Murder grove, p.1
Murder Grove, page 1
MURDER GROVE
E.V. Adamson
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022
Copyright © E.V. Adamson 2022
Designed by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2022
E.V. Adamson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008439293
Ebook Edition © August 2022 ISBN: 9780008439309
Version: 2022-07-25
Dedication
To all my Spanish friends
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by E.V. Adamson
About the Publisher
Prologue
MIA
August
We are standing in the olive grove hoping to find traces of the dead. The light shade of the perfumed trees protects us from the glare of the early morning sun. Blanca, dressed in her customary mourning clothes, her face as wrinkled as a grape left out to dry in the summer heat, grips my hand.
Despite her old age, she is strong. Her watery dark brown eyes show a determination to uncover the truth. She rasps out a sibilant whisper in Spanish, ‘Mia, my dear, with the grace of God, we will find her today.’
She doesn’t want revenge, she tells me again. All she needs are the remains of her mother so she can gather her bones together and give her the proper burial she deserves. It must have been so lonely for her, Blanca says, her poor mother shot like a dog and left to die in this stretch of dry land near the shadow of Devil’s Head.
I look up at the grotesque rock formation that juts out above us and try to make out the supposedly demonic features, but a fragment of memory from the previous night threatens to overwhelm me. I sense Blanca looking at me. She asks if I’m all right and I tell her that she isn’t to worry about me. I’m here to support her.
Her eyes scan the ground and the two-foot-deep trench dug by a mini JCB yesterday. Her mother has lain here for the past eighty-one years, her grave unmarked apart from the flowers brought by Blanca, blooms that would often be snatched or destroyed by one of the descendants of los asesinos – the murderers. Yet Blanca would not allow these small acts of barbarism to interrupt her mourning and, on finding the flowers missing or the petals macerated, she would turn up here on the edge of the once-abandoned village with a fresh supply.
The volunteers, masked and wearing gloves, pour a final cup of coffee from a shared flask, and say something I can’t hear. They go to the van and take out the tools they need: a couple of wheelbarrows, mattocks, pickaxes, buckets, shovels, a selection of brushes, large rulers and measuring squares, coloured flags, and various markers for the dead. As the archaeologists begin to work, I help Blanca into a folding chair. She wants to watch every step of the process.
She tells me that she will never forget the look in her mother’s eyes as the soldiers dragged her away or the terrible noises that came from her throat. It was worse than any matanza, the annual killing and butchery of the family pig. She has not seen her mother since that terrible day when she was five years old. She is, as she told me, alone before God: she has a great-nephew she is close to, her younger brother died years back, and she was never able to have children herself. We sit and listen to the sound of birds and the harsh strike of metal on earth. The soil here is rich in gypsum and the translucent crystals glint in the sunlight. A light breeze plays through the branches of the olive trees, whispering a tale of past horrors.
‘La pobre,’ says Blanca, looking down into the earth. ‘For the best part of life you’ve lain underground. I’ve been in mourning since the day they took you.’
I grip her hand again as the old woman’s jaw works backwards and forwards. We’ve only known one another for a matter of months, but I feel as protective towards her as if she were my own grandmother.
‘We will give her the burial she deserves,’ I say in Spanish. ‘And you can place flowers on her grave as often as you like.’
‘I hope they find her,’ she replies. ‘Once they find her, I’d be happy to die.’
Before arriving in Spain a few months back with my boyfriend Rich, I’d had an intellectual understanding of the meaning of death in Spanish culture. I’d done a degree in the language, studied the literature and painting, and my dissertation was on the concept of the duende in Lorca. ‘In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other place in the world,’ the poet had written. ‘Their profile wounds like the edge of a barber’s razor.’ Now, as the sharp blade of a pickaxe slams into the earth, I’m reminded of these words, and can feel the reality that here, in this dry corner of Spain, the dead are very much alive.
The men and women from the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) believe there could be as many as fifteen bodies here, victims of the Francoist militia during the Spanish Civil War. Blanca’s mother, a leftist, was persecuted by the falangistas for her political views. In July 1938, her head was shaved and she had been paraded through the village before being shot by the soldiers and, along with a group of other ‘troublemakers’ and ‘communists’, pushed into a makeshift trench. Her name was Esperanza – Hope. The irony is almost too much to bear.
With each bucketful of earth emptied into the wheelbarrow I’m convinced that Blanca can sense her mother’s spirit rising from the ground. At times her eyes glaze over and it seems she’s transported back into the past, enveloped by memories of being held within her mother’s embrace and smelling the milky warmth of her skin. She whispers to herself, words she wished her mother could hear: lost dreams, lost causes, lost land, lost peace, lost spirit.
Just then there’s a call from one of the archaeologists, Diego. He’s standing behind an ancient olive tree, its trunk twisted and split. He says he’s found something. But there’s something about his voice, its panicked edge, that sounds out of place on an archaeological site, even one that has a mission to dig up the dead.
‘Over here – quick!’ he shouts.
‘Is it my mother?’ Blanca cries. She doesn’t understand, she says. She was always told that her mother’s remains lay in a trench that ran parallel to the road. But perhaps that information was wrong; perhaps she does lie in the shade of the old olive tree. Have they found her mother? ‘Madre, ya voy.’
Blanca tries to push herself out of her chair, but I tell her to stay where she is. I will go and check. The volunteers throw down their tools and gather round the tree. It’s then, just as I’m letting go of Blanca’s hand, that I hear a scream. It’s one of the younger girls in the team. Perhaps she’s new, I tell myself, and it’s the first time she’s seen a skeleton. But she screams again, a high-pitched sound that splits the morning air. I see the girl staggering back, falling down onto the ground, being sick into the dry scrub.
‘What is it?’ I call out.
I take care not to disturb the trench and rush over to the olive tree. There, in the shade of its enormous branches, the volunteers recoil from what lies there. This
I can’t comprehend what I’m seeing. I try to breathe, but I feel like I’m suffocating. I steady myself by the tree. Another memory from the night before flashes into my consciousness. I’m here in the olive grove. I’m shouting. I feel possessed by something that has been building within me all year. I …
Diego interrupts my thoughts as he explains how he realized that the cooler bag full of lunch things and water bottles needed to be in the shade. He went to drop off the bag in a nook behind the olive tree when he saw something strange out of the corner of his eye. It looked as though a clutch of fingers were growing from the ground like strange, etiolated mushrooms. He did a double take, went to have a closer look and was horrified to discover that there was a hand pushing through the earth. He quickly brushed off the thin layer of topsoil and unearthed the corpse.
He crouches down and checks the pulse for the second time. He looks up and shakes his head.
‘There’s no hope,’ he says. ‘They’re cold, been dead for hours.’
I hear someone talking to me. ‘Mia, Mia – are you all right?’
I try to speak, but I can’t seem to form the words. I feel cut off from the world. I hear Blanca calling my name, asking to see her mother, and I return to her side, feel the sharp edges of her fingers on my arms. She’s crying, demanding to see the body.
‘What have you seen?’ she cries. ‘Did you see her body? Is it Esperanza?’
I kneel down by her chair and take her bony hands in mine.
‘It’s not – not your mother,’ I manage to say. ‘It’s …’ But my voice fails me. I can’t say the name because that would make the horror, the impossibility of what I’ve just witnessed, real.
I hear Diego telling one of the other volunteers that they will have to call the police. Also, they will have to close down the dig, at least for the time being. It seems as though the death was quite recent, he says. He’s no expert, but it’s likely it occurred in the last twelve hours. The body has sustained some significant injuries to the head, he adds. There’s dried blood in the hair, brain matter on the ground.
It looks as though this could be murder.
1
MIA
February, six months before
A new country. A new beginning. Just what we need, says Rich again, as we pass over the French border into Spain. I look out of the rain-streaked window and see the Pyrenees obscured by snow clouds. I turn to Rich and watch him concentrating at the wheel. The driving conditions have been awful all day – spray from lorries hitting the windscreen, reducing visibility to zero for a terrifying second or so – but this does not seem to faze Rich. He directs the Saab like an arrow on course to meet its target.
He’s been like this since the day I met him at university. Incredibly focused. Objective. A left-hand side of the brain kind of person. Apart from his obvious physical appeal – with his fine features and slim, athletic build, he’s a good-looking guy – some of my friends on my Spanish course thought we were just too different to make the relationship work long-term.
They didn’t understand that he was just the kind of man I thought I needed. He had his feet firmly planted in reality – a physicist who believed in evidence, measurements, laws of nature. He would be able to tell me the reason why the tide came in and why the stars didn’t drop out of the sky. Matter, its behaviour and motion through time, he would inform me, is the most beautiful thing in the world. Gravity. Electricity. Kinetics. Mechanics. Thermodynamics. His world was the very definition of dependability. He also told me that he’d always protect me. He was a martial arts nut. Black belt. He knew all the techniques to disarm someone. Could he kill someone, I’d asked? He’d nodded confidently, as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
‘Are you looking forward to it? Val Verde?’ he asks, brushing a strand of his long ginger hair from his face. ‘It’s a great place, you know.’
‘I can’t wait,’ I reply, not quite feeling the enthusiasm the words suggest. ‘It will be like an adventure.’
‘I know you had your doubts about it all, but after … after everything that went on, I think it will be good for you. Good for us.’
It took courage to give up our jobs in London – I was a Spanish teacher in a big comprehensive in east London, Rich a consultant in solar engineering. But Rich was right, it was the best thing to do after what we’d experienced.
I remember it was a sweltering hot day towards the end of the summer term. There was a playful atmosphere as the school began its preparations to close for the year. I was in a local café on my afternoon off, putting together a light-hearted quiz to test my students’ knowledge of Spanish-speaking celebrities when I got a text on my phone. It was from Rich. He’d been looking at Facebook and had come across a post about a girl from my school who had died. At the same moment my phone rang. It was the headmistress, Mrs Beaumann. As soon as I heard her voice I knew there was something wrong.
‘Mia, I’m afraid I’m calling with some very bad news,’ she said. ‘It’s concerning one of our students, one of your students. It’s Emily Thomas. Apparently, she just stepped out in front of a bus at a busy junction.’
The news hit me in the stomach. I had a soft spot for seventeen-year-old Emily and I’d been talking to her – what? – only an hour or so before. I’d bumped into her outside the school gates and I’d walked with her through the streets of Hackney – she was going back to her parents’ house and I was heading for the café. Our conversation centred on her plans for the future: she was excited about the possibility of training to be an actress or a dancer.
The headmistress didn’t know the circumstances of the death at that moment, but soon rumours started to circulate that it hadn’t been an accident. I knew that she was a vegan and that she refused to fly, but Emily’s friends talked of her worries about climate change and her anxieties about how we only had twelve years left before the rise in temperatures made the world uninhabitable. She couldn’t imagine a future for the planet and some people were thinking that perhaps that’s why she had decided to end it all.
Yet I couldn’t believe it had been suicide. She was a feisty character, full of life; she had dark hair, dark eyes, and indeed there was something Mediterranean about her spirit. She just wasn’t the kind of girl to end it all. Of course, I wracked my brain for any signs of depression or hints of unhappiness during our last conversation. Was it something I’d said to her? Had I responded in a way that she thought was negative or problematic? We hadn’t mentioned the environment or climate change. Perhaps not addressing the issue had been the problem? However, no matter how hard I played back that conversation – back and forth, on a never-ending loop – I couldn’t come up with anything that could explain Emily’s actions. I was left in a kind of limbo, asking myself why.
Rich and I had been talking about leaving London to do something different for years – it was one of those perennial conversations we had whenever we went away – but the shocking news of Emily Thomas’s death made the dream more of a necessity. We had to act and we had to act fast, Rich had said. We were in our mid-thirties and if we didn’t change our lives now, then when would we? It was up to us to do our bit, he added. It might not mean anything in the larger scheme of things – what with carbon emissions rising and all the rest of it – but as everyone kept saying, there’s no planet B.
And so the plan to pack in our jobs – and our lives in London – was born. When Rich’s mother, Marianne, died in August and he inherited her house, La Casa de la Luz, southern Spain seemed like the most natural destination. After all, we could rent out our flat in Hackney and the place in Almería would cost next to nothing to run due to its array of solar panels. The village, Val Verde, was off grid and full of interesting people from all around the world. Rich made a few quick trips out there to make sure all the paperwork was in order, and we couldn’t wait for our new lives to begin in February, just when England was at its most miserable. Although I never bothered with social media, Rich announced our new adventure with a picture of the spectacularly beautiful valley on Twitter and a quick post, after which he deleted his account. Of course, both of us would have our phones – the house doesn’t have a landline – but it would be great for him to step away from social media because the platforms only seemed to make him more angry.
