by Chris Simms
‘But you’d signed off on cause of death being hanging.’
‘Correct, but I hadn’t signed off on the incineration of her remains. Where are her clothes?’
The porter piped up. ‘According to my sheet, one bag – with a yellow label – was collected for incineration last night.’
Miriam shot a glance at Malcolm. ‘We’d better check what’s on that corner table.’
He nodded meekly as Miriam opened the inner door of the office. Snapping on a pair of latex gloves, she walked briskly over to the heavy-duty plastic bag on the corner table and undid the zip.
From inside, she removed a bone about eight inches in length that widened at one end. ‘The lower tibia and upper hoof of an ungulate. Malcolm, this is the sheep.’
He gestured weakly at table six. ‘I really don’t remember attaching a yellow label to that bag. I...I put the dress and stuff...’ He ran a hand through his receding hair. ‘No, wait...I gathered up the skeleton of that sheep –’
‘Malcolm?’ Miriam’s voice cut him dead. ‘If her remains haven’t gone into the furnace, would you like to tell me where the hell they are?’
Chapter 45
Laura could see him through the spy-hole. Funny, she thought. I once found him mildly attractive. Now he seemed so young. He had an apprehensive expression and was holding a large bouquet of flowers.
She opened the door and tried to smile. It was immediately there in his eyes: shock. He doesn’t look younger, she realised. I am older. My eyes are more sunken, my mouth more pinched.
‘Laura, it’s so good to see you.’
She retreated, waving a hand. ‘How was your trip down?’
‘Fine. So fast – the train hurtles along.’ His eyes were darting about the flat as he stepped inside. ‘It’s a nice place you have here. These are from Molly’s dad. He’s made me promise not to leave without getting a date for you to visit.’
‘They’re lovely,’ she said, putting Mouse in the armchair, taking the flowers and going through to the kitchen.
‘Seriously, Laura. They’re due home in another fortnight.’ He was speaking from the doorway behind her as she filled a jug. It reminded her of the church-hall kitchen at Oldknow. The two of them chatting. ‘He wants you to stay with them.’
Steve had mentioned as much over the phone to her before they’d left. He’d even said about visiting them in America. Tamsin – in one of her many emails – had also invited her to stay in San Francisco. Molly was receiving her treatment at a hospital in Los Angeles. Not that far between the two cities, Laura understood, if you flew. She’d considered a trip over but, in the end, had decided against it. The thought of flying was nice. She always loved to gaze down onto a fairytale land of clouds. But the thought of the noise; engines whining, signs pinging, seat belts clicking. She didn’t think she’d cope.
‘So, do you think you’ll come up to Oldknow and see them when they get back?’
‘I don’t know.’
He removed an envelope from his bag. ‘Molly made you a card before they left.’
‘How did she seem to you about going all the way there?’
‘Fine. Excited. Apparently making arrangements for the flight over was tricky.’
Laura knew that; the airline had insisted on her being accompanied by a nurse. Laura had quietly signed the cheque for that, too. ‘But she was in good spirits?’
‘When is she ever not?’
She took the card. Molly had drawn some flowers. Her message was sweet.
Thank you, Laura, for helping me. You are very kind and I will be grateful to you forever. All my love, Molly. XXX. PS Please come and see me when you feel like it!
‘Aaah,’ Laura murmured. ‘She’s so gorgeous.’
‘Isn’t she?’
His smile was brittle. The worried look hadn’t entirely left his eyes. She speculated again on why he’d really come to visit. If it was to press for more details about that night, he wouldn’t get them. Laura liked the psychiatric nurse’s theory at the hospital near Stockport best. According to him, she’d had some kind of psychotic episode. She’d looked into the cavity and seen the woman’s body propped against the shaft of the chimney just as the electricity failed. Down in the cellar, the episode had got worse. Bad enough to make her climb into a coal pit crawling with toads. Her mind had then created the vision of the dead woman to explain her overwhelming sense of panic and dread.
It was rubbish, of course. But Laura had enthusiastically agreed: it meant getting out of hospital far more quickly. What the theory didn’t explain was how she knew it was a fully-grown female in the wall, when all she’d felt were the ends of some shoes. Shoes alone wouldn’t have let her tell the woman was the same heavily-built one from the photo. How I knew, Laura thought, was because I saw her coming slowly down those cellar stairs, moaning and – ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘No, I’m fine, thank you.’ Martin’s voice was stilted as he glanced nervously into the front room. ‘It’s a nice place you have here.’
He’s said that already, Laura thought. ‘Yes. Shall we sit down?’
‘Please.’ He settled on the edge of the little sofa. His thumbs rubbed at one another.
She plonked Mouse back on her lap and looked at him.
‘Erm, Laura, I...’ He cleared his throat. ‘This isn’t easy. But I need to tell you something. Can...can I please tell you something?’
She wasn’t sure if he was about to proposition her. Or was he seeking some kind of absolution? It felt like she was the representative of God here, not him. She hesitated. There was such a look of torment on his face, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.
‘Please. I...’ His head dropped. ‘I don’t know who to turn to. But you deserve to know this...’ He looked up. She was astonished to see he was almost crying.
‘What is it?’ She kept her hands on Mouse, enjoying the smooth fur and – more than that – the warmth the animal gave off.
The sides of Martin’s nose flexed as he dragged in air. ‘When I took over Oldknow church, the vicar who was retiring sat me down. It was on the day he was actually leaving. He’d already gone through all the standard things during the handover period. This...this was something different.’
The air in the flat seemed to have become very heavy. Only Mouse’s contented purr broke the silence. ‘Go on.’
‘Well,’ he looked up at the ceiling. Or maybe to heaven, she thought, seeking strength. ‘His name was Tim Dobby. When he took over the church, the previous vicar sat him down and told him the exact same story. He described it as a kind of tradition – I wasn’t sure what to make of it, to be honest.’ His thumbs wrestled one another once more. ‘It was in the strictest confidence...I was only ever meant to pass it to whoever took over the church from me. That was how it worked. Dobby made me swear – but I cannot keep silent.’ His eyes met hers. ‘Not now.’
She lifted her eyebrows in encouragement. This secret was clearly tearing him apart.
‘When Dobby told me what I’m about to tell you, he didn’t name the actual cottage. But...but now I think he was referring to Lantern Cottage,’ he blurted.
‘You’re talking about the canary breeder who was hanged at Strangeways?’
His mouth fell open. ‘You knew about that?’
She gave Mouse another stroke as the conversation with Adrian Moore came back. She realised Martin hadn’t been in the church hall when it had taken place. She remembered Moore telling her how the canary breeder had confessed to killing his wife and burning her body. Only now Laura knew he didn’t wheel her to the limekilns in the dead of night and put her body inside. She could feel the tips of those shoes once more.
Martin’s hands were now pressed between his knees. ‘On the morning of his execution the canary breeder summoned the vicar of Oldknow at that time. Once they were alone, the canary breeder admitted that he hadn’t killed his wife. You see, for years, she’d been desperate for children. They’d tried but, as time
went by, it became obvious that they would never be blessed.’
She looked away; he could be talking about me.
‘Gradually, her feelings soured to a deep loathing. She’d sit brooding in the cottage and listen to children from the village as they came to see the canaries. She’d pace the moors above the cottage, sometimes pulling at her own hair. Then, one evening, she came back from one of her walks carrying the male canary in its cage. The males are the ones who sing. She told her husband she’d used the bird to coax a young lad from the outskirts of the village.’
Mouse squirmed and Laura realised she’d stopped stroking the animal. Her fingernails were beginning to dig at the cat’s fur. She lifted her hand but didn’t look back up.
‘She led him into the fields above Lantern Cottage, where the mineworkings used to be. The boy followed, entranced by the canary’s singing. As you know, a lot of the mines had ventilation shafts sunk into them. Back then, with many of the mines active, most shafts hadn’t been capped. She led him right to the edge of one and she...she...’ His shoulders spasmed as he got the words out. ‘Pushed him in.’
Laura shut her eyes. Part of her wanted him to be quiet. It wanted him to get out of the flat. She stayed silent.
‘After telling her husband what she’d done, she went upstairs to the room she’d so painstakingly prepared as a nursery. She’d refused to allow him to use it for anything else. He rushed out to check the shafts nearest to the cottage, but could find no sign of any boy. When he got back, he went upstairs to ask if she’d been telling the truth. He found her hanging from the rafter.’
The rafter. Only one upstairs room had an exposed beam, she thought. Owen and I had used it as our bedroom. We’d been sleeping in the room where she’d hanged herself. She thought of how crooked the neck of the thing in the cellar was. The way it rested on a shoulder. She whispered down at Mouse, ‘So why did they hang the canary breeder?’
‘He told the vicar he’d never admit the truth. He felt so ashamed – and that he was to blame for not being able to give her the child she so craved. He didn’t want her to be remembered as a monster. He preferred to have that epithet for himself. So he went to the police and said he’d killed her and burned the body.’
She ran her hand down Mouse’s back, returned it to the top of the cat’s head and repeated the action. She kept doing it. ‘I thought the canary breeder was some kind of paedophile. I thought he killed the child.’
‘No, I understood he was harmless. It was her who has full of poison and bile. She made life a misery for him, always going on at him for not being a man.’
Laura could hear that bitter, shrill voice again. The one that ridiculed Owen at every opportunity. ‘But why didn’t the vicar do something?’
Martin took a moment to answer. ‘Maybe it was too late for the wheels of justice to be stopped. I think the vicar froze. I don’t think he knew what to do. So he kept quiet and the hanging went ahead.’
Laura knew what she was hearing was the truth. ‘And the canary breeder wouldn’t say where he really put his wife’s body?’
‘He just told the vicar it was with the canary. The one she’d used to lure the young boy to his death.’
She supposed it made sense, placing his wife as close as possible to the nursery she so treasured. Every night we slept in that house, Laura thought, she’d been just behind us. She and the canary, inches from our heads. She looked up at the vicar.
He held her gaze for a second and broke eye contact. ‘I’m sorry, Laura. I think it was her, who you found in the wall.’
Yes, she thought to herself. It was. The thing that came out of the wall hated children. So it used the canary once more. Used its song to lure William away.
Another thought spun off. And the implication of this one was strong enough to make her swallow. She wondered for a second whether to say anything. Of course she had to. She had no choice. ‘I need to go back.’
The vicar blinked. He shifted in his seat. ‘To do what? I mean...will telling what I’ve just told you achieve anything?’
The selfishness of the comment left her momentarily speechless. She lifted her chin higher. ‘You come here with all this and then expect me to keep quiet?’ Anger made her forearms tingle. ‘You hoped to make yourself feel better by unloading the secret on me?’
‘No...I...’ He couldn’t look at her properly. ‘I just thought...’
The man was weak, she thought. He and all the vicars before him. They’d done nothing. ‘You and I are going back because I know where the child is.’
‘The child?’
‘I know where he is.’
‘Which child?’
The ventilation shaft might have been too narrow for William. But someone smaller would have fallen right to the bottom of it. ‘The one she murdered first.’
Chapter 46
Dr Robert Ford sat in his study. There was an unread newspaper spread across his lap as he stared at the small cage. For more years than he could remember he’d done exactly the same thing; worked up all his patient notes at the surgery, locked the building, returned home, eaten a meal and retired to his study with a tot of whisky. There, he would sit quietly and read.
But now the little object had changed all that. He wished he had never taken the thing. It was a stupid, impulsive thing to have done. He was still not quite sure why he’d snatched it. By doing so, he’d broken the law, risked everything – but that wasn’t the reason why he could no longer concentrate on his journals or that day’s news.
As the fire crackled in the grate and the clock ticked on the mantelpiece above it, his eyes rested on the dead bird beyond the thin bars. He kept turning his head, first to one side then the other. Straining to catch a faint echo of song. He’d now done the same thing for thirteen nights. He reached for the decanter beside him and poured another measure. It had to stop: he was drinking too much, sleeping badly, waking early. His mind felt fogged and slow every morning.
The memory of Owen in that field came back. His body half-covered with snow. There had been a trickle of blood leading from one nostril and his eyes were slightly open. What a terrible thing to have happened. And all, he thought, because of you. He gazed at the bird’s corpse as he sipped again. Somehow, because of you. This was stupid. Maudlin. Worse than maudlin: it bordered on fanciful. He put the half-finished glass down and yawned. He should toss the thing on the fire and have done with it. There was no song associated with it. How the hell could there be? But he didn’t pick it up. One more night, he decided. I will listen for one more night. That will make a fortnight. Then I’ll burn it.
He struggled forward in the leather armchair with its headrest that curled in on either side. At the door – finger on the light switch – he checked the room a final time. The cage sat on his footstool, lit by flames that were growing fainter behind the fireguard. The clock ticked on. He turned the light off, did the same in the kitchen and made for the stairs.
He was on the third step when a trickle of notes floated past his ears. His foot froze and his head turned. Silence. Had he imagined it? He didn’t think so. The movement felt unnatural as he walked backwards down the stairs, one hand on the banister to steady himself.
He stood in the study doorway. The cage and his footstool were bathed by the fire’s warm glow. Beyond them, shadows lay thick. Unable to shake the impression of hearing something, he took his seat and resumed his vigil. The clock ticked on. After a few minutes, he finished off the glass of whisky and allowed his head to rest against the armchair’s soft leather.
When he woke, several things had changed. The room was cold, so cold he was shivering. He looked blearily at the clock. A single long note was repeating itself. A car alarm, somewhere out on the close? 11.53. He’d only been asleep for twenty minutes. The fire had died down but the embers still burned brightly; tiny pulses scurrying back and forth across the amber surface. It shouldn’t be this cold, he thought, confusedly beginning to sit forward. As he realised the shrill noise
was not coming from the street outside, he became aware of a figure standing next to his armchair.
His bladder opened. Hot urine spread beneath his buttocks and thighs. She was naked and huge; the dry flesh of her massive breasts mottled with black. The sheet of dirty hair that hung before her face reminded him of the fibrous layer that filled the mouths of baleen whales; there to filter sustenance from the ocean’s sunless depths. It was her. The woman he’d seen inside the wall at Lantern Cottage. Curls of steam began to rise from his lap and a childlike whimper escaped him.
The noise caused her head to loll in his direction. Slowly, she shuffled forward and bent towards the armchair. As she did so, a section of hair slipped to the side and he looked in at an empty eye socket, nothing there but the optic nerve’s withered root. He shut his own eyes and felt the tips of her hair brushing the backs of his hands as she sniffed him.
And even as he sensed her draw back, and even as he heard the scrape of her leathery soles against the floorboards, and even as the canary’s exuberant song moved further and further away, he kept his eyes shut and he would never open them again.
Chapter 47
The men stared at the hole in grim silence.
Laura turned away from the hushed group to gaze across the dull field at a finger of bright snow. It clung stubbornly to life in the shadow of a dry-stone wall. She realised, wrapping her shawl more tightly about herself, it was the last visible evidence of the brutal storm from a fortnight before.
From below their feet a disembodied voice called out. ‘OK, carry on!’
The firefighter holding the winch started turning it once more, winding in a length of rope that dropped like a plumb line into the dark cleft.
The heads of his colleagues stayed bowed, as did those of three policemen, a man in an overcoat and Martin Flowers. A funeral, she thought. It looks just like a funeral. But no body was being buried. The reverse, in fact.
A yellowish glow broke the blackness at their feet. She looked on impassively as the dirt-smeared head and shoulders of a man rose slowly out of the ground. In the harsh light of day, the lamp on his miner’s helmet was suddenly useless. His arms came into view. They were cradling something loosely wrapped in blue plastic sheeting.