Bones In the River

by Zoe Sharp

  Queenie knew she, too, should dive out of his way but she had suddenly taken root. She curled her arms around Sky’s body as if she could protect them both by doing so. At that moment, she could no more have moved her feet than she could have flapped her arms and flown.

  Just when she began instinctively to flinch, to close her eyes and tuck in her head, she was aware of the big horse juddering to a stiff-legged halt, very like the colt did, when he was at play in the fields with his dam.

  She risked opening her eyes. The horse was standing right in front of her—towering over her, in fact. He was still blowing hard, his sides pumping like the bellows for a furnace. Sheltering Sky’s body with her own, she reached out a shaky hand for the sodden lead rope hanging loose under the horse’s whiskery chin. All the while, she murmured calming words of nonsense to him, relying on tone to get across her meaning.

  She glanced past the horse, saw Vano cradling Jackson. He had him on the surface if not yet out of the water. The big man was not moving. His limbs floated slack and there was blood on his face.

  Queenie put a hand to her mouth to cover her gasp of shock. And, as if he’d heard her, Vano glanced up sharply. He saw her standing there, with the rope to Jackson’s horse in her hands, and his expression darkened. Like he knew exactly what she’d done, by asking the horse to look after her family before his own.

  And, all at once, Queenie felt the chill of fear quiver across her limbs, as if she, too, had taken a plunge into the cold waters of the Eden.

  “Here, let me take him,” said a voice at her elbow. And Bartley reached across to take the horse from her.

  “No.” She twitched away from his hand. “I have him. Leave us be.”

  “But Queenie, darlin’. You’re pale as a ghost,” he said gently, swinging Sky up into his arms. She clung around his neck and buried her face in his shirt.

  Queenie didn’t reply, just turned and started walking slowly, clicked to the horse to walk with her. He took a moment to start moving, as if he couldn’t quite remember which order to shift his feet.

  Bartley fell into step alongside. Even looking down, she could tell he never took his eyes off her face, like he was watching her for signs of guilt. They walked the length of The Sands in silence, the four of them, until the horse had stopped shivering and going up on his toes at every sound. Until his head started to lower, nodding to each stride.

  Until the ambulance had nosed through the crowd and Jackson had been loaded inside.

  Someone came and took the Clydesdale from her then. Vaguely, she recognised him as one of the pair who’d been with Jackson when he’d threatened Bartley, up on the field—members of his clan. There were no threats now, just sober thanks.

  Queenie stood and watched them lead the big horse away without apparent recrimination. That was something, at least.

  She turned toward Bartley. Sky, she saw, was fast asleep, still cradled against him. Without needing to be told, he put his free arm around Queenie, pulled her close and held her. Without needing him to say anything, she let him.

  After a moment or so, though, she felt the tension in him that didn’t let up. She lifted her head from his shoulder, stared into his worried eyes.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What else has happened?”

  She felt his chest rise and fall on a deep breath. When he spoke it was with a hesitancy that wasn’t like him.

  “Queenie…I don’t know how to… They’ve found a body…”

  37

  It was more in hope than expectation that Nick rang the twenty-four-hour support line for the retailer of the mobile phone found with Eden Man’s body. Sure enough, his call was passed from one extension to another, with him having to repeat his explanation of who he was and what he was after to each person he spoke to.

  After the fourth—or it might have been the fifth—time of going through all the details, the frustration was making his brain throb. The guy at the other end of the line said, “No, I can’t help you with that, mate,” and just when Nick was about to hang up, he added, “but I do know someone who might be able to. Let me just check if Alex is in today.”

  Nick tucked the phone against his shoulder to muffle the awful distortion of the on-hold muzak and rubbed his eyes. They no longer felt quite lined up with the holes in his face.

  “Hello? Hello? You still there, mate?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Still here.”

  “As I thought, Alex is off this weekend.”

  “Oh, well, when—?”

  “But, under the circumstances, I think I can let you have a mobile number, eh?”

  He thanked the guy and quickly dialled. The phone rang out so long Nick was on the point of giving up when a groggy female voice answered with a bark of, “What?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m trying to contact Alex. Is he there, by any chance?”

  There was a long pause, then the voice finally said with awful precision, “‘He’?’ It sounded a lot more awake, but no less annoyed.

  Uh-oh.

  “Or she,” Nick amended quickly. “No reason at all why Alex couldn’t be female. None at all. Absolutely not.”

  There came a short laugh. “Oh, well rescued. Well, not quite but nice try, anyway.”

  “Sorry. You’re Alex, I assume?”

  “Yeah, you got me. Running on too much caffeine, not enough sleep, and a dollop of pissed off that work have given out my number on the only day off I’ve had in the last month but yeah, you go right ahead. How can I help?”

  Nick’s turn, if not to laugh, then certainly to smile before he introduced himself and ran through his spiel one more time.

  There was another long pause. But just when Nick was expecting another blow-out, Alex said, “Sorry, I was just grabbing my laptop. So, you have only a partial serial number for the phone. What about the serial number for the SIM card itself? Should be between twelve and twenty digits long.”

  She sounded completely awake now, revving. Nick checked his notes. “Ah, there wasn’t one on it, and CSI have tried switching the SIM over into a working phone but it doesn’t want to play ball, apparently.”

  “No number,” Alex murmured, almost to herself. “Must be an old one, then…”

  “We reckon it could have been in use anywhere from eight to twelve years ago.”

  “Ooh, a challenge. If you email me whatever you’ve got of the serial number from the equipment, I could run a search.”

  “Well, I’m not really supposed—”

  “Lighten up, DC. I’d bet you’re handling your searches manually, right? You give me as many parameters as you like and I can filter out a lot of the chaff, leave you with the wheatie goodness.” She paused. “Or, I can just send you a great wodge of data and let you pick through it by hand. Your choice, but it could take you weeks.”

  Nick did laugh then, not just at her tone but at the fact she used his rank as a nick-name. “OK, OK, I’m sold.”

  “Good. If I’m going to have my first-day-off-in-a-month ruined, at least it will be for something interesting.” She reeled off an email address and Nick sent the digits Ty Frost had managed to recover. “You mentioned eight to twelve years ago. Is that when the phone was first used, or last used?”

  “We think that would be when it was last used.”

  “So, you want someone who had one of our mobiles, with a serial number that matches your partial, but who’s shown no activity for at least eight years, and who hasn’t upgraded, asked for a PAC code to move their existing number to another network, or cancelled their contract,” she said. “Anything else?”

  “Males only, aged between nineteen and twenty-four.”

  “OK, that it?”

  “I think so.”

  “How do you want them sorted?”

  Nick thought for a moment. “Geographically, if that’s feasible,” he said. “Cumbria residents first.”

  “No problem. You got an email address I can send the results to?”

  Nick rattl
ed off his work email. “Alex, thank you so much. And I appreciate it’s your day off, but when do you think you might be able to get those over to me?”

  “Check your inbox, DC,” she said cheerfully. Almost on cue, Nick’s computer let out a ping to signal incoming mail.

  “Wow, that was fast.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.” Her tone was dry. “Now, your turn to do me a favour.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let me know if this leads anywhere—I don’t need the details, just the result, OK?”

  “Deal.”

  “Great. Now, sod off would you, and let me go back to sleep.”

  38

  Ty Frost was at his desk when Grace got back to the CSI office at Hunter Lane.

  He glanced up when she came in, his expression wary.

  “Are you OK?” he asked. “How…was it?”

  “Not good.” Grace put down her camera bag and dug in the end pocket of it for the memory cards she’d used at the crime scene. As she sank into the chair at her own desk, she felt the energy drain out of her body. “Oh, Ty,” she said, not troubling to hide the anguish in her voice. “Never mind run over… He looked like he’d been mauled by a bear.”

  “Ah…”

  Frost got up, looked about to speak, then gestured uncomfortably to the door and went out. Grace hardly noticed him go. She took a deep breath and flicked the memory cards out of their protective cases, fired up her laptop and plugged in the card reader. She’d just set the first one downloading when Frost returned, carrying a cup of weak milky tea that was the same shade of beige as the magnolia paint on the walls. He set it down carefully on the corner of her desk.

  “There you go—I put sugar in it,” he said. “For the shock.”

  Grace started to say, “There was no need—” but he looked so crestfallen she simply finished with, “Thank you, Ty. That was very thoughtful.”

  He sat down again, frowning. “Never easy, when the victims are young, is it?” he offered at last. “I mean, my first one, I got called out to a bad smash on the M6. Pitch black, freezing fog, a truck jack-knifes, wipes out a family saloon. Parents, grandma and two kids—gone, just like that. It wasn’t until the next day, when it got light, we found out grandma had been holding the baby on her lap. Thrown clear in the crash with not a mark on him, but landed down the embankment in a water-filled ditch.” He shrugged. “I’ve always wondered, what might have happened if we’d found him sooner…”

  Grace was silent for a moment. For all his air of being an overgrown puppy, Ty was a fully qualified CSI. He had been to more than his share of crime scenes and coped with gathering whatever evidence he found there in a thorough and competent manner. Sometimes, it was easy to forget.

  “I know,’ she said gently. “The only thing we can do is find the answers—the what and the how, even if the why is sometimes a mystery.” She picked up the tea, took a tiny sip and tried not to wince. It was tooth-achingly sweet. As a distraction she nodded to his computer screen and asked, “What are you working on?”

  “Oh, Chris Blenkinship’s got me running image searches on the design on the medallion he found with Eden Man,” he said, tilting his swivel chair backwards onto two of its castors and balancing there. “It’s some kind of weird symbol. Not sure what it means—if it means anything at all. I s’pose, sometimes people just decide to wear stuff because they think it looks cool, not because it signifies anything special, right?”

  The first card finished downloading. Grace checked all the images were in the correct folder without looking at them too closely. That was something she was going to have to work up to.

  “What’s the symbol?” she asked, clearing the first card.

  He leaned forward and tilted his screen in her direction. “Here, see for yourself.”

  Grace was just inserting the second memory card. She set that downloading before she looked up, without expectation. And froze.

  Frost let the chair rock forward again and land with a thud of wheels on the thin carpet. His eyes were on her face. “You’ve seen it before,” he said. It was almost an accusation rather than a question.

  “Yes, I rather think I have…”

  “So, what is it?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  39

  “So, what is it then?”

  Blenkinship asked the question as soon as he was halfway through the door into the Penrith CSI office. Both Ty Frost and Grace McColl looked up in surprise as he strode in.

  “Good morning, Christopher,” Grace said, in that infuriating tone of placid condescension she seemed to manage as easily as breathing.

  He scowled by way of reply. “I’ve got a dead body and a ticking clock until half my suspects scatter to the four winds,” he snapped. “But, oh, let’s not forget the niceties of small talk, by all means!”

  There was a moment’s silence that Blenkinship realised was shock. And—belatedly—that they might just have good reason to view his outburst in that light. He swallowed, took a deliberate grip on the frayed strands of his temper.

  “Sorry,” he said shortly, “but I’ve got all the top brass above me breathing fire down my neck to get answers faster than anyone below me seems able to provide them.”

  Frost looked suitably chastened, but Grace favoured him with a cool stare. “In that case, I would suggest better results might be achieved by you keeping that heat away from the people who work ‘below’ you, as you term it, rather than holding a proverbial blow-lamp to the soles of our feet.”

  “And I would suggest that you keep your insubordination to yourself, McColl!”

  She raised an eyebrow. “If you feel I’m being insubordinate for objecting to you charging in here without any concession to the norms of decent human behaviour, then let’s take this upstairs, by all means.”

  He stood, hands on hips, and let his breath out between his teeth. “I apologise,” he gritted. “I’m under a lot of pressure—”

  “As are we all.”

  “As are we all,” he echoed. “But that was no excuse for taking it out on my staff.” He closed his eyes for a second, trying to ignore the mental image of putting his hands around her throat and squeezing until she finally lost that icy poise. “Now, would one of you, please, like to bring me up to speed about the symbol on the medallion, eh? What does it mean?”

  She sat back in her chair. “I have no idea.”

  He threw a disgusted look at the pair of them and whirled away. “Oh, for—”

  “But,” Grace said, her tone cutting through whatever expletive he’d been about to utter. “I do know I’ve seen it before—and recently. And I can tell you where to go”—she smiled and put in a measured pause—“in order to find out.”

  “Where?”

  Grace gestured to her computer screen. Blenkinship waited, narrow-eyed, until she tilted it slightly in his direction before he moved to look, wary of being treated as more of a fool by her than he had already.

  But as soon as he saw the screen, his interest quickened. There, in close-up, was a whole stack of medallions of varying sizes. The symbol he’d so painstakingly revealed was portrayed in stark clarity among half-a-dozen other hieroglyphs and pictograms.

  “Where did you take this?”

  “At the Fair,” Grace said. “When I was up there yesterday, looking for any vehicles with damage that might correspond to that on the boy’s bicycle. I was trying not to make it obvious that I was photographing only vehicles, so I took some other snaps as well—of the stalls and the goods they were selling.” She clicked the mouse and zoomed out so the full shot was in view. He saw one stall in a row of others, selling the usual Gypsy tat.

  “Where was this stall?”

  “Well, I didn’t draw a map at the time but I can tell you roughly what area of the field it was in so you—”

  He was already shaking his head. “Not me, Grace—you,” he said. “You’re the one that spotted this and remembered it. Onl
y right that you should be the one to follow it up.”

  She seemed momentarily taken aback, he thought with a certain satisfaction. About time, too.

  “But…I can’t.”

  “Why not? It could be an important lead.”

  “It could be, or it could be a complete dead end,” she said with the first hint of losing her composure. She pointedly checked her wristwatch. “Besides, I don’t have time to traipse across to Appleby right now.”

  “And what’s so important you can’t be bothered to collect evidence, eh?”

  She ignored the jibe. “I have to leave here shortly to get to the boy’s post-mortem examination.” She rose. In heeled boots she was almost on a level with Blenkinship’s own height. On the whole, he preferred it when she was sitting down. “This man—whoever he is—deserves justice. I won’t argue with that,” she said, her voice entirely reasonable and all the more irritating for that. “But he’s been dead a long time and you know as well as I do that the chances of catching his killer, perhaps a decade after the event, are slim. The boy, on the other hand, is a new and active case that surely must take precedence?”

  “You’re right,” Blenkinship said. His sudden acquiescence seemed to take the wind out of her. She stared at him blankly. He squared his shoulders. “Which is why I, as Head CSI, will attend the PM personally.”

  Her mouth actually opened and closed without any words emerging. Blenkinship could not help a private victory cheer that he’d finally struck Grace McColl speechless.

  “I… You can’t,” she said, which was no argument at all. “It’s my case.”

  “And I’m your boss,” he said. “So, suck it up, McColl, get your arse to Appleby, and find that medallion, or I will be writing you up for insubordination, all right?”

  40