Kill Fish Jones (5 page)

‘It's too soon for someone from the gas company,' said Susan, doubtfully. ‘I only just rang them.'

Fish got to his feet and hurried out of the kitchen and up the hall, leaving his mother and his aunt staring after him anxiously.

The front door opened on a well-built man in jeans and a crumpled shirt. He looked as if he had been up all
night, and he also looked familiar, but the first thing that Fish noticed about him was that he glowed all over with a silvery shine. Fish's heart went cold. This man too had lost someone dear to him. Bad things were stacking up all around them and it didn't bode well.

The man smiled at him gravely. ‘Fish Jones?' he said.

Fish nodded.

‘If your mother is here I need to speak to her. It's important.'

The man's blue eyes met Fish's hazel ones and a look passed between them. It was a look that sent Fish's heart plunging to his boots. Whatever it was that the man had to say, it wasn't just important, it was life or death. And in that moment, Fish recognised the man as Jon Figg.

He put out a hand. Startled, Jon Figg took it. Fish clasped it for a moment, his face grave.

Jon Figg swallowed hard. ‘Thank you,' he said, understanding the look in Fish's eyes, ‘but how did you know? About Emily dying last night …' He stopped, emotion twisting across his face.

Fish stood back to let Jon into the house, the man's huge bulk filling the hall. With Fish in the lead they went back to the kitchen, where the only sound was the ping of the toaster as it popped up four golden slices.

‘I know you!' cried Susan at once. Her voice had taken on an odd edge. ‘Of course, it's Mr Figg! I didn't recognise you without the yellow hat and overalls.'

He stepped forward and offered her his hand. ‘I am
deeply sorry, ma'am, for all that happened yesterday. I had my troubles, it's true, but I should have paid full attention to my work or stayed at home. I am responsible for your current situation and I want to help you if I can.'

Susan smiled and put her hand in his. They shook solemnly.

‘Apology accepted, and don't worry, my sister is looking after us. Won't you sit down, Mr Figg …'

‘Call me Jon, please.'

‘… Jon, and have some breakfast?'

‘I'd like that, for I have some other things to tell you as well, and a cup of tea would be most welcome.'

He settled at the table in between Fish and Marsha, and Susan poured tea for all of them. She set the toast on to a plate in the middle of the table, then put some more bread in to do. Jon took a long gulp of his tea. He drank it like a man in the desert would drink water, and when he had finished he drew a long breath.

‘Thing is, Mrs Jones …'

‘Susan, please!'

‘… Susan, we've met before. I mean before I knocked down your house, though you might not remember. When I saw you yesterday, I thought there was something about your face that I recognised and suddenly, last night, the penny dropped.'

Fish had turned to look at Jon as he spoke, which meant that his range of vision moved to take in the corner of the kitchen and the space next to the sink. His
heart turned over as he realised that the demon was there, sitting on the floor, with its notebook in front of it and its pencil clutched in its paw. It was watching them carefully, so Fish turned his head away, hoping it hadn't noticed him looking startled or horrified.

Susan was nodding. ‘I felt the same!'

‘It was a few weeks ago,' Jon explained, ‘when I helped out a friend of mine. He had a large job on and needed some extra hands. He's in the grave-digging business …'

‘Marble Hill!'

‘That's it. Marble Hill Cemetery. At least it used to be. But the Church of St Michael's was sold off and the company that bought it want to turn the whole place into a residential home for old folk. They bought the graveyard too, and that's where my mate comes in.'

‘That's right. They dug up the coffins and reburied them in the cemetery at St Peter's.'

‘Not all of them are buried yet, but I'll get to the reasons for that in a moment. For now, the last few coffins are being kept in the crypt at the Church of St Peter and St Paul, where they were taken when they were first exhumed.'

‘Good Lord!' muttered Marsha. ‘How do you come into this, Su?'

‘You know I do voluntary work for St Peter's sometimes? Well, the vicar asked me if I would help … um … organise the coffins.'

‘And
that's
where we met before. I was with my mate Steve, carrying the coffins to the crypt, and you were keeping a record of the details and telling us where to lay the next one and so on. Made us a lovely cup of tea too. You only spoke to Steve, but I was the one standing right behind him.'

Susan nodded again. ‘Yes! I do remember now. You were the man who helped.'

Fish risked a glance at the creature in the corner. It was watching Susan and Jon with great attention. Because it was so close now, Fish couldn't help a shiver as he noticed its eyes, which were inky black from corner to corner. It was dressed in patched trousers with a hole cut out for its tail and had a complicated watch strapped to one skinny wrist. Fish also noticed that what he had taken for a hump was actually a filthy old backpack, made of worn leather with tarnished buckles and a couple of sturdy pockets on the front. Suddenly, the creature looked up, as if it sensed Fish's gaze. Quickly, Fish turned his attention back to the conversation.

Jon's voice had become sad as he went on. ‘Thing is, Steve is dead now, which is part of the reason why those last few coffins haven't been buried again – they haven't found anyone else to finish the work yet. He drowned in the lake after his house burnt down, his wife fell off a roof on to the railings, his son had a horrible accident with a fire hose, and his daughter got crushed in some revolving doors.'

Marsha and Susan were staring at Jon in horror. Fish felt an icy trickle run down his spine. Things were getting worse and worse. The web of death and disaster stretched further than he had realised. All over again, he found himself remembering the vicar's horrible death.

‘And then, just after Steve's death in fact, my dog exploded, the roof of my house was crushed in by a falling tree and Emily got bashed on the head and went to hospital. The bash on the head didn't kill her straight away, but last night … She never regained consciousness, not even once.'

Jon bowed his head, the tears running down his cheeks. He didn't try to stop them or to wipe them away. Susan put out a hand and touched his arm.

Fish sent a look of undiluted fury at the creature, sure that it was somehow responsible for all this horror. It was scribbling in its notebook and didn't notice the look, which was good because if it had it would have known at once that Fish could see it.

Jon got a hold of himself and straightened up. He raised his head. Fish thought he looked afraid.

‘And how is the vicar?' Jon asked. It seemed like an innocent enough question, but Fish knew at once that it wasn't.

Susan looked puzzled, then sad, then terrified. ‘He died just the other day. He was up in the bell tower and … Of course, some people said it might be suicide because of his house collapsing due to subsidence, his
wife falling off that mountain in Switzerland and his … his mother being run over by a lawn mower, but I
knew
him and he
wouldn't
.'

The icy trickle had spread, seeping through Fish to his core. Suddenly the catalogue of pain was full of hidden meaning. The terrible things that had happened to the vicar were linked in some way to the terrible things that had happened to his own family, to Jon Figg and to Jon's friend Steve. Was the demon causing it all somehow? And if so, why?

He felt his mother's eyes on his face, looking at him searchingly, so he met her gaze and put his hand in hers. He ignored the demon, which was watching them all intently, as if waiting for something.

With a sigh, Jon nodded. ‘Yes, I thought that might be another reason why the reburial of the coffins from St Michael's hasn't gone ahead.'

Marsha was staring at them with wide eyes full of shock. It was as if fear had infected them all, spreading from one to another like a plague.

‘And then …' Marsha gasped, her brain putting all the pieces together and coming to one inescapable conclusion, ‘… and then Susan's house got knocked down and my Reg died.'

Four pairs of eyes locked across the table, and Fish's heart turned over.

‘It's …'

In the corner, Grimshaw waited for someone to say it. Sooner or later someone always said it. And then they
would try to run. Sooner or later, they always tried to run.

‘It's as if …'

He fixed his eyes on Marsha, willing her to finish the sentence. She did.

‘It's as if we're all under some horrible curse!'

‘What you have to ask yourselves,' said Jon, ‘is why?'

Fish had made them some more tea, pouring it strong and hot and adding plenty of sugar. He was still cold right to his core and knew that the others would be feeling the same. Hot, sweet tea was just what they needed to help thaw their hearts and give them back some strength. The toast was still on the plate. The second batch had been done long ago, but was cooling, unnoticed, in the toaster.

‘I think now is the time to tell you about the exhumation of Lampwick the Robber,' said Jon. ‘It was on the last night of the job, just before all this awfulness began. We only had a few graves left to do, but there was this particular one that spooked the hell out of me. Something about the feel of it, an air of wakefulness, like the deceased wasn't properly gone. I think, subconsciously, we'd been avoiding it, but it was the only one left so at last we had no choice but to dig the coffin up.'

Jon hesitated, as if he didn't really want to say any more. Fish shuddered, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Marsha and Susan do the same.

‘Go on,' said Marsha, her voice full of fear.

It was one of those lovely mornings,
Jon began,
before the sun is up, when the horizon is just showing a promise of dawn. For some reason, probably to stop people coming to gawp, exhumations are always done after dark and so I was glad to see that morning was on its way because it meant the job was almost over. Someone had to move the bodies from the old graveyard to the new one, and Steve was the kind of bloke who did his work with respect. Even so, I didn't much care for the thought that we were disturbing the dead.

This last grave, the one we had been avoiding, was an old one – the deceased had been buried way back in Victorian times. The headstone was covered in lichen, and bushes had grown over it, making it difficult to get at. I couldn't read the inscription at first, just the name. Lampwick. I tried to clean it up, scrape off some of the lichen and that. When I'd done, I could see the words. ‘Leave Him In Peace'. It seemed like a funny thing to write on a headstone, more like a threat or a warning.

I won't bore you with the digging. Enough to say that we got down to wood at last. And then, as if it hadn't been bad enough already, things got really creepy.

It was early morning, like I said, and the sun was just coming up over the horizon as we reached the coffin. The birds
were singing their hearts out the way they do, to welcome in the new day. As soon as our spades scraped the coffin lid, they stopped.

Silence.

Not a tweet.

Now, Steve isn't the imaginative sort. You don't go in for grave-digging as a career if you've got a lot of imagination. But even he stopped what he was doing and looked at me.

It only lasted a moment. Then the birds got going again and everything seemed normal. Except for the coffin. Instead of a metal plate with the deceased's name and dates on it, there were words scratched into the wood. We didn't have time to read them. The sun was coming up and we needed to get the grave filled in properly before the world was up and about. All I saw was, ‘Herein lies the body of Lampwick the Robber, dare not to disturb.'

I didn't catch any more, not just because we were busy getting the coffin out of the ground, but because something distracted me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement. Nothing much, just a shadowy rustle of the bushes, probably a cat or a fox. But it gave me a chill down my spine and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to get out of that graveyard!

We got the coffin loaded up and drove it, and the others we had done earlier that night, all the way to St Peter's.

There, Steve went to speak to the vicar and the lady – you, Susan – who was helping organise the coffins. We unloaded them and you showed us where to put them in the crypt. Lampwick the Robber was first out of the van. I remember
that you tapped the top of his coffin when directing us. It was the lightest of touches, but I was already so spooked it made me flinch.