Dying to Sin

5

A team from Sheffield University had been unloading equipment — shovels and trowels, wire-mesh screens for sifting bone fragments from the soil, evidence bags, tape measures and orange markers. One of the students was already using a video camera to record the position of the remains from every angle before the team approached it.

Fry knew that digging a dead body out of a grave was never as easy as burying a fresh one. When an unprotected corpse was placed in the ground, it formed an intimate union with the earth. Flesh rotted, fabric disintegrated, the skull, spine and pelvis became embedded in the soil. A casual digger would soon despair of freeing the entire body, even after it had spent a year or so in the ground. If anyone removed a body to bury it elsewhere, they were bound to leave a few bits behind.

‘We’re being allowed to approach for a few minutes’ consultation with the anthropologist,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘But then we have to keep clear. Dr Jamieson says he wants to protect himself from assumptions.’

‘Whose assumptions?’

‘Ours, I think.’

The forensic anthropologist’s task was the recovery of human remains, and the determination of age, sex, stature, ancestry, time since death, and any physical trauma that might indicate manner of death. Beyond that, he was not part of the investigation.

Fry laughed. ‘Are we allowed to speak to him at all?’

‘You could probably wish him a Merry Christmas.’

When he heard the laughter, the anthropologist looked up from the excavation with a suspicious scowl. He had a pale, bald head, almost the same colour as the paper scene suit he was wearing. Water gleamed on his scalp. From rain or sweat, it was impossible to tell.

‘How is it going, Doctor?’ called Hitchens.

‘Mixed fortunes, I’m afraid. A dry soil would have preserved the body better. But this is, well …’ He scooped a handful of mud that seeped through his fingers.

‘Too wet?’

‘Correct. Much too wet.’

‘But there’s some good news, I take it?’

‘Well, you know, there are plenty of opportunities on an isolated farm for disposing of a body. If your aim is to reduce the remains to something unidentifiable, then burial is actually one of the slowest and least successful ways to achieve that.’

‘It’s much quicker just to leave it exposed somewhere, if you can get away with it,’ suggested Cooper.

‘Yes. How do you know that?’

‘Every livestock farmer knows that a dead sheep left out in the open during the summer will be reduced to a skeleton within a month.’

‘Exactly. Burying a corpse just slows the process of decomposition. A deeply buried body can take eight times as long to decompose as one exposed on the surface. In this case, burial and the use of plastic sheeting are the two factors which might enable the victim to be identified.’

Protective clothing was being distributed to the forensics team — coveralls, hair caps, gloves and shoe protectors. Trace evidence was transferred so easily that it could be carried away from a crime scene just as easily as it was carried there.

Next to the grave an area had been provided for the scientists to work in, preventing any more disturbance of the grave itself than was necessary. Soil would be removed by lifting it in layers of about ten inches at a time, then it would be passed through sieves of various mesh sizes to extract evidence. They would be trying to locate fragments of bone, personal items, anything that had been dropped or didn’t belong in the area. Some of the anthropology students had begun cursing when they saw the condition of the soil they were supposed to sieve.

‘Yes, buried bodies can be said to be protected from the elements to a large extent. If the soil is acidic, the body will tend to decompose more rapidly. In temperate zones, or areas with severe winters, the processes of decomposition are slowed. Did you know that fat people skeletalize much faster? It’s because their flesh feeds huge armies of maggots. It’s not a weight-loss programme I’d recommend, but maggots can strip forty pounds of surplus flesh off an obese body in twenty-four hours.’

The remains would have to be exposed completely before they could be lifted from the grave. There was too much risk of losing body parts to the sucking grasp of the wet clay. The excavation team had come equipped with an array of small tools — dental picks, bamboo sticks, paint brushes and hand trowels. Fry could see that this was going to be a long, slow, painstaking job. And even after the remains had been removed, the excavation would continue. The anthropologist had called for a further ten inches of soil to be taken from below the body, in case small bones or other evidence had been left behind.

The whole process was being recorded by video and digital photography, as well as handwritten records at every stage. Items that were discovered with the body which might indicate an identity couldn’t be assumed to belong to the victim. Intentional placing of false documents had been known. Anything to confuse investigators.

Fry leaned forward to get a view of the remains, her shoes slipping on the edge of the duckboard.

‘Some parts of the body look very grey, Doctor.’

‘Saponification. It’s a factor that can affect a body after burial, especially if it’s buried in a moist area or directly exposed to water and kept free of air. The fatty tissues of the body turn into adipocere. That’s the greyish, waxlike substance you can see.’

It was that unnatural greyness that Fry would remember most about the victim at Pity Wood Farm. There was a big difference between a violent death and a natural death, between the killing of another human being and death as part of life. The latter she’d come to accept. The former she never would.

Cooper found himself drawn back into the farmhouse by some irresistible urge. It was if the house was calling to him, coaxing him into its rooms so it could tell him its story.

This time, he noticed that the whole kitchen had a curious yellow tinge. The wallpaper above the table might have been lemon once, and the cupboards were made of that golden pine which never seemed to darken completely. But there was also a sort of patina over the ceiling and the walls, particularly near the armchairs. Cooper guessed the Sutton brothers must have been heavy smokers. He could picture them sitting in those two armchairs in the evening, one either side of the fireplace. They would be puffing away, not talking to each other much, if at all. Thinking their own thoughts, but keeping those thoughts to themselves.

Turning away from the kitchen to look back into the sitting room, Cooper found himself disorientated. With the black range and the dripping tap behind him, and the smell of paint and fresh cement in front of him, he felt as though he was standing on the threshold between two worlds. For a moment, he wasn’t sure whether he was standing in the present, looking back into the vanished past, or somehow occupying a brief second of history, sharing the forgotten warmth of the Suttons’ kitchen while getting a glimpse of the future.

He wished he could pin down his sense of life and the lack of it, why some of the rooms were different from others. He was sure there were no scientific data that would back up his impressions. It was more a question of a feeling in the walls, a faint gleam that reflected the generations who’d survived an uncomplicated existence here, accepting life and death as it came. So why was that feeling lacking in some parts of Pity Wood Farm? Why was the gleam missing from the kitchen, why did the shadows seem blacker and more permanent in that middle bedroom on the first floor?

Outside, it was getting dark quickly. No surprise, since it was almost the shortest day of the year. At this time of year, darkness snuck up on you almost without you noticing, so that suddenly it was pitch black. Cooper could just make out the corrugated-iron roof of the shed and the faint gleam of the cars parked in the yard. The mountain of silage bags seemed to be spreading dark shadows across the farm.

But someone had pulled their fingers out and got the floodlights up. Now, part of Pity Wood Farm was bathed in a yellow glare that turned the muddy ground into a corner of the Somme. Mud and trenches and decomposing bodies.

The anthropology team were still working, but Scenes of Crime had gone home for the night, and only a couple of uniformed officers were left on scene protection duty. Soon, the farm would be settling back into its ancient silence.

When darkness descended totally, all he could see beyond the floodlights were the distant, isolated lights of scattered farmhouses. There were no streetlights out here, not even on the B road down in the valley. There was no upward glow from the lights of a town to reflect off the sky. There were no towns near enough. Soon, the shadows would have taken over the world. Or the whole of Rakedale, at least.

To the south of the farm, Cooper could just see Pity Wood itself, or what was left of it. Dark clumps of trees, their bare branches dripping with rain. And from the direction of the big shed, the only sound he could hear was the incessant scratch, scratch, scratch against the corrugated-iron sides.

As if Fry didn’t have enough on her plate, Ben Cooper was behaving oddly. Well, even more oddly than usual. She could see him stopping periodically, and sniffing. Sometimes he even crouched and sniffed close to the ground. Quietly, she came up behind him, realizing that he was totally absorbed in whatever he was concentrating on. When he stopped to squat on the ground again, she tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Hey, what are you supposed to be? General Custer’s Red Indian guide?’

Cooper almost overbalanced, and had to push a hand palm down in the mud to stop himself falling.

‘Oh, for — Diane, don’t do that.’

She found him a clean tissue in her pocket, noting that he’d been so taken by surprise that he didn’t even bother to correct her inappropriate use of the term ‘Red Indian’.

‘What’s with all the sniffing?’

‘There’s a strange smell in this area,’ said Cooper. ‘I thought at first it was just cat urine, but there’s more to it than that.’

‘It’s a farm,’ said Fry. ‘Farms have smells like dogs have fleas. Haven’t you noticed that before?’

‘Not a livestock kind of smell. It’s a chemical odour. Ammonia, but something else too.’

‘This must have been the machinery shed. There’d be diesel, lubricating oil. Damn it, there must have been fertilizer and herbicides, too. Disinfectant — all kinds of chemicals. What’s one whiff among friends?’

‘Can you actually smell it?’ asked Cooper.

‘No. But, then, I think I’m getting a cold.’ Fry turned her face up to the drizzle that had started while they were speaking. ‘And if I stand out here much longer, it’ll be pneumonia.’

Fry sent Cooper to see if the DI needed anything doing before he went off duty. She shook her head as she watched him go, despairing at her inability to understand him, even now.

There were so many things about Cooper that bothered her. She was aggravated by his tendency to look hot and flustered, as if he’d only just got out of bed. These days, he’d probably been in bed with that SOCO, Liz Petty. Or maybe it was just the stress of running from one obsession to another. At least he didn’t look quite so dishevelled as he used to, so maybe he’d learned to wash and iron for himself since he moved out of the family farm into his little flat at Welbeck Street.

When she first met him, Fry had mostly been struck by that disarray and by his air of innocence, which was lacking in those around him. He looked as though he’d hardly left the sixth form at High Peak College. Now, she wasn’t so sure whether what she saw was innocence any more. For a start, his hair wasn’t quite so untidy. It no longer fell over his forehead, but had been styled. His tie still needed straightening, though, and that scuff mark had been on his leather jacket for months.

She looked up as Cooper’s car passed, catching his profile as he drove by. In retrospect, it was amazing that he’d ever seemed innocent at all.

Fry recalled the day he’d told her about his father, Sergeant Joe Cooper, and his death on the streets of Edendale at the hands of a gang of thugs. ‘Three of them got two years for manslaughter, the others were put on probation for affray. First-time offenders, you see. Of course, they were all drunk too.’ And then there had been his mother, the psychiatric illness and the complications that had taken her life only a few months ago, with Ben at her bedside in the nursing home.

Fry wanted to be fair to him, she really did. In the circumstances, she supposed it was surprising that Cooper still retained a positive outlook on life at all, let alone the concern he so often showed for the problems of other people. He ought to be cynical. He ought to have grown as cynical as she was herself. She wondered how he managed to avoid it.

Before she left Pity Wood, Fry took another look inside the inner cordon to see how work on the remains was progressing. Under the floodlights, the shadows of the diggers against the sides of the PVC tent. The body was emerging bit by bit, but it was a painstaking job.

Something dark and fibrous in the soil caught Fry’s attention. She couldn’t make out what it was at first. Then she realized it was a hank of black hair that had become detached from the head.

In a way, she found it more bearable when a corpse had started to decompose. At least it definitely looked dead. Fresh bodies were more disturbing, because they still had the look of life about them, as if they might spring up at any moment and carry on as normal. At those times, it was hard to be unaffected by the most distinctive things about a dead body — the coldness, the utter stillness, and the knowledge that a human life had just been snuffed out an hour, or even a few minutes, before you arrived.

In other ways, a body left in a shallow grave for years, undiscovered and unidentified, was the saddest sort of case. Somewhere, there must be family and friends, wondering even now what had happened to this woman.

Fry knew that hand would live in her memory for a while. It was bent into a gesture, welcoming, almost inviting. It was as if the dead woman was greeting her visitors, enticing them down into her grave.

She’d waited a long time to have company. And it must have been lonely down there.