The Restless Dead

14

The black-headed gull had found something. It stood with its head cocked, eye levelled at the mud, then stabbed down with its beak. There was a brief, uneven tug of war before the bird plucked a small brown crab from the creek bed. The crab’s legs wriggled as it was dropped on its back, the instinct to survive continuing even in the last moments of life. Then the yellow beak came down again, tearing at the vulnerable underbelly, and the crab became another part of the food chain.

I looked away as the gull went about its meal. Beside me on the bank, Lundy stared down at the waterlogged torso suspended on the barbed wire.

‘So this is what you call keeping a low profile, is it?’

It was said without any real heat. But we both knew this was different from when I’d found the training shoe.

This changed everything.

The body was strung out on the barbed wire like so much dirty washing. The water level in the creek hadn’t yet dropped enough to expose all of it, but from the waist up the torso was now revealed in all its decaying glory. Police officers and CSIs stood around in coveralls on the bank, waiting for the water to sink low enough for the unenviable task of recovery to begin. At least the tide meant there was no need for police divers: by the time they could have got here the creek would have drained enough not to need them.

Right now, though, it seemed like a long wait.

I’d gone back to Creek House after Trask and I had freed his daughter from the barbed wire. There was no point in staying with the body until the police arrived. For one thing it had sunk under the water again; it wouldn’t be going anywhere. For another, I needed to change out of my wet clothes. I’d only just shaken off one chill after standing around soaking wet, and I’d pushed my luck enough as it was.

I steered the boat while Trask huddled with his daughter. The sight of them together made me feel more of an outsider than ever, and stirred something that was uncomfortably like envy. Although Fay was older than my own daughter had been when she’d died, she was still younger than Alice would be now. The realization lay heavily on me as the boat droned along the creek.

Telling myself it was probably cold and fatigue talking, I focused on more immediate problems. We couldn’t do much for Fay’s wounds out there, but although she’d need stitches none of the cuts looked deep enough to have caused serious blood loss. More worrying was the risk of infection from the contaminated water. A decomposing corpse was host to all manner of bacteria, some of them potentially deadly. I’d received shots for most of them because of my work, and I was on antibiotics anyway. But the girl would need a full course of inoculations, and so would her father. We’d both gashed our hands on the barbed wire, and Trask’s cuts were much worse than mine.

Still, I didn’t think there was any great danger. They hadn’t come into direct contact with the body, and the creek’s saline waters were kept fresh by the constantly flowing tides. The most immediate threat to Fay was shock and hypothermia. Although the water temperature wasn’t as low as it could have been, we were only just coming into spring and it was still cold. I’d given Trask my dry jacket to wrap her in, but other than that there wasn’t much I could do. Except one, small thing.

Trask had looked stunned, his face bloodless as I started the engine and set us back on course for the house, keeping to the deeper water in the middle of the creek. He said nothing, but it wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.

He jerked, startled, when I touched his shoulder to get his attention. ‘It was male,’ I told him quietly. ‘OK? It was male.’

He seemed to sag, then made a visible effort to pull himself together. Giving a nod, he hugged his daughter to him while I opened up the motor and sent the boat roaring back down the creek.

I hoped I’d done the right thing.

The truth was that it was impossible to guess the corpse’s gender, and certainly not from the brief glimpse I’d had. Under normal circumstances I would never have committed myself like that. But the young girl needed her father, and Trask looked like a man close to the edge. Small wonder. Only two days ago the body of his wife’s suspected killer had been found. That was enough for anyone to deal with without having to agonize over whether we’d just found his missing wife’s remains as well.

And so I’d spoken as a doctor rather than a forensic anthropologist. If I was right, then it would spare the family days of tortured waiting. If I was wrong… well, I’d made mistakes before, and for worse reasons.

Back at the house, I’d called Lundy to let him know what had happened and agreed to meet him out at the creek. With Trask’s hands badly cut from the barbed wire, Jamie had driven his father and sister to hospital. I’d changed into dry clothes from my bag and patched up my own cuts as best I could. My jacket was no longer needed — Fay had been wrapped in a blanket — but it was wet and muddy. Leaving it there, I’d accepted Rachel’s offer of an old one of Trask’s, and also a pair of wellingtons to replace my waterlogged boots. The melancholy that had gripped me on the way back had faded now I had something to do. All things considered, physically at least I didn’t feel too bad. A little shaky, but that was more adrenalin than anything else. When I found out that Rachel was taking the injured dog to an emergency vet, I asked her to drop me off as close as possible to the stretch of creek where we’d seen the body.

It was easier reaching the place on foot than I’d thought. The road crossed a small bridge that was only fifty yards from where Fay had been caught on the barbed wire. It made a convenient landmark for the police to assemble at, and there was also a trail of sorts — a dirt path that ran from the bridge to the creek itself. From there, it took only a few minutes to walk along the bank to the trapped pool of water where we’d seen the body.

First to arrive were a pair of uniformed PCs. One of them waited at the bridge while I took the other to the creek, and shortly afterwards the rest of the orderly circus that attends a crime scene began to troop up as well. By the time Lundy and Frears got there the creek’s level had dropped as though a plug had been pulled, exposing loops of barbed wire that coiled from the water like rusty brambles.

Inch by inch, the body emerged. The head first, its crown breaking through the surface like the dome of a jellyfish. Then the shoulders, chest and arms. It wore a heavy leather jacket that could have been either black or brown, although it was too filthy and waterlogged to be sure. The body was suspended face down. One elbow was bent the wrong way, and the hands had fallen away to reveal stubs of bone and gristle inside the jacket cuffs. Tilted at a sideways angle, the head also looked on the verge of coming loose, supported more by the barbed wire than any remaining connective tissue.

Frears had waited until the water level was low enough for him to get a look at the body and then headed back to the mortuary. It was obvious that freeing the fragile remains from the barbed wire without damaging them was going to be a slow process, and the pathologist didn’t strike me as the patient sort. Not that there was much point in his staying. Clarke was tied up in court, but Lundy was more than capable of overseeing the recovery until she got there.

There was no reason for me to stay either: as a witness I’d technically no right to even be there. But no one suggested I leave, so I sat down on a convenient hummock with a plastic cup of coffee Lundy had provided and watched as the tide slowly revealed its secret.

‘Not something you’d want a kid to see, is it?’ the DI commented as the CSIs began to wade into the creek. ‘Bad place for her dog to go for a swim. You reckon it could smell it?’

‘Probably.’

I’d had time to think it over as I’d been waiting. A dog’s sense of smell would be sensitive enough to detect a badly decomposed corpse when the ebbing tide brought it closer to the surface. Rachel had told me that Trask had only bought his daughter’s pet after his wife disappeared, so they’d owned it less than seven months. It had been a long, wet winter that would have discouraged walks in the Backwaters. It was possible — likely, even — that the excitable young animal hadn’t had a chance to discover the intriguing scent coming from the water until today.

The CSIs began negotiating the barbed wire to get closer to the body. They were wearing heavy duty gauntlets and chest-high waders, but I still didn’t envy them the task. Lundy continued to watch them as he spoke.

‘I spoke to Trask on my way here. He said you’d told him it’s male.’ His tone made it a question as well as a reproach.

‘I thought he’d got enough to worry about without wondering if this was his wife.’

‘And if you’re wrong?’

‘Then I’ll apologize. But even if this is a woman I don’t think it’s Emma Derby.’

Lundy gave a sigh. ‘No, me neither.’

The lower half of the body was still under the water, so it was hard to gauge its height. But, even allowing for bloating and the thick leather jacket, there was no mistaking the broadness of chest and shoulders. Whoever this was, it had been a heavy-framed individual.

That didn’t necessarily mean it was male. Determining the gender of a body, particularly a badly decomposed one like this, wasn’t always as clear-cut as it might seem. While male and female skeletal characteristics did exist, the line between them was often blurred. The skeleton of a juvenile male might superficially resemble an adult female, for instance. And not all fully grown men conformed to the traditional stereotype of large-boned masculinity, any more than every woman was petite.

I’d once worked on a case involving a skeleton over six foot tall. The skull had a heavy, square jawbone and thickly pronounced eye ridges, all strong male indicators. The police thought it could be a missing father of two who’d disappeared eighteen months before, until the oval-shaped pelvic inlet and width of the greater sciatic notch revealed the body to be female. Dental records eventually identified her as a forty-seven-year-old teacher from Sussex.

As far as I know, the missing man was never found.

Even so, from what little I could see of the body hanging on the barbed wire, one thing was clear. It was much too big to belong to the slender woman whose self-portrait I’d seen in the boathouse.

The level in the creek had fallen about as low as it was going to. The sandbank formed an effective dam on this side, trapping a pool of water perhaps twenty yards long and several feet deep. The efforts of the CSIs had exposed the body to its hips, but both legs were still hidden beneath the surface.

There was a debate between Lundy, the CSIs and the crime scene manager about the best way to get the body off the wire. ‘Can you drag the whole thing out?’ Lundy asked as the CSIs sloshed through the murky water.

One of them, a young woman rendered sexless and unrecognizable under the protective gear, shook her head. ‘Too heavy. I think the wire’s caught on the bottom. We’re going to have to try and get the body off.’

‘OK, but watch out for those barbs. I don’t want to have to fill out any accident forms.’

That merited a snorted laugh. Lundy stared at the body contemplatively. ‘How long would you say it’s been here?’ he asked me.

I’d been wondering that myself. Until Trask and I disturbed it, the body would have been submerged in the deeper water dammed by the sandbank even at low tide. That would make it decompose at a slower rate than if it had been exposed to sunlight and air, and with the barbed wire holding it in place it wouldn’t have suffered the wear and tear of being dragged around by tidal currents.

Still, there were too many unknowns to offer anything better than a rough guess. ‘It’s started to come apart and there’s quite a build-up of adipocere. That’s slow to form, so several months at least.’

‘But we’re talking months, not years?’

‘I’d say so.’ Any longer than that and the head would have fallen away. Submerged or not, the creek’s waters were relatively shallow and warm, and constantly moving with the in-and-out of tides.

‘Has anyone else local been reported missing?’

‘Only Emma Derby, and we can rule her out. But just so I’m clear, you think this has been in the water longer than the body from the Barrows?’

Lundy’s face gave nothing away, but I knew what he was thinking. Finding a second body so soon after the first was a potential — and unwelcome — complication, especially if the evidence suggested they’d died around the same time.

I could reassure him about that much, at least. ‘A lot longer for it to be in this condition. It’ll have decomposed more slowly underwater than on the surface, but a lot depends on how long it was drifting before it got caught up.’

‘If it was drifting.’

I looked at him. ‘You don’t think it was?’

He made a see-sawing motion with his head. ‘Not sure yet. Looks a bit too well trussed to me.’

I’d been focusing on the body rather than what it was caught on, assuming it had been deposited here by the tide. Now I paid more attention to the wire coils. Tatters of grass and torn plastic trailed from them like tired party streamers. The barbs were buried as deep as fishhooks, gouging indiscriminately into clothes and flesh. That could have happened as the creek rose and fell, the body’s own weight progressively working the rusty points deeper. But would that have snared it in so many places? Or entangled it quite so much? There were even strands of wire caught on the back of the remains, apparently by chance. That could have been caused by the natural motion of the water in the creek: as well as twice daily tides, storms and tidal surges which would have caused both body and wire to shift around.

Yet now Lundy had planted the doubt, I saw what he meant. Earlier, I’d been angry at whoever had casually dumped barbed wire in the creek.

Perhaps there hadn’t been anything casual about it at all.

Moving the body from the creek proved even harder than anyone had expected. It was too badly decomposed for the barbs to be removed while it was still in the water, so a decision was made to leave them embedded while the wire was snipped with cutters.

Lundy had told me of the plan rather than ask my advice, but I’d agreed that sounded the best approach. Only then did he turn to the CSIs and give them the go ahead to start.

Each time a wire parted, the body would sag and cause the whole mass of coils to flex, vibrating like a strummed guitar. It took more than half an hour, but eventually the last strand parted with a twang. Still sprouting stubs of clipped wire like coarse hairs, the remains were eased on to a stretcher and brought to the side. I moved aside as the body was set down on the bank. Up close there was the familiar reek of putrefaction. A few flies darted around, but this was too far gone even for their rarefied tastes.

This was the first chance I’d had to take a good look at it, and nothing I saw contradicted the instinctive reassurance I’d given Trask that it was male. This had been a big individual, not a giant but well over six feet tall. The jacket was biker-style, made from thick dark leather, with a rusted metal zip. A black shirt, now filthy and torn, hung loosely over black jeans. The right leg was at a strange angle, with something protruding under the denim below the knee, making me think the tibia and fibula of the shin were probably broken as well as the left elbow. I’d expected the feet to have fallen away like the hands, and it had crossed my mind that the right foot I’d found inside the training shoe before might be from these remains rather than Leo Villiers’. Lundy hadn’t said anything else about that, and the idea of the cheap trainers belonging to the wealthy failed politician still bothered me.

When the body emerged from the water, though, I saw it still wore a pair of calf-high leather boots. They would have protected the vulnerable ankle joint, preventing the feet from detaching as they otherwise would. I looked at them and then back to the jacket, on the verge of grasping a half-formed thought.

But whatever it was slipped away. There was more than enough here to consider anyway. The eyes had been picked away by scavengers, and most of the hair had sloughed off the scalp, leaving only a few lank strands of indeterminate colour. A dirty-white coating of adipocere had formed over the whole head and neck, giving it a waxy, mannequin-like appearance. Not even that could disguise the damage that had been inflicted on the face. From the forehead down, it was striped with raw, parallel slashes that had gone through both flesh and bone. The nasal area was all but obliterated, and a series of cuts had taken away most of the teeth and shattered those that were left. They extended across the throat and on to the chest, slicing through the thick leather to expose the underlying ribs before petering out.

I looked at Lundy, to see if he was thinking the same thing as me. This was the second body we’d found in the waters around the estuary that had its identifying facial features destroyed. Not by a shotgun this time, but the damage was every bit as bad.

‘I know,’ Lundy said, answering my unspoken query. ‘Doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

‘Boat propeller,’ one of the CSIs asserted, a big man red-faced from exertion. ‘I’ve seen that sort of thing before. Body’s floating along just below the surface, boat comes along and bam!’

He slapped his fist into his palm. Lundy gave him a reproving look before turning to me.

‘What do you think, Dr Hunter?’

‘It’s possible,’ I admitted. The wounds could have been caused post-mortem, and at first glance they seemed consistent with the parallel slashes caused by a small boat propeller. Or, at least, what I could see of them under the adipocere. But there was a flaw in that theory.

‘I’m not sure how a propeller could have struck the face,’ I said. ‘Not to that extent. The body would have been floating face down, not on its back.’

‘I know how bodies float,’ the big CSI snapped. ‘The boat could have rolled it over first. It’s got a busted arm and leg, so that’d explain them as well.’

I still didn’t like it, but there was no point in arguing. Until the body could be examined at the mortuary it was all speculation anyway. And it would be someone else doing that, I reminded myself. Lundy had done me a favour by letting me stay for the recovery, but I was under no illusions that Clarke would suddenly change her mind and allow me back on the investigation. She’d been annoyed enough with me even before this.

The DCI still hadn’t appeared, but Lundy got a call from her as the remains were being carefully lowered into a body bag. He moved off down the bank to take it, looking at the body as he spoke. He listened, nodding, then ended the call and headed back.

‘That was the chief. She’s been held up in court so she’s going straight to the mortuary.’

It was a convenient opening for what had been on my mind. ‘You’re going to need a forensic anthropologist for this.’

I’d been thinking it through while he’d been on his phone, realizing this could be the last chance I’d have to press my case. Lundy just nodded.

‘You’re probably right. How are the hands?’

I’d forgotten about the cuts from the barbed wire. I flexed my plaster-covered fingers, only becoming aware of the soreness now he’d mentioned it.

‘They’re OK,’ I said, not really caring just then. ‘Look, since I’m here don’t you think it’s stupid for me not to take a look?’

‘That’s up to the chief.’ He seemed amused. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t call her stupid, though.’

I was letting my frustration get the better of me. ‘I’d still like to talk to her.’

‘Fair enough. You can ask her about it at the mortuary.’

‘At the mortuary…?’ His easy agreement took me by surprise. ‘So Clarke wants me to examine the body?’

‘I don’t know, she’s not said anything about that.’ Lundy grew serious. ‘There’s something else we’d like your opinion on.’