Michael Fowler - Heart of the Demon

Grace said, “Did she ever talk about fancying anyone?”

Hunter smiled to himself. It was almost as if she had read his mind.

Kirsty paused in mid thought, and then glanced across at her mother.

Grace picked up on the hesitation. “Come on Kirsty what is it?”

For a few seconds Kirsty stuttered over the words, until she finally got them out. “Well it was the other way round actually. A couple of weeks ago she just blurted out that this bloke had been coming on to her, pestering her for her mobile number.”

“Where did she tell you this?” Grace was edging even further forward, trying to get eye contact with Kirsty.

“Well she told me at the youth club. She just came up to me and said she had something to tell me in secret. Whispered it like. And then we went to a corner and she just said this guy had come up to her when she was on a ride at the fair and told her how nice she looked, and asked her if he could take some photos of her. I told her that was weird. She said it wasn’t like that. He wanted to take some nice pictures of her. Rebecca can be a bit naïve when it comes to lads and all that. I think she thought I was making fun of her. She got the hump and said I was only jealous. I didn’t want to row with her so I didn’t say anything else even though I still thought it was freaky. Anyway I asked her who it was, thinking he was in the youth club, but she said he wasn’t there. She’d met him when she’d gone outside the club. I pushed her for a bit more but she clammed up. She said she thought I didn’t believe her. I kept telling her I believed her but she wouldn’t tell me anymore.”

“Do you know which fair this was at, and when?”

“I can only think it must have been the Feast fair, which came a couple of weeks ago. It’s the one that comes every year on the fields at the back of the youth club.”

Hunter continued to make detailed notes.

“Did she say anything else about him? Mention his name or where he came from?” Grace continued

“Nope. But there was this one time when we were walking home from school and her mobile rang. She looked at the screen and blushed and wouldn’t let me see who it was. She never did that, we always told each other everything. Anyway she answered it and I heard her answer that she was with someone. She said it was her friend Kirsty — me. Then she just said ‘okay speak with you later,’ and cut off her mobile. I asked her if it was her boyfriend, just joking like, and she went bright red. She said if I were taking the mess she wouldn’t tell me anything else. I told her I wasn’t and then changed it round a bit to try and find out who it was like. She said he was really nice and had his own car. She said he kept telling her how pretty she was, and what a nice figure she had. I didn’t say anything but I thought it was really weird stuff to say that to Rebecca. Not that she wasn’t pretty or anything like, but I mean she hasn’t really developed properly yet. You’ve seen what she’s like. She’s stick thin. You know what I mean?”

Grace nodded. “Kirsty you said Rebecca told you he had a car. Which lads do you knock about with who have cars?”

“Well we don’t. I mean we know some of the sixth formers have cars but we don’t talk to them. But it’s not what she said about him having a car, it’s how she said it. I just got the impression that when she said guy, that she actually meant someone a lot older.”

“A man you mean?” asked Grace taken aback by this sudden answer.

“Well I suppose so, yes.”

For the next hour Grace backtracked over everything they had discussed. Kirsty faltered at times, catching a glimpse of her mum, and repeated with a similar answer as previous.

Hunter knew from his policing experience and as a father to two children that she was holding something back. He wanted to jump in and push her for answers but this was Grace’s call.

She didn’t push. At the end of the talk Grace handed Kirsty one of her batch of small business cards, with the force crest in one corner and the blue block type stating THIS IS NOT A FORM OF IDENTIFICATION running across its length. She took a pen and underlined her work mobile number.

“If you can think of anything else Kirsty,” she pressed the card firmly into the girl’s palm, catching her gaze, making eye contact. “If you want to talk to me in confidence Kirsty call me on this number,” she finished, before nudging Hunter and making for the door.

DAY SEVEN: 12th July.

Because of the repetitive nature of Dougie Crabtree’s work he constantly found his mind wandering, reminiscing and throwing up rose-tinted images of how this dark and stark landscape once looked when it was the site of the former Manvers Colliery. He shifted his nineteen stone bulk from one cheek to the other on the vinyl seat, in time to the swaying motion of his cab on the huge Komatsu track excavator. His thick muscular arms effortlessly and skilfully manoeuvred between transmission and hydraulic gears, as the crane surged over deep rutted tracks, whilst the eighteen foot reach mechanical shovel scooped enormous wedges of cloggy grey earth and slopped them into the waiting caterpillar dumper truck. He was thinking to himself what a coincidence this was. Having started work at the thriving colliery from school and then witnessing its demise and dereliction after the Miner’s Strike in 1984, he was back on the site, and involved in its regeneration. Though he hated to admit it, particularly after the struggle, anger and bitterness he had gone through to fight for ‘his pit,’ it was refreshing to work regularly in the fresh air on a daily basis. The eighty-four acre old colliery and coking plant site was in the throes of a major transformation. The previous infrastructure of winding gear, coal preparation plant, site offices and coking unit had gradually gone, and in its place were plush working industrial units and landscaped environments. And he was toiling on the final phase. Reclaiming the old slurry pits, to make way for a £130 million scheme, which would see retail, leisure and residential units woven into the vista.

The engine growled and his cab vibrated as the huge bucket gouged the lumpy grey surface, scooping out another lump of the toxic earth. The oily surface water bubbled as pockets of methane gas escaped from beneath the mess and Dougie screwed up his face as the rotten ‘eggy’ smell wafted across his nostrils. He was about to dive the steel fingers of the shovel back into the earth again when he spotted an unusual form poking through the scrape he had just dug. He halted the bucket’s dip, and squinting, peered out through the smeared windscreen. He could have sworn that looked like a body. He closed his eyes for a split second, flicked them open again and stared, focusing on the object that he had unearthed, trying to separate the dirt from the shape. “It can’t be,” he said to himself, as a rush of adrenaline surged through his body and his stomach emptied. “It is though; it’s definitely a body.”

* * * * *

Detective Constable’s Tony Bullars and Mike Sampson, the other half of Hunter’s team had been pulled from the Rebecca Morris murder to join the police and forensic team that were foraging amongst the slurry tips on the Manvers site. They took a short-cut to the scene, via a well-used undulating dirt track, which bounced them bruisingly around in the CID car, and found their witness Dougie Crabtree, by the side of a marked police car, talking animatedly to an officer who was attempting to formulate his excited jabberings into hard facts. A hundred yards away a half dozen, white-suited, members of the Forensic Team were on hands and knees probing around in the solid clods of coal dust. A white tent was in the process of being erected. It appeared so bright set against the stark grey backdrop, reminiscent of a lunar landscape.