Simon Beckett - Written in Bone

I thought about his reaction when he’d seen Duncan’s body. It had been genuine after all. But it hadn’t been the shock of seeing a body, it had been the realization that his sister had started killing again.

‘Why did she kill him?’ Fraser demanded without turning round, his voice cracked. He was slewing the car round the bends almost recklessly, throwing us from side to side.

‘I don’t know. But in the past whenever Grace…had an episode, we’d always moved on. This time we couldn’t. And when she realized there was going to be a murder investigation she must have panicked and tried to get rid of anything that might incriminate her. Duncan must have just been in the way.’

‘In the fucking way?’ Fraser snarled, the car swerving as he started to turn round.

‘Easy,’ Brody warned him. His face was like stone as he turned back to Strachan. ‘How many people has she killed?’

Strachan shook his head. ‘I don’t know for sure. She doesn’t always tell me. Four or five before this, perhaps.’

I don’t know which was worse, the number or the fact that Strachan hadn’t even kept track of his sister’s victims.

‘Tell me about Ellen,’ Brody grated.

Strachan closed his eyes. ‘Ellen was a mistake. There always was that…tension between us. I tried to avoid her, I daren’t make Grace suspicious. But a few months after we’d arrived here, I found out Ellen was going to visit college friends in Dundee. So I made an excuse to be there as well. It only happened that once, Ellen insisted on that. When I found out she was pregnant, I tried to pay her to go away somewhere. Somewhere safe. But she refused. She said she wouldn’t take a penny off me, because I was married. Quite an irony, eh?’

His bitterness quickly faded.

‘I’ve lain awake at night, terrified what would happen if Grace ever found out…’

He tailed off. Now his house was visible up ahead. Both cars were still outside, and the lights still burned in the window. Seeing them I felt a faint hope.

‘Should we see if she’s still there?’ Fraser asked.

‘She won’t be,’ Strachan said with certainty.

Brody looked at the approaching house, torn. If Grace was still here we could end this now. But if she wasn’t we’d have lost even more time.

‘What’s that on the drive?’ I asked. A pale yellow shape was lying motionless in the driveway. I felt cold as I realized what it was.

The body of Oscar, Strachan’s retriever.

‘She killed his dog?’ Fraser exclaimed. ‘Why the hell would she do that?’

No one answered, but Strachan’s face was bleak as we left the house behind.

‘Drive faster,’ Brody told Fraser.

Within minutes, the first houses had appeared ahead of us. The light had almost gone as we entered the village. Its streets were ominously empty. Fraser barely slowed as he flung the Range Rover into the side road leading up to the hotel.

The front door stood open.

Strachan leaped out of the car even before it had stopped moving. He ran up the hotel’s steps to the entrance, but then stopped dead, his battered face suddenly leached of colour.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Brody breathed, staring inside.

The hotel had been wrecked. Broken furniture littered the hall. The grandfather clock lay face down and smashed, the mirror torn from the wall and smashed into crazed shards of glass. It was frenzied, wanton destruction, but that wasn’t what had stopped Strachan.

The hallway was covered with blood.

The metallic stink of it thickened the air with a slaughterhouse taint. It was pooled on the wooden floorboards, spattered in abstract splashes across the panelled walls. It had sprayed highest just inside the doorway, jetting up the walls almost as far as the ceiling. This would have been where the attack first took place, but its progress afterwards was easy enough to follow. The blood formed a trail, big round splashes at first, then smeared tracks as its source had stumbled down the hallway.

The trail disappeared into the bar.

‘Oh, no…’ Strachan whispered. ‘Oh, please no…’

There was hardly any coagulation, which meant the blood was still fresh. Not very long ago it had been pumping round a living body. Both Strachan and Brody seemed paralysed by the sight of it. I forced myself to go past them and hurried down the hall, trying to avoid treading in the splashes on the floor. A bloody handmark stood out on the white doorframe, where someone had clutched it for support. It was too smudged to say how big or small the hand had been, but it was low down on the frame, as though whoever had made it had been crawling.

Or a child.

I didn’t want to see what was inside. But I’d no choice. I took a breath, trying to prepare myself, and stepped into the bar.

Nothing in it had been left intact. Chairs and tables had been tipped over and smashed, curtains slashed, bottles and glasses shattered in a frenzy. In the middle of it all was Cameron. Limbs splayed out in the relaxation of death, the schoolteacher lay slumped against the bar. His clothes were soaked through with blood that had only just begun to dry. A wide gash had opened a second mouth in his throat, slicing across his trachea as though trying to free the bulging Adam’s apple.

The teacher’s eyes were wide with shock, as though unable to believe what Grace had done to him.

Fraser appeared behind us. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he mumbled.

The air was a nauseous cocktail of alcohol and blood. There was another odour as well, but even as my stunned senses began to recognise it, a sudden sound tore through the silence.

A child’s scream.

It came from the kitchen. Strachan was running even before it had died. Brody and I were just behind him as he burst through the kitchen’s swing door, but the scene inside halted us all in our tracks.

The devastation we’d found before was nothing compared to this. Broken crockery crunched underfoot, while spilt food littered the floor in dirty snowdrifts. The kitchen table had been upended and its chairs smashed, the tall pine dresser pushed over on to the floor. Even the ancient cooker had been wrenched away from the wall, as though someone had tried to tip that over as well.

But right then none of that really registered.

Ellen was backed into a corner, terrified and bloodied, but alive. She clutched a heavy saucepan, gripping it white-knuckled in both hands, ready to ward off or swing.

Standing between her and the door was Grace. She clutched Anna tightly to her, one hand clamped over the little girl’s mouth.

The other held a kitchen knife to her throat.

‘Get back, don’t go near her!’ Ellen screamed.

We didn’t. Grace’s clothes were mud-spattered and wet from the walk to the village. Her raven hair was wild and windblown, her face puffy and streaked with tears. Even dishevelled as she was, she was still beautiful. But now her madness was all too apparent.

So, too, was something else. The smell I’d noticed in the hallway and bar was instantly identifiable in here, thick enough to clog the throat.

Gas.

I looked again at how the cooker had been pulled away from the wall, and glanced at Brody. He gave a barely perceptible nod.

‘The cylinders are round the back,’ he murmured to Fraser, not taking his eyes from Grace. ‘There should be a valve. Go and turn it off.’

Fraser slowly backed out, then disappeared down the hallway. The door swung shut behind him.

‘She was waiting when we came back from Rose Cassidy’s,’ Ellen sobbed. ‘Bruce came in with us, and when he tried to talk to her she…she…’

‘I know,’ Strachan said, calmly. He took a step closer. ‘Put the knife down, Grace.’

His sister stared at his bloodied face. She looked taut as a bowstring, ready to snap.