Bury Them Deep

by Oswald, James

  But nothing happened.

  Bayne reacted first. He had dropped his grip on the boy with the knife, pulled his other hand away from Renfrew as he turned to see what was happening. The stunned silence changed to murmurs, and then cries of alarm. The collective stupor that had spread over the congregation was dissipating fast. Then the old man shouted at Sergeant Donaldson.

  ‘Get him out of there. Now.’ He didn’t wait to see if his order was carried out, instead turned back to the altar. This time he grabbed the boy’s hand more roughly, but the magic was swiftly dissipating, the moment lost. Alexander fought him for control of the knife, until Bayne cuffed the boy across the face. With a high-pitched yelp of pain, Alexander fell to the floor, relinquishing his grip. The old man caught the knife, spun it in his hand like a professional, and raised it high again. He mouthed a silent prayer, placed his other hand back on Renfrew’s breast, thumb and index finger spread to mark the position of her heart.

  McLean was already swinging the heavy chain around as Bayne brought the knife swiftly down. Iron met bone, and the blade shattered. A sound far louder than any explosion reverberated through the chamber, shook the ground under their feet, rattled the nearby hills and distant mountains. Cracks ran through the stone walls and ceiling, meeting at the high point above the font. Dust and small rocks fell to the ground.

  ‘What have you done?’ Bayne stared at the remains of the knife in his hand. A solid handle fashioned from old wood and leather, and poking from it like a bad fracture, the ragged stub of bone that was all that remained of the blade. Then the old man lifted it high again, his other hand moving up towards Renfrew’s neck, sizing it up for a slicing cut.

  This time McLean’s chain and ring hit him square in the face. His head snapped around, blood spraying from mouth and nose, along with something that might have been teeth or might have been dentures. Bayne toppled sideways, falling to the floor with a noise like breaking sticks.

  McLean paused, panting at the exertion, then looked up to see the congregation staring at him. They all faced him from the other side of the altar, and they all had a mad, angry gleam in their eyes that didn’t bode well for either him or Renfrew. The boy, Alexander, lay on his back on the ground where he had fallen. His face was a picture of fear and confusion. Everyone else looked murderous.

  ‘You’re all under arrest. Conspiracy to murder.’

  Even to his own ears, it sounded weak. He might as well have shouted at a herd of cattle. They moved in slowly at first, hesitant, eyes on his swinging chain. But then someone who might have been a senior civil servant he had once met at a police liaison committee meeting lunged forward with an animal snarl on his lips. McLean hefted the chain and its ring, swung it round and caught the man in the side. He grunted, doubled over as the weight knocked the wind out of him, but the others were already spreading out. They circled around the altar and towards him; no way he could fend them all off, and he didn’t like the manner in which some of them were eyeing up Renfrew either. She had to be dead, he was sure, but they looked like they might rip her apart anyway.

  A young woman leaped at him from the side, and he was forced to duck back to avoid her outstretched, claw-like fingers. As if that had given them permission, the rest of them fell upon the body lying on the altar like vultures. Something collided with the side of his head, a glancing blow that darkened his vision even as his reflexes kicked in. McLean dropped low, lashed out with his still-bound hands. There were bodies everywhere, too many for an effective attack, and half of them focused solely on the woman laid out on the altar. Roaring in defiance, he sprang up, speed his best weapon in the confined space. He pushed hard at the chest of a woman with mad eyes and unkempt hair, hardly waiting to see her fall backwards and take out three other people before he swung around and swept the heavy chain into a group coming at him from the other direction. It snagged around an outstretched arm, snapped bone. As someone screamed more in frustrated rage than pain, McLean saw the young boy, Alexander, back on his feet and desperately trying to pull his father away as he clawed at Renfrew’s body. At least someone still had their wits about them.

  He pulled at the chain, and another scream erupted from the man around whose broken arm it was wrapped. McLean stepped forward, smashed his forehead down, felt the man’s nose explode. No point in trying to fight fair, he tugged the chain free as the man went down, then let out a quiet ‘Fuck’ as he saw who had stepped in to take his place.

  Police Sergeant Andrew Donaldson was a big man, fully six foot four and with the heavy build of an active lifestyle despite his advancing years. Any thought McLean might have had of appealing to his professionalism disappeared as he saw the sergeant’s face. The spring water had painted it a rosacea red, matting his grey hair to his skull like bloody bandages. He bared his teeth like a wolf. A low animal growl rumbled up from his throat as he advanced.

  McLean took one step back, foot wobbling on something uneven. He tensed his arms, felt the weight of the chain that was both his only weapon and his biggest restriction. Hands tied together, he could only swing it, and that took time to get momentum. Donaldson’s eyes might have been wide and mad, but he was still smart enough to know it too. He crouched low, ready to close in. Another step back, and this time McLean’s foot slipped, forcing him down onto one knee. Off balance, there was nothing he could do as Donaldson pounced except fall backwards, put his hands up to try and stop the killing blow.

  The cavern echoed with the grunts and screams of a mob turned animal. McLean lashed out with a foot, but the sergeant dodged the blow, pinned him down. Large hands reached in and grabbed him round the throat, choking the breath from him as he struggled to free himself. Too heavy, too strong, Donaldson had the upper hand. Even as McLean tried to smash his clenched fists into the sergeant’s side, he could feel the weakness in his arms, see the light grow dim as his brain was starved of oxygen. He was going to die here, in this hellhole cavern hidden underneath the Moorfoot hills. He’d never see Emma again. Never have the chance to apologise for being so useless.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he tried to say, even though he had no breath left.

  Then something erupted on the other side of the altar and the world lit up in painful, brilliant light.

  Shielded by the rock, McLean was spared the brunt of the explosion. Donaldson wasn’t so lucky. One moment he was there, squeezing the life out of McLean’s neck. The next he was tugged away by some unseen hand, picked up and thrown against the wall a few metres away. If his neck went crack as it twisted too far, McLean didn’t hear it. The blast was so loud it had turned almost instantly to muffled silence, and the sergeant slumped to the ground without so much as a word, clearly dead.

  Others nearby weren’t so lucky. Rocks thrown by the explosion had smashed heads, broken arms, punched holes in bodies. McLean struggled to his feet, the dust-filled air choking him even as he desperately needed to gasp it down. It was only as he leaned his still-cuffed hands on the altar for support that he realised Renfrew was missing. She lay at his feet, rolled off the altar either by the throng or by the explosion. Her body was twisted almost as badly as Sergeant Donaldson, but as he watched, she spasmed, retched, began to spew out what seemed like gallons of dark red liquid. Not blood, but the water from the spring.

  The silence morphed into a high-pitched whine, his ears beginning to recover. McLean bent down, doing what he could to gently ease Renfrew into a better position. How she was alive, he couldn’t begin to understand. Unconscious in the water she should surely have drowned. And yet she flinched at his touch, if only weakly. Her skin was still stained red, darker bruises and scrapes beginning to form where she had been attacked by the mob.

  ‘Shallow breaths. Take your time.’ He barely heard the words, doubted she did either. Fuzzy, indistinct noises that might have been shouts began to fill the cavern. He risked a peek over the altar, and saw through the settling dust to the entrance across the other
side.

  Only there was no entrance.

  Where there had been a neatly carved arch, fitted with stout iron-banded oak doors, now there was a gaping, irregular hole. Rocks piled around the floor like broken teeth punched from a drunk man’s face. Cracks zigzagged through the arch of the ceiling, wide enough to shove a fist in. Half of the flaming torches had gone out, along with the strange glow from the font. As he shook his head to try and get rid of the water in his ears, McLean saw pinpricks of brighter light spear through the dust from the tunnel beyond the entrance. In moments they resolved themselves into the beams from torches strapped to the side of semi-automatic weapons, carried by a fully tooled-up armed-response unit. He let out an inaudible sigh of relief. DC Harrison might have gone a bit over the top with the backup, but it looked like the cavalry had arrived just in the nick of time.

  69

  ‘Hold still a moment, sir. There. That should do it.’

  McLean leaned over the stone altar, arms out as if he were in prayer while an ARU officer freed him from his chains. He hadn’t appreciated quite how much they weighed until they dropped to the floor with a clang even he could hear, albeit as if underwater. His arms rose upwards of their own accord, in supplication to whatever bizarre version of God the people now being taken away for questioning had worshipped.

  ‘Thank you. That’s much better.’ He rubbed at the chafe marks around his wrists, then winced in pain as the pins and needles set in.

  ‘Might want to get that seen by someone, sir,’ the ARU officer said, then wandered off to the far side of the cavern. Despite the ominous cracks, the ceiling hadn’t shifted at all. The dust had settled, matting everything but the bubbling surface of the spring as it filled the stone font.

  ‘We should get you out of here, sir.’ DC Harrison stood close by, her nervousness all too apparent. McLean agreed with her, but there were a couple of things he needed to do first. Still rubbing at his wrists, he walked over to where Sergeant Donaldson lay, head at an impossible angle. He pressed a finger to the sergeant’s neck to be sure, but he was certainly dead.

  ‘I thought he was one of the good ones, which just goes to show.’ He stepped carefully around the rubble strewn across the floor until he reached the prone form of Sandy Bayne. Unlike Donaldson, he lay on his front in a pose that was almost natural. To the casual observer he might merely have been unconscious. The pasty texture of his skin said otherwise; that and the lack of any discernible breathing. He had no pulse and was cold to the touch already.

  ‘Give me a hand here, will you?’ McLean gestured for Harrison to help, and together they rolled Bayne onto his side. He had trapped his arm underneath him as he had fallen, the ceremonial knife with its shattered nub of bone blade pierced his breast, exactly where his heart should have been. Poetic justice? Maybe. It would save the cost of a trial, at least.

  They lowered his body back down gently as, nearby, a pair of paramedics attended to Anya Renfrew, making sure she was stable before they took her away. Face covered by an oxygen mask, and a saline drip already in her arm, they had covered her nakedness with a blanket. Her head flopped over to the side and she looked straight at McLean, but there was no recognition in those eyes, and neither was there any sense of fear or alarm. It could have been whatever they had given her to help with the pain of course.

  ‘What . . .’ Harrison paused as if unsure how to voice her question. ‘What exactly happened here, sir?’

  McLean stood up slowly. His hearing was still recovering from the blast, and he knew that technically he should be handing the crime scene over to someone else to process. He was too close, too involved, and possibly too concussed to be of any use.

  ‘He might’ve been able to tell us.’ He waved a hand at Bayne’s prone figure. Then he turned slowly and pointed at Donaldson. ‘I reckon he was second in command. So I guess we’ll have to piece it all together from the statements we get from everyone else. But basically they were going to sacrifice Renfrew, drink her blood and eat her flesh. Apparently that makes them pure or something.’ He didn’t add that they’d been doing it for centuries, possibly millennia, generation upon generation of the Bayne family. Formerly Bean, which derived from the Latin, bene. The root of benevolent, good, blessed, sacred. He’d have laughed then, if there wasn’t the horrible chance that once he started he’d not be able to stop.

  ‘I saw her skin,’ Harrison said. ‘Their hands are the same. Is that blood? Paint?’

  McLean looked over to the font, the spring water now running clear. If what Bayne had said was true, then the time for the ceremony had passed. Would it ever run red again?

  ‘Bale.’ He was striding towards the font before the word was even out. How could he have forgotten?

  ‘Bale?’ Harrison echoed him, catching up as he reached the stone lip. In the poorly lit cavern, the depths were black, impossible to make out anything in there. No more the strange glowing light from the depths.

  ‘He was here,’ McLean said, even though the whole episode had the feel of a dream about it. Everyone else in the cavern had been acting as if they’d been on a bad acid trip, so maybe some of it had rubbed off on him too. ‘He went in there. I didn’t see him come back out.’

  If Harrison thought him mad, she kept it to herself. She called one of the ARU officers over and had him point his torch into the water. The stone sides disappeared down further than the beam could penetrate, but something floated in the centre, only a few feet below the surface. Something large that spun slowly as the current eddied around it.

  ‘Fetch a rope or something, can you?’ McLean asked. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the object began to shift from its slow circle. Inch by inch it rose towards them, but he knew well before it broached the surface what it was. Who it was. The ARU officer packed away his torch and reached in to haul the body out. No miraculous recovery, no spluttering up of mysterious red liquid. Norman Bale’s skin had that puckered look of having spent too long in the bath, and unlike Renfrew, he was pasty white. No miracle of transubstantiation for him. No redemption from his god.

  They laid him out on the dusty, rubble-strewn ground, and the ARU officer felt for a pulse. He left his fingers at the wet neck for long moments before finally pulling them away, prised open one eyelid and shone a torchlight into the pupil.

  A shake of the head.

  Norman Bale was truly dead.

  It took McLean a while to pick a route out of the cavern through the fallen stone and remains of the door. He stared for a while at the heavy boulders before realising he was looking at a body crushed by the fall. Morag Bayne had gone the same way as her husband, it would seem. She must have been dead, or a paramedic would have been trying to revive her. Had she been fleeing the mob? He recalled her reluctance to join in with the ceremony, the way she no more than touched Renfrew’s body where others had pushed the sacrifice deep under the water. It was a puzzle they would never solve now.

  A couple of soldiers stood to one side of the ragged entrance, staring at the mess and arguing among themselves about something.

  ‘Maybe went a bit heavy on the explosives, lads,’ McLean said to them in passing. ‘Not that I’m complaining, you understand.’

  ‘You were in there when it happened?’ The soldier who asked the question looked at him with a quizzical eye, then past him to see if there were any arresting officers about.

  McLean stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out his warrant card. It was damp, like everything else about him, but he showed it to them anyway. Both soldiers still looked at him as if he might attack them at any moment, so he added: ‘I’m one of the good guys. Glad you arrived when you did, even if the explosion was a bit . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘That’s the thing, sir. We only used enough to shatter the lock. It’s almost as if the door was already rigged to explode if it was interfered with. Like a booby trap. Only we can’t see how they could have d
one it. There’s no residue, no wires.’

  McLean shrugged again. Yes, it was a mystery, but it was someone else’s mystery. He had no energy or enthusiasm for such questions. He left them to their quiet argument and carried on up the wide tunnel.

  When he emerged at the top of the steps, he was surprised to find it was still full daylight. Somehow it felt as if much more time should have passed than that. There was something else strange about the scrubby ground around the barrows too. Apart from the milling groups of police officers and yet more soldiers. He took a deep breath of pine-scented air, and that was when he realised what it was. The foul death stench that had permeated the place before had vanished. He no longer felt the urge to flee deep in his core. Of course, that might just have been the bone weariness that blotted out everything else.

  ‘Tony?’ The familiar voice had him turning to see Detective Chief Superintendent Jayne McIntyre. Her eyes widened as she saw his face, so he reckoned he must have looked quite a state. Standing beside her, leaning on an elegant cane, Grace Ramsay merely raised an eyebrow and tutted.

  ‘I’d heard you weren’t much of a one for following protocol,’ she said, just loud enough for him to hear. The ringing in his ears from the explosion had only begun to dissipate, although at least outside the echoes no longer hurt his brain.

  ‘What are you –?’

  ‘Grace was filling me in on the details of her investigations when word came through about what you were up to. It was her who suggested calling in the soldiers from Penicuik, seeing as they were closest.’

  ‘Helps that their commander’s an old friend too.’ Ramsay hobbled up to him as she spoke, her final question a hopeful whisper he could hardly hear above the whining in his ears. ‘Anya?’