by Jo Allen
‘What did you see?’
‘Not much. It’s pretty badly charred. But I think we’ll find there are the remains of a rope around the neck.’
Then it was murder or suicide. ‘Can you be certain?’
‘Not on the first look. I’ll get suited up and get stuck in as soon as the other guys get here. I’ll stay up here until we’ve got everything we can from the scene. You’ll want to get the post-mortem done as soon as you can, I imagine.’
Yes. They’d need to find out who it was and then someone – he desperately hoped not him – would have the unenviable task of telling the family of the grim end that had befallen a parent or a child, a sibling or a spouse. And after that would come the unravelling of the mystery that would tell them why this person had died – by accident, by their own hand or by someone else’s. ‘Yes. I’ll sort it. And I’ll call up a few more officers to secure the scene. I don’t want anyone coming along tomorrow and trampling over what little evidence we have.’
Leaving Tammy to take control of the scene, he walked back down to where the fire engine was still parked up, calling up more support as he did so. They’d need a forensic team to help Tammy take the place apart. Charlie – solid, reliable Charlie – had already called for the doctor, to undertake the formality of pronouncing life extinct. In his head he was already picking the team who’d help him solve this particular mystery and bring whoever had committed the crime – because although you should never prejudge, he was quite clear in his head that it was a crime – to justice.
The firefighters were sitting around their vehicle, showing every sign of exhaustion. ‘I’m looking for Joe Stevenson.’
‘Over here.’ One of the men heaved himself up from the ground where he’d been sitting, running a hand through thinning hair.
‘All right, Joe?’ The poor bloke looked done in, but that was hardly surprising. None of them looked as if they wanted to hang around any longer than necessary and they were probably secretly cursing their colleague for the discovery that had held them back. ‘I won’t keep you a minute. Then you can get back home and get some rest. You all look as if you’ve earned it.’
A ripple of assent ran round the assembled group. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help.’ Joe, seemingly unaccustomed to being the centre of attention, looked abashed.
‘Okay. You’ve given a statement to PC Fry, I know. Run me through it again, would you? Just quickly.’
Joe sighed, coughed as if to clear the thick air from his lungs. ‘We’d been fighting the fire since early afternoon. It was reported to us about two, I think. It was a grass fire. Someone called in from over the other side of the dale, I think. There were a few crews fighting it, and they got a helicopter. We were tackling it from the lakeside. Mercifully, we managed to put it out quickly.’ He sighed.
‘What time was that?’
‘Sixish?’ He looked to his colleagues for confirmation. ‘We did a good job on the bugger – got it very quickly. It covered a big area but it was only going to be a problem if it got to the trees. The rain put it out for us up on the fell, and we had the water from the lake. We’d made sure it was out and we were heading back down to go off shift, and I took a detour over past the old byre, just to make sure it was safe.’
He stuttered to a halt. Understanding, Jude offered him the best he could manage in the way of a sympathetic smile. There weren’t that many fires in this part of the world. Joe, even with his ten years’ experience, might have attended the odd barn fire and come across incinerated livestock, but a human being was very different, and probably something he’d never encountered.
‘And?’
‘I went in to see what was going on. I could see that the fire had gone over the top of the building, but that there was a lot of damage inside. I went in through the door and I tripped over something.’ He stopped again. ‘It wasn’t the prettiest thing I’ve seen in my life.’
No; it wouldn’t be. Though there was never such a thing as a body that was easy on the eye, some of them were unquestionably easier to look at than others. ‘I can imagine. What happened?’
‘I realised what it was straight away. Backed out. Called for help. Roy over there called Charlie. He was keeping an eye on the road. That must have been twenty to seven.’
It would be easy enough to get a log of the call and fix the time it had been made. ‘And when you were fighting the fire? Did you see anyone?’
‘We had the road closed off from about two. No one came up or down the Burnbanks road after then. Some tried, of course. The usual rubberneckers. Charlie saw them off.’
Jude sighed. ‘Thanks. That’ll do. Someone will take a full statement from you tomorrow, but right now we don’t need you any longer.’
4
DI Chris Dodd, arriving at the office on a Monday morning with his head already so full of information that he struggled to process it without a second cup of coffee and a third cigarette, took too much pleasure in overhearing other people’s conversations. Today, as he drifted along to brief everyone on his early morning conversation with Jude, he found himself behind Mel, the one woman from the HR department who detested him, as she marched what he assumed was the department’s new recruit along towards the newly designated incident room.
And what a new recruit. He might not be that way inclined, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate a very sexy female backside when it was – quite literally – in front of him. That was going to set the pulses racing among the younger, single members of the team, and maybe a couple of the older married ones, too. He beamed. There was nothing like a bit of variety to spice up a procedural desert and liven up the long hours of fruitless paperwork.
‘Normally we’d have time to put you through a proper induction process, but today it looks like they’ve pitched you in at the deep end,’ Mel was saying. ‘Today we’re dealing with a suspicious death and an unidentified body so I’m just going to hand you over to the team and let them put you to work in the incident room as they see fit. Sink or swim.’ She marched on down the corridor with her blonde ponytail bouncing behind her as if it were fixed on elastic, turned a couple of corners and opened a door without bothering to knock. ‘Where’s Doddsy? Anyone seen him?’
‘I’m behind you. I have been all the way.’ Evil of him, he knew, but he enjoyed the look of annoyance on her face, even though he admired her quick recovery.
‘You might have said.’ She forced a smile, surely for the sake of appearances. ‘We could have had this conversation at the front desk and spared me the walk.’
‘I didn’t know you were looking for me. But you’ve found me, so all’s well.’
She tossed her head at him, turning to her companion. ‘This is DI Chris Dodd. Doddsy, I’ve brought you your new sergeant, Ashleigh O’Halloran. Off you go, Ashleigh. Into the lions’ den. Good luck with the awkward squad.’ And she’d gone.
Doddsy stretched a hand out towards the new recruit. It got better. The front view was as good as the back. Strictly speaking she wasn’t good looking – the chin was too strong and the cheekbones too soft for that – but there was a sensuality about her that no one, man or woman, gay or straight, would be able to deny. She’d chosen clothes that contained her ample bosom but there was nothing she could do to hide it, and no matter how long she’d spent straightening her hair to produce a severe image, he could tell it would break out into curls by the end of the day. ‘Ashleigh. Hello. Good to meet you. I’m sure you’ll be an asset to the team.’
‘Good morning, Inspector.’ Ashleigh O’Halloran treated him to her sharpest look, as if she’d read his mind and wasn’t about to give his thoughts a five star review. Fair play. Her bosses in the Cheshire force had thought highly of her and she came with a respectable reputation for sharp thinking and character judgement. He should have known better, but he hadn’t expected someone quite so much larger than life. Working with this woman – bright blue eyes, scarlet lipstick that pushed the uniform policy to its limits, a n
ecklace with an iridescent fake gemstone, all enveloped in a cloud of expensive scent – was going to be a sensory assault course.
‘Everyone calls me Doddsy. We have another Chris on the team.’ Mentally slapping himself on the wrist for the dual sins of casual sexism and making assumptions, he turned away from her and led the way across the incident room to where two other detectives were already waiting for him, shuffling their chairs in front of the whiteboard, sipping their coffee and joking about whatever they’d got up to over the weekend. ‘The boss doesn’t like etiquette. We use titles in official meetings only. And dealing with the public, of course.’
‘Then just call me Ashleigh. Or Ash.’
‘Okay. Welcome, Ashleigh. I’m going to start with the briefing meeting, get things up and running. Afterwards we can chat.’ He waved her to a seat and checked his watch. ‘Morning. You heard Mel. We have a suspicious death. At least fate saw fit to hand us this one on a Monday morning rather than a Friday afternoon, so we can all approach this fresh.’
‘Makes a nice change.’ Chris Marshall, the youngest of them, managed to sound as if he’d been in the job for forty years.
‘I’m the boss for the next hour or so, so you can all show me some respect for once.’ Doddsy’s fake scowl was met by laughter as he checked his pad for the list of instructions Jude had thrown at him in that phone call, far too early in the morning for all of it to have lodged in his brain. ‘First up, you’ll have noticed that we have a new team member. This is DS Ashleigh O’Halloran, who comes to us from Cheshire Police.’
He took a look around him. ‘Ashleigh. This is DC Aditi Desai. And this is DC Chris Marshall.’ He smiled at the constable – young, free, single and already looking mightily interested in Ashleigh O’Halloran. Pleasantries over, he moved on to the real business, taking his place in front of the whiteboard where someone had pinned up an OS map. ‘Yesterday afternoon, a member of the public reported a grass fire up on the fell above Haweswater, about half a mile above Burnbanks. Uniformed police and the fire service attended. When the fire was extinguished, the fire brigade discovered human remains in the burned out shell of a previously ruined barn. Here.’ He jabbed a forefinger on the map. ‘The body was too badly damaged to allow identification, and it wasn’t immediately obvious if it was a man or a woman. Chris, Jude asked for you to be a key part of this team because of your research skills. First up, I’m going to be tasking you with running a check for any missing persons. That’s one of the few things we can do right now.’
‘Yep.’ The constable nodded and made a note on his pad.
‘Jude attended the scene with Tammy Garner. The CSI,’ he added, for Ashleigh’s benefit. ‘Both Jude and Tammy felt that there were elements of the scene that are inconsistent with a tragic accident. Tammy’s at the scene with the CSI team at the moment. The body has been removed to the mortuary in Carlisle and Jude’s there right now. He’s asked the fire investigators for a report on the causes of the fire as soon as possible, and they should be able to tell us where and how it began. When we know that, we’ll be in a better position to know what kind of operation this is and how many people need to be involved. In the meantime, we need to find out who went up the road through Burnbanks yesterday lunchtime. Ashleigh. That’s something for you to take on. I’ll find you a couple of uniformed officers and you can get that started.’
The blonde head nodded. Out of the corner of his eye, Doddsy thought he saw Chris Marshall licking his lips. What it was to be young. ‘I’ll get on to that as soon as I can.’
Doddsy’s phone pinged. Jude.
Will be back in the office as soon as I can to update the team. Get Tammy along.
‘Good. We’ll reconvene before lunch.’ By which time, he hoped they’d have a better idea of what they were dealing with.
5
The pathologist, masked and gowned, leaned over the charred lump laid out on the mortuary slab. Up on the viewing platform, Jude challenged himself to watch for at least the first five minutes of the process. He wasn’t ordinarily squeamish, but there was no more pleasure to be got from seeing a human being carved up by the scientists than there was from the first sight of a dead body, whether or not it still looked human. And there was no pleasure, either, in telling a victim’s relatives that their worst nightmares had come true.
On reflection, he sometimes found himself asking exactly what pleasure he did get out of the job, and why he was doing it at all. He closed his eyes for a moment as the pathologist turned away from the cadaver and he got a clearer view than he liked of the charred remains, but he didn’t have to cross examine himself too closely on that point. It was about the satisfaction of seeing people who broke the law, and too often broke other people in the course of it, paying for their crimes.
Quite the avenging angel, Becca teased him from somewhere in their shared past, so loudly that he turned his attention back to the operation playing out in front of him in preference to listening to her. He didn’t regret anything. What he did wasn’t, as she sometimes seemed to think, about revenge, about power, about punishment. It was about saving people, and you didn’t have to look far – in Carlisle, in London, even in his own circle of friends and former friends – to see how badly they suffered if somebody didn’t. She should have known that. She was a district nurse and the deprived underbelly of even rural life was starkly familiar to her.
His face creased into a wry smile. It was no wonder Becca had got fed up of him, if he sounded as self-servingly evangelistic to other people as he sounded to himself. With hindsight, the only surprise was that she’d taken eight years to decide she couldn’t put up with him any longer. And yet there was that confrontation he’d had with her the evening before – a fight of sorts, but one they hadn’t needed to have.
You could spend your life picking apart all the evidence and solving mysteries, but the most important questions – the ones that related to you and to your life and to the people you really cared for – never seemed to come with a satisfactory answer. If he were rich he’d employ every expert under the sun to sort that one out, so that it didn’t niggle at his conscience like an unsolved crime. Why did it happen and what can I do about it? What a challenging brief that would be. It was much simpler taking the pieces of the puzzle that pathologists and CSIs and fire investigators produced for you, and fitting them together to get an answer.
He watched for another few minutes before he could justify stepping down from the viewing platform and leaving the room. Outside in the corridor, he checked his phone. Doddsy had replied to his message.
Meeting at noon.
That would be optimistic. He called his deputy as he strode down the corridor in search of a cup of coffee. If he didn’t get one he wouldn’t be awake for the meeting. ‘Doddsy. How’s it going?’
‘We’re waiting on you and on the PM results. Any joy?’
‘Not yet. I won’t have anything for a while. I’m thinking of snatching a couple of hours’ kip in the car before I come down to the meeting.’ He’d managed to stop off at home for a shave and a shower on the way from Burnbanks to Carlisle, but there hadn’t been time for sleep.
‘Up all night thinking about it when there was nothing you could do, eh? If there’s any way I can help, you know you’ve only to ask. I can pick up any slack.’
Jude rubbed a hand over bleary eyes. Doddsy knew his mind better than he knew it himself, and that wasn’t always a comfortable thought. ‘Hold the fort until I get in. I’ll know what I need when we get some results from the specialists. The most important thing is to find out who it is, and I don’t imagine we’ll know that for a while. Has Chris come up with any leads?’
‘If by leads you mean a list of missing persons, the answer is yes, a shedload of them. We can run checks on them when we have stuff from you. But nobody’s been reported missing in this area in the last couple of days, for what that’s worth.’
A body could come from anywhere, needn’t have been reported missing. Some people,
indeed, were never missed. ‘It’s a start. Have you got anyone down in Burnbanks?’
‘I’ve put our new girl onto that.’
‘Is she any good?’
‘Any good? She’s a wee cracker. You should check her out.’
‘Inspector.’ Jude made himself sound severe, even though he knew Doddsy was being mischievous. They might be friends, but even your best friends could get you into trouble. ‘Don’t make me talk to you about equality and diversity. I don’t have the energy.’ He grinned, nevertheless. He needed a laugh, and Doddsy’s determination to matchmake for him overlooked the inconvenient fact that Becca still occupied far too big a space in his recent past.
‘I was being serious. You’ll like her. She’ll be a good fit in the team.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ Jude suppressed another yawn. Coffee or a power nap? The coffee, probably, because the car would be so hot he’d never sleep. ‘I’ll need to stay here until the PM’s done. We can’t decide what’s going on until we know the cause of death.’
‘And who it is.’
‘Yes. Put the meeting back until two o’clock and I’ll be with you then.’
*
‘I thought you’d want to know my conclusions as soon as possible.’ Matthew Cork, the pathologist, closed the door of the lab behind him, peeled off his latex gloves and dropped them in a bin marked ‘Medical Waste’. ‘I’ll write them up in full, of course, and get them to you as soon as. But this one struck me as something you’d want to deal with straight away.’
Jude sighed. Murder, then. He and Tammy had been right in their shared instinct that something about the crime scene wasn’t right. He prepared himself for a grim story. ‘Okay. Let’s hear it.’
He turned away from what he knew would be Matthew’s sympathetic glance. He’d worked with the doctor before, on a number of occasions, and they understood one another well enough, up to a point, but just as Matthew could never quite grasp that you didn’t get used to seeing these things, Jude never quite understood how you could. Still, he consoled himself, it wouldn’t do if they were all the same. Teams needed complementary skills, as Doddsy always used to say when he sent Chris down to make the coffee.