Death Rites

by Wendy Cartmell

  “Well two reasons really. DS Mulholland, who I usually have working with me, is on paternity leave. And my new DS is being partnered by DC Douglas.”

  “So? Take someone else from another squad.”

  “Well, that’s my problem, sir. We’re all so stretched at the moment working big cases, that it would be bad for moral if I just pulled someone from another team. It’ll make them short-handed instead and cause more than a few ructions I can tell you. I wouldn’t be the most popular person in the class.”

  “So what’s your solution?” Grimes ran his hand over his already immaculate salt and pepper hair.

  “Well, I just wondered...” Derek absentmindedly put his hand up to try to tame his own hair, which didn’t work. It never did.

  “Yes? Come on, Derek, you’ve only got 3 of your 5 minutes left.” Grimes started to tap his foot.

  Derek took a deep breath and said, “Well, I wondered if Crane could partner me? You know how well we’ve worked together in the past. If you just think of all the cases...”

  Grimes interrupted him. “Yes I know all about them and about the legendary Sgt Major Crane. So he’s definitely out of the army is he?”

  “Yes, retired on medical grounds.”

  “But isn’t that gammy leg of his going to be a problem?” Grimes grimaced, looking as though the last thing he wanted was more problems.

  “Not really, sir, we’ll be doing interviews and brainstorming and looking at evidence, that sort of thing. Nothing physical.”

  Grimes stole a glance at his watch. “Well I’m not sure how that would fit in with our own health and safety policies.”

  “There’s also discrimination to consider,” said Anderson. “We can’t be seen to be discriminating against the disabled.”

  After a moment Grimes said, “Oh, alright, but on what basis would he join us? He’s not part of the police force and I doubt he could join up, he wouldn’t pass the physical.”

  “No, but he could be a special consultant, like we have consultant psychologists, hand writing experts, that sort of thing. My God this place is practically run by civilians. There are civilian evidence gatherers, civilian analysts to decode all the data, forensic staff...” By now Derek was grandstanding.

  Grimes put his hand up to stop him. “Alright, I get it, Derek. Well, it’s your budget.”

  “So that’s a yes, sir?

  “Yes it’s a yes,” said Grimes standing upright. “If you can persuade Crane, that is,” he said as he started to walk away.

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble there, sir,” called Derek after him.

  23

  When Ted ‘Dunnie’ Dunstan woke up at 6 am and looked out of his bedroom window, the world was white. Completely white. The vista was awful enough to chase him back to bed for another hour’s kip. However, at 7 am not much had changed, apart from the fact that he couldn’t grab yet another hour in bed. He needed to be at the yard for 8 am to let his employees into the compound.

  Dawdling as long as he could, he was eventually ready. He’d donned a pair of thermal long johns and vest underneath his blue workman’s boiler suit. On top of that went a padded tartan shirt, topped by a gilet, or body warmer to Dunnie and his mates. He had a pair of extra thick socks on inside his steel toe-capped boots and two pairs of gloves on his hands - one with no fingers in and one with. The whole ensemble was topped off by a Russian-type fur hat with ear flaps. A check in the mirror confirmed how he felt; like the Michelin man. Oh how he hated working outdoors in the unpredictable English winter. But working outside had given him a very nice lifestyle, thank you very much, one that his wife particularly enjoyed. Dunnie didn’t get to join in so much with the shopping trips, lunches out with her friends and weekends away at health clubs; his role was to make sure he had enough money to pay her credit card bills.

  Once outside, his warm breath turning to droplets in the frigid air, he scraped the frost off his windscreen while the engine warmed up. Luckily there was no snow to complicate matters, so it wasn’t long before he was on the move, bowling down the road to his compound, a mere 10 minutes’ drive away.

  Two of the lads were waiting for him when he arrived at the gate and they were puzzling over the lock. Christ Almighty, Dunnie thought, can’t they do anything on their own? Now they can’t even open up. Leaving the engine of his car running, he clambered out and approached the two men at the gate.

  “Open it up for God’s sake,” he called as he neared them. “What on earth is the matter?”

  “The lock’s been broken, Dunnie. Look.”

  “Broken? Has someone broken in?”

  Dunnie looked through the gates at his empire. Row upon row of rusting cars were stacked four high, in various stages of being dismantled. Eventually each car would end up crushed into a cube and sold on. But Dunnie was loath to crush a car until he’d managed to get every possible part off it. From where he stood everything looked normal. The crane was parked to one side of the large lot, its hinged arm projecting into the air, looking like some sort of extra-terrestrial being, with the grabber on the end poised to lunch on the empty cars it was guarding. But the colourful rickety piles of abandoned cars were not where the money was. That was in the large wooden building, housing the customer reception and heaps of second-hand parts already taken off the dying vehicles and stored in metal racks. A much tougher place to get into than the front gate.

  “Come on,” he called to his staff. “Let’s go and see what’s happened.”

  It was with some trepidation that he approached the building that looked like nothing more than a tatty shed. But that was only a decoy. The door was secured by an alarm system which could only be opened by the right person with the right thumb print. But all looked well. No one had attempted to prise open the door, not that they’d be able to, what with all the steel rods running through it, which projected into the door frame. There was no alarm clanging in fright and no red lights displayed on the keypad. Dunnie relaxed. All was well.

  Unlocking the door he shouted to his men to get on with their day and for someone to drive his car into the compound. He entered the warehouse, turning on lights, booting up computers and turning on the kettle.

  He didn’t think much about the break-in after that; he was too busy with customers. It was a couple of hours into the morning when he decided to go out into the stacks. He’d had a phone call from a long-standing and highly valued customer who was looking for a particular part of interior trim for an Audi TT. And he just happened to have one. Upon first glance there didn’t appear to be a system to the stacks, but they were actually arranged by manufacturer and all the data was held on the computer. So he knew that the car he wanted was in one of the middle stacks towards the far side of the yard.

  Whistling as he went, swinging his screwdriver, he was thinking about the accounts. They were due into the tax authorities in a couple of weeks and he reminded himself to ring the accountant when he got back in the office. Finding the TT, he approached it from the rear and was surprised to find that the boot was ajar. It wasn’t the biggest boot in the world, a bit snug, but not bad for a convertible sports car. He lifted the lid, intending to slam it down to make sure the lock caught, when he spotted a flash of material push up into the depths of the space. Wondering why there was something in the boot, as they were normally very particular about taking everything out of a car, he put his hand in, expecting to pull out a rag. But he touched something that felt suspiciously like hair. Human hair. He ran his hand down the rags, which were beginning to feel like limbs. And then it moved. Well toppled over to be exact, revealing a young girl, now lying on her back, dressed in a black shift with long blond hair. As he looked at her face, marble white, with open eyes now clouded in death, he backed away and for the first time in his life Dunnie screamed in fear.

  24

  Anderson yet again got the dreaded shout from the doorway, “Got a strange one here for you, guv. Bloke just rang in from the local scrap yard.”
>
  “What’s wrong, have a few second hand car parts gone missing?”

  “No guv, he’s not lost anything, he’s found something.”

  “Alright, hit me with it.”

  “A dead girl. And she’s got some marks on her arms.”

  Anderson stilled for a moment. This was clearly not a time for levity. Surely it couldn’t be? Not another poor young girl abducted and tattooed? He glanced at the photo on his desk, showing his own three girls captured on a day out at the beach, fingers of hair whipped by the wind plastered their faces, but couldn’t hide their sheer joy at being alive. An involuntary shudder ran through him and his stomach clenched in fear for them. A dead kid - what could be worse? With a sigh he grabbed his suit jacket and called for DS Bullock to come with him, as Crane had a physiotherapy appointment up at the hospital. He could always meet up with Tom at the morgue after he’d been to the scene.

  Thirty minutes later Bullock pulled up in front of the scrap yard, let Anderson out and then drove off and parked the car further along up the street, as directed by a traffic policeman. The new DS had been particularly quiet on the drive over, avoiding answering Derek’s questions, which were just the usual chit chat about family, and spoken in an effort to divert his mind from the gruesome task ahead. But Bullock had spent most of the drive staring straight ahead, with a death-like grip on the steering wheel. Maybe he was just feeling it too, the tension that was building as they’d driven ever nearer to the crime scene.

  Climbing out of the car, Anderson shivered in the cold and pulled his beige mac around him. It was the one that Crane said made him look like Columbo. Unfortunately, much as Anderson liked wearing it, it wasn’t built to withstand the morning’s cold. Blowing into his cupped hands he called to Bullock who was hesitating and still stood by the car.

  “Come on, man, what’s the matter with you? Let’s get this over with,” and with Bullock reluctantly trailing behind, Anderson entered the scrap yard. A uniformed constable directed him to the owner.

  “Good morning, I’m DI Anderson and this is DS Bullock from Aldershot police,” Derek said. “Perhaps you could tell us what happened, Mr Dunstan.”

  The large, florid faced man looked up from where he was sitting on the steps of an ambulance, wrapped in one of those heat retaining blanket things, that Anderson always thought looked like tin foil.

  “Call me Dunnie, everyone does. I only went to get some interior trim,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Never had anything happen like this before.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t, sir. But can we start from the beginning?”

  “Oh, right, well there was a bit of a queer do this morning when we arrived. Someone had broken the padlock on the gates and had obviously gained entry to the yard, but as there was no sign of any intrusion in the warehouse, like, we never thought much of it. Just put it down to kids, like.”

  Anderson nodded in agreement; the kids in Aldershot, especially from the housing estate nearest to the scrap yard, were a law unto themselves. Feral some would call them. They never did anything really bad, just nicked a bit of lead, shop lifted, ran off with someone’s shopping bag in the supermarket; but no matter how many times they were caught and cautioned, it didn’t seem to make any difference. Anderson once had a boy who he had sent off with a flea in his ear, turn round and grin at him and flip him the finger from the door of the police station as he was leaving. So much for respect for the police or any sort of authority come to that.

  “But it seems it wasn’t kids who came into the yard?”

  “Nah. Must have been someone dumping the body in one of my cars. Don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

  “Could you tell me how you found the girl?”

  “She was just pushed into the boot, lying right up against the back of it. Thought it was rags or something that one of the lads had left there by mistake. Such a shock when she rolled over like that and I saw her face.” Mr Dunstan’s own face began to look like jelly, cheeks wobbling, mouth working, eyes opening and closing. He was clearly in a great deal of distress.

  “Sorry, but I have to take him now. He’s suffering from shock and we need to get him to hospital.” The paramedic spoke in a tone that left no room for dissent, so Anderson nodded his agreement, telling Mr Dunstan that someone would come and see him and take his statement the next day.

  “Oh, before you go, are there any CCTV cameras?”

  “No, sorry, never felt the need for them. The value is in the warehouse not in the stripped cars.”

  “Alright, thanks very much. Come on, Bullock, let’s go and see the body.”

  Once again DS Bullock lagged behind and his tentative behaviour was beginning to irritate Anderson. Why couldn’t the man walk next to him instead of behind him like some sort of subservient employee? But thoughts of Bullock’s strangeness flew out of his head at the sight of the young girl.

  She was lying on her back in the small boot of the car, a scrap of a thing, dressed in the same sort of black shift that Hope had been wearing. Some of her blond curls were stuck to her face, but you could still see her eyes. Open. Staring. Opaque. Her stick-like bare arms were covered in various drawings and symbols and there were dark, angry bruises on the back of both hands. Anderson’s eyes filled with tears to the point that the scene dissolved before him. But it was no good. He couldn’t get the picture of his happy, healthy girls juxtaposed with the poor dead child in the boot, out of his head. Behind him he could hear DS Bullock throwing up.

  25

  Anderson sent Bullock back to the police station in a traffic car, glad to be rid of the man who seemed to irk him no matter what he did, and made his solitary way to Frimley Park Hospital, managing to catch Crane as he emerged from the Rehabilitation Suite.

  Crane said, “That doesn’t look good.”

  “What?”

  “Your face. I’ve got pain as an excuse for my grimaces, what’s yours?”

  “I need a coffee first.”

  Crane said, “Sounds good to me, come on,” and led the way to the cafeteria on the ground floor.

  Once sat at an empty table Crane shook a sachet of sugar and emptying it into his cup said, “This coffee’s abysmal, but at least it’s hot and wet. So, what’s happened?”

  Looking at his friend, with a broken body, yet still razor sharp mind, albeit dulled by pain medication, Anderson was suddenly very glad Crane was there. His friend and confidant for years now, Derek had been desperate not to lose his company and expertise.

  “We found another girl. Another Hope.”

  “Hell’s teeth. Where is she? When can we see her?”

  “In the morgue and now.”

  Crane slowly put his coffee cup back on the saucer with just the smallest of tremors in his hand. Once it was safely back on the table he said, “You mean this one’s dead?”

  Anderson nodded.

  “Jesus, Derek, you don’t pull any punches do you?”

  “Sorry. I’m not feeling very subtle at the moment.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you are. Come on, tell me.”

  Anderson started his story, keeping his eyes on the table, rather than on his friend, for if he saw Crane having an emotional reaction to the death of a child, he wouldn’t be able to hold it together.

  At the end of his retelling, Crane coughed, as though clearing his throat of emotion and said, “What can I do to help?”

  “Join the team.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Is there something wrong with your ears? I’m asking you to formally join the investigating team, then we can go down to the morgue and you can see the body.”

  “Is this on the level?”

  “Of course, I’ve got approval to employ you as a civilian consultant.” Anderson looked straight into his friend’s eyes and so as not to give Crane any chance of dalliance said, “So are you in? I need to know now, so we can get on with it.”

  Crane looked out at the weeping willow for a moment; the tree that And
erson felt was now weeping for two children. Then he turned and grinned. “I’ve no idea how you managed to swing that, but you bet I’m in. If you can put up with me dressed in my loose comfortable clothing as required by my physiotherapist,” Crane indicated his track suit, tee shirt and trainers, “Then come on, let’s get out of here,” and he grabbed his stick.

  “Listen up, people,” Anderson called as he and Crane entered the Incident Room. “Before we get started, most of you know Sgt Major Crane here, well this is just to confirm that he is now officially part of the team, so work with him, discuss the case with him and generally do your best to make him welcome.”

  All eyes turned towards Crane who rather self-consciously waved his stick in greeting.

  “Must we, guv?” quipped one joker to titters and smiles from the team.

  “Yes, otherwise he’ll inflict on you his own brand of army punishment. You could find yourselves doing 50 press ups right here on the office floor if you’re not careful. So, does anyone else have any questions about Crane? No? I thought not. Right, on to matters in hand.”

  Anderson and Crane discussed with the team the death of the unknown girl and Anderson showed photographs of the markings on her arm. He allocated someone the task of comparing and contrasting those on the dead girl, with those on Hope.

  As yet they had no cause of death, nor time of death, as they were awaiting the results of the post mortem that would take place that afternoon.

  “How are forensics doing?” he asked DC Douglas.

  “Still there at the scrap yard, guv. They think it will take the rest of the day to process the scene.”

  “Alright, make sure they put this one at the very top of their list, will you? And ask them to let us have information as and when they get it. I don’t want them to wait to file a complete report, I’m happy to have the results drip fed.”