by M J Lee
‘Morning, Charlie, what are you doing here?’
Charlie Whitworth stroked his moustache. ‘Wouldn’t miss your first day on the job, would I, Ridpath? And anyway, this is about that bastard Dalbey. Me and John Gorman were the ones who put him away.’
Mr Health and Safety leant into their conversation with his hand held out. ‘Rob Campbell, Health and Safety.’
Charlie Whitworth ignored the hand and continued speaking to Ridpath. ‘Alice Seagram was his fourth victim. You caught him with the fifth, remember?’
How could he forget? The day he had chased after James Dalbey, catching him in the lock-up next to the allotments. The police arriving. Looking up and seeing the girl – Freda Scott was her name. Naked and shackled to a blood-spattered wall at the rear of the building. Covering her with his jacket as she shivered in his arms. Her words’: ‘Save me…save me…save me,’ repeated again and again and again.
‘No…no…no…Albert, they need to be wearing their masks. They can’t take them off to breathe.’ Mr Health and Safety matched off to the graveside.
‘Dalbey’s trying to wriggle out of it. Prove his conviction was dodgy to get a pardon.’
‘He was a vicious bastard, Charlie.’
‘Aye, but we nicked him.’
The gravediggers had put their masks back on and returned to digging.
‘How did yesterday go?’
‘Mrs Challinor doesn’t have much time for Jim Howells.’
‘Who would? But let us know what’s going on there, Ridpath. Wouldn’t like it to get away from us.’
Ridpath turned to face his boss for the first time. ‘Second time you’ve asked me. I’m no nark, Charlie.’
‘Never said you were, but—’
The sound of the tip of a spade hitting wood.
‘Looks like we’ve hit the mother lode,’ Campbell shouted back towards them. ‘And she’s in good condition, too, from the sound of it.’
The gravediggers quickly removed the remaining earth covering the casket and jumped out of the grave. The undertaker took his own time putting on a white Tyvek suit, finally pulling on a pair of bright-pink plastic gloves given to him by Mr Health and Safety. He lowered himself into the grave, carefully placing his boots on either side of the coffin.
‘Apparently I have to observe this part,’ Ridpath said, moving to the graveside.
The undertaker was bent double, carefully scraping the last remnants of soil off the tarnished brass nameplate on the lid of the coffin. ‘I can read the name. It’s Alice Seagram.’
Ridpath remembered the words from the file he was supposed to say at this time. ‘Please remove the coffin, Mr Ronson.’ He then stepped back to allow the gravediggers to move the trestle, with its lifting ropes, over the grave.
The undertaker removed himself from the grave with an athleticism which surprised Ridpath.
‘Fancy breakfast? There’s a good greasy spoon next to the flower shop,’ said Charlie Whitworth, now standing beside him.
‘I’ll hang on here till the undertaker’s put the coffin in his van, and the thing is on its way to the pathologist.’
‘Following the rules to the letter, are we?’
Ridpath ignored him. The gravediggers, with the help of Ronson, were manoeuvring the ropes under the coffin so it could be lifted out of the grave. One of the gravediggers tugged on a rope attached to a pulley and the click of a ratchet echoed through the air.
The sun was fully up now, the mist being burned off by its rays. Off to the left, a blackbird was proclaiming his dominance of this graveyard from the top of an ancient yew tree.
Mr Health and Safety was encouraging the gravedigger. ‘Up a bit, slowly, that’s it, she’s coming up.’
The gravedigger was ignoring him, just going about his work with a singular concentration.
The ropes were taut and the dark, earth-stained wood of the coffin slowly rose into view. Ridpath expected a strong smell, perhaps of a rotting corpse, but there was nothing. Just the scent of the earth: a rich, black, fertile aroma.
They held the coffin above the grave as one of Ronson’s assistants brought out the gurney from the back of the van. He locked the two sets of wheels and trundled it across the grass, positioning it next to the grave.
Mr Health and Safety’s voice rang out again, loud enough to wake the dead. ‘Swing it round, gentlemen. Watch the straps.’
The gravediggers, with Ronson on one side, ignored him again, carefully moving the coffin from above the grave to the gurney. As they did so, Health and Safety decided they weren’t moving quickly enough and pushed the side of the coffin with his gloved hand. The edge caught on the side of the gurney, before wobbling for a moment and then settling down.
‘That was close,’ he said, ‘nearly fell off the straps.’
As he finished speaking, one of the straps snapped and the end of the coffin slipped down, crashing to the soft earth.
The two gravediggers and Ronson jumped backwards as the coffin landed on the ground with a loud thud. The lid popped open and slowly slid off to one side.
The undertaker recovered his composure quickly, leaning over to peer into the coffin. Then he stood upright and, in the loudest voice he had used in years, said, ‘Inspector, I think you should come and look at this.’
Ridpath stepped forward, walking around the gravedigger to stand beside the undertaker.
The man’s long arm, still with the incongruous bright-pink plastic glove covering his hand, pointed downwards. ‘The coffin…it’s empty.’
CHAPTER NINE
James Dalbey rearranged the pens on his desk so they were at exact right angles to the pale-yellow plaster walls of the cell, and checked his books were still in alphabetical order as the first rays of dawn wheedled their way through the barred window above his head.
His final act that morning had been to say three Hail Mary’s and five Our Fathers in front of the wooden cross hanging on the wall, crossing himself quickly seven times.
The bed had been neatly made already, and the toilet bowl scrubbed and cleaned. It still leaked slightly from the cistern, a drip, drip, drip into the pan every minute of every day like a liquid metronome. He had asked for it to be repaired countless times, but so far nothing had happened.
He would keep asking.
He always kept asking.
He had been assigned to this cell away from the others in the High Security Unit because nobody else would share a cell with him for more than a week. Their complaints were numerous:
‘He’s crazy, that one. Up in the middle of the night, pacing up and down like a fuckin’ robot, shaking his head and muttering to himself.’
Or:
‘He’s always fuckin’ cleanin’. All day long, does me fuckin’ head in.’
Or:
‘I hit him a couple of times, just to knock some sense in him, but he didn’t stop. Carried on folding up my stuff and arranging it. Well, it’s not on, is it? You don’t touch another con’s stuff.’
Eventually, they had given up and given him a cell on his own. He hadn’t planned it this way but he was glad it had happened. He didn’t want to be with anybody. They all smelt, the other cons. That peculiar sour prison smell of sweat and cabbage and stale sperm.
He didn’t like the smell; it reminded him of home too much.
He opened the diary on his desk and wrote down his to-do list for the day. There were just three things on it:
Write to the Seagram family.
Research the Criminal Law and Justice Act.
Research the Coroners Act 2009.
From the first day he arrived in Belmarsh, he had badgered the deputy governor with the persistence of a woodpecker searching for a beetle hidden in the bark of a tree:
Please sir, can I work in the library?
Please sir, can I work in the library?
Please sir, can I work in the library?
Please sir, can I work in the library?
Eventually, the man had allowed
him to spend three hours each day cataloguing the books. With a mind like his, the job took less than 30 minutes. The rest of the time he could do his research. And when the new deputy governor came he was allowed to take the books back to his cell.
The man believed a prisoner should use his time in jail to improve his mind.
He was going to use his time in jail to prove his innocence.
For a short time in 2014, the idiot minister, Grayling, had prevented prisoners like him from receiving new books, saying: ‘We believe offenders need to behave well and engage in their own rehabilitation if they are to earn privileges and incentives.’
What a smug tosser.
Luckily, the governor had simply ignored the edict, arguing he would have a riot on his hands if prisoners were deprived of the means of self-education.
Too right. He would have been the first on the barricades if they had shut the library. It was his only source of freedom, his only chance to escape.
‘Focus, James.’
On the floor above, he heard somebody moving. The jail was beginning to stir and the other prisoners were waking up.
What had the judge intoned that day?
‘James Dalbey, you have been found guilty of the heinous murder of one woman and the unlawful incarceration of another. You will be taken from this court and detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure for a period of 30 years.’
Pompous old prick. What did Her Majesty care for him? And why did it give her pleasure that an innocent man was going to spend time in jail?
Then the judge waved his hand like he was swatting away a fly. ‘Take him down, Sergeant.’
The copper standing next to him had gently touched his arm, turning him to go down into the cells beneath the court. From the gallery, a woman had shouted: ‘It’s too short. Hang him. Hang the bastard for what he did.’
He had wanted to turn back and tell her he was innocent, somebody else had killed Alice, proclaim the truth from where he stood in the dock, with its irregular handrail. He had asked the sergeant to fix the handrail but he had been ignored. Now, it was too late; the handrail would never be fixed.
‘Focus, James,’ he said out loud again.
The noises were getting louder along the wing. Shouts from the rapist in cell 223. Laughter from the murderer in 246. The sound of farting from the flatulent con next door. Doors sliding open, metal against metal, as the screws changed shift, whispering to each other. The creaking of the building as the cold bricks were warmed up in the early morning sun of April.
It was the one thing he missed: the sound of silence. What most people don’t realize is you can survive the mind-numbing routine. You can stand the acrid smells. You can even withstand the aching ugliness of the four green walls. But it was the lack of silence that got to him. The constant noise of prison. Even in the dead of night, when he lay in his bunk unable to sleep, there was still noise somewhere.
He missed the sound of silence.
‘Focus, James.’
James Dalbey picked up his blue pen with the 0.18 nib he had exchanged for his allowance of cigarettes, pulled a sheet of clean, white paper from the diary and wrote the first words:
Dear Mrs Seagram…
CHAPTER TEN
The lid had slipped off, forming a sharp diagonal across the top half of the coffin. The hazy morning light had crept inside to highlight an empty ivory satin pillow, sitting on a darker, yellower fabric.
Ridpath could see nothing.
He sniffed the morning air, expecting to smell the aroma of decayed flesh.
Again, nothing but the scent of freshly turned earth.
Had the body slipped down to the bottom of the coffin? Had it somehow moved when it was being buried?
Should he wait for forensics? Or take a look inside? If he called a team out to a false alarm, he would get a right bollocking for wasting time and resources.
Then he remembered he was now a coroner’s officer, not a detective any more. Could he call for a forensics team or would he have to ask Charlie to do it?
He made a decision. ‘Give me a pair of gloves.’
Mr Health and Safety reached inside his bag and produced another pair of bright-pink latex gloves, still in their wrapper. ‘It’s the only colour we’ve got in the stores,’ he said, shrugging his large shoulders.
Ridpath took them and rolled them onto his hands. He leant further forward, trying to peer deeper into the coffin.
Nothing but blackness. Still no smell though. Would the body have decomposed by now, reduced itself to an elemental mass of fat and tissue? Or would it have simply dried on the skeleton?
He didn’t know.
Tentatively, he reached out and touched the coffin lid with one pink-gloved finger.
The lid stayed where it was.
‘I don’t think you should do that, ‘said Mr Health and Safety, ‘You’re not wearing a suit. Breaks all the rules.’
Ridpath ignored him.
This time he pushed a little harder, using two fingers. The lid moved a little, wood scraping against wood as the light revealed more of the inside.
He peered into the dark interior. What was that? Something grey and mottled.
A sound to his left. He glanced back towards Charlie Whitworth, who winked at him, popping a sweet in his mouth.
Ridpath placed his fingers on the side of the coffin lid.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said Mr Health and Safety stepping backwards. The gravediggers and the sallow undertaker were both staring at him. Charlie Whitworth shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘nothing to do with me’. Even the blackbird had stopped singing from its perch in the yew tree.
They were all waiting for him to act. Perhaps, he would be the first coroner’s officer to last exactly one hour in the job before he was fired. The shortest secondment ever in the history of Manchester Police. That would go down well with the deputy chief.
Sod it – in for a penny, in for a pound. He pushed the coffin lid harder. Again the wood of the lid scraped against the base, before finally sliding off to rest against the tarpaulin.
‘What the fuck?’ said Charlie eloquently.
Inside the coffin, three mottled-grey breeze blocks with an abstract palm leaf design lay resting on the stained ivory satin lining.
Dead breeze blocks.
Very dead breeze blocks.
‘What are we going to tell the family?’ said the undertaker in his monotone.
‘I’m going to need a forensics team, Charlie.’
The DCI was bending down, staring into the empty coffin.
Ridpath repeated his request.
‘What am I going to tell them? We opened a coffin and there was nothing inside?’
‘Tell them what you want, Charlie.’ Ridpath reached into his jacket and held out his phone. ‘Or you could tell the coroner.’
The chief inspector ran his fingers through his thinning hair, scratching the bald patch on his crown. ‘And what am I going to say to the super? John Gorman is already twisting my ear about wasting resources.’
‘We need the coffin and the earth from the grave examined.’
‘Examined for what, Ridpath?’
‘The Scene of Crime Officer will tell us that when he gets here.’
‘So we have a crime scene, do we? What’s the crime?’
Ridpath looked into the empty coffin, with the three breeze blocks resting comfortably against the ivory satin lining. ‘Let’s try theft for starters. After that, we’ll see where it takes us.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lesley sat opposite the girl on a 1970s chair she’d found abandoned in the workshop upstairs. It was already 5.30 and he was late.
The girl was weeping softly, her body and soul crushed by the night she had spent alone in this wretched place. Lesley had given her water when she returned. Not too much – just enough to keep her alive. But no food. He didn’t like them to have food in case they made a mess later.
He always thought ahead.
<
br /> She examined the girl in front of her.
With her clothes removed, the body was exactly as he specified: thin to the point of emaciation with the greasy hair and sores around her mouth of a drug user. Lesley could already see her teeth were starting to go, a side effect of the chemicals used in the manufacture of crack, the girl’s drug of choice.
She checked her watch again: 5.40.
He’d told Lesley to wait until he arrived, to do nothing until he arrived. She always obeyed him, she always would.
The girl was chained to the brick wall, her wrists fastened by manacles and held slightly above her head. She had been here since the previous day. Lesley had brought her back, manacled her to the wall and injected a large dose of lorazepam into her left arm.
It would be enough to keep her quiet while Lesley went home to rest. The girl would wake up thirsty, hungry and disorientated, but no matter. They were in no rush to experiment with this one.
The building was an abandoned workshop on the edge of Stockfield, just off the A6 to Buxton. They used to make hydraulic pit head props here in the sixties and seventies, but Thatcher’s crushing of the coal industry had signalled the death of the mines in places like Poynton. They weren’t ‘economically viable’ anymore, so workshops like this and thousands of others had slowly gone out of business. The owner, he was still alive somewhere in the bottom of a whisky glass, had tried to make a go of it, but he had finally given up, retiring to his detached house in Woodhead with the decanter attached to his right hand.
‘You’ve done well, Lesley.’ He was pleased with her when she told him about the workshop over the phone. His words sent a shiver racing through her body. ‘You won’t be punished this time.’
She was happy she wasn’t going to be punished. She knew she deserved it; he told her she deserved it, but not this time. She had done well.
‘Meet me there at five o’clock tomorrow,’ he ordered.
But she couldn’t. She had to prepare her mother’s tea. Her mother always ate at the same time every evening. Five o’clock. So she could watch Noel Edmonds and Deal or no Deal, imagining herself as one of the contestants, choosing a suitcase number based on her infallible system. So far she had won six million pounds, thanks to Noel. At least that’s what her mother said.