Page 28 of Their Burning Graves
‘Fine by me, although I’m hardly a teenager I’ll just have a look downstairs first.’
Ben didn’t answer, he was already making his way up the stairs.
Morgan looked at the heavily bloodstained table. That thing needed burning, no matter how much it was scrubbed they would never get all the blood out of the grains of wood. She wondered where the hell the Lawsons’ bloodied hands were. Had the killer taken them with him, or had he left them here? She crossed to the American-style fridge freezer and opened the door. Wendy had looked in here, but had she been through every drawer? She knew that she would have, she was thorough and a complete professional, but still she had been delayed getting here and it wouldn’t hurt her to take a quick peek.
Pulling out each drawer Morgan sifted through the contents with her gloved hands. Lots of joints of meat, one drawer full of fish, shellfish, every kind of fish. There was a drawer filled with pizzas, burgers, Hamwiches, God she remembered those when she was a teenager. Stan used to buy all their weekly food shop from Iceland, and he always threw in a pack of them even though she didn’t really like them. She stared at the bag, wondering if they had made them bigger, because it looked bulkier than she remembered. She looked closer, surely not, everything these days was significantly smaller not bigger. Then why was this bag so lumpy? A sickening feeling of dread filled her stomach. Grasping the bag by the corner she picked it up. It was too heavy, there was no way it was full of those funny, triangular cheesy bits of ham. There was an ordinary pink household peg holding the bag closed. Morgan lifted it fully out of the drawer and stared at it, a queasy feeling in her stomach.
Was that a drop of blood on it?
‘What are you doing?’
Morgan shrieked, jumped away from the freezer and dropped the bag with a heavy thump on the kitchen floor. The peg sprang open and flew across the tiles as the contents of the bag spilled out onto them.
‘Jesus Christ, that’s a hand,’ Ben yelled from behind Morgan.
Lying on the floor, looking out of place on the marble tiles, was a bloodied, frozen hand. Morgan nodded. It was indeed a hand, one she hoped wasn’t going to come to life and skitter across the floor on its fingertips like Thing inThe Addams Family.
Ben pushed past her and bent down to look at it, prodding it with his pen.
‘It’s solid, no wedding ring either. Sally wore one, not sure about David but I’d assume he did.’
A wave of sadness washed over Morgan. ‘Tim’s?’
She looked at the empty bag where it had been hidden inside. It had been placed in the drawer full of junk food that a typical teenager would eat. Giving the hand a wide berth, she went back to the freezer drawers.
‘Did Sally ever tell you what kind of food she loved to eat?’
She was already thinking that the other missing hands could be in different drawers hidden inside the plastic packaging.
‘I think she ate a lot of seafood; she was always trying some fad diet; we talked a lot about diets.’
Morgan was already looking through the drawer, noticing nothing in there as bulky as in the other one, but Sally was quite petite, she wasn’t going to have a huge hand.
‘Hang on, we better get CSI here to document this and let Wendy or whoever is on call go through the rest of the drawers.’
Morgan knew this, of course she did, but she was eager to see if her hunch was right. Nodding she pushed the drawer shut, closing the freezer door. She turned around to see Ben still kneeling, staring at the hand.
‘I don’t get it, why the hands? I mean what does it mean? Is it some kind of clue, a symbol, or is he just a sick bastard?’
Morgan was wracking her mind, what was that saying Sylvia used to say, something about the hand of God? It was that long ago she couldn’t remember exactly – being judged by the hand of God maybe?
‘My mum used to say they’d been dealt the hand of God when she was talking about people sometimes, but I have no idea what she meant. Have you heard of that saying?’
Ben shrugged. Standing upright his knees creaked loudly in the silence of the kitchen.
‘What, like a religious thing?’
She looked down at her own hand, slender fingers with painted black nails as Goth-like as she could get whilst on duty, along with her neat eyeliner wings.
‘Maybe, we could ask Father Theo, he might know.’
‘I thought you disliked him more than my beef stew?’
‘He’s not that bad, and your stew would be okay if you made it in a slow cooker instead of the oven. My teeth aren’t tough enough to chew through it on a good day.’
Ben smiled at her. ‘Father Theo, I suppose he might know something. Do you want to go and pay him a visit whilst I check out Tim’s bedroom and wait for CSI to arrive?’
‘What, as in you’re going to stay here and stare at that hand until there’s a free unit? You’re not going to delegate it to me to sit and wait?’
