Buried

by Graham Masterton

  Start Reading

  About Buried

  About Graham Masterton

  Reviews

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  In memory of my friend Andrzej Kuryłowicz

  10 April 1954 – 21 March 2014

  You left us on the first day of Spring

  ‘Chan eil saoi air nach laigh leòn’

  Irish saying: Even a hero can be hurt

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  About Buried

  Reviews

  About Graham Masterton

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  Coming soon from Graham Masterton

  From the Editor of this Book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  One

  ‘Are you coming inside or not, you useless collop?’ Declan demanded.

  It was obvious, though, that Christy wasn’t going to come any nearer. He stood on the front doorstep, his black and tan fur bedraggled by the rain, and Declan had never seen him look so apprehensive. His eyes were wide, and his nostrils were twitching, and every now and then he tilted his head sideways as if he were trying to peer inside the hallway and in through the living-room door, because he was sure that there was something frightening in there.

  Colm called out, ‘Declan, for feck’s sake, will you stop discussing the weather with that mutt of yours and give me a hand with this fecking fireplace?’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Christy, you’re some jibber,’ Declan told him. ‘If you want to stay out there getting yourself soaked, that’s your lookout. But if you die of pneumonia, don’t come blaming me for it.’

  He left Christy and went into the living room where Colm had knocked the brown-tiled fire surround loose from the wall and was now trying to lever it further away with a crowbar. The air in the tiny room was filled with dust and the floorboards were gritty underfoot so that the soles of his boots made a scrunching sound.

  ‘Never known him act like that before,’ said Declan, picking up a shovel and wedging it into the opposite side of the fireplace. ‘It’s almost like he’s scared of something, do you know what I mean? Maybe there’s a ghost in here, like.’

  ‘That wouldn’t fecking surprise me at all,’ said Colm, violently wrenching the crowbar from side to side. ‘The old feller who used to own this place, they discovered him dead down the bottom of the stairs, that’s what that girl from Sherry Fitzgerald’s told me. Tripped over his cat, so she reckoned. Broke his neck like a fecking stick of celery and they didn’t find him for a month.’

  Colm had reckoned that it would take them at least two weeks to renovate the whole house. It was a small two-bedroom property in Millstream Row, Blarney, in a terrace of eleven cottages that had been built sometime in the 1860s to house woollen workers from Mahony’s mill.

  Although the previous owners had lived in it since 1952, they had decorated it only once during the whole of their years there, with dingy brown floral wallpaper. In 1964 they had built a single-storey lean-to extension in the backyard to accommodate a bath and a twin-tub washing machine, but that had been their only concession to modernization.

  Now that the widowed owner had died, the house had been sold to a young professional couple for 123,000 euros as their starter home.

  Together, grunting like two prize hogs being prodded to market, Declan and Colm manhandled the fire surround out of the house and into the rain. Christy was still sitting there, soaking wet, and when he stepped back to allow them to shuffle out of the front door he shook himself furiously.

  ‘You’re a lunatic, do you know that?’ said Declan, after he and Colm had heaved the fire surround, with a deafening crash, into the empty skip that was parked in the narrow road outside. ‘Why don’t you go in and get yourself dry?’

  He bent down and took hold of Christy’s collar, but when he tried to drag him into the house Christy stiffened his legs and growled. When Declan pulled harder he scrabbled his claws against the wet pavement and barked, refusing to step over the threshold.

  ‘Sure look at him,’ grinned Colm. ‘I bet you’re right about a ghost. How about it, Christy? Can you see a ghost in there, boy? Woooooo!’

  ‘Maybe there’s just a smell he doesn’t like, dead rat or something,’ said Declan. ‘Most people don’t know it, but your Kerry beagle has an even more sensitive nose than a bloodhound.’

  ‘Yeah, but come on, Dec. How much of him is Kerry beagle and how much is some stray mongrel that gave his mother the lad when her owner wasn’t looking?’

  ‘It’s all very well you skittin’, boy,’ Declan retorted. ‘This feller can smell if somebody’s farted in Limerick, I swear to God. He can smell tripe boiling even before you’ve lit the gas.’

  He yanked at Christy’s collar one more time, but Christy snarled and bared his teeth, and Declan gave up. ‘Okay, have it your way. You need a bath any road.’

  Declan and Colm went back into the house. Now they needed to pull up all the floorboards in the living room because the new owners were going to replace them with hand-scraped Victorian oak.

  Colm lit a Johnnie Blue and took three deep drags before pinching it out and tucking the butt behind his ear. Then he picked up his crowbar and used it to jemmy the skirting board away from the wall underneath the window. While he lifted the skirting board over his shoulder and toted it outside to the skip, Declan bent over and gripped the exposed end of the central floorboard, tugging at it again and again until he dislodged the nails out of the joists underneath. He tilted it up and dropped it to one side with a clatter.

  Declan was used to finding builder’s rubble underneath the floorboards of these old houses, as well as the skeletons of rats and mice. Once he had discovered a black tin box containing thirty-five pounds in Saorstát, the banknotes issued by the Irish Free State, a tarnished harmonica, and a Valentine’s card for ‘my own dearest Muirgheal’.

  In this house, however, it looked as if several bundles of old clothing had been stuffed between the joists – a man’s suit, a woman’s maroon dress, a girl’s yellow pinafore, and a baby’s pink nightgown. They were all faded until they were almost colourless and covered
thickly in fine grey dust, so it was anybody’s guess how long they had been hidden there.

  Declan pulled up another floorboard, and then another, the nails screeching in protest, and he was just about to start pulling up a third when he saw that a hand was protruding from the cuff of the man’s green coat.

  He stared at it for a long time, feeling as if his scalp was shrinking. The hand looked papery and dry, and it was almost completely flat, but he could tell that it was a real human hand all right. Some of the knuckle bones had broken through the desiccated skin and it still had all of its fingernails, even though they had turned amber with age.

  He knelt down to examine it more closely, but he didn’t have the nerve to touch it. Instead, he reached out and gently squeezed the sleeve from which it was protruding. There was no question about it: there were two stick-like arm bones inside it.

  ‘Lord lantern of Jesus,’ he whispered.

  He was breathing hard through his nostrils now and his heart was thumping. He let go of the sleeve and cautiously patted the back of the coat, as if he were frisking it. Underneath the fabric he could feel the hard curved bones of a ribcage.

  He sat back on his heels. Holy Mary, Mother of God, if there’s a mummified feller inside of this coat, what’s inside of the woman’s dress? And the children’s clothes, too?

  Still kneeling, he shuffled himself sideways to the space between the next two joists where the woman’s maroon dress was lying crumpled up, with buttons all down the back. He hesitated for a moment, because it didn’t seem right to be touching a woman without her consent, even if she was long dead. Then he reached out and gently pressed against the bodice. Beneath the coarse dyed linen he could again feel ribs, although these ribs were looser, as if they had become detached from the spine.

  These weren’t bundles of old clothes at all, these were bodies. Years and years ago somebody must have laid them face-down beneath the floor and then nailed the boards down over them. Declan still hadn’t pulled up enough boards to be able to see their shoulders or their heads, but it looked to him as if a small family had been hidden there – father, mother, daughter and baby.

  He stood up, wiping his hands on his black denim jacket. As he did so, Colm came back from outside, relighting his cigarette.

  ‘Jesus, it’s lashing,’ he said, his head half hidden in smoke. Then he glanced down at the gap in the floorboards and frowned. ‘What the feck’s all them old clothes doing down there?’

  ‘They’re not just old clothes, boy, they’re bodies,’ said Declan. ‘Man and a woman and their two wains, too, by the looks of it.’

  ‘You’re codding,’ said Colm, but Declan pointed to the man’s dried-out hand. Colm leaned forward and squinted at it short-sightedly, and then he said, ‘Feck.’

  ‘I’d say they was probably murdered,’ said Declan.

  Colm stepped over the gap and crouched down to see if he could make out what the bodies’ heads looked like. ‘You don’t know that for certain,’ he said. ‘They could have died of the flu or something. People used to die like flies in them days, of all sorts. My old man’s youngest sister died of the chickenpox when she was only three years old.’

  He stood up straight again and nodded at the bodies. ‘Maybe their relatives couldn’t afford a funeral.’

  ‘Oh go ’way. Even if you can’t afford a funeral you don’t bury your nearest and dearest face-downwards underneath the fecking floorboards.’

  ‘I don’t know. My Uncle Patrick was buried lying on his left side. That was the way he specified it in his will. Serious. He said that when my Auntie Saoirse was buried next to him he wanted to be looking at her.’

  ‘What, he had X-ray vision did he?’ asked Declan. ‘He could see through coffins?’

  ‘Don’t be soft – he was dead, wasn’t he?’ said Colm. ‘He was just being romantic, do you know what I mean, like?’

  ‘Romantic? Stone-hatchet mad, more like. Anyway, give me a hand to take up the rest of these floorboards.’

  Between them, Declan and Colm lifted up all of the floorboards in the living room and carried them outside to the skip. When they had finished they stood and looked in silence at the four bodies lying between the joists. It had stopped raining outside and a silvery sun had appeared behind the clouds, so that the living room was filled with colourless light like an over-exposed photograph.

  The man was lying furthest away from the window, with his left arm by his side. His right arm was crooked up, with his forehead resting on it. His hair was thick with dust but it was still brown and curly. The woman had long black hair, very straight, fastened with a simple brown horn slide. The little girl had brown curly hair, too, tied with ribbons into bunches. The baby had a single dark tuft, like a leprechaun.

  ‘Ah, the pity of it,’ said Declan.

  With a succession of hideous screeches, they prised up the last two floorboards. Underneath they discovered that the space between the joists was crammed with a tangle of thick grey hairs, which at first looked as if it could have been a coat or a shaggy blanket of some kind. Colm took his shovel and prodded at it, and then tried to pick it up. As he lifted it up, however, the blanket tore softly apart and one half of it dropped with a dull thump back into the floor space. Colm immediately dropped the other half, too, because now they could see that what they had uncovered was not a coat or a blanket but the dried-up bodies of two young Glen terriers.

  ‘The family pets, I’ll bet you,’ said Declan. ‘Whoever did this, Jesus, they didn’t leave nothing alive, did they? Surprised there’s no fecking goldfish down here.’

  Because the adults’ hair was so thick and so dusty it was not immediately obvious what had happened to them, but Declan and Colm could tell from the baby and the little girl how this family had died. They had all been shot once in the back of the head, including the puppies.

  Declan crossed himself. ‘You’d best ring the guards,’ he told Colm.

  Colm nodded and took his mobile phone out of his shirt pocket. Both of them had been deeply sobered by what they had discovered. They could have been sleeping, this dust-covered family, like characters in a fairy tale. Declan was surprised that he wasn’t frightened or horrified by them, only saddened. He almost felt as if he had known them, despite the probability that they had been nailed down under the floorboards long before he was born. They didn’t smell – not as far as he could tell, anyway – although Christy must have picked up the scent of human decay, even if it was decades old, and that was why he had refused to come inside. Either that, or he was psychic and Colm had been right about a ghost. Or ghosts, plural.

  Colm had got through to 112. ‘That’s right,’ he was saying. ‘Millstream Row, Blarney. You have it, just past the factory. You’ll find it easy, there’s one of O’Brien’s green midi skips directly outside. No, we won’t touch nothing. No. Well, if they are, they must be about a hundred and ten years old by now, so I don’t reckon they will be. No. Thanks a million.’

  Once he had finished his call they went outside. Colm took out his pack of Johnnie Blues and handed one to Declan. They lit up and stood beside the skip, smoking.

  ‘Did the guards tell you how long they’d be?’ asked Declan.

  ‘Fifteen minutes at least. The Garda station on The Square isn’t manned at the moment.’

  ‘What was that you was saying to them about somebody being a hundred and ten years old?’

  ‘The feller on the switchboard asked me if there was any chance that the person who hid the bodies could still be lurking around, like. You know, in case you and me was in any kind of danger because we’d discovered what he’d done.’

  ‘Holy St Joseph, and they say that criminals are thick.’

  ‘No, fair play to him, I hadn’t told him how old the bodies were, like. Well, we don’t know how old they are, do we? All I told him was, we’d found some people who looked like they’d been shot.’

  ‘Then you’re three times thicker than he was. These people must have been shot practic
ally before guns were invented.’

  Normally, the two of them would have carried on bantering, but now they lapsed into silence, smoking and stamping their feet to keep warm. Although he was shivering, Christy stayed by the open front door, still looking inside with his head tilted inquisitively, almost as if he was expecting to hear somebody calling out to him.

  After a few minutes, a white Garda patrol car came speeding round the curve in front of the woollen mills, its blue lights flashing. It was followed closely by a second patrol car, and then an unmarked blue Focus. There was a chorus of slamming doors.

  ‘You realize we’ll be in all the papers,’ said Declan, as the uniformed gardaí came towards them.

  ‘So long as they don’t print my fecking address,’ Colm told him. ‘I don’t want that Big-Arsed Blathnaid coming after me for child support.’

  Two

  Detectives Aislin O’Connell and Gerry Barry had been sitting at their stall in Mother Jones Flea Market since it had opened and so far they had made 67 euros from selling two mismatched table lamps, three party dresses and a pink lace-up corset, as well as a stack of old copies of Ireland’s Own.

  It was 3.15 in the afternoon now, but there was still no sign of Denny Quinn, the young suspect they were waiting for. Detective O’Connell had found the time to paint her nails turquoise and Detective Barry had stepped outside five times on to York Street for a smoke, and they were both beginning to think that their informant had either been mistaken or else had been stringing them along. They had been given false tip-offs with increasing frequency lately, almost as if somebody was deliberately trying to waste their time.

  A Garda patrol car with two uniformed officers was parked further up the steep slope of York Street, just out of sight in the cul-de-sac of Little William Street, and Detective Barry had been keeping in touch with them via an earpiece and r/t microphone. They had started by regularly keeping in contact with each other, but as the day wore on almost all he heard from them was yawning and complaining that they were busting for a piss.

  Detective Barry checked his watch and said, ‘I feel like a right gom sitting here. I’ll bet money your man never shows.’