Dark Winter Tales: a collection of horror short stories. Paul Finch

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СКАЧАТЬ him enjoyed. A wood like the one at the bottom of the Dell should not be silent and filled with undisturbed shadows; courting couples sneaking off into its undergrowth should not go unspied upon; tadpole-filled ponds like the one deep in the middle here should not remain unplundered.

      But that is the way of it these days. And with good reason.

      The murder of Andrew Conroy was really quite horrible. More so from my point of view, perhaps, because I knew the kid personally. He was a contemporary of Geoff’s … went to the same school and scout troop, was a member of the same swimming club. Don’t ever believe it if someone tells you that police detectives get hardened to the slaughter of the innocents. Especially don’t believe it if those police detectives happen to work in their home town.

      It was his eleventh birthday, and young Andrew had gone down to the Dell to see if any of his pals were around. That was all anyone really knew about it. His body was discovered seven hours later, under a bush and covered with leaves. He’d been bludgeoned to death with a brick, then sexually interfered with. We made fingertip searches through those woods for the next three weeks, ran door-to-doors throughout the district, questioned every ‘possible’ in the town, and their families – over and over again. But to no avail. This happened in 1975, still nine years before the first DNA breakthroughs would be made, but even if we’d had that level of crime-busting technology available, it’s unlikely we’d have made progress. The killer was either too clever or too lucky. There was minimal evidence to go on. The murder weapon, which we recovered, had been thrown into the pond and thus was washed clean of fingerprints; it had been a dry summer day – the ground firm, the turf lush and springy, which meant there were no footprints; nobody living in the nearest houses had seen or heard anything untoward; public appeals for information drew a blank. No-one, it seemed, knew a damn thing.

      I headed up the investigation, being already a seasoned detective. And if I couldn’t make ground on the murderer, nobody could, people said. They usually said that while giving me a conciliatory slap on the shoulder. I still remember those slaps, though I remember them more these days like the blows of a whip.

      I reach the bottom of the slope – not without some huffing and puffing, because meadow-grass grows deep and tussocky at this time of year, and tends to be liberally laced with cocksfoot and creeping thistle, and as I’ve already hinted, I’m not the sprightliest sixty-seven-year-old. Anyway, I reach the bottom and the wood stands before me. Not that there is anything dark or sinister about it. Sunlight slants through its open spaces; its leaf canopy whispers in the breeze; somewhere in the higher boughs, a woodpecker jackhammers away. Rural idyll – it bespeaks pure rural idyll. Mind you, it probably did the same on that fateful day in 1975.

      I press on in, having to tread carefully. Various pathways once wound back and forth through the miniature coppice; clear, well-trodden routes that served as ably for bicycle tyres as they did for sneakered feet. The fact that they are now largely invisible, submerged under dense profusions of thorns and bracken, tells its own story. There are sections of them I have to beat my way through, using my stick like a machete. Here and there my trousers snag, strands of briar conspire to tangle my ankles and try to trip me. But I am resolute; I will keep going – because all the way through there are melancholy reminders of what this place once meant. In a high elm quite close to the centre of the wood, a few mildewed planks lie balanced between the branches, one hanging loose from a rusted nail. These are all that remain of a carefully constructed treehouse. It hailed from an era long prior to my son’s, but consecutive generations adopted it as their own, each one making its own renovations and improvements. I remember Geoff telling me how he and his cronies put a carpet up there and cushions, and hung a polythene roof over the top of it. There was even a rumour that someone provided a stash of girlie magazines for it, snaffled from the barber’s shop by an understanding older brother.

      Further along, I come to the pond itself. It occupies a low, shady hollow in the very centre of the wood, and at this time of year is only just filling up again, recovering from the annual dry season that is August. Already though, it has scummed over; it looks soup-like, stagnant – clearly no-one has been fishing here, or even poking about in it. One particularly wet year, when the surface of this pond had risen a foot or so higher than usual, Geoff and other kids like him – Andrew Conroy amongst them, I expect – built themselves a raft and spent the entire summer poling their way barefoot from one end of it to the other. High above it and now out of reach, a ravel of rotted strings are all that is left of the once infamous rope swing; more than a few youngsters came splashing down from that in their time, thankfully none injuring themselves seriously. These days, I imagine the weight of a squirrel would suffice to break it.

      I carry on, hacking my way through swathes of vegetation, and sense the trees close in behind me, blotting out all visible traces of the grassy slope and the neat row of houses at the top. Just ahead, what was once the path will soon split into two, the left-hand route bending back on itself to loop around the other side of the pond, the right-hand route meandering deeper and deeper between the ranks of ash and juniper, finally terminating at the fence on the edge of the horses’ paddock. As I understand it, this was once the place for youngsters to come to if they’d wanted to watch the prize-winning animals get put through their paces, or to feed them lush tufts of elephant grass. Unfortunately, it has different connotations now.

      I never cease to feel a cold breath on my neck as I approach this spot. You’ll understand if I explain that the first time I personally came here was to view a wide, taped off area with a police tarpaulin erected over it as a rainproof tent.

      No evidence of that remains now, but the atmosphere is the same. In fact, in some respects it is worse, because the spiky hawthorn bush under which Andrew Conroy’s battered, violated body had been stuffed, has now grown up and out, turning into a young tree. This in itself is enough to create a menacing shadow in the once sunny glade, but to make matters worse, the small embankment along which the barbed wire fence was erected proved an insufficient anchorage for the growing tree’s spreading root system. As such, it tore loose from the ground some time ago and now leans backward across what was left of the open space, its upper branches intermingling with those of the adjoining hazel and alder, creating a partial roof through which scarcely a lick of sunlight can penetrate. Other items of underbrush have grown up along the fence beside it, thus blocking off any sight of the dressage field, and enclosing the forgotten murder scene in a den or hide entirely of its own.

      I stand there, as I always do, gazing down onto the bare earth, and thinking about Andrew Conroy. He was a pleasing enough youth – red-haired, happy-faced. I didn’t know him so well. I don’t think he ever once came to our house. As I recall, he was a little bit backward in some respects; what they called a ‘remedial’ in those days, but now probably referred to as ‘special needs’. I’ll never forget watching him collected from school while I was waiting there for Geoff. Either his mother or his older sister would come, and they’d be all smiles as they walked side-by-side with him out of the yard, nodding and listening as he told them excitedly about his day.

      That memory alone is enough to bring a tear to my eye. As a murder detective, you only need to fail one victim and you’ve failed them all. From a distance, particularly when it is portrayed in the slick, overly dramatised way that it is on television, it must seem like a glamorous, heroic world, the Criminal Investigation Department. In reality, it isn’t like that at all. It is dark, brooding, intense and it can be utterly soul-destroying; it is also exhausting, physically, emotionally and spiritually – and the higher up the ladder you progress, the more serious the crimes you’re landed with and the more onerous the weight of responsibility, until finally you reach that ultimate zenith (and nadir): the Murder Squad.

      Back in those days, we rarely used specialised homicide units. We tended to deal with unlawful killings as and when they occurred, forming separate investigation teams for each one, drawing our staff from the surrounding divisions’ most dedicated and experienced detectives. Of course, it doesn’t matter how experienced you are; the pressure of just one СКАЧАТЬ