Four Below (8 page)

‘Any ID on the driver yet?’

‘Nothing so far.’

Sergeant Lynch had been positive their customer had to be known to them. ‘Why not? Drugs, ammo clip and a cloned car? He can’t have just dropped from the sky. Hang on, perhaps
that’s
how the accident happened; we never thought of that, did we?’

‘He’s just not come to our attention before. There has to be a first time for everyone. In his case, of course, it was also the last time. Or perhaps he had no previous because he
was too clever for us.’

McLusky nodded theatrically. ‘Sure. That’s why he took his airbags out and drove without a seat belt.’

‘Oh, okay, a bit thick but slippery.’

‘Let’s hope the car can tell us some more. Of course we didn’t find the missing gun?’

The files were getting heavy. Austin rested them on the edge of the desk. ‘Nope, nothing. The whole surrounding area was searched and gone over with a metal detector. He either
didn’t have it on him or it was pinched.’

‘That’s all we need, some opportunist lowlife armed with a gun. What type was the magazine for?’

Austin riffled through some papers. ‘I got it here … Beretta 92 FS.’

‘Marvellous.’ McLusky didn’t know much about guns, but this was a common enough model. He knew it held fifteen rounds. Sooner or later the counter staff at a post office, a
shopkeeper or a police officer was going to be looking down its barrel.

‘Where exactly was the ammunition clip found?’

‘In the glove box.’

‘Could be a spare.’ McLusky nodded inconclusively and took a sip from the plastic cup. The contents had cooled to an unpleasant temperature. ‘Oh, yuck. Talking of unsolved
crimes, have you heard about the kettle? We’re supposed to drink this muck now.’ He theatrically dropped the half-empty cup into the metal dustbin.

‘I know, it’s quite mad. There’s always the canteen …’

‘By the time you’d carried your cup to your desk it’d be cold. No, Jane, something has to be done. This job’s hard enough without jobsworth making it harder.’

Behind Austin, DC French stuck her head through the open door. McLusky quite liked French, though he thought she might qualify as the plainest-looking woman he had ever met. Unless she was in
the same room, he could never remember quite what she looked like. She was waving a piece of notepaper. ‘We had a call from a member of our adoring public. A dog-walker up in Leigh
Woods.’ Austin and McLusky’s symphonic groans didn’t put her off her stride. ‘Her dog stumbled upon human remains.’ She gently laid the note on top of Austin’s
pile of files and patted it. ‘Control have already dispatched some uniforms up there, but this appears to be yours.’

Austin looked past McLusky out of the window, where thick mist drifted in from the River Avon. ‘Great, and me not wearing my thermals today.’

Leigh Woods was, if anything, colder, damper and mistier than before. Not only did they once more find themselves down the same forester’s track, but McLusky’s
heart sank even further when he recognized the dog walker as the same woman who had called them out two days earlier, only this time she was standing by her car wearing a definite I-told-you-so
expression. PCs Pym and Purkis had already cordoned off the find, some thirty yards further into the trees. Giving the dog-walker a cowardly berth, McLusky aimed straight for the cordoned-off piece
of ground guarded by the officers. The area looked suspiciously small.

‘Please tell me you’re standing by the very small body of a very old person, complete but for one missing ear. And preferably clutching their bus pass so we know where to send the
remains. You’re just not, are you?’

‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ said PC Purkis, keeping a straight face for the benefit of the woman, who was looking across at them.

McLusky stopped at the police tape and looked down on the rectangle of leaf litter. In the centre lay a mangled piece of human tissue. ‘What exactly am I looking at, Purkis?’

‘You can see it more easily from this side, sir.’ She made room for him and squatted down. ‘See?’ she said as McLusky joined her. ‘It’s part of a hand. Left
hand. Two last fingers and part of a palm.’ She seemed unperturbed by the unpleasant sight.

McLusky looked as closely as his breakfast allowed. He could clearly see now that it was part of a hand, dark, dirty and chewed. Ants were crawling over it, and through it. It looked like it had
belonged to a man. He thought he could catch a nostrilful of its sickly smell and quickly straightened up. ‘You need sharp eyes not to walk straight past that. How does that woman walk her
dog, on all fours?’

‘Do you want me to ask her?’ Austin hadn’t bothered to get close to the find; he was happy to take everyone’s word for it. Bits of body. He could imagine it, thanks.

‘Her dog found it,’ Pym said.

‘All right, this time we’ll get all the manpower we need for a systematic search. We’ll go over the whole area, including the part we covered ourselves; there were so few of
us, we could have missed it.’ He walked back with Austin. ‘Get the surgeon to take a look at it and get it bagged up before the ants make off with it.’

‘Could still turn out to be just a walker who died of natural causes, of course. Keeled over in the wood somewhere.’

McLusky sniffed the air. Despite the mist and cold he had to admit the place smelled better than the city centre. ‘No. It’ll be a shallow grave. Somewhere back there.’

The dog-walker stood her ground beside her silver car. Her Jack Russell stared out through the back window of the hatchback. ‘Thank you for calling us promptly today, Mrs …’
Did he know her name?

‘Walker.’

Appropriate. ‘Mrs Walker. Has someone taken a statement from you yet?’

‘Yes, the woman constable took a long statement, asking all sorts of irrelevant questions.’

‘Then there’s no need for you to remain here.’

‘I know that, Inspector.’

McLusky walked with Austin to their cars. ‘Let’s get back to the nick. We’ll get a search organized, and you and me can sit this one out until they find the rest of the
body.’

The call came through late that afternoon. ‘They found the body of a man. Shallow grave, remains disturbed by animal activity.’

Just as McLusky had suspected, they had completely missed the body in the mist and gloom. Things looked different now. The track was choked with vehicles; generators and arc lights had been set
up. Despite the mist, the scene was thrown into sharp focus by the lights and the occasion.

‘You lot must have walked straight past it,’ DSI Denkhaus told McLusky as they were donning protective gear beside the scene-of-crime tape. A white tent had already been erected over
the body. ‘If you hadn’t missed it two days ago, it would have saved a dozen officers a lot of man hours.’

McLusky got on with kitting up, putting on overshoes and face mask. He knew that the less you contradicted Denkhaus, the sooner his lectures petered out. Sometimes he suspected the
superintendent simply thought it was part of his remit to harangue junior officers.

Inside the cordoned area a narrow path had been established along which everyone and everything now travelled to avoid further contamination of the site. A suspicious death always invited the
professional attention of scores of people: police officers of all ranks, from the bored constables guarding the site against unauthorized persons to the senior investigation officer; crime-scene
co-ordinators to manage the site, surgeon, pathologist, scene-of-crime officers, forensics technicians and CID, from freshly minted detective constables up to superintendent. As he followed
Denkhaus along the path to the tent, it struck McLusky just how crowded this lonely spot in the woods had become. Many people wouldn’t attract such attendance figures at their funerals,
especially if they had died quietly of natural causes, and would get shorter notices in the papers, too.

Just then the surgeon dived from the tent, pulled off his mask and took a few gulps of cold, uncontaminated air.

‘Is it bad?’ Denkhaus asked.

‘It’s pretty rank, yes, Superintendent. I’ll never get used to the smell of human decay, I’m afraid.’

‘In that case, aren’t you in the wrong job, Doctor?’

‘I don’t do this all day, you know. They don’t pay me enough as it is. Anyway, I’m finished. The pathologist is here, and he’s the one with the fat pay cheque. I
doubt they pay
you
enough, though,’ he added as he squeezed past them.

Inside, the tent was busy. Three scene-of-crime officers were in there, one taking video shots under a glaring light. They made room around the body for Denkhaus and McLusky. Coulthart, who was
squatting next to the remains, greeted them curtly. ‘Rob … McLusky.’

Denkhaus remained standing while McLusky squatted down on the stony ground, joining the pathologist, who was using a plastic spatula and tweezers to probe the flesh of the corpse. ‘We can
safely rule out accidental death, then,’ McLusky murmured.

‘Oh, quite,’ Coulthart agreed. ‘Unless he somehow put a bag over his head, then tied his hands together and buried himself.’

The corpse had been mauled by scavenging animals. With the hands entirely chewed away, the first thing that struck McLusky was that the victim had been tied by the wrists with thick, brutal
wire. The bag that originally covered his head was made from natural fibres and had been torn open by sharp teeth. The head was badly chewed. The whole area looked a filthy mess to McLusky, who
found it hard to distinguish any features. He thought he could glimpse bits of skull where nose and eyes ought to be.

‘How long’s he been dead, Doctor?’

‘A rough estimate would be four to five weeks. Direct contact with the forest floor allowed rapid insect access, but the exceptionally cold weather kept down bacterial activity and helped
to preserve the body somewhat.’

If this was what Coulthart called a ‘somewhat preserved’ corpse, then McLusky never wanted to see a rotten one. In his eight years on the force, he had come across more than one body
that had had time to start decomposing, but this was his first disinterred corpse. The sickly, cloying stench was so intense that it made thinking of anything else difficult.

‘What kind of a bag is this, do you think?’ It had been tied around the victim’s neck with what looked like green garden twine, which was now almost completely black from
having soaked up many types of fluid.

‘It appears to be some kind of shopping bag made of rough canvas or similar. If you look closely, you’ll see it had handles once. They’ve been cut or torn off.’

McLusky’s eyes followed Coulthart’s pointing spatula to the frayed stumps of twisted rope handles. ‘Any idea as to the cause of death?’

‘I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at this stage; it is too difficult to establish out here which traumas are pre- and which post-mortem. I heard you found parts of a
hand?’

‘Yes, it’s what led us to him.’

McLusky had kept his breathing as shallow as possible, but all this talking had made it necessary to take great lungfuls of death, and his stomach was now in revolt. ‘I’ll take a
quick breather, Doctor, if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all, go ahead. I don’t blame you, Inspector, especially since your boss fled some minutes ago.’

Once outside the tent, McLusky walked quickly along the designated path and ducked under the crime-scene tape. It wouldn’t do to throw up inside the cordon. After a few deep breaths in the
cold forest air, the danger of vomiting receded. He strove to keep his mind clear of the images from the tent, and memories of the canteen lasagne he had eaten for lunch. He found Denkhaus behind
the wheel of his Range Rover, the engine running. The superintendent had shed his protective gear, which meant he had no intention of returning to the locus. He didn’t invite McLusky to join
him in the warmth; instead he rolled the window down a few inches.

‘What does it look like to you, McLusky?’

‘Hard to say. We’ll know more when they come up with the cause of death.’

‘I hope so. How long’s he been there?’

‘Up to five weeks. SOCO tried to get fingerprints off the partial hand we found, but changed their minds when they saw it. If he has previous, we’ll ID him from his DNA; if not,
there’s always dental records.’

‘Good.’ Denkhaus put the car in gear. ‘Okay, McLusky, it’s all yours. We don’t expect DCI Gaunt back for several weeks, so you’ll report direct to me.’
The window slid up as the large engine surged and sped the car along the track. A few press photographers, corralled beyond the police vehicles, flashed their cameras at it, mostly from
boredom.

As McLusky ducked back under the scene-of-crime tape, Austin emerged gasping from the tent. He stared hard into McLusky’s eyes for a few moments while he greedily filled his lungs with
pure forest air.

‘Well done,’ said McLusky.

‘Only because you insisted. I didn’t last long in there. Why did they have to put a tent over it? It just concentrates the smell. Coulthart is still happily poking around among the
maggots. People like that worry me.’

‘Now that you’ve seen the body – any immediate thoughts?’

‘I definitely want to be cremated.’

‘Anything beyond that?’

‘His end must have been absolutely terrifying. Presumably they didn’t put the bag over his head after he’d died. They tied his wrists with galvanized wire.’

‘Yes. I think if someone ties your hands with fencing wire, you more or less know you’ve had it. Whoever has got you has no intention of letting you go.’

‘I suppose not.’

McLusky heard the pathologist call his name and nodded his head towards the tent. ‘I’ll go back in for a last look. You go on ahead and set up at Albany.’

Inside, the pathologist was waiting for him beside the corpse. More of it had now been uncovered. ‘Do you see this slant? The way the body seems to rise up?’ He ran the spatula
alongside the body, downwards towards the knees. Here, the leaf litter and earth cover was still undisturbed. He stabbed the spatula into the ground below the knees. ‘I expected the legs to
continue there under the ground, but they don’t. They disappear into the ground at right angles.’