by Jan Newton
By 9.30am, Julie was in Kay Greenhalgh’s office, sipping her second caffeine-packed coffee of the day. Kay smiled. ‘So, keen on pathology and iv caffeine. We could be related if it weren’t for’t fact that you’re from the wrong side o’t Pennines entirely.’ Julie laughed at the deliberate accent slippage, which was rare from the doctor, but somehow made them feel like allies. Against what, she wasn’t quite sure.
‘So, what do you think? Was she murdered?’
‘That’s going to take me a bit longer to unravel. What I can’t work out is what the odd smell was that she was giving off.’
Julie raised an eyebrow. ‘How long have you been a pathologist? That smell when you open up a body is like nothing else.’ She sniffed and shuddered, but only slightly.
Greenhalgh nodded. ‘Even after generous application of the most expensive shampoo money can buy, I still think people will smell it on me when I’m in the queue at Costa at lunchtime.’ She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the strip lighting above her desk. Two large and very dead bluebottles lay on the patterned plastic. ‘But, apart from the familiar scent of putrefying internal organs there was something else. Something with a distinctly chemical whiff about it.’ She glanced back at Julie. ‘And it wasn’t Estée Lauder, that’s for sure.’
‘And you’ve no idea what that might be? What are you thinking: could it be petrol or diesel? Something you’d find in the back of a vehicle, maybe?’
‘Sergeant Kite, you should have been a scientist.’ Greenhalgh clinked mugs with Julie. ‘There are a few possibilities I’m toying with. I’ve taken samples and I’ll send them off for testing today, but it may take a little while to sort out.’ She set her mug back on her desk. ‘Annoying though, because I recognise that smell. It takes me back to when I was a kid, but I just can’t remember why.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, as you heard in there, she was female, probably early- to mid-twenties, and she has, at some stage, given birth, although I can’t tell you how long ago that might have been.’
‘And the hand was definitely gnawed by something, rather than being removed?’
‘Yes, the marks on the end of the radius and ulna are definitely consistent with striations made by teeth rather than a blade. There was no evidence of blood either in-situ or on the clothing, which would also suggest that the hand was detached post mortem.’
‘Thank heavens for small mercies. So we’ve not a huge amount to go on.’ Julie sighed. ‘Where to start?’
‘Well, we’ve got the signet ring. Despite what I said yesterday, once I got it under the microscope, I could see that there are in fact very faint initials on the ring – CRH, we think, and there’s that fairly distinctive tattoo on the left shoulder.’ Greenhalgh flipped through photographs on her screen. ‘What do you think that could be?’
Julie stared at the screen. ‘A four-leaf clover maybe? Or a shamrock, with a red rose. Could it be a Lancashire rose?’
‘And it could be the red rose of England. You Lancastrians. What are you like? At least our Yorkshire rose is a little bit more distinctive.’
Julie laughed. ‘Fair enough. Can’t blame me for trying though.’
‘Any excuse to drag the conversation back to Lancashire then, is it?’ Greenhalgh smiled. ‘Have you been back since you moved?’
Julie shook her head. ‘I should do, my mum’s been nagging on a regular basis. I’ve not seen them since we got here.’
‘They’re missing you?’
‘She thinks there’s something wrong with Dad. He’s just taken early retirement and he’s bored witless, but she thinks he’s not quite himself.’
‘She could be right. Will you go and see them?’
‘I will, it’s just…’
‘So, at a guess, work’s getting in the way?’ Kay Greenhalgh drained her cup and stood up.
‘You know what it’s like.’ Julie rolled her chair out from under the desk but remained seated. ‘I will go back, once we’ve got this poor girl her answers.’ She glanced at the photograph of the corpse on Kay’s screen. ‘What about the needle tracks? Was she a serious user?’
Greenhalgh handed Julie a selection of plastic evidence bags containing clothing. ‘I would say that she was in the industrial usage bracket. There were even very faint tracks on her feet and neck, and some of them very recent. I’m still waiting for toxicology reports to come back, but I’ll let you know as soon as they do. Despite the head injury we’d have to assume an overdose until we can prove otherwise, given the evidence.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Why do they do it?’
Julie shrugged. ‘I’ve never been able to understand drugs. I’ve never done anything more outrageous than ibuprofen.’
Kay grinned. ‘Nor me. Her clothes don’t give much away, cheap chain store stuff, all well-worn, but clean if you disregard the mud. There’s a checked shirt, jeans, black denim jacket nothing distinctive.’ She reached up onto a low shelf and brought down a bag containing the boots. ‘These are interesting though.’
‘Doc Martens?’
‘They are DMs, but really old ones. The insides and the edges by the laces give it away, with the uncoloured leather. The newer ones are prettier, with neatly coloured innards. I’d have said 1970s or maybe eighties at a push. I had a pair just like these.’
‘I’ll defer to your judgement as an innards expert, Doctor.’ Julie laughed. ‘I didn’t have you down as an aficionado of Northern Soul, Dr Greenhalgh.’ Julie took the bag from her and twirled the boots in their plastic shroud to get a better look. ‘Did you go for the long skirt and bomber jacket too?’
‘Cheeky mare.’ Kay Greenhalgh was laughing now and Julie thought it made her look years younger. ‘For your information, young lady, I used to get over to Manchester as often as I could. Tony Wilson was a god.’ She shook her head and gave a wistful little sigh. ‘There’s nowhere quite like the Haçienda was in the eighties.’
Julie smiled. The doctor was full of surprises. ‘Nice to know you were the right side of the Pennines occasionally though, eh?’ She grinned and hooked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Thanks, Kay. We’ve got a lot more than we had yesterday. Now all we’ve got to do is find out who she is and what happened to her.’ Julie stood up and Kay held the door open for her.
‘Good luck with that one then,’ Kay Greenhalgh said. ‘Hopefully I’ll be able to phone you in an hour or two with a bit more information.’
CHAPTER SIX
Day Two
Swift drove slowly, leaving a dust cloud in the Volvo’s wake, which was coating the car in a thick grey film. The track ran alongside a small stream, and on either side, the valley soared almost vertically. It reminded him of the Westerns he’d watched as a kid with his dad. This would definitely have been classed as a gulch. Would that be the same as a bwlch in Welsh, he wondered. He slowed for a deep-set cattle grid with nettles and reeds growing through the metal and accelerated away once the car lurched back onto the scalpings. That was Julie Kite’s influence, making him look at maps and signs and working out what names meant in English. Was it her age or her Manchester background that made her look at things so differently? Her sense of humour was certainly northern and he wasn’t entirely sure that Morgan Evans would ever quite get the hang of that. He smiled to himself. Maybe it was healthy for the two of them to spar, now and again.
Where the track turned into a vast oblong of pale concrete by the farmhouse, Swift drove straight on, heading for a long stone building with a rusted, corrugated roof and tall wooden doors which were propped open. He parked the car and peered into the cool gloom of the shed.
‘Hello, Mal, are you there?’ He stepped inside, straining to see, and gingerly avoiding various piles of animal droppings. A sheepdog stood up but lay down again in a rattle of chain as he passed. ‘Mal. You about?’
‘Well, if it isn’t young Craig Swift. Where have you been hiding?’ Mal turned the ewe between his knees back onto her feet, transferred a fearsome pair of hoof clippers into his left hand and pumped Swift�
�s hand vigorously. Only a small amount of the purple spray transferred itself to Swift’s shirt cuff. ‘Foot rot,’ Mal said, attempting to wipe Swift’s cuff and making things infinitely worse.
‘Not to worry,’ Swift said. ‘Glad to see you’re still on with the sheep.’
‘What else would I do? You know me, I’m not one for sitting about indoors. Come on in, Sarah’s been baking.’
‘I’m on business, Mal, if I’m honest. I was wondering if you’d seen anyone hanging around over on the Monks’ Trod, or anyone here or in town who looked…’ Swift struggled to find a word which wouldn’t immediately give the game away.
‘As though they might be up to no good?’ Mal frowned. ‘We heard about that poor chap left out there. He was in a bit of a state, from what we heard. All maggoty.’
‘Yes, Mal, as though they might be up to no good.’ Swift shook his head benignly. ‘And you heard right. Although goodness knows where you got it from.’
‘You know me, Craig. I always say it pays to keep your ear to the ground, especially the way things are today. It’s not like it used to be in the old days, is it?’ Mal stepped outside the pen and clanged the hurdle shut. ‘Come on in and see Sarah, have a panad. You can tell me more.’
‘That’s not quite how it works,’ muttered Swift, following the old man out of the shed and across the yard. Despite Mal’s observation, it seemed that this place had barely changed since the day it was built, maybe three hundred years ago. There were no cables into the house or the barn. The phone network hadn’t yet reached this far up the valley, nor were Mal and Sarah linked to the National Grid. The faint hum of a generator and Mal’s pristine red truck were the only signs that this valley wasn’t trapped in a time warp.
Sarah had been busy. The kitchen table was loaded with fruit cakes and pies, and there were enough scones and bara brith to feed a family of ten. As the men came in and Mal removed his cap and his boots, Sarah pushed the enormous joint of meat she’d been basting back into the belly of the Rayburn and reached for the kettle.
‘Still tea with two sugars, is it, Craig?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your memory, Sarah.’ Swift smiled. ‘You cooking for the five thousand?’
Sarah beamed at him. ‘Not quite. The boys from the Graig are going to be over before dinner. They’re gathering the last of the hill sheep for us. We’d normally have had it done a couple of months ago, but when Mal broke his ankle we were a bit stuck for a while.’
‘You’re fussing, again.’ Mal shook his head. ‘Craig doesn’t want to know about all this.’
‘I do.’ Swift sat down in the chair Sarah had pulled out for him at the table. ‘What happened?’
‘Stupid really. I was trying to catch that Herdwick tup that Mogs had lent me to take it back. They have a mind of their own those things. I thought Texels had a sense of humour until I saw this one.’ Mal looked up at Sarah as she handed him his tea. ‘It cleared the cattle grid.’
‘And Mal didn’t.’ Sarah patted him on the shoulder. ‘Bit like a man trap, that grid. We couldn’t get him out. By the time I’d come out to see where he was and heard him shouting, well his ankle had swelled up like this.’ She held out both hands, curving her gnarled fingers to the size of a small football.
‘What did you do?’ Swift went into incident mode, but was having trouble imagining a plan for this particular scenario.
‘Frozen peas and Vet Wrap,’ Mal said. ‘Good job she was in the Girl Guides or I might still be there.’ He smiled up at Sarah. ‘She managed to get the swelling down and then bound my ankle so tight it made my eyes water. Still, it was the only way I was going to get out of there. If she’d left it until someone had got here, it would have been huge. We’d have had to cut the grid to get me out.’ The way they looked at each other was something else which Craig thought might not have changed in the sixty years since the two of them had moved to Sŵn y Coed to begin married life together.
‘Besides,’ Sarah said, ‘the ruddy truck was this side of the grid, wasn’t it. I’d never have been able to get out to raise the alarm without running him over.
Swift managed to squeeze in two cups of tea, a slice of bara brith and a scone before he was allowed to talk about the real reason for his visit. Sarah was more forthcoming than Mal about sightings of strangers.
‘He won’t tell you because he thinks accepting any help is admitting he’s past it.’
Swift laughed. ‘There’s no way he’s past it, Sarah. He’s a lot fitter than me, and half the lads on the force.’ He waited for her to continue, which she did only after receiving an almost imperceptible nod from Mal.
‘Well, someone’s been mending our fences. We were going to have to replace most of the posts alongside the wern down in front of the house. They get wet down there, see, even if you creosote them, they rot pretty quick.’
‘You need to be careful with that creosote,’ Swift said, wiping crumbs from his hands with his handkerchief. ‘They’ve banned it, haven’t they? Isn’t it carcinogenic or something?’
Mal laughed a deep rumbly laugh. ‘We don’t seem to be doing too bad on it, do we now? Besides, there’s enough of the stuff in the shed to see us out. Can’t waste it, can we?’
‘So, who do you think is doing it? Is it your neighbour? Could they think it’s their fence?’
Sarah tipped peeled potatoes into a huge pan and lifted it onto the stove before adding cold water in stages by means of a large pottery jug.
‘It’s them next door, it is. They’ve been here maybe ten years now. He was something legal maybe, and she was a social worker or a teacher or something. Anyway, they’re nice enough, and they seem to have lots of help.’
‘It’s not just us,’ Mal said. ‘They sent some chap round with a chainsaw when a tree came down on the lane to Gwyneth’s place. She didn’t ask them to do it, they just turned up, or some boy who works there did.’
‘But that’s just being neighbourly isn’t it?’ Swift asked.
‘Ah, but Gwyneth isn’t too keen on people roaming around up there, is she. She’s even more solitary than she was as a kid.’ Sarah smiled. ‘She was a funny little thing even then, but if anything, she’s worse since she’s been back in the valley.’
Swift drained his cup and Sarah applied the teapot even before he got it back to the saucer. ‘They’re good Samaritans then?’
Mal snorted. ‘Some people just have a knack of taking over.’
Swift nodded. ‘So, they have a lot of people working for them?’
‘We reckon, apart from the office staff and the manager, there must be about four of them working out there on the farm, but it’s hard to tell to be fair. They all look just about the same. And there’s another funny thing.’ Mal looked up at Sarah and then across at Swift. ‘You never see any of them driving anywhere. We’ve seen them in town a few times, but they only seem to go in on market day and always with her, the wife.’
‘But we’re glad they’re there, aren’t we, Mal? We could call on them if we needed anything.’
Mal grunted. ‘I’d be happier if I knew what was going on. It seems a bit odd to me like.’
Swift knew Mal would never be happy asking anyone for help, least of all people who weren’t from the valley. He eyed the Welsh cakes, but decided to exercise unaccustomed self-control. Instead he stood up and pushed his chair back under the table. ‘I’ll go and have a word,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be asking around anyway, about the discovery on the Monks’ Trod, so I’ll let you know if I find out anything.’
‘About the body?’ asked Mal, rather too eagerly
‘About the neighbours,’ Swift said. ‘I’ll leave you to find out about the deceased.’ He smiled. ‘But do let me know if you come across any information in that department won’t you?’
‘You can rely on us, Craig, can’t he, Mal?’ Sarah patted Mal’s shoulder.
‘He can, cariad,’ Mal said. ‘That he can.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Day T
wo
‘So, we’ve had no luck with B&Bs or hotels in Rhayader.’ Craig Swift plonked himself on the edge of Julie’s desk and surveyed the board. ‘We need to broaden it out then. I assume there’s been no abandoned vehicle reported either?’
Goronwy shook his head. ‘Nothing, Sir. No vehicle, and no sighting of anyone matching what we’ve got in the mortuary.’
Swift looked at the map. ‘Right, Goronwy and Rhys, you can ask around in Pontrhydfendigaid. It won’t hurt to be over there for a second time, just in case it manages to make someone feel uncomfortable enough to talk to us. Go over and talk to the B&Bs and campsites, ask around in town. Have a look at Tregaron too, while you’re there. Morgan, you can have a run up to Llangurig and any of the villages between here and there and do the same.’ Morgan Evans scowled at the prospect of another long and probably fruitless journey.
‘Go on, Sergeant,’ Swift said. ‘Give us the gruesome detail.’
‘Well, we do know that the victim is a young woman,’ Julie said.
‘No way.’ Rhys stared at the photograph on the board. ‘That can’t be right. So we’ll have to go and ask all the people we’ve already contacted about a missing man, and tell them that we’re actually looking for a missing woman then is it?’
