The little park was marked off by lines of police tape for the second day of searching. Perhaps it should have been done before, Banks worried, but the evidence linking Samir to the Stokes house, and Frankie’s statement that the boy had run towards the park, were what had clinched the matter.
Uniformed officers stood guard at regular intervals to keep away curious onlookers and, more to the point, aggressive journalists. The case was still attracting a lot of publicity, especially since the revelation of Samir’s identity and the possible county lines connection. The media came armed with cameras and mobile phones, which doubled as cameras and voice recorders. One man stood with a bulky television camera hefted on his shoulder. Adrian Moss, the media liaison officer, moved among them, chatting with those he knew here and there, while at the same time making sure no one overstepped the mark. Even Banks had to agree that Moss had earned his salary this month.
Banks signed the clipboard and slipped under the tape, joining Annie and Gerry by the side of the beck, next to the children’s playground. Over the narrow strip of fast-moving water, the woods and bushes were full of CSIs and police officers in disposable white boiler suits, carefully grid-searching every inch of the ground.
‘What have they got?’ Banks asked Annie.
‘Don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘They’re being very thorough.’
A few minutes later, one of the searchers marched out of the undergrowth with a scruffy young man in jeans and a white shirt, bent almost double as the officer twisted his arm up his back. ‘Found something nasty in the woods, sir,’ he said, letting go.
The young man swore and rubbed his arm. ‘Fucking police brutality,’ he said and turned to Banks. ‘You saw that.’
‘Saw what?’ said Banks.
‘You’re all the fucking same.’
Banks held out his hand. ‘Phone, Donnie,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Mobile. Come on. Hand it over. You don’t want to end up down the nick, do you?’
‘Interfering with the freedom of the press now, are you?’
Banks took a step towards him, and Donnie Vickers, intrepid reporter for the Eastvale Gazette, handed over his mobile phone. It was the kind that didn’t require a password to access the camera and photograph functions, which was all Banks was really interested in. He deleted a couple of blurry snaps of men in white searching through the bushes and handed it back. ‘Let’s have a level playing field, Donnie, there’s a good lad,’ he said, pointing to the others behind the tape. ‘Now off you go and join your mates.’
Donnie ambled off, still rubbing his arm, grumbling and scowling over his shoulder. Adrian Moss took him by the arm when he got to the police tape, and Banks turned back to Annie and Gerry.
‘I can’t imagine they’ve found anything much,’ Annie said. ‘Remember that bloody deluge the morning after the killing, when we found the body?’
‘I remember,’ said Banks. ‘But the weather’s been good since then. Dry, too. Who knows, if Samir was killed around here, with all the shelter the trees and bushes provide, we may still find traces. We can’t assume that he knew where he was going when he ran off this way. Look at it from his point of view: he’s stuck in a gloomy old house on an empty estate with a dead body. He’s probably seen more than enough of them in his time, but that doesn’t necessarily make the situation any easier. Perhaps it sets off memories he’s managed to suppress for a while? Whatever the reason, when the back door opens and big Frankie comes lumbering through, it’s a breaking point for Samir, and he takes off. Remember, he’s never seen Frankie before, doesn’t know who he is. And, maybe, just maybe, he ends up here.’
‘Then what?’ Annie asked.
‘That’s what we don’t know yet. But I hope whatever it is they’ve found might make it a bit clearer.’
‘Sir? I think they’re ready for us now,’ Gerry said.
Banks turned immediately towards the woods and saw one of the white-suited searchers gesturing for them to enter the woods. ‘Be careful,’ she said, ‘there’s some thorny undergrowth around here.’
And indeed there was. Banks found himself scratched on several occasions as he made his way into the shrubbery, and judging from the curses behind him, so did Annie and Gerry. Finally, they came across Stefan Nowak standing in a clearing. It was cool in the shelter of the trees.
Without preamble, Nowak pointed at the ground. ‘You can see the ground has been flattened here and there.’
Banks saw that Nowak was right. Without the CSM’s trained eye, though, the disturbance to the ground would have been easy to overlook.
‘Unfortunately, there’s no telling when this occurred,’ Nowak went on, ‘but you can also see that this area has been reasonably well sheltered.’
They looked up. Banks saw that above them stretched a perfect canopy formed by the overhanging branches and light green leaves of the trees.
‘It doesn’t mean nothing got through, of course,’ Nowak went on, ‘but it would certainly have kept out a good portion of that shower.’
‘Annie said you’d found something,’ Banks said.
‘Yes.’ Nowak walked over to the shrubbery at the base of an ash tree and used a stick to lift up the hanging fronds and branches. ‘Look here.’
Banks’s knees cracked as he crouched. At first it was too dark to make out anything much at all, but then he saw that some of the lower leaves were dotted, or smeared, with a dark substance.
‘I think it’s blood,’ Nowak said. ‘Anyway, we’re taking samples, and Jazz should be able to determine pretty quickly if it’s human and, with a bit of luck, whose. Don’t get your hopes up yet; it could be animal blood. A bird killed by a cat or something.’
Banks stood up slowly. He found that if he got to his feet too suddenly these days he became dizzy. His doctor said it was due to a drop in blood pressure, most likely because of the medication he was taking, but if he had any other symptoms, such as fainting, chest pain, headaches or heart palpitations, he should come back immediately. He didn’t have any. Not yet.
‘Good work, Stefan,’ Banks said. ‘Anything else?’
‘Quite a lot, actually, but we don’t know how much use most of it is.’
‘Anything you think I may be interested in?’
Nowak pointed to a nearby tree. The long grass at its base was flattened in one spot. ‘Near that tree there, we found these.’ He held out a plastic bag containing what looked at first like two cigarette ends, but on further perusal turned out to be roaches.
‘So someone’s been using the park as a spot to smoke up,’ Banks said. ‘That’s hardly surprising with the decent weather we’ve been having lately.’
‘Again, we don’t know if this is from before or after the murder, but it was under the foliage there, and there’s a good chance there might still be DNA.’ He then brought out another package. ‘With this we’ve got an even better chance, though. Chewing gum.’
Banks looked at the grey lump. He knew that chewing gum was a great place to find saliva samples, even after some time out in the open. Of course, there was no saying whether it had come from the same person, or people, who had smoked the joints, let alone whether it had anything to do with Samir’s death. But it was progress. And Adrian Moss would view it as something new to keep from the media, so they would at least get the feeling that things were happening in the case, albeit behind their backs. They would already be curious about all the activity in the little park that morning.