Unlikely Graves (Detective Inspector Paul Amos Mystery series) (3 page)

Chapter 7

To add to his woes, Amos found on his return to the CID department that Sheila Burns was on the phone. Swift had taken the call and she put her hand over the mouthpiece as Amos walked up to her desk.

‘Sheila Burns from the Echo,’ Swift said quietly. ‘Very irate and very persistent. I kept her talking but shall I get rid of her?’

‘Put her through to my office. I’ll take it in private,’ Amos responded.

As he walked through the door to his inner sanctum, Amos could hear his colleague saying: ‘Just putting you through to Detective Inspector Amos now.’

The phone rang on his desk and he picked it up as he collapsed into his swivel chair. Office and chair were new to him, a reward for clearing up a previous murder inquiry that had caused consternation among some of the Chief Constable’s acquaintances. Would it be taken away from him now?

‘Sheila,’ Amos said as smoothly as he could. ‘Let me explain.’

‘Explain,’ the reporter exploded. ‘I thought we had an understanding. I held off as you asked and all I get as a reward is to be beaten by a poxy local radio station. Then you call a press conference for two o’clock which as you well know means I shan’t have the proper story until the final edition – if I’m lucky.’

‘Sheila, I assure you I did not tip off Radio Lincolnshire. I don’t know where they got it from. And I can’t give you any further information until the press conference.

‘However,’ he added hastily as the indignant Burns began to protest further, ‘I couldn’t get back to you sooner because I was out of the office early beginning my investigation.’

The words had become increasingly slow and emphasized. Burns took the hint and fell silent.

‘I was out of contact for some time because it’s a fair way from HQ in Lincoln to the nearest town to the tip. I suppose it’s always possible that someone saw police officers going from door to door in East Street though I shan’t be able to say anything on that score until this afternoon.

‘I suppose you can work out for yourself that we don’t yet have a name for this body that we are supposed to have found after 15 years. So sorry, I can’t tell you anything before the press conference.’

‘I quite understand,’ the now partly satisfied Burns replied. ‘See you at two.’

Amos was treading a fine line. The story in the Echo detailing how old the body was and that police had been seeking whether anyone remembered a disappearance 15 years ago would be written before the press conference but the newspaper would not reach police HQ until afterwards.

With luck Fletcher would not realize that Burns must have had an inside tipoff. No doubt she would have worked out which town Amos had visited that morning and had a contact in the area who could find someone in East Street to verify what the police had been asking.

Chapter 8

The press conference attracted the usual bunch of reporters: Radio Lincolnshire and the Lincolnshire Echo looking relaxed and smug after stealing a march on the others; BBC Look North with a superior air and an attendant cameraman; and a couple of local newspapers looking harassed and playing catch-up.

‘It’s all on the record,’ Amos announced in expansive fashion, glancing up at David who was hopping from one foot to the other in agitation in the doorway.

The inspector outlined the basic details, remaining as matter-of-fact as possible given the grisly nature of the find.

The body had been found on a rubbish dump in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire late in the evening two days ago; the body appeared to have been there for about 15 years and had been buried under a large quantity of rubbish; there was no obvious identification on or near the body; the police were appealing for any information on any male aged in his late teens or early 20s, about 5 feet 6 inches tall, slim with dark hair, who had vanished in the late 1970s.

Having already broadcast his scoop, and blessed with the ability to update his audience more rapidly than his print rivals, the Radio Lincolnshire reporter was anxious to press home his advantage.

‘Peter Coombes, BBC Radio Lincolnshire,’ he said, smirking and rising to his feet for lesser media mortals to survey. ‘Do you believe the body has been there for 15 years or was it slipped in through the fence more recently?’

He’s done his research, Amos thought. He knows about the gaps in the perimeter wire netting.

‘We can’t entirely rule out an intruder but we are 99.9 per cent satisfied that the body has been there all this time. Successive bags of rubbish have been tipped on top from lorries over the years and it would be extremely difficult to insert a skeleton underneath. It is purely by chance that the body has been exposed at this point in time.’

‘Are you saying that the body came in with a routine rubbish collection?’ one of the weekly newspaper reports asked.

‘We think that is probable, almost certain,’ Amos replied. ‘The young man was relatively short and we believe quite slim. Although he would have been fairly heavy compared with the usual rubbish bag, two people could easily have lifted him into the truck.’

A thought struck Amos: ‘Look, just off the record for the moment.’

David, who had been relaxing a little, could be seen tensing up in fear of what indiscretion Amos might blunder into. He need not have worried, however.

‘I hope you will all treat this matter with come sensitivity.’ Amos continued. ‘This person was someone’s son, perhaps a brother or even a father. It’s pretty distasteful to be treating him as a piece of rubbish. OK, back on the record.’

‘Do you have any idea in what town or what area the body was picked up?’ Sheila Burns asked archly.’

‘We have a fair idea from papers found near the body, but unrelated to it, where it came from but we believe that is irrelevant,’ Amos admitted. ‘We cannot be sure that the victim was from the East Lindsey area and our inquiries so far suggest that the young man came from further afield, possibly from outside Lincolnshire altogether. We have alerted neighbouring police authorities and they are checking their missing persons files.’

‘I take it we are talking murder?’ the local newspaper reporter asked.

Amos was surprised that this assumption had remained unsaid for so long.

‘We are treating this as murder.’

Press conference over, Amos reported back to Swift.

‘It went pretty well, I thought. Now all we can do is get on with our other work and wait for developments.’

One came sooner than expected.

Chapter 9

The call came from Gainsborough police station just before 5pm.

‘There’s a guy here who knows something about this body you’ve found,’ the station sergeant from further north up the A156 told Amos. ‘Says he wants to talk only to you. One of the detectives here tried to persuade him to tell us more but he threatened to leave.’

At least one good thing had emerged from the hasty press conference. The inspector’s name had been on the radio all day and in some editions of the evening papers, so anyone with information would know who to ask for. Amos had so little to go on that he preferred to hear any news first hand.

‘Tell him to hang on and we’ll be there in half an hour. If he won’t hang around get his name and address and we’ll go to his home – but don’t tell him that as I’d rather see him at the station. I’ll need an interview room. Is that OK?’

‘Understood, sir.’

Swift’s ears pricked up. Although she could not hear what was being said on the other end of the line, she sensed the slight but perceptible note of excitement in Amos’s voice.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Amos told her, ‘but we may have a breakthrough. You’d better come with me. You drive and I’ll put on the blues and twos until we’re nearly there. I don’t want this guy to lose interest. Gainsborough it is.’

Most of this utterance was delivered on the way to the car park as the two officers hurried from their desks. Swift, being younger, had faster reactions and could drive more quickly. Strictly speaking, this was not an emergency and Amos did not switch on the blue flashing lights and two tone siren until they were well clear of HQ. He switched them off again about half a mile from Gainsborough police station.

The informant had chosen to wait for them. At first glance Amos could see why. Moving any distance would clearly be a struggle. To the inspector’s astonishment, Swift immediately recognized him.

‘I’ve seen you at rugby matches in the past,’ she said. ‘You talked to my boyfriend Jason a few months ago after a match.’

Amos shuddered inwardly. Swift’s macho young man, a thug of a prop forward, occasionally came into the CID office in Lincoln pleading in tears with Swift after one of their many petty squabbles.

However, this 40 something year old man before them now hardly looked as if he himself had been a player even in his prime. Swift gave him a hand as he struggled to his feet.

He was six feet tall and overweight and he needed a walking stick to accompany the two detectives to the interview room. Lack of mobility meant that he was short on sufficient exercise and lack of exercise added to his weight problem. Amos noted that as he walked with stick in right hand he held his left hand across his back.

Once ensconced in the interview room, and a certain breathlessness notwithstanding, the man was quickly into his stride, verbally if not physically.

‘My name’s Guy Stone. Just to fill you in,’ he said directly to Amos, ‘I used to be a rugby player. You wouldn’t think it now to look at me but I was pretty good for local rugby. Now I’m reduced to scouting for the county, and I haven’t been able to manage even that for the past few weeks.

‘That’s why I talked to Jason,’ he added to Swift, ‘as you probably gathered. He’s got talent. He just needs to curb his temper.

‘Anyway, about why I came here and asked how I could contact you. I think I put your body on the dustcart. It was the mistake of my life.’

Stone paused for breath.

‘Do you want a tea, coffee?’ Swift asked. ‘We could try to rustle something up.’

‘No, thanks. I just get a bit short of puff. Walking’s not too bad, it’s getting in and out of a chair that knocks me.’

After a further pause, Stone continued: ‘I was on the bins. No wheelie bins in those days. Bin men have gone soft. We had to pick up the bags and sling them on the lorry.’

Amos smiled to himself. He could remember when a week’s rubbish was put out in a metal dustbin and the binmen slung it onto their backs and tipped it over their heads into the wagon. The binmen of his day had thought Stone’s lot had gone soft just slinging black bags onto the lorry.

‘One day we were going down East Street – I lived and worked in the Louth area then – when I went to pick up this bag and it was heavy. Actually, it was two bags, one inside the other and I actually tore the outside bag trying to lift it.’

So far so good, Amos thought. That could well be the tear that eventually exposed the skeleton arm.

‘One of the other guys offered to help me sling it on,’ Stone continued. ‘but I was too proud. I was strong and I knew how to lift, bending your knees and not your back, so I shifted it on my own. The lads gave me a round of applause and I took a bow.

‘That’s when I felt it as I straightened up. Just a sharp twinge and it was gone. But as the day wore on I was starting to feel it in my back.’

Stone paused again.

‘You seem to remember all this remarkably well,’ Amos interposed. ‘People don’t usually remember events of 15 years or so in such vivid detail.’

Stone snorted sardonically.

‘Oh yes, I remember it all right. How could I forget? It was the beginning of the end. I have had plenty of time to think about it since and often wondered what was in that bag. Now I know.

‘Next morning I could hardly get out of bed. I had to take a couple of days off, the first sickies I had ever taken. I tried to get back to work but after a few weeks my back was really playing up.

‘We were near the end of the rugby season and I hoped the summer layoff would do the trick but I never played again. Over the years my back has got worse, not better.’

Stone struggled to reach into his inside jacket pocket and fish out a piece of paper.

‘You can have this,’ he said. ‘I wrote down the date I was finally laid off by the council. The incident with the rubbish bag must have been early March that same year.’

Amos took the piece of paper. The date on it was 15 November, 1977. The previous March fitted in with the dates found on papers with the body.

‘I don’t suppose you remember which house the bag was outside?’ Swift asked

Stone shrugged.

‘It was pretty near the bottom, on the left hand side going down. I don’t remember precisely.’

‘I’ll need your address, Mr Stone,’ Amos said. The inspector wrote down the details that Stone gave him on the piece of paper below the date.

‘Phone number?’

Stone shook his head.

‘Mr Stone,’ Amos said, ‘many thanks for coming forward. It’s much appreciated. We’ll give you a lift home.’

This offer proved more difficult to fulfill than Amos expected. Stone took several minutes to shuffle to the police station car park and he struggled to get into the back seat. Then the same performance was required to get him out of the car and into his house.

Amos’s conscience over the misuse of sirens prevented him from activating the device to speed the car twice in one day, so it was well after 7pm when they reached HQ.

Sergeant Blackbourne was at the desk. He greeted the returning pair with the words: ‘Better turn right round. We’ve got another body for you. This one’s a bit fresher.’