Dark Skies: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 7)

by LJ Ross

  “Drowning? But the reservoir didn’t exist in 1981,” Yates argued.

  “He didn’t drown in the water,” Pinter explained, and a trace of compassion entered his voice as he looked down at the wasted remains of what had once been a living, breathing person. “He would have drowned in his own blood.”

  There was a short silence as a mark of respect to the dead, then Phillips asked the next question.

  “Could it have been self-inflicted? Did he fall on a rock?”

  “Highly unlikely,” Pinter said decisively. “I would say the blow came from behind, in a downward motion from the right, judging by the angle of the wound. The force necessary to cause that degree of trauma wouldn’t have been caused by a simple fall, unless he fell from a great height. Then there’s the small matter of the gashes to his chest,” Pinter said, with a degree of smugness, as if he’d been saving that little coup de grâce.

  He pointed to four or five shallow wounds dotted around the boy’s torso.

  “These injuries resemble what I’d expect to see from a knife, probably a small-to-medium blade of around three or four inches.”

  “Like a penknife?” Yates suggested.

  “Yes, or a small chopping knife, something smooth with a sharp point rather than serrated.”

  “I might have passed off the head injury as an accident but I’m betting he didn’t stab himself in the chest several times for good measure,” Phillips declared, matter-of-factly. “What I don’t understand is, how did he get into this state? How did he stay down there for so long without decomposing?”

  “This level of natural preservation only happens in very specific conditions,” Millington explained. “It’s a natural phenomenon of bodies encased in peat because of its unique biochemical composition; the water content is highly acidic, the temperatures are usually low and there’s a lack of oxygen which combines to preserve the skin—but it’s tanned to a deep brown colour, as you can see.”

  “How about his bones and internal organs?” Yates wondered.

  Millington gave a slight shake of her head.

  “That really depends on the type of bog. In this case, most of the bones haven’t survived because the acid content in the peat has dissolved the calcium phosphate, whereas his internal organs have survived remarkably well, along with the skin. Patches of land and sub-strata around Kielder are rife with sphagnum moss, which plays a major role in creating the right pH levels in the peat.”

  “It’s like vinegar,” Pinter said, bluntly. “Bog acid has a similar pH level, so it preserves the skin and soft tissue just like pickled vegetables.”

  Phillips pulled a face.

  “Howay, man, Jeff. I just had my lunch.”

  “Sorry, just trying to help…”

  “Aye, that’s what you always say,” Phillips complained, thinking of the pickled gherkin he’d enjoyed on a bacon cheeseburger at lunchtime. “How about bacteria? Wouldn’t it get into the peat and decay the body?”

  Again, Millington shook her head.

  “That’s what makes the peat conditions so unique. They’re almost completely anaerobic. Research has shown that if a body is conserved during the coldest months, that works even better.”

  “What about this lad?” Phillips cast his eye over the boy again. “What time of year would you say he was buried?”

  “Given the fact he had injuries that would attract scavengers, it’s more likely to have been a cold month,” Millington postulated. “Anything warmer and he wouldn’t have been so well kept.”

  “Which means early or later part of 1981, if we assume the bus pass is an accurate indicator,” Yates concluded. “Couldn’t have been later, because they started filling the new reservoir after then and the whole area was closed to the public.”

  Phillips nodded, thinking through the next steps.

  “Must have been buried pretty deep all these years,” he mused. “Otherwise, the water from the lake would have let in pockets of air.”

  “Yes, I’d agree with that,” Millington said. “It’s likely that the natural ebb and flow of the water gradually dislodged the layers of peat and stone, causing his body to rise.”

  “This is going to be big news when the press find out,” Pinter thought aloud.

  “Let’s keep it under our hats for now,” Phillips said briskly, and gave the two clinicians a warning look. “He must have been reported missing back in ’81 and whoever’s responsible for cracking his head was probably hoping that Nature would do the rest. When the reservoir filled, they must’ve thought they were in the clear.”

  “They were wrong,” Yates said, and the light of battle shone in her eyes.

  “Aye,” Phillips murmured, and surprised everybody—including himself—by stepping closer to the boy's body, where he looked down at the remains with a kind of tenderness. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll make sure you find your way home.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “Bloody buggering hell!”

  DI MacKenzie stared at the list of supposedly ‘urgent’ cold case files on her computer screen and swore viciously.

  “Ma’am?”

  A timid-looking detective constable occupying the cubicle next to hers popped his head over the parapet and gave her a worried look.

  “Is everything alright?”

  She ran frustrated hands through her mane of red hair and then held them up, palms outward, to signal the coast was now clear.

  But when he ducked down again, she looked back at the list and recognised some of the names from her years in CID. The memory of those cases and the long months spent tracking a killer, or a rapist, brought the same depressing sense of failure and loss that every detective experienced when they’d been unable to solve a crime. When she was working on active cases, it helped to overcome that lingering feeling of disappointment and, she admitted, it was easy to forget the faces of those they had been unable to help.

  MacKenzie clicked open the first one on the list.

  Hannah Adams.

  The image of a young woman of around twenty with a pretty, smiling face popped onto the computer screen. She’d gone missing back in 2010 and her body had been found in a shallow grave not long afterwards, bearing marks of sexual abuse. MacKenzie remembered how the department had rallied to find her killer; how they’d searched, analysed, questioned and finally, desperately, begged the public to help them, but all to no avail.

  Hannah wasn’t the only one.

  Northumbria CID had a strong track record, one they could be proud of, but that didn’t mean they were infallible. Some cases slipped through the net, ones where a perpetrator was either smart enough or lucky enough not to get caught, or where CID hadn’t been equipped with the resources to find them.

  MacKenzie scanned witness statements and case summaries, supporting documents and forensic evidence. The worst of it was, they had DNA on file that probably belonged to Hannah’s killer but no match to any existing offender on the national database. Nearly sixty-six million people lived in the United Kingdom last time she’d checked, three million of whom were permanently based in the North East. Not great odds for catching a killer without a stroke of luck, and that didn’t count the possibility of transients, or tourists.

  She drummed her fingers against the desktop and then brought up the landing page for the police DNA database, the National DNA Database and European Nucleotide Archive, thinking it wouldn’t hurt to run another check just in case things had changed. There were automatic alerts in place that constantly checked old evidence samples against new DNA listings, but some instinct led her to key in the manual check.

  But a few moments later, her computer gave a jingling alert.

  No match.

  With a heavy sigh, MacKenzie glanced again at Hannah’s smiling face and then moved on to the next.

  * * *

  As night fell and washed the sky in shades of deep midnight blue, Anna stayed up for a while chatting over the events of the day with her postgraduate students. However, when th
e discussion moved away from local history and turned to important questions of the age such as which act had performed better on The X-Factor, she realised she was out of her depth and decided to give up the pretence. She said goodnight to the small group of twenty-somethings and left them to chew the fat over bottles of cheap beer with the sure and certain knowledge they would be skinny-dipping in the Swedish-style hot tubs that came with every lodge the moment she left.

  Anna smiled as they called out inebriated farewells and promised her they would be up bright and early to explore the next historical landmark on their itinerary the following morning. With a chuckle, she stepped onto the narrow asphalt road leading to her own lodge a couple of doors down.

  Then she simply stared.

  It was incredible.

  Stars covered the night sky in a swathe of diamonds, winking in the heavens above where Anna stood, enraptured. The temperature had dropped and the air was icy cold but she lingered because, at times like these, she understood why people believed that an omnipotent being had created such splendour. She stood there with her neck craned upward and watched a shooting star blaze a trail across the sky, burning through the atmosphere in one final, beautiful act of defiance.

  When the cold penetrated through the layers of her clothing, Anna turned away and crunched across the gravel, following a line of solar-powered lights in the direction of her lodge.

  Then she came to a complete halt.

  She didn’t know what had alerted her to the presence of another, but the extreme darkness of the surrounding trees heightened her senses and magnified every whisper of wind through the leaves, every creak and moan.

  Her body went on full alert.

  Fear crawled across her skin and she began to shiver. During the day, the area had seemed so full of people wandering back and forth towards the visitor’s complex. Now, the place was deserted but for the odd yellow light shining at intervals along the roadside from the row of lodges.

  Her breath came out in short gusts as she geared herself up to run.

  Now, her mind whispered. Do it now!

  She could scream. The area was so quiet, her voice would sound like a banshee and people would hear.

  If she just turned and ran…

  “Anna?”

  The scream welled up and died in her throat when a tall, dark figure materialised on the shadowy road ahead.

  “Ryan? For goodness’ sake, do you have to creep about like that? You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  But she smiled and hurried along the road to meet him.

  “I didn’t know you were coming to stay,” she said. “I wouldn’t have spent so long with the others if I’d known you were waiting around.”

  Ryan tugged her against him in a hard embrace, wrapping his arms around her slim body.

  “Hey,” her voice was muffled against his coat. “Is everything alright?”

  Ryan rubbed his chin across the top of her head.

  “Let’s go inside,” he suggested. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  * * *

  A short while later, they were seated side by side on the leather sofa in front of a hearty log-burner which crackled in the living room of Anna’s holiday lodge.

  “I wish you’d told me,” Ryan said again, and she rested her head against his shoulder.

  “You might have felt compelled to report it. I don’t care for my own sake but I didn’t want your reputation to be damaged. Not after everything we’d already been through.”

  He nodded, understanding the choice she had made.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she added softly.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to thank you properly for what you did.”

  Anna gave him a startled look.

  “What? You don’t need to thank me—”

  “Oh, yes, I do. Discharging a weapon is upsetting at the best of times, on a licensed gun range and with specialist firearms training. Discharging a revolver that isn’t your own, to save the person you love whilst running the risk of killing someone? I can’t imagine what that must have cost you.”

  Anna looked down at their hands, linked together in her lap.

  “Yes, you can,” she said softly. “You did the same thing for me, not so long ago.”

  His fingers tightened and Anna plucked up the courage to ask something she hadn’t dared ask before.

  “Ryan, was I the one who killed him? The Hacker?”

  He hugged her close to his body, thinking of how she must have been wondering and worrying these past months.

  “No, you didn’t. The inquest found no evidence of a gunshot wound and if you’d hit him squarely, there would have been. You might have skimmed his shoulder,” he admitted. “But his skin was so badly torn from the fall, the post-mortem was inconclusive. One thing was certain: it was the fall from High Force waterfall that killed him, not you.”

  “Oh,” she said, feeling both relieved and oddly disappointed. “Turns out I’m not as much of a crack shot as I thought.”

  Ryan huffed out a laugh and turned to face her.

  “Did anybody ever tell you, you’re a force to be reckoned with?”

  In that moment, he forgot about his troubles with Lucas and the worries awaiting him at work the next day and thought only of the woman sitting beside him with dark eyes that shone in the firelight.

  “You never told me these places come with hot tubs,” he said.

  “I thought a southern boy like you would find it far too cold for your constitution.”

  “How about we go skinny-dipping and you can be the judge?”

  She waited a beat.

  “You’re on.”

  * * *

  Sleep would not come.

  The long hours of the night crawled by and the tick-tock of the chamber clock fell like a death knell on the mantelpiece. Shadows passed across the walls of the bedroom, seeming to morph into the shape of a person.

  Not just any person.

  As the first light of dawn began to shine through the windowpanes, the shadows formed the shape of a boy who was not yet a man, his gangly limbs trailing closer and closer to the person lying huddled on the bed in the foetal position.

  “No, no, no.”

  It was not possible.

  It was not possible.

  It was only a nightmare.

  But ever since the police found his body, Duncan’s face had begun to appear; blurred, snatched glimpses in a windowpane or in the mirror, before he disappeared again like the rippling water where he’d lain.

  Why now?

  Why had he waited so long to rise again and destroy everything that had been built, so carefully, for thirty-three years?

  A new day dawned, casting blazing rays of ochre light across the room. But the shadows lingered, clinging to the person who lay shaking and sweating against the bedclothes while sanity slipped slowly away.

  CHAPTER 9

  Saturday, 1st October

  Guy Sullivan was still drunk.

  It was the only possible explanation for why he was up at the crack of dawn, taking a bracing walk through the trees without a map or any clue where he was going. Unable to sleep, he had taken the executive decision to seek out a pharmacist or a 24-7 supermarket that could dispense Alka-Seltzer, ibuprofen or some other magical drug that could make hangovers disappear. However, as he continued his pilgrimage through the trees, he realised he had failed to consider three very important things.

  Firstly, the need for appropriate footwear. In his drunken state, he had donned canvas shoes rather than water-resistant walking boots and his feet were now soaking wet.

  Secondly, the nearest pharmacy or supermarket was at least five miles away, in any direction.

  Thirdly—and most mortifying of all—there was a gift shop less than fifty yards from their lodge which sold a small selection of essentials including things like headache and indigestion tablets, so he could have just waited in the cosy lodge until it opened.

  Now, disg
runtled and humiliated, Guy continued to wind his way through the trees, brushing past low-lying branches of towering Sitka spruce until he stumbled upon the worn track of a public bridleway.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” he murmured.

  The air was heavy and claustrophobic as the pathway meandered through overgrown thickets, further and further away from civilisation. He could hear the tinkling sound of water somewhere nearby and wrongly assumed it was the reservoir, so he continued walking in the wrong direction. Having failed to consult a map, Guy was blissfully unaware of his predicament as he continued to forge ahead with a combination of youthful complacency and desperation brought on by an excess of cheap plonk.

  Why, oh, why hadn’t he gone to bed?

  Of course, he knew the reason, and her name was Isabella. Gorgeous, half-Italian and specialising in pre-Christian religious history, she was a constant distraction and he’d stayed up half the night hanging on every dulcet word she’d said.

  And where had it got him?

  Nowhere.

  Guy raked an impatient hand through his floppy fringe of blonde hair and tried to gauge his position. He couldn’t see the reservoir and there were no sounds of life other than the low drone of insects buzzing in the undergrowth and his own feet squelching in their sodden insoles.

  “Shit,” he muttered, feeling suddenly afraid. There were no signs or markings and he wouldn’t have the first clue about how to ‘read the land’ or whatever the hell they called it.

  He pulled out his mobile phone and tried again to find a GPS signal, but the entire area was a black hole and the battery was running dangerously low.

  Guy turned a full circle and then looked up at the sky, screwing his eyes up against the sun.

  Was that east or west?

  Panic was starting to bubble on the edges of his mind when he heard a rustle on the bridleway ahead. His young face broke into a wide grin as he turned to see who had come to save him.

  * * *

  “Duncan?”

  He was standing further along the bridleway smiling in that silly, puppyish way he always did. He was even wearing the same stonewash Levi’s and his blonde hair was still too long, flopping into his eyes.