A Season For Everything by Matthew Fairman (e reader txt) 📖

by an early dog walker. The tracks rounded the tops of the quarry pits and left the woods on a pathway through a meadow. She doubled back into the woods, striking out a new path that followed a steep incline down into a quarry pit. The way down was easy to see and the snow was well trodden and compacted making it slippery and dangerous. Hollis held onto the tree roots to keep herself from sliding. The pitt formed an amphitheatre around and above her head. It was hard not to feel like she were being watched from somewhere, someone behind a tree or a rock. It was an unnerving feeling, the place had a strange atmosphere all of its own that was lost when you stepped outside of the woods.

There was a cave up ahead, it was cut deep into the base of the cliff face, a black horizontal gash that sucked in all of the surrounding light. There was a slope down through a low entrance way where the cave opened out inside to a large entrance chamber. Hollis kept one hand on the roof of the entranceway, stooping down to look inside. She could make out two tunnels leading from the chamber. In the middle of the space sat a half burnt tree timber surrounded by the usual rubbish you would expect in such a place. She heard some shouts behind her, she turned around to see two boys pass the face of the quarry pit on bicycles. She thought about following them to see why they weren’t at school but as she was not on duty she decided to let it go. She found herself thinking that maybe it was better that the boys didn’t go out so much. ‘I wouldn’t want them playing around here that’s for sure.’ The cries of the boys and the sound of cracking tree branches ricocheted around the quarry and between the web of trees. She left the quarry on a lower path that led back to the village green where her car was still parked. Hollis got inside and sat with her hands resting on the wheel. She was thinking about the boys she had seen in the wood and she was thinking about the Powell’s kid who had died there. Most of all she was thinking also about her own two children. There was so much in the world you couldn’t protect against. So much that was unforeseen. Maybe it was her fault, maybe she made had made them scared of the world. She had seen enough of it to know the kind of bad things that could go on. She was certainly no stranger to its dangers. She slowly put the key in the ignition and held it there still thinking, then she started the car. The thrum of the engine beneath the bonnet kickstarted her mind again. She put the car in gear and drove down the hill back towards the village.

Beaton crouched in the snow behind a holly tree, the duffle bag held tightly in his lap. He was watching woman standing in the quarry pit below. He had first seen her along the path from the canal to the woods. He had been in the shadow of the copse about to climb a wooden stile. She had walked out of the quarry along the path across the meadow, had stopped as if lost and then turned back retracing her steps. It seemed at first that she might have seen him but she was not in a hurry and didn’t look concerned. He followed her at a distance and watched her as she made her way down the steep path that wound into into the large pit. He lost sight of her as she approached the base of the quarry face beneath where he was hiding. ‘What are you looking for?’ He was getting nervous the longer that she was gone from view. He was about to start heading around and down along the edge of the bluff but he stopped. He heard the sounds of shouting, two boys on mountain bikes were weaving through the woods. As they passed in front of the quarry face he saw the woman return. She didn’t look in any way familiar. She wasn’t dressed like a police officer. ‘Maybe just a random walker. your getting paranoid about things.’ He waited until he was sure she had gone before coming down and around to the mouth of the cave. He quickly looked around the entrance chamber but it appeared nothing had changed much. The green garden twine that led to the gravesite was still wrapped around the root stump.

He followed the string trail by torchlight until he reached the niche where the stack of stones concealed the dead body. He took his time lifting away the rocks and piling them against the opposite wall. Twenty minutes later he had recovered the body wrapped in its blanket. He rolled the corpse away from the wall so it was in the centre of the slab and dumped the duffle bag next to it. He took out the compass saw, secateurs and the rubble sacks and the gloves. He rolled off one of the sacks, he made a hole in the bottom of the sack and cut two slits at either side. He pulled the make shift apron over his head and put on the gardening gloves and turned off the torch. Feeling along the body with his hands he found the neck and with his left had resting there he reached out and picked up the compass saw. He felt the tug and the snag of the fabric in the teeth of the blade. The blanket made a ripping sound like a cat clawing at the arm of a settee. Then the saw blade took hold of the flesh beneath and he felt the spray of tiny cold droplets hitting his face each time pulled the tool towards him. He leant into the blade, sawing at the dead meat methodically. He remembered how his father had taught him to hold a saw, to let the blade do all the work. To follow through each time, the body a machine driving the tool. The tendons snagged and ripped and it wasn’t long before he had reached the bone. He worked the blade between the cervical vertebrae, it sounded and felt like a hacksaw going through a piece of plastic pipe. ‘It’s just an old piece of pipe, just a pipe. Nothing but an old piece of plumbing pipe’ The vibration made his hand vibrate and the fingers feel numb. He was hot beneath the plastic sack, it was hard sweaty work. All the time he repeated to himself the same words. ‘Keep on Beaton, don’t stop Beaton, keep on going, don’t give up’. Over and over, each word spoken to the push and pull, see saw rhythm, the buzz and the zip of the tiny little teeth biting through this thing that he was desperate to hide. Once he had disengaged the head from the body he tied it up inside the canvas bag and dumped it into a rubble sack, knotting it twice at the top. He hadn’t anticipated the work taking him so long. ‘This is going to take at least several days.’ he thought to himself.

Beaton contemplated how he was going to divide the body into small enough pieces to carry. ‘I will just take the head and the arms today, the legs tomorrow and the trunk last.’ He rolled the headless corpse onto its side and propped it with stones. He remove the arm from just below the shoulder, dividing it again at the elbow, just above the joint. He repeated the process on the other side and put both pieces in separate sacks. He put all three sacks into the duffle bag. He left the tools next to the slab with the make shift apron and his gloves. He rolled the body up against the wall, it already felt noticeably lighter, and he covered it again with the rocks. Outside he scrubbed the blood from his face with handfuls of fresh snow. He sat and ate the crackers staring at the reddish brown stains on his knees. He was surprised at how hungry he was, shocked at his capacity to eat after the task he had just performed. When he had eaten all of the crackers he took his duffle bag and left. He still had work to do today.

 

 

Michael Powell had spent the last few days in a waking dream. He could not focus on any task for more that a few moments without his mind slipping. He couldn’t believe that Emma would have simply up and left him. He knew that whatever the reasons were for her disappearance, running away was not one of them. After all, it was Emma that had insisted on staying in the village after Jonathan had died. It was Mike that had wanted to leave, to get away and make a fresh start. Not Emma. They had not spoken much lately, the pub was a full time job and it kept them both tired enough. They had slipped into their daily routines, both accepting the fact that nothing was going to change now that everything had changed. The police had told him to try and get on with his normal life but his life had, for a long time, seemed far from being normal. There had been times, not long after their son had died, that Emma had gone away. It had never been more than a few days at a time and she always returned. He never asked her where she had gone although he had always suspected that she had gone to her sisters. They had both coped and grieved in their own way. He had never been one for showing or sharing his emotions. He had accepted his sons death and knew that they would not have another. He had been close to Jonathan, they were best buddies and he had always been proud of him. Jonathan was a sweet natured boy, sensitive and popular with the other children at school. Mike had always thought of him as being a little more immature than some of his piers but it was nothing that he wasn’t going to grow out of in time. It was probably just having been an only child, he was imaginative and would play in the woods for hours on end. Emma and Michael could not explain his death. The coroner ruled that the death may have been suicide or accidental death, a game gone badly wrong. Emma would not accept the ruling. She ‘knew’, that was how she put it. She knew that there was more to the story. She believed that Jonathan had been murdered, she could not face the idea that her boys death could have been an accident or something far worse. She had been the one to find the young boy, hanging by his neck from a tree above the quarry pit. Hanging in the cold dying light of an autumn evening. It had appeared that Jonathan had taken the rope swing and made a noose which he had tied around his neck before stepping from the brink. Kaiser, just a puppy then, was yelping looking up at the weird fruit dangling from the crooked bough above. It was because his wife had ‘known’ that they had never left the pub, had stayed in the village. He had screamed, begged and pleaded with her to leave but she refused. She had told him she would stay regardless, it was up to him if he would stay with her. He had stayed but ever since the ultimatum the love between them had grown into understanding an acceptance of how things would be.

Michael had asked Ryan to do double shifts for a while to staff the bar, he didn’t feel up