The Drowning Ground

by James Marrison

  ‘All right,’ she said. She opened the car door and reached for her bag on the passenger’s side. She searched her handbag, pulling out a lipstick, a packet of tissues and a large fat purse. It seemed to be taking a long time. I gave Graves a pained look over the roof of the car, and Graves rolled his eyes. Finally, she had the phone. She backed out of the car, peered at it and dialled. We watched.

  She shook her head and looked up. ‘No. She’s not answering,’ she said, sounding a little puzzled. ‘Straight to voicemail.’

  ‘Leave her a message,’ I said. ‘Tell her to call DCI Downes if she gets the message. I’ll give you my number. She knows me. Tell her to call me and I’ll meet her in Cheltenham. She’s not to get on that train before she speaks to me. All right?’

  ‘She’s not in any trouble, is she?’

  I shook my head, uncertain. ‘No. But you’re sure you don’t know who this man is?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘And can you think of where she might go in town? A place where she might meet this person?’

  She paused, thinking. ‘Well, not off the top of my head. But…’ She reached into her bag for her front door keys and gripped them in the palm of her hand. ‘Hold on. Yes,’ she said. ‘There is. There’s a café near that daft old clock they’ve got there.’

  ‘Clock?’

  ‘Yeah, you know the one. You must have seen it. It’s in that shopping centre. It’s like a duck or something. It’s for the kiddies. It’s not really a clock at all.’

  ‘You don’t know it, do you, Graves?’

  Graves shook his head. ‘’Fraid not. Never been to Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘Haven’t had time yet.’

  ‘It’s in the arcade. Off the high street, at the top. She goes there for a cup of tea sometimes before she takes her train.’

  28

  I let Graves drive again. It was less than twenty miles to Cheltenham, and the roads leading there were quicker than the winding lanes that had taken us to Lower Slaughter. Every now and again I would reach for the phone and dial Nancy. But there was no reply. I didn’t really know what to make of it. Only that I didn’t like it. Nancy was smart, like Powell had said. She’d acted quickly when Sarah Hurst had had her accident by the pool. But now that we knew she hadn’t come here for Hurst’s funeral at all it changed everything. She was here for another reason – and that reason sounded like it had something to do with Hurst’s daughter. But what could Rebecca have to do with any of it?

  We made good time, despite the bad weather, and we soon left the tiny villages far behind us. Within half an hour we were in the town. We stopped the car and parked it high on a kerb outside a guest house.

  I didn’t know the clock Nancy’s sister had mentioned. But I knew where the shopping centre was and that the only way to it was through a great quantity of people. At the bottom of the rise, the high street stretched out before us, cutting a thick swathe all the way across the bottom of the hill. A huge splintering crowd streamed across the road in both directions. We headed quickly down the slope.

  What had from above seemed to be a solid wall of people now turned into individual faces and shapes. The melted snow had left the walkways shining. Laughing and giggling, people pushed past us and became indistinguishable from the other moving bodies. It was nearly 9.00, but most of the shops were still open because it was almost Christmas.

  We strode on, leaving puzzled and annoyed faces in our wake as we barged through the Christmas shoppers. Grimfaced people rushed from shop to shop like soldiers jumping from trench to trench, emerging with yet more bags clutched in their hands or sometimes unbelievingly empty-handed. In minutes we had reached the high street. Here the throngs moved and swayed in a mass. They poured into the shopping centre, calling out to one another in the gathering cold.

  ‘She told me she ran a guest house, but she was lying,’ I said over my shoulder to Graves.

  Graves picked up speed. His face was tucked into the collar of his coat. His thick brogues rang out on to the street.

  ‘She’s here for another reason – something to do with Rebecca.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And this man she’s meeting – she’s chosen a very public place, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Could be because she’s scared of him.’

  For a moment Graves lapsed into silence and gazed mournfully at all the shoppers.

  ‘And why all the secrecy?’ I asked. ‘Why hide it from her sister?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’ Graves shrugged. ‘But, to be honest, I don’t like it either: her just showing up like this for a funeral of someone she couldn’t stand.

  We walked on towards the shopping centre. Heavy Christmas lights and bulky decorations, stars and branches of holly, shone out above us. We passed the heavy brass doors of a department store. I stood for a while watching the rolling tide of people pouring forward. Graves pushed himself across the road and headed towards the shopping centre. I reached for the phone inside my pocket and dialled Nancy’s number, staring at the crowds and hoping I might hear it ring out. But there was nothing. Half the people in the street seemed to be talking into their telephones. I stepped back into the moving mass and headed inside the centre.

  Fewer people here. Piped music reverberating around the walls. A constant echoing murmur of footsteps and people. A videogame shop was packed full of kids vying for the controls. A fountain with blue water. Heavy potted plants grew along some of the walls.

  In the middle of the shopping centre more people were gathered, looking up towards the ceiling. I pushed past a group of teenagers. All of them were looking up. Waiting.

  There above me was the clock. Nancy’s sister had been right. It was absurd. At the top of the clock face was a white wooden duck and beneath it a wooden fish. The whole contraption began to spin. This was what the crowd had been waiting for. I looked at my watch. It was 9.00 exactly. The duck laid what looked like a wooden egg, and the egg went spiralling down a red chute. A second later, the fish began to flap its fins and spin round. Bubbles floated out of the fish’s open mouth. A tinkling piano; a voice ringing out a tune I vaguely recognized, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’.

  I watched it for a moment, transfixed like the others. Then it stopped spinning. Graves moved off first. I followed, and we climbed up the escalators. Bubbles were floating along the upper floor and towards the glass-domed roof of the shopping centre. Some of the children were trying to catch them. The tune still followed us as we strode through the upper floor.

  There was a single small café tucked away at the end of a small hall at the far end of the shopping centre. Graves pushed open the door and we walked into the centre of the room, staring at the customers. We checked all of the booths and tables. An employee was on the other side of the counter at the back, shaking used coffee granules into a plastic bin and looking at us warily. ‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said quickly. ‘A woman. Mid-thirties. Would have been carrying a bag. A suitcase with her maybe.’

  He looked blank and shrugged his shoulders. He was tall and rather self-conscious.

  ‘She was with someone. A man,’ I said. ‘Would have been here … I don’t know. Not long ago. Half an hour maybe.’

  The man shrugged and rubbed his hands on a cloth. ‘We’ve been pretty busy,’ he said, and looked at the crowds surging outside the window.

  ‘She comes here quite a lot,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘Is there a shortcut to the station near here?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, already losing interest and turning back to his espresso machine. ‘Down the bottom there. You take the exit by the jeweller’s and then cut out through Fox Towns Lane at the back of the shops and past the church.’

  We stalked out. I took off my coat and clutched it under my arm. I felt the first hard jab of real fear. A low ache right in my gut. I stood at the railing and peered down over the edge. The clock on the ceiling, now nearly at eye level, was still again. But
I couldn’t get the damned silly tune out of my head. My forehead was beaded with sweat, and my hands were fidgeting nervously by my sides. I wiped the sleeve of my coat hard against my forehead. I pushed myself off the rail.

  ‘Let’s try that shortcut,’ I said.

  We kept on going. We headed down the escalator, went straight to the back and out a side entrance. The door rattled on its hinges. A shoe shop. The jeweller’s. A car park. The cold hit me straightaway, and a few moments later we were back in the never-ending crowds.

  It was less well lit here at the back, and the further we went the smaller the shops became and gradually there were fewer people. Within minutes the shops had all but petered out. The noise of the crowd subsided into a distant murmur, while the town shed its quaint Georgian charm and became rugged and sparse. We found and then followed Fox Towns Lane towards the station.

  Walls were smeared with graffiti. Squat windows were ringed with dirt. From far off came an announcement in neutral tones from a speaker. A single train rattled across a bridge, cutting the horizon in two. Its heavy rumble echoed off the reddish walls.

  We had almost reached the station. There was a shadowy patch of wall. Some old garages. We turned a corner.

  Graves saw her first, because he picked up speed and began to run. The first thing I noticed was the shoes. The same ones she had been wearing for Hurst’s funeral. The blood began to pulse in my ears. My mind snapped, as if recoiling from what was in front of me. I let out a kind of hiss through my teeth.

  My feet pounded along the path. Graves, ahead of me, leapt over an old mattress. A very small green suitcase was lying by her side.

  Graves hovered over her. Then he darted off down the lane. He disappeared from view as he headed towards the orange lights of the train station. I stopped and stood over her.

  Chubby ankles poked out of high-heeled shoes. Her face was pressed against the mud and slush. Mud brushed her teeth. A splattering of saliva and blood came from the corner of her mouth, and blood was spattered on the dirty snow. I knelt beside her. A large thick flap of jagged skin hung loosely on her forehead. Her eyes were wide open, just like Hurst’s had been. It was as if she were staring at me from the darkness and saying it had all been my fault. And maybe it was.

  29

  A few hours later, I was sitting in my car and looking at Gardner’s scrawny silhouette through the top window of his house. As I watched Gardner, I thought of Nancy, and of Brewin standing over her body in the arc lamps. Then policemen blocking the path and the sudden chaos in that quiet, sordid back alley. Graves had come back empty-handed. Whoever it was, they could have blended into the masses of people at the train station or made their way to the high street in seconds. The sing-song old-fashioned crooning voice kept on coming back to me. It had sounded cheerful back in the shopping centre. Now it seemed mocking. Cruel even. I saw the egg falling down that long chute and the bubbles rising to the ceiling. I saw Nancy lying dead in the dirt.

  I closed my eyes and then stepped out of the car, thinking that I had been wrong about Gardner all along, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I had talked to him again, and this time without his lawyer. On my way over, I had thought about those tapes. So what had Hurst really wanted Bray to find out about those men? A secret spot. An out-of-the-way place, which they may have visited and which no one else knew about. That’s what he’d asked Bray to look at specifically when he’d hired him. But why? What had Hurst really been after? If I were right, it meant that Gardner, despite his taste for younger girls, was innocent when it came to Gail and Elise.

  I moved quickly across the front garden and round to the back of Gardner’s house. I looked in through the kitchen window, beyond the overloaded dirty sink and towards the living room. I tried the cold metal handle of the kitchen door. It made a small, tentative squeak as I pushed against it and stepped into the flat light of his kitchen. I waited. Then I closed the door, turned the key in the lock and slipped it into my coat pocket. I could hear Gardner talking on the phone upstairs.

  Very quietly, I moved across the lino of the kitchen, past the grease-splattered oven and towards the hallway, still listening. I planted myself very firmly at the bottom of the narrow, dusty stairs and waited for him.

  Gardner was laughing ingratiatingly into the telephone. He hung up quite suddenly. A door opened and a few moments later a toilet flushed. Then Gardner started to move along the landing and down the stairs, looking at his feet as he padded down in his trainers. He rubbed his hands together, pleased with himself. He was halfway down when he seemed to sense that something wasn’t quite right. He paused abruptly, the toe of his shoe about to touch the next step, when he looked down and saw me, and froze.

  I stared up. Gardner’s face was sun-salon brown, but the tan was fading in the hard Cotswold winter, and it went almost completely white when he realized who was staring at him from the darkness of his stairwell. His eyes became much wider, and his bottom lip turned down, revealing a row of crooked teeth. He took a step back and actually clutched his heart like an old woman in a black-and-white melodrama. I almost hoped I’d given the bastard a heart attack.

  But Gardner seemed to recover quickly. His face screwed up. His cockiness instantly returned. I moved away from the stairwell with my right hand resting on the banister. Gardner looked to the front door. He took another step forward and glanced towards the kitchen. He licked his bottom lip and turned his head towards the kitchen again. I watched, amused that Gardner had to consider the same thing twice. I reached into my coat pocket and waggled the back door key at him.

  ‘What? What do you want?’ he said. ‘Give me my key. You can’t just come in here like this, Downes. This is private property. It’s breaking and…’

  Gardner stared uncertainly at the rush mats by the front door, and then, suddenly resigned to my presence, walked down the stairs, pushed past me and wandered into the living room. He fell into a sagging brown sofa, picked up a can of beer from the coffee table and started to open it. Then, thinking better of it, he put it back on the table. I switched off the television and moved closer.

  ‘All right,’ Gardner said, finally looking up. ‘What is it? I told you I know nothing about any of this. Why can’t you people just leave me alone? I’ll be on the phone to Baxter as soon as you’re out the door. Or maybe I should call him now.’

  ‘You don’t know a woman called Nancy, Nancy Williams, do you?’

  Gardner shook his head.

  ‘Hurst’s old housekeeper.’

  ‘No. Never heard of her.’

  ‘Didn’t think so. Been here all night, have you?’

  Gardner nodded towards the remains of a takeaway. ‘Yeah. Having a quiet one.’

  ‘You know something, Chris,’ I said, ‘I got it all wrong. I was wrong about you and Hurst.’

  ‘I know,’ Gardner said. ‘I told you, didn’t I? So I suppose you’ve come all this way to offer me an apology. All right, apology accepted. Now please fuck off and give me my fucking key before you go.’

  I stood still for a moment, hovering over him. ‘You knew him, though,’ I said. ‘But not as well as I thought you did.’

  Although I didn’t relish the prospect, I moved in until I was standing just inches away from him. Up close, I could see the wrinkles beneath his eyes and his thinning scalp. ‘I’ve got a tape of you hanging around schoolchildren. Little kids,’ I said, almost conversationally. ‘What do you think of that, Gardner?’

  Gardner’s body twitched.

  ‘What tape? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Hurst had it. It was in his house. Locked up with a bunch of other stuff in a drawer. Didn’t know I had it, did you?’

  ‘What?’ Gardner said.

  ‘I watched it last night,’ I said, ignoring him, ‘while I was cooking my dinner. Of course, I wasn’t very hungry after that.’

  ‘What tape?’ he almost pleaded. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It showed you hanging about an old cricket pa
vilion with a bunch of kids.’

  When I mentioned the cricket pavilion, Gardner breathed in very sharply. There was a look of furtive panic on his face, which he immediately tried to conceal. It was very quiet in the living room, with the snow falling outside. Peaceful even.

  ‘I’m going to bury you,’ I said. ‘You understand that, Christopher? I’m going to bury you with that tape. I know you’ve been in a lot of trouble over that kind of thing before. But it will be nothing compared to what will happen as soon as I hand over that tape to my supervisor. It’s proof that you’ve been trying to molest a minor.’

  ‘But what tape? I … For Christ’s sake, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Know what? Come on.’

  ‘Hurst was having you followed.’

  ‘Followed?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But who? Who by?’

  ‘Hurst hired someone to follow you.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Gardner said. ‘So that’s how he knew.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Look, I know now that you didn’t have anything to do with those two girls. I got it wrong. You’re in the clear on that one. But I’m dealing with two murders in just one week and I’ve got you on tape hanging about outside a school. I’m not sure how far it went. But if it went as far as I think it did –’

  ‘But nothing happened,’ Gardner interrupted quickly. ‘Nothing happened, I swear.’

  Gardner’s forehead was shiny with perspiration. He held out for a moment longer, then said, ‘All right, all right. I was there. There on the hill with Hurst. I knew you’d be on to me sooner or later, but I didn’t know what to do. I suppose I panicked when I heard. When I heard what had happened to him.’

  ‘You heard Hurst was dead on the news?’

  ‘Yeah, on the radio on the way to work. I heard some bloke had been found up there. Dead. I thought it could have been him or it might have been a walker – but there was no way of knowing. Not to begin with. I nearly shit myself when I heard it were him.’ Gardner cleared his throat. ‘Look, I very nearly came forward when I found out. You have to believe me about that. But then I thought, what’s the point? I didn’t see anything, and why get into trouble over a silly argument. And it was nothing more than that. I’m telling you that right now.’