Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  And it was then that he struck gold. A news item popped up in his internet search regarding two schoolgirls who had gone missing from the nearby St Mary’s Convent School just weeks before Justin himself had been found. Again, it wouldn’t have registered on Chesterton’s radar at the time, because Justin Pickersleigh the perfect citizen who hardly ventured out of Hereford City was a very far cry from the man who had emerged many weeks later, who’d turned into Justin Pickersleigh, paedophile and danger to any kid who crossed his path. And in fairness to Chesterton, that had been the point when he’d lost all control of the investigation. Whether the Serious Crime Squad looking into child pornography had made the connection was another matter, but Bill was more than a little worried that nobody had bothered to relay that information back to Chesterton if they had.

  This was his personal problem with the way the modern police force was divided up into specialist task forces. When they produced results they were often spectacularly good. But Bill had been in the job long enough to have a serious respect for the man on the ground’s instincts for thinking, ‘hang on a minute, isn’t that like...?’ which was something missing from the specialist squads. Such as now. Who amongst the detectives investigating child exploitation would be making the connection with the death of a known adult trafficker?

  Bill stood and took a deep breath. The school that the missing girls were from, and the deposition site of Justin’s body, were less than two miles apart – that couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “What the hell did you do, Justin?” he asked aloud. “And I don’t like the fact that we’re less than half a mile in both cases from the Welsh border. Did you pick the school because of that? And if so, should we be calling the lads over in the Powys region and asking for their help? Because God help me, I can’t help but wonder whether there has been a deliberate attempt to blur the lines here.”

  Chapter 6

  WITH MUCH OF THE AFTERNOON still his to do with as he wished, Bill sat down under the ancient tree and opened his map out wider. Was there somewhere he could go and have a walk? Somewhere he could stretch his legs properly and work his muscles a bit? Having damaged one knee only a couple of years back, he couldn’t play sports like he used to, but he’d found the steady rhythm of walking the knee could cope with.

  He was smoothing the map out across his lap, tracing the lines of some of the marked footpaths with his finger and trying to work out a circular walk, when he got a tingling feeling. It started between his shoulder-blades where he was in contact with the old tree, but was running down into his finger. As the hair on the back of his neck started to stand up, Bill realised that the tingling increased every time he moved his finger westwards.

  Oh heck, here I go again! he thought. The logical part of him was hoping that there wasn’t another weird connection in the offing, but the spiritual side of him was already feeling a growing excitement, because having once had his eyes opened to a side of the world he’d never known existed before, other parts of his life had started to feel more than a tad mundane. Let go, his inner voice was telling him, let this feeling guide you. It’s trying to tell you something.

  He’d already realised that tempting though the hill fort just down the road looked, he’d need his full walking gear to tackle a slope like that, and there weren’t any clear paths leading up to it. So it had been as he’d moved his finger across to the next small village that the tingling had started. It was obviously a place with some history, having the remains of two castle mottes in the village and another one just to the north, but as he let his finger drift a little further westward, he instantly knew that this wasn’t where he was supposed to go. At the next village, a place blessed with not only a motte but a prehistoric standing stone as well, the tingling increased significantly. But there was something nudging him to go farther, so it wasn’t the stone that was calling to him. It wasn’t towards New Radnor, either, because as he started to trace the road in that direction, the tingling decreased until it was gone altogether at the town.

  “Okay, hint taken,” Bill grunted, then yelped, “Ouch!” as he got a jolt like static electricity as he put his finger back on the map at the village. What the heck was there around there that he was being shoved towards? There was a small country road heading north-east from there which didn’t go anywhere, but might be pleasant to walk along since it would be unlikely to carry any traffic. But he was still getting the feeling that he wasn’t quite on the spot yet. And then he saw it, off to the west was marked, ‘Quarry (dis)’, and with a sinking feeling in his gut he traced the footpath to there, the tingling reaching an almost painful intensity as his finger touched the words.

  “Oh bloody hell, I don’t like the look of that,” he sighed, turning the map over in his hands and seeing how close it was in terms of miles to both the school and to where Justin had been found. And of course it was over the border in the Powys division’s jurisdiction, even if it was only by a couple of miles. That meant that he’d have to make it look feasible that he could have just stumbled across whatever he was meant to find, because he couldn’t simply call up his own lads.

  “Maybe if I start at Kinnerton village with the standing stone and stuff, that looks reasonable,” he pondered aloud, realising that at least there he’d be likely to find somewhere where he could reasonably leave the car without blocking anyone’s way. “Then I can cross the main road and walk up that no-through-road and go up to the remains of the church at the end. It then looks more reasonable that I’d take the footpath up the slope to the woods, with the intention of coming back down to the road. There’s nothing radically abnormal about a bit of a circular walk like that.”

  But it did take him right past the quarry, which was most important. Part of him thought that if he’d been doing the walk for no other reason, then he’d have tackled the slope up towards the quarry first, because it was always easier to do the tougher bits of a walk at the start. In this instance, though, there was a part of him that very much wanted to have the chance of a nice walk before he got to the grisly bits, and it had turned into a lovely afternoon, with just a light breeze to keep him cool as he walked and barely a cloud in the sky.

  “What a shame it’s going to get mucked up at the end,” he sighed as he got back into the car.

  At Kinnerton he found a straight stretch of road where he could leave the car without inconveniencing anyone, and wandered down to have a look at the stone. Little more than a large boulder, it still gave Bill a warm feeling just being near it. This place, at least, felt wholesome and clean, and as he set off up the moderate incline of the dead-end road, he was actually enjoying himself. Somewhere up out of sight, he was sure he could hear a skylark singing, and if he was puffing a bit hard on the steep bit up to where the road made a sharp turn to the right, that was what he wanted from a walk – something to get his pulse going a bit.

  For a while the road then followed the contour of the hill before briefly dipping down into a fold of the land. That was nothing unusual in this part of the world, but looking off to his left, Bill could see straight up the tiny crease of a valley to the quarry, and just catching a glimpse of a bit of the scar the old quarry had left on the landscape was enough to send a shiver down his spine. If ever he had needed convincing that his instincts were tugging him there, then that was it, because he couldn’t even begin to count the other old stone quarries he’d passed on other walks, and none of them had made him feel like this.

  Keep going, though, he told himself firmly. The GPS on your phone will confirm your walk if anyone needs it, so let’s give them every possible reason to think this is an accidental find. God knows you won’t be able to say an apple tree told you to go there!

  And had he needed any further proof, only a third of a mile farther on, he passed another small disused quarry which he didn’t even turn a hair over. When he came to the track he needed to turn up, it was easy enough to find, being opposite a more substantial track up to a farm – again useful in that he wo
uldn’t have to justify how he had come this way, unlike if it had been knee-deep in nettles. Off to one side lay the remains of a tiny church, which he paused to take a photograph of, determined to play the innocent tourist to the hilt. By the time he’d got there, he’d decided to follow the broader but steeper track straight up to the tree-line rather than the smaller diagonal path, and then enjoy some time walking in a bit of shade. With his short hair-cut, Bill was regretting not having brought so much as a baseball cap with him, and knew that tomorrow his forehead would be definitely pink where he’d caught the sun, but then it had been far too long since he’d been out on a walk like this. What a shame it was going to end badly.

  As he finally came around the sweep of the edge of the wood, he saw that the quarry lay on the wood’s side of the track, deeply in shade now since it faced almost directly east. And yet that was what gave him a reason to go inside it, for in the low light and from out of the corner of his eye, he could have sworn he saw something white-ish fluttering. It was enough to make him stop and look harder, and with a sinking feeling he saw the signs that someone had brought a car or van into the quarry relatively recently. Something had churned up the loose shards of stone scattered across the floor of the quarry, and then he saw the track leading off to the side.

  “Oh sod it!” he muttered grimly, getting a very nasty feeling about what this was going to mean. But first he walked deeper into the quarry, carefully negotiating his way around the misshapen lumps of rocks that had been left behind as of no use by the quarrymen. It was ankle-breaking stuff if you weren’t careful, but Bill hadn’t gone beyond the first couple of big boulders before he saw what had caught his eye more clearly. It was white cloth. Or rather it had once been. Now it was tattered and grubby, but enough of its original colour was left for it to stand out against the shadow-darkened rocks, and Bill was experienced enough that he stopped and took a photo every time he could balance enough to do so. The forensic team would need to know what it had looked like in its pristine state.

  It took him longer than he expected to get closer to the cloth, and then when he could see it clearly, wished he couldn’t. Even for someone as used to crime scenes as Bill, there was something heartbreakingly tragic about the remains of the child lying in a tangled heap. You didn’t need to be a pathologist to know that she – and Bill was horribly sure it was a little girl going by the tattered ribbon in the tangled remains of hair – had come off the top of the quarry. Whether she had fallen or been thrown was another matter, and that wasn’t for him to decide.

  Sitting down on the nearest boulder, with a heavy heart Bill rang through to his colleagues, telling them to get onto their counterparts in Powys immediately.

  “Bloody hell, gov’!” Charlie Houseman swore, having been the one to pick up the phone to Bill. “Strange things do follow you around!”

  You have no idea, Bill thought wryly, then realised that Charlie was asking,

  “Is there anything we can do to help?”

  “Well there should be a spare set of keys to my Subaru in the desk drawer. I always like to leave a spare set there just in case. If a couple of you could come out and retrieve it from Kinnerton village and bring it up to the end of the track, I’d be immensely grateful. I’m sure the Powys lads would give me a lift back, but they’re probably as stretched manpower-wise as we are, if not worse, and I’d rather not have to walk all the way back down.”

  “Not a problem,” Charlie assured him. “I’m just coming off and Ray’s holding the fort, so I’ll get my mate Trev’ to give me a lift over. He’ll be chuffed to do something for a proper investigation – says life as a plumber is nothing like as exciting, though I keep telling him he wouldn’t think that if he’d seen some of the sights I have.”

  Bill smiled at Charlie’s chuckle but couldn’t raise a laugh himself, though normally he also would have found it amusing. There was something too tragic about being here for that. But then once he’d rung off, he knew that he mustn’t go any closer to the body. A proper path would have to be established, every step calculated to do the least disturbance to the site, though in truth Bill was already sure that the killer hadn’t come this way into the quarry. Whatever they found in the way of evidence would be up at the top of the quarry, of that he was positive.

  Having found his way out of the tumble of rocks to the path, he saw that the tyre marks wound along it, and knowing that he would have a long wait before anyone could get out to him, decided to walk up and see what else he might find. He was very careful to step down into the drainage gully the quarrymen or forestry workers had cut beside the track though, carefully photographing the path he was about to take as evidence that he’d not gone tramping over someone else’s footprints. Yet it only took to the turn of the track before he saw the low cottage, and this time Bill found himself swearing a good deal more strongly. That was a new padlock on the door, no doubt about that, and that meant that somebody had wanted to keep strangers out, a somebody who he was getting the sneaking feeling might turn out to be Justin Pickersleigh.

  With the local force covering the huge swath of territory of the two regions of Dyfed and Powys, and with its HQ right down in the south at Carmarthen, Bill was praying that someone was based a bit closer or he was going to be here all night. Not that he was impatient at his colleagues’ response time, it was a reality of the skinned to the bone police forces of the twenty-first century – if anything he was simply glad that he worked a more geographically manageable TPU. But he was very relieved when he started to see several sets of headlights crawling up the hill towards him as the light began to fade.

  The DS who introduced herself to Bill as Jane Stennett seemed only too glad to have a senior officer on hand, even if he was from another force, and by the time Bill had explained what he’d been doing in the area, she was looking even gladder that he was here.

  “So you think this might be connected to your case?” she sighed.

  “Well not my case, technically,” Bill admitted. “The original officer was DI Chesterton from Hereford, but then when they discovered that his victim was a paedophile, it got shunted across to the specialists and he’s not really been kept in the loop since. That was why, when I got the feeling his case and mine might be linked, I felt I wasn’t going to be stamping on his toes merely by coming out to see the deposition site. I was really just trying to see if I could see a similarity between them, because Chesterton’s vic’ and mine might have been predators, but they were after very different targets. And while Sanay Costa is about as mixed race as you can get, Justin Pickersleigh was whiter than white racially – they hardly had many similarities as victims.”

  “And did you come to any conclusion?” Jane asked, as the forensic team came labouring up the hill with their gear.

  “Horribly similar sites, though what on earth that means, I do not know,” Bill confessed. “Both places are small and ancient orchards, probably only ever planted to supply enough cider apples for the farms they were on. They sure as hell aren’t of a commercial size or quality. So whoever did for both of these men knows a thing or two about cider apples – that’s if we’re talking about one murderer, not two, and I’m still far from sure either way on that.”

  Then as the forensic team had caught their breath, “But that deposition site isn’t here – I came here just for a walk afterwards, never thinking I was going to be calling in another crime. It was only when I saw it was a child that I made the connection with the Pickersleigh case. ...Right, I’ll show you the way in and point out how far I got. This late on in the day, I’m afraid you’re going to need to set up a lot of lights,” and heard one of the team groan in anticipation of lugging the big spotlights they’d need up as well.

  Feeling a bit guilty at having probably dragged them halfway across their territory so late in the day, and possibly already at the end of their shifts, Bill felt he could at least help them with that. However, before he got that far his phone rang with a call from his own chief inspecto
r, Suzanne Gwynne, though at least it wasn’t Superintendent Williams, a man who Bill loathed with a passion.

  “Bill, what the hell have you been up to this time?” he heard her voice on the other end of the line say, though without rancour. And so once again Bill had to relay what he’d been doing out on the Welsh border on his day off.

  “Hmph. Well you’re going to pay for your keenness. We’ve had a call from the Powys DCS, and since they’re stretched even thinner than us, and there’s a fair chance of this being tied into a West Mercia case, at least as far as the initial dealing with the crime scene is concerned, you’re it, I’m afraid. Their own man will try and get to the site as fast as possible, but he’ll be a fair while, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh joy,” Bill sighed.

  “Ach, it’s your own fault! If you will go falling over bodies in your spare time...”

  “Okay, point taken, gov’, but could you do something for me, please? Would you get in touch with DI Tim Chesterton at Hereford and tell him about this? I think he deserves to know what’s going on, especially if I’m right in my suspicions about this being related to the Pickersliegh case.”