Dead And Buried

‘What did he say to you when he called you?’ asked Fry.

‘Well, he was rambling, not making any sense at all. Something about the ninth circle of hell.’

‘The what?’

‘The ninth circle of hell.’

‘He must have been referring to the fires, I suppose.’

‘He could have been,’ said Samantha doubtfully. ‘It feels so strange, the fact that those were his last words to me. And yet I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. I wish he’d left me a different message.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Fry was silent for a moment, allowing Samantha Merritt the surge of emotion. It mustn’t overwhelm her, though. Not at this stage. Fry still needed her to focus.

‘We found your husband’s car, Mrs Merritt,’ she said. ‘A blue Ford Focus?’

‘Oh, yes. I didn’t think about the car. Where was it?’

‘It had been parked at the side of a road near Oxlow Moor. It seems Mr Merritt left it there and walked the rest of the way to the Light House across the moor. It’s possible he intended to get nearer, but was prevented by a road closure.’

‘Road closure?’

‘The fires.’

‘Of course.’

Fry could see that the woman was having difficulty. In these circumstances, the mind tended to go round in circles, unable to cope with the facts it was being presented with. Unless she was guided, Samantha would keep coming back over and over to the ninth circle of hell, which wasn’t helpful at all.

To concentrate Mrs Merritt’s attention, Fry leaned forward and clasped her hands tightly together until the knuckles turned white, forming a focus point they could both see. She waited for the woman’s eyes to settle on her hands.

‘Mrs Merritt, have you any idea why your husband would have gone to that pub? It had been closed for six months.’

‘The Light House, you mean? Aidan went there a lot.’

‘Yes, but there could have been no point this time. It was closed,’ insisted Fry, spelling out the words slowly and clearly. ‘He must have known that.’

‘Of course. Well … yes, I’m sure he did.’ Samantha stared vaguely at Fry. ‘I can’t imagine. I don’t know what he was thinking of.’

‘Didn’t he talk to you about it?’

‘Not about where he was going. He must have gone up there right after school. He sometimes had to stay behind for a meeting or to do some marking or something like that, so I didn’t expect him home straight away. He didn’t drink heavily, but now and then he went for a drink with a few of the other teachers. They like to get together and have a good moan, you know.’

She laughed. It was that short laugh with the slightly hysterical overtones that Fry had heard from relatives before. It could mark the beginnings of denial, an insistence that nothing as ludicrous as the story she’d just been told could possibly have happened. But I only spoke to him that afternoon, they’d say, as if the whole world had taken an unbelievable turn of events in the meantime.

‘He was a teacher at Edendale Community School,’ said Fry. ‘Is that right?’

‘Yes. Aidan is … was an English teacher. He was good at his job. Oh, does the school know? I’ll need to tell them. They’ll be wondering where he is. Aidan isn’t the type to call in sick, you see.’

‘We’ll deal with all that,’ said Fry. ‘There’s no need for you to worry.’

There was a family liaison officer sitting in the room, a young female PC who’d made the tea now standing on a table in front of Mrs Merritt. Fry could see that it was untouched and going rapidly cold, a scum forming on the surface.

‘The Light House,’ repeated Fry. ‘Why would Aidan have gone there? Please try to think what his reason might have been. Did he mention the pub at all recently?’

‘Aidan never mentioned the Light House, once it had shut,’ said Samantha. ‘He started going somewhere else. Actually, he’s been going to several different places. He never settled on a regular pub after the Light House.’

‘Did he talk about meeting anyone?’

‘No. Not that I can remember.’

‘Didn’t you go to the pub with him sometimes?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t like pubs. I do take a drink now and then, but I prefer to stay at home with a nice bottle of wine and watch a DVD.’

‘Perhaps you can give me the names of the other teachers,’ said Fry.

‘Who?’

‘The ones he used to drink with sometimes after school.’

‘Oh, certainly. I can give you one or two.’

Fry offered her a notebook. ‘Please write them down while you’re thinking about it.’

Mrs Merritt did as she was asked, scrawling two or three names with a shaky hand and passing the pad back to Fry.

‘I need to ask you …’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘How did he die exactly?’

Fry had a copy of the post-mortem report right in front of her. When Mrs Merritt asked the question, she instinctively covered the file with her hand, in case any details were visible.

‘Blunt-force trauma,’ she said, repeating the Home Office pathologist’s practised phrase.

Most murders in the UK were the result of blunt force or a bladed weapon. Bashing or stabbing — the two methods favoured by the British for doing each other in.

Samantha nodded, balling a tissue in her fist.

‘Do you know what he was hit with?’