Grace said, “Did she ever talk about fancying anyone?”
Hunter smiled to himself. It was almost as if she had read his mind.
Kirsty paused in mid thought, and then glanced across at her mother.
Grace picked up on the hesitation. “Come on Kirsty what is it?”
For a few seconds Kirsty stuttered over the words, until she finally got them out. “Well it was the other way round actually. A couple of weeks ago she just blurted out that this bloke had been coming on to her, pestering her for her mobile number.”
“Where did she tell you this?” Grace was edging even further forward, trying to get eye contact with Kirsty.
“Well she told me at the youth club. She just came up to me and said she had something to tell me in secret. Whispered it like. And then we went to a corner and she just said this guy had come up to her when she was on a ride at the fair and told her how nice she looked, and asked her if he could take some photos of her. I told her that was weird. She said it wasn’t like that. He wanted to take some nice pictures of her. Rebecca can be a bit naïve when it comes to lads and all that. I think she thought I was making fun of her. She got the hump and said I was only jealous. I didn’t want to row with her so I didn’t say anything else even though I still thought it was freaky. Anyway I asked her who it was, thinking he was in the youth club, but she said he wasn’t there. She’d met him when she’d gone outside the club. I pushed her for a bit more but she clammed up. She said she thought I didn’t believe her. I kept telling her I believed her but she wouldn’t tell me anymore.”
“Do you know which fair this was at, and when?”
“I can only think it must have been the Feast fair, which came a couple of weeks ago. It’s the one that comes every year on the fields at the back of the youth club.”
Hunter continued to make detailed notes.
“Did she say anything else about him? Mention his name or where he came from?” Grace continued
“Nope. But there was this one time when we were walking home from school and her mobile rang. She looked at the screen and blushed and wouldn’t let me see who it was. She never did that, we always told each other everything. Anyway she answered it and I heard her answer that she was with someone. She said it was her friend Kirsty - me. Then she just said ‘okay speak with you later,’ and cut off her mobile. I asked her if it was her boyfriend, just joking like, and she went bright red. She said if I were taking the mess she wouldn’t tell me anything else. I told her I wasn’t and then changed it round a bit to try and find out who it was like. She said he was really nice and had his own car. She said he kept telling her how pretty she was, and what a nice figure she had. I didn’t say anything but I thought it was really weird stuff to say that to Rebecca. Not that she wasn’t pretty or anything like, but I mean she hasn’t really developed properly yet. You’ve seen what she’s like. She’s stick thin. You know what I mean?”
Grace nodded. “Kirsty you said Rebecca told you he had a car. Which lads do you knock about with who have cars?”
“Well we don’t. I mean we know some of the sixth formers have cars but we don’t talk to them. But it’s not what she said about him having a car, it’s how she said it. I just got the impression that when she said guy, that she actually meant someone a lot older.”
“A man you mean?” asked Grace taken aback by this sudden answer.
“Well I suppose so, yes.”
For the next hour Grace backtracked over everything they had discussed. Kirsty faltered at times, catching a glimpse of her mum, and repeated with a similar answer as previous.
Hunter knew from his policing experience and as a father to two children that she was holding something back. He wanted to jump in and push her for answers but this was Grace’s call.
She didn’t push. At the end of the talk Grace handed Kirsty one of her batch of small business cards, with the force crest in one corner and the blue block type stating THIS IS NOT A FORM OF IDENTIFICATION running across its length. She took a pen and underlined her work mobile number.
“If you can think of anything else Kirsty,” she pressed the card firmly into the girl’s palm, catching her gaze, making eye contact. “If you want to talk to me in confidence Kirsty call me on this number,” she finished, before nudging Hunter and making for the door.
- ooOoo –
CHAPTER FOUR
DAY SEVEN: 12th July.
Because of the repetitive nature of Dougie Crabtree’s work he constantly found his mind wandering, reminiscing and throwing up rose-tinted images of how this dark and stark landscape once looked when it was the site of the former Manvers Colliery. He shifted his nineteen stone bulk from one cheek to the other on the vinyl seat, in time to the swaying motion of his cab on the huge Komatsu track excavator. His thick muscular arms effortlessly and skilfully manoeuvred between transmission and hydraulic gears, as the crane surged over deep rutted tracks, whilst the eighteen foot reach mechanical shovel scooped enormous wedges of cloggy grey earth and slopped them into the waiting caterpillar dumper truck. He was thinking to himself what a coincidence this was. Having started work at the thriving colliery from school and then witnessing its demise and dereliction after the Miner’s Strike in 1984, he was back on the site, and involved in its regeneration. Though he hated to admit it, particularly after the struggle, anger and bitterness he had gone through to fight for ‘his pit,’ it was refreshing to work regularly in the fresh air on a daily basis. The eighty-four acre old colliery and coking plant site was in the throes of a major transformation. The previous infrastructure of winding gear, coal preparation plant, site offices and coking unit had gradually gone, and in its place were plush working industrial units and landscaped environments. And he was toiling on the final phase. Reclaiming the old slurry pits, to make way for a £130 million scheme, which would see retail, leisure and residential units woven into the vista.
The engine growled and his cab vibrated as the huge bucket gouged the lumpy grey surface, scooping out another lump of the toxic earth. The oily surface water bubbled as pockets of methane gas escaped from beneath the mess and Dougie screwed up his face as the rotten ‘eggy’ smell wafted across his nostrils. He was about to dive the steel fingers of the shovel back into the earth again when he spotted an unusual form poking through the scrape he had just dug. He halted the bucket’s dip, and squinting, peered out through the smeared windscreen. He could have sworn that looked like a body. He closed his eyes for a split second, flicked them open again and stared, focusing on the object that he had unearthed, trying to separate the dirt from the shape. “It can’t be,” he said to himself, as a rush of adrenaline surged through his body and his stomach emptied. “It is though; it’s definitely a body.”
* * * * *
Detective Constable’s Tony Bullars and Mike Sampson, the other half of Hunter’s team had been pulled from the Rebecca Morris murder to join the police and forensic team that were foraging amongst the slurry tips on the Manvers site. They took a short-cut to the scene, via a well-used undulating dirt track, which bounced them bruisingly around in the CID car, and found their witness Dougie Crabtree, by the side of a marked police car, talking animatedly to an officer who was attempting to formulate his excited jabberings into hard facts. A hundred yards away a half dozen, white-suited, members of the Forensic Team were on hands and knees probing around in the solid clods of coal dust. A white tent was in the process of being erected. It appeared so bright set against the stark grey backdrop, reminiscent of a lunar landscape.
“That’s where our body must be,” announced Tony Bullars, moving to the back of the CID car to collect a forensics suit.
Whereas Tony was tall and slim, with a good head of gelled hair, Mike was in complete contrast; small and podgy, unruly dark hair, and a craggy face badly pockmarked from acne in his adolescence. What they did have in common though was a sharpness of mind and a keenness to detect crime, which had elevated them both from uniform into CID, relatively early in
their careers. Both had joined the Major Investigation Team at its inception eighteen months ago.
Tony skipped across the rutted site whilst Mike trudged, whingeing and moaning almost with every step.
“Bloody hell ‘Bully’, just look at the frigging state of me. How come you’re not in the same state?” He grimaced, glancing at his mud splattered shoes.
Tony turned and laughed, “You’ve either got it Mike or you haven’t.” He turned and then strode away leaving Mike to his predicament amongst the deep ruts.
Both Tony and Mike were glad to see that Professor Lizzie McCormack was in attendance, her latex-gloved hands, already clearing soil around the mummified corpse, still partly entrenched amongst the dingy earth. The remains were curled up in the foetal position and in a bit of a mess. Portions of the body were devoid of flesh, and the skin, which did cover the thin-boned form, was shrivelled and hard as rock. The overall colour of the cadaver matched that of the earth around it.
Lizzie looked up, her glistening grey eyes, appearing over her designer spectacles. “Ha gentlemen so glad you could join us. Two bodies in less than a week, you are keeping me busy.” Her sharp eyes spotted Mike Sampson shudder and turn his sight sharply away from the rotted corpse. “I hope you will have the stomach to see this one out officer.”
Mike looked at Lizzie and blushed
“You see this is what sets us woman apart from you men,” she begun. “We spend months changing smelly nappies without thinking about it. But what you don’t realise is all those months of shovelling shit gives us a stronger stomach for the messier side of life.”
She gave the detective a wink and forged her mouth into a wry smile. Lizzie continued to move slowly and meticulously around the corpse. Picking at it here and there and removing fragments that were quickly bagged by her young female assistant. After three quarters of an hour she pushed herself up onto her haunches, snapped off a glove, removed her spectacles and shot a glance at the two detectives.
“Gents what we have here is the decomposed yet mummified body of a young female who has obviously been in the ground for some time. There are remains of clothing. What appears to be a shirt or blouse and a pair of jeans. I’m not sure if we are going to be able to get any fingerprints at this time. The body’s caked in mud so I’ll have to check if we can get into the ridges when the body’s back in the mortuary. The head also needs some cleaning up but it does have plenty of hair fragments to enable DNA analysis. There is evidence of massive trauma to the nose and lower jaw area, some teeth are missing, and there are incised wounds around the eye sockets.” She bent forward and looked into the dark holes where the eyes should have been, “I will be able to give firm confirmation of my thoughts after the post-mortem, but if I’m not too mistaken here there are some similarities between the injuries inflicted on this corpse and those inflicted on Rebecca Morris.”
-ooOoo-
CHAPTER FIVE
DAY EIGHT: 13th July.
By the time Tony Bullars and Mike Sampson arrived at the mortuary the next morning the examination of the mummified corpse was already underway. The dark, shrivelled form lay naked on one of the metallic pathology slabs, having had its clothing cut away, and that now lay separately on another table undergoing photographing by an attendant Scenes of Crime Officer.
Professor McCormack was currently dragging a comb through the dead girl’s lank and matted hair, dropping several strands, along with soil fragments, into a clear plastic exhibit bag. She was talking rapidly in post mortem legalese into the overhead microphone. She studied the corpse in a methodical way, observing and touching in timely fashion. Pausing from time to time she pulled at the arms, carefully rotating them, cracking the dried fragile skin, and probed cuts and indentions with a scalpel, before stepping back to allow the SOCO officer to photograph them.
At times she looked carefully at patches of the shrivelled skin under a magnifying glass then instructed a technician, following in her wake, where she wanted incisions on the body, and which parts of the body she wanted chopped away. Finally the hand-held circular saw was switched on and the top of the skull was deftly cut and removed, to reveal a murky brown interior that contained the shrivelled remains of a brain.
“Thankfully because of the toxicity of the soil very few insects have attacked the body, and the internal organs, except one, although badly decomposed, are relatively intact.” The Professor stated as she looked up and glanced towards the two detectives.
She continued with the legalese, only halting her speech when she measured and weighed various organs. After the two-hour autopsy she stopped, threw her gloves, and mask into a bin, grabbed a paper towel and mopped her moist brow. Then wiping her spectacles and replacing then, only on to the bridge of her nose, so she could look over them and turned to Tony and Mike.
“Gentlemen, you have here a girl who is between her early to late teens. The structure of her pelvis and hips tell me she has not yet reached adulthood. She has collar length brown hair and is five feet five inches tall. She would have been very slender prior to her death. She has multiple stab and incised wounds to the head, neck, trunk and upper extremities. Three stab wounds in particular are very nasty indeed. The blade has penetrated the brain through the eyes sockets and part of her upper chest has been sliced open. What is unusual about this is that her heart has been cut out and removed.”
Tony and Mike exchanged startled looks.
“You heard me right gents. Her heart has been cut out.” She nudged her glasses back into place with her forearm. “And also as per Rebecca Morris’s examination I have also found similar markings incised into her abdomen.” She paused and studied the corpse’s stomach with a critical eye. “I say similar,” she continued looking back up. “In fact the first mark is slightly different. It looks more like a reversed letter L. The other marks are the same, an I, and V, and number 3. Could be a combination of Roman numerals; your guess is as good as mine at the moment. I’m going to have to get a scan done of these to confirm this, and I’m also going to re-examine Rebecca Morris just to check if I’ve missed anything.”
Professor McCormick began pulling at the plastic protective apron covering her scrubs. “She also has minor blunt injuries to the head, especially around the nose, left cheek area, and lower jaw. Many of the stab wounds to the head are very irregular, and are located mostly to the left hand side. Her left ear has almost been severed. The majority of the wounds to the trunk and upper extremities have penetrated the subcutaneous skin, and muscle layers, through to the bone. The stab to the sternum has passed into the chest and penetrated the left lung,” the Professor continued without catching breath.
“The upper extremities have multiple sharp-force injuries consistent with defensive injuries. Lastly the hyoid bone, the thyroid, and the cricoid cartilages are fractured. The marks on the neck tissue suggest a wide ligature; most probably a belt.” The Professor paused, as if to gather her thoughts. “This young lady has suffered a horrendous death. I do have moulds to make from the stab wounds, in order to determine both the type of weapon used and confirm they are a match, but I am confident when I say the weapon used has similar curves to that which was used on Rebecca Morris.”
“Do you have any thoughts on the sequence of events?” asked Tony.
“Thoughts, young man. I don’t have thoughts. I give out facts based on my forty-two years experience” she cut back at him abruptly.
Despite the tone of her answer Tony Bullars quite liked being called young man, notwithstanding he was twenty-eight years old. Though he guessed to her he must appear quite young and fresh faced. Professor McCormack must be at least retirement age, he thought to himself, and his face creased into a smile.
“Before you arrived gentlemen I carefully removed her clothing. Her blouse had several buttons missing; torn off, and was open to the navel. Her bra had been lifted above her breasts and these would have been exposed. Her jeans were still on and fastened and she was also still wearing her panties. Wit
h that in mind and the nature of her injuries it leads me to believe that she was punched first in the nose and jaw area. Her clothing was either disturbed during this, but more than likely after the assault, which, in my opinion would have been violent enough to render her unconscious for a short time. She then came to and struggled, during which time she was stabbed repeatedly. Remember I told you she had defence injuries; like so.” The Professor proceeded to raise both her arms and shield her upper body and face. “The angulations of the incisions, and stab wounds, leave me to believe he was above her at the time. More than likely sat astride her. Many of these wounds would not have caused immediate death. What would have killed her without doubt was the stabbing to either of her eyes, or the slicing through of the chest wall to get to the heart, and or the strangulation. At this stage I do not know which was first, and which was final, though I am inclined to think that the removal of the heart was more a defiling act after she was dead.”
“How long had she been buried Professor?” Mike Sampson asked, as he tugged the zip of his white forensic suit down over his well-fed stomach.
“There are still quite a few tests to do on that front, but my experience tells me she has lain there for some considerable time. Best guess, ten to fifteen years.”
“Anything else I can take back for the briefing Professor?” enquired Tony.
“What I am fairly certain about from my examination of both this body and that of Rebecca Morris is that you are now dealing with two murders and one killer.”
- ooOoo -
CHAPTER SIX
DAY NINE: 14th July.
Bright morning sunshine filtered through the blinds, bathing Detective Superintendent Michael Robshaw in a soft warm light. Leaning over the computer keyboard on his desk he entered his password and hit the return key. Then clasping his hands behind his head he leant back in his seat and stared at the screen. Forty-three messages and only two days had lapsed since he had last logged on. He scanned down the list and saw that the majority was In-Force spam, but he knew a few had to be opened up and responded to before his next Command Team briefing.
Heart of the Demon (D.S.Hunter Kerr) Page 5