Ritual Read online

  The hand-holders moved over the shingles towards the sea. Behind them, they could hear the excited Alsatians. Anna clutched David’s hand. The dogs worried her. The children followed them at a discreet distance and hid behind the sand dunes. Watching. They didn’t whisper together. They knew something interesting was about to happen. Gilly sifted sand through her fingers, waiting. Watching and waiting.

  The man and woman stood eighteen inches away from the wave fall. The water was a vibrant green, slashed with muddy seaweed. Neither of them had spoken during their walk. David looked at her come-hither eyes. He badly wanted to kiss her. And that was all. Everything had passed beyond the borders of lust. She wanted him to kiss her. But that was not all. Here was as good a place as any. With the sea’s minuet laving towards her feet.

  ‘It’s a pity you gave yourself away, Anna, I didn’t really suspect you of murder—even when I accused you in your bedroom. Not really.’

  He stroked his finger under her waiting chin.

  She interrupted him. ‘Whatever are you suggesting? That I killed Gypo? What for? When? How?’

  David was calm and patient.

  ‘Anna, don’t think I’m not flattered, I am. You killed him to save me, didn’t you? You killed him because you loved me—or wanted me—that’s right, isn’t it? Your other murders were sacrifices to the tree. That’s your altar, isn’t it? That’s the obscene part of you. Your experiments! You’re the only one who really hated Gypo. The others tolerated him—but they didn’t hate him. But Gypo had had you—and then insulted you—and you had no more use for him. I was the next one lined up for sexual battery. So I’m going to arrest you, dear, and charge you with the murder of Billy and Dian. We’ll forget about Gypo for the time being.’

  David’s gentleness deceived Anna. She smiled indulgently.

  ‘Oh, David, you are so sweet. Having me on like that. It’s a cute story, too. Who do you think really did it? Really? Come on, you can tell me. I may go in for the odd minor perversion but I couldn’t kill a butterfly. You scared me for a minute. Who did it? The idea of me killing my sister’s a bit sick, though. So who did it? I want to know!’

  Anna continued to reiterate her innocence and ask who was really responsible. There was something oblique and dark in David’s violet eyes that made her extremely nervous.

  ‘Please tell me... please...’

  ‘I think we’d better go now. I haven’t got any handcuffs with me—but I don’t think you’ll run away.’

  Avidly the children watched the grown-ups. They could see Anna remove David’s sunglasses and then kiss him coolly on the mouth. David seemed to be struggling. Anna thrust her tongue into his mouth. Her arms tugged at his neck. His eyes were shut. She continued to drag at his neck. Slowly he gave in. His knees buckled into the soft sand as she slid underneath him. They continued to kiss.

  The children were very excited. Not that they hadn’t seen displays like it before—they had—but never with a real live policeman!

  They watched David’s leg curve over her thigh. His right hand slide into the top of her brassiere. They could see his tense fingers stimulating her nipple. They couldn’t see what his left hand was doing. Only the sea observed that.

  Suddenly she arched her back and gasped softly. And then lay still.

  The Inspector stood up and said something to her. She didn’t answer but lay happily under the hot sun. He smiled down at her, said something else, and then walked away from her towards the trees.

  The children waited.

  22

  ‘Well, Mrs. Spark,’ said Inspector Coldwell. ‘Well, I’m afraid—though I rarely suffer fear—I’m afraid I’m going to be forced to charge you with bestiality—I’m pleased to say! And when we find your daughter, she will receive the same treatment. Have you anything to say? I mean, we can wait for your lawyer, if you like!’

  Mrs. Spark was remarkably unperturbed.

  ‘I’ve little to say, Inspector, little. Except your other Inspector, David Hanlin—well, I should find him, yes, I should find him, and look after him—you see, he will go mad today. Quite mad. He’s had an imaginative battering and he’s not strong enough to withstand fear—so there’s nothing left but the breakdown. I should find him. I really should!’

  David hadn’t gone far up the beach when he met a police sergeant with an eager dog.

  ‘It’s all right, sergeant. You can pick her up now. I’ve finished with her. Charge her with first degree murder! I’ll come with you. She said she wanted five minutes to herself. Cool as a cucumber, she is. She’s just lying there with all the time in the world—sunbathing.’

  David pointed to the still silhouette of Anna. The waves licked their creamy tongues towards her.

  The sergeant nodded. They moved slowly towards the sunbather. The children came out of their hiding places and followed. David was a little startled by their sudden appearance. The children had never taken their eyes off the sunbather. The dog strained at its collar. It was a sunshine day. The wound in David’s shoulder pulsed. Then he began to bleed. Badly.

  23

  The nurse is bandaging David’s arm. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Thornton is sitting on the edge of his bed and the sun is white through the window. Most of the pain has gone. A doctor hovers.

  David is talking. They are listening. He covers his eyes as he talks. His sunglasses are lying on the top of his locker while the sun creeps in wide ribbons up his chest.

  ‘There’s only one thing I don’t completely understand?’

  ‘What’s that?’ growls his super, surprisingly gently for him.

  ‘Well, Anna and I were standing on the beach, see. And then I arrested her. She smiled, took off my sunglasses and kissed me. The sun skewered my sight. I was temporarily blind. My brain seemed to haemorrhage. I must have blacked out. I do, you know, sometimes when the sun’s at its hottest. She must have forced me down into the sand with her. I was beyond anything. In a kind of nightmare. I didn’t know where I was. When I came to, I was still kissing her. Well, I stopped and put my sunglasses back on. And I looked down at her and spoke to her but she didn’t answer so I went to the trees. There I met Sergeant Wading and together we went back to arrest her. When we got back we found her with my paper-knife thrust through her right ear into her brain. She was quite dead. So I stood there and spoke to her. I asked how she could be the murderer if she was dead. I don’t remember anymore. I must have blacked out again.

  ‘All I know is she can’t have murdered Billy or Gypo. No, the murderer murdered her. But how could he? I only left her a minute. You will destroy him, won’t you? I’m sure he murdered the little girl next door to me! You see, I can’t go on any more. I’m going to be an Under Librarian on the Scilly Isles.’

  David shuts his eyes as the sun laps his chin. The doctor hands him his sunglasses. Gratefully he puts them on.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Hanlin. We’ve caught the murderer,’ Thornton said, quietly. ‘The children saw it happen. The fellow was schizophrenic. Suffered from sun madness. Most of them go nutty by moonlight but the sun got him. So don’t you worry.’

  David is very glad. He enjoys being a librarian. It is so pleasant in the white room.

  He has arrived.

  If you enjoyed reading Ritual by David Pinner you might be interested in Shades of Death by Aline Templeton, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract Shades of Death by Aline Templeton

  Prologue

  The scary, awful screaming and howling seemed further away now, though it was hard to tell because of the echoes.

  Snuffling and choking in terror, with her hand over her mouth to stifle the noise of her uncontrollable sobbing, she groped her way along in the impenetrable dark, still too frightened to use the small blue torch she had in the pocket of her thin summer dress. Her fat feet in their Start-rite sandals kept stumbling over rocks and into potholes she couldn't see; she couldn't remember how many times she had fallen, but her fleshy knees and her hands were st
icky with blood.

  She was lost now. She hadn't gone far — she couldn't have, moving so slowly — but she didn't know which way she was facing and in the caves there were these huge horrible holes you could just fall down and then they would never even find your dead body. She'd been well warned never to go in; she always just said, 'Oh, Mum, don't go on about it', but was she ever wishing now she'd done as she was told!

  It was really creepy, walking in the dark like this, but it would have been worse to let them catch her. It was the darkness that had let her escape, just like she was invisible or something. She'd cowered down, watching the flares and the lights from their torches flickering, casting giant shapeless shadows on the walls of the passage beyond, heard them yelling like savages as they rushed past. Hunting her…

  Yes, the noise was definitely further away now. She let out a long, shuddering sigh and put up her hand to wipe her eyes. Her cheeks felt stiff where the salty tears had dried.

  The silence seemed to be gathering itself together again as the animal sounds faded, until it was part of the thick, endless, terrible blackness. It was dead cold too. She pulled the blue cardie her mum had knitted tight over her dress, but it didn't help much.

  She couldn't hear them at all now, but strangely that didn't make her feel any better. There was still a faint sort of whispery sound, sort of like, well, like a huge animal breathing... She was almost scared to take the little blue torch out of her pocket and switch it on, for fear of what she might see. But then, she was scared of the dark too.

  With her groping, outstretched hands she could feel a wall in front and another beside her. She turned round, shrank further into the corner, huddling down, and took out the torch.

  When, taking a deep breath, she switched it on, the feeble pencil beam didn't go very far. She shone it round about; she was in a little, shallow sort of cave, and all there was to be seen were rocks and stones and a puddle or two. Nothing awful, nothing like — oh well, eyes or anything.

  She shuddered at the thought, then shone the torch down to look at her injuries. Both knees were badly bruised and gashed, and blood had trickled down her stocky legs on to the neat white socks which were filthy already with mud and dust. There was a huge triangular tear in her dress too. She didn't know when that had happened. Mum would kill her when she got home — she was dead fussy, was Mum.

  If she got home. Just as the thought came to her, the torch flickered and she gasped in alarm. She switched it off and it was as if her eyes were shut; she blinked them once or twice, just to make sure they were actually open. She was really scared now, really really scared, even more scared than she had been when they were after her, but in a different way.

  `Spying on our mysteries! Get the spy! Get her! Get her!' Someone had caught a glimpse of her and screamed, then they'd all started screaming like they'd gone crazy or something and she had run away in what had seemed like real terror. Then.

  But in a sort of way she hadn't quite believed it was anything but a mean, horrible game. She was used to them slagging her off and calling her names. Like 'sneak' and `snitch' when all she'd ever done was say what was true. And just suppose they'd caught her — they wouldn't have dared to hurt her, not really. Not once they'd cooled down.

  So that panic wasn't like this. This was worse, much worse. This was a cold deadly chill that seemed to be seeping into her very bones with the icy damp.

  Her teeth had started to chatter. She'd no idea where she was now. Even if her torch battery didn't run out, she could wander for ever if she took a wrong turning. She could starve to death, if she didn't pitch into one of those dreadful holes, screaming uselessly as she fell…

  But that wouldn't happen. They'd have to come back, look for her, say sorry. Or tell someone where she was, if she wasn't back for dinner time.

  Of course they'd have to. She had begun to cry again; she sniffed dolefully, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. To cheer herself up, she thought of how she'd make them pay for frightening her like this. They'd be in trouble and no mistake, once she told her mum what they'd done to her.

  But what if they didn't come back? What if they were scared she'd tell, what if they just went home and pretended they didn't know where she was? No one else even knew that the others came here.

  She wasn't going to think about that, not yet, anyway. They'll come back to find me before I count to a thousand, she told herself, trying not to hear the sound of her racing heart.

  She had reached six hundred and thirty-five when she saw it – the faint, bobbing beam of a big torch somewhere down the further passage. Only one beam, no voices. They must have separated to search for her, realised they'd have to say sorry and beg her not to tell…

  The torchlight was nearer now, shining along the passage she had escaped into, towards the mouth of her little cave. She stepped forward. 'Who's that?' she called. `I'm in here, and you'd better come and get me out or I'll tell what you all did—'

  The beam of light swung sharply round, picking her out ruthlessly, shining directly into her face. She couldn't make out who was behind it; she put up her hand to shield her eyes.

  `Who is it?' she demanded again, more shrilly this time. `I can't see you — put the light down lower.'

  But the beam didn't waver. As the person holding it advanced slowly, silently, menacingly, she took a step backwards and then another step.

  `Stop it! Stop it! You're scaring me! Who is it?'

  She turned away, trying even in that confined space to slip past, to vanish into the darkness as she had somehow managed to do before. But this time she was skewered by the dazzling light which drove her back, back into the corner she had come from.

  Deathly fear clutched at her throat so that she could hardly breathe. 'No, no,' she whimpered, turning away, burying her face in her arms against the rock face. 'No, no!'

  Something hard and heavy struck the back of her head. She knew a second of searing pain and she screamed. Then her legs buckled beneath her, the bright light faded and the darkness came surging in to swallow her up.

  Chapter One

  Lindy could sense the cave all about her, almost like a malevolent presence, as behind the others she stumbled out into it from the cramped, tortuous passageway. She could hear its echoing vastness in the hollow sounds the men's boots made on the rocky floor. The powerful beams from the miners' lamps in the helmets they wore gave only glimpses of its immensity, and currents of air from other passages and shafts and crevices whispered across her face like some slow, menacing exhalation.

  She straightened up painfully, easing her back and neck and rubbing the bruises on her plump arms and legs. Lindy wasn't built for wriggling through confined spaces, not like Doug and Ally, who were thin as whippets and lithe as eels. As was bloody Andrea, who was on her first ever caving outing too, but was loudly loving every minute of it.

  Lindy wasn't. She hated the darkness and the clammy damp and the dank smell and the crushing feeling of having hundreds of tons of earth and rocks above her head. She was muddy and wet and cold and here in the main chamber it seemed colder than ever, a deathly ice-house chill that seemed to go right through to her bones.

  From the dense shadows above, water dripped through a billion trillion pores in the limestone, a perpetual rain which had formed pale crystalline pillars or was dropping now with a sharp, delicate ringing sound into the clear stream coursing along the channel it had carved out for itself over millions and millions of years. Lindy couldn't get her mind round that sort of time.

  Doug and Ally whooped as they reached it, prancing round boulders scattered on the floor like building bricks after a giant toddler's tantrum, their lamps throwing distorted silhouettes on to the craggy walls. Andrea jumped down neatly to join them, and their high excited voices awoke echoes long-dead and better, Lindy thought uneasily, left undisturbed.

  She shuddered. Like a cathedral, Doug had told her lyrically when she'd met him at the End of Year Dinner, like some great beautiful temple
of nature, where you could feel as if you just might be the first person in the world ever to step into this secret place. Awesome, he had told her as he chatted her into signing up for the University Caving Club the following year. Looking into his bright blue eyes, she had decided there and then that she would follow him, if not to the ends, then certainly to the bottom of the earth. Now she wished she'd gone down whenever term finished and was safely at home in Middlesex instead of in this dreadful place.

  She couldn't complain that he'd hyped it. It reminded her more than anything of the description of Hell in Paradise Lost, which she'd done for A level. Something about rocks and caves and shades of death.

  Still, here at least you could stand up and walk normally, which was more than you could do in the passage she had just struggled through, where the ground rose and the roof came down without warning and you had to crawl into terrifying narrow funnels through puddles and even little streams. Or else the walls came together so that you were squeezing painfully sideways between rocks greasy with the sweat of damp while cold drips from above landed suddenly on your face like the touch of a clammy finger on your skin, but you couldn't scream, because this was what Doug and Ally had casually described as an afternoon stroll, and bloody Andrea was greeting each new torment with fetching cries of delight.

  So, gritting her teeth, she managed to say, 'Brilliant!' when Doug came back to ask her what she thought of it and help her across the stream where she was hesitantly looking for a way to cross. She joined in the laughter when Ally made a joke, but as the laughter reverberated away into the dim recesses it seemed to take on a mocking life of its own. Never, in all her eighteen years, had Lindy felt so coldly and unreasoningly afraid.