The Restless Dead

3

Salt spray stung my face as the RHIB heeled over to one side. I wiped it from my eyes, gripping the edge of my seat as we skimmed over the water. The estuary wasn’t particularly rough but we were heading against the tide and wind. The boat juddered as its bow smacked into successive waves, each one sending a curtain of cold spume into the open cockpit.

It was fully light now, although the sun was no more than a diffuse glow in the overcast sky. The smell of plastic from the boat’s hull mixed with diesel fumes and salt-soaked rope. The marine unit sergeant stood at the controls, riding the waves easily as he gripped the small wheel. I sat behind him with Lundy and three other life-jacketed officers from the marine unit. The boat was cramped. The six of us shared it with a stretcher and two piles of aluminium stepping plates, set either side of the boat so as not to unbalance it.

I was jerked in my seat as the boat hit a wave head on. Lundy gave me a smile, his glasses flecked with water. ‘You all right, there?’ he shouted above the noise of the wind and engine. ‘Shouldn’t be much longer!’

I nodded. I’d sailed when I was younger, and normally the choppy ride wouldn’t have bothered me. It wasn’t helping the vaguely washed-out feeling I’d woken with, but I tried to put it from my mind. I’d been given a lifejacket to wear as well, this one bright orange rather than the dark blue of the marine unit’s. My chest-high rubber waders were uncomfortable to sit in, as were the waterproof coveralls I wore underneath. Still, looking at the estuary’s muddy banks on either side, I knew I’d be glad of them later.

The tide had returned with surprising speed. By the time I’d changed and collected my flight case of equipment from the car, the marine unit were already manhandling the boat down the slipway and off the trailer. The channel in front of the quayside was almost completely flooded, water slopping around the concrete ramp as the estuary’s mud and shingle disappeared under the encroaching sea.

‘We’re not going to have much time,’ Lundy had warned me as we’d stood by the slipway. ‘The helicopter says the body’s grounded partway up a sandbank, but it won’t stay there long. The tide here comes in quicker than a man can run, so we’ll need to work fast.’

Very fast, by the sound of it. This was going to be a race to recover the body before the returning tide floated it off again, which made me question even more why I was there. Although I preferred to examine remains in situ given the chance, there wasn’t going to be much time to do that here. The priority would be to retrieve the body as quickly as possible, and Lundy and the marine unit were perfectly capable of doing that by themselves.

I stared over the RHIB’s blunt bow as we reached the deeper water in the middle of the estuary and then headed out towards the Barrows. The sandbanks lay dead ahead, a natural barrier stretching almost from shore to shore. They’d been isolated by the rising tide but they were still exposed, smooth brown humps emerging from the water like a pod of beached whales. Beyond them, where the estuary met the open sea, I could see three strange-looking structures rising from the water. They were too far away to make out any detail, but from the pitching boat they looked like square boxes perched on pyramidal stilts. Oil derricks, perhaps, although they seemed too close to the shore for that.

Lundy saw me looking. ‘It’s a sea fort.’

‘A what?’

We had to yell above the din of the engine. ‘A Maunsell sea fort. The army and Navy built them along the coast during the Second World War to keep German ships out of the estuaries. This is an army one. It used to have seven towers all linked by walkways, but these three are all that’s left.’

‘Is it still in use?’ I shouted. Lundy said something but it was lost in the wind and noise. I shook my head. He leaned closer.

‘I said only by seagulls. None of the army forts are. A few of them were used by pirate radio stations back in the sixties, like the one here and at Red Sands in the Thames estuary. But most were either dismantled or fell down years ago. There was talk about turning this one into a hotel a while back, but nothing came of it.’ Lundy shook his head at the thought of such folly. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised. I wouldn’t want to stay there.’

Neither would I, but we were almost at the Barrows so I gave up attempting any more conversation after that. It became blessedly quieter as the RHIB throttled down, slowing to make its approach. It was possible to hear the chop of the helicopter now. It hovered ahead of us, lights winking as it held station above the body.

The marine unit sergeant eased the RHIB between the sandbanks. They rose up like small islands all around, waves lapping at their smooth sides. It wouldn’t be much longer before the rising tide covered them, and I understood what Lundy had meant about the Barrows making the estuary all but impassable. It was hard enough negotiating them even when they could be seen above the surface. Hidden by the high tide they’d be treacherous.

We were almost directly under the helicopter now. The wash from its rotors was deafening, buffeting us and flattening the water’s surface.

‘There it is.’

Lundy pointed at something ahead of us, but I couldn’t see past his bulky figure. Then the RHIB slowed and came around, and I had my first sight of the body. The tide had deposited it partway up the muddy slope of a sandbank, a sodden mess of clothing slumped in the stillness only the inanimate and the dead can achieve. It lay face down with its head nearest the water and its legs and feet trailing up the sandbank, angled away from us. As I watched, a gull landed nearby, but after hopping closer to examine the body it lost interest.

I knew then this was no recent drowning.

Lundy spoke into his radio, raising a hand in acknowledgement as the helicopter rose up and banked away. Our momentum carried us forward as the boat’s engine was cut, and in the sudden silence there was a bump as we ran aground. Intent on the body, I began to climb out of the boat. The sandbank looked solid enough but it had the gelid, grainy consistency of wet mortar. I almost overbalanced as my leg sank in up to my knee.

‘Careful there,’ Lundy said, grabbing my arm. ‘Best wait till we’ve got the stepping plates down. You’ve got to watch yourself on this stuff or you’ll be in up to your waist.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, embarrassed. I tugged my foot free, glad of the waders. I could see now why the police hadn’t wanted to winch anyone down from the helicopter. It would have been impossible to recover the body that way without getting stuck.

The marine unit officers began laying down stepping plates on the sandbank, making a path up to the body. The metal plates sank under our weight, water squeezing up around their edges. They were soon smeared and slippery, but it was better than trying to walk across the wet sand.

I stayed back while they worked, noting the haphazard arrangement of limbs. The tide had deposited the body face down, in the same position as it would have been floating. It wore a long, dark coat of waxed cotton or some similar stiff material, caked in mud and ballooned by the air still trapped inside. One arm was by its side while the other was draped across its head in apparent abandon.

Even from where I stood I could see that the hands and feet were missing.

‘I’d like to take a look before we move it,’ I said to Lundy when the officers finished laying the plates. He gave a nod.

‘It’ll have to be quick. Another few minutes and this is going to be underwater.’

He was right. Despite his earlier warning I was still surprised by how fast the tide was returning. Waves were already snapping at our heels; in the time it had taken to lay the stepping plates the water level had kept pace with us, rising more than halfway up the sandbank’s slope.

Careful not to slip on the muddy plates, I picked my way up to the body. It looked a forlorn thing lying there, like something discarded and thrown away. Another gull hopped towards it, leaving arrowhead-shaped prints in the wet sand. It launched itself into the air and flapped away, cawing in protest as I approached. More of them wheeled above us in the zinc-coloured sky, but like the lone seabird I’d seen earlier, none paid any attention to what lay on the sandbank. That said a lot about its condition. If voracious scavengers like gulls weren’t interested then it must be badly decomposed.

That was confirmed a moment later when the wind shifted, and the rank odour of rotting animal tissue polluted the salty tang. I stopped a few feet away and studied the body. Even lying crumpled as it was, in life this would have been a taller than average individual. That made it more likely to be male, although not certain: it could be an unusually tall woman. Most of the head was concealed by the long coat, which had bunched up over it like a hood, so only a few sparse strands of sand-clogged hair were visible above the collar.

I crouched down for a better look. Blunt stumps of pallid bone and gristle emerged from the trouser bottoms, while the forearms ended at the wrists. A gold watch was embedded in the swollen flesh of one of them. There were no signs of the missing hands or feet on any of the nearby sandbanks, but I’d have been surprised if there had been. Although this wouldn’t be the first body I’d encountered where the hands had been removed to prevent identification, I couldn’t see any obvious damage to the bones of the wrists and ankles here to suggest they’d been severed. With no clothing to protect them, the hands and feet would have simply fallen away as the connective tissue of the joints decomposed.

I took my camera from the bib pocket of my waders and began taking photographs. I didn’t hear Lundy approach until he spoke.

‘You can have copies of our video.’

I glanced round: he moved lightly for a big man, even on the metal plates. ‘Thanks, but I’ll take a few of my own anyway.’

I usually did: that way I’d only have myself to blame if I missed anything. Lundy stood looking down at the body. ‘Male, by the look of things. Must have been in the water a while to lose its hands and feet. Fits with how long Leo Villiers has been missing, wouldn’t you say?’

I’d been waiting for him to ask. Normally, estimating a time-since-death was something of a speciality of mine. I’d trained at the original body farm in Tennessee, where human cadavers were used for controlled experiments into decomposition. I’d learned how to establish when an individual had died, assessing bacterial activity and the degree of putrefaction, using esoteric formulae to analyse the breakdown of a body’s volatile fatty acids. I could say without conceit that I understood as well as most forensic entomologists the life cycle of blowflies, and the way different insects will colonize a rotting corpse. And while I still preferred to call it experience rather than instinct, over the years being able to accurately judge such things had become second nature.

But that was on land. On land a body would stay in one place, and nature cooperated by providing obligingly measurable criteria. Water was different. While there was no shortage of aquatic scavengers, there wasn’t a water-based equivalent of a blowfly, whose life cycle provided a convenient stopwatch to gauge time-since-death. And a floating body would move, changing depths and therefore temperature as it was subjected to tides and currents. The situation was even more complex in an estuary like this, where river met sea and marine and freshwater ecosystems converged.

I looked down at the body. Except for the gnarled joints of the wrists and ankles the coat covered most of it. Still, I could see enough. ‘In these conditions it wouldn’t take long for the hands and feet to detach, even at this time of year. So probably, yes…’

At the last second I stopped myself from adding but. Four to six weeks was certainly long enough for the hands and feet to drop away in shallow tidal waters like this. That wasn’t what bothered me, but I didn’t want to say anything until I’d seen more.

Lundy looked at me for a moment, as though expecting me to go on. When I didn’t he gave a nod. ‘Right, let’s get it in the boat.’

I moved aside as two marine officers clumped along the stepping plates, carrying the stretcher between them. The sergeant followed with a body bag and a folded plastic sheet.

‘How’re we going to do this?’ one of them asked, setting down the stretcher and looking at the face-down body with distaste.

‘Roll it over on to the sheet, then we can lift that into the body bag,’ the sergeant instructed. He turned to Lundy, remembering at the last minute to include me as well. ‘Unless you’ve any other ideas, sir?’

‘Just so long as we get it back in one piece,’ Lundy said equably. ‘That sound OK to you, Dr Hunter?’

It wasn’t as though there were a lot of options. I shrugged, knowing the question was a formality. ‘Yes, fine. Just be careful with it.’

The marine unit sergeant exchanged a look with one of his team, passing silent comment on my advice. The tide was already lapping at the body’s head as the plastic sheet was unfolded and spread out next to it. The officers all wore masks and thick rubber gauntlets as well as chest-high waders similar to mine. Now I’d finished with the camera, I put on a mask and gauntlets of my own, pulling them over the thin blue nitrile ones I’d been wearing.

‘OK, nice and careful. Lift and turn on three. One, two…’

The body shifted sluggishly as it was eased on to the plastic sheet. A waft of foul, damp air was released as it sucked free of the wet sand and flopped on to its back. One of the marine officers turned away, raising an arm to cover his nose.

‘Oh, nice.’

Wrapped in the long coat, the thing lying on the plastic sheet no longer looked human. There was no hint left of age, race or gender. Most of the skin and flesh was gone from the skull, and the eye sockets were empty holes. The vulnerable balls of jelly would have been one of the first targets of scavengers. There were even early signs of adipocere, a dirty white build-up as though a melted candle had been dripped on to the remaining features. It was a caricature of a face, hollow eye sockets clogged with sand, while the nose was a stub of gnawed gristle. That was only to be expected, given how long the body had been in water.

But the lower face was missing completely. Where the mouth should have been was a gaping maw that exposed the cartilaginous tissue at the back of the throat. The jawbone, or mandible, was completely gone and only a few shattered stumps of teeth remained in the upper jaw.

The head had tilted to one side as the body had been rolled on to the sheet. Now it wasn’t covered by the coat collar I could see what looked like an exit wound at the rear of the skull, big enough to put my fist in.

Unperturbed, Lundy studied it, then turned to me. ‘What do you think, Dr Hunter? Shotgun?’

I realized I was frowning. I roused myself. ‘It looks like it,’ I agreed. The damage to the lower face certainly suggested the more explosive violence of a shotgun rather than a rifle or handgun. ‘There’s something embedded at the back of the throat.’

Without touching the body I leaned closer for a better look. An object was buried in the mangled bone and tissue: a small brownish disc, too regular to be natural.

‘It’s the wad from a shotgun shell,’ I said, making no attempt to remove it.

That would confirm the type of weapon. Not that there was any real question, but it was unlikely any of the pellets would have lodged in the body. Shotgun pellets begin to disperse the moment they leave the barrel. The further they travel, the larger their spread, and the bigger the resulting wound. From the relatively small size of this one the pellets had been closely bunched, and remained so as they punched a hole through the back of the skull. That suggested they’d been fired at close range.

Very close.

‘Contact wound, by the look of it,’ I said. A shotgun blast fired from one or two centimetres created a sort of tattooing effect, and that was evident here. ‘There’s blackening on what’s left of the teeth and bone, quite a bit of searing still present on the soft tissue, too. The barrel was either inside the mouth or resting against it when it was fired. At that range I’m surprised the wad from the shell didn’t go through as well.’

Lundy nodded agreement. ‘So it could be self-inflicted.’

‘It could, yes.’

A contact wound would be in keeping with a suicide, especially when a shotgun was used. The length of most shotgun barrels made it awkward to reverse them and still reach the trigger, so contact was usually unavoidable. Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility that someone else had shot him.

Lundy must have picked up on my tone. His eyes creased in a smile, although I couldn’t see it because of his mask. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not jumping to any conclusions. But it looks like it’s who we thought it would be.’

I couldn’t argue with that. A potentially suicidal man had gone missing along with his shotgun, and now a body with a close-range gunshot wound had been found. There seemed little doubt this was Leo Villiers.

I said nothing.

Lundy beckoned to the waiting police officers. ‘OK, let’s get it on the boat.’

In the few minutes we’d been talking the tide was noticeably higher. The sea was already covering the lower edge of the plastic sheeting. As Lundy called in to report, I took hold of one corner while the marine unit officers took the others. Water streamed from the plastic as we lifted the dead weight and lowered it into the open body bag on the stretcher.

It seemed the least I could do; I hadn’t been able to contribute much else.

After everything had been loaded on to the RHIB, I took the same seat as before as the engine roared to life. The tops of the sandbanks had been above our heads not so long ago: now we were almost on a level as the tide rose. As the RHIB pulled away I looked back to where we’d just been. The waves were already lapping over where the body had lain, smoothing over the sand and erasing any sign that anything had been there.

Lundy nudged my arm as the boat picked up speed. He pointed to a rocky promontory that jutted into the estuary on the seaward side of the Barrows.

‘See over there? That’s Willets Point, where Leo Villiers lived.’ Unlike most of the other places I’d seen around here, the promontory was thickly wooded. Almost hidden by the trees, a large white Victorian villa stood alone on the lonely outcrop of land. Its large bay windows faced out to sea over a small dock, their view only interrupted by the towers of the sea fort that guarded the estuary.

‘Used to be the family’s summer home, but it was mothballed until Villiers decided to move in a few years back,’ Lundy said, raising his voice above the engine. ‘His father splits his time between London and the main house near Cambridge, so he had it to himself. Not a bad bachelor pad, is it?’

It wasn’t, but the family’s wealth hadn’t done Villiers much good in the end. I thought again about the condition of the body. ‘You were saying earlier you weren’t sure exactly when he disappeared,’ I shouted. ‘How come?’

Lundy leaned closer so he could speak without yelling. ‘He wasn’t reported missing until a month ago, but the last actual contact anyone had with him was a fortnight before. He called a vet out to his house to put his old dog down. She said he was pretty cut up over it, and no one saw or spoke to him after that. No phone calls or emails, no social media. Nothing. So whatever happened was sometime during that two-week window. We haven’t narrowed it down beyond that, but the vet’s fee was the last time his credit card was used. So the thinking is that whatever happened was probably closer to six weeks ago than four, but nobody realized until later.’

‘No one missed him for two weeks?’ That might be feasible if this was some lonely pensioner without friends or family, but it seemed a long time for someone like Leo Villiers. ‘What about his father?’

‘They weren’t what you’d call close. Seems to have been a bit of tension there, so it wasn’t unusual for them to go weeks without talking. It was his housekeeper who reported him missing. Villiers didn’t have many staff, just her and a gardener who both came in once a week. She had her own key and it wasn’t unusual to find no one at home, so she didn’t bother at first. But then she turned up one week and the place was a mess. Bottles everywhere, dirty plates in the sink, half-eaten food. He’d thrown benders before, so she just tidied up and left. She noticed the Mowbry’s cabinet was unlocked and empty, which she thought was strange because Villiers rarely took it out. Didn’t like hunting, which is a surprise. But it wasn’t till she went back the following week and found the house exactly as she’d left it that she thought something might be wrong. There was post filling up the mailbox, Villiers’ car hadn’t moved and neither had the dinghy he kept there. So she had a look round, found the note and that’s when she called us.’

‘She didn’t call his father first?’

‘I don’t think Sir Stephen’s the sort who takes phone calls from staff. Besides, I think she felt the news was better coming from us. Shooting the messenger, and all that.’ Lundy looked sheepish as he realized what he’d said. ‘Sorry. Bad choice of words.’

‘What about the shotgun? Wasn’t it at the house?’ I asked. Even if the gun had fallen in the water it should have been found at low tide.

‘No, which made us wonder at first if someone else might be involved. But given the note and everything else, suicide still seemed more likely, so we were working on the theory that he shot himself somewhere else. Probably the Backwaters, which is why it’s taken so long for his body to turn up. Explains why we haven’t found the Mowbry as well.’

He sat back, leaving me to think over what he’d said. Leo Villiers had been missing at least four weeks, but more likely nearer to six. I weighed up the decomposition I’d just seen, and the probable factors that might affect a body drifting in these estuarine waters. There was temperature and scavengers, both aquatic and avian. And then the effect of brackish water and tides that would leave it exposed to wind and weather twice a day.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sun breaking through a gap in the gauzy cloud. It gilded the estuary’s choppy surface with points of light. There was a sudden glare from the shore as the sunlight glinted off something; a bottle or shard of glass. Then the sun was veiled again and it vanished.