‘Dr Grace,’ he murmured, lowering his head as if he was afraid of being lip-read. ‘Dr Sarah Grace.’
‘So?’
‘Sauce,’ he hissed, ‘were you asleep when you were a plod? She’s the chief’s ex-wife. She went home to the States after they got divorced, but now it seems she’s back, and in her old job. I doubt if she expected him to be turning up at crime scenes any more, though.’
‘It didn’t seem to faze her much.’
‘It wouldn’t. She’s a cool one, is Sarah.’
‘And a looker, as well.’
He frowned. ‘I’ll forget you said that, and so should you, Sauce. Banish lust from your mind and concentrate on your moll. I tell you, mate, I still worry about you and that one.’
‘Then don’t. Cheeky and I have an understanding; she never, ever asks me about the job.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ he drawled. ‘And has she given up driving get-away vehicles as well?’
Yes, Jack knows which buttons to push. ‘That was a misunderstanding,’ I snapped. ‘Her mother pleaded guilty, remember. She said she’d spun Cheeky a story, and naturally she believed it.’
‘With respect,’ he chuckled, ‘it was a plea bargain and the fiscal bought it. She might have finished you, Sauce, yet you’re still seeing her.’
‘Enough, Jack,’ I warned him.
He held his hands up, palms out. ‘Okay, okay. Your life, your career.’
‘Exactly, and I’m not about to risk either.’ He was chasing the wrong hare, anyway. My relationship with Cheeky was working in my favour, but he didn’t know that.
We drifted back to the senior officers’ meeting, which was breaking up with the arrival of the meat porters. We stood together and watched as they lifted the body, shrouded once again, from its temporary resting place, encased it and took it away, the entire exercise completed without a single word being spoken. Just before they folded the sheet over the victim’s face I took a last look, and estimated that he must have been close to my own age, maybe a year or two older, but likely under thirty.
That brought it home to me; this was my job, the one I had chosen, but it had its moments of horror. The chief had been doing it for a lot longer than me, and I knew that he’d seen worse than that, much worse. Little wonder then, that it showed in his eyes, and in DCS McGuire’s, when I looked more closely. If it didn’t, then maybe they’d have a touch of the monster in them. That’s something I’ll guard against in the future, I promise.
Skinner stepped forward, and crouched down beside the grave, making sure that the bright lights above didn’t cast his shadow across it. He peered in, then reached in and touched something. He glanced over his shoulder, at me. ‘See that, Sauce?’ he murmured. He was frowning; still, it seemed to me, not quite himself. I wondered if something else had unsettled him, as well as the presence of his ex.
I knelt beside him, following his pointing finger, to a piece of living root from the tree alongside. ‘It’s been cut,’ I said.
‘Yeah, that and others. But it’s clean. It doesn’t feel that it was chopped through by a spade. Indeed it’s probably too thick for a spade to have got through it in one whack. No, I’d say it’s been severed, by a knife.’ He picked something up, from the ground where the body had lain. ‘See?’ He stood and held it up, examining it closely in the light. ‘It’s the other half, or similar, ripped out and cut off, and not with a bread knife either, but by something very sharp.’
He looked up at Stallings. ‘How was it when it was found, Becky, do you know?’
‘Yes, sir. I was here when they opened it. The turf had been replaced, after a fashion, and there were branches laid over it, and stones, covered in dirt, as if they’d been in the ground and dug out with the soil, then placed on top.’
‘To hide it?’
She frowned, as she thought. ‘No. No, the opposite; I’d say they looked more like protection, as a cover, and as a marker, even.’
‘Interesting,’ the chief said. ‘As you can imagine, I’ve stood over a few informal funerals in my time. Most of you will have too. But I don’t recall ever seeing one that was quite like this. The others were all obviously rushed, and most of the victims weren’t even properly covered. None of them were unclothed, but none of them was treated with any dignity either. This grave was dug carefully and the body was put in it. . How can I say it? It was buried reverentially, wrapped in a sheet.’ He paused. ‘I’d say this was dug by hand. I may be proved wrong, but I don’t see one person doing it alone, not to a depth of about what, twenty inches or more.’
‘Then there was the phone call,’ the head of CID added, ‘through a voice scrambler. The communications centre usually pins down everything incoming, but not this. It was a mobile number, but untraceable.’
‘And they took his clothes,’ Skinner added. ‘It’s as if they were giving him to us, giving this man into our care, and yet they don’t seem to want us to know who he is.’ His eyes pierced me. ‘What do you think of that, Sauce?’
I hesitated; in that group I was so low on the totem pole I was almost holding the thing up. I felt like a student at a practical exam.
‘Come on,’ he insisted. ‘You’re the freshest mind here. What are your instincts?’
I took a deep breath then voiced the only thought I had. ‘Whoever buried him didn’t kill him. They treated him like a friend, not an enemy; like a comrade.’ Something from my schooldays offered itself from my memory. ‘There’s a poem I read once; I don’t remember the words, but it was about a soldier being buried on the battlefield.’
The chief constable nodded. ‘I know the one. Jesus, I don’t like this. Unknown man, a casualty of something. His colleagues can’t dispose of his body properly, so they give it to us for safe keeping, more or less. Which probably means they’re still here. But why?’
‘Surely, sir,’ Jack said, ‘they must assume that we’ll identify him, given our resources. The body’s unmarked; we can mock up a lifelike image for the media, and if that fails, there must be a likeness of him on record, somewhere. We can do a national database search, and put a name on him, eventually.’
‘On the contrary,’ Skinner retorted. ‘It’s just as well I’m not a betting man, or I’d lay you long odds against any of that working and I’d cover any stake you laid down. I didn’t see his hands, but I know his fingertips haven’t been sliced off.’
‘How do you know for sure?’
‘Because they left us his fucking head as well,’ he snapped, ‘lifelike image and all. The man is not on any database, Jack, not prints, not image, not DNA: not any database that we can access, at any rate.’
‘Are you suggesting he’s foreign?’ Becky Stallings asked.
‘I’m suggesting nothing. I’m telling you that as far as we’re concerned the guy we’ve just had carted off to the morgue is a non-person.’
‘So where do we start looking?’ She sounded impatient. It struck me that her tone might be pushing her luck.
The chief raised his eyebrows, peering down at her. ‘Am I wearing a white pointy hat and bejewelled robes?’ She stared at him. ‘Am I infallible? No, I’m not; I know this because I’ve met the real Pope. You do all the routine things, photographic databases, fingerprint comparisons, DNA too, when we get a profile. You do them because I might be wrong. But after you find that I’m not, you fall back on the only asset we’ve got: the body itself. You ever been to the mortuary, Sauce?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.
‘Good, in that case, you won’t need directions there. I want you to attend the post-mortem tomorrow morning.’
‘On my own, sir?’
He frowned at me. ‘You don’t expect me to come with you, do you?’
I gulped, not knowing quite what to read into that, but having enough smarts to keep my mouth shut.
‘Sit in with Dr Grace,’ he continued, ‘and learn from her. Before she begins, I want you to update her on the discussion we’ve had here and to explain to her that we’re looking for any way of identifying her patient, however unlikely it may be. Joe Hutchinson’s the best in the business, but he’s got nothing left to teach Sarah. If there are any pointers there, she’ll find them.’