Viridian Tears (20 page)

“Of course.” Meinwen kept her face perfectly neutral. “Give me a call sometime.”

“Sure. I will.”

She swung the car door closed and stepped back, watching the car speed off toward his garage. So much for him taking her to Boscastle. She’d have to chalk that one up to experience and move on. Who else could she ask?

She looked around. The trees seemed even barer today than they had yesterday. The night’s rain had stripped the last of the leaves from the hedgerow ash trees, and even the oaks displayed their winter-bare branches. The stile into the field was slimy with damp and she wiped her palms on the wet grass after she’d climbed it, careful to avoid the cowpats.

She crossed the field into Gorsley Wood and headed back up to the quarry, stopping twice, once to pick field mushrooms and the second to collect a double handful of deep red rose hips. The dark fruit of the dog rose made an excellent cough syrup when boiled up with sugar and a little tannin. It was a good thing to have in stock, though many of her customers preferred the Tibetan remedies produced by the major pharmaceutical manufacturers and sold in capsule form at the local supermarket. Not that she could sell rose hip syrup. She hadn’t got a license to sell either medicine or food products and had no desire to do either.

She dropped them into the bottom of her voluminous handbag, there to wallow with the mushrooms and the countless twigs and other flora she collected on her travels. It all went into either her cooking pot or her alembics, and she took great care not to mix the two.

She headed along the path, avoiding the deeper ruts. Despite it being mid-morning, the puddles still had ice across the surface. She pulled on her fingerless gloves, wondering if Joseph was warm enough in his bivouac tent.

When she arrived at the clearing there was no sign of life. The pile of shards from his excavated ammonites was still at the base of his spot next to the fire but the flames had long since died and the ashes were cold.

“Joseph?” She looked around the quarry, trying to spot the old man. Since he was nowhere in sight, she headed cautiously to the tent, where she could see a huddled form beneath the tarpaulin. “Joseph?”

She reached the tent and drew aside the flap. It was as cold inside as it was outside, a tin mug next to the sleeping bag had a rime of frost and her breath steamed against the blue plastic walls.

Her heart sank. Had he died in the night? “Joseph? It’s Meinwen.” She reached inside and pushed against the sleeping bag. There was no response, but the bag dented where an arm would be. She nudged it less cautiously, relieved to find that what she thought was a body was really just a messily discarded blanket.

She huffed a sigh of relief and backed out, grateful she hadn’t had to call the police about a death. A thought struck her, and she looked around once more. Unable to spot Joseph, she reached into his tent again and did a brief search for the key he’d shown her. No such luck. He must still have it on him.

“Joseph?” She called once more into the sullen flint cliffs and the name echoed from every side, but the only answer she received was the cry of a pair of crows, squabbling over possession of a Rowan tree rooted in the side of the cliff.

“Did I not tell him I’d drop by today about the key?” Meinwen checked the tent one last time. His pack wasn’t there and neither were the ammonites he’d been freeing and if he had the fossils there was a good chance he’d taken them to be sold.

She shook her head. It was just her luck to get a lift off Winston this morning. Without a lift she’d have walked here via the shop and thus run into Joseph on the way, but the route by car was much longer and followed a road that meandered through the fields and town rather than the direct route along the canal.

She hurried out of the quarry again and back toward the road. When she reached the field the sun had managed to hurdle enough clouds to at least lend brightness to the natural world even if it still seemed devoid of warmth. It was a short jaunt from the stile to the canal bridge, where she half-walked, half-slid down the frozen mud onto the towpath and headed toward town.

The canal was covered with thin sheet of ice, upon which moor hens and ducks clattered, looking for a gap into the water. The ice crepitated as they waddled along, the high pitched shrieks warning of impending cracks until with a splash and a satisfied chorus of quacks they found a broken section where tree cover had kept the ice at bay.

Meinwen hurried onward, hearing the everyday noise of the town as a muted hum as she grew closer to the railway lines and the busier roads. She nodded to a woman walking a dog, recognising her from one of the market stalls. The woman pretended not to notice her greeting and dragged the dog past, ignoring the deposit the dog had left at the edge of the path. On any other day Meinwen would have called the owner back to clear it up but not today.

As she got closer to the railway she realized the new cemetery, where she’d talked to the proprietor only yesterday, was behind the hawthorn hedge on her right. On the opposite side, inaccessible from the towpath, the railway sidings provided refuge for rusting goods vans and cement hoppers. Many of the rails were brown with disuse and elder and buddleia bushes had rooted through the shale to blur the geometric edges of the tracks and sleepers.

She faced a sea of half-frozen mud, crisscrossed by the tracks of a mechanical digger. What on earth was a digger doing on the towpath dredging the canal? It was normally done by the water board from a backhoe mounted on a barge, not from the towpath where the danger of crumbling edges threatened to tip the whole vehicle into the deep brown bilge.

She clambered awkwardly across the expanse of fresh mud, holding on the thicker pieces of hedge to navigate the wider sections, where a thin veneer of frozen mud concealed a foot or more of wet sludge. There had been no attempt to filter the product, either. Bottles and cans littered the filth along with a bicycle wheel and the rusted carcass of a shopping trolley and something else. Something that glinted in the morning light, half hidden where it had fallen into a deep puddle.

She scrambled across to it, trying to protect her boots from the worst of the mud. It was one of Joseph’s ammonites, the large one he’d been cutting last night. It really was a beautiful piece, the ridges gleaming as if they’d been carefully polished.

She pried it out of the mud. It had fallen into a puddle after the ice had formed and broken the surface. The water had re-frozen around it but not too long ago since it was barely a hairs’ breadth thick. The fossil was muddy below but there was a band of frozen liquid just above the ice line. Meinwen pressed a finger to it, the warmth of her skin melting it onto the tip. She held it to the light and took a cautious sniff. Blood, she was convinced of it.

She put the fossil down to one side of the puddle and took a careful look at the rest of the scene. There were several sets of footprints and dog prints crisscrossing the mud, some overlaid with others thanks to the cold weather preserving three or four day’s worth. The lighter patterns of bird’s feet, both webbed and clawed, overlaid them all.

She moved forward, spotting several places where the footsteps were heavier than usual. She followed these toward the hedge, where a six-foot wide gap in the hawthorn barrier gave access to the New Eden cemetery. The caterpillar tracks and torn branches indicated a mechanical digger had forced its way through from the cemetery to the canal bank, destroying a section of the hedge in the process.

She headed further into the cemetery. This was an untended area, one that Mrs. Maguire had not yet begun to develop. She seemed to be using it as a compost heap for excavated earth and piles of leaves and garden waste. Bunches of flowers left at gravesites ended up here, returning to the ground again as nutrient-rich soil. Meinwen heartily approved. She had a compost heap in her garden, where she dumped everything she could that would rot down. Not only garden waste and autumn leaves, but kitchen scraps, tea leaves and cardboard, as well as any wool or cotton garments too old or holey to be sent to charity shops.

It looked like Eden did the same. Meinwen could see a bit of an old jumper sticking out of the pile of dirt and leaves, a mustard one similar to the one Joseph had worn last night. She could picture it clearly in her mind. The photograph she’d take of him holding the key had been edged with the same ochre wool at his wrist.

She moved closer, hesitant now her earlier fears of finding Joseph dead might be confirmed. At the edge of the head she stopped and took out her phone, opening the cover at the back to take a photograph of the site. If there was a body under there, White would want the details preserved.

She scraped away the leaves around the cloth to reveal more of the mustard wool. On side she also found the edge and zipper of a green parka. She followed the line of the zip to where it ended at the neck, brushing away more dirt and leaves in this shallow, haphazard grave.

For a shallow grave it was. At the top of the zip was the edge of a scarf, above which Joseph’s face was revealed. His skin was cold and waxy, but she checked for a pulse despite the open mouth and wide, staring eyes. Old Joseph was as dead as leaves that covered him. There was no doubt it was murder. The blood clotted over his hair attested to that, as well as the evidence of a shallow grave..

Meinwen said a quick blessing for the migration of his soul to whatever afterlife the old man believed in. After a few further moments of silent respect, she began snapping pictures, taking every detail before reaching into his pockets to look for the key with the John Stearne's symbol.

She didn’t find it.

With a heart heavy over the loss of another friend, Meinwen dialed the police, navigating the reception and call forwarding to reach DI White himself. She’d intended to talk to Sergeant Peters, who always seemed to be easier to talk to.

“Detective Inspector? It’s Meinwen Jones here. I’m sorry to inform you that I’ve found a body. It’s in the far corner of New Eden, the cemetery off Markham…you know it? Yes, if you head toward the canal you’ll see a section of missing hedge. The body’s a few yards from there.”

Chapter 22

Eden stared at Emily, her mouth open for several seconds before it occurred to her to shut it. She took another moment to compose herself, her thumb and forefinger placed lightly over her closed eyes. She could feel a headache poking at the back of her eyeballs. “Shirley Burbridge is dead?”

“Yes.” Emily looked pleased to be the bearer of such ill tidings. Eden wished she was a Roman senator and could kill the messenger. Emily would make an exquisite corpse if she died before the flush of youth she was currently enjoying faded into the spite and sagging jaw line of wisdom. “She hosted a seance to talk to her recently passed husband and he turned up and killed her. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“About what?” Eden imagined the arguments centered on the tragedy of life being cut short while you were still mourning the loss of a loved one.

“They say the ghost did it himself. It speaks for how happy a marriage was when your dead husband comes back to do you in.”

“That’s not true and you know it, Emily. There are no such things as ghosts, particularly not ones who go around murdering the living.”

“It’s what they’re all saying, though.” She took out her mobile and brought up a webpage. “Look on the Chatter network and you’ll see 'Ghostkiller' is trending.”

“Who on earth starts these rumors?” Eden took the phone off her and cycled through. She shook her head as she read progressively wilder theories about the dead returning from the grave to exact revenge upon the living. It was like an old Hammer Horror script in a hundred-odd characters of badly-written grammar. “That poor woman. Loses her husband and then her life.”

“It’s not all bad. Look at how famous she’s becoming. She’s an overnight Chatter sensation.”

“I hardly think she cares about such things any more.” Eden stood to pass the phone back to her assistant. “Seeing as she’s dead, I mean. However, I think you’ll find she wasn’t killed by her husband’s ghost at all but by someone quite physical with a knife in their pocket.”

“You don’t really think that, do you? It’s a classic locked-room scenario, like those ones in the detective books.”

“Only if you discount the open doors and the other participants.” Eden shook her head again. “Anyway, we know Edward Burbridge didn’t kill her because he’s currently a block of compressed ash on the shelf in the back office.”

“I don’t think physical remains have anything to do with ghosts.”

“Please don’t tell me you believe in the supernatural, Emily. You have a degree in Natural Science, for goodness’ sake. How could you work here if you’re superstitious? This is like a passenger transport terminal for the dead.”

“I don’t think belief has any bearing on where you work.” Emily’s voice had turned frosty, “but if you think I’m no longer suitable because of my beliefs I’ll take my qualifications elsewhere.”