So what now, you twat? thought Caffery.
After a moment or two he started the car. He knew where to go. He wanted to see where Ben Jakes’s body had been on the night someone had shaved off some of his hair.
5
Every month the underwater search unit did a handful of decomposed-body recoveries. A decomposed corpse is a dangerous thing. A biohazard. The fluids it produces when the abdomen splits can transmit a number of blood-borne diseases, and if the body has been eaten by rats there are other dangers: the transmission of leptospirosis or Weil’s disease. Sometimes when the corpse is moved it will ‘sigh’, as if it has come back to life as air leaves the lungs, maybe expelling tuberculosis spores into the air. Most police forces in the UK insist that severely decomposed cadavers are handled by teams trained to use breathing apparatus. In short, the divers. Even if the body is on dry land.
Flea’s unit had a strict clean-up routine in their headquarters after a body recovery and usually they managed to keep the place smelling OK. But that morning, at ten o’clock, sitting in the office filling in the RIDDOR accident forms, she noticed that something was wrong. She sniffed the air. Not nice. She put the forms into the envelope, got up and went into the corridor. Sniffed again.
After the accident with the air lines yesterday, paramedics had checked her over but she hadn’t let them take her in. She was fine. Fine and sturdy. She’d dropped on to the pontoon and done twenty press-ups to prove it. Nothing and no one could talk her into hospital for the rest of the day, and that had turned out to be a good thing because within two hours the team had had another call-out – to collect the sixteen-stone body of a fifty-six-year-old man who’d died on the toilet in a block of flats in Redland. He’d been sitting there for eight days, pyjamas round his ankles. Toilets were the worst because there was never any room to move. It had taken them three hours, start to finish, to get him out. Back at base they’d decontaminated their chemical-incident suits. They’d laid them out on the floor and scrubbed with long-handled brushes, rinsed and sanitized and changed the five phase filters in the masks, then sprayed everything down with antibacterial solution for good measure. Everything had been done by the book.
But the smell of the man was still there.
Flea went into the locker rooms where all the team were getting changed. She wasn’t thrilled about the way they’d heard her in narcosis yesterday. So far no one had teased her about it but she wouldn’t put it past them. ‘What’s the smell, guys?’
‘Your banana bread?’
‘Funny. We did the decontamination. It shouldn’t smell like that in here.’
Wellard shrugged. The others shook their heads.
‘OK. Go on.’ She made a shooing motion with her hands. ‘All of you. Do it again. Use the Janitol.’
No one moved. They all gazed back at her steadily.
‘What?’
‘We’ve already done it. Again. While you were in the office. Done it twice.’
‘Twice? Then, where’s the sodding smell coming from?’
‘Your banana bread?’
She went into the decon room where the suits were hanging up to dry – ghostly, like a line of people standing there – and sniffed. She went back into the hallway and sniffed again. The smell was unmistakable. She went to the dustbin that they’d used to transport their soiled suits off site, put her face into it and took deep breaths of the air in there. Wellard appeared next to her, keeping pace, watching her forage in the bins for the liners they wrapped used bootees and gloves in.
‘It’s not that.’ He folded his arms. ‘I checked. The cleaner took them.’
She straightened. ‘I give up. Where’s it coming from?’
‘Haven’t got a clue.’
She sighed, took a green apron off the hook, pulled it on and tied it. ‘And I was planning to go jogging.’
‘You shouldn’t be jogging, not after yesterday.’
‘Well, I’m not, am I? I said I was planning to.’ She pulled on nitrile gloves. Pumped some air into the pressure spray. ‘Instead I’m going to clean these suits. Again. Do your job for you.’
‘Ooh. Arsy.’
‘Not arsy, Wellard, hormonal. I’m a woman. I’ve got ovaries. I get hormonal.’ She went to the store and pulled out some things. A cylinder. An air hose. ‘Come here.’
He looked at the air hose. ‘Good God, boss. I didn’t mean it.’
‘Give me your hand.’
‘At least make it quick.’
‘Attach this,’ she slapped the hose into his palm, ‘to the valve. That’s the way. Good boy. Now, while I redo the decontamination, you go round the buildings and sniff the drains. If anything smells, run some water into it. If it backs up, use this.’
‘Compressed air? In the drains? Sarge, we’ve got a caretaker somewhere in the building, I’m sure we have. He’s a lovely man. He’ll have some rods. Better for the interior decoration than air.’
‘Wellard?’
‘Yes?’
‘JFDI, mate. Just fucking do it.’
The Arctic Monkeys CD was on the player. Flea turned it on, jacked up the volume really loud and got stuck in. Scrubbing and spraying. Sluicing water into the drain. The umbilical lines that had ruptured yesterday were in a yellow nylon bag pushed up against the tiled wall, waiting for the HSE lab to pick them up. They’d take months. The lab would subject them to a battery of tests trying to work out what had gone wrong and how she’d managed to rub a hole in both of them just like that. She stopped for a moment next to them.
It befuddled her. She’d always thought they were pretty bombproof and it made her feel really uncomfortable and thick that she hadn’t checked her equipment. She’d been so, so close. It was starting to feel as if she was on a run of bad luck. There was this, yesterday. Then on Tuesday she’d got into a hell bastard of an arrest with the MCIU people on Operation Norway, a job that had all but destroyed the member of the team now on compassionate leave. Not to mention the day before that when she’d got forced into a position again of covering for Thom. He’d come home paralytic one night, driving her car and trailing a cop car with him. Being the sap she always was for her brother, she’d stepped in for him, sworn to the jobsworth cop she’d been driving the car, even did a breathalyser for him. Thom had dodged a serious bullet for the hundredth time, and she was left wondering two things: if he was ever going to stand on his own two feet and how long she could continue to pull him up the hill.
She pulled out the white wellingtons the team wore for body recovery and turned them inside out to check that no body fluids had run down into the absorbent interiors. As she got to the last pair, Wellard appeared in the doorway. She wiped her forehead and dropped the boots, defeated.
‘I give up. I’ve done everything. I’m going to have to go through all your bags next. Check for disgusting man underwear. Socks. That sort of thing. What’s the report, Dyno-Rod man?’
‘Drains are as clean as a whistle. Anyway, no point worrying about it now.’
‘Eh?’
‘Phone’s been ringing off the hook. You had the music up too loud.’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘Your friendly search adviser, Pearce. Got another body. More overtime.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. They think they’ve found Lucy Mahoney.’
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6
Quarry number eight was deserted. Caffery stood next to his car and stared at the puffy clouds and blue sky reflected in the still, cold face of the water. At the head of the quarry, on the flat perimeter where the water hadn’t yet risen, two old cabin cruisers lay on their sides, chained together with a rusty anchor line. At the other end vast grey cubes of dimension stone had been abandoned in puddles of brown water. Buddleia clung to the waste tips sloping up on all sides.