by Heide Goody
From the far side of the house there was the rattle of a back door being tried. Concerned, the old woman turned and shuffled through her living room toward the kitchen.
“That’s just my friend,” said Jimmy, following, spade still in hand. “We were worried.” His eyes happened to fall on a spiral notepad on a chair arm, an arrangement of boxes on the top page, each with a name in. It took him a moment or two to realise why he recognised some of them. “Shit!”
Mrs Skipworth saw him looking, registered the alarm in his eyes and reflected it back at him. She stepped up a gear in her hurried totter to the kitchen.
“Wayne!” he shouted.
There was the smashing of glass. The woman started to make a fearful cooing noise as she fled. Jimmy went after her. A hand slipped through the broken glass of the back door as Wayne let himself in. Mrs Skipworth switched directions around the kitchen table, like this was some weird geriatric chase and she could possibly lose them by running round furniture.
“Stop her,” said Jimmy.
Wayne stepped forward. He had his shovel held high. Jimmy could see what he was going to do. He had time to shout out, but his brain had frozen. Wayne struck out. Mrs Skipworth crumpled. A flailing hand reached out and knocked two cat mugs off a draining board by the sink. The cups made more noise hitting the floor than she did.
Mrs Skipworth was laid out between kitchen table and sink. Her housecoat had ridden up to expose wrinkled knees and sparrow legs dotted with liver spots. Jimmy didn’t need to check her to know she was dead. He had seen the life fly out of her when Wayne smashed her face in.
Jimmy was suddenly out of breath. “Wayne,” he gasped. “What have you done?”
12
Wayne stared at the body, his mouth working. “I … I … I…”
“Yes,” said Jimmy.
The alcohol in Jimmy’s system had turned instantly to acid. His whole body wanted to throw up, to rip off its skin, to empty the sickness inside him all over the floor.
“I … I…”
Jimmy staggered with faltering movements. A part of him, little Jimmy MacIntyre – the one who’d sat up straight in school assemblies, who wanted to join the cub scouts – that little Jimmy MacIntyre wanted to kneel beside dead Mrs Skipworth, check her pulse, give her chest compressions to bring her back to life. Another part, older and wiser and more cynical, was telling him to run. Run far and fast and never look back.
“Why did you kill her?” he said.
“I didn’t,” said Wayne.
“You fucking did!” hissed Jimmy. Immediately he thought his voice was too loud; that their every word and movement was being heard.
“You told me to show some initiative,” said Wayne.
“Do not pin this on me,” Jimmy whispered.
The older, cynical, wiser part of Jimmy’s mind was gaining traction. It was a black and inky thing: cold, lurking in a cave at the back of his mind. Now it seeped out, reaching over him with enfolding tentacles. Options presented themselves, coldly and rationally.
They could call an ambulance and the police, tell them a version of the truth which fitted the facts. They were working late, saw a woman at a window for whom they were suddenly concerned. Jimmy had knocked on the door, spoken to her and… He couldn’t make a broken kitchen door and a shovel to the face sound like anything other than murder, or manslaughter. You hit an old lady with a shovel and you definitely went to prison.
“We can sort this out,” he said.
Option two was a slight variant. Wayne had hit her, Wayne had to pay the price. Who could say why Wayne had chosen to go round the back of the old biddy’s house and club her in the face? Jimmy had no idea what he was going to do. Maybe Jimmy had even tried to stop him.
Wayne stood with his shovel still raised. There was a square of blood on the underside of his shovel. There were even two empty patches for her eye sockets, a jagged line for her upper jaw, like the shovel was a horrific version of that fucking Jesus shroud thing in Italy. Blood dripped on the floor between his dirty, mud-caked feet.
Wayne was the killer. That much was obvious.
Except, thought Jimmy, when the police questioned him, Wayne wouldn’t be slow in mentioning the graveyard, their secret night-time job, and the access track to the building plot. The Welton le Marsh building site, the Shore View development, Frost and Sons – what little remained of Jimmy’s career and financial well-being would all tumble down like dominoes.
Shop Wayne to the coppers for murder and Jimmy would be out of a job, ostracised by the industry, penniless, and probably still liable for some criminal offences.
Unless, of course, Wayne didn’t get to speak to the police.
Wayne had just killed an old woman. Jimmy had seen him. Perhaps Jimmy had tried to stop him. Perhaps, shovel in hand, he had reacted instinctively to protect the old dear and keep the mad killer at bay. Jimmy raised his own shovel…
“What we gonna do?” said Wayne.
Wayne might have been an idiot, a fat idiot at that, but there was muscle under that flab. Jimmy could easily imagine that it would take more than a couple of taps with a shovel to crack Wayne’s egg-like noggin. Jimmy did not want to find out if he was up to the task.
“We sort this out,” he said, lowering his shovel.
“But the old lady…”
“Yeah, she was old,” he said, or the cold, dark and calculating something inside Jimmy said. “She was nearly dead anyway. It was a mercy killing. And she shouldn’t have been spying on us, anyway, should she?”
“No…”
Jimmy mentally assessed the room, looking beyond the crumpled saggy mess on the floor, at the marks they’d left behind, the things they might have touched.
“Put your work gloves on,” he said, taking his own from his back pocket. “Touch nothing. We’re cleaning up.”
“Cleaning up,” nodded Wayne.
There was a dishcloth on the draining board. Jimmy grabbed it and went out through the living room to the front door. Do things in order. Be methodical. He went outside. The cold, the sudden exposure to the night and the thought of potentially hundreds of eyes watching him, made him shiver.
He had knocked on the door. He wiped it where his knuckles and fingertips might have touched the surface. He had entered the door. His hand might have brushed the door frame and door here, or maybe here. He wiped vigorously.
He went inside. He had touched nothing in the living room. But there was the notepad and the names. The names…! Bloody interfering bitch! He ripped off the top sheet and then, because he’d seen those old police shows, ripped off a half dozen more sheets in case the impression of the pen carried through. He stuffed them all in his pocket and went back to the kitchen. Wayne was looking at his phone.
“What are you doing?” asked Jimmy.
“Looking up how to conceal a death,” said Wayne.
“You are fucking kidding me.”
“Look.” Wayne held up the phone. “There’s a WikiHow. With pictures.”
Panic exploded in Jimmy’s brain. Mobile phones. The police could track them, couldn’t they? Something to do with the nearest transmitter masts or something. Would the police be able to tell they were here? Or would that only apply if he made a phone call?
Jimmy whipped out his phone, ripped off the protective case and tried to remove the battery. The damned thing was a sealed unit! No access. The SIM card then.
The card was encased in a little side compartment. He scrabbled at it with his fingers and then saw the little hole. “Pin!”
“What?” said Wayne.
“I need a pin.” He pulled open a kitchen drawer, then another, a third. A paperclip! He unfolded it with clumsy gloved hands and waggled it in the side of his phone until the SIM card came free. He shoved both it and the phone in his pocket.
“It says here that most people are killed by someone they know,” said Wayne. “That’s good news.”
“What?” said Jimmy.
Wayne p
ointed at the dead woman. “Do you know her?”
“No.”
“See?” said Wayne and smiled. “Step two—”
“Sorry? Step one in concealing a murder is make sure you don’t know the dead person?”
“Yeah. Step two, don’t leave DNA at the scene.”
Jimmy paused. “DNA. We’ll have left some.”
“I didn’t notice,” said Wayne.
“Hair.”
Wayne brushed his bald scalp.
“Spittle,” said Jimmy. “Even a little. Blood. You cut yourself at all?”
“No.”
“No,” agreed Jimmy.
“It also says semen,” said Wayne.
Jimmy swore under his breath. “I don’t think either of us spunked on her, Wayne. Or did you get really excited?”
“But it says…”
“Sure. It says.”
“Step three, leave the body where it is. Don’t get any of its DNA on you.”
“We can’t do that,” Jimmy said.
“It says we shouldn’t move it.”
Jimmy mentally retreated from the moment, into the dark cave at the back of his mind. It was a calm place, where emotions and fears could not enter. Jimmy suspected he might just be going into shock, but he retreated to the cave nonetheless, letting the dark rational thoughts, its squidly tentacles, wrap around him and take over.
“We can’t leave her here,” he said. “When she’s found, they’ll see she’s been murdered.”
“I didn’t murder her,” said Wayne. “I just killed her.”
“Same difference,” said Jimmy, thinking yeah, whatever happened, Wayne was shafted. He killed her. He was the one who’d used his bloody phone in her house, Googling how to dispose of corpses. If anyone was going to pay for this screw-up, it was Wayne. One way or another.
“Maybe we can make it look like an accident,” Wayne was saying.
“You bashed her head in with a shovel, Wayne. I’m no criminal pathologist, but I’m pretty sure even the most gormless copper won’t miss the massive dent in her skull. There’s bone fragments in her hair, for God’s sake.”
“Then we make it look like a random attack.”
“Random attack? By who?”
Wayne shrugged. “Bandits?”
“Bandits! What the Jesus fuck, man?”
“I dunno,” said Wayne. “They used to have Vikings round here.”
“A thousand years ago! The police find this body they’re going to be able to work an approximate time of death. They’re gonna know it was after ten-fucking-sixty-six!”
“I’m just coming up with ideas,” said Wayne. “WikiHow says—”
“Screw that. Go to the van. Bring a tarp and some of that decorators carpet protection roll.”
“The see-through one or the blue one?”
“We’re going to wrap up a body for transportation. What do you think?”
Wayne took a guess. “The blue one?”
“Yes, the bloody blue one!”
Wayne hurried out. Jimmy found himself alone with a dead body. Except he wasn’t alone. In the cave, the dark squid-thing was with him, holding him in its loose but certain embrace.
13
Sam had filled eight boxes with items she had found in the attic and various cubbyholes and nooks dotted around Duncastin’s sprawling rooms. Whether they were valued mementos, possible antiques, nearly worthless junk, or entirely worthless tat was a matter of judgement. At breakfast time, Sam perched on a stool at the kitchen counter, simultaneously sorting junk, eating toast, and keeping an eye on the screen of her laptop.
Her dad hovered, ostensibly tidying the kitchen, but occasionally moving items from the boxes at the tat end of the spectrum and into the ‘to be kept’ box. He looked at the map on her screen. “What is that?”
“It’s my lorry,” she said.
“Oh, we own a lorry now, do we?”
“It’s delivering a parcel for work. I’ve had it redirected here after I failed to be in for it yesterday. I don’t want to miss it.”
Marvin Applewhite looked at the screen again. “It’s just round the corner, down Drummond Road.”
“I know.”
“You could just pop round and knock on his window.”
Sam gave a tight, bitter smile. “I did. It’s not there.”
“It is,” said Marvin and pointed at the screen.
“On there it is,” she said. “It’s been there for two hours. I went down to meet it but it’s not there.”
“Where is it then?”
Sam raised her hands, sharing her mystification at the ways of the universe. She posted the last piece of marmaladed toast into her mouth, then spotted something in one of the boxes.
“Er, dad…?”
He looked. A pair of small handcuffs dangled from her fingertip.
“These would fit a child,” she said.
“I suppose they would.”
Except they were proper handcuffs, with a ratchet locking mechanism. “I think these need explaining, dad.”
“Winter of nineteen seventy-five. I was doing panto, Aladdin, at the Wolverhampton Civic. Roger De Courcey and I were the Chinese policemen. We got the kids up on stage to sing a song in the second act.”
“Chinese policemen? You?”
“It wasn’t considered racist in those days. I don’t know if you can even call Chinese policemen Chinese these days.”
“Depends if they’re Chinese,” said Sam.
“Well, it was me and Roger De Courcey, so no.”
“And you handcuffed children when they came on stage?” said Sam, worried.
“No, although that would have been good.” He caught her glance. “It was a different world back then. But, no, the handcuffs were for Nookie Bear, Roger’s puppet. We’d arrest him, lock him up, do a little escapology turn. We had a lot of fun. He was an absolute gentleman.”
“Nookie Bear?” said Sam.
“Both of them,” said Marvin after some thought.
14
Wayne turned into the Elysian Fields Caravan Park. Built to the south of the town, in a stretch of land caught between crop farms and unattractive sand dunes with only one narrow road in and out, Elysian Fields Caravan Park was the end of the line as far as holiday accommodation went. The quality of the caravans didn’t help. A few were mobile trailer caravans, now wheelless and raised on bricks. The rest of the static caravans were grimy and tarnished things, seemingly only held together by the mould and mildew. Elysian Fields was the place where caravans came to die.
Jimmy didn’t reckon anyone came to the place for a holiday. It was too far to walk to the delights of Skeggy and had very little to offer on site. There was an open air swimming pool that was only three feet deep, yet you still couldn’t see the bottom. You’d only book a holiday let in Elysian Fields if you hated holidays and yourself. The people who lived here, slack-faced troglodytes the lot of them, were probably permanent residents, serving penance for murky undisclosed sins.
Apart from the Odinsons. The Odinsons were different, holding themselves apart from the rest of the caravan park. They had what amounted to a compound at the furthest corner of the site. There was a tightly parked row of trailer caravans which, upon closer inspection, were clearly unoccupied and merely there to form a wall. A chain barrier was strung across the only gap in that wall, beyond which was the kingdom of the Odinsons: a small warren of caravans, sheds, workshops, and enough space to park a motley assortment of trucks, lorries and heavy machines.
Wayne stopped the van a distance from the chain barrier.
“What’s the matter?” said Jimmy, which was a bloody stupid question on reflection. Right now, everything was the matter.
They had spent the small hours of the night wrapping the old biddy in layers of plastic, then wiping and rewiping the floors and counters and anywhere that blood had splashed or might have splashed; anywhere they had touched or might have touched. They swept up the broken glass and smashed cups
from the kitchen floor and stuck a piece of cardboard in the kitchen door to replace the glass, with what they judged to be the right skill level for an elderly woman. They checked the coast was clear before dawn – rechecked it and triple checked it – before bringing the van round to the cottage and loading Mrs Skipworth into the back, wrapping her up further with wiring and plastic sheet so she looked less like a corpse. A nightmare of a night, covering up a pointless death.
“You sure about this?” said Wayne.
“Sure how?”
“Using the Odinsons.”
Jimmy gave an exasperated huff, not least because he wasn’t sure at all. “The Odinsons do a lot of work for us, and they do it no questions asked. They dumped all those Barbie doll things for us yesterday. Vanished. Gone.”
“It’s just … they’re a bit dodgy,” said Wayne.
“Exactly. They are dodgy. They are underhand. And they work for cash.”
An Odinson, dressed in nothing but tracksuit trousers and an open leather jacket, slouched up to the chain barrier and waved the van forward.
“They frighten me,” said Wayne.
Jimmy looked at him. “They frighten you?”
He was surprised. The Odinsons were coarse and rough and, for the most part, mad as a bag of ferrets, but he’d always regarded Wayne as being socially closer to the Odinsons than himself. They were all working class, but Jimmy considered himself to belong to the noble, aspiring working class. A common man done well for himself by the sweat of his own brow. One day he’d own a house outright and, if he ever had kids, they’d be the type to go to uni and become doctors or barristers or something, be able to hold their heads up high among the great and good of society. Wayne was definitely part of the non-aspiring working class: a skilled grafter for sure, but perfectly happy as long as he had a pint in one hand, a pie in the other and Sky Sports on the telly. The Odinsons … well, they were some distance even below that. What they did for a living – it was hard to call it work, and they weren’t exactly grafters. They belonged to that perplexing underclass which would put in extraordinary amounts of effort to avoid doing regular work. Extremely busy doing nothing, or at least nothing good.
