Unti Peter Robinson #22

by Peter Robinson

  Banks turned to glance at Annie beside him. She was sitting straight up, arms folded, earmuffs covering her ears, eyes tight shut. He was going to tell her that they would be arriving at any moment, but he realized she wouldn’t hear him. The noise of the helicopter was deafening, and the swaying, bobbing motion it made, as if it were being tossed on waves in a stormy sea, was probably what was responsible for Annie’s pale face and the contents of the paper bag she clutched on her lap.

  Banks could already see that the crash site was spread over a wide area. The valley bottom was narrow, not more than a quarter of a mile wide, and bits of white van and various pieces of engine metal glinted in the sun, which seemed to illuminate the scene with an almost gleeful garishness, as if to say nature doesn’t care, the universe doesn’t care, we move to our own rhythms, follow our own whims, and life on earth means nothing.

  An abrupt landing jolted Banks back to reality. The rotor blades started to slow down; the noise diminished from a roar to a whoosh. Banks touched Annie’s shoulder gently and smiled when she looked at him. He mouthed the words, “We’re down,” and they took off their earmuffs. The pilot opened the door for them, and they both scrambled out. Even Banks felt glad to standing on terra firma once again. Annie stumbled, her hair blowing in the downdraft generated by the rotor blades, bent forward and put the bag over her mouth. The pilot reached back into the cockpit and came up with a bottle of spring water, which he kindly handed to her. When she had finished with the bag, she gave him a weak smile and drank the water. He reached out his hand to take the paper bag, too. “Wouldn’t want you contaminating the scene, ma’am,” he said.

  Annie pulled a face and handed it over.

  “I assume you want me to wait, sir?” the pilot asked Banks.

  “Yes, if you would, Mal.” Banks glanced at Annie. “DC Cabbot might hitch a ride back with the CSIs, but I’ll be needing you. Others may, too.”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  Banks and Annie trotted off toward Stefan Nowak, whom they had spotted directing his men to mark the positions of various bits and pieces of wreckage. Neither spoke about Annie’s reaction to the helicopter flight. Banks knew something of what she felt like. He had suffered from car sickness as a child, until he was fourteen, when all of a sudden it had simply gone away. But the combination of stark terror and nausea Annie had just experienced could be very disorienting, he knew. The farther they got from the draft of the slowly turning helicopter blades, the worse the smell of raw decaying meat became.

  Nowak was standing beside something made out of metal and human body parts that resembled a Damien Hirst sculpture or some Giger-­designed creature from the Alien series. That bits of it had once been a man, a car seat, an engine and a steering wheel was just about possible to discern, but it wasn’t as easy to estimate where one began and the other ended. Both Banks and Annie stood with their backs to it as they spoke to Stefan. Banks wondered if Annie was wishing she still had her paper bag. He almost wished he had one himself.

  “I know,” Nowak said, looking at their expressions. “I’ve seen tidier crime scenes. We think it’s the driver.” He pointed up the steep daleside to a rocky outcrop. “It looks as if he plunged over the edge and hit that rock full on. Most unfortunate.”

  Banks winced, and Annie turned paler. “That’s putting it mildly,” Banks said. “But it’s not why we were called out here. The chief super wouldn’t authorize a helicopter for a road accident.”

  “Too true,” said Nowak. “The investigators will do their jobs, of course, but it was an accident, all right. The fellow going the other way reported it. He wasn’t hurt, but he’s very shaken. The paramedics took him to Muker to get him some hot sweet tea and keep an eye on him for a while. You can talk to him there later if you need.”

  “What did he say?”

  “There was a brief but heavy hailstorm. Our chap here was in the middle of the road. A sheep ran out, in front of both the car and the van, and when this driver hit the sheep and swerved to get out of the way of the oncoming car, he ran the van over the edge. Anyway, you’re right, it’s not him you’re here about. Had to be a bit circumspect on the phone, but I don’t suppose it matters much now.” He looked up at the news helicopter arriving from the south. “Want to follow me?”

  “Do we have to?” Annie muttered. “I just know this isn’t going to be good.”

  Nowak favored her with a heart-­melting smile. “Not if you don’t want to, my dear,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Lead on.”

  “Careful where you tread.”

  Nowak led them away from the driver’s crushed and broken body, treading carefully between scraps of metal and bits of engine. Banks had noticed that the ground was also scattered with black bin bags, most of them broken or split open and spilling their loads. The flags of black plastic flapped in the wind that roared eternally along the narrow channel of the valley bottom. That was how the pass had got its name; belder was Old English for “bellow” or “roar.”

  Here and there, Banks could make out the carcass of a dead sheep, pig or calf, a stillborn lamb, some of them whole, some just parts, a head, torso, hindquarters. Most of the animal bodies had split open to reveal inner organs, trails of glistening intestines and snail tracks of blood. It was a gruesome and surreal sight, he thought, and for a moment he could have sworn they were all museum animals, like the lions and tigers that had ended up on the overhead tramlines when the Germans bombed Leeds Museum in 1941. But when he looked more closely, there was enough blood and gore to convince him that they were real. The scattering of animal body parts and van wreckage seemed to spread across the whole valley bottom, as if it were some sort of battlefield. The field at Towton, Banks remembered from a book he had read, had been so drenched in blood that the becks and rivers had run red when the thaw came. Annie wasn’t showing any reaction, but Banks found himself feeling a bit sick. Mostly, it was the smell.

  “As I told you on the phone,” Nowak said, “the driver, Caleb Ross was his name, worked for Vaughn’s ABP, so this”—­ he spread his arm in a gesture to take in the whole area—­“is only to be expected.”

  Vaughn’s Animal By-­Products was a company that dealt in the removal and disposal of fallen stock. If a farmer had a dead animal on his farm, it was Vaughn’s, or someone like them, that he called. Caleb Ross would have driven from farm to farm, following a list of orders to pick up, and when his van was full he would take his load to the incinerator out back at Vaughn’s yard. Banks had seen the distinctive white vans often around Eastvale, and woe betide you if you got stuck behind one on a slow winding road.

  Banks heard the sound of another helicopter and wondered if Mal had taken off for some reason. But when he looked up, he saw the logo of yet another news station. There was also a line of vans way up the steep valley side, parked on the pass road, which had been sealed off to regular traffic. The media were here already. Hardly surprising, Banks thought, when he considered the drama of the crash and the scene. They’d be getting great visuals from their helicopters, too, and there was no way to stop them short of calling out the RAF.

  “Peter Darby here yet?” he asked Nowak.

  “No. He’s waiting for a mate to come over from Salford. Some specialist in crash scene photography. They should be here soon. Geoff Hamilton and his team are here, though, and Dr. Burns. In the meantime we’ve been asked not to touch anything, just put down markers where we think they’re necessary. We’re taking plenty of photographs of our own, though. We’re also arranging to have some lighting brought in. It’ll be dark before long, and it doesn’t look as if any of us will be going anywhere for a while yet.”

  “The wonders of the modern mobile phone,” said Banks. “These days, it seems everyone’s a photographer.”

  “Just as well they’re useful for something,” said Nowak. “There’s no reception down here. I had to get o
ne of the local officers to call you from Muker, the lad who went with the other driver. I think one of the crash scene specialists has a satellite phone, though, if you need to use one.”

  When they found Dr. Burns, he was kneeling by something on the ground, obscuring it from Banks’s view. When Banks got close enough to see around him, he wished he hadn’t. It was half a human body, the left half, by the looks of it, both armless and headless.

  “Oh, Christ,” Banks said, tasting bile in his throat.

  Dr. Burns looked up. “I don’t think He had much to do with it.”

  “The crash did this?”

  “The crash spilled the load and crushed the van driver,” said Dr. Burns. “But this was just a part of it, wrapped in that black plastic bag there like some of the animal parts. I very much doubt it happened in the crash. The butchery is far too neat for that. You can see the—­”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Doc. Since when did Vaughn’s get in the human body disposal business?”

  “They’re not, as far as I know,” said Dr. Burns. “This, you might say, was superfluous to the load.”

  “A stowaway?”

  “If you like. You’ll have to ask the dispatcher, but I doubt if he knows anything about it.”

  “Maybe he did it?”

  “Maybe,” said Burns. “That’s for you to find out.”

  “Any idea who it is?”

  “None at all.”

  “Found any other bits?”

  “Not yet.” Dr. Burns nodded toward a line of uniformed police officers. “They’re still looking.”

  At that moment, one of the officers raised his arm and shouted, “Over here, Doctor.”

  Banks followed Dr. Burns, along with Annie and Stefan, and they found the other half of the human being, again armless. Still no head.

  “What the hell’s going on,” Banks whispered, almost to himself.

  “There is one thing I can tell you, Alan,” said Dr. Burns, gently pulling away the fabric of the victim’s shirt with tweezers. “Actually, you can see for yourself.”

  Banks looked at the exposed skin, which was a rich light coffee color, even in death, and he saw the bottom half of what was probably a spider’s web tattoo on what was left of the neck.

  “Bloody hell,” he said. “Morgan Spencer.”

  7

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING BEFORE DETECTIVE CHIEF Superintendent Gervaise managed to gather the troops together for another meeting in the boardroom. This time the whiteboard and glass board were practically covered in names, circles, arrows and photographs. They showed just how much the case had escalated within a few short hours. A lot of the information concerned the Belderfell Pass crash, but there were more connections now, more circles linked by arrows.

  Banks and Annie had just got back from the crash scene. Annie still looked ill, Banks thought, though he could hardly blame her. She had been as keen as he was to get out of the flesh-­strewn valley bottom, so she had decided to take the helicopter back with him rather than wait for someone to give her a lift along the bumpy, winding tracks back to civilization. Dr. Burns had accompanied them this time. The ride was less turbulent, and though Annie had held on to a fresh paper bag, she hadn’t needed to use it.

  When Banks and Annie had left the scene, Morgan Spencer’s head was still missing, though his right arm had been discovered under some of the van wreckage. The CSIs and crash scene investigators were still searching. As soon as the rest of Morgan had been found and photographed in situ, the pieces would be delivered to Dr. Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary, where they would be assembled for the postmortem. Banks had agreed to attend the procedure, and he was not looking forward to it. The media had also arrived in force, and there were rumors on the evening news about human body parts being found among the animals.

  Leslie Palmer, the driver of the oncoming car, had been able to add nothing to his statement. He was the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop in Swainshead, on his way back home after a visit to colleagues at the Grove Bookshop in Ilkley. All he could tell the police was that Ross had been too close to the middle of the road when the sheep ran out and Palmer turned the bend. Pure bad luck. Geoff Hamilton’s team and the rest would continue to investigate the circumstances of the incident, and Peter Darby and his crash scene photographer expert from Salford would take photographs and videos, but Banks was more interested in the remains found scattered around the scene than in Caleb Ross’s unfortunate demise. As far as Banks was concerned, the pass wasn’t the real crime scene; that was still the hangar in the Drewick airfield, where he was certain that Morgan Spencer had been shot. All they needed now was more forensic evidence to back up these theories.

  “Right,” said Gervaise, as soon as everyone had settled down. “Can we get down to business? It’s been a long day, and it isn’t over yet. DCI Banks?”

  Banks walked to the front as Gervaise sat down. A long day, indeed. Banks remembered standing beside Morgan Spencer’s smoldering caravan in the gray dawn light. It seemed eons ago.

  “It’s true that a lot’s happened,” he began, “and we’ve learned quite a bit. But we’re still missing some important pieces of the jigsaw. While Jazz has analyzed the DNA sample from the hangar and discovered that it’s human, and it belongs to one person only, we haven’t yet found any match on the database. That doesn’t mean a lot, as you know, but it does mean that we need to get a move on and broaden our search. Specifically,” he said, “we need to get a sample of Morgan Spencer’s blood analyzed as soon as possible. Given that we just found him—­or what we think is him—­in pieces scattered over the bottom of Belderfell Pass, that shouldn’t prove too difficult.”

  Jazz nodded. “I’m on it.” She looked at Gervaise. “If someone could just get Harrogate CID off my back for a while, please? They’re driving me crazy over a sample I’m late with. It’s a rape case, so I can hardly blame them.”

  “I’ll talk to Harrogate, Ms. Singh,” said Gervaise. “Just do your best.”

  “Thanks. Well . . . one thing I can say for certain is that there was no DNA belonging to Michael Lane found in the hangar. The hairbrush DI Cabbot brought in gave us hairs with the follicle attached, which was just what we needed to check that out. No match.”

  “So the body in the hangar wasn’t Lane’s,” Banks said. “And thanks to Gerry, we also know from the mobile records that it was Morgan Spencer who texted Michael Lane at 9:29 a.m. on Sunday morning. We don’t know what he wrote, of course, as we don’t have access to either his or Lane’s mobile phones, but we were able to check with the ser­vice provider against the numbers of the itemized calls. According to his partner, Alex Preston, when Michael Lane received this text, he said he had to go out to do a job, and that he might visit his father later. He left his flat at the East Side Estate shortly after 9:30, and it would have taken him about ten or fifteen minutes to get to the hangar, if that was his destination. That puts him there at about 9:45. We can also assume that the job involved Spencer, as he was the one who texted, and he and Lane were known to work together on removals and farm labor. As far as we can gather, Michael Lane never got to his father’s, and he hasn’t been seen or heard of since Sunday morning. Alex Preston assured DI Cabbot that’s out of character.”

  “But can we assume that this job Lane and Spencer had to do involved the airfield and the hangar?” asked Gervaise.

  “We still lack any hard evidence on that. We don’t know anything about Morgan Spencer’s movements that morning, except that he sent Lane a text at 9:29. If he stole the tractor, he may well have spent the night with it at his lockup. A number of ­people from the site do remember seeing him as usual during the day on Saturday. We’ve questioned most of the ­people at the caravan park now, and nobody admits to really knowing Spencer, or to seeing anything suspicious during the night of the fire. At the moment I’m
just assuming it was his blood at the hangar because we know it wasn’t Lane’s, and we’d have to be very unlucky to have two major incidents at once. We’ll know whether Morgan was killed in the hangar when Jazz compares the blood sample with that from the crash site.”

  “But how is the hangar connected with the theft of Beddoes’s tractor?” Gervaise asked.

  “We don’t know that it is. Not for certain. Whatever happened there might not be connected with Morgan Spencer or Michael Lane or the tractor theft at all. I mean, why kill someone over a stolen tractor? The owner, John Beddoes, didn’t get back from Mexico until late Sunday night, so he’s in the clear. He also doesn’t need the insurance money. It’s possible that Spencer intended to meet Lane somewhere else entirely to do an honest job, then he got snatched and taken to the hangar, but none of that explains Lane’s disappearance. If he couldn’t find Spencer at the intended job site, why didn’t he just go home?”

  “I still don’t like it,” Gervaise said, casting her eyes around the room. “Too much speculation. What about physical evidence?”

  “Stefan found some traces of red diesel in the hangar,” said Banks. “It could have come from the tractor or some other farm vehicle permitted to use the stuff. But there was nothing else to indicate that the tractor had been there. He also found traces of other vehicles having been there, but it’s impossible to say when. We just don’t know.”

  “Anything from the train companies or the news item we ran?” Gervaise asked Doug Wilson.

  “No, ma’am. They said they’d check the online purchase records and put a few flyers on the route, but it’ll take time.”

  “Rather like train journeys themselves,” muttered Banks.

  “Is there anything else to connect the hangar with the stolen tractor?” Gervaise asked him.

  “I think Winsome and Gerry might have something to report on that.”