Human Remains (5 page)

‘Coffee would be great, thanks. Two sugars. Alright if I use your loo?’

I pointed him in the direction of the toilet and then I went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, waiting for it to boil. On the windowsill of the kitchen was a little statue of an angel that I’d bought in a New Age shop in Bath. It was lit up by the sunshine, shining as though surrounded by a halo of glory.

I brought the coffees through to the living room. He was already sitting there, his pocket notebook out on his lap, writing something, head bent over the task.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You work in Intel, right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m the public protection analyst. And I’m also one of the divisional analysts.’

‘You’re doing two jobs?’

‘Pretty much. There were four of us and I just did public protection, and then two of the team were redeployed last year and now there’s just me and another analyst. We share the stuff for the division between us.’

He wasn’t remotely interested in our job descriptions but I was always hopeful that someone would eventually take note of the injustice of having to do twice as much work for no extra money. I nearly added something about how Kate just did the analysis for the North Division,
and
I did that and the public protection work too. But, as always, I bit my lip and said nothing.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you went in through the back door, is that right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There was a light on. I thought that was a bit odd because I didn’t think anyone was living there.’

‘There was a light on? Whereabouts?’

‘In the dining room. There was a lamp on the table.’

He was writing. I waited for him to finish, tense. ‘Let’s go back a bit. You said on the phone that you broke a window?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not on purpose, anyway. I pushed at the door and the pane of glass was loose and fell inside the kitchen and smashed on the floor. One of the panes at the bottom of the door was broken already.’

‘But the door was open?’

‘No. The key was inside. I unlocked it.’

More writing.

‘And you said there was a light on…’

‘Yes. In the dining room.’

‘Was it still on when you left?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t turn it off?’

I stared at him, baffled. Of course I hadn’t turned it off – why would I do that? Stumble back out in the dark? But then I hadn’t been thinking straight. Maybe I had turned it off after all.

‘I don’t think I turned it off,’ I said doubtfully.

He made a noise that sounded like a ‘hmm’.

‘Am I going to get arrested for burglary dwelling?’ I asked, accompanying the question with a laugh that sounded forced even to me.

‘Not right now,’ he said with a grin. ‘I’ve got enough to do.’

Taking my statement seemed to take forever, even though it was less than an hour. He got me to read his scrawled handwriting and sign his notebook to say I agreed with what he’d put. He said he’d type it up and get me to sign the proper version some time at work on Monday. Then he went back to the house next door, and left me in peace.

Not long after that, there was a knock at the front door. A man I didn’t recognise: an ill-fitting jacket and jeans, a full head of grey hair swept away from his face in what might once have been a quiff.

‘Hello. Sorry to trouble you,’ he said, and of course what I should have done was shut the door there and then. But foolishly, and because I was polite, I didn’t.

‘I’m a reporter with the
Briarstone Chronicle
,’ he said. ‘I’m here because of your next-door neighbour. I wondered if it was you who called the police?’

I bit my lip. ‘I don’t know who called the police,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘They told me it was a neighbour. There isn’t a house on the other side, so I thought it must be you.’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said. ‘Now, I’m really busy – sorry.’

‘Right. Thanks for your time.’

I didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. Shut the door firmly. A few hours later there was another knock. I looked out through the peephole this time, and saw another man I didn’t know, definitely not someone in uniform. Youngish, casually dressed, with dark hair that needed a cut, glasses. There was a woman standing a few paces behind him, with a huge camera dangling by its strap from her wrist. I didn’t open the door.

Despite three showers and washing all my clothes, I kept sniffing the air, the smell in my nostrils still. Maybe it was my imagination. The cat had curled up on the sofa, tucked into an indignant ball, her back to me and the room. It would probably be some time before she felt ready to look me in the eye again.

It was nearly ten o’clock already and I’d hardly achieved anything useful. But I still couldn’t face starting the Tactical Assessment, so I opened up the despatch system and searched for my name and address. This was, strictly speaking, against the rules, but if anyone asked I could probably argue a legitimate business interest for looking.

It went on beyond that for several pages. Various teams were called out, according to the protocol. The efforts to locate a next of kin for Shelley Burton were dutifully recorded; eventually they found an elderly aunt in Norfolk. No mention was made of the partner, Graham, if indeed I’d remembered his name correctly.

‘Did you see the Chief’s Summary?’ I said. ‘There’s been another one.’

‘Another what?’ Kate asked, peering over the top of her computer screen at me.

‘Another decomposed corpse. Only forty-three years old.’

Kate tutted at me. She always glossed over those ones, since technically there wasn’t any crime. Bodies found in the comfort of their own homes with no apparent suspicious circumstances weren’t our concern. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d found the latest one, I probably wouldn’t have given it much thought either. But there was something else that had been nagging away at the back of my mind – that Major Crime guy had queried what I’d said about the light being on. Clearly, when they’d gone into the house, the light had been off. This in itself wasn’t what was worrying me – after all, maybe I did turn it off without thinking when I left, or maybe the first patrol had turned it off, or maybe the bulb had finally blown. But I remembered how I’d thought there had been someone in the house. I’d felt something – a presence – and at the time I’d put the feeling down to there being a person in the armchair, and any noises I heard as being the cat. But what if there had been someone else there all the time?

‘I just think it’s a shame,’ I said. ‘Lying there all that time, and nobody even notices you’re gone.’

‘Mmm,’ Kate said, but she wasn’t really listening.

‘I wonder how many there’ve been this year?’

No answer at all this time. I wasn’t really expecting one. Kate was pretending to be engrossed in writing the bi-weekly report that we’d have to present to the management team on Wednesday, although what she was actually doing was updating her Facebook status on her phone.

What the hell – I wasn’t busy. I set up a search to look for all calls and incidents where a body had been found since the start of the year. I added the wildcard search terms: ‘decomposed’ or ‘decomposition’. Surely there couldn’t be that many, I thought.

But I was wrong.

‘Twenty-four,’ I announced.

‘Twenty-four what?’

‘Bodies. Twenty-four since January. In Briarstone borough.’

Kate sighed and put down her phone. She craned her neck round the edge of her screen and regarded me steadily. ‘What bodies? What are you on about?’

‘All bodies found inside a property in a state of decomposition.’

‘What are you looking at that for? We’re supposed to have this finished by lunchtime.’

‘And,’ I said, pausing for an inaudible drum roll, ‘guess how many there were in the whole of last year?’

She shrugged. ‘Twenty? Ten?’

‘Four.’

She stared at me for a moment, her interest piqued at last, and came round to my desk to look over my shoulder. The figures were all there – the same criteria search for the two date ranges, showing a surprisingly high figure for this year so far, and a curiously low one for last year.

‘What about previous years?’ she asked.

‘I think that’s what I’m going to check next.’

‘Can’t see the point myself,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s going to be interested. It’s hard enough getting them to do anything when a crime’s been committed, let alone when there definitely hasn’t.’

‘Ah,’ I said, tapping one finger on the end of my nose, ‘it’s all about the packaging. Community Safety. Fear of Crime. Social Cohesion. Neighbourhoods, all that.’

Kate was right, unfortunately. Working as civilians in the police force was often a battle of cultures, trying to persuade senior officers that we had a worthwhile contribution to make to an investigation, to resource-planning and to strategic initiatives, just as much as officers who had real experience of going out and arresting people. The nearest I was likely to come to a criminal was living in blissful anonymity two streets away from my local serial sex offender, or passing someone in the front office as they waited to be dealt with. I was never going to have to calm down someone who was holding a knife, nor tell someone that a loved one was dead. I was never going to have to try to persuade a woman to leave her violent partner, or tell a parent that their child was being abused. Instead I looked at all the figures, all the raw data that churned in day after day after day, forming it into patterns, looking for a way in. Even then, after finding something that was potentially interesting, trying to persuade the senior management that my recommendations were worth following up was often a battle. As I’d just said to Kate, phrasing it carefully to suggest that there were added benefits in terms of achieving Home Office targets was always a good idea.

I looked at my list of incidents. Twenty-four people, all found dead, alone, some time after they’d died. Unfortunately, as the deceased weren’t classed as victims of crime, there was no way to search for other parameters such as age or sex, but scanning through a couple of the incident reports it was already clear that they weren’t all elderly people.

I ran the same report going back to the start of 2005 and exported the data to a spreadsheet. A quick table showed just how interesting the latest results were – just three decomposed bodies in the whole of 2005. In the seven years between 2004 and 2011, twenty-two bodies – the highest in 2010 with eleven, but then it had been a very cold winter. And in 2012 – twenty-four bodies in the first nine months of the year.

At lunchtime I went out, walked up the hill to the town centre, puffing a bit. On the other side of the road, Kate and Carol were also heading in the same direction, talking animatedly. They hadn’t seen me, or had chosen to pretend I wasn’t there. They were walking twice as fast as me, anyway, and in a minute or two they would be at the top of the hill and around the corner, out of sight.

On the way back to the police station I looked at the rows of terraced houses lining Great Barr Street, rows of
dirty-looking
steps and greying net curtains. Piles of post against the inside of one frosted glass door; a couple of dead flies, legs up, on the windowsill of another. How many more people were out there, waiting to be found?

I drove from the Park and Ride to the supermarket in the rain, the radio on, going through the list in my head of all the things I was going to do to treat myself after the trauma of the weekend. Maybe order a takeaway. Have a long soak in the bath. Read a book, or watch a film.

I had lived on my own for years, and I liked it. Besides, I had the cat. I had the angels to protect me.

My mum was becoming frail. Since she’d had a fall last year, even though she’d only been bruised, she had been too nervous to go out – so she issued me with shopping lists, instructions to collect her prescriptions and post things for her, and on the way home from work I would stop at her house two or three times a week, make her dinner and wash up. Technically she could cook for herself and do her own washing-up, but when she’d been ill with a chest infection in December I’d cooked for her, and even though she was now well again I hadn’t quite managed to get out of the habit when I was over there.

Her house was an old Victorian terrace just outside the town centre. Still parked outside was her old Nissan Micra, rusting to pieces and yet she insisted on taxing and insuring it just in case she suddenly felt the urge to leave the house. I pulled in behind it and sat for a moment, savouring the feeling of being alone, being quiet.