by J M Gregson
‘And you found a body there?’ Ellie had paused for a moment to organize her thoughts, but Tracey could not stand the tension of even this momentary break.
‘Yes. There’s not much more to say, really. It was against the wall of a room, stowed away in a corner.’ Ellie felt herself shudder at the recollection. She was trying to be careful with her words, but she realized that even that word ‘stowed’ implied that someone had put the thing there. It showed how careful you had to be in saying things to the police: perhaps Dermot was right to be cautious, after all.
‘Was it young or old?’
‘I don’t know. It must have been there for months, perhaps even years. It was – well, rather horrible. Not at all exciting. That’s really all there is to it.’ She was back again with that awful vision of stretched black skin which had disturbed her last two troubled nights.
Most of them saw that she was upset and left it at that. Tracey threw her a couple more questions and then went away. The bell rang and the staff filtered out of the room and away to their classes. Ellie Boyd gulped down her coffee and went with them.
There was one woman who did not go. She had asked not a single question during Ellie’s sensational revelation, but she had listened to every syllable of what the history teacher had said. Jo Barrett had a free period now, but she did not turn immediately to marking or preparation. She sat alone in the deserted staff room, her elbows on the table, her dark eyes staring into space.
She was a tall, slim woman of thirty-four, with slender but muscular hands and a long, oval, strikingly pale face, beneath straight hair which was such a stark black that it probably owed something to a bottle. She was always to be seen in dark clothes and black footwear, and in school at least she wore no make-up. She seemed to paint herself deliberately in black and white, so that the smile which frequently lit up her face came somehow as a surprise. She made no secret of the fact that she was gay, though she was at present without a partner.
Jo Barrett was a valued member of the school staff, a conscientious teacher of general science and chemistry, who stood no nonsense but was both respected and liked by her pupils.
She sat unmoving for minutes on end, her mind churning with rapid thoughts, her heart thumping with a sick excitement. She told herself that nothing was certain as yet, that there was nothing to be gained by jumping to conclusions. After a quarter of an hour, she made a series of swift, sudden moves, shut her case with a snap, dragged a pile of exercise books resolutely towards her and began determinedly to mark the work.
She marked only two of the books before she threw down her red ballpoint pen and abandoned the task. She looked swiftly round the empty room, then took a mobile phone from the black handbag beside her. ‘Kath? … I’m fine, thank you. Look, a body’s been found, out on Pendle Hill … No, I hadn’t heard, either, not until break time. Look, it’s one of our staff who found it … No, a woman called Ellie Boyd … that’s right, Dermot’s wife … I know we shouldn’t. I think all that’s been released officially is that it’s the body of an unidentified female … Of course that’s true, yes … But from what Ellie Boyd says, I’m sure this is going to be the body of Annie Clark.’
Peach drove the few miles out to the Home Office forensic laboratory at Chorley to see the pathologist who had done the post-mortem examination on the remains found in the high stone ruin on Pendle Hill.
The pathologist was a man more at home with corpses than living humanity, a man of few words in most social contexts. But he knew Peach from previous investigations, and on his own ground and his own subject he was much more forthcoming. ‘Could be a tough one for you, this,’ he said as he waved an invitation to a chair.
‘They nearly always are when they’re not found immediately.’
‘You’ve got yourself a bonny lass for your sergeant. She never looked like fainting during my dismemberment of that corpse this morning.’ That was obviously a major plus mark, from Colin Steel. The pathologist was from the north-east, though he had needed to confess to being a Sunderland supporter before Peach had pinned down his accent to Wearside.
‘DS Blake said it was a young woman. She’s checking our missing-person computer files at this moment, but I didn’t ask her anything else, as I’d already arranged to see you.’
‘A young woman who was probably in excellent health at the time of her death.’
‘Which was when?’
‘Several months ago. The maggots have long since been and gone. Very informative chaps, maggots. You can often date a death pretty exactly from their state of development, when they’re still making hay with a corpse.’
‘How many months?’ Peach sensed that the man wanted to enlarge upon the chemistry of human decay: probably he didn’t get many opportunities to display his expertise.
Steel steepled his fingers and pursed his lips. Though he was scarcely conscious of the fact, he was quite enjoying this. He regarded Peach as that most welcome of audiences, a professional man from a different field, who needed to be enlightened. ‘Very difficult to say just how many months. Certainly more than two. Certainly less than seven.’
Peach gave him his encouraging smile. ‘Colin, you’re not in court now. I won’t cross-examine you; I won’t even come screaming to you if you happen to be wrong. Let’s have an opinion.’
Steel gave him an answering grin, and for an instant looked disconcertingly like a mischievous schoolboy. ‘All right. I’d say she died some time at the end of the summer. It’s very difficult to assess the rate of degeneration of human flesh when it’s happened at an altitude like that and in a place like that; I think it must have been below freezing on about forty of the last sixty nights up there. I wouldn’t say this in court, so that you’ll find my official report will state “between two and seven months”, but I’d say this girl died around four months ago. That’s an informed guess, mind, no more.’
It was now the twenty-fourth of January. So this unknown girl had died in September or October, according to expert opinion. He’d ring Lucy Blake as soon as he got outside and help her to pinpoint the search. ‘A young woman, you said.’ His mind went back to that thing in the corner of the derelict building on the hillside which could have been male or female, a teenager or a pensioner. Death robbed you so quickly of everything which had distinguished you as a vibrant, individual, living thing. ‘How young, do you think?’
‘I can be a little more definite for you there. I’d say early twenties. Perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four. Her teeth were healthy, and there’d been minimal dental work: just two fillings, I think. We can get a chart to you by tomorrow, if you should need it.’
‘How did she die?’
A pause from this man who liked to deal in certainties, who had found pathology more attractive than the diagnosis of living bodies, because you could cut up the dead and be certain. ‘Almost certainly manual strangulation. What flesh is left around the throat is too far gone for us to be absolutely certain that some form of rope or scarf wasn’t used, so I’d have to say ninety per cent sure in court. There’s no possibility whatever that she hanged herself. Privately, I’d be confident from other corpses I’ve seen that this woman was strangled by hand.’
‘So probably a man.’
Steel smiled thinly, aware that he was being led. ‘Afraid not. The throat is too far gone to say that she wasn’t taken from behind. If she was surprised, no great strength would have been needed. Sorry about that.’
Peach answered the man’s smile with a rueful one of his own. They knew now how this girl had died and when. Both of the answers were less vague than he had feared when he’d seen the state of the corpse in its icy resting place, but less precise than he would have hoped for if luck had been on their side. Time to establish the third of the big details of a suspicious death. ‘Can you give us any idea of where this young woman died?’
‘Afraid not. She could well have been killed at the spot where you found her, but there’s no certainty of that.’ There was silen
ce for a few seconds, as both of these men, who were hardened to the facts of death, pictured this girl being lured to her doom in that lonely place by person or persons unknown.
Then the pathologist went on: ‘But she could easily have been killed elsewhere and taken up there in a vehicle. I imagine that would be easy enough if you chose the right time of day. Normally there’d be hypostasis, with the blood settling to show us if she’d been left lying in a different position for any length of time, but there isn’t enough of her left for that. She’s partly mummified. I’ve taken DNA samples, of course. I think you might find that the most reliable as well as the kindest method of identification for the relatives will be by DNA.’
‘The SOCA team went through her pockets, as well as they could, and found nothing. There was no handbag. Have you come up with any rings or personal possession that might help to place her?’
‘Her clothes have been bagged for your forensic crime experts. I doubt whether they’ll find much. And I haven’t found any birthmarks on what little skin is intact. I think that someone removed a ring from the third finger of her left hand. She could have taken it off herself, but it seems much more likely that it was the person who killed her. But that’s your field, not mine.’
‘Yes. It looks to me as though someone has been over the body after she was killed and removed anything he or she thought might be useful to us. And she could have been killed almost anywhere in the north of England and dumped in that place on Pendle.’ Percy Peach stared thoughtfully, almost resentfully, at the lined face of Colin Steel.
‘Except that whoever chose to put her in that building didn’t do so at random. I should think they selected it as a place where she wasn’t likely to be discovered for some time. That implies a degree of local knowledge, surely?’
‘You’re right. You should have been a detective!’ said Peach dryly. ‘Is there any other information you can offer which might be of interest to us?’
Steel smiled. He had planned to throw his one dramatic finding in casually at the end of his verbal report, where it might make the greatest impact. ‘There is one thing which will certainly be of interest. This girl was pregnant. About three months gone, I’d say.’
Five
Thousands of people go missing every year in Great Britain. Their absence is noted and their details are filed, but unless they are children, or criminals fleeing from justice, or divorced men disappearing to avoid paying maintenance, or there is some reason to suspect foul play, not much effort is made to locate them. The law does not favour it, and police resources are spread too thinly across the burgeoning industry which is British crime for missing adults to receive much attention.
But a murder victim is an immediate priority. An urgent follow-up of all women between twenty and twenty-five who had been reported missing in September and October of the previous year was instituted in Brunton, Burnley and all the Ribble Valley towns and villages which adjoined the Pendle area. Other towns in Lancashire were also asked to cooperate, wherever the computer threw up the names of women in the right age-bracket who had disappeared in their areas.
The first thirty-six hours produced nothing, and Percy Peach offered the gloomy opinion to his team and to Tommy Bloody Tucker that their victim might be a Mancunian or a Liverpudlian, bringing into the equation the vast numbers of women disappearing in the conurbations of south and west Lancashire. He was fond of the statistic that more people lived within thirty miles of central Manchester than central London, feeling vaguely that that was one up to the north-west of England in the north–south divide.
DCI Peach’s hunch was wrong, as hunches tend to be, despite the respect accorded to them by the writers of crime fiction.
It was on the outskirts of Preston that the painstaking routine of checking produced results. An alert, fresh-faced, uniformed constable came up with something that seemed promising.
‘You’ve won the lottery, if you’re right,’ his grizzled station sergeant told him. ‘It won’t do your career any harm to be noticed by the bleeding aristocrats of CID at this stage. If you’re right, they’ll take over. Only appear when things get interesting, those buggers.’ The sergeant’s cynicism didn’t make him forget to claim the credit for this. He reported to the super that he’d spotted 23 Church Terrace as a promising possibility and had sent his best young constable round to check.
Ten miles away in Brunton, Percy Peach nodded his head over the e-mail and decided this was promising enough for him to send Lucy Blake and DC Brendan Murphy round to investigate.
Twenty-three Church Terrace was what the agents called a ‘superior town house’. It was in fact an unremarkable place, high and narrow within its terrace of eighteen houses, faced with the smooth red Accrington brick which seventy years earlier had been used to announce that the frontages of these residences at least had a touch of quality about them.
The woman who opened the door to their ring was around fifty, with a worn face and tired, defeated-looking grey eyes. She wore an apron on which she wiped her hands as they introduced themselves and showed their warrant cards. Perhaps she had expected to be invited to shake hands with them. Instead, Lucy Blake smiled at her and said, ‘I think it would be best if we came inside, Mrs Clark. You don’t want the neighbours to see you with police officers on your step!’
There was no answering smile from Mary Clark. ‘I can’t see why you’ve come, you know. I said everything I had to say to that young man in uniform this morning.’
Brendan Murphy said, ‘It’s the way the system works, Mrs Clark. It takes time, but it gets results, and it doesn’t usually miss things. In circumstances like this, we try to follow up all the possibilities with a blanket coverage. The constable who came to see you was part of that coverage. When something seems more likely, we follow it up in detail.’
That meant that a mother should have read something sinister, some possibility at least of bad news, into this second visit. But Mary Clark showed no sign of distress. ‘You should be Irish, with a name like that.’ She took in his fresh face, his dark curly hair, his large brown eyes. He looked younger than his twenty-five years, and unversed in the seamier ways of life. But Percy Peach had spotted when he recruited him that an appearance of innocence, even naïvety, could be a valuable asset in a CID man.
‘Indeed I should be Irish, Mrs Clark. My mother’s as Irish as they come, so I suppose you could say it’s in the blood. But I have to tell you that I’ve spent all my life in Lancashire.’
Mrs Clark looked a little disappointed at that. She said, ‘You’ll be of the Faith, though, I expect,’ as if that were a second prize, and looked at him with her head a little on one side. She had the trace of a brogue herself, though it was overlaid with a generous helping of Scouse.
‘Indeed I am!’ said Brendan Murphy. He wouldn’t tell her that he was entertaining serious doubts about his Roman Catholicism, that he was now an irregular attender at Sunday mass. This woman might need every small comfort she could get, if she proved to be the mother of what had been found on Pendle.
DS Blake was patient with their small talk, because she understood what was going on. She said, ‘Has Annie got a father around, Mrs Clark?’
A wry smile. ‘No. He left here fifteen years ago. I’ve no idea where he is.’
Lucy Blake nodded. ‘When exactly did Annie go missing?’ She knew from the file when she had been officially recorded as missing, but that was not always the same thing.
Mary Clark looked appreciatively at this pretty, polite girl with dark-red hair and such an air of competence. She was a little older than Annie, but this is how she had hoped her daughter would turn out, if … For the first time, she met head-on the thought which she had thrust to the back of her mind until now, and the tears started to her eyes.
But they did not fall. Not yet. She steadied herself, though her voice broke a little as she spoke. ‘She left home in April last year.’ She held up her hand as Lucy threatened another question, recovered herself as sh
e said, ‘Annie wasn’t reported as missing then, because she wasn’t. She kept in touch for a while, even came to see me, once. And she phoned. Once a week at first, then less often.’ On that last phrase, the tears burst out at last, and she cried silently into the big man’s handkerchief she snatched from her sleeve.
Lucy Blake waited until she had controlled her tears, then put a hand on top of the older hands that had dropped back into Mary Clark’s lap. She wanted to say that all might yet be well, that this corpse might not be Annie’s at all, that the daughter might be back in this room next week, laughing and apologetic, clasping her mother and mouthing the platitudes of reconciliation. But false reassurance was worse than false hope. She said nothing for several seconds, then said quietly into the stricken woman’s ear, ‘Before we go, we’ll need to know any phone numbers that you know Annie was ringing, Mrs Clark.’
Mary Clark nodded, went on snuffling for a few seconds, blew her nose resolutely and said abruptly, ‘What’s in there?’
She was pointing at the plastic bag that Brendan Murphy had carried into the room and set down awkwardly beside his feet. He glanced at DS Blake, then opened the bag. ‘There’s nothing conclusive about this, Mrs Clark, and we don’t want you jumping to hasty conclusions. But we wondered whether you might recognize this shoe?’
He took a small white trainer with green trimming from the bag and held it a yard in front of Mary Clark’s anguished face. If they expected something dramatic, some heartrending cry of grief, they were wrong. She took the trainer into her hands, turned it over, looked with wide eyes at its sole. Then she said dully, ‘This is nearly new.’