Buried in the Past (2 page)

The intruder closed the door carefully before switching the light on. He moved from shelf to shelf before he found what he was looking for. He scanned the contents label until he was satisfied that this was the right product for his purpose. Then he took a small hacksaw from his pocket and began to cut until he had created a slit near the base of the can. He positioned the vessel directly over the conduit that encased the electric cables that ran through the room and on to the rest of the building. He watched as the chemical began to leak gradually from the tin, to trickle along the wooden shelf, then down the vertical surface of the shelf edge, before dripping close to the conduit. Noting the near miss, the intruder repositioned the tin slightly and checked to see if the new site was achieving the desired effect.

This time the chemical was hitting its target and after a few minutes, he began to notice the change. First, a wisp of smoke drifted up from the conduit. Shortly after, the white plastic surface started to discolour, then distort, until after a while a hole appeared. The corrosive liquid was now dripping directly onto the outer casing. Soon, the inflammable substance would make contact with the mains cable supplying the building. Time to leave.

Being a careful man, the intruder remembered to switch the light off before relocking the door, then walked slowly towards the steps leading to the ground floor. He thought about what he had done and tried to remember anything he could have missed. There seemed to be nothing, because his pace increased as he climbed the stairs.

When he reached the ground floor he glanced across to the office. The sole occupant was behind her desk, as befitted her role as a secretary. But she wasn’t working, for her head was resting on the surface of her desk. The sedative she had been given would ensure she slept through the fire that would shortly engulf the whole building, taking her and two of her colleagues along with it.

He continued to the first floor, where the other three occupants of the building awaited him. Two of them were as unconscious as the woman downstairs. The intruder glanced briefly at them, before turning his attention to the only other person awake. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Yes, they’re well out of it. How is it down below? Everything set?’

‘Coming along nicely, I guess. It had already reached the cable when I left. That acid’s bloody strong. I think now would be a really good time to leave.’

Outside, they waited, their car parked discreetly in a corner of the car park, out of sight of all but the most careful observers. After some time, they saw the fire, which had started to take hold of the building. ‘I hope their insurance is up to date,’ the arsonist murmured, as he accelerated clear of the conflagration.

Ray Perry answered the phone, recognizing the lisping falsetto voice immediately; Tony Callaghan, known to one and all as Dirty Harry after his namesake in the films.

‘Ray, I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. I need to talk to you. Now your Uncle Max has gone, I think it would make sense if we combine forces. We’ve enough competition without fighting each other.’

Ray was suspicious; the two gangs were armed neutrals at best, and he knew Max hadn’t trusted Callaghan any more than Callaghan had trusted Max. Added to which, Max’s murder was still fresh in Ray’s mind.

‘I hear you’ve been having a lot of trouble with the Chinks and we’re getting the same. Thing is, I’ve a plan to get shut of them, but it needs both teams working together and we’ve got to act fast,’ Callaghan told him. ‘Besides which, I think I know who killed Max.’

It was certainly true that the Chinese triad gangs had been attempting to muscle in on their operation, equally true that Ray was looking for information about Max’s murder. ‘If you’re up for it,’ Dirty Harry continued, ‘come over to Five Elms at eight o’clock tonight and we can talk it through.’

Five Elms Car Sales had grown from a 1940s bombsite; the sort of pitch started in many places after the war, later to become a
respectable-looking
used car dealership.

Alongside the showroom was a small office and facilities, with a large workshop behind, which covered the width of the building. The workshop rapidly gained a good reputation locally for the
quality of its paintwork, becoming known as ‘the Beauty Parlour’, for the excellence of the spray jobs they turned out.

Ray Perry was surprised to find the showroom door open when he arrived. He went inside, and getting no response to his call, ventured towards the office. ‘Callaghan. Callaghan, where the hell are you?’ He pushed the office door open.

‘Christ, what the hell’s happened here?’ He looked down at the body of Callaghan’s minder. The man’s throat had been cut; there was blood all over the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Ray was no stranger to violence but the sight of so much blood made him nauseous. He opened the door to the workshop. That was when he found Dirty Harry. He too had been stabbed, but in the chest; the knife was still in the last of the wounds.

Some malign influence caused Ray to pluck the weapon from the dead man’s body. As he did so, blood spurted from the wound, covering his trouser leg and mingling on his boots with that of the minder. At that moment the door behind him slammed back against the wall. ‘Police! Don’t move; put the knife down – slowly.’

Perry swung round, stared at the advancing officers. He took two steps backwards, looking frantically for an escape route, in the full knowledge that he’d been set up.

‘Perry, put the knife down. Now!’ The officers began moving forward. Ray leapt over a trolley jack, heading for the concertina sliding doors at the back of the workshop. The first officer dashed after him but his foot caught on the lift arm of the jack and he fell to the ground, wincing with pain. A second officer skirted Callaghan’s body and met Perry head on. Two officers grabbed him from behind and Perry lashed out with the knife as they tried to wrestle it from his grasp. In the ensuing struggle an officer was cut before Perry was eventually held face down on the floor, handcuffed and panting, listening to the sergeant: ‘Ray Perry, I am arresting you….’

There was silence, or near-silence in the woods, and the walker loved it. Savoured it, for the complete contrast it gave to the rest of his normal, everyday life. For six days a week, up to sixteen hours a day, fifty weeks a year, he had to live with noise, had learned to
tolerate it. The ringing of telephones, the chatter of colleagues, the bleeping of monitors, all formed a constant background to his working day. Then there were the added, more strident, sounds. The clamour of sirens as ambulances screamed their way to the hospital, demanding a clear path, sometimes with the counterpoint of accompanying police cars.

Here, in the depths of the forest, he walked on tracks that were barely discernible, and only kept passable by the movement of deer and other woodland creatures. Admittedly, the silence was broken from time to time, but only by the rusty croak of a pheasant, the raucous call of a magpie, the gentler cooing of a wood pigeon, or even the occasional rattle of a woodpecker. These sounds were almost apologetic in tone, and once they died away the silence seemed even more absolute.

On this morning, the forest seemed particularly quiet. As he penetrated deeper into the woods, even the spaniel that was his joyful companion was silent, as if in awe at the wonder of her surroundings. The sun had risen in a cloudless sky, but here, the foliage was so dense that only an occasional glimmer broke through.

As the walker reached a gap in the thick barrier of bramble and briar, a fallow deer, possibly startled by him or the dog, broke cover and darted through the gap, hurdling a fallen tree trunk with the effortless ease of a racehorse. He watched the mottled hind quarters of the deer vanish through the tunnel formed by the scrubby mixture of evergreen and deciduous trees and followed at a more leisurely pace. He noticed the many impressions of deer slots,
signalling
the passage of a sizeable herd. At that moment, he felt that everything in his surroundings was as close to perfect as possible.

He had stooped to avoid an overhanging branch in the entrance to the arbour when the spaniel emerged from a dense part of the thicket away to his left, carrying a stick in her mouth. ‘Here, Bella,’ he called.

The dog trotted towards him and as she got closer he realized it wasn’t a stick she was carrying, but a bone. A deer had died, he thought, possibly shot, or maybe expired from disease or old age. It was only when Bella was directly in front of him, her tail wagging
in search of approval, that he became aware that his second thoughts had been as inaccurate as his first.

Many people would have missed the significance of the shape of the bone. But, as an orthopaedic surgeon, he knew, with a kind of sick horror, that he was looking at a femur. A human femur.

‘Netherdale CID. Detective Constable Pratt speaking. How can I help you?’

‘I’ve found a body.’ The caller spoke quietly, his voice calm.

‘Sorry, you’ll have to speak up, sir.’

‘I said, I’ve found a body.’ He described the location briefly. ‘Or rather, some body parts. They’re definitely human, but they have been there for some time.’

‘Can you tell me more? Is this close to where you’re calling from?’

‘As close as can be, a few miles away, no more. I’m at Bishops Cross. In the phone box.’

Patiently, the young officer took the caller through the routine. As the questions were answered, he was struck with a thought. The caller seemed calmer than he did. Why was that? he wondered. He set off to consult his superior.

‘The call came in a few minutes ago, sir.’

‘And you’re sure it isn’t a hoax?’

‘As sure as can be, sir. The man seemed genuine enough. For a while I thought he was taking it too calmly. Most people would be upset at discovering something as gruesome, but when he told me he’s a surgeon and how he came to recognize the bone as human, that explained it. Then, of course, he went deeper into the woods and found more body parts. What do you want me to do, sir?’

‘I’m still not convinced. I don’t want to send a whole team of officers on what might be a wild goose chase. You go, and take Binns with you. Radio in if there’s anything in this tale. Oh, and, Pratt …’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I don’t want the pair of you out there all bloody day. There’s a station here to run, remember.’

‘The rest of CID will love it out here. Tramping through the woods will get their nice shiny shoes all muddy.’

The two officers were standing alongside the surgeon who had reported the grim discovery. They stared at those body parts that were still in situ. The remains they could see were purely skeletal.

‘The rest of CID?’ Binns asked.

‘You don’t think whoever this is … er … was, simply wandered out here one sunny day and decided to lie down and wait for the end to come, do you?’

‘I take your point, and the implication must be that they were murdered.’

‘Either that, or suicide, but again, if someone had decided to top themselves, they’d hardly take the trouble to come all the way out here to do it.’

Pratt turned to the surgeon, who was struggling to control his dog, who wanted to be free of her lead. ‘You know more about these things than we do, sir. How long do you reckon the body’s been out here?’

The surgeon considered the question for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Difficult to tell with any degree of accuracy, certainly without conducting a detailed examination, but I’d say two or three years perhaps, possibly longer, but no more than five years at the outside. There again, pathology isn’t my specialist area, but out here the body would attract a high incidence of predation, and constant exposure to the atmosphere would accelerate decomposition. On second thoughts, perhaps three years would be the approximate upper limit.’

‘Thank you, sir. Now, we have your contact details. You’re in the holiday cottage until next weekend, I think you said, and then you’ll be contactable in Birmingham, on the numbers you gave us, is that correct?’

The surgeon nodded agreement. ‘I assume you’ll need a formal statement and that the coroner may want me to attend an inquest.’

‘Someone will be in touch, sir.’ Pratt turned to his colleague. ‘Toss you for it, Jack. One of us has to go back to the car and contact Netherdale, and then wait for forensics, so that we can guide them to the spot.’

Binns won the toss, and a few minutes later Pratt watched him disappear along the woodland path together with the surgeon and his dog, now bounding excitedly around, free from restraint. Pratt turned and stared at the remains, his solitary vigil only just
beginning
. ‘Who are you?’ he asked aloud. ‘And how did you come to end up here? What story could you tell, if you were able?’

All questions that would remain unanswered for many years.

Margaret Fawcett enjoyed her weekly shopping trips into Helmsdale on her day off, especially on market day. That meant she didn’t have to take the car. When she’d finished her shopping, she left her bags with the butcher. Lee Giles was more than happy to look after them until it was time for her to catch the bus back to Kirk Bolton. It was part of the service that made the business a local legend.

Margaret pottered around the market place, inspecting the goods on display on the many stalls, peering through the windows of the gift shops to see what the tourists were buying this summer and stopping occasionally to speak to one of the many mums with children. One of the shops belonged to the local coach operators. Margaret read the trips advertised there. In amongst the visits to stately homes, theme parks and shows in the West End, one caught her attention.

It was a fifteen-day excursion, taking in the capitals of Europe: Paris, Rome, Madrid, Prague, Geneva. Margaret read the list with growing excitement. The price was just within her means. She
hesitated
and thought for a moment, took her diary from her handbag and checked the date. She remembered her passport still had three years to run and stepped inside.

When she emerged twenty minutes later, she felt a guilty thrill of pleasure, as if she’d done something sinful. It would make a big hole in her savings, but it was worth it, surely? After all, she might never get the chance again. The trip was to leave in a few weeks; there was a lot to organize.

As Margaret made her plans, she was unaware that the decision she’d just made, reckless or not, had saved her life.

Many of the villages scattered round the market towns in the dale contained houses that had ceased to be permanent residences. The demand for holiday homes had pushed the prices beyond the means of locals, many of whom had moved into town, or out of the area altogether. A good proportion of the houses were let only during the summer. Bishops Cross was no exception.

Phil Miller, seated alone in the small lounge of the cottage looked up as he heard the crunch of gravel outside. He glanced through the window, his expression anxious, then relaxed once he recognized the car parked alongside his. He strode quickly across to the front door and opened it just as Corinna was about to knock. ‘Expecting me?’ she asked. ‘Or had you a date lined up?’

He gestured to the fields. ‘Of course I had. There’s my harem. A different one every night.’

She glanced over her shoulder at the flock of sheep and laughed. ‘You must be desperate. We’ll have to see what we can do about that. Are you going to let me in or have I to stand here all bloody day? Don’t tell me I’ve driven all this way to spend my time chatting on the doorstep.’

He moved to one side as if to let her in, but when she moved forward to pass him, he pinned her against the wall. What followed was as rough a prelude to mating as could be imagined, but Corinna, it seemed, didn’t mind. Either that, or she was used to it. ‘You missed me then!’ She grinned as she walked past him into the lounge.

‘Too bloody right. I always wondered what they meant by stir crazy until I came here. As if last time wasn’t bad enough. Did you get it?’

‘I did. It’s in the boot.’

‘Come on then, show me.’

They walked to her car, arm in arm. She pressed her car key and the boot lid opened smoothly. He stared down at the contents, ignoring her suitcase. ‘Perfect,’ he breathed. ‘How did you get it?’

‘Don’t ask; just don’t ask.’

Twenty minutes later, he stood in front of her, arms spread wide. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘You look just like a real fireman. Now would you mind explaining why you want it? If you tell me it’s because you’ve been invited to a fancy dress party I swear I’ll slit your throat.’

Chief Fire Officer Doug Curran looked at the sheaf of reports that had accumulated during his leave, before glancing up at his second in command. ‘This hoax call to Netherdale Council offices. Tell me exactly what happened.’