Dead Girls

Chapter 2

A squirrel darted a stuttering dash along the bough above my head, twitching its velvety grey nose at the edges of the shadows among the leaves and sniffing suspiciously at the encroaching sunlight. In the dense cover high above, a lone woodpigeon flexed its wings and fluttered the sleep from its rumpled feathers. He looked like he’d had a rough night.

I looked worse, if my reflection in the car window was anything to go by. I’d had them both open all the way here, and my undried hair had frizzed up into a bouffant bird’s nest. I slipped the hairband from my wrist and bundled the mess into a rough, damp knot at the base of my neck. If it didn’t improve me, it might at least give the pigeon second thoughts about moving in.

I propped my foot on the sun-bleached picnic trestle beside the car and bent to tighten my shoelace. A pair of wasps buzzed hungrily around the rubbish bin beside me, keeping a respectful distance from one another as they took turns to dive inside for a bite. A third investigated the sticky rim of a Coke can, idly dropped in the grass not three feet away, the silvered peaks of its crushed carcass shimmering thousands of tiny jewels of light across the fixed-penalty warning notice plastered to the receptacle. No Littering. Maximum fine £2,500. The futility of mandatory environmental correctness, summed up in a shiny red aluminium nutshell. I picked up the can and disposed of it properly. The wasp didn’t flinch.

This, right here, is the kind of peace I crave: the earlymorning sun prickling my upturned face; the idle lapping of the river against the pebbles on the bank; the soft quirrup of ducklings perpetually distracted from the arduous task of keeping up with mum; the merest whisper of distant traffic, just there enough to temper the isolation without intruding on the blissful, cossetting quiet of—

‘Oi! Pocahontas! Over here!’

Oh. Right. Kevin.

I took in a lingering lungful of cowshit and pollen.

Geoff Green – no relation – greeted me with an indifferent nod as I slipped between my Alfa and the adjacent patrol car. I’d seen the burly constable around often enough to know his name, but his snakelike eyes and disdainful demeanour had always deterred me from wanting to know much more about him. Whether he perpetually wished he were somewhere else, or simply didn’t like the look of me any more than I did him, I couldn’t entirely tell. Nor did I particularly care.

Geoff had been left in charge of guarding the inner perimeter. It was clearly a hurried affair, the blue-and-white warning tape sagging between posts speared skew-wiff and at random intervals into the sandy earth as it bisected the picnic site. It also seemed a somewhat extraneous measure, given that the access road was barricaded by patrol cars at its inception half a mile back, the car park entrance was itself taped and guarded, and a fourth cordon encircled what seemed to be the object of the collective attention – a burned-out car slumped at the far side of the clearing.

If I’d known him better, I might have accused Geoff of erecting the barrier himself, just to look as though he had something important to do. However, half a dozen years having passed between us without the need for small talk, and with neither of us any more inclined than the other to fix what wasn’t broken, I kept my suspicions to myself and simply returned Geoff’s sulky nod as I ducked under the tape, which he lifted just high enough to garrotte me had I not been half-expecting it.

At the other end of the mood swing, and entirely at odds with his tone on the phone, Kevin McManus was a veritable grin on a stick. He picked through a maze of yellow plastic markers and staked-off squares of sand, sterile suit rustling, teeth flashing, arms wide like he thought he was going to get a hug. ‘You know, for a minute I thought you might blow me out,’ he crowed, his voice sounding hollow and windswept against the squawk and chatter of radios and crime scene techs and the rattle and hum of a diesel generator.

‘Save it,’ I warned him. ‘You’re at the top of my shitlist today.’

‘Well, aren’t we the little ray of sunshine?’ In defiance of the mechanics of the human face, and presumably working on the assumption that I was joking, he broadened his smile to within a whisker of obscuring his own vision. ‘Listen, don’t go shooting the messenger, okay? You know I wouldn’t kick you out of bed without—’

I choked on my own spit.

‘I mean. . . You know, drag you out of—’

‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’

Oh, Jesus Christ, Kevin. ‘Anyone you like. Take your time, I’ve got all day.’

‘John,’ he remembered, with none of the exaggerated embarrassment you or I might affect when caught with our wits down. Instead, he ran a hand through his dark, wiry mop and scratched at the short patch over his crown, a remnant of a recent pistol-whipping. ‘He’s, um . . . in the car,’ he said. ‘I think.’

‘You think?’

‘Well, it’s . . .’ He glanced over his shoulder at the remains of the car and just sort of sighed.

‘What about DC Keith? Any sign?’ John Fairey hadn’t been alone when he’d seemingly vanished into thin air; there was no trace of the freshly minted detective he’d snagged for a dogsbody, either.

Kevin gave me a shrug and a sympathetic smile. ‘I’ll get you a suit,’ he said.

‘Where’s Mal?’

‘The what?’ Kevin dropped a fetching pair of white rubber boots at my feet and handed me the paper jumpsuit he’d retrieved from the back of the nearby CSI van. He’d tried to flirt with Sandra, the duty pathologist, but she was on the phone and had batted him away with an irritable glare. His smile had faded rapidly.

‘Mal,’ I repeated. ‘Mal Lowry. He should be here.’

Kevin narrowed his eyes and nodded with a look that said No shit, Sherlock. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got personal problems, right?’

I didn’t know what he meant by that; I just knew it didn’t explain where my DCI was. I flattened the suit out on the ground and slipped my feet into the leg holes. ‘You know what else I can’t see?’ I pulled it up to my waist and realised I had it back to front.

‘What?’

‘Any bodies in that car. Where are they?’ Did I turn the suit once or twice? It now appeared to be upside down.

‘I was getting to that.’ Kevin eyed the jumpsuit curiously as I attempted vainly to pass it behind my back without reversing it. ‘Do you want a hand?’

‘Could you?’ I don’t know how many of these godforsaken things I’ve had to clamber into over the course of my career, but it’s one of those tasks – most of which, come to think of it, seem to involve items of apparel – for which practice will never make perfect. I will never be able tie an apron behind my back, and I will never be able to get into a front-fastening one-piece paper jumpsuit without the assistance of a third party. Fact of life.

‘Don’t worry about Lowry,’ he said, which seemed strange, because I wasn’t. ‘Just enjoy the peace and quiet while it lasts.’ He turned me around by the shoulders, scrunched the suit up in his hands and squatted behind me, tapping each of my legs in turn as he wanted them lifted and lowered. ‘’Scuse fingers.’

‘Keep them below the knee,’ I laughed. ‘Geoff’s watching.’

The constable looked casually away as Kevin yanked the suit up over my hips and said, ‘I think he’s got the hots for you, you know.’

I stifled a chuckle. ‘Well, he all but pulls my hair every time he sees me,’ I said.

‘Boys are always mean to girls they like,’ he agreed, standing to guide my arms into the appropriate holes and slide the shoulders of the suit up onto my own. ‘You can manage the zip on your own, right?’

I gave him a withering look and said, ‘Ha bloody ha. Who called us?’ as I fumbled hopelessly with the zip and Kevin pretended not to notice the trembling in my fingers.

‘The usual,’ he said, handing me a full-face particulate mask. ‘Dog walker. Said his dog wouldn’t stop barking at it, so he took a peek. Watches a lot of true crime shows.’

‘Him or the dog?’

‘Not sure.’

‘What time?’

‘Five thirty-five.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I sent him home. He’ll come in this afternoon if we need him to.’

‘You talked to him yourself?’

‘Yep.’

‘How did he seem?’

‘Genuine.’

I nodded and snapped the mask over my head and Kevin did the same. ‘Ogay,’ I said, waving to Sandra and getting a thumbs-up in return. ‘Ned dayg a nook.’

There was no denying it was my old partner’s Mondeo. I’d spent a lot of hours staring pointedly out of the window of that car, or gripping the sides of my seat, or instinctively thumping my right foot onto an imaginary brake pedal. I was in it when he creased the wheel arch against a bollard, and I was standing right where I was now when he kicked the dent into the front wing in anger at some humiliation or other. My seat was gone, just a buckled metal frame remaining. The worn carpet in the footwell was gone, too – in fact everything was gone; it was just a ravaged shell. But those dents were as good as a fingerprint.

It wasn’t blue any more. It was orange and black and brown, rust and soot and death. It sat sadly on its sills in the sand, one back door hanging limp on twisted hinges. The roof sagged from front to back, the tailgate bent on its frame so that the lid reared up, arched like a mouth shrieking in horror. And in that mouth was what I could only assume were the remains of my two former colleagues.

Bone is bone. It doesn’t really look like anything else. I suppose I could have convinced myself it was coral, or pebbles at a push, but I didn’t bother to try. It was a grey rubble of bone, fragmented, cemented with splatters of rain-pasted ash. To my untrained eye it could have been anyone, or anything. Sure, I know all the words; I read the same books you read. Skull sutures. Pubic symphysis. Phalanges, which just reminds me of Phoebe from Friends. I could even tell you what they mean, and relate the most reliable method of estimating the height of a person from their skeleton, or of determining the gender and racial profile of a skull. But I’m no more than an armchair expert; my opinion isn’t worth the calories I’d expend merely forming it, and the jigsaw puzzle in front of me now was far beyond my understanding of how a person could even begin to make sense of it. And so, knowing in my gut that this was the final resting place of Detective Inspector John Fairey and Detective Constable Julian Keith, I resisted the urge to plunge my hand into the ashes, pull out a shard of calcined something-or-other and shout ‘Aha’, and I walked away from the car.

‘Okay, first screamingly obvious things first,’ I said, once I’d flicked the mask off my face and could breathe again. I pointed at the square of blackened grass beneath my feet; one of a dozen I could see, evidence of a summer of careless barbecuing. ‘There are burn marks just about everywhere except under the car. Who’s out looking for the crime scene?’

Kevin looked from me to the car and back again, and scratched the back of his head. ‘Not organised that yet,’ he said, which I had to concede was an accurate if inexhaustive statement. ‘Been a little bit busy on my own here. I haven’t even had a cup of tea yet.’

Signed off till Monday. Not going to feel guilty for having breakfast. ‘You’ve done a good job,’ I said, although I knew Sandra had probably beaten him here and taken control of the scene herself. ‘We haven’t got the whole car here. The bumpers, the tyres, all of the plastic and rubber bits that have melted off. They’re not here. We’re missing a debris field. Plus there are no drag marks, but there’s a trail of mud and oil at least all the way back to the top of the road. See?’ I indicated a set of thick, wide-treaded tyre tracks printed in clods of earth and clay, leading to and from the Mondeo and punctuated by a circular swirl on the tarmac at the entrance to the picnic site. ‘Someone carried it here on a tractor, right? Frontloader, teleporter, whatever you want to call it.’

Kevin nodded. ‘Which was thoughtful of them.’

‘Ha. So who, and why now? It’s been two months.’

He thought about it for a moment. Scratched his head. ‘Is there anything significant about the date?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

I knew where he was going to go before he went there. ‘Well, if we were in a film, I’d say The perp is sending us a message, but . . . we’re not, are we?’

‘Well, you might be,’ I conceded, ‘but whoever dumped this here isn’t. We’ve got a convenient trail of breadcrumbs, but it’s just muddy tyre marks and you can’t really engineer those. If they lead all the way to the burn site, it’s an accident. Also, never say “perp” again. You sound like an idiot.’

‘Agreed.’

‘It’s a pretty thin theory, isn’t it?’

‘Kind of.’

‘So what am I going to find when I leave you here to chase around after Sandra and go follow that trail by myself?’

‘Oh, come on!’

Chapter 3

No, you come on. I was tired, hungover, thirsty, more than a little confused, and I wasn’t even supposed to be here today or indeed any day this week, and I thought a nice gentle drive in the countryside would do me good. Frankly, I thought it was probably a waste of time; you can only load your tyres with so much muck, so the trail was bound to go cold in short order, leaving me free to pop into the nearby village and buy some sugary drinks for myself and maybe even Kevin, if I was feeling more generous by then.

He didn’t put up too much of a fight, either. He was obviously enjoying his moment, peacocking around the place as the only – and therefore most senior – detective on the scene. He probably had another hour to enjoy it, so I was happy to let him. And Geoff was clearly happy to let me go, too, because he lifted the tape clean over my head this time.

The trail was laughably easy to follow; clumps of earth and sand and clay, and weeds snatched out from the verge by a vehicle clearly a few inches wider than the single-track road. And leaky, too. Whether it was oil or hydraulic fluid, it shone beautifully in the sunlight, a spot the size of my fist every ten yards or so.

I was in no hurry. I didn’t even touch the throttle, just stuck it in second and let the clutch out and allowed the car to roll along at its own leisure. It was that kind of morning. The roadblock slid lazily aside to let me out, and we all exchanged smiles and waves as I idled by. Then I was free, turning right onto the little B-road that led to the village, and immediately I knew my hopes for a jolly to the shops were dashed because there were muddy tracks and spots of oil on the other side of the road, too, and I only had to follow them for a couple of miles before they arced left onto a wide concrete track and escaped under a three-bar metal gate.

I stopped the car, and sighed, and thought about what I might do next. I knew exactly what I should do, but my mouth was dry and tasted evil, and my temples were threatening to throb, and I had no phone signal anyway, and the village was only a mile further down the road, so I thought fuck it and did that instead.

There was, thank God, a newsagent’s shop in the village, and it was open, if not altogether welcoming. A portly, ruddy-cheeked old chap in a tweed jacket eyed me from behind the counter in some kind of appraisal or other, his eyes boring into the back of my head as I grabbed three cans of coldish Coke from a chiller that was probably older than me. I forced myself not to meet his eye, instead scanning dusty shelves packed with canned goods and decade-old toys, looking for something I might want to eat at this time of the morning and happily finding a box of Nurofen that was, surprisingly, in date. That would do, although I grabbed a handful of Twixes and a mint Magnum for good measure and finally gave the guy a smile as I dumped the lot on the counter. ‘Morning,’ I said.

He gave me a tight nod and a casual ‘How are you today, officer?’ as he rang up the till.

My neck prickled and my breath caught in my throat and I instinctively flashed a look over my shoulder at the empty shop. Was his face familiar? Should it be? Was mine? ‘I’m sorry?’

He paused for a beat, then hit a button on the till with a sound like crashing thunder. The total flickered green on the little pop-up display. ‘How are you?’ he repeated.

I held his stare for a moment, perhaps a moment too long. His left eyelid began to twitch. ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Sorry, have we met?’

He narrowed his eyes, flickered an inscrutable thought and said, ‘I don’t think so, Miss, no. That’s six eighty-five.’

What does six eighty-five mean? Mind racing, panic setting in. This was not expected. ‘Six eight—’ I noticed the till then: £6.85, all squared off and glowing green. Right. ‘Right,’ I nodded, shaking the blankness out of my head and fumbling for my purse. Only then did I realise that I was still wearing the lanyard around my neck, which of course made me bark a startled laugh that must have made me look even more special than I already did. ‘Right,’ I reiterated, holding the badge up meekly as I handed the guy a tenner. ‘God, I thought you’d recognised me from somewhere. Sorry, I’m not awake yet,’ I smiled, in an effort to pretend I wasn’t suddenly entirely on edge.

He relaxed visibly, even if he didn’t return my grin. ‘Best part of the day,’ he said, handing me my change.

I took the opening. ‘It is peaceful,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you that. I don’t suppose you have the need to call my lot out too often, do you?’

He regarded me curiously, a blue twinkle flashing across his bloodshot eyes. I’m sure he knew as well as I did that I already knew the answer to that. He humoured me, though. ‘Not really,’ he agreed. ‘We don’t have a lot of differences we can’t take care of between us. They say strange things pass through here at night, but the streetlights go out at eleven so I don’t see none of ’em.’

I hid the shiver that ran down my spine, and asked him, ‘What about in the daytime?’

He just shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell me anything, but he might at least be able to save me some time, so I pressed on. ‘Maybe you can help me,’ I said, undeterred by his blank expression. ‘About a mile back that way, on the right-hand side, there’s a concrete track with a gate across it. Can you tell me where that goes?’

He gave it a moment’s thought. Probably figured it was nothing I couldn’t look up on a map anyway. ‘The old airfield,’ he said.

‘It’s not an airfield any more?’

‘Not since the war. Bomber base.’

‘So what is it now?’

‘Wheat and barley now.’

‘Can you tell me who owns it?’

‘That’ll be Giles.’

I waited for him to crack a smile, but his poker face was strong. ‘And Giles is a farmer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Farmer Giles.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I never heard it like that before,’ he said. ‘That’s funny,’ though he still didn’t smile.

I quit while I was ahead.

Farmer Giles timed his arrival perfectly. I knew full well that the creepy shopkeeper would phone him the second I was out the door, so I saved myself some hard work and just sat in the entrance to the old airfield until he turned up, which he did, in a brand-new Range Rover, just as I was nibbling the last of the chocolate from my ice cream stick.

‘Giles, is it?’ I said, stepping from the car as he did the same. ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly. I’m Detective Sergeant Green. I was wondering if you might be able to help me out with something.’

‘Giles Wynne-Parker.’ He extended his hand to shake mine. ‘What can I do for you?’ Cut-glass accent. Neatly cropped hair, greying at the edges. Strong, dimpled chin.

I flicked the Magnum stick away to shake his hand. He watched it fly with a raised eyebrow. ‘Oops,’ I said. ‘There’s probably a law against that.’ I paused, just long enough for his face to register that his jig was up. ‘Your tractor could do with a service,’ I suggested, indicating the trail of oil on the ground.

Giles sighed and nodded at his strangely unmuddied Buckler boots. ‘I know,’ he conceded with a resigned smile. ‘It’s hydraulic fluid. I’ve got a leaking piston.’

‘I’d get that seen to before you leave any more anonymous donations,’ I said, ducking my head to peer up into his eyes. ‘But thanks for giving us our car back, we’ve been wondering where it went.’

He snapped his head up at that, and the eyes that met mine now were a little wider than they had been a moment ago. ‘Your car?’

‘Oh,’ I laughed, ‘yeah, it’s a police car. That’s not really the worst of it, though.’

‘Oh bloody hell,’ he said. ‘How much trouble am I in?’

I chewed over that for a moment; let a few scary thoughts roll through his head, just for the sake of it. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s not worry about that. I mean, yes, you’ve been a bit of a plank, honestly, and you did dump it right next to the sign telling you not to dump anything, which, you know, we could easily take as you sticking two fingers up at us, and on a personal level, I’m not actually supposed to be at work today, so I kind of wish you’d waited until Monday, but right now, what I really need more than anything is for you to take me to wherever you moved it from because there are a few bits still missing, and it’s also potentially a murder scene.’

The colour drained from his face faster than piss from a flushed toilet. ‘Murder?’

‘Why did it take you two months, Giles?’

‘Two months?’

‘That’s how long we’ve been looking.’

‘I . . .’ He shook his head, eyes wide, nervous. ‘We were away. Florida. We’ve only been back a fortnight, and I don’t really use this gate. The main one’s at the other end of the runway. There’s nothing over here. I only came because some of the chickens got out. I . . .’

‘Why didn’t you call us?’

‘Wh—’ He puffed out a sigh and shook his head. ‘Honestly?’

I waited for him to tell me that we wouldn’t have bothered coming, that the council wouldn’t have been interested in removing a burned-out car from a private field. And he’d have had a fair point, but he didn’t go there; he just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Relax. Don’t worry about it. Just how about you show me the spot, okay?’

He took a moment to breathe, and then nodded and said, ‘Sure. Okay.’ Then he took a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and unhooked the gate and opened it a crack and said, ‘You won’t need your car. It’s right over here.’

It was barely inside the gate, on a barren patch of clay off to the right of the track, shielded from the road by a grassy bank and from the rest of the farm by a clump of trees and overgrown bramble bushes. A twenty-foot black square, dotted with lumps of twisted, melted stuff, identifiable only by guesswork and its relative placement; a bumper here, a tyre there.

The ground was hard, but two months ago it hadn’t been; there were wheel tracks leading to the burn site, until this morning cast into the earth but now crumbled and flattened by Giles’ tractor, its hefty tyres overlaying them with a patchwork of deep chevrons. I tutted at him quietly, although it made no real difference; this was quite evidently the crime scene, however much he’d trampled on it.

And more than that, Giles had approached and retreated from the spot in a straight line, and hadn’t strayed around the edges of the square, and this, I realised as I surveyed the scene, might be very good news indeed. I turned to him as he stood awkwardly beside the Range Rover, picking at the skin around his thumbnail, and pointed at his car and asked him, ‘Giles, did you drive that over here at any point?’