Simon Beckett - The Calling Of The Grave

This time I didn't bother to shout. A final brick tumbled down on to the rubble with a sound like falling skittles, then there was nothing. Not a sound, nor any sign of life.

The kiln yawned in front of me, dark and silent as a grave.

The police found Monk three days later. In the aftermath of everything else that had happened, the search for the convict was stepped up still further. But even then events hadn't quite run their course.

It took the emergency services eight hours to dig out Terry and Roper from underneath the kiln's walls. By the time the remaining structure had been made safe enough to start shifting the rubble, everyone knew it was a recovery operation rather than a rescue.

I wasn't present, but I'm told there wasn't a sound from the rescue teams and police who'd assembled at the scene. When the last bricks were removed Roper was found lying on top of Terry. The postmortem showed later that he'd died almost immediately, which was no surprise given the injuries he'd already sustained. Terry wasn't so lucky. Roper's body had partially protected him from the falling debris, and there was enough brick dust in his lungs to suggest he hadn't been killed outright. Although there was no way of knowing if he'd been conscious or not, the cause of death was suffocation.

He'd been buried alive.

My own injuries were painful but not serious: three cracked ribs from where I'd been hit with the scaffolding pole, plus cuts and bruises. For the second time in twenty-four hours I found myself back in hospital, though this time in a private room rather than a curtained cubicle, where the press could more easily be kept away.

'You've opened up an unholy mess,' Naysmith told me. 'You know there's going to be hell to pay over this, don't you?'

I supposed there would be, but I couldn't get too worked up over it. Naysmith was watching me carefully.

'Are you sure you've told us everything? There's nothing you've missed out?'

'Why would I leave anything out?'

When I left the hospital and stepped outside into the daylight everything felt slightly unreal. I'd been told Sophie was stable but still unconscious, although I hadn't been allowed to see her. I couldn't face going back to her house again so I booked into a nearby hotel. For the next two days I hardly left it, ordering room service I barely touched and watching the story break on the news. Monk still hadn't been caught, and there was fevered speculation about where he might be, and why the police hadn't captured him.

I knew from the updates I received from Naysmith that it wasn't for lack of trying. The rain continued to fall, and the teams going down into the cave system where Monk had taken Sophie were hampered by flooding. The discovery of a third entrance disheartened everyone. For a time it looked as though he might have escaped to some other refuge, or even fled Dartmoor altogether.

He hadn't. When the flood waters receded enough to allow the search team deeper into the dripping tunnels, they found Monk still in the narrow fissure where I'd last seen him. He'd been dead for some time, wedged so tightly between the rock faces that it took the best part of a day to get him out. Although the fissure had flooded he hadn't drowned. The strain of forcing his massive frame into that small space had proved too much even for him, as I think he'd known it would. When I couldn't see his torchlight behind us I'd assumed it was because he'd managed to free himself. But the searchers found the torch in his pocket, switched off. He'd died alone in the dark, far away from daylight or human contact.

He'd made his choice.

The cause of death was heart failure and pneumonia after a cocaine overdose, which was as I'd expected. But the post-mortem produced two notable findings. On most people the striations where the muscle fibres anchor to the long bones of the arms and legs are quite delicate. On Monk they were unusually deep, more in keeping with the dense musculature of a beast than a man.

That explained his abnormal strength, but it was the other finding that was most significant. There were massive lesions in his brain, corresponding to the depression in his skull. They were in the orbitofrontal cortex, where even mild trauma can cause behavioural problems and frontal lobe epilepsy. The likelihood was that they'd been caused by the forceps delivery that had killed his mother. Monk had been born damaged, a freak but not a monster.

We'd made him into one of those ourselves.

News of his death deepened my feeling of being stuck in limbo. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the caves with Sophie and Monk. Or hearing the awful hollow impact as the scaffolding pole clubbed the back of Roper's head. My thoughts would run off at a tangent, as though trying to pick their own way through my mind. I felt as though there were something I should remember, something important.

I just didn't know what it was.

When I finally fell into a fitful sleep that night it was only to wake suddenly in the early hours with Terry's voice echoing in my head, as though he were in the room with me.

You had your chance eight years ago.

It was something he'd said in the kiln, but it had been buried along with everything else until my subconscious spat it out. I thought it through, fitting it in with everything else till I was sure, and then called Naysmith.

'We need to go out on the moor.'

The first frost of the season crisped the coarse grass in the hollow as the CSIs began digging into the mound that Sophie had led us to years before. Naysmith and Lucas stood beside me, watching in silence as the dead badger was once again exposed to daylight. Preserved by the peat, the animal was hardly any more decomposed than it had been last time. But as more of the mound was cleared away the remains could be seen to be flattened and crushed, the splintered ends of broken bones protruding through the peat- clogged pelt.

'Where do you think Connors got the badger from?' Naysmith asked as a CSI carefully removed it from the hole.

'Roadkill,' I said.

Wainwright had told me as much when I'd visited him, but I'd dismissed it as rambling. I was wrong. The discovery of the badger had appeared to explain both the cadaver dog's reaction and the disturbance to the soil. It had seemed a literal dead end, its presence enough to deter us from digging any deeper.

But no one thought to question why an animal that preferred dry, sandy conditions should have dug its sett in waterlogged ground. Monk's abortive escape had distracted us, but there were other clues we'd overlooked. Animal bones had also been found at Tina Williams' shallow grave, and the coincidence alone should have alerted me. As should the smell of decomposition: faint or not, it was stronger than it should have been in peat conditions.

Most obvious of all, though, was the broken bone that Wainwright had exposed. It was a comminuted fracture, a fragmented break typically caused by deliberate or accidental violence. A fall, say, or being hit by a car. An animal that had died in its burrow had no business with an injury like that.

There was no way of knowing when Wainwright had realized. It was possible he'd known for years, and elected to keep quiet to protect his reputation. But dementia sufferers often live more in the past than the present. Perhaps the knowledge was waiting in his subconscious, trapped there until it was brought to the surface by some random misfire of failing synapses.

I should have realized myself. And on some level I had. Even back then, when the search reached its violent denouement, I'd felt the familiar itch that told me I was overlooking something. But I'd let it go. I'd been so sure of myself, so confident in my abilities, that I hadn't thought to second-guess my findings. I'd seen only the obvious, blithely putting the Monk case from my mind as I got on with my life.