Wednesday's Child ib-6

by Peter Robinson

  bering over a pile of scree towards the opening of the flue. Marjorie knew all about the flue, because she’d heard Roger read her the relevant sections from the book several times out loud. “Listen to this, darling …” But the only thing she needed to know right now was that it could be dangerous.

  Built originally to extract and condense the fumes of the smelting process and carry them far away from the immediate area, the flue was a bricked hump about two hundred yards long. It looked very much like a tall factory chimney that had fallen on its side and half buried itself in the gentle slope of the hillside. Because it was old, sections of the arched roof had collapsed here and there, and more were liable to follow suit at any moment. It had originally ended at a vertical chimney on the hilltop, designed to carry the lead fumes away, but that had long since fallen down.

  Megan was happily scrambling along over the scree to the dark entrance. Marjorie set off after her. “Megan!” she shouted. “Come away!” Behind, she noticed that the others had come out of the smelting mill and stood watching a few yards away. “It’s all right,” Marjorie said over her shoulder. “I’ll catch up with her before she gets inside. It’s quite safe out here.”

  Maybe she had underestimated the six-yearold’s speed and nimbleness, she thought, as she struggled over the rocks, trying not to trip up. But she made it. Megan got to the verge of the flue just as Marjorie managed to grab her shoulder.

  “It’s not safe, Megan,” she said, sitting down to catch her breath. “You mustn’t go in there.” As she looked into the black hole, she shivered. Far up ahead, she could see the tiny coin of light where the flue ended. Its floor was scattered with bits of stone, most likely fallen from the arched roof. A few yards or so in, she noticed a large,

  oddly-shaped hump. It was probably a collapsed section, but something about it made her curious. It looked somehow deliberate, not quite as random as the other scatterings. She packed Megan off down the rise to join her parents and crawled into the opening.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she heard Roger calling. “Marjorie! Come back!” But she ignored him. Just for a moment, the sunlight had flashed on something ahead.

  It was dark inside the flue, despite the light from behind her, and she hurt her knees as she crawled over the bed of flinty stones. She tried to stand, back bent low. The place smelled dank and foisty, and she tried to keep her breathing to an absolute minimum. She remembered Roger saying that the poisonous fumes of the volatilized lead condensed on the flue walls, which boys were employed to scrape at regular intervals. What a job that would be, she thought, crawling through here day after day and scraping lead off the stone.

  When she arrived about six feet away from the hump, she could still make out nothing clearly. If she edged to one side and moulded her back against the curve of the wall, some light passed her and provided a faint outline. Then Roger blocked the entrance and yelled for her to come back.

  “Get out of the way,” she shouted. “I can’t see a bloody thing!”

  Oddly enough, Roger did as she asked. A faint wash of light picked out some of the details in the heap of stones, and as soon as Marjorie saw the small hand sticking out of the pile, she screamed and started to turn. As she did so, she stumbled and kicked some small stones near the body. A cloud of flies rose out of the heap and buzzed angrily up the flue.

  II

  “We’ve had three confessions already,” said Gristhorpe,

  as Banks took the Helmthorpe road out of Eastvale.

  Roger Bingham’s message had been vague, and both

  avoided speculating whether the body of Gemma

  Scupham had been discovered. “One of them told us at

  great length exactly what he’d done with Gemma and

  how much he enjoyed it. I tell you, Alan, sometimes it’s

  a bloody shame you can’t lock a man up for his

  thoughts.” He ran a hand through his unruly grey hair.

  “Good God, did I really say that? Shows how much this

  business is getting to me. Anyway, we got him for wasting

  police time instead. He’ll do six months with any

  luck.”

  “The searchers turn up anything yet?” Banks asked.

  Gristhorpe shook his head. “They’re doing the area east of the estate now, past the railway tracks. We’ve taken on a few civilian volunteers. And we’ve interviewed all the known local child-molesters. Nothing there.”

  At Fortford, Banks turned left by the pub and passed between the Roman fort and the village green.

  “Anything on the car?” Gristhorpe asked.

  After his visit to Brenda Scupham the previous afternoon, Banks had caught up with his paperwork on the case, helped Susan with the house-to-house and Richmond check the garages and car-rental agencies.

  “Not so far. We’ve got through most of the garages and agencies. Phil’s still at it.”

  “Well, maybe it was their own car, after all,” said Gristhorpe. “They’ve vanished into thin air, Alan. How can they do that?”

  “Either very clever or very lucky, I suppose. No one on the estate was very communicative, either,” he went

  on. “I only did a couple of streets with Susan, but she said the others were no different. And she had another chat with that Mr Carter at number sixteen. Waste of time, she said. He just wanted to talk about Dunkirk. People are scared, you know, even when we show them our warrant cards.”

  “I don’t blame them,” said Gristhorpe.

  “But I reckon if it had happened to someone else around there, they’d speak up now.”

  “You never know with people, Alan. Remember the old Yorkshire saying, ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’ “

  Banks laughed. At the junction in Relton, he turned right. A slow-moving tractor in front pulled over to the side and gave him just enough space to squeeze by. “I’ve been on the phone to Belfast, too,” he added. “The lads over there spent most of yesterday with Terry Garswood, Gemma’s father, and they’re certain he had nothing to do with it. For a start, he was on duty that day and couldn’t have got away without someone noticing, and apparently he had neither the inclination nor the money to hire someone else to steal her for him.”

  “Well, look on the bright side,” said Gristhorpe. “At least that’s one less lead to follow. There it is.” He pointed out of the car window. “Pull in here.”

  They were on Mortsett Lane, about halfway between Relton and Gratly, below the looming bulk of Tetchley Fell. Banks pulled up on the gravelled lay-by next to a Range Rover and looked at the narrow track. There was no way you could get a car up there, he thought. The stony path was only about three feet wide, and it was bordered by small boulders and chips of flint that would play havoc with tires. Ahead, he could just make out the partially collapsed roof of the smelting mill over the rise.

  He had seen the place before, but from a different perspective. Looking down from the Roman road that cut

  diagonally across the fell, he had been impressed by the range of colour, from pale yellow to dark green, purple and grey, and by the flue hugging the hillside like a long stone tunnel. Now, as they neared the mill, all he could see was the murky opening to his left and the group of people huddled together by the mill to his right.

  “Which one of you is Mr Bingham?” Gristhorpe asked, after he had introduced Banks and himself.

  “I am,” said a countryish type, in gear far too expensive and inappropriate for the short walk. “My wife, Marjorie, found the … er … Well, I remembered there was a phonebox back down on the road.”

  Gristhorpe nodded and turned to the woman. “Did you disturb anything?”

  She shook her head. “No. I never touched … I … When I saw the hand I ran back. And the flies … Oh, my God … the flies …”

  Her husband took her hand and she buried her face in his shoulder. The other couple looked on sadly, the man with a grim set to his mouth and the woman stroking her child’s golden
hair. Banks noticed a head over her shoulder, a sleeping baby in a backpack.

  Gristhorpe turned to Banks. “Shall we?”

  Banks nodded and followed him over the scree. They had to walk carefully, as many of the stones wobbled under them. Finally, they managed to scrabble to the gloomy semi-circle and peer inside. Gristhorpe brought the torch out of his pocket and shone it ahead. They could easily see the heap that Marjorie Bingham had mentioned, but couldn’t pick out any details from so far away. Gristhorpe had to bend almost double to walk, which made it very difficult to negotiate a path through the rubble that littered the flue’s floor. Banks, being a little shorter, found it easier. But he felt uncomfortable.

  He had never liked caves; they always seemed to bring

  out a latent sense of claustrophobia. Once he and Sandra had visited Ingleton and gone in the caves there. When he had to stoop and almost crawl on his belly to get under a low overhang, he had felt the weight of the mountain pressing on his back and had to struggle to keep his breathing regular. The flue wasn’t as bad as that, but he could still feel the heavy darkness pushing at him from all sides.

  Gristhorpe walked a few feet behind him with the torch. Its beam danced over lead-stained stones, which glistened here and there as if snails had left their slimy tracks. They went as cautiously as they could in order not to destroy any forensic evidence, but it was impossible to pick a narrow path through the rubble of the flue. Finally, they stood close enough, and Gristhorpe’s torch lit on a small hand raised from a heap of rocks. They could see nothing else of the body, as it had been entirely covered by stones.

  As they stood and looked at the hand, a gust of wind blew and made a low moaning sound in the flue like someone blowing over the lip of a bottle. Gristhorpe turned off the torch and they headed back for the entrance. They had probably disturbed too much already, but they had to verify that there was indeed a body on the site. So often people simply thought they had found a corpse, and the truth turned out to be different. Now they had to follow procedure.

  First they would call the police surgeon to ascertain that the body was indeed dead. No matter how obvious it might appear, no matter even if the body is decapitated or chopped into a dozen pieces, it is not dead until a qualified doctor says it is.

  Then the SOCO team would arrive and mark off the area with their white plastic tape. It might not seem necessary in such an isolated place, but the searching of a

  crime scene was a very serious business, and there were guidelines to follow. With Vic Manson in charge, they would take photographs and search the area around the body, looking for hairs, fibres, anything that the killer may have left behind. And then, when the photographs had been taken, the doctor would take a closer look at the body. In this case, he might move aside a few stones and look for obvious causes of death. There was nothing more that Banks and Gristhorpe could do until they at least had some information on the identity of the victim.

  Banks gulped in the fresh, bright air as they emerged into daylight. He felt as if he had just made an ascent from the bottom of a deep, dark ocean with only seconds to spare before his oxygen ran out. Gristhorpe stood beside him and stretched, rubbing his lower back and grimacing.

  “I’ll call it in,” said Banks.

  Gristhorpe nodded. “Aye. And I’ll have another word with this lot over here.” He shook his head slowly. “Looks like we’ve found her.”

  There was nothing to do but wait after Banks had made the call over the police radio. Gristhorpe got Marjorie Bingham’s story, then let the shocked group go home.

  Banks leaned against the rough stone of the smelting mill and lit a cigarette as Gristhorpe walked carefully around the flue entrance looking down at the ground. It was quiet up there except for the occasional mournful call of a curlew gliding over the moorland, a cry that harmonized strangely with the deep sigh of the breeze blowing down the flue and ruffling the blades of grass on the hillside. The sky was the whitish blue of skim milk, and it set off the browns, greens and yellows of the desolate landscape. Beyond the mill, Banks could see the purple-grey cleft of a dried-up stream-bed cutting across the

  moorland.

  Gristhorpe, kneeling to peer at the grass a few yards to the right of the flue entrance, beckoned Banks over. Banks knelt beside him and looked at the rusty smear on the grass.

  “Blood?” he said.

  “Looks like it. If so, maybe she was killed out here and they dragged her into the flue to hide the body.”

  Banks looked at the blood again. “It doesn’t look like much, though, does it?” he said. “And I’d say it’s smeared rather than spilled.”

  “Aye,” said Gristhorpe, standing. “Like someone wiped off a knife or something. We’ll leave it to the SOCOs.”

  The first to arrive was Peter Darby, the photographer. He came bounding up the track, fresh-faced, two cameras slung around his neck and a square metal case at his side. If it’s Gemma Scupham in there, Banks thought, he won’t look so bloody cheerful when he comes out.

  Darby went to take some preliminary photographs, starting with the stained grass, on Gristhorpe’s suggestion, then the flue entrance, then carefully making his way inside. Banks could see the bulbs flash in the black hole as Darby took his pictures. When he’d finished in the flue, he took more photographs in and around the smelting mill.

  About half an hour after Peter Darby, Dr Glendenning came huffing and puffing up the path.

  “At least I didn’t need a bloody truss to get here this time,” he said, referring to the occasion when they had all been winched up the side of Rawley Force to get to a body in a hanging valley. He pointed towards the flue. “In there, you said?”

  Gristhorpe nodded.

  “Hmphh. Why the bloody hell do you keep on finding

  bodies in awkward places, eh? I’m not getting any younger, you know. It’s not even my job. You could get a bloody GP to pronounce the body dead at the scene.”

  Banks shrugged. “Sorry.” Glendenning was a Home Office pathologist, one of the best in the country, and both Banks and Gristhorpe knew he would be offended if they didn’t call him to the scene first.

  “Aye, well …” He turned towards the entrance.

  They accompanied Glendenning as he picked his way over the scree, complaining all the way, and ducked to enter the flue. Banks held the torch this time. It didn’t provide much light, but the SOCOs had been instructed to bring bottled-gas lamps as it would be impossible to get a van with a generator up the narrow track.

  Glendenning knelt for a while, sniffing the air and glancing around the inside of the flue, then he touched the small hand and moved it, muttering to himself. Next he took out a mercury thermometer and held it close to the body, measuring the air temperature.

  The entrance of the flue darkened and someone called out. It was Vic Manson, fingerprint expert and leader of the SOCO team. He came up the passage with a gas-lamp and soon the place was full of light. It cast eerie shadows on the slimy stone walls and gave an unreal sheen to the heap of the stones on the ground. Manson called back to one of his assistants and asked him to bring up some large plastic bags.

  Then everyone stood silent, breath held, as the men started to lift the stones and place them in the bags for later forensic investigation. A few spiders scurried away and a couple of obstinate flies buzzed the men angrily then zigzagged off.

  Banks leaned against the wall, his back bent into its curve. One stone, two, three… . Then a whole ami became visible.

  Banks and Gristhorpe moved forward. They crouched over and looked at the small hand, then both saw the man’s wristwatch and frayed sleeve of a grey bomber-jacket. “It’s not her,” Gristhorpe whispered. “Jesus Christ, it’s not Gemma Scupham.”

  Banks felt the relief, too. He had always clung to a vague hope that Gemma might still be alive, but the discovery of the body had seemed to wreck all that. Nobody else in the dale had been reported missing. And now, as Manson and his men picked stone after stone away, t
hey looked down at what was obviously the body of a young man, complete with moustache. A young man with unusually small hands. But, Banks asked himself, if it isn’t Gemma Scupham, then who the hell is it?

  Ill

  Jenny darted into the Eastvale Regional Headquarters at

  two o’clock, just in time for her appointment with Banks.

  She always seemed to be rushing these days, she

  thought, as if she were a watch a few minutes slow always

  trying to catch up. She wasn’t even really late this

  time.

  “Miss Fuller?”

  Jenny walked over to the front desk. “Yes?”

  “Message from Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, miss. Says he’s on his way. You can wait in his office if you wish.”

  Jenny frowned. “But I thought I was to see Alan— Chief Inspector Banks?”

  “He’s at the scene.”

  “What scene?”

  “It looks like a murder scene. I’m sorry I can’t say any more, miss. We don’t really know anything yet.”

  “That’s all right,” Jenny said. “I’ll wait.”

  “Very well. The superintendent’s office—”

  “I know where it is, thanks.”

  Jenny poured herself some coffee from the machine at the bottom of the stairs then went up to Gristhorpe’s office. She had been there before, but never alone. It was larger than Alan’s, and much better appointed. She had heard that rank determines the level of luxury in policemen’s offices, but she also knew that the department itself was hardly likely to supply such things as the large teak desk, or the matching bookcases that covered one wall. The cream and burgundy patterned carpet, perhaps—it was hardly an expensive one, Jenny noticed— but not the shaded desk lamp and the books that lined the shelves.