Authors: Roberta Kray
Eli Glass gazed into the back of the truck. ‘Spade’s gone,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Huh?’ said Rick, his eyes glued to his phone.
‘The spade. Someone’s nicked my bloody spade.’
‘Kids, probably. It’ll turn up.’
‘Better had.’ Eli thought about what Delia would say if it didn’t, forgetting for a moment that Delia Shields would never be providing another lecture on leaving tools unattended. She would never be complaining about anything again. He took no pleasure in her death, but felt no grief at it either. She had been a difficult, unsympathetic woman.
Rick continued to press buttons, a frown gathering on his forehead. ‘I don’t get it. Why isn’t she replying? It’s been hours. She must have got my messages by now.’
Eli gave a shrug. His knowledge of mobile phones was about as slim as his knowledge of relationships. Feeling in no position to offer useful advice on either, he took his tobacco from his pocket and began to roll a fag.
‘Maybe I should call her at work. Do you think? Perhaps she hasn’t got her phone with her.’
Eli rolled the tobacco into a skinny cylinder, ran his tongue along the thin paper, sealed it, put the fag in his mouth, struck a match, lit up and inhaled. Only then did he answer. ‘Urgent, is it?’
‘Adam Vasser’s been released. And so has Lena Gissing. Maddie doesn’t know. She thinks they’re still banged up.’
Eli stared at him. He presumed Rick was talking about the girl with the long brown hair, the one who tended the graves. There was something going on between them, although he didn’t know the ins and outs. All he did know was that Rick made a habit of bumping into her every time she came to the cemetery. ‘I saw him, that Vasser. He was here this morning.’
‘What? He was here?’
‘Just said so, didn’t I? He was over by his old man’s grave.’
‘Rick’s eyes flashed with worry. ‘When, exactly? What time?’
Eli pulled on his fag and gazed down at his boots. He thought back over his movements. It was after he’d cleared up that mess by the gates, so it must have been when he was emptying the bins. He glanced up again and gave a nod. ‘About half nine, quarter to ten.’
Rick hesitated for a second and then punched in a number on his phone. ‘Yeah. Can you give me the number for Marigolds, please? It’s a garden centre in Kellston, East London.’ There was a short pause and then he said, ‘Yeah, put me straight through.’
Eli was beginning to feel uneasy. Some of it was down to Rick’s anxiety, but there was another reason too. A thin, sad whispering was blowing through the graveyard. He walked away, inclining his head as he tried to make out the words. They drifted past him, through him, a kind of lamentation. He gazed out across the endless headstones of granite and marble. ‘What is it?’ he murmured, straining his ears to hear.
‘Shit!’ Rick said from behind him. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’
Eli turned. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘She hasn’t turned up for work. She rang them apparently, just before ten, said she’d be late, but they haven’t heard from her since.’ Even as he was talking he was busy dialling again. ‘Yeah, hello. Can you put me through to DI Middleton, please?’
And Eli knew, instinctively, that Rick was right to worry. He started to pace up and down, catching only snatches of the conversation.
‘And can you send someone over to her place? I’ve tried the landline, but she’s not picking up… Yeah, Vasser, he was here this morning… She doesn’t know yet…’
Eli looked up at the sky. He could tell from the position of the sun that it was almost one o’clock. If the girl was genuinely missing, then she’d been gone for over three hours. That wasn’t good. A knot was beginning to form in his stomach. Had she come here this morning? He hadn’t seen her, but that didn’t mean anything. She could have easily turned off the main thoroughfare, taken one of the narrower paths or cut across the grass.
Rick hung up. He looked wildly around the cemetery as if she might suddenly appear. Then he turned his attention back to Eli. ‘Did you see where Vasser went? Did you see him leave?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? Think about it, Eli.’
‘I was clearing the bins. One minute he was there, the next…’ Eli gave a shrug. ‘You want me to help you look for her?’
‘Look where?’ Rick raked his fingers impatiently through his hair. ‘She can’t be here. Why would she be? She does the graves on a Wednesday, not a Tuesday. No, that fuckin’ Vasser’s got her. He must have. Christ!’
Eli began walking away.
‘Where are you going?’ Rick called after him.
‘To check the graves, see if there are any fresh flowers.’
‘I’ve already told you. She doesn’t —’
Eli stopped and looked over his shoulder. ‘You got a better idea?’
Rick screwed up his face, bouncing his fists off his thighs in frustration. For a moment, he seemed in two minds, but then he gave a sigh and jogged up the thoroughfare to join him. They checked the closest ones first, Alfie Reach and Annie Patterson, but it was clear that they hadn’t been attended to that day. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘Let’s try over the west side.’
Rick shook his head. ‘She’s not doing that grave any more.’
‘No harm in looking.’ Eli strode on, determined and purposeful. The sun was shining, but he had a chill in his bones. Was this the time? He had always known that it would come eventually. The past was forever snapping at his heels, waiting for the right moment. Fate, destiny, whatever you chose to call it, was as unavoidable as death.
Eli’s heavy boots squashed down the long grass and the weeds as he marched on. He was leaving the voices behind now; they were receding, growing fainter and fainter. The silence echoed in his ears. It was a silence waiting to be filled. Perhaps today, after all these years,
she
would finally talk to him.
The two men didn’t speak again until they got to the end of the narrow path and were standing by Lucy Rivers’s grave. Rick gazed down at the roses, their petals starting to curl a little in the sun. He checked out the ground, but the heat had dried out the soil, leaving nothing but dusty earth. A hissing noise slipped from between his teeth. ‘She’s not been here.’
Eli stared hard at the white marble headstone. He ran his palm along the smooth curved upper edge. ‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Those roses have been here all week.’
Eli frowned, cocked his head and put a finger to his lips. ‘Do you hear that?’
Rick listened, but all he could hear was the thin breeze rustling through the trees. ‘What? What am I listening to?’
‘It’s Lucy,’ Eli said softly.
‘Christ, Eli, I haven’t got time for this shit! Lucy’s dead and buried. She’s not saying anything.’
But a strange, almost beatific smile had appeared on Eli’s face. He gave a nod, his lips moving, although no sound coming out. His hand still gripped the headstone as if his fingers had become moulded to it. Forgiveness, that was all he was asking for. All these years he’d waited and now, finally…
Angrily Rick stormed off along the path. ‘Crazy, fuckin’ crazy!’ he muttered. ‘You think I need this now?’ He brushed aside the buddleia, not knowing where he was going, not caring, just wanting to get away from the madness. He dived down into the gloom, feeling the chill as he left the sunshine behind. It was only as his eyes fell on the small brick building that it occurred to him. God, why hadn’t he thought of it before? How could he have been so stupid? Quickly he scoured the muddy ground. Yes, there were footprints, two lots of prints, but there was no way of knowing if they’d been left here today.
‘Eli!’ he yelled. ‘Here! Get down here!’
Rick ran to the door and tried the handle. Locked. Of course it was locked. He rattled the handle. ‘Maddie? Maddie, are you in there?’ He pressed his ear against the metal and listened. There was no sound coming from inside. He got down and tried to peer through the keyhole, but all he could see was darkness. Scrambling back to his feet, he placed his shoulder against the door and pushed. It didn’t move.
There wasn’t time to wait around for the key. He had to get in. He had to get in now. He ran back as far as he could, took a deep breath, sprinted back to the door and launched himself against it. He heard the splintering of wood as the frame gave way, felt the shudder and the give, the final submission as he plunged into the sour-smelling air of the mausoleum.
DI Valerie Middleton stood by the mausoleum, watching as the officers brought out the crates one by one and laid them on the grass. She was still irked by the fact that she’d been kept out of the loop. A major undercover op right on her patch and no one had seen fit to let her know. It was only yesterday, after the discovery of the murder of Delia Shields, when she’d finally been informed of what was going on.
And now they might have another death on their hands. Would the girl live? It was touch and go. She’d been in a bad way when the ambulance arrived, barely conscious and hardly breathing. The wound to her head was a nasty one. Add in the trauma of being locked in the pitch black with no one but the dead for company and God alone knew what the outcome would be.
Valerie turned her attention back to the crates. There was a veritable armoury here: sawn-off shotguns, automatic revolvers, machetes, knives. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find a few grenades thrown in too. Adam Vasser had clearly been planning a war. As well as the weapons, there was a large supply of drugs, mainly cocaine, ecstasy and weed.
That question rose into her mind again: why the hell hadn’t anyone told her? It was over three months since the stash had first been discovered by the manager of the cemetery, Bob Cannon. On noticing that the key to the Belvedere mausoleum was missing, he’d gone to check on the building, had suspicions that it might have been interfered with and called out a locksmith. Then, after finding what was inside, Cannon had made a direct call to his old mate Superintendent Saul Redding.
Valerie made a tutting sound with her tongue. It was typical of Redding to go behind her back and launch an undercover surveillance without so much as tipping her the wink. It had been decided that rather than removing the stash, they’d wait until someone came to pick it up. The Streets had been the primary suspects – Terry Street spent a lot of time in the cemetery these days – but they’d been barking up the wrong tree. It was Adam Vasser who’d been using the mausoleum as his own personal lock-up. As yet her evidence for this was purely circumstantial – Maddie Layne had been in no fit state to identify him as her attacker – but she was pretty sure they’d find his fingerprints all over the place.
There was already a warrant out for his arrest and it wouldn’t take them long to pick him up. It had been bad timing when they’d let him go this morning. A couple of hours later, the computer had flagged up a match for the blood they’d found on his white shirt: not Delia Shields’s, but a rent boy’s in Soho who’d been beaten half to death.
Valerie raised her head as she heard a slight commotion coming from the inside of the mausoleum. A few seconds later, Swann emerged from the building. ‘Well, we’re falling over corpses today.’
Valerie stared at him. ‘This is a cemetery, you know.’
Swann gave her a grin. ‘Yeah, but this resting place is holding a few surprises. They’ve been opening the coffins to make sure there’s nothing inside them that shouldn’t be there. And guess what? Six coffins, seven bodies. So unless the Belvederes were trying to save a few bob, I reckon we’ve got one spare.’
She took a moment to recover from the shock. ‘Recent?’
Swann shook his head. ‘Nah, this one’s been there for a while. Not a hundred years, though. We’re looking at twenty or thirty at the most.’
Maddie squinted like a newborn baby. The light, hot and blinding, burned into her eyes. There was a babble of voices, noise, activity, a clattering sound in the background. Why couldn’t they be quiet? Didn’t they know she was trying to sleep? She’d been dreaming of Greta: the two of them walking on the beach as kids, their toes sinking into the sand, the sea rushing up and swirling about their ankles.
A sheet was laid over and around her, tight like a shroud. Was she dead? An antiseptic kind of smell. Memory came to her in flashes, disjointed images like a flickering reel of old black-and-white film: the blue glow of her mobile phone, the dense, impenetrable darkness, the thick metal of the mausoleum door. She was lying down. There was a pain in her head. She was being lifted, carried. She heard the name, David. She didn’t know anyone called David.
She grasped at reality, but it slipped through her fingers. Her knuckles hurt. Eli was standing by Lucy Rivers’s grave, his face raised to the sky, tears streaming down his cheeks. Why was he crying? She was floating, sinking, rising. Greta was here. Yes, she was. Leaning over, smiling, laughing, her face drawing close to whisper in her ear. But she couldn’t hear what she was saying. She couldn’t hear because of all the noise.
It was over a week, seven hazy days and nights, before Maddie was out of intensive care and able to start making sense of what had happened. Even then the pieces of the jigsaw didn’t quite fit together. Rick came and went, feeding her bite-sized portions of information: Adam Vasser arrested… guns and drugs… a police stakeout… an extra body in a coffin. The words settled around her but didn’t quite sink in.
Time passed. She lay back and listened to the sounds of the hospital: the creak of wheels, footsteps on lino, a telephone ringing, the hum and beep of the machines. Alisha and Winston brought homemade soup and news of Zac. Shauna dropped by with magazines and gossip, their differences forgotten in the face of a crisis. Solomon sat on the edge of the bed and sighed. ‘Hell, babe, you’re the only person I know who can turn grave-tending into a dangerous occupation.’
It was on the Saturday that everything changed. Rick was sitting by her, talking again about the police surveillance on the cemetery. ‘Because of the missing key, they thought someone who worked there might be involved. That’s why it was all hush-hush. Even Delia Shields didn’t know about it.’
‘And the body?’ she asked. ‘The other one. Have they found out who it was yet?’
‘Still trawling through the missing persons list. You’d be surprised how many people go AWOL, just walk out of the door and disappear.’
‘The cigarette ends at the mausoleum,’ she said, not sure why she had suddenly remembered them. Her thoughts seemed to be leaping around like jumping beans. ‘Did Vasser leave them there?’
‘Or one of his cohorts. He must have had help shifting all that gear. Maybe one of Tony Gissing’s boys. We reckon they did some of it at night, came over the wall of one of the houses. But they probably dropped by during the day too.’
She thought of Vasser lurking in the bushes, watching and waiting. The idea wasn’t pleasant. By tending Lucy Rivers’s grave, she had inadvertently got a little too close to his hiding place. And then, while she was pondering on this, her thoughts shot off in another direction. ‘Did you ever suspect anything? About the cops, I mean. Although, I suppose people are always wandering around the cemetery.’
He gave her an odd look. ‘What?’
Maddie managed a weak smile as her hand automatically rose to her bandaged skull. ‘I’m missing something, huh? Sorry – my brain is still mashed.’ And then, out of nowhere, the penny finally dropped. Her eyes widened as the truth hit her. ‘You said “we” just then, when you were talking about Vasser. You said “we reckon”. Oh my God, you’re a cop, aren’t you? You were part of the operation.’
Rick gave a reluctant nod. ‘Yes. I came down from Manchester. They needed someone who the locals wouldn’t recognise. It was a big job, a chance to nail the Street family once and for all – except it didn’t quite work out like that.’ He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to deceive you. But I couldn’t say. You do understand that, don’t you?’
She frowned, still trying to absorb the revelation. And then, with a jolt, she realised that she had fallen in love with someone she didn’t know at all. A dark, sick feeling grew in the pit of her stomach. ‘Is your name even Rick?’
‘It’s David,’ he said. ‘David Hampson.’
‘David,’ she repeated, testing the name on her tongue and feeling its oddness. Her mind flipped back through the past few months, trying to pick up on any clue, any hint, anything that might have given her reason to doubt him. But there was nothing. He had played the part of the genial gravedigger to perfection.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I know it must be a surprise, a shock. But the two of us, you and me, none of that was a lie. I never meant for it to happen, but…’
‘But it did.’ She stared at him, struggling to find a way to accept, to move beyond, but her emotions were in turmoil. Who was this man? What did she actually know about him? ‘You’ll be telling me you’ve got a wife and kids next.’
She had meant it as a joke, but instantly his gaze slid away from her, his face full of guilt. Her heart sank. Just when she’d thought it couldn’t get any worse… Quickly she snatched her hand away. ‘You bastard! Get out of here. Get out of here now.’
‘Maddie, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t —’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘Leave me alone. Go away. Fuck off and don’t ever come back.’
Slowly he rose to his feet. She listened to his footsteps cross the room, heard the door open and close again. And then there was silence. What now? Tears rose to her eyes, but she blinked them away. She couldn’t afford to give in to self-pity; if she started crying now, she might never stop. She had taken a chance and it hadn’t paid off. Love had slipped through her fingers again.
Maddie stared hard at a thin, jagged crack running up the wall. She had to hold herself together, refuse to fall apart. She had to find a way to carry on. Terrible things had happened – too many of them – but she was still living, still breathing. Damaged, perhaps, but not destroyed. She was, if nothing else, a survivor.