Blood Atonement (23 page)

Nigel gestured, as if to ask whether he wanted one rolling, and was met with an emphatic shake of the head.

‘Not if you paid me,’ Foster said. He looked at the

meagre exhumation party. ‘There would be more, if we’d

been doing this officially. But we’re not. These two guys are from a company that does this sort of thing for us and I’m paying them out of my own pocket as it stands. Keep that to yourself, though.’ He glanced at his watch and

strolled off to speak to the excavator operator.

Nigel took a deep drag on his cigarette and shook his

head. Maybe some secrets are best left dead, he thought.

But then he thought of Naomi Buckingham cowering

somewhere, alone and petrified, or lying dead in some

unmarked ditch, and he told himself to stop being so

precious. Yet the revelation that Foster was doing this on the sly did little to quell the bubbling in his guts. More than he would like was riding on them finding a lead in the grave. He shivered again. Foster returned.

‘I tell you what, we’re lucky she’s buried in consecrated ground. Over there with the non-believers they’re sometimes buried one on top of each other, which would have made it interesting if she was on the bottom.’ He sniffed, and clapped his hands together. ‘This is how it’s going to play out. Mickey in the digger is going to scoop out the soil to the required depth. Then you’re going to jump in with a spade.’

What?’

Foster smiled. ‘Lighten up, eh? If some of these lot

rose from the dead, they’d be less stiff than you. Seriously.

Once we’ve exposed the coffin, young Jim there will check we have the right one, hopefully by reading the inscription plate. He’ll open the lid and we have to be ready. Keep clear because it could smell a bit. A lot, actually. There’s ninety years or so of decomposition in there and the gases to match, so be prepared. Once the lid’s opened and whatever foul gasses need to escape have escaped, then we’ll have a look and see what we can find. I’ve got a jemmy to open the tin if we find it.’

Nigel drew the last from his cigarette before it burned

his fingers. Will there be anything left of her?’ he asked, flicking the stub away.

Foster raised his broad shoulders and let them fall.

‘Depends. If the undertaker did a good job, then there

might be a fair bit of her left. We’ll soon find out, won’t we?’

Nigel sensed he was enjoying his discomfort. Foster

checked his watch once more. Nigel looked at his. It was midnight. They waited for a few more seconds to elapse, before Foster whirled his hand above his head and the

excavator’s engine roared into life. Foster gestured for Nigel to stand beside him at the side of the grave.

The wet soil yielded easily, the jaw of the machine tearing it in chunks. The operator worked swiftly, clawing lumps of soil, depositing them to one side, before slicing out another layer. Each bite at the earth caused Nigel’s chest to tighten and his breath grow shorter. The hole grew deeper and wider, less of the excavator’s arm visible above the ground until the unshaven man at the side of the grave leaned over to see, and then held his arm up. He made a few gestures to the unsighted operator, who responded by wielding the jaws with almost surgical care, a scratch of earth here, and a small handful there. Five minutes later, the unshaven assistant held up his hand to stop and the engine died, the silence afterwards profound and ominous to Nigel’s ears.

The assistant looked at Foster, nodded downwards,

grabbed a spade and jumped in. The pair of them walked

to the edge of the pit and looked in. There was a simple mahogany coffin, muddied and worn, but otherwise in good condition, the lid closed. The excavator had cleared a shelf to the side of the coffin on which the man stood, looking up at them. Foster walked round and lowered himself in. Nigel’s heart hammering against his ribcage, mouth dry as a bone and the taste of fear in his throat, he climbed in, too, almost slipping as he turned. Eventually his feet found the shelf. He didn’t care about the layer of mud that was now caked on his front. He turned, trying to keep his footing on the slippery mud. The only scent was the heady smell of wet soil.

There was a brass plate on the coffin lid. The assistant crouched down and with a gloved finger carefully wiped away the grime. Foster and then Nigel crouched, too. They were so close that Nigel caught a whiff of damp that came from Foster’s sodden raincoat. The assistant finished cleaning the plate. The inscription was clear:

Sarah Rowley

Nigel tried to wet his mouth but there was no moisture,

just a dry, clacking sound. Foster’s previous jocularity appeared to have evaporated, too.

We know it’s the right one,’ he said softly. ‘Go on,

Jimbo — do your worst.’

He stood up and with his arm ushered Nigel back from

the edge of the shelf. He put a gloved hand over his nose and Nigel did likewise.

‘I should really have brought masks,’ he said, voice muffled.

Nigel

felt the first leapings in his stomach that indicated

he might be sick. He took away the glove and sucked in a deep lungful of the moist night air while it was still clean.

With a crowbar, Jim eased away the lid at various points along its side, a faint cracking sound audible each time he lessened its grip. He worked quickly and respectfully for a minute, Nigel unsure whether to watch or look up at the sky. At one point Jim stopped and looked away; a second

later Nigel knew why. A choking, acrid smell invaded the air around them. He closed his eyes, tried not to vomit.

Nigh on a century of decomposition had just escaped

into the atmosphere, he knew. He felt light-headed,

whether from the stench or the fear and apprehension he

was unsure.

Jim nodded to Foster again.

‘The lid’s about to come off,’ he said to Nigel. ‘Don’t

look at her, look around her and see if there’s anything there. Then we’ll get it out.’

Nigel nodded, incapable of unsticking his tongue from

the roof of his mouth to speak. Foster nodded to Jim to

open the coffin.

Nigel felt himself calm. His focus was on what was

beside the body, not the body itself, and there was work to do. If only he had some water to moisten his lips. Jim knelt down and slowly opened the lid, pushing it away

from him. Then he moved aside.

There she was. All that was left of her earthly remains

was a skeleton. Her eyeless sockets gazed skywards, jaw

set in that mirthless grin common to all skulls, hands still crossed in front of her like they would have been after being placed in the box. The skeleton appeared small, no bigger than that of a teenage girl. A few threads clung to the bones, their colour impossible to tell. Nigel found himself gazing at her for several seconds, lost in thought, no longer in fear.

Foster’s voice shook him out of it. ‘Look,’ he said

simply.

Nigel followed the direction of his finger. By the bones of her right foot lay a silver container no bigger than a shoebox. Metal. It was padlocked. A rusting Yale ‘cartridge’

lock, state of the art in its day, Nigel noted. She

really had gone to great lengths to seal this secret from the prying eyes of the world, and here they were foiling her.

Foster leaned down and gathered it up. ‘It feels empty,’

he said, weighing it in his hand. He put it on the surface and hoisted himself up. Nigel followed suit. He went back to the side of the excavator and laid it down on the footplate.

He pulled hard at the lock but it was not so corroded

as to give way that easily.

‘Hold that,’ he said to Nigel, eyes burning with intent.

It felt cold and damp. Nigel could feel his heart beating fast once more. It was all he could do to stop his hands shaking. Foster produced a set of bolt cutters. Nigel hoped his hands weren’t shaking as much as his own, or he might lose his fingers.

‘Hold it tight,’ Foster urged. Nigel applied as much

downward pressure as he could. Foster placed the jaw of

the cutters around the lock and snapped. The lock broke.

Foster placed it in his pocket.

‘You can let go now,’ he said to Nigel, who was still

grabbing the tin with all his might.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Go on then,’ Foster added impatiently. ‘You’re the

expert in handling old stuff. Open it up.’

Nigel produced a pair of pristine white cotton gloves

from his pocket. He had a stock of these back home for

handling old objects and aged documents, but the truth

was he always forgot to take them with him and ended up

borrowing those belonging to whichever archives he was

working at. He slipped them on.

‘Open the lid, please,’ he said in a hoarse whisper,

excitement once again drying out all the moisture in his mouth.

Foster lifted the lid.

The box was empty.

At least, it appeared to be at first glance. The bottom

was lined with yellowing paper. Nigel picked it up carefully, feeling it crinkle slightly between his fingers. There was nothing on it. But then he looked beneath it, on the floor of the box.

A photographic print, though it was impossible to make

out what it showed in the graveyard gloaming. It was black and white, he could see that. Behind him Foster switched on a torch, careful not to shine the beam directly on to the picture, but illuminating the print. The image came into focus and it chilled Nigel to his core.

A row of hideously charred bodies, more than a dozen,

some tiny, obviously children, were laid out on the ground in a row, in front of a burned-out building.

While Nigel continued to stare, Foster shut the box,

took it back to the grave to put it back where it had been found. In the background Nigel heard him make a phone call to the vicar, telling him he could come in now and

perform the burial rites as requested by the diocese before Mickey and Jim filled in the pit.

Nigel continued to stare at the gruesome picture. Rictus grins on each of the burned bodies, some frozen in contorted agony, the rigor mortis hands of others held rigid out in front as if in supplication. Who were these people?

he thought.

The secret had been unearthed. Now it had to be

deciphered.

The image of those blackened bodies haunted the few

snatched minutes of sleep Nigel had that night. He gave

up on the prospect of any rest shortly after six, less than three hours after going to bed, and fixed himself a pot of tea, as he re-scanned the photo over and over in his mind.

Twelve bodies in total, at least five children, all laid out in a line in readiness for burial, he presumed. At one end was the mournful face of a man, leathered and worn, holding a spade. Sarah Rowley had not wanted anyone to see this

picture, to even know of its existence.

He stayed there for an hour, perhaps more. Outside the

wind howled. On the radio, Naomi’s disappearance had

been relegated to second item on the news list. Instead, news reporters intoned dramatically from storm-tossed coastal towns, delivering, with lip-smacking glee, dire predictions of floods and mayhem, while others spoke gravely of disrupted travel for Monday morning commuters. It

was only when he sat down that he saw he’d missed a call.

The ringing phone brought him back to the present.

Chris Westerberg. He had the results of the biogeographical ancestry test on Katie Drake’s DNA.

‘Bloody awful day outside, is it not?’ the Irishman said after they had greeted each other. Nigel agreed it was. ‘I managed to rush through the results of this test for you.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, six per cent of her genes are Native American.

Given her age, and using the thirty-year rule for each

generation, I think we can say with certainty that a maternal Native American ancestor entered the bloodline circa 1850—1860’s. You’re looking at her marrying a white

Anglo-Saxon man around that time. Hope that helps.’

Nigel dressed hurriedly, throwing on the mud-spattered

trousers he’d worn the previous night, and ran to the street outside, ignoring the elements. He called Foster from his phone on the way. The detective was arriving at work. He explained what Westerberg had told him: that Sarah Rowley’s mother was a Native American who married a

white man around the mid-nineteenth century. While it

would be almost impossible to trace every single marriage between a Native American and a settler in that time, if the man she married was a Mormon, and she became a Mormon — and this at a time when the religion was still in a fledgling stage — then there was a chance he might be able to pinpoint enough likely candidates, see how many children they bore, and whether any had a girl around the same time Sarah was born.

‘But you said they would almost certainly have changed

their name?’ Foster replied.

‘True. Their surname definitely. Their given name?

Maybe not. It’s a long shot, but it may mean that I can pick up the paper trail and find out what it was that happened in the States back in 1890, why they fled.’ He paused. ‘And I think the reason they fled has something to do with the burned corpses on that photograph.’

‘Do it,’ Foster replied.

2I(

Nigel had often wondered how many people had lived and died since the first man stood upright thousands and thousands of years ago. He’d seen a few estimates: the most learned and reasoned ones putting the figure between around 70 and 120 billion. Creationists — who think the human race began in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve six thousand years ago, and believe that an Almighty flood wiped out what there was of mankind apart from Noah and his next of kin a few thousand years before Christ was born — are more conservative and pitch their estimates around the 50 billion mark. Of those dead billions, very few left any trace of their existence. Only those born since around 1500 or 1600 are even likely to have been recorded as they passed across the earth, which means tens of billions of people are, in the eyes of the Mormon Church, ‘lost souls’, unable to receive the Gospel because we can never know their names and therefore never baptize them by proxy.