The Calling of the Grave (6 page)

    'Didn't
realize you two knew each other,' he said. Roper hung back just behind him.

    Sophie
gave Terry a smile that seemed to have an edge to it. 'We do now. David's been
telling me what he does. It's really fascinating.'

    'Is
it,' Terry said, flatly.

    'Do
you want to join us?' I asked, made uncomfortable by the sudden atmosphere.

    'No,
we won't interrupt. Just came over to give you the news.' He spoke over his
shoulder to Roper. 'Get the beers in, Bob.'

    Roper
blinked but hid any displeasure he felt at being ordered around. A trace of aftershave
lingered behind him as he went to the bar.

    'News?'
I said.

    Terry
addressed me as though Sophie wasn't there. 'You know this morning when I told
you I'd got to go somewhere? Well, I went to Dartmoor prison to see Jerome
Monk.'

    That
explained Terry's secrecy earlier: no wonder he'd seemed keyed up. But Sophie
jumped in before I could ask anything.

    'You've
been to
interview
him? Why wasn't I told?'

    'Take
it up with Simms,' he shot back.

    Sophie
was furious. 'I still can't believe you questioned him without consulting me
first! Why bring a BIA in and then not use them? That's just
stupid

    I
tried not to wince. Tact obviously wasn't her strong point. Terry's face
darkened.

    'I'm sure
the SIO'll love to hear how stupid he's been.'

    'You
said you'd got news?' I said, trying to head off the row.

    Terry
gave Sophie a final glare before turning to me. 'Monk claims he can't remember
who he buried where, but he's agreed to cooperate.'

    'Cooperate
how?'

    Terry
hesitated, as though he didn't entirely believe it himself. 'He's going to take
us to the other graves.'

    The
prison van bumped along the narrow road. Police cars and motorbikes flanked it
front and back, blue lights flashing. The procession made its way past the
grassed-over ruins of an old waterwheel, one of the remnants of the tin mines
Wainwright had told me about, and pulled up near where a helicopter stood on a
patch of clear moor, its rotors turning idly. The doors of the police cars
opened and armed officers climbed out, the snub shapes of their guns gleaming
dully in the early morning drizzle. Now the front doors of the prison van
opened as well. Two guards climbed out and went to the rear. The clusters of
uniforms there obscured what they were doing, but a moment later the doors
swung open.

    A man
stepped out of the back. The police and prison guards quickly formed a tight
cordon around him, screening him from clear view. But the big, shaved head was
clearly visible, standing out like a white football in the centre of the
encircling figures. He was bustled across the moorland to the waiting
helicopter, hunched over as the two guards hurried him beneath the whirling
rotor blades. He climbed into the cabin clumsily, as though unused to the
exercise. As he pulled himself up he slipped, going down on one knee. Hands
reached out from inside the helicopter, grabbing his arm to steady him. For a
second he could be fully seen, shapeless and doughy inside the prison-issue
jacket.

    Then
he was inside. One of the guards followed him aboard and the door slammed shut.
The rotors picked up speed as the other guard retreated back towards the prison
van, clutching his hat to his head as the downdraught from the blades rippled
the grass. The helicopter lifted from the ground, tilting slightly as it
turned, and then it was angling away across the moor, shrinking until it was
little more than a black speck against the grey sky.

    Terry
lowered the binoculars as the sound of its rotors diminished. 'Well, what did
you think?'

    I shrugged,
hands stuck deep into the pockets of my coat. My breath steamed in the fine
drizzle. 'Fine, apart from when he slipped. Where did you find him?'

    'The
double? He's some slaphead PC from HQ. Nothing like Monk when you see him up
close, but he's the best we could do.' Terry gnawed at his lip. 'The guns were
my idea.'

    'I
wondered about that.'

    He
gave me a look. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

    'It
seems a lot of trouble to go to, that's all.'

    'That's
the price of a free press. This way they get something to photograph and we can
get on with the job without the bastards getting in the way.'

    I
couldn't blame him for sounding disgruntled. Even though it was supposedly a
secret, word had inevitably leaked out about Monk's involvement in the search.
Keeping the press off open moorland would have been impossible, so the decoy
would distract their attention while the real business was under way. Finding a
grave out here would be hard enough without journalists trampling all over the
moor.

    'Looks
like something's happening,' Terry said, staring through the binoculars.

    About
a mile away a line of cars and vans was racing across another road in the
direction the helicopter had taken. Terry gave a grunt of satisfaction.

    'Good
riddance.' He glanced at his watch. 'Come on. The real thing should be here
soon.'

    It
had taken two days to finalize all the necessary paperwork and arrangements for
Monk's temporary release. I'd spent most of that time in the mortuary. Cleaned
of the thick coating of peat, the full extent of the young woman's injuries was
shockingly apparent. There seemed hardly any part of her skeleton that wasn't
damaged: in places only the decaying tendons and soft tissue held the bones
together. It was the sort of trauma you'd expect from a car crash, not
something inflicted by a human being.

    'The
post-mortem wasn't able to establish a definitive cause of death,' Pirie told
me, apparently unperturbed. 'There are any number of injuries that could have been
responsible. Many of the internal organs and soft tissues are ruptured, the
hyoid bone is broken and there are fractures to several cervical vertebrae. The
damage to the thoracic cavity would almost certainly have proved fatal, as the
splintered ribs penetrated the heart and lungs. In fact, the injuries suffered
by this young lady are so severe that shock alone would probably have killed
her.'

    
Young
lady
sounded curiously old-fashioned. Prim, almost. For some reason it made
me warm to the odd pathologist. 'But. . . ?' I prompted.

    I was
rewarded with a thin smile. 'As I said yesterday, skeletal trauma is more your
field than mine, Dr Hunter. I can't rule out strangulation, but the blows to
her head were so forceful that her vertebrae and hyoid would probably have
broken anyway. The attack must have been quite frenzied.'

    'How
do the injuries compare with Angela Carson's?'

    I'd
only been given a copy of the earlier post-mortem report that morning. I hadn't
had a chance to read it fully, but the similarity of their injuries seemed
undeniable.

    'The
soft tissue was too degraded to distinguish any signs of sexual assault,
unfortunately. I'd hoped the peat might have preserved it adequately, but the
physical trauma and shallowness of the grave worked against us. A pity.' He
sniffed regretfully. 'The Carson girl also suffered mainly facial and cranial
trauma, although nowhere near so severe as this. But as I understand it in that
instance Monk was interrupted by the police, which perhaps explains why these
injuries are so much more . . . pronounced.'

    They
were that, all right. Against the dull silver backdrop of the examination
table, the features barely looked human. The front of her skull had been
crushed in like a dropped egg, while the remaining skin and soft tissue of the
face were pulped into the fragmented bones of the cheeks and nasal cavity.

    'I
believe psychologists claim this sort of facial disfigurement is an expression
of the killer's sense of guilt. Eradicating their victim's accusing gaze. Isn't
that the accepted explanation?'

    'Something
like that,' I agreed. 'But I can't see Jerome Monk as the remorseful type.'

    'Quite.
In which case he either has a truly terrifying temper, or he disfigures his
victims for pleasure.' He looked at me over the tops of his half-moon glasses.
'Frankly, I'm not sure which is the most disturbing.'

    Neither
was I. A fraction of the force used would still have been fatal. Whoever this
was, she hadn't just been beaten to death: she'd been pulverized. It was
overkill in a very literal sense.

    I'd
expected the pathologist to leave me to work with an assistant, but he stayed
to help with the grisly task of cleaning the remains: first cutting away the
soft tissue then helping me disarticulate the skeleton so it could be soaked in
detergent. It was a necessary part of my work but not one I enjoyed. Especially
not when the victim was little more than a girl, and I'd a daughter myself.

    But
Pirie showed no such qualms. 'I'm always keen to learn new skills,' he said,
delicately teasing a tendon away from its connected bone. 'Although I accept
that these days that probably puts me in a minority.'

    It
took me a second to realize he'd been making a joke.

    In
the end, confirming that the dead woman was Tina Williams was relatively
straightforward. The clothes and jewellery the body was buried in matched those
the nineteen-year-old was last seen wearing when she'd disappeared from
Okehampton, a market town on the northern edge of Dartmoor, and dental records
confirmed her identity beyond doubt. Although the jaw and mandible were
shattered and the front teeth broken, enough remained to provide a positive ID.
The attack had been extensive but not methodical. Either Monk didn't realize
his victim could be identified from her dental records, or he didn't care.

    But
then he probably never expected her body to be found.

    I'd
been able to add little to what we already knew. Tina Williams had suffered
horrific blunt trauma injuries. Most of her ribs and the clavicle had simple
fractures caused by a swift downward force, as did the metacarpals and
phalanges of both hands. Although her face had LeFort fractures, formed when
force from an impact dissipates along certain buttressing areas of the cranium,
the rear of her skull was intact. That suggested she'd been lying face up on
soft ground when the injuries had been inflicted.

    Yet
she seemed to have made no attempt to defend herself. Typically, when the
forearm is raised to block a blow, it's the ulna that takes the brunt of the
force, causing a wedge-shaped break called a 'parry fracture'. Here the ulnae
and radii in both forearms had a combination of simple and more complex,
comminuted fractures. That pointed to one of two scenarios. Either Tina Williams
was already dead or unconscious during the attack, or she'd been trussed and
helpless while Monk broke most of the bones in her body.

    I
hoped for her sake it was the former.

    It
was hard to say what had caused the injuries, but I thought I could guess.
While Monk was powerful enough to have inflicted many of them with his bare
hands, the frontal bone of Tina Williams' skull — her forehead — bore a
distinctive curved fracture. It was too big to have been caused by a hammer,
which would in any case more than likely have punched straight through. It
looked to me like something that might have been caused by a shoe or boot heel.

    She'd
been stamped on.

    I'd
worked on any number of violent deaths, but the image conjured up by that was
especially disturbing. And now I was about to come face to face with the man
who was responsible.

    The
sound of the helicopter rotors had all but disappeared as Terry and I went back
to the small township of police trailers, cars and vans that had now sprung
into life around the moorland track. The constant traffic was churning the moor
into a quagmire. Duckboards had been set down as temporary walkways, but black
mud oozed up through their slats, making them treacherously slippery.

    I
hadn't expected to be here more than a few days, but the convict's surprise
offer to show us where Zoe and Lindsey Bennett were buried had changed all
that. While Wainwright would remain in charge of any excavation, Terry had told
me Simms wanted me on hand when - if — any more bodies were found.