A Stranger's Grave

by Craig Saunders

  PC James smiled, just a small thing, and sat back.

  ‘Tall story?’

  ‘Pretty big,’ nodded Elton.

  ‘I’m all ears,’ said James. ‘Love a good story, me. Be good for the station.’

  ‘I don’t think it will,’ said Elton. ‘But see how we go, eh? See if you still want to tell the boys your story when you’ve heard mine.’

  *

  49.

  The young man’s name was Wayne. He was a black guy, which didn’t make much difference either way to Elton. Back then, in England, it was passing strange for a white man and a black man to pal around in prison, but not so weird people made a huge issue of it. Few words were spoken, a few words back, a couple of scuffles. By and large that was it.

  By and large.

  The ratio of black guys to white guys in the prison was about equal, even though the percentage of black guys in the outside was way smaller. Elton thought maybe you had a harder time getting away with a crime if you were a black guy. He wasn’t a statistician, not back then. He had a degree in English, though, and he was far from an idiot. He could see the way things were, outside, as well as in.

  Either way, Elton didn’t give a shit. Wayne was a nice guy. The poor kid was completely insane before coming in, and maybe a hell of a lot worse after.

  He was a good boy, though, all told.

  Wayne got raped a few times after coming in. That was the worst thing, for Elton. Not the rape – happened to plenty of guys and they got over it or didn’t. No, the worst thing was that the kid shouldn’t have been in. He should have been in one of the prisons reserved for the kids or a mental hospital, at worst. He was only eighteen, and that hurt Elton, because there was nothing anyone could or would do to help Wayne – he was too old for a youth offender’s prison and too young for a category A. It wasn’t right. No matter what the kid had done, it wasn’t right.

  What Wayne had done was burn a small child to death. He hadn’t told the court why. No one knew, not even Elton, and he shared a cell with him. People talk, if they share a cell for long enough. They shared a cell for two years. Wayne never told, Elton never asked.

  Wayne came in 1987. He was raped for the first time in 1987. Plenty of times since then, by a big hard bastard. The rape didn’t have anything to do with lust. The big hard bastard’s name had been Dave King. People called him King. He came in 1986.

  Elton stepped lightly around him. Not so light as to make himself a target. Just kind of trying not to be in the same place at the same time. Elton was an angry man. He didn’t care if he lived or died. But King was something else.

  Elton wasn’t afraid. He was a hard man himself. Not as hard or dangerous as some, but able to look after himself, if it came to it. Hard enough not to be scared, sensible enough to keep his distance.

  Until one day Wayne got killed badly, and King smiled the following day.

  Wayne didn’t have much choice about the way he died.

  Elton did.

  There are always choices, even behind bars.

  *

  50.

  Elton had two friends in prison. One was called Wayne. The other was called Harry. If Wayne was nuts, and he was, Harry was probably a bone fide psychopath. But he was a good lad, too. Elton never did really know why he was friends with the two of them. He supposed even in prison you had to be friends with someone.

  The three of them hung around during common time. People knew Harry. People knew Elton.

  They backed off...until King killed Wayne.

  Things went quiet then, for a time. People kind of holding their breath, waiting for something to happen. King probably knew something was going to go down. Back in the 80’s, there were gangs in prison, but it wasn’t like now. Wasn’t all black and white. Plenty of shades of grey. Plenty of people waiting and watching with no real interest other than to see who was going to die next.

  It was like the air before a storm. People knew it was coming, but they didn’t know exactly when the fat drops were going to start to fall.

  Maybe Elton wouldn’t have done anything. Maybe he would have let it go. But he didn’t really care about getting out, because there wasn’t anything to get out for.

  Harry was a psychopath, and he loved Wayne. Called him his boy. White guy, looking after a young black kid with no sense and shit luck and a brain that should have put him in some secure mental ward, not a category A prison.

  Black kid and a white man becoming mates didn’t matter. No one really cared. Prison in the east of England isn’t like prison in the states, or in London. People don’t care, by and large.

  By and large.

  Some might, but things have a way of sorting themselves out, behind bars.

  Harry had plenty of ways of sorting things out. He couldn’t touch King, but one day, six weeks after Wayne’s killing, Harry killed King with Elton’s hands.

  *

  51.

  Saturday August 13th 1989.

  Premeditated, like linoleum in a kitchen. It looks random, but it isn’t. Someone designed it. No one ever saw the pattern, but that didn’t matter, because Elton got twenty more years for the killing and he was happy to get it.

  Premeditated, largely by Harry, but Elton, too. They planned it out, quiet, in the common room. They thought their way around it. Harry couldn’t do it. He wasn’t tough enough - but he could start it. Elton could finish it, and he was happy enough to die trying. Either way, Elton would win, because by then he didn’t care if he got out or not. He didn’t care about anything but a skinny little mental kid and Harry.

  Harry, the psychopath, put a sharpened toothbrush into Elton’s shoulder. It hurt like fuck.

  It had to be Elton, because Harry wasn’t strong enough.

  It was after Harry spat on King. Elton stepped in, tried to break it up. Took the toothbrush for his trouble then Harry managed to stick his improvised stiletto into King’s eye. He was trying to kill him, but knew he wasn’t fast enough, not good enough, to take out King. He thought maybe Elton would, could, finish the job.

  He wasn’t wrong, but then Elton could have done without a bum shoulder while he was doing it. Still, King only had one eye. It might have been that a doctor could have saved that eye, but it didn’t matter much after they got to the infirmary because the guards and the doctors walked out, like Elton had known they would, because everyone liked Wayne, baby killer or not. He wasn’t the worst for a category A prison.

  Neither was King.

  Because he wasn’t dead. King had something to live for.

  Elton was already dead. He didn’t give a fuck. But he’d loved that kid and he hated King for what he’d done.

  The guards walked out and King smiled, blood dripping down his face. Blood ran from Elton’s shoulder and it already hurt like a bastard. He shrugged his shoulders a few times, loosing up.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and King swung.

  *

  52.

  Both men had spent the last few years hitting the weights. Both men knew how to use their fists. King was a rapist, too. He knew how to use a knife. But there weren’t any knives in the infirmary that weren’t locked down.

  No scissors. No blades. Just fists and Elton knew his fists.

  He let his anger go and ducked under King’s wild swing. He punched, swinging his right fist up and round as his head went under King’s right arm. The punch caught King on the jaw. Rocked him, but didn’t break anything.

  King probably outweighed Elton by three or four stone. Maybe fifty pounds. Six inches taller, and Elton wasn’t a short man.

  Both strong enough.

  King lashed out again and Elton stepped in and broke the man’s nose. Not a tough one to shake off, but you get hit in the nose and things don’t seem rosy anymore. It’s real pain. Your eyes well up. You can’t help it, crying with a broken nose. It doesn’t matter how hard you are, it’s just a natural thing. Then your vision starts to waver.

  Then King broke Elton’s knee, and Elt
on knew he was in trouble.

  In that two, maybe three seconds that King should have been bawling, he stamped down sideways on Elton’s knee. Turned out the fucker was harder than Elton had given him credit for. He heard it snap. Tendons and ligaments given way.

  Dead inside, for a moment Elton wondered if he really wanted to die.

  He flashed back, back to one Christmas Eve when he’d held a cleaver in his hand and then sat down to wait for the police while a man’s head looked at him from his kitchen floor.

  He thought of his wife while he grabbed King’s arm, his body refusing to die even while his mind wished it, and then he twisted with four years of weights and a lifetime of anger and fighting lending him strength. He broke King’s arm and pulled him to the floor. He didn’t even know his knee was broken anymore. He didn’t feel any pain.

  King lashed out with his left fist, rocking Elton’s head back and breaking his nose. He’d had his nose broken before and it didn’t matter to him at all, because tears already blurred his vision.

  King threw out another punch and split Elton’s lip while Elton tried to wrestle him, two handed against King’s one. King knew he was fighting for his life, though. He put up a hell of a fight. One handed, the larger man grabbed Elton’s throat and tried to break his neck, or maybe strangle him.

  Like his wife. Strangled, on the floor.

  Let him do it, Elton thought. Let me die.

  But his anger reared up, and then all thought was gone, all the pain, the anger washed him clean and made him new, like he was a psychopath himself. And maybe he was.

  He broke King’s other arm. The man screamed. His arm was loose at the elbow.

  Elton didn’t stop. Couldn’t, because he wasn’t himself anymore. It wasn’t about Wayne any longer. It wasn’t about Georgia and Francis. It was about anger and killing and he knew what he was doing, as he punched and punched, bloodying his knuckles with King’s blood and his own. He popped three of his own knuckles on the bastard’s face and didn’t realise. He hit and hit, not bothering with the body, just punching like a mad man, hitting over and over again until King’s face wasn’t recognisable anymore.

  He didn’t see a knife-faced man. He didn’t see anything. Everything was red. It wasn’t about a kid named Declan who’d been mad, or a kid named Wayne, who’d been mad, or Harry, or Georgia, or Francis, or himself.

  The anger took over and he punched it out, all of it, right into King’s face, until there was just a bloody mess left and when the guards finally came back in they had to knock him out cold to get him off.

  *

  53.

  ‘There you go,’ he said. PC James was pale, like he’d been after he’d seen the old woman and the old man and the buggy. ‘That’s the whole of the tale. That’s what it doesn’t tell you in the jacket. That’s what no one else knows.’

  ‘You’re a psycho.’

  ‘Show and tell, PC. I’ve shown you my scars. That’s me, that’s all there is. That’s why I spent twenty odd years in prison instead of five, because of the fury of the attack. The board called it that, you know. Fury. Said I was still a danger. I don’t think I am anymore, but...’ he said, thinking hit him now, ‘where’d the man with the buggy go?’

  ‘He just disappeared,’ said the PC, who then rocked like he’d been hit, because Elton blindsided him so well.

  ‘Fuck,’ said James, and Elton smiled.

  *

  54.

  Elton came back from the kitchen, stepped across his small living room and handed the policeman another cup of coffee. PC James took the coffee with a slightly shaky hand.

  ‘So, you think some ghost, or two women who don’t exist either, somehow killed the kids?’

  Elton nodded and smiled. ‘Psycho, remember? It might be complete shit. I don’t think it’s the old man, though.’

  ‘You think ghosts are killing people? Come on. Seriously?’

  ‘Told you it was nuts.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how nuts. Mr. Burlock, that’s not nuts. That’s fucking nuts. That’s a trip to a mental ward up Hellesdon way and some pills that make you dribble.’

  ‘I know,’ said Elton. ‘I know. But I tell you something else I know.’

  ‘Fuck it. It’s worth it just to see what else you can make up.’

  Elton smiled again. He was tired, tired of the whole mess, but it wasn’t done and he couldn’t stop until it was.

  Don’t stop ‘til it’s done.

  ‘The old man. We find the old man. He knows what’s going on. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘The old man...’

  ‘Come on, PC. Throw me a bone. You know he just disappeared.’

  ‘Stress. Murder scene...’

  ‘Bullshit, and you know it. We both saw him. How’d you explain that?’

  ‘Maybe...maybe...’

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ said Elton, tired from telling old stories that still hurt. Tired from weeks of living on edge, and dealing with the police, and working himself to the bone so he didn’t dream of beheading a man for his dead family, killing him twice so things would be right as they could, or of beating a man to death for his second family, two nuts, one called Harry and one called Wayne.

  He was tired and enough was enough.

  ‘You saw the old man with the buggy. You saw the old woman, too. I know you did. You admitted as much. Fuck it, PC James, I need help. You’re a copper. A good one, I figure. When the kid got killed, you didn’t run around like a chicken with its head off. You were calm, even when you saw them, even with a dead body on the ground and your partner shaking in his boots. Fuck, I was shaking, too. I’ve seen worse than what happened to that kid. I’ve done worse. I’m not afraid to admit it. Maybe I’ve served my time, and maybe this is still it, but you fucking saw them so either leave, pretend like you didn’t, and live with it, or help me.’

  PC James put his mug down on the wooden floor, between his knees.

  ‘Mr. Burlock...’

  ‘Elton. If you’re going to blow me off, at least call me by my first name.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re asking. I’m a policeman. I’d lose my job if anyone ever found out.’

  ‘I just need help finding the old man. I can deal with the rest of it on my own.’

  ‘Ghosts? Little girls with one eye? Come on!’

  ‘You saw.’

  ‘I don’t know what I saw.’

  ‘Then I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘Do what, exactly?’

  ‘Find out what’s going on?’

  ‘You’re nuts, Elton. That’s what’s going on. I should call social services, get someone down to see you...’

  ‘But you won’t,’ said Elton, ‘will you?’

  PC James sighed. ‘No. I won’t. But I can’t help you. I can’t. You understand that, right? The position I’m in. You’re a murderer, you’re seeing things...’

  ‘You, too.’

  ‘...you’re not sound. You see how it would look, if anyone found out?’

  Elton sighed.

  And the thing that got him the worst was that the policeman was right.

  He’d been an idiot. What did he think was going to happen? A policeman was going to help him with the ghost infestation?

  ‘What if they kill again?’

  ‘It’s not ghosts, Elton, it’s something else.’

  ‘It is something else, alright, and you know it. Protest all you want.’

  ‘I’m leaving now. I’m going to forget this, OK? It’s been hard on you, adjusting, seeing both dead kids. I get it. But I can’t have anything to do with this. Understand?’

  PC James took his hat from the pew and put it on as he rose. ‘I can’t.’

  Elton just nodded. Already, his mind was ticking over onto the next problem. He’d fucked up, asking James for help. He knew that now, and he should have known before asking.

  But it was done, it was out there, and he couldn’t take it back.

  He shut the door on James and went back to h
is couch, sat down with his coffee held in his lap. Thinking.

  Someway, somehow, he’d have to do it himself. Only problem was, he needed Henry Harrison, and what he knew.

  Harrison was the key.

  If he could find him. If he could make him tell.

  He figured if he could do the first, he could sure as hell do the second.

  Elton finished his coffee and put it on the table with the stain he couldn’t get out, no matter how hard he scrubbed.

  *

  Henry Harrison

  There’s an old man who walks through a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town.

  The old man’s name is Henry Harrison. He says he was born in 1931 in a cottage just outside the town. The cottage no longer stands, though the foundations remain beneath the earth.

  But he’s older than that.

  Henry Harrison proposed to his fiancé, and shortly afterwards, a period of roughly a quarter of a minute, was engaged to be married. She bore him two daughters.

  His wife was buried in the cemetery after she died in shame. He presided over the funeral.

  Mr. Harrison never remarried, but adopted a little girl at birth. The adoption in those years would have been difficult for a man with no wife, but his wish was a little girl that nobody wanted, a gorgeous, adorable little child, and he was a man in good standing in the community.

  For only three years she became his world.

  Who else would have taken her in?

  The little girl had but one eye, and as she grew, she only ever developed a solitary tooth, right there in the roof of her mouth. She had one small hand, one ordinary, and she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

  *

  55.

  Elton sat on his pew, overlooking the cemetery, watching darkness fall.

  He was alone. He would be until the day he died.