by Jake Cross
He didn’t see Liz.
The burial was elsewhere.
He crossed to the café to fetch Katie.
* * *
She was silent for most of the drive to the cemetery and he had a good idea why. She had never quite forgiven Liz for entering their lives and all the damage she brought.
When they arrived at the cemetery, she announced that she would wait in the car.
The crowd was bigger at this venue. At least a hundred, all in black. The sky was overcast, the gravestones were grey, and even the grass in this monochrome world was washed out, all of which added to his depression. Here, further indication of Grafton’s criminal status: the gates were manned by shady-looking big guys to keep out intruders. Others lined the perimeter wall at intervals. Karl had a mad moment when he searched the skies for some enemy of Grafton’s coming in by parachute.
Finally, he spotted Liz. She was in a black suit dress and had black hair now, dyed to match this dark occasion. It was also cut short, as if she’d opted for practicality rather than appearance. During the burial, she kept her head bowed, dabbing at her eyes now and then. Karl kept back, beside a large mausoleum some 260 feet away, and watched the show. He felt like an intruder.
He couldn’t hear anything, and, although the silence was eerie, he preferred that. The things said around the grave wouldn’t gel with what he believed about Ronald Grafton. He tried not to look at an open grave near where he stood, lined with wooden planks and tarpaulin, a great mound of dirt next to it. He tried not to wonder which poor bastard was going into that one later today. He pictured a family milling outside the church, waiting for their turn. Busy places, graveyards. People were dying to get in, so went the old joke.
The coffin was lowered. Liz and another woman, facing each other across the hole, tossed in a handful of dirt each. Liz then lowered a small wooden box using a length of rope, tossed the rope in and stepped back.
And then it was done. He wondered why he’d come since he’d been nothing but an observer, and always from a distance. He watched people file away, but Liz broke off and approached him.
‘Glad you could come.’ She lit a cigarette. Had she started smoking since he’d last seen her?
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, thinking that was the line to use at a burial.
She nodded.
Beyond them, the final few people were vanishing. They were alone except for a mourner off to the left, coming in their direction. Some guy in a suit with an opened umbrella covering most of his head, as if he expected rain to pay its weekly respects to a dead relative. But the grey skies were all bark and no bite.
‘The wake is at my house. Both welcome, if you like. I’m guessing your wife felt awkward being here today. I hope she and the baby are okay, by the way.’
As she raised the cigarette to her lips, he noticed a bandage along the underside of her hand where the paw print tattoo was. Or used to be.
She saw his eyes drop to her hand and said: ‘Part of the accepting.’
He understood: why pretend the journey wasn’t over?
‘The wake?’ She prompted.
Karl noticed the mourner had veered off a path, and was heading their way. He looked around to make sure he wasn’t standing too close to a grave. ‘I think I need to get home,’ he said. ‘Katie and the baby are fine though. Thank you. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, too. This has been the hardest part. Hopefully life gets easier from here.’
Karl had buried his father five years earlier. He could testify that time was a good healer. But he said nothing. The events of last week had mentally battered and bruised him and he wondered how his wounds would heal over the next five years.
Liz heard the approach of the suited mourner, turned; Karl saw that he was weaving his way past graves just thirty feet away. She sounded like she wanted to wrap things up before the stranger was in their vicinity. ‘Well, I should get back. Maybe we’ll meet again, Karl Seabury.’
‘Maybe, Elizabeth Grafton,’ he replied, before he could wonder if she’d reverted to her maiden name. To accept the journey’s end.
Liz turned to go. She paused to let the mourner walk across her path, but he didn’t. As Karl watched in shock, the mourner stepped across a grave laid with coloured stones, dropped his umbrella, and yanked her, one-handed, into him. He slipped an arm across her chest and his elbow in her throat in a vice-like lock. Even before her scream of shock, Karl recognised the man. The head was shaved and ragged stubble covered his face, but Karl couldn’t fail to identify the face that surfaced in his mind a hundred times a day.
Mick McDevitt put a blade to Liz’s face and said: ‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
‘Run, Seabury, and I’ll gut her right here, and you’ll have to live with that.’
He started walking, dragging Liz with him, towards Karl, who backed off, his mind racing. He could scream out, but would that help? The nearest people were over 200 feet away, and even if some of those big guys heard and raced this way, it wouldn’t happen immediately, would it? Maybe nobody would see their bodies in the grass at this distance. Just a guy in a suit who’d cried out in distress by the grave of his loved one.
‘Stop and turn around,’ Mick said. The last thing Karl wanted to do was give this guy his back out here, alone, but his body disobeyed his mind. He stopped, and he turned, and braced for overwhelming pain. But none came. A hand grabbed his shirt collar and he was pushed onwards, and just inches behind was Liz’s ragged breathing. The ground levelled out and they hit a path, but didn’t follow it. Across, and onto a section of ground where new gravestones poked up, perfectly upright, amid mown grass.
There was an open grave. His fear rose as they moved towards it. There was nobody here. Karl realised McDevitt planned to throw their bodies into that open hole. His eyes searched the ground ahead for a weapon. He’d already decided he was going to make a move, and he even saw it in his mind, like a remembered movie scene: at the edge of the grave, he would grab Mick’s hand, clamp it down hard onto his shoulder, and leap over the hole. He’d land on the other side, and Mick and Liz would be yanked into the abyss. From his sunken position, knife or no, Mick wouldn’t stand a chance thereafter.
But they were one grave short of the final setting for this blockbuster when Mick pulled him up short. He felt a jerk, and a yell from Liz as she was thrown aside, then a kick to the back of his knees. He landed on his arse, and scrabbled aside, hands thrown up to deflect a blow that never came. As he turned, he saw Mick, just feet away, haul Liz’s tiny frame to her feet with ease, and push her hard towards… not the open grave, but the gravestone of its neighbour. She hit it hard, head first, and collapsed onto the grass. He grabbed her hair, that other hand still holding the knife, and ground her face hard into the stone.
‘Well, say hello, then,’ he said, nice and calm, like a party host introducing two strangers.
Karl understood, right then. Mick had brought them to this grave, not the open one. To meet someone after all.
* * *
The car is on its roof, lying diagonally across a high kerb. It flipped twice, losing a backdoor and the boot lid, and every inch of metal is warped and buckled, like tinfoil scrunched up and then straightened out again. The front end is bent around a tree like lobster claws. The tree and the kerb did the job of compressing the interior of the car into almost nothing.
There is space, though. The passenger door is a twisted mess, the window frame down to barely a slat. But there is space. Mick presses himself up against the smashed side of the car, and a jagged shard of metal, forked, like a lightning bolt, pierces his flesh in two spots, one below and one above the collarbone.
He’s already seen that the driver’s side is a waste of time. The window is more accessible, but Wendy’s head is smashed by the roof, which looks like an inverted mountain range, and her neck bent too far, much too far, and sharp metal has dislocated her jaw so that it is at forty-five degrees. No hope. Dead. He can only hope it
happened instantly.
The hundreds of obsessive hours he spent in the gym are now regretted as his thick upper arm fills the gap.
‘No, please don’t!’ he screams, his right arm outstretched, reaching ahead, but short, too short by inches, or miles, because either way he can’t stop this.
The pain in his chest is excruciating, and blood flows. His fingers fall short still.
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’
His fingers continue forward.
‘Please!’
Three feet away, a pair of eyes stare blankly back at him, devoid of emotion. He grabs the jacket in desperation, takes a vice-like fistful.
The bolt pushes deeper into his skin. An inch, and then another inch. The pain throbs throughout his chest like an electrical charge.
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t!’ he moans.
Deeper still. The blood starts to flow, mixing with more blood on the floor. The metal between the jagged forks hits the flesh over his collarbone, and movement is checked.
‘Please, Tim!’
And there is a massive jerk, all shoulder muscle, and Mick screams as the bolt pushes deeper, bending and then snapping his collarbone, and the prongs force themselves further in, and the blood gushes out of his chest and soaks his clothing.
But his fingers manage vital extra inches because the bone isn’t an obstacle. They slip over ripped, slick flesh. The chest is destroyed, but surgeons can fix that. The heart is still alive. The ribcage is busted open by a great wedge of steel, but the heart is right there, untouched, and it beats still.
‘Tim, I promise, okay?’ he screams. ‘I promise I’ll save you.’
His fingers lock onto a rib. He pulls. At first, nothing. Tim is not held by a seatbelt, but his legs are crushed. There’s an engine where they should be. He’s jammed between the seat and the dashboard. The roof is caught on Tim’s head. Compressed from all sides. The biceps contract, and something’s got to lose this battle. At first, Mick is pulled closer, and the metal sinking into his chest goes deeper, but there’s no more pain than before. His body’s got the message – serious shit is happening to you – and there’s no need for overkill.
‘Come on, you fucking cunt!’
But he pulls again, and this time Tim moves. A trapped arm freed, and now there’s space for the torso to shift. His head is tugged back by the roof as his body leans towards Mick, and now he’s not looking at his father, but upwards, high into Heaven. Just a few inches of movement, but enough. And just in time. The heart stops beating a moment before his fingers close into a fist that rhythmically thumps the shattered sternum to keep the muscle working.
‘There, Tim, there, see, Daddy keeps his promises.’
* * *
The newspapers had opened up Mick McDevitt’s life in an attempt to find out what had turned him into a killer. The last few years had seen an almost fifty per cent rise in stress-related sickness among police officers. Job cuts, overtime bans, and complicated shift patterns, as well as an increasing belief that the public felt let down. If that could make a cop sick, or turn to suicide, then surely it could throw a guy’s morals out of whack.
‘Routines, that’s all I’ve got left,’ Mick said. ‘I missed a lot of my son’s life because I was hunting people like your fucking husband at all hours. But I always got home, and I always looked after him. If some animal like your man hadn’t slaughtered an innocent person, I always tried to make him breakfast if I was there in the morning. If some fucking gangster like Grafton had me out all night, I always made Tim’s bed when I came in. And if I got the call that another poor bastard had been cut down by someone like your fucking husband, I always said goodbye when I went out. Except for one night when he went out to celebrate finishing school. It’s a full-time job, hunting bastards like Ronald Grafton, and I was in the files, and I didn’t hear Tim leave.’
A bike crash as a lowly constable fresh into the Metropolitan Police had been mentioned in the press, too. Frontal lobe trauma could mess up a chap’s head. The papers proved it with quotes ripped from medical journals and statements from a plethora of doctors.
‘Last thing I said to him: “This is for you”. An hour earlier, when I changed some of his loose coins for a £20 note to spend that night. “This is for you.” Not “I love you”. And then he’s gone. And I never got the chance to say that again, did I? The one time I never said it, and it was the most important time of all. Then I get the call from my ex-wife. It’s her turn with him. But she’s let him go out clubbing. His friends have called her. Tim’s taken a drug. A new thing on the streets, very popular. Buzz, it’s called. But Tim’s not having a buzz, no. He’s having a bad reaction. I stand on the street. Waiting. She’s bringing him home. I see their car coming down the road, fast. And then Tim… Tim has a bad, bad reaction to the drug. Attacks his mother while she’s driving.’
And the car crash deaths of his ex-wife and sixteen-year-old child, the papers made a big deal of that, of course. A good way to screw up a logical head. But McDevitt had been back at work within weeks. A little antisocial, a little more reserved, sleeping less, suffering from headaches and intense muscles spasms. But otherwise unaffected, at least externally. Not like he lost a loving spouse and a baby, that was how some of his more scathing colleagues viewed it. Immune to the heartache of losing loved ones because of his job, said other, more seasoned murder detectives. And no third party was ever blamed. The police never traced the man who sold Timothy McDevitt the drug.
‘I searched his room. I tore it apart, looking for more drugs, looking for a clue. But there was nothing. Tim could have got the Buzz off anyone, anytime. None of his friends had seen him buy it. I could have hit out at dealers in that club, but how would I know if I got the right one? I had no one to blame, and there was nothing I could do. Unless I burned the whole world to ashes, I could miss the bastard who sold my boy that filth.’
Staring at the ground, Mick continued. ‘But I couldn’t sleep at night, tormented by my thoughts. Did I turn my boy to drugs? Did I not see the signs? Was it all my fault for not being at home more, for not keeping him on the right track? Was I the only one to blame all along?’
His eyes refocussed on his prey. And he grinned.
‘No, no, no, because one day Brad gave me a name, didn’t he? And suddenly the cross hairs shrank. The world was safe. I had a target. Before, I was lost in a maze, but when he gave me that name, a door was opened, and I saw the way out. Just before I put a screwdriver through his brain, the dealer told me two things. He said Tim had told him he’d never taken drugs before. That was good news.’
Quick as a snake, he bent and grabbed Liz’s hair again. He jabbed the knife hard into the gravestone an inch from her skin.
‘He also gave up your husband. A new name. Others had been involved. Others would have to pay. Tim was in his club that night. Your bastard man was told that Tim was the son of a detective, so he thought it would be funny to overdose him and see what happened. Just for a laugh. So, he sent the dealer across to my son’s friends with some freebies. Just for a laugh. And I bet he slept okay that night. Just a tragic accident, not his fault. Just for a fucking laugh. Is he laughing now?’
He twisted her head so she could look at him, but through her wild hair Karl saw that her eyes were screwed shut.
‘When I saw the name of the church where you were burying your husband, it all made sense. The very same graveyard where my son is buried. Fate. All along, you wasted your time running and I wasted my time trying to kill you. It was never meant to happen. You were invincible, unlike your husband. Until now. Until Tim was watching.’
‘You’re insane,’ Liz said, barely audible, shaking against the gravestone. ‘This is why nobody ever knew you blamed Ron. All this blood, all this… It was just a tragic accident, don’t you see that?’
Mick slid the blade of the knife towards her eye. And then he looked into the sky.
‘See, Tim. They took your mother from you, and you from me, but I g
ot them, didn’t I? And now Daddy’s about to keep his last ever promise to you.’
To his right Karl sensed more movement. His eyes flicked that way. Another man, this guy in a baseball cap and a tracksuit. Sixty feet away. Now there were four people on this planet.
Mick dropped the knife and clamped both big hands around Liz’s tiny neck and lifted her. Easily. Right off the ground. In two steps he was by the open grave. Karl’s eyes went to the knife, there in the grass, just six feet away, but he was frozen in place, unable to will his muscles into action.
‘I’ll be back for you,’ Mick said as he swung her out, over the grave. And then he dropped her, and started to turn, meaning to come for Karl – meaning he would dispatch Karl first so that he could take his time with Liz.
But as she fell, her fingers grabbed his wrist. They slipped away instantly, but there had been enough friction which meant he had to try to take a step sideways to rebalance. But there was nothing to step onto. His foot came down into the abyss, and his arms sought something to grab. But there was nothing to hold onto. He toppled, like a giant oak, and landed hard the far edge of the grave. And then he vanished into the grave with her.
Karl rushed to the open grave and stared down. Liz was on her back with Mick kneeling astride her. He was taking fistfuls of soil, forcing them into her face, but he looked calm, his movements methodical. His demeanour, more than anything else, told Karl that Mick was now a human in shape only.
‘Liz,’ Karl shouted. That got Mick’s attention, as if he’d forgotten about his other enemy. He stood and swiped at Karl, planning to haul him into the pit. But Karl backed off. Mick clambered out of the hole quickly for a big man, and in his hands was a spade. Karl turned, and found himself facing another man.
The guy in the baseball cap. He was right there, running towards them, cap now gone, snatched by the wind. No time to dart aside, so Karl threw up his arms, turned away his head, and got ready for the impact.
