The Restless Dead

10

‘You should have called me.’

Lundy sounded more reproachful than annoyed. We stood in the kitchen area of the boathouse, mugs of untouched tea cooling on the worktop. He was dressed more smartly than before, and I wondered if my call had interrupted his own bank holiday plans.

‘And what would you have said?’ I asked wearily. ‘For all I knew it was just some old trainer. I only went to set my mind at rest. And there wasn’t enough time before the next high tide to organize a search anyway.’

That earned a grudging sniff. ‘Pity you didn’t think to take a look when you saw it yesterday.’

Tell me about it. Once I’d seen what the training shoe contained, I’d been faced with a tough choice. Although I was loath to handle it myself — that was a CSI’s job — the tide was flooding back into the creek at an alarming rate. If I didn’t move it soon the water would, and I didn’t want to risk losing it again.

So, after taking photographs, I’d used a bin-liner to pick up the shoe, then reversed the plastic bag so it was wrapped inside. There was no mobile service out there, and it wasn’t until we were back at the boathouse that I could phone Lundy.

The DI had been surprised to hear from me, especially when I told him where I was staying. Trask obviously hadn’t mentioned it when they’d spoken earlier, but Lundy didn’t pass any comment beyond an exasperated sigh. He’d be right out, he told me, adding that I should stay put.

I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. The trek across the marsh had taken a lot out of me, and by the time Rachel and I had walked back to the boathouse I felt done in. While she made tea, I put the ice packs I’d frozen earlier into a plastic bag and slipped them into the cool-box with the foot before gratefully sinking on to a chair. I could see Rachel wanted to ask me about it, but she restrained herself. Just as well: I couldn’t have told her anything anyway.

I’d more questions than answers myself.

Lundy arrived sooner than I expected, with a pair of CSIs in tow. He stayed with me while Rachel took them to where we’d found the training shoe. I didn’t offer to go with them, knowing I’d already pushed myself more than I should, and in any case the high tide prevented walking along the creek. Rachel said there was a small road bridge that wasn’t too far from where we’d found the trainer, so they could take their car and go on foot from there. The three of them left, the CSIs taking the cool-box and its contents with them. Lundy barely waited until the door was closed before turning to me.

‘Right, Dr Hunter,’ he’d said, folding thick arms across his chest. ‘Care to tell me what’s been going on?’

Now he let out a long breath. ‘I don’t have to tell you how awkward this is, do I? Emma Derby’s family have been through enough without getting dragged into this.’

‘And if I’d known her husband’s name was Trask I might have made a better job of avoiding them,’ I shot back. ‘OK, I cocked up, I admit it. But what else could I do?’

Lundy pushed his glasses up on his forehead and kneaded the bridge of his nose. ‘Well, what’s done is done. At least we’ve got the foot. You say you’ve got photographs?’

I’d not had a chance to transfer the shots I’d taken at the creek to my laptop, so I found them on my camera and passed it over.

‘I’ll need emails of these,’ Lundy said as he studied the images on the small screen. ‘Doesn’t look like it was severed, does it?’

‘Not from what I saw.’

Although I’d known better than to examine the actual foot, by expanding the photographs on the camera’s screen I’d been able to view it in better detail. The curved sculpture of the talus — the ankle bone — was visible inside the filthy purple sock. Fish, crabs and seabirds had picked clean as much of the soft tissue as they could get to, but a few tattered vestiges still clung to the ankle’s exposed surface. Except for the tiny pitting caused by scavengers, the contoured face of the ankle bone itself was smooth, with no obvious evidence of cuts or splintering. Even from the little I’d seen, I felt certain that the foot had separated naturally when its connective tissues decomposed.

That was all I was certain about.

‘Looks too big to be a woman’s,’ Lundy said, flicking to another photograph. ‘Don’t suppose you saw what size it was?’

‘No, I thought I’d better bag it up and get it in the cool-box. It looked around a ten, but that’s only a guess.’

If that meant anything one way or the other he gave no sign. ‘Any thoughts on how long it might have been in the water?’

‘Not beyond the obvious. Long enough to detach from the leg, so at this time of year let’s say a few weeks. Beyond that I can’t say without examining it.’

‘So roughly the same length of time as the body we found yesterday.’

‘The foot will have been protected inside the shoe, so it could be longer. But possibly, yes.’

‘And there was no sign of the other foot?’ I just looked at him. He sighed. ‘All right, stupid question.’

If there had been I’d have already said so. But the feet and hands wouldn’t have fallen away at the same time. It would be sheer fluke if they’d ended up in the same place.

Lundy flicked back through the photographs to one that showed the entire training shoe. His lips pursed as he studied it.

‘Are you going to say it or shall I?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Say what?’

‘From what I’ve heard about him, that doesn’t look like something Leo Villiers would wear.’

‘Doesn’t mean he didn’t. People have all sorts of surprising things tucked away in their wardrobes.’

‘Purple socks?’

‘I grant you, it’s not the sort of thing I’d imagine Villiers wearing, but stranger things happen. We’re still trying to persuade his father to let us see his medical records, so until that happens for all I know he might be colour blind. It’s not as if anyone knew what clothes he had on when he went missing. We weren’t allowed to search his house, so we can’t say what sort of stuff he might have had there.’

‘You weren’t allowed?’ I asked, surprised. Withholding access to medical records before someone was officially declared dead was one thing, but I couldn’t see how anyone could prevent the police from carrying out a search, no matter who they were. ‘What about when Emma Derby disappeared?’

‘We didn’t have enough evidence to get a warrant.’ He shook his head, annoyed at the memory. ‘His father’s lawyers were all over us. We carried out a cursory search when he was reported missing, to make sure he wasn’t dead in a spare room or something. They couldn’t stop us from doing that. But somebody had obviously been through the place already by then. The housekeeper said she’d tidied it before she realized he’d disappeared, but this had been cleaned top to bottom.’

‘Wasn’t that obstruction?’

Lundy took a new packet of antacids from his pocket and began stripping off the plastic. ‘Nothing we could successfully argue. It wasn’t as if we knew what we were looking for, except perhaps Emma Derby’s body, so we couldn’t accuse anyone of destroying evidence. But the point I was making is that we don’t know enough about Leo Villiers to say he didn’t own cheap trainers and purple socks. If he was planning to blow his brains out with a shotgun he probably wasn’t too bothered about what he had on his feet anyway.’

He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.

‘You’re not happy about this either, are you?’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter what I am.’ He crunched down on two antacids as though taking it out on them. ‘Frankly, I’d rather believe that Villiers Junior had dodgy taste in footwear than the alternative, which is that we’ve got another dead body missing its feet somewhere.’

There was another possibility, but now wasn’t the time to go into that. Besides, I felt sure that Lundy would be aware of it already.

‘Do you know when Frears is planning on examining the foot?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to be there.’

Lundy suddenly seemed uncomfortable. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’

I tried to hide my disappointment. An individual foot might not tell us very much, but I’d assumed the police would want me to take a look anyway. And while I was there I’d thought I could examine the body from the estuary as well. I was still annoyed with myself for missing the post-mortem, and even if I couldn’t add to the pathologist’s findings I’d at least like to know I’d done what I could.

Now I wouldn’t get the chance. ‘So Clarke’s mad at me,’ I said.

Lundy sighed. ‘There are enough complications with this case as it is. The chief doesn’t want any more.’

‘How is letting me examine the foot complicating things?’

‘Well, apart from missing the post-mortem, you’ve ended up being house guest with the family of a missing woman, and taken her sister on a hunt for a misplaced body part. Not bad going for twenty-four hours, is it?’

Put like that it didn’t sound good, but we both knew that wasn’t a fair picture. ‘Aside from the fact that I didn’t know who they were, you’d already told me I was off the investigation before I even thought about renting this place.’

‘I know. And we wouldn’t have found the foot if not for you, I’m not disputing that. But the chief’s decided, so…’ He spread his hands. ‘I dare say she’ll come round once she’s calmed down. There’ll be other investigations in future. The best thing you can do now is keep a low profile.’

If my profile was any lower it wouldn’t exist. But Lundy was right, and antagonizing his SIO wasn’t going to help.

The DI took a drink of tea, closing the subject. ‘So how much longer are you planning on staying?’ he asked, setting down his mug.

‘Only until my car’s ready.’ I raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Was that a hint?’

He chuckled. ‘No, I’m just making polite chit-chat. To be honest, I’m surprised Trask let you stay here in the first place. Has he tried to discuss the case at all?’

Now we were getting to it. ‘No, and I made it clear I wasn’t going to talk about it.’

‘He did ask about it, then?’

‘Wouldn’t you if it was your wife?’

I hadn’t meant to snap. Recovering the foot had left me feeling irritable as well as washed out, but Lundy didn’t seem offended.

‘Fair enough, but I’m not convinced that wasn’t part of the reason he’s been so obliging. You know this boathouse was Emma Derby’s pet project? And getting his son to fix your car as well. Sounds like a bit of a charm offensive to me. Perhaps he reckons it can’t hurt to have a friendly police consultant on his side.’

I didn’t think ‘charm’ really applied to Trask’s manner. ‘That’s not the impression I got. If anything he seemed reluctant to let me stay, so I doubt he’ll be sorry to see me go.’

‘I dare say, but I wonder if he’d have been so amenable if you weren’t involved in the police inquiry.’

‘He didn’t know about that when he towed me out of the creek,’ I said. But I also remembered how I’d thought the Land Rover wasn’t going to stop, how its driver seemed to deliberate before coming back. And the offer of a tow to Creek House was only made after Trask found out why I was there. Even then he’d seemed torn. ‘It sounds as though you don’t like him much.’

‘It’s not a case of liking him or not. He can be an abrasive bugger but you’ve got to feel for him and his family. They’ve had a rough time of it this last year. Bad enough for his wife to go missing, but for it to come out that she’d been having an affair as well…’ Lundy shook his head, frowning into his tea. ‘The family’s had rotten luck. Trask’s first wife died not long after his daughter was born, some sort of complication after the birth. He had to bring up a baby and young lad by himself, which can’t have been easy. Then he meets this glamorous younger woman, London type who’s on the rebound herself, marries her and brings her out to the arse end of nowhere, if you’ll pardon my French. Christ knows what either of them were thinking, but it’s hard to see how it was ever going to work.’

‘Did he know about the affair with Leo Villiers before she went missing?’ I belatedly realized I’d no right to quiz him when I wasn’t on the investigation any more. But Lundy only shrugged.

‘He says he guessed she was seeing somebody, but not who it was. That came out later, when we pulled her phone records. There were a lot of recent calls to Villiers’ number, ending a few days before she disappeared. After that, everything pretty much pointed one way.’

‘You said yesterday that you’d suspected Trask at one point?’

Lundy’s smile was humourless. ‘He’s the husband; of course we did. But he was in Denmark for an architectural conference when she disappeared. Several witnesses saw or spoke to her after he’d gone, then two days later she dropped off the radar. His son and daughter were both away as well, the girl on a school trip and the lad staying with a friend from sixth form, so the alarm wasn’t raised until he got back later that week.’

I thought about the beautiful and assured woman in the framed photograph. Barring some unexpected stroke of luck, with Leo Villiers dead no one would ever know what had happened to her. Death was bad enough for a family to cope with, but for a loved one to simply vanish was even worse. And if her killer had disposed of her body in the Backwaters, as seemed likely, then there would be little left to recognize by now. The vitality, vanity, ambition and everything else that had made Emma Derby who she was would be long gone. Even though I hadn’t known her, I felt a familiar hollowness at how that could happen. The gulf between life and death is a mystery I couldn’t reconcile now any more than when I lost my own family.

‘Dr Hunter?’ Lundy said. ‘You all right?’

I pulled myself together. I’d been drifting: I was more tired than I’d realized. ‘Sorry. Just thinking.’

He drained his tea and put the mug down. ‘Well, I’d better get off. I’m supposed to be at my granddaughter’s birthday party this afternoon. She’s promised to save me a piece of cake, though I’m not holding my breath.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ I smiled at the bittersweet memory of my own daughter’s birthday parties. ‘How old is she?’

‘Four. Proper little madam, Kelly is. Already knows how to wrap me round her little finger.’

‘Have you any other grandkids?’

‘Not yet, but one’s on the way. My daughter Lee — that’s Kelly’s mum — is expecting her second.’ He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t seem two minutes since she was blowing out birthday candles herself. How about you? Do you… ah, do you have any plans for when you get back?’

He’d recovered well, but I knew what he’d been about to ask. Do you have any kids? He’d caught himself in time, so either he’d done his homework on me or someone had told him about my past. I’d grown adept at fielding the question by now, and while it would always be painful it rarely caught me off guard any more. But Lundy looked mortified, his already ruddy face blooming an even deeper red.

‘No, no plans,’ I said, brushing over it to spare his awkwardness.

‘Right. Well, thanks again.’ He stuck out a meaty hand for me to shake. ‘Safe journey, Dr Hunter.’

After Lundy had gone I poured my cold tea away and made another mug. Although I still felt wrung out, I couldn’t detect any chills or feverishness that might indicate the infection was flaring up. But the DI’s visit had left me feeling flat and depressed. I couldn’t really blame Clarke for not wanting me back on the investigation — I’d hardly covered myself with glory so far — but it was still a disappointment. Still, dubious circumstances or not, I’d redeemed myself to some extent by finding the foot. Going out on the marsh might have been ill-advised but at least I could return to London knowing I’d done something useful.

And it had been worth it to get to know Rachel better. We seemed to get on well now we’d cleared the air, and despite everything I’d enjoyed spending time with her. I’d got the impression she felt the same way. Yes, because nothing helps hit it off with someone like finding a rotting foot.

I drank the tea sitting in the chair by the arched window, looking at birds paddling on the full creek outside. I told myself I should call to find out what was happening with my car, but decided it could wait a few more minutes. Trask had said they’d let me know when it was ready, and hassling them wouldn’t get it done any faster.

Besides, I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to London. The prospect of spending the tail end of the bank holiday on my own in an empty flat settled on me like a pall. I could always head over to Jason and Anja’s, but it was a long drive and by the time I got there it would hardly be worth it.

I shifted to a more comfortable position in the armchair, stretching my feet out as I watched the afternoon slipping by outside. I’d only seen a little of the Backwaters, but I liked it here. The low-lying saltmarshes under the high sky had a restful, meditative quality. It seemed a long way from the noise and clamour of London, where the only green spaces were parks hemmed in by arterial roads. I’d not realized how tightly wound I’d become, how wrapped up in the grind of commuting and traffic. And the boathouse was a good place to stay: basic but with everything I needed. I’d be sorry to leave the peace and quiet.

Is that all you’ll be sorry to leave?

I didn’t know I’d dozed off until the sound of an engine outside woke me. I sat up, rubbing my eyes as I checked the time: I’d been out for over an hour. I felt better for it, though, still tired but clear-headed again. Thinking it must be Jamie with my car, I got up from the chair and almost tripped as I stubbed my foot on something under the rug. I swore, hobbling over to open the door just as someone knocked on it.

Rachel stood on the doorstep, hand raised. ‘Oh,’ she said, startled.

‘Sorry, I thought it was Jamie,’ I said, then felt like an idiot as I realized that didn’t make much sense.

‘What’s wrong with your foot?’ she asked, seeing me favouring it.

I straightened, trying to ignore the throbbing of my stubbed toes. ‘Nothing. I just caught it on something under the rug.’

‘That’s my fault, I should have warned you,’ she said, looking pained herself. ‘There’s an old trapdoor in the floor. The handle sticks up, so it’s a bit of a trip hazard. That’s another of those last-minute jobs I still need to do. Please tell me you haven’t broken it?’

‘I can’t vouch for the handle, but my foot’s OK.’ I smiled. Even if it wasn’t there was no way I was going to admit it. ‘How did it go with the CSIs?’

She shrugged. ‘There wasn’t much for them to do. They just took a few photographs of the creek where we found the shoe and then gave me a lift back to the house.’

She’d changed out of her wellingtons but wore the same red waterproof jacket as before. It was open to reveal a chunky Aran sweater that went well with her jeans.

‘Do you want to come in?’ I asked, standing back.

But she shook her head. ‘I’m not staying. I’m on my way to pick up Fay from a friend’s, but I told Jamie I’d drop by. The good news is that your car’s nearly ready. He’s changed the oil and stripped and cleaned everything, so it should be OK. He says you’re lucky it’s not a new car, because they’ve got more complicated electrical systems and he wouldn’t have been able to fix them.’

I tried to muster up some enthusiasm. ‘That’s great.’

‘Don’t build your hopes up. The bad news is it needs new spark plugs. Jamie doesn’t have any, so you’ve two options. There’s a big car spares store about twenty-five miles away that’s open on a bank holiday. He’s offered to pick some up from there. He says it shouldn’t take him long to get the car running again once he’s got them. I think he feels bad he hasn’t managed to finish it yet.’

That wasn’t his fault, and what he was suggesting would involve a fifty mile round trip for him, on a bank holiday Sunday afternoon. There was bound to be traffic once he hit the busier roads, and he’d still have to fit the replacement spark plugs when he got back.

‘What’s the other option?’ I asked.

‘There’s a petrol station at Cruckhaven that should have them. It’s only a local one, so it’ll be closed now. But it’ll be open tomorrow morning, if you don’t mind staying another night.’

I’d been so resigned to leaving that evening I didn’t know how to respond. God knows, I didn’t feel up to driving back to London after trekking across the marsh: I’d pushed my luck enough for one day. The sensible thing to do would be to rest up until to morrow, and Trask had already said that would be OK. But even if Clarke wasn’t already annoyed that I’d involved Emma Derby’s family, there was another potential drawback.

‘This petrol station isn’t called Coker’s, is it?’ I asked, remembering my attempt to call out a mechanic.

Rachel gave me a wary look. ‘No. Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

For a moment I thought she was going to pursue it, then she evidently decided against. ‘It’s up to you, but I’ve got to go into Cruckhaven in the morning anyway. I can pick up the spark plugs then and you’ll be on your way by lunchtime. It just depends how much of a hurry you’re in.’

No hurry at all, I thought, thinking about the empty flat waiting for me. I felt my resolve wavering.

‘What does your brother-in-law say?’

‘Andrew doesn’t mind either way.’ She pushed a hank of dark hair from her forehead, and for an instant I saw a resemblance to her sister. ‘It’s not as if you’re getting in anybody’s way out here.’

Again, I thought back to my conversation with Lundy. I’d told him I’d only stay until my car was repaired, but I didn’t say when that would be. One more night couldn’t make much difference, not if Trask didn’t object.

Besides, I’d already been thrown off the investigation.

‘Can I walk to Cruckhaven from here?’ I asked, stalling. I’d put on the family enough as it was without Rachel’s having to fetch sparks plug for me as well.

‘You can but it’s the best part of an hour, depending on the tide. And there’s not much point when I’m going there anyway.’ She gave me a sudden smile that carried a shade of embarrassment. ‘If it makes you feel any better why don’t you come with me?’

There were still any number of reasons why I shouldn’t. I felt a brief, internal tug of war.

‘I’d like that,’ I said.