Cause of Death

by Jane A. Adams

  He was aware that she’d spotted him too, and when she smiled and gestured towards a nearby café he followed her. He and his team had once been tasked with getting rid of this girl, Haines kidding himself that this would be an easy disposal and hoping to gain kudos with some fellow called Vashinsky. Even then Stan had suspected it would not be straightforward, and so it had proved.

  They perched like a couple of kids on high stools and the young woman giggled.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

  ‘Fancy,’ he agreed. ‘I thought you’d be long gone.’

  ‘I was, then I came back, I went away again, and now . . .’

  ‘Now you’re back to see that brother of yours?’

  ‘To see,’ she agreed, ‘not to be seen.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She dismissed the question with a shrug and ordered for both of them. Some kind of fruit concoction for herself and a tea for him.

  ‘What is that thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Mango, peach, lots of crushed ice. I heard you were out. Going to Rina’s, are you?’

  ‘Maybe. I’ve not decided yet.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t think I’ll be paying a visit this time. I sort of blotted my copybook the last time I was here.’

  ‘So I heard. So, what are you here for, and don’t tell me it’s coincidence we ran into one another.’

  She prodded a straw into her drink and eased round in her seat so she could look out at the sparkling ocean. ‘Not entirely a coincidence, no. I mean, I’d not actually planned on seeing you today, but I thought we might run into one another sooner or later. It’s sort of inevitable, isn’t it?’

  She smiled and Stan felt a chill run down his spine. She was what, twenty? Twenty-one? A slight, slim, pretty little thing, and yet another that could answer the subtle-as-a-knife description Coran would have used.

  Dangerous, Stan thought, and with none of the usual sense of caution that might slow her down.

  ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘You’re here for Haines.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  Stan shrugged. ‘I’ve not made up my mind yet.’

  She laughed, and for an instant Stan could almost imagine she was normal. Her laugh was genuine and the way it made her eyes dance and the corners crinkle utterly real and true. Stan understood all too well how people might be fooled, but he knew better than that. He’d seen what she was capable of and heard about a lot more besides.

  ‘So, what are you calling yourself now?’ he asked. ‘Still Karen Parker?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sticking with Karen,’ she said. ‘It’s a common enough name. But I’m Munroe now, Karen Munroe, and don’t worry, Stan, I’m not about to get in your way. I think we’ve got a cause in common here, don’t you?’

  Stan sipped his tea and watched her smile. This time it didn’t reach her eyes.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ Elodie waved her arms and jumped up and down. The digger stopped and the engine cut out. The driver climbed down from his cab and came over to where she stood.

  ‘Spotted something?’ Joe asked.

  ‘More bones, I think. I just caught a glimpse.’

  She pointed at the spoil heap and Joe frowned. ‘We neither of us saw anything last night,’ he said. ‘I’ve only tipped one bucket load today.’

  ‘I know. It was when you dropped the new soil on top. Something moved.’

  They climbed down into the ditch at the base of the soil heap and Elodie crouched down, hands delving carefully into the loose earth. Joe watched avidly. He had known nothing much about archaeology before she had come on site. The local authority had sent in a routine team to check up on the access road into the newly refurbished flight field. Ten years back some bits of pottery had been found by field walkers, so the law said archaeologists had to be given access to the site.

  Archaeologists – three of them – had come and gone, deciding there was little of interest, and Elodie, a post-grad student, had been left behind to keep an eye on things. Three days ago they had uncovered bones. Human bones. Work had been halted and Joe and his digger sent to clear out the old drainage ditches surrounding the flight field, which should, theoretically, have had nothing new to show anyone. The three more important archaeologists had returned and Elodie was sent off to keep an eye on Joe and his excavations.

  Not, he thought, that she seemed to mind. And he certainly didn’t. Blonde, tanned, lithe and vibrant – he thought Elodie was gorgeous.

  Joe squatted down beside her. ‘There’s not supposed to be anything over this way,’ he said. ‘The drainage ditches have been cleared out regularly, haven’t they?’

  Elodie shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The records for the site are a bit patchy, but I definitely saw something.’ She frowned and dug her hands back into the crumbly earth.

  ‘Are you sure that’s the stuff I just dug out?’ Joe said. ‘It looks too dry.’

  ‘Dry?’ She sat back on her heels and looked. ‘Dry,’ she repeated. ‘It shouldn’t be dry.’

  ‘No, look, the last bucket load is there, see. Black and wet and full of organic matter.’ He was quite proud of that phrase.

  Elodie laughed. ‘Organic matter,’ she mocked.

  ‘Yeah, you know, dead leaves and muck.’ He fell back laughing as she pushed him off balance.

  ‘Hey, who’s supposed to be the expert round here?’

  ‘Expert, eh? I thought the only experts on site were over by the bones on the new road. I don’t see any expert here, just some lowly post-grad student stuck up to her ankles in mud in a drainage ditch.’

  She shoved at him again and he caught her hand, dragged her down beside him, then pulled her very close. She smelt wonderful, he thought. Floral perfume blended with sun-warmed skin and the rich, loamy scent of fresh-turned earth. He kissed her hungrily, then let go reluctantly as she pulled away.

  ‘Bones,’ she said. ‘Save that for later, OK?’

  Later, Joe thought, grinning at her like an idiot. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise, now help me look.’

  Gently, they began to sift through the soil. It crumbled between their fingers, fell away dry as they touched it. ‘This is all wrong,’ Elodie said, and Joe knew she was right.

  ‘Look.’ He pointed at a small fragment of white protruding from the loose fill. Elodie brushed at it, uncovering a fragment a couple of inches long.

  ‘Is that what you saw?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I swear I saw a long bone.’ She placed the fragment in one of the plastic trays they used for finds and then dug deeper, gently brushing the earth aside, layer by layer. ‘There.’

  Definitely a long bone, Joe thought; he’d seen several this past week. ‘A tibia?’ he guessed.

  ‘Well, listen to you.’ She frowned. ‘These don’t look right.’

  ‘They don’t look like the other bones,’ Joe agreed. The first ones they’d found had been pitted and friable, and darker than this, stained with all the years of being buried in the earth. By contrast, these looked fresh, pale and very solid, unmarked but for a few . . . well, what looked to Joe like shallow cut marks. He pointed them out. ‘What’s that there?’

  With her forefinger, Elodie gently examined the marks. Deeper than scratches, very straight, very deliberate. Almost reverently she placed the bone in the tray beside the shorter fragment. ‘I don’t think this is archaeology,’ she said finally. ‘Joe, I think we need to get some advice on this. I don’t think we should touch anything else.’

  He agreed. He’d been intrigued by the earlier finds. The dead of a couple of thousand years ago, reverently laid to rest, their interment accompanied by care and ritual, but this filled him with a different emotion. Bones tumbled into a ditch and covered with loose earth that had, he felt, almost certainly not come from the scene. This was definitely not the same.

  He took her hand and they scrambled out of the ditch, then turned to look back at the pile of earth. The scrape from the digger bucket was clear
and defined, as was the blackened mud he had excavated just a few minutes ago. At first glance the friable earth further down at the side of the spoil heap looked like dried and crumbled soil from the day before, and he could now see where some of the previous day’s mud had been piled up to cover it. Unfortunately for whoever had practised such concealment, the load Joe had dropped on to the heap that morning had caused the loose pack to slide, exposing the foreign soil.

  ‘I don’t like this, Elodie.’ He glanced around as though suddenly afraid that whoever had dumped the bones and earth was still there, watching them. Not more than a hundred yards away the rest of the team worked and voices, machines, the sounds of tools, metal on metal, clear and familiar, drifted across. Those sounds did nothing, Joe thought, to dispel the sudden sense of unease.

  ‘We’d best report this,’ he said and he felt her nod. The way things were going here, he didn’t see the new access road being ready for the open day.

  It happened that PC Andy Nevins was the first officer on the scene. Neither Andy nor Frank Baker being at the police station, Mac hadn’t felt able to leave. He had called Frank, who had still been up on the cliff top on foot, so Mac had summoned Andy.

  ‘They’ve found some bones at the dig,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t that what they’re supposed to find on a dig?’

  ‘These are different, apparently. Check it out will you, Andy, see if we need to call in the big guns.’

  And so Andy Nevins was now on his knees, peering into a ditch with Elodie on one side of him, Joe on the other, and three more senior archaeologists looking on.

  Work had stopped across the site and the foreman had summoned the owner of the airfield. Edward de Freitas was now on his way.

  ‘What do you think?’ Elodie demanded. ‘It doesn’t look right, does it?’

  Andy was inclined to agree. ‘Um, what do they think?’ he asked, nodding towards the other archaeologists.

  ‘Oh, they agree. This isn’t archaeology, this is something else. Look, you can see where we’ve hit the natural clay level there. The ground is clean, no sign of anything, and this ditch has been cleaned out God knows how many times. The other bones we found were what we’d expect on a site like this: crouched burials, with grave goods. The condition of the bones was pretty poor, but you could see how they’d been laid out, and the remnants of their grave goods.’

  ‘I saw the pictures in the paper.’ Andy nodded. He sat back on his heels. ‘These are certainly not old bones,’ he decided, ‘and I think you’re right, someone’s dumped them here and then covered them up with . . . well, it looks like garden compost.’

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ Joe agreed.

  Andy stood up and brushed off his knees. ‘Got to call the boss,’ he said. ‘I think we need the CSIs and someone a bit more senior than me to deal with this one.’ He paused, staring at his mobile phone for a moment as the thought seized him that he might be able to persuade Mac to let him carry on here for a bit. Life for the newly qualified PC Nevins hadn’t been nearly as interesting as life for probationer Nevins had proved to be. He could do with a bit of a challenge. He dialled Mac’s number and began to fill him in on what was happening. ‘Oh, hang on, boss, Edward de Freitas has just arrived. You want a word?’

  ‘You’re on scene, Andy. You can tell him more than I can. I’ll have a word after you’ve briefed him, if he wants one. Meantime, I’ll get on to SOCO and I’ll call and tell Frank not to hurry himself. I’m sure you can manage.’

  ‘OK, will do,’ Andy signed off. He could feel himself blushing as he always did when stressed or happy, the knowledge that Mac thought he was well able to cope with the situation creating both reactions simultaneously.

  Edward de Freitas was crouching down where Andy had knelt. Andy joined him. ‘Mac is sending the CSIs,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’ Edward frowned. ‘Do we know what’s down there yet?’

  ‘No, not really. Elodie and Joe spotted the bones. They realized pretty quickly that something was wrong and preserved the scene after that.’

  ‘But the bones are human?’

  ‘They think so, yes.’

  Edward stood up. ‘So what do you want us to do?’ he said. ‘Do we need to close the whole site?’

  Andy thought about it. He glanced around, appraising the position of the site in relation to the road and the airfield and what facilities were available. He knew Edward de Freitas quite well, having worked an earlier case that had involved him, and knew he could rely on the older man’s cooperation.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I think if we could keep those barriers next to the road in place, route all site traffic back through the old entrance, then the CSI team and anyone else we bring in can come round the back and get to the scene through that gap in the hedge. Joe tells me only he and Elodie came along that bit of road this morning and everyone else has cut across from the Portakabin and the actual dig, so I think we can assume only Elodie and Joe have come the way of whoever dumped the bones. If we can close off from the barriers to the trackway and that bit of verge, the rest of the site can carry on as normal.’

  Edward nodded. ‘OK, whatever you need to do. I’ll go and talk to the site foreman, tell him what’s happening and that you may need extra pairs of hands, and can I suggest we move one of the vans down to the end of the lane to act as a temporary road block? The media are bound to get wind of this and if we can keep them on the verge near the main road it’ll make your life a whole lot easier.’

  Andy hadn’t thought of that. ‘Thanks,’ he said. What else? He had an odd feeling that Edward de Freitas had already thought of the ‘what else’, but was waiting, almost willing Andy to come up with it himself. He took a look around. There was a gap in the hedge where the new slip road was due to go through, and the little bridge that would take traffic over the drainage ditch that Joe and Elodie had been clearing had been marked out. On the other side of the hedge the airfield had its own security patrols, there initially while the building work had been going on to protect the site and the materials left there. The main gate, allowing access on to the road into Frantham, was currently padlocked while the building work was finished, public access allowed only via the stile and—

  The public footpath. Of course.

  ‘Would it be possible to get your security people to set up a permanent station that side of the fence to keep an eye on anyone coming down from the coastal path? We can arrange a cordon, but having someone on site would be really helpful. Unless this escalates into a murder enquiry, I don’t know how many extra bodies I can call upon.’

  Edward de Freitas nodded and Andy felt a glow of satisfaction that he’d not had to be prompted further. ‘I’ll go and see to that now,’ he said. ‘Let me know if there’s anything further I can do.’

  Andy watched him go and felt oddly lonely. He was aware of several pairs of eyes – Elodie, Joe and the archaeologists among them – watching and waiting to see what would happen next and what he was going to do.

  Statements, he should get that under way. Find out who had been where and when and construct a timeline for yesterday and this morning.

  One of the other workers called out to him. ‘Boss says you can use that Portakabin,’ he said. ‘We’re just clearing you some space and getting the kettle on.’

  Welcome news, Andy thought. He was lucky this was de Freitas’s land. Edward considered that he owed Mac big time and therefore, by extension, was willing to be helpful to his deputy and make sure everything went smoothly.

  Deputy, Andy thought. That had a good ring to it.

  He knew there were time constraints: the formal opening was only a couple of weeks away, all of the publicity was out and there was a general buzz in the Frantham community about this new boost to the local economy. Andy felt the implicit pressure to get things cleared up quickly, but was relieved not to be reminded overtly for the moment.

  ‘I’ll need statements from everyone,’ he said. ‘And do you have CCTV on site?’
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br />   ‘Not over this side,’ Joe told him. ‘There’s a couple of cameras keeping an eye on the heavy equipment and so on, they feed into the security cameras on the airfield, but there’s nothing to look at here. Or there wasn’t.’

  Andy nodded, slightly disappointed. But, he thought, you never knew, the camera might have caught someone coming on site. He led everyone back to the designated Portakabin. Two tables were covered in plans and maps and the walls decorated with paperwork. A young woman in a high vis jacket was unpinning some kind of schedule and moving it, page by page, to a pinboard close to the stacked tables while her colleague fiddled with a computer set on a now empty desk.

  ‘Boss says you can use this,’ he said. He didn’t look particularly pleased.

  ‘And there’s tea- and coffee-making stuff there,’ the woman added. ‘Will this give you enough room? Only we’re a bit pushed for space.’

  Andy assured her it was more than enough. Everyone seemed to have crowded into the doorway behind him and he saw the look of amusement on the woman’s face.

  ‘If you could all, um, wait outside,’ Andy said, ‘I’ll get sorted out and get the statements done.’

  The man left and the woman drifted off to sort out papers down at the other end of the cabin. After a moment she departed too, awkwardly clutching a rolled up chart, a large hammer and a can of spray paint. Andy wondered what she was planning to do.

  Then he was alone. Desk in front of him, computer waiting expectantly and – he could see through the half-open door – an orderly queue of would-be witnesses waiting outside.

  Andy’s heart suddenly sank. He wished Mac were here to tell him what to organize first, or the round, comfortable presence of Sergeant Frank Baker. What would Baker do?

  Come on, lad, he’d say, call the first one in. Start with them as can tell you least on account of them not being around. Get their statements and get rid, then focus on the important folk.

  Right, the important folk would be Elodie and Joe, so deal with the archaeologists first, maybe see them as a group and get their take on things, and then take proper statements from Joe and Elodie and have a chat with the site foreman and find out who was last on site.