The Burying Ground Read online

  David Mark was a journalist for fifteen years and now writes fiction full-time. The first novel in his DS McAvoy series, Dark Winter, was chosen for the Harrogate New Blood panel (where he was the Reader in Residence), selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and was a Sunday Times bestseller. Dead Pretty was longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger in 2016.

  @davidmarkwriter | davidmarkwriter.co.uk

  Also by David Mark

  Novels

  A Rush of Blood

  Borrowed Time

  The DS Aector McAvoy Series

  Dark Winter

  Original Skin

  Sorrow Bound

  Taking Pity

  A Bad Death

  Dead Pretty

  Cruel Mercy

  Scorched Earth

  Cold Bones

  The paperback edition first published in Great Britain,

  the USA and Canada in 2020

  by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  First published in 2019 by Severn House Publishers Ltd,

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

  blackthornbooks.com

  This digital edition first published in 2020 by Black Thorn

  Copyright © David Mark, 2019

  The right of David Mark to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 83885 094 4

  eISBN 978 1 83885 095 1

  ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’

  Benjamin Franklin

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  EXTRACT. TR 046.

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  SECRET HERO

  CORDELIA

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  CORDELIA

  FELICITY

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  October 2, 2010

  The voice is brittle. Raw. The words sound as if they are being scratched into sandpaper with a coffin nail.

  ‘… yrja alttawaqquf … yrja wade hadd laha … ich habe keine informationen …’

  The sounds rasp up and out of the old man, grinding into the dead air around his face. It seems that some invisible force is pushing on his chest. The utterances spew onto the front of his paisley pyjamas. They froth onto his stubbled, red-veined chin. They spill into the bristly caverns of his big pink ears and rain upon a woollen blanket that has taken on the appearance of an unwrapped shroud.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ asks the elderly lady in the high-backed chair beside the bed. She is in her early eighties. Beneath her tights, her legs are swaddled in bandages. Her feet are clad in mauve slippers, cookie-cutter holes snipped out to accommodate matching bunions. She wears a pleated skirt and pale blue jumper. She has a pleasant face and kind eyes.

  ‘It’s almost sad. You feel so helpless. They look at you like it’s your fault – like you should be able to make it stop. You end up feeling angry at yourself and at them and then at the whole world. You sometimes wish it would all just end.’

  ‘The whole world?’ asks her companion, who stands at the foot of the bed and leans on the mattress, her hands planted either side of the old man’s feet.

  The lady in the chair watches her companion’s mouth as she speaks. She is deaf in one ear and has grown used to reading lips these past few years. She has a habit of imitating the words of the speaker while they talk so it seems that the room contains a faint echo.

  ‘The pain,’ she explains. ‘The suffering.’

  ‘Seems a silly wish to me. You don’t get to pick the bits that you like in life. You agree to the whole lot. Pain and suffering are part of it. And if you want to know what he’s saying, he’s asking for it to stop. Asking for the pain to end.’

  ‘It will soon,’ says her companion.

  ‘Too bloody soon. His Arabic’s terrible. German’s good. Wherever he is in his mind, he’s not having a good time. Wouldn’t be eligible to serve these days. You talk in your sleep and you’re out of the service. There were experiments with shock treatment to try and prevent it, back in the ’50s. I read the files. Horrible.’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t tell me these things,’ says the woman in the chair, shuddering. ‘Hands hurting, are they?’

  Her friend scowls then looks down at her hands as if they are enemies. Her knuckles are twisted and swollen so that her fingers spread out and twist like the roots of an ancient hawthorn. ‘Anybody who tells you pain is all in the mind can take a running jump,’ says the woman. ‘Pain is in the bloody nerve endings.’

  Despite the suffering they cause her, the woman still wears her rings. There is a diamond and a gold wedding band on the third finger of her left hand, and a modern, Aztec-style twist of silver on her thumb. She has long white hair and a thin, sharply angled face. Her eyes are lapis-blue. She wears a fitted white jacket over a clinging blue top and smart, neatly-pressed trousers. She is a handful of years younger than her friend but could easily pass for sixty. She looks younger still when she smiles.

  ‘I should have switched to a typewriter,’ she mutters, sighing. ‘Or a computer. Writing by hand will kill your joints. Damn things.’ She glances at her friend, an incongruous and impish smile chasing the anger and sadness from her face. ‘They’re not nearly as ghastly as your legs.’

  ‘Ooh, you’ve a nasty side to you,’ smiles her friend. ‘You could twang a raw nerve like a violin string, you could. My legs don’t hurt. They’re just annoying.’

  ‘They’re bloody horrible to look at.’

  ‘I know. Our John says they look like those sausages you get abroad.’

  ‘More like a pair of nylons stuffed with haggis.’

  ‘I’ve never liked haggis.’

  ‘You tried it?’

  ‘No.’

  The silence stretches out for a moment. Neither feels compelled to talk. They have been friends for a long time.

  The younger woman screws up her face. Tastes the air. ‘It’s supposed to smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage in places like this. I can’t smell anything at all.’

  ‘It’s nice. I enjoyed my last stay.’

  ‘You’re not meant to enjoy it, Flick. It’s a hospital.’

  ‘Not really. It reminds me of that B&B where I stayed when I was down in Bournemouth. Nice people. Lots of chatter. A few people who don’t know what day it is …’

  ‘Sounds lovely.’

  ‘Aye well, it was good enough for us,’ says Flick. ‘I tried abroad. Didn’t like it.’
<
br />   ‘There’s a lot of it, I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘Well I didn’t like the bit I saw. We’ve been through this before, Cordelia.’

  Cordelia rolls her eyes. She looks back at the small, frail figure in the bed. She fancies she could pick him up and carry him and he would weigh no more than a sack full of bones.

  ‘Shall we wake him?’ asks Flick, cautiously. ‘It seems wrong, somehow. I know we’ve come a long way but it was different just talking. It seems wrong being here. I don’t feel like I should.’

  Cordelia scratches her forearm and the scent of her fruity, floral perfume fills the small, comfortable room. This is a pleasing space in which to die. The walls are a sunshine yellow and hung with pictures of local landscapes. There is a TV mounted on a stand in the corner of the room and though the curtains are closed, the window by the far wall usually offers a view of the front garden. Cordelia would like to open the curtains. Outside, a light rain is falling from a grey-blue sky. She enjoys such weather. It reminds her of home.

  ‘It’s now or not at all,’ says Cordelia, quietly. ‘The nurse said if we can steer him onto the right path, all sorts of recollections might pour out. He might have fooled them into thinking he doesn’t know who he is but that’s only because they don’t know the truth of him. He’s been so many different people it’s no surprise he’s in a muddle. But here, at the end, I have a feeling the centre of him, the truth of him, will want to make itself heard.’

  ‘I don’t know if I want to know. Not really. Not now we’re here.’

  ‘We’ve waited half a bloody century, Flick.’

  ‘But look at him. Whoever he was, he’s not him any more. People change …’

  ‘We can’t make him suffer any more than he already is,’ says Cordelia, gently. ‘Whatever he can see in his dreams, he’s in his own hell. He would thank us for the reprieve.’

  Flick turns to look at him. She seems to be considering her own mortality, her own mounting frailty. ‘Don’t ever let me get like that,’ she says.

  ‘You already are,’ says Cordy, and her face splits into a smile that her old friend shares.

  They take a moment. Pause; revelling in this last, final instant in which they can still walk away. They are two figures upon a clifftop, leaning forward into the wind, held upright by a gale that could drop without warning. Then Cordelia walks to the side of the bed and leans over the decrepit figure who fits and cries and prays in his tortured sleep.

  ‘Wake up,’ she says, and closes her fingers around his nose, flinching a little at the contact and the pain the action causes joints. ‘We have questions. You have answers. And if you keep pretending, I’ll bury you. I’ll put you in the ground, just like the body in the blue suit.’

  Beneath her hand, the old man coughs. His breath is warm upon Cordelia’s wrist. She applies more pressure and his fragile body twists. Only when he seems about to burst do his eyes slide open.

  He looks up at the white-haired, blue-eyed figure, lit from behind by a glowing golden bulb.

  He smiles the smile of a man who had expected to wake in Hell.

  CORDELIA

  October, 1967

  I was lying in a grave the first time I met Felicity. It was the day the storm came. The clouds were a mound of dead doves; all grey and purple, silver and muddy white. Made me think of foxgloves pulped against stone. It would be a week before we saw blue again. A week before the clouds rained themselves out. The Tyne rose six feet that fortnight. They had to evacuate half of Haltwhistle. Bones rose from the churchyards like worms.

  I wasn’t uncomfortable, lying there, looking like something the earth had winkled out. It was out of the wind, protected by the branches of the big laurel tree that stood sentinel over the oldest headstones. I liked such spaces, at the time. I liked containment. Manageable environments. I would have dug a hole and crawled inside it if I knew anybody well enough to shovel the dirt back on top of me.

  I breathed in. Damp grass. Mud. That high, meat and camphor whiff of unloved furs. I experienced the sudden sensation of coming back to myself. I realized I had drifted off again. Not asleep exactly – just absent. It felt like I was dying in increments, dwindling into nothingness, like a name in an unread book. What had I been doing? I flexed my fingers and felt the reassuring weight of the novel, sitting on my belly in the place where Stefan used to like to plonk himself; a jockey on his mother’s belly, giggling while I jiggled him …

  I adjusted my position. My clothes were sticking to my skin. Grass prickled at the skin of my wrists. A long-necked daisy had grown between the fingers of my left hand. I wondered how long it would take for the earth to claim me. I had a vision of myself, semi-consumed, a risen hump of grass, cow parsley and buttercups, split into sods with the gravedigger’s spade. I shook the image away before it took hold. I found myself staring out at the little grey mausoleum that stood at the rear of the churchyard. Were I a painter, this would be the section of the landscape that I would have chosen to paint. Cosy, in a Gothic sort of way. I envied the building its indelible pocket of gloom, shielded as it was by the purple leaves of an overhanging tree. Moss grew on its walls, as if the stone was a living thing that somehow provided nutrients. I had seen swifts flitting in and out of the elaborate eaves.

  Upper Denton. That was the name of the village. A mile south of Gilsland. A place at the edge of things. It was shaped like a crucifix – the cross section formed by a straight grey road that ran parallel to the train tracks. Three houses at the top of the village and a couple more sloping away down the hill. Ragged outbuildings and crumbling barns. Then the church. Beyond that lay the river and the trees and endless miles of nothing at all.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Joseph and Mary, I thought you were a ghost!’

  I didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. I’d heard her approaching. Lain still as a housebrick and hoped she would pass right on by.

  ‘Are you well? Oh my goodness, I’m shaking!’

  She was one of them. A local girl. One of the tribe. A girl from the borderlands, the place between pages; tucked into the margins between two northern counties and a stone’s throw from the Scottish border. A Gilsland girl. As much a part of the landscape as the cow shit and tumbledown stone walls.

  She’d jumped like a startled cat when she saw me. Literally jumped. Both feet off the floor and one hand rising to her face. The other held a small bouquet of carnations, which she was crushing against her damp jacket like a child with an ice cream.

  ‘I’m so sorry …’ she began.

  I stopped her with a shake of my head. I couldn’t abide feebleness. Already I felt I knew what she was. Could imagine her running a neat little home, peeling potatoes, picking elderberries, scrubbing medicated shampoo into some pale-skinned little ruffian’s hair. I drank her in a little more. She was older than me. Mid-thirties, though with the fashions in that place it was never easy to be sure. Women started dressing like their grandparents as soon as they pushed out a child.

  ‘You gave me quite a start,’ she said, all fussy. Her accent was local, a low, self-conscious marbling of Geordie and Scot. ‘Have you fallen? Can you hear me? Are you not well? I’m Mrs … well, I’m Felicity, really …’

  I probably shrugged. I certainly didn’t have the energy to smile. Just looked at her, over the top of my book, and wondered if she was going to say any more. I didn’t want company. Hadn’t wanted company in a long while. Didn’t even know if my sore throat and cracked lips would allow for conversation.

  ‘It’ll be Mrs Hemlock, am I right?’

  She wasn’t going to accept silence, that much was clear. But I wasn’t about to jump up and thank her for acknowledging my existence. I was enjoying being rude. Made me feel like I was back at university and so full of anger and ambition that it sometimes made me want to tear at my clothes and skin. I was like that, then. Maybe I still am.

  I shifted my position a little and managed a tight smile. The action felt unnatural to me, like putting on a dress that
used to fit and finding it suddenly uncomfortable and restrictive. The air felt wrong around me. It was as if there was burning metal on the breeze. I didn’t know if I was too hot or too cold; a wet baby beneath a thick woollen sheet.

  ‘I was just enjoying the quiet,’ I said, aware that my mouth opened more precisely around my words than her’s did. I sounded posher. Richer. Better bred.

  ‘In a graveyard?’ she asked, looking baffled at the notion. ‘On your own?’

  ‘Nothing to be scared of in a graveyard,’ I said, in the tone of voice that had always made people think of me as a little fond of my own opinions. ‘There’s nothing here that can hurt you. We’re the only people in history to think of bones as unclean things. There are cultures where people dig up their ancestors every year. Dress them and take them for a celebration. We’re the ones who decided there should be a dividing line between life and death. Other people think of it in shades of grey.’

  She nodded. Gave a tight smile. It was a well-meaning gesture, the sort you give a child who has just drawn a picture of an eight-legged cat. ‘That’s nice.’

  We both fell to silence. Something buzzed, fatly, by my ear. I felt the tickle of tiny creatures scurrying across my skin. At length, she tucked her elbows in to her sides and drew a circle around me with her eyes. ‘That’s a grave you’re laying on.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, oddly pleased. ‘Victoria Asbrey. Died in 1717, aged 100, though I have my doubts that they kept proper records. She was probably much younger.’

  ‘She was a Reiver,’ said Felicity, jerking her chin in the direction of the grave. It was a mannerism I associated with men – hands in their overalls and giving directions with grunts. ‘She was a hundred when she died. Says so on the headstone, look.’

  ‘A Border Reiver?’ I said, and winced at having asked a silly question. I wanted this woman to know how clever I was. I had always needed to be the brightest in the room.

  ‘Rough people,’ explained Felicity, quietly, in case they overheard and took offence. ‘Fighters. This whole area is Reiver country. Used to be, anyways, though if you throw a rock in the air it’ll hit somebody with a surname from one of the old clans.’