The Fifth Grave, page 8
part #1 of DCI Jacob Series
“Maybe this is a bad idea, Kip,” he said to himself.
With Artio turning away from the main path and walking away from him, he gently clicked open the pickup door and swung his legs out into the cold air. Boots squashing down into the mud, he pushed the door into the frame but stopped short of clicking it shut.
No sense in announcing yourself.
He followed his victim along the path for several minutes, unheard and unseen. Artio had slipped out of sight for a moment, but when Kieran turned a corner on the track he saw his quarry once again, walking off the path and into a thicket. When he stepped on a branch and broke it loudly in two, Artio turned sharply and gasped.
“What the hell are you doing here, Kieran?”
*
Kieran Messenger paused before replying, nervously slicking the fingers on his right hand.
“I might ask the same of you.”
“My quad broke down and I walked home to get my tools.”
“What’s in the bag?” Kieran asked.
“Are you following me?”
He took a step closer. “I just wondered if we could have a chat, Artio.”
“No one’s called me that for years, so don’t.”
“Why not? Don’t you like it?”
“No.”
“But you did use that name a long time ago, didn’t you?”
“Well I don’t use it anymore.”
“No.” Kieran took another step closer.
Artio unzipped the bag. “I asked you what you’re doing up here?”
“Nothing much – just out for a walk.”
“At this time?”
Kieran took a deep breath and glanced over to the eastern part of the woods. “I was thinking about the body they found over near Four Sisters.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“Horrible stuff, dying out in a place like this and then getting buried in an unmarked grave so no one ever knows where you are. No funeral. No loved ones visiting you, leaving flowers on your grave. Nasty.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And then I started thinking about all those rumours about that weird little club you were in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That secret society you were in. Don’t you remember? It was a long time ago, I know, but…”
“I was never in any secret society, Kieran. I don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re starting to bother me. I’m going to have to ask you to leave me alone.”
“Or what? You’ll call the police?” Kieran snorted dismissively. “I don’t think so, mate. I’m the only one who’ll be calling the Old Bill around here. And the thing is, I might have to mention your little Grove to the police and see what they make of it. It might be relevant to their enquiries, don’t you think?”
Artio was silent.
“That copper running the show seems pretty sharp to me, too. Reminds me a bit of a bird of prey, the way he circles around and then gets down to business. A no-nonsense sort of bloke. I don’t reckon he’d mess about if he got hold of a lead like that, do you?”
Artio swallowed. “So what do you want?”
“I was thinking we could come to some kind of arrangement.”
“You’re blackmailing me?”
“Maybe a quarter mill.”
“What?” Artio felt the rage rise from deep within. After everything they had been through and now this – this creature was trying to profit from it.
“Call it what you like, mate, but if you don’t pay what I want, I will shop you to the law.”
A red mist descended and there was nothing that could be done about it. Kieran saw it coming, but a moment too late to save his life. Artio had snatched the first thing that came to hand from the bag and was now bringing the weapon down on the top of Kieran’s head. The sound of the skull shattering echoed in the frozen woods like a gunshot and then it was all over.
The fractured dawn light covered the murder scene like a cloak as the killer stared at the body with unconcealed horror, heart pounding like a fist and head dizzy with adrenaline. Then, to the west a branch snapped and the killer’s head jerked up to see a familiar face staring through the gloom. The man took off into the trees like a frightened hare and Artio whispered a pathetic curse.
Another loose end to tie up.
*
The HQ briefing room was packed with police officers, each of them staring at Jacob and waiting for him to lead them into the next phase of the investigation. He clapped his hands and brought everyone to attention. “All right settle down. We’ve had a big break in the case today and we need to get on.”
He turned and drew a large black circle around the photo of a young woman on the white murder board behind him. “Emma Russell, a student from a village just outside of Salisbury. I’m sorry to report it was Emma’s remains that were found in the wood yesterday morning.”
“I remember that case,” Morgan said. “I was a PC, still in uniform. Massive manhunt for her but she was never found. In the end they concluded she’d gone to Italy.”
“It was a famous case but well before my time,” Jacob said. “She grew up in the area and did very well in school. Her father is Ian Russell, one of the top men in a major investment bank in London at the time and now retired, and her mother is Chiara Russell, originally from Tuscany. Emma went to Oxford to study medicine. Twenty-three years of age, she was in her final year of the clinical stage of her medicine degree.”
“Clinical stage, sir?” Holloway asked.
“I don’t know about other institutions, but in Oxford, a medicine degree is divided into two distinct sections,” Jacob replied. “They have a period of pre-clinical study for three years in the city and then there are three years clinical study, usually at a hospital and not necessarily in Oxford.”
Holloway gave an appreciative nod. “How do you know all this?”
Jacob paused a beat. Some in here already knew, others might not. “My fianceé was a doctor, and she studied at Oxford before moving to the Royal London Hospital.”
A respectful hush descended over the room, and only one person could break it.
“This is a big lead for us,” Jacob continued. “And we all have Morgan and Holloway to thank for it. They didn’t stop working last night until they got what they were looking for. I’ll let Bill explain.”
Morgan stepped up. “In the end we got her thanks to a DNA match, but the ID has now also been confirmed by dental records.”
“DNA, sir? Innes asked. “Criminal record?”
Morgan shook his head. “Not at all. She wasn’t on a police database, naturally, but we were able to use the names that Holloway and I tracked down on the missing persons register last night to find the name of a medical student who had gone missing in 1992.”
“Nice work,” Anna said.
Morgan smiled. “She was almost finished with her studies and had moved back home at the time of her death, but during her degree she’d been part of what was at the time cutting-edge DNA research, and luckily for us there was some of her DNA on record at the John Radcliffe hospital. We had a sample sent over to our pathology bods and they confirmed that the two records were a perfect match.”
Jacob took over. “She was reported missing in October 1992 by her parents and also some of her friends at university and the actual university authority itself. Thames Valley Police and Wiltshire Police looked into it at the time in a joint operation but never had any luck in tracing her. She was officially registered as a missing person due to a lack of evidence pointing to murder.”
He turned to Morgan. “I want you to order the case files for the original investigation from archives and start to go through them with Holloway. If you can remember the original case you’re the best person to go through those files.”
“No problem, boss.”
He looked over to Anna and DC Innes who were both sitting suspiciously close to the radiator running below the long window at the side of the room.
“Now, how’s the witch-hunting getting on?”
“I think it’s over, sir,” Anna said. “As in I’m not sure we can dig any deeper, if you’ll excuse the pun.”
“Go on.”
Anna stepped up. “The basic legend concerns some young women called the Handsel sisters.”
“The Handsel sisters?”
“A very sad story,” she began. “Apparently, there were four of them, and they moved from Denmark to Wiltshire nearly three hundred years ago back in 1737. They settled in the Wilton area right next door to Grovely Wood, but unfortunately for them their arrival in the village coincided with the deaths of 137 people from smallpox.”
“Very unfortunate,” Morgan said. “What happened next?”
“So many deaths at one time in such a small village was serious business, and the villagers reached the conclusion that the sisters were witches. They accused the women of being in league with the devil and sentenced them to death.”
“My God.”
“Exactly. A few days later they dragged them into Grovely Wood, beat them to death and buried them out in the woods. Local legend says they were each buried beneath a beech tree some distance from one another so they couldn’t conspire with each other after death and plot revenge on the living.”
“And has anyone ever found these graves?” Holloway asked.
“Some claim to know which trees mark the graves,” Innes said. “They’re very large beech trees and obviously very old, but as far as I know no one’s ever dug down beneath them.”
“The point is,” Anna said. “Emma Russell’s body was also found beneath a beech tree.”
“But that doesn’t necessarily indicate someone planted one on her grave,” Morgan said quietly. “There are thousands of beeches in Grovely and that means millions of seeds floating around every year. Could just be a coincidence.”
Jacob sighed. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Whoever killed that woman planted a beech tree over her grave to hide the body, which was probably the same reason the villagers hid the bodies of the women they killed under beech trees.”
Morgan frowned. “Still doesn’t mean there was any witchcraft involved. As you say, the tree could have simply been a practical measure to cover the body.”
Jacob shook his head. “I think there’s more to it, Bill. Anyone smart enough to plant a beech tree on a grave knows it’s not going to provide any real cover for years, decades even. There must have been some other significance to planting the tree on her grave.”
“You mean a load of bloody voodoo nonsense?” Morgan said.
“That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
“We found a lot of stories of the wood being haunted,” Anna continued. “Not just the Handsel sisters but also another story of a poacher or possibly a woodsman who was caught stealing and hanged. A lot of people come to the wood to ghost-hunt or talk with the dead. I know it’s absolutely ridiculous but there it is.”
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “I’ve been in those woods at night and they’re pretty spooky.”
Anna raised a disbelieving eyebrow and fixed her gaze on the Welshman. “You’re not being serious?”
“But three hundred years ago?” Morgan said, changing the subject. “How can there be a link to the death of this girl thirty years ago? Please tell me we’re not talking about some satanic nutjobs.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Anna said. “This has nothing do with that.”
“Oh, go on then,” Morgan said. “Tell me why.”
“According to the research we did last night, none of this points to what we know as satanism at all. What we’re seeing here predates all of that by thousands of years. This is far more ancient and far darker than anything to do with modern ideas of heaven and hell, God or Satan. This stuff is right out of the ancient world.”
“But you were talking about witches,” Holloway said. “Necromancy... I thought these were relatively new ideas. Salem witch trials and so on.”
Anna shook her head. “Not according to what I was reading last night. Witchcraft, vampires, you name it – all of these things go right back to the very beginning of human civilisation. I found references to these things from ancient Egypt and even Mesopotamia, and certainly they are well documented in texts and poems from the Classical world – both ancient Greece and Rome.”
“Bloody stuff gives me the creeps,” Morgan said.
Anna gave him a look of vaguely patronising sympathy. “It was just how the ancients tried to explain the world. The fact we associate witches with the last few hundred years is simply because our cultural history focuses on those eras, and also the rise of popular publishing during that time as well.”
“Cultural history?” Morgan said. “You sound like one of those nimrods up at uni.”
“It’s amazing what being able to read can achieve, sir. You should give it a try.”
Her famous wink made Morgan laugh, and then she continued. “The truth is, people from every country in the world have told stories about witches for thousands and thousands of years.”
“Could this be a coincidence though?” he said. “Three hundred years ago they kill these women for being witches and now a body turns up not half a mile away in the same woods, under another bloody beech tree!”
Jacob was reluctant to accept the link. “We’re way too early to be drawing parallels, Bill.”
The Welshman shrugged. “If you say so, boss. Just putting it out there.”
Jacob turned to Innes. “You said you looked into the book we found with the remains?”
She nodded. “Yes, sir. I did some basic research and found there’s not much to it. The book was written by Sir Walter Scott who was a Scottish baronet born in 1771, and he’s most famous for his historical novels, even though he was also a judge.”
“Tell me more about this book though.”
“He wrote it in 1830, sir. Its central premise is that society even at that time still believed heavily in things like ghosts and devil worship and witches.”
“Go on.”
“From what I can gather from the internet the book is considered to be critical reading to people with an interest in the darker side of life.”
“You mean occult?” Morgan said.
“Not just that, sir. It provides a lot of historical information about the witch trials in Europe. I’m still reading it and it’s pretty unsettling stuff, particularly the bits about the witch hunts and trials and also sections on torture. Scott himself was very sceptcical about it all and considered most of it to be nothing but ridiculous, silly superstition.”
Jacob sighed. “And it was in a twenty-three year-old medical student’s bag on the night she died in a wood haunted by witches.”
“So what next?” Morgan asked.
“Next, Sergeant Mazurek and I have a very unpleasant house call to make.”
CHAPTER 11
“When she went missing our world ended.”
Jacob listened as Chiara Russell struggled with the words, even after so many years. When they had knocked on the heavy oak door of their large country house, mid-morning, she had appeared with a tumbler of vodka in her hand, and a vacant stare over their shoulders into the snowy garden beyond.
She knows he had thought. She knows why we’re here.
“Tell me, Mr Jacob. Are you absolutely certain?”
He gave a short, businesslike nod. “I’m sorry, but yes. When your daughter was at Oxford studying for her medicine degree she took part in a DNA trial.”
“That’s right,” she said, interrupting him, trying to delay the hammer blow. “It was a very cutting-edge subject during the late eighties-early nineties and Emma was very proud to be part of it.”
“We isolated various names on our missing persons database and went through them, researching their backgrounds very carefully one by one until we reached Emma’s. When we saw the Oxford connection we contacted the university and they surprised us by telling us they had her DNA on file as part of the research she had been doing.”
He paused a beat, reluctant to deliver the final cut. Aware of a ticking carriage clock somewhere behind, and Chiara’s eyes burning into him, he continued. “Unfortunately, that sample was a perfect match for the DNA sample our pathologist extracted from the remains found in Grovely Wood yesterday morning. I'm very sorry for your loss.”
Chiara Hall said nothing but raised the vodka glass to her lips and down a good inch of the spirit without flinching. The ease with which it went down, the burst veins on her cheeks sloppily covered by blush and cheek foundation, the slight slurring of her words all painted a terrible picture of what this crime had done to her life.
“I see,” she said at last.
He watched her composure slip. She had steeled herself for this moment every day for the last twenty-six years but not even the expectation of the darkest news, long held in her heart, could hold back the reaction Jacob now saw as she began to sob violently.
Anna moved to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “I’m very sorry, Mrs Russell. You’ve suffered a terrible loss.”
“Twice,” she said sharply, wriggling free of Anna’s arm. “Back then and again today.”
She rose from the chair and tottered over to the drinks’ cabinet. It had been decorated with tinsel and nestling in between some bottles was a plastic dancing Santa, mercifully switched off. “Are you certain you won’t join me?”
Jacob raised his hand. “Not for me, thanks.”
“Nor me, but thank you,” Anna said respectfully.
She slopped another good inch into the cut glass tumbler and returned to her seat. “We have an en tout cas tennis court at the rear,” she said out of nowhere. “Darling Emma used to play on it all through the summer months.”
The words hung in the air for a few seconds until the sound of the ticking clock returned to break the tense silence.
