A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2)

by Mark Dawson

“It’s not what we thought it was. This has to stay between us. We haven’t gone public yet.”

  “Of course.”

  “Fyfe looked at the remains. They’re not as old as they ought to have been.”

  “The teeth,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  He frowned. “And there’s no possibility of this being an official burial?”

  “None. The last burial there was in the forties. They still bury locals in the graveyard of the church now and again, but not at the chapel.” She nibbled at a poppadom. “We searched the graveyard today to see if there was anything else that was out of place. There are a couple of spots that look as if they might have been disturbed in the last few months, but it’s difficult to be sure without digging them up, and that’s delicate. Fyfe’s conducting a full examination. I’ll have a better idea after that.”

  Mack’s phone buzzed on the table. She spun it around so that she could see who was calling. “Speak of the devil.”

  Mack got up and answered the call in the hallway that led to the bathrooms. Atticus loaded his poppadom with chutney and took a bite. He watched Mack as she spoke; she frowned, and that frown deepened into an expression that spoke of serious news.

  Mack finished the call and came back to the table.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Got to go.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Fyfe says he’s found something.”

  “He tell you what?”

  “No. You know what he’s like.”

  “Drama queen.”

  She nodded. “He wants to show me in person. I need to get over to the hospital.”

  “You can’t drive,” Atticus said.

  “What? Why?”

  “You’ll be over the limit.”

  She swore, then reached into her bag for her phone. “I’ll call a taxi.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s not a problem. What else am I going to do tonight?”

  His offer wasn’t entirely altruistic. Atticus had been enjoying the evening and was not averse to continuing their conversation, even if it was in the car while he drove her to the hospital. And, beyond that, he was curious. What discovery could Fyfe have made that was important enough to drag Mack all the way out to the mortuary rather than discussing it on the phone? They both knew that the professor was prone to deliver information with theatrical flourishes, but there still had to be something of consequence, and Atticus was intrigued.

  He had taken a day or two off from his work for the bank, but, now that he had located Molly York, he had no excuse for not getting back to it. Tracking down hidden assets was remunerative, but the fraudster he was pursuing was not particularly cunning, and the work was far from challenging. The bones that they had found in the graveyard were much more interesting, and, if there was a mystery as to how they had come to be buried there—plus whatever fresh tweak the pathology might discover—then Atticus definitely wanted to be involved.

  He got up and laid a note on the table to cover the bill. “All right?”

  “Come on, then,” she said, slipping on her coat and leading the way to the door.

  31

  Atticus drove them to Oddstock. It was eight o’clock when they arrived at the hospital. He switched off the engine and turned to look at Mack.

  “Let me know how it goes?”

  She paused, weighing something up.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “Come in, too.”

  “Sure?”

  “It might be helpful. A bit of backup. And you did find the body.”

  “This is true,” he said.

  “Just don’t make a tit of yourself.”

  “As if,” he said, opening the car door before she could change her mind.

  Atticus followed Mack as she led the way to the mortuary. Mack pressed the button to buzz the intercom and waited for the door to unlock. It did, and she pushed the door open and went inside. Atticus came in behind her.

  Professor Fyfe was waiting in the reception area. “Good evening, DCI Jones,” he said.

  “Evening,” Mack said. “You remember Atticus Priest?”

  He frowned with displeasure. “How could I possibly forget?”

  Atticus had always found it difficult to modulate his responses to other people, especially those about whom he had a low opinion. Atticus thought that Fyfe was a bombastic, self-aggrandising old fool, and he knew that Fyfe was aware of his opinion. The two of them had never really seen eye to eye, especially after—on their first meeting—Atticus had corrected the pathologist when he had erred about the cause of death of a man who had been found in the woods outside Tisbury. Fyfe had suggested that the man had been beaten before he died, but Atticus had disagreed, suggesting that the lesions upon which the conclusion had been founded were, in fact, the bluish discoloration that was sometimes caused by lividity. There had been an argument during which Fyfe had haughtily dismissed Atticus’s objections as those of an amateur. The family of the deceased had insisted upon a second opinion, however, and Atticus’s conclusions had been preferred.

  Fyfe frowned at Atticus sourly. “I heard you were sacked?”

  “More of a mutual parting of the ways.”

  “It was Atticus’s suggestion that led to us finding the body,” Mack said, trying to maintain the peace between the two of them. “He has a good eye for these kinds of things. I wouldn’t mind having him here to listen to this—provided you don’t mind, of course?”

  “It’s irregular.”

  “I won’t say a thing,” Atticus said. “I’ll just stand here and watch.”

  Fyfe looked as if he might complain, but, with Mack smiling pleasantly at him, he relented. “Fine. This way.”

  He took them through to the room where the bones had been arranged. Fyfe took a pair of gloves from a box and pulled them onto his hands. “I’ve finished a preliminary examination. I have a much better idea about Amy at the time of her death.”

  Atticus looked down at the skeleton and saw the open, circular inlet in the pelvic area. The hip bones were more outwardly flared, and the sciatic notch in the ilium was broad, both of which also indicated gender.

  “Age?” Mack asked.

  “As we thought,” Fyfe said. He pointed down to the skeleton’s legs. “To allow for growth, the ends and shafts of long bones are separated by cartilage plates. They disappear and the extremities of the various long bones fuse at different ages. By knowing the sequence of these bones coming together, we can estimate age. In Amy’s case, the degree of fusion of the first and second sacral bodies and the medial clavicular bones suggests she’s fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Anything else?” Mack asked.

  Fyfe moved around the table so that he was standing over the skull. “This is more speculative, but the features we see here—the shape of the skull, the shape of the nasal region and orbits, the degree of protrusion of the jaw—suggest Amy was white.”

  “Height?”

  “Between five feet four and five feet five.”

  Atticus moved closer to the table and bent at the waist so that he could look a little more closely at the remains. “She was strangled.”

  Fyfe started to speak. “That’s what—”

  Atticus cut over him. “The hyoid bone is fractured.” He took a biro from his pocket and pointed down with the chewed end to the small collection of bones beneath the jaw. “There. It almost never fractures—it’s protected behind the mandible and the cervical spine. It’s only ever external pressure when it’s been damaged like this.”

  Fyfe folded his arms across his chest. “Quite,” he said, indignant that his thunder had been stolen.

  Atticus barely noticed it.

  He turned to Mack.

  “She was murdered.”

  Part IV

  Thursday

  32

  Mack got up at six and took a shower. She looked out of the window of the hotel and
saw that the rain was coming down hard. She checked her phone and saw that the forecast had rain until the evening, with a temperature that was predicted to fall to just above freezing. Mack knew that she was going to be out on the Plain all day, that it was going to be dirty work and cold. She dressed in her warmest clothes and took her Wellingtons from out of the closet and stood them next to the door so that she wouldn’t forget them.

  She went down to the restaurant and had a larger than usual breakfast in anticipation that she might not get the chance to eat again until much later. She ordered eggs and bacon and checked her phone for emails while she waited for the food to arrive. She had reported the results of the forensic examination of Amy’s body to Beckton late last night and then had been in touch with the station at Bourne Hill so that the preparations for a Major Incident Room could be set in motion. The discovery of the fractured hyoid bone and Fyfe’s conclusion of manual strangulation made murder the only possible conclusion. Beckton had arranged for an expedited application to the Ministry of Justice, and the exhumation licence had been granted just before midnight.

  It was the green light for a lot of muddy, cold, unpleasant work.

  The phone buzzed with a message. She checked: it was from Atticus.

  Have fun today.

  She smiled and tapped out a reply.

  Fun? Have you seen the weather?

  I’ll think of you while I’m warm and dry.

  Your concern is touching.

  Want to take that bet?

  She remembered what he had said as he had dropped her outside the hotel after running her back into town. He had predicted that Amy would not be the only victim that they found in the graveyard. Mack had dismissed the suggestion, telling him that there was no reason to think there would be more than one.

  She typed: What do I get if I’m right and you’re wrong?

  Dinner with me.

  And if you’re right?

  Two dinners with me.

  Mack knew that flirting with him was a dreadful idea, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Agreed.

  Mack walked from the hotel to the car park where she had left the Range Rover last night. It was a filthy day. Rain lashed the street, and the passing cars threw up curtains of dirty spray over pedestrians not paying attention to the water that clogged the drains. The prospect of being out in the middle of the Plain on a day like this was not one that filled her with enthusiasm, but she knew that her presence out there—at least at the start of the day—was completely non-negotiable.

  She had called Nigel Archer and told him to get the team together so that she could brief them before heading out to Imber to oversee the work that was starting there. There had been a lot of high level negotiation with the Ministry of Defence to block the area around the village and to close off access to exercising troops. The Ministry were unhappy with developments and Mack knew that they would be exerting plenty of background pressure to bring the investigation to an end as quickly as possible.

  She parked the car at the station, hurried inside and went to the bathroom, where she checked her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was wet, lashed by the wind and the rain and plastered to her forehead. She dried it as best she could, then took out her makeup bag and made herself presentable.

  She looked in the mirror again. She still looked good, she told herself. Her skin was still supple, her nightly moisturiser replenishing it after days spent outside in all weather. A lifetime of regular exercise had maintained her trim figure. She didn’t want to think about divorce, but she turned her face to look at both sides and told herself that she wouldn’t be left on the shelf. She would start to take a little better care of herself in the meantime; she would show Andy that he had made a mistake.

  She straightened her shirt, smoothing it down, and made her way to CID.

  Mack went into the open-plan office and called out that the briefing was about to start. A conference suite had been secured as the location of the Major Incident Room, and she went inside and waited for the others to join her. They filed in and sat down around the long conference table. She took the chair at the head and looked from face to face.

  To her right sat Robbie Best, Mack’s second-in-command. Best was a doughty inspector with years of experience who, while a little slow on the uptake, was a hard worker who had succeeded by dint of diligence and determination rather than leaps of imagination or intuition.

  DS Mike Lewis and DC Nigel Archer were next to each other. Lewis was an old-school copper who, by his own admission, was prepared to push the boundaries just as much as he could get away with. He had twenty years of experience and, thanks to that, owned an extensive knowledge of the criminal scene in Salisbury and the rural areas that surrounded it. Archer was younger than Lewis and had made the switch from uniform by dint of ferocious ambition and a work ethic that made everyone else feel guilty by comparison. Archer was smart and had hitched his wagon to Lewis in the hope that he might be able to short-circuit the acquisition of experience by soaking up as much of Lewis’s as possible. Mack had recommended Archer’s transfer and had remembered him as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed up-and-comer. His time at Lewis’s side had seen him absorb some of his tutor’s character, an irascibility that seemed to develop by osmosis. There were frequent jabs at the closeness of their relationship, with the less politically conscious members of the team suggesting that Archer was selling sexual favours in exchange for Lewis’s tutelage; others just referred to them as Statler and Waldorf, the cantankerous elderly Muppets.

  Mack’s remaining two detective constables completed the team. Stewart Lynas was ambitious, but Mack feared that his aspirations outpaced his ability. He was a local lad from a wealthy family, educated at one of the city’s private schools and then Bournemouth University, returning to Salisbury with an overinflated sense of his own competence that Mack feared would not survive its first real skirmish with the practicalities of police work. He was in his mid-twenties and handsome, although he had a superciliousness that suggested he was simply marking time with the plebs while he waited for the brass to notice his talent; Mack suspected that he would be waiting a long time, at least until he found some humility.

  Francine Patterson sat at the opposite end of the table to Mack. Her family had a long history of service in the armed forces, and she had not deviated from that path. She had been a redcap, a corporal in the 1st Investigation Company of the Military Police based down the road at Bulford. She had made her name with the investigation of a private who had been killed during a live-fire exercise, eventually concluding that the lance corporal in the man’s platoon who had fired the fatal shot had been high on LSD at the time. She was short and compact, with an athletic build that she nurtured on twenty-mile runs and hours spent at Parkwood, the health club just before the London Road on the way out of the city.

  Mack took a seat and paused until they were all in place. She rapped her knuckles on the table and then ran through what they had discovered so far: the discovery of the bone, the location of the remains from which it had been taken, the dental implant that dated the burial, and then the suspicion that they were looking at murder.

  “Cause of death?” Archer asked.

  “Strangulation. Fyfe’s full report should be with us this morning. But that’s the headline.”

  “How old does he think the victim was?”

  “No older than sixteen.”

  “Shit,” Archer said.

  Mack nodded her agreement. She had been putting that to the back of her mind; the idea that they might find more kids in the graveyard was not something she wanted to think about.

  Patterson raised a hand. “What’s the plan, boss?”

  “We’re going to go back to the graveyard today and look for any evidence that there are other remains that shouldn’t be there.”

  “How many bodies are officially buried there?”

  “Around a hundred, although we’ll want to be certain about that. We’ll start near where
Amy was found and work out from there.”

  Patterson noted it all down. She was a dutiful officer with a bright future, and Mack reminded herself to give her a little extra responsibility if she could.

  “And then what?” said Archer. “Dig them all up?”

  “Preferably not, Nigel. We’ll take it as it comes. Fyfe is on standby, and we’ll test the bones that we find as we go. The hope is that the remains we do find can all be dated to before the churchyard was closed.”

  “And if they can’t?”

  “Then the odds are that we’re looking at something that could get big. And then we’d have to keep digging.”

  “The budget on that’s going to be nuts,” Lewis said.

  “It could be. That reminds me. Get on the phone to Simon Chester and make sure he’s there.”

  “Who?”

  “Forensic anthropologist. We’ll need an archaeologist, too, at least for a site survey. They’ll be gagging to come out on a job like this.”

  “Beckton’s not going to be pleased.”

  “No, he’s not. But he knows we don’t have much choice.” She collected the clipboard that she had brought with her and referred to the piece of paper that was secured to it. “We need to assign roles.”

  She picked Robbie Best as deputy SIO, Archer as office manager and Lewis—although unhappily—agreed to serve as exhibits officer, responsible for ensuring that all the documents that were generated by the inquiry found the right home. It would be a nightmare in a case like this, and Mack needed to be sure that it would be done right. Mack told Archer to appoint the rest of the backroom team—the action manager, disclosure officer, document reader and registrar—and to make sure that the Holmes 2 software was ready.

  “Robbie,” Mack said, nodding to Best, “I want you out at Imber. There’s going to be a ton of set-up work to do. Equipment, manpower—that’s going to be on you.”

  “Yes, boss.”