Walking With Ghosts

PART 5

The silence in the room was like nothing Josie had ever felt. It hung heavy, like an accusation of murder or a bell that chimed out every man’s doom. Unspent tears shone from each face. The more vocal were screaming threats into the killers face, but this wasn’t 24, and none of them were Jack Bauer.

The fact a child had died hadn’t even begun to sink in yet.

Josie stared at the shovels. Three of them, all encrusted with hard residue. The floor around their blades was clean. Maybe he’d cleaned them off already.

One of the uniforms said: “Where the hell would you bury anyone between York centre and here?”

Josie stared. The shovel’s were dry, pitted with old dirt. The man’s clothes were coated in orange dust and cement. She walked over to the shovels, crouched down and peered closely.

There was something else, a small blade hiding behind them. She looked around, caught Kett’s eye. “Look at this.”

He crouched down beside her. “What’s that? A… a trowel?”

“A builder’s trowel,” Josie said. “For a grave-digger?” Something deep was starting to speak to her, and not the spirits this time. It was intuition, belief, faith.

“The answer to his question,” she nodded at the cop who had wondered about any kind of burial site. “Is simple. You can’t.”

“It’s a brick trowel. And the orange reside is brick dust. This bastard’s escalated from graves to something closer to home. He’s bricked her up in the fuckin’ walls… Sir.”

Kett’s face was horrified. He stared around with a stupid look on his face. “But there aren’t any walls, Leigh. These are internal partitions, block and plasterboard.”

“I’m sure about this.” Josie said carefully. “He’d need time. And he’d need to be alone.” By now there were more than a dozen cops taking interest.

One of them said: “Basement.”

And down they went, angels dressed in combat gear and stab vests and heavy shoes. Twenty men and one woman, with their hopes and their perceptions of life hanging on a single chance. They attacked the walls with fingers and feet until their nails and knuckles were bleeding and scraped raw.

And when the cry went up that one of them had found fresh mortar they all dug it out. Blood coated the brick. There was no time to fetch tools. No time to lose. In a few minutes they had dislodged a brick. The big cops got their hands in there and pulled hard. More bricks tumbled on to the floor.

Josie was listening for any sound. Anything at all. When more bricks rained down she glimpsed feet.

“She’s there!”

The feet moved. The rest of the wall came shattering down. The cops paused for one heartfelt moment of sheer joy, a moment so great few of them would ever experience its wonder in their lives again.

It was the moment little Kayleigh Bryant opened her exhausted eyes, and said: “Hi.”