Time of Death Page 13

  ‘I don’t know Steve,’ she said. She had decided that was probably a very good thing. She squeezed Linda’s hand and stared towards the curtained window.

  Thinking, I don’t know you.

  As Helen closed the bedroom door behind her, Charli stepped out of the bathroom. The girl stuck her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. Helen stared at the patterns embroidered on the legs. A peace symbol, a marijuana leaf.

  ‘All right?’ Helen asked.

  Charli let her shoulders drop and smiled at the stupidity of the question.

  Helen felt the blood move to her face. ‘You and your brother want anything?’

  The girl looked up and stared past her, the cistern filling noisily behind the bathroom door. ‘What are we having for tea?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Helen guessed that food was being brought in regularly but was unsure about the arrangements. She had not seen it happen the day before. ‘Want me to find out?’

  ‘Can we get chips?’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ Helen said.

  Charli spun a multicoloured bracelet around her wrist for a few seconds, then walked past Helen, keeping close to the wall. Helen turned to watch Linda’s daughter open the door of the second bedroom, just wide enough to squeeze through the gap.

  Walking into the kitchen, Helen had the distinct impression that she had interrupted something; the rise and fall of a muttered exchange, audible as she had come down the stairs. An Airwave radio unit lay on the worktop next to the sink. Carson and Gallagher watched her as she hooked her bag on the back of a chair and flicked on the kettle for want of anything else to do.

  ‘How’s she doing?’ Carson asked.

  Helen did not want tea. What she really needed was a large glass of wine, but she thought better of it, having put a couple away over lunch with Thorne an hour before.

  ‘Not great.’

  The pub, which Paula had told her about, had turned out to be no better than average, but Thorne had seen off a plate of shepherd’s pie happily enough, a pint and a half of Guinness. She guessed that even if he had been disappointed, he would not have said anything. She could tell that he was being . . . careful around her, still smarting from the argument by the fishing pool and, though she felt bad about it, she did not want to risk bringing the subject up. Getting into anything. She knew that his suggestion that they go for a walk had been purely for her benefit; that fresh air and exercise were right up there with heavy metal and sticking needles in his eyes. She could see how much she had pissed him off.

  Eating lunch, they had talked about Alfie and about her father, an unspoken agreement to leave what was happening in Polesford behind them for a few hours. They talked about Hendricks, Helen’s sister, the holiday in Portugal or Tenerife that they both knew now was unlikely to happen.

  Helen had said the right things, laughed when she might have been expected to and tried to be nice. Normal.

  ‘Wasn’t easy for her,’ Carson said now.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘This morning, at the station. A lot of things she didn’t want to hear.’

  ‘She told me.’

  ‘She tell you anything else?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Anything. I don’t know.’

  Helen looked at her. ‘What, like how she knows where the other girl’s body is, you mean? How the pair of them were in it together, some weird sexual thing. The two of them shagging each other’s brains out afterwards?’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Seriously, what do you think she’s going to tell me?’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ Gallagher said. Helen and Carson turned to look at the PC. ‘But I’ve spent the morning with Jessica Toms’ parents, so you know . . . ’ She nodded up at the ceiling. ‘I’m a bit short on sympathy.’

  ‘So, she deserves to feel like shit?’ Helen stepped towards her. ‘That what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not “deserves”.’

  ‘She deserves what she’s getting from those idiots outside?’ Helen pointed back towards the front of the house. ‘You can hear some of the things they’re shouting, can’t you? You’re not deaf as well as stupid?’

  ‘Haven’t we been through this before?’ Carson waited until Helen turned to look at her. ‘Professionally speaking, this isn’t really any of your business.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ Gallagher said. ‘I mean that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You’re her mate.’

  ‘What?’

  The PC’s face had reddened, those freckles subsumed by blood again, but she was trying hard to stand her ground. ‘All I’m saying, you’re maybe not the best judge, that’s all.’

  Helen fought to keep her voice down, its tone as even as possible. She had no desire for Sophie Carson to see her lose it. ‘Listen, whatever the twat she’s married to has done, and that still remains to be seen, you know, as far as the law’s concerned . . . she has done nothing. All right? Nothing.’

  Gallagher sniffed, looked away.

  ‘So, until you’ve got the faintest idea what you’re talking about, constable, I suggest you keep your mouth shut and we won’t fall out.’ She turned away, walked back to where the kettle had just turned itself off. She needed that wine more than ever, but went through the motions anyway. She opened a cupboard, reached for a mug and set it down nice and carefully on the worktop. She opened the fridge and looked inside for milk.

  ‘They charged him with murder half an hour ago,’ Carson said.

  Helen turned, one hand on the open fridge door.

  ‘The twat she’s married to.’ Carson stared, nothing in her face. Gallagher spread her legs and straightened a cuff of her crisp white shirt. ‘Thought you might want to tell her.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  It took no more than a single, short conversation with the woman at the café to find out where the woods were. A fifteen-minute walk away, that was all. Had they known where to look, he and Helen would have seen them from the car as they had driven out of town a few hours before.

  Thorne was still getting used to the speed at which word got around in this place.

  News spread quickly enough through a station, Thorne was well aware of that, quicker still within a squad. News, rumour, gossip; serious, malicious or simply because there was nothing else to do.

  There were not too many days like that, but coppers got bored easily.

  Chief Superintendent so-and-so has got the Rubberheelers on his case.

  Sergeant Whatsherface is on the sauce again.

  Detective Inspector You-Know-Who is having problems in the bedroom . . .

  Thorne knew how it went, had been on the receiving end of it himself often enough. He had come to recognise the look on faces, a moment before they turned away; the subtle change in the atmosphere when he walked into an incident room. Months now since the events on Bardsey Island and the jungle drums were still being beaten. A rumour that Thorne had let a prison officer die rather than risk the life of a friend. Waking from dreams of blackened bones and a stream of blood running over clifftops, he had thought about simply announcing that the rumours were true and that he would make the same choice again, if he had to. In the end he had decided to say nothing, well aware that those with a mind to bad-mouth him would quickly find some other reason to do so and happier that this story, at least, was one about which he was not ashamed. Truth or tittle-tattle, gospel or garbage; he had learned to live with it.

  This place though.

  Jesus . . .

  Thorne guessed that there would always have been something to talk about. Who someone was sleeping with or who had money troubles. Usual stuff. Gossip was currency in a town like this one, and suddenly everybody had struck gold. When it came to a station or a squad room, it was usually the same couple of people at the centre of everything. The ones getting those drums out. It was Thorne’s bad luck that the gobby
DS who could always be relied upon to have the latest gen had been with him on Bardsey Island.

  He wondered who the movers and shakers were in Polesford when it came to spreading the word.

  The woman who ran the café – had Paula said she was a friend? – was certainly a contender. Hare, the landlord of the Magpie’s Nest, clearly liked to talk, and with a bar full of coppers he was getting his info from very reliable sources. It was interesting to speculate, but Thorne knew that it was easy enough to find out. He would just need to see who the media were talking to. Who those reporters were thrusting microphones or cash at.

  He walked towards the woods thinking about the subtle difference between the smell of the truth and the stink of a lie. The people who were trusted to sniff them both out.

  Thinking about wolves, and people waving fresh meat around.

  If finding the woods had been straightforward, locating the spot where the body had been discovered was even less taxing. Though there was still an hour or so of good daylight left, the arc lamps had already been switched on around the crime scene. From the edge of the woods, Thorne could see a semi-circle of them burning, the light milky against trunks and bare branches a hundred yards into the trees; the glow of activity.

  Halfway there, Thorne stopped at a line of crime-scene tape. It snaked away on either side of him, tied to trunks and saplings; circling the grave site. He waited as a uniformed officer trudged across, showed his warrant card and ducked beneath the tape.

  That moment again . . .

  Wherever, whenever, hillside or housing estate. Just that movement, that simple act of lifting then ducking down and under, the tape brushing his shoulder, his iffy knee cracking; enough to get the blood ticking a little quicker.

  Like you always enjoy it,

  Most of the time . . .

  Though the body was long gone, there were still four or five scene of crime officers hard at work. Those ubiquitous plastic bodysuits, the familiar rustle as they moved. Watching them from Paula Hitchman’s front room, shot from the news helicopter, they had looked like aliens wandering in the woods. Some Spielberg movie. Gathering samples or waiting for a ship to collect them.

  A white forensic tent covered the area six feet or so around the grave. Thorne watched one SOCO walk in, another walk out. Plastic trays and evidence bags were piling up on a table in the centre of the clearing, though most seemed to contain only soil. The gravecut.

  Thorne walked across to where a SOCO was working with a sieve; singing quietly to himself, poking at clumps of sticky black earth with a nitrile-gloved finger. He looked up for a second at Thorne, went back to poking.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ Thorne asked.

  The SOCO looked up again. He barely glanced at the warrant card Thorne was once again brandishing. ‘Interesting stuff’s already gone to the lab,’ he said. The man wore glasses and had a dark moustache. There wasn’t too much else to be seen under the blue plastic hood. Might just as well have been an alien, albeit one with a Geordie accent. ‘We’re just tidying up, really. Belt and braces, you know how it goes.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  The SOCO laid down his sieve, scratched at his chest through the plastic suit. ‘There was a fag-end they were all getting very excited about.’ He nodded back towards the tent. ‘In with the body.’

  ‘You find that?’

  ‘Somebody else.’

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘Old man out with his dog. Usual story.’

  If he found it at all odd that a detective working the case would not know the answer to such basic questions, the SOCO showed no sign of it. Often the scene of crime team would be brought in from well outside the area. They might have no direct connection with the murder squad assigned to the investigation, would not necessarily even know their names.

  ‘Dog had done most of the digging for us,’ the SOCO said. ‘It wasn’t very deep.’

  ‘What kind of state was she in?’ Thorne asked.

  The SOCO stared for a few seconds, then laughed. ‘Sorry, I thought you were talking about the dog there for a minute. Not actually sure if it was a boy or a girl.’

  ‘The body,’ Thorne said.

  ‘She’d certainly been here for a while.’ The man stuck out his bottom lip and blew air up on to his face. The weather had improved considerably since the morning and though it was not what anyone would call balmy, Thorne knew how hot it could get inside those bodysuits. ‘Well, dead for a while, at any rate.’

  ‘Any clothing?’

  The SOCO shook his head. ‘Not much of anything, like I said.’

  ‘Weeks, then?’

  ‘God, yeah . . . she’d burst, pretty much. Plenty of creepy-crawlies in there helping themselves.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Burned as well, by the look of it. Seriously stinky.’

  Thorne looked towards the tent and sniffed, convinced for a second or two that there was a trace of the smell lingering. Not barbecue weather, so probably no more than simple association. Like fighting the urge to scratch when somebody talked about head lice.

  He knew what burned flesh smelled like.

  ‘So, there goes your killer’s DNA.’

  ‘Probably why he did it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Must be a pain in the arse for you guys.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trying to catch the smart ones.’

  ‘Sometimes they think they’re smarter than they are.’

  The SOCO smiled and picked up his sieve again. ‘Unfortunately, the same goes for some coppers too.’

  ‘Plenty of coppers,’ Thorne said.

  The SOCO nodded, looking at Thorne as though trying to decide if he was one of them. Thorne thanked the man for his time and left him to his soil and his singing; trying and failing to place the song as he walked away. By the time he reached the crime scene tape on the far side, he was desperate for a piss. He ducked beneath the tape and walked deeper into the woods, in search of somewhere suitable.

  Five minutes later, job done, Thorne emerged from behind a clump of bushes into the path of a man walking a large black dog. The dog immediately began barking and pulling at his leash; straining towards the bush behind which Thorne had just ‘marked his territory’.

  The man stared at Thorne, pulling the dog back.

  ‘Nice dog,’ Thorne said. The dog did not look particularly nice, but it was socially a little more acceptable than explaining what he had been doing in the bushes. The man kept staring and Thorne wondered if he should show his warrant card. ‘What kind is it?’

  ‘Labradoodle,’ the man said.

  Thorne wondered if this might be the dog responsible for discovering the body, then remembered that the SOCO had described the man as being old. This dog’s owner was mid-forties, if that. Though he was neither old nor decrepit, as far as Thorne could tell, he was carrying a walking stick. Thorne could only presume it was an affectation of some sort. ‘Labrador and poodle, right?’

  The dog was still pulling hard. ‘I’d normally let him off,’ the man said. ‘Give him a run. They’ve told us not to though, because of what’s happening over there.’ He nodded back towards the area of the woods Thorne had come from.

  ‘Probably be gone by tomorrow,’ Thorne said.

  ‘One of those girls, is it?’

  ‘I think so,’ Thorne said.

  The man looked away, stared off in another direction for a few moments. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it.’ He pulled at his dog. ‘I’ve got a daughter the same age, near enough.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Sounds like they’ve got the bloke though, so I suppose that’s something.’

  The dog began barking again, and Thorne and the man turned to see another dog-walker – a young woman with a sausage dog – approaching. She stopped when she reached them and the tw
o owners exchanged nods and watched their pets greet one another. The usual canine pleasantries.

  I sniff your arse, you sniff mine.

  Clearly acquainted with one another, the man and the woman began to talk. About the weather looking better which was a blessing, you know, considering the flooding. About having to keep their animals on leads which was a real shame, but understandable obviously, given the terrible circumstances. The woman glanced at Thorne once or twice, but didn’t speak directly to him. Perhaps she was wondering where his dog was.

  When the woman was walking away, Thorne said, ‘You walk your dog here a lot?’

  ‘Every day usually,’ the man said.

  ‘Quite a few other dogs around as well by the look of it.’

  ‘Yeah, like I said, it’s a good place to let them run.’

  Thorne nodded, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘I’d better let you get on.’ He nodded towards the labradoodle. ‘Looks like he’s bored with me now.’

  ‘You a copper?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘You look like one,’ the man said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Charli said, ‘That woman gives me the fucking creeps.’

  Danny was lying on the bed, headphones plugged in, staring into space. He shook his head, irritated, then yanked one earbud out. ‘What?’

  ‘Her,’ Charli said. ‘That copper. The new one.’

  Danny shrugged. ‘She’s a fed, what do you expect? They’re all wankers.’

  ‘Yeah, well you would say that.’

  Danny pulled a face.

  ‘Public enemy number one.’ She pulled a face back. ‘Gangsta boy.’

  Danny gave her the finger, plugged his earbud back in.

  A few months before, a police officer had arrived at the door to talk to their mother. Danny and a few of his friends had been making nuisances of themselves, there had been a complaint. There was some talk about strong drink and weed being smoked. It was a warning, that was all; the copper was local and their mother knew him. She promised to have a serious word and that was the end of it. There had been several extremely serious words, a clout or two and Danny had lost his computer for a fortnight which had really been hitting him where it hurt. Later on, Charli had asked her brother about the weed and he had said that one of his mates had been smoking it. He’d been lying, obviously. She always knew when he was lying and she suspected he’d been helping himself to some of her weed, so she just made sure he knew she was on to him and moved her stash somewhere else.