Free Taking Pity by David Mark

dot the church grounds.
    He lays his hand on the flaking paint of the gate and enters the grounds.
    Despite the solitude, it does not strike McAvoy as an eerie location. It seems quite peaceful. The gravestones in this churchyard stretch back centuries. A vast tomb stands immediately to McAvoy’s left; all black railings and angular blocks of stone. Around it, headstones jut at random angles from the spongy, deep green grass. As he walks along the short, overgrown path, McAvoy sees a tall gray angel looking down at him; face serene and shiny with rain. It stands atop a square slab and seems to survey the grounds with an air of timeless ownership. It has been here for at least two centuries. Those gray eyes witnessed the events McAvoy has come here to excavate and explore. They have seen gravestones sunk into black mud and watched soil patter down on coffin lids. They have watched grief in all its forms. Seen mourners come and go. Seen the bereaved lose interest in pulling up daffodils and weeds to then honor their loved ones with handpicked blooms. Seen the living forget the men and women beneath the ground. Seen grave markers turn green. Seen headstones crumble. Slip. Fall.
    McAvoy walks to the rear of the church, past newer, shinier headstones decorated with the odd bouquet of half-dead flowers and the occasional sad teddy bear, saturated and rotting among shingle and dirt.
    This is where it happened.
    Here, at the rear of the church.
    This is where they were found.
    McAvoy takes his notepad from his pocket and reacquaints himself with the names and timeline he jotted down in perfect shorthand as he sat squinting at the computer screen. Looks at the little map he copied from the photographs in the file. Looks, with soft eyes, at the little crosses he has drawn on the map of the graveyard, and the four corresponding names.
    Nods.
    Puts the notepad away.
    Listens to the nothingness.
    Tries to picture what happened here.
    On the night of March 29, 1966, Police Constable John Glass was alerted in Patrington to shots having been fired from the church grounds in nearby Winestead. He had presumed that this was a troublesome young man from a nearby farm cottage whom he had spoken to before about using firearms without supervision. PC Glass and a resident of Patrington drove to the scene. It was dark and beginning to snow. A short time later, PC Glass found the first body. Soon, he discovered three more. He had also found Peter Coles, sitting on a gravestone, cradling a shotgun, and mumbling about how sorry he was. Glass had arrested the lad and instructed his companion to drive to the nearest telephone and alert his superiors. Uniformed officers and a team of CID men from Beverley Police were at the scene within the hour. By morning, Peter Coles had been charged. Following his initial statement to PC Glass, he did not speak again. A search of the house he shared with his grandmother led to some unsettling discoveries. A notebook beneath his bed was filled with scribbled fantasies about the pretty, blond teen whose face he had just blown off with a shotgun. A search of an outbuilding revealed a cache of underwear he had stolen from his neighbors’ washing lines. A series of interviews with nearby villagers revealed that Peter Coles had always been a peculiar, unhinged kind of boy whose mother had left him when he was just a toddler and who had been brought up by his grandmother in one of the cottages belonging to the nearby manor house. The manor house and the surrounding farmland had been owned and operated by local businessman Clarence Winn. And Peter Coles had just killed Clarence Winn; his wife, Evelyn; his son Stephen; and his daughter, Anastasia. Only the eldest son, Vaughn, had survived the massacre, having left a day earlier to return to the North East, where he was working. Vaughn later provided identification of his mother’s and father’s bodies. His brother and sister were too disfigured by the shotgun blasts for him