An Unsuitable Death (19 page)

If you enjoyed reading
An Unsuitable Death,
you might be interested in
Girl Gone Missing,
also by J M Gregson

Extract from
Girl Gone Missing
by J M Gregson

Chapter One

MURDER takes place on the sidewalk. We have constant reminders of that. But as we reach the end of a violent century, violent death is not restricted to city centres. Killers are found in beautiful and remote places, as well as in ugly and crowded ones.

Not that the massive walls of Chepstow Castle, at the feet of which the corpse was found, are unfamiliar with death. They have stood on their cliff above the Wye, controlling the route into Wales, since William the Conqueror brought order to a disordered kingdom. They were the centre of vicious conflict in the Civil War in 1645, when the Wye which swirls below them ran red with English blood. But the castle is now a ruin, and Chepstow is a quiet town, far enough away from the points where the bridges carry the M4 motorway across the estuary of the Severn to be insulated from the noise and the bustle of the traffic which pours in and out of Wales.

There are no pavements visible beneath these mighty ramparts which have stood for almost a thousand years above the river. And the Wye, swirling here through the last of its picturesque bends to join the estuary of the Severn, is one of the most beautiful and unspoilt of Britain’s rivers. Yet there can be death, even here. Violent and unnatural death.

The body had come down the river with the floods. It might have drifted ashore a few miles higher up at Tintern, where the angry brown waters had lapped against the stones of the ancient Cistercian abbey and washed three-piece suites from the villagers’ cottages into the main street. But the macabre human detritus had swirled unseen past Tintern’s soaring arches. On one of the great horseshoe bends where the swollen river ran beside Offa’s Dyke, the body had become enmeshed with the twigs at the end of a great branch of gale-felled oak, and been carried thus to Chepstow.

The Wye Valley walk runs up the river from Chepstow, through some of the most beautiful waterside scenery the country can afford. But the young mother and her son were locals, happy to be enjoying a brisk afternoon stroll with the dog now that the October rains had finally relented. It was the dog, indeed, which discovered the river’s grim cargo.

It was low tide, and the branch of oak with its sinister burden had come to rest on the mud flats opposite the high walls of the castle on the other bank of the Wye. In a few hours, branch and body would have been lifted softly but inexorably with the rising tide, the highest in Britain, moving up to fifty feet above the water’s lowest level. And as the tide flowed swiftly outwards to the Severn estuary, the already badly damaged corpse would have been washed into the open sea, and perhaps lost forever.

Instead, the Labrador’s curiosity took it ankle deep into the soft black mud, despite its owner’s urgent shouts of recall. And when it saw what the branch held wrapped within its unseeing arms, the dog barked, excitedly, continuously, unstoppably.

The woman peered curiously at the source of the dog’s excitement, then moved a pace or two further up the bank to get a better view of the dark bundle beneath the branches. At first she was not sure, swallowing back the sickness which rose to the back of her throat, telling herself that this thing could not be. Then she saw in the distance a grey-white hand, bloated, incomplete, damaged by the unseen creatures of the Wye. She screamed once, long and harsh, the sound ringing in her ears as though it came from a long way off. Then her maternal instincts took over and she gripped the nine-year-old hand firmly and protectively within her own.

She moved quickly back downstream, her face white and cold, the nausea she had felt heaving within her stilled by the urge to protect her son from this awful thing. The dog barked on for a moment, torn between the body and his owners, his head switching frantically between his find and his disappearing mistress. Then he left the mud and turned reluctantly back to the bank, afforded the branch and its burden a final volley of barks, and raced after the woman and child that represented food and shelter

The woman found it difficult to steady her fingers in the phone-box. But 999 is an easy number to dial. Within minutes, the police machine was grinding into action. Within half an hour, the area was cordoned off and the police surgeon had confirmed that this was a human death.

Chapter Two

‘
SUPERINTENDENT’ John Lambert was a patient man, in normal circumstances. And in these abnormal ones, he was determined to be at his most massively tolerant. Detective Sergeant Bert Hook was also a patient man. He was renowned for his composure in the Oldford CID section, even to the point where younger and more irreverent colleagues had been known to poke fun at his restraint in the face of provocation by the criminal fraternity. When it came to patience, DS Hook was a veritable Job among policemen. But this was golf. A game which brought a wholly unacceptable series of trials. Bert glared at his ball like a malevolent frog, his rubicund, village-bobby features swelling with an unaccustomed fury. ‘Bastard!’ he yelled. ‘You bleeding, stupid, BASTARD thing!’

‘That won’t get the thing into the air,’ said Lambert with equanimity. ‘I know — I’ve tried it often enough.’

‘I know THAT!’ snarled Hook, with unaccustomed emphasis. ‘But it might make me feel better.’ He did not take his eye off the ball. He felt an obscure certainty that if he did it would roll mischievously between his feet, would bring him crashing ignominiously to earth when he tried to move on. For it was already clear to him that this maddening white sphere had a will and impetus of its own and that its intentions towards him were malign.

‘Just address the ball in your own time and swing slowly,’ said Lambert, massively calm.

Hook risked taking his eyes off the ball for an instant, so as to transfer the full fury of his gaze to his superior officer and mentor. When he swung his attention viciously back to the ball, it had not moved. It lay still among the twigs and the first yellow leaves of autumn, where his last viciously topped effort had trundled it. ‘You can’t even claim you got an impossible ball or a ridiculous decision at this bloody stupid game,’ he snarled morosely.

‘That’s the charm of golf,’ Lambert agreed, ignoring the glance of smouldering hatred the remark produced from his companion. ‘You’re always really playing yourself, you see.’ His own ball was lying on the fairway, staring smugly up at him and asking to be hit, in Hook’s view. Lambert selected a 7-iron, knowing privately that this was the club which carried for him the least chance of disaster, and dispatched his ball high and straight towards the green. It flew in a parabola which seemed impossibly high and graceful to his sergeant, pitched a few yards short, skirted a bunker and ran appealingly on to the emerald carpet of the green. Hook muttered something which sounded suspiciously like ‘clever bugger’ and turned his attention miserably back to his own ball.

Bert aimed three more savage slashes at the uncooperative object, addressed it crudely as an intimate female organ to which it bore no obvious resemblance, picked it up, and strode to the next tee in a fury. John Lambert, schooled for nigh on thirty years in the worst excesses of police vocabulary, had never heard the gentle Bert use that word before, though he had little doubt that it had been addressed to obdurate batsmen in times of stress: Bert was a fast bowler of fearsome prowess, now retired from serious performance.

Hook was still red-faced and panting with frustration when Lambert arrived smiling at the tee. The Superintendent decided that it was not the moment to comment on the exhilarating nature of the day, with its warm south wind and white clouds flying against the crisp blue of the autumn sky. He had not seen Bert so ruffled since he had refereed a school football match and found ex-pupils chanting ‘Who’s the bastard in the black?’ from the safety of the beeches at the edge of the playing fields.

Yet golf is as unpredictable as it is exasperating. Salvation was at hand for the suffering Hook. The ninth hole at Oldford Golf course is a par three, only one hundred and forty-seven yards long. He took the 6-iron which Lambert counselled and teed his ball with an air of hopeless resignation, vowing for the tenth time that this would be his first and last visit to this place of torment.

Shutting his ears to his instructor’s admonitions of rhythm and the straight left arm, he swung savagely and without hope at the tiny white target.

At first he did not see the ball. It was the gasp of astonishment from behind him which alerted him to the possibilities and raised his eyes towards the sky. The ball was up there, clear but impossibly high against the azure background. It stayed there for what seemed an impossibly long time, then pitched in the very centre of the green and stopped within a yard. An astonished smile spread very slowly over Bert’s large face, until the visage was as round and delighted as his teenage face had been a quarter of a century earlier when he had bowled the great Gary Sobers in a charity match. ‘Bloody ‘ell!’ he said. Then, more quietly, and with the air of wonderment men produce in the face of great natural phenomena, he repeated softly, ‘BLOODY HELL!’

Lambert said, carefully keeping the surprise out of his voice, ‘There you are, I knew you could do it!’ Almost as though he had produced the shot himself, Bert thought sourly.

The Superintendent addressed his ball carefully, feeling a sudden and unexpected pressure upon him. Perhaps he held his tall frame for a fraction too long over it. His shot was thinned; it reached scarcely half the height of Bert Hook’s effort and curled inexorably right, into the deep bunker beside the green. There was a pause. Then Bert produced a carefully articulated ‘Hard luck, John’. He found himself fighting hard against an inexplicable need to burst into uproarious laughter.

Lambert’s lie in the sand was not a good one. He made three attempts to play it out: each one hit the steep face of the bunker in front of him and came to rest at his feet. When he picked his ball up and said, ‘Ah, bollocks to it!’ Bert felt this was the first piece of golfing jargon which made complete sense to him. He turned his face towards the clubhouse and studied the clockface on the side of it determinedly, wishing he could stuff a handkerchief into his mouth to suppress a childish and inconvenient set of giggles.

They had switched off their radios on the course. Now, as they passed through the car park and made for the tenth tee in the early evening, Lambert felt he should have a last check with the man they had left minding the shop at CID.

It was the tinny electronic tones of DI Christopher Rushton, high and thin beneath the yellowing leaves of the oaks, which drew them back from the schoolboy world of games to the savage reality of the world which was their everyday life. ‘We have a murder on our patch, Super,’ he said. ‘A girl. Eighteen, or thereabouts. Fished out of the Wye yesterday, at Chepstow. But it seems beyond doubt now that she’s an Oldford girl.’

*

It was obliging of the corpse to present itself at Chepstow. The town houses one of the seven laboratories run by the Home Office Forensic Science Service. The police ‘death wagon’ had only a two-mile journey to deposit the remains into the care of the forensic scientists.

On the morning after the news of the death had reached him, Lambert drove to the Chepstow laboratory. It was a bright October morning and his route ran along the A466 beside the sparkling Wye, through woods which were gathering the wistful glory of early autumn as the first yellow leaves appeared. He had been a policeman for too long to feel any guilt about enjoying the run on such a morning. He had already little doubt that this was a death which was sinister as well as tragic, but you grew used to death, to the need to distance yourself a little from even its most terrible manifestations. You had to survive and you had to remain objective.

You even had to feel a little excitement when a death became a murder, if you were a CID man. Violence kept you in business, provided you with the contests of wit and resource which were the reason why you followed such a strange occupation. So John Lambert enjoyed his drive. He even dawdled a little, as the sun rose high enough on his left to gild the trees and make the sheep of the ancient Forest of Dean skip as if this were spring rather than autumn. He had ample time to do so on this uncrowded route, for he had not arranged to meet the scientific officer who had conducted the post mortem until ten o’clock. It was five to ten when he turned his car into Usk Road and parked in the small area allotted to visitors beside the laboratory.

‘Cliff Saunders,’ said the man from behind his office desk. He gave his visitor the curtest of nods and did not offer his hand. ‘I hope this won’t take long.’ He was a short, spare man with a tightly trimmed beard; Lambert found himself wanting to ask if it wasn’t inconvenient to him in his work. He was at least ten years younger than the superintendent, but curiously ill at ease, even though he was on his own ground. Not many people came into this place to discuss its findings, and Lambert sensed already that this was a man more at home with things than people, more at ease with the certainties of scientific investigation than the see-saw of conversational exchange.

As if to reinforce this impression, Saunders said aggressively, ‘I don’t know what you expect to gain by talking to me. Everything I have to say will be contained in my official report. Your inspector has already had a verbal summary, and the full report is being typed as we speak. It will be with you first thing tomorrow.’

‘And I’ve no doubt it will be comprehensive,’ said Lambert evenly. ‘As comprehensive, that is, as a document can reasonably be, when it may eventually have to stand up to examination in a court of law. Cautiously comprehensive, as you might say.’

‘The report contains everything I have to say about this matter. The corpse was not in good condition, not even complete after all this time.’ The corners of his mouth turned downwards in a moue of distaste, as if he were a chef complaining that he had been asked to prepare a dish with inferior materials.

Lambert realised that there was no point in trying to explain his methods to this stiff creature, no point in trying to justify his need to get to grips with a case by gathering in the feelings as well as the findings of those involved, as this man now had been, however briefly and dispassionately. Intuition was sometimes a valuable quality for a detective, but Saunders would surely have no use for such an imprecise notion. No doubt he had turned eagerly from the uncertainties and untidiness of living humanity to the certainties of the dissecting table. A certain sort of mind demanded certainty above everything, and you could not carve up living bodies to provide definite answers to every question.

Lambert said only, ‘I find that it often helps me to talk to the man who has conducted an investigation into the causes of death. You’ll have to take my word for that.’

‘I don’t see how I can help you, that’s all.’

You wouldn’t, of course. But then you’re not used to being challenged, Lambert thought. He knew that he would gain nothing by offending this austere man. He said, ‘I’m aware that you have to be careful and precise in your findings; that they may be probed for weakness at some later date by some smart-alec lawyer.’ He saw from Saunders’ face that he had struck a chord of recognition there, at any rate. ‘That is in itself a limitation. Sometimes it helps me if forensic men will go a little beyond the mere facts which are all they can safely put into an official report. Speculation may be dangerous in a legal context, but it can be helpful to policemen floundering after leads at the beginning of an investigation.’

Saunders said woodenly, ‘I am not a doctor, Superintendent. I deal in facts. I am not at home with anything else.’

Lambert had to resist the impulse to shout at the pompous twit that policemen also deal in facts, that he was here only because they wanted to establish the most important ones and proceed from there, that without facts they could never compile a case those cautious buggers from the Crown Prosecution Service would take up. Instead, he said doggedly, ‘Nevertheless, I think an exchange between us would be useful. Let’s just go over the facts you have established for us and see if I have any questions, shall we?’

Saunders shrugged, then sighed petulantly. ‘If you think it will help. The cadaver had been in the water for a long time, you know. I should say ten to twelve weeks, though it’s difficult to be certain.’

His hand flashed comically to his mouth after these last words, and Lambert realised immediately that he had been more adventurous in speech than in writing: the summary DI Rushton had already communicated to him had spoken of eight to fourteen weeks. He did not underline the point that the forensic man was already being more precise in speech than in his report; the man had already realised that for himself. Saunders might be a prickly sod, but he was sharp and intelligent, and that was more important. ‘And the corpse has been in the Wye for the whole of that time?’

Saunders looked at him sharply. He had plainly not entertained the idea that the body might have been in other waters before it reached the river. It seemed unlikely, but it was possible, and a scientist must not disregard what was possible. The man found himself unexpectedly drawn towards the mystery that he thought he had already relinquished with his report, towards the puzzle which he now saw was just the first of many for this grizzled detective who sat so watchfully on the other side of his desk. ‘It’s impossible to say for certain just where the body has been since death. It’s certainly been in water for most of the period between the time of expiry and the hour when it was sighted in Chepstow. The deterioration and the damage from outside sources are what I would expect in a corpse immersed in a river like the Wye for ten to twelve weeks. The body was that of a young woman. Seventeen to twenty, I’d say. With a face too much damaged for normal identification, but a full set of teeth and recent dental treatment.’