to look at the church. Only the closest of the four towers, the one on the south-west corner, could be seen from that angle.
‘Three dead pigeons,’ said Rushton. ‘I could smell ’em myself before I was halfway up the stairs.’
‘Will you check the cellar again?’ asked Harry. ‘They were local girls. They were taken from here and found here. They must have been kept somewhere nearby.’
Rushton barely glanced at him. ‘Thank you, Reverend, the force has some experience of conducting murder investigations.’
A radio started crackling. Jove pulled the receiver off his belt and turned away from the group. ‘DI Neasden,’ he muttered. After a moment, he turned back to his chief. ‘Needed in the house, Guv’ nor,’ he said. ‘They’ve found something.’
‘How long will she be out for?’ asked Gwen Bannister.
‘Hard to say,’ replied Evi. ‘Temazepan is a very mild sedative and I didn’t give her much. Someone a bit fitter, maybe with greater bodyweight, would just feel very drowsy, maybe a bit spaced out. Gillian must be exhausted to have fallen asleep so quickly.’
Gillian’s face had relaxed, lost some of the tension of the past half-hour. She looked younger, softer. One arm was stretched out across the pillow. The long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing had ridden up almost to her elbow. Evi reached out, gently took hold of Gillian’s arm and raised the fabric a little higher.
‘I thought she was getting better,’ said her mother, looking down at the livid, fresh scars across the girl’s forearm. ‘She’s improved, since she’s been seeing you.’
‘These things take time,’ said Evi. ‘It’s still very early days.’
Gwen turned to the door. ‘Come on, love, you shouldn’t be standing up. What do you say to a brew?’
‘That would be good,’ said Evi. ‘It feels like a long time since breakfast.’
‘Tea or coffee?’ Gwen left the bedroom. Evi paused for long enough to tuck Gillian’s injured arm inside the bedclothes and to pull the quilt a little higher up around her shoulders.
‘Tea please, milk, no sugar,’ she called out softly, as she walked back into the living room. The mist outside was definitely getting thicker. When they’d arrived at Gillian’s flat, it had been hovering over the higher reaches of the moor and the upper parts of the town. It had crept lower since. She could just about make out parts of the ruined tower. Nothing beyond.
Evi turned from the window and sat down. The coffee table in front of her looked as if it had been smeared with fine dust. She heard the sound of the kettle boiling, of water being poured, the fridge door opening. Then Gwen returned, carrying a tray with two mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. She stopped and looked down at the table surface, registering the significance of the dust.
‘Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?’ she said, without straightening up. ‘Should I wipe it down, do you think?’
‘I’m really not sure,’ said Evi. ‘Perhaps leave it for now. I’ll try and get in touch with that police officer before I go. I’ll ask him what we should do.’
Gwen bent down and put the tray on the floor. She offered the plate of biscuits to Evi.
‘I don’t think Gillian can be left on her own today, I’m afraid,’ said Evi, biting into a biscuit and regretting it. It was soft and lay like damp cardboard in her mouth. ‘I can call in again later when she’s awake, but she needs someone with her. If you aren’t able to stay, I can arrange for her to be admitted. To hospital, I mean. Maybe just overnight.’
Gwen shook her head. ‘It’s OK. I can stay with her. I’ll take her back with me tonight. I suppose we can put up with each other for once. Ruddy ’ orrible biscuits. Sorry, love.’
‘You’re not close?’ ventured Evi. Gillian so rarely talked about her mother, she really had no clear idea of the relationship between the two.
Doubt flickered across Gwen’s face. ‘We do well enough,’ she said. ‘Gill ran a bit wild for a time. Things were said on both sides. I expect you and your mum have your fallings out at times.’
‘Of course,’ said Evi. ‘Is there just you at home?’
‘Aye. Gillian’s dad died in a nasty car accident a long time ago. My second marriage didn’t last. But I expect you know all that already, don’t you?’
Evi smiled and dropped her eyes.
‘I heard they dug up some bodies last night in the churchyard,’ said Gwen, finishing her biscuit and reaching for another. ‘Bodies that shouldn’t have been there, I mean. Is it true?’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t been told much about it,’ said Evi.
‘Little kids, I heard. Is that why you’re here? Do they think it’s Hayley they found?’
‘There was some talk of that being a possibility,’ said Evi, wondering how much more vague she could make that sound. ‘But of course…’ She gestured towards the coffee table, at the dust that seemed to be moving now, as though stirred by a breeze neither of the women could feel.
‘How cou
ld it be Hayley when Hayley’s been in a jar in the kitchen for the past three years?’ finished Gwen.
‘When you came in,’ said Evi, ‘Gillian was saying that the ashes weren’t Hayley. Do you know why she felt so certain of that?’
‘She always refused to believe it,’ said Gwen. ‘Even when the remains were confirmed as being human, she wouldn’t accept it. As though someone else could have burned to death in the house without her knowledge.’
Gwen sat chewing her biscuit for a second. Evi sipped scalding tea and waited.
‘I sometimes wonder if it was my fault,’ said Gwen, after a second. ‘Whether I should have got help for her a long time ago. But in those days, we didn’t have any namby-pamby counselling rubbish – no offence, love – we just got on with it.’
‘You thought Gillian might have needed help some time ago?’ asked Evi. ‘Did she have problems at school?’
‘Just the usual teenage stuff,’ replied Gwen, putting her mug down on the carpet and brushing biscuit crumbs off her fingers. ‘Smoking behind the bike sheds, sneaking days off. No, I’m talking about what happened to her little sister. When Gillian was twelve. She must have mentioned it.’
Gwen was staring at Evi now. The lines around her jaw seemed to have hardened. Then she picked up the mug again and drank too much. When she lowered it, Evi could see damp splashes around her mouth.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Evi cautiously, as the other woman ran a finger around her lips. ‘I don’t think Gillian ever mentioned a sister.’
Gwen leaned forward and put her mug down on the coffee table. ‘You should ask her,’ she said.
‘I appreciate your advice,’ said Evi, ‘but we only talk about what Gillian wants to bring up. It wouldn’t be fair to spring a subject on her. If Gillian had a sister, I have to wait until she wants to talk about her.’
‘Well, you might be waiting for a long time,’ said Gwen. ‘She certainly never wanted to talk to me about it. But maybe you should know, especially if…’ She looked at the coffee table, where her mug sat amidst a soft film of ash. ‘Gillian had a little sister called Lauren,’ she went on. ‘She fell downstairs when she was eighteen months old. Someone left the stair-gate open – Gillian most likely, although she never admitted it. Lauren tripped over the bar and went from top to bottom. She hit the slate tiles on the hall floor. Lived for three days but never woke up. I never saw her eyes open again.’