Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

Percy Peach glared moodily at the back of Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake. It was an aspect he had grown familiar with during their short association.

  He spoke to the sturdy shoulders reluctantly, for he was loath to share any information with them, as if doing so might in itself compromise his position. ‘There’s a body turned up at the golf course, apparently. We’re to investigate it, Tommy Bloody Tucker says.’ He felt oddly disorientated, knowing that the scent of a murder would normally have had him springing about like an excited terrier.

  ‘Which golf course?’ The response was as low-key as his revelation. She did not turn to face him, nor even look up from her desk.

  ‘The North Lancs.’

  ‘Ooh, there’s posh! On home ground for you, then, sir.’ The last word came like an afterthought, an ironic, insulting appendage. She had looked up now from her papers, but she stared straight ahead of her, alert as a cat, still refusing to turn.

  Lucy Blake’s back, with its waist surprisingly trim above the more opulent contours beneath it, was proving increasingly disconcerting to Peach. He had seen a lot of it over the last few days, and for a while he had thought it would be fine by him if that was all he ever saw of her. But now he realized that it did not help his flow of invective. He needed a face to fasten his hostility upon, reactions to his barbs to encourage him to continue them. And he had not known that his new DS was aware of his status as a newly elected member of the North Lancs.

  He said, ‘Word is the body’s been there for some time. It’s a female, probably below the age of thirty-five. We shall know more after the PM.’ He released the little information he had as grudgingly as a miser dispensing his gold. ‘You’d better go and start the check on the local missing persons register, Sergeant.’

  Lucy Blake stood up straight, looked at him briefly, and turned on her heel. Once she had gone, Percy leaned back on his seat, raising it on to two legs, straining back to the point where he was about to fall backwards, as he had been used to do as a boy when unobserved by adults. He had chosen the task he would have least relished himself for her. The bitch would be busy for the rest of the day at the computer screen, with luck.

  He was almost balancing the chair on its two back legs, gingerly raising his feet from the carpet, when the door opened abruptly, without any prior knock. He had been concentrating so hard on his balancing act that the surprise was too much for him. He lost concentration and equilibrium in the same instant, disappearing backwards into the corner of the room in a welter of flying shoe-leather and turn-ups.

  If Lucy Blake allowed herself any amusement at the sight, it had been removed from her features before Peach was able to inspect them. He said from the floor, ‘What the hell? I told you to—’

  ‘The computer search of local missing females is now in hand, sir, as you ordered.’

  Percy scrambled first to all fours and then to his feet, the process being more laboured because he knew with what interest it was being observed. ‘What I ordered, Sergeant Blake, was that you should conduct that research yourself. I did not suggest that—’

  ‘Work for a detective constable, sir, I thought. DC Jackson is well used to such things. Was able to turn up the relevant files on the computer within seconds. He’ll have the material you require with us in twenty minutes, he says. Far more quickly than I should have managed it. That’s the advantage of a specialist. Meanwhile, I am at your service for whatever professional task you think appropriate.’

  He dusted the seat of his trousers, so vigorously that his hand left a red weal on his buttock which he would examine with horror that evening. Fortunately for him, the phone shrilled at that moment, preventing him from making a suggestion to his sergeant that would undoubtedly have caused him further trouble. He snatched it up, modulating his snarling response when he found out the speaker. ‘Right. Thank you. I’ll come myself. We’ll need an exhibits officer, of course.’ He glanced across the room to where Blake was resuming her seat and allowed himself a small, vindictive smile. ‘And I’ll bring my new detective sergeant with me, I think.’

  He was hoping she would ask him about the call, but of course she did not. He had to make the running himself, as usual. ‘That was the pathologist. Autopsy on the cadaver tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. It’s deteriorated badly, they reckon. Very nasty, to those not used to such things. But I don’t suppose it will upset we professionals.’

  ‘Us professionals, I think that would be, sir. I’ll be there.’ She looked towards the corner of the room, where the chair lay still on its side. ‘Just in case you collapse under the pressure, sir.’

  ***

  Even on this golden October day, there was not much light left now. And on the eighth hole of the North Lancashire, there were only policemen and their civilian acolytes.

  There had been human killings within yards of this spot one thousand years and more before this night, and the scene which stretched away to the north over the last great outposts of the Pennines had not changed much in all that time. But these latest human occupants, moving ant-like over the shoulder of the hill, had no thought for those earlier deaths, nor for the bloodshed on these lonely fells in the intervening centuries. The death that concerned them might be insignificant against the cosmic backcloth of its setting but it occupied all the thoughts of the men who had to deal with it.

  They had thought it best to bring in the Land Rover with its four-wheel drive to remove the remains. An ordinary ambulance would probably have made it across the close-mown turf in this weather, but there was no sense in risking spinning wheels. The thing they were removing had once been human, should have been duly mourned with its last rites at the time of the death. They would risk no last blow to its diminished dignity now.

  Besides, the police these days were open to scrutiny and there were always those only too ready to criticize. Better not to give those mischievous tongues any cause for complaint about the procedures. And Detective Superintendent Tucker, who was watching over the operation as the officer in charge of this embryo case, was also anxious that there should be as little damage as possible to the hallowed turf of the North Lancs fairways, where many of the town’s most influential feet were known to tread. This would be his only direct contact with the crime, so it was important to him that there should be no cock-ups.

  The scene-of-crime team had finished their work now. They had gathered and bagged what they could from the bottom of the pond and the surrounding area. Once the corpse had been removed, they would use their floodlights for a final sift through the mud and earth which lay around and beneath the body and the stones which had held it static for so long. Anything else would wait for the morrow. There would be no invasion and no disturbance of this lonely site.

  The men who moved gingerly into the slime at the bottom of the old quarry wore plastic gloves and face masks. The dead must be afforded what dignity was possible, but the living must be protected from the dangers of decaying flesh and the things which sometimes fed upon it. Under the direction of the pathologist, they lifted the dripping shape carefully on to a large polythene sheet and shuffled back over the treacherous and uneven route to the firmer ground at the side of the quarry, now browned by the tread of many feet over the preceding five hours. Once there, they drew the sides of the sheet together and sealed it.

  With each step in the process, the burden became more anonymous, less human. Within minutes, it had been placed in the fibre-glass ‘shell’ and lost all definition. Unconsciously, the men relaxed and sped up their movements, safe in the knowledge that their macabre subject was now less vulnerable and their task almost complete. The plain coffin was slid into the back of the Land Rover and the doors locked upon it. The vehicle moved cautiously away down the slope, speeding up a little as its lights picked out the way it had come over the flatter ground.

  Save for a last faint glow in the west, over the point where Blackpool Tower had been distantly visible earlier in the day, the scene was now in darkness.

  ***
r />   The water ran steadily over the stainless steel of the pathologist’s cutting area, sluicing away the detritus of his work, signifying that all that was significant had been extracted.

  Peach wrinkled his nose suggestively. ‘Tongs a bit, don’t she?’ he said, studying his sergeant from the corner of his eye. She should have been green by now. Instead, she looked distressingly animated, with one lock of her dark red hair creeping unchecked over her forehead.

  Lucy Blake said, ‘I find the smell of the formaldehyde almost worse than the smell of the human decay it disguises. Matters of taste, I suppose. This has been very interesting: I’ve never seen the dissection of a body as far gone as this one before.’

  If the pathologist was surprised at her coolness, he was much too wise to refer to her gender. He said, ‘Good to see someone taking such interest in the processes of science. Some officers find post mortems a bit much for their stomachs.’ He looked to where the various elements of his dissections were laid out and labelled in bowls on the unit beside them, like items assembled for some nightmare buffet.

  ‘When you’ve attended a few bad road accidents, this is child’s play,’ she said. ‘So long as it’s not alive, then it doesn’t feel, and it can’t be either helped or hurt. That’s the way I look at it.’

  Peach thought these two were far too cosy with each other. He wasn’t quite sure what he had hoped for, but it had certainly included a fit of the vapours from his new sergeant. He said to the pathologist, ‘Can you summarize your results for us, then, please? We have an investigation to get on with, you see.’

  The doctor smiled, beginning to peel off his polythene gloves. Peach had a disconcerting notion that this man knew how the inspector’s nose had been put out of joint: he certainly seemed both gratified and amused by Lucy Blake’s resilience. ‘I’ll put it all in writing for you later today. It’s all in here, as you know.’ He tapped the tiny cassette recorder which he had attached to his lapel two hours earlier and spoken into at intervals. ‘But I can recap the essentials for you easily enough, yes. The first fact indicates that it’s hardly worth your hurrying: she’s been dead for approximately two years.’

  ‘How accurate is that?’

  The doctor shrugged. ‘In scientific terms, it’s no more than an educated guess at the moment. We shall send some body tissue samples to the forensic laboratory at Chorley for further analysis. But if you’re looking at the list of disappearances, I’d have to advise one to three years ago.’

  Lucy Blake said, ‘Dental records?’

  ‘Ah! Much more promising. As you saw, the jaws are complete and undamaged.’ He spoke with the enthusiasm of a man evaluating antique furniture. ‘The forensic odontologist at the university will give you a dentistry profile that should produce reliable results; I’d say there is enough recent dental work for a positive match.’

  Percy Peach said, ‘And how old would she be when she was killed?’

  ‘If you put me in court, I’d have to be cautious. Providing you don’t quote me in that context, I’d say between seventeen and twenty-four. Again the forensic lab will be able to pinpoint it with further tests. But perhaps you’ll have her identified by then.’

  Peach looked at him suspiciously, wondering if he was being teased. He was not often a victim of such mistaken humour but you couldn’t trust some of these professional men. ‘Height and weight?’

  ‘Height about 165 centimetres—about five feet six, in old money. Weight difficult to estimate, but she was young and reasonably fit. I’d say about nine stone, in normal circumstances.’

  ‘Normal circumstances?’ This was Lucy Blake, speaking quickly when she had meant to remain silent, half-suspecting already what was to come.

  ‘She was pregnant. Three or four months, I’d say.’ For the first time, the pathologist dropped his lightness of tone, no longer prepared to contend that this was no more than a job like any other, that the thing he had been working on was merely decaying refuse. The eyes of his listeners strayed for a moment to those sinister bowls with their black polythene covers, speculating despite themselves on which one of them might contain all that was left of that pathetic foetus.

  It was Peach who said, ‘Was she drowned?’

  ‘No. She died by strangulation. There’s no sign of a ligature, but the flesh at the throat and neck has almost totally gone. My guess would be manual strangulation. She was definitely dead when she went into the water, but at this distance it’s impossible to tell how long before that she died.’

  ‘Was she brought to the pond from a distance?’

  ‘That again is impossible to say now. Had we had a cadaver in better condition, there would probably have been marks of carrying or transportation on it. All we can say is that heavy weights have been attached to the limbs. Presumably at the site where she was found.’

  Peach nodded. ‘She was weighted with rocks from around the quarry. Could she have been killed there?’

  ‘She could indeed. But as I’ve explained, she could well have been killed a hundred miles away and brought there for disposal. I’m afraid there isn’t enough of her left for us to help you with that.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell us?’

  ‘Only the obvious. Don’t get the next of kin to do an identification, when you find out who they are. The dental records will be positive enough. As you’ve seen, we haven’t much more than a skeleton with a few bits of damaged flesh under there.’ He nodded towards the slabs where he had worked under their observation for most of the morning. ‘There’s no way I could sew that lot back together for examination by a relative.’ He was back to his most robust, as if complaining about the inferior materials with which they had provided him.

  While Peach was conferring with the exhibits officer about the rags of clothing which were to go to forensic, Lucy Blake slipped into the cloakroom. She looked in the mirror, happy to see that the blush make-up she had taken time to apply that morning was still doing its job. She had always had a strong stomach but there had been moments during the morning when it had been severely tested. She pressed her forehead for a moment against the cool of the mirror, then sipped a glass of cold water.

  Then she took a deep breath and made for the door. As she went through it, she donned the bright confidence which she now regarded as her Percy Peach expression.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There are too many missing persons in modern Britain for any search among them to be easy. But the operators of the police computers had a time to start from: two years or thereabouts since this disappearance. And they had a place. They checked initially those women under twenty-six who had gone missing from homes within ten miles of Brunton.

  Within two hours, they had a list of fourteen who seemed interesting candidates. It was entirely possible that this would be a false start, that the team would have to begin the lengthier sift through the National Home Office Missing Persons Register, established after bizarre discoveries of a positive graveyard of bodies of missing women at Cromwell Street, Gloucester, in 1994. But the searchers would try the obvious avenues before fanning outwards in the search.

  In the first hours, the CID did not begin the interviewing of relatives. It was better to wait until they could be absolutely sure of the victim’s identity. There was no point in causing further distress to parents and husbands who had already suffered years of alternating hope and despair. No point in starting false hares running; when three-quarters of all violent deaths are contrived within the family, the next of kin of a murder victim automatically become suspects, until such time as they can be eliminated.

  After the well-publicized gaffes of the last decade, the public are nowadays suspicious of the police, sensitive about any false starts, only too happy to accuse officers of bumbling indifference, even when known criminals are pulled in for questioning. Therefore there is an even greater need to be sure of your facts when you are beginning a murder investigation which has already had the publicity of a melodramatic discovery of
the corpse.

  Superintendent Tucker was well aware of all this. Whatever Peach and others thought of him as a policeman, he had studied his public relations techniques. In his press conferences, he exuded a business-like determination. For Granada Television, he promised, with full confidence, that they would ‘get to the bottom of this one’, that ‘no stone would be left unturned in the search for the person responsible for this callous disposal of a young woman in the prime of life’. With his mastery of the telling cliché thus established, he assured the camera earnestly that ‘the public had his personal guarantee’ that the dead girl would soon be identified.

  He had every reason for confidence in this last assertion. An hour before he made it, the dental records had provided them with conclusive proof of the identity of the remains which had been immersed for so long. By the end of the day, the parents would have been informed and the name would be released to the media. Superintendent Tucker’s first promise would be vindicated. The public would have the confidence of a sound man in charge of the investigation, a man who was already producing results. No one, Tucker liked to think, managed the release of information more tellingly than he did.

  The forensic odontologists confirmed that the woman was one of the fourteen thrown up by the initial computer search in the Brunton nick. The one, in fact, who had lived nearest to the point on the North Lancs golf course where the corpse had been found. A woman without any previous police record, whether as criminal or victim.

  That evening, Superintendent Tucker was able to reveal that the victim was a girl called Debbie Minton.

  Tucker had passed the information to Peach within sixty seconds of receiving it. His air was that of a man who had done the hard work and was now generously turning the routine conclusion of a case over to his grateful underlings. He put down the internal phone, fiddled with the buttons on his desk until he was satisfied that the light outside illuminated the ‘Engaged’ disc, and retrieved a putter from the regulation steel issue wardrobe in the corner of the big office. An executive deserved some reward for his efforts.