by Kevin Brooks
‘I’m still looking …’
‘There’s a slight bend in the road just past it, and the entrance on the north side – the town side – is blocked by two big piles of earth.’
‘Yeah, I’ve got it now.’
‘What do you think? It’s got to be a pretty isolated spot, because if you’re coming from town the first entrance is blocked, and the other entrance, which I suppose is the exit really, that’s a really tight turn.’
‘Yeah, and if you’re coming the other way you’d have to cut across the road right after the bend, and you wouldn’t want to do that.’
‘Can you make out what’s in there?’
‘Well, like you said, it’s not really a lay-by, it’s just a lane … a pull-off area. I can’t see any buildings or anything. It looks like there’s a little stream running alongside it … maybe a ditch. It veers off to the right about halfway along and heads down a bank towards the railway tracks.’
‘I’m going to take a look.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, there’s something about it … I don’t know. It feels …’ Like a dead place, I was going to say. It feels like a dead place. Which it did. It felt rotten, decaying, empty, soulless … but, for some reason, I didn’t want to voice those feelings.
‘Listen, Cal,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder to check that the road was clear. ‘I’m just going to put the phone down for a minute, OK? I’ve got to make a U-turn and … well, you know what my driving’s like.’
‘OK.’
I put the phone on the passenger seat and glanced over my shoulder again. The road behind me was clear, but I had to wait for a lorry to rumble past from the opposite direction. Once it had gone, I put the car into gear and swung a tight U-turn so I was heading back in the direction I’d just come from, and then almost immediately I slowed down again to make the 180-degree left turn into the lay-by. It was just a narrow track at first, curving round to the right, before gradually straightening out into a slightly broader stretch of gravelled concrete. The night was almost fully dark now, and as I drove slowly towards the widest part of the lay-by, the beam of my headlights lit up the gloom in front of me. The lay-by itself was just a flat slab of emptiness, a pot-holed lane with a bulge in the middle. There were a few scraps of litter around – an empty KFC box, some burger wrappers, carrier bags hanging in trees – but none of it looked fresh. This wasn’t a well-used place. The surrounding trees and hedges seemed to lean in towards the lay-by, giving the whole place a tunnel-like sense of enclosure and isolation.
I parked the car and turned off the engine.
The silence was acute.
I sat there for a while, gazing around at the rapidly dimming surroundings, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and I tried to imagine what I’d be thinking if it was 2.30 in the morning and there was a dead body in my car. Would you get rid of it here? I asked myself. Would you feel safe getting rid of it here? And, if so, where exactly would you dump it?
I picked up my mobile.
‘Cal?’ I said.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yeah. I’m in the lay-by now. I’m just going to take a quick look round, OK?’
‘Keep your phone on.’
‘Yeah.’
I reached under the seat and pulled out a torch, checked it was working, turned it off again, then opened the door and stepped out. I’d already spotted the stream that Cal had mentioned – or, at least, I’d seen the top of a tree-lined clay bank that ran alongside the lay-by, stopping about halfway along, and I was pretty sure it was the bank of the stream that Cal had seen on Google Earth. As I crossed the lay-by, heading for the point where the bank dropped away, I could smell a growing sourness in the air – rotted leaves, waste, dead things. The stagnant odour of decay. There was a small gap between the end of the bank and a thick black tangle of hawthorn trees – just enough room for an adult man to squeeze through – and as I approached the gap, I turned on the torch. I’m not sure what I was expecting to see – footprints, maybe … a scrap of cloth caught on a branch – but, of course, there wasn’t anything there. If anything had happened here, it had happened a month ago – time enough for the wind and rain to remove all traces of evidence.
I moved closer to the gap, raising the torch to see if I could make out what was on the other side. I saw darkness, an empty space, the tops of trees. I edged into the gap, turning sideways to avoid the worst of the thorns, and slowly eased my way through. My feet kept slipping on the rain-moistened clay and I had to grab hold of a thickish branch to steady myself. I cautiously inched forward, sweeping the torchlight over the ground in front of me. To my left, it was all trees – a dense thicket of hawthorn – while away to my right I could see the stream, a shallow run of muddy brown water oozing along a dirty clay ditch. To my immediate right, where the bank fell away, there was a surprisingly sudden drop of about eight to ten feet, at the bottom of which was a boggy black pool. The stream trickled down into the pool, before oozing away again into a sparse patch of littered woodland. The pool had clearly been used as a dump over the years, and as I shone my torch down into the darkness, I could see all kinds of discarded waste down there: great lumps of concrete, dried-up sacks of cement, rolls of rusted wire mesh, sheets of corrugated iron, an old metal trough, iron poles and rusted chains and …
‘Shit,’ I heard myself whisper.
There was a face down there.
The remains of a face.
There wasn’t much left of it, and it was half covered by sodden strands of long black hair, but there was no doubt in my mind whose face it was.
Breathing slowly, I took the phone from my pocket and held it to my ear.
‘Cal?’ I said.
‘What’s happening, John?’
‘I’ve found her.’
‘What?’
‘Anna Gerrish … I’ve found her.’
16
She was lying on her back in the shallows of the pool, completely naked, her body draped limply over a large sack of rubble. Her bone-white skin was streaked with grainy black mud and silt. One arm was twisted back under her body, and both her legs were bent at unnatural angles. I guessed she’d been thrown down the bank, or just dropped, probably when she was already dead, and the fall had broken her legs. There were dark gashes all over her body, possibly stab wounds, and a larger opening in the right side of her abdomen. I focused the torch beam on her neck, looking for the half-moon necklace that her mother had told me she always wore, but there was nothing there.
‘John?’ Cal said. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yeah …’
‘Are you sure it’s her?’
‘As sure as I can be.’
‘Where is she?’
I told him.
‘And where are you?’ he said.
‘At the top of the bank, about ten feet above her.’
‘Stay there,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t go anywhere near her, OK?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you going to call the police?’
‘I have to.’
‘Bishop?’
‘No … I’ll just call 999. Bishop’s going to find out eventually, but I don’t want to have to deal with him straight away.’
‘All right, but we have to get our story straight first, before you call anyone –’
‘What story?’
‘Shit, John,’ he said. ‘Think about it … they’re going to want to know how you found her, aren’t they? And you can’t tell them what we’ve been doing all day, all this shit with the CCTV cameras –’
‘They won’t care about that.’
‘Maybe not, but if they start sniffing around me, which they would … well, I’d be fucked, John. Well and truly fucked.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘How about if I just tell them that I was following up on what Tasha told me? Bishop already knows that I talked to her, so if I just tell them what she told me about Anna getting picked up that night … all I’d hav
e to say then was that I followed up on that information by driving around looking for places where her body might have been dumped … what do you think?’
‘It’s not very believable.’
‘I know … but it’s pretty much what actually happened, isn’t it? Believable or not, it’s not too far from the truth. The only thing I’d be keeping from them is how we narrowed down the search area.’
‘Yeah, I suppose …’ Cal said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe you should keep the Nissan out of it too? Bishop’s going to be running the murder investigation, isn’t he? And if he has got some kind of link with the Nissan … well, maybe it’s just best to tell him as little as possible.’
‘Yeah, but I texted him the registration number, remember? He already knows that I know about the Nissan. Although …’
‘What?’
‘Well, there’s going to be a full-scale murder investigation, isn’t there? And, yeah, Bishop’s going to be in charge of it. But if he’s got something to hide, he won’t just have to hide it from me any more, he’ll have to keep it from everyone else who’s involved in the investigation.’
‘Yeah, everyone who’s not in his pocket.’
‘They’re not all bent, Cal.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Shit …’ he sighed. ‘This is a right fucking mess.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll call the police now, and when they get here I’ll tell them as much of the truth as I can without mentioning you, OK?’
‘And what about Bishop? What are you going to tell him?’
‘I don’t know … I’ll see what happens.’
‘That’s it? You’ll just “see what happens”?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s not much of a plan, John.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I said, ‘the best-laid schemes of mice and men …’
‘What?’
‘They gang aft agley.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I muttered, looking down at Anna’s pale body … naked, butchered, bled white …
Dead.
For ever …
‘John?’ Cal said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Not really …’
‘Do you want me to –?’
‘Listen, Cal. I’ll call you later, OK?’
‘I can come out there if you want.’
‘No … it’s OK. I’ll just … I’ll call you later.’
The first police car turned up about fifteen minutes later – two uniformed constables in a patrol car – but even as I was showing them where the body was, more vehicles began to arrive, and within about an hour or so the once-gloomy isolation of the lay-by had been transformed into a brightly lit hive of activity. A crime-scene tent had been erected, floodlights blazed, there were uniformed officers all over the place, CID detectives, scenes-of-crime officers, a doctor, pathologist, photographer … all of them bustling around, doing what they had to do, which included asking me lots of questions. By the time Mick Bishop finally arrived, I must have told my story at least three or four times already. But as Bishop got out of his Vectra and immediately began taking control of the scene, I knew that it was going to be the story I told him, and how I told it, that really mattered.
I was sitting in the back of a car with a female officer called DC Roberts when Bishop first arrived. Roberts was asking me some more questions – and also, I think, just keeping an eye on me – and as she carried on talking, I watched Mick Bishop striding around the lay-by, doing his thing – barking out orders, demanding answers, telling people where to go and what to do. He never once looked over at me. He spent very little time at the actual crime scene either. I saw him go through the gap between the end of the bank and the hawthorn trees, and in the bright white light of the floodlights I saw him gazing down at the pool below, but he didn’t go any further. He just stared down at Anna’s body for a while, asked a few questions, then turned round and came back.
And now, I could see, he was heading towards me.
He looked tired, his skin even paler than usual in the blaze of sterile white light, and there was a depth of cold determination to his eyes that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t like the look of it at all. As he came round the back of the car, DC Roberts opened the door for him.
‘We’re going to need lifting equipment to get the body out,’ he said to her. ‘Sort it out, OK?’
‘Sir,’ she said, closing her notebook and getting out of the car.
Bishop waited for her to leave, then got in, sat down beside me, and closed the door.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ he said calmly.
‘I called the police –’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
‘I didn’t have your number.’
‘I gave you my card.’
‘Yeah, I lost it –’
‘Bollocks.’ He stared angrily at me. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I fucking told you not to do anything without telling me first.’
‘I was just driving around –’
‘Yeah, so I’ve heard. You were just driving around and you just happened to find her. Is that the best you can do?’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘Like fuck it is.’ He stared at me. ‘How did you know, John? How did you know where she was?’
‘I didn’t –’
‘Come on, John,’ he said, smiling thinly. ‘You can tell me. Look, there’s no one else here, just you and me … whatever you say to me now, I can’t use it. So come on, humour me, how did you find her?’
‘I looked.’
‘That’s it? You looked.’
‘Yeah. It wasn’t that difficult, really. I just asked a few questions and went where the answers took me. Anyone could have done it if they’d made the effort.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing … I’m just answering your question.’
We looked at each other in silence for a few moments, Bishop tapping his ring finger on his knee, his mouth tight, his eyes focused … and I could imagine the hum of his brain, the busy grey flesh behind his eyes, trying to work things out – assessing the options, running things through, considering this, considering that …
I was so tired – and drained by the speed – that my own grey flesh was dancing like a brain-damaged boxer.
Eventually, Bishop sighed and said, ‘You know what your trouble is, don’t you?’
‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
He smiled. ‘You’re just like your father. He was a fucking pain in the arse too. And look where it got him.’
About an hour later, I was driven away to Eastway police station where I spent another hour or so sitting around, waiting to have my fingerprints and DNA taken again, for elimination purposes. I was then escorted to an interview room for further questioning.
‘DCI Bishop’s still at the crime scene,’ a uniformed PC told me. ‘But he shouldn’t be long. So if you’d just like to wait in here until he’s available …’
‘Can’t someone else do it?’ I said.
‘Sorry … DCI’s orders.’
He closed the door, and I sat down and waited.
I just have to wait. And wait …
And I wait.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday … long days and eternal nights of oblivion, living for nothing, waiting for nothing … what is there to wait for? DI Delaney will call me soon about the DNA results from the piece of flesh retrieved from Stacy’s stomach, and then I will either know or not know the identity of the man who raped and butchered the love of my life. But even if the killer is identified, even if he is arrested, charged, tried and convicted … what difference will it make?
What happened cannot be unhappened.
Stacy will always be dead.
And for ever is a long long time.
So why do I wait?
What am I waiting for?
It’s Friday 27 August, about 10.30 at night, and I’m si
tting in the front room, drinking whisky, trying to drink myself to sleep. This is where I sleep now. I haven’t been in the bedroom since the day it happened. I can’t go in there any more. I spend my nights sitting on the settee, staring at the television, drinking whisky – and taking whatever drugs I have – until I pass out. And then I wake up and start all over again.
Tonight, I’m purely drunk. I have a couple of grams of cocaine somewhere, but I don’t want cocaine now. I don’t want to be awake. I don’t want to think about anything. I just want to drink and drink and stare at the pictures on the television screen until I can’t see anything any more …
And that’s what I’m doing when I hear a faint sound from the hallway, a soft metallic clack. It sounds like the letterbox flapping shut, the familiar sound of post being delivered … but it can’t be. Not at this time of night. I almost ignore it, too drunk to care if I’m hearing things or not, but for some reason I find myself stumbling to my feet and shuffling out into the hallway … and there, on the floor by the front door, is an envelope. A plain white envelope. I stare at it for a moment, then lean down and pick it up. My name is typed on the front – JOHN CRAINE – but nothing else. No address, no stamp.
I open the front door.
There’s no one there.
I walk up the garden path, open the gate, and look up and down the street.
There’s no one there.
I go back into the house, into the front room, and open the envelope. Inside is a single sheet of plain white writing paper. I take it out, unfold it, and read the typed message:
The DNA retrieved from the hair and flesh sample in Stacy Craine’s stomach is a 100% match with the DNA profile of ANTON VINER. Viner was convicted in 1977 for aggravated rape and sentenced to 15 years. He was released in 1985. He was arrested again for sexual assault in 1989, but the charges were dropped. Viner’s current address is: 27 School Lane, Hey, Essex, HE15 9ES. This information will NOT be forwarded to DI Delaney until 09.00 tomorrow morning (Sat 28 August).
I read it again, and again … and again. There’s no signature, no name, no indication who it’s from. But it has to be from someone who either works in the crime lab or who has access to someone who works in the crime lab. I think about it … dredging through the sludge of my memory for anyone I know who could possibly fit the bill, and the only two names I come up with are Leon Mercer and Cliff Duffy …
