Such a waste of four young lives. Yet Detective Inspector Paul Amos felt almost relieved that at least he knew the worst. Then he felt guilty about the relief.

Before him, way past the blue police tape that barred his drive home, he could see the crushed remains of a white car smashed against a roadside tree. Police cars, an ambulance and two fire engines framed the scene with their blue lights flashing and headlights static.

A young uniformed policewoman stood sentinel some 50 yards back from the wreckage. Although a new recruit, she recognized Amos immediately.

‘Sorry, sir,’ she said as the inspector got out of his car. ‘It’s a bad one. You don’t really want to see it. Four teenagers trapped in the vehicle. All dead.’

It was no more than Amos had expected. The curse had come upon him. The curse of the church spire.

Paul Amos shuddered every time he looked up at that tall church spire towering above him. Something terrible always happened whenever he saw it, which is why he tried to avoid driving through Louth. He had the shuddering, irrational feeling that this spire did not belong to the loving God of the New Testament, shepherding the flock into the fold of salvation; rather it was claimed by the God of the Old Testament, the jealous avenging omnipotent being before whom all sinners cowered, as Amos did whenever he found himself beneath it.

It was not just the height of the whole edifice that dominated the town. The spire itself was quite short compared to the tower it stood on, a tower that soared three gigantic storeys with four threatening fingers at the top of each corner pointing skywards to the all-seeing, all-knowing God who knew your every sin.

Yet Amos and his wife were occasionally drawn across the wolds from Lincoln in pursuit of what, even now in the 1990s, was still something of a rarity. Dating back to the days when the first Asian faces appeared in Lincolnshire to challenge centuries of isolation, especially in matters of spicy food, their mutual love of curry was about the only pleasure that still united them.

And this Indian – or was it Bangladeshi? Amos was not sure – was good. It always had been from the moment it opened on the site of an old petrol station driven out of business when the bypass finally arrived.

From the comfort of the Amoses’ home, the option of a meal out seemed appetizing. From the off-peak parking place beneath the spire, the outing lost much of its appeal.

Now, faced with the consequences of having defied the curse, Amos felt physically sick. Muttering a word of thanks to the policewoman, the inspector got swiftly back into his car and reversed, fearful that the officer would mistake his discomfort for squeamishness in the face of death.

The rain that had started to dribble down from the skies while Amos and his wife were in the restaurant, and which had turned the road surface fatally greasy, was growing steadily persistent and the light was fading on the summer evening.

Amos reversed cautiously for about a hundred yards before spotting a farmer’s gateway that he could back into and turn round. By the time he had returned to the main road and headed south to work round the obstruction it was quite dark, especially as the shock of the accident had persuaded Amos to drive cautiously.

Mrs Amos knew what he was thinking. She quoted the lines from Lincolnshire poet Tennyson:

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

‘The curse has come upon me!’ cried

The Lady of Shalott

As they turned a gentle bend and began to descend the rolling hillside, Mrs Amos suddenly cried out. Among a small copse on the right hand side of the road, what looked like a house chimney was blazing away merrily.

The curve in the road meant that stopping would create a potential hazard, given the poor visibility and wet road, but just beyond the copse there was a wide dirt track leading 20 yards or so up to a pair of metal gates.

There was nothing coming the other way. Amos swung across the road and pulled up just short of the gates. He was quickly on his newly acquired but little used mobile phone, dialing 999 and asking for fire in response to the routine triple-option question.

‘It’s Inspector Paul Amos of Lincolnshire police here. There’s a house on fire on a lonely stretch of the main road about five miles south of …’ he began breathlessly.

The voice answering the call cut in swiftly: ‘It’s all right sir. Are you by any chance outside the council rubbish tip?’

Amos looked for the first time at the sign on the gate. Indeed, he was.

‘You’re the fourth report tonight. This one’s an old favourite. That chimney stack is not attached to a building. It’s just there to burn off the gases coming off the rubbish. You don’t always see it because of the trees but I’m told the flames leap really high when there’s a lot of gas.’

Feeling stupid, Amos made his apologies and rang off. He was looking down at the ground as he opened his car door to resume the twice-interrupted journey home.

Only when he bent his head to enter the vehicle did he realize that his wife was sitting in her seat frozen and struck dumb. Her arm was outstretched diagonally across the car interior, pointing shakily.

Amos followed the stare. Dim but unmistakable in the car’s headlights, a bony finger on a slimy hand was pointing straight back from a black bin bag near the base of the mound of refuse.

Chapter 2

Removing the body proved more unpleasant and more disruptive than Amos expected.

There was not much point in securing the site. The body looked as if it had been dumped in with a lorry load of waste and in any case any vehicle marks would have been obliterated by more recent deliveries. Judging from the state of what little he could see, Amos reckoned that the remains had been left undiscovered for several years.

There were, he reckoned, several hours to work in. Refuse lorries would need to complete their collection rounds before they required access to disgorge the loads. That meant keeping just a site manager and an assistant off the premises the next morning.

Amos made the decision to leave a lone police constable on guard duty overnight, given that no-one was likely to try to get into the site and recover the body.

East Lindsey District Council took a dim view of the potential disruption, however. The inspector decided that he had better take the precaution of contacting the council chairman and its chief officer straight away, thus spoiling their evenings with bad news delivered at nearly midnight. The chairman in particular was angry at being awoken.

By 8am next morning, having been similarly disturbed first by the council chairman and then the chief officer, the head of the refuse committee was on the phone to county police headquarters, equally irate at the demands by his superiors to sort matters out. He became no less exasperated at being passed round various officers and departments as vain attempts were made to find Amos in the building.

It was, in fact, Chief Constable Sir Robert Fletcher who contacted Amos as the inspector arrived back at the refuse disposal site. And for once, Fletcher came up trumps. Anxious to attend a meeting of the East Midlands counties chief constables that lunch time, he took decisive action. After all, it was Derbyshire’s turn to host the monthly meeting of minds, and Derby always put on a good spread.

‘You’re in charge, Amos,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m putting extra staff at your disposal. You need anyone, just ring HQ. I’ll deal with Manby.’

Fletcher rang off before the stunned Amos could reply but the Chief Constable was as good as his word. Half an hour later an obsequious, lowly ranked minion arrived from Tedder Hall, the East Lindsey District Council headquarters at Manby Park to the east of Louth.

His role that day was supposedly to act as link man between Lincolnshire Constabulary and the area council, although his main achievement was to get in the way.

Another effect of the law of unintended consequences was that David, the Chief Constable’s panicky press secretary, was on the phone throughout the day inquiring solicitously as to whether Amos required further assistance.

Amos hated these new-fangled mobile phones, cumbersome and heavy as they were, but he decided not to switch it off because he wanted to keep the Chief Constable onside while he got to grips with what would inevitably be a difficult case.

In fact, only half a dozen people were needed, ably supervised by Amos. The job would have been completed sooner had a supply of wellington boots been forthcoming as requested. At least David was useful for getting that task organized, though it took an hour for suitable footwear to find its way from Lincoln.

What was left of the short body was painstakingly removed from its unlikely grave. As much muck as flesh clung to the bones. The body was naked and bent in two at the waist to make the parcel smaller still.

The victim had been clothed extensively in bubble wrap, which added little to the weight but disguised the contours, before it had been placed within two black bin bags, one over the head and feet and the other pulled up over the backside and middle body

‘Someone didn’t want us to identify the body in a hurry if it ever came to light,’ Amos remarked to Detective Sergeant Juliet Swift as they stood inches deep in decaying rubbish, every step a hazardous balancing act.

‘The gate’s locked at night,’ Swift commented, ‘so the chances are he was put out with the rubbish one morning and worked his way through the system.’

‘Have there been any reports of the perimeter wire fence being cut?’ Amos asked Mr Obsequious.

‘Not that I know of sir, though there could have been,’ came the reply. Mr Obsequious was more accustomed to mobile phones and regarded them as a useful tool of the trade. He quickly relayed the question to Tedder Hall.

‘You’re in luck,’ Amos told John Lowe, one of three uniformed constables assigned by the eager Chief Constable to assist in the unpleasant task.

Lowe liked working with Amos. He did not often get the opportunity to do so but at least this was one detective who appreciated the help of uniformed officers. There were not many in CID you could say that of.

He would, admittedly, have preferred something a little less distasteful than extracting a skeleton from a refuse tip.

‘Make a tour of the perimeter and see if there are any obvious signs of entry,’ Amos said.

Lowe needed no second bidding, though he struggled to wade clear of the foul quagmire. He was gone for a good hour.

‘How does this work?’ Amos asked Mr Obsequious as Lowe disappeared through the copse and out of sight. Do you dump in one area until it is full then move on or do you spread it around?’

It was the site manager, standing outside the fence, who replied.

‘As this was an old quarry, we dumped into the centre first and filled it up. That’s taken about 40 years. However, we started using this bit on the edge about 15 years ago. As each zone mounted up until it was higher than the surrounding area, we covered it with top soil and let it settle.

‘We then drove over it to fill in the bit beyond and so on. We were planning to come back to this section after it had dropped further. It looks as if the full lorries going over the top have squeezed out the bottom layer.’

‘So all the rubbish surrounding the body would have been dumped here at roughly the same time?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And would it all have been collected from the same area?’ Amos asked.

‘Good lord, no,’ the site manager replied. ‘Lorries from all over the area would have come in one after the other. But there’s a fair chance that most if not all of the bags nearest to the body would have come from the same load.’

Amos nodded. The team knew what was coming next.

‘Remove all the bags around the ones the body was in. Pull them out slowly so we disturb as little as possible.’

‘You’ll have the whole lot coming down on top of you,’ the site manager protested. ‘You do it, you take responsibility. I’ve warned you.’

Ignoring his pleas, the small team formed a short chain, easing out the bags and passing them to safety. Half a dozen had been shifted in this manner before a shower of rubbish came down from higher up.

‘That’ll do,’ Amos announced peremptorily. ‘Let’s get clear. We should have enough to tell us roughly where this load came from.’

The gallant crew picked their path out carefully. As they did so, rubbish from higher up started to slide slowly into the vacuum they had created. By the time they were outside the gate, the gap in the mound had closed up.

Mr Obsequious was not pleased.

‘Now we’re going to have do a safety check on this entire zone,’ he whined. ‘God knows what it will cost. And we can’t use it or drive over it until it’s been stabilized.

‘It’s all very well for you,’ he went on when he saw no sign of sympathy or contrition in Amos’s demeanour. ‘You’re not the one who will get the blame.’

At this point Lowe returned, having made sure his tour was completed too late for him to have to re-invade the rubbish dump.

‘It’s a lot further round than you think,’ he said a little too hastily.

Amos smiled to himself, turning away so that Lowe could not see his reaction. Lowe’s remarkably good timing, arriving just as the other officers were vacating the site, was too convenient for chance.

In any event, the attention of all present was drawn to a car pulling into the short stretch of dirt track leading into the rubbish dump.

Amos recognized it immediately. Unfortunately from Amos’s point of view, Sheila Burns from the Lincolnshire Echo, the evening newspaper, had turned up before he was ready to brief the local press.

Burns emerged from the driving seat with alacrity.

‘What’s going on, inspector?’ she called out cheerily to Amos. ‘Unlikely place to find a body.’

She’s fishing, Amos thought. She’s not certain about the body. Where on earth did she get her information from? He did not want news of the skeleton reaching the public until he had a better idea of who it was and where it had come from.

Amos took her on one side, out of hearing of the others.

‘Look, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Go easy on this. Let’s just say we have found a suspicious package.’

Burns was unconvinced. ‘Is it a body or isn’t it?’ she persisted.

Amos avoided a direct answer: ‘Don’t you think we put more police officers on a murder inquiry?’

‘You think it’s murder?’ Burns asked eagerly

‘Look,’ Amos said wearily. ‘For now it’s a suspicious article. You’ve got that much to yourself and I won’t release it to Radio Lincolnshire until you get into print. Hold back and I’ll give you the inside track as soon as I can. You know I keep my word – I gave you an exclusive as promised in the Killiney Court murder.’

Burns backed off reluctantly. She had a bodyless exclusive now and the prospect of a biggie tomorrow. A bird in the hand and possibly one in the bush as well.

‘Promise?’ she said after a few moments thought.

‘Promise,’ Amos repeated.

BOOK: Unlikely Graves (Detective Inspector Paul Amos Mystery series)

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