An Early Grave

by Robert McCracken

  ‘I need your help, Tara. Please.’

  Suddenly, she bent down to her shopping bag and pulled out a copy of the Daily Mail, shoving it into his chest.

  ‘Page five.’ Her eyes pierced him, her cheeks glowing.

  He found the correct page, but Tara willingly recited the headline for him.

  ‘Former aide to junior minister found stabbed at home. Something else you didn’t tell me, Callum. Why? I thought you’d told me of all the relationships. Why didn’t you tell me that Charlotte had worked for Egerton-Hyde?’

  ‘I didn’t…’

  ‘Save it, Callum. But here’s something else for you to think about. We met Egerton-Hyde last Friday evening. You told him we were intending to visit Charlotte. We find her dead on Sunday. A connection? Go home and think of a reason why a government minister might want to murder his former aide. Think, Callum. Go home to that hovel of yours and bloody think.’

  CHAPTER 43

  Sometimes the silence of an empty room induces loneliness, at others a feeling of tranquillity. Tara closed her door, dropped her bag on the floor, dumped her jacket on the stool at the breakfast bar and made for the fridge. Nothing much appealed within by way of drink. A day old carton of milk, a bottle of pressed apple juice and no more than a glass worth of a Zinfandel rosé: nothing took her fancy. Defeated, she removed a glass from the cupboard above the sink and filled it with water from the tap. By the time she’d reached her sofa she’d discarded both shoes. Legs outstretched, she faced the window and was blessed with evening sunshine over the Mersey, a giant cruise ship making for the docks. A familiar sight nowadays. Thousands of tourists at one go all eager for the delights of Liverpool, intrigued not only by its history but also its rebirth. She’d listened to politicians speak of it and of how the Merseyside Police were helping to shape the bright future of the city. Why then didn’t she feel a part of it? The old problems still simmered away, poverty, unemployment, crime and lack of prospects. Her parents could never have imagined this life for their daughter, an Oxford graduate, now a Scouse police officer, a young woman, pretty it was said, but at twenty-seven years old sitting alone trying to make sense of it all. Trying to make sense of her feelings. Thinking of a broken man living on a broken housing estate. No one could ever have dreamed up that one.

  The cold water eased her thirst and revived her mood. When she’d emptied the glass, she set it on the coffee table and in doing so noticed one of the books she’d recently bought. The Clock-tower, second story in the Time-Travellers Club series by Tilly Reason. She picked it up and began reading from the first chapter. Perhaps she was in the right frame of mind, but she quickly became engrossed in the tale of children at an old boarding school embarking upon adventures by travelling back in time, and in doing so experiencing the ultimate lesson in history. The kids at Pendulum College had been introduced by their history master to an old clock, said to have been one of the earliest mechanical clocks built in England in the Fourteenth Century. As the story unfolds, they learn of the clock’s magnificent powers to transport people through time, to when the clock first sprang to life. The kids, of course, are keen to give it a try, but there are rules and lessons they must first learn. Much of this was the subject of the first novel in the series, The First Form Time Travellers Club, but in The Clock-tower, Tilly had recapped on the basic laws governing time travel. The most important lesson to note was that no one may travel through time in order to change the course of history. What happened has happened, whether or not it was recorded that some time traveller was present at a crucial event in history. Tara thought the explanations were quite complex in places, especially for children. She found the Grandfather Paradox rather intriguing. The time traveller travels to a point in time when his grandfather had not yet married. At that moment, the time traveller kills his grandfather and, therefore, the time traveller is never born when he is meant to be.

  Fading light interrupted her reading only as long as it took to switch on the lamp in the corner of the lounge. She returned to the sink and refilled her glass with water, snatching a bag of crisps from the larder while she was there. She felt true escapism in reading Tilly’s book. Tilly must have had great fun creating it. What a useful tool time travel would be to the police detective. To return to the scene of a crime as the crime was committed, or even before it was committed. She came across a word used by Tilly, its meaning explained in the text. Kairos is a Greek word with the literal meaning, the right or opportune moment. How strange to witness a crime and as a time traveller powerless to prevent it? Unable to change a thing? Enough to drive anyone mad.

  But now, resolved to thinking instead of reading and instead of picturing a world created by Tilly Reason she considered the situation she had tried all afternoon to avoid. The case, Callum’s case, the death of his wife, daughter and alumni of Latimer College. What had been the kairos, the right and opportune moment that sparked all of these murders? Justin Kingsley’s disappearance? Peter Ramsey’s secret love affair with a future MP, one tipped for high office? That same MP’s relationship with Charlotte Babb? How did it ever involve Zhou Jian or Tilly Reason?

  *

  She never thought she’d be back on the Treadwater Estate so soon. The phone call that morning, made to Assistant Chief Kurt Muetzel in Lucerne brought about a change of mind. The Swiss policeman had once again been most helpful, he having made little progress in his investigation of the murder of Zhou Jian. The information he provided for Tara, however, suggested the identity of Zhou Jian’s killer, though still not a motive. It piqued her curiosity once more and prompted her to at least pay a visit to Callum.

  Life moves on. Time passes. All places: Liverpool, Oxford, Canterbury, Lucerne, middle-class suburbs, working-class housing estates, all hold secrets, all harbour tales of tragedy, hope and happiness. She felt it as she drew up by the house of Callum Armour. A feeling of change, of moving on. Audra Bagdonas was now consigned to the history of this Netherton estate, the life of Mark Crawley changed irrevocably and that of the young mother Debbie.

  Tara watched the girl approach, pushing slowly a pram containing her new born child. Curtis, the toddler, giggled in the arms of the scraggly kid, his father the lizard.

  ‘Hello, Debbie. You’ve had her then?’ Tara noticed the pink trim of the pram and assumed a baby girl.

  Debbie stopped, and smiled warmly. She looked happy, the tension that wracked her face when Tara saw her on the night she came for Mark Crawley had slipped away. She looked a proud mother.

  ‘Do you want to see her?’ She peeled back the nylon flap across the front of the pram. Inside was a tiny bundle of pink wool, yellow-brown cheeks and a wisp of dark hair.

  ‘She’s lovely. Have you got a name yet?’

  ‘Edie, me gran’s name.’

  ‘Very nice. I’m sure she’s thrilled. Are you keeping well? Managing all right?’

  ‘Got back with Jamie. He’s helping me.’

  Tara glanced at the youth; still he looked a mere child, head shaven, nose stud, left arm obscured in tattoos, a football shirt and shorts hanging on his skinny frame. He stared blankly, no attempt at interaction. She sincerely hoped him a better catch for Debbie than Mark Crawley.

  ‘Look after yourself, Debbie.’

  She turned towards Callum’s house, and, to her surprise, Jamie suddenly broke his silence.

  ‘If you’re looking for Stinker, he’s not in. Saw him down Marion Square heading for the park.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The young family continued on their way, leaving Tara gazing at the changes to Callum’s house. Those damned screens were gone, the windows looked clean and the front door, though still battered, was now devoid of graffiti. She smiled her approval and turned back to her car.

  Parking in Marion Way behind a supermarket, she crossed the road and walked through the gates into the park. She found him sitting alone on a bench staring idly across the green. It was a bright morning, but she felt early September days growing cooler. Even as she drew n
earer he didn’t seem to notice until she stood over him, a rarity that she could look down upon him.

  ‘Used to bring Midgey up here for his walk,’ he said when at last he noticed her.

  ‘Nice place, lovely view,’ she lied. As dull a park as she could ever recall. She sat next to him on the bench joining him in staring straight ahead.

  ‘My father used to bring me here. He could remember the place before they built the houses and flats around it. Changed times.’

  ‘I read one of Tilly’s books.’

  ‘Looking for clues to the murders? I’ve tried that; drove me nuts.’

  ‘It’s a good story. Tilly was very talented.’ He didn’t respond. ‘She used a word that set me thinking. Kairos, do you remember it?’

  He shook his head, no, and continued gazing to the distance. She looked at the side of his face, handsome in profile. His hair looked clean and combed, little breeze this morning to disturb it, his face shaven and his skin looking fresh. He’d even managed a clean shirt and a neat V-neck jumper.

  ‘It’s Greek. It means the right or opportune moment.’

  He suddenly turned towards her.

  ‘You’re thinking about the murders again?’

  Her eyes widened, but his continued to stare, boring inside her, searching her. His question hung between them. She didn’t feel inclined to answer. His staring didn’t seem to need one. Without warning, he leaned over, and in a single movement his lips touched hers. She recoiled in surprise, but then his arms encircled her narrow shoulders, and he completed the kiss. Several followed before she gently pushed him back, sufficient to cool the moment. Their eyes continued to challenge like a pair of boxers circling in the ring, squaring up for the fight. He kept his arms around her, but her hands lay flat upon his chest, braced, when ready, to push him away.

  ‘I see you’ve taken those awful screens down?’

  He grinned, conceding that he knew the moment had passed. His arms released their grip, and instinctively, he slid away creating a space between them.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the things you said. That I shouldn’t have sunk to this level. There are loads of people out there who lose their partners, the people they love. I shouldn’t be wasting my time here.’

  She closed her eyes briefly. She had to or the tears would flow. She couldn’t help confusing her thoughts, mixing his problems with her own, thinking of him losing Tilly, her own loss at Oxford, her time spent with Callum and the kiss that had just occurred.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A fresh start.’

  ‘That’s great, Callum. I’m happy for you.’

  ‘As soon as I find the man who killed Tilly and Emily, and I’m not going to do that festering away in Netherton. I’m going back to Oxford, to that Alumni meeting. It’s the most likely place for Justin to show up. And if he’s there waiting to get the rest of us, I’ll be ready for him.’

  ‘In that case, I suppose I’d better come along, too.’

  CHAPTER 44

  Latimer College stands amongst those colleges bounded on the west by St. Aldates, on the north by High Street and to the south by Merton Field and Christchurch Meadow. Callum loved the place and had always dreamed of leaving home for university, not so much for the leaving behind of his old life but more for the adventure he imagined in moving to another world. And for a young lad raised on a housing estate, first in Belfast then Liverpool, Oxford was an entirely alien concept. With each year he spent in the city as an under-grad, post-grad and finally post-doc, he felt more a part of its fabric, its tissue, learning to live and breathe with it. He and Tilly once had a conversation arising from her stories of time travel, when they discussed the possibility of re-incarnation, of being born again and again, one soul passing through many human forms. He asked if she ever had a feeling when entering a room, a building or a town that she had been there before even though she definitely had not. She told him it happened many times, but she couldn’t always be certain that she hadn’t seen, heard or read about the place sometime beforehand. Callum explained that years before he had ever come to Oxford, he felt a peculiar affinity for the place, as if he were destined to one day live there. Tilly understood perfectly. She told him that as a child she’d gone to Scotland on holiday with her parents, but inexplicably she already seemed to know so much about Loch Lomond, had a passion for Burns poetry, towering mountains and dark lakes, and she recalled asking for porridge for breakfast when she hadn’t a clue what it was made of. She could never explain where such inclinations originated. Callum felt the same about Oxford. He found himself reading stories and histories on the city long before he ever thought or even dreamed of studying there. At times he felt as though Oxford ran through his genes like a family trait, except that no one in his family had ever been to university, let alone to Oxford. He hated leaving it. He’d once been perfectly happy to see his future well and truly set among the spires and colleges. The death of his wife and child wiped all such notions clean away like a bleached dishcloth on a kitchen worktop.

  *

  Tara had also loved the place. Her dreams, however, always pointed well into the future, beyond student days, beyond the foundations of a career, to a time when she had a settled life with a husband she adored and children to love and inspire. She didn’t care where in the world she went to realise it. Oxford was a wonderful place in which to picture it, but she believed happiness could exist anywhere. All too soon, however, she realised happiness co-existed with misery; only the proportions of each varied with time and place.

  Walking along Merton Street, Callum beside her, she looked beyond the College that gave the street its name to a building similar in appearance, but only in the hue of its stonework, since Merton outdated Latimer by nearly seven hundred years.

  ‘You all right?’ Callum asked when she stopped suddenly. ‘You don’t look too happy going back to your old College.’

  She didn’t answer straightaway but allowed her gaze to linger upon the muddle of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century blocks, cleverly made to look as old as every building surrounding them. But it wasn’t the buildings, or the college, giving rise to her hesitation. It all came down to the memory of one person. She never dreaded revisiting Oxford and Latimer; it was her former life that frightened her, saddened her to the point where she regretted volunteering to accompany Callum on his quest for justice. The face of the man who had broken her heart, who had nearly destroyed her completely, was easy to recall. She pictured it daily, every day since her graduation. When Simon had told her their student days were over, he threw in the words that they were over, too. Callum sought justice for Tilly and Emily. Somehow, for the first time, it occurred to Tara that she needed justice for what Simon had done to her. Dreams and plans shattered by one callous phrase. After Oxford they were to move to London, live together, establish careers, marry and, in a country village, buy a house big enough for a team of kids. Simon helped create the dreams in her, had her believing it all was possible, when the whole time he knew that Tara, in the eyes of his well-to-do family and evidently in him, was merely his student plaything. A little girl with a quirky northern accent would never measure up to his family’s social standing. Their parting was to be as final as a bow to the vice-Chancellor on graduation day. Of course, despite her reluctance in returning, she didn’t for one minute believe that Simon was the type to re-visit his old college, his old stomping ground. After all, they were his words ‘Our student days are over, Tara. Time to start work on the next chapter. Never look back when you’re climbing a hill.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said at last. ‘Time to get this thing started.’

  She took Callum’s arm, and they walked towards the porter’s lodge of Latimer College.

  They were allocated rooms on separate staircases on opposite sides of the small quadrangle, its fountain in the centre a memorial statue to the Oxford martyrs of 1555, a small reproduction of the George Gilbert Scott memorial which stands between St. Giles and Magdal
en Street. In this case, from within the spire-like monument, water poured from beneath the figures of the three martyrs. On the side of the water bowl the inscription, borrowed also from the actual monument, read ‘To the Glory of God, and in grateful commemoration of His servants, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer.’ Changed times indeed that by the Twentieth Century Latimer College not only opened its doors to non-protestants, but also to women.

  *

  She sat on the single bed, her back against the stone wall, shoes kicked to the floor, her suitcase open beside her. Upon her knee sat a folder containing some of the papers she’d taken from Callum’s box-files. There was hardly a sound, the adjoining rooms unoccupied so far, and little stirring outside apart from the tap-tap of a gardener’s hoe in one of the flower beds. Before leaving Liverpool, in fact, even before she’d met Callum in the park, she’d decided to keep to herself the information she’d received from Assistant Chief Muetzel in Lucerne. She had a name; that was all, but for now she assumed it was the name of Zhou Jian’s killer. The reason for his death, however, remained a mystery. Apart from Latimer College, she could think of no logical connection between Zhou Jian’s murder and the deaths of the other alumni. If she was right about the killer then she must begin piecing together any possible scenarios that might reveal a motive. Setting the folder to the side, she removed two books from her case, Tilly’s novel, The Clock-tower and the manual given to her by its author Georgina Maitland. Leafing through this volume she hit on the section of Live Your Life devoted to healthy eating. Recalling Georgina’s fabulous cup-cakes, she wondered just how healthy they were intended to be. She got to thinking, too, just how healthy was the Maitland-Egerton-Hyde marriage? How had they got around Anthony’s apparent homosexuality?

  The people who knew that she and Callum had intended to visit Charlotte were Ollie Rutherford, Georgina and Anthony Egerton-Hyde, and yet Callum persisted with his theory that Justin Kingsley was responsible for the murders. It would be quite a result indeed if he were to show up in Oxford on this weekend. Strangely, he was the only member of that circle of friends who hadn’t actually graduated. He’d staged his disappearing act in his final year. He was not an alumnus of Latimer College.