A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2) Read online

  “Thank you,” York said. “It’s a relief to have someone looking for her.”

  “Try not to worry. The overwhelming majority of people who go missing are found.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I will be. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  6

  Atticus went back up to the office, filled Bandit’s bowl with biscuits and let him out of the bedroom. The dog mooched over to his food, lowered his muzzle and started to eat. Atticus scratched behind the hound’s ears and then went over to his desk and woke the computer. His secretary—a woman named Stella who worked for him remotely—had sent over a dossier on James York, and he had neglected to open it.

  He double-clicked. James York was listed as the director of Hatfield Farm Limited, a company with a registered address in Broughton, Hampshire. A Google search revealed that he was listed by Yell as a farmer, and that he held a position on the committee of the Salisbury and South Wilts Golf Club. He navigated to Google Maps and typed in the address of the farm, switched to a satellite view and looked down on a collection of buildings: a house and several barns and outbuildings. He zoomed in and saw a collection of what looked like agricultural machinery and, in the yard that fronted one of the barns, evidence of building work. He zoomed all the way out and saw that the buildings nestled at the centre of a network of large fields; some bore the neat tracks of a tractor that had passed left to right from top to bottom; others were untrammelled green fields left to pasture to feed herds of cattle that appeared as small white dots. The farm was not on a public road and looked to be accessed by way of a narrow track.

  The dog padded over and presented his muzzle for Atticus to scratch.

  “Not much to go on, boy,” he said.

  His phone rang. He found it in the pocket of his jacket and saw that it was Mack.

  “Afternoon,” he said. “Where were you today?”

  “Busy.” She was distracted. “What are you doing?”

  “Just looking into a new case. A parent has negligently misplaced his daughter, and he’s asked me to find her.”

  “What about now? Can you spare an hour?”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “I need you.”

  “Words I thought I’d never hear you say.”

  “Don’t be an arse, Atticus. I need to run something by you. How about dinner?”

  “Sounds intriguing.”

  “Come to the hotel restaurant. Eight?”

  The White Hart was two minutes away from the office. “I can do that.”

  “Good. I’ll see you tonight.”

  7

  The White Hart was the hotel that Mack had moved into the first time that she and Andy had separated. Atticus had stayed with her here for several weeks, until, eventually, Andy’s strategy of waiting for her to miss her children too much to stay away had borne fruit. Atticus wondered how he should feel as he passed from the cold, damp night into the warm reception area. He knew that Mack would be missing her kids terribly once more, and he did not wish her sadness; on the other hand, he had never given up hope that he and Mack might be able to rekindle their relationship. It was difficult not to focus on that as he unzipped his leather jacket and took it off, hanging it on a coat hook outside the restaurant. Mack was sitting at a table in the back of the room, a notebook open in front of her.

  “This is the same table,” Atticus said as he sat down opposite her.

  “What?”

  “The table we always used to sit at—from before.”

  “Is it?” She shrugged. “Force of habit.”

  Atticus took a menu and thumbed through it. It hadn’t changed since he had been here last and, uninspired, he ordered a burger and chips. Mack ordered the fried cod and a pint of lager for each of them.

  “You missed the verdict today,” he said.

  “I was otherwise engaged. Were you there?”

  “I was. You should’ve seen Allegra’s face.”

  “That would have been fun.”

  “Lennox’s, too. I think he still thought he was going to get off. Have you spoken to Beckton?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He’ll be happy.”

  “He’ll be relieved,” she said. “It’s been a weight on everyone’s shoulders.”

  The waitress delivered their drinks.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her. “You look tired.”

  “I’m knackered.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got a situation, and I wouldn’t mind picking your brain.”

  “Pick away.”

  “This stays between us,” she said. “It’s not public yet. All right?”

  “Understood.”

  Mack reached down into the bag at her feet and took out an iPad. She unlocked it and then tapped and swiped until she had a photograph on the screen. She turned it around so that Atticus could see it. The photograph was of what appeared to be a shallow depression in the middle of a bleak and isolated landscape.

  “Salisbury Plain?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mack reached around and swiped through to the next photograph; this one had been taken closer to the depression, looking more directly down into it. Atticus saw what looked like a bone resting half in and half out of a muddy puddle.

  “Oh,” he said. “Now I’m interested.”

  “We were contacted by a dog walker yesterday morning,” she said. “He was on the Plain when his dog ran off. When the man caught up with him, the dog had that bone in his mouth.”

  “Human?”

  “Yes.”

  Atticus took the iPad from her and opened his fingers to zoom in on the bone. “Looks like a femur.”

  “Female, we think.”

  He squinted at it. “Young?”

  “Still to be confirmed.”

  “Found anything else? Any other bones?”

  “None. We’ve started to widen the search, but nothing yet. The first question we have is how it came to be there.”

  “An animal. The bone’s been scavenged from somewhere else and brought there.”

  “That’s what we think.”

  Atticus sipped his pint. “I read a report once. Foxes and badgers are the only wild animals large enough to affect a set of remains through scavenging.”

  “You read a report on animals scavenging remains?”

  “Human remains,” he clarified. “And, yes, I did. You know me—I read everything. I believe this particular dissertation was from a student at the School of Anthropology at Oxford. You never know when information like that might prove useful. I store it away and then, when it might be relevant—like now—I have it to hand.”

  She eyed him sceptically, although he knew that she found his voracious appetite for new information partly amusing and partly daunting; she’d told him the same when he’d tried to argue that a treatise on botany that he had read meant he could offer a solution as to when a body found on the banks of the Avon had arrived there. He had offered her a bet that he was right and the pathologist was wrong, and she had taken it. The body, as he recalled, had been found on a bed of Himalayan balsam, a species that died back every winter to regrow in the spring. Atticus had examined the flattened stems and estimated the balsam was four months old, which meant that, judging from the regrowth that had taken place, it was likely the body had been lying there for two months. Subsequent investigation was to prove his supposition was correct. Mack had grudgingly accepted that she had lost the bet and bought him dinner.

  “Let’s have it, then,” she said.

  “The researchers used dead pigs and deer when they were testing their hypotheses. Foxes were found to scavenge the deer more frequently than badgers. Individual foxes were capable of removing a whole deer, and moved smaller items—bones, for example—over long distances.”

  “How far?”

  “Miles. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear, but I think you might have to expand your search area.”

&nb
sp; “You know how big Salisbury Plain is?”

  “Three hundred square miles. But I think we might be able to narrow the radius a little. I’d be happy to come out and take a look.”

  She winced. “Might be a bit tricky.”

  “Because of that little misunderstanding?”

  “I’m not sure it was a misunderstanding. You were fired.”

  “Semantics.”

  “You were fired, and then you drove a coach and horses through the Mallender inquiry.”

  “Thereby preventing an innocent man from spending the rest of his life behind bars.”

  “And embarrassing your chief superintendent in the process.”

  “The man has thin skin. What can I say?”

  She eyed him. “Let’s say I could swing it. You think you might be able to help?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Can’t you just tell me what you think?”

  “I’ll need to have a look at where you found the bone before I put my reputation on the line.”

  The waitress returned with their food. Atticus picked up the burger and took a bite.

  “What are you doing tomorrow morning?” Mack asked him.

  Atticus had planned to go over and see James York, but he knew Mack would be up early. He could go to see the dig site with Mack and still visit York before lunch. And, he knew, he would find a mystery like this much more intriguing than tracking down a missing girl. One task was mundane and ought to be easy; the other was interesting and given added piquancy by offering him the chance to help the police. It wasn’t altruism; it was the opportunity to show them what they were missing.

  He chewed and swallowed. “Would have to be early.”

  “Six?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have boots?”

  “I do.”

  “You’ll need them. It’s a quagmire with all this rain. I’ll pick you up at six.”

  Part II

  Tuesday

  8

  Atticus’s alarm sounded at half five, and his first thought was to ask himself why he had agreed to meet Mack at such an ungodly hour. He didn’t have a shower and had been using the facilities of the gym near the Maltings whenever he decided he was too fragrant to put it off any longer. No time for that today, so he filled the basin with warm water and used that to wash, drying himself off and dressing in a Tool T-shirt that exposed the sleeves of tattoos down both arms; the designs ran from his shoulders all the way down to his wrists. He opened the cabinet and took out the plastic bottles of Ritalin and Cipralex, shook out his daily pills and swallowed them with a mouthful of tepid water from the tap. The bottles were both less than a third full, and he reminded himself that he would need to go to the doctor for a refill. He had learned, to his cost, that bad things happened when he was off his meds, and he was not about to sabotage the progress that he had made over the course of the last few months. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to tease out the worst of the tangles, and, happy—or as happy as he ever was—with the way that he looked, he went back into the office for his leather jacket.

  He found his boots in the back of the cupboard with his wet-weather gear. He looked out of the window, saw the sky was still dark with clouds, and decided to take it all with him. He changed into the boots and stuffed his waterproofs into a rucksack. Bandit bounced around him excitedly, mistaking his sudden activity for the prelude to a walk.

  “Somewhere different for your walk this morning,” he said to the dog. “Excited?”

  The dog beat his tail happily.

  “Me too.”

  Atticus clipped Bandit’s lead to his collar and led him down to the street just as Mack was pulling up in her battered old Range Rover. She pressed the button to open the back, and Bandit bounded inside, curling up and laying his head on his paws. Atticus unclipped the lead, ruffled the dog’s fur and went around to get in next to Mack.

  “He’ll be a good boy,” he said. “You never know—he might find another bone.”

  She put the Range Rover into gear and pulled out. “I just called the station,” she said. “We’ve had a couple of lads out on the Plain all night.”

  “Any developments?”

  “It was too dark to search,” she said. “They’ve just been making sure the scene is secure.”

  Mack drove them out of the city. She turned on the radio, punching the buttons on the old unit until she had found Radio 2. The forced jollity of the DJ and her guests felt incongruous given the dark skies and what they would find at their destination.

  Mack turned off the B390 at Chitterne Antsy and drove north. They passed signs indicating that the land ahead of them was restricted, but Mack ignored them and followed a narrow aggregate track onto the Plain. The Range Rover handled the terrain without too much difficulty, although Atticus could see stretches of mud to the left and right that might have proven to be more of a challenge even for a four-by-four. There was a collection of vehicles next to three large beech trees, and she parked there, next to a van with a stencil that identified it as belonging to Wiltshire Police Forensic Services. She killed the engine just as the rain started to fall, and pointed out the windscreen.

  “We’re going just behind the hawthorn over there.”

  They got out. Atticus put on his waterproofs, went to the back of the Range Rover and opened the door to let Bandit out. The dog looked left and right, his tail wagging vigorously, no doubt enthused by the prospect of all of this space in which he could run and explore. Atticus clipped the lead to his collar and held on tight as he strained at it.

  Mack led the way. They passed around the edge of the hedge and then descended into the hollow where the bone had been found. It was now being treated as a major crime scene. The boundary had been extended, with blue-and-white tape tied to a series of metal posts that laid out a wide perimeter. Mack signed the log for them both and held the tape for Atticus to duck beneath.

  “Where’s the bone now?” Atticus said.

  “The mortuary. Fyfe is running tests to date it.”

  “But it was found down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the dog walker say if the dog had moved it?”

  “He said it didn’t. He was clear about that. He saw the dog come down here without the bone, and then she had it. If she moved it, it wasn’t by much.”

  A man wearing a protective forensic suit came over to meet them.

  “Simon Chester,” he said. “You must be DCI Jones?”

  “That’s right. And this is Atticus Priest.”

  Chester looked at him. “What do you do?” he said, a little sniffy.

  “The DCI asked me to come down to help. Now—what are your conclusions so far? Is it human?”

  Chester looked to Mack for approval; she nodded that he should answer the question. “We believe so.”

  “And how did it get here?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to ascertain.” He paused, confused. “I’m sorry. You didn’t say what you do.”

  Atticus didn’t answer. “Could you hold my dog for a moment?”

  Chester was too bewildered to protest and took Bandit’s lead. Atticus took out his phone, selected the compass and found north. He made his way around the edge of the hollow, slowly moving between the ferns and bushes, all of his attention focused on the muddy ground at his feet. Mack and Chester watched. The mud became irrelevant, save that he was careful where he stood. The ground was damp and muddy, and Atticus doubted that he would be able to distinguish anything from the morass of prints that had been left by the officers who had attended the scene. Still, he swept left and right, up and down the slope of the hollow, at one point pushing his way between the branches of a hawthorn.

  “What are you looking for?” Chester asked.

  Atticus was too engrossed in his work to answer, and, before Chester had the chance to repeat his question, he stopped and pointed. “There.”

  “What is it?” Chester said.

  There was a
collection of bushes, close together but with enough space between them to allow for a small animal to pass. Atticus dropped to his knees, splashing in a muddy puddle but oblivious to it. He lowered himself until he was directly over the tracks that proceeded from between the bushes and then down into the hollow.

  Mack knelt down next to him. “Atticus?”

  Atticus was too engrossed by what he had seen on the ground to answer.

  Chester tied Bandit’s lead to the trunk of a sapling. “What is it? What have you found?”

  “Here,” Atticus said. “Look.”

  He pointed to a collection of prints that emerged from between the bushes, and gestured to the clearest print.

  “See? Indentations made by four pads and, there at the front of the print, four claws.”

  Mack nodded. “I see it.”

  “We won’t be able to follow the tracks to where the bone was found because, alas, the ground has been churned up by the flatfoots who’ve been tramping around without thinking of what they’re doing.”

  “Wait just a moment,” Chester began to protest.

  Atticus silenced him with an upturned hand. “It doesn’t matter. We know where the animal went to from this point: it went down into the hollow where it left the bone. The question is where it came from.”

  “How do you know there’s not another dog involved?” Chester said.

  “It’s a fair point,” Mack added. “There are walkers out here all the time. Couldn’t another dog have found it and moved it?”

  “No. Look.” Atticus found a small, straight twig and placed it across the middle of the print, along the tops of the two outermost toes. “Dogs and foxes both have five pads on their front and back paws: two in front, two to the side and one at the back. With a fox track you’d usually see a gap between the rear of the two front pads and the rear of the two outer pads—the line of the stick should run between them without touching, and it does. The outer pads of a dog usually overlap the front ones, so the line would run across them. This is a fox—one hundred per cent.”