by Conrad Jones
‘This is going viral, Dad,’ he said, frowning. ‘Some people are making shit up. I’m trying to put them straight.’
‘That’s what people do when they don’t know the truth,’ Richard said, pressing play, ‘they make shit up.’
‘They shouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’ Richard asked. Jake looked confused. ‘Everybody else does. The newspapers do it every day. If they don’t know what happened, they make shit up. If television reporters don’t know the truth, they make shit up.’ He shrugged. ‘If politicians get asked a difficult question that they don’t know the answer to, what do they do?’
‘Make shit up,’ Jake answered.
‘Correct. It’s human nature, son.’ Richard watched the football but wasn’t really seeing it. ‘We have a burning desire to know the truth, to know what happened. Films, soap operas, books, are consumed by millions because we want to know what happens. And if people don’t know, they make it up.’
‘I can’t keep up with all the questions, Dad,’ Jake said, shaking his head.
‘Don’t try, son. The jungle drums will be beating tonight, let them,’ Richard said, shrugging. ‘They’re going to speculate whether you tell them what happened or not. You’re bound to say it’s not true, aren’t you?’ Jake nodded. ‘I’m your dad. Most people won’t believe you anyway. They’ll make their own minds up.’ He turned down the television and stood up. ‘I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough excitement for one night.’ He ruffled Jake’s hair and hugged him. It felt normal. That was reassuring. ‘Night, Jake. Don’t worry. This will all blow over.’ Jake nodded and half-smiled.
‘Night, son.’
‘Night, Dad.’
Richard walked out of the living room into the hallway. The wooden floor felt cool and soothing beneath his feet. His stomach was in knots. He checked the lock on the front door and climbed the stairs. Jaki was lying on her bed, typing furiously on her laptop. She looked up at her dad and shook her head in disbelief.
‘This is a nightmare, Dad,’ she said. Her voice sounded strained. ‘Why are people so shitty to each other?’
‘Because it’s human nature to be shitty to one another,’ he said. ‘It will pass, Jak,’ he sighed.
‘Melanie Brand’s father has posted that he is going to make sure the school suspend you while they look into the allegations,’ she said, turning her laptop around so he could read the screen. ‘He’s head of the parents’ committee.’
‘I know who Kevin Brand is, Jak,’ Richard said, reading the post. It was on the school page. It disappeared when he was halfway through reading it. Jak gasped and looked at him.
‘What happened, Dad?’
‘That will be Helen deleting comments. She’s a diamond.’ The page froze for a second and vanished. Richard sighed with relief. ‘She’s taken the page down. That will stop all the speculation for tonight.’
‘Not on Snapchat and Twitter it won’t,’ Jak said, shaking her head. ‘Half the school are on there, gossiping.’
‘Luckily, I have no concept of what that means, and hopefully, neither will most of the people that matter,’ he said. He bent down and hugged her. She tensed briefly before relaxing. It was enough to make him feel sick inside. His own daughter had doubts. They may be tiny, insignificant, unfounded and natural, nevertheless, they were there and that cut him deeply. ‘Night, Jak. I’m sorry that you’ve had to go through this. I know exactly what schoolkids are like. There’s not a shred of truth to this. It will blow over, I promise.’ She hugged him properly this time and it felt good. ‘Night night,’ he said, kissing her forehead.
‘Night, Dad,’ she replied.
‘Shall I close this door?’
‘Yes, please.’
He pulled the door closed and headed to bed. It seemed like an age before he could sleep, and when he did, his dreams were dark and twisted. His sheets were damp with sweat when he awoke. It was dark and the shadows seemed to crowd in on him. He switched on the bedside lamp and patted the empty spot next to him. Celia hadn’t come to bed; she often slept on the couch after too much wine, but this time, the fact she had stayed downstairs seemed to have more significance.
4
Detective Superintendent Marcus Braddick pulled up in his Evoque and parked next to three marked police cars and a CSI van. A couple of dog walkers had braved the wind but they didn’t look like they were enjoying themselves. There was no sign of any law enforcement personnel. He assumed they would all be on the beach, on the other side of the dunes. He switched off the engine and reached for his mobile before opening the door. The wind whistled through the gap, chilling him to the core. He grabbed a parka from the back seat and wrestled into it. As he zipped it up, he climbed out of the vehicle and pulled the hood over his bald head. Sand stung his black skin and made him squint. He closed the door and walked towards the path. The wind was roaring in from Liverpool Bay, across the beach, over the dunes and on to the mainland. It carried fine grains of sand with it; each granule was a painful projectile. He lowered his head and followed the path around the boating lake towards the dunes. It was longer than it looked and he was walking against the wind. To his left were the docks at Bootle. Stacks of multicoloured containers towered above the ships that were moored there. Nearby, a wind turbine rotated rapidly, at odds with its surroundings. It made an eerie whistling sound as it turned. To his right, the dunes went on as far as the eye could see. Thick green grasses topped the higher peaks. Parallel to them, Victorian terraces hugged the coast for miles into the distance. The boating lake was empty, its waters dark and choppy.
Braddick tried to remember the last time he had been here. His ex, Louise, had been fascinated by the iron statues. Sir Antony Gormley’s iron men had transformed the beach and made it a tourist attraction. He couldn’t decide how many years ago it was. It was too many. Life had hurtled past him since then. He envisioned her pretty face in the sunshine and couldn’t remember why they had split up; not that it mattered. His thoughts ran through his mind as he headed for the path to the beach. The path was a few hundred yards long and climbed between the dunes, twisting its way up a gentle slope to a wide concrete promenade. When he reached the top, he paused to take in the view. It was a view that stopped people in their tracks and took away their breath. The wide sands were dotted with the iron men, staring out to sea, each one waiting to be submersed by the oncoming sea. Beyond the beach, the sea shimmered in the sunshine, and dozens of white wind turbines appeared to hover above the waves on the horizon.
Braddick pushed his hands into his pockets and looked around. A few hundred yards to his right he spotted uniformed officers creating a cordon and the CSI unit at work. His DS, Sadie Myers, waved at him. She was leaning on one of the iron statues, watching the forensic officers at work. Her fur-lined hood was flapping in the wind and her long red hair was tied at the back of her head into a tight bun. Braddick had never seen hair so ginger. She was the archetypical redhead: pale skin and freckles. He waved back and trudged down the promenade, through deep drifts of sand, until he reached some stone steps that led down to the beach. The salty tang of sea air filled his senses. Wide banks of seaweed, driftwood and debris striped the beach, marking the limit of the last tide. Razor shells crunched beneath his feet; seemingly, tens of thousands of them had been washed up in the storms – along with a body. Bodies on the beach were nothing new, and rarely attracted the interest of Merseyside’s major investigation team, but this one was special. Initial reports indicated it had been encased in wire mesh and weighted; the body had been dumped by someone who didn’t want it to surface. It clearly wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t accidental, which left murder as the cause, hence the call to MIT. As he approached, Sadie smiled, and gestured with her head.
‘Nasty one, this,’ she said. ‘The victim was wearing a United shirt.’ She turned and looked out to sea, her expression serious. ‘We’ve removed it to save his family any embarrassment.’ She grinned. Braddick shook his head. He tried very hard not to smil
e but couldn’t help it. ‘Got you,’ she said, ‘made you smile.’
‘Very funny,’ Braddick said, nodding. ‘The old ones are the best, eh, sergeant?’
‘Don’t be like that,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ve been standing here for two hours, freezing my tits off. I had to amuse myself somehow.’ She stamped her Ugg boots in the sand, shifting her weight from one leg to the other in a vain attempt to keep warm. Her jeans were faded and worn. ‘I love this place in the summer, I come here with the dog a lot, but today, I’m not feeling it.’
‘It’s a bit fresh,’ Braddick said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Who is our victim?’
‘Doctor Libby said he would give me his initial findings when he has finished, whatever “finished” means,’ Sadie said, eyebrows raised. She frowned. ‘That was an hour and fifty minutes ago. I’m sure he does it to wind me up. Now you’ve arrived, I bet he comes over in less than five minutes.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’s always brown-nosing you.’
‘That’s not an image I need in my head.’
‘Fiver says he does.’
‘Tenner,’ Braddick said, sealing the bet with a handshake. As if he had heard them, Graham Libby took off his glasses and walked over to them. Braddick could feel Sadie smiling behind her hand. That would cost him a drink. He nodded hello as the doctor approached.
‘Braddick,’ he said, cleaning his glasses on his blue forensic suit. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, sergeant,’ he added, turning to Sadie. ‘I didn’t want to move our friend here until I was sure which bits washed up with him, and which bits belong to him.’ He put his glasses back on and gestured for them to follow him to the corpse. Braddick frowned when the smell of decay reached him. Sadie handed him a small jar of tiger balm and he dabbed a blob beneath his nostrils. It helped a little, but there was something about a body that had decomposed in the water. The stench was cloying, choking almost.
‘You can see from the state of decomposition that he’s been in the water a while.’ The bloated flesh was swollen, and protruded between the mesh in places.
‘Roughly how long?’ Braddick asked.
‘Considering how cold the water is, probably three weeks or so. I’ll have a better idea once we’re back in the lab.’ He shifted his weight and knelt. ‘You see this here,’ he said, pointing to some strands of seaweed in the wire. Braddick nodded. ‘This type of algae is found in freshwater.’ He paused, and pointed further down the left leg. ‘This is saltwater seaweed. He was put in the water up river and he’s floated down here into the bay. The storms lifted him from the bottom and dumped him here.’
He looked up the river, his eyes drawn by a Mersey ferry that was approaching the Woodside terminal across the river on the Wirral. The grey waters crashed against the hull, turning white, before splashing back into the water.
‘How far up river? That’s the question,’ Sadie said.
Braddick glanced at her, that was the key question. The doctor was clearly right – if the body had been in the sea for two weeks, it would have been far out in the bay by now. Too far out to be washed ashore.
‘I read a study that suggested a body could travel as much as a mile a day in the river,’ Sadie said.
‘Which study?’
‘The university published it.’
‘I read some of it, but threw it in the bin when I realised they didn’t use bodies to do the study,’ Graham Libby said. ‘They used weighted floats. It isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’ He dismissed it a little too vehemently. ‘Unless human bodies are used, there are too many variables to make it accurate. Water temperature, the time between death and being put into the water, body fat percentage, depth and flow of the river, tidal flows, phase of the moon, the list goes on and on.’ He shook his head. ‘You might as well pick a number between one and ten and double it.’
‘I did wonder how accurate it was when I read it,’ Sadie said, nodding. ‘I wasn’t convinced.’ She smiled, revealing straight white teeth. She was a naturally pretty woman. Her green eyes had a sparkle of mischief in them.
‘You were right not to be convinced, sergeant.’ The doctor rubbed his chin, deep in thought. ‘Last month there was an article about a motorcyclist killed in a crash in California. He was thrown from his bike, over a bridge, and into a river. Three days later he was pulled from the water, 175 miles downriver.’ He paused for effect.
‘Nearly sixty miles a day?’ Sadie asked.
‘He was obese so he floated quickly, and the water was warm so he decomposed rapidly. When they found him, the local police guessed he had been in the water for a month, from the state of decomposition, but they found his ID and ran a search. Of course, they had the bike but no body. They knew when the crash had happened, and realised he had only been in the water three days.’ He pointed at the body. ‘That university study is piffle. Real bodies have to be used.’
‘Fascinating,’ Sadie said. It was interesting, but the doctor was prone to going off track. She looked at their victim to bring back his focus. ‘I wonder where he was put in.’
‘Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that.’
‘Okay, what do we know?’ Braddick asked. He noticed Sadie was blushing; she blushed a lot. Her skin was so pale it was obvious when she was embarrassed. He winked at her. The doctor was prone to the odd rant too. He was an opinionated buffoon but very good at his job.
‘We know that he’s male, somewhere between twenty-five and forty. I’ll give you a more accurate number later.’ The doctor pointed to the right arm. ‘Can you see the fine cuts here, and here?’ he asked. Braddick moved closer. The flesh was swollen and rotten, but there were obvious wounds in the skin. They looked fine but deep. ‘There are dozens of cuts like this all over the body. The cuts are so deep that the bones are scarred.’ Braddick looked closer. Many of the bones were exposed and clearly visible. They looked unnaturally white against the sand and seaweed. ‘These cuts were made slowly and the killer went as deep as possible – the bones stopped the blade going any deeper.’ He pointed to the skull. ‘His eyelids, nose and lips are missing. At first, I thought maybe the sea life had nibbled on him, but then I noticed some of the wounds are precise. The bottom-feeders have removed flesh to a degree, but there are dozens of surgical wounds too. Someone removed his genitals, fingers, toes, tongue, and most of his face. This man was encased in wire mesh, tortured to death, and dumped in the river.’ He pointed to some crisscross patterns on the arms. ‘These marks indicate that the killer wrapped him in mesh ante mortem. He must have struggled against the wire.’
‘What a way to go,’ Sadie said.
‘Is there any good news?’ Braddick asked.
‘Yes,’ the doctor replied, bluntly. Braddick waited for him to expand. The silence was annoying. ‘His teeth are still intact. We should be able to identify him from his dental records.’
‘As long as we find out who he is,’ Braddick said.
‘Good luck with that one,’ the doctor retorted.
‘The killer overlooked that,’ Sadie said. ‘Why go to all that trouble and leave the teeth? Was it a mistake?’
‘I don’t think so.’ The doctor shook his head. He looked out at the wind farm in the distance. ‘He went to a lot of trouble wrapping the body in mesh. Look at the way he’s weaved the sections together with wire. It’s very intricate.’ The detectives exchanged glances. ‘Every limb is encased and weighted, yet still exposed to the elements. The flesh would be eaten, and would rot away, but the skeleton would remain intact at the bottom of the sea. He didn’t overlook the teeth, he overlooked the power of storm Dennis.’ He gestured to the sea. ‘It’s a freak of nature that his body was brought up. Your killer didn’t get sloppy, he didn’t count on us ever finding him.’
‘Let’s get Google onto the missing persons lists. Tell him to start with addresses in the city, and work outwards.’ Google was the nickname of a detective sergeant who had an uncanny knack of knowing things that most people didn’t. ‘If we can identify him, it will give u
s a starting point,’ Braddick said, shivering against the wind. ‘Thanks, Graham. Keep me up to date.’ He nodded to the doctor. Dr Libby turned back to the body without a word. ‘There’s nothing more to do here. Leave the tidying up to uniform, Sadie,’ Braddick said, turning away. ‘Walk back to the car with me.’
‘You don’t have to say that twice,’ Sadie said, jogging to catch up with him. ‘I’m bloody freezing.’
‘Me too. I need a large coffee.’
‘Sounds good. Your turn to buy them.’
‘It’s always my turn.’
‘What do you think?’ Sadie asked.
‘Early days yet,’ he said. He lowered his head to protect his eyes from the shifting sand.
‘You saw what I saw though, yes?’
‘Yes.’ Braddick nodded. There was something familiar about the way the body had been disposed of. ‘There was something that tugged at the memory bank.’
‘The wire mesh,’ Sadie said, studying his face for a reaction. He looked at her and she knew she was right. ‘I thought the same thing as soon as I saw it; the way it was fastened together?’
Braddick nodded. ‘We’ve seen something very similar before.’
5
Richard left the house before Celia and the twins were awake. It was still dark and the rain was pouring down. The traffic was light as he navigated the route to school. It was a journey that he had made Monday to Friday for eleven years. Today was different. Today, he was driving towards a firing squad. It was surreal. He was anxious and panicking about the reception he would get. His colleagues wouldn’t believe the accusations, would they? Surely not. The pupils wouldn’t; he was very popular with the kids he taught, and he had never so much as laid a finger on any of them. They would know it was all lies. It was the parents who concerned him. Some of them knew him, but most didn’t. Not all the parents interacted with the school. A lot of them couldn’t give a shit. There were parents who had never been to parents’ evening, not caring how their children were performing or behaving. He was a stranger to them, a stranger they entrusted the safety of their children to. All he could do was have faith in the trust he had built up throughout his career. Today would be a test of faith.
