Kate heard Hollis clear his throat as if he was going to ask a question but Kate raised her hand, palm out, to stop him. She didn’t want anything to interrupt the flow of Julie’s story.
‘I asked her what she meant but she wasn’t making much sense. To be honest I was really worried about her so I rang a taxi and took her home. I told Rob that I was staying with a friend and spent the night on her settee. In the morning she was a bit sorry for herself but she didn’t seem to remember what she’d said. Eventually I asked her what she’d meant when she said she felt responsible for what had happened to her sister and she looked shocked. I really don’t think she meant to say anything. Not ever. But I wouldn’t let it go. Jeanette was my best friend and I felt like I had a right to know. Her disappearance soured my teenage years and I wanted to know what had happened. So Caroline told me. Not everything. Not details, but enough.’
‘What did she tell you?’ Kate asked gently.
Julie sobbed. ‘I can’t say. I swore I wouldn’t.’
‘It was enough to convince you to help her though? You helped her to change her identity. You helped her to disappear. She’s not dead, is she?’
Julie shook her head. ‘No. But you’ll not find her now. She’s got a new name, a new bank account. She even looks different.’
Kate felt as though the air had been sucked out of the room as Julie’s features froze. Everything felt brittle and sharp. ‘You’ve seen her? You’ve seen her since we found her car?’
The noise upstairs when they’d been there the previous day. Was it really a cat? Had Caroline Lambert been hiding upstairs while they questioned Julie? ‘She was here, wasn’t she?’ Kate asked. ‘That was the noise upstairs.’
Hollis leapt to his feet, heading for the stairs.
‘She’s not here now,’ Julie said. ‘She went not long after you’d left. Said it wasn’t safe for either of us. I have no idea where. And I don’t know what she’s calling herself. Have a look if you don’t believe that she’s gone.’
Hollis stamped up the stairs leaving Kate to consider what she’d just heard.
‘You know I can arrest you for harbouring a fugitive?’ she said. ‘Or for the birth certificate? And you know that Dennis may not be the only person that Caroline has killed?’
Julie looked embarrassed. ‘I know that something happened with a nurse from the hospital. She wouldn’t tell me what. If she hurt somebody else it would have been an accident. It was only Dennis that she wanted to get rid of and I understood why. That’s why I helped her. I’d do it all again, exactly the same. I’d do it for Jeanette.’
‘So let’s do something else for Jeanette,’ Kate urged, trying to suppress her anger at Julie’s disregard for Maddie Cox’s life. ‘Tell me what Caroline told you. Help us to find her. Let’s put this to rest. I think she’s dead. Is that right?’
A sob.
‘She didn’t run away, did she? She never left the house that night. Did Dennis kill her?’
Julie snuffled and wiped her eyes. Kate thought she was going to leave them hanging, to keep Caroline’s secret but, eventually, she gave a barely perceptible nod.
‘Julie, where is she? Where’s Jeanette’s body?’
‘He buried her in the garden somewhere. He made Caroline help him and he told her that if she ever went to the police he’d make sure that she was arrested for helping him. She really believed that she’d go to jail.’
Kate grabbed her phone as she heard Hollis thumping back down the stairs. Raymond couldn’t refuse her now.
32
It was a dreary scene. The sky was leaden and overnight frost had coated the grass, giving the lawn a ghostly hue. The ice had cracked the soil on the remains of the flowerbeds making it look like something underneath was trying to get out. Kate leaned against the back wall of the house, hands tucked deep in the pockets of her down jacket, scarf wrapped tightly round her neck.
She’d spent much of the previous afternoon at Doncaster Central, interviewing Julie Wilkinson who had agreed to cooperate fully with the investigation. Kate still wasn’t sure that there was much mileage in charging her with a crime – Raymond hadn’t been convinced either. O’Connor’s source wouldn’t testify that she’d obtained an illegal birth certificate from him and she hadn’t been intending to use it anyway. At worst, she’d conspired to help a fugitive; at best, she’d allowed herself to be used and the CPS wouldn’t be interested in the latter at all.
‘We’re ready,’ a voice called from the top of the garden. Two men huddled around an object which resembled an oversized lawnmower. They’d spent the past hour measuring the lawn and mapping out a plan to survey it with the ground-penetrating radar equipment and it was finally time to see what lay beneath Dennis Lambert’s back garden.
Kate raised a hand and nodded, watching carefully as one of the men broke away with the equipment and pushed it along a near straight line following the back hedge. The other one walked over to her and sat on a camping stool, watching the progress of the GPR on a laptop. Kate peered over his shoulder, baffled by the lines and squiggles. It looked like it was going to be a long, cold day.
‘So what are we seeing?’ Kate asked.
The man turned and looked up at her. He didn’t look much older than her son Ben and most of his lower face was covered by a trendy beard but there was a smile in his brown eyes. ‘We’re looking at a depth of two metres at the moment – most illegal burials are shallower than that because the soil tends to collapse in on the grave unless the sides are supported, and most people trying to get rid of a body don’t want to draw attention to a massive hole in the ground. The transmitter sends electromagnetic energy into the earth and if it encounters an object the pattern changes.’
He pointed to the screen where the grey waves were fairly even apart from a tiny blip of black and white stripes.
‘So, what’s that?’ Kate asked, pointing at the screen.
‘Some sort of pipe. It’s uniform in size and it’s about this wide.’ He held his hands about eight inches apart. ‘Soil pipe probably. A burial will be more irregular and probably much wider. See that line there?’ He pointed to another anomaly. ‘That’s a shift from one type of soil to another. It’s mostly clay round here but some people add sand to veg beds to make it easier to turn over.’
Kate stared, fascinated, as the lines scrolled across the screen until a sudden shout from the GPR operator made her glance over to the end of the garden. He’d stopped and was staring at the small screen attached to his equipment.
‘Can you see that, Alex?’ he yelled to the technician. Kate looked back at the laptop. There was a large patch of black and white amongst the grey. She’d only had a quick explanation but she could see that something was there.
‘Got it,’ Alex said. ‘Looks like it’s about a half a metre down. Big enough to be a body?’
The other man shrugged. ‘Could be. Only one way to find out.’
Kate took that as her cue. A Crime Scene van was waiting on the street, the SOCOs choosing to stay in the warm rather than spending the morning freezing their bits off watching the progress of the GPR search. She went to stand at the top of the path and gesticulated to the van driver. Less than a minute later two overall-clad figures appeared, one holding a crime scene case and the other wielding something that looked like a mattock.
‘Ground’s probably frozen,’ he explained as he saw her puzzled look. ‘Can’t get through it with a trowel.’ Kate studied the ground where the equipment had indicated something below the surface. It looked just like the rest of the garden around it; the frost was disturbed by the wheels of the GPR unit and its operator, leaving brighter green tracks in parallel lines. There was nothing to suggest that it had ever been dug up; ever been different from the surrounding lawn, but thirty years was a long time. If this was where Jeanette was buried, the ground could have resettled and repositioned itself until it was indistinguishable from that which surrounded it.
The first stroke of the mattock m
ade Kate jump. She felt it in her feet as it bit into the frozen earth. The man wielding it was well built, his overalls straining at his shoulders as he swung again, breaking through the surface as easily as if he were dipping an oar into water.
Ten minutes passed with no sound except for the thump of the mattock, the click of a camera, and the increasingly heavy breathing of the overalled man wielding the heavy implement. He swung back for yet another stroke and then stopped.
‘I’m through the frozen layer,’ he said, gesturing to his colleague who passed him a trowel. He squatted on his haunches and scraped at the dark, damp soil.
‘There’s something there,’ he said, putting down the tool and kneeling to get a closer look. His colleague joined him and they moved the earth more slowly with trowels, taking photographs as they cleared the earth. Kate felt like screaming at the sudden drop in the rate of progress; they might as well have been using teaspoons.
‘Can you see anything yet?’ she asked as one of them dug a brush out of the case he’d been carrying.
‘Bone,’ he said. ‘Skull. There are some teeth still attached. Bits of wool as well. Could be a jumper or a carpet.’
Kate tried to picture the scene. Dennis Lambert wrapping his daughter’s body in a bit of old carpet and dropping it in a hole in the garden. No wonder Caroline wanted her sister’s body found. It was well past time for a proper burial. Kate leapt back as a purple-gloved hand held a jawbone out to her.
‘Canis familiaris,’ the SOCO said. ‘Domestic dog. Looks like Fido’s final resting place.’
He continued to sift around in the hole, pulling out more bits of browned bone but nothing recognisably human. The GPR techs lost interest and wandered off for a smoke while every last fragment was removed from the grave. Frustration had Kate almost wishing that she still smoked; a cigarette would be perfect for calming her nerves. She was worried that, if Jeanette’s body were here, there would be nothing left to find after so long, and more worried that either Julie had lied to her or that Caroline had lied to Julie. Raymond wouldn’t care which it was and she knew exactly who he’d blame if this turned out to be a waste of money and time.
With the dog exhumed, the GPR techs were free to continue their survey. The SOCO team retired to their van and Kate went back to her position against the back wall of the house from where she could see the screen of Alex’s laptop.
Morning dragged into afternoon and the lines on the screen showed nothing except more sandy soil and the footings of some old fence posts. Finally, Kate conceded that there was nothing to find. Wherever Jeanette was, she wasn’t buried in the garden.
Alex tapped away on the laptop keys and the screen cleared. ‘I’ll save the results,’ he said, his disappointment clear in his movements which were lethargic despite the cold. ‘Shame really. I thought we might find something. It’s only my second time out with the police. I’ve just left university. I was supposed to go travelling but I wanted to earn a bit of money first. Oh well.’
He stood up, knocking over his camping stool. As he bent to retrieve it, something caught his eye. ‘You know, we’ve not looked everywhere. How long’s that greenhouse been there? Was it there when the girl went missing?
Kate mentally reviewed the statements that she’d heard and read in the last few days. Brenda Powley had said something about the greenhouse. What was it? Dennis had put it up for his wife to grow flowers after Jeanette went missing. Was that it? Brenda had mentioned him doing work in the garden to help Irene cope, and Kate was almost certain that the greenhouse was part of the improvements that he’d made. It had to be worth a try.
‘I think it was put up after Jeanette disappeared,’ Kate said, walking across the grass towards the structure. She peered through the grimy glass, trying to ascertain what the floor was made of. If it was earth then it would be easy to dig. She couldn’t quite make out what lay underneath the benches which ran along each side but the middle section was flagstones.
‘Let’s have a look,’ she said and slid open the door. The light inside had a greenish cast from the algae which covered many of the glass panes but Kate could easily see the concrete beneath the benches. She squatted down. Each bench had six legs and each leg had obviously been embedded in the cement before it set.
‘Looks pretty solid,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Shit. I thought we might be able to dig here.’
Alex had followed her inside and was examining the feet of one of the benches. ‘You know, we could get the machine in here. There’s enough room under the benches to allow some movement.’
‘Will it work through the concrete?’
‘Easily,’ Alex said. ‘Utility services use it to locate pipes. We might not be able to go as deep, though. Let’s clear some of the crap away and get set up.’
He bent down and moved plant pots and empty compost bags, throwing them through the door to land on the lawn.
Kate bent down to clear the other side, thinking that she could at least make herself useful by doing a bit of manual work. She removed the cylinder from an ancient push-along lawnmower and then found its handle lying further back. She reached in to grab one of the rubber grips but she couldn’t move it. It was wedged between two legs of the bench and was too long to slide out. She’d need to work it further forward then slide it at an angle. She knelt down to get a better view. One of the cross pieces was stuck behind the leg of the bench. She leaned in and pushed it backwards, careful not to push too far and break the glass behind it. As it moved, she scraped a bright, grey slice into the filth and dust that covered the concrete. Something stood out darker against the pale smudge.
‘You got a torch?’ she asked Alex.
‘No. Can you use your phone?’
Cursing her own stupidity, Kate took her phone out of her pocket and selected the torch function. She shone the beam under the bench, playing the light along the freshly revealed concrete surface. There were two initials there – obviously made when the surface was still wet – tiny and hard to make out but they were definitely letters, partially hidden by the thick wooden leg of the bench. She tried a different angle, then another, and suddenly they came into sharp focus.
J.L.
Jeanette Lambert.
Had she still been alive when the greenhouse was built? It seemed unlikely if Julie’s story were true. Could Brenda Powley have been mistaken? Again, Kate was fairly certain that she’d said that the greenhouse had been a present from Dennis to Irene after their daughter disappeared. And then it hit her. Julie said that Caroline had been made to help Dennis bury the body. Was this her tiny act of remembrance for her sister? Had she crawled under here and scratched the letters just before the cement set, forever marking Jeanette’s final resting place?
Kate stood up and brushed off her trousers. ‘We need to start under here,’ she told Alex. ‘Jeanette Lambert’s initials are hidden behind that leg of the bench. I have a feeling that her little sister might have done it to mark where the body is buried.’
Alex looked sceptical but called his colleague over and, within ten minutes, they were set up to examine whatever lay under the bench. Almost immediately Kate saw a change in the pattern on the screen. A blip of black and white ripples amongst the grey.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the laptop screen.
‘Not a pipe, or a difference in soil or rock. It looks like there’s some kind of void under the concrete.’
Kate dashed from the greenhouse and gestured again to the driver of the crime scene van. He must have sensed her excitement because seconds later she heard footsteps pounding up the path beside the house.
‘What have you got?’ Mattock Man asked.
‘There’s something buried under the bench. I think you might need a saw to get the bench out before you can dig. I’ve no idea how thick the concrete is though.’
‘Less than three centimetres,’ Alex chimed in, still glued to his laptop screen. ‘Probably not much more than two in places. Should be easy to get throu
gh.’
Kate stood back as a saw was procured and the two men in overalls removed the bench, manoeuvring it carefully through the greenhouse door. They then swept and photographed the area beneath while Kate just wanted to grab the mattock and start swinging.
Finally the heavy work started and Kate and Alex had to stand outside, peering in through the dirty glass, trying to see what was going on.
‘We’ve got something,’ the SOCO with the camera said. ‘Come in but mind where you step.’
Kate rushed back inside and stared down at the ugly fresh scar in the concrete. Beneath was dark soil and, mingled in with it was what looked like plastic or polythene. Kate squatted down and looked more closely. Mixed with the polythene were scraps of filthy fabric and, almost exactly where the initials had been was a brown smear of bone and a few strands of hair.
‘Hello, Jeanette, sweetheart,’ Kate whispered. ‘It looks like we’ve finally found you.’
33
Kate smiled at her reflection in the rear-view mirror as she checked her appearance for at least the tenth time since leaving Doncaster Central. Indicating right, she pulled into the hospital car park and let out a long breath. She wasn’t sure exactly what the information was that Nick Tsappis wanted to share but he’d been insistent that they meet in person. He’d been going through Dennis Lambert’s case notes and, when Kate questioned him about why she wasn’t dealing with the original consultant, Tsappis was vague but charming. She didn’t doubt that he’d found something significant but she was suspicious of his motives for wanting to tell her face to face.
Merciless: a gripping detective thriller (DI Kate Fletcher Book 2) Page 24