Veil of Darkness (39 page)

The inspector makes an impatient gesture. The two coppers drag the table away and the three of them look down.

‘Good God, Mallet,
what a mess
. Come on then, let’s get busy, if the weapon’s down there we’ve got to find it. The old guy certainly went to some trouble to cover his tracks.’ And he presses his handkerchief harder against his nose. ‘There’s enough rubbish down here to set up home with.’

Like magicians emptying their pockets, the contents keep coming, never ending. Now there’s a pile of household utensils and the policemen, sleeves rolled up and covered with dust, are sweating profusely. One is inside the hole chucking stuff up, while the second shovels it out of the way.

‘Hang on,’ cries Mallet. ‘Hang on.’

‘What’s up?’

‘I dunno, but there’s something bloody odd here.’

‘Keep delving.’

When Mallet’s face next appears it is shocked. His hair is white from brick dust, his eyes are red and rimmed. ‘You better take a look, Inspector.’ And he holds back the mess with a frying pan handle. ‘Further down, under the rubble. He’s got to be dead, sir. Got to be.’

The inspector stares down in horror. ‘My God. I don’t believe it. How long has the poor bastard been stuck here?’

‘Who can he be?’ asks Bernie, enthralled.

‘This is awful,’ sobs Avril.

Kirsty stands rigid and silent, her eyes focused on a far-off place.

‘Fetch a ladder. We can’t reach him from here.’ When, five minutes later, Mallet returns with a rope, a ladder and a couple of waiters from the hotel, the inspector ties a large loop on one end and orders Mallet to climb down the ladder. Suddenly he becomes aware of the unofficial presence of the three women. He is not prepared for hysterics. This is work for the experts. ‘And clear the room at once.’

Bernie and Avril and Kirsty back out. ‘Good grief,’ exclaims Bernie, only relieved that her part in the mess around
Magdalene
has so far not been revealed. ‘This is unreal. There’s a dead man down there.’

Back inside the derelict kitchen the inspector takes a firm stand. ‘We might as well be done with it and haul him out, whoever he is,’ He turns to the others and lowers his voice, ‘Let’s hope the poor sod isn’t jammed.’

No, fortunately he is not jammed. And, after a hard struggle by Mallet on the ladder to circle the dead man’s right arm and neck, the men form a chain which reaches the door and haul hard on the rope to a great and threatening tumbling of rubble.

‘Keep heaving,’ shouts the desperate inspector, terrified he has made things worse. He should have waited for the fire brigade; he should have waited for the lab boys.

‘Heave!
Heave
!’

Slowly and grotesquely the head and shoulders of Trevor Hoskins appear above floor level. Covered in dried blood, his short black hair is matted and white with dust, his face is a yellowed mask of death. ‘Jesus!’ one of the coppers exclaims.

‘Keep heaving,’ shouts the inspector. ‘Don’t let him slip back now.’

His naked torso, once tanned and muscled, is dyed with a hectic pattern in scarlets, purples and blacks. His lower limbs are matted with blood, excrement and slime. He wears no shoes or socks.

‘Good grief,’ says Sergeant Mallet in shock as he helps to manoeuvre the heavy body over the edge to be laid out flat on firm ground.

‘Who is this man?’ enquires the inspector. ‘And how the hell did he get down there?’

But no-one in the room has an answer.

The inspector leans right over the corpse and suddenly spies the mangled ear. ‘Good God, can you believe it, the poor bastard has tried to feed himself by cutting off his own bloody ear.’

‘The ambulance will be here soon,’ one of the waiters is relieved to report.

‘We’ll all have to wait for forensics now.’

The inspector pulls back from the stench and the grisly sight of that missing left ear lobe. The poor devil must have fallen in, stripped off his clothes for some unknown reason, shouted for help to no avail and gradually starved to death. He must have been dead when that old fool Flagherty dumped his golf club and filled in the hole. The next object to emerge from the mine is the number four wood. Mallet inserts it in a plastic bag and labels it as evidence.

When the putrefying carcass of Fluffy the cat is thoughtlessly carried out by the legs, Avril, outside, collapses completely and has to be fanned with fresh air. Oh no. Fluffy obviously wandered in there by accident and toppled down the shaft.

But she was nineteen years old, after all.

Nobody ought to be too upset. In a way it’s a happy release. She didn’t suffer. She was dead when she landed.

The diseased Flagherty’s antecedence is given to the police by Colonel Parker. The explanation is quite straightforward.

After young Kirkwood’s mother was hanged, her employer, Sir Michael Geary, took him in and found him a home with a respectable family on his estate. The Flaghertys were childless and only too happy to adopt the orphan and bring him up as their own. Colonel Parker blows his multiveined nose on an off-white handkerchief. ‘The Flaghertys came to work for me, oh, fifty years ago, and young Flagherty worked in the gardens here where he has been employed ever since. Of course nobody ever let on about his rather unfortunate start. I doubt that Flagherty knew himself.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought I saw him, I could have sworn it was Graham,’ lies Avril, blushing, to the cross inspector one hour later. ‘I honestly thought I saw him talking to Ed on the golf course that morning.’

Trevor Hoskins is identified by a driving licence in his back trouser pocket.

‘Do you know what your husband might have been doing in here?’ Kirsty is questioned gently. She makes a pathetic sight, cut to the quick, shocked and terrified.

She peers out through shaking sobs. ‘No. We met. We argued. He must have decided to hang around and wait till I came off duty.’

‘How would he manage to get inside when you were the holder of the keys?’

‘Flagherty had a set of keys, too,’ Mallet reminds the inspector.

‘This must be a terrible shock,’ the inspector sympathizes. ‘We thought he’d gone into the sea; it would have been kinder if he had. The mind boggles at the thought of how that man must have suffered.’

And that same day, in the afternoon…

‘Cause of death: accidental,’ announces the coroner at the inquest which Avril has been dreading.

As the forensic evidence slowly emerged, Avril sat at the back in a trance.

‘Yes, there’s no doubt about it,’ said the coroner mournfully. ‘Mrs Stott, a rather parsimonious lady, made sure the gas container under the caravan was empty by the time her stay was ended. She was unwilling to pay for gas she might not use. Instead of replacing the large tank, she and her husband rented a smaller, portable bottle from the caravan site shop; this fuelled one gas ring, which is all the Stotts required, and it was this bottle, found to have a serious leak, which caused the fatal accident when Mrs Stott woke up in the night and felt the need to light her Wright’s vaporizer.’

BOOM!

‘And may I pass on my sincere condolences to the bereaved,’ said the coroner in conclusion.

At dinner, over a delicious paella, Candice is left with one straightforward option.

Publication must proceed, copyright being ended, and the real truth of the author’s credentials being far more fascinating than ever envisaged.

‘You might well have to return some money but that is a matter for the publishers now.’ There is no doubt that the real author’s grim identity will fill the coffers to overflowing. Nobody’s going to back out now. ‘But,’ she tells the three women generously, ‘because your re-write was so well done they will very possibly be quite happy to give you the credit and deal with you directly.’

Dollar signs pop into her eyes as she pats the original
Magdalene
, which she keeps by her side at all times.

Candice feels on top of the world while her companions seem pensive tonight. Why this should be eludes her. They are making good money out of this. They ought to be humbly grateful.

‘Cheer up!’ she encourages them breezily. ‘I know, while I go to the loo why don’t you order some champagne? It’s all on me, don’t worry.’

Avril, Bernie and Kirsty avoid one another’s eyes.

How can they allow this book to be published?

When Candice leaves they sink into silence, hardly able to carry on eating. They play with their food and stare listlessly out of the window.

It is Avril who gets up and walks determinedly round to Candice Love’s chair, her lips pressed together tightly. It is she, with her dyed, spiky hair of banana yellow, who opens the agent’s briefcase, retrieves the last copy of
Magdalene
and puts it in her own handbag. The others just watch without comment.

Eventually Bernie looks up gravely. ‘What are we going to do with it?’

‘Burn it. Does anyone disagree?’

Before Candice Love returns, the three neatly replace their napkins, pick their coats up from reception and head outside into the cold night air. Kirsty leads the way. Kirsty, who knows what she has done and suspects that the others know, too.

What do they imagine they are achieving?

There are plenty of revised copies of Magdalene in circulation. Burning the original will solve nothing now. And it seems that only they have been so grotesquely affected, the three that meddled with the author’s work.

But this is something they know they must do. Bernie follows on the path to the cove, a sleepwalker, eyes fixed to the ground. If he had accepted her proposal she would have continued to blackmail Rory until she got her fanatical way. She would have been happy to see him die rather than live life without her. All in the name of love.

And Avril, the timid one, eager to please, who was willing to burn her father and mother, to see her brother imprisoned for life, all in the name of revenge. She can’t let her thoughts take her further, she would never have harmed Kirsty’s children—would she?

And a cold shiver rends her as she totters down the path in impractical heels.

And as for Kirsty? They have their suspicions. They can hardly look at her.

They have all had such a lucky escape, but only by a whisker.

When they reach the sand they scatter and solemnly gather armfuls of twigs and branches, beachcombings brought in by the tide. The cliffs rising up behind them are a high grey curtain wall, silhouetted against the night sky. They light the fire in the centre of the beach; this is a ritual, a cleansing with pagan symbolism that comes naturally when faced with malevolence such as this. With reverence, as a priest presents a sacrifice to the altar, but with fingers so clumsy they frighten her, Kirsty lowers the book onto the pyre and the sticks crackle around it for a while, white, red and silver, until the book catches and changes the flames to the darker, more sombre colours of evil.

Avril lays a hand on Kirsty’s shoulder.

Bernie’s eyes are dry and fixed. ‘Pray for us all,’ she says.

No warmth appears to come from the fire, but a coolness blows off the slate-grey sea and they shiver as they stand round and watch
Magdalene
burn.

And the leaping flames of the fire and the newfound warmth between them are the brightest lights in the harrowing dark.

W
ITH GRAHAM STOTT’S GRUDGING
agreement the murder charge has been swapped for manslaughter to which he is pleading guilty. He will probably be out in five years.

Monies already paid in to the personal account of Bernadette Kavanagh are considered fair payment for substantial work already done. A fresh contract has been drawn up and now all those publishers involved are happy to see Kirsty’s name on the title as adaptor of the original book.

Candice, true to her nature, half to impress the publishers and half to satisfy her own sense of drama, paints a grim picture of Kirkwood the killer, which is published in the front of the book in the form of a note to the readers.

Perhaps she should not have jumped to conclusions.

Not picked on the first Ellen Kirkwood she found.

In present-day terms, the author of Magdalene was a vicious psychopath. A killer who stalked the streets of Plymouth with her grisly weapon in her hand, on the lookout for any lone man she could overpower with her apelike strength. She would offer them her body and savagely slit their throats with cheese wire when they were at their most vulnerable. She would then turn her attentions to the still-warm bodies and neatly remove certain parts: fingers, toes, ears, noses, nipples, testicles and penises. These she would wrap up in her shawl and carry home. As these were never found it has been suggested by today’s forensic experts that she probably ate them raw in some macabre ritual.

Throughout the book the discerning reader can detect many examples of Kirkwood’s madness. Nobody of a sane mind could write a book like Magdalene with all its disturbing attitudes, insinuations…

and so on and so forth.

Poor old Mrs Stokes.

She knew she was never loved.

Alfred Stokes broke Moira’s heart when he left her after one year of marriage. Thirty years her senior, he had never recovered from the love of his life, an American floozy who visited the Burleston when Alf was an impressionable bootboy of twenty. Got her pregnant, too, with the child that should have been Moira’s, leaving her barren in body and mind with a womb like a dried-up fig.

She knew of the child from the start because of the air-mail letters, and anyway, Alf didn’t bother to hide it, discretion was not his forte. They kept arriving after Alf left the Burleston—Moira refused to send them on—thin, brittle, drifting letters with all the distance in the world inside them and full of events she knew nothing of.

‘Ellen refused to give up her lifestyle for me,’ Alf used to moan, expecting Moira to sympathize, ‘and who could blame her? She was a beauty. She had style. She was an enchantress and she had a
mind
,’ he said, screwing his finger into his forehead and insinuating that Moira had not.

‘Huh,’ said young Moira in her chambermaid pinny. ‘It’s high time you got over her. You’re married to me now, Alf Stokes.’ And she tried to flutter her eyelashes at him.