Twist of Fate Read online

  Also by D.L. Mark

  The Guest House

  Into the Woods

  As D.M. Mark

  The Zealot’s Bones

  As David Mark

  Anatomy of a Heretic

  The Burying Ground

  A Rush of Blood

  Borrowed Time

  Suspicious Minds

  Cages

  The Whispering Dead

  The Ds Aector McAvoy Series

  Darkness Falls

  Dark Winter

  Original Skin

  Sorrow Bound

  Taking Pity

  Dead Pretty

  Cruel Mercy

  Scorched Earth

  Cold Bones

  Past Life

  Blind Justice

  TWIST OF FATE

  D.L. Mark

  An Aries book

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2023 by Head of Zeus Ltd, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © D.L. Mark, 2023

  The moral right of D.L. Mark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PB): 9781803287744

  ISBN (E): 9781803287720

  Cover design: Mark Swan (kid-ethic)

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  To my afternoon delights … Paulene, Merja, Rebecca, Tricia, the Lindas, Anne, Iris, Dorothy, Kim, Marguerite, Jane, Christine, Emma and the Goldster gang. You mean the world to me.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Thirty Years Ago

  Part One

  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

  Part Two

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  ‘…a roaring lion fiercely threatened to tear him with its bloody teeth: then a bellowing bull dug up the earth with its hoofs and drove its gory horn into the ground; or a bear, gnashing its teeth and striking violently with either paw alternately, threatened him with blows…’

  Extract from Felix’s Vita S Guthlaci, eighth century

  Thirty Years Ago

  The Church of St Wendreth, Little Mercy, Cambridgeshire

  There are two of them. A him and a her. Neither of them should be here. They have partners waiting for them at home. Another him. Another her. They have responsibilities. Duties. Lives.

  He’s Sam.

  She’s Marguerite.

  From here, in this light, it’s hard to see where he starts and she ends. Their parameters are hazy, ill-defined; their forms slithering and interweaving in unions of limb and hair and spit. They move together like eels in a bag: all muscle and sinew and slime. In places he is her. She thrills to his touch: mould as damp clay beneath the firm ministrations of his palms.

  Guiltless, wanton, they press against one another. Paw and claw and smear and lick. They grasp for one another as if looking for answers within one another’s flesh.

  Sam and Marguerite will die tonight.

  They won’t die well.

  *

  The building in which they shelter is no bigger than an outside toilet, its walls a collage of mismatched bricks and rotten wood. It’s tucked into the ‘L’ of the low stone wall that surrounds the little church – itself encircled by a ring of ancient yew trees, their sodden leaves and tatty branches forming a scruffy canopy overhead. She hadn’t known it was here. Had just held his hand and she had followed, meekly, as he shone the light from his phone down the pitted path and made his way towards the little church with its iron railings and big stone walls, its stained glass and listing headstones.

  He’d seemed confident. Sure-footed.

  He’s been here before.

  *

  Take them off, he says, kicking at her mud-caked walking boots. I need to get to you…

  She shivers. Shifts her weight, the cold air and the strong cider causing her world to softly spin. She feels dampness soaking through the seat of her jeans. Does as she is told and enjoys the lash of cold air across her exposed skin. Enjoys the smell of him as he begins to slip out of his clothes.

  She splays her hand and reaches behind her for support. Pushes her palm down into a mound of cut turf. She drifts into him. Searches for him. He’s not handsome, not really, but there’s something about him. Something fresh and exciting. Something bigger than her little terraced house and her dying Vauxhall Nova and the bills and bills and bills. Something more than her boring bloody husband. She reaches up, grass and dirt upon her palm. Touches his cheek. His face, inches from hers, is damp. Pinkishly warm, like the belly of a cooked crab. His mouth, opening into hers, is aromatic with bourbon, with garlic, with the perfume and lip gloss of her face and her neck.

  There is a fleeting contact; a dragonfly upon still water, as his embouchure forms the soft ‘f’ of safe. He is holding her the way she needs, his arms two thick plaits of rope around her waist and one hand a starfish against her back. She cannot fall. She is anchored here, pressed to him. She thinks for a moment of fossils and of wings, of brachiopods and footprints in ancient stone. She wonders what would become of their bodies if they could be left undisturbed. Has a fleeting image of their mortal remains becoming stone, their edges blurred; a monolith built of their fused forms.

  Where are you? he asks, and his features are so close to hers that she feels dizzy searching for his eyes. She blinks, and he withdraws a little, as if chastened.

  Your mind, he asks. Where did you go?

  I was thinking of stones, she says. Fossils. I’d like it if we turned to stone together. Have you seen the shapes barnacles leave on rocks? Or the patterns of leaf skeletons in soft rock? I’d like us to be like that. Do you think if we lie down long enough, we could just sink into the ground and it wouldn’t matter any more? We’d just be together. One entity…

  She stops talking, irritated at her own inability to precisely articulate her thoughts. Since meeting him she has become increasingly aware of the gulf between emotion and language. She occasionally feels that her declarations of love will sound asinine to his ears. It is as if the language of her passion necessitates a more physical, demonstrative depiction. Sometimes she longs to crush a peach within her hand and hold it to his lips for him to lick. She wants to shake apples from a tree by swinging on the branches. Wants to say… I love you this much.

  Like towels, he says, twitching a smile. Neat, hotel towels, stacked on top of one another. We’d be like that. It’s a nice picture.

  She smiles, her tongue poking out between her teeth and her nose wrinkling. He has told her before that her smile was the first thing he loved about her. She likes this lie. Of all the lies he tells her, it is the one she is happiest to believe.

  Sam leans forward to stroke the tip of his nose against her warm, soft cheek. She raises her head to allow him the room to kiss the part of her neck he likes best. He runs his tongue along the fine, delicate bone beneath her throat. He has taken one hand in his and he closes his palm around her wrist so he can feel the quickening of her pulse.

  *

  Abruptly, he cocks his head: a gun dog hearing the fall of a bird. She looks at him quizzically, wanting his mouth back upon hers.

  Did you hear something? he whispers.

  I was in the moment.

  He listens. It’s the faintest of sounds. It’s a soft, unctuous sort of a sound. Gloopy. Moist.

  Is somebody there? she asks, quietly, her face so close to his that their noses almost touch. You said there would be nobody here…

  It’s fine, he promises. Maybe a walker. Got lost. Made it home late…

  It’s gone midnight, Sam.

  He frowns, displeased at this sudden interruption. He listens again. A squelching, sucking, rhythm, like footsteps through thick mud.

  I’ll go see, he says, without enthusiasm.

  No, stay here, she protests. If they see you…

  I’ll be quick, he says. I can’t concentrate. The car, remember? If somebody nabs it…

  There’s no mistaking the sound now. He can hear the sound of mud slapping on mud
. Out there. Beyond the small, low church, with its old timbers and its patterned glass and its monuments to the countless climbers who lost in their battles with the elements. Out there, in the little graveyard with the old bones and the damp tombs and petals bright as blood.

  I’ll be quick, he says, and slips from her embrace.

  Sam…

  He pushes open the rotten wooden door and steps out into the darkness.

  *

  He regrets his decision almost as soon as he has extricated himself from her grasp. He’s not afraid of the dark. Doesn’t mind graveyards. Doesn’t believe in ghosts. But he is afraid of discovery. Exposure. Unwittingly he twiddles the wedding ring he always transfers to his right hand when he ventures out for their dalliances. Runs through some potential lies.

  I was out for a walk…

  Had a few too many…

  Needed some air…

  He holds his breath as he moves across the wet grass. The moon is almost full tonight, and it casts an eerie, bone-white light into the blackness. He’s in the oldest part of the churchyard. Big Gothic monuments and mossy headstones, sticking out from the long grass and the dead leaves like shark teeth. He follows the sound as if hypnotised. He guides himself through the darkness with his hands, his fingers touching smooth stone, slimy stone, crumbling stone. He squints at names. Dates of birth, dates of death. Runs the pads of his fingers through the curve of an ‘r’; some Latin inscription bemoaning the passing of a much-loved father, son, vicar of this parish…

  The noise grows louder.

  Suck, squelch, pull, suck, squelch, pull: a sensuous, dirty sort of a noise.

  He crouches low. Runs, soundlessly, to the church wall. Looks back at the little groundsman’s hut where he has left the woman he thinks he might like more than any of the others. Feels silly. Forty-three years old. A successful quantity surveyor. Owner of a four-bedroomed house with a grand view. Jeep Cherokee. Big telly and a hot tub. Three kids and a stepbrat and a plump little wife who doesn’t give him more trouble than he can handle. Too old and too important to be scurrying about in the dark, investigating noises while a perfectly decent pair of tits grows cold not twenty feet away…

  He peers around the wall of the church. Peeks out; a naughty child seeing whether the coast is clear before sneaking out with his pals. He squints, trying to get his bearings.

  His gaze slides down. He blinks, eyes like the shutter on an old camera. It takes him a moment to process what he is looking at.

  A thin figure is bent over between two graves, plunging a shovel into the soft, wet earth. They are working in a fervour, their movements quick and practised. Their lower half is eclipsed by a black headstone with a curved top. The shadows cast by the screen of trees ripples the blackness around the figure, making it seem to Sam as though they are at the centre of some eddying, shifting collage; a spinning top painted in different shades of black and grey and darkness.

  He steps back, unable to help himself. A gasp escapes his throat. His fingers contract, burrowing into his palms. Adrenaline courses through him. His head fills with a muddle of words and pictures.

  Grave robber, he thinks, unbidden. Burke and Hare. Dr Knox. Fresh cadavers. Leathery skin.

  His mind fills with pictures. Intestines, unspooling like ropes; big purple-grey innards; muscles and sinews and tendons exposed, pliers tugging at cartilage, electrodes pulsing against dead flesh…

  He stops himself. Bites down hard. Begins to move away. He wants no part of this.

  Time to go, he tells himself. Slip away. Make a call later, if you must. Nothing for you here…

  He looks back to the groundskeeper’s hut. Pictures her inside. Shivering. Scared. Waiting. Hoping.

  He would like to leave her. Would like to walk briskly between the headstones and across the grass towards the lych-gate. Would like to run for his car. To drive home in the warm blue confines of his big, safe Jeep. Wants to drink brandy in front of his big TV then go upstairs and kiss the wife. But he can’t. He’s willing to be thought of as an occasional prick, but she doesn’t deserve to be left alone. Doesn’t deserve to risk discovery by the sort of person who digs up graves in the dead of night.

  He listens, carefully.

  The digging has stopped.

  Sam suddenly realises how cold he is. Cold and damp. It’s not quite raining but the air is misty, and his fleecy jacket is rimed with tiny drops of moisture. He pushes his hand through his sparse hair. It comes away wet. His breath gathers about his face. It looks somehow ghost-like as it clings to his skin.

  He tries to remember what happened to the girls. Which came home and which did not. Finds his head filling with memories of Catherine and what she became the second he stuck a fucking wedding ring on her finger.

  He walks quickly in the direction of the hut. Makes up his mind what he will do. Stick a hand over her mouth so she can’t shout. Can’t scream. Tell her with your eyes that this isn’t a joke.

  Not a sound, laddo, not a fucking sound.

  He looks over his shoulder. Sees movement, as if the shadows are becoming flesh.

  A small, pitiful yelp erupts from his mouth and suddenly he is running. Slipping and slithering between the gravestones, his feet going out from under him, casting frantic glances back the way he has come, hauling himself up, grazing his hands on the rough stone of a fallen headstone, sprinting for the exit, the girl forgotten…

  *

  From the doorway of the little hut, Marguerite peers out into the darkness. She sees her man, the man she wants, the man she thinks she loves. Sees him running and falling, slithering and tumbling, squirming feebly on the grass, scrabbling backwards towards a headstone the colour of bad meat.

  She hears him shout. Hears him shriek.

  She looks left. A tall, thin figure moves between the graves. Their face is half obscured by the folds of a black hood. Watches as they stride into a circle of watery moonlight. Feels her gorge rise as she glimpses something strangely pig-like – an intimation of snout and tusk and tanned leather. Sees something that makes her think of dried-out meat and snuffling tusks and the stink of bacon fat in the bottom of the pan.

  Man, she decides. Big. Strong. Capable…

  They have something in their hand. It glints silver in the milky light.

  Her eyes pan right: a sniper glaring through a telescopic sight.

  And her Sam is on his back. He can’t seem to find his feet. She wants to help him. Wants to run to him. But the fear holds her where she stands, one fist in her mouth, biting through her skin, mouth filling with the taste of liver and pennies.

  The figure does not pause in their stride.

  She sees her man raise a hand. Hears him try to speak: shrill and alien, cracked syllables, broken by fear.

  The words carry to her on the breeze.

  No.

  Please… please…

  I’ve got kids…

  Don’t.

  She closes her eyes too late. Her mind, spiteful, makes the connection. Gleaming metal and old wood. A spade. The suck and squelch and pull. Spade. In a graveyard. Bodies. Corpses.

  Meat.

  Meat.

  Meat.

  And then she is watching the figure in black bring the shovel down into the belly of her man, cutting through skin and fat and innards as if shovelling snow.

  Her teeth meet through the flesh of her index finger. Blood trickles onto her skin, thick red caressing the blue veins at her pulse.

  Marguerite feels her heart slow. Watches her breath rise like steam. For a moment it feels as if she is fragmenting, as if she is coming apart and being put back together by a force more powerful than her own will.

  She hears herself breathing hard. Becomes aware of the dryness of her mouth; her heavy, dilated pupils; the goose pimples on her flesh.

  Marguerite steps out from her hiding place.

  The darkness engulfs her like a mouth.

  PART ONE

  1

  October 6, 6.06 p.m.

  Mount Carmel House, Thames Embankment, London

  ‘Lovely, exquisite… ex-animo, perhaps ecrasant – that is acceptable, yes? Ecrasant. Overwhelming. Not a croissant, ha, haha… that’s something else. But loveliness, yes? No? Non, perhaps… non, erm… mignon, non seduisant… ah, formidable! Yes, formidable! That is how you appear, oui, if that is the intention. However you wish to look, that is most certainly how you look. Was that wrong also? Forgive, je me ridiculise, forgive…’