Trial by Fire

by Frances Fyfield

  `We may as well go home,' said Superintendent Bailey. 'If we search in the dark we may ruin the chances. The doc will be here shortly after five a.m. So shall I.'

  Ì've left Smith and Peters here to peg out the area. All that.' Ànd shoot foxes,' Bailey added, smiling.

  `With what, sir? It's the ghosts worry them.' The inspector grinned, comfortable with Bailey as few were, grateful for the pragmatism that was going to allow some of them to sleep instead of messing around all night, talking about it until daylight revealed anything they would miss if they moved now.

  `Seal off the footpath and the carpark, will you?'

  Will do, sir. Bowles will do that. Funny thing is, it was only opened again yesterday.

  Been resurfaced, out of action for weeks. They've all been taking their cars elsewhere.'

  `Good. More chance we'll find traces of whoever put that body in there.'

  `Poor cow.'

  `Yes,' said Bailey, looking at the protruding hand sealed with polythene. 'I wonder who she is.'

  The inspector grinned. Was, sir.'

  Bailey sighed. 'Definitely past tense. Was. Come on, let's get some sleep before we have to look at the rest of her, presuming it is a woman. See you at five. Tell them to walk carefully.

  He may have left some souvenirs on the footpath.'

  Eleven p.m. now and too many boots for comfort on that footpath already. Tell them not to deviate into the woods either, for God's sake, crashing about and standing on anything that might have been left by the performer of these rude and hurried burial rites. Looking at the shallow grave, flattened earth, and bent branches around it; Bailey supposed there would be traces. No careful undertaker this; no wonder the fox had found her. Tomorrow would be soon enough for discovery, when all the willing troops were deployed to their worst after brief sleep.

  All except Peters, Smith, and Bowles, who would not even have their turn to sleep in the morning. Bailey tried to forget them all on the way home, tried, on his way to Helen, to forget that offending, blotched stump of a hand pointing its accusation above earth.

  In the carpark, half a mile from the grave, Police Constable Bowles tapped on the window of the single van parked beneath the trees, stood back politely. Inside, beyond the condensation on the glass, he could see movement, a breast rapidly covered, an arm in guilty movement, a face pressed to the rear window, eyes wide at the sight of the buttons on his uniform. More movement, until a youth scrabbled out of the front, buttoning his shirt, furious in the face of Bowles's half-smile.

  `Wha's the matter, for fuck's sake? No law agin it, is there? First I knew.'

  `Just hope she's sixteen, son. But you've got to move. Got to clear this carpark, see. Sorry about it.'

  `Why? Why the fuck . . . why should I?' His fists were clenched, aggression on display like a fighting ram.

  `Less of that. This your car, son? Or your dad's? Or your gaffer's? Been for a drink, have we?'

  Àll right, all right, all right.' Querulous fear rose in the voice. A girl's head, young but not childlike, appeared at the window. Bowles relented.

  `Found a body in the woods, miss. Dead. Got to clear the area, seal it off. Hop it.'

  The girl shrieked, short and shrill, an eerie little sound, then curled back in the passenger seat, pulling the boy in beside her. The engine spluttered, van spitting away full of the boy's fury, leaving profound silence. Extending the yellow tape across the entrance to the road, Bowles missed the company and wondered how they had failed to see the police car parked in the far corner. Shame on you, boy, you could have done better than that.

  The purr of Bailey's diesel engine at the door was a welcome sound. By the time he had collected his case, gazed at the sky, gathered his wits, wondered if Helen was still awake, and opened the door, she had padded into the kitchen, found the Scotch, run the bath, and filled the kettle. This was not the first body he had found in their six months' sojourn in this not so peaceful place, nor was it the first late evening to give Helen the opportunity to practise domestic solicitude, which Bailey neither demanded nor expected, but which secretly delighted him to the marrow of his strong and slender bones.

  Bailey welcomed these attentions like a child. It felt like having the wife he had seen described in fiction, a true comforter never encountered in his life until now, and not even a wife in name. Bailey regretted that, and respected it. It was Helen's decision, not his. Sleep, even after thirteen hours of duty, was less important than news and the long embrace of dear familiarity. One day they would discuss his reservations about the place, this frightful house she seemed to like, but not now. There is nothing, he thought, more delightful than a woman who is happy to see you.

  There is nothing, Helen thought, more becoming than the wrinkles on Bailey's face.

  `Very macabre,' he told her, sitting up in bed with Scotch and coffee, Helen curled beside him, as welcoming as the night had been chill, both of them indulging in a frequent if decadent night-time ritual. 'Macabre with the usual comic overtones. It always makes me laugh when the divisional surgeon turns out. You know, he who precedes the pathologist and gives us licence to continue.'

  Helen knew.

  `Dr Flick, busy little man, looks at this hand, this suggestion of body, far from fresh.

  "I think she's dead at the moment," he says. "I'll do a certificate." Very pompous and Irish. I don't know why we needed a doctor to tell us that. "I'll pronounce it lifeless, I think," says Flick, just as he would if faced with a pile of bones. Pretty clever diagnosis, I thought. Has a swig of this out of his back pocket' — Bailey raised his own glass to illustrate — 'then scuttles away as fast as his legs will carry him.'

  `Back to the living. Or the pub. Can't blame him.'

  `No,' said Bailey, turning to her. 'I don't blame him. The living have more to say. I'd rather be with you than keeping vigil in a wood.'

  She smiled at him, forgetting her preoccupations, seeing him anew as she did almost every day. 'Well, if that's the case, I'm glad you've no other choices.'

  `Who said I haven't?'

  Ì did.'

  Later in the warmth, his arms surrounding her. Geoffrey murmured sleepily into Helen's ear, 'You didn't have to run a bath for me, you know. I don't have to touch the bodies.

  Not these days.'

  She stirred. He could feel her frowning. 'But you do. They touch you, and you touch them.

  You always do.'

  `Yes,' he said, remembering the spasm of anger as his own fingers had touched that pathetic and pleading mutilation of a hand, felt the ice-cold mottled forearm in the dark. He had wished her goodbye, disliking the prospect of tomorrow's disinterment, wishing they could simply leave her alone.

  `You always do,' Helen repeated.

  `You're right,' he sighed. 'I always do.'

  CHAPTER TWO

  Detective Constable Amanda Scott arrived early by fifteen minutes, always in advance of the boss, careful in this and all things to preserve the good opinion she had tried so hard to deserve. She stepped out of her neat car, unaware of its highly polished gleam, but pleasantly conscious of the shine on her leather pumps and the curve of her waxed and tanned calves as she stood away from the door with her precise movements.

  She checked her hair in the side mirror, reproving herself for her own vanity while locking the car with automatic care. Miss Scott was dressed as she was always dressed in sensible but feminine clothes. White long-sleeved blouse with buttons, pleated cotton skirt in navy blue, matching the handbag and shoes, offset by tiny pearl earrings. Nothing flashy about Miss Scott — not a Mrs or a Ms — clad in good chain store clothes with an eye to economy and perfect presentation rather than the luxury of flair. She had liked the less nerve-racking days of uniform duty, still reflected in her conservative clothes, but she liked this better and knew herself to be modestly, only sometimes raucously, admired.

  She sniffed the air. Woodland smells mingled with fresh Tarmacadam in the carpark, completed when? A day or so before, she wo
uld have guessed. No common access to the woods from here for over a fortnight. She gazed around her, saw the footpath into the trees, and mentally propelled herself above it all, forming in her mind a plan of the area. Maybe they would need an aerial photograph, but with a facility all her own, she imagined she could see herself and the scene of this demise from the air. A triangle, body in the middle. I stand, she told herself as she would have told a class, one mile from Branston on the Epping road, on the edge of Bluebell Wood. Here is a carpark, a picnic spot provided by the council, and here is a footpath that leads into the woods but peters out after half a mile; only proper walkers go farther, to their own disappointment because there isn't that much of it, really.

  Only another half-mile, then a valley, uphill to a small field and a bit more woodland surrounding that awful hotel. You could walk straight across to the hotel if you could ever get through that jungle of a garden. About a mile from here to there, with woods extending a mile on either side of where I point, two more picnic spots on the other side. Not a particularly beautiful or pleasant place outside the footpath and even with the dearth of green trees on this border of London and country, strangely unpopular. Might have been less so if the establishment on the other side, which insisted on calling itself a hotel rather than the unfriendly pub it was, actually welcomed guests.

  Amanda's single visit had coincided with that of a cockroach. She had never returned and could not remember what they called the place now — the name changed with each renewal of the licence and the whim of the owners. The Crown, that was it, and no one, surely no one, would brave entry into the woods and fields through their garden. Compared to that wilderness, the woods were as easy as a street.

  Detective Constable Scott paced three steps left and three right, small, clipped steps.

  Should she stay and greet the troops or walk down the path to the muslin-sheeted grave? She hated being still: she would walk; no, she would wait for the boss and walk behind him.

  Bailey would talk and think at the same time, dividing the wood into sections for searching, throwing ideas and instructions over his shoulder, and Amanda would remember them all, watch, and learn. She was only there to learn, would never miss a single scrap of knowledge or let past her sharp blue eyes the slightest opportunity for making a quiet contribution.

  She would be as she always was, his calm, efficient shadow, earning trust. It never occurred to her to wonder if she actually liked Bailey, or any of her colleagues. Amanda's concentration was streamlined. Her own feelings were irrelevant, suspended as Bailey arrived and greeted Dr Vanguard as an old friend. Both their cars were parked crooked, and she wondered why, on such respectable salaries, they drove such shabby vehicles.

  The team assembled like the cast of a play, Bailey leading and Vanguard following, as daylight grew sharper, the signal for a hot day. More speed, said Vanguard. The sooner we get her out the better. Police Constables Bowles and Peters rose stiffly from camp chairs as the rest arrived in single file, not deviating from the footpath, as Bailey had told them.

  Photographers, exhibits officer next with bags, labels, gloves, tweezers, strolling behind the ambulancemen, who were the only ones talking.

  Às I said, Fred, it ain't really my turn to do this shift.'

  `Never mind,' said Fred. Ordinary grumbles in the mist.

  The searchers, combers of undergrowth, pickers of detritus, carriers of bags, would follow, foot soldiers behind cavalry.

  Vanguard never seemed to mind the dirt. He who had waded into stinking Thames mud to recover half-submerged limbs, who had pulled a leg away from a hip joint in a cesspit, found this dry earth relatively innocuous. He knelt by the grave and began uncovering the form beneath the soil with all the care of an archaeologist, sweeping away handfuls of leaves with systematic energy until the shape emerged. The photographer recorded each stage of the process. The others watched from either side as the figure came into focus, lying straight with legs uncrossed, face turned flat against the earth as if refusing to watch what was being done.

  She was recognizably female in limbs if not yet in detail, and as Vanguard's hand dusted the face, Amanda could not suppress the rising nausea, glanced at Bailey, and maintained calm against her shiver of disgust. The face was discoloured green and black, alive with bright white maggots twisting in the cavities of empty eye sockets, active in the distended nostrils, full of hideous and indignant movement in the eyes and lipless mouth where their destruction had exposed teeth bared in an obscene grin.

  Bailey wondered why they had attacked the face first, what dreadful lack of mercy; render to earth what must be rendered, but first distort, make unrecognizable what was once so human, may have been beautiful. No greater damage than the face; apart from the half-chewed hand without fingertips, the limbs were intact, stained like green marble, but whole.

  No doubt the larvae would have found the other orifices, liquid, vulnerable private parts.

  Amanda turned her head away as pathologist and assistants lifted the body on to the plastic sheet laid ready to receive it. She was ashamed for the woman's nakedness, knew disgust and contempt for one found in such condition, almost an acute dislike for the dead, resented her own squeamishness and the constant struggle to suppress it.

  Thank God Vanguard would not be taking his vaginal and anal swabs here: they would be spared that sight until the thing was finally devoid of all humanity on the postmortem table. In the haze of her own disgust, holding her breath to avoid the stench, feeling her skin itch as if the larvae had attached themselves, Amanda shook her senses, forced herself to look harder.

  She was not there to feel pain, noted the gash on the forehead, the gaping throat. Well. They would soon know better. The exhibits officer collected larvae from the face, put them in a bag without a word, treating them with gentleness. Amanda wondered what manner of man it was who analysed them.

  `How long, Doc? Can you say?'

  Vanguard was continuing a cursory inspection, calling up the ambulance boys for the tiresome walk back to transport, grumbling under his breath. 'How long? What, for a report?

  Oh, I see, how long dead? Difficult to say. At least a week, probably more. Depends if she was left uncovered first, speeds up the decomposition a bit. Do we know who she is?'

  `No, not yet. No one local reported missing, except children.'

  Vanguard grunted, scratched, and Amanda wondered how his wife ever let him inside the doors. 'Well, look for a woman, fortyish, dark-haired, bit big in the bum, but otherwise shapely, probably pretty.' He cackled, Bailey grimaced. He liked the man, had time for him, but occasionally the humour was hard to take. Ànd a knife, I would think. Also something blunt. About three p.m. OK? Got another one first.'

  Bailey felt the hangover of familiarity. Another session with formaldehyde smells and all the ceremony of an abattoir. His own aversion to the necessary witnessing of the pathologist's knife owed less to squeamishness than to a sense of indignity. Sad enough to be buried, slaughtered first before time, terminally abused, without being disinterred and cut apart, so distant from the dignity of laying out and decent burial that was the ordinary hope of ordinary men.

  No saving grace for the murder victim, none at all, no stateliness in death or anything that followed and from the disgrace of secret killing there would follow more. In Bailey's mind there grew the dull and familiar anger against the dealer of such treacherous cards, the perpetrator of such brutality, which carried this in its wake. Pitiful nakedness. Not a stitch on her or with her. Not even woman's comfort, the ever-present handbag.

  He turned, issued his orders. Start here, fanning out in sections, eyes to the ground.

  Cigarette ends, notable footprints, broken branches suggesting haste; a week is long enough to hide half the traces if there are any traces, and what a scrubby, mean, depressed bit of woodland this is. Not real forest or real country, not the oil-drummed, rubbish-filled adventure playground bombsites of his youth, either.

  He felt dislike of
Branston and all its environs rise like a tide, sink in the need for action. Two dozen men, more if needed, comb the ground for a square mile. Amanda, organize a press release, meet me at the hotel, no, I don't need a lift, I prefer to walk, and I wish you were not so obsequious, or that I liked anything about this place.

  Bailey had walked every inch of this ground, alone sometimes or with Helen, pacing the territory of his new home like a cat, fully aware that without butter on his paws, he would have aimed for home. For the wider territory of his professional manor he had made it his business to drive every road and take into his brain each landmark, street, pub, station, and anything else immovable. He knew the bus routes and the trouble spots as well as the areas of innocence.

  The manor extended far beyond Branston, slipped into the sprawl of northeast London where he was stationed in a building of monumental ugliness. The three other bodies whose removal he had witnessed in the last two months had been found, respectively, in a flat, behind some dustbins, and in the front seat of a car. Minicab driver with smashed skull, urban waste, sticky with blood, but found before the predators and the flies got to him. Not like this. This was beyond town limits and the zone of improved chances. The same was not supposed to happen here. For Helen, himself, and all who dwelt here.

  An afterthought, catching the man's eye. 'Stay on and help, Bowles, will you?'

  `Sir.' The grin widened on Bowles's face. Overtime and, besides that, work he liked, reminiscent of weeding and pruning, pedantic garden chores, which he also liked. Bowles was fifty, with eyes like magnets attracting him to anything out of place. A man of infinite patience which his children did not understand, so that he was forced to pretend occasional irritation foreign to a cultivator of plants and detector of metal objects on Essex riverbanks.