Authors: Lindsay Ashford
‘That was a long time ago. More than fifteen years, I think he said. It’s like the thing in the laundry – why wait that long for revenge?’
‘What if someone’s been biding their time? Maybe a mate of the dead man who’s been in prison and only just got out? Did he ever say the name of the person he killed?’
Dom screwed his face up. ‘He did, yeah. It was something weird out of the Bible. Let me think… Noah, or Ezekiel or something…’ He scratched his head. ‘No, I’ve got it: Moses – that was it. Moses Smith.’
The sun was setting as Megan walked away from the prison. It set the shinier gravestones in St Mary’s churchyard ablaze with colour. There were some huge, elaborate memorials; towering angels with chipped wings and noses, harking back to a time when this was a prosperous, respectable area of Birmingham.
She was searching for the last resting place of Moses Smith. There was no particularly good reason for this. But she had to pass through the graveyard anyway and she felt impelled to find something, anything, that connected to Carl Kelly’s past. She had felt the same about the Birmingham prostitutes whose killer she had brought to justice just over a year ago. Like Carl, they were vulnerable people on the fringes of society. And – also like him – they were regarded
by the tabloid-reading public as deserving whatever gruesome fate befell them. One thing that had struck her during the many post-mortems she had attended was that in death, everyone is equal. If some rock star or politician had been found dead from strychnine poisoning the press would be howling for an explanation. In her view, Carl Kelly was no less important.
It took longer than she expected to find the grave. The stone was smaller than average and the inscription was almost obscured by a stand of rose bay willow herb that had seeded itself directly in front of the black granite slab. All that was visible was “RIP Mos”. She bent down to push the pink-headed stalks aside. Now she could read it all. There wasn’t much: “RIP Moses ‘Mo’ Smith, 13.1.60 – 14.3.91.”
As she straightened up she noticed something else. There was a rectangular patch of bare earth at the centre of the grave. All around the grass grew thick and coarse, but in the middle of Moses Smith’s plot, the ground had been disturbed. She stood staring at it in the fading light. Had someone else been buried here recently? His wife, perhaps? It seemed unlikely that burials would still be taking place when the church itself was derelict. And anyway, the patch looked too small for that. It was barely three feet long and only a couple of feet wide. Not even big enough for the wooden caskets they put people’s ashes in. So what had happened? Had someone deliberately interfered with the grave? And if so, why? Could it have something to do with Carl Kelly’s death?
She shivered as the dying rays of the sun lit up the clods of earth at her feet. The police would have to be told about this. And if they wouldn’t listen she would come back here tomorrow with a camera. And a trowel.
There wasn’t time to go home. Megan was due to meet her friend Delva Lobelo for drinks at one of the bars overlooking the canal basin. She’d planned to shower and change, to wash the vile smell of the prison from her skin and her hair. But she’d spent longer than she intended with Dom Wilde.
The walk back from the prison took her to the rear entrance of Heartland University’s Department of Investigative Psychology. She paused when she reached the reserved space where her car was parked. Glancing up at the windows of the building she noticed that there were still a few students in the library. What was the betting one of them was Nathan MacNamara? She knew that part of the reason she didn’t want to go back to her office to check the phone messages and emails that had no doubt piled up during her afternoon at the prison was because of him. It was getting ridiculous. It was as if he could sense her presence in the building. She was going to have to ask the admin people to intercept him if they saw him coming along the corridor. With a heavy sigh she climbed into the car. She would just have to put off checking the emails until she got back home.
But there was one thing she wouldn’t put off. Before driving out of the car park she punched out the number of West Midlands Police on her mobile. She was halfway across the city before the switchboard managed to locate DS Willis.
‘A disturbed grave? At St Mary’s?’
She could tell from the inflection in his voice that he
had her down as a timewaster. The unkempt graveyard of a derelict church was a prime target for local louts. Why should what Megan had spotted be anything other than a random act of vandalism? The fact of the grave being that of Carl Kelly’s alleged victim failed to impress him. Kelly had never been convicted of murder and he wasn’t interested in what he obviously regarded as tale-telling by a fellow inmate.
With a grunt Megan ended the call. Put that way, it did sound pretty flimsy. But there was something about the way the grave had been disturbed; it was all so…
neat
. Why would some bored teenager bother to dig a perfect rectangle on the top of someone’s grave? Far more effective, surely, to spray graffiti on a tombstone or knock the head off an angel. She could almost imagine kids exhuming a body for a gruesome prank, but they couldn’t possibly have got a coffin out of a hole that size. She frowned as she searched for a parking space along the canal basin. It didn’t add up. There had to be an explanation, but it wasn’t going to come to her tonight.
There was a large mirror at the entrance to the bar and she winced at the site of her reflection. Her long black hair was windswept and her olive skin looked sallow in the fluorescent light. She darted into the ladies and rummaged in her bag for one of the many lipsticks that lurked at the bottom. Her fingers closed round the silver tube of a Body Shop number called Pink Ginger. It did an instant brightening job on her face. Glancing down, she adjusted the long silk scarf that had slipped into two unequal tails on the walk from the prison. Great things, scarves, she thought, for hiding a bulging tum.
Pulling a wry face at herself in the mirror, she reached for the door. She’d long since stopped worrying about what she looked like next to Delva, who was a statuesque West African with Naomi Campbell cheekbones. The last time the two of them had been out together they’d been called ‘an exotic pair’. The comment had come from an elderly man who was
somewhat the worse for drink and he had incorrectly guessed that Megan was Brazilian. People usually had her down as southern European. Her mixed Welsh/Indian heritage was an unusual one and she liked the way it kept people guessing.
She walked through to the bar and immediately caught sight of Delva’s braided hair, which twisted round her head like a sculpture. She was chatting to the barman, who was beaming at her, no doubt revelling in the kudos of serving someone he’d seen on the telly. Delva was anchorwoman on the local news channel and she had just finished her shift. In a red linen pencil skirt and cropped jacket, she looked as if she’d just stepped off the catwalk. No matter how hectic her day had been, Delva’s clothes were always immaculate. Megan wasn’t sure how she did it. She supposed that being on camera every day made her ultra-conscious of her appearance.
But Delva’s personality was the total opposite of the model-girl image. Off screen, when she opened her mouth the first thing you were likely to hear was her amazing, throaty laugh. It was so loud and so deep that it took people by surprise. It was the kind of laugh that made it almost impossible for those who heard it to keep a straight face. Megan heard it now, booming across the room as Delva caught sight of her.
‘Hiya –what you having? He’s making me a Pink Lady!’ Delva guffawed at the barman, who grinned back as he poured a lurid-coloured liquid into a silver cocktail shaker.
‘Well, I er…’ Megan hesitated. She felt like a drink to loosen her up after the prison visit. ‘I think I’ll have a small Pinot Grigio.’
‘Oh come on! It’s Happy Hour!’ Delva batted her on the bottom with her Louis Vuitton handbag.
‘Oh, go on then!’ Megan sank onto a bar stool, suddenly aware of how tired she felt. But a few sips of Pink Lady
seemed to have a remarkable effect on her state of mind. She and Delva moved to one of the little booths at the far side of the bar where they could chat without being overheard. Delva started regaling her with tales of the latest shenanigans in the newsroom and Megan found herself almost crying with laughter. It was like listening to an episode of
Drop The Dead Donkey.
‘Anyway,’ Delva said, downing the last of her cocktail, ‘tell me about Jonathan. How’s it going?’
‘Well,’ Megan said, rolling her eyes, ‘he’s in Australia at the moment as an expert witness in a murder trial. And the week before that he was in Bosnia, so I haven’t seen much of him lately.’
‘Bosnia? What was he doing there?’
‘He was with a team of forensic anthropologists, trying to identify victims found in a mass grave. It’s an ongoing thing – he’s supposed to be going back there as soon as the trial in Australia’s over and done with.’
‘Ugh – rather him than me.’ Delva shuddered. ‘It must be awful. ’
Megan nodded. She had started seeing Jonathan Andrews while they were both working on a murder case in Wales. As one of only two professors of forensic dentistry in the world, he was in great demand. He was based in Cardiff, so getting together wasn’t easy. He also had a teenage daughter from his marriage, which had ended when the girl was three years old. Juggling his job and seeing his child left little time for a relationship.
‘I’m beginning to understand why his marriage broke up.’ Megan stared at the pink liquid in her glass. ‘It’s impossible to plan anything because he seems to live his life out of a suitcase. We haven’t had a weekend together for about two months. The best we’ve managed was a night at my place when he was en route to a court case in Jamaica – and the
only reason he came over then was because the flights from Cardiff and Bristol were booked up.’
Delva wiggled her eyebrows. ‘Oh, come on! I’m sure that wasn’t the
only
reason!’
‘Well, it wasn’t exactly romantic,’ Megan shrugged. ‘He had to be up at five the next morning to get to the airport.’
‘So when are you seeing him again?’
‘I don’t know. Next weekend maybe – if Laura doesn’t have plans for him, that is.’ When they’d first got together, Megan had thought Jonathan was the perfect partner. They got on well, had loads in common and laughed at the same things. The fact that he already had a child had seemed a big plus. Megan had been told at the age of twenty-five that she would be unable to have children. It was one of the big regrets of her life, not least because it was her own fault. A botched abortion as a student had damaged her fallopian tubes. It was a mistake that had dogged her throughout her adult life, scuppering her marriage and her last long-term relationship. Both her ex-husband and her previous lover had got other women pregnant while they were still with her. It had nearly destroyed her faith in men but meeting Jonathan had changed that. Here, she thought, was a man for whom having children was not a priority. And it was true: Jonathan didn’t want any more kids. What Megan hadn’t realised was that she would be competing with the one he already had.
‘What is it about men, eh? I think I’m going to get myself a dog instead.’ Delva let out a snort of a laugh that had heads turning in their direction. Megan couldn’t help laughing with her. Delva’s record with men was nearly as disastrous as her own. In her case it was being famous that caused problems. She never knew if men were interested in her for herself or because she was a face on TV.
‘Come on, let’s have another drink,’ Delva said. ‘Then you can give me the lowdown on Balsall Gate – we’ve been
trying to get inside that dump for years!’ Over a second Pink Lady, Delva told Megan that BTV had been trying to get permission to make a documentary about the prison. ‘Governor’s as tight as a duck’s arse, though, isn’t he? We’ve had to resort to subterfuge. One of our researchers has started writing to a prisoner. She’s young and very innocent-looking. Once she’s buttered him up she’s going to try smuggling a camera in. You can get really tiny ones now and the searches in that place are supposed to be pretty lax.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Megan shook her head slowly. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I don’t want this to go any further at the moment, but as far your documentary’s concerned, it’s absolute dynamite.’
Delva’s eyes widened as Megan told her about Carl Kelly’s death. ‘Strychnine? Where the hell would you get hold of something like that?’
‘No idea. But it’s not the sort of thing that would go unnoticed, is it? If there was a batch of it cut with heroin, I mean.’
Delva shook her head and her braids shuddered. ‘If it had happened to anyone outside the prison we’d have known about it. I mean, you don’t get many stiffs with a grin on their faces, do you?’ Her own mouth curved down as if she had tasted something nasty.
‘No,’ Megan replied. ‘That’s why I think it was deliberate.’
Delva blinked. ‘You think someone murdered him?’
‘I think someone smuggled that dodgy heroin in – probably via one of the screws – to settle some score.’ She told Delva about the grave in St Mary’s churchyard; about the patch of disturbed earth.
‘What did the police think?’ Delva asked.
‘They weren’t interested.’ Megan sat back in her chair, folding her arms. ‘It really pisses me off. Carl Kelly was in
jail when he died, and his death involved drugs: the subtext of every conversation I’ve had with them is that he’s not worth bothering with.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Dig.’ Megan raised her eyebrows. ‘Figuratively and literally.’
Delva’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that legal?’
‘Strictly speaking, no. That’s why I’m going very early tomorrow morning – as soon as it’s light. There won’t be anyone about so if it turns out to be nothing, I’ll bugger off and no one will be any the wiser.’
‘What if you find something? I mean, what do you think might be there?’
‘I’ve really no idea. It’s just a hunch.’ Megan closed her eyes and shook her head, searching for a better way of explaining what she felt. ‘I just feel I have to do it. Not just for Carl Kelly but for all the other blokes in that
god-forsaken
jail. I’ve got a horrible feeling that if I don’t get to the bottom of what’s happened someone else could be at risk.’ She didn’t say his name. In fact she had deliberately withheld it when telling Delva about the events of the past few days. She was afraid that her friend would see it in her face; would suss out that there was something more than concern for a confidante in her mind.
The way she felt about Dom Wilde was turning into something she hardly dared admit to herself, let alone to anyone else.
‘What time will you be getting to St Mary’s?’ Delva asked.
‘About half-five.’ Megan shot her a quizzical glance. ‘Why?’
‘Can I come with you?’