The Unburied Dead

by Douglas Lindsay

  She kept shaking her head. It was a big discussion and warranted a hell of a lot more time, but I didn't have it.

  'Look, Evelyn, I've got to go. Think about what I've said. Don't do anything yet and we'll talk at the weekend.'

  She smiled weakly at that and nodded. Not sure, of course, if I'll have the time to see her.

  That was it, and we went our ways. We're both in work tomorrow and we can take it from there. A right bloody shambles.

  Had a brief interview with Charlotte as she disappeared for the evening. Wants to go away tomorrow evening, spend the night in some hotel somewhere. Said she had a place in mind. I didn't fight it and as I stood in her office having the brief discussion on the subject, I just wanted to leap over the desk and rip her clothes off.

  Not long after that the expected phone call from Peggy came through. Juggled enough women in my time to sound cool about it. Even so, like a complete idiot, I couldn't bring myself to say definitely no about tomorrow night. Put it off until tomorrow.

  So, just after nine on a Friday night, up to my eyes in paperwork, and I can't concentrate on a single line of it. Charlotte, Peggy and Evelyn Bathurst keep intruding into the thought process. Mostly Charlotte.

  As far as I know, she's spending the evening alone. Very tempted to go down there when I've finished at the office. Utterly succumbing to infatuation and there's only one road to go down once you start feeling like this; there's only one thing that's going to happen. You're going to make an idiot of yourself.

  I'm forty-four for God's sake. Bit of a slow starter, but after the war I had all those women and by God, I don't believe I made an arse of myself with any of them. Too messed up. There may have been several who were pissed off, certainly several that were hurt, and my behaviour might be considered reprehensible in some quarters, but I never actually made an idiot of myself. Now, however, we're right smack in the middle of the biggest murder inquiry we've ever had in this patch, and I'm acting like a total lovesick knob.

  The quicker I fall flat on my face and screw everything up – get dumped by Miller and screw up with Peggy, end up with no one but two-bit scrubbers picked up in the pub on a Saturday night – the quicker I can get on with things. So if I go to see her tonight I'll either get put in my place, not before time and just what I'm needing, or else I'll get into her bed for the night and plummet deeper into the abyss of infatuation.

  First, however, I've got to get this work done. Christ, who joins the rozzers to do paperwork?

  Finish off the cup of tea at my right hand, sit back in the seat, stare at the ceiling. Begin contemplating getting out of here, doing all the crap tomorrow. Ponder what my reception will be in Helensburgh, because no matter how wrong it is to do it, I know I'm not going to be able to stop myself going down there. Uninvited.

  *

  Of course – because it's the way of things for there to be copious amounts of crap dropped onto the path of life from an enormous height – however shit I imagine I might end up feeling when I get there, it doesn't even begin to wipe the backside of how shit I actually end up feeling. Not a bloody patch.

  23

  Evelyn Bathurst looks not unlike Jo.

  She parks the car on the road at the bottom of the garden of the large house in Helensburgh, steps out into the rain. Stares at the lights in the house fifty yards away along the driveway, wonders about what she is doing. Shivers, pulls her jacket closer around her.

  She locks the car door. Her own car under repair – faulty brakes – she has borrowed the car from Constable Forsyth, on duty through the night. Forsyth believes that she may repay the favour sometime.

  She will not get the chance.

  She swings back the gate, feels the beating of her heart. Looks at her watch, wonders if the Superintendent will be at home. A Friday night, not long after ten o'clock. Whatever it is that Miller does, she will find this an unwelcome interruption, with unwelcome information.

  Takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself; begins the long walk up the driveway. She has somewhere else to go, someone else to whom she could talk – not that she was going to mention that to Thomas Hutton – but she has decided to come here first. Perhaps she'll move on later. Perhaps not.

  Should she have listened to Hutton? But it wasn't Hutton talking, it was her conscience. She had been meaning to do the same thing for the past year. Slowly the desire had worn off. The months will do that to you. But now it was back, born of fear, guilt and self-loathing for what she had been a part of. There was no need to confide in Hutton any further. What he had said earlier in the station had been all that she'd been needing to hear.

  Her ponderous steps take her nearer to the house, her stomach crawls with nerves. She wonders if she is about to be dismissed, in the manner she has heard Miller dismiss so many officers in the past. Not as bad as she seems, Hutton had said, and she hopes it is true.

  She automatically rings the bell, without a clear thought in her head; moves back from the second step so that she is outwith the meagre protection of the front of the house. The rain soaks her head. She shivers again in the cold. Throat dry, nervous fingers.

  The door opens, catching her unaware. She stares into the dim light of the house, feels the rush of warmth. Charlotte Miller stands in front of her. Doesn't recognise Bathurst at first. Miller wears a long, blue silk pyjama top, her legs are bare. Bathurst looks at her skin, smooth and gold in the dim light from behind.

  'Constable Bathurst?' she says, surprise in her voice coming with sudden recognition.

  Bathurst nods, says nothing. No words. They stare at each other for a few seconds, before either awakes to the other. Miller shakes her head, feels the cold, summons her inside and closes the door behind her.

  Bathurst stands in the hall, looking around. Unaware of what her husband does for a living, she wonders what Miller earns as a superintendent to afford such opulence.

  'I'm sorry to bother you on a Friday night,' she begins, but Miller stops her with a shake of the head.

  'Don't be silly. Take your coat off and I'll get a towel. How long were you standing out there?'

  Bathurst thinks of stepping out of the car, seems like an hour ago. Doesn't answer, removes her coat, Miller ushers her into the sitting room.

  'I've just got a quick phone call to make, then I'll get the towel,' she says.

  She disappears. Evelyn Bathurst stands in the middle of the room, suddenly warm, aware of the dampness of her hair.

  *

  There was nothing special about the story of the kid walking along the road, bumping the head of a dead baby in the potholes. Fuck, I grant you, it sounds special. It sounds like the kind of thing that doesn't happen every day. But that's just what people think nowadays because most of the population haven't spent time in a war zone.

  Previous generations, those bastards were always going to war. That's what they did. Everyone went to war, everyone got used to it, learned to live with all the complete shit you see when you're in that situation. You got home, you coped. If you didn't cope, they locked you up, or you became the guy stuck away in the corner of the village that everyone told their kids to stay away from.

  These days, it's all about coping. Society is about the individual. It didn't use to be. It used to be about society functioning as a whole, and if that meant that individuals got shafted to enable society to function, then so be it. These days individuals have the right not to get shafted. Very thoughtful of society to put the individual first, except it's the very reason why society is falling apart.

  So everybody hurts and everybody cries and everybody has a story to tell, and this is just me telling mine. Except I don't want to tell it; I don't want to talk. There's so much of it, that if I have to think about it, if someone was ever going to force me to think about it, then by fucking God, I won't just cry, I won't just go quietly fucking mental…

  I don't know what I'd do. I just don't want to think about it.

  There was nothing special about the kid and
the baby with its head bouncing off the road, except it was the only story I told to the psychiatrist I saw a month after I got back from the Balkans.

  I sat down, she asked me a couple of questions, I cut her off and told her the bouncing baby's head story, and then before I'd got to the end – although, of course, it's a story that doesn't really have an end – I got up and walked out. I didn't want to tell her any more, and if I wasn't going to talk to her then there was no point in being there.

  As I talked, I stared at her throat. She had an unusually large Adam's apple for a woman, and I just stared at it the whole time wondering if she was really a man, or if the Adam's apple wasn't actually all that big and I was exaggerating it in some bizarre attempt to distract myself.

  I never saw her again. Looking back, her Adam's apple probably wasn't all that big and she probably wasn't a man.

  *

  Not much after six a.m. The rain still falls in a steady drizzle, as Constable Bathurst arrives at the station, leaving Forsyth's Peugeot in the car park, the keys in the exhaust. He will be off duty in a couple of hours. From there she will walk home, a ten minute promenade through wet, deserted streets in the middle of the night.

  As she steps out onto the street and rounds the first corner, someone sees her, sees her dark brown hair dully reflect the orange street lamps, but she does not see him. She walks on, the dull ache in her leg muscles heightened from sitting in the car.

  She thinks about Charlotte Miller, has vague thoughts of Thomas Hutton, but thinks not of the problems with which she stepped out that evening. Wonders whether to have coffee when she gets home, or whether she should go straight to bed.

  She will, however, never get to choose.

  24

  Having a weird dream where Peggy and Charlotte are naked together on a huge front lawn somewhere, singing Aerosmith – Crazy – when the phone rings. It plagues the dream for a while, before I'm plucked from the fantasy into the cold early morning. Still dark outside, cold in the bed. First thing I think of is driving down to see Charlotte last night, and getting my rude awakening. Constable Forsyth's Peugeot 307 sitting outside her front gate. Forsyth. Fuck. So I sat there feeling like a total idiot, before turning around and heading back home. Resisted the pull of the vodka bottle, went straight to bed. I cannot believe she went for Forsyth. Course, I can't believe she went for me either, but at least I'm not some spotty constable for whom shaving is a distant dream. At least we'd had some sort of thing going on since the curious incident of the tits in the lunch time. But Forsyth? Had he ever seen her tits?

  Look at the clock while my hand makes its tortuous way out from under the covers, on the long journey to the phone. Not yet seven o'clock.

  'Yeah?' I mutter down the phone.

  'It's Ramsey. You need to come in.'

  *

  Dawn's grey light begins to show behind the tenement buildings. The rain has stopped, the cold does not seem so cold. The small area at the bottom of the park where the body was found is log-jammed with police; the entire park is cordoned off from the public. The Saturday between Christmas and New Year, and not too many people have crawled out of bed. A few anoraks who've brought their dogs out to let them dump on the park, stand around and watch the police activity, such as it is. What are they expecting to see?

  And what are any of us doing, these too many chiefs and too many Indians? The SOCOs are doing their business, while the remainder of us stand around in monstrous misery and anger.

  The body of Evelyn Bathurst has already been removed.

  The first officer at the scene did not recognise her, her face having been dealt with in the same manner as Anne Keller five days ago. Multiple stab wounds, so that she was utterly disfigured. The body was identified by the ID card in her inside pocket. Strangely, it wasn't until then that the constable on duty had to throw up.

  The gang's all here, each and every one of us looking sick. What makes it worse? That she was one of us? That she was so attractive? Or is it just that it's happened again, the killer has struck once more?

  Bloonsbury is still drunk from last night. Very fetching he looks in his abject misery and inebriation. Taylor at least has managed to sober up, just looks hungover – the same as that idiot Herrod. And Charlotte Miller stands alone. Even saw her shed a tear. Haven't seen her at the scene of a crime since she got here, but this is different. This is a combination of all our worst nightmares.

  Tried speaking to her a few minutes ago, got nowhere. She looks in shock. That hard bitch act is exactly that, but you would have to be built of granite not to be moved by this.

  'And when he was home, there lay his uncle smitten on the head, and his father pierced through the heart, and his mother cloven through the midst.'

  That was what she said, those her only words. Her voice was small, and like all intellectuals who cannot speak the truth of their emotions, she hid behind some inappropriate literary reference. The usual source, I presume, but I don't know. Don't care. She does, at least, look genuinely distraught.

  Forsyth walked past her not long after and they didn't even look at each other. And what were they up to no more than a few hours ago? Why would a Superintendent have a constable back to her house? There can be only one reason, and it's the same one that took me there on Christmas Eve. Makes me wonder why she's asked me away for Saturday night.

  Tonight in a hotel looks extremely unlikely and if I don't spend the entire evening at the station, I can be glad of the fact that I did not dismiss Peggy's invitation. These, however, are trivial considerations at the moment. They would be, even if this latest murder had not been one us, and a popular member of the force at that.

  I've got my back to a tree, the tenth smoke of the day in my hand, my mind all over the place. I'm going to have to talk to Taylor, no doubt. Who is there for me to betray, now that the only one of the gang of five whom I would have protected has been killed?

  Sequence of events. Monday night – Anne Keller is murdered, and at the same time Edwards is mouthing off to Bathurst about the great conspiracy of last year. Two days later Bathurst fills me in on the full story. Doesn't want me to tell anyone else, so I have to presume she hasn't. I go to see Crow, he looks dumb about Monday night – and gut instinct says he's telling the truth – although there is something about Herrod and Bloonsbury, as if the conspiracy is still active in some way. Our killer tries to strike again, this time unsuccessfully, and the potential victim gets a good look at him. Bit of a vague description of course, since all these people are idiots, but it certainly isn't anything like Crow. The guts continue to say that he had nothing to do with the murder. I speak to Bathurst, advise her to go to Miller, and the next episode in the story is the one where she gets murdered.

  So was she killed by the same man who did Keller – the same m.o. as far as anyone can tell at this stage – or was she murdered in copycat to keep her quiet, in which case, how did they know she was about to play the whistleblower? Could I have alerted them by my pointless trip to see Crow? That is the thing which consumes me the most. Was I to blame for her death?

  Jesus, it's a horrible thought. But the gut feeling says that Bathurst was just another victim in the line. Dark brown hair, walking alone through the streets in the middle of the night, she fits the mould of the victims.

  But then there's that other gut feeling, the one which says there is no such thing as coincidence. If she's dead now, it's because of her knowledge of what happened last year. And if somehow they know that she told me...

  Get the shivers, feels like a hand at my neck. Light another cigarette as the cold morning continues its painful appearance. Another media crew pull up and I wonder how Bloonsbury's going to handle them in his state.

  Taylor appears, looking hellish, much the same as the rest of us.

  'You all right, Sergeant?' he says.

  Cigarette in the mouth, I nod. Why is he asking me?

  'I mean,' he says, 'you two, you had something going, didn't you?'


  Aye, right enough. He thought I spent the night with her leading into Christmas Day.

  'Nothing but another in a long line of rejections for me, sir,' I say, and the cigarette tastes awful. Serves me right for smoking more than a half packet before breakfast.

  'Oh,' he says, and looks disinterested. Doesn't believe me, which is fine.

  'This is a fucking mess,' he says, looking around at the commotion. And a hell of a bigger mess than he supposes.

  'Telling me,' I say. Crush the cigarette under foot, determine not to have another until I've eaten something. 'I need to talk to you about something, sir.'

  'Aye, sure, whenever. Not now, though. Someone's going to have to talk to the press. Jonah's in no fit state.'

  'Still pissed from last night.'

  'Still pissed from Monday night,' says Taylor – in one of our old jokes – as he walks off to talk to the gathering herd of TV, hungry for the story for the morning news. Nothing people like better with their Cornflakes than a bloody mutilation.

  *

  Been a long day. Our battered husband woke up and wants to press charges. Had to go and speak to him, and having found the wife unlikeable and hard to believe, he was just as bad. Perfect for each other, except that one of them is a brutal, lying bastard. Or perhaps, as occurred to me at some point during the day, they're both brutal bastards and they're both telling the truth about the other's brutality. Got a feeling it's going to be like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in War of the Roses and they'd save us all a lot of trouble if they just went off somewhere and fell from a chandelier together.

  The shit has hit the fan, of course. The Chief Constable showed up, acting like he owned the place – I missed him fortunately, the guy's a moron – dragged back from his 'winter retreat' – that's what he called it, the fucking idiot – and not too happy about it. As it is the need of authority to dump on the next most senior in the firing line, Miller got it in the neck and everyone expected her to come firing thereafter. Didn't happen, however. She got them all together – missed this as well, at the hospital – and gave them some concerned talk, considerate, subdued, about the need for a quick result, not only for the benefit of the public, but for our own good. Stressed the need for good, honest work, to do the job well and not try anything that could backfire. Good police chatter, but not at all like Charlotte. Usually she's in amongst us like a headcase with a chainsaw. Never been around her when she's lost one of her people before, so you don't know what she'll be like.