by Val McDermid
29
T
he smell was the same, but stronger because the fire had been more recent. The acrid notes of burnt plastic mingled with something more primal. Carol, Paula and Karim stood in a tight knot on the outside of the fluttering plastic tape that marked out the province of the forensic team and the fire investigator. Kevin was on his way up to the farmhouse to see whether Anselm Carter had anything to add to what he’d already told North Yorkshire.
And Tony was walking a grid that only he understood. The passing place on the single-track road was separated from the grazing by a ditch and, beyond that, a single strand of barbed wire. It didn’t seem much to keep cows corralled. He walked along the road in the direction the car had come from, seeing nothing of interest. A hundred metres along the road, he stopped and assessed the ditch. It was about a metre deep and about a metre and a half wide. He reckoned he could get across without too much trouble. Tony backed up a couple of strides and took a short run at it. He cleared the ditch but his momentum almost took him into the barbed wire fence. He teetered on the lip of the ditch and just managed to save himself from toppling backwards into the muddy trench. Now he was on the other side, he could see that the flimsy strand wasn’t the only precaution against wandering cattle. Beyond it was the thin filament of an electric fence. When it was switched on, it would give the cows enough of a jolt to divert them away from the road.
Tony studied the barbed wire apprehensively. He wasn’t the most dextrous of men; this was precisely the kind of scenario that could end in torn trousers and blood running down his legs. He could get Karim to do it. But Karim wouldn’t read the scene in the same way he did. There was nothing else for it. He’d have to take a chance.
Gingerly, he pushed the wire downwards and stepped over it. Luckily there was enough clearance and he let out a long sigh of relief as he cleared it. There was no tell-tale hum coming from the electric fence but he touched it with the back of his hand to make sure. Nothing.
He crossed the electric fence and walked slowly back towards the burned-out shell of the Peugeot, alternately staring at the ground and the distant horizons. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but he knew there had to be something that connected this setting to the scene of Kathryn McCormick’s immolation.
And it was a setting, he was sure of that. This wasn’t a random passing place on a random road. It had been chosen for reasons that were at the very least practical but which might have a deeper emotional and psychological significance. What that was, he had no idea yet. But everything he learned at this stage had the potential to open doors in his head further down the line.
It was a striking landscape. Low hills that swept in curves to valleys where sheep and cattle grazed. Stands of trees that dotted the slopes. Drystone walls that straggled up the gradients and crossed at angles that were everything but right. It was greener than the moorland around Carol’s barn and the views were more dramatic. But he could see the genetic link between the two landscapes.
As he drew nearer, he could see the activity around the car itself. White-suited figures in their protective suits, masks across their faces, taking photographs and samples. Just as he had his own grammar for reading a crime scene, so had they. The things that mattered to them would never attract his attention, and vice versa.
He carried on past the crime scene, still not happy that he had found what he was looking for. Whatever that was. He paused and looked around again. Nothing out of the ordinary. But twenty metres on, he came upon something that stopped him in his tracks. Right in front of him, on the field side of the fences, something had scraped a scar in the surface of the grass. About a couple of feet square, there was a deeper indentation on one side. It looked fresh; the grass that it had uprooted was wilted rather than dead. Something had recently been tossed into the field.
Tony turned and cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘Carol,’ he shouted. Her head lifted and turned towards him. ‘You need to see this.’ He pointed extravagantly at the ground.
She walked up the road towards him, Paula and Karim at her heels. ‘What is it?’
He indicated what he’d found. ‘I was looking to see if maybe he’d jumped across the ditch to get away.’
‘Why would you do that in the dark when there’s a perfectly good road?’ Karim asked.
Tony grinned. ‘Now that is the kind of question I ask. And I don’t know the answer, but I do know that somebody chucked something into this field from somewhere near where you’re standing. You can tell by the direction of the skid mark and the flattened grass,’ he added.
‘I’m glad to see you’ve been picking something up from the forensics techs,’ Carol said drily. ‘Paula, can you get one of the crime scene specialists up here? I want this processed.’ She looked up at Tony. ‘Nice work, Tony.’
He shrugged. ‘You lot would have found it eventually when you considered the wider scene. I got lucky, that’s all.’ He turned away and scanned the horizon. Without saying anything more, he set off across the field at an acute angle, dodging cowpats and sheep droppings. He kept his eyes on the ground; if there were any traces of someone else having passed this way, he didn’t want to compromise them.
At the far side of the field, he stopped by a metal five-barred gate with a sturdy spring-fastener latch. ‘You’re not going to have left any traces on this gate, are you?’ he said aloud. ‘You’re far too savvy for that. But I’m not going to take a chance on messing up the forensics just in case. I mean, it was dark when you came here. You might have made a mistake.’
He contented himself with checking out what lay beyond. A rough tractor track led back towards the Carter farmhouse through another pasture where sheep dotted the green. Beyond that was a drystone dyke. Where the wall met another, he could make out the fingerpost for a footpath. ‘Was that what you were looking for?’ he mused. ‘Did you literally walk away from what you’d done?’
Carol watched Tony wander off across the field, wondering what bee was buzzing in his bonnet. Given their lack of progress so far, anything was worth pursuing. She briefed the white-suited CSI tech who muttered darkly about amateurs messing with his crime scene. Nevertheless, he started scrutinising the bank on both sides of the ditch to see whether he could find any signs of a crossing.
Carol left Karim with the CSI and walked back to the focus of attention with Paula. ‘One thing strikes me,’ Paula said.
‘What’s that?’
‘If our cars say anything about our personalities, I bet Amie’s a very different kind of woman to Kathryn. The Ford Focus is exactly the kind of car you’d associate with a woman like Kathryn – a bit staid, reliable, nothing to frighten the horses. But the Peugeot 108 – that’s a very different message. It’s a sporty little number. A bit racy, even, you might say.’
‘Interesting,’ Carol said. She chuckled. ‘Everybody’s channelling Tony today, apparently.’
The fire investigator was stripping off his gloves and dropping them into a paper bag when they reached the car. The white pointed hood made him look like a cartoon of a man in a wind tunnel. Carol introduced Paula to Finn Johnston then asked what he had for them.
‘Well, it’s definitely a human body in there.’
‘What else would it be?’ Paula wondered.
‘You have to keep an open mind. Round here, people have been known to transport sheep and even pigs in their cars.’ He gave her a boyish grin. ‘You’re not in the city now, Sergeant.’
‘Can you tell whether it’s a man or a woman?’ Carol asked.
‘Hard to say. Not my field. But because of the way the body’s canted over, the midriff has been somewhat protected, so when they move the body, the medic might be able to give you a quick answer. What I can tell you is that it’s either a woman or a man with small feet.’
‘You can tell that from charred remains?’ Paula asked.
‘No. I can tell that because I can see the trainers. And I can tell you the victim was wearing jeans with some ki
nd of stretch material incorporated in them.’
‘That’s different from the previous victim,’ Carol said. ‘Why is that?’
‘The sunroof. The best way of thinking about a body in a fire in a contained space like a car is to imagine your Sunday joint roasting in the oven. A nice leg of pork with plenty of skin for crackling. If you leave it in long enough, the surface skin will blacken, it’ll split and it’ll char. Then the fat under the skin melts and as it’s released, it catches fire and burns away. And eventually you get down to bone. And bone has very well defined stages of thermal decomposition. Colour changes, cracks and fractures appear. If the fire burns long enough, you get ash. Like at the crematorium. Time’s the key. Regardless of how high or low the temperature is, the result will be the same if you leave it long enough.’
The images his words conjured up made both women feel slightly queasy. Carol didn’t think she’d be serving roast pork any time soon. Good communicators like Finn with his vivid comparisons almost made her wish for the nerds who blinded her with science. But it was those very comparisons that made the case come alive for Carol and her team. Those word pictures were impossible to forget, long after they’d forgotten the detailed scientific explanations for what they’d seen. They made her care because they made the events real.
‘So what’s the difference with the sunroof?’ Paula persisted.
‘When the sunroof burns, it funnels the fire upwards. The hot gases are drawn out of the hole so the lower parts of the interior may not be too badly damaged. So here, although everything above mid-shin is pretty well incinerated, the lower calves are less badly damaged. I’ve obviously not disturbed the body but I can see enough to tell you that the trainers are superficially damaged but more or less intact. Which means the feet probably are too.’
‘So we’ll get DNA?’ Carol asked.
Finn shrugged. ‘I’d have thought a definite maybe. That’d make it easier for you, I guess?’
‘We still have to have something to compare it with,’ Carol said. ‘If it’s her car and the DVLA details are right, we might be quicker finding a dental comparison. Any chance of getting evidence of someone else inside the car this time?’
He looked dubious, puffing his cheeks and blowing out air through pursed lips. ‘I doubt it. Though we’ll hopefully get more detailed results about the cause and progress of the fire this time because we’ve not had the hoses and foam all over it.’
‘Which is a good thing,’ Carol said.
‘Indeed.’ His sharp nose twitched. ‘I’m not getting any of the obvious accelerants on smell alone, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t present. Just that they’ve dissipated in the fresh air. What I can tell you is that it looks as if it started in the same place – in the driver’s footwell. And this one went even faster and hotter because of the fabric roof. Once that went up, the oxygen supply increased massively and the fuel load inside the car burned faster and hotter.’ He pulled a face. ‘You’d have to hope your victim was already dead when the fire started.’
Carol liked him better for that brief moment of humanity. ‘That’s what we all hope. When will you have something to tell us?’
‘Two or three days,’ he said. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll get something more distinctive this time.’
Carol shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t count on it. This guy knows how to cover his tracks. So far, he’s not put a foot wrong.’
30
S
am sucked down a third of his pint in one go. He’d spent three weeks in a bubble of hot rage that nothing seemed capable of cooling. It had taken him days to sort out his bank account and credit cards. His mortgage was still suspended and he kept discovering new things that Stacey had done to his digital footprint. He’d had to close down his Facebook account because every day it filled up with cute GIFs of cats. His Instagram was infested with puppies and his Twitter feed was a constant retweet of stupid bigoted comments from football fans of every stripe. It was vengeance out of all proportion to his offence. All he’d done, for God’s sake, was to tip off a journalist about Carol Jordan’s miraculous escape from her drink-driving charge. From Stacey’s overreaction, you’d have thought he’d taken up paedophilia as his latest hobby.
Everything had been going so well up until then. He’d got his feet under the table, Stacey was buying him expensive presents and she thought the sun shone out of his arse. And it wasn’t an effort. He’d been out with women who had a lot less going for them. She wasn’t bad looking, the sex had been better than OK and frankly the fact that she was loaded had been a great incentive. Sam had reckoned he was on to a good thing and he’d planned to make it last. Why did she have to lose it over a stupid newspaper story that was nothing more than the truth? OK, the paper had kind of insinuated that the rules had been bent for Jordan’s benefit, but that wasn’t his fault.
He sighed and took another swig of his beer. And now he was stuck drinking on his own because nobody on his new squad wanted to be his friend on account of they thought he had airs and graces because he used to be on an MIT.
Just as he reached that low point in self-pity, a fresh pint appeared on the table in front of him, followed by an attractive well-groomed woman whose age he estimated at somewhere between forty and forty-five. Not that Sam thought a few extra years disqualified a woman if she had other satisfactory attributes. And this one definitely had some of those. Lustrous dark hair, stylish coat with a casually knotted velour scarf, expertly applied make-up. He thought he’d seen her before but he couldn’t remember where.
She slid into the booth opposite him and gave him a megawatt smile. She had good teeth, he couldn’t help noticing. ‘You don’t mind if I join you?’
He smiled. ‘Not if you come bearing pints. Have we met?’
‘Not as such. I’ve seen you at press conferences. My name’s Penny Burgess. I’m the chief report —’
‘I know who you are.’ He curled his lip in a scornful smile. ‘You’re the one got Kevin in trouble years back.’
She smiled, a lazy smile that held all sorts of promises. ‘Kevin got himself in trouble. But that was a long time ago, and I think he’s forgiven me now that he’s back at his old rank.’
‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ Sam scoffed. ‘That lot in ReMIT don’t forgive anything or anybody.’
‘Had a bit of bother with them, have you?’
He shook his head. ‘None of your business,’ he said roughly.
‘Hard to believe Carol Jordan didn’t pick you for her swanky new team.’ She ran a finger round the rim of what looked like a gin and tonic.
‘I’m happy where I am,’ he said, with more conviction than he felt.
‘All the same.’ She let the words hang in the air between them.
‘All the same, what?’
‘Did you hear about the fatal car crash a couple of weeks ago up near Halifax?’
‘I may have done,’ he said, wary now. Penny Burgess’s reputation was unsettling for someone in his position.
‘Five dead. It was four initially, but the fifth victim gave up the ghost yesterday.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘The driver who caused it, Dominic Barrowclough? He was one of the other people who got let off the hook along with Carol Jordan. The allegedly faulty breathalyser. But you know all about that, right?’
Sam gave her a level stare. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said flatly.
Penny laughed, her eyes sparkling with humour. ‘Don’t try to kid a kidder, Sam. I know you were the source for the story that revealed Carol’s “lucky break”.’ She made quote marks in the air with her fingers.
He drained his first pint and pushed the glass violently to one side. It was a gesture that could have been taken as a threat. Equally, it was entirely deniable. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
‘I think you do,’ Penny said. ‘You leaked once, you’ll leak again, Sam. Next time it’ll be easier. And it’ll go on getting easier. I wan
t to make sure it’s me you leak to, that’s all. And I won’t leave a paper trail. Cash, Sam. In traditional brown envelopes. Absolutely no blowback.’ From her bag, she took a folded copy of that evening’s paper. She pushed it over to him and with one finger, he flipped the fold open. There was no envelope. Instead, four crisp red fifty-pound notes. He twitched and hastily closed the paper again.
‘What do you take me for?’ This time there was an aggressive note to his voice.
‘A source who likes to be well paid. That’s just some beer money, Sam. Look, they hate you already. What have you got to lose?’
He shook his head. ‘My job?’
‘I would never betray one of my personal sources. And as long as you don’t pass on anything to me that only you could know, you’re covered.’
A long silence. The burn of anger fought with Sam’s sense of self-preservation. The bargain she was offering made sense. ‘How do we communicate? How do I protect myself?’
Penny took out a notepad and scribbled a number. ‘We meet in the dark. In the indie cinema in Kenton Vale. When you’ve got something for me, call this number. It’s a hole-in-the-wall dry cleaner’s. A one-man operation. Put it in your phone under “dry cleaning”. Tell him the name of the film and I’ll see you in the back row at that evening’s screening. You don’t even have to watch the film, Sam.’
The paper sat on the table between them. ‘It’s a criminal offence, to corrupt a police officer,’ he said.
‘You already committed a criminal offence when you leaked that story about the breathalyser. If someone passed that paper trail on to the IPCC, you’d be fucked.’ She shrugged prettily. ‘You know you want to, Sam. It’s eating you up. I can see it in your eyes.’
He snatched up the paper and downed the beer she’d bought him in one. He wiped his mouth and stood up, flushed. ‘Carol Jordan is a drunk,’ he said. ‘The woman running the ReMIT can’t get through a morning without hitting the vodka bottle.’ He started away from the table.