Page 37

Dead Man

Kit

The kitchen table was as they had left it. Two cups. Cold tea. He picked them up and washed them and set them on the rack and dried his hands on the cloth. His movements were mechanical. There was work to do and he was glad of it. Work did not ask questions. Work did not look at him with brown eyes and say murderer and mean it.

He changed into his oldest shirt and trousers. Collected the crowbar from the stable, the hand saw, the claw hammer. He found the sack of quicklime in the outbuilding where he had left it months ago, still dry, still powdery beneath the canvas wrap. He hauled it to the yard along with two buckets of sand from the pile behind the stable wall. Filled a third bucket from the well.

He lit the lantern and climbed down the ladder. The boards were where he had left them, jammed hard across the tunnel mouth: three oak planks salvaged from the collapsed stable stall, driven into the earth with iron spikes and wedged tight against the stone. He had done a thorough job. That was the problem.

He worked the flat end of the crowbar behind the first plank. The wood had swollen with damp and gripped the spikes. He leaned his weight into it. The plank groaned, shifted, held. He repositioned the bar lower and threw his shoulder behind it. The spike pulled free with a screech of iron on stone, and the plank came loose in his hands, trailing clots of wet earth.

The second was worse. The spike had rusted into the surrounding rock and the wood had warped around it. He hammered the crowbar deeper, working it side to side, feeling the vibrations run up through his arms. Sweat ran into his eyes. The plank split down the grain before the spike gave, and he had to wrench the pieces out in sections, pulling splinters from the stone with his fingers.

The third came easier. He pried it loose in one motion and the tunnel mouth stood open. Black. A draught came through it carrying the smell of earth and rain. He crouched and held the lantern inside. The passage was intact: seven feet high, four feet wide, vaulted in old stone. Monks had built it three centuries ago. Now it served a different kind of traffic.

There were timber props spaced every six feet, the floor packed earth. He could see fifteen feet in before the dark took the light.

Open. As Reeve would expect it.

He sat back on his heels and looked at the tunnel mouth, then at the patch of dark earth fifteen feet in, where the passage widened before the first curve. The grave. Tamped flat behind the stone barrier he had built. Anyone coming through the tunnel would pass the barrier. Reeve's men would notice the turned earth. They would dig. And what they found at four feet would raise questions Kit could not afford.

The body had to move.

He dismantled the barrier stone by stone, stacking the loose rock against the tunnel wall. Behind it, the grave. He took up the spade and dug.

The spade cut into the tamped earth with a soft crunch, the sound swallowed immediately by the stone around him. He worked in steady strokes, piling the soil to one side, keeping the edges of the hole clean. He had been taught to keep the edges of everything clean. The dirt was cool and damp at the surface. Drier beneath.

At two feet the colour changed: darker, richer. At three feet he hit the smell. It came up to meet him, thick and sweet and cloying, and his stomach clenched once and settled. He breathed through his mouth and kept digging.

At four feet the spade struck sacking. The sound it made was dull and wrong: not the ring of metal on stone or the hiss of metal through soil, but something muffled and yielding. A sound with a body behind it.

He set the spade aside and got on his knees and cleared the remaining soil by hand. The sacking had held better than he had expected. Stiff with damp and stained dark but intact, the shape inside still recognisably human.

He worked his hands beneath the bundle and lifted. The weight had changed, lighter in some places, heavier in others where the moisture had settled. He got it onto his shoulder, one hand holding it steady, and climbed the ladder.

The evening air hit him as he came through into the cellar. Clean and cold after the stale dark below. He stood for a moment and breathed.

He carried the body across the yard and past the kitchen garden and through the gap in the low wall where the orchard began. The apple trees were old and untended, their branches heavy and drooping. He picked a spot at the far edge, where the ground dipped towards the boundary ditch and the grass grew long. A quiet place. Out of the way.

He set the bundle down beneath the nearest apple tree. The sweetness of the fruits on branches mixed with the rotting smell of the windfall apples on the ground and made it almost bearable.

He dug. Properly this time. Six feet deep. Straight sides. Square corners. A grave that took time and care. A grave that said: someone stood here with a spade and decided this mattered. Reeve would never have given anyone this, and Kit needed to be better than Reeve in at least this one regard.

The soil here was looser than the tunnel. Sandy beneath the topsoil, with a layer of clay at five feet that made the spade ring. His shoulders burned. His blistered hand cracked open and bled into the glove. He kept digging. When the hole was deep enough he lowered the bundle in. It sat at the bottom in the dark and he stood at the edge and looked down at it. He did not pray. He did not know the man's name.

He stood there for a few seconds. Long enough to acknowledge that a man had lived and died and been buried twice. Then he filled the hole. Tamped it flat with the back of the spade. Cut a square of turf from nearby and laid it over the fresh earth, pressing the edges down with his boot. He found a stone, flat, pale, the size of his palm, and set it at the head of the grave.

He went back down and spread quicklime over the old grave site in the tunnel, then packed fresh earth on top. When he was finished, the widened section of the passage looked undisturbed. A man walking through would see nothing.

He cleaned the tools and put the yard back in order.

* * *

He stripped in the kitchen.

Shirt first, peeling it over his head. It was heavy with dried sweat and dirt and lime dust, and he balled it up and dropped it in the copper tub by the scullery door. Trousers next. Boots he had already left at the side entrance, caked in mud. He stood in his drawers and filled the basin from the kettle he had put on the range before he started. The water was barely warm. It would do.

He scrubbed with the hard soap and a rag. Face, neck, arms, chest. Grit came off him in grey streaks. The blister on his hand stung under the soap. He scrubbed it anyway. His shoulders were knotted from the hammering and the crowbar work and the lifting, and the hot cloth on the back of his neck loosened them enough that he grunted.