“Fine.” A harsh bark, not at all like the student Graham used to know. “I liked you a lot in school, Mr Stewart. You were a good teacher, made science interesting, you know? But I’ve got to protect my family.”
“I don’t-”
A step forwards from them made Graham back up one. He was still dripping onto the floorboards, and he noticed, absently, that the fire needed more wood.
“You’re not going to tell.” It was a statement. “You’ll keep your trap shut, or something bad will happen. Maybe to Sarah, maybe to your spoiled niece.”
Graham could only stare, aghast.
There was more. “Or maybe to those kids at your old school. Think about that, Mr Stewart, before you run off to the police. Are we clear? You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
Graham swallowed around his dry mouth. “No,” he croaked.
“Good.”
When he was left alone in the old house again, Graham had lost the peace he’d slipped into so easily earlier. It was gone, replaced by fear, uncertainty and doubt. Graham wasn’t sure he’d ever get it back.
Two
Six months later
I groaned when Graham showed up on my doorstep.
“Mornin’!”
“You’re early.” I waved him into the house, anyway. “I haven’t had coffee yet.”
Graham grinned. “It shows.” I pretended to swat him, but he ducked away. He started his stretches whilst I swallowed down my nuclear-hot coffee, sans milk, which Graham always looked at with disgust.
“Without milk, it’s just burnt bean water,” he muttered as he stood on one leg, stretching his quads.
“Amateur.”
“Oi,” he said, looking completely unoffended. He paused his stretches to rub his forehead, and I shot him a look.
“Sure you don’t want some?”
“Never,” he muttered, but the look of discomfort didn’t leave his face.
“A painkiller?” I offered, frowning. “Have a late one, did you?”
“Ah, don’t fuss. I had aspirin already.”
I let him be, swallowing the dregs with a grimace at the grittiness. I really needed a new coffee maker. Maybe when I finally got a promotion.
Graham was a tall man, close to my own height but not quite, and his brown hair hung scruffily around his head. He was built heavier than I was and his lumpy nose, from his misspent youth, he’d said, and large ears might’ve made him intimidating if it hadn’t been for how he was always smiling. However, he looked a little tired today.
I shoved on my shoes and pulled a face at the rain outside the window. “Let’s go show those hills.”
“Show them what? How old we’re getting?” His expression seemed drawn today, and his usually tanned skin looked pale, so his teasing fell a little flat. He was getting on for twenty years older than me, but usually, he looked to be such a beacon of good health and energy that he could pass for ten years younger.
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Fifty is the new forty, right?” He smacked me over the head, and I grinned, feeling the caffeine kick me into gear. “I’m ready for the Three Tops race, even if you aren’t.”
Graham scoffed good naturedly. “You’ll be eating my dust, Darren, you just see.”
I laughed. “Mud more like. Not much dust round here.” He grinned and nodded.
Fell running was something most people found out about and then grimaced. The moors were stunning, though. We set off, running steadily through the town together as we warmed up, before beginning to climb up into the moors, where it was bleak and lonely and stunning. The track we followed twisted its way up the side of the hillside, passing a steep patch of scree and a tall bank on one side before we broke out onto the upper moorland.
The heather was still mostly in beautiful pink and purple flower even though it was getting into September now and they’d soon be dying off. The plump bilberries from the summer had already been picked, either by walkers or the birds, and once the heather died off, the hills took on a darker aspect until the gorse began to display all its brilliant yellow glory in January.
As we skidded and struggled up the muddy path, I had to catch Graham’s arm once, when he almost went over.
“You doing alright?” I asked him, between my own fast breaths, the cold air rushing through my chest. Graham seemed to be panting more than usual, even wheezing, and I pulled up short at the crest of a hillock.
But he was stubborn and just nodded. “Fine,” he said, but it wasn’t especially convincing.
“Take a break, huh?” I bent over my knees to catch my own breath, scrubbing my curly hair out of my face as the wind lashed it and made it cling to my forehead.
Once I’d recovered myself, I gave Graham my full attention and frowned at the look of him. His face was an awful, pasty grey, and his lips looked almost white.
Graham saw me looking and, even though he was still gasping, shot me a stubborn look. “Don’t go all DI Mitchell on me,” he croaked.
I put up my hands in surrender. “Just concerned, mate. You look awful.”
“Thanks,” he said, but he rubbed his forehead again with a wince. “Feel awful too.”
I looked around us at the moor path we were on and the surrounding fells. We were already a way up, but not miles from the village.
“I reckon we should get you home. No point beating yourself into the ground.”
I thought Graham would argue, but he gave a sharp nod which said how bad he was feeling.
“C’mon then, back this way’s probably fastest.”
He huffed. “I can go on m’own. It’s just a headache.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “More like the flu. Or food poisoning, maybe. Did you eat some undercooked chicken?”
He rolled his eyes at me and grumbled under his breath but didn’t argue further as we walked a short way back down the way we’d come before branching off towards Graham’s.
He and his wife, Sarah, owned an old farmer’s cottage way up in the moorland, closer to the top of Shining Tor than it was Lockdale town down in the valley. It was a remote but lovely place to live. Graham had retired early, as far as I knew, and I couldn’t imagine a better place to spend one’s twilight years. When we met up, we mostly stuck to running in silence, rather than talking a great deal. I could hazard a guess that Graham and Sarah had moved up here to get away from it all and have some well-earned quiet. He’d certainly succeeded there.
He came to an abrupt stop beside me. “Dammit.”
“What?” I twisted around and startled at the blood running down from his nose and dripping off his chin. “Christ, Graham.”
He fished out a hankie from his pocket and pinched his nose with a grimace. “This headache,” he groaned.
I was concerned now, my stomach feeling twisted up in the same way it was when I got the call on my radio and knew that something had gone wrong. The uncertainty of not knowing how bad it would be was always almost the worst.
“Your house isn’t far. Let’s get you into the warm.” I tried to take his arm, but he shook me off.
“I don’t need your babying,” he chided, but his gentle tone took away any bite in his words.
We headed slowly down the lane, Graham still pinching his nose, though his handkerchief was already sodden with blood.
“Is it stopping?”
“S’fine.”
That was ‘no’ then. I grimaced.
We got to the bottom of the long drive up to Graham’s house.
“I’ll be fine from here.”
I frowned. “Don’t even try. I’m seeing you to the house.”
Even grey-faced, in pain and bleeding, Graham gave me a firm look that harked back to his teaching days. “I’m not having you mother-henning me, Mitchell. Go off home.” He started walking away before I could respond, turning his broad back on me.
I scrubbed a hand over my face with a groan. “Stubborn as heck,” I groused under my breath. “Call me when you get back!” I yelled af
ter him. He held up a hand in acknowledgement.
I watched him walk slowly uphill until the twists of the lane took him out of sight.
Three
I’m getting so old, Graham thought as he struggled to climb the drive to his house. He could feel Darren watching him go up and so kept his stride as normal as he could manage, even though his vision was swimming.
He wasn’t one to get nosebleeds, and this one was worse than any he’d had as a child. What could have set it off, he had no idea. He was sure, though, that if it didn’t stop bleeding soon, he was going to end up on the floor.
He unlocked the door and stumbled in, nudging it shut behind him. His hankie was saturated, and blood ran through his fingers. Grimacing, he stumbled through to the kitchen, making a mess of the floors as he went as he got blood and mud all over the place. Sarah was going to have a conniption at the mess, and Graham made a mental note to clear it up before she got back. He had to catch himself in the kitchen doorway as he passed through and left a bloody smear there, too.
He tried pinching his nose, tried icing it and leaning forwards, but it wouldn’t stop. The pain in his head was excruciating, and he was beginning to feel sick, his mouth tasting of metal. He pulled an old tea towel out of the drawer and jammed it under his bloody nose, but the blood ran into the towel too.
One moment he was upright by the sink, then he was on the floor. His head was throbbing more painfully than any hangover, and he groaned quietly.
“Crikey,” he muttered. He was still bleeding. He’d messed up, he realised slowly. This was serious, and he shouldn’t have driven Darren away. Darren could’ve called someone for him and fixed this, but instead, because of his own hard-headed stubbornness, he was here alone. He wished more than anything that Sarah hadn’t been away and felt a rare stab of frustration that she disappeared off to the city so often. But it wasn’t her fault, and he didn’t really blame her.
His stomach felt tight and painful, and he groaned, trying to get up, but the floor was slick, and he slipped back down again. When he lifted his shirt, his stomach was black and blue with bruises, far more than he could have received just from falling to the floor. It looked like he’d been hit by a car.
Feeling ill and dizzy, Graham crawled out of the kitchen and into the hallway towards the phone. His mobile phone wasn’t anywhere nearby since he never took it while running. There was the creak of a person’s weight on floorboards behind him, and for a blissful second, his heart lifted.
“Sarah?” he said weakly. His mouth tasted like blood, sharp and bitter. Was she home early?
But it wasn’t her. Graham reached out, but they were silent, silhouetted against the light coming from the living room so that their face was barely visible.
“Help me,” he begged. His nose was still bleeding. His stomach felt hard and awful.
He struggled to reach for the phone hanging on the wall, forced to tug it down using the cord since he couldn’t stand up to reach it. He fumbled with blood-tacky fingers to press the buttons.
A hand wearing a well-used workman’s glove took the phone out of his hand.
“No,” Graham groaned. He slumped down, staring at the skirting board as he tried to think. His thoughts seemed to be moving agonisingly slowly, like a fish swimming through treacle.
This wasn’t an accident or some freak health condition, he realised as he stared woozily up at the face looking coldly down at him.
A glove-covered hand reached down to rest on his shoulder. He wanted more than anything to shrug it off, but he didn’t have the strength. His sight was going dim, like the lights had been turned down.
“Sleep now.”
Four
I jogged back the way we’d come, turning things over in my head. I went for a longer run than usual, pushing on up into the moors until I ran out of paths and had to cut through a patch of prickly, half-dead bracken to get back down.
Exhausting myself usually worked to stop my mind going round, but worry about Graham niggled. I didn’t tend to carry my mobile when I ran as my running gear had no pockets big enough for it. So calling him to check in had to wait until I’d arrived at the door of my small terrace house on the main street in town, not too far from the station.
I was dripping water onto the floorboards of my kitchen, and there was a trail of dark, peaty mud to show where I’d walked, but I would deal with that later. The phone rang and rang with no answer, and as I dragged a hand through my hair, I called Sarah’s mobile.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Darren, Darren Mitchell.”
“Oh, Darren, hi, how are you?”
I cleared my throat. “Fine, good, thanks. Is Graham doing alright?”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. “Why wouldn’t he be? What’s wrong?”
My stomach sank. “You’re not home, are you?”
“No, I’m in York with business. What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, it’s probably fine,” I said, trying to reassure both of us. “It’s just- he had a nosebleed, and a headache while we were running, that’s all. I wanted to check in.”
“You called him first?” I made a noise of agreement. There was a pause. “He doesn’t usually get nosebleeds.” She sounded worried. “Darren… I’m sorry to ask--”
“I’ll go,” I said. “Just see how he’s doing, and I’ll let you know.”
She released a sigh. “Thanks, thank you. Appreciate it.”
“Sure.”
We hung up and, after grabbing my mobile phone, I went straight out the door, never having taken off my shoes. It was probably foolish to be worried, but he hadn’t looked well. If I’d known Sarah wasn’t home, I never would have let him go off alone.
I drove over as quickly as was safe, growing tense at how long it seemed to take to wind my way up the lane through all the twists and turns. Though Graham’s home was in the middle of beautiful scenery, it did make it remote and at that moment, worrying for Graham, I resented that.
Climbing out of the car outside Graham’s, I tapped the brass knocker loudly and waited, listening. There was some kind of heavy clunk, sounding like it’d come from the back of the house.
“Graham?” I called. This didn’t feel right, not at all. I tried lifting the latch on the front door and breathed a sigh when it did. Country folk often left their doors open, but not always. I certainly didn’t, but I was damn glad that Graham had.
“Graham?” I stepped inside, freezing at the sight of blood on the floor. Not a lot. It was probably only from Graham’s nosebleed, but it reminded me too much of a crime scene. “Get it together, Mitchell,” I muttered. “Graham?”
The old house was silent.
I followed the blood trail through to the kitchen. Bloody kitchen towels lay on the floor in a heap.
“Christ, Graham.” Why hadn’t he called an ambulance? Or had he, and that was why he didn’t seem to be here? But I was worried that he’d passed out somewhere, knocked his head.
I turned my back on the bloody towels, before hearing- something from outside, a crunch of stones perhaps. Why the hell would Graham have gone outside? Still, I went over to the window and looked. The garden wall around the back blocked some of the view of the slope onto the moors, but I saw a flash of black. It could’ve been an animal, a black sheep or a badger, and I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t imagined it.
It didn’t matter. I needed to find out where exactly Graham was and whether he was well. I left the kitchen, checking the pantry, the laundry. The living room was at the back, and I headed there last, turning the corner only to stop sharply in the corridor.
Graham was sprawled on the floor, the phone dangling from the wall hook above him. He was lying on his front and not moving.
Jerking forwards, I dropped down beside him and eased him onto his side. Even as worried as I was, I stayed away from the pool of blood and tried to touch him as little as possible; crime scene habits were hard to break. When I turned him, I found
the front of his shirt and his cheek caked in half-congealed blood.
“Graham?” I croaked.
His eyes were open and blank, face grey. I shook his shoulders, thinking of Sarah’s worried voice on the phone, and how I’d seen him not an hour ago, running and joking and alive. Christ.
I cursed quietly and, with shaking fingers, closed his eyes. We hadn’t been close friends, just running partners for a little less than a year after word got around town that both of us liked fell running. Small towns were like that.
I swallowed, looking down at Graham and thinking how much harder it was when it was someone you knew. Laying him down gently on the old floorboards, I stepped away. I eyed the landline phone that’d fallen on the floor. The plastic had cracked like he’d dropped it, but it looked like it’d still work. But I didn’t want to disturb any fingerprints that might be on it, and so tugged my mobile out of my waistband where I’d tucked it away.
“Lockdale polic--” Samuel answered, sounding bored.
“It’s DI Mitchell,” I broke in. “I need officers up here at Graham Stewart’s.” There was a stunned silence. “Samuel,” I snapped, short on patience. “Go and get the sergeant, tell her we’ve got a civilian dead, and the cause of death is unclear.”
“Yes, sir.”
I hung up and called the coroners. They would have to confirm the death, even though it was all too obvious.
“What were you doing?” I said quietly to the too-still body on the floor. “You never told me Sarah wasn’t here.” I pressed a hand to my face and took a breath, trying to focus on the smell of old wood rather than the sickening stench of new blood in the air.
A touch calmer, I stood up and, carefully avoiding the pooling blood, headed back towards the front door.
The chief inspector, Hogan Hogan, and my partner, Kay McGregor, pulled up outside the house first. I’d stepped out of the house to be in the fresh air and because, no matter how many times you see a body, there was always something uncanny about the lack of animation that had once been there.
DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Book 1-3 Page 2
