The Vacant Casualty Read online

  This made Sam’s head swim for a moment as he tried to work out how to answer diplomatically. The first remark that came to mind was, ‘No, but I saw Gandalf having a wazz behind the bike sheds earlier.’ Instead he managed to mumble, ‘Er, no, I’m pretty sure that would have stuck in my mind. Why, er . . . why do you ask?’ he ventured, with some misgiving. People who abused alcohol and handed out amphetamines could be a lot of fun, but those who saw ogres tended to be acid-soaked hippies or paranoid schizophrenics, neither of whose company he found very relaxing.

  Horace was frowning as he scanned the bushes and trees in the corner of the graveyard. ‘Oh, no reason,’ he said lightly, still glancing over his shoulder. ‘Hey look, anyway – you seemed interested in some pills last time we met. Can I sort you out with anything?’

  Sam looked over his shoulder to check that Bradley wasn’t nearby. He seemed to be chatting to the vicar for the time being. ‘That would be great,’ he said. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Well, now, let’s not be too obvious. Come back here behind this sarcophagus and I’ll see if I can’t sort you out with something . . .’

  The two young men retreated to a place of greater privacy and there conducted some business with which both sides were very happy: Horace taking away the best part of a hundred pounds, and Sam pocketing eight pills and a small clear plastic envelope of white powder.

  ‘Now, the pills are very nice indeed,’ Horace was explaining. ‘A very special batch.’

  ‘I’ve not seen any like this before,’ said Sam, holding one of the pills up to look at it. ‘What is it?’

  At that moment the vicar and the detective appeared around the side of the church from the opposite direction they had expected, and rather than try to make up a reason why he was standing in a graveyard buying pills from the minor aristocracy, Sam flung the tablet into his mouth. Then for no reason in particular he threw one arm behind him, leant back against the sarcophagus and affected a highly theatrical and suspicious air of nonchalance, staring with deep fascination at the new Lord Ickham, nodding and saying, ‘Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,’ as though agreeing with him, even though the other man wasn’t saying anything at all.

  ‘You idiot,’ he thought to himself. ‘You could easily have said that you were getting an aspirin off him, feeling like your headache might come back. There was no need to take the pill! You’ve never even taken these things before. How fast do they act?’

  ‘Reverend Archie Smallcreak, meet Sam Easton. Sam’s a writer.’

  ‘How lovely to meet you,’ said the little man, shaking his hand somewhat damply. ‘You seem remarkably well turned out, may I say. I always understood the cliché of the young writer these days was of an alcoholic drug addict.’

  ‘Ha-HAAAH!’ yelled Sam manically. ‘Steady on,’ he thought. ‘They haven’t even kicked in yet.’

  ‘What do you write?’ enquired the vicar, smiling.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sam, sure he was making a fool of himself and determined not to say any of the titles of his awful books. ‘Oh, just . . . just shit, really.’

  ‘I see,’ said Smallcreak. ‘Well, if that’s your game, you should try and get into the loo-book business. That I Before E (Except After C) book was jolly good fun – I bought six copies!’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Sam softly, keeping his composure by replaying in his mind the scene from The Omen where the priest gets impaled from above by an iron spike.

  ‘Archie was suggesting that we visit the library. Miss Elvesdon will be most happy to help us, apparently, and she’s there this afternoon.’

  ‘I’m just as concerned for Terry Fairbreath’s welfare as anyone,’ said the Reverend. ‘He was a gentle soul, very well read and always good company. I’m still quite new here, but at the back of my mind is a lurking fear that there may have been other missing persons cases, and I was thinking you should have a look at the newspaper archives.’

  ‘Bloody good plan,’ said Sam. ‘Er, sorry,’ he added, and did the sign of the cross. ‘Surely it can’t be kicking in this quickly,’ he wondered. A moment before, the young intellectual aristocrat had slipped into the shadows at the mention of drugs and so Bradley and Sam walked back to their car alone.

  ‘I Before E,’ said Sam spitefully. ‘I Before Bollocks, more like!’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say, Sam,’ said the detective complacently.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Sam, getting into the car. ‘That’s what my follow-up parody of I Before E was called. Bloody thing didn’t sell a copy.’

  ‘Oh, well. At least the Reverend liked it.’

  ‘You’re not really listening, are you?’

  ‘I think the library’s just on the left, down here . . .’ said Bradley, pulling away.

  Chapter Ten

  THE LIBRARY WAS housed in what had once been a somewhat grim-looking Victorian schoolhouse on a deserted side street. As they were standing outside waiting to be admitted, Sam noticed something strange further up the road: what looked like a hundred or so bags of rubbish by the kerb. It seemed totally out of keeping with the rest of the area. Instead of being cleared up, as he thought anything unsightly around there would surely be at pretty much a moment’s notice, it had been cordoned off with roadworks signs.

  They pressed the bell again and looked doubtfully up at the library building. It didn’t seem as though there was anyone inside, or indeed that it had been open any time in the past twenty years, but presently Miss Elvesdon came to the door and opened it.

  ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen,’ she said demurely.

  Sam was about to reply that it was perfectly all right when a strange, deep rumbling sound stopped him. For a moment he thought it was his stomach, or Bradley’s, and then for an even more awful one, that it was Miss Elvesdon’s. But it was too deep, too loud. It seemed to come up from beneath them to shake the cobblestones.

  ‘What—’ began Bradley.

  ‘This way, please, gentlemen,’ the librarian said briskly, ushering them inside. Then she was marching them down the corridor towards her small office at the back of the building. ‘Early closing today, but I stayed open for you. It’s nice to have official guests,’ she said. ‘Or exciting for me, anyway. We mostly get the little old ladies round here. One so rarely has male company . . .’

  ‘Is it just me,’ said Bradley into Sam’s ear, ‘or was that the largest fart I’ve ever heard in my life?’

  Sam refused to reply. Partly because he couldn’t think of anything to say, except that he’d never felt an underground fart (or rather, an underground explosion) before, and partly because his mind was starting to race.

  Seen close up, Miss Elvesdon wasn’t quite so fusty as Sam had first imagined. The ‘prim librarian’ was clearly a look that she had cultivated on a professional basis, but behind the large glasses and deliberately unshowy hair with strands of grey, she was a slim forty-year-old, who was in conspicuously too good a shape to be a country librarian.

  As he walked behind her, it began to occur to Sam that trapped as he was here in this tiny town, besides this morning’s haughty waitress, this was the first female he’d seen to whom he could summon up even the mildest attraction. Added to this, he noticed that the individual candle bulbs placed along the walls were giving a slight strobing effect that was making his mind race excitedly.

  ‘Oh no,’ he thought. ‘It’s starting already . . . Look straight ahead. Take deep breaths. I’m horny and trapped in what looks very much like the 1930s, and I’ve just taken a barbiturate of unknown strength.’

  Looking straight ahead, though, Sam found himself following the movement of Miss Elvesdon’s hips beneath her brown wool skirt. Stop it!

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, leading them to a desk. Behind it several metal storage cabinets stood open and there were many cardboard boxes laid out on the tables, a few near the top showing that they contained old editions of the local newspaper, the Mumford Argus and Advertiser.

  ‘Look at this: “Rise in
teenage delinquency caused by children gorging themselves on dangerously unhealthy ‘iced creams’ which are being callously marketed directly at our youth.” Nothing changes.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘2003.’

  ‘Can I fetch you a drink, gentlemen?’

  ‘Bit early for that . . .’ mumbled Bradley, before meeting her eye and saying, ‘Oh, I see. Thanks. A tea would be smashing.’

  A tea would be smashing, thought Sam. Yes. If you think about it, smashing is exactly what tea is. That’s a pretty profound thing to . . . ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My mind was wandering. Did it take me embarrassingly ages to respond?’

  Miss Elvesdon said nothing, and Bradley dropped the paper he was reading and turned to look at him.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Sam. ‘Tea, please, thanks. And tortoise milk. No! Milk! Just ordinary milk.’

  ‘No sugar?’

  ‘No, I’m not a monster,’ he said absently, before being swamped once more by his own thoughts.

  ‘So, old Archie Smallcreak thought there might be evidence here of past crimes. I’ll take 1972–74, you have this box, 1983–85. Look through for anything suspicious.’

  ‘You mean like murders?’ Sam said dully.

  ‘Yes, Sam, well done. Exactly like murders.’

  ‘She’s so sexy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t say anything.’

  Miss Elvesdon returned with the tea in due course and left the men to their study, promising to return if they wanted anything before she locked up at six.

  Peace descended as Bradley methodically worked his way through the newspapers in front of him and Sam scrabbled furiously through his between becoming obsessed with particular pieces or adverts for minutes on end.

  ‘Here, look at this . . .’ Bradley said. ‘Terrible murder case. Man found mutilated on the moors.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were any moors round here,’ said Sam.

  ‘Shush! Listen, he was found with “Thou shalt not commit adultery” carved into his back. And his brain was taken out. God, look at this, too – the very next day another body was found. And this had “Thou shalt not steal” carved on it.’

  ‘Here,’ said Sam, skipping ahead a few weeks. ‘Apparently he did all ten. That seems a bit strong for all of them, doesn’t it? Isn’t one of them just about honouring the Sabbath? Oh, and look – they got him. “Commandments Killer Caught – the man they labelled Cecil B. DeKILL was captured yesterday, blah blah blah.”’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Bradley, disappointed.

  ‘But wait a minute, what’s this? Look, in the 1966 file. Man found decapitated in the woods. Then,’ he flipped over the next newspaper, ‘next day, a woman’s body discovered. His name is Jack, her surname is Queen. Then the next day, look – a man named King is found disembowelled.’

  ‘They’ve dubbed him the Playing Card Killer,’ said Bradley, coming over and taking the paper. ‘Maybe we’re on to something!’

  ‘Yes, but then I suppose there’s not a card in the conventional pack called the Fairbreath. Or the Terry. And it happened forty-six years ago. Do serial murderers often leave a gap that large?’

  ‘Maybe his middle name’s Ace,’ said Bradley, searching through the old newspapers.

  ‘No, here we are,’ said Sam. ‘“Lauren Ace, respected publicist for a well-known British publisher, was spared the attentions of the Playing Card Killer as the murderer was caught hours before he had a chance to make his move.”’

  ‘So they got him,’ said Bradley, crestfallen.

  Some minutes passed before he spoke up again. ‘Look here!’ he said. ‘March 1972. Apparently there was a sudden huge attack of telekinesis. Poltergeists destroyed homes, ghouls swarmed through the streets and covered the place with green ectoplasm; the dead rose from their graves.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘But apparently four guys turned up in a station wagon and sorted it out lickety-split. Then the following year there was a local rollercoaster that was supposedly haunted, but this time four kids with a cowardly Great Dane turned up in a van to investigate, and it turned out that it wasn’t haunted at all, it had just been the guy who was running the roller-coaster all along, wearing a mask.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Bradley. ‘I bet he was really ticked off to be caught out by a bunch of meddling kids!’

  ‘It’s insane. This place seems to be some sort of nexus for terrible crimes, but they’ve all been solved!’

  ‘Can I help you two gentlemen?’ said Miss Elvesdon from the doorway.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Bradley. ‘The Reverend seemed to think there was something for us here, perhaps in the reports of old crimes. But we’ve been through everything and there doesn’t seem to be a clue as to anything that Terry Fairbreath would have been interested in.’

  Was Sam imagining it, or was Miss Elvesdon leaning somewhat coquettishly against the door? And the way she waggled that pencil and then occasionally looked at him with the pretence of disinterest. Surely she was being deliberately provocative. God, he really had to stop grinding his teeth . . .

  ‘It’s certainly true that Terry had come to see me,’ said Miss Elvesdon, ‘and he looked through these files just the same as you did, but he seemed to go away disappointed. I never knew what he was looking for – except . . .’

  ‘Except?’ asked Sam. Accept me! Let’s go to the— Stop it!

  ‘Except he made some cryptic remark about the Hill, which I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to interrupt him at the time because he seemed to be in a world of his own, but I wondered what he meant.’

  ‘We’re surrounded by hills. Which hill?’

  ‘Ah – here in town when we say the Hill, we mean the one that rises behind the abbey.’

  ‘We went up there,’ said Bradley. ‘Infested with hippies.’

  ‘Are they really hippies? I’m not so sure. The townsfolk always seem quite scared of them, and don’t speak about them the way I would expect well-off posh folk to dismiss crusties like that. That Hill is something that people – older people – don’t talk about. They always change the conversation when you bring it up, and I don’t understand entirely why.’

  ‘These newspapers only go back to the late 1950s. Do you think there could be another earlier record?’

  ‘Oh, yes – I never had a chance to tell Mr Fairbreath about it, he left before I could speak to him. But I was told that when the library moved in here, the pre- and immediately post-war collections were housed in the basement of the abbey. You might find something there.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Elvesdon,’ said Bradley. ‘You’ve been most obliging. May I use your facilities?’

  ‘Just down there,’ she said, pointing him the way, before turning back to face Sam. ‘And it’s Miss,’ she said, coming to sit near him. She perched on the edge of the table next to his chair so that she was above him. His body temperature rose by about nine degrees.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Easton,’ she said. ‘What is it that you write?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said emphatically. Then he blinked. ‘Nothing you would have heard of, I daresay.’ Then he struggled to clear his throat for several seconds.

  ‘Oh, you never know. I might look like a quiet little librarian, but I’m very broad-minded . . .’

  ‘I think I know where she’s going with this,’ he thought. His blood pressure continued to rocket.

  ‘My personal interest is in erotic fiction,’ she said.

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘I’d be delighted to show you my collection, if you ever wanted to see . . .’

  That was it. She had said it – made a direct invitation.

  Sam had by now very certainly cruised far beyond and above any legal, medical or psychological definition of the phrase ‘being high’. His mind raced, and he could only respond to her advances by avoiding her gaze and bobbing his head forwards and backwards to an imagined beat. There were two things at that moment (with the certainty of the stoner) that he knew
to be absolutely true. One of them was that this somewhat attractive woman was trying to have sex with him. And the other was that his upbringing made it almost literally impossible for this to happen.

  ‘Any time,’ she said, placing her hand on his leg. He gazed at her. ‘You see, while I like to read about it, I don’t get much chance to put the theory into practice . . .’ The blood was now pumping so fast around Sam’s veins that some of it was starting to overlap.

  ‘Yuh,’ he said. ‘Ahem. Yeehuh, I, uh, I – oh, there you are, Bradley. Miss Elvesdon was just helping me with my, er, leg.’

  ‘Oh good. Is it feeling better? Come on, we’d better get on up to the Abbey. It’s nearly dark and I don’t want to be skulking around there all night.’

  ‘You never know who you might meet,’ said the librarian, running a finger down Sam’s spine, out of the sight of Bradley.

  ‘Coming,’ said Sam.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘THE OLD ARCHIVES?’ asked Archie Smallcreak, standing in his own doorway wearing carpet slippers, and as friendly as ever. ‘I’d forgotten they were ever put in there. But she’s quite right. Let me fetch the key.’ As he bustled away up the stairs, Bradley turned a suspicious eye to Sam.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ whispered Sam, his eyes wide. ‘Quite fine.’

  ‘That hangover’s really caught up with you, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Tell the truth,’ said Sam, struggling to get the words out, ‘the hair of the dog would probably do me a bit of good, yes.’ This was, however, a distant prospect as before them stretched a potentially lengthy, chilly and pointless search for information based on a half-formed hunch. And just as the phrase ‘half-formed hunch’ popped into his mind, Sam was disturbed once more by the sight of Mrs Trench pushing a squeaking mop lugubriously around the vicar’s porch. She stopped and raised her head very slowly to take them in, regarded them for a few seconds, then lowered it again and moved on.

  ‘It’s like meeting glances with a berthing whale,’ muttered Sam.