A Stranger's Grave

by Craig Saunders

  *

  15.

  ‘Just fucking go and check it out, alright?’ said Fredrickson, flicking ash onto the stained and sticky grey carpet around his desk.

  PC James nodded to Davis. ‘Sir,’ he said.

  ‘Cunt,’ said PC James, when they were outside.

  ‘Yep,’ agreed PC Davis.

  ‘Dead body in the cemetery? What’s he think we are?’

  ‘Stupid?’

  ‘Yes, Davis. Stupid. Cunt.’

  ‘I suppose we better...anyway.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said James, but they walked that way, in entirely the opposite direction of the pub, which seemed somehow wrong.

  A car passed them. Fredrickson driving.

  ‘Was that Freddy?’ said Davis, who would never call Fredrickson ‘Freddy’ to his face. The boss might get away with it, but he sure as hell wouldn’t.

  ‘Looked like it.’

  ‘Why’s he got his lights going?’

  ‘Maybe he’s due a quickie off his tart.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Davis, looking worried.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well,’ said Davis. ‘Dead body?’

  ‘He taking the piss, Davis. Dead body in the cemetery? It’s school boy bollocks, Davis, and you know it.’

  They huffed a little further up the hill. Another car passed, lights flashing.

  PC James started to look worried.

  ‘You reckon?’ said James.

  ‘I don’t know...’

  James did. Fredrickson, fucking about, maybe...but now with another CID car going up the hill? PC Winston James knew they were in the shit, big time, because although they beat forensics and the coroner, the coroner wasn’t really needed, and the show had already started.

  PC Ewan Davis might have been a little on the dumb side, but he was smart enough to save his breakfast for the bushes and not the corpse. Damned waste of a good breakfast, he thought, then seeing the best part of two sausages, two fried eggs, two rashers of bacon, and a half a tin of beans splayed between his feet, he heaved again.

  *

  Memories of the Dead

  There’s a ledger in the cottage in a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  A 28 year old lady, Mrs Williams, took a record of all the graves between 1941 and 1944. She marked the locations of the headstones and each name.

  In 1944 she received word that her husband had died fighting for the liberation of France in the first week of Operation Overlord. She never recovered from the melancholia which set in with the reality of the news, but the work on the ledger recording the many dead in the cemetery was already complete.

  She remembered the dead with every entry, split between those in the older parts of the cemetery, the centre, and those in the newer part of the cemetery, when the land was extended to the north in 1938.

  In the May of 1946 Mrs Williams placed the ledger up among the rafters with a heavy heart, touched beyond words at the graves she found and marked. She cried not for her husband, solely, but for all those that would never be remembered.

  She cried for those she could not remember, because their names would ever after be forgotten. She cried for all the babies, those buried in stranger’s graves, and prayed her husband would not suffer such a fate.

  An Irish immigrant named Joe O’Connelly was ridiculed in town when he claimed he saw her ghost hanging from the rafters, but he was not wrong.

  He was not wrong.

  *

  16.

  A light rain began to fall over the cemetery, the kind of rain that was just settling in before the real rain began. Some team or other, Forensics, or the scene-of-crime officers, or someone, began to erect a tent over the dead boy. No one covered him with a sheet or a coat. No one would until he lay on a metal slab in the mortuary.

  His mangled head was still on show. Elton could still see it, even as his wet hair fell in his face. He wished his hair was longer. He wished he didn’t have to look, but he couldn’t stop himself. Couldn’t stop looking over the policeman’s shoulder, straight at the boy’s face, twisted, crushed, out of shape, the back of his skull missing.

  ‘Did you know the boy?’

  The policeman hadn’t introduced himself, or if he had Elton hadn’t been listening. He couldn’t look away.

  ‘Sir? Did you know the boy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you know the boy?’ Exasperated.

  ‘No,’ said Elton. ‘No. I didn’t.’

  Don’t volunteer anything. If he was asked, he wouldn’t lie. But he wouldn’t volunteer. He’d been fucked before.

  He finally turned his attention on the policeman. CID, he guessed, but not MIT. Not a plod, anyway. The detective was attempting to smoke a cigarette against the rain. He stank of cigarettes. His first four teeth, the ones top and bottom, were stained by the tar. With his long face and sloping shoulders, the Detective put Elton in mind of a vulture.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I never met him.’

  ‘You just moved in yesterday?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You said earlier to my colleague that you didn’t hear anything last night?’

  The boy’s head was hardly recognisable. Maybe he should have heard something. Maybe if he’d heard something going on he could have stopped whoever did this. Made something worthwhile. Saved a life instead of taking.

  On the heels of that, he thought: not many men could do that to a head. Do that to a man’s body. Not just the strength, but the will. The rage.

  Such rage.

  ‘No. I was asleep. I cleaned the cottage until four in the morning, or thereabouts. Then I slept.’

  ‘Like a log, it seems...’

  ‘I’m a good sleeper,’ said Elton.

  ‘Must be. I imagine that was quite a scuffle?’

  ‘A scuffle?’

  The detective nodded, as though pleased with his description, though to Elton’s mind ‘scuffle’ didn’t quite cover it.

  ‘Where did you come from? Before?’

  There wasn’t really anyway to embellish it. They’d check.

  ‘Wayland,’ he said.

  The detective’s eyes lit up. Elton sighed, but quietly, on the inside, where he kept his thoughts and memories, but the memories were seeping out. The misshapen head. The eyes...the fucking eyes.

  He could feel tears welling up, but he wouldn’t...couldn’t crack.

  ‘The town?’ said the detective, but he knew it wasn’t, even though he’d asked. He’d known Elton was an ex-con, right from the word go. There was something in him, he knew, that set him apart. It was obvious enough to those that had seen the look before.

  Some people got a look. People in the right line of work, who’d seen hard things, maybe done hard things. Soldiers, coppers. Hard timers, too.

  ‘No.’

  He could sense the smile waiting on the detective’s lips. Case closed, he was thinking, but not even, thought Elton, because he knew it hadn’t been him. He wasn’t like that anymore.

  ‘What were you in for?’

  The detective was expecting robbery. Category C prison, easy enough time. A rehabilitation unit, a gym. Soft time, soft crime.

  He wasn’t expecting to hit gold, but then you can’t sugar coat some pills.

  Elton was fucked no matter what he did and he knew it.

  ‘Murder,’ he said, because at one time he hadn’t been in a Category C prison, doing easy time, working on getting a second degree, biding his time, waiting to get out to whatever life he might be able to salvage.

  One time he’d been in a Category A prison with hard bastards and killers, killers just like him.

  *

  17.

  The policeman who looked like a vulture smiled, but it wasn’t a reassuring kind of smile.

  ‘Sir? Could you wait there?’ he said.

  Elton nodded. He could see the way things were going to go. He’d be printed, questioned, taken
down to the cells, maybe, or an interview room if he played his cards right. It wasn’t like he had a choice. He knew any reputation he might build in this town, in his new job, in his life, was now fucked. Ex-con, murder in his back garden, pretty much – it didn’t bear thinking about.

  But looking at the head, the boy’s head...

  The cleanup team finally got up a tent round the boy’s body.

  Elton stood in the rain, in a t-shirt, not shivering but cold. Teeth firm together and his wide jaw tight. Mind wandering, but watching the detective talking to someone, probably his superior. Superior in a small town like this probably meant they were from out of town, somewhere with a bigger department. Maybe a detective inspector, rather than a DC or a DS. Maybe CID, but maybe MIT, if they were here already.

  He didn’t know and he didn’t care. It didn’t matter who interviewed him, how far the investigation went. All he knew was that they were maybe half an hour into a murder investigation and they had a suspect who was gold. Elton was everything they could ever dream of. He’d be fighting a losing battle the whole way, because they already thought it was him.

  Fortunately, they wouldn’t find anything, but then sometimes that didn’t matter.

  The DS came back. Elton was sure he was a DS now. He had another guy in tow, leading him, but the other detective was obviously higher up the food chain. He had distaste for the first guy written all over his face. For a second, just a fleeting second, he thought maybe he had some kind of chance. He couldn’t play his cards because he wasn’t holding any, but maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t be spending the night in a cell.

  Interview room, maybe. Maybe a cup of coffee.

  Best case.

  ‘Sir. I’m Detective Inspector Terry. No point in fucking about, eh?’

  ‘I guess not,’ said Elton. ‘Few questions? Down the station? See how it goes?’

  ‘Spot on, Mr. Burlock. You want a ride?’

  ‘I’d rather walk.’

  The DI, to his credit, laughed, but the laugh didn’t touch his eyes, not a bit.

  *

  18.

  Elton had plenty of time in the interview room. Time to think. Time to remember. Remember the first time he’d killed a man.

  Killing a man was easy. Dying...well, how easy or hard that was depended on the man killing you. The man Elton killed didn’t die easily.

  He sat in a hard chair, metal legs, wooden butt and back, thinking back. Back to 1985 and the reason he was in an interview room right now. The reason for everything since 1985, on one night, one Christmas Eve, when his life had turned to shit and led to him being in an interview room yet again.

  Christmas Eve, 1985, and the night his wife and his baby girl died.

  *

  19.

  Elton Burlock met his wife in 1982, shortly after beating the shit out of a man. The beating took place in a boxing ring. It was legal. What Elton did to the other boxer should’ve been illegal, but back then fights, even amateur, could go bad, and Elton was an angry man.

  Starting out as an amateur when he’d been a teenager, and boxing for his university, he’d carried on after his degree because no matter how many people he hit he just couldn’t seem to get the anger out. Whenever he finished a fight, it went away. Went away for a little time, and he felt bad, but somehow he felt good, too, because that burning rage inside him left, if only for a time.

  This time he just felt shit, because the other boxer hadn’t been good enough. He could have knocked him out cold, but he destroyed him. Ruined the man. Gave him a beating he’d never recover from, for no more reason than wanting, needing, to destroy.

  With guilt burning a fire in him in that place where his rage usually sat, Elton followed the ambulance to the hospital. The guy lived, but he took some brain damage despite the headgear he wore. Elton felt as though his own life had ended, in some ways, in that ring. He felt bad as hell and knew without a doubt he had to get some help before he really did end up killing someone.

  It wasn’t that he’d had a bad upbringing, or that he came from a broken home, or a bad neighbourhood where you had to talk with your fists. It was just in him, this insane anger that he couldn’t control. He’d starting boxing when his dad, God rest him, had seen the way Elton was going. His dad thought the boxing would give him focus, settle him. It did, to a degree, but it also gave him the tools to hurt people worse when he lost it and that mist descended over everything, that red mist through which he could only see blood and pain.

  Somehow he managed to stay out of prison in the early days, when he’d fight a man in a pub for taking a look at a girl he might be with, or for knocking his drink, or looking at him or his friends funny. He fell in with a bad crowd, like the progression was some natural slope he couldn't help sliding down because people knew he was a psycho. He’d be the one to finish any kind of fight anyone else started.

  In the end he didn’t even need to start fights. They just seemed to come to him.

  He’d been damn lucky to stay out of jail.

  He left his home town before he could go to jail, took a job in a city in the middle of the country and did some night courses. Found he enjoyed it. Went to university. Enjoyed that, too. Not quite as much as the boxing, but his Dad always told him, you start a job, you finish it.

  He always did. He passed out his degree in English Literature with first class honours. He knew well enough how to work hard. He carried on boxing, taking it out in the ring. Never lost a fight. He could’ve gone pro, maybe, in another couple of years, but then he stopped, because of the fight when he nearly killed a man and realised he needed help.

  Then he met Georgia.

  ’82 to ’85. Best years of his life.

  *

  20.

  Christmas Eve, 1985.

  Elton was in the gym, sweating out. He sat at the rowing machine for twenty minutes, his breath growling as he fought the imaginary oars. He hit the weights, grunting as he built up to the limit of his strength, punching out repetitions. Ran slow for five minutes, then hard enough to feel his heart straining in his chest. Training hard enough to worrying about killing himself, and for nothing other than his family.

  He had a good job working as a teacher in a good school. He could have gone anywhere, but Georgia’s job as an anger counsellor was in the city and he owed her his life. She loved her job and he wouldn’t do anything to make her sad. He loved her because she was beautiful, and funny, and smart, really smart. Mostly, he guessed, he loved her because she saved his life.

  Georgia was at home, wrapping presents. Elton hadn’t bought his presents. Not yet. It was a man thing. It didn’t feel right, doing like Georgia did, buying presents in November, having Christmas all sown up so early.

  Elton took the last five minutes on the treadmill slowly, feeling his heart settle. Sweat already drying, he then took a shower and changed from his work out gear into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. He wore a coat over the top, but no jumper. He’d be warm enough from working out, and that winter it wasn’t that cold.

  He left the gym at two in the afternoon. He’d been a lunchtime trainer since taking the school job. Plus, he didn’t want to train evenings when Georgia was at home. He didn’t want to miss her.

  Francis, his baby, was at Georgia’s mother’s for the day. Georgia would pick up their daughter after she’d got the wrapping done. She’d spent way too much on a little baby for Christmas, who wouldn’t even know she’d got half the presents, and would probably play with nothing but the boxes her toys came in anyway. Elton didn’t mind, though. Their first Christmas as a family, just the three of them. If he’d had a fortune in the bank, he’d happily have spent it on them.

  The shops were pretty much full of men. Mostly, because men are lazy, but there’s something about shopping on a Christmas Eve. Women don’t usually do it, except maybe to get some last minute things – a few vegetables that wouldn’t keep, pick up the turkey, that kind of thing. Maybe something they’d forgotten. Georgia would ha
ve had a list since November, known what she was going to buy everyone, but still somehow make it a surprise.

  Elton didn’t have a list. He had three hundred pounds to spare, and he wanted to spend them all.

  By five-thirty he’d done his shopping. He didn’t stop for a coffee, or something to eat. He didn’t drink and he didn’t really have any friends to catch up with, or go for a beer with. He just wanted to get home. Christmas Eve traffic, it’d probably take him an hour or more to get home.

  Five-forty eight was the last time Elton saw on the clock on the dashboard before all the electrics on his car failed. The power steering, the lights, the clock.

  The radio was playing non-stop Christmas tunes, which once he’d hated. He found himself singing along to them, until the electrics failed and he got angry and stopped singing.

  He fought the anger down, like he was beating it, beating it until its nose was bloody and blood ran out of its mouth and ears. Just anger, just a concept, a feeling, but in his mind he got physical with it. It was the only way it worked for him. Georgia taught him that. How to take his anger and channel it. In a way, he supposed that was what he did when he got his degree. Turned his anger into focused energy.

  He was calm when he spoke on the phone. Calm when the rescue vehicle finally turned up.

  He was a little angry again that he didn’t get home until ten-fifteen in the evening, but after that he wasn’t angry. He was just cold. Cold, like a dead man, on the inside, and what happened after that wasn’t really down to him, because when he found Georgia and Francis dead in the kitchen and the man upstairs going through the Christmas presents that his beautiful, smart, funny wife had bought that November, he wasn’t Elton. He was dead, and he had been ever since.

  *

  21.