The Blood That Stains Your Hands (32 page)

Why did he do that? Why would you bury someone in an already marked grave, and highlight the headstone with a new engraving?

But I know. I know already. Those words, they have nothing to do with the man who dug up this grave and placed another body in it. Those words just appeared, the same as that girl has appeared in my head so often.

Shovel into the grass and into ground, the earth soft with the cacophonous rain. Not trying to do a neat job, or an anything job. Just need to get it done. Cut a square of grass, lift out the first wedge. Aware that Wallace is standing over me.

'I'm going to call it in, sir,' he says.

I pause, my back to him. Good lad.

'Give me twenty minutes, Stevie,' I say, turning, 'then you can call it in. OK?'

He stares down at me. The rain falls straight, without a breath of wind.

Wallace leaves. I start digging. Head's not screwed on straight. I dig, don't think. A few minutes later, I'm aware that he's back. I've barely begun. I don't want him to tell me that Taylor's already on his way. He surprises me by appearing with a shovel, and starting to dig from the other end.

I pause for a moment, watch his first couple of scoops.

'Thanks,' I say.

'You were never going to do it in twenty minutes, sir,' he says.

*

W
e dig. No idea about the time. And he was right. The constable knows a lot more about digging a hole than I do, it appears. Whatever the time is, it's a lot longer than twenty minutes, even with two of us. At some point we hit the lid of the coffin. Only space for me in the pit, Wallace at the side, moving earth out of the way.

I've no intention of attempting to make this a clean operation. I don't need elaborate space around the coffin. I'm not looking to raise the thing and carefully remove the lid. I just need to clear the earth from part of the lid, to smash the top with the shovel, to break in, to find what I know I'm going to find.

What if I'm wrong?

The thought barely crosses my mind. Occasionally flits in and out.

Am I still crying? Jesus, I don't know anymore. Maybe I have been the whole time. Consumed. Consumed by the need to open the coffin, and find the body of the girl. She's going to be here, I know she is.

Standing at the thin end of the coffin, the shovel now scraping along the lid at the top, picking up the sodden dirt, tossing it in clumps up to the surface. Soaking rain, pitch darkness. How am I even going to see anything? Thinking of problems as they arise.

'You got a torch?' I shout.

Why am I shouting? Above the pounding of the rain, the pounding in my head.

I pitch up some more earth. He doesn't answer. I look up, and then he shines a narrow beam of light down onto the top of the coffin.

Hear a car pull up outside the church. Someone in a rush. Not the only ones.

The light shining down on the dirty, sodden coffin lid, I lift the shovel and thump it down as hard as I can in the confined space.

Footsteps. Aware of more torchlight bouncing around above my head.

Another hit with the shovel, a crack of old, damp wood.

'Constable!'

The light shining on the coffin lifts. Drive the shovel in again. Louder noise. Do it again, quickly.

'Constable?'

Taylor, barking. Not alone. Constable Wallace says nothing. Suddenly there are two torches being shone down onto my coffin, another in my face.

Bring the shovel back down onto the lid.

'Hutton? Hutton! What the fuck are you doing?'

Angry words. Angry words and rain and light all pouring down. With the light, I can see the coffin lid is cracking.

Taylor's not stopping me. Doesn't know what to do. I don't look up to see who's with him. Feet to the side of the coffin, jam the shovel into the crack in the wood and start to prise it open. The wood is cracked and old and damp, getting damper by the pouring, bloody, torrential second.

'Jesus, Hutton,' shouts Taylor.

The light goes into my face again for a second, and then back down onto the coffin lid.

Rain. Rain. So much fucking rain. Fucking Scotland.

The wood doesn't give as much as I think it's going to. Bring the shovel back down onto the lid. Again. Again.

'Hutton!'

Try to prise it open again, but it's not breaking apart yet. Toss the shovel up onto the ground, then wedge my feet against the sides of the pit and lean forward. Grab the wood, start pulling it. Immediately hands cut and splintered, pain jags into them. Ignore it, rip wood.

A large piece lifts up from the middle, bend it perpendicular, then push it back with my feet. A ten, twelve-inch gap opens up. Three torches shine into it. With the rain and the confused light it's not all immediately apparent, but I know what I'm looking at, and soon enough, those other three see it.

'Hutton?' says Taylor.

The urgency has gone from his voice. Now he's questioning.

In the dark and the rain and the convergence of torches there's a mat of long hair, bones, skulls, one lying on top of the other, a faded dress, a faded cardigan.

I know the dress. I know the cardigan.

Oh, I'm crying now. Not just the rain. On my knees, on a broken coffin lid. In the dark.

'Hutton!'

––––––––

S
itting in Taylor's car. The rain has stopped. Fuck. Wouldn't you know? Doesn't matter.

Cup of coffee. Voices outside. Windows steamed up. Soaking, cold, hands circled around the coffee, hoping the warmth travels up my arms. Shaking slightly, tissues wrapped around cut fingers, but slowly pulling myself together.

More of our lot have arrived. Mrs Buttler has been alerted. Lights are being set up prior to a proper excavation of the grave taking place. Only been a few minutes. Fifteen maybe. Twenty. Look at the clock. Realise I've lost track of time. 20:37.

Car door opens and Taylor gets in. Doesn't have coffee. Puts the key in the ignition, but doesn't start the car.

'You need to go home,' he says.

'The girl,' I say, before he asks the question. 'The girl who gave me the book. I told you about the girl. That's her in the grave.'

He looks sharply at me.

'What? When did she die?'

OK, that was a bad start. Straighten myself out. This is no place for ghosts and absurdity and whatever the fuck this is. I don't know who gave me that Book of Daniel, but it wasn't her. She's dead, and has been for over forty years.

'There's been a girl haunting me. In my head. Can't explain it, but, you know, if anything, it's probably because I've been so fucked up. I don't know, I've been open to this kind of thing. Whatever that is.'

More coffee. Keep talking. Don't let him ask questions.

'Baxter, the old guy, the old minister, he said, find the girl. You need to find the girl. I checked back. Old records, missing persons, murders. Discovered that the vicar, Forsyth, he'd been married in the fifties, sixties, had a kid. The kid vanished. Never seen again. His marriage fell apart, he came to live here. I found the wife, she showed me a picture of the missing kid. It was the girl in my nightmares. I'd seen this grave, I just knew that's where she'd be.'

'What's her name?' he asks.

That's good. A request for basic information, taking for granted everything else. I can't handle disbelief.

'Daisy Compton. It's her. I recognize the dress.'

'You think... I don't know, what do you think?' he says.

'He killed her. Who knows why? Maybe it was an accident, maybe he was abusing her and she was going to talk. Who knows? He buried her in a graveyard, and then got a position in this town to watch over her. And he was going to make damn sure no one ever sold this land and dug up the grave.'

'Fuckity,' he says.

Fuckity?

More coffee. Finally turn and look at him. Getting back to normal. He's helped me by not expressing incredulity at how I came to be scraping away at a coffin lid in the pouring rain and the dark.

'You still have him in custody?'

He shakes his head. 'Let him out...' checks the clock '... more than four hours ago.'

'We need to go and see him.'

'You need to get home.'

'We need to go.'

He starts the engine.

*

P
ulling up outside the old fella's house. Looks like a small light on in the hallway, nothing else showing. Wonder if he's taken the opportunity to leg it, yet why would he?

'What was going on with him and Cartwright?' I ask, breaking the silence of the previous few minutes.

'He was part of Cartwright's plan,' says Taylor. 'That's all. Asked them both separately about it. They obviously had no opportunity to confer. They said the same thing. A grand conspiracy. Think they just enjoyed, God, I don't know, the intrigue. Made them feel like they were in a Dan Brown novel.'

Stops the car and we get out. The air is damp and cold, but no rain.

'So it could have been this guy who killed the other four, just as much as it could have been Cartwright?'

He nods.

'Did you let Cartwright go?'

'Yep. Just didn't have enough to charge him, so we had to. Connor was spitting.'

Up the garden path. Ring the bell, wait in silence.

Turn away, look across the road. Curtains closed, can practically hear the televisions of the street blaring out their mindless crap.

Taylor tries the handle and the door opens. He gives me a glance and walks in. We pause in the hallway. Little sign of life other than the small lamp, but looking down we can see the timer plug behind it, meaning it will have come on automatically.

'Forsyth!' he calls out.

Looks up the stairs, then he mutters, 'Fuck,' and pushes open the door into the front room.

Reverend Forsyth is dead, a single spike hammered into his eye socket.

The room feels cold, and for the first time in a while I'm aware of my soaking, dripping clothes.

––––––––

T
hree hours later. Almost midnight. Standing over Forsyth's dead body. Taylor and I have just arrived and Balingol has been doing his thing.

The spike has been removed from the eye. A dark, bloody, empty socket looks back at us. Have barely seen Taylor since we found the body. I stayed with the stiff and headed up the on-the-ground investigation. He legged it over to Cartwright's joint to speak to him, possibly to re-arrest him.

Naturally enough, this time the man had alibis coming out of his ears. He'd just been released from police custody. It was pretty inevitable that his wife and more than one other member of his family would be there to meet him, then take him home for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Then Taylor had the job of informing Mrs Faraday that we might have found her daughter. We don't know for sure, yet. It wasn't like the body we found was obviously identifiable from the picture the woman had shown me earlier, or from the girl that had walked through my nightmares for the past couple of weeks. We should be able to complete formal identification tomorrow.

Forsyth. A single spike in the eye. The words from Daniel are just sitting there in my head. How does that happen? I only read them once or twice.

'Same sedative as previously administered?' asks Taylor.

'Indeed,' says Balingol.

'Anything other than the obvious?'

'Doesn't seem to be. Single spike to the eye socket, and as you can see here...' and he indicates the spike, which is lying on a small table next to the cadaver, 'it's long, fairly blunt and quite thick. Hammered in, I imagine. Might have caused the victim a peculiar sensation or two before he expired.'

Expired. Nice. Like a parking permit.

Feels cold in here. My clothes have not really dried out. Beginning to get shivery. Need to go home, get out of these. Dreaming of a warm shower.

'Time of death?'

'I think, quite possibly within an hour of him being released.'

Taylor lets out a long sigh. It's unavoidable. If he hadn't released him, he wouldn't be dead. Although, of course, the only reason to have kept him would have been because of some belief that he was the killer, which he very clearly was not. Unless, of course, he was part of a team, and someone else is tying up loose ends.

'There's a pattern to these, is there?' asks Balingol.

Taylor looks at me.

'"I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things."'

They look at me. The words are just there, in my head. I don't know how.

'This was the little horn, you think?' says Balingol, having come to terms with the fact that someone unexpected was spouting badass biblical shit.

I nod. Taylor, however, is still regarding me as a curiosity. He turns back to Balingol.

'You had a chance to look at the girl?' he asks.

I look round. Hadn't noticed it when I came in, but there she is, the small figure on the other side of the room, shrouded in white.

Shrouded in white, and impossibly sad. Jesus.

I wonder if I'll see her tonight.

Shiver again, rub my arms, once more try to throw melancholy out of sight.

'You look cold, Tom,' says Taylor. 'You should get home.'

'Will in a minute.'

'Blow to the head,' says Balingol. 'That's what I took from a cursory glance. If you don't mind, I think I might go home and do a more thorough investigation in the morning. Maybe I'll get Dr Baird to look at it.'

'Of course,' says Taylor.

He turns away, rubs his eyes, looks at the door. Is he expecting Connor to walk in here any minute, demanding answers and action?

'Fuck,' he mutters. Voice low. Balingol gives him a glance, a raised eyebrow, then pulls a sheet over the top of the Reverend Forsyth's body.

'See you in the morning, Bill,' he says.

Balingol replies without speaking. Taylor starts to walk to the door and I fall in behind.

'You get home, Sergeant.'

'You too.'

'Just going to tie up a few things at my desk. You need to get a shower, get into bed, or you'll be coming down with the flu, some shit like that. We don't want you off sick when you get suspended, now, do we?'