by Jane Adams
* * *
‘Bloody tourists!’ Mal muttered angrily. He was convinced that tourists and incomers were responsible for most of the ills he saw around him.
I mean, he thought angrily, what local would go dumping their bloody rubbish in a spot like this?
He unclipped his torch from his belt and shone it on the offending pile of black dustbin bags. A couple of them were already torn open and the fetid contents dragged across the grass. Foxes, probably, Mai thought.
He turned the torch beam back across the field towards the road, the light picking chewed-up turf and the tracks of several vehicles at the field edge.
Travellers, then, he thought, remembering vaguely some report he’d heard about police moving a group on a few days before.
‘Time they learnt to take their fucking rubbish with them. Leaving their bloody mess.’
The dogs were nosing about in the pile. Irritably, Mai called them to him. The mood of the evening was spoiled now and his hunt, too, no doubt, if there’d been folk tramping about all over.
He kicked petulantly at the nearest bag, then stepped back, momentarily startled at the resistance, the weight of it against his foot.
He shone his torch at the heavy bag, then bent down for a closer look, enlarging a small hole already torn in its side.
* * *
‘Makes me downright suspicious,’ Mike said. ‘I mean, you hear such stories. Mind control. People cut off from their families, virtually held prisoner—’
‘And all that’s true,’ Maria interrupted him, ‘of some of the more extreme religious groups. You can’t pin that kind of label on here, though.’
‘So? Tell me.’
‘I did some digging after John’s phone call,’ Maria said. ‘There are three houses run by the Children. One here, which we know about. One in Scotland somewhere and another just outside York. They’re farmers, groups of families that joined together about fifty years ago, formed the first community and expanded when their population did. They don’t proselytise and they seem capable of becoming both part of the local scene and of standing outside it. This group out at Otley trade with the local farmers and are part of the combine collective.’
‘The what?’ Mike asked.
John grinned. ‘They share the more expensive machinery. Smallholders who can’t stump up the capital on their own, they’ve been doing it for a while round here.’
‘Ah!’ Mike nodded. ‘And what do they actually believe, these so-called Children?’
‘Hoped you wouldn’t ask that. They don’t exactly advertise that part of it.’
‘Embury says they believe their founder to have been the Lord’s prophet, or something,’ John put in.
Maria nodded. ‘Though exactly what he prophesied is a bit vague.’ She frowned, then reached over and investigated the contents of the coffee pot.
‘I’ll make you some more in a minute, my dear.’
‘Thank you, John. It seems he predicted some kind of world crisis. Not the end of the world, exactly, but a great turmoil.’
‘And for that they called him a prophet?’
She laughed. ‘No, not exactly. He advocated gathering like-minded people, forming self-sufficient communities and protecting their children, sheltering them from what was going to happen on the outside.’
‘So he wasn’t into modern living,’ Mike stated. Then frowned, suddenly. ‘No, that doesn’t fit. Pearson worked outside the community and I remember seeing photographs in the old report, some pretty high-tech stuff. Price said we had to call our computer buffs in to check things out.’
‘I never said they did away with high-tech,’ Maria objected. ‘Just that they gathered together to protect themselves from the bad things.’
She smiled and added, ‘In fact, Norman Luther advocated taking the best of the old and the best of the new. Of gathering together the knowledge of the past and of the present, from wherever it originated, and preserving it.’
‘Sounds like an academic Noah’s Ark.’ Tynan joked.
Maria laughed. ‘I think this Norman Luther was quite a man in his own way. The community thrived, they were self sufficient within ten years and thinking of setting up a second house in twelve.’
Mike was frowning slightly. ‘Sounds like a grand-scale return to “The Good Life”,’ he said. ‘Weird, all the same. But you’d view them as fairly harmless?’
‘Well,’ Maria said cautiously, ‘in Norman Luther we’re not looking at some Jim Jones or David Koresh, if that’s what you mean.’
‘If it wasn’t for their acceptance of modernity, they’d sound a bit like the whatchamacallits, the Mennonites and all that lot.’
Maria nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’d guess something close to that,’ she said. Then, ‘Tell me, John. This Sam of yours, did he say if he’d ever gone back, visited his old home?’
‘I asked Embury about that. It seems that when Sam left, well, that was it. His name was struck off the register — quite literally, from what I can gather. Sam’s dead to them now. If he fails outside, he can never go back home to stay.’
* * *
It took Mal fifteen minutes of hard running to get to a phone. In his panic he’d run straight to the nearest visible road. It was a good mile following the bend in the roadway back to where he’d left his car. Mal had realized this almost as soon as his feet had hit tarmac. He’d turned the other way instead, to where he could see the lights of the closest farmhouse, yellow in the distance.
He clutched his shotgun, the weapon still broken over his arm. Cartridges loaded.
Swearing to himself, he ejected them, slipped them into an empty pocket and snapped the weapon closed, flinging it over his shoulder on its leather strap even as he picked up pace once more, the dogs loping beside him.
* * *
Mike stared out into the blackness beyond the window. The storm had passed but night seemed to have followed early.
How would it feel, he wondered, for someone like Sam to leave everything he had ever known, and, for all Mike knew, maybe believe he risked damnation as a result?
What would it feel like for Pearson?
Sam, from all accounts, was a practical man, intent on sorting out his life in a methodical if slightly plodding way.
But Pearson? Pearson had left the house to study to be a teacher, presumably, with the blessing of the Elders. But he had come back. To be forced to leave, be rejected by his own people, must have been a double blow for someone as intense and uncompromising as Pearson.
He glanced at Maria and then at John, getting up to make more coffee.
What would it feel like suddenly not to belong? To lose family, religion, livelihood all in one fell swoop?
Was it any wonder Eric Pearson took a bitter view of life? Was it any excuse?
‘Penny for them?’ Maria said.
Mike smiled at her. ‘Not worth it. Mind wandering, that’s all.’
She smiled back at him and reached across the table for his hand.
Out in Tynan’s hall, the telephone began to ring.
Chapter Thirteen
Saturday 2 a.m.
By the time Mike arrived, the scene had been cordoned off and a narrow walkway, flanked by red and white tape, guided him to the place where the body had been found.
The police surgeon was already there, together with the SOCO. A young woman in white overalls was recording the scene on video. A stills camera hung from a strap across her body.
The entire area was illuminated by dragon lights. Two of them, strung up on makeshift supports. Their brilliance cast everything and everyone into stark relief, giving people and objects twice their own number of shadows. Colours were washed out almost to monochrome.
Price was already there. He saw Mike and came over, his face pale in the brilliant light.
‘It’s a kid, guv. Early to mid-teens from what they can see. Wrapped up in a rubbish bag.’
Mike followed his gaze to where the police surgeon knelt, directing the young woma
n with the camera to take still shots. She moved closely around the body, recording the ground before she stepped. Taking macro shots in situ of anything alien to grass or trees. Framing her body shots to indicate exact locations. Precise relationships.
Others stood around at the edge of the cordoned area. Watching, waiting for their cues.
Mike glanced upwards at the sky. The clouds had thickened and the air grown even more chill as they stood there. A rough shelter had been rigged to cover the site, polythene sheeting that cracked and rustled in the rising wind.
‘Who found the body?’
‘Man named Malcolm Fisher. Out after rabbits.’ Price nodded his head back towards the road. ‘He’s in the car.’
Mike glanced back one more time at the murder scene, then turned towards the road.
‘Let me know when they’re about to move the body,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and talk to Mr Fisher.’
Mal was drinking coffee in the back of the Area car. He was a youngish man, mid-twenties, Mike thought, though shock and pallor had aged him. He put his cup down and shook Mike by the hand. Then drew back abruptly as though not certain that had been the correct thing to do.
‘Did you touch anything?’ Mike asked him.
Mai shook his head emphatically.
‘Like I told them other lot,’ he said. ‘I bent down to see and it looked like a hand, with the fingers just sticking out of the hole.’ He shrugged as though still disbelieving. ‘So I pulled the plastic, like, just a little way and shone my torch right inside and I saw it. Lying there. And these eyes, wide open and looking at me. And then I ran.’
Mike nodded slowly. ‘And you touched nothing else? You’re certain of that?’
‘I touched nothing. I came in through the trees and I saw this rubbish lying on the ground like someone dumped it there.’
He shook his head. ‘I only came out looking for rabbits,’ he said. ‘Then I saw this bloody rubbish strewn all over the place and I got so fucking mad . . . I mean, you know. . . dumping stuff like that.’
He turned to look at Mike, his expression tense and hurt.
‘I kicked it,’ he said. ‘The kid in the bag, I mean.’ He halted suddenly, breaking down, bringing up his hands to cover his face. Mike heard the words muffled through Mai’s fingers. ‘I kicked it. I didn’t know it was a kid . . . Someone killed him and then I go and do a thing like that.’
‘You didn’t know,’ Mike told him softly. ‘You didn’t know.’
Chapter Fourteen
Saturday 9 a.m.
It had always seemed to Mike that a murder investigation should be a more dramatic affair. That there should be more outward sense of urgency. Of fevered activity.
There should be people rushing from place to place, gathering clues, putting them together and snatching the answers from nowhere. Something as violent and blasphemous as the taking of another human life should leave more traces. Shake the fabric of the universe in some tangible, obvious regard.
But that was never the way of it.
Mike stood in the clinically clean room waiting for the post mortem to begin and considering, step by cautious step, just where his investigation should take him.
An incident room had been set up on the roadside close to where the body had been found. Road blocks stopped the sparse traffic. Anyone remotely local would be interviewed this morning, though even that, most basic of procedures was of little use until a timeframe could be established. For that, they needed a time of death.
Price stood close by, champing at the bit far more visibly than Mike. He wanted to get on. To be out there, doing, solving, creating his own kind of organized havoc in order to get to the bottom of this.
He was angry, Mike could see that. Angry and hurt in the way that all officers became over the death of a child. That was when it became personal. That was when the case became their own.
Normally at a crime scene some approximate parameters could be established — how long the body had been there, an approximate theory as to cause of death.
In this case, with the body wrapped tight in its pathetic black shroud, the only clue had been the dryness of the grass beneath it when, finally, they had lifted it onto plastic sheeting and carried it away.
Hot days, but it had rained the last two nights. Been dry before.
At least two days, then, maybe three.
Mike sighed and tried not to speculate too much. Tried instead to concentrate on what would happen next.
Soon the pathologist would begin. A description would be circulated. Anyone seen in the area over the last few days would be found and questioned. Missing persons reports searched in detail — time consuming and, Mike knew from experience, often unrewarding.
Then, if they struck lucky, they’d find his family. His name. Get a recent photo and media time to circulate it. There’d be sightings, many of them. Most leading to dead ends or other kids unrelated to this one. Each lead would be checked, collated and rechecked. Each failure would become a personal one. Each possible breakthrough the stimulus to keep on looking. To push that little bit further.
Mike felt suddenly depressed at the prospect.
The crash of the double doors being opened and a trolley being wheeled into the room brought him from his reverie. He watched as the body, still in its protective wrappings, was laid on the table.
The outer coverings were peeled back. The whole package weighed and then the careful visual examination began, the pathologist speaking all the while into a microphone suspended above the table.
He felt Price move closer as the black plastic was cut away and the body finally laid out in full view. Even from where he stood, Mike could see that parts of the hand and a small area of the shoulder, had been chewed and scratched. But the face seemed untouched. Unclosed eyes staring up at nothing and the jaw slack, leaving the mouth to fall open when the body moved.
Just for an instant, Mike remembered Stevie. The shock he had felt when he’d tried to close his eyes and found the lids refused to shut, the muscles drawn into spasm after death.
‘They used to put pennies on the eyes of the dead,’ Mike said softly. ‘To stop them from opening.’ Price made no reply.
The pathologist continued with his ritual.
‘Male Caucasian. Estimated thirteen to fifteen years. Height, five feet two, one hundred fifty-seven centimetres. Evidence of bruising to the right temple, left shoulder and the right side of the rib cage two centimetres above the nipple.
‘You have that?’ he asked, waiting for his assistant to record the marks on the body chart.
The photographer from the crime scene circled the body as she had earlier, recording each injury. Preparing to switch to video as the operation progressed.
Mike watched as they took samples of hair, swabs from nose, mouth and rectum. Examined the eyes for signs of asphyxia. Scraped beneath the short nails.
He watched as they sat the body forward to examine the back, noting the marks of hypostasis on the right-hand side. He flinched, as he always did, at the eerie sound of expelled air forced upward from the lungs and through the larynx as the body was eased forward, head lowered towards the knees and samples of the spinal fluid taken.
He stayed while the boy was washed and the X-rays taken, feeling like some anxious parent watching as their child was examined, and thinking all the time about his own dead son. But when the surgeon produced the dissecting knife and laid the body straight to make the first cut, Mike left swiftly. Striding across the room to the swing doors. Pushing through and hearing them clang loudly behind him.
Price followed only minutes later and joined Mike in the car.
‘Should be bloody strung up,’ he said. ‘Fucking bastards. Just give me ten minutes and a length of rope. That’s all they’re bloody worth.’
* * *
Saturday evening
Mike sat alone in his flat and watched the press conference on the evening news, glad that this at least had been taken out of his hands.
&n
bsp; The superintendent read a pre-written statement. He looked grey and strained, Mike thought. Maybe he liked this kind of personal appearance as little as Mike.
‘The body of a teenage boy was found at ten p.m. last night,’ he said. ‘It had been dumped, wrapped in a black dustbin liner, close to a spinney locally known as Bright’s Wood, just outside of Colton.’
The news cut to pictures of the murder scene. Police cordon, covered area, a small group of people moving purposefully about, and, close by, a long-lens view of a line of searchers moving slowly across the neighbouring field.
‘The body has not, as yet, been identified but it is believed to be that of a teenaged boy, aged between thirteen and fifteen years. Five feet two inches in height with light blue eyes and sandy hair. A red sweatshirt believed to belong to the victim was also found at the scene.’
Mike watched as the camera cut once more, this time to the red garment that had been found bundled into the bag with the dead boy. The bloodstained sleeve had been tucked back out of sight and the shirt was wrapped inside a clear plastic bag. The logo of an American football team showed clearly on the chest.
It hadn’t been purchased locally. That much they did know. But the labels had been removed and a slight tear at the neck had been mended, badly, in green thread.
The sweatshirt was probably the best lead they had.
There followed an appeal for information. A hotline for informers and frightened relatives. A reassertion that everything was being done to bring the killer or killers to justice.
‘This is a despicable crime,’ the officer was saying. ‘An act of true evil. I want to assure the public that every avenue of investigation is being pursued and that this force will not rest until the boy’s killer has been brought to book.’ His left hand moved unconsciously to twist the large onyx ring he wore on his right hand. Then Superintendent Jaques turned to the assembled journalists, fielding questions from the floor.
No, as yet there were no suspects.
No, the cause of death had not yet been established and, no, he couldn’t comment on whether or not the boy had been sexually assaulted until all the reports were in.