The Summer That Never Was
Dedicated to the memory of
Gordon Allan Halladay,
1922-2002
1
T
revor Dickinson was hungover and bad-tempered when he turned up for work on Monday morning. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a birdcage, his head was throbbing like the speakers at a heavy metal concert, and his stomach was lurching like a car with a dirty carburetor. He had already drunk half a bottle of Milk of Magnesia and swallowed four extra-strength Paracetamol, with no noticeable effect.
When he arrived at the site, Trevor found he had to wait until the police had cleared away the last of the demonstrators before he could start work. There were five left, all sitting cross-legged in the field.
Environmentalists
. One was a little grey-haired old lady. Ought to be ashamed of herself, Trevor thought, a woman of her age squatting down on the grass with a bunch of bloody Marxist homosexual tree-huggers.
He looked around for some clue as to why anyone would want to save those particular few acres. The fields belonged to a farmer who had recently been put out of business by a combination of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth. As far as Trevor knew, there weren’t any rare pink-nippled fart warblers that couldn’t nest anywhere else in the entire country; nor were there any ivy-leafed lark’s-turds lurking in the hedgerows. There weren’t even any trees, unless you counted the shabby row of poplars that grew between the fields and the A1, stunted and choked from years of exhaust fumes.
The police cleared away the demonstrators–including the old lady–by picking them up bodily and carting them off to a nearby van, then they gave the go-ahead to Trevor and his fellow workers. The weekend’s rain had muddied the ground, which made manoeuvring more difficult than usual, but Trevor was a skilled operator, and he soon got his dipper shovel well below the topsoil, hoisting his loads high and dumping them into the waiting lorry. He handled the levers with an innate dexterity, directing the complex system of clutches, gears, shafts and winch drums like a conductor, scooping as much as the power shovel could hold, then straightening it so as not to spill any when he lifted it up and over to the lorry.
Trevor had been at work well over two hours when he thought he saw something sticking out of the dirt.
Leaning forward from his seat and rubbing condensation from the inside window of the cab, he squinted to see what it was, and when he saw, it took his breath away. He was looking at a human skull, and what was worse was that it seemed to be looking right back at him.
Alan Banks didn’t feel in the least bit hungover, but he knew he’d drunk too much ouzo the night before when he saw that he had left the television on. The only channels it received were Greek, and he never watched it when he was sober.
Banks groaned, stretched and made some of the strong Greek coffee he had become so attached to during his first week on the island. While the coffee was brewing, he put on a CD of Mozart arias, picked up one of last week’s newspapers he hadn’t read yet and walked out on the balcony. Though he had brought his Discman, he felt fortunate that the small time-share flat had a mini stereo system with a CD player. He had brought a stack of his favourite CDs with him, including Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Schubert, Walton, the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.
He stood by the iron railings listening to “Parto, ma tu ben mio” and looking down at the sea beyond the jumbled terraces of rooftops and walls, a cubist composition of intersecting blue and white planes. The sun was shining in a perfect blue sky, the way it had done every day since he had arrived. He could smell wild lavender and rosemary in the air. A cruise ship had just dropped anchor, and the first launches of the day were carrying their loads of excited camera-bearing tourists to the harbour, gulls squawking in their wake.
Banks went to pour himself some coffee, then came out again and sat down. His white wooden chair scraped against the terra cotta tiles, scaring the small lizard-like creature that had been basking in the morning sun.
After looking at the old newspaper and perhaps reading a little more of Homer’s
Odyssey
, Banks thought he would walk down to the village for a long lunch, maybe have a glass or two of wine, pick up some fresh bread, olives and goat’s cheese, then come back for a nap and a little music before spending his evening at the taverna on the quayside playing chess with Alexandros, as had been his habit since his second day.
There was nothing much that interested him in the newspapers except the sports and arts pages. Rain had stopped play in the third test at Old Trafford, which was hardly news; England had won an important World Cup qualifying match; and it wasn’t the right day of the week for the book or record reviews. He did, however, notice a brief report on a skeleton uncovered by a construction worker at the site of a new shopping centre by the A1, not far from Peterborough. He only noticed it because he had spent a good part of his early life in Peterborough, and his parents still lived there.
He put the newspaper aside and watched the gulls swoop and circle. They looked as if they were drifting on waves of Mozart’s music. Drifting, just like him. He thought back to his second conversation with Alexandros.
During their game of chess, Alex had paused, looked seriously at Banks and said, “You seem like a man with many secrets, Alan, a very sad man. What is it you are running from?”
Banks had thought about that a lot. Was he running? Yes, in a way. Running from a failed marriage and a botched romance, and from a job that had threatened, for the second time in his life, to send him over the edge with its conflicting demands, its proximity to violent death and all that was worst in people. He was seeking a temporary escape, at least.
Or did it go deeper than that? Was he trying to run away from himself, from what he was, or from what he had become? He had sat there pondering the question and answered only, “I wish I knew,” before making a rash move and putting his queen in jeopardy.
He had managed to avoid affairs of the heart during his brief stay. Andrea, the waitress at Philippe’s taverna, flirted with him, but that was all. Occasionally, one of the women from the cruise ships would give him that certain kind of wistful look that led only to one place if you let it, but he hadn’t let it. He had also found himself a place where he didn’t have to confront crime on a daily basis, more particularly a place where he didn’t have go down into cellars stuffed with the violated bodies of teenaged girls, a scene from his last case that still, even here on the peaceful island, haunted his dreams.
So he had achieved his goal, run away from a messy life and found paradise of a kind. Why was it, then, that he still felt so damn restless?
Detective Inspector Michelle Hart of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, Northern Division, entered the forensic anthropology department of the District Hospital. She was looking forward to this morning. Usually at post-mortems she found herself disturbed not so much by the cutting and probing itself, but by the contrast between the
bright reflective surfaces of utilitarian tile and steel and the messy slosh of stomach contents, the dribbles of blackish blood running into the polished gutters, between the smell of disinfectant and the stench of a punctured bowel. But this morning, none of that was going to happen. This morning, all that Dr. Wendy Cooper, the forensic anthropologist, had to examine was bones.
Michelle had worked with her just over a month ago–her first case in her new posting–on some remains that had turned out to be Anglo-Saxon, not unusual in those parts, and they had got on well enough. The only thing she found hard to take was Dr. Cooper’s predilection for playing country and western music while she worked. She said it helped her concentrate, but Loretta Lynn had quite the opposite effect on Michelle.
Dr. Cooper and her graduate-student assistant, David Roberts, were bent over the partial skeleton arranging the small bones of the hands and feet in the correct order. It must be a difficult task, Michelle realized from the one brief anatomy course she had attended, and how you told one rib or one knuckle from another was quite beyond her. Dr. Cooper seemed to be doing well enough. She was in her early fifties, a rather stout figure with very short grey hair, silver-rimmed glasses and a no-nonsense manner.
“Do you know how many bones there are in a human hand?” Dr. Cooper asked without looking away from the skeleton.
“A lot?” Michelle answered.
“Twenty-six,” said Dr. Cooper. “Twenty-six. And awkward little buggers to make out, some of them.”
“Got anything for me yet?” Michelle took out her notebook.
“A little bit. As you can see, we’re still trying to put him back together again.”
“Him?”
“Oh, yes. You can take my word for that. The skull and pubis bear it out. Northern European, too, I’d say.” She
turned the skull sideways. “See that straight facial profile, the narrow nasal aperture? All signs. There are others, of course: the high cranium, the eye sockets. But you don’t want a lesson in ethnic anthropology, do you?”
“I suppose not,” said Michelle, who actually found the subject quite interesting. Sometimes she thought she might have chosen the wrong career and should instead have become an anthropologist. Or perhaps a doctor. “Not very tall, though, is he?”
Dr. Cooper looked at the bones laid out on the steel trolley. “Tall enough for his age, I’d say.”
“Don’t tell me you know his age.”
“Of course. Only a rough guess, mind you. By measuring the long bones and applying the appropriate formula, and by simple measuring tape here on the table, we’ve calculated his height at around five foot six. That’s somewhere between a hundred and sixty-seven and a hundred and sixty-eight centimetres.”
“A kid, then?”
Dr. Cooper nodded and touched the shoulder with her pen. “The medial clavicular epiphysis–collar-bone, to you–is the last epiphysis in the body to fuse, normally in the mid-twenties, though it can occur any time between fifteen and thirty-two. His hasn’t fused yet. Also, I’ve examined the rib ends and vertebrae. In an older person, you’d expect not only signs of wear and tear, but sharper ends and more scalloping on the ribs. His rib ends are flat and smoothly rounded, only slightly undulating, and the vertebrae show no epiphyseal rings at all. Also the fusion of ilium, ischium and pubis is in its early stages. That process usually takes place between the ages of twelve and seventeen.”
“So you’re saying he’s how old?”
“In my business it doesn’t pay to go out on a limb, but I’ll say between twelve and fifteen. Allow a couple of years either way as a fair margin of error. The databases we get these figures from aren’t always complete, and sometimes they’re out of date.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“The teeth. Of course, you’ll have to bring in the odontologist to examine the roots and check the levels of fluoride, if there is any–it wasn’t introduced in toothpaste here until 1959–but I can tell you three things right now. First off, there are no deciduous teeth left–that’s baby teeth–and the second molar has erupted. That means he’s aged around twelve, again give or take a couple of years, and I’d hazard a guess, given the other evidence, that he’s older rather than younger.”
“And the third thing?”
“A bit less scientific, I’m afraid, but judging by the general state of his teeth and the look of all these metal fillings in the posterior teeth, I’d guess vintage school dentist.”
“How long ago was he buried there?”
“Impossible to say. There’s no remaining soft tissue or ligaments, the bones are discoloured, and there’s some flaking, so I’d say more than a decade or two, but beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess until I’ve done more rigorous tests.”
“Any sign of cause of death?”
“Not yet. I need to get the bones cleaned up. Sometimes you can’t see knife marks, for example, because of the encrusted dirt.”
“What about that hole in the skull?”
Dr. Cooper ran her finger around the jagged hole. “Must have occurred during excavation. It’s definitely post-mortem.”
“How can you tell?”
“If it had happened before death, there’d be signs of healing. This is a clean break.”
“But what if it was the
cause
of death?”
Dr. Cooper sighed as if she were talking to a dense undergraduate. Michelle noticed David Roberts grin, and he blushed when he saw her watching him. “If that were the case,” the doctor went on, “you’d expect a very different shape. Fresh bones break in a different way from old
bones. And look at that.” She pointed to the hole. “What do you see?”
Michelle peered closely. “The edges,” she said. “They’re not the same colour as the surrounding bone.”
“Very good. That means it’s a recent break. If it had happened around the time of death, you’d expect the edges to have stained the same colour as the rest of the skull, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so,” said Michelle. “Simple, isn’t it?”
“If you know what you’re looking for. There’s a fractured humerus, too, right arm, but that’s healed, so I’d say it happened while he was alive. And do you see this?” She pointed to the left arm. “It’s slightly longer than his right arm, which may indicate left-handedness. Of course, it could be due to the fracture, but I doubt it. There are differences in the scapulae that also support my hypothesis.”
Michelle made some notes, then turned back to Dr. Cooper. “We know he was most likely buried where he was found,” she said, “because the remains were about three or four feet underground, but is there any way of knowing whether he died there or was moved there later?”
Dr. Cooper shook her head. “Any evidence of that was destroyed the same way the skull and some of the other bones were damaged. By the bulldozer.”
“Where’s the stuff we found with the body?”
Dr. Cooper gestured towards the bench that ran the length of the far wall and turned back to the bones. David Roberts spoke for the first time. He had a habit of keeping his head down when he spoke to Michelle, and of mumbling, so she couldn’t always hear what he was saying. He seemed embarrassed in her presence, as if he fancied her. She knew that her combination of blond hair and green eyes had a captivating effect on some men, but this was ridiculous. Michelle had just turned forty and David couldn’t be more than twenty-two.