In the Blood (47 page)

Not an option,
Tayte thought.
 
He left Hayne and began to walk around the back of the mausoleum, trampling beside an unfussy granite wall until he reached the corner.
 
He looked back.
 
Hayne seemed distant.
 
Then something caught Tayte’s imagination.
 
Hayne was too distant.
 
The building was too deep.
 
The plaques on the wall inside hadn’t seemed as far away as Hayne was to him now, and he was sure it hadn’t taken him anything like as many steps to reach them.

Tayte thought about Gerald Braithwaite and the writing box, reminding himself of one of the procedures Gerald said he used to determine if a box had anything to hide.
 
The Fairborne mausoleum was nothing more than a big box after all, and from where Tayte was standing this box was definitely hiding something.

He paced deliberate steps back to Hayne.
 
“Twenty-four,” he said as he arrived.

Hayne looked bewildered.

“Hold it!” Tayte shouted to Manning as he arrived back at the entrance to see him reaching a key towards the lock.
 
He rushed up the steps with Hayne in tow.
 
“I need to go back inside.”

Manning froze as Tayte grabbed the handle and threw the door open.
 
He walked into darkness and a torch flicked on behind him, shortly followed by the main lights.
 
Tayte stared at the marble slab on the far wall, beyond the sarcophagus in the central recess.
 
It had struck him as being a little too plain for its surroundings; no engravings and seemingly no functional purpose.
 
He counted his paces towards the slab and when he arrived he knew he was right.

“Only seventeen,” he called back.
 
“It’s seven paces short.
 
There must be another chamber.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

W
ith just under forty minutes to spare before his scheduled meeting with Simon Phillips on Durgan beach, Tayte wasn’t sure whether his pulse was hammering because he thought he was going to be late or if it was just because he’d arrived at one of those rare defining junctures that made everything he ever did worthwhile.
 
He was at the marble slab, running his fingers along the edges, looking for a way through into the chamber that every instinct in his body told him had to be on the other side.

Hayne joined him.
 
“Looks pretty solid,” he said.
 
“Are you sure you counted right?”

Tayte didn’t turn around to answer him.
 
He was on his knees now brushing his hands along the floor where it joined the slab.
 
“There’s a raised lip,” he said.
 
He looked up at the ceiling and pointed.
 
“There’s another,” he added.
 
“They’re holding the slab in place, like it’s on runners.”

“A sliding door?” Hayne said.

“Why not?
 
Whoever sealed the chamber off might have wanted access again at some point.”
 
Tayte fixed his hands on the right side of the slab and began to push.
 
It was like pushing against a brick wall - nothing gave.

Hayne was directly in front of the slab.
 
He gripped the edge with Tayte, ready to pull.
 
“Three, two, go!” he said.

This time Tayte felt something move.
 
“Again,” he said, and now he felt the slab slide a little further.
 
A dark crack appeared and he could feel the draught as he put his face to it, drawing the air in.
 
It wasn’t the best fragrance he’d ever sniffed but it was all his - he’d discovered it.
 
They heaved again and Tayte could tell by the look of disgust on Hayne’s face that the time-locked reek was far from his liking.

 
“Urgh!
 
What’s that?” Hayne said.
 
He shied away.
 
“Smells stale - like that musk aftershave I always got off my gran at Christmas.”

Tayte smiled at the idea that anyone would deliberately manufacture anything that stank like the air that was coming out from behind the slab.
 
“Earthy too,” he added, shoving at the edge of the slab again.
 
“Two key ingredients that go into making a great find.”

Manning was still with them, though he kept his distance.
 
“I’m sure her Ladyship would not approve of this,” he said.

Tayte was too focused to pay him any attention.
 
The gap was a few inches wide now and growing by the second until Hayne was able to squeeze a shoulder in.
 
He put his back into it and Tayte nearly fell over as the momentum picked up and the slab slid a couple of feet at once.
 

Hayne’s Maglite lit the way.
 
“After you.”

The gap, which was plenty wide enough for Hayne to fit through was not so accommodating for Tayte.
 
He sucked everything in and squeezed through into a narrow tunnel-like space that was dark until Hayne joined him with the torch.
 
They were standing beneath a stone door lintel.
 
Rotten wood littered the floor and the rusty hinges where the door used to be still hung out across the opening.
 
Tayte pushed the upper hinge and it broke away, falling with a dull clank onto stone steps that gave way to soft earth part-way down.
 
He was convinced he’d caught the ground moving at the edge of the torchlight.

Hayne shone the torch to the back wall, revealing a two by four matrix of empty recessed chambers.
 
The beam wandered higher then until it caught a stone angel looking down on their arrival with an uncharacteristically malevolent stare.
 
Hayne flicked the light away again to a large central granite sarcophagus that was plain sided and carried no decorative detail.
 
Both men followed the light towards it.

Standing over it they could see that the lid was covered with engraved lettering; several names and dates appeared around a central inscription.

“Now lie with them in death,” Tayte read aloud.

“Cryptic,” Hayne said.
 
He set the torch down on the sarcophagus lid with the beam facing the ceiling.
 
Dull light spread and faded across the room, re-introducing the angel who continued to watch them through unsettling eyes.
 
Beyond the point of light directly above them, the room was barely illuminated; it was like looking through a dark veil.

Around the inscriptions were the names of the interred: James and Susan Fairborne, their children, Lowenna and Allun.
 
Tayte scanned the dates and their ages at death, confirming that Lowenna had died in 1803 at the age of seventeen, giving further credence to Emily Forbes’s story.
 
Yet something about that story bothered Tayte.

“Lowenna’s child was to remain in the family,” he said, as much to himself as to Hayne.
 
“She would have known where her aunt and uncle lived and from what I’ve learnt about Lowenna, I’d say she was a very determined girl.”

Hayne’s eyes remained on the sarcophagus, taking in the details, saying nothing.

Tayte shook his head.
 
“I just can’t believe she’d kill herself and leave her child like that - her lover’s child.
 
Hendry’s murder must have been hard to take, sure, but leaving the child?
 
How could she make that decision?”
   

Hayne looked up at last.
 
“Believe me,” he said.
 
“It happens.”

Tayte couldn’t argue the point.
 
Checking the dates further, he was not surprised to learn that Lowenna’s brother, Allun, died just two years later.
 
After reading Lavender Parfitt’s death record at Simon’s flat, he’d already formed his opinion about what had become of Allun; that he died soon after Lowenna just confirmed it.

Were they both murdered?
 
Lowenna’s death made to look like suicide?

Tayte had no trouble convincing himself that he was right.
 
He now knew that James Fairborne left no heir from his marriage to Susan Forbes.
 
None of his immediate family were alive to contest his will and that made things very convenient for the man who claimed to be his brother.
 
He wondered for the first time whether this man had also ensured that was true of James’s family by his first marriage to Eleanor.

“Now lie with them in death,” Hayne said, still pondering the meaning.
 
“It’s almost like there’s something missing.
 
Something only the person who wrote it understood.”

Tayte rolled the words around in his head and suddenly got a buzz along his spine.
 
“They’re here!” he said, grabbing the torch and throwing Hayne into darkness as he flashed the beam down at the earth, scattering a confusion of bugs.

“Who’s here?”

“All of them,” Tayte said.
 
“The family I came to find.”
 
The torch beam continued to scan the ground.
 
“Now lie with them in death.
 
It can’t be about the people in the sarcophagus with James.
 
Of course he’s lying with
them.
 
That only leaves his first wife, Eleanor and their children.
 
Apart from a sister and brother-in-law, James had no other family in England.”

Hayne watched the focused torch beam cut across the earth like a laser.
 
“You think we’re standing on them?” he said.
 
He picked up his feet like he was checking his shoes for gum.

“It makes perfect sense,” Tayte said.
 
“Stick James Fairborne in here with all
his
family, out of the way and forgotten, while this other man who took everything James had keeps the penthouse.”
 

“But the inscription,” Hayne said.
 
“It reads more like some sort of punishment.”

Tayte had to agree that it intrigued him, like whatever had happened in life meant that he now had to lie with them in death.
 
He could as yet only guess what that might be.
 
He moved around the sarcophagus and continued to scan the ground towards the far wall.
 
Every fruitless sweep gave him cause to question his thinking and when he reached the wall, having seen nothing but earth and scurrying bugs, he was close to despair.
 
It wasn’t until he drew the beam back along the base of the wall that he saw something that gave him hope.

Pale light-starved ivy covered the wall.
 
Strands of almost translucent runners tangled across it like bloodless veins carrying life to colourless leaves that looked wet and pallid in the torchlight.
 
Tayte went closer and Hayne followed the light with him.

The torch beam fixed on a spear-like point, leaning away from the wall about a foot from the ground, like it had cut itself free from its ivy bonds.
 
Tayte dropped to his knees and began to tear the ivy away.
 
He held his breath as the stone point became wider.
 
Then he put the torch between his knees and with both hands he snapped the rest of the ivy away to reveal the tip of a thin grey headstone.
 
It bore an inscription, but the ivy had so completely covered it that when he tore the runners away its tendril marks stained the surface like lichen.
 

Tayte began to dig at the earth with his bare hands, shovelling soil away from the headstone.
 
Whoever was buried here had been given a proper burial and he could only imagine why the room had been filled with earth.
 
Someone had since tried to hide them, only the soil had compacted and sunk over time.
 
It occurred to Tayte that all this must have been done before the sarcophagus in the middle of the room had been set in place; before James Fairborne had died.

Tayte kept digging.
 
He was about a foot down now.
 
The engraved lettering here was free of ivy marks and barely worn, but it was clogged with dirt and still difficult to read.
 
When he thought he’d revealed enough, he stopped.
 
He sensed Hayne was right over his shoulder as he took up the torch and shone it into the hole.
 
He brushed away the dirt and random letters appeared at first, like an anagram.
 
When they took form the word that appeared was, ‘Katherine’.
 

Tayte scraped at the ivy to his right.
 
He felt a hard edge and quickly cleared the ivy away to reveal another forgotten headstone.
 
Then he did the same to his left with identical results.
 
“They’re all here!” he said.

Hayne began to dig with him and as Tayte returned his attention to Katherine Fairborne’s headstone, the date he was looking for began to appear.
 
The first part he already knew from her birth record.
 
What Tayte wanted to know was when she died.
 
If his suspicions were right he didn’t need a death record to tell him how she died.
 
He dug his nails into the engraving and with each scrape a part of him hoped he would be proved wrong.
 
He made out the words, ‘Died’ and, ‘October’ and he knew he was right.
 
A moment later he confirmed it.