When they found Dr. Burns, he was kneeling by something on the ground, obscuring it from Banks’s view. When Banks got close enough to see around him, he wished he hadn’t. It was half a human body, the left half, by the looks of it, both armless and headless.
“Oh, Christ,” Banks said, tasting bile in his throat.
Dr. Burns looked up. “I don’t think He had much to do with it.”
“The crash did this?”
“The crash spilled the load and crushed the van driver,” said Dr. Burns. “But this was just a part of it, wrapped in that black plastic bag there like some of the animal parts. I very much doubt it happened in the crash. The butchery is far too neat for that. You can see the—”
“I’ll take your word for it, Doc. Since when did Vaughn’s get in the human body disposal business?”
“They’re not, as far as I know,” said Dr. Burns. “This, you might say, was superfluous to the load.”
“A stowaway?”
“If you like. You’ll have to ask the dispatcher, but I doubt if he knows anything about it.”
“Maybe he did it?”
“Maybe,” said Burns. “That’s for you to find out.”
“Any idea who it is?”
“None at all.”
“Found any other bits?”
“Not yet.” Dr. Burns nodded toward a line of uniformed police officers. “They’re still looking.”
At that moment, one of the officers raised his arm and shouted, “Over here, Doctor.”
Banks followed Dr. Burns, along with Annie and Stefan, and they found the other half of the human being, again armless. Still no head.
“What the hell’s going on,” Banks whispered, almost to himself.
“There is one thing I can tell you, Alan,” said Dr. Burns, gently pulling away the fabric of the victim’s shirt with tweezers. “Actually, you can see for yourself.”
Banks looked at the exposed skin, which was a rich light coffee color, even in death, and he saw the bottom half of what was probably a spider’s web tattoo on what was left of the neck.
“Bloody hell,” he said. “Morgan Spencer.”
7
IT WAS EARLY EVENING BEFORE DETECTIVE CHIEF Superintendent Gervaise managed to gather the troops together for another meeting in the boardroom. This time the whiteboard and glass board were practically covered in names, circles, arrows and photographs. They showed just how much the case had escalated within a few short hours. A lot of the information concerned the Belderfell Pass crash, but there were more connections now, more circles linked by arrows.
Banks and Annie had just got back from the crash scene. Annie still looked ill, Banks thought, though he could hardly blame her. She had been as keen as he was to get out of the flesh-strewn valley bottom, so she had decided to take the helicopter back with him rather than wait for someone to give her a lift along the bumpy, winding tracks back to civilization. Dr. Burns had accompanied them this time. The ride was less turbulent, and though Annie had held on to a fresh paper bag, she hadn’t needed to use it.
When Banks and Annie had left the scene, Morgan Spencer’s head was still missing, though his right arm had been discovered under some of the van wreckage. The CSIs and crash scene investigators were still searching. As soon as the rest of Morgan had been found and photographed in situ, the pieces would be delivered to Dr. Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary, where they would be assembled for the postmortem. Banks had agreed to attend the procedure, and he was not looking forward to it. The media had also arrived in force, and there were rumors on the evening news about human body parts being found among the animals.
Leslie Palmer, the driver of the oncoming car, had been able to add nothing to his statement. He was the proprietor of a secondhand bookshop in Swainshead, on his way back home after a visit to colleagues at the Grove Bookshop in Ilkley. All he could tell the police was that Ross had been too close to the middle of the road when the sheep ran out and Palmer turned the bend. Pure bad luck. Geoff Hamilton’s team and the rest would continue to investigate the circumstances of the incident, and Peter Darby and his crash scene photographer expert from Salford would take photographs and videos, but Banks was more interested in the remains found scattered around the scene than in Caleb Ross’s unfortunate demise. As far as Banks was concerned, the pass wasn’t the real crime scene; that was still the hangar in the Drewick airfield, where he was certain that Morgan Spencer had been shot. All they needed now was more forensic evidence to back up these theories.
“Right,” said Gervaise, as soon as everyone had settled down. “Can we get down to business? It’s been a long day, and it isn’t over yet. DCI Banks?”
Banks walked to the front as Gervaise sat down. A long day, indeed. Banks remembered standing beside Morgan Spencer’s smoldering caravan in the gray dawn light. It seemed eons ago.
“It’s true that a lot’s happened,” he began, “and we’ve learned quite a bit. But we’re still missing some important pieces of the jigsaw. While Jazz has analyzed the DNA sample from the hangar and discovered that it’s human, and it belongs to one person only, we haven’t yet found any match on the database. That doesn’t mean a lot, as you know, but it does mean that we need to get a move on and broaden our search. Specifically,” he said, “we need to get a sample of Morgan Spencer’s blood analyzed as soon as possible. Given that we just found him—or what we think is him—in pieces scattered over the bottom of Belderfell Pass, that shouldn’t prove too difficult.”
Jazz nodded. “I’m on it.” She looked at Gervaise. “If someone could just get Harrogate CID off my back for a while, please? They’re driving me crazy over a sample I’m late with. It’s a rape case, so I can hardly blame them.”
“I’ll talk to Harrogate, Ms. Singh,” said Gervaise. “Just do your best.”
“Thanks. Well . . . one thing I can say for certain is that there was no DNA belonging to Michael Lane found in the hangar. The hairbrush DI Cabbot brought in gave us hairs with the follicle attached, which was just what we needed to check that out. No match.”
“So the body in the hangar wasn’t Lane’s,” Banks said. “And thanks to Gerry, we also know from the mobile records that it was Morgan Spencer who texted Michael Lane at 9:29 a.m. on Sunday morning. We don’t know what he wrote, of course, as we don’t have access to either his or Lane’s mobile phones, but we were able to check with the service provider against the numbers of the itemized calls. According to his partner, Alex Preston, when Michael Lane received this text, he said he had to go out to do a job, and that he might visit his father later. He left his flat at the East Side Estate shortly after 9:30, and it would have taken him about ten or fifteen minutes to get to the hangar, if that was his destination. That puts him there at about 9:45. We can also assume that the job involved Spencer, as he was the one who texted, and he and Lane were known to work together on removals and farm labor. As far as we can gather, Michael Lane never got to his father’s, and he hasn’t been seen or heard of since Sunday morning. Alex Preston assured DI Cabbot that’s out of character.”
“But can we assume that this job Lane and Spencer had to do involved the airfield and the hangar?” asked Gervaise.
“We still lack any hard evidence on that. We don’t know anything about Morgan Spencer’s movements that morning, except that he sent Lane a text at 9:29. If he stole the tractor, he may well have spent the night with it at his lockup. A number of people from the site do remember seeing him as usual during the day on Saturday. We’ve questioned most of the people at the caravan park now, and nobody admits to really knowing Spencer, or to seeing anything suspicious during the night of the fire. At the moment I’m just assuming it was his blood at the hangar because we know it wasn’t Lane’s, and we’d have to be very unlucky to have two major incidents at once. We’ll know whether Morgan was killed in the hangar when Jazz compares the blood sample with that from the crash site.”