An Early Grave

by Robert McCracken

  She placed her left hand on top of his right; he was warm to the touch. She felt his frustration, saw the despair in his eyes as they watered. She wanted to hold him, to help him break free of his deep cycle of anger, confusion, loneliness and more anger. He pulled his hand away.

  ‘No. You’re wrong. I don’t know what happened to Jian or Peter. But I do know that my Tilly was murdered. I don’t have a motive. I don’t have any proof that it was Justin, but it always seemed to me a logical place to start.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  *

  Morning promise of a sunny day became the reality of a wet afternoon. An incessant drizzle sprayed the car as they drove around the M25 towards their hotel at Heathrow. Little was said. Callum fell in and out of a sleep, his head rolling as the car slowed in traffic, jerking awake when Tara braked hard. She tried to think of the next move, but she arrived repeatedly at the same conclusion that her explanation to Callum was correct. It would be a matter for the Kent Police to establish a link between Peter Ramsey and Anthony Egerton-Hyde. She wondered if Georgina Maitland had any involvement in trying to protect her husband’s reputation. It might explain her cold expression at the restaurant.

  She might be completely wrong about Egerton-Hyde and Callum right about Justin Kingsley, but where did they go from here? He had arranged a meeting for Sunday with Charlotte Babb, the one remaining living person from Callum’s photograph she had yet to meet. According to Callum she had continued living in Oxford after she graduated from Latimer College. Hers might be an interesting take on the fate of this group of friends.

  Suddenly Callum sprang to life in the car, awake and studying the road signs along the motorway.

  ‘Do you mind if we go somewhere? It’s not far from here. Come off at the next junction.’

  It seemed she had little choice than to meet his request. The sign ahead on the M25 indicated Junction 10 for Guildford.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘If you pull into the next garage. I want to buy something.’

  She found his dryness hard to take. Not once had he asked how she felt. Was she tired from driving? Did she enjoy being a cop? How was her time at Oxford? Did she have a boyfriend? And did he appreciate her for running off to London to help some down-and-out with daft notions of killings and conspiracy theories? He knew nothing about her; showed no interest in her whatsoever. Keeping her patience, she pulled into a service station. She checked the fuel gauge and noticed she could do with topping up with petrol anyway. While she was filling the car at the pump, he got out and strode across the forecourt. She watched him as he browsed the rack of flowers outside the window of the shop. By the time she’d finished and was heading over to pay he was already inside.

  ‘What number was the pump?’ He called out as she entered.

  ‘Six,’ she replied, rocked suddenly by the realisation that he was actually about to pay for something.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said as they walked back to the car together. Although he’d paid for the fuel, she had bought a pack of crisps, a bottle of water and a Hello magazine.

  ‘No problem,’ he said, clutching two bunches of flowers, one of red roses, the other pink carnations. ‘All they had,’ he said, showing her what he’d bought.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘It’s not far. I want to show you where they are buried.’

  He directed her off the A3 to Guildford and into open countryside. Within a mile or so she saw a churchyard directly ahead, standing by a fork in the road.

  ‘This is it,’ he said, still clasping his flowers. There was a small lay-by with one car parked, but there was ample space for her to pull in behind. Thankfully, the rain had ceased, or at least there was a lull between showers. They both got out, and Callum walked ahead up a short lane bordering the churchyard. It was one of those incredibly ancient places that Tara had always associated with the southern English countryside and those murder mystery programmes. Crooked gravestones, many with the inscriptions smudged by time itself, one or two more recent additions displaying fresh flowers and potted plants. He opened a wooden gate, and they entered the church yard, Tara’s eyes drawn to a sign with gold lettering on a blue background. Church of St. Nicholas. She had guessed at the year of its foundation, but was astounded to discover she was out by more than three hundred years. This tiny church, with high pitched roof and stone tower, was as old as England itself if you regarded the Norman Conquest as the start of it all. She followed Callum as he passed by the main door, set within the tower, and skirted around the side of the church. Once at the rear, he began zig-zagging his way through the gravestones. The beech trees growing close to the building and casting shade over the graveyard soon gave way to brighter open space. He stopped on a rise above the road, where it was possible to see for some distance over the surrounding fields. Tara, twenty yards off, came to a halt when she saw him drop to his knees. She watched, giving him time alone, his head bowed over a grave. When she thought it appropriate, she came towards him, hearing his sobs, his shoulders rising and falling in a grievous rhythm.

  The headstone seemed as old as the others scattered around, but it held a more recent inscription. ‘Tilly Reason aged twenty-eight years and daughter Emily Armour aged eighteen months.’ Instinctively, she placed her hands on his shoulders, his pain running through her like a discharge of electricity. She squeezed him gently and, still on his knees, he turned his body into hers. She fought back tears as he clutched at her waist. The flowers lay on the ground, dropped, not placed.

  See the victim, and you won’t stop searching for the killer. Words spoken to her when she’d viewed her first murder scene. Only a gravestone today, but the names upon it and the grief of the man kneeling before it gave rise to the same intention. Having seen where Tilly and Emily lay, she realised she couldn’t stop looking for their killer.

  CHAPTER 30

  She thought he may have wished to go inside the church, to pray or to light a candle, but it wasn’t his faith that had brought him here. Tara, though, recalled a prayer she’d heard at the funerals of each of her grandparents and used occasionally whenever she felt inclined to visit their graves. She recited it quietly to herself.

  O God, by Your mercy rest is given to the souls of the faithful, be pleased to bless this grave. Appoint Your holy angels to guard it and set free from all the chains of sin the souls of those whose bodies are buried here, so that with all Thy saints they may rejoice in Thee for ever. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

  When he got to his feet she took his arm and walked him slowly back through the gravestones, around the church and down to her car.

  He spoke in a weak voice. ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, me crying like that.’

  ‘It’s all right, Callum. No need to apologise.’ They leaned their bodies against the car, looking back towards the church. Despite the dampness of the day, the air remained warm and still. She wished for a breeze to blow through them, helping at least, to refresh their mood.

  ‘She was baptised in this church. Confirmed, married and Emily also was Christened here. Hatches, matches and despatches, my Dad used to say. I suppose, while I’m here, I should pay a visit to my in-laws, if you don’t mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s not far.’ He nodded up the road. ‘We can walk from here.’

  A hundred yards along the narrow road, past a village shop, formerly the post-office, they came to a sweet-looking old house in brown brick, high-pitched roof and lattice-light windows. It sat back from the road, separated from it by a mixed hedge of laurel and golden privet. Several healthy rose bushes of pinks and yellows framed the downstairs windows, and in the centre of the lawn a multi-armed bird feeder was the focus of attention for a solitary house sparrow. A glazed-metal plaque, black with white lettering and fixed to the right-hand gate-post, identified the house as St Nicholas’ Vicarage. The Reverend Timothy Reason answered the chime of the bell. Opening the door, he stepped back in what Tara
regarded as a mixture of pleasant surprise and immediate unease.

  ‘Callum! What on earth? Come in, come in.’

  The vicar showed no outward signs of his profession. He stood in one of those American college-style sweatshirts, grey with ‘Track and Field’ across the chest in white, although the print was badly faded. He wore jeans holed in several places about the knees and a pair of leather slippers. Tara looked upon a large head with brown hair fighting in all directions and turning silver at the sides. His eyes seemed friendly, peering down his nose through a pair of flimsy-looking reading frames.

  ‘Hello, Tim, sorry for turning up without warning, but we were passing.’ Tim stared intently at Tara, which prompted Callum to quickly introduce her. ‘This is Tara Grogan.’

  ‘How do you do, Tara?’ He shook hands with her then stepped backwards. ‘Come in, come in,’ he repeated. He led them down a rather dim hallway into a lounge at the back of the house with a huge picture window providing a view of a well-maintained lawn with several trees and a vegetable patch at the far end. The room looked well-worn, lived in, homely. The walls were adorned randomly, it seemed, with photographs, paintings and sketches, and two sturdy bookcases filled the recesses either side of the chimney breast. ‘Sit down, please,’ said Tim. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Jenny is out the back somewhere.’ He shouted at the open door through which they had just entered. ‘Jenny?’

  Tara and Callum sat together on a wide sofa awash with cushions. Neither one was immediately conscious of how it looked to an outsider that they were seated together as a couple. Tim had returned to an armchair with a matching foot-stool upon which lay a copy of The Daily Telegraph, or at least the news portion of the Saturday edition. A large television in the far corner of the room, to one side of the window, was switched on, the sound muted. It seemed that Sri Lanka were playing England at Trentbridge in a one day match and currently required sixty-eight runs to win.

  ‘Passing by, you said?’

  ‘Yes,’ Callum replied. ‘We were down at Canterbury. Just on our way back to our hotel at Heathrow.’

  ‘Right, right,’ said Tim, his eyes seldom leaving the face of Tara, who tried her best to maintain a smile without looking demented. ‘Glad to see you looking well, Callum. That you’re getting on with things.’

  ‘And how have you been?’ Callum replied.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, but not too enamoured by our British summer. Plays havoc with the garden and the cricket.’ He gestured at the TV screen. A reliance on discussing the weather signalled that the conversation between father and son-in-law was already floundering. Tara sensed the growing awkwardness, but realised also that Callum had told her nothing about Tilly’s parents. Did they get on with Callum? Did he like them? To her they seemed the most relevant questions. He didn’t look terribly comfortable, but maybe that was down to her sitting close beside him, the significance of which he may have just realised.

  ‘Have you been to the grave?’

  ‘Yes. Left some flowers.’

  ‘Good, good. Quite bright on that side of the church this time of year.’ Callum nodded agreement. His questions were gradually cutting all lines of communication, but Timothy Reason had someone to help relieve the tension. ‘So, what do you do, Tara?’

  Conscious of hesitating, for the second time today, she had no option but the truth.

  ‘I’m a police officer.’

  ‘In Liverpool? My, my, that must be an interesting job.’

  ‘There’s plenty of work for us to do.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sure there is.’

  At that point an attractive woman, of similar height to Tara, in loose gardening clothes, beige trousers and a long-sleeved flowery T-shirt, appeared at the threshold. Her apparent confusion at being summoned by her husband evaporated on seeing she had visitors.

  ‘Callum!’ He stood immediately, and she came towards him with her arms wide. They hugged then kissed on both cheeks.

  ‘How are you, Jenny?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jenny replied already smiling at Tara, who noticed instantly the close resemblance between the woman and the photo she remembered of Tilly. ‘And who have you brought with you?’ The question sounded a little strange to Tara, as if it contained a hint of suspicion or even jealousy. After all, this was her son-in-law, a widower, come to visit his in-laws, another woman in tow.

  ‘This is Tara, a good friend of mine.’ Tara felt elevated once again to the position of good friend.

  ‘Hello, Tara, very nice to meet you. This man is a dark horse, you know? We hear nothing from him for months, and then he turns up at our door unannounced and with a new girl at his side, a lovely one at that.’ There were slight tears in her eyes as she spoke. ‘Tim, didn’t you organise tea?’

  ‘I was just about to.’

  ‘Have you been to the grave?’

  ‘Yes, Jenny. We’ve just come from there,’ said Callum.

  Once more the awkwardness descended upon the room.

  ‘So what have you been doing these last few months?’ She asked Callum the question but, in the same manner as her husband, fixed her eyes on Tara.

  ‘Nothing much.’

  Jenny sat on the arm of another sofa, wringing her hands nervously.

  ‘Sarah’s still up in London,’ she added, clearly struggling to find something worthwhile to say. ‘That’s Tilly’s younger sister,’ she said directly to Tara. Timothy Reason looked at his wife and smiled sympathetically.

  ‘Why don’t you show Tara the garden,’ he said. ‘And while you’re at it make some tea? Callum and I can watch the rest of the game?’

  She was treated to a perfunctory tour of the gardens at the back of the vicarage, Jenny naming the plants and shrubs, while Tara affirmed their beauty. Tara observed a woman full of nerves. Maybe it was due to Callum having shown up unexpectedly, that seeing her son-in-law brought the tragedy to the front of her mind, and to make things doubly worse he had walked in with a new girlfriend.

  ‘Mrs Reason,’ Tara began, while they stood among some pear trees, the sun emerging from dense cloud.

  ‘Jenny, please.’

  ‘Jenny. I’m terribly sorry for your loss, and I realise how difficult this is for you.’

  ‘What is?’

  Tara looked her straight in the face. Jenny didn’t seem more than fifty, not a line or wrinkle and not a grey hair among the dark brown.

  ‘Me turning up here with Callum. It’s not what you might think. I’m not his girlfriend.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if you were, dear.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? I can’t imagine the pain you and your husband have gone through with the loss of Tilly and Emily, but Callum struggles with it every day, too.’

  ‘He wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped for Tilly. But she seemed happy, and when little Emily came along I suppose we began to warm to Callum.’ She pulled a crumpled tissue from the pocket of her trousers and blew her nose. ‘If only he hadn’t been so damned late for the train.’

  ‘Jenny, I’ve been trying to help Callum put his life back together. Every day he dwells on what happened. It’s not any life for him. It’s not for anyone.’

  ‘Are you his therapist?’

  ‘I’m a police officer, a detective inspector.’

  ‘Has he done something wrong?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He is convinced that Tilly and Emily were murdered. He’s trying to find out who was responsible.’

  The woman looked as though she’d been punched in the stomach. She drew a sharp breath but didn’t dare exhale. Tara stepped closer, taking hold of Jenny’s right arm to steady her.

  ‘But why? Who would have done such a thing?’

  ‘At the moment we don’t know. There have been other deaths, Jenny. They appear connected in so far as the victims were all graduates of Latimer College. Callum believes the answer lies in their student days, but he can’t figure out what it is. Do you know of anything that troubled Tilly back then? Anything that may have led to
someone wanting to kill her?’

  Jenny Reason stood in tears before the girl she had met only a few minutes earlier.

  ‘I can’t think of any reason why someone would deliberately harm Tilly.’

  Tara slid her arm around the woman’s shoulders and walked her back towards the house. On the way she told her as much as she knew about the deaths of Peter Ramsey, Zhou Jian and the mystery surrounding the sympathy card sent to Callum on the day Tilly and Emily were killed. By the time they reached the kitchen, where only a kettle had been boiled for tea, Jenny Reason had recovered some composure.

  ‘Would you like to see Tilly’s room?’

  ‘I would love to,’ said Tara.

  A few moments later they sat in a cosy room with a dormer window through which they could see over fields to the village primary school. They sat together on a soft divan bed. The décor was of easy shades of pink and blue, the furniture comprising a chest of drawers, wardrobe and small bookshelf, all of pine; the only books resting on it were written by Tilly Reason. Jenny leaned forward, opened the second drawer in the chest and removed three photograph albums, placing them between her and Tara. From the bottom drawer she lifted two scrapbooks with bright multi-coloured covers. Tara sat patiently, secretly hoping the woman would quickly get to the relevant times and places in Tilly’s life. In the meantime she was treated to a complete biography in pictures: Tilly in Brownies, the pony club, holidays in France and Italy, school plays and family gatherings, including Christmas and birthdays.

  ‘We were overjoyed when she was accepted at Oxford, although she already knew that she wanted to write.’

  Jenny opened another album, most of the photographs inside were loose, never fixed into place. There were several informal shots of Tilly in academic gowns taken outside the Sheldonian after her graduation. Tara also recognised the exterior of the chapel of Latimer College, a couple of pictures showing Tilly with friends, celebrating by throwing their mortarboards in the air. Georgina Maitland was instantly recognisable, but three other girls Tara could not identify.