Scaring Crows (24 page)

No one had touched the other two walls. They were marked, painted cream, showing obvious signs of damp and age. There was dust on the floor.

Brick dust, cement.

Mike was standing so close behind her she could feel his breath on her neck. And he too was staring at the wall. And she knew they were both thinking the same thought. She turned to meet his eyes, and caught his mood.

Almost in a dream she put her hand out and gently tapped the whitewashed bricks.

Hollow.

Hannah was framed in the doorway. ‘This is just the ...' Then she too was staring at the wall. ‘That's funny,' she said faintly. ‘That's very funny.'

But she did not share the two police officers' suspicions.

‘Get her out of here,' Joanna murmured over her shoulder. ‘Get
her
out and a couple of strong officers with a lump hammer
in
!'

But now Hannah must have heard – or sensed – something. She reached past Mike to pull at Joanna's arm. ‘What are you doing?' There was rising panic in her voice. ‘What are you doing? You won't find anything in here.' She made an attempt at a laugh. ‘This is a larder. Jams, pickles.' Even she did not believe that there was nothing in there.

‘I'm sorry,' Joanna said. ‘But you'll have to leave now. Please. Someone will take you back to your cottage.'

The old lady stood stone still, and stared at the whited wall.

Ten minutes later the shelves had been cleared, the jam jars neatly stacked along the kitchen formica. Joanna grabbed the lump hammer from Police Constable David Timmis and smashed it hard against the wall, loosening the first brick. Then she used it to tap. Hollow here, dull there. Flies buzzed around the pantry as though sensing a new source of nutrient. Joanna waved her arms around her head, oppressed by the rising sense of foreboding, claustrophobia, the irritating insects.

Mike had stopped tapping and was watching her with incredulous, wide eyes. There was no need for either of them to speak.

His face was very close to hers. It was a very confined space. A few whitened bricks between them. All his strength was displayed as he swung his lump hammer and the bricks jumped. A shower of dry cement powdered both their faces. His fingers scrabbled to remove the first brick.

There was a space behind the true wall, a space created by the building of a false wall. Dust settled on both their faces, their hair, their skin, their hands. Silently Timmis handed them both a mask and they continued bashing at the wall.

Behind them they heard Hannah Lockley in the living room. ‘I'm staying,' she was saying. ‘I'm going nowhere. You brought me here. I've a right to ...'

Arms swung.

The blows were delivered with all the grim determination of prize boxers in the ring. Joanna and Mike removed more bricks until there was room for her to put her hand inside and grapple with something dry and boney ... She sucked in a long breath.

She had found Ruthie Summers.

Korpanski flashed his torch inside the gap. Wrapped in a black plastic sheet, one hand resting against her hiding place, dried skin, almost leathery parchment. A strange scent, flies. Black clouds of flies.

She left the tiny larder to gulp fresher air from the sitting room, stared out through the glass porch to the embers of the summer sun.

How could anything so horrible have happened here, in this rural heaven?

It took her a few minutes to recover her composure. She must now reassemble a second SOCO team and summon Matthew again to the farmhouse.

She sat down and waited in the sitting room, facing the sole survivor of the family. Neither said a word. Hannah sat, motionless.

She knew.

Mike stood and blocked the larder door. The heap of damaged bricks bore testament to what lay behind it.

Matthew arrived at almost the same time as Sergeant Barraclough. He looked fresh and clean in a blue laundered shirt that showed a pleasing expanse of muscular brown arm. He gave her a quizzical, twisted smile before entering the pantry.

By now the two PCs had removed enough bricks to uncover the entire plastic bag and once WPC Dawn Critchlow had forcibly removed Hannah Lockley to the Incident caravan and Barra had taken photographs of the body in its tomb they carried it into the sitting room and laid it on the floor.

The plastic had formed a winding sheet from which one hand had escaped. It had been this which Joanna must have touched. She shuddered and watched Matthew finger the rope that had been knotted around the mummy shape. ‘It looks like baling twine,' he observed quietly, before slicing through it.

‘We might just get a couple of good palm prints from the plastic.' Barra spoke steadily. He was, as always, in full control.

Matthew slit open the bag and clouds of bluebottles buzzed out noisily, angry at being disturbed in their perpetuation of the species. Lazy white grubs crawled from beneath beige, parchment skin.

Whatever Ruthie Summers
had
been, a small, slim, pretty girl,
singing as she herded the cows, singing as she took aim to shoot the crows
, now she was advancing in putrefaction, an object of revulsion.

Joanna muttered a swift, silent apology. This girl had not earned her suspicion. It had not been she who had fired at her father and brother. It could not have been. She was innocent of the crime, a victim herself. She must have been dead for the entire month of her disappearance. Joanna struggled to avert her eyes from the mummy shape, but it was hard. The object repulsed yet drew the gaze. Even when she was staring across the room she was conscious of it. Mike was studiously staring out of the window and she knew his emotions were the same as hers. Only Matthew showed no revulsion, yet, only fascination as he busied himself with his work, studying the hands, the hair, the face. Joanna almost vomited.
The face.

He must have sensed her feelings because he looked up with a trace of sympathy in his eyes.

‘Never did have a strong stomach, did you, Jo?'

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak one word.

He touched the corpse's thick, dark hair. ‘I take it this will be your missing suspect?'

‘Almost certainly.' She was amazed at the steadiness of her voice.

‘Well, she didn't die last Tuesday morning.'

‘When?'

‘Round about a month ago. There are ...' Apologetically he prodded at the heaving mass of grubs.

‘So I see.'

He was touching the hands, paying particular attention to the nails. And there was a grimness in his face she had never seen before.

She felt a sudden panic. ‘Matthew?'

He was calm. ‘It's all right. I was a bit concerned she might have been bricked up still alive.' He was smiling now. ‘But panic over. Nothing under the fingernails. What I think must have happened was the arm escaped as rigor mortis wore off.'

‘Thank God,' she breathed. ‘So what did she die of?'

‘I hate guesswork, Jo, and there's nothing too obvious besides the state of the body, but I'd lay a bet that whoever murdered this little lady came back later to finish the job. Put it like this. Someone really had it in for this family.'

‘Murder?'

‘She didn't brick herself in there.'

Saturday, July 11th, 8 a.m.

‘I don't know why post mortems are always so early in the morning. And on a Saturday too.' Joanna was grumbling as Sergeant Barraclough laced her into an attendant's gown. Barra grinned. He knew her complaints were an attempt to hide her nervousness at a post mortem. He had watched her through too many before, green faced, staring at anywhere but the body. For himself he was proud of his wooden detachment from the proceedings. He coped by concentrating on efficient collection of specimens.

They were all tense as the mortuary attendant unzipped the body bag and released a powerful scent of fly spray.

Even Matthew made a face as he began his superficial examination. ‘Not a pretty sight, Jo. It's possible large portions of the brain might have been destroyed by the larvae.' His eyes moved along the corpse. ‘Although the abdominal organs seem in a reasonable state surprisingly.' His green eyes were almost luminous. ‘It's even possible we might have a problem determining the cause of death.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Well, as I said last night she didn't brick herself up in there,' Matthew commented drily. ‘And considering what happened to the rest of her family I'm tempted to make a connection between the deaths. Aren't you?'

‘Just wait a minute.' Joanna stopped him. All night she had not slept but had pondered this one point. ‘
Only
Aaron or Jack would have been in a position to build that wall. They'd hardly have stood by and watched a complete stranger breezeblock Ruthie in at the back of their larder, would they? So if Ruthie was murdered it was either her father or her brother who did it. And the other must have colluded with them in concealing her body.'

Matthew said nothing but his eyes were gleaming as he continued the preliminary examination. It was a few minutes before he spoke. ‘So were they murdered as a result of Ruthie's death?'

She glanced at the scalpel poised in his hand. ‘I suppose it depends what she died of.'

But already her mind was working it out. Jack had been unpredictable. Jack had been mentally deranged. He had been violent on more than one occasion. What if he had lashed out at his sister?

Matthew was still busy recording his observations. ‘Large portion of the brain completely destroyed. Cranium undamaged and complete.' He gave Joanna a meaningful glance. ‘That knocks off my favourite cause of violent death, a head injury.' His hands moved deftly through the soft tissue. ‘In fact I'm not too optimistic I will be able to ascertain a cause of death.'

‘Just do your best,' Joanna muttered from the far end. Over the years she thought she had grown used to the precise nature of Matthew's work, of the butcher's shop scene of a corpse laid open to yield its secrets. No one knew better than she that it could be disgusting, horrible, gory. As a police officer she had a healthy regard for the truths that could be exposed when he wielded his scalpel. But this degradation of life was today particularly disgusting to her because of the idealized picture she had held of the farmer's daughter, a young woman who collected eggs from the henhouse, someone who sang as she led the cows into the parlour for milking, someone who had cared for her brother. But the image had been cruelly shattered. So she stood at the far end of the mortuary, beneath the air exchange while Matthew delved in Ruth Summers' abdomen, handling organs.

‘They're in good condition,' he was muttering. ‘Surprisingly so, considering. But then ...' He was muttering to himself. ‘I suppose the warm air whistling through the air brick must have dried the body. Mummified it to some extent.' He used his shoulder to scratch an ear, push his hair away from his face. His gloved hands were never used – sacred objects – smeared with death and decay. He was working methodically, according to the text book, using classic post-mortem techniques, a rigid set of manoeuvres learnt over the years with a few deft procedures of his own, silently slicing through tissue with his scalpel.

And all Joanna could think of, at the far end, feeling the fresh, clean air blow across her face, was this vision she had clung to, the girl, pretty, slim, dark and small, singing as she herded the cows in for their milking.
That
girl and this object could
not
be one and the same person.

Matthew was getting more excited. ‘This,' he was saying, ‘is really interesting. I can't believe it.'

Reluctantly she watched him finger something. ‘The deeper pelvic organs are really in quite good nick.' Suddenly he gave an exclamation and bent forwards. The police recognized the signs and moved closer with him. They forgot their repugnance at the procedure in their eagerness to know something. At last he looked up. ‘Did you know your girl was pregnant?'

She nodded. ‘But people don't die of...'

Matthew was holding up a small, tomato object, held between two sets of forceps. ‘They do if it lodges inside their fallopian tubes. Your girl,' he said triumphantly, ‘died of natural causes.'

‘Natural causes?' She stared at the piece of tissue held between the pincer grip of the forceps.

‘Natural causes? You're sure?'

‘I'm sure all right. I've done a few too many corpses in this state to miss this particular diagnosis. She died of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and I'm prepared to stand up in court and swear that under oath. There is absolutely no sign of trauma. She would have died suddenly and in great pain but no one murdered her.' He gave one of his twisted smiles. ‘Unless you want to count the foetus.'

Joanna couldn't help staring at the cherry tomato object and shook her head thoughtfully. ‘Or the man who made her pregnant,' she said.

Barraclough turned to object. ‘But the murders?' Matthew shrugged and dropped the object into a formalin pot while she was left floundering with the medical facts and the circumstances that had led to their discovery of the girl's body. She knew she must delve a little deeper. ‘Matthew, please, in words of one syllable or less, explain so we understand exactly what happened. What was the sequence of events?' And because her head was reeling with the terrible fact that Ruthie's corpse had been bricked up and no one had confessed that she was dead, somehow the rest of her family had been slaughtered. Why? What could possibly be the reason, the connection?

Like a flash it burst through her brain.

It had to be revenge.

‘OK. I'll explain.' For a moment Matthew turned his back on the body to address the police officers. ‘Ruth Summers became pregnant. But instead of the little embryo lodging against the wall of her womb it got stuck in the fallopian tubes. What happens then is that the embryo grows so big...' His fingers moved towards the ball of tissue, no bigger than a golf ball. ‘The poor girl gets ill with abdominal cramps which get steadily worse until she goes to a doctor who with a bit of luck makes the correct diagnosis and pops her into hospital where they excise both tube and baby.'