Zoë and Ben pulled on white forensic suits, tightened the hoods, and added gloves. They ducked into the tent. The air inside was warm and packed with the scents of crushed grass and earth, the ground crisscrossed with lightweight aluminium tread plates.
‘It’s her.’ The crime-scene manager stood a foot inside, making notes on a clipboard. He didn’t look up at them. ‘No doubt. Lorne Wood.’
Behind him at the end of a walkway the crime-scene photographer was circling a muddy tarpaulin, taking video.
‘The tarp’s the type they use to cover firewood on the barges. But no one on this stretch of canal is missing one. The guy threw it over her. To look at her you’d think she was in bed.’
He was right. Lorne was lying on her back, as if asleep, one arm resting on top of the tarp, which was pulled up to her chest like a duvet. Her head was lolling to one side, turned up and away from the tent entrance. Zoë couldn’t see her face, but she could see the T-shirt. Grey – with ‘I am Banksy’ across the chest. The one Lorne had been wearing when she’d left her house yesterday afternoon. ‘What time was she reported missing?’
‘Eight,’ said Ben. ‘She was supposed to be on her way home.’
‘We’ve found her keys,’ said the CSM, ‘but still no phone. There’s a dive team coming to search the canal later.’
In the corner of the tent a technician dropped a pair of black ballet pumps into a bag. He put a red flag in the ground, then sealed the bag and signed across the seal. ‘Was that where they were found?’ she asked him.
He nodded. ‘Right there. Both of them.’
‘Kicked off? Pulled off?’
‘Taken off. They were like this.’ The CSM held out his hands, straight and neatly together. ‘Just placed there.’
‘Is that mud on them?’
‘Yes. But not from here. From the towpath somewhere.’
‘And this grass – the way it’s been flattened?’
‘The struggle.’
‘It’s not much,’ she said.
‘No. Seems to have been over quickly.’
The photographer had finished videoing. He stepped back to allow Zoë and Ben to approach the body. The tread plates divided into two directions at the foot of the tarpaulin and circled the body. Zoë and Ben went carefully, taking the side that led to Lorne’s face. They stood for a long time in silence, looking down at her. They’d both been working in CID for more than a decade and in that time they’d dealt with just a handful of murders. Nothing like this.
Zoë looked up at the CSM. She could feel her eyes wanting to water. ‘What’s made her face go like that?’
‘We’re not sure. We think it’s a tennis ball between her teeth.’
‘Christ,’ said Ben. ‘Christ.’
The CSM was right: a piece of duct tape had been placed across Lorne’s mouth. It was holding in place a spherical object that had been jammed inside as far as it would go, luminous green tufts visible at the top and bottom. It had forced her jaw open so wide she seemed to be snarling or screaming. Her nose was squashed into a bloodied clot, her eyes were screwed up tight. There was more blood in her hair. Two distinct lines of it ran from under the duct tape down to her jaw – almost in the places the jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy would be hinged, except that they met her jaw almost under her ears. She must have been lying on her back when the bleeding had happened.
‘Where’s it coming from?’
‘Her mouth.’
‘She’s bitten her tongue?’
The CSM shrugged. ‘Or maybe the skin’s split.’
‘Split?’
He touched the corners of his mouth. ‘A tennis ball forced into her mouth? It would put strain on the skin here.’
‘Skin can’t spl—’ she began, but then she remembered that skin could split. She’d seen it on the backs and faces of suicide victims who’d jumped from high buildings. The impact often split their skin. The thought put a cold weight in her stomach.
‘Have you pulled back the tarp?’ Ben was leaning over, trying to peer under the tarpaulin. ‘Can we see?’
‘The pathologist’s asked no one else to touch it – asked that you come to the PM. He – I— Both of us want her down to the mortuary just as she is. Tarp and all.’
‘So, I’m guessing there’s a sexual element?’
The CSM sniffed. ‘Yes. You can definitely say there is. A strong sexual element.’
‘Well?’ Ben checked his watch and turned to Zoë. ‘What do you want to do?’
She dragged her eyes away from Lorne’s face and watched the officer on the other side of the tent label the bag with the shoes in it. ‘I think …’ she murmured ‘… I think I want to take a walk.’
Chapter 3
For a while Lorne Wood had been part of Millie and Sophie’s little group – but then, about a year ago, she had seemed to grow apart from the other girls. Maybe they hadn’t had that much in common to begin with – she had been at a different school, was a year older and always struck Sally as more sophisticated. She was the prettiest of them all and she seemed to know it. A blonde with milky skin and classic blue eyes. A true beauty.
That lunchtime the teenagers gathered around the computer in Isabelle’s study, trying to get all the gossip they could, trying to piece together what had happened from Facebook and Twitter. There wasn’t much news – the police hadn’t made any public statements since the one they’d issued this morning, confirming she was missing. It seemed Lorne had last been seen by her mother yesterday afternoon when she’d headed into town, on foot, for a shopping expedition. Her Facebook page hadn’t been updated in that time and no calls had been made on her mobile: apparently, when her parents had rung, the phone was switched off.
‘It could just be a tiff,’ Isabelle said, when the kids had gone back outside. ‘Fed up with her parents, run off with a boyfriend. I did it when I was that age – teach your parents a lesson, that sort of thing.’
‘Probably,’ agreed Sally. ‘Maybe.’
It was nearly one thirty. Time to get going. She began to pack up her things, thinking about Lorne. She’d met her only a handful of times, but she recalled her as a determined girl, with a slightly sad air. She remembered sitting in the garden with her one day, when she and Millie were still living with Julian in Sion Road, and Lorne saying, quite out of the blue, ‘Millie’s so lucky. You know – for it to be just her.’
‘Just her?’
‘No brothers or sisters.’
That had come as a surprise to Sally. ‘I thought you got on with your brother.’
‘Not really.’
‘Isn’t he kind to you?’
‘Oh, yes, he’s very kind. He’s kind. And he’s nice. And he’s clever.’ She pushed her hair away from her pretty face. ‘He’s perfect. Does everything Mum and Dad want. That’s what I mean. Millie’s lucky.’
It had stuck in Sally’s mind, that exchange, and it came back to her now as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. She’d never heard anyone say it was a disadvantage to have a brother or a sister before. Maybe people thought it, but she’d never heard anyone actually voice it.
‘I wish they wouldn’t do that.’ Sally looked up. Isabelle was standing in the window, frowning out at the garden. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told them.’
Sally got up and joined her. The garden was long, planted with fruit trees and surrounded by huge poplars that rustled and bent when so much as a breath of wind came through. ‘Where are they all?’
Isabelle pointed. ‘See? At the end. Sitting on the stile. I know what they’re thinking.’
‘Do you?’
‘Oh, yes. Pollock’s Farm. They’re wondering if they can get down there before we notice.’
Isabelle’s house was a mile to the north of Bath on the escarpment where the steep slopes of Lansdown levelled out. To the north-west were the lowlands and the golf courses; to the east, and butting up to Isabelle’s garden, was Pollock’s Farm. It had been derelict for three years since the owner, old man Pollock, had gone mad and had started, so people said, drinking sheep dip. The crops stood dead in the field, weed-choked; dead brown maize heads drooped on their stems. Half-dismantled machinery rusted along the tracks, pig troughs filled with stagnant rainwater, and the decomposing pyramids of silage had been broken into by rats and gnawed until they seemed like the crumbling ruins of a forgotten civilization. The place was notoriously dangerous – not just for the hazards in the fields, but for the way the land stopped abruptly in the middle, interrupted by an ancient quarry that had cut a steep drop into the hillside. The farmhouse was at the bottom of the quarry – you could stand in the top fields and look down through the trees on to its roof. It was where old man Pollock had died – in his armchair in front of the television. He’d sat there for months, while the seasons changed, the house decayed and the electricity was turned off, until he’d been discovered by a meths addict searching for privacy.