Each time his consciousness returned, it would stay a little longer. Things were becoming more clear. He tried to hold onto the clarity, to remember how he had ended up here. The last thing he could recall was stumbling his way home after a night out with his friends. He’d had a bust-up with his girlfriend, Wendy. Smiling, cursing, maddening Wendy. He would give anything to see her again. Hold her in his arms. Tell her he was sorry. Kiss her wild, mousy hair and stare into her fiery amber eyes. But, he was inside a bag. A cloth sack. Upside down.
Two tiny holes allowed a fuzzy image of foliage, a river bank and water. He was close to the water. Too close. The earthy, dead-fish stench filled his prison.
His breathing hot and heavy in his ears, he shook his head in an attempt to clear it and called out.
“Hello? Is anybody there?”
The only answer was the whisper of water over stone. His friends would be back any moment. He was sure of that. They had obviously thought this funny. It wasn’t funny anymore.
Then came the gut-clenching realisation he was sinking. Coming ever closer to the water. The smell and the coldness overwhelming, he drew in a sharp, rasping breath.
“No! No! Please… Lads, I give in. You got me. Boys…”
The water continued rising up his head, until he assumed a foetal position within the bag. Any respite was short-lived. It hit his neck and shoulders, just before his next words became a warbled noise. It carried on up, relentless.
The bag threshed about for several minutes, before finally falling still. The observer waited another few minutes, before pulling the bag back up a little to cut the rope which had tied his victim in. The lifeless form plunged back into the water, slowly sinking, head first.
When he was sure his victim had disappeared, he rolled up the cloth sack and left the scene.
2
Curiosity killed the cat
Yvonne watched the rubber-suited divers reel the body in, painstakingly loading it onto the berry-red rescue dinghy. Their gentle reverence impressed her. Checked shirt and jeans became a dark-haired, young, adult male.
She rubbed her chin, staring hard. If they’d been on land, he’d be photographed in situ, the area cordoned off while SOCO worked it. Water had no respect for forensic process. Rope and rubber dinghies were your lot, until hauled in to dry land. They had a good idea who it was. Lloyd Jones had gone missing some days before. They wouldn’t be sure, however, until formal identification had taken place.
Pathologist Roger Hanson barked instruction to his assistants, as he made his way to where the body lay stretchered. She held her breath. This wasn’t her case. At least, not yet. Curiosity had brought her down here. This was the second body to be found on this stretch of the river in as many months. Not unheard of, but definitely not the usual.
“I knew I’d find you here.” Dewi grinned, teasing accusation narrowing his eyes as he made his way along the bank.
“Are you calling me nosey?” Yvonne pulled a face.
“Er…Yeah.” Dewi laughed then grunted, as he remembered the sober occasion. “Drunk, I’d imagine.” He pressed his lips into a thin line. “Young.”
“Yes.” Yvonne headed in the direction of Hanson and his team. Dewi followed.
A gloved and plastic-suited Hanson waited patiently for the dinghy to moor. “Probably fell in after a few,” he said, by way of greeting. “Can’t see any obvious trauma on the body.”
“We had another body a few weeks back.” The DI’s hands were on her hips as she gazed down. “Hadn’t expected one again, so soon.”
“It’s the heat. Town centre’s been a bit busier than usual,” he answered, referring to the summer revellers.
“How soon will you know cause of death?”
Hanson looked down at the water, then back at Yvonne. “Should be able to say for sure within about forty-eight hours or so, provided toxicology pull their finger out.”
Yvonne knelt next to the dead man. He lay, a pale ghost on the stretcher, river detritus in his matted hair. The skin on his hands was severely wrinkled. His stomach had begun to swell.
Yvonne’s thoughts turned to his friends and family. The news would hit them like a punch to the chest. No. A baseball bat to the head. The raining of blows from some dark power, unseen. The removal from beneath of everything solid. Having personally felt that mind-numbing, knee-buckling sense of loss, more than once, she didn’t envy the officers who’d be knocking on their door.
“Ay-up, here comes Carwyn.” Dewi nodded in the direction of one of the divers, who was headed their way. “Carwyn Davies. It’s been a while.”
The diver freed his head from his rubber suit and wiped his brow. “Dewi.” He nodded back. Then, looking from Dewi to Yvonne and back, said, “It’s probably not a murder, you know.”
Dewi grinned, “It’s okay, we’re just taking a look.”
Yvonne pulled at her bottom lip. “What makes you so sure it’s not murder? There’s been no autopsy yet.”
Carwyn shrugged. “He’d been drinking. We found his mobile phone upstream and marks where he’d most probably slipped down the bank. His family said he’d phoned them, telling them he was lost. Most likely disorientated. His phone went dead during the call. Looks like he was concentrating on talking to them, when he fell into the water. If he was drunk, it would’ve made it hard to get out. The river’s very swollen and fast-flowing.”
“The place where you found the phone, is it marked out?” Yvonne put her hands in her pockets, frown lines creasing her forehead.
“Er, yeah. We’ve got it cordoned off. Forensics took a look where he fell. It’s been photographed already.”
“Great.”
Carwyn grimaced. “Look, I’d better be going. Nice to see you, Dewi. And good to meet you…er…”
“Yvonne.”
“Yvonne,” he nodded.
“She’s my DI.” Dewi grinned.
“Ma’am.” Carwyn coloured.
“It’s okay. Thanks for the info, Carwyn.”
“Better get back to the station, then?” Dewi eyed the lines on Yvonne’s forehead. “Still thinking?”
She shrugged.”No. No, let’s go.” She took her hands out of her jacket pockets and headed back with him the way they had come. They had more than enough to be getting on with.
Later that evening, she was back, standing at the blue-and-white, police cordon by the river. It was hard to associate the peace of this place with death, filled as it was with the sounds of lapping water and summer birdsong. After he had fallen in, the air would have been full of desperation, as he clawed around for anything to hold on to. Except, nothing would prevent the inevitable. She closed her eyes, and it was several seconds before she opened them again.
She could see the flattened trails where the young man’s feet had supposedly lost their grip. The place he had dropped his phone. Had his parents heard a splash before the phone went dead? She would check when she got back to the station.
Peering down, large boulders peppered the shoreline, where the river abutted the bank. He would have had to have hit those on the way down. She took a couple of pictures with her mobile. She expected his body would be bruised, perhaps with a broken bone or two from the fall onto those rocks. She could look out for that when the autopsy results came through.
Glancing around, she wondered how he got here. If this really was where he went in, he was half a mile away from the town centre. She had read the ‘missing’ articles in the County Times, which described how he had left the Elephant and Castle public house on Broad Street, near the main bridge, and had told friends he was headed to his parents home on Canal Road, barely a thousand metres away. He would have accessed the riverside path via some steep steps down and then headed right, along the river path, in the direction of Canal Road. So why, then, was his body found upstream, as though he had reached the path and turned left, heading in the direction alongside and behind the town car park? It didn’t make sense unless he was so inebriated that he had lost a
ll sense of direction. Had he been distracted by something, or someone, and headed that way to investigate?
She thought about picking her way further down the bank, but decided against it. Instead, she headed back up, still deep in thought.
Something caught her eye. To her left, the thick trunk of an ash tree had been chalked with two vertical lines, equal in length. She cast her eyes around but could see no markings on any other tree in the area. She took a couple more pictures with her mobile.
3
Anatomy of a drowning
Yvonne paused to listen outside LLewellyn’s office door before giving it a couple of clipped raps. She could barely hear his answer. He must have his head buried in something.
He looked up from his papers as she entered, his head cocking to one side. “Yvonne? Everything okay?”
The DI cleared her throat. “Sir, I wanted to speak to you about the drowning in the river. The body was pulled out yesterday.”
“Yes. Sad business.”
“I’d like to look into it a little.”
“Oh? I thought it was an accidental death?”
“Well, there’s a possibility it was a suicide and there’s some confusion around where, exactly, the victim went in. It’s almost certain he didn’t go in where his phone was found, though there were imprints indicting he had slipped, there.”
“Okay-“
The DI tapped her pen several times on her chin. “He was in conversation with his family. For the sake of completion, I’d like to talk to them and find out what was said.”
The DCI grunted. “Sounds perfectly sensible. Don’t spend too much time on it, though, Yvonne, you have to prioritise the hit-and-run.”
Yvonne’s stomach turned over. For just a little while today, she had allowed the hit-and-run to hide on the back-burner of her mind. It returned with full force, full clarity and gut-wrenching sadness. A twelve-year-old boy was mown down outside his school on Plantation Lane. The driver had carried on going. The two children who had witnessed the incident had described a white or silver car, possibly an urban four-by-four, but knew neither the model nor the registration. All they could say was the car had taken a right turn at the bottom of the lane and was being driven at speed. The DI had eaten, drunk and slept the case for two weeks but was really no further forward.
“It’s okay, I know the case isn’t easy.” Llewellyn sensed her sadness and frustration. “Everyone wants closure and the press won’t leave us alone until we have it. Keep digging.”
4
Autopsy
Hanson’s autopsy of Lloyd Jones was underway as Yvonne suited up and entered the brightly lit mortuary.
He gave her a brief glance, as she finished putting on her over-shoes. “Eyes were wide and glistening, when he came out of the river.”
“Fear?”
“Confirms he died in the water. He wasn’t killed beforehand.”
“I see.” Yvonne rubbed her chin. “How drunk was he?”
“Well, that’s where I am somewhat perplexed.”
“Go on.”
“Aside from minor bruising, and very minor abrasions, there’s no injury.”
“So, very drunk?”
“No. He was two and half times the legal limit for driving. Drunk, but not so drunk he couldn’t put up a fight to survive. I’d have expected maybe a few torn muscles from the struggle to stay afloat and, given where he was found, a fistful of debris.”
“Grabbed whilst he was trying to stay afloat.“
Hanson nodded. “A drowning man really does clutch at straws.”
“Did he commit suicide?”
“That’s very possible. Everything else we see would fit that hypothesis. He was found in a semi-foetal position. Head-down and still submerged. It’s possible he was beginning to rise but decomposition was only just getting started. His blood had settled where we would expect and there was nothing at all to suggest foul play.”
“Did you see where he was supposed to have gone in?” Yvonne folded her arms, leaning back against an empty trolley.
“No, not yet.”
“It’s full of rocks. Boulders, actually. If he’d slipped down that bank, I’d have expected him to be severely bruised. May I?” The DI took her mobile phone to the pathologist, to show him her photographs of the slip marks on the bank and the rocks below.
Hanson pursed his lips. “He didn’t fall in there. Definitely not. There’s nothing I see that would support it.”
“It’s where his phone was found. He’d been in conversation with his parents.”
Hanson shook his head. “Strange.”
Yvonne nodded. “Something’s off.”
“Unless he fell there, picked himself up, but couldn’t find his phone. Then, maybe he wandered about and fell in somewhere else?”
“Hmm.” The DI pocketed her mobile phone. “There was drowning a few weeks ago, wasn’t there?”
“Now, that one I believe was accidental. The guy was four or five times over the limit and a disaster waiting to happen. He was using the river walk as a shortcut but was the wrong side of it. Looked like he tried to swim across and was overcome before he made it. The river’s running so fast, right now.”
“Would you mind if I came back to you for more details on that drowning, if I need to?”
“Be my guest.”
“Did you run a full toxicology for this victim?” Yvonne gestured towards the dead man.
“We did. Nothing detected aside from the alcohol.”
“Poor bugger.’ Yvonne sighed, her glistening eyes lingering on the young man’s lifeless face.
“Indeed.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it.” She gave the pathologist a weak smile, before turning for the door. “Let me know if you find anything else unusual.”
The young man fitted the bill: lean, athletic, bright. He was animatedly relating a story to his two friends, all of them laughing. His beer spilled a little in the telling. The room, in the Lion public house, was filling up, but not so full that he didn’t have a clear view of his would-be-prey. Not yet, anyway.
He placed a trembling hand into his jacket pocket to feel the tiny, glass vial, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, as he confirmed it was still there. He moved forward to stand next to the laughing group, right in front of the bar.
“Get you anything?” The teenage barman enquired, finishing drying off a glass, before putting it on a shelf below the bar.
“Just a swift half. I’m only passing through.” He managed a half smile, though his mental focus was taken up by the young man in the white cotton shirt, whose muscular frame stretched the material, but not too much.
“There you go, sir. That’ll be one pound and forty.”
He felt in his pocket for the change, handing over one-pound-fifty, holding his hand up when the barman tried to hand him the ten pence change.
He glanced around the room, near the ceiling. One CCTV camera, probably with a fish-eye lens, taking in the whole room at once. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be possible tonight. He couldn’t afford to be caught on camera.
“Be right back.” His quarry ran a hand through his dark hair, before heading to the gents. He’d left the last third of his drink on a ledge, against the wall. Next to it were a bunch of stacked stools. The young man’s friends availed themselves of three of them and moved away from the bar area.
“Could I have a whisky?”
The barman nodded and muttered, “Sure. Coming right up,” before turning his back.
The hunter walked over to the stack of stools and, with his back to the room, whipped out the vial, emptying its contents into the young man’s drink. He then grabbed a stool and headed to a free space, near the door. As far as the camera could see, he was merely getting a stool. Not that they would detect any spiking. The GHB would be out of his quarry’s system well before he was found.
The young man was back, taking his beer from the ledge, quickly sighting his friends and grabbing the waiti
ng seat.
He wanted to watch but couldn’t risk it.
“Come on, drink up,” the larger of the two friends instructed. One more and we’ll move on. I fancy another at The Castle.”
“All right, keep your hair on.” The quarry downed the rest of his drink and grabbed his jacket. As they left the Lion, the young man stumbled on the step.
Not yet, it was too soon. The hunter gritted his teeth then relaxed, as he realised the boy was walking fine, now. Just a little tipsy.
It was half-an-hour later, the young man stumbled down the Castle Vaults steps, into the alleyway. The nearest bouncer was in the middle of dealing with a fight that had just kicked off and didn’t see him go.
The hunter stayed back, knowing by now his quarry would be feeling worse for wear and wanting to get home. He followed at a distance, avoiding, where he could, the CCTV cameras. The young man’s home was a few streets away. He overtook him and headed in that direction, resisting the urge to make contact or say something. He had to trust that home was where the guy was headed. There was no CCTV where the van was parked. The boy would be coming that way and would offer little resistance. Not now the drug would be in full swing. A swift u-turn and they’d be heading up the Milford Road and out of town. He’d gotten false plates on the van, just in case.
5
Young lives lost
Finish up that coffee and come with me.”
“Ma’am?” Dewi gulped down the dregs and grabbed his jacket, barely having time to get it on before they were heading out of the station. “Where are we going?”
“We have two families to visit.”
Dewi shrugged and got into the passenger seat. “Right,” was all he said, though he raised an eyebrow at his DI driving faster than usual. Especially given she was saying so little.
DI Giles BoxSet Page 72
