A Stranger's Grave

by Craig Saunders

  ‘And you didn’t see anything?’

  Elton shook his head. A crazy old man. A buggy. An old woman in a black dress.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  DI Terry glanced at PC James. The PC shook his head. Me neither, he said with the shake.

  They went round the houses again, time and time again. Two o’clock and Elton was yawning. They went at it a little longer, but he was in bed by three.

  They could ask all they liked, but he couldn’t tell them anything more than he already had. The truth of it was, he hadn’t seen much of anything that made any kind of sense, and the only person who had wasn’t doing much talking anymore.

  *

  37.

  Franklin Sampson ran most of the way home. He was an old man, older than most, not as old as some. When he got home he locked the door and put the security bolt on. His house was down the hill, but he still felt like an old man who’d just climbed the biggest fucking hill in the world with his fat wife strapped to his back.

  His heart pounded away in his chest for a long time. He thought he should maybe sit down for a while, until the pounding subsided. Once you hit sixty, it seemed, you still forgot not to do stupid things from time to time.

  Sampson was pretty fit, all things considered. He walked into town, ate alright. Not super healthy or anything, and he didn’t fuck about with fruit, but since his wife died he ate better than he ever had because she never could cook for shit.

  So he sat down for a while and the shock wore off. Twelve o’clock, or thereabouts, he flicked off the TV and took out his dentures, which he put on the table beside his armchair. He went to bed and swilled some water round his mouth. He got into bed and pulled up the cover, right up to his chin.

  When he died at a quarter past twelve in the morning, Sampson didn’t know a thing about it.

  Fredrickson kicked down the door in the end. He jolted his knee bad enough to walk with a limp for the whole of the next week. It was still a waste of time, though, because he didn’t get much out of the witness anyway.

  Turned out Elton would have to learn to dig graves, after all.

  *

  38.

  Time passed for Elton, but not for the dead, and not for the girl once known as Tania Reed. Maybe she deserved it, maybe she didn’t.

  Bring her. Make her come.

  She saw the woman in black, the woman in white.

  The woman in black walked toward her, never reaching her. Like she was on one of those moving walkways at the airport.

  Thinking that, somewhere deep, that’s where she was.

  All the while, the woman in black behind her, walking, slowly, taking her time because of course she was dead already, a dead woman and a murderer, too.

  Didn’t matter that she was dead. She could still kill. She still had claws.

  Tania jumped, sometimes, deep under, when the nice dream went and the woman in black tore Dave’s lungs from his chest and blood splashed into her hair, down her neck, and she remembered how her nipples had been hard when he’d died.

  Then she remembered the nice dream.

  The woman in white, going down on her. She didn’t fight that dream, even though there was something wrong, because the woman in white was dead, too, wasn’t she?

  Then there was the other dream, the one where she remembered all of it.

  The woman in white, fingering herself. The woman in black, behind, tearing Dave to pieces.

  And a hideously deformed, but somehow beautiful, little girl, watching from the bushes.

  *

  A Place for all God’s Children

  There’s a grave in the cemetery in a small Norfolk market town that is eight feet six inches deep.

  When space was not of paramount concern, double graves were commonly arranged side by side. In the older section of the cemetery there are many examples, often surrounded by wrought iron fencing, with elaborate monuments of crucifixes and Celtic-style crosses, and yes, angels. No paupers’ graves, these, but the places the rich and landed chose to leave behind.

  There are no crypts, no mausoleums. Everyone here is buried in good honest dirt.

  In 2002 a man named Franklin Sampson dug a grave six feet six inches deep in which the remains of the custodian’s wife were interred. In 2007 Sampson dug down again, this time so that the custodian himself could also be buried, right above his wife. She died of an unexpected illness aged fifty-five, five years previous to her husband, whom she loved. He loved her in return, right up until his suicide.

  Six inches of soil and cement-lined caskets separated husband and wife, even in death, as regulations demanded.

  There were no regulations for a triple plot dug in 2007, but Franklin Sampson figured it should be eight feet and six inches deep.

  Franklin Sampson figured the regulations right, but some graves can never be deep enough.

  *

  39.

  Time moves on, people go back about their business. When someone dies, there’s a flurry of activity. There are records to be updated, papers to put in order, whether you’re a policeman or a relative or a friend, there are things to do. People to contact and a funeral to arrange.

  In the next few weeks there were three funerals to arrange. One for a boy named David Sutherland - Sutherland like Donald Sutherland, thought Elton. One for Franklin Sampson, who seemed to watch over Elton while he dug the grave and after, in the dark, when Elton met the small girl with the strangely deformed and strangely beautiful innocent face.

  There was another funeral, too, in a joint plot, but it was unrelated to the other deaths. Just a widow, joining her husband. Elton read the regulations on the depths of graves, like Franklin had a few years back when he’d taken up the job.

  He dug three graves in the next few weeks. By the third, he had it pat. And every night, bar the last, after the mourners had gone, he filled those graves in by the light of a Coleman lantern, the way it was supposed to be done.

  Good honest work. Getting dirty, digging. It felt right to Elton. Almost like this was what he was born to do.

  He went on feeling good, right up until the little girl, and the dreams, and the crazy old guy with an empty buggy, wheeling his dead daughter around and around, trying to keep her asleep, because the most beautiful sound in the world was a baby snoring.

  Don’t wake her up, he said, and Elton didn’t. Didn’t want to. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Because she was a long time dead and he thought the crazy old guy didn’t even know.

  *

  40.

  Elton didn’t see Henry Harrison for a long time. He looked out for him, but he wasn’t there. The old man wasn’t on his circuit, wasn’t on his bench. No lingering smell of pipe smoke to let Elton know he’d been around.

  Nothing.

  Thinking things were slowing, maybe, on a Thursday night, ready for a Friday funeral, he laid the spade against the turf and began cutting shallow strips while he removed the grass from the plot. He’d dig down until he hit Sampson’s wife’s casket. He didn’t know that Franklin Sampson had hated his wife for most of their marriage. But then, people that age, they never really did get divorced, whether they hated each other or not. It wasn’t love, or hate, even, that kept a marriage like that going. It was spite.

  But Mrs. Sampson had arranged the plot. Maybe she arranged it out of spite, too. Elton didn’t know any of this, but it didn’t matter. He dug, by the light of a full moon and his Coleman lantern.

  Turf to one side, he dug down into the hole, neat as he could. Cutting down into the sides, gradually building a mound of earth over to one side. He could have used a digger, maybe, but doing it this way seemed right. Maybe he wasn’t doing it the same way Franklin would’ve done, but Franklin was dead, so Elton couldn’t ask him. He just cut down as far as the regulations demanded. It made sense to put the turf to one side, to leave the dirt covered against the rain because mud would be so much heavier to shovel back in. These little things Elton didn’t think, just knew.

&n
bsp; The council came to the cottage, two days after Franklin’s death, probably as soon as word got out. Asked him if he’d do it, if he’d double as gravedigger until they could find someone else to take the position.

  Of course he would. He didn’t need anyone else to take the position, he told them. Maybe he was doing himself out of some money, but he liked the work, and it was his cemetery now. It felt like his. Almost like the cottage felt home to him, the cemetery became a matter of pride. He worked on it and worked hard. The council guy seemed impressed. Word got around about the cemetery too. Not by the younger people, but by the old people. In a small Norfolk market town? Word gets around. Mrs. Someone talks to her girlfriend in the local shop. She talks to her hairdresser. That custodian, she might say, he’s working out just fine.

  Sure, yes, she might say. Of course I heard he was a murderer. But he served his time, right?

  Maybe they’d say, ‘What the hell did he do? Twenty odd years, wasn’t it, what he got?’

  But mostly he figured they didn’t care as long as he kept their loved ones tidy, kept the place looking good. He knew the cemetery was a source of pride in the community, and they thought he was an asset. He got the good looks when he went into town. People were beginning to say hello to him in shops.

  He felt great, in fact, like he felt when he was digging in the dark.

  He felt like maybe he could be home.

  Digging hard, a light sweat under his jumper despite the evening chill, he heard something, something rustling in the bushes. His first thought was that it was an animal, or a bird, or something. He didn’t know a damn thing about what lived in the bushes, but he certainly wasn’t superstitious. He hadn’t forgotten seeing Harrison with his buggy in the dark, the night the second boy was murdered. He hadn’t forgotten seeing the old lady.

  He was surprised when a little girl came out of the bushes though. Really surprised, because she looked like a monster, something memory left over from his younger years, maybe, when he used to watch the Saturday morning picture shows as a little kid way back in the fifties, then on television in the sixties.

  Monster, he thought, but then something else, because she turned that beautiful single eye up at him and smiled, and her face shone with innocence.

  Then his second and third thoughts were that she was a wonderful little girl and that she was dead.

  Her clothes were outdated. She was smiling at him, solid enough, but there was something about her that reminded him of the night he’d seen Harrison with his buggy and the old woman, the night he’d found the dead boy and the girl, holding the shaking girl in his arms...the way he shook that night and the way he shook now, because the little girl was obviously a ghost.

  He wasn’t a superstitious man. He didn’t particularly believe in ghosts, but he couldn’t deny the evidence of his eyes, because one minute the girl was there, then with a grin she backed into the bushes, like she was playing, but when he went and looked for her there was nothing there, nothing there at all. No footprints in the damp earth, but there was something that tickled. A smell.

  A smell like...

  Pipe smoke?

  *

  41.

  ‘Fuck is he doing?’ said PC James, from way back deep in the bushes, dewy drops running down his face.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said PC Davis.

  James could make out Burlock’s shape in the distance by the soft light of the Coleman lantern. He watched him turn, startled. Stop for a second and lay down the shovel he was holding and head into bushes that ran over by the new section of the cemetery.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Davis.

  ‘Quiet down a minute,’ said James. Listening hard, even though from the distance they hid they couldn’t even hear the shovel biting into the dirt.

  They’d had a few nights off, but DI Terry had wanted them out in the cemetery the night that Franklin Sampson’s grave was dug, and the night after.

  ‘Just in case,’ the DI said. ‘Just in case.’

  PCs James thought it was a big waste of time, a time sink, like the games Davis played on Facebook in the station. But then maybe they’d hit gold. Elton rooted around in the bushes, like he was looking for something. Then they could see him shrug, his wide shoulders framed by the light behind him. Then he turned back to his work and finished.

  ‘We’ll wait for him to finish, go and check it out.’

  ‘Really?’ said Davis, disappointment obvious in his voice. But that was why Davis would never see a promotion, and maybe James would.

  ‘It’s a...’ James was hesitant to say lead, but couldn’t find a word that fitted more perfectly. Something off kilter, a discordant note, and really, no one had a thing to go on throughout the whole case.

  It didn’t sit right with them, knowing that someone had murdered two people in the cemetery, and that they’d probably get away with it, but when Elton finished up and headed back to his cottage, and James and David went to Sampson’s empty grave, they found nothing. Nothing in the bushes - not a hint that there was anything there.

  ‘Probably thought about going for piss,’ said Davis.

  But James knew that was wrong. He couldn’t for the life of him figure it out, but he would. If he could put a stop to this...could be the making of him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘back to the bushes.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Davis, grumpy, ‘Really? It’s fucking freezing.’

  ‘You want to tell Terry we fucked up again, if something happens? You want to tell Freddy?’

  Davis shrugged, his shoulders barely visible in the darkness.

  ‘Didn’t think so. Come on. Coffee and a game of eye spy.’

  ‘Can’t fucking see anything,’ said Davis, feeling surly and cold.

  James shook his head, imperceptible movement. They stood in the cold, in the bushes, getting damp and drinking coffee, but the little girl didn’t show. The woman in black didn’t show. The man with the buggy.

  James had seen two of the three before, but he hadn’t, really. Had he?

  He wondered about that, as he shifted from foot to foot and drank good coffee turning cool, until the sun came up.

  Elton Burlock was asleep the whole time, and when James and Davis were warm in bed, Elton was getting up.

  But before that, the night drew on.

  *

  42.

  Elton washed off the dirt back in his cottage. He ran hot water from the bathroom sink over his hands and forearms, scrubbing hard with a nail brush to get his nails clean. He took his clothes off and put them in a wicker basket he’d carried back from the supermarket that he put his dirty clothes in for a weekly trip to the launderette.

  He washed his face and brushed his teeth and took a glass of water to bed. His muscles ached, lightly, but it was a good ache. The more tired he was, the better he slept. Sometimes, lately, in his comfortable old bed with its new mattress, he didn’t even dream. Or if he did, at least he forgot about it in the morning.

  He lay staring at the dark ceiling rose in the centre of the room. He thought about his cottage, his cemetery and how he was slowly coming to love this afterlife that he was living.

  He didn’t think about cleavers. He didn’t think about beating a man to death.

  But he did get to wondering. He tried not to, shifted under his quilt and stared at the wall, turned, stared at the curtains. He was wondering, and he couldn’t stop.

  He thought about old crazy guys, and small beautiful girls with strange heads and small hands.

  He thought about two murders and a death.

  It wasn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep.

  *

  43.

  A woman dressed all in white knelt before him, and he felt guilty because she was unzipping his supermarket trousers and he couldn’t do anything but let her. He was a married man, but he was interested, and she was the most stunning woman he had ever seen. Everything about her said that she knew you wanted her. Something else, some promise in her eye
s, in the moisture on her lips, let you know that you could do anything to her you wanted, and that she’d come. She’d buck underneath you, giving soft gasps, holding onto you with her pussy and squeezing. You couldn’t deny her sex, you couldn’t deny she was the most beautiful, the sexiest...woman...ever...

  Better looking than Georgia? Sexier than Georgia?

  Elton moaned in his sleep, turning in the covers, his legs in tangles between the covers.

  Georgia didn’t matter. All that mattered was the woman in white, kneeling now. God, it had been so long...

  She took him out of his trousers and brought her mouth toward him, but he pushed her away.

  His father told him many things. Told him how to count the days in a month using his knuckles. Told him you do a job until a job’s done. But he also told him one other thing, a thing he’d always remembered. That the hardest thing for a man was to say no to a woman, and God, he believed his old man now.

  She smiled, and there was something of the dark about her smile. Like she knew what she was going to get, whether he wanted to give it or not.

  She lay back on the grass, right over Franklin Sampson’s grave. But he hadn’t put the grass or the dirt back yet. She sank down into the grave. Her pussy became the grave, enticing him in, bringing him to his death.

  But she wasn’t Georgia.

  ‘Stop,’ said a voice and the woman in white was there before him again, but this time, whimpering, like a dog, a pet, chagrined and panting while she was shuffling her dress back down over herself.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said the voice.

  ‘Sister,’ said the woman in white, and Elton turned to see the little girl. She wore sensible shoes, he saw, and that was good, because a child’s feet were delicate things. He thought then of Francis, his beautiful little girl, and something about this girl reminded him of her, perhaps more a feeling, of sadness and beauty lost.