Bones In the River

by Zoe Sharp

  “Ah, good morning, Christopher. How nice of you to join us,” Dr Onatade called cheerfully across the open ground. As if trained for the stage, she could project her voice without apparent effort. Any thoughts of keeping his late arrival quiet, of sneaking in and pretending he’d been here all along, were quickly discarded. “And you will need your Wellington boots!”

  “Morning, doctor,” he shouted back. “I’m OK, I think—it’s not too bad on this side.”

  “Yes, but unless you intend to have very wet feet all day, there is the small matter of getting over to this side of the river.”

  It was only then that Blenkinship realised the tents had indeed been set up on the far bank. Without answering, he turned and trudged back to his car, digging out the Wellingtons that lived permanently in a bag in the back. The extra delay before he had to look at the body was half-torture and half-relief.

  Animals had worn a track through the scrubby grass to the easiest crossing point, a little further upstream. The banks flattened out and he could see the stones and rocks on the bottom clearly. The river level might have dropped quite a bit overnight but it was still running strong. He almost went back to the car for the long trekking pole he kept in the boot, just to give him some extra stability in the water, but his guts were tied in enough knots as it was.

  Instead, he crossed with care, moving one foot forward at a time and then bringing the other to join it, almost a hutching movement. As he did so, he made sure he kept his crime-scene kit carried high in his arms so it was clear of the water.

  As he approached the cordoned area, it seemed to Blenkinship’s critical eye that the main tent had been sited in a somewhat precarious position. All right, so you couldn’t choose where a body was found—well, not usually—but this was perched right on the very lip of the bank.

  Anywhere near to the edge would have been a bit risky, what with the flash flooding of the last few days. You could tell just from the river debris spread all over the grass that this whole area had been submerged. No telling when it might start to rise again.

  Plus, what if more of the ground gave way? It was clear from the clods of mud and rocks at the foot of the bank, plus the fresh revealed earth, that it had recently done so.

  He was still frowning when he reached the tape cordon. One of the uniforms met him there—a young Community Support Officer Blenkinship didn’t recognise. The crime-scene log was being kept on a clipboard leaning against one of the tape poles. The youngster signed Blenkinship in and was already moving back to his search as the CSI ducked under the tape. Not quite procedure, but Blenkinship knew they didn’t have the spare manpower to station someone there doing nothing else.

  As he moved toward the tent, looking dubiously at its positioning, Dr Onatade thrust aside the flap and emerged.

  She was the daughter of a Nigerian diplomat and a Jamaican astrophysicist. That she was accepted into Roedean School was a testament to her parents’ wealth and influence. That she went from Roedean straight to a Double First at Oxford was entirely achieved on her own merits.

  The first time he’d met her, Blenkinship had been so knocked flat by the force of her personality, so wrong-footed by her formidable intelligence, that he almost overlooked completely the fact she was a woman. Never mind that she was black…

  Even he recognised that anyone who attempted to pigeonhole the good doctor by those factors alone would meet with very short shrift—from a woman who knew exactly how and where to hide the bodies.

  “Hasn’t anybody done a risk assessment for this?” he asked, jerking his head toward the first tent.

  “Well, no-one has fallen into the river so far,” she said briskly. “Except for part of our poor victim, of course.”

  “So, what can you tell me?”

  She tilted her head to one side and regarded him for a moment. “Why are you taking the lead on this, Christopher? The nearest CSIs are in Kendal, surely—or possibly Penrith? You have sole charge of Carlisle. Shouldn’t you be practising the forgotten art of delegation?”

  “I have sole charge of all of it, if you want to look at it that way,” he countered. “So, if something else comes up, I’ll get the chance to put my delegating skills to good use, won’t I?”

  “Hm.” She turned back toward the tent. “In that case, follow me and I’ll bring you up to speed.”

  Blenkinship waited until the last moment to pull on a pair of nitrile gloves. Even in winter, they made the wearer’s hands sweat like nobody’s business. In summer you ended up with finger ends like prunes in minutes.

  The last person he’d expected—or hoped—to see as he entered the tent was DC Nick Weston. The fair-haired copper was wearing a crime-scene suit but no gloves, although he was standing right up against the side of tent, as far away from the crumbling bank as he could manage. A notebook and pen were in his hands.

  “Weston, what are you doing here?” The question was out before Blenkinship could prevent it and he added, almost defensively, “I didn’t see your car.”

  Weston raised an eyebrow. “My car’s at the garage while they estimate the cost of repairs,” he said, somewhat pointedly. “And they’re hardly going to assign anybody more senior, are they? Not yet—not for this.”

  Blenkinship frowned. His eyes slid to the edge of the bank. Dr Onatade was climbing down a short ladder into a second tent that had been butted up against the first, albeit at a lower level. Between the two, a chunk of bank had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in the reddish-brown earth. He edged closer.

  “You two are acquainted, I gather?” Dr Onatade said.

  “Oh, yes,” Weston said. “We’ve…bumped into each other, you might say.”

  Blenkinship ignored them both. He was near enough now to look down into the hole where it gaped toward the riverbed. At the bottom, partially uncovered, were nothing but bones, including a spinal column and skull. The long bones of the legs had spilled out onto the exposed stones that bordered the river, the metatarsals and phalanges scattered. To Blenkinship’s suddenly uncomprehending eye, they obviously belonged to an adult, and had been there for some time.

  Not a child, then. Not a young boy with a bloodied skull and slack body.

  “But…what the devil’s this?” he blurted.

  “Human remains,” Dr Onatade said, a little tartly. “And based upon my preliminary examination of the sciatic notch of the pelvis and the posterior ramus of the mandible, I can tell you with absolute confidence that we’re looking at an adult male of the species.” She paused. “Why, what were you expecting, Christopher?”

  “I—” He broke off, scowled. “I was expecting something a bit more…”

  “Exciting?” Weston put in, his tone dry.

  “No—urgent,” Blenkinship snapped. “I mean, how long has he been in the ground?”

  “An unembalmed adult, buried without a coffin, in ordinary soil.” She pursed her lips. “Say…eight to twelve years. But in order to narrow that down any further, you’ll have to wait until I get him back to the lab,” Dr Onatade said. She sounded almost gleeful at the prospect. Blenkinship had to remind himself that, when she wasn’t acting as FME for Cumbria, her speciality was forensic anthropology. For her, the condition of this victim would be of particular interest.

  He sighed. “OK, then, what about a cause of death?”

  “I saw no visible injuries during my initial observation of the remains although, of course, I did not want to disturb the scene unduly.” She straightened and smiled. “But, now that you are here to document the evidence, I may examine him more closely. Shall we get to work?”

  She always sounded so damn cheerful for one in a profession that dealt with the dead. Blenkinship found it grated on his already raw nerves. Without responding, he set down his kit and started attaching the flashgun and battery pack to the body of his camera.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it and let DI Pollock know what we have so far,” Weston said. He glanced down at the notebook. “Adult male—I think you
said somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five?”

  Dr Onatade nodded, sweeping a hand between the skull and pelvis. “Between the fully erupted wisdom teeth and the development of the pubic symphysis, that’s as much as I can say at the moment.”

  “No problem. It gives us a starting point, anyway. I’ll hit the Missing Persons database and see what pops.”

  She laughed. “Well, good luck. And you may need it. I seem to remember that people go missing in the UK at a rate of something like one every nine seconds.”

  “Not in Cumbria, they don’t, fortunately—more like one every two or three hours,” Weston said, grinning at her like a fool.

  “Indeed. Including this young boy I’ve been hearing about—the one with the bicycle. Has there been any sign of him yet?”

  “No. And the longer it goes on…” Weston shrugged.

  “Well, let us hope for a positive outcome on that one, hm, Nicholas? That when he is finally found, you do not require my services.”

  “I’ll second that. And it’s just Nick, by the way. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. Not Nicholas. I think my old man was in too much of a hurry to get back to the pub to write it out in full.”

  “How wonderful!” Dr Onatade said. “I would have preferred to be simply Ayo, but my father insisted on Ayoola and—”

  “If you’ve quite finished swapping your family histories,” Blenkinship said between his teeth. “Shall we get on with the job in hand?”

  25

  As he walked away from the crime-scene tents, Nick was already peeling off his Tyvek coveralls. The material was thin and supposed to be breathable but it was still an extra layer he could have done without in this weather.

  One elasticated cuff caught on his watch and he struggled with it briefly before it pulled free, glad he was out of sight of the irritating crime-scene tech.

  “Who’s rattled your cage this morning, Mr Blenkinship?” he murmured.

  As far as he could tell, the new Head of CSI had few redeeming features—no, make that none whatsoever. The bloody man couldn’t even turn up on time…

  Nick settled for stripping the coveralls half off and knotting the sleeves around his waist. There was no way he was going to take his boots off until he got back to the car his garage had loaned him. He found Blenkinship’s reaction to his unexpected presence interesting and…revealing. Beyond a natural embarrassment, why should running into Nick’s car at Hunter Lane make the man so obviously unsettled around him?

  He still couldn’t shake the feeling there was something odd about that ‘accident’. Even the way he subconsciously emphasised the word when he thought about it, pointed to something hinky going on. And if there was one thing Nick’s years of undercover work had taught him, it was to trust such metaphorical taps on his shoulder.

  Back at the car, he sat with the door open on the passenger side to shed the coveralls and change back into his shoes. He sat for a moment, looking at the expanse of flat ground where the Gypsies returned to camp, year after year. His eyes shifted to the crime-scene tents, the peak of the lower one just visible from his position.

  Was it coincidence, he wondered, for a long-buried body to turn up here? He’d encountered Gypsies, Romany and Travellers when he’d been with the Met. Yes, there was a criminal element among them, but you could say that about any group of people. And particularly when they tended to be marginalised by the rest of society.

  If you treat someone as an outcast, you shouldn’t be surprised if they start behaving like one.

  Idly, he registered the sound of a vehicle approaching up the valley, heading toward Kirkby Stephen. Heard the rumble of it hitting the cattle grid on the approach to Water Yat. He half-expected, as it rounded the bend and came into view, that the driver would slow down. It was the usual, instinctive reaction to spotting a marked-up police car lurking by the side of the road.

  Instead, the car—an old Volvo estate—gave a lurch and accelerated hard, engine screaming as it bore down on him like a battleship in full ramming mode. The car left the road and bounded onto the rough grass, pitching wildly as the elderly suspension tried to cope with the terrain.

  What the hell—?

  Nick leapt from his vehicle and crouched, ready to dive out of the way of the collision. He couldn’t see the driver because of the sun’s reflection on the windscreen.

  At the last moment, the Volvo swerved away from him and headed directly toward the crime-scene. As it did so, Nick caught a glimpse of a kiddie-seat in the rear of the car, with a terrified looking child strapped into it.

  “Hey!” Nick yelled, as much to attract the attention of the two uniforms on the far bank as the driver. He took off after the Volvo at a dead run, cursing having changed out of his boots.

  Sheer momentum carried the car some way onto the grass, but the flooding from the night before and the heavy-footed use of the throttle meant it was never going to get far.

  The front wheels began to judder, then to spin, sending liquid mud splattering along the side of the car. Nick saw the driver’s door fly open. The slight figure of a woman scrambled out and ran, slipping and sliding in the mud. The car itself kept rolling forward.

  Nick thought of the child’s face in the rear and put on an extra burst of speed. He reached the open door and managed to throw himself across the driver’s seat, yanking on the handbrake and shoving the transmission out of gear.

  Only then did he glance into the back of the car. There were three children shrieking in the rear seat.

  “It’s OK. It’s all OK. You’re safe now,” he told them. It had little effect. He grabbed the keys to kill the engine and backed out of the car again.

  The woman was still going. She’d clearly fallen once and had lost a shoe, but wasn’t going to let that stop her.

  Nick set off in pursuit. In utter panic, she’d headed straight for the tents without working out she needed to cross the river first. He caught up with her on the bank directly opposite the scene, grasping her shoulders just as it looked like she was about to throw herself in to swim across.

  “Mrs Elliot?” he said, finally recognising the woman. “Yvonne?”

  It took him a while to get through to her, by which time the two uniforms had reacted, splashing across the river and running to join him. Dr Onatade and Blenkinship had both been drawn outside by the commotion. The Medical Examiner wore a look of concern. Blenkinship seemed to be enjoying the show.

  Nick normally had no problem subduing awkward or violent suspects during an arrest but this was different again. Yvonne was a distraught mother, as much a victim as—possibly—her son. As soon as he realised who she was, he’d also known what she must have thought, seeing the crime-scene tape and the tents and police presence.

  As a parent himself, his heart broke a little for her.

  “It’s not Jordan, Mrs Elliot,” he told her, over and over, keeping his voice calm but loud enough to penetrate. “Yvonne, listen to me. It’s not your son. It’s not him.”

  Eventually, she stopped fighting and just slumped, sobbing. Nick tried to keep her on her feet but the sudden change threw him. All he could do was control her descent. She ended up on her knees on the ground anyway, arms wrapped around his legs and her face burrowed into his hip. He caught a glimpse of the leer on Blenkinship’s face.

  Oh, yeah, he’s definitely enjoying the bloody show…

  It was Dr Onatade who called across, “Is she all right, Nick?”

  “I, er… She will be.” He held out a fending hand to the young PCSO who’d signed him in to the crime scene. “Give us a minute, will you? And there are kids—in the car. Can you check on them? I think they’re OK. They were terrified and screaming blue murder.”

  “Better that than too quiet,” the copper said, turning away.

  Nick managed to prise Yvonne Elliot’s hands away from his legs. He bent so he could look her in the face, make sure his words were going in.

  “Yvonne?”

  She reacted t
o his voice this time. Her eyes were bloodshot and swimming but they managed to focus on him, at least.

  “It’s OK,” Nick repeated gently. “It’s definitely not Jordan that we’ve found—do you understand?”

  “It’s not?” Only the rising inflection in her wavering voice made it a question. “Who–who—?”

  “We don’t know who it is yet, but the bones are old, OK? They’ve been in the ground for some time—years. It can’t possibly be your son.” He kept his voice soothing, expecting her to start to relax. Instead, she tensed afresh.

  “O–old?” she echoed. “How old?”

  He hadn’t been expecting that, either. Giving out information to anyone who wasn’t part of the investigation team was a complete no-no, Nick knew that. But how could he tell her nothing at all. He hesitated, picked his words with care.

  “Well… we don’t know, as yet. But certainly an adult, OK? So it can’t—”

  But Yvonne wasn’t listening anymore. She clamped her hands to her face, curling inward as though she’d been kicked in the stomach, and gave another howling wail of utter despair.

  26

  Unsettled, Blenkinship turned away from the sight of the woman on the far bank and the detective who comforted her.

  To begin with, he thought he was witnessing an episode in DC Weston’s private life, being enacted on a very public stage. And yes, he’d be the first to admit that, initially, he’d found amusement in watching him struggle to hold her. He would have assumed—what with Weston’s supposed reputation as some hot-shot from the Met, up here to show the hayseeds how things should be done—that he’d know how to handle a woman.

  And then one of the uniforms, a local man, had made a passing comment as he’d jogged past on his way to assist. Only then had Blenkinship found out who she really was.

  The mother of the boy who was…

  Missing.

  The one who…

  He tried to block out the woman’s gut-wrenching sobs and the detective’s voice as he reassured her. Weston was not, it seemed, one of those blokes who didn’t know what to do with an over-emotional female. Blenkinship himself always felt at a bit of a loss. His first instinct was to tell them to calm down and pull themselves together. It had not, in his experience, proved an effective response.