Cross and Burn (5 page)

T
he carefully chosen furniture was gone now, carried off by the man and a van she’d picked from the small ads in the local paper. Actually, it had been two men and a van, and it had taken two trips to strip the barn of Michael and Lucy’s possessions. Everything personal, Carol had packed in plastic crates from the DIY warehouse and stacked in the garage. All the rest was a memory, doubtless gracing the house of some lucky punter who was blissfully ignorant of its history.

The one part of the barn she’d left intact was the separate room that Michael had created at one end of the building. It was a studio-sized spare bedroom with its own toilet and shower, completely cut off from the remainder of the space by a new wall as thick as the traditional stone that protected the interior from the bitter weather. The reason for the sound insulation was that the room had doubled as Michael’s office. Here, he wrote code and developed software for games and apps. Along one wall was a long table where an array of computers and games consoles still sat. As far as Carol was aware, this room was untainted by the presence of her brother’s killer. When she came in here and closed the door, she could still feel as close to Michael as she had been when he was alive.

Back when she’d first come to Bradfield, they’d shared a loft conversion in the centre of the city. Outside their tall windows the city had hummed and throbbed, sparked and glittered. But inside, it had been a space where Michael had worked and they’d both lived. She remembered how she’d often opened the door to the rattle of gunfire or the electronica of a futuristic soundtrack. Once he realised she was home, Michael would always put headphones on, but he preferred to work with the sound effects blasting at him from all sides.

These days Carol had got into the habit of drinking her coffee and eating a bowl of cereal with tinned fruit in the room where she slept, music pouring out of the tall speakers that bookended the work table. Every morning, it was Michael’s final playlist, the last music he’d been listening to while he worked. A mixture of Michael Nyman, Ludovico Einaudi and Brad Mehldau. Nothing she would ever have chosen. But she was growing comfortable with it.

She ate quickly, eager to return to the hard physical work that made introspection impossible. When she walked back into the barn, she was astonished to see a black-and-white Border collie crouching on the floor a couple of yards inside the door, pink tongue lolling between strong white teeth. Her heart leapt in her chest, a cascade of reproaches and terrors flooding her head.
How could you be so stupid? Leaving the door open, are you mad? This is how people die. This is how people have died. Dog means human, human means stranger, stranger means danger. Have you learned nothing, you stupid bitch?

For a moment, she was frozen, incapable of figuring out what to do. Then the old Carol Jordan kicked in. Slowly she stooped and put her bowl and mug on the floor. She knew where her tools were; she’d always had good recall. She retreated a little and moved sideways. Neither she nor the dog took their eyes off each other. Her left hand strayed outwards till her fingertips brushed the handle of the sledgehammer. As she gripped it, the dog’s ears pricked up.

Carol swung the hammer up and held the shaft of the hammer across her body, hands apart. Then she launched herself towards the dog, roaring wordlessly at the top of her voice. Startled, the dog jumped up, backed off, then turned tail.

She followed it through the door, still raging at the blameless animal who was now, she saw, sitting at the heels of a strange man, peering round his legs with ears flat to its head. She skidded to a halt, not sure whether to feel foolish or frightened. He didn’t look very frightening. She fell into her old habit of mentally creating an APB description in her head. A shade under six feet tall, medium build. Flat tweed cap over dark hair, silvering at the temples. Full beard, neatly trimmed. Narrow lips, fleshy nose, dark eyes nested with outdoor wrinkles. He wore a waxed jacket, open to reveal a brown suede waistcoat over a heavy cream cotton shirt with, God help her, a cravat at the neck. Toffee-coloured corduroys tucked into green wellies. He looked as if he should have a shotgun broken on his arm. A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. ‘You seem to have terrified my dog.’
Public school accent. The yap of the posh boys who don’t know the price of milk.

‘I don’t like trespassers.’ Carol let the heavy hammer swing down till the head was resting on the ground.

‘I do apologise. She’s too curious for her own good.’ This time, the smile was full on.

‘The dog has an excuse, then. What’s yours?’ She didn’t care that she was being rude. After what had happened here, any local would cut her slack, confronted with a stranger on her own ground.

‘I thought it was about time I came to introduce myself. I’m George Nicholas. I live in the house over the brow of the hill.’ He turned and pointed behind him to his right.

‘Would that be the bloody big house over the brow of the hill?’

He chuckled. ‘I suppose you might call it that.’

‘So you’re the guy who owns all the land I can see apart from my own patch here?’

‘Not quite all of it. But yes, most of it. And this is my dog, Jess.’ He rumpled the fur on the dog’s head. ‘Say hello, Jess.’ The dog sidled out from behind him and sat in front of Carol, raising a paw.

It was, she had to admit, a good routine. Completely disarming, if you were the sort of woman who allowed herself to be disarmed. Carol shook the dog’s paw then crouched down to stroke its thick fur. ‘You’re a lovely girl, aren’t you?’ Then she stood up. ‘I’m Carol Jordan,’ she said, firmly avoiding a handshake by sticking her free hand in her trouser pocket.

‘I know. I was at the funeral.’ He looked pained. ‘No reason why you would know that. I… I was very fond of Michael and Lucy.’

‘They never mentioned you.’ It was a harsh response, but she didn’t care. It was a lie too. Lucy had talked about going to dinner at the big house and Michael had teased her about abandoning her socialist principles.

‘And why should they have,’ he said easily. ‘I gathered you didn’t live in each other’s pockets. But we were neighbours and we socialised from time to time and, for what it’s worth, I liked them both very much. Like everyone around here, I was appalled by what happened to them.’

Carol cleared her throat. ‘Yes. Well. It was appalling.’

Nicholas looked at his feet. ‘I lost my wife three years ago. Drunk driver rammed her car on the motorway slip road.’ He drew in a long breath and tilted his head back to stare at the sky. ‘Obviously nothing like the scale of what happened here, but I do have some understanding of losing people one loves to sudden violent death.’

Carol tried to care, but she knew she didn’t. Not really. She couldn’t be bothered with people who tried to convince her they knew what she was going through. She was done with empathy. She’d watched Tony Hill being Mr Empathy for years and look where that had got her. Fuck empathy. Still. The obligations of good manners remained. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘So am I.’ He met her eyes again. This time, the smile was sorrowful. ‘Anyway, I wanted to say hello. And to invite you to supper. Next week, perhaps? I’ve got a couple of friends from the village coming over on Tuesday, if you’d like to join us?’

Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not very good company right now.’

He nodded, brisk in his understanding. ‘Of course. Another time, perhaps.’ There was an uncomfortable silence, then he glanced at the barn door. ‘How are you getting on with…’ His voice tailed off.

‘I’m gutting it. Come and have a look.’ Seeing his hesitation, she gave him a grim smile. ‘It’s all right, there’s nothing left to see.’

He followed her inside to the hollow shell of the barn. Seeing it through his eyes, she understood the extent of what she’d done. Only the kitchen area remained unscathed. Everything else was stripped to the bare bones. The last job was the demolition of the gallery floor where Michael and Lucy had been murdered on their bed. She’d already ripped out the staircase. Today’s task was to break down the supporting beam that held up the floor so she could set about the final stage of destroying it. She pointed to the sturdy timber. ‘That’s my next job.’

‘You’re not taking the whole beam out, are you?’ He craned his head to follow the beam up to the A-frame joist that ran the width of the barn.

‘If I take that out, the floor will start to collapse. It’ll be much easier to break it down.’

Nicholas stared at her as if she was mad. ‘If you take that out, your whole roof will collapse. That’s a major structural beam. It’s been there since the barn was built.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve been around old buildings all my life.’ Suspicious, Carol followed his pointing finger as he outlined the structure of the hammer beam truss. ‘If you don’t believe me, get a structural engineer in to have a look. But please, don’t get rid of it until you’ve taken advice.’ He looked so distressed that she surrendered her instinctive mistrust of anyone trying to tell her what to do.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll work around it.’ She crouched down again and ruffled the dog’s fur. ‘Looks like you did me a favour, Jess.’

‘We’re always happy to help,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ll be off now. No doubt I’ll see you around?’

Carol made a noncommittal sound and followed him to the door. She stood and watched him leave her land and strike out across the rough pasture towards his home. It occurred to her that she’d been more friendly to the dog than to its owner. There was a time when that would have embarrassed her.

Not any more.

T
here was a terrible moment when Paula misunderstood what she was looking at. The shaggy blonde hair, the square shoulders, the legs that had always brought Anne Bancroft to mind; all markers for Carol Jordan. She’d never seen her naked except in fantasy, but her imagination was enough to blur the reality in front of her for a split second. Then she understood that the dead woman sprawled on the floor was not Carol Jordan. She was the wrong body shape. Too heavy in the hips and thighs, too squat in the torso. But it had been a head-swimming moment.

Fielding had caught it too, which wasn’t going to help her respect for Paula. ‘You all right, McIntyre? I’d have thought you’d be used to this by now.’

Paula coughed into her paper mask. ‘With respect, ma’am, I never want to be used to it.’

Fielding turned away with a shrug. ‘Fair enough.’ She took a couple of steps towards the body, stooping for a closer look. ‘He didn’t want us to recognise her, that’s for sure. Look at that.’ She pointed to the mash of flesh and bone that had been the woman’s face. The naked body was a mass of bruises and abrasions. Paula had seen plenty of victims of violence, but she couldn’t remember a body that had taken such a comprehensive beating.

Then another possibility flashed across her mind. She’d been slow to make the connection. But a description of this bludgeoned woman would also fit Bev McAndrew. Her breakfast coffee burned at the back of her throat and she sidestepped a CSI photographer for a better view. For the second time, relief made her weak in the knees. This wasn’t Bev. Torin’s mother was taller and slimmer, with bigger breasts. Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t the missing pharmacist.

Paula looked around the room. It was a dismal place to die. The walls were stained with damp and mould and the floorboards were filthy with ground-in dirt. A sagging sofa faced a scarred coffee table whose missing leg had been replaced with a pile of crumbling bricks. Beer cans were piled at either end of the sofa and three ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts and roaches. Empty blister packs of over-the-counter painkillers were scattered around among crushed boxes that had once held pizzas and burgers. The stench was a gruesome mixture of all the things she wished she’d never smelled.

Paula turned back to stare bleakly at the murdered woman. She longed for Tony Hill’s facility for reading a crime scene and understanding something of the mind that had created it. But her skills were for interrogating the living, not the dead. She’d go through the motions at the crime scene, but she knew she’d always have to rely on other specialists for what it could reveal.

And right on cue, one of those specialists walked in on them. ‘DCI Fielding. You have something for me, I’ve been told?’ Paula recognised the warm Canadian drawl of Dr Grisha Shatalov, the Home Office pathologist who generally worked Bradfield’s homicides. He clapped Paula’s shoulder softly as he passed her. ‘Paula. Good to see you.’

Fielding stepped aside with what looked like relief on the little Paula could see of her face. ‘She’s all yours, Doc. Brutal, this one.’

‘Taking someone’s life? That’s always brutal in my book.’ Grisha hunkered down by the body. ‘Even when it looks gentle.’ He moved his hands over her body, gradually applying pressure and pausing to gauge temperature and rigor.

‘Did she die here?’ Fielding’s question was brusque. It sounded to Paula as though her reputation for impatience was well-founded. There was clearly no place here for the exchange of pleasantries she’d always seen between Carol and Grisha. Straight to business and no messing around, that seemed to be Fielding’s style. Like a lot of women in senior positions, she set out her stall to out-tough the men.

Grisha glanced over his shoulder. ‘I’d say so. You’ve got blood spatter from the head wound, you’ve got lividity that looks to me like she hasn’t been moved post-mortem. Chances are high she was still alive when he brought her here.’ He looked up at the photographer. ‘Are you done here? Can I move her?’

‘She’s all yours, mate.’ The cameraman stepped away and left them to it.

Grisha carefully tilted the victim’s head to one side. ‘Look, here. You see this?’ He pointed to a depression in the skull, blonde hair turned dark and matted with a mixture of blood and brain matter. ‘A blow to the head with something long, rounded and heavy. A baseball bat or a metal pipe. I’ll have a better idea once I get her to the lab. If nothing else had happened to her, chances are that would have killed her. But he made sure by giving her a good kicking.’ He gestured at the bruises on her torso. ‘Large, irregular rounded shapes, it’s a classic bruise from a kick. And the colour, red shading towards purple. That tells us she was still alive when he gave kicking her to death his best shot.’ He sat on his heels and considered. ‘Either he’s smart or he got lucky.’ He paused expectantly.

‘I’ve not got time for twenty questions,’ Fielding groused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He kicked her. He kept on kicking her. He didn’t stamp on her. It would have been better for you if he had. You might have got a sole pattern from his boots.’

‘Bastard.’ Fielding sounded disgusted. ‘Boots, not shoes?’ Her face gave nothing away, but she folded her arms across her chest as if to defend herself from the violence.

‘Given the extent of the damage – her face is wrecked, Fielding, look at it – my best guess would be steel toecaps. And that tends to boots rather than shoes.’ Grisha pointed to her left ankle. ‘Check out those abrasions. Looks like a restraint tell-tale to me. A shackle of some description. But one with a straight edge. Maybe designed for pipework rather than humans. That’s why it’s torn the skin the way it has. I’ll check her wrists when I get her on the table.’

Before Fielding could say more, they were interrupted by another white suit. ‘Guv, I thought you’d want to know. It looks like we’ve found her clothes and her bag. Stuffed behind the bath.’

‘Good work, Hussain. Bag the clothes and get them straight to the lab. Paula, you go and have a look at the contents when we’re done here. You’re a woman, you’ll have a better sense of what’s what than these hairy-arsed lads.’

Paula bit her tongue. Only because she was glad to have first crack at the victim’s possessions. But if Fielding thought she could defuse her by putting her in the little woman box, she was going to have another think coming. ‘Ma’am,’ she said.

‘What about time of death?’ Fielding was already on to the next thing.

Grisha took hold of the woman and gently rolled her on to her stomach. ‘Let’s see what she has to tell us.’ He opened the plastic satchel he always brought to crime scenes and took out a thermometer. He parted her legs slightly so he could take a rectal temperature reading. Then Paula heard his breath hiss over his teeth. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. Grisha seldom showed any emotion, but the disgust was obvious in his tone.

‘What is it?’ Fielding demanded.

Grisha bent forward and stared intently between the woman’s legs. He reached out gingerly with one finger. ‘I thought I’d seen everything.’ His voice was so quiet Paula could barely hear him.

‘What is it, Grisha?’ she asked, laying a hand on his shoulder.

He shook his head. ‘It looks like he’s superglued her labia together.’