by Peter Boland
“Okay,” he said. “Shall we walk on, find the place where Dave’s body fell out of the tree?”
Tannaz nodded again. He could see she wasn’t enjoying this. She was holding onto her phone for dear life, never taking her eyes off it; her link to the virtual world more comforting than the real one.
They followed the gravel road, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz through the haunted forest. The darkness of the trees folded in around them, the stillness unnerving. The further they walked, the more the gravel road shrank until eventually it was little more than a desire line.
Up ahead Savage spotted a giant pine lying on its side, like a beached whale. Just like the tree where Luke had been found, metal stakes encircled it. However, the caution tape that had hung between each one had gone.
In this lonely part of the forest, they were surprised by the sound of footsteps. Tannaz and Savage weren’t the only ones interested in the tree. They had company.
Chapter 11
A young couple about the same age as Tannaz were wandering around the fallen tree, heavy-duty cameras slung around their necks. The guy was as bald as a billiard ball and wore a long army-surplus trench coat and large circular glasses with thick black rims. The girl had a leather biker jacket, similar to Tannaz’s and biker boots. In the dim light Savage could see purple dreadlocks hanging down her back.
Savage leant over and said quietly to Tannaz, “I bet they like the same movies you do.”
Tannaz elbowed him in the ribs.
As they got closer, the couple didn’t seem startled to hear two people approaching them. They turned and smiled, almost happy to have company.
“This is a cool place, huh,” said the guy.
“If you like that sort of thing,” said Tannaz.
“We do,” said the girl. “There’s delicious dark magic here. You can feel it.” She shivered with delight.
“Hey,” said the guy. “Did you see the other tree on your way here where the son was found hanging?”
“Yes,” said Savage. “It’s hard to miss.”
“Do you know why it’s called Dead Maids?” the girl asked keenly.
“No idea,” said Savage.
“Well, there are two versions,” she replied, relishing the thought of enlightening them. “The first is deliciously romantic. There is a legend of a highwayman around here. He had two lovers at the same time, and these women would hide him when the authorities came looking. Each woman did not know the other one existed. Both of them thought he was their one true love. They had no idea he was cheating on them. Anyway, the authorities never caught the highwayman, but they did catch the two women who harboured him. The first time they laid eyes on each other was when they met on the gallows, when they were hanged for giving refuge to a highwayman. Isn’t that the most delicious story you’ve ever heard?”
Savage was beginning to get irritated by the girl’s overuse of the word ‘delicious’. Maybe it was the new hip word.
“What’s the other version?” asked Tannaz.
“The realistic version is more macabre,” the guy said.
“Really?” said Savage. “I thought that story was pretty macabre.”
“Well, get this,” the guy continued. “Apparently, in the middle ages, when families were so poor that they couldn’t feed themselves, they had to make hard choices to survive. Sometimes, they would lead the oldest member of their family, usually an unmarried aunt—an old maid—deep into the forest, so deep that she couldn’t find her way out and would eventually die. One less mouth to feed. This part of the forest is where they’d lead them. Hence the name, Dead Maids.”
The girl couldn’t contain her excitement and shook with glee. “Isn’t it the most deliciously wonderful place for a suicide. Can you feel the energy here? The beauty of decay all around us. It’s a deeply spiritual place. Like Aokigahara in Japan.”
“What’s that?” asked Savage.
“The Sea of Trees,” Tannaz answered.
“That’s right,” the guy said. “It’s this amazing forest near Mount Fuji where people go to commit suicide. The forest is so dense, sometimes the bodies aren’t discovered for months. Dead Maids is like a smaller version.”
“We’re planning to go there next year,” the girl added.
Savage should have felt angry at these two. Yes, they were annoying, and some people just had a morbid curiosity; hanging around in graveyards and being close to death. But this couple were naïve about what it really meant, no better than children playing with toys. They had probably never experienced death for themselves which is why they were beguiled by it. Savage, on the other hand, had seen enough death to last him several lifetimes. For him there was no beauty to it. It was ugly and brutal and vile and it smelt rank. It meant separation from the ones you loved. It meant pain and loss and guilt. Day in, day out.
While their enthusiasm didn’t bother Savage, the same could not be said for Tannaz. Savage could feel the rage radiating off her, that temper of hers brewing like boiling acid. He grasped her hand and gave it a squeeze, as if to say, take it easy. She snatched it away.
“Actually,” Tannaz said. “We’re here because we knew one of the guys who died here. He was a friend of ours. A real nice, quiet guy. And although I didn’t know him for very long, it’s still very raw. We came here to pay our respects and we find you two creeps treating it like a theme park for goths. Shame on you. Luke was a real person. He had a life. His death isn’t here for your amusement.”
The two looked at the ground, heads bowed, humbled. “We’re very sorry, we didn’t know he was your friend,” the girl added.
“We wouldn’t have said those things, truly we’re sorry,” the guy added. They both went silent. Eventually the guy said, “Do you have a picture of him?”
“What?” said Tannaz.
“Could you send us one?” the girl asked. “We’d love to see what he looked like.”
Savage anticipated the punch that Tannaz was about to throw and grabbed her arm before she could launch it into the girl’s face.
“Get off me,” Tannaz snarled. “You two are sick. If you like death so much, why don’t you do everyone a favour and have a go yourselves. Two less assholes on the planet.”
As Tannaz struggled against Savage, the couple stood staring at her curiously and without fear, as if she were a creature in the zoo. They both raised their cameras and started snapping off photos of her twisted angry face. Up to that point, Savage had regarded the pair as harmless idiots with a thing for gruesome details, but they had stepped over the line.
He chanced letting go of Tannaz, leaped forward and snatched the camera from the girl’s hands. Quickly fiddling with it, he released the memory card from a slot in the casing.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” the girl said.
“Think I just have,” Savage replied.
“I need the pictures. It’s very important.”
“Not anymore,” Savage replied. He pushed the memory card into a pocket of his jeans and then handed her back the camera. Then he held out his hand to the guy, who had sensibly stopped snapping pictures. “You, Le Corbusier.”
“Who’s Le Corbusier?”
“Swiss architect. Invented ugly concrete buildings. Wore stupid glasses like yours. Memory card. Now.”
“Please, I can’t,” the guy said. “I’ll delete the pictures of your friend. We both will. But we need the rest of the pictures for our work.”
The girl nodded rapidly. “That’s right.”
“Not good enough,” Savage replied. “I want the memory card.”
“And what if I don’t,” the guy replied.
“Believe me,” said Tannaz. “You really don’t want to go there.”
The guy’s shoulders dropped and he slowly pulled the small plastic memory card from his camera and passed it to Savage, who took it and p
ushed it into his back pocket. “Now, get lost,” he said to them.
The pair looked at each other, resigned expressions on their faces. They sloped off, back along the path in the direction of the car park grumbling. “We’ll have to start all over again,” Savage heard one of them say.
“Sorry,” said Tannaz. “Lost my temper.”
“And you were quite right to,” Savage replied. “Suicide is not a spectator sport.”
For the next half hour, the pair of them scoured the fallen tree for anything out of the ordinary.
“Hey,” said Tannaz. “There’s a yellow X painted on the trunk.”
“That’s what lumberjacks use to identify which tree needs cutting down, so they don’t accidentally fell the wrong one.”
“Oh. Thought it might be a clue. X marks the spot.”
“X never marks the spot, as Indiana Jones would say.”
“Would you stop quoting movies at me, it’s getting annoying.”
“Sorry.”
They continued searching. Savage pushed branches aside. They were so dense he needed to have brought a machete or even a chainsaw to cut them back. In the cold air, Savage found himself becoming sticky with sweat, dead pine needles clinging to him like little magnets.
“What are you looking for?” asked Tannaz.
“Well, assuming that Dave didn’t kill himself, someone, actually more than one person, would have had to lift his body high into this tree, which is no mean feat. Dead bodies are heavy and unwieldy. They’d need pulleys or a winch, at least some climbing rope. Whatever they used would’ve left a mark.”
Savage continued sifting through the dense network of branches but the task was pointless. A fruitless fool’s errand. Many of the tree’s limbs had been battered and splintered by the fall or had been crushed and then had buckled, trapped beneath the hulking trunk. Any marks left by potential killers would have been camouflaged by the damage caused by the fall.
Eventually, he satisfied himself that there was nothing to see. He joined Tannaz who sat on a stump smoking a cigarette, using a damp leaf as an ashtray. “Don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I’m taking the ash back with me and the butt too.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Shall we head back?”
“If you think you’re done.”
“Yep, there’s nothing else I need to see.”
Tannaz stood up, ground out her cigarette on the leaf, scrunched it up and put it in her jacket pocket. The pair of them began the long walk back to the van.
“Well, that didn’t tell us much,” said Tannaz.
“On the contrary, it told us a great deal.”
Chapter 12
Tannaz kept looking at Savage, eagerly waiting for his insight like a salivating dog. He seemed to be concentrating hard, his brain filtering and compartmentalising data, like a program waiting to load.
“So,” said Tannaz. “What does it tell us? Don’t keep a girl waiting.”
“Sorry, just going over stuff, making sure my logic is sound.” Savage bent down and picked up a fallen branch and started using it like a walking stick. “Okay, here we go. Now this is based on a lot of assumptions…”
“Just tell me, already.”
“Our first reaction when we heard Luke was dead was that he didn’t seem suicidal.”
“Yes.”
“Trouble is, people who often commit suicide put on a happy face to the world. Having considered suicide myself, and getting as far as putting a gun to my head and nearly pulling the trigger, I know this from first-hand experience.”
Tannaz shunted Savage to a stop with both hands. “Promise if you ever feel like doing that again you call me, okay?”
“Okay, I promise.”
Tannaz let go and the pair continued walking.
“Where was I?” Savage asked.
“People who commit suicide often put on a brave face.”
“Yes,” said Savage finally regaining his thread. “Maybe Luke was severely unhappy, and wanted to join his dad in heaven or whatever.”
“But we definitely know he wasn’t close to his dad.”
“True. Let’s say the note found on his body was correct. Maybe he also had depression, wanted to end it all, and he hid it from us very well. And he had a strong desire to join his father in the next world.”
“Okay.”
“If that assumption was true, why would he come all this way, and then hang himself on the first suitable tree near the car park? Surely he’d make the trek to where his dad died and carry out his final act there, so he could slip into oblivion close to where his dad departed. Or somewhere inconspicuous.”
“That makes sense.”
“Luke was shy, like his dad. He wouldn’t want his dead body on show, just a stone’s throw away from a public car park.”
Tannaz nodded, lighting up another cigarette. She took a deep drag and blew it out into the still air. “Yep, Luke wasn’t showy, he’d have tried to do it somewhere secluded, plus there was the risk of him being seen, being caught in the act. Unless he did it in the dead of night. I can’t imagine anyone’s here after dark.”
“I agree,” said Savage. “Now let’s come at this from a different angle. Let’s assume someone killed Luke and wanted to make it look like a suicide. That sounds easy but it isn’t. Firstly, Luke lived in London. So whoever did this had their work cut out. They’d have to snatch him in London and get him down here. That poses several problems. If they kidnap him and transport him here, they have to restrain him, gag him, tie him up. All of which leaves marks on the body, defensive wounds et cetera. Marks that would show up on a medical examiner’s report, pointing to the fact he struggled and therefore this was a murder made to look like a suicide. We know the police are convinced it’s a suicide, so they couldn’t have done that.”
“So what did they do?” Tannaz asked.
“Another alternative is to drug him, to make it easier to transport him down here. Again, drugs would show up in his system, pointing to a murder.”
“Okay so they didn’t do it that way. How else would they do it?”
“They kill him in London. Somehow hang him behind closed doors.”
Tannaz stopped, thought for a moment. “How would they do that? Lure him somewhere? That sounds hard. They’d have to avoid a struggle, marks on his body again.”
Savage halted, stabbed at the ground with his stick. “True. It’s tricky but not impossible,” said Savage. “Let’s just assume they did manage it. Now they have to transport a dead body down here.”
“Why’s that a problem?”
He held his stick vertically in the air. “They have to keep the body upright. If they lie the body down, say in the back of a van, all of Luke’s blood will drain to the lowest part of his body and stay there.” He turned the stick through ninety degrees, holding it horizontally, and ran his hand along the underside. “If they lie him on his back without a heartbeat to pump the blood around, gravity takes over and pulls all of his blood down, making it pool in his back. Like engine oil in the sump of a car. It’s called livor mortis.”
Tannaz shivered.
“Are you okay with all this?”
“Yep, I’m good, go on.”
“So if Luke’s body has livor mortis on the back, that’s going to sound alarm bells ringing in a medical examiner’s head. A body that’s been hanged has livor mortis in the arms and legs where gravity has pulled the blood down, not the back. Our medical guy would know Luke’s body’s been moved and has been hung after he’s dead.”
“So, how would the murderers get around that?”
“Again, tricky but not impossible. They transport Luke’s dead body upright. I dunno, wrap it in a carpet or blankets or bubble wrap to avoid marking the body. Then lash it to the inside panel of a van, one with extra head
height. They drive it to Dead Maids car park. Unload Luke’s body, still keeping it upright, and carry it through the gap beside the gate.”
“That sounds really hard.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head. It is hard. Like I said, dead bodies are heavy and unwieldy. Even with two or three guys, carrying a dead body is hard at the best of times. They’ve also got to keep it upright, making it even more difficult and they’ve got to get it through the narrow gap, without leaving a mark on it. Once that’s negotiated, they have to keep hauling the body upright, deep into the forest. Bloody difficult.”
“Sod that for a game of soldiers,” said Tannaz. “So they stop at the nearest, suitable tree and rehang Luke’s body.”
“Exactly.”
Tannaz and Savage both began walking again, increasing their speed with every step, spurred on by the logic of this new deduction.
“Or maybe none of that happened,” said Tannaz. “Maybe they just got him here at gun point, avoiding struggles and drugs. Sat him in the back of a car with a gun pointed at him. Drove him down here then hanged him.”
“True,” said Savage. “Why bring him all the way down here at gunpoint and then hang him within view of the car park, where there’s a chance someone would see them?”
“Presumably, they did this is in the dead of night, when no one’s around.”
“We don’t know the time of death, which is a bit of a handicap. Yes, you would think it was done in the dead of night, but it’s still a risk to do it by the car park, even at night. There’s a chance, not a big one, that someone might see them—a random car driving past. It’s a risk they don’t need to take. Surely anyone with half a brain would have pointed the gun and marched Luke deeper into the forest completely out of sight. Plus it looks more convincing.”
The pair went silent, nothing but the sound of their feet scrunching along the pathway back to the car park. “Or maybe,” Tannaz said. “Luke came here by himself intent on committing suicide near to his dad, twisted his ankle, couldn’t walk any further and hung himself on the nearest available tree.”
