Sleeping in the Ground

Chapter 1

If the incident had been a scene in a film, it would have looked beautiful. The violence would have taken place in elegantly choreographed silence and slow motion. Perhaps it would have started with the wedding party milling around outside the picturesque country church, then the camera would zoom in on a rose of blood blossoming from the bride’s white gown as she looks up, surprised, and floats serenely to the ground, arms reaching out, grasping for something too insubstantial to hold. She would toss her bouquet high in the air, pink and purple flowers against a backdrop of blue sky, and it would fall into the arms of a pretty bridesmaid. Then the bridesmaid’s head would disintegrate. Strings of blood would snake through the air like drops of ink in water.

But the way Terry Gilchrist saw it — and he was there — it was as swift as it was brutal. A crack, loud enough to be heard above the church bells, was followed by a dull thud, then a patch of blood spread over the bride’s chest. Her body arched, and she spun half around and crumpled in an untidy heap of blood-soaked white chiffon and lace, her mouth open, the scream for ever stuck in her throat. Another crack, and her groom fell beside her. A frightened child clung tightly to his mother’s legs. The bridesmaids clutched their posies, eyes wide with horror. A third bullet hit the maid of honour before she could run for cover. She fell beside the bride and groom, half her face shot away. The men in their grey pinstripe suits and the women in difficult shoes and wide-brimmed hats bumped into one another as they ran around in panic and confusion. A bullet chipped the corner off an ancient tombstone and a sliver of stone entered the photographer’s eye. A guest fell, clutching his thigh. The quickest to react reached the church door as another bullet slammed into the centuries-old wood. Someone managed to pull the heavy door open, and those who could rushed inside. They jammed the doorway, and another bridesmaid arched backwards and dropped to the ground, blood oozing from her back. People trampled over her body in an attempt to get into the sanctuary of the church.

It was all finished in less than a minute.

Terry Gilchrist reacted as quickly as he could. He was no stranger to sudden death and violence. He had been under fire before, but nothing had quite prepared him for this. Even so, his soldier’s instinct kicked in. He glanced up at the hill where he thought the shots were coming from and saw a dark figure scurrying away, over the grassy summit and down the slope.

Gambling that the assault was over and that there was no one else up there, Terry tried to shepherd the stunned and dazed stragglers into the safety of the church, desperately searching for Winsome. There were no more shots. The church bells stopped ringing. Tentatively, one by one, the birds started singing again.

Terry stood alone in the bright December sunlight and called the police and ambulance on his mobile. One of the fallen guests was moaning with pain. Nearby, a bridesmaid sat propped up against a gravestone crying, her hands pressed to her bloody midriff where something wet and shiny rested in her lap. Terry was no medic, but he had picked up some basic first-aid training in the military, and he visited all the fallen to see if there was anyone he could help before the ambulances arrived. The groom was his mate, Ben, and he had been shot just above his stomach, around the location of his liver. He was still alive, though barely conscious, and the best Terry could do was tear off and wad up part of Ben’s bloodstained shirt and have him press it against the wound. Tears came to his eyes as he passed the dead bride and cast a glance down at her crumpled body. He knelt to touch her still-warm cheek and closed her staring eyes. It seemed that all he could see were bodies strewn around the graveyard. Then he turned and went into the church to find Winsome.

Banks left the crematorium ahead of the others, David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ playing over the tinny PA system, and hurried away from the knots of people gathering behind him, down the gravelled drive to the iron gates.

‘It always made her feel happy, that song,’ he heard someone say between sniffles. Earlier in the brief service, a friend had read a Christina Rossetti poem: ‘When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me’. ‘Starman’ was certainly no sad song, but it still had people in tears. And even David Bowie was dead now.

Banks moved on quickly. He didn’t want to hang around and make small talk about death and loss with people he didn’t know. He had seen the mourners crying on the front row: two young couples, probably daughters or daughters-in-law, with small children, grandchildren, most likely; he had spotted her parents, father in a wheelchair, his head nodding and arm twitching. The others would be friends, work colleagues, nephews and nieces. The eulogy had mentioned the deceased’s tireless work for Médicins Sans Frontières so some of the guests would be from that organisation.

But for Banks, this was his death, not something he wanted to share. He wanted to hold it to himself, to take it into him, if he could, let the grief become a part of him, and join with the grief of long ago.

The taxi he had ordered was waiting across the road. He slid into the back seat and told the driver to head for the train station. It wasn’t a long journey, and it passed in silence. When he checked his watch against the timetable just inside the station entrance, he saw that he had almost an hour until the next train. He walked back to the street and scoped out the area. There was a Waitrose supermarket with a café to his left, but that wasn’t much use. He didn’t feel like a coffee or a cup of tea. Far more tempting was the Great Northern Hotel, almost directly opposite. It was a three-storey brick building with the ground-floor facade covered in white stucco, a blackboard listing the daily specials stood by the door. Banks crossed the street, walked in towards the reception desk and saw the bar to his left. He didn’t normally drink so soon after eleven in a morning, but after the funeral he felt in need of something to take the edge off. It sounded as if some sort of function was going on to his right. Banks could hear someone making a speech, punctuated now and then by hearty laughter.

The bar was almost empty. One elderly couple sat at a table sipping white wine and that was it, apart from the pretty brunette barmaid. There was a rugby game on the large screen TV at the far end of the room. Banks sat on a bar stool, from which he would be able to watch the game as he enjoyed his drink. He was about to order a pint but decided that he’d have wine instead. Less liquid. He had a two-hour train journey ahead of him, and the toilets on trains were generally a health hazard, littered with soggy paper and awash with spillage. Usually the taps didn’t work, either, which didn’t matter much as the paper towels were scattered all over the floor.

The barmaid smiled at him as he sat down. Banks ordered a large Shiraz and settled on his stool. He wasn’t a great rugby fan, and he had no idea who was playing, but he did enjoy watching a game now and then. He’d played rugby union at school, had even been good enough to make the school team as fly-half, being wiry, slippery and reasonably fast. Nevertheless, sometimes he wasn’t quite fast enough to prevent one of the hulking prop forwards from flattening him. He played once a week in regular games periods, and once on a Saturday morning for the school, no matter what the weather. Some weeks he was sloshing about in the mud, others slipping on the frozen earth.

It felt odd being back in his hometown and not visiting his parents, but they had sold the council house he had grown up in and moved into a private care home near Durham to be closer to Banks and their granddaughter Tracy, who lived in Newcastle. They were well into their eighties, and still healthy enough, but slowing down. Banks’s father told him before the move that their cruising days were over; his angina bothered him and he had suffered a minor heart attack only a few months ago. Also, most of their friends on the estate had either died or moved away, so there was nothing to keep them there. Moving wasn’t as much of a wrench as it would have been a few years earlier. With the money left to them by Roy, Banks’s brother, they could afford the best care in a beautifully restored Victorian manor house with a fine view over the River Wear. They still had their independence. The one-bedroom flat had a large well-equipped kitchen, and Banks’s mother still prepared the meals. They could come and go as they pleased, and there was always a registered nurse on duty, just in case. They said they had everything they needed and seemed happy enough, though Banks’s father complained that some of the other tenants were either too posh or too gaga for his liking. He also wasn’t much of a joiner and didn’t sign up for quiz night, sing-alongs or exercise classes. Banks’s mother got along just fine with the posh folk; she had always had aspirations beyond her class.

Just then, a small group from the party across the hall came in and clustered around the bar. A wedding group, Banks noticed. The men wore ill-fitting tuxedos with buttonholes, and the women were resplendent in lush cream satin gowns of ivory or peach. The bride and groom stood at the centre of the group. Someone ordered a round of pints and G&Ts. One of the men had a loud grating voice and, of course, he was the one who talked the most. The bride had a laugh like a braying horse. The loud-voiced man told a dirty joke and they all doubled up laughing. Someone else made a witty comment about the groom’s mother-in-law, which raised more guffaws, especially from the mother-in-law herself, who seemed well in her cups. Fortunately for Banks, it was a short break. They downed their drinks quickly and headed back to the reception. The barmaid glanced at Banks and pulled a face.

Banks drank some more wine and saw that he had almost finished the glass. Checking his watch, he calculated that he had enough time to get another one down and asked for a refill. He took a long slug of Shiraz, and though his eyes were fixed on the rugby game, he wouldn’t have said he was actually following it. He was thinking about those Saturday mornings long ago, towards the end of the sixties, when he still cared enough about being one of the lads to run around in the terrible weather week after week, risking a broken arm, cartilage damage or a wet rugby ball between the legs. It wasn’t so bad, he reflected. You got a hot shower at the end of the game, and most Saturday afternoons he went into town record-shopping with his mates Dave, Graham, Steve and Paul. All dead now, except Dave. You could buy used 45s at a stall in the open-air market, he remembered, but the discs were recycled from jukeboxes and the middles had been punched out, so you had to buy flimsy plastic inserts which didn’t always work. The 45s were often scratched, too, and they tended to skip. Caveat emptor. There was a second-hand bookstall in the market, too, where he had hunted down old Saint, Toff and James Bond paperbacks with lurid covers.

But the best thing about Saturdays back then was the nights. On Saturday nights he would usually go to the pictures with Emily: Emily Hargreaves, the first girl he had ever loved, the girl whose coffin he had just seen rolling towards the flames.

‘It wouldn’t be for long,’ Ray Cabbot was saying. ‘A week or so at the most. Just until I find somewhere suitable.’

Annie Cabbot put her knife and fork aside. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I mean, you know how small the cottage is.’

‘I wouldn’t get in your way, love. I promise. I wouldn’t cramp your style.’

Annie laughed. ‘My style? What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t think I have one. Anyway, it’s not that...’ But she was a bit worried about the effect a house guest might have on her relationship with Nick Fleming, a DI from County HQ. It was relatively new and had come after a lengthy drought. But she wasn’t going to tell her father about that. ‘What’s wrong with the colony?’

‘Nothing. I just feel like I’m getting a bit too old for all that sort of thing. These young turks.’ He grinned. ‘Nobody paints or sculpts any more. It’s all concepts and attitudes. You could walk in an art gallery and piss on the floor and claim it was a work of art these days. Next thing they’ll be wanting is a bloody lathe or a 3D printer for making installations. No, love, it’s time to move on.’

‘And you used to be so Bohemian, so avant-garde. Getting conservative in your old age?’

Ray Cabbot huffed. ‘Everyone has to draw the line somewhere.’

‘You’re not in any trouble, are you?’

‘What do you mean, trouble? Of course not.’

‘It just seems so sudden.’

‘Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it for some time.’

‘Besides,’ Annie added after a swig of beer. ‘You’re not old.’ She thought Ray seemed a lot younger than his seventy-plus years.

‘Thanks for saying that, love.’ Ray ran his hand over his hair. It was silvery-grey, the same colour as his straggly beard, but he still had enough of it to wear in a ponytail. ‘Maybe I’m just tired.’

‘But why Yorkshire? You’ve always lived in Cornwall. It’s home.’

‘I know. It’s just... well, you’re here.’

‘Don’t be so soft, Dad.’ It was rare that Annie called Ray ‘Dad’. Ever since she’d been a little girl, after her mother died, she had got into the habit of calling him Ray, and he had seemed to like it. It was all part of the Bohemian atmosphere of the artists’ colony outside St Ives, where she had grown up.

‘It’s true. You’re all I’ve got, Annie. All that’s left of... It’s all right. I’m still fit and healthy. I don’t have cancer or anything. There’s nothing physically wrong with me. I’m not moving up here so I can use you as my nursemaid, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘It’s not. And I wouldn’t make a good nursemaid.’

‘No bedside manner?’

Annie grinned. ‘That’s right. It has been criticised, at any rate.’ She picked up her fork and speared some more salad. They were having lunch in the Black Swan, in the village of Harkside, where she lived. It was a small, quiet pub behind its whitewash and timber facade. Annie didn’t eat there often, but she had to admit that, as salads went, this one was a cut above the usual: avocado, quinoa, grape tomatoes. It didn’t go with the pint of Swan’s Down bitter very well at all, but that was something she could live with.

‘When would you want to start this house hunt, then?’ she asked.

‘Soon as possible. Right away.’

Annie dropped her fork. ‘You mean... like now? Today?’

‘That’s what right away usually means. Not today, perhaps, but after the weekend. Monday. Why? Is there some problem?’

‘No. No. It’s just that I could have used a little warning, that’s all. I thought this was a preliminary visit. A recce, like. I mean, don’t you have to go back and turn off the water or pack a bag or something?’

‘Sorry, love. All done. At least until I find somewhere.’

‘Can’t be helped, I suppose. What about your paintings?’

‘Zelda’s taking care of them. I can trust her.’

‘Zelda?’

‘Long story. So it’s OK, then? I can stay?’

‘Of course you can. As if there was ever any question.’ There was no way Annie could turn him away. He was her father. He had brought her up, had always been there for her — well, almost always — had loved her and cared for her, even if he hadn’t made a lot of personal sacrifices to do so. He hadn’t changed his lifestyle, for one thing, which had made her childhood interesting, to say the least.

But her cottage was so tiny, and the walls were so thin. It would mean an end to nights with Nick until... well, who knew how long it would take Ray to find a suitable Yorkshire cottage? He was an artist, after all, and he would need a studio, somewhere the light was right, preferably with a fine panorama. He could be fussy, demanding and hard to please, despite his laissez-faire demeanour. It was a lot to ask, and it would be expensive. Still, she also knew that he was successful and not without funds. He did a brisk trade in Cornwall during tourist season — landscapes, seascapes and portraits — but his more serious Impressionist-influenced work hung in respectable galleries and fetched ever-increasing prices. At least he wouldn’t be a financial burden.

‘Of course,’ he said, as if reading her mind, ‘I could always afford a hotel or a B and B, if that’s what you’d prefer?’

Annie thumped his arm playfully. ‘Don’t talk daft. I told you. You can stay at mine till you get somewhere.’

Annie’s mobile rang, its ‘Winkworth Gong’ ringtone imitating the bell of a sixties’ police car. ‘Sorry, got to answer this,’ she said. ‘Work.’

She walked out into the street and put the phone to her ear. It was Chief Superintendent Gervaise, the Eastvale Regional Area Commander, and her voice sounded tight, urgent. ‘We’ve got a serious incident. Shooting at a wedding. St Mary’s church near Fortford. Nothing clear on how many casualties yet. All hell’s breaking loose around here so you’d better get out there ASAP. And see if you can get hold of Detective Superintendent Banks. He should be on his way back from Peterborough by now.’

Annie could hear voices in the background, shouts, phones ringing, heavy footsteps. As she said, ‘Yes, guv,’ the only thing she could think of was Winsome. Her friend and colleague DS Winsome Jackman was supposed to be going to a wedding at St Mary’s, Fortford, today.

Feeling light-headed and sleepy from the hastily consumed second glass of wine and early morning, Banks was glad to find that he had two seats to himself, facing forward. The previous evening, he had compiled a playlist on his computer and downloaded it on to his iPod for the train home. He leaned back, adjusted his headphones and cocooned himself in his own little world as he watched the landscape flash by through half-closed eyes.

He enjoyed the lush countryside of the English heartland. Even now, in December, the sun was shining on fields of stubble and distant rolling hills. Now and then the train would flash by a village, or he would catch sight of a steeple or squat Norman church tower in the distance, a stately home on top of a rise. Car windshields flashed in the sun. People walked their dogs down country lanes.

There was a stretch he particularly liked, a series of small lakes separated by grassy banks and copses, where he could usually spot at least two or three fishermen sitting far apart with their rods angled, lines far out in the calm water. The sight always made Banks want to take up fishing. There they sat like Buddhas, still and contemplative, waiting for the bite, the twitch, nirvana. Maybe they were thinking of the bills they had to pay, or the office girl’s tits, but they always seemed so focused on the sublime, so at one with the elements. The only times Banks had been fishing, he had been bored silly, and he hadn’t caught so much as a stickleback.

As the train sped by the ponds, Banks found himself listening to Andy Roberts singing ‘Gliders and Parks’, which he had included because it reminded him of the day he had met Emily in Hyde Park and she had ended their relationship. It wasn’t so much the narrative as the mood the song created. That was followed by ‘First Boy I Loved’ by Judy Collins, then Roy Harper’s ‘I’ll See You Again’. He knew he was indulging himself in gross sentimentality, not to mention nostalgia, but he didn’t care. It was his death, his mourning, and he would cry if he wanted to.

But he didn’t.

Memories of Emily didn’t cascade effortlessly in his mind, though he could picture her standing before him, the little scar on her upper lip where she had fallen off her tricycle as a young girl, the way it twisted when she smiled; her pale, smooth complexion, waves of long blond hair tumbling over her shoulders. He had always told her that she reminded him of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago, and it was true that there had been something luminous about her, as if the light always favoured her eyes and lips. But Emily was no ethereal being; she could be earthy, impulsive, even crude. She laughed a lot, he remembered, but she could be serious, too. And she was moody, mercurial. There were times when it had been exceedingly difficult to get through to her at all, when she had remained a silent, aloof and enigmatic presence, especially towards the end of their relationship.

They had listened to Ziggy Stardust when it first came out, and he did remember that ‘Starman’ had been one of Emily’s favourites from the beginning. He was stunned to discover she had still liked it enough that she chose to have it played at her funeral. But he hadn’t known much about her recent life at all. He hadn’t even known that she worked for Médicins Sans Frontières. If Dave hadn’t clipped the death notice from the local paper and sent it to him, he wouldn’t even have known that she had died. When your friends and lovers start dying, you begin to feel as if you have only narrowly escaped the reaper yourself, and that it’s only a matter of time. Which, of course, it is. In the meantime, there’s a version of survivor’s guilt to deal with.

He found himself wondering if Emily’s children would find anything of him when they cleared out her house. Would they find old photo albums and mementos of events and experiences meaningless to them? Rock concert posters? Ticket stubs? Love letters? Postcards? The Tibetan bracelet he had given her for her birthday? The silver ring?

The train stopped at Newark, then Doncaster. When the food trolley rattled by, Banks stirred himself and bought a cup of coffee and a Penguin biscuit, opened the tray by the empty seat beside him and set them down.

It always took less time to get from Doncaster to York than he expected, and soon after York came Northallerton. His stop. He switched off his iPod halfway through George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ and put it in his briefcase beside an anthology of English poetry he hadn’t opened for a few days. The last poem he had read was Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, which he had enjoyed very much.

He had turned off his mobile for the funeral service and forgot to turn it back on again. Now, as he prepared to get off the train, he did so. The infernal thing practically exploded in his hand with urgent messages and texts. Something seriously bad had happened while he had been away. Juggling the phone in one hand and his briefcase in the other, he walked along the platform and listened to the first message from DI Annie Cabbot.