The Drowning Ground

by James Marrison

  ‘Good morning, Graves,’ I said. It was an apt name for a policeman. I’d thought it the first time I’d seen it on his file.

  ‘Morning, sir. We already know who the victim is,’ Graves said, a little out of breath but obviously pleased with himself. ‘Dr Brewin recognized him. Apparently he owns this field. He’s called Frank. Frank Hurst.’

  The moment, the very moment I heard that name, I thought of a swimming pool in summer and of a dead woman lying face up on its surface.

  ‘Apparently he lives on the other side of this hill,’ Graves said, looking around.

  ‘Frank Hurst. Jesus. What happened to him?’

  ‘Someone’s rammed a pitchfork into his throat,’ Graves said, looking as if he wished that there had been a nicer way to say it.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said again.

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘You could say that,’ I said grimly. I paused, thinking, and gave him a long look. Graves had turned a little pale and was trembling inside his coat, though he was trying very hard to cover it up – not because of the cold but because of whatever it was he had seen at the top of the hill. You tried to prepare yourself for what was waiting for you, but sometimes it wasn’t enough.

  ‘Well, you’d better send someone to his house,’ I said a little doubtfully. ‘And you’d better try to get as many PCs as they can spare. We’re going to need them. You can do that for me, can’t you, Graves?’ I said hesitantly. ‘Set all that up?’

  Graves smiled. ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll manage.’

  I nodded. ‘All right, then.’

  I moved up the hill. Frank Hurst. I turned around suddenly. Graves was already nearing the gate.

  ‘Graves!’ I yelled.

  He turned around and trotted back up the hill.

  ‘He has a daughter,’ I said. ‘She may still live there – in the house – and there’s a housekeeper or at least there used to be. She might be there too. If she isn’t, you should try to find her – be worth talking to her, I think. Lives locally, if I remember rightly. But find his daughter first – be good if we can let her know before the papers get wind of it and she learns the hard way.’

  Graves nodded and immediately started down the steep incline. I watched critically for a few moments, until he disappeared beyond the hedgerow. Graves looked more than a little rattled. I turned around and started to walk, feeling oddly out of place all of a sudden. Sometimes the strangeness of the countryside hits me. And it struck me right then like a cold wet slap as I trudged alone under the moving shadows of the clouds and up the hill. To me, for a moment, the hill seemed completely unreal, as if the earth before me had split into a thousand cracks and one more step would see me flung straight into the abyss. Maybe it was the cold that was making my head spin or the remnants of the dream of home, which now seemed to be following me as I shuffled up the hill. I tried to shake it off. But it was no good.

  It happens to me more and more as I get older. This feeling that I’m in two places at once. Or should be somewhere else. How did I end up here, so far from home? For a moment the very idea that I was standing here, on this hill, in winter, seemed absurd.

  It is a strange, unsettling feeling, which is hard to shake off once it takes hold. Like the cold in a way. The Spanish voice inside my head is becoming louder and more insistent. It will not be bullied and it will not be crowded out. It would be summer in Buenos Aires now. The usual writhing delirium of heat and noise. So hot you could literally fry an egg on the pavement. In truth, I was lucky to be away from it. Power cuts. Protests. The buses rammed solid with people. Tempers flaring out of hand. Random senseless acts of violence spreading in points of light and fury around the city, quenched only to rise again amongst the network of never-ending streets. The streets that would quite happily swallow you up if you didn’t know your way about. I stared around me at the gathering cold. Not like here at all. A snatch of an old tango from home came to me as I walked. Precise and insistent. Cheerful despite the cynicism.

  He who does not cry does not get fed,

  and he who does not steal is an idiot.

  Go ahead! Keep it up!

  We’ll all meet again in hell.

  Don’t think about it any more,

  Sit to one side.

  Nobody cares

  if you were born honourable.

  I smiled and then put it out of my mind as I finished my journey up the hill. Or tried to.

  Two figures were sharply outlined at the top. Taped police barricades encircled the crime scene. With some effort, I pulled myself back into this life. The cold morning sun edged the contours of the trees, sharpening the reality both of the morning and of what awaited me beyond the barricades.

  Dr Brewin was crouched over the body. He had been a pretty handy prop forward in his day, but now, in his early fifties, he was running to fat. Despite this, he still looked tough. He was broad-shouldered with a flat nose, and his big, meaty hands seemed specifically designed for pushing someone’s face straight into the mud. But there was a daintiness to his movements right now as he searched for trace evidence, picking away at the corpse’s neck, the side of its face, its overcoat. Dressed in white overalls, Brewin looked, as always, happy to be at work.

  Next to him, kneeling by the side of the body, Brewin’s assistant, Fiona, smiled sweetly up at me before going back to her task: cutting off the dead man’s fingernails and collecting them in an evidence bag. Brewin noticed the smile, and finally turned around.

  ‘Morning, Shotgun,’ he said cheerfully.

  I nodded. I have known Brewin for a very long time. Brewin sometimes ironically imitates the graveyard humour that coroners use on television, the ones that eat egg sandwiches while they sever heads on mortuary slabs, and then offer squeamish policemen a bite of their lunch. So what he said next did not surprise me all that much.

  ‘Ten pesos if you guess the cause of death?’ Brewin finally stood aside and gestured in a theatrical way, as if he were welcoming me into a circus tent displaying the corpse.

  Of course, the first thing I noticed was the pitchfork sticking out of the dead man’s neck. It had been driven in with such force that two of the four metal prongs had passed all the way through the neck and embedded themselves in the mud on the other side. The overall effect was that the man’s throat had been slashed almost all the way across. It had taken an enormous amount of force. The horrendous, irregularly shaped gash revealed cartilage and bone, and, I realized with some horror, that I could even see earth at the back of the wound, beyond a final white shock of shattered bone.

  The pitchfork was new by the looks of it. It had a bright-yellow plastic handle, and the wooden wishbone shaft tapered inwards, met by the stainless-steel-pronged fork at the bottom. It was wedged in deep. Really deep. I looked at the pitchfork, thinking of my walled garden at home in the summer. I thought of water hitting the roses in the borders of my garden and ricocheting into the grass. I blinked, suddenly seeing the body and smelling its dampness. I became aware of the sound of the wind rustling in the branches of the trees.

  ‘You know what,’ Brewin said, ‘I thought we were going to have to order another stretcher for … old … what’s his name.’

  ‘Graves,’ I said absently.

  ‘The man turned green, didn’t he, Fiona?’

  ‘Ah, don’t be too hard on him,’ Fiona said and sighed a little dreamily. ‘Poor thing.’

  An admirer already, I thought. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and stood there indecisively for a moment before looking once more at the body. A surprisingly large bunch of keys, along with a few pound coins, had spilled out of the man’s pocket and lay on the grass. By a log on the ground were the remains of his last-ever meal.

  Hurst had possessed the typical voracious farmer’s appetite. There was an apple core, the plastic wrapping from a whole pack of mini pork pies and two empty packets of budget-brand crisps. The inside of a chocolate-bar wrapper shone dully in the grey early-morning light. Next to it was a s
mall carton: a dancing cartoon orange wearing a bowler hat and carrying a cane stared out at me. The orange juice was unopened, with the straw fixed tightly to its back. A ragged piece of bread had been trodden underfoot and ground hard into the earth.

  Frank Hurst was still lean-looking. His head, with its grey closely cropped hair, was tilted at a slight angle, and he was staring upwards at the sky. For a moment a cloud reflected in his eyes and was gone.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I heard myself saying. ‘It really is Frank Hurst, isn’t it?’

  Brewin nodded.

  I looked at Frank Hurst’s screaming mouth, and, as I did so, a trace of a late-summer day came back to me. With well-practised precision I remembered Frank’s wife lying face up in the water. Her blood had coiled along the surface. It was Hurst’s blood that was now flowing into the mud. Hers had meandered gently in the blue water of their swimming pool, drifting in small eddies towards the tiled edges. Water and mud. Mud and water. Blood and the smell of chlorine and that smell of lavender. But why lavender? I remembered now that there had been banks and banks of it lining the fence surrounding their swimming pool. The smell had been overpowering, unpleasant.

  ‘He’s been here all night,’ Brewin said. ‘No one spotted him till this morning, so I’m guessing that whoever did this must have done it just as it was getting dark and he was packing up to go home.’

  Hurst’s other tools were stacked up by the log: shears, a spade, a few coils of brand-new barbed wire. Pliers. It looked as if Hurst had been doing some general maintenance on his field. Clearing the ditches. Cutting back the hedgerows. Fixing the fences. He would have had a clear vantage of the entire hill from here. So whoever had killed him must have crept all the way here and sneaked up from behind. Perhaps they grabbed the pitchfork from where the other tools were lying near the log. Unless Hurst had known them, seen them coming and waited.

  Brewin ran his gloved fingers along the bottom of his jaw and straightened up. ‘I’ll tell you what I think I know,’ Brewin said. ‘Though we can’t be certain until I examine the body properly. But, so far, it looks like he didn’t have time to put up much of a struggle. There are no defensive wounds on his arms and none on his hands either. So whoever did this was strong and fairly quick too. Knocked him to the ground’ – Brewin lifted both hands up, as if he were holding the pitchfork – ‘and then in.’

  Fiona had stopped what she was doing and was listening. She nodded and smiled all the while as Brewin talked. Hurst’s left hand was still clutched in her own as if she were giving him a manicure.

  It sounded about right. It was nasty but, generally speaking, not all that different to the majority of homicides I have investigated. A messy, nasty and sordid business, but then that’s killing for you. I learnt very quickly that the people who murder hardly ever seem to plan it. Sometimes I can’t help but feel that every time I look at a murdered corpse, somehow something has been taken away from me.

  I said, ‘What about the dog? The old lady down there said something about his dog.’

  ‘It’s over there.’ Brewin pointed to a clearing in the trees past the body. For some reason Brewin suddenly seemed angry.

  I strolled away from the crime scene and went further into the woods, weaving my way between the trees. As I walked towards the clearing, I caught a glimpse of Frank Hurst’s big old house through a gap in the hedgerow. It lay at the bottom of the other side of the hill and appeared dark and isolated in the hill’s shadow. A strange place to build a house, I had always thought. The hill seemed to take away all the brightness of the morning light and leave only grey, so that from here the house seemed like an institution of some sort: an old people’s home maybe, or even a hospital. I could see the tiled roof above and the grounds sweeping away from it; and I could just make out the swimming pool at the back.

  I turned away and continued to the clearing and then stopped in my tracks. From one of the trees hung something dark and heavy. A strange odd shape suspended from a low thick branch. The trees seemed to be crowding round the pitiful sight before them like witnesses to a senseless accident.

  Hanging by its neck was a large black Labrador. It had been strung up on a tree branch. Its choke chain had embedded itself deeply into the black fur around its neck. Its tongue, still wet with saliva, looked black as it lolled out of the blood-flecked mouth. The dog swayed in the breeze amongst the creaking branches, and its long shadow spilled out, slowly dancing and twisting beneath it. Despite the appalling way it must have died, it still looked ferocious and big and menacing in death.

  The air had got much colder, and suddenly there was a flurry of snow. I gazed down the hill at the sloping roofs of the village. Word would soon be out there. Some would be saying that Frank Hurst had got what he deserved. I knew that. Unable to see what had happened to him, to see its truly horrifying nature up close, they would be pleased as they drank their tea, and ate their huge fried breakfasts and pushed their half-asleep kids out of the door to school. Yes, the villagers would be happy that he was finally gone from their midst. Some of them anyway.

  Standing in the cold, I started to remember other things. A girl’s flower hairpin, bent out of shape and slightly rusty, glinting in the sunshine in the palm of my hand. My fist closing. Thinking. Wondering, as I stood beside Hurst’s pool with his house tall and silent behind me in the early morning.

  I walked back towards Brewin, imagining the brief and silent struggle as the life drained away from Hurst and his eyes slowly dimming. It was the absurdity of a dead body that always got to me the most. And its ugliness: Frank Hurst in death forever nailed to the top of Meon Hill. His whole life would now be defined by this moment. This is how he would be remembered. You were remembered if you were murdered.

  5

  The PCs, along with Douglas and Irwin and a few other officers Graves did not recognize, stood by their vehicles, which were parked along the line of shops opposite the village green. Snow had begun to fall. The shadows of the cars formed wide strips on the road. A lorry-driver noisily unloaded pallets of food and drink wrapped in cellophane to a small supermarket, while at the post office next door a matronly woman stared at them fiercely in disapproval. Already the villagers seemed tense and on edge. Lights blazed from the cottages and houses. Children, who would normally be agitated by the snow, seemed cautious and subdued as their parents drew them hastily up the street to the small school at the edge of the village.

  Graves stood leaning on his car, which he had parked near the old telephone box, watching the traffic pass along the street. The man who had quizzed him in the canteen the morning before, a sergeant, got out of his car and stood next to Douglas, as a narrow door opened across the road, and a morose old man gazed in stunned silence at the activity on the green. One of the PCs called out and made a signal for a light, but for the most part the men were silent and, like the children being led along the road, strangely subdued.

  Downes was already making his way towards them on the pavement. The hollow sound of his footsteps echoed off the houses. He glanced up and, seeing the men before him, seemed to shake off the cold; his step became more authoritative. The men shuffled their feet and drew more closely together. A constable sidled up towards Graves and his hesitant, wary gaze fixed on Downes.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, and shook his head.

  Graves looked at the PC. He was near retirement age but sturdy. He winced and wiped a snowflake from the top of his broad skull.

  ‘You’ll be his new sergeant, then. That’s what the boys are saying.’

  Graves said that he was.

  ‘I’m Drayton,’ he said, and gave Graves a look of unmistakable pity. Then he turned away. ‘And on your first day this,’ he said, running the palm of his hand along the top of Graves’s new car as if he owned it. ‘We’re going to be stuck out here for days, you know that, don’t you? Traipsing round in the blooming cold. And Christmas. You can forget about Christmas an’ all. Christmas,’ he proclaimed, ‘is cancelled until this
is all over.’

  Graves shrugged. Christmas had never bothered him much either way.

  A look of resigned annoyance crossed Drayton’s face as Downes stood before them, motionless, yet still managing to appear like someone slowly uncoiling from the cold.

  ‘Bloody Shotgun,’ Drayton said very quietly but with vehemence. ‘He’s on the warpath, all right. The lads knew he would be,’ he said,

  ‘Of course he’s on the warpath,’ Graves said, and motioned to the hill rising beyond the village. ‘What do you expect?’

  Drayton didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: ‘It’s Frank Hurst, though, ain’t it?’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Knew of him,’ Drayton said, looking away.

  Downes scanned the upturned and expectant faces, and for a moment his gaze settled on Graves in what might have been a slight nod of encouragement before moving on. Graves pushed himself off the car, leaving Drayton behind. In the cold, Downes seemed white beneath his brown skin, and the scar appeared more pronounced. He undid the top of his coat. His imposing height and bulk made him resemble one of those old Hollywood actors of the forties or fifties. But the scar gave him a slightly menacing air. Perhaps it was Downes’s undeniable strangeness that had prompted Graves to think of another time. He didn’t belong here in this small village, standing in the snow. Yesterday he had seemed calm and at ease; now he looked extraordinarily alert. Some of the men before him appeared reluctant to return his gaze.

  Downes waited impatiently while a rundown old jeep passed on the road and then said, ‘For those who don’t already know, this is Sergeant Graves.’

  Graves suddenly found that all eyes were on him.

  ‘He’s new here, but an extremely experienced officer and we’re lucky to have him. So I would ask you all to do exactly what he says and I mean exactly. Understood?’