‘Thanks,’ I said, embarrassed. I tugged my foot free, glad of the waders. I could see now why the police hadn’t wanted to winch anyone down from the helicopter. It would have been impossible to recover the body that way without getting stuck.
The marine unit officers began laying down stepping plates on the sandbank, making a path up to the body. The metal plates sank under our weight, water squeezing up around their edges. They were soon smeared and slippery, but it was better than trying to walk across the wet sand.
I stayed back while they worked, noting the haphazard arrangement of limbs. The tide had deposited the body face down, in the same position as it would have been floating. It wore a long, dark coat of waxed cotton or some similar stiff material, caked in mud and ballooned by the air still trapped inside. One arm was by its side while the other was draped across its head in apparent abandon.
Even from where I stood I could see that the hands and feet were missing.
‘I’d like to take a look before we move it,’ I said to Lundy when the officers finished laying the plates. He gave a nod.
‘It’ll have to be quick. Another few minutes and this is going to be underwater.’
He was right. Despite his earlier warning I was still surprised by how fast the tide was returning. Waves were already snapping at our heels; in the time it had taken to lay the stepping plates the water level had kept pace with us, rising more than halfway up the sandbank’s slope.
Careful not to slip on the muddy plates, I picked my way up to the body. It looked a forlorn thing lying there, like something discarded and thrown away. Another gull hopped towards it, leaving arrowhead-shaped prints in the wet sand. It launched itself into the air and flapped away, cawing in protest as I approached. More of them wheeled above us in the zinc-coloured sky, but like the lone seabird I’d seen earlier, none paid any attention to what lay on the sandbank. That said a lot about its condition. If voracious scavengers like gulls weren’t interested then it must be badly decomposed.
That was confirmed a moment later when the wind shifted, and the rank odour of rotting animal tissue polluted the salty tang. I stopped a few feet away and studied the body. Even lying crumpled as it was, in life this would have been a taller than average individual. That made it more likely to be male, although not certain: it could be an unusually tall woman. Most of the head was concealed by the long coat, which had bunched up over it like a hood, so only a few sparse strands of sand-clogged hair were visible above the collar.
I crouched down for a better look. Blunt stumps of pallid bone and gristle emerged from the trouser bottoms, while the forearms ended at the wrists. A gold watch was embedded in the swollen flesh of one of them. There were no signs of the missing hands or feet on any of the nearby sandbanks, but I’d have been surprised if there had been. Although this wouldn’t be the first body I’d encountered where the hands had been removed to prevent identification, I couldn’t see any obvious damage to the bones of the wrists and ankles here to suggest they’d been severed. With no clothing to protect them, the hands and feet would have simply fallen away as the connective tissue of the joints decomposed.
I took my camera from the bib pocket of my waders and began taking photographs. I didn’t hear Lundy approach until he spoke.
‘You can have copies of our video.’
I glanced round: he moved lightly for a big man, even on the metal plates. ‘Thanks, but I’ll take a few of my own anyway.’
I usually did: that way I’d only have myself to blame if I missed anything. Lundy stood looking down at the body. ‘Male, by the look of things. Must have been in the water a while to lose its hands and feet. Fits with how long Leo Villiers has been missing, wouldn’t you say?’
I’d been waiting for him to ask. Normally, estimating a time-since-death was something of a speciality of mine. I’d trained at the original body farm in Tennessee, where human cadavers were used for controlled experiments into decomposition. I’d learned how to establish when an individual had died, assessing bacterial activity and the degree of putrefaction, using esoteric formulae to analyse the breakdown of a body’s volatile fatty acids. I could say without conceit that I understood as well as most forensic entomologists the life cycle of blowflies, and the way different insects will colonize a rotting corpse. And while I still preferred to call it experience rather than instinct, over the years being able to accurately judge such things had become second nature.
But that was on land. On land a body would stay in one place, and nature cooperated by providing obligingly measurable criteria. Water was different. While there was no shortage of aquatic scavengers, there wasn’t a water-based equivalent of a blowfly, whose life cycle provided a convenient stopwatch to gauge time-since-death. And a floating body would move, changing depths and therefore temperature as it was subjected to tides and currents. The situation was even more complex in an estuary like this, where river met sea and marine and freshwater ecosystems converged.
I looked down at the body. Except for the gnarled joints of the wrists and ankles the coat covered most of it. Still, I could see enough. ‘In these conditions it wouldn’t take long for the hands and feet to detach, even at this time of year. So probably, yes…’
At the last second I stopped myself from adding but. Four to six weeks was certainly long enough for the hands and feet to drop away in shallow tidal waters like this. That wasn’t what bothered me, but I didn’t want to say anything until I’d seen more.
Lundy looked at me for a moment, as though expecting me to go on. When I didn’t he gave a nod. ‘Right, let’s get it in the boat.’
I moved aside as two marine officers clumped along the stepping plates, carrying the stretcher between them. The sergeant followed with a body bag and a folded plastic sheet.
‘How’re we going to do this?’ one of them asked, setting down the stretcher and looking at the face-down body with distaste.
‘Roll it over on to the sheet, then we can lift that into the body bag,’ the sergeant instructed. He turned to Lundy, remembering at the last minute to include me as well. ‘Unless you’ve any other ideas, sir?’
‘Just so long as we get it back in one piece,’ Lundy said equably. ‘That sound OK to you, Dr Hunter?’
It wasn’t as though there were a lot of options. I shrugged, knowing the question was a formality. ‘Yes, fine. Just be careful with it.’
The marine unit sergeant exchanged a look with one of his team, passing silent comment on my advice. The tide was already lapping at the body’s head as the plastic sheet was unfolded and spread out next to it. The officers all wore masks and thick rubber gauntlets as well as chest-high waders similar to mine. Now I’d finished with the camera, I put on a mask and gauntlets of my own, pulling them over the thin blue nitrile ones I’d been wearing.
‘OK, nice and careful. Lift and turn on three. One, two…’
The body shifted sluggishly as it was eased on to the plastic sheet. A waft of foul, damp air was released as it sucked free of the wet sand and flopped on to its back. One of the marine officers turned away, raising an arm to cover his nose.
‘Oh, nice.’
Wrapped in the long coat, the thing lying on the plastic sheet no longer looked human. There was no hint left of age, race or gender. Most of the skin and flesh was gone from the skull, and the eye sockets were empty holes. The vulnerable balls of jelly would have been one of the first targets of scavengers. There were even early signs of adipocere, a dirty white build-up as though a melted candle had been dripped on to the remaining features. It was a caricature of a face, hollow eye sockets clogged with sand, while the nose was a stub of gnawed gristle. That was only to be expected, given how long the body had been in water.