by J M Gregson
DCI Peach decided that there was a lot to be said after all for the modernization of the police force.
He pulled on his well-worn wellies and set off in single file behind his younger colleague on the route to the spot where the corpse had been found. There were plenty of tracks ahead of them in the snow, but single file seemed safest in these conditions. The fact that it enabled him to study DS Blake’s perfectly rounded rear on the way to the ruined farmhouse was purely coincidental.
The police surgeon had gone through the ridiculous formality of pronouncing what was left in the outhouse as dead and gone on his way. But the Home Office pathologist was there when Peach and Blake arrived, the funnels of his breath interweaving with those of the civilian scene-of-crime team as they went quietly about their business under the direction of Sergeant Jack Chadwick.
Within the crime-scene area cordoned off from a curious public by police plastic ribbons, there was normally a professional cynicism. The members of the team liked to show that they had developed a professional carapace in relation to blood and gore and the whole business of death. They would make tasteless jokes about corpses and their degeneration, asserting their familiarity with death, reminding their colleagues that they were old hands in these things.
On this occasion, it was different.
They spoke to each other in low tones, almost in whispers. It might have been the still, biting cold in the place, which seemed to cut through even the thickest of garments. It might have been the isolation of this derelict building, which seemed even more isolated from the rest of living, human life in the snow and frost of the winter landscape. But Peach was certain, after a swift, appraising glance round the stone-walled room, that it was the thing that lay in the corner which was stilling the normal robust exchanges.
Even the pathologist seemed to be affected by the atmosphere. But his frustration at being able to do so little here probably contributed to his terseness. He nodded to Peach, acknowledging that they had met before, with each encounter overshadowed by a death. ‘It’s a difficult one, this one. Difficult for me, I mean. Maybe not for you.’
Peach forced a bitter smile. ‘It won’t be easy, I’m sure. They never are, when we don’t find the stiff until well afterwards.’
‘She’s been gone a long time. Been here for months,’ said the pathologist tersely.
It was a female, then. You couldn’t tell even that from the blackened oval that had once been a face. Peach moved across the crowded little enclosure and stood looking down at her for a moment. Most of the flesh had gone, but the skin was still stretched like dark parchment over the bones. He said aloud, ‘We’ll get them, love. Whoever did this to you.’
Then, as if embarrassed by this tiny eruption of emotion in one who was supposed to take these things in his stride, he lifted his eyes to the wall above the body and said gruffly, ‘Young, was she?’
‘I think so. I don’t want to disturb any more than is strictly necessary. I’ll cut away her clothing when I get her into the lab.’
There was a moment’s silence. He didn’t need to explain himself. Everyone knew that what was beneath the soiled garments might be brittle, might break whenever it was moved. Whatever it could offer in the way of evidence would be best contained within the clothing until that could be cut away and the contents exposed upon the stainless-steel tables of the laboratory.
‘How long ago?’
‘Months rather than weeks. Maybe longer than that. But you could have deduced that for yourself. I’ll give you something better in due course.’
‘You’ll make it a priority?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s quite probably a missing person, you see. It’ll be difficult to pin her down, until we have some idea how long she’s been dead.’
Peach realized that he was going through the motions, talking for the sake of it, doing anything to lower the tension in that grim and freezing place. If this proved to be one of the thousands of people who went missing in Britain in every week of the year, they would probably need to know exactly when she had died even to identify a victim. He was assuming already that it was murder, that no one would have come out to this bleak place to end her own life.
As if he followed this train of thought, the pathologist said, ‘I’m not even sure how she died, yet. There’s nothing obvious from what we can see and I don’t want to run the risk of contaminating the evidence by interfering with the clothing. You’ll have all that soon enough, once I get her on the table.’
Lucy Blake forced herself to go over and stare down at the very dead thing in the corner which was to become a part of all their lives, and of hers and Peach’s in particular. It was an absurd part of working in what was still essentially a man’s world: she was the only woman in that crowded, icy room. She had to show them that a woman could look down on a thing like this without puking, without showing a weakness which would be entirely human. It was ridiculous and probably out of date; perhaps she was the only one present who felt that she had to show a male toughness in the face of a shocking sight.
DS Blake had learned early in her days in uniform that young male PCs were far more likely to throw up than she was when they attended a gory road accident, but she had always taken it as a sign of humanity in them. And you couldn’t win in the canteen culture: if you showed yourself to be tough, the diehards would decide you were probably a dyke.
Her eyes seemed reluctant to transfer their gaze from that awful blackening face, with the lips almost completely gone and what was left of the mouth twisted into a ghoulish leer, which no living face could have carried. She forced her focus away from the face, saw for the first time long, dark hair, which might in life have been lustrous. It was dry and soiled now, but the only thing about the corpse that looked as if it had been recently alive. She knew that it was a myth that the hair and the nails went on growing after death. She was suddenly certain that this had been beautiful hair when the woman had been alive. But that was probably only because she wanted it to have been so, wanted this relic of life to have once been splendid, as some compensation for having died in a place like this.
If indeed she had died here: the CID professional asserted itself in her. The probability was that the woman had been killed elsewhere and merely dumped here to guard against the quick discovery of her remains. Lucy resolved that she would get the man who had done this – she was already sure that it was a man; and with that determination, she felt the hunter stirring within her, the love of the chase that Percy Peach said was an essential part of any CID officer. Even here, in the presence of death and its grisly residue, she felt a guilty excitement. Grim mysteries like this were what she had joined for, were what had made her and others want to be part of CID.
She moved a little, transferred her gaze to the other end of the body. The feet looked pathetically small in their trainers, which shone unnaturally white and clean in the arc lamp the SOCA team had rigged up with a battery to assist their work. She thought how inadequate such footwear was, then remembered that this woman might have died in the summer, when the sun had shone through long days and the weather had been warm, even up here.
‘So you’ve no real idea how long she’s been lying here?’ she said to the pathologist, repeating Peach’s enquiry just because she wanted to say something, anything; knowing even as she completed the question that it was naïve: he’d have told them that, if he’d known.
‘Months rather than weeks, as I said. Possibly longer than that, but I don’t think so. I’ll have a better idea once I have the technology of the lab and what’s left of her on the table. The entomologist can tell us all kinds of things from the development of the maggots, though I’m not sure how much the altitude and the cold would affect that and what’s happened since.’
There was the sound of a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the still air outside, coming closer, picking its way cautiously across the snow-covered fields, until the sound of its engine seemed to vibrate within the damp stone wal
ls of the place where they stood. Jack Chadwick went to the low doorway and looked out. ‘It’s the meat wagon,’ he said. Unnecessarily, for all of them had realized what it was. With no paved roads to the derelict farmhouse, no other vehicle would have been allowed to come so close. The SOCA team would look for tyre marks on the unpaved track, when the snow melted. It was unlikely they would find anything significant, after such a time had elapsed, but not impossible, in an isolated place like this.
The experienced crew of the long-base Land Rover were charged with the collection of the corpse, with the careful stowing of whatever remained into the plastic zipper case of the body bag, with the lifting of that into the ‘shell’, the fibre-glass coffin in which it would be transferred to Chorley for the post-mortem. Lucy Blake caught a whiff of diesel as the engine was switched off outside.
And with that sudden silence, the people inside the stone room, who had been frozen into a tableau of their own thoughts by the arrival of the vehicle, sprang again into life. There was a sudden, blinding flash as the photographer snatched a last view of the position of the corpse and the way it lay beneath its covering. Then they moved out of the building and stood bleakly in the cold, forming into two rough lines, moving a step or two in a silent cortège behind the corpse, as the men moved carefully between them and slid the shell and its grisly contents into the back of their improvised hearse.
No one moved as the Land Rover chugged slowly away across the frozen field, its wheels spinning a little as it rejoined the paved road and turned towards Clitheroe and civilization. It was a last, futile, scarcely conscious mark of respect to the woman who had long been dead. Then the scene-of-crime team went back into the ruin to complete their work, to search for whatever might be revealed on the ground now exposed to them, where the corpse had lain.
DCI Peach exchanged a few quiet words with Sergeant Jack Chadwick, who had years ago been his CID colleague, before having been shot and almost killed in a bank raid. Then Chadwick disappeared back to his work and Peach and Lucy Blake walked slowly back across the fields to the gate where they had left the police Mondeo.
It was fine but cloudy, with a biting north-east wind. Peach looked across towards the top of Pendle Hill, well above the tree-line, stark and white with its winter covering against the deep grey of the sky. From this angle there was not a single habitation visible. It was a scene that would have been exactly the same four centuries and more before, when the Pendle witches had been dabbling in the supernatural and paying for it with their lives.
They picked their way over the frozen ground in silence. They were two hundred yards from the ruined farm before Lucy Blake turned to look back at it and said, ‘I’m glad to be out of there. I felt there was something evil in the air.’
Percy Peach knew that he should reassure her, should smile away such childish superstitions and remind her of their professional responsibilities. Instead, he repeated with terse conviction his first words when he had seen the body: ‘It’s not going to be easy, this one.’
Three
‘They’ll want to see us, you know.’
‘Who will?’
‘The police.’ Dermot Boyd was impatient with her denseness. ‘They’ll want to ask us questions about how we found the body, about whether we saw anything suspicious.’
‘But we didn’t.’
‘Of course we didn’t. But they’ll want to know that. It’s just routine. They’re not very intelligent you know, the police. So they have their routines, so that they don’t need to think. The average woodentop isn’t much good at using his initiative, so they operate by the book all the time. The book tells them what to do, so they do it. Saves them from the painful business of thinking. It’s a bit like women following fashion: it saves them from thinking.’
He’d managed to get a dig in at her, or her sex, at the end. That was characteristic. But it wasn’t like him to say so much. It was almost as though he was nervous. Eleanor thought waspishly that she’d like to prolong this exchange, in that case. ‘But it hadn’t just happened, had it? We couldn’t possibly have seen anything that was helpful.’
‘Of course we couldn’t. And the sooner they’ve finished with us, the better. But that’s what I mean: they put their procedures into practice, whether they’re appropriate or not. They do what the book tells them to do. Some PC Plod will be round to see us, you mark my words.’
‘I expect you’re right.’
He wondered why it annoyed him so much when she said that. Perhaps it was not the words but the way she turned away from him, signifying that the argument was at an end, or perhaps that she didn’t think it worth her while to argue with him. He could remember when they had loved to argue with each other, to pursue a point for its own sake, stretching their minds, knowing that it would end in a happy resolution, whatever the subject. That seemed a long time ago, nowadays. He said stubbornly, ‘It’s no big deal. I just thought we should agree what we’re going to say, that’s all.’
She looked back at him from the books she was putting into her briefcase. ‘Why on earth should we do that?’
He sighed. ‘Because we don’t want to look silly, that’s why. They’d be delighted if we said different things, even if they were only slightly different. They’d get a kick out of making us contradict each other. It’s their job to do that. And they hate schoolteachers, the plods.’
Eleanor hadn’t heard that before. She would have thought that police and teachers were both authority figures in a world which had less and less respect for authority – that they might have had a fellow feeling about the excrescences of the worst of modern youth. But she had neither the time nor the inclination for more argument. ‘All right. If they do come to speak to us, there’s nothing to say anyway, is there?’
He turned ostentatiously away from her, watching her movements in the mirror over the mantelpiece. ‘Not much, I suppose. But we should say that it was completely by chance that we went to that old farmhouse at all. That we’d no intention of going there when we set out.’
‘Of course we should say that. For the very good reason that it’s the truth. We’d never have gone near the place if the lace on my boot hadn’t broken, would we? And that body would still have been lying there now.’
He nodded, with what she thought was an odd eagerness. ‘That’s what we need to say, then. I just think it’s important that we both say exactly the same thing – don’t get our wires crossed.’
He’d have picked her up on it if she’d used a cliché like that. Eleanor rather enjoyed saying, ‘You sound almost as though you were nervous about it, Dermot. You haven’t got a criminal record you’ve carefully concealed from me for twenty years, have you? I hope you’re not the phantom rapist of old Brunton town!’ She laughed at the ridiculous thought as she walked to the hall cupboard and took out her car coat.
‘It’s not a subject for hilarity, as far as I’m concerned. This is almost certainly a suspicious death, you know. And in any case, you’ve no good reason to think that that poor girl was raped.’
She turned to face him in the dimness of the hall, giving him her full attention for the first time. ‘You must have looked at that thing up there far more carefully than I did. I didn’t even know that it was female, let alone whether it was young or old.’ But he hadn’t, she thought, with a little frisson of horror. He’d hardly looked at the thing in the corner at all, as far as she could remember.
He stood very still in the shadows for a moment. Then he came forward with a false, unchanging smile and held her shoulders. ‘You’re right. Of course you are! I don’t know why I said that. I suppose I just assumed it was a girl because so many of the bodies found nowadays are young women. I’d no real reason to say that, as you so rightly point out.’
She couldn’t help glancing sideways at his right hand as it grasped her shoulder. He didn’t often touch her nowadays, apart from their routine couplings in bed. It was as though he was trying to convince her of something. She said ungenerously
, ‘It’s good to know that I can be right about something, after all!’ and glanced at her watch.
He gave her that forced smile again, then said, ‘That just underlines what I was saying, though, doesn’t it? We need to be careful what we say to the police. The kind of slip I made then might give them totally the wrong impression. It might start them off on a wild-goose chase – one that would be entirely profitless for them and embarrassing for us.’
‘I suppose you may be right. I’m going to be late if I don’t go now.’ She slipped free of the grasp he still had on her shoulders and went through the kitchen to the utility room.
Her hand was on the door that led into the garage when he said, ‘That’s agreed, then. We’ll both tell them that we were set on climbing Pendle Hill, that we’d no intention of going to that farmhouse until your bootlace snapped and the miniature blizzard caught us. That it was only because of those things that we were glad of any shelter in an emergency, even of that derelict place we’d never have even glanced at otherwise.’
‘All right. Must go, I’m afraid. See you tonight.’
‘Have a good day then, old girl!’ It was an expression he hadn’t used for years, one of the phrases he had teased her with when they were first married, because her father had used it to her mother and he knew it annoyed her. He reached for her as she turned away from him and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
Dermot never did that.
Eleanor Boyd drove through the morning rush hour towards the comprehensive school where she was head of the history department. Dermot shouldn’t have gone on about the police like that, whatever his anxiety. It had made her think back to those minutes in the blizzard, when she had been limping along, looking desperately for any kind of shelter.