A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2)

by Mark Dawson

  “I have no idea what that means,” Atticus said.

  Joseph reached down to his waistband and pulled out the pistol. “It’s all right—I’ll show you.”

  “Okay,” Atticus said, his hands held up, palms forward. “There’s no need for that. I said I was sorry.”

  “I’ll give you a chance to make up for that.” He stood up and pointed the piece down at Atticus’s legs. He aimed at his right knee, then at his left. “Which one? You decide. Which leg you want to limp on?”

  Atticus tried to get out of the chair, but the two men behind him held him down.

  The intercom on the mantelpiece squelched, followed by an anxious voice. “Yanko? You there, man?”

  Joseph waved a hand at the intercom. “Answer it.”

  Shayden went over to the mantelpiece, but, before he could reach it, the intercom squawked again. “Skate! It’s the feds!”

  Joseph cursed and hurried to the window. The basement was below the level of the pavement, but the blue-and-red strobe of police lights was visible against the trunk and naked boughs of the tree that stood in front of the house.

  “Shit,” he said. “He’s right.”

  The room was suddenly full of panic. That was bad. Poor decisions were made when people didn’t think clearly, and Atticus was still vulnerable.

  “Listen to me,” Atticus said. “You need to be clever.”

  “What?”

  “Do you have a way out at the back?”

  Joseph nodded. “Door into the garden.”

  “You need to go. Now.”

  “They’ll be waiting for us.”

  “No, they won’t. This isn’t a drugs bust.”

  “Course it is—feds are outside, man. Why else they be here?”

  “No, it isn’t. I was on the phone to a police officer when you came outside.”

  Joseph’s face twisted with anger. “I knew you were a fed.”

  “And I told you I’m not. It doesn’t matter. They’re here because they think I’m in trouble. I’d be very surprised if they’ve had time to stake out the back. If you go now, you’ll be able to get away.”

  Joseph stayed where he was.

  “You don’t strike me as being stupid,” Atticus continued. “They catch you with that gun and you know the minimum: five years, probably longer. You add in all that”—he swept his arm out to indicate the drugs on the bed—“and you’re looking at a long time to think about how you really ought to have listened to me.”

  They heard a banging against the ground-floor door above them.

  “Police! Open up. Open the door!”

  Joseph turned to the others in the room. “Out the back,” he said. “Go through the gardens. No waiting—just go.”

  They had been waiting for his order to go and, now that he had given it, they turned and fled. Joseph turned back to Atticus and pressed the gun up against his forehead. He leaned in, close enough for Atticus to smell the sweat and the tang of the dope he had been smoking.

  “Lucky,” he said. “You put your nose in my business again and I swear to God you gonna get strapped.”

  Atticus clenched, waiting for Joseph to underline his point, but he followed his younger brother out of the door and toward the rear of the flat.

  25

  Atticus heard more knocking on the ground-floor door. He got up and exhaled, allowing himself to relax. It had been awkward for a moment, to say the least; Joseph was clearly unpredictable, and Atticus knew that things might very easily have gone a different way without Jessica’s intervention. He assumed that she had called for backup and that there had been a patrol car in the area. If she had not, or if the officers had been delayed… Well, he concluded, that was something that didn’t really bear thinking about.

  He remembered what James York had said about Molly leaving her bag inside the house. He had said that it was down here, in the basement flat, and he saw a bag in the corner nearest to his chair. He went over and took it. The zip was open and, as he opened it enough to look inside, he saw a phone in a bright pink case. He tapped the screen and a picture of Molly astride a horse appeared as the wallpaper. He dropped the phone back into the bag, zipped it closed and went to the basement door. He opened it and stepped out, the blue and white of the police strobe washing over him.

  He tucked the bag under his arm and made sure that his hands were visible. “Down here,” he called out.

  The head and shoulders of a male police officer leaned out over the wall. “Come up here, please, sir.”

  Atticus climbed the steps. There were two police cars parked up against the kerb, their lights flashing. A small group of locals had gathered on the other side of the street, gawping at the spectacle. There were three officers on the steps outside the front door, with another standing on the street.

  The officer who had called down to Atticus met him at the top of the steps.

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Atticus Priest.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “Mr. Priest, we heard you were in trouble. That right?”

  “It is,” he said.

  The officer introduced himself as DC Hutchings. Atticus explained what had happened: how he had located Molly York, reunited her with her father, and then been accosted by her boyfriend and his older brother.

  Hutchings scratched his chin. “Is anyone still inside?”

  “The ones in the basement went out the back. I’m not sure about the rest of the property.”

  “They’re selling drugs inside?”

  Atticus nodded. “The stash is in the basement. They send it up the chimney and sell it on the ground floor.”

  Hutchings nodded his satisfaction. “We’ve had half an eye on the place for the last few days—you’ve given us grounds to go in and have a look around. The lads from the drugs squad are on the way.”

  The officer called down to the man by the cars and told him to go around the block and secure the property from that direction. Atticus opened the gate and leaned against the trunk of the tree as a car pulled up behind the squad cars, and Jessica stepped out.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  “Thanks to you.”

  “I called the cavalry.”

  “And I’m very pleased that you did.”

  “Where’s Shayden?”

  “With his brother. They went out the back.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  Jessica was about to reply when they both heard the sound of a phone.

  “Nice ringtone,” Jessica said with a smile.

  Atticus wasn’t up on modern music enough to be able to identify the tune. “What is it?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “My tastes lie somewhere in the seventies,” he said as he unzipped Molly’s bag and reached inside for her phone.

  “It’s The Weeknd. ‘Blinding Lights.’”

  “Popular with the kids?” he said, only half-joking. He reached into the bag and took out the phone in its pink case. “Thankfully, this belongs to my client’s daughter. She left her bag behind.”

  “If you say so,” Jessica said.

  Atticus looked at the screen and saw that the call was from Shayden. He held up the screen so that Jessica could see it. She indicated that she wanted to speak to him, so Atticus slid his finger across the screen to answer the call and then handed it across.

  “Shayden?” she said. “It’s Detective Constable Jessica Edwards. Please don’t put the phone down—your mother is worried about you.” She paused, perhaps waiting for a response, then frowned. “Shayden? Are you still there? Hello?”

  She lowered the phone.

  “He’ll turn up,” Atticus said.

  “Once he’s been arrested—and that’ll be the end of whatever chance he had of doing something with his life. It’s stupid—the whole thing. Just such a waste of potential.” Jessica handed the phone back to him. “Where’s your misper now?”

  “With her father. He’s driving her home.”

 
A police van arrived, parking in the middle of the street and blocking it as it disgorged the officers inside. There were six large men, all dressed in stab vests and wearing helmets and face masks. The final pair brought out a metal battering ram and hefted it across the pavement and up the steps. Atticus and Jessica watched as the officers held the ram in place, drew it back and then crashed it against the door. The lock was torn out of the jamb, and the door flew backwards, and the other four officers stormed inside.

  “They’ll want to take a statement from me,” he said. “I’ll miss the last train.”

  “I could put you up if you like. I’ve got a spare room.”

  “You sure?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s kind of you.”

  Part III

  Wednesday

  26

  Mack woke with a mouth that was sticky with sleep and a pounding headache. She lay still until she realised that it was the buzzing of the phone on the bedside table next to her that had woken her. She reached out and fumbled for it, knocking over a half-finished glass of wine and spilling loose change over the edge. She found the phone, wiped off the wine against the sheet, and put it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Allan Fyfe. Did I wake you?”

  “No, no,” she said. “I was already awake.” She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and looked at the clock radio that sat on the table on the other side of the bed. It was six.

  “I know it’s early, Mack. I waited as long as I could. You need to come and see me.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve finished my examination of the bones we took out of the graveyard. We’ve found something—things aren’t quite as straightforward as we thought.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’d really rather you came here so I could show you.”

  Mack slumped back into the pillow. “Is it important?”

  “It is, Mack. Sorry.”

  “Give me half an hour.”

  She ended the call, reached over to put the phone back on the table, missed, and dropped it onto the carpet. She closed her eyes. She had ordered room service last night and had polished off a bottle of wine. No, she corrected herself, two bottles of wine. She remembered calling down for the second. She had been miserable. Getting drunk had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now she was still miserable, and she felt sick.

  She bolstered herself against the throbbing in her head and, feeling like an old woman, sat up and swung her feet out of bed. She glanced around the room. The tray that her dinner had been served on was still on the table, but the metal cloche had fallen to the floor. The remains of the meal—a pasta bake of some description, she couldn’t recall exactly what—were smeared across the plate, and there was a bread roll and a streak of butter on the chair.

  Mack groaned, hobbled over to the table and cleared up the mess while the regrets of the previous night came back to her. She remembered the conversation with Andy. He was still so angry with her, and the separation hadn’t helped him find his way to forgiveness. She didn’t blame him for how he felt about what had happened with Atticus, but that was more than a year ago now, and she had apologised. She had done everything that she could think of to demonstrate that she considered the affair a mistake, that it hadn’t happened again and that, as far as she was concerned, it never would. But it wasn’t enough for him. He had never explicitly told her that they had no future, but his behaviour had made it obvious that he didn’t consider them to be a couple any longer, and that, as far as he was concerned, there was no chance of reconciliation.

  He had made that abundantly clear last night.

  She looked at the two wine bottles with disgust. She had the kids to think about now. She couldn’t afford to drink away the self-pity. She was just going to have to deal with it, to make the best of a bad situation, if only for their benefit. She dumped the bottles into the bin and went into the bathroom to clean herself up for the day. She had always thrown herself into her work whenever she needed a distraction from the mundanities of real life, and, today of all days, at least she had Fyfe’s news to uncover.

  27

  Mack drove over to the hospital and parked. It was still early, just after six thirty, but the wide space was already beginning to fill as staff arrived and made their way inside to start their days.

  The remains that had been disturbed at the churchyard in Imber had been transported to the pathology department for examination. Fyfe’s office was situated behind the mortuary, and, as usual, Mack felt a little shiver as she followed the signs to the nondescript rooms in the basement of the hospital. The forensic suite and mortuary were next to the two large furnaces that tended to the steady flow of medical detritus that needed to be destroyed: soiled bed linen and dressings joined organic waste, all of it poured down the chutes into the fiery innards of the incinerators. The units vented into the twin smokestacks that reached up into the dirty grey of the morning, creating trails of white smoke that were quickly dispersed by the wind. The chimneys and the cathedral spire were both visible for miles around; Mack had always found it grimly appropriate that they should dominate the city’s skyline, markers of death in their own ways.

  She made her way along an austere corridor, passing the morgue and the hospital’s dead. She had seen her fair share of bodies in the course of her employment, but there was still something macabre about the thought of the corpses waiting to be examined or passed on to the funeral directors for disposal.

  She made her way to the two post-mortem suites and held her finger against the doorbell. The lock buzzed and she stepped inside. Fyfe was waiting in the reception area that served the two suites. He was wearing his lab coat, nitrile gloves and a hair net.

  “DCI Jones,” he said, “thank you for coming.”

  “What do you have?”

  “I’ll show you.” He pointed to a box of disposable plastic gowns. “You’ll need to put one of those on. Gloves and hairnet, too.”

  “Why? Has something changed?”

  “Best if I tell you inside.”

  Mack put on the protective gear and followed Fyfe into the examination room. There was another person waiting for them. She was similarly attired and, although it was difficult to be sure behind the protective gear that she was wearing, Mack guessed that she was in her late middle age.

  “This is Detective Chief Inspector Mackenzie Jones,” Fyfe said to the woman. “Mack, this is Dr. Julie Williams.”

  Mack nodded. “And you are?”

  “A forensic odontologist.”

  “What we’re going to look at is a little beyond my expertise,” Fyfe said, “so I brought Julie in to help.”

  Mack smiled to conceal her growing impatience. Fyfe had a habit of drawing out his big reveals for dramatic impact, but Mack had no time for that this morning. She was tired, she had a hangover, and she wanted to get on with the work that needed to be done. “What are we going to look at? Can we get to the point?”

  “Of course.”

  The bones that had been exhumed from the churchyard were laid out on a stainless-steel examination table. The table had a groove in the centre that led to a drain at one end; Mack knew exactly what purpose the groove served and tried to put it out of her mind. Fyfe gestured to the skeleton. The bones had been cleaned and were an alabaster white, much brighter than had been the case when Mack had seen them before. The skeleton had been reassembled as much as possible, and, now that it was together, Mack could see that it was perhaps five feet five from top to bottom. She was far from an expert, but she could see that not all of the bones were present.

  “You’re missing some,” she said.

  “We are,” Fyfe said. “Six bones, to be precise. Two ribs, the sacrum and three phalanges from the right foot.”

  “Scavenged?”

  “That does seem to be the most likely answer. I’m confident that the gnawing on the first bone that you found on the Plain
was from a fox. The distance between the markings that were scratched onto the surface of the bones matches what we would expect to see from an adult fox. I’m confirming it with a zoologist I know, but I wouldn’t expect that conclusion to change.”

  “And the missing bones?” Mack said.

  “The phalanges are small. The rib, too. They would have been easy enough to move. The sacrum is a little larger and more substantial, but if I were a betting man, I’d say it’s been taken underground to a burrow.”

  Fyfe went over to a tablet computer that was fixed on a stand on the desk next to the table and woke the screen. “Let’s start with what we have been able to establish. The bone you found on the Plain definitely matches the skeleton in the graveyard. I could have guessed that from the fact that the skeleton was missing her femur, but I decided to be sure and ran a DNA test. Bone is the best source of DNA from human remains—we can take samples from demineralised bones even after the flesh has decomposed. I took two samples—one from the leg and the other from an arm—and compared them. It was a match.”

  “You said ‘her’? She’s female?”

  Fyfe nodded. “We’re calling her Amy for ease of reference. I estimate mid-teens when she died.”

  “Good,” Mack said. “That’s progress.”

  “‘When she died,’” Fyfe said, repeating himself. “Of course, that’s the key question. I understand that there was no headstone near the body?”

  “No. But that’s not surprising. There are only ten headstones in the churchyard, but records show more than a hundred bodies buried there.”

  “We don’t need a gravestone to tell us when she died. Julie?”

  The doctor indicated that Mack should follow her to a smaller stainless-steel table at the side of the room. There was a metal object in a clear plastic forensic evidence bag. Mack bent over it so that she could look more closely. One end of the object was threaded, like a screw, narrowing to a point.