I parked the car and turned off the engine.
The silence was acute.
I sat there for a while, gazing around at the rapidly dimming surroundings, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and I tried to imagine what I’d be thinking if it was 2.30 in the morning and there was a dead body in my car. Would you get rid of it here? I asked myself. Would you feel safe getting rid of it here? And, if so, where exactly would you dump it?
I picked up my mobile.
‘Cal?’ I said.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yeah. I’m in the lay-by now. I’m just going to take a quick look round, OK?’
‘Keep your phone on.’
‘Yeah.’
I reached under the seat and pulled out a torch, checked it was working, turned it off again, then opened the door and stepped out. I’d already spotted the stream that Cal had mentioned — or, at least, I’d seen the top of a tree-lined clay bank that ran alongside the lay-by, stopping about halfway along, and I was pretty sure it was the bank of the stream that Cal had seen on Google Earth. As I crossed the lay-by, heading for the point where the bank dropped away, I could smell a growing sourness in the air — rotted leaves, waste, dead things. The stagnant odour of decay. There was a small gap between the end of the bank and a thick black tangle of hawthorn trees — just enough room for an adult man to squeeze through — and as I approached the gap, I turned on the torch. I’m not sure what I was expecting to see — footprints, maybe … a scrap of cloth caught on a branch — but, of course, there wasn’t anything there. If anything had happened here, it had happened a month ago — time enough for the wind and rain to remove all traces of evidence.
I moved closer to the gap, raising the torch to see if I could make out what was on the other side. I saw darkness, an empty space, the tops of trees. I edged into the gap, turning sideways to avoid the worst of the thorns, and slowly eased my way through. My feet kept slipping on the rain-moistened clay and I had to grab hold of a thickish branch to steady myself. I cautiously inched forward, sweeping the torchlight over the ground in front of me. To my left, it was all trees — a dense thicket of hawthorn — while away to my right I could see the stream, a shallow run of muddy brown water oozing along a dirty clay ditch. To my immediate right, where the bank fell away, there was a surprisingly sudden drop of about eight to ten feet, at the bottom of which was a boggy black pool. The stream trickled down into the pool, before oozing away again into a sparse patch of littered woodland. The pool had clearly been used as a dump over the years, and as I shone my torch down into the darkness, I could see all kinds of discarded waste down there: great lumps of concrete, dried-up sacks of cement, rolls of rusted wire mesh, sheets of corrugated iron, an old metal trough, iron poles and rusted chains and …
‘Shit,’ I heard myself whisper.
There was a face down there.
The remains of a face.
There wasn’t much left of it, and it was half covered by sodden strands of long black hair, but there was no doubt in my mind whose face it was.
Breathing slowly, I took the phone from my pocket and held it to my ear.
‘Cal?’ I said.
‘What’s happening, John?’
‘I’ve found her.’
‘What?’
‘Anna Gerrish … I’ve found her.’
16
She was lying on her back in the shallows of the pool, completely naked, her body draped limply over a large sack of rubble. Her bone-white skin was streaked with grainy black mud and silt. One arm was twisted back under her body, and both her legs were bent at unnatural angles. I guessed she’d been thrown down the bank, or just dropped, probably when she was already dead, and the fall had broken her legs. There were dark gashes all over her body, possibly stab wounds, and a larger opening in the right side of her abdomen. I focused the torch beam on her neck, looking for the half-moon necklace that her mother had told me she always wore, but there was nothing there.
‘John?’ Cal said. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yeah …’
‘Are you sure it’s her?’
‘As sure as I can be.’
‘Where is she?’
I told him.
‘And where are you?’ he said.
‘At the top of the bank, about ten feet above her.’
‘Stay there,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t go anywhere near her, OK?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you going to call the police?’
‘I have to.’
‘Bishop?’
‘No … I’ll just call 999. Bishop’s going to find out eventually, but I don’t want to have to deal with him straight away.’
‘All right, but we have to get our story straight first, before you call anyone — ’
‘What story?’
‘Shit, John,’ he said. ‘Think about it … they’re going to want to know how you found her, aren’t they? And you can’t tell them what we’ve been doing all day, all this shit with the CCTV cameras — ’
‘They won’t care about that.’
‘Maybe not, but if they start sniffing around me, which they would … well, I’d be fucked, John. Well and truly fucked.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘How about if I just tell them that I was following up on what Tasha told me? Bishop already knows that I talked to her, so if I just tell them what she told me about Anna getting picked up that night … all I’d have to say then was that I followed up on that information by driving around looking for places where her body might have been dumped … what do you think?’
‘It’s not very believable.’
‘I know … but it’s pretty much what actually happened, isn’t it? Believable or not, it’s not too far from the truth. The only thing I’d be keeping from them is how we narrowed down the search area.’
‘Yeah, I suppose …’ Cal said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe you should keep the Nissan out of it too? Bishop’s going to be running the murder investigation, isn’t he? And if he has got some kind of link with the Nissan … well, maybe it’s just best to tell him as little as possible.’
‘Yeah, but I texted him the registration number, remember? He already knows that I know about the Nissan. Although …’
‘What?’
‘Well, there’s going to be a full-scale murder investigation, isn’t there? And, yeah, Bishop’s going to be in charge of it. But if he’s got something to hide, he won’t just have to hide it from me any more, he’ll have to keep it from everyone else who’s involved in the investigation.’
‘Yeah, everyone who’s not in his pocket.’
‘They’re not all bent, Cal.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Shit …’ he sighed. ‘This is a right fucking mess.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll call the police now, and when they get here I’ll tell them as much of the truth as I can without mentioning you, OK?’
‘And what about Bishop? What are you going to tell him?’
‘I don’t know … I’ll see what happens.’
‘That’s it? You’ll just “see what happens”?’