Bones In the River

by Zoe Sharp

  “Oh, I doubt it. She’s wise to him but not above making use of his labouring skills to help get her new garden beaten into submission, the minx.”

  “How’s she settling in? Didn’t you say she lived in Appleby before?”

  “Yes, years ago now. Still, it hasn’t taken her long to re-establish herself. I think she’s already plugged-in to the gossip hotline. When I was up there the other day, she reminded me the week of the Fair is known locally as a good time to settle old scores. You can get your own back on the people who’ve annoyed you all year, but you can blame it on the Gypsies.”

  Nick was silent for a while after that, his face serious. Watching him, Grace remembered the first time they met, when he was both in a foul temper and hung-over, but she’d itched to photograph him. She still did, if she was honest. Had contented herself with taking some portrait shots of him with his daughter, Sophie, a few months before.

  At last, he said, “I wonder if that was what happened to the guy whose bones were uncovered at Mallerstang—a settled score? And then his body buried at a place where the Gypsies often camp, just in case it ever did come to light.”

  “Or a deliberate attempt to make them look guilty.”

  “True. But until Dr Onatade carries out her post-mortem exam, we don’t even know if he was murdered, or died accidentally.”

  “Well, considering where and how he was buried, someone will have questions to answer, certainly.”

  Nick shrugged. “For what—failing to register a death? Failing to gain consent of the landowner before carrying out a private burial? Hardly big league stuff, is it?”

  “And you haven’t identified him yet, your John Doe?”

  “I spent most of today trawling through the Missing Persons database but there are no obvious matches.”

  “I suppose, if he was part of the Traveller community, it’s likely he was never officially reported missing. They don’t exactly trust the police.”

  “Tell me about it! We’ll just have to wait and see what we get from the PM—or from the effects found with the body. I understand there’s even an old mobile phone, although what use it will be is another matter.”

  “Well, if anyone can do something with it, I’d put my money on Ty Frost.”

  “So would I.” Nick stood, stretching out his back with a groan. “Ah well, time I was making tracks. Lisa’s working late tonight, again, so I need to pick up the little one from her grandparents’ place.”

  Something in his voice tapped at her. “How are things with Lisa, since the two of you got back together?” Grace asked.

  Another shrug. “OK—some of the time.”

  “Oh, I was hoping for second honeymoon territory.” Her voice was gently teasing but when he didn’t smile she sobered. “What is it?”

  “Again, I’m not sure I know.” He rubbed a hand around the back of his neck. “She’s been acting…strangely. Secretive, defensive. Just…half a beat out of step with me. Or maybe it’s me that’s out of step with her.” He flashed a quick smile. “Oh, just ignore me. I’m tired. It’s been a long day.”

  “Perhaps,” Grace agreed. “But you have good instincts and I’d be tempted to trust them.”

  “And do what, though?”

  “Whatever you know is right.”

  He picked up his glass and went back inside the house without answering. Grace followed, bringing the remains of the wine and her own glass. Tallie lifted her head, saw Nick and gave a brief token growl, then flopped down again, as if it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Nick placed his empty glass on the breakfast bar and turned to her, car keys already in his hand. “Thanks, Grace—for letting me talk. I always feel a little better for it.”

  “Then my work here is done,” she said. “Look after yourself, Nick.”

  It was only as the exhaust note of his car died away up the lane that she remembered her encounter with the unknown Gypsy woman at Appleby. Grace wondered if she should have mentioned the woman’s response to the discovery of the old bones, or her outburst about something that was owing…

  How did the settling of old scores fit into that?

  31

  At the end of the lane leading away from the cottage, Nick braked slowly to a halt. The road ahead was clear but still he sat for a moment, arms braced against the steering wheel.

  “Why do you do it to yourself?” he murmured.

  He didn’t expect an answer—but then, he didn’t need one.

  He knew why.

  Ever since he’d first encountered Grace, at the start of a long and difficult case the previous summer, he’d fought against the attraction he felt toward her. Why else would he be so minutely aware of the moment she entered a room? Or, on the occasions when she had cause to call him, to report findings or update him on something they were working on together, he often knew without needing to see the incoming number, that she was on the other end of the line.

  He didn’t like it, this…awareness he had of her, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. Avoiding her was not an option. Despite Chris Blenkinship’s occasional snide comments, Grace was probably the best crime-scene technician they had. He’d be a fool to settle for anyone less.

  Was that what he’d done with Lisa—settled for somebody less?

  Nick occasionally wondered, if Lisa hadn’t broken up with him just after he transferred up to the Cumbria force, if he would have been able to keep Grace firmly in the Friend Zone. But, almost as soon as they’d moved north, Lisa announced she was leaving and moved out, taking little Sophie with her. At the time, Nick suspected it was what she’d been planning all along.

  It was only after Lisa had gone that he’d met Grace for the first time. He wasn’t on the rebound exactly, although he wouldn’t deny his male ego was still smarting from the rejection. But, the usual restrictions—that absolute loyalty to the woman who was his partner, the mother of his child—seemed no longer to have any meaning.

  Perhaps that was why he’d felt the pull of the lanky redhead and had allowed himself to become…enthralled.

  He shook his head as if to clear his ears, like a dog coming out of water. He was still sitting at the junction and the road was still empty. He put the car into gear and turned south, heading sedately out of Orton village toward the motorway.

  A few months after Lisa left, she’d started to backtrack. It was subtle at first. Rather than making him fight for every minute he wanted to spend with Sophie, Lisa began inviting him to join the two of them on picnics, days out, family gatherings.

  Once the relief of being able to see his daughter without all the hassle had sunk in, Nick soon realised what she was doing. Rather than admitting that she might have made a mistake, Lisa was setting out to…re-seduce him, all over again. Only, this time, she had the added lure of Sophie on her side.

  What Lisa could not have known was that, during the weeks they were apart, Nick had come to recognise that their little girl was more or less the only thing they had in common. In some ways, she’d done him a favour by forcing him to assess the situation with the clarity of distance, however slight.

  Bluntly put, Nick simply didn’t want her anymore.

  He discovered, to his surprise, that he was developing a taste for lanky redheads over petite blondes.

  Not that he made any moves in Grace’s direction. Her ex—Max—had not taken their divorce well and was still trying to reassert his claim. Nick realised that offering anything other than friendship, at that point, would have sent her running in the opposite direction.

  If Lisa had remained determined to do without him, who knows what might have developed with Grace. But Lisa had changed her mind. And, thinking of his daughter’s happiness and sense of security, Nick had agreed to a reconciliation.

  Even though, he acknowledged privately, it was with resignation rather than joy.

  Of course, Lisa knew things weren’t quite right between them. Initially, she’d tried a little too hard to pretend everything wa
s exactly as it was. But her smile was too bright and she couldn’t quite carry the forced note of cheerfulness in her voice. Not for long.

  Eventually, she exploded, yelling and throwing breakables along with insults and accusations. Nick had responded with a weary calm where once there would have been desperation. And maybe Lisa had realised, at last, how badly she’d misjudged both him and the situation.

  The fact they were still together was due to inertia rather than anything else. She didn’t have the nerve to move in with her parents again. And Nick found that sharing his life with Lisa, however uncomfortable that might be, was a small price to pay for being able to see his daughter every day and tuck her into bed nearly every night.

  But, just sometimes, he needed a small reminder of how things might have been.

  “Yeah,” he said aloud and heard the rueful edge. “That’s why you do it…”

  Part V

  Saturday

  32

  When Blenkinship walked into DI Pollock’s office the following morning, he was irritated to see that, once again, Dr Onatade had beaten him to it. The FME was already ensconced in one of the visitor chairs facing the DI’s desk. She sipped from a glass of water rather than accepting Pollock’s truly awful coffee, and had what could only be the post-mortem report balanced across her knees.

  “Ah, there you are, lad,” Pollock said darkly. “I was just thinking of sending out search parties.”

  “Sorry sir. My wife’s car wouldn’t start.” He gave an apologetic shrug to accompany the lie. It was probably more believable than admitting he hadn’t been able to sleep until the early hours—again—and avoided any discussion of a possible reason for that state of affairs.

  Blenkinship declined a cup of coffee from Pollock’s personal filter machine over on the filing cabinet. The DI bought only the good stuff but then spooned in so much for every jugful, it practically qualified as an offensive weapon. The thought of something so acidic made Blenkinship’s stomach surge. He took a deep breath to quell it, slid into his chair.

  “Dr Onatade has already gone over the PM results,” Pollock said, with only a hint of censure. “The full report will be in your inbox, of course, but if you’d just like to give Mr Blenkinship the gist, Ayo?”

  “Of course,” Dr Onatade said. “Blunt-force trauma to the back of the head. His skull was smashed like a ripe melon.”

  Blenkinship took another calming breath. “Are we sure that couldn’t have happened after he was put in the ground? After all, half the bank collapsed around the body, by the looks of it.”

  Dr Onatade straightened in her chair. “As surprising as it may seem to you, Christopher, I am able to tell the difference between ante-mortem, peri-mortem, and post-mortem injuries,” she said with great precision. “Yes, the fractures to his right femur, pelvis and jaw all happened some time after death. The bone around the breaks is brittle, almost crumbly. That damage, without doubt, took place some time after he was buried.” She tapped the report with her forefinger but didn’t need to consult it. “The greenstick fractures to the radius and ulna of his right arm happened several years before he died. Both exhibited considerable formation of callus. The break to his right clavicle was even older—possibly even in childhood. Again, it was well-healed—clearly ante-mortem—”

  Blenkinship lifted his hands in surrender. “OK, pet, you’ve made your point. I—”

  “But,” Dr Onatade over-rode him, her voice round and rich and forceful, determined to finish now she’d started, “the fracture to the base of the skull showed all the hallmarks of occurring to living bone with a blood supply. Therefore, the considerable expertise for which Cumbria Constabulary pays me so handsomely, leads me to conclude that this was the defining peri-mortem injury, occurring immediately before death. Obviously, the brain is no longer available for me to examine but I can assure you that, in my professional opinion, sufficient damage would have been caused to the underlying brain tissue to make your victim’s demise almost inevitable.”

  She sat back in her chair and beamed at both men. Pollock cleared his throat.

  “Yes, thank you, Ayo. That all seems…very clear cut.”

  “I don’t suppose it was possible to establish what kind of weapon caused the fatal injury?” Blenkinship asked, determined to find something the blasted woman didn’t have an answer for.

  “He was killed by an upward blow to the underside of the skull with a thin bar or rod,” she said promptly. “Bring me an object matching that description and I will be able to tell you, one way or the other, if it caused the wound. However, bearing in mind the possibility that he was not killed where he was buried, this would rely on your people being able to discover the primary crime scene, when it could easily be a decade after the event.” She paused. “So, what do you have so far?”

  Blenkinship felt like a snooker player whose opponent has just utterly barricaded-in the cue ball and then cheerfully handed back the table with no shots available to play.

  “Not much, I can tell you that,” he admitted. “There were some clothing fragments found in the immediate vicinity of the body but they’re generic and don’t tell us much. Some plastic buttons, probably from a cotton shirt that’s rotted away. Rivets from denim jeans, which again have rotted to nothing. If he was wearing shoes or boots, the river took them, along with his feet. No watch, no wallet. No ID, either. He was wearing some kind of medallion round his neck on a chain but that’s corroded badly. We’re doing what we can with it.”

  “What about the phone?” Pollock asked.

  “Well, that could prove interesting but at the moment it’s so covered in crud that we’re having to go fairly slowly cleaning it up.”

  “Does young Ty Frost think he can do anything with it?”

  “Well, he doesn’t expect to be making calls from it anytime soon, eh?” Blenkinship said, trying to lighten the mood. Neither Dr Onatade nor DI Pollock smiled in response. “Ah, yes, the electronics are scrap but Frost reckons that the serial number is likely to be on a label inside the case. Rush it, and we risk destroying our only means of identifying who the phone was sold and registered to. And that’s if it’s not a Pay-As-You-Go phone, and if the service provider still has records going back that far.”

  “I have taken the liberty of sending off a DNA sample with a rush on it,” Dr Onatade said. Pollock shot upright in his own chair and she raised a finger to silence his imminent protest. “It was something DC Weston said this morning that made me think of it.”

  Pollock raised his eyebrows. “This morning? How early did the lad get in?”

  “He called me just before I examined the body, to ask if there were any indicators that the victim might come from the Gypsy or Traveller community.”

  Pollock allowed himself to slump back again, frowning as if the steam had gone right out of him. “Did he now?”

  “Waste of time and resources,” Blenkinship said. “There was nothing to suggest—”

  But again Dr Onatade did not let him finish. “On the contrary,” she said, “the more I thought about it, the more logical a suggestion it seemed. There were no matching reports in the Missing Persons database. The body was found on a piece of land regularly used by Travellers. And the old injuries I found might be consistent with riding—or falling off—horses.”

  “Aye, and they might be consistent with riding or falling off a mountain bike, an’ all,” Pollock muttered.

  “Very true. And if there was, currently, happening nearby, a huge gathering of mountain bike riders from all over Europe, I would have rushed the test then, too.”

  Blenkinship had read all about the new integrated microfluidic system for rapid DNA analysis. It cut the turnaround time from around seventy-two hours, down to just four. But he’d never had a case that warranted the extortionate cost, and he wasn’t sure he had one now.

  Dr Onatade watched the realisation hit Pollock with, Blenkinship thought grumpily, a satisfaction bordering on smug. Then she nodded and got to her fe
et. “The Gypsies are here until Monday and then they’ll begin to disperse. You know as well as I do, Brian, that once they leave, you may never see them again—particularly anyone who might know something about the dead man. You won’t get a better opportunity than this.”

  “Aye,” Pollock said, his voice still gloomy. “And I’ll pay through me nose for the privilege.”

  33

  Wynter Trelawney pushed her old Land Rover as fast as she dared, keeping one eye out for speed traps. They always put in lower limits along the road between Brough Sowerby and Kirkby Stephen during the run-up to the Fair, but there were hardly any vans camped on the verges now. Most of them were already up at Appleby.

  She found the turn-off to Warcop just before she reached the edge of the town itself, swinging sharp right and accelerating again, hearing the ringing rattle of the gearbox and the diffs whining. She leaned forward and scanned the road ahead anxiously.

  The voice on the phone had been vague—deliberately so, but she was used to that.

  “Come quick, dieya,” it had said. “Appleby Road out of Kirkby. Come quick!”

  And knowing better than to ignore such a summons, she’d run across to one of the neighbouring cottages to get someone to sit with her mother, grabbed a bag and jumped straight into the Landie.

  Now, she was looking for a cluster of vans, so she nearly missed one boy standing next to a piebald pony in a gateway by the weir. She braked and slid back her window.

  “Was it you—who called me?”

  The boy regarded her for a moment as if he didn’t understand, then shook his head and said briefly, “Me puro dad.”

  My grandfather, Wynter translated as she climbed out and slammed the door behind her. Just as they’d called her mother when they phoned. But then she saw the blanketed form lying in the grass by the edge of the river.

  And she remembered that dieya also meant nurse.