08.Dying to Sin

by Stephen Booth

  ‘So do you have anything specific for me?’

  ‘I checked the intelligence when you emailed, Ben. Sorry, mate – there’s nothing in your area. I thought it was all sheep in the Peak District, anyway?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Well, if you want to take it any further, you’ll probably have to tackle the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon. They’ll have an Enforcement and Removals team that operates in your region.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Oh, and Ben?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Watch out for anyone called Ernest Xavier Ample.’

  Half an hour later, Fry stood with Hitchens at the tape marking off the freshly excavated patch of ground, now covered by its own tent. Pity Wood Farm was starting to look like a campsite for tourists with strange tastes in sleeping arrangements. Inside the tent, Dr Pat Jamieson was humming to himself, like a mechanic under a dodgy Ford Escort.

  Forensic anthropologists were conservative by nature, especially when asked to report on the biological profile of a victim. Jamieson was one of the most conservative of all, likely to suck his teeth and shake his head without committing himself to an opinion.

  ‘You know I can’t address cause of death, Inspector,’ said Dr Jamieson, his bald head gleaming briefly in the light. ‘That’s a medical determination, for the pathologist to make. An assessment of age, sex, stature and ancestry, yes. Time since death, possibly. But beyond that, well …’

  While Hitchens was fidgeting impatiently, Fry took a call from Murfin on her mobile.

  ‘Bad news, Diane. We’ve lost a couple of those builders.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two of the East Europeans have done a bunk from their B&B, and the agency has had no word of them since Thursday. They suggest they might just have gone off for a long weekend.’

  ‘A long weekend doing what?’

  ‘Boozing probably,’ said Murfin. ‘I can’t blame them, personally. We might have to wait until Monday and see if they turn up again.’

  ‘Damn. Did we check on their status?’

  ‘You said it could wait,’ pointed out Murfin.

  ‘No, Mr Hitchens did.’ Fry couldn’t disguise the small surge of relief. ‘Which two are missing?’

  ‘A Slovak and a Czech. I’d give you the names, but I can’t pronounce them.’

  ‘I’ll get Ben Cooper on to it. He has some contacts.’

  Fry ended the call and switched her attention again.

  ‘The pathologist’s preliminary report on the first victim said there were no signs of major trauma,’ Hitchens was saying to the anthropologist.

  ‘Oh, well – there’s your other difference, then,’ said Dr Jamieson, with a patronizing smile. ‘Apart from the age of the burial, that is.’

  ‘What difference is that, Doctor?’

  ‘The bodies might appear to be intact and free of major trauma as far as the torso, but beyond the upper vertebrae we’re in quite different territory.’

  ‘Injuries? A cause of death?’ said Hitchens hopefully.

  ‘Not necessarily. But your second body is definitely different, Inspector. This one is missing a head.’

  12

  There was plenty of work for SOCOs and the photographic unit to do now. Before it could be moved, any item of physical evidence would be photographed in situ from several angles with a ruler for scale, and a sketch containing accurate dimensions with locations and measurements of all objects would have to be made.

  ‘Well, I can only give my view if the pathologist requests it,’ said Dr Jamieson. ‘And most of them think anthropologists are charlatans when it comes to the manner of death.’

  ‘But the missing head –?’ said Hitchens.

  ‘– wasn’t necessarily the cause of death. Not that I can pronounce on the subject.’

  ‘Removing someone’s head is a sure way of causing death. Even I can pronounce on that.’

  The anthropologist shook his head. ‘Postmortem removal. Do I need to say more?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I understand you’re bringing in ground-penetrating radar to examine the site for more burials?’ said Jamieson. ‘I’ll be here if you need me.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Postmortem removal,’ said Hitchens to his detectives, when they were out of earshot of the anthropologist.

  ‘Somebody removed the victim’s head after she was dead,’ said Fry.

  ‘Yes, I know what it means, Diane. Well, I know what the word means. But what’s the significance of the act? Who would take a head from a dead body?’

  ‘Collectors?’ suggested Murfin. ‘There are people who collect anything.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I bet it’ll be worth a fortune on eBay.’

  ‘Do you want me to check?’

  ‘No, Gavin. We’ll leave that for later.’

  ‘Serial killers love dismemberment,’ said Fry. ‘The psychologists say that taking body parts from their victims as trophies gives them a feeling of control, a sense of achievement previously lacking in their lives.’

  ‘We’re not dealing with a serial killer,’ said Hitchens firmly. ‘Don’t even joke about it. This is Edendale, not Ipswich.’

  ‘We have two bodies already,’ pointed out Fry.

  ‘Two doesn’t make a series.’

  ‘Well, perhaps …’

  ‘I’m serious here. The last thing we want is to start a scare. Besides, there might be no connection between these two victims, apart from the fact that they were buried a few yards apart. Heck, we don’t even know they were murdered. They might be accidental deaths, or they might be suicides. So let’s have no talk about serial killers. There’s absolutely no justification. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Hitchens relaxed a little. ‘We don’t want our new detective superintendent arriving in Edendale and finding us panicking unnecessarily. Now, do we?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Fry.

  She looked at Cooper, who had been silent so far. But he lowered his head, refusing to respond. No doubt he had his own theories. She’d get them out of him later.

  ‘Actually, we’re calling our second victim “she”, but we won’t get confirmation of gender for a while yet,’ said Hitchens. ‘So no assumptions, OK?’

  ‘No assumptions,’ said Fry.

  That taste was in her mouth again. She didn’t know where it came from, or why. It was like a pregnancy craving, but she wasn’t pregnant, thank God. No chance of that.

  ‘Are you all right, Diane?’

  She became aware of Cooper standing nearby, watching her with concern written all over his face, as if he had stumbled across someone who was ill.

  ‘Of course I’m all right. What are you staring at?’

  ‘I just thought –’

  ‘Ben, were you thinking of hanging around here until the rain stops? We both have work to do back at the office.’

  Cooper shuffled his feet in the mud. ‘They’ve found a shoe, about ten feet from the second body, just under the surface of the soil.’

  ‘A woman’s shoe?’

  ‘Yes, size four.’

  ‘Can they get a shoe size from a skeleton?’ asked Fry.

  ‘I don’t know, Diane.’

  Fry paced back towards the house, skirting the crime scene tape. But then her feet slowed as if the weight of the mud was drawing her to a halt, and she stopped.

  ‘If Raymond Sutton knew those two bodies were buried in the yard, would he have been willing to sell the farm? He must have known there was a good chance a new owner would start digging the place up, if it was going to be developed.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t know it was going to be developed,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m thinking about all the vehicles and equipment that were left behind. Apart from the livestock, nothing seems to have been sold off at all – not even the furniture in the house. I
wonder if Raymond Sutton was under the impression that the farm was being sold as a going concern.’

  ‘Sold to another farmer, you mean?’

  Cooper nodded. ‘If Mr Sutton thought Pity Wood was going to continue as a dairy farm, he might not have worried about the bodies. Farmers have more to keep them occupied than building patios, especially if they’re starting a new herd from scratch.’

  ‘Did you ever speak to the auctioneers?’

  ‘No, I never got round to it. It didn’t seem all that important.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better do it now,’ said Fry.

  ‘OK, I will.’ Cooper turned. ‘You talked to the new owner, didn’t you? Goodwin, is that the name?’

  ‘Yes, I spoke to him on the phone. Why?’

  ‘Did he seem like someone who’d make a convincing dairy farmer?’

  Fry thought for a moment. ‘Not to me, he didn’t. I’d say he sounded more like a moderately successful provincial solicitor. You know – divorces and boundary disputes, that sort of lawyer. Steady business, but nothing that demands too much in the way of brains.’

  ‘And he lives in Manchester somewhere?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmm. Dropping out of the rat race, maybe?’

  ‘Downshifting, they call it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s pretty much what you did, Diane. Moving from the big city into the country. It was a bit of a leap, wasn’t it?’

  Mrs van Doon had the first body on the table in the mortuary. When Fry entered, suited and masked, the pathologist was trying to separate the skin from the mummified hand, easing it off the desiccated fingers like a glove. She would be hoping that someone could get usable fingerprints from it once it was clear of the corpse.

  ‘Can you estimate a time of death yet?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Ooh, time of death. That’s a favourite question, isn’t it? Well, by far the best indications of time of death are rigor mortis and body temperature. Anybody want to guess why those aren’t helpful in this case?’

  Fry looked at the remains on the table, was about to speak, then realized the pathologist was probably making a joke.

  ‘That’s right. Because they’re both useless once you get past about thirty-six hours. Here, we’re well past that by a factor, of … oh, I’d say about three hundred or so. The only possibility you’re left with in this case is finding some evidence of the last time your victim was seen, or the last time anyone had contact with her.’

  ‘A factor of three hundred would make it about a year,’ pointed out Fry.

  ‘Oops, did I let slip an opinion? It was unintentional, I assure you.’

  ‘But appreciated, all the same. We need anything we can get.’

  ‘Well, there’s one thing I’ve never seen before,’ said Mrs van Doon. ‘There seems to be an extraordinary amount of tooth decay for an individual of this age. Quite excessive. I propose to consult the forensic odontologist for a specialist opinion.’

  ‘If the victim had some unusual medical condition, that might help us tremendously.’

  ‘Yes …’ The pathologist hesitated, as if about to say something else. ‘Well, we’ll see. No point in speculating too much, is there? I know we’re as one on that point, Detective Sergeant.’

  Cooper settled himself back at his desk in Edendale and opened the records book carefully. The bound ledger only went back to the 1980s, presumably to the time when the brothers had first taken over the farm from their father. Their names were inscribed inside the front cover, with the date the book had been started.

  He was pleased to see that whoever was responsible for the neat, copperplate handwriting had taken the trouble to record the stocking rates and cropping rotas on the farm, as well as adding up the accounts. DEFRA would have been proud of them.

  At the time the ledger was started, the main enterprise on the farm had been a flock of Swaledale ewes – four hundred head of them, either bred pure or crossed to a Bluefaced Leicester ram to give mule lambs for sale. It seemed that all the purebred Swale ewe lambs were retained as flock replacements, and sent into Lincolnshire for their first winter, while the males were sold as stores through Bakewell market. It was still standard practice on many sheep farms in the Peak District.

  A few years later, a small herd of Belted Galloway cattle had been tried. Cooper nodded approval. That was a good idea of someone’s. Galloways were hardy cattle, and that was important because there was little space for in-wintering cattle at Pity Wood Farm, and the breed would have been capable of making use of the coarser grasses.

  Flicking through the records, Cooper began to see the evidence of falling prices and rising costs as the years went by and Pity Wood entered the 1990s. The thriving enterprise that Raymond and Derek had inherited from their father was gradually, inexorably, getting into trouble. He tried to imagine the brothers discussing their financial problems by the fireside in the evenings, but he couldn’t manage it. An anxious silence filled his head, both brothers reluctant to talk about what was worrying them, perhaps even more reluctant to admit there was anything wrong. Optimism in the future, that was the keyword in those days.

  And then, in 1999, he saw the first attempts at diversification. That was already too late. The writing had been on the wall for a decade by then. After the arrival of Tom Farnham, there had been other failed enterprises – a farm shop, a campsite, holiday lets, rare breeds of sheep.

  There was diversification, and there was diversification. If you had half a million pounds to spare, you could buy into the buffalo meat business with your own hundred-strong breeding herd, including butchery and storage equipment and stalls at farmers’ markets. Cooper had seen it advertised quite recently. A water buffalo enterprise over at Chatsworth, and thriving by all accounts.

  But sheep? There were already half a million sheep in the national park alone. They were a feature of the landscape, those white, woolly blobs scattered across the hillsides like snow. They were a driving hazard on the unfenced roads, especially on the high passes of the Dark Peak at night, when they were drawn to the tarmac for warmth and their eyes gleamed suddenly in a driver’s headlights as he rounded a bend.

  Yes, many people would say there were already too many sheep in the Peak District.

  When Fry returned from the mortuary, Cooper was unfolding a map attached to some legal documents.

  ‘You know, Tom Farnham said they used to park farm trailers on that bit of ground where the first grave was found.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Fry.

  ‘Well, I’ve been going through the deeds, and there was a copy of a map drawn up for the conveyance between the Suttons and the previous owners. It clearly shows a building on that part of the property.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s a pretty big building. It looks as though it ran from the corner of the paddock almost to the first gate, right along that wall.’

  ‘Does it specify what the building was?’

  ‘No, it just says “outbuildings”.’

  Fry looked at the map. ‘It might just have been re-drawn from an old document. They don’t bother to come out and re-map a property every time it’s sold, do they? So this map probably shows the way the farm looked at the time of an earlier purchase.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Farms change appearance all the time, don’t they? Farmers knock old buildings down and put up new ones, willy-nilly. They’re not subject to the same planning regulations as the rest of us.’

  ‘That’s true. But a building this size … well, it wasn’t just some old pigsty they didn’t need any more.’ Cooper shook his head. ‘It’s a shame there aren’t any photos of Pity Wood from that time.’

  ‘We should be so lucky.’

  He put the map back into the document wallet where he’d found it.

  ‘You know that area should never have been disturbed?’ said Fry. ‘Not by the building contractors, anyway. Jamie Ward was digging a completely unnecessary trench when he came across
the first body.’

  ‘The new owner might have been planning on calling in some landscape gardeners later on, or he might have wanted to tackle the garden himself.’

  ‘This is the Manchester solicitor, Goodwin?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Is he a keen gardener?’

  ‘I have no idea, Diane.’

  ‘I do wonder why he bought that farm,’ said Fry.

  ‘Didn’t he say he wanted to move out into the country for some peace and quiet? You called it downshifting, didn’t you?’

  ‘I meant, why that farm? Why Pity Wood? The place is a complete mess. There must be lots of more attractive propositions within commuting distance of Manchester.’

  ‘Of course. But probably it was a question of price. This property would have been a lot cheaper than most. You just need deep pockets for the modernization work.’

  ‘What if he had another reason for choosing that particular property? A more pressing reason?’

  Cooper thought about it for a moment. ‘You mean he might have known there were two bodies buried on the farm and couldn’t risk anyone else buying it, in case they discovered the graves?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Cooper. ‘It might explain the hurry.’

  ‘Was there a hurry?’

  ‘They didn’t take the time for an equipment sale.’

  ‘Oh, that. Well, all that stuff is starting to make a bit of sense now. I think I’ll give Mr Goodwin a call and ask him why he chose Pity Wood.’

  ‘You’ve no evidence for this theory, Diane.’

  ‘Somebody has to use a bit of initiative.’

  Cooper raised an eyebrow. He thought he could see Fry already starting to respond to the imminent arrival of the new superintendent. No doubt she believed she’d do better under a female boss. He didn’t think that DCI Kessen or DI Hitchens had ever shown any bias for or against her, and had never avoided giving Diane responsibility because she was a woman. But perhaps he wasn’t in the right place to notice. From Diane’s point of view, the situation might look completely different. It was possible that she observed lots of little things, small signs of favour or disfavour that no one else saw or would know how to interpret.