The fifth grave, p.1
The Fifth Grave, page 1
part #1 of DCI Jacob Series
THE FIFTH GRAVE
(A DCI Jacob Mystery)
Rob Jones
Other Titles by the Same Author
The DCI Jacob Mystery Series
The Fifth Grave (A DCI Jacob Mystery)
The Joe Hawke Series
The Vault of Poseidon (Joe Hawke #1)
Thunder God (Joe Hawke #2)
The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke #3)
The Curse of Medusa (Joe Hawke #4)
Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke #5)
The Aztec Prophecy (Joe Hawke #6)
The Secret of Atlantis (Joe Hawke #7)
The Lost City (Joe Hawke #8)
The Sword of Fire (Joe Hawke #9)
The King’s Tomb (Joe Hawke #10)
Land of the Gods (Joe Hawke #11)
The Cairo Sloane Series
Plagues of the Seven Angels (Cairo Sloane #1)
The Avalon Adventure Series
The Hunt for Shambhala (An Avalon Adventure #1)
Treasure of Babylon (An Avalon Adventure #2)
The Raiders Series
The Raiders (The Raiders #1)
The Harry Bane Thriller Series
The Armageddon Protocol (A Harry Bane Thriller #1)
COMING SOON
The Orpheus Legacy (Joe Hawke #12)
The Sanctuary (A DCI Jacob Mystery)
Visit Rob on the links below for all the latest news and information:
Email: robjonesnovels@gmail.com
Twitter: @AuthorRobJones
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Website: www.robjonesnovels.com
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
—Dostoyevsky
“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
—Hegel
PROLOGUE
Wiltshire Downs, 1992
The young woman scrambled through dead leaves and branches, scratching her arms on a wild blackberry bush as she staggered deeper into the woods. With her heart pounding and her breath clouding in the cold, dark air, she scanned the trees for a way to escape the terror now closing in behind her.
She ran forward once again, the brambles and holly whipping at her arms and legs as she tried to find a path to salvation. Turning, she saw he was still there, closer than ever – stalking forward through the night, made into a silhouette by the blazing fire burning at his back.
Her head swam with the drugs and everything she saw was distorted by blurred vision. For a moment she thought she saw the headlights of a car, a flash of hope – but what would a car be doing all the way out here? Then she realised it was the moon, rising in the eastern sky above the ancient woods, doubled by her inability to focus properly.
Not knowing what else to do, she ran towards it anyway. Perhaps she could hide somewhere further ahead among the trees with the spirits of the dead. With luck, her pursuer would stumble into one of the muddy ditches that were obscured deep in the misty understory and die before he found her.
She clambered up a rise until she was at the highest elevation but her view was still blocked by the dense woodland and her failing eyes. A jackhammer heart thumped against her ribcage as she scanned the trees for another escape route. Was it better to run or hide?
Spying a jumble of logs freshly cut from the carcass of a felled tree, she clambered down behind them and prayed for a miracle. Her breathing slowed and her mind raced. How had it come to this? She thought she knew him. She thought she’d known them all.
She was one of them once – a part of all this. But now, the excitement had decomposed to terror, the exhilaration they had known together had rotted away into the horror of being hunted like a lame vixen cowering in a covert. For a moment she wondered if he could be reasoned with, but then the moonlight reflected off the blade in his hand and she saw he was no longer the man she had once known. He was someone else now, or something else. She should have known better.
“I’m going to kill you, witch!” His voice split the autumn air like steel. Cold, emotionless and, she realised with panic, a faint tinge of pleasure. He was enjoying tracking her, knife in hand. The realisation struck her like a fist – as far as he was concerned she was no longer the woman he had known, but simply prey.
She wanted to scream out and tell him to leave her alone, but she knew the futility of doing so and that it would only give her away. Would the others come to her rescue, or would they join the hunt? If she wanted to live to see another sunrise, she had to fight the urge and stay silent.
She watched as he struggled through the dormant bracken and cottongrass and cursed her name to the moon. He was drawing closer now. Hiding was a mistake and she felt her pulse quicken as she stared at the trees, searching for a way out of this nightmare.
She felt the energy draining from her body as the man stalked ever closer, and now as she spied on him he started to transform into some kind of chimera – or was it just the drugs coursing through her bloodstream? Her mind drowned with confusion and fear. Perhaps they had done this to her, given something to her to stop her getting away, to sharpen their sadistic pursuit of her?
Now, as the deranged hunter drew nearer, the adrenaline pumping hard inside her gave a moment of lucidity and her mind raced with thoughts of her family. Her mother and father safe at home in the warm, so near and yet so far. How could she have been so stupid to end up like this? She closed her eyes and mumbled a hopeless prayer.
“Getting closer, witch!” The words leapt from his spit-flecked lips like needles.
She clambered out of the log pile and made a dash for it down the northern slope of the ridge. Ahead she thought she saw a road and headed towards it, but the man behind her was faster, stronger, more agile. She knew that only too well. Now he was upon her, swearing and cursing as he made his way down the bank, stopping only to kick his leg free of some muddy leaf-strewn ground.
“We’re going to burn the witch...” he said, louder now and almost hysterical. “You can finally be with your sisters.”
Almost at the edge of the woodland, she felt a heavy smack on the back of her head and fell forward, tripping on an exposed root and going down into a filthy ditch where she struck her head again on a half-buried rock. In the mulch and leaves again, she saw stars and realised he must have hit her on the head with a rock. But maybe, she dreamed, she would be safe in here.
Safe from the chimera.
From Magalos.
Stai lontano, per carità! Please, just leave me alone...
Behind her she heard the man laugh. Somewhere behind him she heard the others chanting as they danced around the fire. It was all a terrible nightmare. Nothing like this could possibly happen to her. There was a crunching sound as her pursuer trampled down the horsetail she was crawling through. Terrified by his closeness, she shut her eyes and stopped breathing.
But it was too late. She felt her heart pounding in her chest, as hard as a tenor drum and like nothing she had ever known before. Now came the dizziness – was it the terror of the night or their poison inside her? She vomited wildly and clutched at her stomach as the agony coursed through her frail body and sent tremors down her arms and legs.
She tried to cry out but no sound came. She felt herself fading away and then she saw he had found her in the darkness. Powerful arms grabbed her shoulders, turning her over in the undergrowth.
“Leave me alone!” she cried out, her voice hoarse with terror. “Please!”
She felt his hands on her as he held her down and looked at her with his dead, dark eyes. He scowled like a devil as he stared at her pleading face, and after glancing over his shoulder he raised the knife in the air. She saw the blade shine in the moonlight as he plunged it towards her, and then her world went black.
CHAPTER 1
Wiltshire Downs
Boxing Day, 26th December 2018
The wind roared across the plains from the west and howled among the tussock grasses. A light mist clung low to fallow fields iced with frost and somewhere behind a thick bank of grey clouds a weak sun struggled to light the day.
Blowing into his hands to warm them, Philip Croft glanced at his watch and decided to get moving before the world and his dog showed up. He had taken a few minutes to rest in the fields to the south of the ancient woodland, but time and tide wait for no man and he had a lot of ground to cover.
His friends were well of ahead of him by now and he had to catch up with them or they’d probably be done and dusted and get to the pub before he even started. Sipping some more tea from a thermos, he screwed the lid back down, put it back in his bag and trudged up towards the trees.
Halfway up the track a bitter wind clawed at his face like raven’s claws. He shivered and pulled down his bobble hat before waving at his friends. They were working the western edge of the woods so he decided to search the northern section near the edge of the chalk ridge.
Reaching the woods brought some relief from the northeasterly wind and after making an adjustment on his metal detector, he tucked his chin into his scarf and began slowly scanning the mulchy earth in pursuit of his treasure. With a bit of luck he’d find something before his friends and then the Christmas drinks were on them.
Philip had been detecting these woods and plains for more years than he could remember, but he’d never taken his equipment to this part of the ridge. Rich in Iron Age and Roman archaeology, the whole district offered treasures of history and gold to anyone with the desire to find them. The often harsh climate, acid soils and chalk bedrock of the downs produced a unique biodiversity.
As he swept his metal detector from side to side, the search coil assembly brushed against sedge, rock-rose and knapweed. Clustered around the woodland floor, fragile tufts of cottongrass waited patiently for warmer days when they would burst into snow-white flower, but Philip enjoyed detecting any time of year. Now, when the ground was clear but frosty, or further into the spring when the landscape blossomed with butterfly orchids and the tiny purple puff-balls of devil’s bit scabious.
With no sign of any treasure yet, he continued to go deeper into the woods. The air was cold and damp in here, and through the bare winter canopy above him, the clouds skipped across the rolling hills of the downs. They moved so fast they reminded him of a speeded-up film.
In the corner of his eye he thought he saw movement. He turned expecting to see his friends but there was nothing except one of the four notorious beech trees. Like most locals he knew all about the the beeches. The wood sustained countless thousands of trees, many of them beeches, but four of them were different from all the others. Four of them had a very bleak history indeed. Old, and massive and... he shuddered and walked in the other direction.
With the giant beech at his back, he made some adjustments to the discrimination setting on the detector. It was a new present he’d received yesterday and he was still getting used to it. He tweaked it again, varying the quantity of metal it would pick up, and lowering the sensitivity due to the increased mineralisation of the immediate area. After a few phantom signals, he made the decision to push on to the northern fringes of the woodland.
With the end of the woods almost in sight and the snow-capped roofs of the Langfords on the horizon, he began to sweep the coil around the base of a much younger beech tree. No chance of disturbing anything nasty under this one.
But then he heard it.
The detector started to whine and bleep – he had found metal at last.
As he crouched down on his knees in the mud and dead leaves, he set the detector down and reached for his bag. Trees stripped of their foliage by the winter winds loomed precariously above his head as he pulled out his trusty pinpointer. He used this to refine his search and speed up his recovery time after the main detector unit had alerted him to the presence of metal.
He swept the pinpointer over the earth and his mind conjured images of Roman coins and Iron Age relics, or even more lucrative Anglo-Saxon jewellery. A Roman Road cut right through the centre of these woods, carrying on to the Great Ridge Wood further to the west. With so much history passing over this spot, he knew the chances of a good find were high. The notion of finding a hoard of precious coins quickened his heart.
Then the pinpointer failed. He cursed and searched his bag for a new nine volt battery. Despite the cold, he changed it with nimble fingers and the device squawked again as it picked up the signal. This time he passed it over the area more carefully and managed to isolate the signal to a few square inches. Whatever he had found, it was tucked away deep in among the roots of the beech, where they disappeared down into the crisp red leaves and the damp loam soil below.
Fumbling for his trowl, he began to dig down into the earth in between some of the gnarled frost-bitten roots, his breath clouding in the air in front of his face as he dug. Working his way well down into the soil around a foot deep, he saw the dull glint of a mud-caked ring. Gold – it was certainly gold.
He moved the trowl away and reached his hand towards the precious treasure. When he finally touched the metal, he realised with horror that the ring was still attached to a brittle, bony finger.
Revulsion drove him away from the grim discovery and he thought for a moment he might be dreaming. Had he really seen this or was his mind playing tricks on him? A second glimpse of the shrivelled, skeletal finger gave him his answer. Turning away from the tree in disgust, he tripped over his bag and fell back onto the frozen ground. He gasped for air, unable to believe what had just happened. Staring up at the monstrous, towering nightmare of bare, twisted branches receding in the falling snow, weathered by endless millennia of bitter winds, his head began to swim.
He had to tell someone.
His friends.
The police.
He called out for the others but there was no reply. They must have moved further to the west and were out of earshot. Reaching for his phone, he cursed when he felt the empty pocket. He always left it in the car to minimise phantom signals from its metal housing, plus signal coverage in the woods was patchy at best anyway. Hurriedly packing his equipment back up into his bag, he turned away from the beech tree and headed back through the woods to his car.
CHAPTER 2
Thirty miles to the north, Detective Chief Inspector Tom Jacob recalled the police psychologist’s words with disdain as he stirred the milk into his tea. Watching the low fat milk cloud up in the black tea, his mind drifted back to the tense conversation from the week before.
Trauma.
Grieving.
Guilt.
He sighed and finished stirring the creamy emulsion, turning the tea a smooth tan colour all ready to drink. Lifting his eyes to the window, he saw the world had changed overnight. A crisp frosting of snow from a light fall the night before had turned his garden white, but the weather wasn’t cold enough to freeze his river. He followed its path as it meandered through the fields and into his garden. Flowing directly beneath the kitchen of the Old Watermill and right out the other side to the decrepit granary in the front garden, he listened to the sound of the running water as he took a sip of the tea.
A stone-curlew shrieked and wheeled in the sky, tucked its wings in behind its back and swooped down below the canopy of the trees at the end of his garden. When it was out of sight, he sipped some more of the tea and considered if the psychologist had made the right decision in advising him to return to work. Maybe he should have followed his instinct and taken some more time out to process it all.
No. His philosophy was that some things were too bleak to be recalled, but Dr Amelia Lovelace had strongly disagreed. She had told him that repressing memories, no matter how terrible, was unhealthy and bad for you. Instead, he had to talk about them, preferably with a professional, or someone close to him. A great idea, except for a couple of issues – he hated talking about himself and he had no one close to him. Not any more.
Now, he rubbed his face to determine if he could get away without shaving or not. He’d shaved two days ago, so the answer would definitely be no, but he still passed his hand over his chin and cheeks just in case.
The answer was still no.
He walked upstairs and ran hot water into the sink. The steam rose up and clouded the mirror, and after crouching a little from his usual six-foot, he squirted some shaving gel into his hands and rubbed it into a lather. After covering his face in it he wiped the steam off the mirror with the back of his hand, leaving gel smudges across his reflection. He sighed and picked up the razor. Ten days old and blunt, he hacked it against the stubble under his chin, nicking himself and drawing blood.
