The Vacant Casualty (12 page)

‘Look at this: “Rise in teenage delinquency caused by children gorging themselves on dangerously unhealthy ‘iced creams’ which are being callously marketed directly at
our youth.” Nothing changes.’

‘When was that?’

‘2003.’

‘Can I fetch you a drink, gentlemen?’

‘Bit early for that . . .’ mumbled Bradley, before meeting her eye and saying, ‘Oh, I see. Thanks. A tea would be smashing.’

A tea
would
be smashing, thought Sam. Yes. If you think about it, smashing is
exactly
what tea is. That’s a pretty profound thing to . . . ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘My mind was wandering. Did it take me embarrassingly ages to respond?’

Miss Elvesdon said nothing, and Bradley dropped the paper he was reading and turned to look at him.

‘Hmm,’ said Sam. ‘Tea, please, thanks. And tortoise milk. No! Milk! Just ordinary milk.’

‘No sugar?’

‘No, I’m not a monster,’ he said absently, before being swamped once more by his own thoughts.

‘So, old Archie Smallcreak thought there might be evidence here of past crimes. I’ll take 1972–74, you have this box, 1983–85. Look through for anything
suspicious.’

‘You mean like murders?’ Sam said dully.

‘Yes, Sam, well done. Exactly like murders.’

‘She’s so sexy.’

‘
What
?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t say anything.’

Miss Elvesdon returned with the tea in due course and left the men to their study, promising to return if they wanted anything before she locked up at six.

Peace descended as Bradley methodically worked his way through the newspapers in front of him and Sam scrabbled furiously through his between becoming obsessed with particular pieces or adverts
for minutes on end.

‘Here, look at this . . .’ Bradley said. ‘Terrible murder case. Man found mutilated on the moors.’

‘I didn’t know there were any moors round here,’ said Sam.

‘Shush! Listen, he was found with “Thou shalt not commit adultery” carved into his back. And his
brain
was taken out. God, look at this, too – the very next day
another body was found. And this had “Thou shalt not steal” carved on it.’

‘Here,’ said Sam, skipping ahead a few weeks. ‘Apparently he did all ten. That seems a bit strong for all of them, doesn’t it? Isn’t one of them just about
honouring the Sabbath? Oh, and look – they got him. “Commandments Killer Caught – the man they labelled Cecil B. DeKILL was captured yesterday, blah blah blah.”’

‘Hmm,’ said Bradley, disappointed.

‘But wait a minute, what’s this? Look, in the 1966 file. Man found decapitated in the woods. Then,’ he flipped over the next newspaper, ‘next day, a woman’s body
discovered. His name is Jack, her surname is Queen. Then the next day, look – a man named King is found disembowelled.’

‘They’ve dubbed him the Playing Card Killer,’ said Bradley, coming over and taking the paper. ‘Maybe we’re on to something!’

‘Yes, but then I suppose there’s not a card in the conventional pack called the Fairbreath. Or the Terry. And it happened forty-six years ago. Do serial murderers often leave a gap
that large?’

‘Maybe his middle name’s Ace,’ said Bradley, searching through the old newspapers.

‘No, here we are,’ said Sam. ‘“Lauren Ace, respected publicist for a well-known British publisher, was spared the attentions of the Playing Card Killer as the murderer
was caught hours before he had a chance to make his move.”’

‘So they got him,’ said Bradley, crestfallen.

Some minutes passed before he spoke up again. ‘Look
here
!’ he said. ‘March 1972. Apparently there was a sudden huge attack of telekinesis. Poltergeists destroyed homes,
ghouls swarmed through the streets and covered the place with green ectoplasm; the dead rose from their graves.’

‘Good Lord!’

‘But apparently four guys turned up in a station wagon and sorted it out lickety-split. Then the
following
year there was a local rollercoaster that was supposedly haunted, but this
time four kids with a cowardly Great Dane turned up in a van to investigate, and it turned out that it wasn’t haunted at all, it had just been the guy who was running the roller-coaster all
along, wearing a mask.’

‘Gosh,’ said Bradley. ‘I bet he was really ticked off to be caught out by a bunch of meddling kids!’

‘It’s insane. This place seems to be some sort of nexus for terrible crimes, but they’ve all been solved!’

‘Can I help you two gentlemen?’ said Miss Elvesdon from the doorway.

‘Yes, please,’ said Bradley. ‘The Reverend seemed to think there was something for us here, perhaps in the reports of old crimes. But we’ve been through everything and
there doesn’t seem to be a clue as to anything that Terry Fairbreath would have been interested in.’

Was Sam imagining it, or was Miss Elvesdon leaning somewhat coquettishly against the door? And the way she waggled that pencil and then occasionally looked at him with the pretence of
disinterest. Surely she was being deliberately provocative. God, he really had to stop grinding his teeth . . .

‘It’s certainly true that Terry had come to see me,’ said Miss Elvesdon, ‘and he looked through these files just the same as you did, but he seemed to go away
disappointed. I never knew what he was looking for – except . . .’

‘Except?’ asked Sam. Accept
me
! Let’s go to the— Stop it!

‘Except he made some cryptic remark about the Hill, which I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to interrupt him at the time because he seemed to be in a world of his own, but I
wondered what he meant.’

‘We’re surrounded by hills. Which hill?’

‘Ah – here in town when we say the Hill, we mean the one that rises behind the abbey.’

‘We went up there,’ said Bradley. ‘Infested with hippies.’

‘Are they really hippies? I’m not so sure. The townsfolk always seem quite scared of them, and don’t speak about them the way I would expect well-off posh folk to dismiss
crusties like that. That Hill is something that people – older people – don’t talk about. They always change the conversation when you bring it up, and I don’t understand
entirely why.’

‘These newspapers only go back to the late 1950s. Do you think there could be another earlier record?’

‘Oh, yes – I never had a chance to tell Mr Fairbreath about it, he left before I could speak to him. But I was told that when the library moved in here, the pre- and immediately
post-war collections were housed in the basement of the abbey. You might find something there.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Elvesdon,’ said Bradley. ‘You’ve been most obliging. May I use your facilities?’

‘Just down there,’ she said, pointing him the way, before turning back to face Sam. ‘And it’s
Miss
,’ she said, coming to sit near him. She perched on the
edge of the table next to his chair so that she was above him. His body temperature rose by about nine degrees.

‘Tell me, Mr Easton,’ she said. ‘What is it that you write?’

‘Nothing,’ he said emphatically. Then he blinked. ‘Nothing you would have heard of, I daresay.’ Then he struggled to clear his throat for several seconds.

‘Oh, you never know. I might look like a quiet little librarian, but I’m very broad-minded . . .’

‘I think I know where she’s going with this,’ he thought. His blood pressure continued to rocket.

‘My personal interest is in erotic fiction,’ she said.

‘Oh God!’

‘I’d be delighted to show you my collection, if you ever wanted to see . . .’

That was it. She had said it – made a direct invitation.

Sam had by now very certainly cruised far beyond and above any legal, medical or psychological definition of the phrase ‘being high’. His mind raced, and he could only respond to her
advances by avoiding her gaze and bobbing his head forwards and backwards to an imagined beat. There were two things at that moment (with the certainty of the stoner) that he knew to be absolutely
true. One of them was that this somewhat attractive woman was trying to have sex with him. And the other was that his upbringing made it almost literally impossible for this to happen.

‘Any time,’ she said, placing her hand on his leg. He gazed at her. ‘You see, while I like to read about it, I don’t get much chance to put the theory into practice . .
.’ The blood was now pumping so fast around Sam’s veins that some of it was starting to overlap.

‘Yuh,’ he said. ‘Ahem. Yeehuh, I, uh, I – oh, there you are, Bradley. Miss Elvesdon was just helping me with my, er, leg.’

‘Oh good. Is it feeling better? Come on, we’d better get on up to the Abbey. It’s nearly dark and I don’t want to be skulking around there all night.’

‘You never know who you might meet,’ said the librarian, running a finger down Sam’s spine, out of the sight of Bradley.

‘Coming,’ said Sam.

‘T
HE OLD ARCHIVES
?’ asked Archie Smallcreak, standing in his own doorway wearing carpet slippers, and as friendly as ever. ‘I’d
forgotten they were ever put in there. But she’s quite right. Let me fetch the key.’ As he bustled away up the stairs, Bradley turned a suspicious eye to Sam.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ whispered Sam, his eyes wide. ‘Quite fine.’

‘That hangover’s really caught up with you, hasn’t it?’

‘Tell the truth,’ said Sam, struggling to get the words out, ‘the hair of the dog would probably do me a bit of good, yes.’ This was, however, a distant prospect as
before them stretched a potentially lengthy, chilly and pointless search for information based on a half-formed hunch. And just as the phrase ‘half-formed hunch’ popped into his mind,
Sam was disturbed once more by the sight of Mrs Trench pushing a squeaking mop lugubriously around the vicar’s porch. She stopped and raised her head very slowly to take them in, regarded
them for a few seconds, then lowered it again and moved on.

‘It’s like meeting glances with a berthing whale,’ muttered Sam.

‘She’s certainly no oil painting, I’ll give you that,’ said Bradley.

‘There we are,’ said Archie, reappearing not with one or two keys, but what appeared to be the medieval gaoler’s stock-in-trade: a gargantuan cast-iron ring, from which hung
perhaps three dozen rust-toothed keys. ‘Better follow me closely, it gets a bit dark round the back here . . .’

As the Reverend stepped into the beautifully-kept garden, Bradley followed him, whistling, but Sam had a sudden and very morbid presentiment. It was as though someone had walked over his grave,
he thought to himself. Either that, or the idea of climbing down into a thousand-year-old sepulchre accompanied by PC Plod’s less intelligent cousin from the country, while on drugs, gave him
the willies.

As they walked, Smallcreak explained the great building’s history. The abbey, it seemed, was relatively famous – although Sam wondered whether
most
abbeys probably were, he
didn’t think there were that many of them around. This one had been the subject of a high-profile charity drive to save it from collapsing in the late 1980s, when several million had been
raised to have the foundations replaced. When this work was being carried out, however, the windows had been found to be in too poor a shape for it to be reopened, and a further and more protracted
effort was mounted to raise the necessary funds to have the stained glass touched up and largely replaced. Then, before it had opened again, squatters had moved in, and only vacated the place five
years later when they were offered much more comfortable council housing in nearby Fraxbridge. Then the roof had needed to be repaired, which meant that all in all, a congregation hadn’t seen
the inside since shortly after Sam’s second birthday. It was a tall and magnificent edifice, even seen here from the back, and rose over them menacingly as they descended through the shadows
to the crypt door.

‘Fascinating,’ said Bradley, looking up at it. ‘Tell me, does it date from the same era as that lovely house on the top of the hill, where the er, famous auth—’

‘Oh, good Lord, me!’ said the vicar, swinging the keys round his wrist so that they jangled horribly, then throwing them clean over his shoulder. ‘Oh dear!’ he shouted
over his shoulder as he scampered to pick them up. ‘I must stop doing that!’

Sam was deeply freaked out by this behaviour, but Bradley showed no surprise at all as the little man beetled back towards them, jangling the keys louder than ever, and he said equably, ‘I
was asking if that large house—’

‘Oh, dearie me! The jangling of the keys is so loud I can’t hear you!’ shouted the vicar, with manic eyes.

‘Please, please make it stop,’ said Sam quietly, and in some confusion Bradley desisted his questioning. The keys became quiet.

‘Here we go, then! Let’s get cracking!’ said Smallcreak cheerfully, darting to the door and trying the keys, one by one, until the lock clicked open.

‘What was that about?’ whispered Bradley.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sam. ‘Just ask him never to do that again. I think he might have broken one of my ears with all that jangling!’

The stone door made a long, attenuated whining noise as it swung inwards, disclosing no more than a pit of darkness within.

‘Light switch?’ asked Sam weakly.

‘What am I thinking? Of course, it’ll be terribly dark in there – I’ll fetch a candle.’

Even Bradley seemed momentarily daunted when the Reverend returned and, stepping inside, they found that they could only see a few feet ahead of themselves. Beyond the wet stone flags, darkness
swallowed up the flickering candlelight.

‘Perhaps you’d better go first,’ said Bradley.

‘Oh yes, I suppose that is sensible. Mind how you go, gentlemen.’ The noise of his voice echoed down the dark chamber and came back up to them, joined by others (or so it seemed to
Sam, over the noise of his fast-beating heart). Scratching, perhaps of claws, what might be distant footsteps, and a whispery breeze that if he listened to it closely he was sure would resolve
itself into a voice – he stuffed his fingers into his ears and hummed gently to make sure this couldn’t happen.

‘I wonder what would happen if I shat myself,’ thought Sam. Which then made him think – ‘I’d probably be allowed to go home. But go home
where
? I
haven’t checked into a bed and breakfast yet!’