Death by Dark Waters

by Jo Allen

  ‘You’ve no thoughts?’

  Matthew’s keen grey eyes challenged him, like a tutor with a student. People always thought they were so clever. Let’s make the detective come up with something and then prove him wrong. ‘I never assume anything when I’ve got an expert who can give me an informed answer. But since you ask, my first thought was that the body might not have died as a result of the fire, and my senior CSI thought she could distinguish the remains of a rope around the neck.’ Tammy would have removed that, along with what remained of the clothing, and sent them off to the lab.

  Matthew must be too good natured to look disappointed at someone else’s success. ‘Your CSI is very smart. Yes. There were signs of trauma to the neck. I can’t be much more specific than that because of the state of the body.’

  ‘And the fire?’

  ‘You were also correct. The lungs were clear of smoke, other than a few traces we’ve probably all got in our system if we’ve been out in the fresh air for the past week. Those traces aren’t significant. The child was dead before the fire occurred.’

  ‘Child?’ Jude stilled. He’d taken a long look at the body, but he’d had it down as a small adult, in as far as you could judge. He should have thought about the age, but maybe there was something in him that had shied away from too much consideration of the victim.

  ‘I’m afraid so. It was a young male.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain. Pre-puberty. Eleven or twelve, maybe?’

  Twelve. Jude swallowed hard. Mikey had been twelve when their mother had been diagnosed with cancer and their father, citing an inability to cope, had walked out and left his children to find the strength he’d lacked to carry on. Was it possible that a child of that age could have been so distressed about something – anything – that he’d take his own life in such an adult way? He didn’t think so, even remembering how distraught his younger brother had been when his world collapsed around him in the space of a week. ‘He surely didn’t do it himself?’

  ‘If you’re asking my opinion, I’d say that he didn’t. I couldn’t be categorically certain, even if the body was in a better state. The child died of suffocation and there was trauma to the neck. Normally I would say that was enough, but in this case the trauma was less than I might expect to see. And again, it’s hard to tell for certain but hypostasis appears to suggest, as far as I can be sure, that the child did not die hanging.’ Matthew shook his head.

  ‘Then where does it suggest—?’

  ‘On his back. Of course, it’s possible that the body was cut down, or fell down, immediately after death, but I think that unlikely.’

  Jude shook his head. ‘No other signs of violence? No evidence of abuse?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And the time of death?’

  ‘I’d put it at some time between one and four o’clock yesterday afternoon, but again, that’s subject to error. I’ll get the full report written up this afternoon and get it through to you. I’ve taken samples for DNA and toxicology and the lab will get them to you as soon as possible.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jude shook the man’s cold hand, still corpselike from the clinging latex glove, and set off back to the car to drive down to the headquarters in Penrith through the shimmering heat. Every street corner he passed on the way to the motorway seemed to host a cluster of twelve year olds, laughing the way twelve year olds ought to, and every time he looked at their streetwise innocence, he clenched his hands more tightly on the steering wheel and vowed to himself that this was a crime he would take a delight in solving.

  6

  ‘We’ll be treating this investigation as a murder inquiry until we have definite evidence to the contrary.’

  Damn. They’d started. Pink from running up from Reception, and flustered from the couple of wrong turns she’d taken on her way through unfamiliar terrain, Ashleigh slowed to a dignified walk as she opened the door to the incident room and tried to portray calm. That wasn’t how to make a good impression on her first day, even when what had held her back was a broken down lorry on the A6 rather than any error on her part. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ Conscious that both Chris and Doddsy were staring, she reached the empty seat they’d left for her and placed her folder on the table.

  Standing in front of the whiteboard, hands deep in his trouser pockets, the man who’d been speaking when she arrived turned towards her, watching her with his grey eyes slightly narrowed. He said nothing.

  She wasn’t used to being ignored. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said again, challenging him before she realised that nobody had bothered to tell her his name or rank and she’d inexplicably failed to ask. ‘Inspector,’ she guessed, choosing the worst of both worlds.

  He sighed, barely bothering to conceal his irritation and compounding it by refusing to help her out. ‘It’s okay. Let’s get on.’

  ‘Jude.’ Doddsy beamed at him, then back at Ashleigh. ‘I told you about our new team member. This is Ashleigh O’Halloran. Ashleigh, DCI Jude Satterthwaite. You’ve met Chris, of course. And this is Tammy, our CSI.’ He waved towards the other person at the table, a small woman with short brown hair and the marks of a sleepless night below her eyes.

  Looking away from Tammy, Ashleigh caught the look of irritation Jude sent to his number two before he turned back to her, though she suspected no one else did. ‘Okay, so now we’ve been introduced. Forgive me, everyone, if I seem terse. I had a late night, and we have a lot to get through.’

  She stared at him as he turned briefly towards the map pinned to the whiteboard before turning back again, almost sensing the black cloud of his discontent enveloping her. It wasn’t personal – or she didn’t sense that it was – but it was no less intense for that. She gazed innocently at him as he waited for everyone to settle again so that he could resume. Tall and slender, with fine features and short dark hair, he wasn’t the softer, more sensitive kind of man who appealed to her, though some might have thought him good looking, but his charisma was undeniable.

  His gaze rested on her again. The grey eyes narrowed. Go on, she challenged him, be angry with me. But he didn’t comply, instead picking up a notepad and pen and tapping away at the list of bullet points. ‘Here’s the situation, in brief. The body Joe Stevenson discovered below Four Stones Hill on Sunday afternoon is that of a young male. Dr Cork reckons he might be eleven or twelve years old. Caucasian. The cause of death was suffocation and there was evidence of some trauma to the neck, but post-mortem evidence suggests that the boy may not have died as a result of hanging but in fact died on the ground, or was placed on the ground very shortly after death. He was dead before the fire set in.’ He slid into a seat at the table and crossed the first of the bullet points out with a controlled slash of his pen. ‘The first question is for you, Chris. Any reports of missing persons fitting that description?’

  To Ashleigh’s left, Chris Marshall flicked open his laptop and clicked a few buttons. A spreadsheet of entries flashed across his screen until a subset popped up. ‘No one fitting that description has been reported missing – at least, not in this area.’

  ‘Kids run away from home all the time,’ Tammy said with a sigh. ‘Tyrone went through a phase of that.’

  ‘If a child went missing locally yesterday, I’d have expected some kind of report by today. Though you never know. Chris, you might want to see if you can run a dental records check. Now, Ashleigh.’ The grey eyes were on her again now. ‘You were down there this morning. What have you got for us?’

  Acutely aware that she was the newest member of the team, that everyone else knew their place and was comfortable in it, she shuffled in her seat. A welcome breeze from the open window lifted the top sheet of her notepad and she snatched at it, flustered, sending her pen flying onto the floor as she grasped at it, her fingers slippery with perspiration. ‘Doddsy sent me to the scene of the fire this morning. The road’s closed off beyond Burnbanks and I have three constables protecting the site. We’ve set up a station in
the village for anyone to come and talk about what they think they might have seen, and I have another two constables making house to house inquiries in the area. There aren’t many houses in Burnbanks. Do you know it?’

  ‘Very well.’ He gave her a cursory nod.

  ‘Okay.’ She picked up a questioning look from Chris, as if he was unfamiliar with the village. ‘You probably all know that it was built in the 1920s to house the workers building the Haweswater dam.’ Getting up, she crossed to the board and stood in front of it and Chris, sitting bolt upright to look at it, gave her an encouraging smile as she indicated the cluster of buildings on the map. ‘There are about twenty-five properties there, and the road is a dead end. You can reach it by car, from the north via Askham and Bampton, or from the east via Shap and Rosgill, and the site where the body was found is about half a mile beyond the end of the road. The constables are asking local residents if they saw any vehicles passing that way. I’ll update them on the description we have from the PM. Do we have details of the clothing?’

  ‘Shorts and a tee shirt,’ Tammy said with a sigh, ‘from what I could see. More than that I wouldn’t like to say. Maybe when the lab have had a look at them we’ll be able to say for certain.’

  ‘I’ll let the team on the ground know. I’m going back down there this afternoon to ask around myself, and I’ll extend the house to house inquiries into Rosgill and Bampton.’

  ‘I’ll tell you the problem.’ Jude shook his head, frowning, but at the map, not Ashleigh. ‘It’s that you can easily get to that spot without going through Burnbanks, though not by car. There are half a dozen different routes.’

  ‘That would assume the child went there willingly.’

  ‘Yes. It’s possible that he walked there. You can get there from Martindale or Howtown. It’s over the hill and it’s about five miles, but a twelve year old could easily manage that.’

  Especially if he didn’t have to walk back. A chill tugged at the edge of Ashleigh’s soul, a picture of a complaining child, trailing behind someone – an adult? a friend? – who would eventually kill him. ‘You can also park by these buildings up to the west of Bampton Grange and walk from there. That’s not so far.’ Her fingers traced a couple of spidery routes along the contours of the hill and down to the lakeside. ‘Are these properties occupied?’

  Jude shrugged. ‘It’s worth checking. They may be holiday lets and if they are they may be empty. And of course, it’s also possible to get to the spot by boat, but that would be extremely visible and therefore high risk.’

  ‘High risk needn’t stop someone.’ Doddsy sighed.

  ‘I’ll make sure the constables ask about boats.’

  ‘Do.’ Jude looked at the map again. ‘We know one thing – that kid had to get there somehow, and if he went of his own free will, the chances are that somebody somewhere will have seen him. There were a lot of people out walking around Haweswater on Sunday. I was out there myself, but over on the other side, up Harter Fell. We must have passed twenty people.’

  ‘You’ll have to do a TV appeal.’ Doddsy, addressing his superior officer, did so with an exaggerated shake of the head.

  The ripple of laughter from her new colleagues implied that that wasn’t at the top of Jude’s priorities. Resuming her seat and making a mental note to check out the outlying lanes from where you might launch a walk to Haweswater with a young boy in tow, Ashleigh couldn’t help looking at him. Yes, Jude Satterthwaite was a compelling man. It was easy to imagine him on screen, begging for information. A bit of an actor, perhaps? He struck her as someone who was more than capable of hiding anything he didn’t want known.

  It was a pity, then, that he hadn’t troubled to hide his irritation with her.

  He moved the conversation on. ‘That was a useful summary, Ashleigh. Let’s hope something comes up from what you’ve done. Now.’ Something else ticked off the list. ‘Tammy. Let’s hear what you and your team have come up with.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He’d caught Tammy yawning, and though she looked mortified at her lack of professionalism, he waved it off with half a smile. ‘You got me napping there. Okay. The team and I have been all over the scene. I don’t think there’s anything more to gain from it. I’d hold it a little longer, but then I think we can probably release it.’

  ‘There wasn’t much to find in the first place, judging by what I saw.’

  ‘No.’ She flipped open an A4 envelope and spilled a sheaf of photographs onto the table, revealing the stark wreckage of the building seared by flames. ‘It’s been so dry, there wouldn’t have been anything in the way of footprints and if there had been, the fire and the water would have scrubbed them away. We took samples of everything, of course, and sent them to the lab.’

  ‘When do we expect the results?’

  Doddsy shuffled his notes. ‘I spoke to them this morning and asked them to prioritise for us. They say they might have them in a couple of days.’

  ‘Okay. Let me know the minute you get them. So, Tammy. Not much hope there. I suppose we’ll end up relying on the dropped button or Granddad’s old pocket watch or whatever our murderer chose to leave behind.’

  ‘You joke about it, but, at risk of sounding like a bad TV game show, there are a couple of things that caught my eye. There was a padlock and chain, and what looked like some shreds of fabric.’

  ‘And a rope?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tammy jumped up and stuck a couple of pictures on the board. ‘Here’s the inside of the building. Here’s the body. Don’t look too closely if you’re squeamish.’ Her mouth twisted. None of them had the luxury of looking away. ‘It was just inside the doorway. When we got a good look at the corpse we did retrieve a rope. Charred, of course, and I dare say there are bits of it that are completely destroyed. It was around the neck. Knotted.’

  ‘And is there anything particular you think you can draw from that?’

  Jude and Tammy must have discussed it between them; he was leading the information out into the open, each of them sharing what they knew. Tammy stifled yet another yawn. ‘What I see doesn’t add up. To hang someone you have to hang them from something. There’s nothing there to hang anyone from.’

  ‘Roof?’ hazarded Chris.

  ‘There is no roof now. The place was gutted. You can see.’ She picked up another photograph and added it to the collage they were beginning to build on the board. ‘What I’d like to know is if there were any roof timbers before the fire. Then of course we’d have an answer. But I don’t think so.’

  Jude made a note. ‘That’s another question for you, Chris. We need to know what state that place was in before the fire. There must be some satellite pictures of it.’

  ‘I’ll ask when I’m in Burnbanks this afternoon.’ Ashleigh was never one to stay silent in meetings. It wasn’t what she’d been taught to do. Her father had paid a lot of money for an expensive education and she’d come out of it with the expectation that people would listen to her. Nagged at for her forwardness by every employer she’d worked for – and criticised, in particular, in her probationary year in the police – she’d battled it but here, in this discussion, there was an obvious answer to the question so there was no reason not to provide it.

  ‘Fine. But, Chris, we’ll have the satellite photos checked too. Tammy – there’s no other way that someone could have been hanged?’

  ‘There was charred wood inside the building. But on the far side of it from the corpse.’ The next picture appeared on the board.

  ‘And so perhaps we can hypothesise that it might have been used to construct some kind of makeshift… apparatus?’

  ‘I don’t hypothesise, Chief.’ Tammy was the only one, it appeared, with the courage to laugh at him. ‘That’s your job. The other possibility is the rope was strung over the walls and hauled up, but that wouldn’t exactly give you the classic hanging, would it?’

  ‘But it might give the appearance of it on the body?’

  ‘It might. And there was a heap of stones against
one wall. Here. You might have pushed someone off that, though I doubt if it would be particularly effective. But as I said – I don’t hypothesise.’

  Chris Marshall sniggered at what must have been an in joke. One day Ashleigh would find she’d been there long enough to share the jokes and someone else would seem like the outsider.

  ‘Okay.’ Jude picked up his coffee, sipped it, looked down at the list again. ‘Doddsy. I think you have something for us, don’t you? Probably the only thing we’ll hear this morning that gets us any further forward.’

  Doddsy shook his head, a wry smile. ‘I’m not sure I like what it tells us, but here we go. The initial results from the investigation undertaken by the fire brigade this morning show clearly that in fact there were two fires. One was started inside the building, probably by setting fire to the body itself. There was evidence of an accelerant being used. The other was also started deliberately, about a hundred yards upwind from the building, along a line around twenty yards long, north-south up the hill.’

  ‘Show us on the map, would you?’

  Levering his compact frame out of the chair, Doddsy took his turn at the whiteboard. ‘The seat of the fire was here.’ He marked a cross on it in marker pen. ‘Wind direction yesterday was westerly. The fire spread from its point of origin to cover an area of approximately two hundred and fifty acres.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s all we have to play with in the way of facts. Now let’s see what we make of them.’ Jude’s gaze flicked around the people at the table, one by one, inviting contributions. ‘Any thoughts?’

  ‘One fire was started to cover the other.’ Chris Marshall, keen to contribute, was the man to state the obvious. ‘And it didn’t take off as well as the arsonist planned, or it would have burned the building out, as well.’