Chapter 65
The path up the hill toward the Garden of Eternal Rest is a pale ribbon in the moonlight. Bogdan offers his arm and Elizabeth takes it.
“Stephen is not well?” says Bogdan.
“No, dear, he’s not well.”
“You put something in his coffee, I think? When we left?”
“We’re all on pills for something.”
Bogdan nods; he understands.
They walk past the bench where Bernard Cottle spends most of his days.
Elizabeth has been thinking some more about Bernard, has had to under the circumstances.
She always gets the sensation that he is keeping guard for the cemetery.
That he’s somehow on sentry duty on his bench.
He won’t go in, but he’s never far away.
What does Bernard lose if the development goes ahead?
She’ll have to speak to him at some point, or, perhaps better, ask Ron and Ibrahim to speak to him.
Which might mean tiptoeing around Joyce.
“He hasn’t played chess in a long time, Bogdan. That was nice to see.”
“He is good. He was a tough player for me.”
They have reached the iron gates of the Garden of Eternal Rest. Bogdan pushes one of them open and guides Elizabeth through into the cemetery.
“You must be quite the player yourself?”
“Chess is easy,” says Bogdan, continuing the walk between the lines of graves and now flicking on a torch. “Just always make the best move.”
“Well, I suppose,” says Elizabeth. “I’ve never quite thought about it like that. But what if you don’t know what the best move is?”
“Then you lose.” He leads her on for a few more paces before stopping by an old grave in the top corner.
“You said I can trust you, okay?” says Bogdan.
“Implicitly,” says Elizabeth.
“Even though you are really called Elizabeth, because I see bills in the study?”
“Sorry,” says Elizabeth. “But other than that, implicitly.”
“Is okay, whatever you need to do. But if I show you something, you don’t tell the police, you don’t tell no one?”
“You have my word.”
Bogdan nods. “You sit while I dig.”
It is a pleasant evening to sit on the steps of a statue of Jesus Christ, and Elizabeth watches very happily as Bogdan, over to her left, starts digging the grave in the faint torchlight.
She wonders what he might have uncovered.
What secret was he about to reveal? She goes through the possibilities in her head.
The most obvious answer was money. There would be a suitcase, or a canvas sports bag, and Bogdan would heave it out and lay it at her feet.
Banknotes, gold, perhaps, a haul, buried by goodness knows who, and goodness knows when.
And a big haul too, or why has Bogdan dragged her up here in the middle of the night?
Enough for someone to kill for? A couple thousand and surely Bogdan would just have taken it?
Finders keepers, no harm done. But a suitcase full of fifties, well, that would—
“Okay, you come see,” says Bogdan, standing by the grave, spade now over his shoulder.
Elizabeth pushes herself up, walks over to the grave, and sees what Bogdan saw the morning that Ian Ventham was murdered.
She supposes that of all the things to find in a grave, a body should be the least surprising.
But as Bogdan’s torch plays over the bones and the coffin lid on which they rest, she has to admit this wasn’t what she had been expecting.
“You thought money, right?” says Bogdan. “Maybe I found some money or something, and didn’t know what to do?”
She nods. Money or something. Bogdan is very good.
“I know. Sorry, no money. Would have been good. Instead, bones. Bones inside the coffin. Other bones, different bones, outside the coffin.”
“And you found these yesterday, Bogdan?”
“Just when Ian was killed, yes. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to think a couple of days. Maybe it’s nothing, I think?”
“I’m afraid it’s probably something, Bogdan,” says Elizabeth.
“Yes, maybe is something,” he agrees.
Elizabeth sits now, dangling her feet into the grave. She stamps down on the lid of the coffin. “So you opened the coffin?”
“I thought was best. To check.”
“Quite right,” agrees Elizabeth. “And you’re sure it’s a different body in there?”
Bogdan jumps into the grave with the torch, and pulls away part of the coffin lid, exposing the bones inside. “Yes. Bones where bones should be. Much older.”
Elizabeth nods, thinking. “So two bodies. One where it belongs, and another, much newer, where it doesn’t belong?”
“Yes. Maybe I should have told police, but I don’t know. You know how the police are.”
“I do know, Bogdan. You did the right thing coming to me. At some point we might need to talk to the police, but not yet, I think.”
“So what do we do?”
“Fill it back in, Bogdan, if you wouldn’t mind? Just for the time being? Give me some thinking time.”
“I dig, I fill in, I dig, I fill in. Whatever you need, until the job is done, Elizabeth.”
“We are birds of a feather, Bogdan,” she says, thinking she must call Austin. He’ll know what to do with all this.
She looks down toward the lights of the village. Mostly off now, but Ibrahim’s light is shining bright. He’ll be working away. Good man.
She looks back at Bogdan, shoveling earth into the grave, covered in dirt and sweating in the moonlight. Sliding a broken coffin lid back over one body while carefully avoiding disturbing another body. She thinks this is absolutely the sort of son she would like to have had.