Martin Edwards - The Cipher Garden

‘A long way to fall.’

‘Right.’

Kirsty leapt from the plane. She was gliding through the air, elegant as a bird. As she came closer, they could make out her canary-yellow jumpsuit. But as they watched, she raised an arm.

‘Jesus,’ Daniel said. ‘What’s she doing?’

Nick swore. ‘She’s taking off her helmet.’

Kirsty pulled the helmet free and it flew away.

Hannah’s stomach lurched. She found herself squeezing Nick’s hand tight.

Miranda let out a cry. ‘What’s she doing? Is she mad? She’s…’

The figure in the sky was uncoupling her parachute.

‘She’s not wearing goggles,’ Nick said.

The parachute was flapping around the skydiver’s legs. It was as if she was dancing, as she tried to wriggle free.

‘Shit, she’s lost her parachute!’

People screamed as the white parachute billowed and spiralled away. Tears were running down Miranda’s cheeks, Louise had covered her eyes.

Kirsty was falling through the air, lying on her back, knees bent towards her chest.

Hannah thought she was going to be sick. She saw Daniel put his arm round Miranda. Their eyes were locked on the girl in the sky.

Kirsty arched her back and put her head down, pointing towards the ground. They could see her long red hair, rippled by a breeze. Her body spun in mid-air and then plunged towards the dropzone.

People were shouting. ‘No! Oh God! No!’

As the girl hit the ground, Hannah retched.

Tears filled Daniel’s eyes as he stuffed one more sack with clumps of grass and stinging nettles. He’d striven to expel the vision of Kirsty Howe’s shattered body from his mind through sheer hard labour, but in vain. However many times he bent his back, the scene at the airfield kept replaying in his mind. That tiny yellow figure in mid-air, intent on destroying herself.

What drove someone to such despair that suicide was the only way out? He’d wrestled with the question a thousand times since Aimee had hurled herself from that tower in Oxford, and never found an answer. To him, life was the most precious gift. To toss it away was unthinkable.

Chaos had engulfed the airfield the instant the girl hit the ground. People were crying out in shock and disbelief, strangers clutched at each other, unable to make sense of what they had witnessed. While Daniel, Miranda and Louise huddled together for comfort, Nick raced off to take charge of the scene. Once Hannah finished vomiting, she followed him. Daniel thanked God he wasn’t a police officer, charged with sorting out other people’s ruined lives. How had his father coped with the horror?

The three of them drove home in silence and had little to say to each other before going to bed. Kirsty’s death had numbed them. All night, he kept waking up, unable to settle. At first light, he headed out into the garden and threw himself into decoding the cipher garden, but his brain wasn’t working and he’d resorted to physical graft. Nothing added up, certainly not this eccentric overgrown landscape in the shadow of the fell. What did an old cipher matter, when the young waitress was dead for no reason?

Senseless, senseless, senseless.

He thrust his fork into the hard dry earth and struck something solid buried a few inches under the ground. A large stone. The spikes of a monkey puzzle tree scratched his cheek as he stood up, but he took no notice. Levering with his fork, he brought to the surface a square grey tablet, a foot long and wide. As he brushed off the dirt, he uncovered chiselled indentations. Within a minute an inscription was revealed.

WILL TAKE OUR LEAVE

An anagram? He played around in his mind with the letters, but couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t fanciful or meaningless. Perhaps the message wasn’t meant to be read in isolation. He’d been clearing the undergrowth from a patch populated by ferns and foxgloves, divided from the rest of the garden by a picket fence and bounded by two monkey puzzle trees, a yew and a small weeping willow.

He leaned on his fork, massaging his back with one hand, listening to the buzzing of the bees. His body was aching, and he’d tweaked the muscles in his ribs, but this wasn’t the moment to give up and retreat inside. A current of excitement was flowing through him, a sensation he’d experienced at Oxford. He was on the brink of discovery.

Hannah closed her eyes and let the blast of water from the shower cleanse her. If only she could wash away what had happened. She must clear her mind, the doctor was right, think about the future. Looking back might destroy her.

She stepped out of the cubicle and towelled herself dry. The house was as silent as a crypt. Strange to be here on a weekday. Her instinct was to ring the office, check out what was going on, but she’d promised Marc that she wouldn’t make the call, wouldn’t allow herself to be sucked straight back into the quicksand of endless meetings and filling in forms.

But it was safer to think about work than the rest of her life. She needed to focus on solving the murder of Warren Howe, it would give her a goal to aim for. Even that was fraught with angst. She couldn’t rid herself of the suspicion that Tina Howe had murdered her husband. But she’d watched Tina running towards the dropzone seconds after Kirsty’s death. The woman’s ravaged face was a sight she would never forget. She might be a murderer, but that was a punishment too far. Nothing was crueller than watching your own child die.

The tablet had lain beneath one of the monkey puzzle trees. Daniel used the fork to test the ground beneath the other. Soon the metal prongs struck another piece of stone. He levered it up and uncovered a second inscription.

LEAVES FROM THE GARDEN

Mosquitoes had stung his bare arms, leaving red tender marks. Sweat was pouring off him, and he’d forgotten to replenish his sun block. None of this mattered. He couldn’t stop now. He was on a roll, no question. The pain in his back and ribs meant nothing.

He was driven on by the conviction that at last the cipher was within touching distance. No stopping now. Within ten minutes, he had dug out a third stone from under the drooping willow branches. He cradled it in his hands, as if it were a Ming vase.

The tablet bore a carved question.

WHY DID YOU LEAVE?

The phone trilled. Hannah let it ring. Probably a recorded message that would try to sell her a timeshare in Spain. But the caller was persistent. In the end she surrendered.

‘Hello?’

‘Hannah, is that you? You sound strange. Are you all right?’

Terri. Faithful Terri. At least, faithful as a friend if not always as a wife. Hearing her brisk, confident tone was a therapy in itself. Hannah wondered whether to lie and pretend everything was all right. But Terri was no fool. She’d see through the subterfuge. And besides, even detective chief inspectors sometimes needed a shoulder to lean on.

‘Well, actually, I’ve been better…’

There must be another stone. Must be. The message he’d uncovered made little sense. There were four trees and he’d convinced himself there must be four stones. But he couldn’t find the missing link.

His skin was burning, but he kept on going. The yew tree had thick, tangled roots that slowed him down, but he was certain there was something to find. Time passed. Twenty minutes, half an hour. What was that, wrapped around by the spreading roots?

He’d found it. Soon he was brushing the dirt from the fourth stone and squinting at its inscription.

TOGETHER AGAIN FOR ETERNITY

Yew trees are often found in cemeteries, he remembered. Christ, did it mean that a corpse was buried here? The thought of it made him grind his teeth. But there was no body in the garden — who could it be? Not Jacob and Alice Quiller, for they had been interred in the churchyard at Brack. Not their son John, whose body had been brought back from South Africa and laid to rest in the same place.