Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

‘So you’re pretty sure that none of what has been going on here in our own century is coincidental.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences like this. Somebody found out that David Webb was in fact murdered and not killed at sea when his body was uncovered. And is doing what, exactly. .?’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘Going after the people responsible? But they presumably died years ago.’

‘That’s why the gravestones are being vandalised. The sins of the fathers visited on the children. Is that the quote?’

‘I don’t know — the Bible’s not my strong suit, Jack.’

I took a sip of my lager as Sergeant Coker’s phone trilled. He answered it and grunted a few times. ‘OK, boss,’ he said finally. He closed the phone and looked at me thoughtfully.

‘Your sandwich will have to wait a while.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Catholic church in a little village just off the top road.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Another grave desecrated. The headstone smashed up.’

‘We know whose?’

‘Oh yeah — Tony Carter’s. Your missing dentist’s grandfather.’

You head south from the roundabout by the Sheringham steam railway and up the Holway road to get to what the locals call the Top Road or Cromer Road.

When we got to the T-junction there we turned left for Cromer, went a little way down the road and then turned right for the small village of East Beckham. It was farmland there mainly, with a few houses dotted around: no shops, no pubs, no restaurants but it still had a church. You couldn’t throw a stone in this part of the world, after all, without hitting a church. Most of them dating back to the Normans when building them was a kind of hobby round here, I guess. Like stamp collecting.

The lights were on inside the ancient building of Saint Mark’s, shining through the equally ancient stained-glass windows like an illuminated Christmas card. The Norwich police had got there a while before us and erected floodlights outside. The usual POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape had been put up at the entrance to the cemetery and a couple of uniformed officers were standing guard inside.

Sergeant Coker and myself ducked under the tape. DI Walsh was there with his sergeant and Superintendent Dean was looking, as usual, as if a wasp had stung her on her admittedly trim arse. We walked over to the smashed headstone and kept back as the crime-scene photographers did their thing.

‘Looks as if you were right, Delaney,’ said Rob Walsh — which didn’t improve Susan Dean’s mood any. ‘If it is the same person and this is his calling card, then the modern murders are connected to the past and probably have nothing to do with the stag-night shenanigans.’

‘Possibly,’ said Susan Dean. ‘And if it is the same person.’

‘You got a lot of people going around smashing up headstones recently, Susan?’

‘You know as well as I, Delaney, that there has been a spate of vandalism in the area lately.’

‘In the caravan park. Some graffiti and minor damage. Hardly anything like this.’

‘What’s your gut feeling on this, then, superintendent?’ asked DI Walsh diplomatically. ‘I mean this is your territory, your patch, and I know we are sailing in uncharted waters here, if I may mix my metaphors. But what’s your take on it?’

‘Well, seeing as we are unable to contact Robert Carter, and nobody seems to have any idea where he is, then yes, we certainly have to consider the possibility that he has been taken by whoever was responsible for the deaths of Nigel Holdsworth and Len Wright.’

‘The question is, what do we do about it?’ I said.

The superintendent glanced at me, as though she didn’t like my use of the word ‘we’, but I didn’t much care. The time for petty local politics and power games was long gone. Had gone when David Webb turned up murdered after seventy-three years and buried in a cave, if you ask me.

‘Something connects all these people,’ added DI Walsh.

‘Something that happened in 1941.’

He nodded, agreeing with me. ‘We just need to find out what it is, before more names are chiselled out of headstones.’

I recognised a face over by the church entrance and left the official investigation forces to walk over and talk to him.

‘How’s it going, Solly?’ I asked.

He grunted and muttered something in a thick Norfolk accent that I couldn’t make out. He didn’t seem too happy, was the gist of it. He was in his seventies, stooped but with a full head of long, still-dark hair that the wind was wrapping around his face. He used to be a fisherman so maybe the salt air had preserved the colour of his hair.

‘You do the grounds here as well, then?’

‘Yeah, voluntary.’

‘Voluntary?’

‘My church,’ he grunted again.

‘You see anything that happened?’

‘No. And I just want to get home. Those people told me to wait.’ He nodded dismissively at the police team.

‘They take a statement?’

‘No, just asked a couple of questions and told me to wait, like I got nothing better to do with my time.’

‘Did you know the guy whose headstone was smashed up?’

‘No, before my time. He was in the ground before I even came to Sheringham. I ain’t a Shannock, you know.’

‘Nor me,’ I said.

He laughed at that, a short, bitter chuckle. ‘No, I should say you aren’t.’

‘You see anybody looking around the graves?’

‘Only her,’ he nodded, scowling again at Superintendent Dean. ‘Bloody bluebottle, telling me I got to wait.’

‘Not tonight. I meant earlier.’

‘Yeah, I know what you meant. She was here yesterday, having a look around.’

‘You were doing the rounds yesterday?’

He grunted again. ‘Evening Mass. We come out and she’s there, peering at the graves.’

‘She look at Tony Carter’s grave?’

‘Oh yeah. Bloody bluebottle.’

I was sitting behind my desk, waiting for Laura to bring me my morning cup of java and a croissant. Hell, if I was going to have staff on my payroll I might as well get some benefit from them. Maybe I should take a leaf out of Amy Leigh’s book and get a glass panel in the door to my office and have DELANEY amp; ASSOCIATES etched onto it.

Outside the wind, as ever, was whistling, and the clouds were scudding in the sky like sailing ships. It was sunny, though. One of those rare breaks you get in England sometimes in October and early November, when it is bracingly cold but the light is bright — dazzlingly bright sometimes when the sun sits low in the sky. The sort of weather when wrapping a scarf round your neck, putting on gloves, duffel coat and hat and going for a long walk in the forests and kicking up leaves doesn’t seem such a bad thing after all. Kate on one side, Siobhan on the other, the baby safely wrapped up warm in a buggy. Maybe a dog. A big mad enthusiastic Labrador to throw sticks for.

Damn, I thought, catching myself. I had better get back to London soon.

The door swung open, by virtue of a kick to its base from a small-sized Doc Martens boot and Laura Gomez entered, a large styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand and a paper bag clenched between her teeth.

She dropped the paper bag on my desk by opening her mouth, much as my imaginary Labrador friend might have returned that imaginary stick.

‘None for Amy?’

‘She’s in court.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Some guy flashing his chipolata at a woman on the 9:45 Sheringham to Norwich.’

‘Classy.’

Today Laura had dyed her hair purple, was wearing a leather jacket over a black Harley-Davidson motorbike T-shirt and a red skater-girl skirt over thick white tights.