A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2) Page 13

  “Liaise with Fyfe. I know he can be a pain in the arse, but the two of you will need to be hand-in-hand on this.”

  Best nodded.

  “Francine,” Mack said, “you’re in charge of going through the missing person reports. I’m thinking that you’ll need to pull all the mispers from the city and the surrounding area between 1995 and 2005. Let’s see if we can find out who she is.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Teenage girls. Any connection with Imber would be a start. A family in the army who lost a child, maybe. I don’t know beyond that. We don’t have much to go on.”

  Archer tapped the table. “If the victim was a kid, we should look at local paedos.”

  “Agreed,” Mack said. “Stewart—get the records of anyone arrested for child sexual offences around the time she was killed. That won’t be a bad place to start. And look at MAPPA for any perverts who might be worth a visit.”

  Multi Agency Public Protection Agreements linked up probation and prison staff with social services, housing and health and helped manage registered sex offenders. Lynas said that he would give them a call.

  “Everyone happy?” Mack said when she was done.

  There were nods and the sounds of agreement. Mack corralled the pieces of paper that she had spread out over the desk and stood up.

  “I’d better get out to Imber,” Best said.

  “I’m coming, too,” Mack said. She pointed at Francine. “And you. I’d like you out there today to get a feel for it.”

  Patterson smiled, her pleasure at being given responsibility overpowering any reluctance she might have felt about spending the day in the rain and the mud. Mack smiled to herself. She remembered feeling that same enthusiasm as a young officer in the Met. Her first murder had followed the discovery of a man’s body in an alley behind the Waitrose in Brixton. Mack had been one of the first detectives to respond and had played a key role on the team that followed the evidence back to a twenty-year-old who said the voices in his head had told him to kill.

  “We’re all good,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

  33

  The graveyard looked very different to how it had been on Mack’s last visit. A perimeter had been established, with crime scene tape fastened around the trunks of trees and metal stakes driven into the soft earth. Two marked cars blocked the road twenty-five feet apart, with the entrance to the churchyard in the middle of the cordon. Blue-and-white crime scene tape was knotted to their side mirrors and secured around a post box at one end and a lamp post at the other. Uniformed officers had been deployed to guard the perimeter. Constable Dave Betts was the loggist at the gate, responsible for signing people in and out in the scene logbook.

  Mack led Archer and Patterson to the gate. Betts nodded a hello and entered their details into the book. There were cardboard boxes containing Tyvek suits, booties, gloves and hairnets. Mack pulled on a suit, waited for Archer and Patterson to do the same, and then lifted the tape so that the three of them could pass through.

  The path to the graveyard had been flattened by the passage of the men and women who had arrived to attend to the day’s work. They had been busy: two large inflatable tents had been erected over the side of the graveyard where Amy’s remains had been found. The tents were composed of semicircular ribs in alternating blue and white and were tall enough for the forensic officers inside to stand. There was activity outside the perimeter, too. Vehicles were parked up, including a four-by-four that bore the livery of a firm in Warminster that hired heavy equipment. A trailer had been hitched to the back of the four-by-four, and a miniature digger was being reversed down to the ground. Officers with bolt-cutters made their way across to the fence so that they could cut the chain-link and open a route inside. Next to the digger, a machine that looked like an oversized lawnmower was being rolled out of the back of a forensic van.

  “What’s that?” Patterson said.

  “Ground-penetrating radar,” Mack said.

  There was another cordon, this time marked out by yellow-and-black crime scene tape and with a second log to sign before they could continue. Mack lifted the tape and slid beneath it, following the path behind the yew trees to the exposed grave that they had discovered two days earlier. One of the inflatable tents had been erected to protect it from the elements. Professor Fyfe was overseeing two CSIs who were on hands and knees, carefully examining the spot from which Amy’s bones had been removed. He saw Mack, raised his hand in greeting and climbed up the shallow slope of the crater and stepped out of the tent.

  “Good morning, Detective. Lovely weather.”

  “Morning. You know Robbie Best.”

  “Detective Inspector,” Fyfe said, raising a gloved hand in greeting rather than offering it for a shake.

  “Not sure if you’ve met DC Patterson.”

  “I haven’t,” he said. “Good morning, Detective Constable. Have you been to anything like this before?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s not going to be pleasant.”

  “Don’t wind her up,” Mack said.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. I was thinking it might help to know what to expect.” He gestured to all three of them. “You two, as well—this’ll be new to you, too.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of stiffs,” Best said.

  “Not quite like this.”

  “What’s the plan?” Mack asked.

  Fyfe pointed to the bearded man in a Barbour jacket who was directing operations around the open grave. “You’d better ask Professor Wilder.”

  “The archaeologist?”

  “Indeed. We’re just waiting for the green light to start the dig. If we’re lucky, all we’ll find are eighty-year-old skeletons. That’s what we’d expect if the bodies here are the ones that were properly buried.”

  Patterson bit her lip nervously. “And if they’re more recent?”

  “Then the bodies will be somewhere along the spectrum of decomposition. Five stages. Fresh—when the cells begin to break down. Bloat—when the gases inside the body cause it to expand, turning the colour from flesh-coloured to green and then black.”

  “Lovely,” Patterson said.

  “Older than that and you’d expect to see active decomposition. Tissue liquefies, and maggots eat whatever they can get to. After that is advanced decomposition, where heavy-duty bugs go after the tougher material like ligaments and tendons. And last of all is skeletal decay, where bones begin to disintegrate. Hopefully that’s what we’ll see.”

  “You’re enjoying this,” Best said.

  “Enjoying isn’t the right word,” Fyfe said. “Do I take pleasure from this? No. Do I find it professionally interesting? Of course. A job on this scale is a once-in-a-career opportunity.”

  Lucky you, Mack thought.

  “Robbie Best is going to be your liaison,” Mack said, “but let Francine know if you need anything.”

  “Very good.”

  A team of crime scene investigators arrived with duckboards, shovels and wheelbarrows. They watched as Professor Wilder briefed them, indicating that they should prepare to excavate in the area to the left of the open crater. The ground had been divided into squares with small pegs that were tied around with string. Each quadrant would be examined one at a time before the team moved onto the next. It was going to be a long and arduous exercise. The ground was soft—at least it would be easy to dig—but, on the other hand, it was already becoming something of a quagmire. The duckboards would give the investigators something solid to rest their knees on while they worked.

  “Oh,” Fyfe said, “I nearly forgot. We found something else. Come over here.”

  He led the way to a trestle table that had been erected beneath the second tent. Lewis had taken up residence there as exhibits officer, and had arranged a stack of empty plastic evidence bags in a box, a Sharpie for marking them with new finds, and a logbook for recording them. Fyfe reached into a cardboard box and took out an evidence bag. He handed it to Mack. There wa
s a watch inside.

  “We found it where Amy had been.”

  Mack held up the bag so that Best and Patterson could see it, too. The watch was a cheap Casio with an analogue face. It was filthy and caked with dirt. The dial bore a graphic with Mickey Mouse’s face and oversized ears.

  34

  Mack was freezing, and Archer and Patterson looked thoroughly depressed. They had been out in the graveyard all day, and the rain had not stopped. It had slackened a little over lunch, falling as a light mist that was easy to ignore, but now, as the light began to fade and the temperature began to fall, it had become a deluge once more.

  She pulled up her hood and looked at the work that was going on. A rough plan of the graveyard had been found online, and they were using that to avoid—as best they could—the existing graves. They knew that they might not be able to do that forever, but it made sense to start looking in areas that were not supposed to have remains. The pit from which Amy’s bones had been exhumed was in a stretch of the graveyard between two lines of headstones, and they had taken the decision to begin their search there.

  The team assigned to the dig were members of the force’s underwater search team, and each man proceeded with extravagant care. They were being overseen by Sergeant Keith Knight, a police search advisor from Trowbridge who had arrived at the scene before the substantive work had begun. Fyfe was still there, watching over their work with a critical eye and clearly fighting the urge to give them detailed instructions as to where they should and should not be working. The process was similar to an archaeological dig: the searchers worked one man or woman to each of the squares that had been marked with string, carefully removing the soil with trowels and examining anything else that they brought out. So far, their haul had been meagre: an antique bottle, stones, broken porcelain. White-suited CSIs stood ready to bag up anything of interest, but, at least until now, their spoils had been limited.

  The work was not restricted to the graveyard. There were administrators at Bourne Hill and Devizes who were responsible for making the job go as easily as possible. The Ministry of Defence owned the land and had made no objection to the search being carried out, but, nonetheless, an application to court under section eight of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act had been made, and a search warrant had been issued.

  Yet, despite a day of hard work, they had found nothing. Mack was pleased. The longer they went on without discovering remains that shouldn’t be there, the sooner the search could be brought to a close, and the sooner she could get back to the hotel for a hot bath and a glass of wine.

  She stretched her legs. Paths that were cleared to use had been marked out with bright plastic cones, and she walked around the perimeter to the tent that had been erected over the spot where Amy’s remains had been found. The bones had been buried close to the surface, but Knight wanted them to go down to five or six feet. The earth had been loosened by the rain, and, even though they had only dug down to knee height, it was obvious that going deeper would require the workings to be shored up. Knight had called for a supply of sheeting and hydraulic supports, and a local civil engineer was on his way to discuss the best way to complete the excavation.

  “Coffee, boss?”

  Mack turned. It was Francine Patterson.

  “Yes, please. I’ll come with you.”

  More equipment had arrived during the day, including a second small mechanical digger, trackway to allow for officers with wheelbarrows to remove soil, and a pedestrian walkway to ensure that the ground was not disturbed by the police and support staff as they went about their work. Mack and Patterson followed the walkway to the hole that had been cut in the boundary fence, and they made their way across the sodden field to the incident support unit that had arrived courtesy of the Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service. Two members of staff busied themselves inside the open-sided trailer, providing the search officers with hot food and drink.

  “Two coffees,” Patterson said.

  The woman behind the counter took two paper cups and filled them with hot water from an urn at the rear of the trailer. She added coffee and left them on the counter.

  “You had anything from the press yet, boss?”

  “Not yet,” Mack said. “But it won’t be long.”

  “That’s one of the benefits of working in a place like this,” Patterson said with a wry smile. “You get the army guarding the way in and out.”

  “Sarge!”

  The call was from back inside the graveyard. One of the diggers had stood up, his arm waving to attract the attention of Sergeant Knight. Mack and Patterson took their coffees and retraced their steps across the walkway and arrived next to the excavation at the same time as Fyfe. The officer in the pit was covered from head to toe in muck. He pointed down at a scrap of fabric that was visible amid the mud.

  Mack crouched down and stared. It was hard to be sure from her vantage, but the fabric looked like denim, and, as the digger very gently used the tip of his trowel to scrape away the covering of earth that obscured it, she saw that it was more than just a scrap: it looked like the leg of a pair of jeans. The officer scraped the earth away from the bottom of the trousers, uncovering the unmistakeable shape of a shoe. There was a gap between the cuff of the jeans and the upper of the shoe and, as more earth was delicately moved aside, Mack could see the white of bone and the pallid grey of decomposing flesh.

  “Stop,” Fyfe called down to the officer. “Stop. That’s much more recent. We need to get it out carefully.”

  The sight was grisly and, without the covering of earth to mask it, the smell of rot quickly became evident. The photographer arrived and, as the digger shuffled back to get out of shot, his camera flashed once and then twice and then a third time, the gloomy tent lighting up each time. Fyfe very carefully made his way down the slope so that he could take a closer look at the exposed remains. Mack stayed where she was. She was the senior investigating officer, but she preferred to let the experts do their work without having to worry about the DCI looking over their shoulders.

  Fyfe clambered back up the slope.

  “That obviously shouldn’t be there,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “It’s very badly decomposed, but it’s much more recent.”

  “Yes, but how long?”

  “A couple of months.”

  “God.”

  “I’ll need to sign a ROLE form,” Fyfe said.

  It was one of the absurdities of the job that paperwork—a Recognition of Life Extinct form—needed to be completed in circumstances where it was patently obvious that the person was dead, but there it was.

  She looked away, turning her face to the sky and the iron vault that spread out across the Plain all the way to the horizon. The bath and the glass of wine would have to wait.

  35

  The discovery of the body led to a flurry of additional activity. Fyfe made it clear that they needed to exhume the remains that evening, and, as darkness was closing in quickly across the Plain, Robbie Best had called back to the MIR and asked them to arrange for lights and a generator. A contractor had arrived at six, and now he was in the process of moving the generator into place so that the rest of the equipment could be powered. Stand floodlights had been placed around the edges of the site, plasterer’s lights stood inside the tent, and a string of LED lights, their bulbs protected by metal cages, had been strung up between two temporary posts. The main cable was plugged into the generator, and the plugs for the lights pushed into splitters. The generator’s engine chugged and spluttered as it was fired up, and then settled down into a steady thrum. The lights came on.

  Mack’s phone buzzed. She answered it.

  “DCI Jones?”

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Mary Winkworth.”

  Mack felt a twist in her stomach. Winkworth ran the media office for Wiltshire Police.

  “I think I can probably guess what you’re calling about.”

  “I’m sure you can. I’ve ha
d a call from a reporter at the Mail. She’s heard that we’ve found two bodies on Salisbury Plain. Is that true?”

  “It is. How did they find out so fast?”

  “You know what it’s like, Mack. How many officers have you got down there?”

  “Lots.”

  “So one of them fancies making a bit of extra on the side. Or maybe one of them says something to a girlfriend or a boyfriend, the girlfriend or boyfriend shares it with someone they know, that person shares it with their friends. Eventually it gets to someone who works in the press. It’s impossible to keep a lid on it forever.”

  Mack turned away from the tent and followed the marked path back to the refreshment stand to get another hot drink. “What do you propose?”

  “We get out in front of it. Get them in for a press conference tomorrow, and you tell them whatever you can. Give them something to run with—it’ll be better if we manage the flow of information. They’re still going to root around, but it’ll be better if we have them onside. You might need their help down the road. They’re more likely to help if we cooperate at the start.” She paused. “You okay with that? Is there something you can tell them?”

  “Probably. It’ll be vague, though—we don’t know much yet. I can give them the top line.”

  “That’s all we need for now.”

  “Clear it with Beckton,” she said. “The last thing we need is to blindside him with something like this.”

  “He’s my next call.”

  Mack reached the stand and asked for another coffee. “When do you want to do it?”

  “First thing. I’ll be there to set it up. You just have to give the statement.”

  “Fair enough,” Mack said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Mack ended the call, took her coffee and squelched through the mud back to the tent. The CSI had finished taking his pictures—for now, at least—and the careful excavation of the remains was continuing. The wet earth was slowly scraped aside, revealing more of the leg and, at the waist, a leather belt. The smell was worse; Mack had always thought that the odour of decomposition was like that of rotting meat with a drop or two of cheap perfume, a rank pungency with notes of sickening sweetness. The Tyvek suits were annoying enough to have been given a nickname by the police who wore them—Noddy suits—but Mack was grateful for hers now. The first dead body she had come across, a spinster with no family who had been left alone to rot during a hot summer, had left its stench on her clothes, and no amount of washing had been able to shift it. It had been a new suit from Monsoon, too; she’d given up in the end, taken it into the garden and burned it. The Noddy suit might mean that she rustled when she walked, but at least it ought to help keep the stink off her.