by Penny Grubb
He looked around. The main fishing lake spread out ahead, still open for business. He could see figures crouched under giant umbrellas at intervals along the shore. The gravel pit was hidden behind a copse. People milled about by the battered shack that served as a reception point and equipment store. He was fairly sure he spotted Mel and Sam in amongst them. He quizzed the two constables on exactly who was about, who had been here earlier. He had a feeling it would be one of those occasions where there would be no shortage of witnesses who’d been close but not close enough, but if Farrar had turned up then the whole thing was climbing the priority list.
‘Get some PCSOs up here to secure the site,’ he told them. ‘Then get on with rounding up witnesses and taking statements.’
As he pushed through the undergrowth, bypassing the direct path, the dark expanse of the gravel pit lay before him, flat, grey and uninviting. A police dinghy floated a few metres out from where a huddle of people watched from the shore. He recognized Farrar and Davis. A man and woman both in wetsuits with blankets round their shoulders huddled on a makeshift seat. As he approached, he heard Davis telling someone to take them back to the hut, get them warm and dry.
Farrar spoke into a radio, talking to the team in the dinghy, then turned to Davis. ‘Go with them,’ he said, nodding his head at the shivering divers. ‘I don’t want them spreading stories until we’ve collared any witnesses.’
Webber broke into the exchange to tell Davis the officers on the tape would be his once the PCSOs arrived. Farrar nodded approval and said, ‘Whatever’s down there, they’ll have it out before long. Come and see this.’
Webber could detect no trace of hostility in Farrar’s tone; he seemed focussed entirely on what was happening around him. ‘What is it?’
As he followed Farrar away from the gravel pit, down an uneven path that snaked through the scrub, Webber took in a summary of the events of the past hour. The theory he’d voiced to Mel was right. The site’s owners had picked up on the lack of urgency that might sink their new venture and had taken matters into their own hands.
‘It’s possible they’ve disturbed a 30-year-old corpse down there,’ Farrar told him. ‘But unlikely. I had a devil of a job getting hold of anyone who could give me an opinion. You’d think the world stops on a Sunday. Thought it might have been a body buried in the mud, well-preserved, trapped by the car. Car gets pulled out, the body pops up. Visibility’s not good at that depth. The idiots who went down thought it was trapped clothing, a green jacket, but when they went to pull it free apparently it bled.’
‘Bled? But …’
‘Yes, a 30-year-old corpse doesn’t bleed. The woman said she tried to pull it free and it leaked some kind of greenish goo. Whether it was blood or not, it freaked them. They’re adamant that the clothing wasn’t there when they found the car.’
‘But if it was trapped under the car, they wouldn’t have seen it anyway.’ He stopped to look out over the dark water. There was a single figure in the dinghy now, leaning over one side staring into the depths. It had been a good while since he’d had a case that had needed an underwater search unit. ‘Green? How deep do you have to be for blood to look green?’
‘20 odd metres, I believe.’
‘Christ! Is it really that deep?’
Farrar nodded, then turned away from the water and scrambled up the slope. ‘But forget the water. Come and look at this. They plan to build a walkway across this stretch. It’s barely started, just foundations for this one end.’
Webber stood at the top of the slope at Farrar’s side. Behind him was the gravel pit where Tippet’s car had been pulled out. Ahead he looked down on a boggy reed bed with an untidy construction half-built at one side. It too had been taped off. Farrar made his way across. Webber followed, trying to avoid the deeper mud but there was no dry path and he felt moisture squelch over and into his shoes. He supposed common sense should have told him to bring wellingtons, but it hadn’t, he’d been focussed on the issue of having Mel and Sam in the car with him.
‘This is your case, now,’ Farrar said as he stopped short of the metal framework of the half-finished structure. ‘You can have Davis as well.’
Webber bit back on a sarcastic, ‘Thanks,’ and winced inwardly at the hit his budget would take. He had a feeling the underwater unit was just the start. He recognised Lana standing beside the newly taped off area.
‘Footings to hold this end of the walkway,’ Farrar said as the three of them stood looking down at a smooth concrete base. Further comment was interrupted by the buzz of his radio. ‘Update Superintendent Webber,’ Farrar said to Lana before turning away.
‘They’re extending that path,’ she said, pointing back towards the thicket that hid the working section of the site. ‘And there’ll be a walkway held up by two towers, one here and one at the other end. Only they swore blind they’d stopped work on it a few weeks ago, before they found anything in the pit. Money was getting tight. They decided the walkway would be stage two and the main thing was to get the pit ready for customers.’
Webber looked again at the smooth concrete. ‘It looks fresh,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘The one who made the emergency call earlier, she said she came across here. It’s the quickest route from the gravel pit to the hut and the phone. She said it didn’t dawn on her until they were back by the water waiting for us to arrive. She asked who’d organised to have the concrete base laid and how they were paying for it. None of them knew anything about it.’
Webber pulled in a breath and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘When? When was it laid?’
‘There was no concrete in there a fortnight ago, that’s all they’re clear about.’
He looked back towards the slope that hid the pit from view. He’d known the underwater team was the least of it. ‘What kind of idiot hides stuff on a site with us crawling all over it?’ he muttered.
‘It could have been done before they found the car – just.’
Farrar marched back towards them, beckoning Webber with a jerk of his head. ‘No body,’ he said. ‘It’s a jacket. It was weighted down. They’ve got it out.’
Webber trudged behind Farrar, not bothering where he trod. His feet were sodden, the cloying mud pulled at his shoes. As they topped the hill, he saw the dinghy now at the water’s edge, a sodden heavyweight orange jacket lying on the grass. As they approached, he felt a weight descend on to his shoulders, a weight he wanted to duck away from. Farrar had said green, but at that depth all colours from the short end of the spectrum would have appeared green.
‘What are you looking so gloomy about?’ Farrar snapped with a trace of his previous rancour. ‘Can’t you cope with another case?’
Webber hurried forward and called out, ‘Let me see that coat.’ They lifted it for his inspection. He took in the lopsided rip at the collar, the black lettering. A couple of days ago he’d spent time watching that jacket with its owner inside it.
‘I’m not sure you’ve given me another case,’ he answered Farrar. ‘That belongs to Tom Jenkinson.’
CHAPTER 9
Webber strode down the pavement, his feet splashing through the puddles that gathered on the uneven tarmac surface. The early sun was all light, no warmth. He’d worn his heavy overcoat and found himself huddling into it as he pushed through the doors.
His ‘What’s new?’ to the desk sergeant was a routine greeting, rarely met with anything other than ‘It’s quiet enough,’ or ‘It’s all through there waiting for you.’ This morning, the man flicked the corner of a newspaper and said with grim satisfaction, ‘Fatal RTA last night. Makes you wonder about that business with the lights and those kids the other week.’
Webber stopped in his tracks. ‘Where? Who? The same time?’
‘Could have been; no one knows. No witnesses. Arthur Trent. Mid-50s. It’s made the early editions.’ He held up the local newspaper. Webber took it and looked at the photograph. A single car concertinaed into a tree. He skimmed the article. The t
ime of the collision was estimated in the small hours, a long time from the height of the rush hour, the window for the recent traffic disruption, and anyway there was no rush hour on a Sunday, no traffic lights nearby and it wasn’t a well enough used stretch of road to have caused gridlock at any time of day.
‘It looks like Trent died at the wheel. Heart attack probably. We’ll get more from the post mortem but no other vehicles involved.’
Webber relaxed a little. Death, accidental and natural, carried on regardless of what went on around it. He looked again at the crushed front end of the vehicle. ‘He was doing quite a speed.’
‘Yeah, he’s not been coasting. Looks like he had his foot hard on the pedal.’
‘Deliberate?’ Webber murmured, his mind conjuring an image of Pamela Morgan. She’d killed herself with pills – a tidier end than Arthur Trent in his smashed car.
He had a briefing to run, that business at the gravel pit to unravel. He stopped, looked back. ‘I suppose the local press have been all over the crash site?’
He saw the sergeant bristle. ‘Not until we’d done what we needed to do.’
* * *
Something had animated Davis. Maybe he had just bowed to the inevitable. Under Webber’s eye he wouldn’t get away with doing half a job. He’d called the team together. There wasn’t room for Webber at the table so he leant on one of the filing cabinets and listened as Davis mapped out the situation.
‘The jacket is with the lab. Don’t know what we’ll get with it having been underwater. Ayaan Ahmed’s chasing up Jenkinson in Scarborough. There’s no sign of him in York. We had someone out to his known haunts last night and we’ve some more to check this morning.’
‘No sign of him down there with the coat, then?’
‘Not yet.’ Davis’s glance flicked briefly to Webber. ‘We had a bit of a break with the shape of the pit at the bottom there. It’s deep and it’s steep. Funnels down. Makes for an enclosed search area. Full of muck and junk that’ll take some sifting but it’s doable.’
Not as expensive as it might have been, thought Webber, but any surplus would be swallowed up chipping out that concrete, the embryo of a foundation for a walkway between the gravel pit and the working section of the site.
As though plucking the thought from his head, Davis switched tack. ‘There’s fresh concrete in the foundation for the far end of the walkway.’ He pointed to one of the photographs on the table. People reached forward to swivel it their way for a better look. ‘It wasn’t there a fortnight ago, but it was there yesterday. Initial signs are that it’s at the recent end of that window. We had a builder take a quick look. What I want is to pin down who delivered it and when.’
‘Could it have been mixed on site?’ Webber asked.
Davis shook his head. ‘There’d have been signs if it’d been mixed nearby and it’s too good a mix to have been done in situ. Apparently it would show round the edges. But more than that, there are tyre tracks. There’s a lorry of some sort been down there. A wagon’s backed down there and poured concrete directly in.’
‘Do we know what depth?’
The officer nearest him looked round at Webber, giving an exasperated shake of her head. ‘They each say something different. All they agree on is that a hole was dug for the foundations before they left it and turned their efforts on to the gravel pit. So no one’s been near it – so they say – since work was suspended on the walkway a couple of weeks ago, except that a couple of them said the hole was used to dispose of hard-core. The more they could fill it, the less concrete they’d need and it’d be cheaper. There was definite friction about it in the group. Two of them wanted to keep on with it, thought the walkway would be the bigger attraction than making the gravel pit useable. So a couple of them are saying there was no more than a foot, eighteen inches on top of the rubble. The others are saying between two and four foot deep.’
‘What extra facilities?’ asked Webber. ‘It’s just more fishing, isn’t it?’
‘No, no. Water sports. The gravel pit’s deep enough for scuba training, that sort of thing.’
‘So has one of them organised that concrete on the quiet just to keep the walkway job moving?’
‘It’s possible. Certainly they weren’t all aware of the plan to dump rubble down there. But if so, I’m surprised we haven’t had an admission. We put the pressure on.’
Worst case, thought Webber, four feet of concrete to chip out.
‘Do you have the schedules for all the concrete firms in the area?’ Davis was saying.
Webber watched as the papers were laid out for inspection. ‘I’ve got everything local for the last fortnight. Nothing was dispatched to that site.’
‘In the grand scheme of things,’ said Davis, ‘It’s not a huge amount. It could be skimmed off a bigger load without anyone noticing.’
‘How does that work?’
‘Bent driver takes a detour and a backhander. It’s not unknown.’
‘So we can assume it came off one of the bigger loads.’
‘We can cut it down further than that,’ Davis said. ‘It’s set but it’s not fully dried. Definitely no more than seven days, possibly no more than three. But we’re probably looking at a mix with a low slump index, the sort of mix that’s the least workable, sets the quickest, typically used in wet foundations.’
Webber was surprised at the level to which Davis had mugged up on concrete mixes. Maybe his admonition the other day had done some good.
‘OK,’ said Davis, ‘we’re looking for large loads. Start with the most recent and work back. Take note of the mix, but no assumptions. It might have been anything.’
When Davis had dispatched his team to chase concrete deliveries and Jenkinson, Webber asked about Ahmed. ‘I spoke to him last night,’ said Davis. ‘No sign of the boy as yet, there or here, but he’s supposed to be in classes this morning. I was going to see if we turn anything up at the University before I get on to Scarborough again.’
‘I’ll give Ayaan a ring,’ said Webber. ‘I want to speak to him anyway.’
Davis looked curious but Webber didn’t elaborate. He felt an ill-defined unease about Ahmed. He was a promising officer who should have a glittering career ahead of him. He’d got his sergeant’s exams and needed to be pushing for promotion, not stagnating in an east coast backwater. Jenkinson had been a real feather in his cap and if the boy had gone bad it would be a blow. He wanted to know that Ahmed was keeping things in proportion. He pulled his phone from his pocket and flicked through for Ahmed’s number.
‘Ayaan? Martyn here. How are you doing with Jenkinson? Any luck?’
‘I caught up with his mother,’ said Ahmed with what sounded like a sigh of resignation. ‘I was on my way round to theirs and I spotted her on Queen’s Parade. She bit my head off, reckons Tom’s gone off the rails again and it’s all down to us.’
Webber did a quick recap in his head of events since last Friday. ‘So she’s seen him.’
‘I think so. I know she’s spoken to him. She won’t admit he’s been back over but I think he has. And I know what it means when she gets defensive like that. He’s told her something that she’s keeping quiet about.’
Ahmed’s annoyance was clear but Webber felt a smile curve his mouth. ‘You’ll save us some time if you can get her to talk, Ayaan.’
‘Any ideas? Tom’s a doddle in an interview room compared to his mother.’
Webber took time to question Ahmed about Jenkinson’s mother, to suggest a few tricks he might try. It was almost a rehearsal for his own strategy to get round Melinda. Despite the turmoil of the various cases he felt more relaxed than he’d done in days. Jenkinson had been back to Scarborough, he’d confided in his waster of a mother. He’d done what Ahmed had feared and gone off the rails. Webber wouldn’t voice the thought right now but far better that than have him turn up under a foot of concrete.
As he ended the call, he saw one of Davis’s team coming back with a look that said he had something. If
his luck held and both Jenkinson and a credible explanation for the concrete delivery turned up, he might salvage something from the tatters of his budget on these cases.
‘What have you got?’
The man glanced towards Davis, on a phone at the far end of the room, then turned to Webber. ‘I’m pretty sure this is the delivery. They sent two lorry loads out. Foundations for wind turbines. Here’s the thing. I’ve spoken to one of the drivers. He’d tipped his load and was on his way off the site when he saw the second batch arriving. He didn’t think anything of it, but according to these dockets, it was the other batch that left the depot first, a good forty minutes earlier. I’m just waiting to hear back from someone who can point me at the driver.’
Webber pointed at the page in the man’s hand. ‘Which one is it?’ he asked. ‘When was it delivered?’
‘That one.’ The man ran his finger down the list pinpointing the date and time. ‘Yesterday morning early. The first batch was out of the depot before six am.’
Webber felt his forehead crease to a frown. Could that concrete bed have been as new as that? He too looked across to where Davis was still hunched over the phone, caught his eye and beckoned with a nod. Davis gave him a hunted glance, then spoke into the handset before ending the call. He hurried across.
‘That concrete base we saw yesterday,’ Webber said. ‘Could it have been as little as seven or eight hours old?’
Davis nodded. ‘Yes, with something like calcium chloride in the mix. Why, what have you got?’ They showed him the paperwork. He nodded again. ‘I know that area. The foundations for those turbines are practically under water. The mix has to dry fast before it’s compromised. I suppose it’s not that different from the reed bed behind the gravel pit.’
A voice called out to Webber. ‘Guv, the Chief Super’s on the phone.’
Webber suppressed a sigh. ‘Talk to that driver,’ he said, ‘and let me know what he says.’