Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

The sergeant had a torch in his hand and was showing me around the interior of the cave. It ran about fifty yards before it hit a solid wall of more chalk.

‘This has been artificially built, too,’ he said, playing his torch beam over the surface of the wall.

I nodded. There were cracks and lines showing where the non-uniform blocks had been assembled.

‘Was it built before or after the dead man was walled up in here, though?’ I asked.

‘No way of knowing until we can cut through this wall.’

‘Is that going to happen?’

‘Not anytime soon and not until after a lot of red tape has been peeled away, that’s for sure.’

‘Health and Safety?’

‘The modern mantra.’

I looked up at the roof of the cave, wondering how many thousand tonnes of rock and assorted glacial-deposit matter lay above us, and thought that the health-and-safety brigade might have it right for once.

We walked back through the cave towards the entrance. I was kicking the loose rocks aside when something caught my eye.

‘This site been fingertip searched?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. Our resources are a bit stretched at the minute, as you know, Jack. We have a recent murder and a missing man to deal with as well.’

‘Do you want to bag that, then?’ I said, pointing to a fragment of card that had come loose from the rock. There was water around it. Presumably the rest of it had been washed away now that the wall had been breached and the spring tides had come crashing up to the cliff face.

Sergeant Coker crouched down, removed a small ziplock plastic bag from his pocket and teased the fragment into it. It was beige, about two inches wide on the straight and downward angles. The inner edge where it had been torn was crooked. Part of a red circle with the letters IAL remaining in a faded red on top of a blob and part of a solid hemisphere of something or other in the same shade.

‘What do you reckon it is?’

I looked at the piece of card in the see-through bag and shrugged. ‘It might be a clue. Might just be a piece of litter washed in on the tide.’

‘If it’s a clue I am buggered if I know what it means.’

I nodded. But something familiar about it tugged at the back of my mind.

We walked back out through the wall of chalk blocks that the deceased man had been buried in and back onto the beach. The tide was far out now. And another spring tide wasn’t due until the full moon so the cave and whatever else was in it should be safe from the waters of the North Sea at least until then.

As we walked back up towards the West Promenade my phone made contact with the Vodafone signal once more and beeped in my pocket. I took it out and found that I had missed a call. I vaguely recognised the number but couldn’t place it. I pushed the green telephone signal and listened to the dial tone.

When the woman at the other end answered, she could barely speak through her tears.

‘Inspector Delaney, I need to see you.’

She broke down in tears again and her words were unintelligible. ‘It’s OK, Helen,’ I said. ‘I’m coming straight there.’ I clicked off the phone and looked at the sergeant, deliberating for a moment.

‘Fancy a trip out to Salthouse?’ I asked him finally.

Helen Middleton had recovered some of her composure by the time we arrived at her place.

She was in her newly finished kitchen and handed us both a cup of tea and led us back into her living room. I had introduced the sergeant and she was pleased that I had brought him along.

We sat down in the chairs that she indicated. Then, as she sat down herself and placed her teacup carefully on a coaster, her puppy jumped straight into her lap.

It was a relief to see him. I had been worried about the dog.

Bruno could obviously tell that his mistress was upset and seemed anxious to offer what comfort he could.

‘What’s happened, Helen?’ I asked.

‘Your friend came round to finish off my kitchen.’

‘Yes.’

‘Completing the woodwork on the windows, glazing them and so on, whilst colleagues of his. . I believe the expression is made good ?’

‘It is.’

‘And a very good job he made of it, too.’

‘Yes.’ I wasn’t quite sure where she was heading with this but she seemed, as before, reluctant to broach whatever it was that was worrying her.

‘Have Bill Collier or his workmates been back, Mrs Middleton?’ asked Sergeant Coker. I had filled him in on some of the background. Not all of it, of course.

‘No, he hasn’t. Inspector Delaney assured me that he wouldn’t be and he has been as good as his word. They haven’t bothered me at all. Of course, I have been away for a while, staying at a friend’s cottage, while the work here was completed.’

‘That’s good.’

‘So what’s happened?’ I asked.

Helen’s eyes welled with tears again and it took her a moment or so before she was able to speak.

‘The man they found blocked up in the wall of the cave — I know who he is.’

The young girl sat huddled on the cold bench in the underground room that the men had come and built in their back garden. She hugged her rag doll Jemima to herself — its eyes were almost as big as her own.

The man sat next to her and patted her on her knee.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said but she didn’t reply. She was shutting out the sounds of the screaming noises that still haunted her. It was a warm afternoon but she was shivering. A small lamp threw out some amber light into the darkness.

‘Would you like some toffee?’ asked the man.

The young girl shook her head.

‘You’re a big girl now. You’re seven, so you don’t have to be afraid any more.’

But the roundness of the girl’s eyes testified to the contrary.

‘Can you keep a secret?’

The girl nodded.

‘It will be our special secret. I am going to show you something but you are not to tell anyone else. Not mummy or daddy or anybody.’

The girl nodded again.

The man pulled back his wrist and showed her the watch strap he was wearing. It was a watch she had seen him wear before, but now in the centre of the strap there had been inset a shiny new plate. The girl looked at it but could not read what was written on there.

‘What does it mean?’

‘It’s Latin. Amor Vincit Omnia. It means Love Conquers All.’

The night sky was coal black as I drew the heavy drape curtains over the bedroom windows.

They were old, period windows, as they were throughout the cottage: very nice to look at, pretty rubbish at keeping out draughts. After I had gone back to the police station and left Harry Coker to brief Superintendent Dean and the posse from Norwich, I had picked Siobhan up from school and cooked dinner. When Kate came back with baby Jade, she asked me about my day and I promised I’d fill her in when the kids were asleep.

I climbed into bed and took a sip of a brandy and soda I had prepared earlier. It was a small shot of brandy, a large shot of soda. As the curly-haired Jewish man once remarked, the times were getting different.

Kate came in, bereft of make-up, her own long curly hair tied back. She was wearing a warm-looking but far from sexy pair of pyjamas. She still looked heart-meltingly gorgeous.

‘Get in here, sex kitten,’ I said, pulling back the duvet on her side of the bed.

‘Sure, and where else would I be going?’ she replied, giving a laughable impersonation of the brogue that I sometimes adopted for dramatic effect.

‘Nowhere, I hope.’