The Calling of the Grave

by Simon Beckett

  Monk escaped. Especially when there was still one piece of evidence that could link him to Zoe Williams.

  'How did Sophie get the diary?' I asked.

  'Nosy bitch went snooping through my things. It was about a year after the search. Debs had kicked me out so I was renting a flat. Me and Sophie had got together again. I always meant to get rid of the diary, but I never did. Stupid really. I'd hidden it, but Sophie always was good at finding things.'

  He sounded bitter. Part of me registered that their relationship wasn't the fling Sophie had claimed, but now wasn't the time to dwell on that. I thought I saw Roper's hand moving, but kept my attention on Terry.

  'How much did she know?'

  'Only that I'd been screwing Zoe, the diary made that much obvious. She was more pissed off because it was while I'd been seeing her than anything. She went ballistic. She wouldn't tell me what she'd done with the diary, only that it was somewhere "safe".' His face turned ugly at the memory. 'It didn't matter so much when Monk was in prison. She couldn't tell anyone without admitting she'd been withholding evidence. But when Monk escaped . . . That changed everything.'

  'That's why you panicked and came to see me. To see if Sophie had told me anything.'

  'I didn't panic. I just wanted the fucking diary back! And I know Sophie. If she was going to go running to anyone from back then, I knew it'd be you.'

  He's jealous? There was a bubbling groan from the floor. Terry looked down at Roper in surprise, as though he'd forgotten him. The policeman twitched, his eyes fluttering.

  'Don't!' I shouted, as Terry hefted the scaffolding pole.

  He paused, the pole still raised. I thought there might be something like regret in his face. 'You know I can't let you go now, don't you? You know that.'

  I did. And I didn't know what I was expecting. 'What about Sophie?'

  'What about her? She can't do anything without the diary.'

  'Don't you even care what you've done to her?'

  'What I've done to her? Jesus! The blackmailing bitch's made my life hell for years!'

  'She was scared. And she's in hospital now because of you!'

  He stared at me, Roper momentarily overlooked. 'What are you talking about?'

  'Monk didn't cause the haematoma. You did, when you forced your way into her house looking for the diary.'

  'Bullshit! I don't believe you!'

  'It's a contrecoup injury from where she hit her head on the bathroom floor when she fell. She discharged herself from hospital before they could pick it up. She obviously wanted to come home to see if the diary was still safe. And even then she didn't tell anyone what had happened. She was terrified, but she still protected you!'

  'She was protecting herself! She was looking out for herself, the same as she always does!' He levelled the scaffolding pole at me. 'You think you're going to make me feel guilty about her? Forget it, she brought it on herself!'

  'And if she dies it'll be just another accident? Like Zoe Bennett?'

  The way he stared at me told me I'd gone too far. The only sound was the mournful sigh of the wind outside the kiln. Terry shifted his grip on the pole.

  'At least tell me where they're buried,' I said quickly.

  'What for? You had your chance eight years ago.' His face seemed to close down, blank of expression. 'Let's get this over with.'

  He started towards me, then suddenly staggered. I thought he'd tripped until I saw that Roper had clutched hold of his leg. The lower half of the policeman's face gleamed wet with blood in the lamplight, and his front teeth were snapped off at the gum. But his eyes were bright and full of malice as he tried to drag himself to his feet.

  'Fucker!' Terry yelled. He lashed out with the scaffolding pole as I rushed at him. I ducked back, falling against the kiln's central chimney, and felt something grate beneath my shoulder. Wrenching his foot free, Terry kicked at Roper's head as if it were a rugby ball. There was a sound like a dropped watermelon and Roper flopped limply. As Terry came at me again I grabbed the loose brick where Sophie hid her spare key and flung it at him. He tried to block it, but it caught him a glancing blow in the face before clumping to the floor.

  'Bastard!' he spat, spraying blood and spittle, and swung the length of scaffolding at my head.

  I managed to get an arm up but the metal pole smashed into my chest. My breath exploded as I felt ribs break. Agony burst through me, and as I crashed to the floor Terry stepped up and whipped his foot into my stomach.

  I doubled up, unable to breathe. Move! Do something! But my limbs wouldn't obey. Terry stood over me. He was gasping for breath himself, his face slick with sweat. He touched his fingers to his scalp where the brick had struck him and stared at the blood on' them. His features contorted.

  'You know what, Hunter? I'm glad you didn't go when you'd got the chance,' he panted, and raised the length of metal over his head.

  The kiln door banged shut behind him.

  Monk, I thought instinctively. But the doorway was empty. The door flapped loosely in the wind, and as Terry spun round to face it Roper lurched into him.

  He was barely able to stand, but he caught Terry off balance. His momentum carried them past me and slammed them into the ancient scaffolding against the kiln's wall. The rickety structure shuddered under their weight, ringing like a giant tuning fork as loose spars clanged to the floor. It swayed drunkenly from the impact, and for a second I thought it would hold. Then, as though in slow motion, the entire scaffold gave a creaking groan and collapsed on top of them like a stack of cards.

  I thought I heard a scream, though I couldn't tell who from. I tucked into a tight ball, covering my head as planks and steel poles came crashing down. The air was filled with a clamour like insane bells that seemed to go on and on.

  Then silence.

  My ears rang as the echoes died away. Slowly, I unwrapped my arms from around my head. The air was thick with dust. The kiln was in darkness: the falling scaffold had knocked out the lamp. I coughed, gasping as pain shot through my broken ribs. The floor was littered with scaffolding and broken timbers. I made my way across them, relying on touch to guide me.

  'ROPER? TERRY?'

  My shout died away. A brick thumped down in the darkness, jangling the fallen poles like discordant wind chimes. In its wake I heard only the pitter-patter of falling mortar. Sophie had told me the scaffolding had been shoring up the kiln's unstable chimney and outer wall for decades.

  Now there was nothing to support it.

  There wasn't anything I could do by myself: I needed to get to a phone. I could just make out the light from the door through the murk. I picked an unsteady path across the tangle of scaffolding towards it. The air outside was sweet and clean. A last faint light remained in the sky as I hobbled towards the house, arm pressed to my injured ribs.

  I was almost there when I heard a rumble behind me.

  I looked back in time to see the kiln collapse. It seemed to sag and then, without fuss, simply toppled in on itself. I stumbled further away, shielding my eyes as a billowing cloud peppered me with grit. Then all was quiet again.

  I lowered my arm.

  A skein of dust hung like smoke over what was left of the kiln. Half of the brick cone was gone, leaving a jagged ruin against the evening sky. The section of wall with the door was still intact. I limped back to it, covering my mouth and nose with my sleeve as I peered through the doorway. It was partially blocked with bricks that spilled out from inside.

  This time I didn't bother to shout. A final brick tumbled down on to the rubble with a sound like falling skittles, then there was nothing. Not a sound, nor any sign of life.

  The kiln yawned in front of me, dark and silent as a grave.

  * * *

  Chapter 31

  The police found Monk three days later. In the aftermath of everything else that had happened, the search for the convict was stepped up still further. But even then events hadn't quite run their course.

  It took the emergency serv
ices eight hours to dig out Terry and Roper from underneath the kiln's walls. By the time the remaining structure had been made safe enough to start shifting the rubble, everyone knew it was a recovery operation rather than a rescue.

  I wasn't present, but I'm told there wasn't a sound from the rescue teams and police who'd assembled at the scene. When the last bricks were removed Roper was found lying on top of Terry. The postmortem showed later that he'd died almost immediately, which was no surprise given the injuries he'd already sustained. Terry wasn't so lucky. Roper's body had partially protected him from the falling debris, and there was enough brick dust in his lungs to suggest he hadn't been killed outright. Although there was no way of knowing if he'd been conscious or not, the cause of death was suffocation.

  He'd been buried alive.

  My own injuries were painful but not serious: three cracked ribs from where I'd been hit with the scaffolding pole, plus cuts and bruises. For the second time in twenty-four hours I found myself back in hospital, though this time in a private room rather than a curtained cubicle, where the press could more easily be kept away.

  'You've opened up an unholy mess,' Naysmith told me. 'You know there's going to be hell to pay over this, don't you?'

  I supposed there would be, but I couldn't get too worked up over it. Naysmith was watching me carefully.

  'Are you sure you've told us everything? There's nothing you've missed out?'

  'Why would I leave anything out?'

  When I left the hospital and stepped outside into the daylight everything felt slightly unreal. I'd been told Sophie was stable but still unconscious, although I hadn't been allowed to see her. I couldn't face going back to her house again so I booked into a nearby hotel. For the next two days I hardly left it, ordering room service I barely touched and watching the story break on the news. Monk still hadn't been caught, and there was fevered speculation about where he might be, and why the police hadn't captured him.

  I knew from the updates I received from Naysmith that it wasn't for lack of trying. The rain continued to fall, and the teams going down into the cave system where Monk had taken Sophie were hampered by flooding. The discovery of a third entrance disheartened everyone. For a time it looked as though he might have escaped to some other refuge, or even fled Dartmoor altogether.

  He hadn't. When the flood waters receded enough to allow the search team deeper into the dripping tunnels, they found Monk still in the narrow fissure where I'd last seen him. He'd been dead for some time, wedged so tightly between the rock faces that it took the best part of a day to get him out. Although the fissure had flooded he hadn't drowned. The strain of forcing his massive frame into that small space had proved too much even for him, as I think he'd known it would. When I couldn't see his torchlight behind us I'd assumed it was because he'd managed to free himself. But the searchers found the torch in his pocket, switched off. He'd died alone in the dark, far away from daylight or human contact.

  He'd made his choice.

  The cause of death was heart failure and pneumonia after a cocaine overdose, which was as I'd expected. But the post-mortem produced two notable findings. On most people the striations where the muscle fibres anchor to the long bones of the arms and legs are quite delicate. On Monk they were unusually deep, more in keeping with the dense musculature of a beast than a man.

  That explained his abnormal strength, but it was the other finding that was most significant. There were massive lesions in his brain, corresponding to the depression in his skull. They were in the orbitofrontal cortex, where even mild trauma can cause behavioural problems and frontal lobe epilepsy. The likelihood was that they'd been caused by the forceps delivery that had killed his mother. Monk had been born damaged, a freak but not a monster.

  We'd made him into one of those ourselves.

  News of his death deepened my feeling of being stuck in limbo. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the caves with Sophie and Monk. Or hearing the awful hollow impact as the scaffolding pole clubbed the back of Roper's head. My thoughts would run off at a tangent, as though trying to pick their own way through my mind. I felt as though there were something I should remember, something important.

  I just didn't know what it was.

  When I finally fell into a fitful sleep that night it was only to wake suddenly in the early hours with Terry's voice echoing in my head, as though he were in the room with me.

  You had your chance eight years ago.

  It was something he'd said in the kiln, but it had been buried along with everything else until my subconscious spat it out. I thought it through, fitting it in with everything else till I was sure, and then called Naysmith.

  'We need to go out on the moor.'

  The first frost of the season crisped the coarse grass in the hollow as the CSIs began digging into the mound that Sophie had led us to years before. Naysmith and Lucas stood beside me, watching in silence as the dead badger was once again exposed to daylight. Preserved by the peat, the animal was hardly any more decomposed than it had been last time. But as more of the mound was cleared away the remains could be seen to be flattened and crushed, the splintered ends of broken bones protruding through the peat- clogged pelt.

  'Where do you think Connors got the badger from?' Naysmith asked as a CSI carefully removed it from the hole.

  'Roadkill,' I said.

  Wainwright had told me as much when I'd visited him, but I'd dismissed it as rambling. I was wrong. The discovery of the badger had appeared to explain both the cadaver dog's reaction and the disturbance to the soil. It had seemed a literal dead end, its presence enough to deter us from digging any deeper.

  But no one thought to question why an animal that preferred dry, sandy conditions should have dug its sett in waterlogged ground. Monk's abortive escape had distracted us, but there were other clues we'd overlooked. Animal bones had also been found at Tina Williams' shallow grave, and the coincidence alone should have alerted me. As should the smell of decomposition: faint or not, it was stronger than it should have been in peat conditions.

  Most obvious of all, though, was the broken bone that Wainwright had exposed. It was a comminuted fracture, a fragmented break typically caused by deliberate or accidental violence. A fall, say, or being hit by a car. An animal that had died in its burrow had no business with an injury like that.

  There was no way of knowing when Wainwright had realized. It was possible he'd known for years, and elected to keep quiet to protect his reputation. But dementia sufferers often live more in the past than the present. Perhaps the knowledge was waiting in his subconscious, trapped there until it was brought to the surface by some random misfire of failing synapses.

  I should have realized myself. And on some level I had. Even back then, when the search reached its violent denouement, I'd felt the familiar itch that told me I was overlooking something. But I'd let it go. I'd been so sure of myself, so confident in my abilities, that I hadn't thought to second-guess my findings. I'd seen only the obvious, blithely putting the Monk case from my mind as I got on with my life.

  And for years I hadn't thought about it at all.

  We found Zoe and Lindsey Bennett only a little deeper than the badger carcass. Whether from sentiment or convenience, he'd buried the sisters in the same grave. The pressure of earth had contorted their limbs, so it looked as though they were embracing each other, but the peat had still worked its arcane magic. Both bodies were remarkably preserved, the skin and muscles uncorrupted, the hair still plastered thickly to their heads.

  Unlike Tina Williams, they had no visible injuries.

  'Wonder why he didn't inflict the same sort of damage on them?' Lucas asked, looking at the undamaged, peat-stained flesh. 'A mark of respect, you think?'

  I doubted respect had anything to do with it. Terry hadn't beaten Tina Williams out of contempt for her, but for himself. It had just taken that long for him to see what he'd become.

  The police found Zoe Bennett's diary in his car, wrappe
d in a clay-coated plastic bag. He'd sold the bright yellow Mitsubishi years ago, but even the minor mystery of the white car seen when both Lindsey Bennett and Tina Williams had disappeared was now explained: at night, especially on monochrome CCTV footage, it was almost impossible to distinguish yellow from white. From what Naysmith told me, the diary contained nothing very incriminating, beyond the simple fact of Terry's name. It showed the seventeen- year-old wasn't as worldly as she'd tried to pretend, thrilled at having a police detective as a lover. Terry would have been flattered by some of what she said.

  Perhaps that was why he'd kept it.

  'It isn't right, what Simms is doing,' Lucas said, as we left the CSIs to complete their work and headed back to the cars. 'Makes me glad I'm retiring. You should be given credit, not treated like you've done something wrong.'