He stood at the bottom of the watchtower’s stairway. Behind him, high in the bared branches of a towering maple, a colony of crows watched his movement with black-eyed disinterest. A chill wind swept in from the north. He upped his collar, eyed the worn stairs. How many shoes had marched up and down that short flight? He had once read an article that alleged watchtower guards were often bought, and grave-robbing had not declined, but simply carried out with more care.
He eyed the ancient structure.
The base of the watchtower had an arched passage through it, the entrance to the original cemetery. Was this where he would find Maureen?
“Andy?” Nance’s skin felt soft and warm. “Let me do this.”
Gilchrist walked up the first six steps, then grabbed the walled stairway. The stone felt cold, and he took the steps one at a time, his heart heavy with the prospect of what he dreaded he would find.
He reached the top step. The watchtower’s door had been boarded over. Scrapes on the wood looked as if they had been made by a claw-hammer. Was his daughter on the other side of that boarding? He resisted the urge to call out her name, afraid she could not answer. Instead, he pressed his ear against the unpainted surface.
He heard nothing.
He slapped his hand against the boarding, then thudded the heel of his hand hard against it. “Anyone?” he shouted, and gave a start when Nance joined him.
“Stand back.” She leaned to the side, kicked out her foot.
The boarding wobbled.
She kicked again.
On the fourth kick, the boarding splintered along one edge.
Gilchrist thudded his shoulder against it, once, twice, then the nails gave out with a tearing crack. He stumbled into the dark interior.
“Maureen?”
Empty. Nothing but bare walls and boarded over openings.
Oh princess, by thy watchtower be.
Bully had him beaten, Burns’ verses his way of making Gilchrist believe he had to solve a riddle to save his daughter’s life. But it was a hoax, nothing more than Bully’s self-satisfying ploy to build up Gilchrist’s hopes. Then dash them. And he now saw that he would never find Maureen. She was gone.
“Andy?”
But he was already skipping down the steps.
He ran around the base like a demented lunatic, slapping his hands against the cold stone, hoping, praying he would find some secret door, some window, some opening that would validate his twisted theory that Bully had Maureen interred in some long-forgotten chamber.
But he found no such opening.
He pressed the flats of his hand to the cold stone walls and hung his head. It took him several seconds to realise Nance was not with him, but down by the new gate to the cemetery extension. He caught up with her as she strode along a gravel path lined by worn memorials. Headstones, darkened with age, spilled down the cemetery slopes to the Bothlyn Burn.
“Go back to the car,” she said.
“I need to see for myself.”
“We don’t know for certain, Andy.”
“No,” he whispered. It was all he could hope for.
They found John Topley’s grave in the newest part of the cemetery, which seemed brightened by shiny headstones of glossy grey and bituminous black, footed by wreaths that sprinkled the grass with pinks, reds, yellows, whites, like the leftovers from some garden party. Topley’s grave was marked by a flat black headstone with an empty pewter flower-holder at its head. Shorn grass grew as tough as reeds around it.
Gilchrist read the chiselled epitaph.
Gone, but not forgotten.
How meaningless words could be.
But the turf that fronted the memorial looked sliced where the grass had been lifted and relaid. He checked the chiselled words. John Topley had died at the age of sixty-two, and been buried ten years earlier. Yet the turf that fronted his headstone had only recently been relaid.
Gilchrist now knew there was no hope.
He slipped his mobile into his hand and punched in the numbers. “Dainty,” he said. “I need authorization to exhume a coffin.” He listened to Dainty fire questions at him, then heard his own voice say, “I think we might have found her.”
Chapter 35
It took less than two hours to uncover the coffin.
As Gilchrist had expected, it was not buried deep. Bully’s men would have had little time in the space of a single night to bury it, and a shallow grave at least ensured it was out of sight. But the fact it was a coffin at all puzzled Gilchrist. Why not wrap Maureen’s body in plastic sheeting instead, the same sheeting in which Chloe’s left leg had been wrapped?
It made no sense to him. Or maybe it did.
Would lugging a coffin into a graveyard at night raise less suspicion? Or maybe Bully had known not to trust his men, that they might not follow his instructions to the letter but bury the body in a grave shallow enough for some feral dog to dig up. A coffin would at least offer the cadaver some protection.
But Gilchrist’s rationale was muddled. Something did not fit. The coffin’s surface looked scratched and worn, as if it had been in the ground for years, rather than days. One of the SOCOs unscrewed the brass holders and prepared to open the lid. Gilchrist glanced at Nance and caught the glitter of tears in the late afternoon sun.
Gloved hands gripped the coffin lid.
Gilchrist stopped breathing.
The lid was lifted and placed on the grass.
“Fucking hell.”
“What’s this then?”
“Don’t touch.”
Dainty stepped forward, his brow furrowed, and Gilchrist saw Nance was just as puzzled. “There must be millions here,” Dainty gasped. “Bloody hell. A fucking fortune is what we’ve got.”
Gilchrist looked into the opened coffin, at bundles packed like icing sugar wrapped in polythene, the same material as that around Chloe’s left leg, he would bet, crammed into the confines of a coffin stripped of silk and padding to make more room.
Dainty scratched his forehead. “I think our Mr. Topley’s got a lot of answering to do. Wouldn’t you say?”
Gilchrist should have been relieved that Maureen’s body was not in the coffin, but it surprised him to feel disappointment flush through him. If Maureen had been buried there, then he had found her, could have tried to live with the horror of it all. But now she was still out there, somewhere, tied up, dead, buried, hacked to pieces, or God only knew what, her body planted for him to find, or not find, at Bully’s dictate.
He now saw why Topley’s mother’s ashes were in the attic. The coffin was used for the temporary storage of drugs, which must have started after John Topley’s death, but before Betsy’s. Bully had instructed Topley not to bury his mother here. The grave-diggers would have unearthed an unrecorded coffin, and Bully’s hidey-hole would have been lost, along with his millions in drugs.
Gilchrist held out his hand. “Gloves.”
The nearest SOCO offered him a pair.
Gilchrist pulled them on and leaned into the coffin. He eased one bundle out, laid it to the side, then did the same with two others. But Bully would not risk contaminating his consignment by storing it with Maureen’s body. Six packets later he knew he was right. He slipped off the gloves.
“What do you think?” Dainty asked him.
“When does Bully get out of Barlinnie?”
“With his appeal going ahead, two, three years, give or take six months or so. Why?”
“He must have known he would be the prime suspect in Maureen’s murder.”
“Come on, Andy, Bully’s in a top security-”
“It’s him-”
“You can’t prove a-”
“I will,” Gilchrist snarled. “Believe me, I will.”
Dainty’s eyes flared, then saddened. “You’ll have a tough time, Andy. His brief’s Rory Ingles. Solicitor to the mob. And the likes of Bully.”