Born in a Burial Gown (2 page)

It could only be only one thing, and as the boy gasped in recognition, his apprehension turned to abject terror.

That night, he hadn’t been thinking about death.

Detective Inspector Avison Fluke stared at the dripping blood without making a sound. It was crimson, almost black, in the subdued lighting, and he watched as each drop grew until it could no longer resist the pull of gravity, and fell, only for the process to start all over again.

The drips were slowing, an indication it would soon be over. Until the next time.

Fluke hadn’t used his bed in nearly a year, preferring an armchair as he waited for exhaustion to give him the temporary release of sleep. He was still tired and the metronomic drip of the blood helped him achieve an almost Zen-like state. He looked at his watch and realised that he’d lost nearly an hour. He felt oddly refreshed at the thought of that. An hour was more than he’d managed at home the previous night.

His peace was interrupted when his mobile phone rang. A nurse at the other end of the cramped ward gave him a dirty look. Fluke mouthed ‘sorry’.

‘Bollocks,’ he said, as he looked at the caller ID. Detective Superintendent Cameron Chambers. Fluke had hoped to be left alone that morning. He stared at the phone before deciding to answer it.

Chambers didn’t wait to be acknowledged. ‘Fluke, where are you?’ He was the type of man who thought he was plain-spoken when in fact he was just rude.

‘Home,’ he replied, his voice raw. He’d smoked far too many cigars the previous night. Brooding and smoking. A bad combination.

‘Home? What the hell are you still doing at home? It’s nine o’clock, man.’

Fluke didn’t answer and there was an uncomfortable pause, one he knew Chambers would fill.

‘Yes, well. I need you in West Cumbria. There’s a dead woman waiting there for you. I’m still on this armed robbery and will be all week, so it’s your case.’

Fluke had seen the bank depot robbery update on the news the previous night and watched his boss being interviewed. There was no way Chambers was giving up the limelight. He had ambitions to be chief constable and a high-profile case like that was a wet dream for him. In his mind, he was earmarked for great things. In everyone else’s, he was an isolated careerist. Everything he did irritated Fluke. They were going to come to blows before long.

‘Who can I have?’ Fluke asked. Most of the Force Major Incident Team were still on the robbery but he’d need help. He also knew that Chambers equated a big team with importance so would want to keep everyone he could. The bigger the case the bigger the team.

‘You can have Sergeant Towler, DC Vaughn and DC Skelton. Can’t let you have anyone else. The robbery’s at a crucial stage. Get local help if you need more. Towler’s already on scene. Get the details from him.’

Towler, that was expected. The only person people liked working less with than Towler was himself. Towler was too unpredictable, too violent. Jo Skelton, as a middle-aged mother of two, didn’t conform to Chambers’s vision of a young dynamic detective and Vaughn was plain weird with his whole ‘I don’t like to be touched’ thing. With Fluke, the four of them represented FMIT’s untouchables. They occasionally referred to themselves as the outcasts and preferred working independently from the main team when they could. Sometimes managing them was like herding cats but Fluke wouldn’t have swapped any of them. What Chambers, that colossal moron, failed to see was that they were all brilliant detectives. Like him, they preferred to put orders through a filter of common sense first but they got the job done. They’d have been an asset to his precious robbery case if he hadn’t been more concerned with how the team looked on TV rather than how they performed.

Fluke was distracted by someone pausing then looking in as they walked past the open-style ward. Whoever it was, he got the impression they’d recognised him. Before he could turn and look properly, they’d disappeared. Probably a gawper. Embarrassed to be caught looking. People often didn’t know how to act round certain wards.

‘And Fluke?’ Chambers asked, interrupting Fluke’s train of thought.

‘Sir?’

‘Don’t milk it. If it’s a straightforward domestic, find out who the dead woman is and arrest the husband.’

Fluke jabbed the end call button. ‘Arsehole,’ he said. It was strange though, what did Chambers know that he didn’t? If it were straightforward, there was no way Chambers wouldn’t have led on it, taking a day away from the robbery to solve a murder would, in his mind, only enhance his reputation. If he didn’t want it, there was something wrong.

Fluke scrolled down his recent contacts and rang Matt Towler. He answered on the first ring.

‘Ave, we’ve got a body, a woman. I’ve shut down the scene until you get here.’

‘Where?’ Fluke asked.

‘The new hospital in the west, part of the ground they’re still developing. She was under some mud in a foundation hole. The foreman found her at eight this morning.’

That almost certainly ruled out a natural death or a suicide. Dead people didn’t bury themselves. A concealed corpse normally meant a homicide. Murder or manslaughter. He knew that, statistically, the street was the most dangerous place for men and the home was the most dangerous place for women. As unpleasant as he was, Chambers was right; when a woman was killed, her partner or ex-partner was usually the culprit. Most of the time for the police, it was a whydunit rather than a whodunit. Few perpetrators of domestic homicides are forensically aware. There were always breadcrumbs to follow when crimes were committed in anger, jealousy or passion. The weapons used were chosen for expediency rather than efficiency and their murders were normally solved within twenty-four hours.

‘What do we know so far?’ Fluke asked.

‘Nothing really. Probably a relationship gone bad. Maybe premeditated,’ Towler said. ‘She was in a golf travel bag. It’s a deposition site, not the murder site.’

‘Shit!’ So that was why Chambers didn’t want anything to do with it. If it was premeditated, it could take time to get to the bottom of it, time away from the robbery, and more importantly, time away from the TV cameras. Anything longer than a day and he risked handing the limelight over to someone else.

By making Fluke the senior investigating officer, Chambers could sit back and poke holes in his efforts. If Fluke charged someone it would be because Chambers had delegated correctly and if he didn’t, then he’d have someone to blame. He’d either take the glory or distance himself from a badly run investigation. A win-win for Chambers and a lose-lose for Fluke.

Still, Fluke much preferred working away from the main team, so the arrangement suited them both.

‘She was under a foot of mud so couldn’t be seen either. Even when looking directly in,’ Towler said.

‘So how did—?’

‘And she’s only been in there six hours.’

‘What? How’d you know that?’ Fluke asked, taking Towler’s bait. He could’ve done without the melodramatic puzzle but he let it go.

‘We have a witness. They left a note.’

Fluke impatiently pressed the assistance button above his bed until the ward nurse came over to see him. ‘I need to go, nurse,’ he said, standing up and sorting out his things. ‘It’s nearly finished anyway,’ he added, pointing at the bag of blood that was clearly not empty.

‘Marion,’ she replied automatically. ‘Do I call you ‘patient’? And you’re not going anywhere. I’ve got a bag of plasma in the fridge for you.’

Plasma? Fuck that. Plasma took longer than blood to go through.

After five minutes of argument and counter-argument, Fluke was defeated. He sat back down, grinning sheepishly at the man in the bed opposite who’d been following their exchange. As soon as the nurse left the room, Fluke stood back up. He couldn’t afford to wait. The first few hours were the ‘golden hours’: witnesses remembered things clearly, forensic evidence was at its freshest and easiest to detect. Alibis weren’t yet fully formed.

He checked that he couldn’t be seen from the corridor before removing the cannula from the back of his hand, just like he’d seen doctors do countless times. He didn’t have a cotton swab so he used a tissue to stem the flow of blood from the wound it left. He looked for somewhere safe to dispose of the needle. He settled with simply wrapping it in his hanky and putting it in his rucksack.

He knew he’d stepped over an unseen line in hospital etiquette and would be in trouble with Doctor Cooper later. She’d probably be on the phone before he’d even reached the car park but that was nothing compared to the trouble he’d be in if anyone at work ever found out where he’d actually been. Arriving two hours late to your own crime scene was unexplainable. Anyway, he didn’t want to see Doctor Cooper. Every time he saw her, it triggered another bout of insomnia. He’d been lying to her about his side effects for over a year and the guilt was keeping him awake. He knew she only wanted what was best for him but the truth had to stay hidden. And the truth was that five months ago, he’d involved her in a crime. A crime she didn’t even know about.

He hoisted his rucksack onto his shoulders, avoided the disapproving stare of the man opposite and walked out of the ward.

The more he went to hospital the more it seemed to tire him. Physically, he was getting stronger and stronger as each day passed but every time he had an appointment, he came out feeling weary. It didn’t seem to matter how much he’d rested or how healthily he’d eaten, like a badly earthed battery, the hospital seemed to drain him of energy.

He put it down to being so sick of hospitals that even being in one tired him. Or perhaps Doctor Cooper had been right and he
had
needed the blood. He put it out of his mind and was out of Carlisle and on the A595 driving west in under five minutes. The thermometer in his car showed 5ºC. It was biting outside. The trees were bare, their dead leaves long dispersed in the strong winter winds. Brown, rotten vegetation littered the verge. The countryside on the wane. A few evergreens were still battling the elements but everything else was waiting for spring. He turned the heater up.

His mobile rang and the caller ID displayed the ward’s number. Fluke pressed the decline button. He’d deal with the fall-out later.

A layer of fog descended the further west he drove. Thick and white. It wasn’t raining yet, but it was going to. He hoped proper forensic practices had been followed. He didn’t want evidence being washed away before he got there. Chambers had the main SOCO team working the robbery so he knew he’d get whoever was left. It didn’t matter, when it came to crime scenes, he preferred to be in total control. The crime scene managers didn’t like having their autonomy removed but he didn’t care. His case, his rules.

The drive would take at least another forty-five minutes, and without any details of the crime to think about, Fluke searched through the car’s mp3 player for some music with a bit of pace and energy. He selected the Clash’s second album,
Give ’Em Enough Rope
, and turned up the volume. FMIT were responsible for investigating the most serious crimes committed across Cumbria, and when the county was the third largest in the UK, if you didn’t like driving, you were in the wrong job.

An hour after leaving Carlisle, he arrived at the rendezvous point. Towler had set it up on some hardstanding between the main building site and the smaller site where the body had obviously been discovered. It was where all the yellow earth-moving vehicles were parked, which all building sites seemed to need, their enormous tyres thick with dark mud. It was also full of police vehicles, marked and unmarked, some still with their flashing lights on. He was obviously one of the last to arrive.

Whenever possible, Fluke used rendezvous points out of sight of the crime scene to ensure everyone was fully focused on what he was saying, rather than rubbernecking at the site. Towler knew that and Fluke nodded appreciatively as he saw the site’s own security fences made the scene self-contained. People were milling round, waiting to start. Most of them had white forensic suits on and from a distance it looked like a convention of Scottish sunbathers.

Fluke got out of his car and stretched. A lone seagull circled overhead, screeching like a half-skinned cat. A uniformed policeman was eating a sandwich and throwing parts of the crust to the gull. Fluke watched as it dived down to catch the last bit. With no more food, it lazily gained height then headed off in the direction of Whitehaven Harbour. Fluke could smell the sea coming off the inland breeze. It reminded him of Plymouth and his time with the Marines.

Matt Towler, a foot taller than everyone else, was speaking to a group of suited forensic staff. He saw Fluke, broke away from the group and walked over. Fluke could tell his friend was worried, and when something worried Towler, a veteran of a gulf war, Sierra Leone and three tours of Northern Ireland, he also worried. Although FMIT officers weren’t officially paired up, Fluke and Towler invariably ended up working together. Barely hidden disdain of anyone below their own high standards, barrack-room sarcasm and a willingness to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week when needed meant other detectives weren’t exactly falling over themselves to join them. It was something Fluke cultivated rather than tried to rectify.

‘You okay, Ave?’ Towler asked.

‘Fine,’ Fluke replied. ‘Tell me about this note,’ he said, as they walked towards the scene. The ground was cold and slippery and threatening to sprain his ankles. They struggled to the outer cordon and stopped.

Towler handed him a plastic evidence bag. It had a piece of paper inside.

Fluke read it.

Look in the secund whole from the door. sum1 has put a boddy in there

It was written on stationery with the same building company logo as the signs on the fences surrounding the site. He turned it over. There was nothing on the back.

 The witness appeared to have used whatever had been to hand.

‘Not exactly Shakespeare is it?’ Towler said. ‘It was by the kettle in the site office.’