by George Mann
Daisy pulled out her phone, but the icons on the screen were swimming. She felt a sudden flash of pain in her head, and gasped, a stream of bile dribbling from her mouth. She hunched over until it had passed. She clutched for the crane, leaning upon its neck for support. It was cold and clammy to the touch. Her breath was coming in short, shallow gasps, and her head was swimming. Was she having another episode? It felt just like it had the previous night.
She steadied herself, searching the garden for any sign of the man. He was getting away, nearing the treeline that bordered the estate. Without thinking, she stepped out from behind the crane and lurched after him, one hand to her head, rubbing her throbbing temple.
As she ran, she felt the world shift, and she pitched forward, throwing her hands out to catch herself as she went down. Her palms skidded on the damp earth. She tried to push herself back up, but everything was spinning, and she slumped over again, unable to find her balance.
“Without grace or remorse.”
She felt herself mouthing in time with the whispered words, felt panic bloom. The world swam up to meet her, and blinked out.
* * *
Daisy tried to move, but something had snagged her tights, and she felt them tear as she kicked at whatever it was, trying to get free. Thorns scraped at her calf, and she opened her eyes, suddenly alert.
It was still dark. She was on the ground. Slowly, she placed her hands palm down by her sides and levered herself up. The ground was hard and cold, and gritty. When she’d fallen, it had been in the field close to the manor house. Where was she now, then?
She moistened her dry lips, spitting frantically at the mouthful of dust and grit she was rewarded with for her efforts. She wiped her face in the crook of her arm. Her sore hand was stinging.
It was darker here than it had been before. She looked up, but she couldn’t see the moon through the dense foliage. She pulled herself into a sitting position, tucking her legs beneath her. She was sitting on a packed dirt floor. Around her, the jagged shapes of crumbling walls loomed out of the trees.
She was in a building. But why were there plants?
A cold finger of dread seemed to run along her spine. Had someone taken her? Had they put her in this place, a makeshift cell or outbuilding? Was she trapped?
Quickly, she got to her feet, feeling a little woozy. She stepped forward, arms outstretched, fingers encountering nothing but leaves. She pushed forward, one more step, then another. The foliage grew increasingly dense, and then, behind it, an old stone wall. It was slick with moss and grime.
She searched her pockets for her phone. For a moment she thought she’d lost it, but it was there, in her pocket, as before. She pulled it out and thumbed the torch on, turning on the spot. The weak light revealed a small room with no roof. The walls around her had mostly crumbled to stumps, one of them collapsing outwards, disturbed by tree roots that had crept inside, rupturing the packed earth, causing little eruptions of green and brown in places they should never have been. Trees, she realised, were growing inside the shell of the small building. The whole place stank of earth and decay.
The building, she realised, was a little one-room house or hovel that had been long abandoned.
A hovel out in the woods.
The thought struck her with a certainty she couldn’t ignore. This was Agnes Levett’s house. She was standing in the ruins of the witch’s old home.
She’d known this place as a kid. They all had. The creepy old witch’s house in the woods. Their parents had told them to stay away from it, but they’d come here to look at it, once even creeping inside, terrified of what they might find. Then Bill Clemens had gone missing, and everyone at school had claimed it was the witch, taking him back to her house in the woods to eat him. He’d turned up safely, of course, two days later after trying to run away to London – but she’d never gone near the witch’s house again after that, too afraid of what might be lurking inside.
And now she was here, in the dead of night, and she had no recollection of how she’d arrived.
Daisy swallowed. All she could taste was bile.
It had happened again. She’d blacked out, up at the manor, and wandered back into the woods. But why here? Had it just been unconscious, because she’d been standing near Agnes’s grave before she passed out? Perhaps it had been on her mind, and her unconscious brain had brought her here on autopilot.
Whatever the case, she needed to get home.
She pushed her way through the vegetation, flinching as the branches scratched at her face.
She emerged a moment later into the clearing around the front of the house, onto the path that would lead her back up towards the manor. It was only then she remembered the figure she’d seen fleeing into the woods, carrying the woman. What had happened? Where had he been taking her?
She looked at her phone screen. No messages. It was late, but surely Lucy would still be awake. She dashed off a quick message:
Everything okay at your place?
The answer was almost instantaneous:
Fine. Boring. Dad and Petra watching
a film. Sorry I couldn’t get away.
Are you home yet?
Daisy paused for a moment, and then typed:
Just got back. About to turn in.
She hit send.
So, whatever she’d seen, it was either a figment of her imagination, or the Walseys simply weren’t aware of it, the latter of which seemed highly unlikely.
So… she was seeing things now, too. Great.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jenny Wren was feeling buoyant as she pulled her beat-up Land Rover to a stop in the small car park they’d been using to service the dig. There was only one other vehicle parked there at this hour – a black BMW, presumably belonging to one of the fishermen who’d risen at the crack of dawn to secure his choice of vantage point around the perimeter of the lake. It seemed such a lonely occupation to Jenny, but she presumed that was entirely the point – that catching fish wasn’t so much the object of the exercise, but to absent oneself from everyday life, to find some solitude away from the bustle of other people. That, she could understand. It was one of the reasons she liked to arrive early at her dig sites – to take a few moments alone to prepare for the day ahead, without having to think about organising everyone else.
Today would be a relatively easy day, however. The TV crew had everything they needed, and the bones and other associated finds had been securely transferred to her lab in Oxford. All that remained was for the stone to be replaced and the site to be handed back to the Walseys.
She knew, of course, that the stone wasn’t going to remain there for long, not when the foundations for the new cottages were due to be dug in a few weeks’ time – but she liked to leave things as she found them, so there could be no finger-pointing at a later date. That, too, was a lesson she’d learned the hard way over the years.
She hopped down from the Land Rover and slammed the door. She never bothered to lock it, not unless she was transporting one of her finds; the chances of anyone choosing to steal her ratty old thing over a shiny BMW, or anything else for that matter, were negligible. It was one of the reasons she loved it.
The march up to the house was brisk, following the long gravel approach up the small incline. She’d thought about tramping up over the field, but it was still dewy and the soft earth made it hard going. This way, she got to revel in the beauty of the manor house as she walked. It looked palatial, sitting there at the end of the long drive, fronted by formal lawns, with twin topiary bushes to either side, sculpted into peacocks. In many ways it was akin to hundreds of similar properties throughout the country, but the fortifications made this one special, at least to her mind. It was as if the Walseys had moved in and gone to ground, awaiting the oncoming siege.
Perhaps that’s how it felt, as interlopers, taking over the manor after hundreds of years of the Abbott family: a war of attrition between the gentry and the villagers, who valiantly fought
against progress whenever it dared rear its head.
She knew she was being unfair – the people here were hardly yokels – but there was an overwhelming sense that tradition had been broken, a mourning, of sorts, for what had passed.
Now, of course, Nicholas Abbott was dead. There’d been all sorts of talk about that at the dig yesterday, people claiming that the spirit of Agnes Levett had returned to claim his scalp. More likely, she considered, some enterprising scoundrel had taken advantage of the timing to see him off. By all accounts he’d been an odious toad, with any number of people bearing grudges. She couldn’t imagine the police were having any difficulty whatsoever identifying suspects, and the long-dead Agnes Levett certainly wasn’t amongst them.
Still, people were going to talk, and she supposed it only helped to raise awareness of the find. Then she cursed herself for being heartless. A man was dead. No matter who he was, or what people said he’d been like, he’d been murdered in his own home in cold blood. That wasn’t a matter to be taken lightly.
She reached the courtyard at the foot of the house and veered right, across one of the formal lawns – treading carefully so as not to leave any boot marks with her wellingtons – and into the field that housed the dig.
The weathervane atop the church spire was spinning in the wind, and now she was up here, exposed against the elements, it felt colder, too.
She popped into the tent and unpacked her case, setting out the paperwork she’d need to get signed when they were finished. She checked her phone, but it was too early for messages, and then ducked back outside, filling her lungs with bracing fresh air.
Re-emerging, she glanced into the grave.
And screamed.
It was a hoarse, primal, anguished sound, utterly involuntary, and she didn’t stop until she ran out of breath, panting, her throat raging and sore.
A man’s body lay in the depression, his face so beaten and broken that he was completely unrecognisable. He was lying on his back, one leg folded over the other, an arm twisted and broken behind him. His bloodied face peered up at her accusingly. One eye orbit had been smashed, the eye itself pulped. His jaw had been broken, and his lips were bloodied, the jagged remains of teeth embedded in the soft tissue of his upper lip.
She thought she could see where whatever blunt object had been used to batter him had entered the skull, and dark fluid had seeped from inside the cavity, staining the soil beneath him. He was wearing a raincoat that seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place it, not least because the bloody mess of the corpse looked somehow less than human. Even the bones that had previously occupied the grave had seemed more familiar, more recognisable.
Dazed, Jenny stumbled back, away from the grave, pulling her phone from her pocket.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The timing could have been better. Another murder, and Peter still didn’t have anyone properly in the frame for the first one. It just went to prove the old adage that you get what you wish for – he’d been desperate to sink his teeth into a more serious investigation, and now he was juggling two. The modus operandi was completely different, too. Where Nicholas Abbott had been throttled, Lee Stroud – he’d been forced to fish the man’s wallet from his trouser pocket to identify him – had been beaten to death with a metal marker post, taken from inside the archaeologists’ tent.
They’d found the weapon in the adjacent field, after DS Patel and PC Chambers had given the area an initial, cursory search. It looked as though the killer had casually discarded it after his crime, probably as he or she was fleeing the scene. Peter had had it bagged, ready to go to the lab for analysis. The SOCOs were on their way, and they’d do a more thorough job of interpreting the scene.
In the meantime, that left him with two murders to solve, both with different MOs, both where victims had enough people bearing grudges against them to create a veritable queue of candidates. And the first two were Jennifer Wren and Hugh Walsey.
He was standing in Walsey’s sitting room with them now – a room that was impressive by any standards, and probably larger than the ground-floor footprint of Peter’s entire house. A large window looked out onto the formal gardens at the rear, with well-stocked flowerbeds and a smattering of fruit trees. Portraits lined the walls, and a large gilt-framed mirror hung over a baroque plaster fireplace. A leather Chesterfield suite had been neatly arranged around the centre of the large space.
He peered up at the portrait of a grave-looking man in an extravagant white wig, who appeared to be looking disapprovingly at Peter down the length of his nose.
“One of the Abbotts, I think,” said Walsey, quietly. “Nicholas included most of them in the sale. Said he had no need for them any more, and that they wouldn’t fit in his new cottage.”
“I suppose not,” said Peter, recalling the three paintings he’d seen on the wall of Abbott’s cottage. “May I?” He indicated a chair opposite Jenny Wren, who looked as white as a sheet, and was nursing what Walsey had told him was her third brandy of the morning.
“Of course,” said Walsey. “Look, do you want a drink? I’m afraid my manners have gone out the window. This is all a bit of a shock.”
Peter shook his head. “No, thanks. Bit early for me.”
“Coffee, then?” said Walsey.
“I had one on the way over,” said Peter. He could hear two women shouting at one another in the background, elsewhere in the house. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the shrill sounds were excruciating.
Walsey looked pained. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, leaving the room and pulling the door shut behind him.
“So, Ms Wren, I need to ask you a few questions. DS Patel will be along shortly to escort you to the station, where you’ll be asked to make a formal statement, and the officers will take your fingerprints.”
She looked up, suddenly more alert than she’d seemed. “My fingerprints?”
“Yes,” said Peter. “We’ll be taking fingerprints and DNA samples from all of your team, just so we can rule out any incidental imprints from the scene. They’ll want to take a look at your footwear, too.”
Jenny shrugged and took another swig of her brandy, shuddering slightly as the alcohol hit her palate. “I suppose you need to do whatever’s necessary,” she said, by way of agreement.
“Ms Wren, we’re awaiting formal identification, but we believe the person you found to be a local man by the name of Mr Lee Stroud.”
“Lee Stroud? That’s who it was in the grave? That’s awful.”
“We’re waiting for confirmation, but that seems to be the case. Tell me, did you know Mr Stroud?”
She nodded. “Not well, by any means. I’d only met him a couple of times.”
“He’d been quite disruptive, I believe, coming out to the dig to protest?” said Peter.
She gave him a hard look. “I know what you’re getting at, and you’re wildly off the mark, DS Shaw. I’m used to dealing with that sort of thing. I’ve seen it all, in my time – developers who want to pay you off to pretend you haven’t really found something of archaeological value, protestors arguing against the removal of ancient monuments, people angry because a Roman wall has prevented them from getting fibre optic broadband. It comes with the territory, and you learn to deal with it. You certainly don’t murder people and contaminate your dig site with their corpses.”
“All right,” said Peter, levelly.
“Look, I didn’t murder him,” said Jenny. “The man’s been a bit of an inconvenience, but that’s hardly cause to kill him, is it?” She looked at her glass, and then downed the last of the brandy. “Lee Stroud was, in my opinion, a very lonely man, looking for a cause, and he believed he’d found it in trying to ‘protect’ everyone from the consequences of the dig. I hear he’d been stirring up trouble down in the village, too, and posting letters through the Walseys’ door.”
“Yes, I’ll be exploring all avenues,” he said. “Tell me, what did he say to you when he first came up to the dig site?”
“He was very quiet, that first time,” said Jenny. “Thoughtful. He asked if he could speak with me, took me to one side and explained very calmly that he was a concerned citizen and wanted to warn me about the dangers of exhuming Agnes Levett’s remains. He seemed to take it all very seriously. Truly believed that people would start dying if we lifted that stone.”
“People have started to die,” said Peter.
She seemed to consider this for a moment, as if realising it for the first time. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. But not in the sense that Lee Stroud meant. He talked about supernatural phenomena, about unquiet spirits and ancient curses. Surely you can’t consider any of that a lead?”
“Lee Stroud was killed by something very corporeal, Ms Wren,” he said. “I can assure you of that.” He scratched at his chin. He hadn’t had a chance to shave that morning, and his stubble was irritating where it rubbed against his shirt collar. “So these ‘dangers’ he mentioned – they were all stories about the risen dead, and historic curses?”
“Exactly that,” said Jenny. “He said that Agnes’s body had originally been buried closer to the church, in an unmarked grave away from hallowed ground, but that her body had been moved after a series of unexplained deaths throughout the village and placed beneath the witch stone to protect the remaining villagers.”
“Is there any evidence to support that story?”
“Archaeologically speaking, no, just stories repeated by the villagers, folklore and received wisdom passed down through the years,” said Jenny. “I did my research before commencing with the dig. It seems to be the accepted story of what happened.”
“And the deaths?”
“It was the 1640s, DS Shaw. People died from the cures, let alone the sickness. A few unexplained deaths would be more sensibly ascribed to the pox, or a nasty strain of dysentery or tuberculosis. Look, I’m not sure what any of this has to do with Lee Stroud,” she said.
