The tree is an ogre with outstretched arms. A body hangs beneath it, suspended from a branch, motionless, white. Not white. Naked. Hooded.
Behind the branches, across the valley a monochrome landscape is slowly emerging from the darkness. Fields divided by hedges and patches of evergreen scrub. Twisting trails of beech trees that follow the streams. The sun is hiding behind a bruised sky. Nosegays and primroses and daffodils are beneath the ground. Colours might not exist.
The wide metal gate has been sealed off with blue and white police tape. Spotlights have been set up around an adjacent barn. The weathered wood seems to be whitewashed by the brightness.
More police tape seals off the farm track. Vehicle tyre prints are being photographed and cast in plaster. At the end of the track is a narrow lane, blocked in both directions by police cars and vans.
The police have erected makeshift barriers and a checkpoint. I have to give my name to a constable with a clipboard. Picking my way along the track, avoiding the puddles, I reach the barn and can look across a ploughed field to where the body is hanging.
Duckboards cover the rest of the journey, white plastic stepping-stones, leading to the base of the tree, fifty feet away. The blades of a plough have created a teardrop shape around the trunk. The furrowed earth is dusted with frost.
Veronica Cray is standing beside the body, looking like an executioner. A naked woman, hanging by one arm, is suspended from a branch by a set of handcuffs. Her left wrist is raw and bleeding beneath the locked metal band. A white pillowcase encases her head, bunching on her shoulders. Her toes barely touch the earth.
Lying on the ground at her feet is a mobile phone. The battery is dead. She’s wearing knee-length leather boots. One of the heels has broken off. The other is embedded in mud. A flashgun fires in rapid bursts, creating the illusion that the body is moving like a stop-motion animation puppet.
The same Geordie pathologist who examined Christine Wheeler’s car at the lock-up is working again, issuing instructions to the photographer. For the next few hours at least the scene belongs to the evidence gatherers.
Ruiz is already here, slapping his arms against the cold. I woke him at the pub and told him to meet me.
‘You interrupted a great dream,’ he says. ‘I was in bed with your wife.’
‘Was I there?’
‘If I ever have that dream, we can no longer be friends.’
Both of us listen as the pathologist briefs Veronica Cray. The unofficial cause of death is exposure.
‘Hypostasis indicates that this is where she died. Upright. There are no obvious signs of sexual assault or defence wounds. But I’ll know more when I get her to the lab.’
‘What about time of death?’ she asks.
‘Rigor mortis has set in. A body normally loses a degree of temperature every hour but it dropped below freezing last night. She could have been dead for twenty-four hours, perhaps longer.’
The pathologist scrawls his signature on a clipboard and goes back to his staff. The DI motions me to follow her. We pick our way across the duckboards to the tree.
Today I have my walking stick- a sign that my medication is having less effect. It is a nice stick, made of polished walnut with a metal tip. I’m less self-conscious about using it nowadays. Either that or I’m more frightened of my leg locking up and sending me over.
The photographer is shooting close-ups of the woman’s fingers. Her nails are slim and painted. Her nakedness is marbled with lividity and I can smell the sweet sourness of her perfume and urine.
‘You know who this is?’
I shake my head.
The DI gently rolls the hood upwards, bunching the fabric in her fists. Sylvia Furness is staring at me, her head hanging forward, twisted to one side by the weight of her body. Her ash blonde hair is matted into curls and is darker at her temples.
‘Her daughter, Alice, reported her missing late Monday afternoon. Alice was dropped home after a horse-riding lesson and found the front door open. No sign of her mother. Clothes lying on the floor. A missing persons report was filed on Tuesday morning.’
‘Who discovered her body?’ I ask.
She motions over my shoulder towards a farmer who is sitting in the front seat of a farm truck. ‘Last night he thought he heard foxes. He came out early to take a look. He found Sylvia Furness’s car parked in the barn. Then he saw the body.’
Veronica Cray lets the hood fall and cover Sylvia’s face. The death scene has a surreal, abstract, achingly theatrical sensibility; a whiff of sawdust and face paint, as if somehow it has been laid out like this for someone to find.
‘Where is Alice now?’
‘Being looked after by her grandparents.’
‘What about her father?’
‘He’s flying back from Switzerland. He’s been away on business.’
DI Cray plunges her hands into the pockets of her overcoat.
‘This make any sense to you?’
‘Not yet.’
‘There’s no sign of a struggle or defence injuries. She hasn’t been raped or tortured. She froze to death, for glory’s sake.’
I know she’s thinking about Christine Wheeler. The similarities are impossible to ignore, yet for every one of them I could find an equally compelling difference. Sometimes in mathematics, randomness itself becomes a pattern.
She’s also contemplating whether Patrick Fuller could have been involved. He was released from custody on Sunday morning having been charged with stealing Christine Wheeler’s mobile.
Uniformed officers have gathered beside the farm shed, waiting to begin a fingertip search of the field. Veronica Cray makes her way towards them, leaving me standing beside the body.
Nine days ago I glimpsed Sylvia Furness through an open door as she undressed in her flat. Her muscles were sculptured from hours in the gym. Now death has turned the sculpture to stone.
Stepping across the duckboards, I reach the perimeter of the roped area and begin walking up the slope towards the oak ridge. My polished cane is useless in the mud. I tuck it under one arm.
The sky has a porcelain quality as the sun fights to break through the high white clouds. The last of the mist has burned off and the valley has fully materialised, revealing humpback bridges and cows dotting the pastures.
I reach the fence and try to scramble over it. My leg locks and I fall into a ditch full of knee-high grass and muddy water. At least it was a soft landing.
Turning back, I scrutinize the scene, watching as the SOCOs lift Sylvia’s body down from the tree and lay it upon a plastic sheet. Nature is a cruel, heartless observer. No matter how terrible the act or disaster, the trees, rocks and clouds are unmoved. Perhaps that is why mankind is destined to chop down the last tree and catch the last fish and shoot the last bird. If nature can be so dispassionate about our fate, why should we care about nature?
Sylvia Furness froze to death. She had a mobile phone, but didn’t call for help. He kept her talking until the battery ran out. Either that or he was here, taunting her with it.
This was a piece of twisted sadistic theatre, but what was the artist trying to say? He gained pleasure from her pain; he revelled in his power over Sylvia, but why did he leave her body so obviously on display? Is it a message or a warning?
There he is again, the man who knows Johnny Cochran’s distant cousin; the one who tried to talk to my fallen angel. He’s a regular corpse chaser, isn’t he? The grim reaper.
I watch him cross the field, ruining his shoes. Then he falls over the fence into the ditch. What a clown!
I’ve known my share of shrinks, doctor-major types who administer mental enemas, trying to get soldiers to bring their nightmares into daylight like some steaming pile of crap. Most of them were bullshit artists, who made me feel like I was doing them a favour by telling them things. Instead of asking questions, they sat and listened- or pretended to.
It’s like that old joke about two shrinks meeting at a university reunion and one looks old and haggard while the other is bright-eyed and youthful. The older-looking one says, ‘How do you do it? I listen to other people’s problems all day, every day, year after year, and it’s turned me into an old man. What’s your secret?’
The younger-looking one replies, ‘Who listens?’
A guy I know called Felini, my first CO in Afghanistan, used to have nightmares. We called him Felini because he said his family came from Sicily and he had an uncle in the Mafia. I don’t know his real name. We weren’t supposed to know.
Felini had been in Afghanistan for twelve years. At first he fought alongside Osama Bin Laden against the Soviets and then finished up fighting against him. In between times he reported to the CIA and DEA monitoring opium production.
He was the first westerner into Mazar-e-Sharif after the Taliban captured the city in 1998. He told me what he saw. The Taliban had gone through the streets, strafing everything that moved with machine guns. Then they went from house to house, rounding up Hazaras, before locking them in steel shipping containers in the broiling sun. They baked to death or suffocated. Others were thrown alive into wells before the tops were bulldozed over. No wonder Felini had nightmares.
Strangely, none of that changed how he felt about the Talibs. He respected them.
‘The Talibs knew they were never going to win over the locals,’ he told me. ‘So they taught them a lesson. Each time they lost a village and won it back again, they were more savage than before. Payback can be a bitch, but it’s what you have to do,’ he said. ‘Forget about winning hearts and minds. You rip out their hearts and break open their minds.’
Felini was the best interrogator I’ve ever seen. There was no part of the body he couldn’t hurt. Nothing he couldn’t find out. His other theory was about Islam. He said that for four thousand years the guy who carried the biggest stick had been in charge and been respected in the Middle East. It’s the only language the Arabs understand- Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Wahhabi, Ismaili, Kufi- makes no fucking difference.
Enough of the nostalgia. They’re taking the bitch’s body down.
A bird flies out of the trees in a clatter of wings. It startles me. I brace my hands against the top strand of wire, feeling the cold radiate from the metal.
On the lower reaches of the field, dozens of police officers are shuffling forward in a long unbroken line. Clouds of condensed vapour billow from their faces. As I watch the strange procession, a realisation washes over me, a sense that I’m not alone. Peering into the trees, I scan the deeper shadows. On the periphery of my vision I notice a movement. A man is crouched behind a fallen tree, trying not to be seen. He is wearing a woollen hat and something dark is covering his face.
Without even realising it, I am moving towards him.
He hears a sound. Turning, he tucks something into a bag and then scrambles to his feet and begins to run. I yell at him to stop. He carries on, crashing through the undergrowth. Big, slow and shiny faced, he can’t stay ahead of me. I close the gap and he stops suddenly. Unable to slow down, I hurtle into him, knocking him to the ground.
I scramble to my knees and raise my walking stick, holding it above my head like an axe.
‘Don’t move!’
‘Christ, mate, ease up.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m a photographer. I work for a press agency.’
He sits up. I look at his bag. The contents have spilled across the sodden leaves. A camera and flash, long lenses, filters, a notebook…
‘If anything’s broken you’re fucking paying,’ he says, examining the camera.
My shouts have summoned Monk who vaults the fence with far more proficiency than I did.
‘Shit!’ he says, ‘Cooper.’
‘Morning, Monk.’
‘Detective Constable Abbott to you.’ Monk hauls him to his feet. ‘This is a crime scene and private property. You’re trespassing.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Offensive language- that’s another charge.’
‘Gimme a break.’
‘The film.’
‘I don’t have any film. It’s digital.’
‘Then give me the bloody memory card.’
‘People have got a right to see these pictures,’ says Cooper. ‘It’s in the public interest.’
‘Yeah, sure, woman hanging from a tree; big public interest story.’
I leave the two of them arguing. Monk is going to prevail. He’s six-foot four. Nature wins again.
I climb a gate and follow the road to where police cars have blocked off the lane. DI Cray is standing beside a mobile canteen, stirring sugar into tea. She stares at my trousers.
‘I fell down.’
She shakes her head and pauses to watch the white body bag being carried past us on a stretcher and loaded into a waiting Home Office van.
‘What makes someone like Sylvia Furness take off her clothes, walk out of her flat and come here?’
‘I think he used the daughter.’
‘But she was at a riding school.’
‘Remember what Fuller said? When he met Christine Wheeler on the path last Friday, she asked about her daughter.’
‘Darcy was at school.’
‘Exactly. But what if Christine didn’t know that? What if he convinced her otherwise?’
DI Cray draws breath and runs her hand across her scalp. Her short hair flattens and springs back again. I catch her staring at me as though I’m a strange artefact that she has stumbled across and can’t name.
Off to my right I hear the sounds of a commotion, several people shouting at once. Reporters and news crews have crossed the police tape and are charging up the farm track. At least a dozen uniforms and plainclothes converge on them, forming a barricade.
One reporter pivots and ducks under the line. A detective tackles him from behind and they both finish up in the mud.
Veronica Cray utters a knowing sigh and tips out her tea.
‘It’s feeding time.’
Moments later she disappears into the throng. I can barely see the top of her head. She orders them to step back… further still. I can see her now. The TV lights have bleached her face whiter than a full moon.
‘My name is Detective Inspector Veronica Cray. At 7.55 this morning the body of a woman was found at this location. Early indications suggest the death is suspicious. We will not be releasing her name until her next of kin have been informed.’
Each time she pauses, a dozen flashguns fire and the questions come almost as quickly.
‘Who found the body?’
‘Is it true she was naked?’
‘Was she sexually assaulted?’
Some of them are answered, others parried. The DI looks directly at the cameras and maintains a calm, businesslike demeanour, keeping her answers short and to the point.
There are angry objections when she ends the impromptu press conference. Already pushing through their shoulders, she reaches my side and pulls me towards a waiting car.
‘I have no illusions about my work, Professor. My job is pretty straightforward most of the time. Your average murderer is drunk, angry and stupid. He’s white, in his late twenties, with a low IQ and a history of violence. And gets into a pub brawl or gets sick of his wife’s nagging and puts a claw hammer in the back of her head. I can understand that sort of homicide.’
By inference she’s saying this case is different.
‘I’ve heard stories about you. They say you can tell things about people; understand them; read them like tealeaves in a cup.’
‘I make clinical judgements.’
‘Whatever you want to call it, you seem to be good at this sort of thing. Details are important to you. You like finding patterns to them. I want you to find a pattern for me. I want to know who did this. I want to know why he did it and how he did it. And I want to stop the sick fuck from doing it again.’