The Calling Of The Grave dh-4

by Simon Beckett

  'You've been to interview him? Why wasn't I told?'

  'Take it up with Simms,' he shot back.

  Sophie was furious. 'I still can't believe you questioned him without consulting me first! Why bring a BIA in and then not use them? That's just stupid

  I tried not to wince. Tact obviously wasn't her strong point. Terry's face darkened.

  'I'm sure the SIO'll love to hear how stupid he's been.'

  'You said you'd got news?' I said, trying to head off the row.

  Terry gave Sophie a final glare before turning to me. 'Monk claims he can't remember who he buried where, but he's agreed to cooperate.'

  'Cooperate how?'

  Terry hesitated, as though he didn't entirely believe it himself. 'He's going to take us to the other graves.'

  Chapter 4

  The prison van bumped along the narrow road. Police cars and motorbikes flanked it front and back, blue lights flashing. The procession made its way past the grassed-over ruins of an old waterwheel, one of the remnants of the tin mines Wainwright had told me about, and pulled up near where a helicopter stood on a patch of clear moor, its rotors turning idly. The doors of the police cars opened and armed officers climbed out, the snub shapes of their guns gleaming dully in the early morning drizzle. Now the front doors of the prison van opened as well. Two guards climbed out and went to the rear. The clusters of uniforms there obscured what they were doing, but a moment later the doors swung open.

  A man stepped out of the back. The police and prison guards quickly formed a tight cordon around him, screening him from clear view. But the big, shaved head was clearly visible, standing out like a white football in the centre of the encircling figures. He was bustled across the moorland to the waiting helicopter, hunched over as the two guards hurried him beneath the whirling rotor blades. He climbed into the cabin clumsily, as though unused to the exercise. As he pulled himself up he slipped, going down on one knee. Hands reached out from inside the helicopter, grabbing his arm to steady him. For a second he could be fully seen, shapeless and doughy inside the prison-issue jacket.

  Then he was inside. One of the guards followed him aboard and the door slammed shut. The rotors picked up speed as the other guard retreated back towards the prison van, clutching his hat to his head as the downdraught from the blades rippled the grass. The helicopter lifted from the ground, tilting slightly as it turned, and then it was angling away across the moor, shrinking until it was little more than a black speck against the grey sky.

  Terry lowered the binoculars as the sound of its rotors diminished. 'Well, what did you think?'

  I shrugged, hands stuck deep into the pockets of my coat. My breath steamed in the fine drizzle. 'Fine, apart from when he slipped. Where did you find him?'

  'The double? He's some slaphead PC from HQ. Nothing like Monk when you see him up close, but he's the best we could do.' Terry gnawed at his lip. 'The guns were my idea.'

  'I wondered about that.'

  He gave me a look. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'It seems a lot of trouble to go to, that's all.'

  'That's the price of a free press. This way they get something to photograph and we can get on with the job without the bastards getting in the way.'

  I couldn't blame him for sounding disgruntled. Even though it was supposedly a secret, word had inevitably leaked out about Monk's involvement in the search. Keeping the press off open moorland would have been impossible, so the decoy would distract their attention while the real business was under way. Finding a grave out here would be hard enough without journalists trampling all over the moor.

  'Looks like something's happening,' Terry said, staring through the binoculars.

  About a mile away a line of cars and vans was racing across another road in the direction the helicopter had taken. Terry gave a grunt of satisfaction.

  'Good riddance.' He glanced at his watch. 'Come on. The real thing should be here soon.'

  It had taken two days to finalize all the necessary paperwork and arrangements for Monk's temporary release. I'd spent most of that time in the mortuary. Cleaned of the thick coating of peat, the full extent of the young woman's injuries was shockingly apparent. There seemed hardly any part of her skeleton that wasn't damaged: in places only the decaying tendons and soft tissue held the bones together. It was the sort of trauma you'd expect from a car crash, not something inflicted by a human being.

  'The post-mortem wasn't able to establish a definitive cause of death,' Pirie told me, apparently unperturbed. 'There are any number of injuries that could have been responsible. Many of the internal organs and soft tissues are ruptured, the hyoid bone is broken and there are fractures to several cervical vertebrae. The damage to the thoracic cavity would almost certainly have proved fatal, as the splintered ribs penetrated the heart and lungs. In fact, the injuries suffered by this young lady are so severe that shock alone would probably have killed her.'

  Young lady sounded curiously old-fashioned. Prim, almost. For some reason it made me warm to the odd pathologist. 'But…?' I prompted.

  I was rewarded with a thin smile. 'As I said yesterday, skeletal trauma is more your field than mine, Dr Hunter. I can't rule out strangulation, but the blows to her head were so forceful that her vertebrae and hyoid would probably have broken anyway. The attack must have been quite frenzied.'

  'How do the injuries compare with Angela Carson's?'

  I'd only been given a copy of the earlier post-mortem report that morning. I hadn't had a chance to read it fully, but the similarity of their injuries seemed undeniable.

  'The soft tissue was too degraded to distinguish any signs of sexual assault, unfortunately. I'd hoped the peat might have preserved it adequately, but the physical trauma and shallowness of the grave worked against us. A pity.' He sniffed regretfully. 'The Carson girl also suffered mainly facial and cranial trauma, although nowhere near so severe as this. But as I understand it in that instance Monk was interrupted by the police, which perhaps explains why these injuries are so much more… pronounced.'

  They were that, all right. Against the dull silver backdrop of the examination table, the features barely looked human. The front of her skull had been crushed in like a dropped egg, while the remaining skin and soft tissue of the face were pulped into the fragmented bones of the cheeks and nasal cavity.

  'I believe psychologists claim this sort of facial disfigurement is an expression of the killer's sense of guilt. Eradicating their victim's accusing gaze. Isn't that the accepted explanation?'

  'Something like that,' I agreed. 'But I can't see Jerome Monk as the remorseful type.'

  'Quite. In which case he either has a truly terrifying temper, or he disfigures his victims for pleasure.' He looked at me over the tops of his half-moon glasses. 'Frankly, I'm not sure which is the most disturbing.'

  Neither was I. A fraction of the force used would still have been fatal. Whoever this was, she hadn't just been beaten to death: she'd been pulverized. It was overkill in a very literal sense.

  I'd expected the pathologist to leave me to work with an assistant, but he stayed to help with the grisly task of cleaning the remains: first cutting away the soft tissue then helping me disarticulate the skeleton so it could be soaked in detergent. It was a necessary part of my work but not one I enjoyed. Especially not when the victim was little more than a girl, and I'd a daughter myself.

  But Pirie showed no such qualms. 'I'm always keen to learn new skills,' he said, delicately teasing a tendon away from its connected bone. 'Although I accept that these days that probably puts me in a minority.'

  It took me a second to realize he'd been making a joke.

  In the end, confirming that the dead woman was Tina Williams was relatively straightforward. The clothes and jewellery the body was buried in matched those the nineteen-year-old was last seen wearing when she'd disappeared from Okehampton, a market town on the northern edge of Dartmoor, and dental records confirmed her identity beyond doubt. Although the ja
w and mandible were shattered and the front teeth broken, enough remained to provide a positive ID. The attack had been extensive but not methodical. Either Monk didn't realize his victim could be identified from her dental records, or he didn't care.

  But then he probably never expected her body to be found.

  I'd been able to add little to what we already knew. Tina Williams had suffered horrific blunt trauma injuries. Most of her ribs and the clavicle had simple fractures caused by a swift downward force, as did the metacarpals and phalanges of both hands. Although her face had LeFort fractures, formed when force from an impact dissipates along certain buttressing areas of the cranium, the rear of her skull was intact. That suggested she'd been lying face up on soft ground when the injuries had been inflicted.

  Yet she seemed to have made no attempt to defend herself. Typically, when the forearm is raised to block a blow, it's the ulna that takes the brunt of the force, causing a wedge-shaped break called a 'parry fracture'. Here the ulnae and radii in both forearms had a combination of simple and more complex, comminuted fractures. That pointed to one of two scenarios. Either Tina Williams was already dead or unconscious during the attack, or she'd been trussed and helpless while Monk broke most of the bones in her body.

  I hoped for her sake it was the former.

  It was hard to say what had caused the injuries, but I thought I could guess. While Monk was powerful enough to have inflicted many of them with his bare hands, the frontal bone of Tina Williams' skull – her forehead – bore a distinctive curved fracture. It was too big to have been caused by a hammer, which would in any case more than likely have punched straight through. It looked to me like something that might have been caused by a shoe or boot heel.

  She'd been stamped on.

  I'd worked on any number of violent deaths, but the image conjured up by that was especially disturbing. And now I was about to come face to face with the man who was responsible.

  The sound of the helicopter rotors had all but disappeared as Terry and I went back to the small township of police trailers, cars and vans that had now sprung into life around the moorland track. The constant traffic was churning the moor into a quagmire. Duckboards had been set down as temporary walkways, but black mud oozed up through their slats, making them treacherously slippery.

  I hadn't expected to be here more than a few days, but the convict's surprise offer to show us where Zoe and Lindsey Bennett were buried had changed all that. While Wainwright would remain in charge of any excavation, Terry had told me Simms wanted me on hand when – if – any more bodies were found.

  'Are you nervous? About meeting Monk, I mean?' Kara had asked the night before.

  'No, of course not.' I had to admit I was more curious than anything. 'It isn't every day you get to meet someone like him.'

  'So long as you don't get too close.'

  'I don't think there's much danger of that. We're all supposed to keep our distance. Besides, I'll be the one hiding behind the police.'

  'I hope so.' Kara didn't laugh. 'How's Terry?'

  'He's OK, I suppose. Why?'

  'I called Deborah last night. I haven't spoken to her in ages, so I thought I'd see how she was. She sounded funny.'

  'Funny how?'

  'I don't know. Distracted. Down. She didn't want to talk. I wondered if everything was OK between them.'

  Terry wouldn't have told me even if it wasn't. We'd never had that sort of relationship. 'I haven't had much chance to speak to him. He's under a lot of pressure, though. Perhaps it's just that.'

  'Perhaps,' Kara said.

  Whatever might be going on in Terry's home life, the strain of this operation was beginning to tell. He had an intense, overwound look about him that spoke of too little sleep and too much caffeine. It was hardly surprising, since as far as I could tell Simms was delegating everything to his deputy. Except for press conferences, which he insisted on doing himself. He'd claimed the glory for identifying Tina Williams, and it seemed that every time I turned on the news I saw his wax-like features holding forth in front of flashing cameras and microphones. There was one quote from him which had been aired repeatedly:

  'The man responsible for the deaths of Angela Carson, Tina Williams, and Zoe and Lindsey Bennett might be behind bars, but this investigation isn't over. I won't rest until all of Jerome Monk's victims have been found and returned to their families.'

  It was suspiciously similar to what Simms had said in the forensic tent on the first day I wondered if he'd been trying out potential soundbites even then. And while his superior courted the cameras and became the public face of the investigation, Terry was left to carry the brunt of the search operation himself. He'd been no stranger to high-profile cases while he'd been at the Met, but nothing like this.

  I hoped he was up to it.

  He glanced nervously at his watch yet again as we clattered along the boards. 'Everything OK?' I asked.

  'Why shouldn't it be? We've got one of the most dangerous men in the country about to be let loose and I've still no idea why the bastard's suddenly decided to cooperate. Yeah, everything's fucking great.'

  I looked at him. He scowled, passing his hand over his face.

  'Sorry. I just keep going over all the preparations, trying to make sure we've not overlooked anything.'

  'You don't think he's serious about showing us where the graves are?'

  'Christ knows. I'd feel happier if… Ah, screw it. We'll soon find out.' He stiffened as he looked ahead of us. 'Oh, great.'

  Sophie Keller had emerged from the trailer serving as a mobile canteen, carrying a polystyrene container of steaming coffee. Bundled up in bulky overalls, the BIA looked like a young girl dressed in her father's workclothes. The thick hair was tied back with a no-nonsense band, the drizzle misting it with fine silver beads. A middle-aged man I didn't recognize was with her, stocky and pleasant-faced. She'd been nodding at something he said, but a coolness crossed her features when she saw Terry.

  The two of them had made little secret of their dislike for each other. Whether it stemmed from something that had occurred on a previous investigation or was simply bad chemistry, they were textbook cat and dog. Terry's face hardened into cold planes as we approached.

  Sophie ignored him as she gave me a warm smile, resting a hand lightly on my arm. 'Hi, David. Have you met Jim Lucas?'

  'Jim's our POLSA,' Terry said, blanking her in return. 'He's been trying to keep some order in this three-ring circus.'

  The police search advisor's handshake was just the right side of bone-breaking. His thick grey hair looked like a wire pan scourer. 'Pleased to meet you, Dr Hunter. Ready for the big day?'

  'I'll tell you later.'

  'Wise man. Still, not every clay someone like Jerome Monk decides to work on the side of the angels, is it?'

  'If that's what he's doing,' Sophie said, looking at Terry. 'I'd have a better idea if I'd been allowed access to him.'

  Here we go again, I thought as Terry's jaw muscles bunched. 'We've already been through this. You get to accompany the team with Monk, but there's to be no direct contact. If you don't like it, take it up with Simms.'

  'He won't return my calls.'

  'I wonder why.'

  'But it's ridiculous! I could assess Monk's state of mind, gauge if his change of heart is genuine, but instead-'

  'The decision's been made. Monk's not talking to anyone, and for the time being the priority's getting him to show us the other graves.'

  'You mean Simms' priority.'

  'I mean the priority of this investigation, and last time I checked you were a part of it. You want that to change, then say the word!'

  The cords on Terry's neck stood out as they glared at each other. Lucas looked as uncomfortable as I felt. It was a relief when Roper came over. The DCs gaze flicked between Terry and Sophie, missing nothing.

  'What?' Terry snapped.

  'Just had the transport on the line. They'll be here in ten minutes.'

  The anger d
rained from Terry. He straightened his shoulders. 'Right.'

  'Hang on,' Sophie protested. 'What about-'

  But Terry was already walking away, feet clumping on the duckboards. Roper hesitated long enough to give Sophie a toothy smile that exposed a line of pale gum above his incisors.

  'Never mind, love. He's got a lot on his mind.'

  She shot him an angry look as he hurried after Terry. Lucas rubbed the bridge of his nose, embarrassed.

  'Well, I need to get on as well.' He hesitated, giving Sophie an uncertain glance. 'Look, it's none of my business, but I wouldn't push too hard. There's a lot riding on today.'

  'All the more reason why I should be able to do my job properly.'

  Lucas looked as though he were about to say something else, then thought better of it. 'Just watch yourself. Monk's a dangerous bugger. You ask me, you're better keeping well away.'

  For a second I thought Sophie was going to snap at the search advisor as well, but then she gave a reluctant smile. 'I can look after myself.'

  Lucas kept his thoughts to himself. He gave me a nod. 'Dr Hunter.'

  We watched him walk away. Sophie blew out an exasperated breath. 'God, sometimes I hate this job.'

  Sophie had made no secret of her displeasure at being left out of the decision-making process. 'You don't mean that,' I said.

  'Don't bet on it. I just can't understand why Monk's suddenly so keen to help. And please don't say it's his guilty conscience.'

  'Perhaps he's planning an appeal and thinks it might help him get a reduced sentence.'

  'He's got at least another thirty-five years to serve. I can't see him planning that far ahead.'

  'You think he's hoping to escape?' I asked.

  I wouldn't have dared mention that to Terry, not given the pressure he was already under to see that didn't happen. The most dangerous part of any prisoner transfer was the transit, but everyone was well aware of what Jerome Monk was capable of. Even so, it was hard to see how even he could hope to escape out here, surrounded by guards and with a helicopter standing by only minutes away.