Death by a Mother's Hand (A Supernatural Suspense Story)

  Death by a Mother's Hand

  by

  Craig Saunders

  Copyright © 2011 Craig Saunders

  All characters in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or format other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  1st Edition

  Cover Art Copyright © 2015 Craig Saunders

  Contents

  Part One:

  Born to Die

  Part Two:

  Blood on the Altar

  Part Three:

  Mothers' Justice

  Also by Craig Saunders

  About the Author

  Part One

  Born to Die

  It’s just a box of rain

  I don’t know who put it there

  Believe it if you need it

  or leave it if you dare

  But it’s just a box of rain

  or a ribbon for your hair

  Such a long, long time to be gone

  and a short time to be there

  - Box of Rain/Grateful Dead

  1.

  Most countries have fallow lands. They are the places where once people lived, but no longer. They moved on. Maybe one day they'll come back and build houses and roads again, and those places will live. They might still be towns or villages or maybe a supermarket or an industrial estate. There's an option on it, somewhere in the future. It's not dead land, but tired, and resting. Just like a farmer might leave a field to weeds, or rotate their crops and so let the nutrients seep back into the soil.

  There are fallow lands across the world.

  There are also barren lands.

  Quiet spots on the landscape, these. Places where people simply do not grow. It might be that a town stagnates and refuses to learn and adapt and evolve, a place where the people are rock-headed, the kids kick dogs or set them on fire so the warmth and light can touch the blackness inside. Or perhaps it's just a single street in a large city that makes outsiders unwelcome, the street where people don't smile. All about, people bustle and children laugh, yet on that one street, in that one town, no one goes unless it's on the way to somewhere else. Dead and cold, a dark spot on the landscape that seems devoid, though devoid of what, outsiders could hardly say. They walk in those places and feel eyes that aren't there but sometimes are - eyes watching them, distrust in those gazes. Those strange, uncomfortable places breed shell-people, hating those who are full. Hungry people, grown jealous of those with big, fat souls.

  You drive through there on the way to elsewhere, and see two women leaving their quiet house, and you think they're twins...but then you see that one is older and one younger. They don't smile. Their faces feel strange, to you, who dwell in a town or a city. You're used to seeing different faces, hearing different accents and seeing different names on the tags the people who serve you coffee or sandwiches wear.

  But here there are a hundred surnames, rather than thousands, or tens of thousands. In the cemeteries, those names are repeated, over and over, like sponsors' messages.

  Here, people don't travel. Sometimes fathers fuck their daughters and make children who the daughters will pass off as their own. Maybe because they want a living doll to hold in the dark nights, but maybe just because that's all they've ever known.

  And the outside-people don't ask, because they've got happy souls gorged on friends and love and light and they're afraid, too. They don't want to get involved, don't want to know, and more than anything they don't want the taste of incest or murder or rape to spoil their wonderful meal.

  People don't interfere because those people are not our people, and we feel it in some ancient place within that we can't touch without looking sidelong at it.

  We tend our affairs and the barren people tend theirs.

  But if those affairs cross paths, it comes down to people willing to step into the other worlds beyond our ken to set things right. Ma Mulrone is like that. She's a woman who never was afraid to step over, to put a foot into the world of others and tend what needs tending. For a price, most often, though sometimes she does it for free.

  Ma Mulrone and her brood, her endless clan of Mulrone children, they aren't barren people. Yet they know the barren places, just as they know the fertile and the fallow, too. They're farmers. And like anyone who tends land or crops, they understand that nothing should last forever.

  *

  2.

  March, 1989

  The car is on the concrete drive of the last house of a short row of terraced houses. The paintwork glints from small places on a country night.

  Two boys hunker down in the dark, looking at the car. They don't know that a row of houses all joined like this is called a terrace. They have an X-Box but never watch television, never read a book. The last books they read were the simple things they had to, when they were little children.

  John Simmond, the older boy, isn't bright, but he is cunning. The younger boy, Barry Felts, is thirteen years old and several inches shorter than John. If John's the tank, Barry is the shell.

  Barry carries a Stanley knife in his jean pocket. He only cut another boy once, but he's threatened plenty of times. He isn't worried about using the knife, if he has to...like if other kids or grown-ups think he won't. There's no sense in carrying a knife if everyone knows you won't use it. If people know you will, often you won't have to, he figures.

  Barry's hair is a dirty, dark brown and he looks, in the dark, like a face with no scalp. John's hair is cut so close to his scalp you can see the scars from falls and fights, and long, ugly graze from a close call with a claw hammer. His head shines brighter than the car.

  'Car's a piece of shit.'

  'Don't matter, dopey,' says Barry. He clucks, sucking a little spit between his teeth. 'We're only fucking around, in't we?'

  He says 'in't' in a country way, rather than 'ain't', or 'aren't'. Like people who talk alike might in the places away from the big roads and the big cities, the sort of places where accents stick around for hundreds of years, just like family names.

  People move around in the second millennium. They move to get away from the bustle and noise of the cities, into the countryside. Or, they move from the countryside or dead-end, troubled towns where nothing ever happens that seems good, and they go to the cities. Like a game of hopscotch, but more expensive than when they were kids. People move to get away, then other people move to get away from them. Sometimes they move to places like this.

  The owners of the car parked in front of the end-of-terrace house are wandering, hopeful souls. A couple up from London, trying to make a home and a life here in this broad, flat fenland. They're dreaming of a better life away from the crime and the gangs and the drugs, somewhere to raise the children they hope to have.

  'Come on. Just a jolly, right?' says Barry, decided.

  He thumps John's bare head, then creeps forward across the deserted road, staying low. John stays low, too, though he's still around five feet tall even crouched. He's a big lump, strong and tough, but he's not built for stealth.

  Barry runs his fingers along the rubber seal at the base of the window. He cracks the car door easily enough with a flat, long tool he stole from
an RAC recovery driver when he was eleven. The car's slightly newer than he'd like, but it doesn't have an alarm and it doesn't take him long to figure out how to get it off the drive. They get it down the drive, turn it gently at a shallow angle so they don't engage the steering lock. The boys push the car away from the house so it's quieter and they don't wake the owners. Barry figures on leaving the lights off, too.

  While Barry's starting the car like people still can in 1989, like in a movie, John gets in and slams the door.

  'Fucking hell, John.'

  'Sorry,' says John.

  Barry checks back at the house, his fingers twisting and pulling beneath the steering column. There's no movement at the house - nothing for a whole minute. Then, upstairs, a light comes on and a curtain shifts.

  'Fuck it.'

  The car starts, under Barry's nibble, grubby fingers.

  'And they're off!' Barry laughs, and drives. John likes Barry when he's happy, so he's happy, too. Both of them, happy.

  The car's just a little hatchback, but anyone can drive a slow car fast if they're heavy enough with their feet. The road is long, straight, and at night it's really dark. The houses around are spread thin, there are no road lights, no cats' eyes, no other headlights but theirs.

  Barry's foot is hard to the floor and the engine labours as hard as it can. Pretty soon, he's up into fourth gear, and ignores fifth completely...because he wants the engine to blow. He wants the fire, the noise, then the hot roaring run through the flat fields and over bridges and canals and back home, laughing while his heart pounds in his chest and the chill air stings his lungs, alive.

  *

  3.

  In the England that was, 1989, it's mostly kids stealing cars. They drive them hard and fast, call it a joyride. When they're done, they burn the car out. Around the cities, their suburbs, on country lanes and lay-bys, it's common enough to see the black shells of dead cars waiting to be shifted elsewhere - wherever dead cars go when they die.

  The police don't care. To them, it's petty crime. There are bigger, grown-up crimes. Muggings, rapes, murders, football hooligans, small riots, pub brawls, people getting punched with shattered glasses and bottles held in fists. England, and the whole of the United Kingdom, is still under the shadow of Thatcher, of conservative power. For some, it's a kind of paradise, but mostly those with money. For others, it's a big fucking pit filled with animals trying to claw their way out.

  A car's a little more important than a stolen bike, or dog shit on the street...but not by much.

  Sergeant Darren Jones moved up from Swansea, and like the couple whose car was just stolen, he moved to the fenlands on the east of the country for a better life. He's thirty. He's seen a bit of action, he supposes. Been in fights, talked people down, brought down a guy with a replica samurai sword in Cardiff City centre once. He doesn't care about joy rides.

  His partner, in the car beside him, Rachel Bowyer, comes from Peterborough, at the western end of these fenlands. She moved to Cambridge after finishing her training to be nearer her family. Her father's arthritis and her mother's aortic aneurysm brought her home, but while she lives with them she's saving money for a down payment on a flat.

  That's what she tells the others at the station, but Jones knows that's only part of her reason for moving back here.

  Three months from now, Rachel's going to be knocked up by Jones, which is how her father refers to it when she get the courage to tell him.

  'Got yourself knocked up? Jesus.'

  That's how he puts it.

  Two weeks before her baby is due, she'll stand before the local vicar in the family church where her grandparents were married and put back in the earth, and become Mrs Rachel Jones. Her father will proudly give her away despite his dislike of Jones and his misgivings about her marrying within the force.

  But all of that is yet to come. Tonight's business is just two young lads who drive past in a stolen car.

  'Fuck's sake,' says Jones, who was perfectly happy in this dark lay-by, hoping to get laid by Rachel Jones-to-be.

  'That the one?'

  'I should think so,' says Jones. He starts the car, puts on the roof lights and tears out of the lay-by flicking gravel up into the air and into the long canal that runs right beside the road. The fenlands are cut all across with these surgical waterways, long ago when longboats carried coal atop the still waters.

  'Travellers?'

  'Nope,' says Jones. He knows Bowyer's had a run in with a travelling family before, a run in that turned bad. Those kind of run-ins always seem to. Ended with a little girl being re-homed, taken into State, and Bowyer working out here. 'One big, one short, wiry? Two local lads, I think. Felts and his crony, some big dullard called Simmonds. Trouble, but only small time.' Jones has been working these flatlands longer than Bowyer.

  'Thank Christ.'

  'Just local,' says Jones. He thinks about touching her shoulder, to comfort her.

  Cock, he thinks immediately after, but he's disappointed and man with sex on his mind whose not going to get it can be a cock indeed.

  *

  4.

  It's not a car chase like in a city. There are no screeching tyres (in England, tyres rarely screech, unless they're bald, or in an underground car park), no smoke, no gunshots. Other police cars don't veer onto the road, throw down caltrops and park in a v-formation with riot shotguns nestled in their shoulder. Jones and Bowyer don't even have to drive hard, not really. They're in a Range Rover. The Range Rover is big, but it's really fast, when it wants to be. The two kids (they're no more than kids, certainly) are in a Vauxhall Nova, and an older model at that.

  Jones is driving. It's not a gender-thing that Bowyer isn't behind the wheel. Jones just has a couple of years in the force on her.

  He's in a bad mood because his balls are throbbing with unfulfilled hope and he's chasing two arseholes in a stolen Nova through the black, endless lines that run all through the fenlands. To the south is Cambridge, to the north Wisbech and Lincoln. To the west, Peterborough, and further to the east, Norwich. The Nova goes north, toward Wisbech and the town called King's Lynn that everyone just calls Lynn. Jones, working out in the fens, thinks that's fair enough. There isn't a King, and if there was he wouldn't care for him, either. He'd vote independence for Wales all the way and be happy to live back home, speak Welsh and never set foot on English soil again. But he really wants to fuck Bowyer, too, and the arseholes in the Nova have screwed that up for him.

  So he drives hard up behind, backs off maybe five feet, hard up again, never more than ten feet from the car. Little wankers refuse to pull over, too, and that winds him up even more.

  Bowyer doesn't complain. In a city, they might be pushing their luck. Criminals have rights. Pedestrians are sacred. Police cars run people down, once in a while, when traffic police get over zealous. Those policemen and women get fucked, then they get canned, then they end up chewed up, spat out, working in some shit desk job or a carrot factory or something. Maybe rightly, maybe wrongly. The point, Jones figures, is that they're here, not there. Bowyer's cool with whatever call Jones makes, and the kids aren't pulling over, even for the lights and the siren which Jones hits.

  The siren's probably loud miles away. Sound travels out here on the flats, in the cold still night. Jones doesn't, at this point, give a fuck. The little shits are driving as hard as the car will let them, and not giving up.

  'Nudge 'em?'

  Jones smiles. He really likes Bowyer.

  It's a Range Rover against a Nova. No big deal.

  The trouble isn't the size of the car, an unfair match, but the ditches that run alongside most of these country roads. Jones and Bowyer just aren't used to the landscape.

  Jones taps the Nova. The right front bumper against the left rear bumper of the stolen car. He doesn't give much thought to consequences. It might as well be a kid's Wellington boot popping a slug.

  The Nova swerves, back end going right until the front end is facing the Range Rover
. Jones' reflexes are good, and he's had a ton of training and experience behind the wheel that the kids just haven't got.

  They'll never get it, either.

  The Range Rover's stopping, but the Nova hops, just enough, as it hits the verge. Another tap from the Rover, more due to the Nova hopping up than Jones being incompetent.

  The small car turns so that the bottom is where the top should be. The kids are probably hurt, Jones figures, but he thinks they deserve a broken bone or two.

  'Ha...' says Jones. Happy enough, now, because upside-down cars are as useless as upside-down tortoises.

  But the Nova slides away into the wall of darkness beside the police car's beams, and for a second Jones loses sight of it.

  'Shit,' says Bowyer, on the wrong side, but looking past Jones' shoulder and not at the headlights. She sees the little car's headed down a slope, into the water.

  People die like that, and quickly.

  The Range Rover stops, and they're both out and after the sliding car. It's maybe fifteen feet down a very steep slope. The car's not tumbling, or burning, or flipping. It's not the Italian Job. It's just a Nova heading down a steep, grassy slope. It would almost be stately if it hadn't been a Nova.

  There's water down the bottom of that slope. Neither Jones nor Bowyer knows how deep the water goes, but they can tell it is water from the shining black surface.

  The car hits the water upside down when Bowyer's still sliding down the slope on her arse. She fucks it up, though, and tries to dig her heel into the dirt beneath the grass. She flips forward and her face hits the grass, then after another turn, she slams into the water.

  'Rachel!'

  Jones hardly ever calls Bowyer 'Rachel', and never in front of anyone. He's panicked, though. The car's stationary. The windows are underwater, but it's heavy enough and resting on the bottom of this canal, or dip, or tributary, whatever it is. Rachel's not so heavy. If anything, she's petite. And the water isn't still, dead, like it looks in the meagre light. It's flowing, and taking Rachel Bowyer's oddly twisted form along with it.