Cradle to Coffin (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 10)

by Oliver Davies

  “It’s good for shock,” I reminded her. “And I put some in all of ours.”

  Sharp frowned and picked up her mug, giving it a tentative sniff followed by a sip. “So, you have.”

  “You haven’t spoken to him for some time, then?” I gathered from what Lena had said before.

  She shook her head, a familiar expression of guilt and sadness that many friends and family members wore in times such as these. “Usually, when he got buried in work like this, we just waited for him to pop his head out again and then we’d all do something. He was never the sort to just give you a ring on the phone or anything,” she said despondently.

  I nodded, and my eyes lowered to my mug, swirling the tea around. Lena sighed softly.

  “Ask me, Maxie. I know you have to; I don’t mind.”

  Even so, a rotten feeling filled me up as I lifted my head and met her eyes. “Where were you last night, Lena?” I asked, hating the words as I spoke them.

  “I was home all night,” she said, her voice cracking the smallest bit. “With my wife.”

  I nodded, lowering my gaze again. Sharp inhaled deeply and looked around her office.

  “Well, that’s that out of the way, isn’t it?” she asked, taking Lena’s hand. Lena nodded, her face still tear-stained and pale.

  There was a quiet knock at the door, and Mills walked in, the bag I had gathered from Schmidt’s flat slung over his shoulder.

  He offered the room a tight-lipped smile before returning to Lena. “Your wife is downstairs,” he said gently. Lena looked from me to Sharp.

  “I’m off then?”

  “You are,” Sharp emphasised. Lena nodded and drank the remnants of her tea, placing the empty mug down on the tray and rose unsteadily to her feet. Sharp rose with her, taking the blanket from her shoulders and looping their arms together.

  “I’ll walk you out. You boys, back to work.” Her tone was the same, brittle and unwavering, but she touched both of our arms briefly as she walked past, leaving us in her office. I handed Mills his tea, and we carried them back to our office, where I kicked the door shut behind us and slumped in my chair.

  “God, poor Lena,” Mills muttered, dropping Schmidt’s bag on his desk. “I can’t imagine how she must feel. I don’t want to,” he added.

  “None of us do,” I replied. “It’s the part of the job we all try to ignore when we can.” I drank my tea and wheeled my chair over to his desk, grabbing the bag. “Let’s see if we can help ease her sorrow a bit, eh?” I said, turning the bag over and letting the things I’d grabbed fall onto Mills’s desk.

  “I gave Wasco the laptop and phone,” he said, unfazed by the mess I had made. “He looked delighted with the phone, said it might actually be work for him to get something out of it.”

  I chuckled breathily. “Every cloud, as they say.” I picked up Schmidt’s work ID and tapped it against the desk. “Lena said he was often pretty heavily invested in his work, so that seems to be our angle more than a personal vendetta.”

  Despite the fact that it was in his home.

  Mills nodded and shook his computer to life, searching the name of the company and getting onto their website. He peered at me over the monitor.

  “Their offices aren’t far away,” he said.

  “Always better to do these things in person,” I said, rising from the chair. And to get out of the dismal atmosphere of the station. Mills hurriedly drank his tea, unbothered by the sugar, and we were out the door a moment later, heading outside and into my car.

  A short drive later took us to a converted Georgian building, the brown brick and long windows looming over the street. I found a place to back at the rear of the building, and then we were pushing through the doors into a surprisingly modern interior. Clean, crisp and cool with white surfaces and glass walls.

  There was a reception desk where a man was bent over a large textbook. As we walked over, I glanced at the page he was on, filled with pictures of excavated bones.

  “Morning,” I said, making him jump slightly. “Is it still morning?” I asked Mills.

  He glanced at his watch. “No. Afternoon now, just.”

  “Bugger me. Where does the time go?” I turned to the man. “Afternoon. Detective Inspector Thatcher, North Yorkshire Police. We’d like to speak to the boss, whoever that is.”

  The man nodded and fumbled for the phone, hurriedly speaking to whoever was on the other line. Mills and I wandered over to some empty seats and sat ourselves down. We sat in silence today, staring at the white walls until a door opened and a grey-haired woman dressed in a tweed suit strode over to us, her hands folded together.

  “Detective Inspector Thatcher?” she asked, stopping in front of us.

  “That’s me.”

  “Doctor Bayat. I’m told you wished to speak to me?”

  “I do,” I said, rising from the chair. “We understand Dr Stefan Schmidt is an employee of yours.”

  She nodded. “One of the finest forensic anthropologists on my team, perhaps in the country, we’re very lucky to have him. Why?” she asked, her dark eyes narrowed.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Dr Bayat, but Stefan Schmidt was found dead in his flat this morning.”

  Her eyes widened, and a hand flew to her mouth. “Stefan? Dead?”

  I nodded morosely. She muttered something under her breath in a language I couldn’t recognise, then turned her attention back to me.

  “And you’re a detective. He was murdered?”

  “We do not believe his death was an accident, no,” I replied. “But it is still early in the investigation.”

  “Of course,” she nodded, sighing heavily. “How can I help?” she asked.

  “We had a few questions if you’re happy to answer them?”

  She nodded, dropping her hand back down to her side.

  “What was Dr Schmidt working on right now?” I asked.

  “An excavation job. Some remains were found out by a local churchyard but not in the cemetery itself. He went to identify what he could and see how they ended up there.”

  I nodded. In some cases, the bones were so old it didn’t matter. In other cases, we found ourselves called to check out the scene.

  “Which church?” Mills asked politely, still sitting down.

  “Um, St John,” she muttered, pulling out her phone, hitting a few buttons, then showing him the screen. I watched him take a note of the place, and then she put her phone away.

  “When was Dr Schmidt last in?”

  “Yesterday,” she answered. “He left a little later than usual, according to the system, but he was gone by half six. He always drove,” she added.

  I nodded. “Did he ever have any problems with his work? Or with his colleagues?”

  “Oh no,” she shook her head instantly. “We’re a small team here, Inspector. They all get along.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Dr Bayat. We’ll likely be in touch again,” I said, handing her a card. She nodded, tucking it into her pocket.

  “However, we can help,” she said. “Stefan was a good man.” Her voice slightly, and she shook my hand once before turning and walking away.

  Mills stood up and came to stand beside me. “What next?” he asked.

  I looked at the address of the church in his hand. “You a religious man, Mills?”

  Seven

  Thatcher

  As we left the city, the rain started to fall; a thin sheet that soaked quickly and quietly, turning the world grey and beige as we drove out to the small village on the outskirts of the city. It was built on a rare, flat area of land rather than deep in the sloping hills and valleys to the north of the city. Farming land, flat countryside and fields, none of the wildness of the moors that I knew and loved. We drove slowly through the village, stopping by a passing local and rolling down the window.

  He shuffled over, a large hat flopped over his face and bent down to the window by Mills.

  “A’right, gents? How can I help?”

 
“We’re looking for the church,” I called, leaning over Mills.

  “Oh, aye. Carry on down this road, lad,” he said, pointing with a gnarled finger. “And follow it round the bend. Church is at the bottom of the lane.”

  “Much obliged,” I said with a wave, rolling the window back up. Mills dabbed at his rain-splattered coat and grimaced as I pushed the car on, leaving the man and making my way down the rain-slick road, to the left and towards the bottom of the lane.

  The church was on a little corner, a lychgate up from the path, the sunken, grey headstones of the graveyard scattered here and there in the grass.

  I parked on the side of the road and climbed out, scanning the area. I wondered where exactly Schmidt had been working.

  “Come on,” I said to Mills, flipping my coat collar up and striding along the road. We walked through the gate and into the churchyard, walking up and around the building itself to where an iron fence circled the perimeter.

  “Nice church,” Mills commented once he’d caught up with me. “Medieval, do you think?”

  “Usually are around here,” I muttered, not looking too long at the daunting grey stone.

  “Not a fan of them, sir?” Mills asked, hands stuffed into his pockets.

  “Never have been, really,” I replied, keeping my eyes down on the path through the headstones, randomly placed here and there. The last I’d been in a church had been for my mother’s funeral, and that wasn’t a memory I cared to relive or repeat.

  “You?” I asked, wanting him to talk, to take my mind off things.

  “Can’t say I have, really,” he replied. “Synagogue more often than not. But my dad usually makes us go to a service on Remembrance Day, and my mum loves a carol service.”

  I nodded solemnly, my eyes drawn to a scene beyond the iron fence.

  “Over there,” I said, leading him along the path and down to the fence. A digging was happening, that was clear, the hole protected by a waterproof tarp nailed into the ground. There was a small gate in the fence that we walked through, heading down to the dig itself.

  There was a bit of distance between the location of the remains and the church itself, and from what little I really knew about churches and Christianity, it seemed an unlucky place to have buried someone.

  “Must be old,” Mills murmured as we reached the dig site. “Probably here before the church was even built, or back when more of the land was owned by it,” he amended. That history knowledge of his really came in handy sometimes.

  “I imagine such findings can be very lucrative in the right industry,” I said. “If they were to be sold to a museum or something.”

  Mills nodded, scratching his chin. “Most likely. It’s not very well protected, though, is it?” he remarked, looking at the waterproof sheet and the otherwise complete absence of security.

  “He must have gotten most of the remains out,” I said. “And until he can say for sure what their importance is, there’s not much security that can be offered to him.”

  Mills looked at me. “What happens if the bones aren’t that old?” he asked.

  “We’ve been known to look into things like that from time to time,” I said. “But more often than not, it’s just another cold case. We can’t even identify the body, so it’s hard to know how they would have ended up there. There’s a thin line between a skeleton that belongs with us and one that belongs in a museum, and Sharp has always been the one to toe that line, not me.”

  Mills didn’t look too surprised by that, nor would he be. I had neither the tact nor the patience for dealing with bureaucracy and pencil-pushing council people, and such a fact wasn’t a secret to anyone in the station at this point in time.

  “Schmidt must have found something else,” Mills muttered. “Something in the dig?”

  I looked up at the fields over the way where some sheep ambled around. “His company gets hired by other people,” I recalled. “Museums most likely. Someone was funding this.”

  “Gentlemen!” A voice called out. “Excuse me, gentlemen, you can’t be there!”

  We both turned to see a man hurrying towards us from the church, dressed in a long black robe, a little white collar peeking out from his neck. I stepped away from the dig, towards the fence and pulled out my warrant card as the priest reached us, his face flushed.

  “Terribly sorry, father,” I said, showing him my ID. “Detective Inspector Thatcher and Detective Sergeant Mills, North Yorkshire Police.”

  The priest looked us over and blinked. “Heavens above. May I ask what brings you here, inspector? Dr Schmidt does not like having people by his dig,” he added meaningfully. I smiled, and we walked to the gate, stepping into the churchyard.

  “You knew Dr Schmidt?” I asked.

  “I—” he broke off mid-answer and studied me. “Knew him?” he repeated.

  “I’m afraid to say that Dr Schmidt was found dead in his flat this morning,” I told him. The priest closed his eyes with a shake of his head. After a moment of quiet, he mumbled something under his breath before making the sign of the cross.

  “My goodness.” He opened his eyes. “Do come inside, both of you, out of this rain.”

  We followed the church up through the yard and through the back door, the old wood creaking as he closed it and led us through. It was a small, local church, with a little stained-glass window at one end, several pews leading down the nave, and an ancient stone font over by the main doors. And like every other English village church I’d ever set foot in, it was cold, draughty with the lingering smell of candle wax, dust, and old hymn sheets. The priest, thankfully, led us to another door into a small little office that was warm and smelt like the pot of lavender on the windowsill.

  “Please,” he said, indicating the sofa. Mills and I took a seat, and the priest pulled a chair from the desk and positioned it in front of us. “Tea, gentlemen?”

  “No, thank you, father.”

  “Harte,” he said. “Miles Harte.”

  “How long have you been here?” Mills asked. “As the priest, that is, or vicar?”

  Mr Harte smiled. “Church of England, my boy, which makes me a reverend. Vicar will do, but feel free to call me Miles. All of my parishioners do.”

  “Thank you, Miles,” I said, and Mills leant back, happily letting me take the reins of this particular discourse.

  “And in answer to your question,” Miles sat, clasping his hands together. “I have been here for almost thirty years. I believe we’re to do a village fete for the pearl anniversary,” he added.

  “The village sounds very lucky to have you,” I said. “How well did you know Dr Schmidt? And can you tell us how he ended up digging here in the first place?”

  “Certainly,” Miles said with a bow of his head. The light above caught the fine hairs of white on his head. “The land in question is not church land, despite its proximity. But the plumbing for the church runs out that way. We had a spot of bother with the heating. I’m sure you noticed.” He waved a hand through the air towards the little heater glowing orange in the corner. “And apparently, this meant digging down to see if the fault was in the lines. To be honest, Inspector, I don’t understand it much. My verger typically handles these things. Anyway, the long and short of it is, they started the work, and then they found themselves stumbling upon some bones. Naturally, we were advised to seek the assistance of a museum and their services. Dr Schmidt has been out here these past weeks, carefully excavating our friend.”

  “The dig is being funded by the museum then?” I asked, a little confused about the details. The reverend looked just as confused as I did.

  “I believe so, yes. Our man from the museum came down once or twice to see how Dr Schmidt was getting on. But he liked privacy when he worked and asked me to keep an eye on any nose parkers that might come poking around. Hence, my coming out to you two.”

  “I see.”

  “Is there any possibility that the remains are supposed to be within the church land?” Mills
asked.

  “There is that possibility, yes,” Miles replied good-naturedly. “The exact amount of land that belongs to the church has, as you can imagine, changed a lot over time. I think what Dr Schmidt was eager to do was determine whether or not the remains predate the church, or indeed, are even Christian remains. And from then, well, it’s nothing to do with me either way, sergeant.”

  “No doubt it would do wonders for the village,” I said. “If Viking or Roman remains were found here about.”

  “Certainly would, Inspector, already there’s a bit of a buzz about it. I can’t go into the village shop without answering several questions in a row,” he said with a faint chuckle.

  I nodded, then asked, “what is the name of the museum, Vicar?”

  “Ah,” he reached behind him to his desk and pulled off a leaflet, handing it over. “Yorkshire Museum, Inspector. I believe they would have an interest in our friend, no matter his century. The man I know is Peter Wadham,” he added as I took the leaflet.

  “Thank you,” I said. “What did you make of Dr Schmidt when you met him?”

  “I thought him a very decent man, Inspector. Honest, hardworking, a little abrasive, but I supposed he was here to work, not talk about the weather with me,” he added. “Though one day, the weather was particularly awful, he did come inside for a cup of tea, and we had a little chat about theology. Unavoidable in my profession.”

  “We found a star of David with him,” I said. “He was of the Jewish faith.”

  “A practising man,” the vicar added with a great deal of respect and a nod. “I find it hard to find any such man of any faith more and more these days.”

  I looked around the room we were in, the slightly uneven stone walls that had stood the test of time. “I suppose there will always be reasons for people to have faith in things,” I said.

  The vicar nodded solemnly. “Not a practising man yourself?” he asked knowingly.

  “Not so much,” I admitted. “I suppose I’ve seen too much of people, too much of the awful things they do.”

  The vicar nodded. “Darkness to the light, Inspector. For every foul deed, there is one of great kindness. I have to believe that it is the balance of it all that matters in the end,” he added heavily. “Else, I’ve spent many years wearing this collar for nothing!” He laughed.