Scaderstone Pit (The Darkeningstone Series Book 3) (24 page)

Brian looked him in the eye and nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, Mr. Marley. It’s up there all right, but you’d never really notice it from down here. We’ll have to climb up. But it’s all right, sir. There’s a set of steps—like stairs.”

Trevor narrowed his eyes.
Did he really just call me
sir
?
It was about time the workmen paid him some respect. But what was all this about stairs? The gorge was a neglected place, hidden away behind a patch of scrubland in the middle of nowhere; there couldn’t possibly be proper stairs. Brian probably meant that he’d found a few footholds and places to hang onto. But even so, the rock face was almost vertical, and he hadn’t climbed anything since he’d been a boy.

Trevor took a breath. He’d come this far; he had to follow through. “Go on then, Brian. You’d better show me what you mean.”

Brian turned to the rock face and pushed the curtain of trailing ivy to one side. “You see? Stairs.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Trevor said. The steps cut into the rock were partially clogged with soil and grit, but their edges were straight and level, and at first glance, the steps seemed to be spaced exactly the same distance apart.

“I’ll go first, shall I?” Brian said.

Trevor hesitated. He tilted his head back and ran his eyes slowly up the forbidding rock face. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I think you’d better lead the way.”

Brian nodded then began to climb.

Trevor chewed at the inside of his cheek and watched Brian’s ascent. The workman was agile despite his over-sized boots, and he climbed quickly and efficiently.

“If he can do it, I can do it,” Trevor muttered. He found the lowest step and placed his foot on it, kicking away some of the accumulated soil and checking that the sole of his shoe had a good grip on the stone. The step was solid enough and not too slippery, so he leaned into the slope and pushed himself up, using his hands to grip the edges of the higher steps as he climbed.

The men clambered upward in silence. Trevor concentrated, forcing his fingers through the gritty soil to grip the steps above, testing every foothold. He was breathing hard, and a thin trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck and beneath his collar, tickling his back.

Trevor looked down. The ground below was rocky and unforgiving. He swallowed the lump in his throat. How much farther would they have to climb? He could ask Brian. But when he looked back up, the workman was nowhere to be seen. “Brian?” he called out. “Where the hell are you?”

For a second, there was no reply, but then a few small stones skittered down the slope and Brian appeared, leaning out from the rock face. “It’s all right, Mr. Marley. I’m up here—on the ledge.”

Trevor cursed under his breath and shifted his weight, swinging his body to one side to avoid the tumbling stones. When he looked up again, Brian was beaming down at him.

“Sorry about that. It’s a bit loose underfoot up here.”

“Just watch what you’re doing, man!” Trevor snapped. “Keep back from the edge.”

Brian nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll stay out the way.” He hesitated, studying Trevor’s expression. “Don’t worry. Keep going, you’ve almost made it.” He smiled then retreated and disappeared from view.

Trevor shook his head. Should he even be doing this? Might it have been better, after all, to let the foreman deal with this? But that man wouldn’t be happy until he’d made everyone stop work. If the foreman knew what Brian had found, he’d certainly call in the police, and he’d enjoy the joke when it turned out that Brian’s suspicions had amounted to nothing. Trevor pictured the men sniggering as a constable handed over the bones of a badger or a stray dog. He’d never live it down. And of course, the men would still want their bonus. There was no way they’d take responsibility for the delay; they’d blame Trevor. Everyone would blame him.

“This bloody place,” Trevor muttered. “I’m sick of it.” But he gritted his teeth and began climbing again.

Soon, he could make out a straight edge that cut across the rock.
That must be the ledge
, he thought, and he kept his eye on it as he climbed. His arms were beginning to weaken. The sooner he could stand up without clinging on, the better.

Trevor reached up as high as he could, stretching his fingers to find the ledge. The rough lip of the ledge bit into the palm of his hand, but he held on tight. He grunted and heaved himself up, hauling his upper body onto the ledge. He scrambled up to his feet and rubbed his hands together, brushing the worst of the soil from his fingers.

Trevor looked around. The ledge was much larger than he’d expected, and it surprised him that he hadn’t been able to see it from below. The ledge was a few paces deep, and more than a dozen good paces from one end to the other. Its surface was remarkably flat and level, although there were a number of loose rocks and boulders scattered across it. Brian was standing at one end of the ledge, next to a large mound of rocks, and his tools were lying on the ground around him. The workman was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and his brow was furrowed.

“Come on then, Brian,” Trevor said. “You’d better show me what all this is about.”

Brian beckoned to him. “Over here, Mr. Marley. They were under the rocks, right here.”

Trevor walked toward him slowly. Now that he was here, there was something bothering him about this whole situation, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t questioned Brian more closely before. “You never told me, Brian—what on earth were you doing up here in the first place?”

“It was where they sent me,” he said. “They said we had to have samples from up on the rock face, and no one else would do it. They didn’t want to go trailing through the brambles, so they sent me.”

Trevor nodded. It figured. Brian was the youngest and least experienced; he would be the one they sent to do all the worst jobs. No doubt the foreman thought it a great joke to send the weakest member of the team to scale the steepest slope of the site.
Perhaps you’ll surprise them all yet, Brian
, he thought. He stood at Brian’s side. “Show me what you found.”

Brian knelt down, and Trevor followed suit. “It was under here,” Brian said. He took hold of a flat stone with both hands, and with some difficulty he slid it to one side. At first, as Brian moved the stone, Trevor could see nothing out of the ordinary. But then his eyes picked out a long white shape lying flat among the gravelly soil. It could only be a bone. He ran his finger slowly along its length, gently brushing away the crumbs of dry, sandy that soil clung to it. It was partially decayed and had clearly been hidden under the rocks for some considerable time. But was it human?

He turned to Brian. “I don’t know. It looks like a femur, but I can’t be sure. Have you found any others?”

Brian shook his head. “Just this one. And I covered it up straight away.”

Trevor scanned the loose rocks that were scattered around them. “How many of these rocks have you moved? Were they spread out like this when you arrived?”

Brian frowned. “Most of them were like this. I just moved a few. They told me to clear a patch big enough for them to come and do some drilling.”

Trevor ran a hand through his hair. He couldn’t help thinking that the stone must’ve been placed deliberately over the bone, and surely that suggested some sort of burial. And a femur that length—what else could it be but human? Trevor put his hands flat on the ground to steady himself. A wave of nausea squirmed in the pit of his stomach, and he suddenly felt cold. There were enough chunks of flat stone scattered around his feet to cover a whole skeleton. He looked Brian in the eye. “We’re going to have to move a few more stones,” he said. “We need to know if there are any more bones. If this is the only one, then there probably isn’t anything to worry about. But if we find any more, we’ll have to decide what to do.”

Brian grimaced and opened his mouth to say something, but Trevor didn’t give him the chance. “I’m relying on you, Brian. I need to see what we’re dealing with here, and I need someone I can trust.” He placed his hand gently on Brian’s upper arm. “Will you do that, Brian? Will you help me?”

Brian nodded unhappily. “I’ll try.”

“Good man,” Trevor said. “Here, give me a hand with this one.” Trevor took hold of the nearest large stone, and between them they managed to shift it one side. There was nothing beneath it but gravelly soil and a large black beetle that scurried away as fast as it could.

Trevor pushed himself up to his feet and studied the arrangement of loose rocks on the ledge. There was no particular pattern to the way the rocks were laid out, but there were a lot of them; too many to deal with one at a time. “We’re going to have to divide our labour,” he said. “We’ll split up and work systematically. I’ll start at this end, by the mound of rocks, and work my way toward the back of the ledge. I want you to work alongside me so that we cover a strip each. We’ll start by just moving the rocks we can manage on our own. If we need to, we’ll work together on the larger ones later. All right?”

Brian tilted his chin upward. “I’ll do my best, Mr. Marley, sir.”

Trevor gave him a reassuring smile. Brian looked happier now that someone was taking charge.

They crossed to the ledge’s outer edge and stood side by side, then the two men went to work. Moving forward in a half crouch, one step at a time, they lifted all the rocks they could and peered beneath them. Before long, they reached the back of the ledge, and neither of them had found anything remotely like a bone.

Trevor straightened his back and turned to Brian. “There you go. I knew there was nothing to worry about.”

“But what about the rest of the ledge?” Brian asked. “And what about all the bigger stones we didn’t turn over?”

Trevor pursed his lips. He hated to admit it, but Brian did have a point. If there had been bones hidden beneath the smaller rocks then they might well have been carried off by animals before now. Trevor checked his watch. He’d been away from his post for some time, and the other workmen might have noticed his absence. But if he could tie this business up once and for all, it would be worth spending a few more minutes on the ledge. “All right, Brian. Why don’t you pick a few of the larger stones, and I’ll help you shift them.”

Brian raised his eyebrows. He hesitated then looked around the ledge. “Let’s move that big one,” he said, pointing to a substantial flat stone. “If there’s anything hidden around here then I reckon it’ll be under that one.”

Trevor groaned inwardly, but he didn’t say a word. Brian was already taking up position on one side of the stone; Trevor could hardly back out now. He stood opposite Brian and bent his knees, running his hands along the stone’s edge, searching for a good place to get a grip. “We don’t need to move it far,” he said. “We just need to lift it enough so we can slide it along.” He nodded toward the ledge’s lip. “We’ll slide it that way, all right?”

“Fair enough,” Brian said. “One, two, three,
heave!”

Trevor put his back into it, tensing his stomach and straining every muscle in his arms and shoulders. Slowly, the flat stone inched upward, and as the two men slid it forward, it grated across the gritty ground.

Trevor focused on the stone, determined not to drop it, but he almost let go of it completely when Brian cried out in alarm.

“Oh my god!” Brian yelled.

Trevor turned his head, and when he saw what they’d uncovered, he quickly lowered his end of the stone to the ground. “Put it down, man! Put it down!”

Brian did as he was told. And as the stone came to rest, both men squatted on their haunches and stared. There, embedded in the thin black soil, and looking out at them with sightless eye sockets, was the unmistakable form of a skull—a human skull.

Chapter 30

2021

A FEW MILES OUTSIDE GRAND-PRESSIGNY
, Crawford guided the guard’s battered pickup truck into a single track country road. He was certain he wasn’t being followed, but even so, he drove on for a little way before he looked for somewhere to pull over. The narrow road ran in a straight line across a flat stretch of farmland. Crawford frowned; if he stopped here, he’d be visible for miles. “Your instincts are slipping,” he muttered. But it was too late to turn back and search for another quiet road, so he pressed on, studying every passing place and hedgerow, but finding nowhere that was suitable for the grim work he needed to complete. It was getting warm and stuffy in the cab so he opened a window to let in the fresh air and drove on.

A few minutes later he spotted a gateway that led through a hedge and into a field of grass, and by some stroke of luck, the metal gate stood open. Crawford allowed himself a grim smile. The place wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. He pulled the pickup onto the grass verge and parked it, but he left the engine running. Working swiftly, he took off his safety belt and released Jules’ from his, pausing only to make a perfunctory check for a pulse on the man’s neck. Naturally, the guard was dead; Crawford had never known the neurotoxin to fail. But he didn’t have time to gloat—there was still so much to do.

Crawford sighed then patted down the dead man’s pockets, searching for anything that might be useful. He took the guard’s wallet and the lanyard that bore his security passes. In the right-hand pocket of Jules’ trousers, Crawford found a wooden-handled Opinel pocketknife. Crawford opened the blade and tested its sharpness with his thumb. The blade was thin and made from poor quality steel, but Jules had kept it razor sharp. “Very handy,” Crawford murmured. “Well done, Jules.”