Cover

Recent Titles by David Mark

Novels

THE MAUSOLEUM *

The DS Aector McAvoy Series

DARK WINTER

ORIGINAL SKIN

SORROW BOUND

TAKING PITY

A BAD DEATH

DEAD PRETTY

CRUEL MERCY

SCORCHED EARTH

COLD BONES

* available from Severn House

THE MAUSOLEUM

David Mark

Epigraph

‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’

Benjamin Franklin

PROLOGUE

October 2, 2010

The voice is brittle. Raw. The words sound as if they are being scratched into sandpaper with a coffin nail.

‘… yrja alttawaqquf … yrja wade hadd laha … ich habe keine informationen …’

The sounds rasp up and out of the old man, grinding into the dead air around his face. It seems that some invisible force is pushing on his chest. The utterances spew onto the front of his paisley pyjamas. They froth onto his stubbled, red-veined chin. They spill into the bristly caverns of his big pink ears and rain upon a woollen blanket that has taken on the appearance of an unwrapped shroud.

‘What’s he saying?’ asks the elderly lady in the high-backed chair beside the bed. She is in her early eighties. Beneath her tights, her legs are swaddled in bandages. Her feet are clad in mauve slippers, cookie-cutter holes snipped out to accommodate matching bunions. She wears a pleated skirt and pale blue jumper. She has a pleasant face and kind eyes.

‘It’s almost sad. You feel so helpless. They look at you like it’s your fault – like you should be able to make it stop. You end up feeling angry at yourself and at them and then at the whole world. You sometimes wish it would all just end.’

‘The whole world?’ asks her companion, who stands at the foot of the bed and leans on the mattress, her hands planted either side of the old man’s feet.

The lady in the chair watches her companion’s mouth as she speaks. She is deaf in one ear and has grown used to reading lips these past few years. She has a habit of imitating the words of the speaker while they talk so it seems that the room contains a faint echo.

‘The pain,’ she explains. ‘The suffering.’

‘Seems a silly wish to me. You don’t get to pick the bits that you like in life. You agree to the whole lot. Pain and suffering are part of it. And if you want to know what he’s saying, he’s asking for it to stop. Asking for the pain to end.’

‘It will soon,’ says her companion.

‘Too bloody soon. His Arabic’s terrible. German’s good. Wherever he is in his mind, he’s not having a good time. Wouldn’t be eligible to serve these days. You talk in your sleep and you’re out of the service. There were experiments with shock treatment to try and prevent it, back in the 50s. I read the files. Horrible.’