Snapshot

58

Challis found vehicles up and down the fenceline at Myers Reserve: photographer, video operator, exhibits officer, crime-scene technicians and the forensic pathologist. A couple of uniforms stood by the access track, one to sign in those authorised to attend, the other to keep onlookers away. Several uniformed police officers were searching the adjacent paddock in a grid pattern, supervised by Ellen Destry. Challis pulled on rubber boots and slogged through wet grass to join her.

‘Over here,’ she said.

She took him into the reserve, the ground soft under their feet. Bracken brushed their thighs and soon Challis’s trousers were hopelessly sodden. ‘What made you think it was a grave?’

Ellen grinned, oddly pleased with herself. ‘The ground looked different. A regular shape, rectangular, a faint depression of the surface, and the grass and weeds were somehow more vigorous.’

Challis grunted. They came to a clearing and an inflatable forensic tent, under which Freya Berg was brushing leaf mould and damp soil away from a body. A crime-scene technician was sifting the nearby soil for objects that might have fallen from the body or whoever had buried it.

‘So, Freya,’ Challis said, ‘two for the price of one.’

‘Wait until you get my invoice,’ Freya said. ‘I was halfway back to the city, dreaming of a long hot shower, and your good sergeant calls me and says “Guess what?”‘

‘What have we got?’ he asked in his ‘CSI Miami’ voice.

She grinned, speaking as she worked. ‘Youngish male, fully clothed, hard to say how long he’s been here.’

‘Approximately?’

She sighed. ‘There’s no adipocere, so we’re not talking months.’

Challis swallowed involuntarily. He knew all about adipocere, the crumbly, waxy substance that appears over large areas of the skin as body fats convert to long-chain fatty acids. He’d once touched the stuff: never again.

‘There are complicating factors,’ Freya went on. ‘Contact with the soil, the type of soil, its moisture content-all these affect the rate of putrefaction.’

As Challis and Ellen watched, Freya and the forensic technician lifted the body onto a stretcher, and then the technician peered into the grave. ‘There’s a section of matted leaves here, not fully broken down yet.’ He looked up, pointed silently at a stand of nearby poplars, on the paddock side of the railing fence. Skeletal now, but only weeks earlier they’d been losing their leaves.

Challis nodded. Now the technician was digging down to consolidated soil, ready to begin the process of sifting the loosened material. Challis touched Ellen’s forearm. ‘You’ve combed the area around the grave?’

‘Of course.’

He needn’t have asked. ‘Thanks.’

Ellen nodded.

‘The clothing hasn’t rotted,’ Freya said, ‘no root growth through the rib cage or pelvis, nothing interesting in fact, just a young man interred in a shallow grave-sometime in the past month or six weeks, would be my guess.’

‘You’re not paid to guess, Doc,’ Ellen said, attempting humour.

‘Until I get him into the lab, I am,’ said Freya said. She was peering at the body, a vaguely human shape covered in damp soil and leaf mould. ‘I can’t see any insect activity, so he was probably buried soon after he died. And no signs that the foxes had got to him. They would have, eventually.’

‘How did he die?’

‘It’s possible he was shot in the chest,’ Freya replied, glancing down at the body. ‘There’s a hole in his upper clothing and what appears to be blood. If so, there’s no exit wound, but I can’t at this stage confirm that it was a gunshot or that it killed him.’

She turned to Challis. ‘Release the body. I’ll do the autopsy tomorrow.’ She glanced at Ellen. ‘Who will attend for the police?’

‘I will,’ he said.

‘And the dead girl?’

Scobie Sutton opened his mouth to speak, but Challis stopped him. ‘No sense in tying two of us up, Scobie.’

Sutton nodded, relieved. ‘I have to inform her mother anyway,’ he said, trudging away from them to the collection of private and official vehicles parked at the side of the road.

‘I haven’t searched his pockets for ID,’ Freya said, as she backed away, peeling off her gloves.

‘I’ll do that now,’ Ellen said.

She crouched over the body, feeling the pockets, examining the hands and wrists for rings or a watch. ‘Nothing,’ she said eventually, but then stood, a strange excitement in her body. ‘Except for one thing.’

‘Except for the missing finger,’ Freya wryly.

Challis tingled. He felt alive suddenly, and leaned over to look. The ring finger of the right hand. ‘Foxes, Doc?’

Freya Berg shook her head. ‘The finger was torn off some time ago. Years rather than weeks or months.’