Bones In the River

by Zoe Sharp

  63

  When Nick walked back into the Hunter Lane station, he was told there was a visitor waiting to see him. He was frowning as he hurried through to the Reception area. Partly because he wasn’t expecting anyone—except maybe Lisa, which could only mean something had happened to Sophie. And partly because his mind was occupied with the questions he and Pollock would need to put together before they interviewed Dylan Elliot.

  Which was perhaps the reason why, as he buzzed through the door, he didn’t immediately recognise the woman standing near the front desk.

  She seemed to know him, right enough. She greeted him with a familiar smile and turned to pick up a lidded cardboard box—the kind used to store archive material in, or old evidence. It was only the lack of the proper labelling that made him realise this was something else altogether.

  “This is what Shanaya and I have managed to dig out,” the woman said. “It’s not much but I’m guessing Mum and Dad might have got rid of a load of Owen’s old stuff after… Well, when he disappeared.”

  It was only as she spoke that it clicked. She was Owen Liddell’s sister, Catherine. He buzzed keyed her through into the main building and found an empty interview suite where he could put the box down and open it with some degree of privacy.

  “Have you looked through it all yourself?” he asked.

  She nodded. “There are some photos. Including some I wasn’t really expecting.”

  Catherine pushed aside the lid, rifling through the contents until she came to an old-fashioned paper wallet for standard-size photographs. The kind Nick remembered his dad picking up from the chemist’s after family events, with the little extra pocket for the negatives at the front.

  Catherine pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and leafed through the prints. Eventually, she picked out two or three and handed them across.

  The top one showed a man that bore enough resemblance to his driving licence picture for Nick to recognise Owen. He was standing near the front of a yellow classic Ford Escort, with a dry-stone wall and fuzzy fields in the background.

  And, in his arms, Owen was holding a baby swathed in a pale-coloured blanket.

  He was grinning self-consciously, tilting the baby’s face toward the camera, clearly nervous to be in sole charge of the child, but proud of it, too.

  “Who is this with your brother?” Nick asked. “You didn’t mention he had kids of his own.”

  “That’s because, as far as I know, he hadn’t any. But, like I said, we’d lost touch.” She shrugged and jerked her chin at the picture. “I’m rather hoping, if you find out what happened to my brother, you might find out what happened to the child, too…”

  64

  Chris Blenkinship almost had a heart attack when the door to the CSI office opened and Ty Frost walked in. Blenkinship was still sitting behind Grace McColl’s desk, having just used his authority to go into her work email and delete the original post-mortem report from Dr Onatade.

  And although Blenkinship was the one who’d been doing something he shouldn’t, it was Frost who halted abruptly, with a slightly hunted look on his face, when he caught sight of his boss apparently sitting there waiting for him, not the other way around.

  Watching him, Blenkinship thought sourly that if Frost ever committed any kind of crime—intentional or not—he wouldn’t get away with it for half a day. Not with that open face. He could read just about every thought and emotion that flitted across it.

  “How did it go with the drone flight?” he asked, just to break the awkward silence. “Find anything useful, did you?”

  “Erm, yeah, we did, actually. I’ve already logged it all in,” he added hastily, as if expecting a reprimand.

  “No problem, Ty. I’m sure you did a bang-up job. And I’ve evidence to log in myself, so I’ll leave you to it.” Blenkinship rose, sauntered around the desk, nodding to the papers he’d left on the corner. “Tell McColl I’ve brought her a copy of Dr Onatade’s PM report on the Elliot kid, would you? Where is she, by the way?”

  “Oh, er, I’m not sure, boss. She was called to another scene, I think.”

  Frost dumped his kit bag by the side of his chair as he spoke, sliding open the top drawer and dropping his keys inside. Blenkinship tensed a moment while he did so, hoping that the young CSI wouldn’t spot the fact he’d thoroughly rifled through the contents of all the drawers, just to double-check that Frost really had thrown away that SD card from his dash-cam.

  “Oh, speaking of the Elliot kid,” Frost said when Blenkinship was halfway through the door.

  He froze, turned back slowly. “What about him?”

  “Did you know we’ve got the lad’s father locked up downstairs—can you believe it? And his car’s been brought into the workshop for examination.”

  Time stopped. Between one tick of the clock and the next, a stream of thought rushed through Blenkinship’s mind. Of the ‘suspect’ vehicle, waiting to be pored over, of Grace being unexpectedly—fortuitously—absent. And of the physical evidence from the boy’s post-mortem exam—including all the clothing that had been on his body when it was recovered—sitting bagged up and ready to be deposited, but presently still under lock and key in the boot of Blenkinship’s car.

  The opportunity to…embellish, was too good to miss.

  Too tempting to resist.

  Blenkinship curbed his excitement. Instead, he heaved a put-upon sigh and made a show of looking at his watch. “Where did you say McColl had swanned off to? Oh, never mind,” he said, before Frost could answer. “I’ll have to make a start on processing the vehicle now, I suppose. If they’re waiting to interview the suspect, time is of the essence, eh?”

  “Oh, er, yeah, I guess so. Sorry, boss. I don’t think she’ll be long, but—”

  He scowled. “Don’t worry about it, Ty. Not your problem, is it?”

  But as he left the office and strode away down the corridor, Blenkinship couldn’t prevent the relieved smile that spread across his face.

  65

  Grace pushed open her front door, still wrestling to remove the key from the lock, and gave Tallie a perfunctory rub across the top of her head on the way through.

  She had already toed off her boots and was about to strip out of her T-shirt when she heard the sound of an engine outside and tyres on the gravel. Tallie scrabbled out from under her hand and rushed the front door, letting out a couple of warning barks as she did so.

  Grace sighed. DI Pollock’s call had been brief, explaining that she was needed at the Elliots’. When she’d tried to explain that she’d just been gathering evidence of Jordan’s presence in the river, so she could be accused of cross-contamination by going straight from there to his home, Pollock was blunt in response.

  “This one needs a woman’s touch, Grace—and you’re it.”

  It was high time, she decided, they recruited another female CSI into the team.

  So she’d hustled from Kirkby Stephen back to the cottage in Orton to shower and change. This unexpected caller, whoever they were, was an unwelcome interruption.

  She pulled open the front door with excuses on her lips that died as her visitor turned to face her.

  “Ayo! What brings you here?” she said, surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry, please—come on in. You don’t mind dogs, do you?”

  “Not at all,” Dr Onatade said. “Oh, you’re beautiful, aren’t you?” She dropped her bag off her shoulder and held her hands out to Tallie, who took a regal sniff and deigned to allow moderate petting from her latest admirer.

  The pathologist glanced around, taking in the discarded boots. “Have I come at a bad time?”

  “Well, I hate to say it but you have, rather. I have to go to one scene straight from another that’s related, so I need to clean up.”

  “Ah, of course. I’m sorry—I should have called first. Please, don’t let me hold you up.”

  Grace paused. “If you don’t mind me multi-tasking, perhaps I could shower while we chat?” She smiled. “I’m not par
ticularly shy and I’m sure I don’t have anything you’ve not only seen before, but probably also dissected.”

  Dr Onatade laughed outright. “Lead on, sweetie.”

  In the end, she sat at the top of the staircase, making a fuss of Tallie. The dog sprawled alongside her, taking up an inordinate amount of the landing, and waving her legs in the air.

  “I had a call from the forensics services lab earlier,” Grace called from the bathroom as she set the shower running. “They’ve confirmed that the boy is Jordan Elliot. But the results also indicate that Dylan Elliot is not his father. I haven’t been back to the office yet, so I haven’t had a chance to update the system.”

  “Well, that certainly complicates matters nicely, doesn’t it?” Dr Onatade remarked. “Although, I can’t say I’m totally surprised. One of the unfortunate side-effects of more and more people buying each other these trace-your-ancestry home DNA kits has been the number discovering, when they get the results back, that husbands and fathers are not always the same person. There is even an acronym for it—NPE. It stands for Not Parent Expected.”

  “Really? Well, I had a quick call from Nick on the way over here—DC Weston. He’s just been to the Elliots’ place and said he raised the subject, briefly, with Yvonne Elliot, Jordan’s mother. She flat-out denied having an affair, apparently, even though she did admit her husband wasn’t always quite so scrupulous.”

  “I do hope she’s bright enough to realise that’s not quite how biological inheritance works.”

  Grace could hear the grin in her voice.

  “Well, having met her, I’m not sure I’d put money on that,” Grace said. She pulled a face, immediately contrite. “I’m sorry, that was probably most unfair of me but Yvonne is one of those dreary women who just seems to accept everything that’s dealt to her, however rotten it is. It’s as if she’s been conditioned to believe that she doesn’t deserve anything better.”

  “Ah, one of those. Well, perhaps she has. We are not all of us lucky enough to grow up loved and encouraged and supported, as we both see only too frequently in the victims who pass through our hands.”

  Grace stepped into the shower and shut the door behind her, raising her voice a little to be heard over the running water. “It doesn’t make it any easier to accept, though, does it?”

  “No. No, it doesn’t.” There was a pause, then Dr Onatade said, “So, if you haven’t been back to base, you won’t have seen the PM report on the boy? I sent it through earlier today.”

  “Ah, no, I haven’t,” Grace said. She rubbed shampoo into her hair and asked, almost diffidently, “How did he die?”

  “Not well, or easily. That I can say with certainty. If you’re asking what killed him, on the other hand—as I said to Christopher, that’s a far harder question to answer.”

  “Oh?”

  “I would say that some of the boy’s injuries are consistent with cyclist versus motor car. Never a good outcome for the cyclist. He ticked all the wrong boxes there.” Grace could visualise the doctor listing the points on her splayed fingers. “He was male—more than eighty percent of bicycle accidents involve males. Riders between ten and fifteen are the most at-risk age group—far more than either younger children or adults. And while almost all child cycling accidents happen during the day, when an accident does occur at night, it is far more likely to be fatal.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” Grace observed.

  “Of course. You see as many car-crash victims as I do and it becomes something of a hobby-horse. I mean, half of cycling fatalities take place on rural roads, where vehicle speeds are faster and there are no street lights. Three-quarters of cyclists killed have major head injuries, as was the case here. And, incidentally, cyclists are much more likely to be seriously injured or killed if the driver of the vehicle is over the limit—in terms of either speed or drink.”

  “You think that was a factor here?”

  She heard the shrug in Dr Onatade’s voice. “I deal in facts and that is supposition, but a reasonable one, even so. If he—or she—wasn’t speeding or drunk, why didn’t they stop? This person not only hit a child but ran over their bicycle as well, I believe? They must have been aware of what they’d done.”

  Grace frowned and ducked under the spray to rinse her hair. “Ty Frost and I surveyed the Eden today by drone, from the point where the body was found back toward Mallerstang. From the trace evidence we recovered, the boy was put into the water somewhere above Stenkrith Park, but we couldn’t find anything to pinpoint exactly where. Perhaps the driver stopped, picked up the child and started to drive him to a hospital. But, at some point very soon into the journey, they realised he was dead and they simply panicked and…dumped him.”

  “In the nearest river?” Dr Onatade gave an unladylike snort. “Well, it’s a theory that relies on both the best and worst aspects of human nature, I’ll give you that.”

  Grace shut off the spray and squeezed the excess water out of her hair, deciding that her usual wipe down of the glass cubicle would have to go by the board for once. She stepped out into the bathroom, wrapped herself in a towel and ventured onto the landing.

  “Come on, Ayo. You could have told me all this over the phone. What’s bothering you enough that you’ve made a special trip?”

  Ayo took a breath, met her eyes. “I’m…concerned about Christopher,” she said flatly. “He was acting very strangely during the post-mortem exam on the boy. I know he claimed simply that he was ill but—”

  “Ill? As far as I’m aware, there was nothing wrong with him when he left Penrith.”

  “Well, there you go. It wasn’t just that, he seemed…not just ill, but ill at ease, too. Twitchy. Is he struggling with taking over as Lead CSI, do you think?”

  Grace felt her eyebrows climb as she pulled on a set of clean clothes. “I would have said that he was positively revelling in his position of superiority. But now you’ve said that, I begin to wonder…”

  “Well, I just thought perhaps you ought to be aware of it.” She hesitated a moment, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “I don’t interfere in office politics if I can help it, but if it impacts on his cases…”

  “I understand. And thank you. I’ll…keep an eye on him.”

  “Good. Speaking of Christopher’s cases, you might like to tell him that I’ve had the dental records through for the bones from the river. I can confirm it is Owen Liddell.”

  “Hm, if you don’t mind, Ayo, I’ll let you deliver that news. It’s probably better than letting him think we’ve been conspiring against him…”

  66

  When Dylan Elliot refused his right either to have a solicitor appointed for him, or to have his own legal representative present, Nick’s cop instincts gave an uneasy twitch. Something was up, which he initially put down to Dylan’s general air of smug over-confidence.

  Pollock began the interview in a relaxed enough way. Without discussing it beforehand, the detective inspector fell naturally into playing an almost fatherly good cop role. As Nick had been the one to physically tackle Dylan during his arrest, continuing to play bad cop went without saying.

  It’s an old strategy, but it works.

  “Now then, lad. As you know, as soon as you clobbered your missus right there in front of us, you left us no choice but to arrest you,” Pollock said. “We have some questions for you about that but, before we start, is there anything you’d like to get off your chest?”

  They’d arranged themselves on two sides of the interview table from Dylan. It was less combative than both sitting opposite. The man was sprawled in the hard plastic chair in the corner, putting on a good show of being unconcerned but picking at the plastic lid on his vending machine coffee, nevertheless.

  “My ’Vonne will never press charges, so you’re wasting your time there.”

  “You may not be aware of this, but the decision on whether to press charges or not actually rests with the Crown Prosecution Service, not Mrs Elliot,” Nick said
mildly. Not quite the whole story but he wasn’t about to spell it out for him.

  As it was, Dylan’s grin stiffened a little, and his eyes flicked between them, looking for signs of deception neither of them were green enough to show.

  Pollock glanced down at his notes. “Just before you thumped her, Mrs Elliot intimated that you might have a bit on the side. Was she right?”

  “Like I told you, she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, isn’t my ’Vonne. You can’t believe most of what she says.”

  “Would that be ‘most’ of it? Or any of it?”

  “Any of it, then. Same difference.”

  “So, we shouldn’t have believed her when she said you were at home, all evening, the night young Jordan went missing, then?”

  For a second or two, Nick thought Dylan might rise to that, but then he grinned at the pair of them.

  “Nope, she were right about that. I was home all night, just like she said.”

  “I see,” Pollock said. He paused. “Got any siblings, have you?”

  “What? I got an older sister, over in Cockermouth. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “No brothers, then? Especially no twin brothers?”

  Dylan wriggled in his chair. “What are you on about?”

  Pollock sat back and let Nick take over. Nick reached into the folder in front of him and pulled out half-a-dozen print-outs, turning each one to face Dylan. For stills taken from video images, they were remarkably sharp and detailed.

  Dylan leaned forward, used his fingernail to draw the nearest one toward him as if wary of leaving fingerprints. He took in the time and date stamp in the corner, the location on that one, and the next. And the one after.

  “For the benefit of the recording, I am now showing Mr Elliot a series of photographs taken from various traffic cameras between Kirkby Stephen and Ambleside, on the evening in question. They clearly show a vehicle registered in Mr Elliot’s name, and being driven by him.”