Dying to Sin (16 page)

Ales were served on a rotation basis, and tonight the bar boasted Barnsley Bitter, Ale Force from the Storm Brewery at Macclesfield, and Towns of Chesterfield. Even a cask-strength whisky. Enough to drown your sorrows, whatever they might be. But a pint of Towns would suit, for now. It was good to get out of the rain.

‘I’ll get the first round in,’ Matt said.

‘I won’t argue.’

Cooper noticed they’d introduced lamb madras to the menu at the Queen Anne. There were two bars, one that had been a smoking area until the ban came in. Like himself, Matt had never smoked, but would probably have liked to see the smoking bar retained. Tradition again? Or a stubborn fondness for dangerous activities?

Ben remembered their great-uncle, who had farmed all his life, explaining that a farmer’s life and the lives of his animals followed an annual cycle that moved with the seasons and was influenced by natural elements, such as the weather.

‘Not these days,’ said Matt sourly, when he was reminded of it. ‘More like influenced by the price of milk and the latest EU regulations.’

An old milk churn stood near the doorway under an ancient stone lintel, and log fires burned in both bars. In the summer they often preferred to sit outside at one of the picnic tables in the garden, admiring the hills or watching the gliders pass overhead. But Matt wasn’t in a mood to notice the scenery, even if it had been daylight.

‘Some of the people who live in these villages now are on a different planet from what we are. If you meet people down at the postbox or in the pub, they don’t relate to what you’re doing at all. Their work and life experiences are so different from ours. They think we’re either mad or quaint.’

That night, the pub was filled with people in various stages of saturation and evaporation. It was like a Turkish bath where everyone had forgotten to take their clothes off. You couldn’t get near the fire for piles of drenched cagoules and plastic over-trousers.

‘It’s sheer ignorance. They think we’re all either grain barons or peasants.’

The smell of cooked food mingled with the steam from drying clothes, like the aroma from the kitchens of some exotic restaurant. If he closed his eyes, Cooper could imagine a genuine curry being prepared in the background, hot with cayenne and spiced with interesting herbs.

‘You know Geoff Weeks at One Ash? He has Right to Roam over part of his farm. Some ramblers complained about finding a dead sheep on his land the other day. They rang the police, even – can you believe it?’

Ben wanted to say that, yes, he could believe it. You only had to spend half an hour in the Call Reception Centre to get an idea of the complaints from the public that call handlers had to deal with. Three thousand of them a day. Litter on the pavement, birds stuck up trees. A dead sheep was nothing. Sometimes the actual nature of the incident wasn’t clear until response officers arrived at the scene.

But he said nothing, preferring not to interrupt Matt when he was getting things off his chest.

‘If you’ve got five hundred ewes,’ said Matt, ‘and you run them until they’re seven or eight crop, the way Geoff does, then a certain percentage of them are going to die. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?’

Ben nodded. Yes, death was certainly a fact of life in the countryside. It was one of the things that urban dwellers didn’t appreciate. These days, they ran special coach trips from the cities to give townies a chance to smell the difference between a cow and sheep. But you didn’t know about the omnipresence of death until you lived here.

Usually, a mention of the word ‘diversification’ was enough to spark a rant on its own. Tonight, Matt was abnormally subdued.

‘I don’t know if you remember Jack Firth, over near Chapel. It turns out he’d been running a nice little sideline, killing and burying unwanted greyhounds on his land. The rules say unwanted dogs should be euthanized by a vet, but breeders and trainers find that too expensive. It was much cheaper to use Jack’s services.’

‘What’s your point, Matt?’

‘He was meeting a demand, you see. It’s what the government wants us to do, find new ways of exploiting our assets, and providing services the public actually wants. Jack told me there are twenty-five thousand unwanted dogs produced every year by the greyhound racing business – dogs at the end of their racing lives, or that have never been particularly good in the first place. The rescue centres could never cope with that number, so Jack had found a niche market. His business would have been safe for years to come.’

‘Was he found out?’

‘Yes. But there was no evidence of cruel or inhumane treatment of the animals. Even when he was arrested, he could only be charged with failing to obtain the proper licences. He didn’t fill in the forms for the bureaucrats. So now he’s a criminal.’

It wasn’t quite what Ben had expected. But he could see that Matt had found an example of diversification that he’d be using for years to come, as a warning to others. Best to change the subject a bit.

‘Can you see a future for the girls?’ he asked. ‘They’ll want to go off and do their own thing when they grow up, won’t they?’

‘Well, I’d like at least one of them to be involved in farming. Our family have been farmers since the year dot.’

‘I know, Matt.’

‘I should think it’s ever since farming has existed. All right, the younger brothers and sisters have always had other jobs, like you. But if they haven’t had a farm themselves they’ve always been involved in some way. There’s got to be a couple of cows or a few sheep – it’s just a way of life. But young people need to believe they can make a living from farming, and they want to get some respect. Farmers feel like they’re regarded as the dregs. We can’t do anything right.’ He paused to take a long swig of beer. ‘And there are the marts.’

‘You mean Ashbourne?’

Ben knew the closure of Ashbourne cattle mart had been a blow for local farmers, though there was still Bakewell, and even Uttoxeter over the border in Staffordshire.

‘That’s just the latest,’ said Matt. ‘Those farmers in isolated locations look forward to market as a chance for a trip out, to meet people with similar problems. The only other person we talk to much is the bank manager. When the rest of the local marts go, that’ll be it, Ben. That’ll be it for livestock farming in this county.’

‘Oh, come on, Matt.’

‘No, I’m telling you the truth. In ten years’ time, I’ll either still be farming, or drawing the social, and that’s a fact. There was an article in the
Farmers Guardian
a while ago that said we’d see the end of small farms by 2010.’

‘There are still a few left, though.’

‘Aye, a few.’

Cooper was silent for a moment, savouring his Towns, letting its flavour wash away the strange chemical taste that seemed to have settled at the back of his throat since he’d first visited Pity Wood Farm.

‘Do you really think it will happen, Matt?’ he asked.

‘I’m damn certain it will. I think it’s all planned out somewhere. In London or in Brussels, I don’t know. But I reckon there’s a dossier sitting in some bureaucrat’s desk drawer right now, showing the target date for the closure of the last small hill farm. They’ve got our fate worked out, and there’ll be nothing we can do about it.’

‘Nothing? You could start planning for it now, couldn’t you?’

‘Oh, yes? You try coming in exhausted after a long day and sitting down to do the government’s bloody paperwork. Then see how much time you have to start planning your future. Not to mention trying to spend a bit of time with your family. You see, that’s the trouble with us farmers. We’ve got this suicidal urge to farm. If we were sane, we’d have said “sod it” by now.’

Cooper felt a familiar niggle of worry about his brother surface at the back of his mind. He’d suffered severe spells of despondency himself, and he knew what it was like when things looked really black and the future held no hope. There was such a temptation to consider the easy way out, the one that would take all those burdens off your shoulders in an instant.

He could only hope and pray that the tendency wasn’t present in his brother, at least not to any greater degree. Matt had seen this happen to people he knew – too many of them, over the years. The highest rates of suicide in the UK were among farmers. They became very attached to their patch of land and could find it hard to cope, particularly when a problem such as foot-and-mouth occurred.

It was one of the saving factors about farming that you were always looking to the future – anticipating the next harvest, or the next lambing season. The work you did today would bear fruit in five months’ time. It was quite different from living on a day-today basis, when every week was the same and nothing was likely to change.

But if that optimism about the future was taken away, then farmers like Matt would have nothing to keep them going.

‘Are we going to have another drink?’

Matt thumped his empty glass down. ‘Why not?’

Ben drained his Towns and got up to go to the bar. After a day like this, he did start to wonder who the sane ones were. Maybe, in the end, it was the likes of Diane Fry who could see the future most clearly, and had it all worked out. Fry’s attitude was the real sanity. Well, perhaps.

* * *

With mounting, irrational rage, Fry stared at the contents of the box she’d lifted from beneath the loose floorboard. Diamorphine hydrochloride. Pharmaceutically prepared heroin, freeze dried in glass ampoules for injection into the wrist.

She’d heard about this use of diamorphine. Low-profile trial schemes had been taking place around the country for some time. Because it came in measured doses, you knew exactly how much you were taking, and you could function perfectly well. That was the theory, anyway. It was heroin on the NHS. And at a cost to the taxpayer, she’d heard, of about ten thousand pounds a year per addict.

Fry knew there were very few pure, one-drug addicts. Heroin users took crack, and vice versa. No one had suggested prescribing crack on the NHS yet, but she supposed it could happen. On the street, women could earn between a hundred and two hundred pounds a night. And in many cases, it all went on gear. A heroin habit took a lot of feeding.

She sat down suddenly on the bed, feeling a powerful surge of guilt at having invaded her sister’s privacy. She wanted to weep at the destructiveness of the emotions that had driven her to do it. Jealousy, bitterness, and fear. Their relationship couldn’t be founded solely on a shared set of genes, could it? There had to be more to family than this endless anger and suspicion.

But Fry looked at the boxes on the floor. And immediately the fury swept over her again in a stomach-churning tide, too powerful to resist.

To her certain knowledge, there was no diamorphine trial taking place in Edendale for local addicts. So where had her sister been going? Where was Angie obtaining her supplies?

15

Saturday

Cooper knew it wasn’t going to be a good day as soon as he entered the CID room and set eyes on Gavin Murfin. Somehow, Murfin was able to arrange his features into a picture of abject misery. Martyrdom and gloom were written all over him this morning. It was enough to shrivel the tinsel.

‘What’s the matter, Gavin?’

‘I’ve been put down for duty over Christmas. All thanks to this job at Rakedale. I’m really going to be in the dog house, I can tell you.’

Cooper took off his jacket and sat down at his desk. ‘I’ll swap with you.’

Murfin looked up. ‘What?’

‘I’ll swap duties with you, Gavin. No one will mind. As long as someone’s around to deal with anything that crops up. Then you can have Christmas at home with your family, and everyone’s happy, right?’

‘But what about you?’

Cooper shrugged. ‘It’s not so important for me. I don’t have kids.’

‘Even so. They’ll be expecting you at Bridge End on Christmas Day. Your lot always have a big family get-together, don’t they? You’ve told me about it often enough. Brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, and hordes of little nephews and nieces.’

‘There aren’t that many, Gavin. Besides, it’ll be different this year. It’s the first year Mum won’t be there.’

‘Oh, right. Yeah, that could be a bit tough, I suppose. So you’d rather come into the office than be at the farm, would you? Sure?’

‘I’ll be all right. I won’t mind being busy.’

Murfin studied him for a moment. ‘Hang on, though. What about Liz?’

‘She’s going home to her own family in Stoke.’

‘And you’re not invited?’

Cooper felt himself starting to get a bit irritated by Murfin’s selflessness. ‘It’s OK, Gavin, really. I want to swap. I’ll do Christmas duty.’

‘Well, all right. Will you tell Miss, or shall I?’

‘I’d better do it, I think. By the way, what are you buying your kids for Christmas, Gavin?’

‘The eldest is really into computer games.’

‘I like
The Sims
,’ said Cooper.

‘I’m a bit worried about that one, in case the wife gets hold of it.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Well, they say there’s the thing about women who play
The Sims
. They use it to exercise their cruel streak, and have fun tormenting small, helpless creatures. They make them live in houses with no toilets. They lock them in rooms with no doors and windows and see how long it takes them to go mad.’

‘Is that so?’

‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was designed by our DS.’

No matter how long the morning briefing had been allowed to run on, it would not have been capable of providing a satisfactory conclusion. There was no lucid narrative to the deaths of the two victims at Pity Wood Farm, no story of their lives to give them an identity. Apart from confirmation that they were both female, they still had no humanity.

Every officer present in the room was conscious of the lack of information, the gaping hole in their enquiry, the blockage that was stalling it before it had even got going. No IDs.

Cooper always felt a particular sense of despair at these cases. Of course, there were many people who lived transient lives. They put down their roots in shallow soil. Unnoticed when they arrived, and unmissed when they left.

‘First of all, there’s no evidence of major trauma, no broken bones,’ said Hitchens, getting straight to the main issue. ‘Some poisons might show up in the hair mat that had sloughed off the first victim. But if death was due to injury to the soft tissues, we’re right out of luck.’

‘Parts of the first body looked almost … mummified,’ said someone.

‘That’s adipocere. We don’t see mummified body parts very often in this part of the world – you need a dry, arid climate for that.’

The list of potential evidence dug out by the forensic anthropology team was impressive. During the excavation, they’d packaged up forty-four bones, two dirt samples, twenty-nine bags labelled ‘unknown debris’, fifteen bags of clothing fragments, and seventeen teeth.

‘Yes, they’ve been dead for about a year and four years respectively, we’re told, but neither of them was necessarily killed where they were found,’ said Hitchens. ‘Or even buried there when they first died. Apparently, the scene is right on a geological boundary – the clay on the south side of Pity Wood Farm doesn’t extend into the fields to the north or east. It’s probably why the place was built there in the first place. Historically, I imagine there was a brickworks, or a clay pit.’

‘It’s almost certainly how the farm got its name,’ said Cooper. ‘Pity Wood, because there were several clay pits here, in the woods. Obviously, most of the trees have gone now, too. They would have needed the wood for firing kilns.’

‘What about dental records, sir?’ asked Fry.

‘OK, we have good dentition remaining on the more recent of the two bodies. Enough to confirm an identity from dental records. If we had a potential identity to confirm, of course. But at the moment we haven’t a clue who she is.’

‘Mrs van Doon said there was an unusual amount of decay to the victim’s teeth.’

‘Yes. When I said “good dentition”, I didn’t mean to suggest her teeth were in good condition. I mean we have a good profile of her teeth, and any dental work, plus the unusual condition. This gives us a better chance of making a positive identification.’

‘Understood.’

‘As for the second victim, this individual is also female. What more can I tell you?’

‘There was a shoe,’ said Cooper. ‘That could give us a lead, at least.’

‘But the shoe wasn’t found
on
the victim, it was lying in the soil about five yards away from the body. Without a direct connection to the victim, it isn’t a known piece of evidence. It could have landed up there some other way.’

Hitchens looked around the group. ‘Now I’m going to hand over to our consultant forensic anthropologist, Dr Pat Jamieson, who is going to fill us in on some of the details.’

Murfin groaned dramatically, as if he’d been shot. Despite himself, Cooper couldn’t help laughing.

‘Superintendent Branagh has expressed a firm view on this,’ said Hitchens, as if he’d anticipated resistance. ‘She thinks we should be fully briefed by the forensic specialists. We ought to make full use of their expertise while we have them on the payroll, so to speak. The superintendent believes we’ll all benefit from the insight.’

Murfin was making noises as though he was going to be sick. Hitchens looked at him.

‘And she emphasized that it should be the
whole
team.’

When Dr Jamieson entered, he looked as surprised as anyone to be sitting in a meeting room with a bunch of DCs who thought they had better things to do. Cooper wondered who had twisted his arm. The mysterious Superintendent Branagh, perhaps?

Jamieson rallied bravely, despite the chilly atmosphere. He became professional after he’d set up his laptop and screen, and began his presentation.

‘Well, there are four things we might hope to establish from decomposed or skeletalized remains,’ he said. ‘Sex, race, age and stature.’

‘And cause of death?’ suggested someone hopefully.

Jamieson turned to Hitchens. ‘Inspector, you know I can’t address –’

‘Yes, I know. Carry on, Doctor.’

The anthropologist hesitated. ‘I see. Well, let’s press on. First comes sex.’

He seemed to notice Gavin Murfin’s expression out of the corner of his eye and hastily amended his words.

‘Ah … first comes gender. As a rule, it’s easy to determine gender in adults if the remains include the pelvic bones. The pelvis of a woman is generally broader than that of a man. It has to be wider in females because it surrounds the birth canal, and a baby’s head has to pass between the bones of the pubis. Without the pubis, the probability of making a correct identification of gender declines. Generally it comes down to size differences, but there’s a certain amount of overlap in the middle. There are approximately ten per cent of individuals who confuse the middle ground.’

‘We do have some very large young women walking around Edendale.’

‘It’s not a question of obesity,’ said Jamieson, ‘but of height, the width of the shoulders, the density of the bone …’

‘And in this case …’

‘In both cases, the pelvis was clearly female. It was obvious even in the field. For both Victim A and Victim B, the pelvis is broader at the hips, with a raised sacro-iliac joint, a wide sciatic notch, a greater sub-pubic angle. All part of the geometry of birth. The skull can also be a help, but of course …’

‘We don’t have two skulls.’

‘Not for Victim B. No, we don’t.’

Jamieson paused, allowing for more questions. ‘Now, race is a question we’re often asked to pronounce on. But it’s getting more difficult. Some characteristics of particular populations are evident in the skeleton, but there’s a lot of variation, even within groups that are historically pure. In the case of Victim A, we have the hair mat, which had sloughed off the skull. As you can see from the first picture, it’s very dark brown and slightly wavy. That, plus the shape of the teeth, mark the victim as white, where the discoloured skin might have been misleading.’

‘And Victim … I mean, the second woman?’ said Fry.

‘We can’t be sure, Sergeant. Completely skeletalized remains, and the absence of a skull – well, I’m sorry, but …’

‘OK.’

‘Now, age. By the time a person reaches the age of twenty, most bone growth is complete, the epiphyses are united and most teeth are fully calcified. So we look at several different structures: skull sutures, clavicles, pelvis.’

Jamieson presented another series of photographs on the screen.

‘In Victim A, the bones of the pelvis were dense and smooth, with a marked absence of grain; the bones of a mature but young woman. Her clavicles had not fully matured, and the basilar structure in the skull was only partly fused, an indicator that she was not yet twenty-five. Factoring all the indicators together, I’m confident that Victim A was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. Victim B is a little older, fully matured. Without the skull, it’s difficult, but I’d say between twenty-five and thirty.’

‘Height, Doctor?’

‘To estimate height, we turn to bone measurements and regression equations.’ He seemed to sense the shuffling and muttering. ‘Yes, I know it sounds like scientific jargon. What it means is that we can predict stature from the length of the femur, for example. Multiply by one number, add another, and bingo. For Victim A, length of the left femur is forty-four centimetres. Using the stature calculation formulas, we estimate she stood between five feet one and a half inches and five feet four and a half.’

A few officers were at least making notes, having detected some facts in the doctor’s presentation.

‘And the skeleton?’ someone asked.

‘Yes, Victim B. You’d think we could just lay a skeleton out and measure it to get the victim’s height. But cartilage decays and shrinks after death, sometimes by several inches. In Victim B’s case, the femur is forty-eight centimetres, giving a height of between five feet six and a half inches and five feet nine and a half inches.’

‘How accurate are these ages and measurements, Doctor?’

‘I’m confident the estimates are accurate, within the parameters I’ve given you. But I’d like to urge the police officers present to be careful with their missing person reports when trying to make a match. Don’t assume any degree of accuracy there.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, a lot of people don’t actually know how tall they are. Or they lie about it. Some would like to be a few inches taller, others a bit less tall. And of course, they don’t realize that their height changes when they age, so they can be giving the wrong height for themselves for years without knowing it. Besides, if you’re looking at a missing person report, ask yourself who provided the information? A spouse, a friend? Some of those figures could just be a wild guess.’

Jamieson took advantage of the silence he’d created to press on hurriedly with his final point.

‘And how long have the remains been buried, you’ll ask me. Well, an unembalmed adult body buried unprotected in ordinary soil will normally take ten to twelve years to decompose down to a skeleton. Burial depth and soil temperature might vary the decomposition rate. A body in air decomposes eight times faster than when buried.’ He looked up from his laptop. ‘Like Detective Constable Cooper’s dead sheep.’

Gavin Murfin laughed, but no one else seemed to understand the joke. The anthropologist moved on rapidly.

‘When bodies are exposed to cool, moist soil, the soft tissues can decay quite slowly and turn into adipocere. Adipocere is a soapy, greasy substance that forms when body fat decomposes in a damp environment. It’s sometimes called grave wax. Adipocere is the cheesy greyish-white mass you can see in this photograph.’

Yes, they could see it quite clearly on the photographs. Some of the officers looked away for a moment, but forced themselves to turn back. Jamieson left the most revolting photograph on screen while he finished off.

‘Adipocere inhibits putrefying bacteria, so when a body reaches this state of decomposition it might stay that way for several years before it decomposes any further. There was a large quantity of adipocere beneath the chest and abdominal regions in the case of Victim A. So I would say you have the cold, wet soil of Rakedale to thank for the relatively intact condition of this body. If I might offer a very non-scientific comment, it’s almost as though Victim A has been waiting in her half-decomposed state for someone to find her.’

Jamieson smiled as he diverged from his professional approach for a moment. He waited for comments, but none came.

‘Finally, then,’ he said. ‘There was no sign of trauma on either victim – no fractures, cut marks, or signs of perimortem damage on any of the bones we’ve recovered. But we don’t have every bone for Victim B. As we’ve already mentioned, there is no skull. And, before any of us run away with assumptions, I should mention that it’s very common for the head to come off when a body disarticulates. With the skull, we have one of the heaviest parts of the skeletal structure, supported by one of the most fragile.’