The Chemistry of Death (17 page)

'Not as far as I know.'

It was enough for her. 'That's what I mean about this bloody village. People are ready to think the worst at the best of times. When something like this happens...' She waved her hand. 'There I go again. Tell you what, I'll go and help with the coffee.'

'Can I do anything?'

She was already heading inside. 'It's all right. I'll send Jen out to keep you company.'

I sat in the night silence when she'd gone, thinking about what Tina had said.
Jenny likes you.
What was that supposed to mean? More to the point, how did I feel about it? I told myself it had been the drink talking, that I shouldn't read too much into it.

So why did I feel so nervous all of a sudden?

I got up and went to the low stone wall that bordered the garden. The last of the light had gone now, and the fields were lost in blackness. The faintest breath of breeze came off the lake, carrying the desolate cry of an owl.

There was a noise behind me. Jenny had come back outside, carrying two mugs. I stepped away from the wall, back into the pool of light thrown from the open door. She gave a start as I emerged from the shadows, slopping coffee onto her hands.

'Sorry, I didn't mean to make you jump.'

'It's all right. I just didn't see you.' She put the mugs down and blew on her hand.

I gave her a piece of kitchen roll. 'You OK?'

'I'll live.' She wiped her hands.

'Where's Tina?'

'Sobering up.' She picked up the mugs again. 'I didn't ask if you took milk and sugar.'

'No to both.'

She smiled. 'Good guess.' She handed me a coffee and moved towards the wall. 'Admiring the view?'

'What I can see of it.'

'It's great if you like fields and water.'

'And do you?'

We stood side by side, looking towards the lake. 'Yeah, I do actually. I used to go sailing with my dad when I was a girl.'

'Do you still go?'

'Not for years. I still like being by water, though. I keep thinking I should hire a boat some time. Just a small one. I know the lake's too shallow for anything very big. But it seems a waste living this close and not going out on it.'

'I've got a dinghy, if that's any good.'

I said it without thinking. But she turned to me, eagerly. I could see her smiling in the moonlight. I became aware of how close we were standing. Close enough to feel the warmth of her bare skin.

'Really?'

'It's not mine, exactly. It belongs to Henry. But he lets me use it.'

'Are you sure? I mean, I wasn't dropping hints or anything.'

'I know. Anyway, I could do with the exercise.'

I felt something like astonishment as I said it.
What are you doing?
I looked out at the lake, glad that the darkness hid my face.

'How about this Sunday?' I heard myself say.

'That'd be great! What time?'

I remembered I'd said I'd have lunch with Henry. 'Make it the afternoon? I'll pick you up about three?'

'Three o'clock's fine.'

I could hear the smile in her voice even though I wasn't looking at her. I busied myself taking a drink of my coffee, barely noticing as it burned my mouth. I couldn't believe what I'd just done.
Tina's not the only one who needs to sober up,
I thought.

I made my excuses and left not long afterwards. Tina made a belated appearance as I was going, grinning as she told me I could let her have the shorts back later. I thanked her but changed back into my damp jeans. My reputation in the village had suffered enough without walking back through it in a pair of lurid surf shorts.

I hadn't gone far from the house when my mobile phone gave a short beep to let me know there was a message. I always carried the phone with me so I could be contacted in an emergency, but when I'd taken off my wet jeans I'd left it in the pocket. I'd forgotten all about it, and the realization that I'd been out of touch for over two hours finally roused me from my preoccupation with Jenny. Guiltily, I called my answer service, hoping I hadn't missed anything serious.

But the message wasn't about any of my patients. It was from Mackenzie.

They'd found a body.

The floodlights cast a ghostly brightness onto the area. The surrounding trees were transformed into a surreal landscape of light and dark. In the centre of it the team of crime scene officers went about their business. A rectangular section of ground had been marked out with a gridwork of nylon string, and to the background hum of a generator they painstakingly scraped away at the earth, slowly revealing more of what lay hidden beneath.

Mackenzie stood nearby, crunching on a mint as he watched. The policeman looked tired and drawn, the floodlights leaching the colour from his face and accentuating the shadows under his eyes.

'We found the grave this afternoon. It's only shallow, about two or three feet deep. We thought it might be a false alarm at first, some animal or a badger set. Till we exposed the hand.'

The site was in a wood, about two miles from where Sally Palmer's body had been found. The forensics team had cleared away most of the top layer of earth by the time I arrived, just after midnight. I watched one of the officers sifting soil through a sieve. She paused to examine something, then discarded it and continued.

'How did you find it?' I asked Mackenzie.

'Sniffer dog.'

I nodded. It wasn't only drugs and explosives that the police used specially trained dogs to find. Locating a grave was rarely easy, and the larger the area to be searched the harder it got. If the body had been buried for some time there might be a tell-tale depression as the disturbed earth settled, and long-handled probes could be used to check for any areas that were more yielding than the surrounding ground. I even knew of one forensic scientist in the States who'd had interesting results divining for graves using pieces of bent wire.

But dogs remained the best search tool for discovering where a body was buried. Their sensitive noses could detect the taint of the gases released during decomposition through several feet of soil, and good cadaver dogs had even been known to locate bodies buried over a century before.

The forensics team were scraping the soil from partially exposed remains using small trowels and brushes, working with an almost archaeological precision. The same techniques needed to be used whether the grave was a few weeks or a few hundred years old. The aim in both cases was to uncover the body with a minimum of disturbance, the better to decipher whatever evidence might have been unknowingly entombed with it.

In this case, the most telling piece of information was already apparent. I wasn't taking part in the recovery process, but I was standing close enough to see what mattered.

Mackenzie glanced at me. 'Any comment?'

'Only what I expect you know already.'

'Tell me anyway.'

'It's not Lyn Metcalf,' I said.

He gave a non-committal grunt. 'Go on.'

'This isn't a new grave. Whoever it is, they've been here since long before she went missing. There's no soft tissue left at all, no smell. The dog did well to find it.'

'I'll pass on your congratulations,' he said, dryly. 'So how long would you say it's been here?'

I looked at the shallow excavation. The skeleton was now almost fully exposed, its bones the same colour as the earth. It was an adult's, lying on its side with what looked like a T-shirt and jeans still clinging to its form.

'I can only narrow it down so far without doing more tests. Buried this deep, the decomposition would take much longer than it would on the surface. So for it to get to this stage, say a minimum of a year, fifteen months? But my guess is this has been here a good bit longer than that. Probably nearer to five years.'

'How do you know?'

'The jeans and T-shirt. They're cotton, which takes four to five years to rot. They've not gone completely yet, but they're getting there.'

'Anything else?'

'Can I take a closer look?'

'Help yourself.'

It was a different scene-of-crime team from the one I'd met before, at the site where Sally Palmer had been found. They glanced at me as I crouched down at the edge of the dig, but continued with what they were doing without comment. It was already late and they had a long night ahead.

'Any signs of trauma?' I asked one of them.

'Some pretty severe cranial damage, but we've only just started to expose it.' He indicated the upper right side, which was still partly covered by soil. But cracks were already visible, radiating from a section where the bone had caved in.

'Looks blunt rather than sharp or ballistic,' I said, examining it. 'What would you say?'

He nodded. Unlike his colleague I'd met at the previous grave site, he didn't seem to resent any interference. 'Looks like it. But I'm not going to commit myself until we make sure there isn't a bullet rattling around inside the skull.'

An injury to the skull caused by either gunshot or something sharp like a knife produced a different type of trauma from one made with a blunt object. It wasn't usually difficult to recognize them, and the signs so far were that this one, with the bone crushed inwards like an egg, was the latter. But I approved of his caution all the same.

'You think the head injury was the cause of death?' Mackenzie asked.

'Could be,' I said. 'By the looks of it, it would have been fatal, assuming it wasn't made post-mortem. But it's too soon to say one way or the other.'

'What else can you tell me, then?' he said, disgruntled.

'Well, it's a male. Probably white, in his late teens or early twenties.'

He peered into the grave. 'Seriously?'

'Look at the skull. The jaw shape is different for men and women. A man's flares out more. And see where the ear was, how that bit of bone is projecting? That's the zygomatic arch, and it's always bigger in men than women. As for race, the nasal bones suggest European descent rather than African. Could be Asian, I suppose, but the cranial shape is too lozenge-shaped, so I'd say not. Age...' I shrugged. 'Again, only a guess at this stage. But from what I can see of them, the vertebrae don't look too worn. And see the ribs here?' I pointed to where the blunt ends of bone protruded from underneath the T-shirt. 'The ends get more irregular and knobbly the older you get. The edges on these are still pretty sharp, so it's obviously a young adult.'

Mackenzie closed his eyes and kneaded the bridge of his nose. 'Perfect. Just what we needed, an unrelated murder.' He looked up suddenly. 'There's no sign of the throat being cut, is there?'

'Not that I can see.' I'd already checked the cervical vertebrae for any knife marks. 'After being buried for this long any damage is going to be harder to make out without a proper examination. But there's nothing obvious.'

'Thank God for small mercies,' Mackenzie muttered.

I could sympathize. It was difficult to say which would complicate things more: having to launch a second murder inquiry, or finding evidence that the same killer had been active for years.

But that didn't concern me, for which I was grateful. I stood up, brushing the dirt from my hands. 'If there's nothing else you need me for, I might as well get back.'

'Can you be at the lab tomorrow? I mean, later today,' Mackenzie added, catching himself.

'Why?'

He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. 'To take a better look at this. We should have finished here by mid-morning. We can have the body with you for lunchtime.'

'You seem to take it for granted I'm going to get involved.'

'Aren't you?'

It was my turn to be surprised. Not so much by his question, as the fact that he seemed to know me better than I did. 'I suppose so,' I said, accepting the inevitability of it. 'I'll be there for twelve.'

I woke up in the kitchen, cold and confused. In front of me, the door to the back garden stood open, revealing the first hint of a lightening sky. The memory of the dream was still fresh in my mind, the voices and presence of Kara and Alice as vivid as if I had just spoken to them. It had been even more disturbing than usual. In it I'd felt that Kara had wanted to warn me of something, but I'd not wanted to know. I'd been too afraid of what I might hear.

I shivered. I'd no recollection of coming downstairs, or what unconscious motive had led me to unlock the door. I went to close it, but then stopped. Rising like a cliff from the pale sea of mist covering the field was the impenetrable dark of the wood. A sense of foreboding gripped me as I stared at it.

Can't see the wood for the trees.
The phrase came into my head from nowhere. For a moment it seemed to have some deeper significance, but it faded even as I tried to grasp it. I was still trying when something touched the back of my neck.

I started and turned around. The empty kitchen confronted me. A breeze, I told myself, even though the morning was still and silent, undisturbed by any whisper of air. I closed the door, trying to dismiss the unease that still persisted. But the sensation of fingertips gently brushing my skin lingered as I went back to bed and waited for the dawn.

I'd got most of the morning to kill before I was due at the lab. With nothing better to do, I strolled up to Henry's for breakfast, as I often did on Saturdays. He was already up and seemed in good form, cheerfully asking me how it had gone the night before as he briskly fried eggs and grilled bacon. It took me a moment to realize he meant the barbecue at Jenny's rather than the discovery in the wood. News of that hadn't broken yet, and what the reaction would be when it did I couldn't imagine. Manham was already struggling to deal with events as it was. And I still felt too unsettled by the dream to want to dwell on such things myself.

So I didn't mention that a second body had been found. But Henry's good mood was infectious, and by the time I left I was in a much brighter frame of mind. My spirits lifted further as I walked back home to collect my car. It was another beautiful morning, without the stifling heat that would come later. The yellows, purples and reds of the flowers edging the village green hurt the eye with their vibrancy, filling the air with the heavy sweetness of pollen. Only the police trailer parked nearby disturbed the illusion of rural quiet.