How the Dead Speak

by Val McDermid

  ‘I didn’t do well at school. Margaret Clitherow put me right off, and I never really settled after that, but I want to work with children. Maybe be a nursery worker or even a nanny and I saw about the Open University on the telly and I thought, that’s not for the likes of you, Lou, but my boss at work, she said I should go for it. So I did,’ Louise blurted out. ‘It’s weird, doing homework at my age, but it turns out I’m quite good at it. Who knew?’

  ‘Good for you. It’s never too late. So, can you tell me when you were at St Margaret Clitherow?’

  ‘Maggie Clit, we used to call it.’ Louise sniggered. ‘I didn’t even know what a clit was when I went there. I was nine. And I was there till just before my twelfth birthday. You can do the sums.’

  ‘How did you end up there?’

  Louise’s spark dimmed. ‘My mum got cancer. She was proper poorly, and I was a wild little madam. Then she died, and I went even more wild. Stealing from the local shops, but in a totally crap way, like I didn’t care if I was caught or not. Stopping out late, bunking off school, being a right bastard to my dad. He couldn’t manage, poor sod. He couldn’t deal with his own grief because I was using up all his energy. The parish priest said he could put me into Maggie Clit’s till I’d calmed down and got it out of my system, then my dad could bring me home. So I got dumped with that bunch of sadistic cows. I thought it would just be for a couple of weeks, but it ended up being nearly three years. I cried myself to sleep wishing for my dad to come back for bloody months.’ For a moment, she had nothing more to say, silenced by the weight of the memory.

  ‘Did your dad not visit?’

  A bitter laugh and a knitting of the forehead. ‘Twice, he came. At the time, I thought he was getting his own back on me for being such a total shit to him. But after I went home, I fronted him up about it and he said the nuns told him to stay away. That it made the girls unsettled if their families visited. It was all about making their lives easier – those bitches. He’d wanted to see me. He’d even come to the Blessed Pearl a couple of other times and they made excuses. Said I was out on a day trip. Which was bollocks, because we never went out on day trips. It was like being in jail.’

  Paula let the silence grow, respecting the other woman’s corrosive memories. Then she said softly, ‘How did they treat you?’

  Louise picked at the skin round her thumbnail. ‘It was harsh.’ She met Paula’s eyes, her own bright with unshed tears. ‘There was a lot of talk there about the love of God but not one of them ever showed us a scrap of love. There were rules about everything. When you went to bed. When you got up. How often you had a shower and how long for. What you were allowed to wear. When you had to shut up and when you could talk and what you were allowed to talk about.’ She shook her head, uneasy at the memory.

  ‘And what happened if you broke the rules?’ Paula probed gently.

  ‘You were punished.’ Louise rubbed her eyes with her fingertips, shedding mascara on her cheeks.

  ‘Punished how?’

  ‘Depends what you’d done. They had . . . I suppose you’d have to call them punishment cells. Just a tiny bare room with nothing except a bucket to piss and shit in. No mattress, no blanket, no nothing. You’d get locked in there overnight. Or sometimes for two or three nights. No food, just a cup of water twice a day. It was freezing in the winter and roasting in the summer. You wouldn’t treat a dog like that, not legally.’

  Now Paula could feel the slow burn of anger in her belly. ‘You definitely shouldn’t treat a child like that. Did that ever happen to you?’

  Louise blinked hard. A tiny tear escaped from the corner of one eye. ‘Just the once. I refused to eat my dinner. It was liver and onions.’ She shuddered. ‘I’ve always hated liver. It’s the texture as much as the taste. Yuck. And they cooked it till it was like shoe leather. One of the nuns dragged me away from the table by the hair. Then they grabbed my arms so tight I had bruises and took me to the punishment cell. I was bloody terrified. I thought I was going mad. I tell you, I never refused liver again. But even the smell of it makes me gag to this day.’

  ‘I can imagine. Were there other punishments handed out by the nuns?’

  Louise sighed. ‘You bet. They stuck to the bible. You know that bit where it says, “spare the rod and spoil the child”? They made bloody sure we weren’t going to be spoilt. The lowest level of physical punishment was the ruler. You remember those thin rulers we had in school? Wooden or plastic, about thirty centimetres long? Well, they’d set those against the back of your legs or your hands, bend them back and then let them go. You wouldn’t think something so little could cause so much pain, but it was bloody excruciating. Especially on the backs of your hands. There’s no flesh there to protect you.’ She grimaced and rubbed the backs of her hands as if she were washing them.

  ‘I bet that stung. One of the boys in my class once did that on the back of my thigh, I was wearing trousers, but I can still remember how it burned.’

  ‘That wasn’t enough for Sister Mary Patrick. The Mother Superior. She had a leather belt, a proper heavy-duty one. Girls would get a beating with the belt for what she reckoned were serious crimes. Like being cheeky to a nun or being late for Mass. There was a story went the rounds that sometimes she’d use the buckle end of the belt.’

  The thought of what that could do to the fragile body of a growing girl made Paula feel physically sick.

  Louise studied Paula’s face, as if weighing something in the balance. Her lips tightened, then she said, ‘Maybe it was just the older girls trying to frighten the little kids. But there were stories that Sister Mary Patrick didn’t always know when to stop.’

  25

  One of the first serial offenders I profiled was a sadistic rapist who specialised in dumping his victims at sites where other women had previously been murdered. He told his victims the gruesome history of the places as part of his strategy to force their silence. Not so much revisiting the scene of the crime as annexing the horror of someone else’s.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  It was only a slight detour for Alvin to visit the crime scene on his way to the office. He wanted to see the place for himself, to fix it in his mind’s eye so that as evidence began to trickle in, he could place it within his own mental map. He was luckier than Sophie; there was space in the car park by the time he arrived.

  As he walked towards the mobile incident room, he took in the extent of the convent and its grounds. With the right people in charge, this could have been an amazing place to grow up. Space to run around. Trees to climb, countryside to go for walks. What had happened instead felt like a double whammy.

  He checked in at the mobile incident room then headed for the blue tent. He found an extra-large protective suit in the pile by the door and was soon almost anonymous within its folds. Bootees over his shoes, gloves on his hands and a face mask completed his camouflage. It wasn’t that he was hiding; he just didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He had a feeling the new boss wouldn’t be happy at his officers going off piste. Rutherford would find out soon enough that was how ReMIT functioned. But Alvin didn’t feel the need to be first out of the gate.

  He spotted the diminutive figure of DCI Fielding and headed in the opposite direction. The very protective gear that disguised him made it hard to identify someone he could count on to fill him in on the details of the investigation. Frustrated, he headed out of the far side of the tent to where the excavation work was being carried out. It looked like a deep gash had been ploughed in the earth a couple of metres wide and about fifty metres long, and teams of white-suited figures were working their way along it, trowels and brushes in hand. Cameras on tripods had been set up alongside, flashguns firing at intervals. They would, he knew, provide a record of the excavations being carried out.

  He walked past the trench, keeping well away from the edge. Halfway along, an officer was standing with a clipboard. As he drew near, Alvin recognised him as one of the CID aides at Skenfrith S
treet. He couldn’t remember the lad’s name, but he could be fairly sure he’d be recognised. Even now there weren’t many black detectives in Bradfield, and certainly none as distinctive as him.

  Alvin stopped beside the aide and nodded a greeting. ‘You registering finds?’

  ‘Yeah. I just make a brief note and send them inside. That’s where the real work’s being done.’ He sounded wistful. Alvin couldn’t blame him. Nobody wanted to be a glorified clerk on an investigation like this.

  ‘Tell me what I’m looking at,’ he said.

  The lad flashed him a quick look of surprise. ‘The developers sent the bulldozers in yesterday morning. First off, they sent a ripper down. That’s a sort of blade they put on the back of a ’dozer to literally rip the ground up. Behind it goes the actual bulldozer with the big blade that kind of digs the trench. The driver of the second bulldozer was about halfway along when he saw the ripper kicking up what looked like a skull. By the time he’d stopped and shouted to the foreman that there was a problem, the ripper had gone right along to the end. And when they looked closer, they could see what looked like a lot of bones. They were a bit stained from being in the earth, but they could still see they were bones.’ He pulled a face. ‘Especially the skulls. Little skulls, Sarge. It turns your stomach.’

  Alvin had children. He understood the power of finding remains like these. ‘I bet,’ he said. ‘So who’s doing the excavations? We don’t have enough forensic specialists round here for something on this scale, surely?’

  ‘They contacted Manchester University. They’ve got a big archaeology department. They sent a whole team out this morning. More to come tomorrow, apparently. There’s a squad from the forensic science course at Bradfield Uni in the tent, helping to sort out the bones. It’s massive, Sarge.’

  ‘A bit of a nightmare,’ Alvin agreed. ‘And we don’t even know if there’s anything criminal gone on.’

  This time the aide didn’t hide his surprise. ‘Well, there’s something. I heard DCI Fielding telling her team that they’ve spoken to the top nun at the Order of the Blessed Pearl and there’s been no authorised burials here aside from the nuns round the back. So at the very least, it’s illegal disposal of the bodies.’

  ‘I get that. But we don’t know yet when that happened. They’ve been here since 1930. We don’t have any professional interest in anything older than seventy years. So it might not be anywhere near our remit.’

  His face fell. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. That’ll be why Fielding’s in such a bad mood. This’ll totally bust her budget. And she might not have owt to show for it.’

  She might not have anything to show for it either way, Alvin thought. If there was glory to be had here, he had a hunch DCI Rutherford would be hugging it to his chest like a newborn. ‘It’s got to be done, though.’ Alvin clapped the aide on the shoulder and carried on along the trench. When he reached the end and rounded the corner of the convent building, he noticed the raised beds and neat rows of vegetables arrayed along the far side of the grounds. It wasn’t the horticulture that interested him, however.

  It was the dog handler moving towards the cultivated area with her golden retriever. What piqued his curiosity was that Alvin happened to know this was no regular police dog partnership. He recognised the woman trotting alongside the handsome dog because he’d encountered her back when he’d still been with West Mercia, before Carol Jordan had recruited him for ReMIT. Sergeant Josy Rivera had brought her dog Paco along to one of the regular training weekends officers had to attend to maintain current knowledge of procedures and forensic developments.

  The course had been held in a hotel with a health club and swimming pool. Josy had asked them to meet her in the locker room at the start of the session for a practical demonstration. Even Alvin’s human nose could detect a variety of scents – chlorine, sweat, the chemical fragrances of deodorants, hair products and colognes. ‘In one of these lockers is a dead rabbit,’ Sergeant Rivera had said. ‘It’s wrapped in clingfilm and double-bagged in sealed plastic bags. One of your colleagues brought it here this morning and decided where to put it. Even I don’t know which locker it’s in.’ She waved a key at them. ‘I have the key, but as you can see, there’s no number tag attached to it.’

  She’d brought Paco in and immediately the dog had reacted with excitement, his tail sweeping to and fro, sniffing the air and casting back and forth. Within two minutes, he’d jumped up on a bench and directed their attention to one locker in particular. When Sergeant Rivera opened it, there was the packaged rabbit, just as she’d described it.

  There had been a talk afterwards. Because the demonstration had been so effective, even to this day he could remember bits and pieces of what she’d said. Dogs have a sense of smell that’s up to a thousand times more powerful than humans. The man sitting next to Alvin had leaned across to mutter, ‘And yet they sniff each other’s arses. No accounting for taste.’

  It took up to two years to train a cadaver dog, mostly because human bodies produce more than four hundred different volatile chemicals as they go through the five basic stages of decomposition. To help train the dogs, an American chemical company had produced synthetic corpse scents. Among them, Alvin vividly recalled, were ‘recently dead’ and ‘decomposed’. Not the sort of fragrance you’d be spraying on if you were hoping for a romantic evening.

  ‘If you’ve been to the scene of a death, you’ll have experienced some of those smells,’ Rivera had said, and the room full of hardened cops had all shifted in their seats. ‘Rotting flesh, urine, faeces, something like extreme halitosis. What you’re getting is the orchestral equivalent of a triangle. The dog gets the full symphony.’

  Long after a body had been buried, those scents carried on telling tales. It made perfect sense to Alvin that Paco and his handler had been called in. Scientists were working on a machine that would be even more sensitive than the dogs, but that was a long way off yet. There were only a handful of cadaver dogs in the whole country; he supposed Paco was based closest to hand. Given the discovery of so many human remains, it would have been negligent not to examine the rest of the convent grounds just in case there were even more.

  He thought about going over to say hello, but decided it wouldn’t be welcome while dog and handler were working. But he’d move a little closer and watch them for a while. He was intrigued to see the dog quartering the area, nose to the ground then rising to sniff the air, then back to snuffle at the grass and the earth.

  Alvin had been watching for less than fifteen minutes when Paco’s behaviour altered suddenly. The dog’s hindquarters dropped to the ground and he began to growl. Four deep barks, then a pause. Four more barks, and Rivera was at his side, feeding him treats from a pouch on her belt. Alvin broke into a run and reached her as she was radioing through to the incident room.

  ‘The dog’s found something,’ he heard her say. ‘Round the side by the vegetable patch. I need a team here now.’

  26

  Children who have experienced extreme trauma in childhood often find it difficult to produce appropriate responses to trauma in later life. Sometimes they can’t cry. Often they are unable to articulate what they’re feeling and fear the consequences if they were to speak. It’s one of the reasons why victims of child sex abuse struggle with coming forward afterwards. They come to believe that the sky will fall if they speak the unspeakable.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  Every interview had a tipping point. On one side, triumph. On the other, car crash. Paula had always had an instinct for that moment. Carol Jordan had spotted her talent for drawing witnesses and suspects into revelations they hadn’t intended to make, and over the years, Paula had seized every opportunity to take courses to refine her skills. Elinor had once observed that when it came to the secrets we keep, she had no defences against her partner, but they both knew that was a tease. Somehow, when it came to worming information out of Elinor, and now Torin, Paula never quite succeeded as well as he
r track record at work might have suggested. Even the best have blind spots.

  When it came to the battle of wills in the interview room, however, she felt confident that she could usually find a way to the truth. It was partly an empathetic understanding of what people needed to hear and partly her ability to make even the most defensive and suspicious individual believe she felt sympathy for them. There were occasions when she wished she could scrub the inside of her head after someone had divulged the dark perversions at the root of their lives. But she consoled herself that she was helping to clean the streets.

  So she met Louise Brand’s frightened blinking with an even gaze. ‘You’ve been carrying this inside for a long time, Louise. It’s time to share the weight. I know you want to break your silence, and this is a safe place for you to do that. Nobody here is judging you. What do you mean when you say Sister Mary Patrick didn’t always know when to stop?’

  Louise picked ferociously at the skin round her thumb. A jagged line of blood oozed out. ‘It was just what some girls said. You know what teenage girls are like. They pick up on something and nothing and spin a whole story out of it.’