‘I’m beginning to understand why his marriage broke up.’ Megan stared at the pink liquid in her glass. ‘It’s impossible to plan anything because he seems to live his life out of a suitcase. We haven’t had a weekend together for about two months. The best we’ve managed was a night at my place when he was en route to a court case in Jamaica – and the only reason he came over then was because the flights from Cardiff and Bristol were booked up.’
Delva wiggled her eyebrows. ‘Oh, come on! I’m sure that wasn’t the only reason!’
‘Well, it wasn’t exactly romantic,’ Megan shrugged. ‘He had to be up at five the next morning to get to the airport.’
‘So when are you seeing him again?’
‘I don’t know. Next weekend maybe – if Laura doesn’t have plans for him, that is.’ When they’d first got together, Megan had thought Jonathan was the perfect partner. They got on well, had loads in common and laughed at the same things. The fact that he already had a child had seemed a big plus. Megan had been told at the age of twenty-five that she would be unable to have children. It was one of the big regrets of her life, not least because it was her own fault. A botched abortion as a student had damaged her fallopian tubes. It was a mistake that had dogged her throughout her adult life, scuppering her marriage and her last long-term relationship. Both her ex-husband and her previous lover had got other women pregnant while they were still with her. It had nearly destroyed her faith in men but meeting Jonathan had changed that. Here, she thought, was a man for whom having children was not a priority. And it was true: Jonathan didn’t want any more kids. What Megan hadn’t realised was that she would be competing with the one he already had.
‘What is it about men, eh? I think I’m going to get myself a dog instead.’ Delva let out a snort of a laugh that had heads turning in their direction. Megan couldn’t help laughing with her. Delva’s record with men was nearly as disastrous as her own. In her case it was being famous that caused problems. She never knew if men were interested in her for herself or because she was a face on TV.
‘Come on, let’s have another drink,’ Delva said. ‘Then you can give me the lowdown on Balsall Gate – we’ve been trying to get inside that dump for years!’ Over a second Pink Lady, Delva told Megan that BTV had been trying to get permission to make a documentary about the prison. ‘Governor’s as tight as a duck’s arse, though, isn’t he? We’ve had to resort to subterfuge. One of our researchers has started writing to a prisoner. She’s young and very innocent-looking. Once she’s buttered him up she’s going to try smuggling a camera in. You can get really tiny ones now and the searches in that place are supposed to be pretty lax.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Megan shook her head slowly. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I don’t want this to go any further at the moment, but as far your documentary’s concerned, it’s absolute dynamite.’
Delva’s eyes widened as Megan told her about Carl Kelly’s death. ‘Strychnine? Where the hell would you get hold of something like that?’
‘No idea. But it’s not the sort of thing that would go unnoticed, is it? If there was a batch of it cut with heroin, I mean.’
Delva shook her head and her braids shuddered. ‘If it had happened to anyone outside the prison we’d have known about it. I mean, you don’t get many stiffs with a grin on their faces, do you?’ Her own mouth curved down as if she had tasted something nasty.
‘No,’ Megan replied. ‘That’s why I think it was deliberate.’
Delva blinked. ‘You think someone murdered him?’
‘I think someone smuggled that dodgy heroin in – probably via one of the screws – to settle some score.’ She told Delva about the grave in St Mary’s churchyard; about the patch of disturbed earth.
‘What did the police think?’ Delva asked.
‘They weren’t interested.’ Megan sat back in her chair, folding her arms. ‘It really pisses me off. Carl Kelly was in jail when he died, and his death involved drugs: the subtext of every conversation I’ve had with them is that he’s not worth bothering with.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Dig.’ Megan raised her eyebrows. ‘Figuratively and literally.’
Delva’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that legal?’
‘Strictly speaking, no. That’s why I’m going very early tomorrow morning – as soon as it’s light. There won’t be anyone about so if it turns out to be nothing, I’ll bugger off and no one will be any the wiser.’
‘What if you find something? I mean, what do you think might be there?’
‘I’ve really no idea. It’s just a hunch.’ Megan closed her eyes and shook her head, searching for a better way of explaining what she felt. ‘I just feel I have to do it. Not just for Carl Kelly but for all the other blokes in that god-forsaken jail. I’ve got a horrible feeling that if I don’t get to the bottom of what’s happened someone else could be at risk.’ She didn’t say his name. In fact she had deliberately withheld it when telling Delva about the events of the past few days. She was afraid that her friend would see it in her face; would suss out that there was something more than concern for a confidante in her mind.
The way she felt about Dom Wilde was turning into something she hardly dared admit to herself, let alone to anyone else.
‘What time will you be getting to St Mary’s?’ Delva asked.
‘About half-five.’ Megan shot her a quizzical glance. ‘Why?’
‘Can I come with you?’
Chapter 6
Birmingham was still sleeping when they reached the churchyard. The tombstones looked eerie in the grey light of dawn and the dew-covered grass clung to the women’s legs as they made their way to Moses Smith’s grave. A trio of crows eyed them malevolently from a broken fence post.
‘What do you think?’ Megan asked as Delva peered at the disturbed patch of earth.
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ Delva knelt beside the grave. She looked very different from last night, clad in khaki cargo pants with a rip in the left thigh that exposed her ebony flesh. The hood of her top was up, covering her hair, and it flopped forward as she bent closer to the earth. ‘Did you bring your trowel?’
Megan nodded. Without a word she started scraping away the soil nearest to the tombstone. Delva did the same at the other end of the rectangle. There had been no rain for the past few days, so although the topsoil was damp with dew, the earth beneath it was dry and easy to move. The air had an early morning chill about it but a bead of sweat trickled down the back of Megan’s neck. Her heart was pounding in her chest. It felt very wrong, disturbing a grave. She wondered if the person whose handiwork they were examining had felt the same.
For a while they worked away in silence. Both were using a light scraping technique – the way an archaeologist might work – for fear of damaging anything that might lie beneath the surface. Suddenly Delva let out a little cry.
‘What is it?’
‘Something hard…a corner of something.’ Delva was panting for breath. ‘A box, I think.’
As they both scraped away at the surface, lettering appeared. An E and a K. Then and I and an N.
‘Nike!’ Delva sank back onto her calves, her arms flopping to her sides.
Megan stared at the familiar logo. It was a shoebox. A cardboard shoebox. What could be inside it? Someone’s dead cat? Some sort of time capsule buried by kids for a laugh?
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw when she lifted the lid. At first she thought she was looking at the face of a doll; a very old, very damaged doll. It was wrapped in blue fabric that turned out to be a pillow case. It was only when Megan pulled the fabric aside that her fingers told her this was no doll. There were tiny hairs protruding from its brown, leathery arms.
‘It’s a baby.’ She looked at Delva, who was kneeling, open-mouthed at the head end of the box.
‘But it’s…’ Delva shook her head. ‘It’s all…’
‘I know.’ Megan bit her lip, filled with a sudden, overwhelmin
g sadness. ‘I think it’s been dead for a very long time. So long that the body’s mummified.’
‘Mummified?’ Delva stared at her in disbelief. ‘I thought that kind of thing only happened in hot countries?’
‘It does,’ Megan nodded. ‘But it can happen in cool climates if a body is stored somewhere warm and dry for a long time’ She let her eyes travel back up the tiny body from the feet to the face. She was thankful that its eyes were closed and the eyelids still intact. She had seen many dead people but his was the first time she had seen a dead child. She swallowed hard. ‘What’s clear,’ she said, ‘is that this body has been brought here quite recently.’ She listened to herself speaking, as if she was outside her own body. She knew she sounded as if she was giving a lecture but she couldn’t help it. It was the only way to stem the rising tide of emotion that the sight of the baby had released. ‘This couldn’t have happened here,’ she went on. ‘The body wouldn’t have been preserved in this way in these conditions.’ She glanced about her. The crows were still eyeing her from their perch on the fence post. One of them hopped down and edged towards the grave. With a flap of her hand she shooed it away.
‘So someone has brought the baby here and buried it.’ Delva nodded her head slowly. ‘It can’t have been long ago. I mean, look at the box – it’s hardly rotted at all and the print’s still quite clear.’ She glanced at the baby’s face and looked away. ‘Why would someone do that?’
‘I don’t know.’ A wave of nausea swept up from her stomach. She coughed and swallowed in a bid to suppress it. Then, a little unsteadily, she got to her feet, wrapping her arms round her middle as she straightened up. ‘I don’t know what I expected to find here.’ She said the words softly, almost to herself. ‘But it certainly wasn’t this.’
‘What do you think we should do?’
Megan shook her head, her eyes on the gravestone. ‘We’re going to have to report it to the police.’
‘But what if it’s something completely innocent? Unrelated to what happened at the prison, I mean.’
‘Delva, it can’t be innocent, can it? Someone has concealed a dead baby for – I don’t know – years and years, maybe decades, and now they’ve buried it in someone else’s grave with no marker of any kind…’
‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ Delva rubbed her chin, crumbs of soil sticking to her skin. ‘We’ll have to put one hell of a positive spin on it, though, won’t we?’
* * *
An hour later a procession of police boots had beaten a path through the grass and weeds to the grave. DS Willis was obviously less than impressed by Megan’s maverick approach. Predictably, he was more concerned about what she’d done to the burial ground than what had been found in it.
‘You do know that it’s an offence to interfere with a grave, don’t you?’ He stared at her, his eyebrows arched.
Megan opened her mouth to reply but Delva got in first. ‘Oh come on, Detective Sergeant,’ she said, ‘Do you honestly expect us to believe that anything would have been done if Doctor Rhys hadn’t taken the initiative?’ Before Willis had a chance to respond, she let fly with a second round: ‘It’d make a great story on tonight’s evening news, wouldn’t it? Body of a baby found by BTV after police refused to investigate…’ She paused, her eyes blazing.
‘We didn’t refuse to investigate, Ms Lobelo, we simply hadn’t got the manpower…’
‘Whatever,’ Delva spread her hands, palms up. ‘But I don’t think it would do you any favours at this point to start criticising what Dr Rhys has done.’
Willis’ eyes narrowed. ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Of course not, Detective Sergeant,’ she replied, a tight smile stretching her generous lips, ‘I’m just deciding how to word the story.’
With a grunt Willis turned away, wandering across the grass to greet the photographer who had come to record the body in situ.
‘Well done,’ Megan breathed, squeezing her friend’s arm. ‘You handled that far better than I would have done.’
‘Yeah – power of the media can be a wonderful thing sometimes, can’t it?’ Delva winked at she glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going to have to go and get ready for work. You coming? We could grab a quick coffee – I’m gasping for one.’
‘So am I,’ Megan nodded, ‘but I want to wait for the pathologist. Do you mind? I’ll call you as soon as I get back to the office.’
Alistair Hodge arrived a few minutes after Delva had gone. His hair was sticking up in grey tufts and he was unshaven. Apparently he had rolled out of bed and driven straight over. He knelt beside the shoebox, his face devoid of expression. Slowly and deliberately he pulled the fabric away from the tiny corpse so that the whole body was exposed. It was a while before he spoke. ‘A boy,’ he said without looking up. ‘Looks to be newborn. Umbilical stump still in evidence but the flesh is dessicated. I’ve seen it once before – a few years ago now. Case of a baby that was hidden under floorboards by the mother.’ He shook his head. ‘She was only thirteen. Terrified of disgracing her parents.’ He glanced up at Megan. ‘It’s the most common form of mummification in temperate climates, you know?’
‘Common?’ Megan gave him a puzzled frown.
‘Put it this way,’ the pathologist replied, ‘You’re much more likely to find a mummified baby in this country than a mummified adult. It’s all dependent on the rate of cooling. The body of a newborn infant will cool and dry much more quickly than that of a man or a woman ‘ He leaned closer to the shoebox. Taking a magnifying glass from his pocket he held it close to the baby’s sunken ribcage. ‘Hmm…thought so,’ he muttered.
‘What?’
‘Looks like moth holes. Do you see?’ He passed the magnifying glass to Megan. She hesitated a moment, struggling with the fact that this was a baby. She had learned to suppress her feelings when dealing with the corpses of adults. She must do the same now, otherwise she would be of no use at all. Angling the magnifying glass towards her, she moved it back and forth until she had a clear view of the pitted skin.
‘I didn’t know moths were attracted to corpses.’ She managed to keep her voice steady as she passed the magnifying glass back to him.
‘They’re not, usually. But dessicated flesh is like fabric. The Brown House Moth is the usual candidate – we’ll check it out in the lab’
‘How long ago do you think he died?’ It felt strange, calling the little thing in the box ‘he’. It made the baby real. Where was the woman who had given birth to him, she wondered? Was she still alive?
‘Could be five years, could be fifty,’ the pathologist shrugged. ‘Very hard to estimate when the body’s been removed from the conditions in which mummification occurred.’
‘I suppose there’s very little hope of identifying someone so young?’
Hodge shook his head. ‘Almost no chance, I’m afraid. No dental records, obviously. Unless someone sees it on TV and comes forward…’ He tailed off, pulling the blue shroud back over the shrunken body.
‘Why would someone do this?’ Megan was thinking aloud now. She didn’t expect Alistair Hodge to venture an opinion on the motive. But to her surprise, he did.
‘Could be a house move,’ he said. ‘Someone conceals a baby, lives in the house for many years, then moves on. They’re afraid the body will be discovered by the new owners, so they move it before they go.’
‘But why bury it here?’
‘Nearest graveyard, I’d guess. Mother has some sort of religious belief and wants her child laid to rest in consecrated ground.’ He glanced around at the overgrown tombstones. ‘This place is ideal, isn’t it? Church no longer in use. No one keeping an eye on the graves.’
She nodded. ‘But why this grave?’ She told him about the connection with Carl Kelly.
‘Hmm,’ he rubbed his bristly chin. ‘That’s one hell of a coincidence.’
‘But what does it mean?’ She blinked as the sun came out from behind a cloud. ‘Let’s just assume for a moment that Carl Kelly was murdered
. And let’s also assume it was some sort of revenge for the death of this man.’ She nodded at Moses Smith’s tombstone. ‘How does a long-dead baby connect with that?’
‘And was the baby put here before or after Carl Kelly died?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, that’s something we might be able to find out in the lab,’ Hodge said. ‘We can run tests on the box, check local weather conditions over the past few weeks.’ He reached for the cardboard lid, studying the logo. ‘Don’t think it’ll tell us a lot more, though. See this bare strip?’ He pointed to a place on the lid where the print was missing. ‘Someone’s ripped off a sticker – probably a serial number. That would have told us where and when the shoes were sold and might even have given us the name of the person who bought them.’
‘I doubt that’s going to matter much.’ Detective Sergeant Willis’ voice startled Megan. He had walked noiselessly across the grass and was peering over her left shoulder.
‘Why do you say that?’ She stepped sideways, uncomfortable about having him so close.
‘A TV appeal should do the trick. I’ve spoken to Ms Lobelo’s boss at BTV.’ The tone of his voice made it clear that the intention was to pre-empt any plans Megan and Delva might have made about the handling of the story. ‘We’ll get something on air by lunchtime. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes out of the woodwork by this time tomorrow.’
‘What – you think the person who did this is going to turn themselves in – just like that?’ Megan and the pathologist exchanged glances.
‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ DS Willis frowned at her. ‘It’s usually a neighbour or a friend from way back when. It’s rare for the perpetrators of this type of crime not to confide in someone somewhere along the line.’
‘Oh? You’ve come across cases like this before, have you?’ Megan tried not to let her dislike of the man creep into her voice.
The Killer Inside Page 5