Roz Watkins - The Devil’s Dice - The most gripping crime thriller of 2018 – with an absolutely breath-taking twist

The duty sergeant was a bearded man who looked slightly too large for his uniform.

‘Sergeant Pearson,’ he said. ‘Ben. No evidence trampled. All under control.’

I didn’t know him, but I recognised the name. According to the (admittedly unreliable) Station grapevine, he was extensively tattooed. Nothing was visible but apparently his torso was completely covered and was the subject of much fascination, which just demonstrated the poor standard of gossip in the Derbyshire force.

‘DI Meg Dalton,’ I said, and looked around the taped area. There was no-one who was obviously dead.

Ben pointed to the cliff. ‘In the cave house.’

A narrow set of steps, smooth and concave through years of use, crawled sideways up the face of the cliff. At the top, about fifteen feet up, a dark, person-sized archway led into the rock.

‘There’s a house up there, burrowed into the rock? With a corpse in it?’

‘Yep,’ Ben said.

‘That’s a bit creepy.’

Ben squeezed his eyebrows together in a quick frown. ‘Oh. Have you heard… ?’ He glanced up at the black entrance to the cave.

‘Heard what?’

‘Sorry. I thought you said something else. Never mind. It’s not important.’

I sighed. ‘Okay, so what about our iffy body?’

‘Pathologist said he died within the last few hours. And SOCO have been up.’ He nodded towards a white-swathed man peering at what looked like a pile of vomit at the base of the cliff.

‘Who’s been sick?’

‘The dog. Seems to have eaten something nasty.’

‘The dog?’

‘That’s how they found the body. Bloke lost his dog. Searched everywhere for it. Eventually heard noises up there.’ Ben thumbed at the gap in the rock. ‘Climbed up, saw the body, found the dog licking something.’

‘I hope it wasn’t tucking into the corpse?’

‘It was a Labrador, so I don’t suppose it would have turned it down. But I think it was the plastic wrapper from a cake or something. Looks like it might have been poisoned.’

‘Is the dog okay? Where’s the owner? Has someone taken a statement from him?’

‘It’s all here for you. They’ve gone to the vet, but the dog seems fine. Only ate a few crumbs, he thought.’

‘Interesting location for a body,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been kind of fascinated by cave houses.’

Ben inched towards the cliff and touched the rock. ‘This area’s riddled with caves. Not many of them were ever lived in, of course.’ He hesitated as if wondering whether to say more, given that a corpse was waiting for my attention.

‘I’d better press on,’ I said, although I wasn’t looking forward to getting my bad foot up the stone steps. Besides, there was something unsettling about the black mouth of the cave. ‘What were you going to say earlier? When I said it was creepy?’

Ben laughed, but it didn’t go to his eyes. ‘Oh, don’t worry. I grew up round here. There was a rumour. Nothing important.’

‘What rumour?’

‘Just silliness. It’s supposed to be haunted.’

I laughed too, just in case he thought I cared. ‘Well, I don’t suppose our man was killed by a ghost.’ I imagined pale creatures emerging from the deep and prodding the corpse with long fingers. I forced them from my mind. ‘I was told the dead man smells of almonds. Cyanide almonds?’

‘Yep, slightly. You only really get the almondy smell on a corpse when you open up the stomach.’ Ben’s stance changed to lecture-giving – legs wide apart and chest thrust forward. I hoped he wasn’t going to come over all patronising on me. I wasn’t even blonde any more – I’d dyed my hair a more intelligent shade of brown, matched to my mum’s for authenticity. But I was stuck with being small and having a sympathy-inducing limp.

‘Yes. Thanks. I know,’ I said, a little sharply. ‘So, do we have a name?’

Ben glanced at his notes. ‘Peter Hugo Hamilton.’

‘And he was dead when he was found?’

‘That’s right. Although I’ve seen deader.’

‘Can you be just a little bit dead?’

Ben folded his arms. ‘If there are no maggots, you’re not that dead.’

‘Okay, I’ll have a look.’ I edged towards the steps and started to climb. A few steps up, I felt a twinge in my ankle. I paused and glanced down. Ben held his arms out awkwardly as if he wanted to lever my bottom upwards, a prospect I didn’t relish. I kept going, climbing steadily until I could just peer into the cave. A faint shaft of light hit the back wall but the rest of it was in darkness. I waited for my eyes to adjust, then climbed on up and heaved myself in.

A musty smell caught in my throat. The cave was cool and silent, its roof low and claustrophobic. It was the size of a small room, although its walls blended into the darkness so there could have been tunnels leading deeper into the rock. A tiny window and the slim door cast a muted light which didn’t reach its edges. I pulled out my torch and swooped it around. I had an irrational feeling that something was going to leap out of the darkness, or that the corpse was going to lunge at me. I scraped my hair from my clammy face and told myself to calm the hell down and do my job.

The dead man lay at the back of the cave, his body stretched out straight and stiff. One hand clutched his stomach and the other grasped his throat. I shone my torch at his face. Scratches ran down his cheeks and trickles of blood had seeped from them. The blood gleamed bright, cherry red in the torch light.

A trail of vomit ran from the side of the man’s mouth onto the cave floor.

I crouched and looked at his fingers. They were smeared red. Poor man seemed to have scratched at his own face. Under the nails were flecks of green, as if he’d clawed his way through foliage.

Resting near one of the man’s bent arms was a book – The Discourses of Epictetus.

A plastic wrapper lay on the stone floor. I could just read the label. Susie’s Cakes. Dark chocolate and almond. I lowered myself onto my hands and knees and smelt the wrapper, wishing I hadn’t given up Pilates. I couldn’t smell anything, but I didn’t know if I was one of the lucky few who could smell cyanide.

I stood again and shone my torch at the wall of the cave behind the man’s body. Water seeped from a tiny crack in the cave roof, and in the places where light from the door and window hit the wall, ferns had grown. Some were crushed where it looked as if the man had fallen against them, and others had been pulled away from the cave wall.

I felt a wave of horror. This was a real person, not just a corpse in an interesting investigation. He was only about my age. I thought about his years lost, how he’d never grow old, how his loved ones would wake up tomorrow with their lives all collapsed like a sinkhole in a suburban garden.

I breathed out slowly through my mouth, like I’d been taught, then stepped closer and pointed my torch at the area where the ferns had been flattened. Was that a mark on the stone? I gently pulled at more ferns with my gloved hands, trying to reveal what was underneath. It was a carving, clearly decades old, with lichen growing over the indentations in the rock like on a Victorian gravestone. It must have been completely covered until the dying man grasped at the ferns.

Something pale popped into my peripheral vision. I spun round and saw a SOCO climbing into the cave house. His voice cut the silence. ‘We found a wallet with his name and photo driving licence. And a note. Handwritten. It said, P middle name .’ He showed me a crumpled Post-it, encased in a plastic evidence bag.

‘Has the back wall been photographed, where he pulled at the ferns?’

The man nodded.

‘Okay, let’s see what’s under there.’ I pointed at the marks I’d seen in the rock.