Lifeless - 5 (34 page)

Caroline didn't want to leave it too late. She wanted to enjoy being a mother while she was stil young . . .

He would find it, course he would, if he just had some space to work it out, but Thorne and the rest of them were real y starting to needle him.

.4 child would bring them close, bring them closer...

He could see it in his mind's eye, almost - unformed and not quite reachable.

Didn't he want a child? He'd said he did.

Like something on the tip of his tongue, nearly there, nearly.., but

what the fuck did Thorne think he was up to?

Didn't he love her any more... ?

He leaned forward and slapped her.

It wasn't his fault. She wouldn't shut up, wouldn't be quiet for just a few seconds so that he could compartmentalise. Probably not her fault either, course not, she didn't know, did she?

She couldn't see past the smile, the face that gave nothing away, but even so, I mean bloody hel ...

He just needed a bit of space to deal with things. To separate the anger from the creativity.

He looked at her. The handprint was clear, a livid scarlet across her jaw and the top of her neck.

Sil y bitch. Waffling on about babies. When he needed a bit of peace and quiet so that he could think about death.

For Thorne, the mug of tea before bed had become something of a ritual. The strol down to the late-night grocers, after discovering he'd run out of milk, was not uncommon either.

He was in this shop half a dozen times a week, minimum. The three brothers that ran it were Turkish, he thought, maybe Cypriot. He didn't know any of their names. They smiled, sometimes, when he bought his bread, paper and beer, but they didn't seem that interested in getting to know him.

As Thorne reached into his pocket to pay for the milk, he imagined finding that he'd left his wal et at home. He wondered if they'd let him owe them the money until next time. Seeing as he'd been in their shop six times a week for the past eighteen months. Would they? Probably not. Maybe if he produced his warrant card, showed them he was a policeman.

Outside the shop, Thorne stood waiting for the lights at the pelican crossing to change, studying the adverts in the window. The one that caught his eye was scribbled in red felt-tip on the back of a postcard.

It was misspel ed, but the services offered were plain enough.

It had been a long time.

Thorne took out a pen and scribbled down the number on the side of the milk carton.

TWENTY-ONE

They'd found Karen McMahon within twelve hours.

From the top of the embankment it was obvious where the team was working. The white tented-off area around the grave stood out starkly against the browns and dark greens of the long grasses and tangles of fern. A white square bil owing above the bones.

Hol and began to move down the hil towards the site, McEvoy ten feet or so away. The two of them had driven there together, along with another DC and a trainee detective. The conversation in the car had been sparse and far from sparkling. Now they moved slowly down the slope, their white plastic bodysuits rustling. Aliens descending, unsure of their footing.

The grave had been found in one of the drainage ditches that ran alongside the embankment at the foot of each slope. Once the overgrown and overhanging greenery had been cu[

back, it had not been hard to see or to reach. The ditch was about four feet wide but movement was restricted. The sides were muddy and in danger of col apse, and hours of hard work which had revealed the remains of Karen McMahon could be undone by one clumsy step.

Hol and and McEvoy pul ed up their masks and ducked down

inside the tent. It was cramped and crowded. There were already half a dozen people in there, crouched or stooping, the tent not high enough to stand up straight in. The sun had not been up long and the morning wasn't warm, but the heat beneath the canvas was stifling. Though the lamps had been turned off outside the tent, there were stil two powerful ones inside and the temperature was climbing al the time. Inside the bodysuit, Hol and could already feel the sweat trickling down his back as he stepped careful y past Phil Hendricks who was on his haunches at the graveside, and moved towards where Thorne was deep in conversation with Doctor James Pettet.

Thorne glanced towards Hol and and McEvoy as they entered the tent. Instantly, and for a second or two, he wondered if something might be going on between them. There was an atmosphere...

He dismissed the thought, and returned to a conversation about death and decay.

As forensic archaeologists went, James Pettet was probably as good as they came, but he was no great shakes as a human being. If Thorne never saw him again, he wouldn't lose a great deal of sleep.

'... moisture is the enemy of composition. Moisture and heat together is just about as bad as it gets. Or good of course, depending on which way you look at it.'

Behind his mask, Thorne let out a long slow breath and very quickly took another one in. Which way you look at it?

'Buried in a drainage ditch, as you say, at the height of summer, it's remarkable we have anything at al .' Pettet's voice was deep and he spoke as if he was constantly on the verge of nodding off, worn out by the effort of explaining things to idiots. 'There is a complete absence of fleshy matter and you can see that the bones themselves are mushy.'

Thorne had never met Pettet before and could only guess at what lay beneath the plastic hood wrapped tightly around the face and the mask that covered the nose and mouth.

'The non-organic material has been better preserved of course.' As Pettet catalogued it, an assistant moved careful y around the grave, occasional y dropping to his knees or onto his chest to gather up a fragment with long forceps and drop it into a plastic evidence bag. 'The material of the dress, the refuse bags, what's left of the carpet she was wrapped up in. The rope, or cord, around the neck remains remarkably intact...'

Thorne imagined Pettet to be balding, perhaps with a Bobby Charlton comb-over and very bad skin.

Thorne turned away and looked down into the grave, the buzzing arc lights casting a harsh and unforgiving light across its grisly contents.

Mushy was about right. Wea-coloured bones sunk down into mud and slime. Tattered remnants of a blue dress, not white, thank heavens, and matted clumps of carpet, al floating in a brown soup. Tufts of hair, plastered to the bobbing skul like worms.

The white bleached bones of the human skeleton existed nowhere but under the skin, where they belonged, and in the imaginations of television scriptwriters. Dem bones dent bones, hanging, grinning and

unreal in doctor's surgery sketches.

Not like this. This human stew.

At the foot of the grave, Hendricks stood back to let one of the team come in close, to stoop down and pluck something long and greasy from the mud. Thorne caught his eye. Hendricks winked at him. He turned back to Pettet.

'What about DNA?'

The archaeologist puffed out his cheeks. 'Don't hold your breath.' Thorne grunted - as close as it was possible to get to a laugh. The smel inside the tent was overpowering, and, masks or not, holding their breath was exactly what everybody around the grave was trying to do. Everybody but Petter, anyway. The archaeologist failed to see any irony in what he'd said. 'The victim's DNA, yes, perhaps. Get me some comparable material - hairs, fingernail clippings. Sometimes the parents hang on to those things for sentimental reasons.'

Of course they'd go through the motions, run the tests, but Thorne

knew he was looking at what was left of Karen McMahon. 'Any chance of anything from the kil er?'

Pettet almost managed a smile. 'Always a chance. There's a chance you'l win the lottery isn't there? Only possibility is the rope. Bits of skin caught in there, perhaps, but any cel ular material wil have been destroyed by the creosote.'

Thorne turned, raised his eyebrows.

Pettet explained, slowly. 'Creosote is used to weatherproof the railway ties. Same stuff you put on your garden fence. Over the years it's leached into the water running along these ditches. Ironical y, if she'd been buried on higher ground, somewhere drier, the creosote in the soil might have acted as a preservative and we might have had a lot more of her left.'

To Thorne, the disappointment in Pettet's voice sounded strictly professional. Not sentimental like those sil y parents with their jewel ery boxes ful of hair and fingernails...

Thorne glanced over to the other side of the tent where a smal pile of dirty rocks stood in the corner. Petter caught Thorne's look. 'At least al the bones are there. The kil er took the trouble to make sure the foxes didn't get at them.'

A layer of rocks laid careful y on top of the grave. Rocks too heavy to be shifted by the snout of something hungry. Rocks, then a layer of mud two feet or so thick and underneath it al , the body of a 14year old girl shrouded in bin-liners, rotting beneath an old carpet. Safe from foxes.

Safe from everything.

A few minutes later outside the tent, Thorne dropped a hand on to Phil Hendricks's shoulder. 'Don't get big-headed, but it's a treat to talk about death with someone who doesn't behave like he's suffering from it...'

'Wish he was,' Hol and muttered. 'Miserable sod.'

Hendricks grinned. 'He was hard work, wasn't he?'

'Like I don't know what fucking ceosote is!' Thorne shook his

head, the wounded expression just what was needed to set them off. They al laughed then, as they desperately needed to. They laughed and shook their heads as they stepped clumsily out of their bodysuits. McEvoy lost her footing and her hand reached out to Hol and for support. The laughter stopped quickly after that, and they al stood in silence for a few moments, taking in lungfuls of wonderful dirty London air.

'I don't understand,' Hendricks said, looking around. 'He obviously didn't want her disturbed, you know, by animals...'

Hol and nodded. 'Must have taken him ages to find al those rocks. There's not many of them anywhere round here.'

'... but he didn't seem to much care where he buried her. She wasn't very wel hidden.'

'She wasn't hidden at al ,' Hol and said. 'She wasn't hard to find. Nobody'd ever bothered to look for her, that's al .'

McEvoy lit a cigarette, spoke as she exhaled. 'Obviously he didn't think anyone would look for her.'

'Oh, he knew they wouldn't,' Thorne said. 'He made sure of it.' She got into a blue car, sir. A Cavalier I think they're cal ed...

'He did this when he was fourteen,' McEvoy said. 'Then he disappears, and pops up again over fifteen years later. Fifteen years.'

Thorne nodded. He knew what was coming. He asked the question out loud, the one he'd asked himself as he'd stared down at Karen McMahon's remains. 'How many more bodies are there out there?'

It was warming up. There was no wind at al where they stood at the foot of the embankment and the smoke from McEvoy's cigarette rose straight up, blue against the concrete-coloured sky. 'No chance on the DNA then?' she asked. Thorne shook his head.

'I told you,' Hendricks said.

Thorne shrugged. Worth a try. It was al academic anyway. They knew who it was lying back there inside the tent, in a hole they dignified with the word grave, and they knew who had put her there.

There would be nothing in the way of concrete evidence on the Palmer-Nicklin case, on the Garner case, to present to anybody. But they had found a body. Bul seye. Thorne had a corpse to offer up to his superiors. He saw himself rather like a cat, dropping a dead bird at

the foot of its master. Stroke me. See? Look at how clever I am. Thorne had never felt less clever in his life.

They turned at a rustle of canvas from behind them, and saw Pettet emerge from the tent carrying a smal plastic evidence bag. He pul ed down his mask and strol ed across to them.

Thorne was pleased to see

that he had been right about the bad skin.

'I thought you might want to see this.'

He held out the bag, and Thorne and the others clustered around, staring at what was inside. Whatever it was had once been a bright colour, but was now faded and thick with black mud. It was Hol and

who first made sense of the broken down and barely legible lettering. 'Bloody hel , I used to love those. Can you stil get them?' Hendricks leaned in a little closer, peering at the plastic bag. Its sides were streaked with muck. The bottom fil ed with dirty water, gritty with tiny stones and traces of bone marrow. 'What is it?'

'It's the wrapper off a chocolate bar,' Thorne said. 'And no, I don't think you can get them any more.' He guessed not anyway, unless Nicklin's tastes had changed. It wasn't the same brand as the one they'd found licked clean and clutched in Charlie Garner's hand, but its presence chil ed him every bit as much.

Thorne took a few steps up the slope of the embankment towards the cars, stopped and looked back. He spoke to Pettet, staring over his head at the smal white tent. 'Be careful taking her out of there, wil you?'

Pettet opened his mouth to reply, but Thorne was already turning and climbing away up the hil . He clutched the white plastic bodysuit in his fist, wondering just how much protection it provided against what Hendricks had cal ed the little pieces of death. Back in that tent, there would have been mil ions of c-hem floating around, settling unseen against the bright white material. Some would have got through and ended up sitting on the skin, nestling in the cuffs and trapped on the soles of shoes. Waiting to sparkle when the time was right.

When it was dark enough.

Thorne took a breath and started to climb faster. He was starting to feel the ache in his thighs as he took out his phone and dial ed Vic Perks's number.

He would have liked to have stayed and waited until they brought her out. That would have been interesting. He wondered how she would look. Probably just one more stain on that manky old carpet he'd wrapped her up in and tossed across his shoulder. The outline of her reduced down and imprinted on it. Bodily fluids marking out her skinny frame in the cheap nylon pile.