The Calling of the Grave (45 page)

    
He's
jealous?
There was a bubbling groan from the floor. Terry looked down at
Roper in surprise, as though he'd forgotten him. The policeman twitched, his
eyes fluttering.

    'Don't!'
I shouted, as Terry hefted the scaffolding pole.

    He
paused, the pole still raised. I thought there might be something like regret
in his face. 'You know I can't let you go now, don't you? You know that.'

    I
did. And I didn't know what I was expecting. 'What about Sophie?'

    'What
about her? She can't do anything without the diary.'

    'Don't
you even care what you've done to her?'

    'What
I've
done to
her?
Jesus! The blackmailing bitch's made my life hell
for years!'

    'She
was scared. And she's in hospital now because of you!'

    He
stared at me, Roper momentarily overlooked. 'What are you talking about?'

    'Monk
didn't cause the haematoma. You did, when you forced your way into her house
looking for the diary.'

    'Bullshit!
I don't believe you!'

    'It's
a contrecoup injury from where she hit her head on the bathroom floor when she
fell. She discharged herself from hospital before they could pick it up. She
obviously wanted to come home to see if the diary was still safe. And even then
she didn't tell anyone what had happened. She was terrified, but she still
protected you!'

    'She
was protecting herself! She was looking out for herself, the same as she always
does!' He levelled the scaffolding pole at me. 'You think you're going to make
me feel guilty about her? Forget it, she brought it on herself!'

    'And
if she dies it'll be just another accident? Like Zoe Bennett?'

    The
way he stared at me told me I'd gone too far. The only sound was the mournful
sigh of the wind outside the kiln. Terry shifted his grip on the pole.

    'At
least tell me where they're buried,' I said quickly.

    'What
for? You had your chance eight years ago.' His face seemed to close down, blank
of expression. 'Let's get this over with.'

    He started
towards me, then suddenly staggered. I thought he'd tripped until I saw that
Roper had clutched hold of his leg. The lower half of the policeman's face
gleamed wet with blood in the lamplight, and his front teeth were snapped off
at the gum. But his eyes were bright and full of malice as he tried to drag
himself to his feet.

    'Fucker!'
Terry yelled. He lashed out with the scaffolding pole as I rushed at him. I
ducked back, falling against the kiln's central chimney, and felt something
grate beneath my shoulder. Wrenching his foot free, Terry kicked at Roper's
head as if it were a rugby ball. There was a sound like a dropped watermelon
and Roper flopped limply. As Terry came at me again I grabbed the loose brick
where Sophie hid her spare key and flung it at him. He tried to block it, but
it caught him a glancing blow in the face before clumping to the floor.

    'Bastard!'
he spat, spraying blood and spittle, and swung the length of scaffolding at my
head.

    I
managed to get an arm up but the metal pole smashed into my chest. My breath
exploded as I felt ribs break. Agony burst through me, and as I crashed to the
floor Terry stepped up and whipped his foot into my stomach.

    I
doubled up, unable to breathe.
Move! Do something!
But my limbs wouldn't
obey. Terry stood over me. He was gasping for breath himself, his face slick
with sweat. He touched his fingers to his scalp where the brick had struck him
and stared at the blood on' them. His features contorted.

    'You
know what, Hunter? I'm glad you didn't go when you'd got the chance,' he
panted, and raised the length of metal over his head.

    The
kiln door banged shut behind him.

    
Monk,
I thought instinctively. But the doorway was empty. The door flapped loosely in
the wind, and as Terry spun round to face it Roper lurched into him.

    He
was barely able to stand, but he caught Terry off balance. His momentum carried
them past me and slammed them into the ancient scaffolding against the kiln's
wall. The rickety structure shuddered under their weight, ringing like a giant
tuning fork as loose spars clanged to the floor. It swayed drunkenly from the
impact, and for a second I thought it would hold. Then, as though in slow
motion, the entire scaffold gave a creaking groan and collapsed on top of them
like a stack of cards.

    I
thought I heard a scream, though I couldn't tell who from. I tucked into a
tight ball, covering my head as planks and steel poles came crashing down. The
air was filled with a clamour like insane bells that seemed to go on and on.

    Then
silence.

    My
ears rang as the echoes died away. Slowly, I unwrapped my arms from around my
head. The air was thick with dust. The kiln was in darkness: the falling
scaffold had knocked out the lamp. I coughed, gasping as pain shot through my
broken ribs. The floor was littered with scaffolding and broken timbers. I made
my way across them, relying on touch to guide me.

    'ROPER?
TERRY?'

    My
shout died away. A brick thumped down in the darkness, jangling the fallen
poles like discordant wind chimes. In its wake I heard only the pitter-patter
of falling mortar. Sophie had told me the scaffolding had been shoring up the
kiln's unstable chimney and outer wall for decades.

    Now
there was nothing to support it.

    There
wasn't anything I could do by myself: I needed to get to a phone. I could just
make out the light from the door through the murk. I picked an unsteady path
across the tangle of scaffolding towards it. The air outside was sweet and
clean. A last faint light remained in the sky as I hobbled towards the house,
arm pressed to my injured ribs.

    I was
almost there when I heard a rumble behind me.

    I
looked back in time to see the kiln collapse. It seemed to sag and then,
without fuss, simply toppled in on itself. I stumbled further away, shielding
my eyes as a billowing cloud peppered me with grit. Then all was quiet again.

    I
lowered my arm.

    A
skein of dust hung like smoke over what was left of the kiln. Half of the brick
cone was gone, leaving a jagged ruin against the evening sky. The section of
wall with the door was still intact. I limped back to it, covering my mouth and
nose with my sleeve as I peered through the doorway. It was partially blocked
with bricks that spilled out from inside.

    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.