'If we find a body I hope you get to it first.'
'Thanks. Give me a hand.'
Together they prised the corrugated iron sheet out of the way and leant it against the fence on their right, which gave on to a narrow alleyway before the garden of the next house. Horton noted there was a side entrance into the garden and a man's bicycle resting against the fence, the Reverend Rowland Gilmore's most probably.
There were three stone steps leading down into the shelter. Inside was dark. It smelt of decay and damp and Horton could hear the soft scurrying and rustle of animals, rats most likely.
Cantelli took a pencil torch from his pocket. The thin beam pierced the dim interior. Horton could see that on either side of the small shelter was a bench. There was nothing on it except dirt.
'I wouldn't like to have been in here when the bombs were falling,' Cantelli said, with feeling.
Horton agreed. There must once have been a large house where the ex-council house vicarage now stood, which must have been bombed. Whoever had lived in it must have been mad, or very brave, to have stayed here during the war, being so close to the naval dockyard and a prime target for the Luftwaffe.
'There doesn't seem to be anything here,' Cantelli said, voicing Horton's thoughts.
He wasn't sure whether he was disappointed or not. He didn't know what he had expected to find. Cantelli's thin beam of light swept under the bench on Horton's left.
'Hang on.' Horton's heart quickened. 'Shine your torch under there again.'
Cantelli obliged. Horton entered the air-raid shelter with Cantelli close behind. Horton had to duck his head, but Cantelli could just about stand up. Horton crouched down and peered into the gloom under the bench where Cantelli shone his inadequate light.
'Old newspapers,' he said.
Horton's pulse began to race and he could feel a cold sweat prickling his spine. Surely Anne Schofield wouldn't have dumped the newspapers that had mentioned him out here? He reached under and lifted a couple of them, but the paper crumbled in his hands. No, these papers had been here a long time.
'Can you see a date on them, Barney?'
Cantelli picked up the corner of one. 'No, but it looks bloody ancient to me.'
Horton again delved under the bench and clutched another handful. The same thing happened. The paper dissolved. 'There's nothing-' His hand froze. He had felt something other than paper.
'What is it?'
'I don't know. It's right at the back. It's hard. It feels like
… bones.'
'Animal?'
Horton heard the hopeful tone in Cantelli's voice. It could be a fox or dog perhaps. He lay down on his stomach and cleared away the rest of the paper as Cantelli peered over his shoulder. Then his fingers gripped the hard narrow object and, holding it, he pulled himself up. Cantelli shone his torch but there was really no need: they both knew instantly what it was.
Horton said, 'It's a femur and it's not animal. Looks like we've found ourselves a skeleton.'
Pauline Rowson
The Suffocating Sea
Twelve
'T he poor bugger could have keeled over in an air raid in 1940,' Uckfield said, after Horton relayed the news to him on the telephone.
'Wouldn't the builders have discovered him?'
'They probably didn't bother to look inside; you know how lazy the blighters can be.'
It was possible, but Horton had other ideas. 'It could be the 'wrong' that Gilmore mentioned and Brundall wanted to confess. They could have killed this person.'
He knew it couldn't be Jennifer Horton because Rowland Gilmore had only been living in the vicarage since 1995. But he still clung to the belief that the two men had known something about his mother's disappearance, and because this skeleton couldn't be her that didn't necessarily mean that she wasn't dead, or that they hadn't had a hand in her death.
Uckfield was squawking down the line. 'Are you saying the vicar then lived with it at the bottom of his garden all these years, knowing he'd had a hand in its murder?'
Horton supposed it sounded a bit incredulous. 'Perhaps he saw it as a penance and prayed over it?'
'Huh! It's just the kind of weird thing they would do.' Uckfield scoffed, obviously of the same opinion as Sebastian Gilmore when it came to religion. 'OK, get Taylor and his team in after they've finished in the church, and get them to bag up the bones for Dr Clayton, but it's not a priority, Inspector. We've got three deaths which are. Any results on the PMs yet?'
'No.'
'Well, hurry her up.' Uckfield rang off.
Horton had no intention of doing so. He gave instructions to the officer guarding the house to ensure that no one except Taylor and his team went in. He prayed that there would be nothing for them to find about his mother. Maybe Uckfield was right and this person had lain in the shelter for over sixty years. But Horton wasn't comfortable with that. He felt instinctively that the skeleton could be the key they needed to unlock this case.
Cantelli drove the short distance to the church. The car park had been cordoned off and a police car was straddled across the entrance. PC Johns hastily hid whatever it was he was reading and tried to look alert.
Apart from the occasional passer-by no one seemed to be taking any notice of the activity. Perhaps they were too busy doing their Christmas shopping, thought Horton, which reminded him of his determination to clear this case before Christmas Eve so that he personally could give his presents to Emma.
Perhaps the weather was keeping everyone inside. The drizzle had turned into a relentless downpour and it had grown colder. Not cold enough for it to snow but Horton wouldn't mind betting they'd get some sleet before the day was out.
They found Taylor and his scene of crime officers methodically ploughing through the charred remains of the vestry. Horton tensed as he stood in the doorway. The smell of burning flesh came back to him as virulently as it had been last night. It made him want to throw up. He saw himself laid out on the mortuary slab with Gaye Clayton drooling over him and Uckfield telling her to hurry up the post-mortem. Jesus, it didn't bear thinking about.
Cantelli, sensing his unease, said, 'You OK to deal with this?'
'I'm fine.' Horton pulled himself together and addressed Taylor. 'Found anything?'
He removed his mask and stepped outside the vestry under the shelter of an awning. 'There's a brass candlestick which looks as though it could be the murder weapon. We've found minute traces of blood on it.'
In a flashback, Horton saw Anne Schofield's body falling face down from the cupboard with a mass of blood in her short grey hair. He heard the sound of splintering glass, felt the rush of searing heat and relived the cold frisson of fear.
'Maidment says the fire was caused by an accelerant, which was soaked in a rag and stuffed into a glass bottle.'
Taylor's voice seemed to come to Horton from a distance. He forced himself to focus on Taylor's long thin nose and slightly prominent eyes.
'From the fragments of glass we've collected I would say that it was a beer bottle. I hear you were inside when it happened, Inspector. Rather you than me. You had a very lucky escape.'
You can say that again, thought Horton with a shiver. 'We've got another one for you, Phil,' he announced briskly. 'But this one's been dead for some time.' And he told Taylor about their find in the air-raid shelter and asked his team to make it their next job. Even Taylor's mournful face lit up at the challenge of finding some forensic evidence after so long.
Horton was glad to get out of sight of the vestry. Rounding the corner to the front of the church he saw a familiar figure leaning into the police car talking to PC Johns. The old man was getting soaked. This could be useful. Horton wondered if he'd seen Anne Schofield yesterday.
'Hello, Mr Gutner.'
Gutner straightened up and his walnut face lit up with recognition. Horton would have to take a chance on Gutner letting slip some information about his mother in front of Cantelli, but he would rather it were the sergeant than anyone else, and Horton knew he could rely on Cantelli's discretion.
