Born in a Burial Gown

by Mike Craven

  Fluke had sold up and headed for the middle of nowhere; the fells above Ullswater. Despite clearing nearly three hundred thousand, prime real estate was still out of his reach. He needed something cheap and that meant something no one else wanted. He bought an acre of woodland high up on the side of a hill that the Forestry Commission had for sale. The holiday home company that owned the adjoining land had been holding out for a lower price and Fluke had nipped in and stolen it from under their noses.

  It was on a sharp incline, had too many large rocks to make logging profitable and was barely accessible. Fluke was sceptical. Until he saw the view. Although some pine trees partially obscured it, he could see down virtually the entire length of Ullswater. With selective pruning, he’d have a vista that rivalled any in the world.

  He applied for planning permission for a holiday home. He spent the rest of his money on a luxury log home which he imported from Finland. Made in the Scandinavian style, it was designed internally around a large open living space. Two bedrooms and a bathroom were off to one side but that was it. But it was the external features Fluke bought it for. A covered terrace encompassed the front and one side of the house and had nearly the same floor space as the inside.

  The civil engineer from Carlisle he’d initially contracted with had told him he was a fool and had wasted his money on the land. The firm who supplied the house also provided the expertise to site it. Engineers from Finland. For them it was a minor project. They were used to working in denser woods and on steeper inclines. They felled a dozen trees and moved some boulders. After two days, they had an area they were satisfied with. They didn’t need to be told to site the house facing Ullswater. When they were finished, they even cleared the trees that blocked his view. All but one which Fluke insisted on keeping where it was.

  It was here that he lived most of his life. He ate outdoors, he read outdoors and, during the summer months, he slept on his hammock. He loved his monastic existence and rarely missed company. His neighbours were creatures of the night. Foxes prowled, owls hunted and the occasional deer came to nibble at the tender shoots of young trees.

  He spent most weekends and long summer evenings making improvements to the surrounding area. The road, previously a mud track for logging vehicles, had to be improved and the backbreaking work gave Fluke a sense of achievement he’d not felt since he’d left hospital. He made a carport from an old sail to keep pine needles and the worst of the weather off his car. Fluke’s hands became gnarled and heavily calloused from chopping wood for the fire pit and wood-burning stove. He wasn’t yet a third of the way through the trees that the Fins had cut down. When he’d burnt them, he’d earmarked a couple of pines that, if removed, would open up the view further and let in more light. Not too much, though. He didn’t want to advertise his presence. Once the cabin had been sited and the trees cleared, he’d taken a trip on one of the Ullswater Steamers, the old passenger vessels that cruised the lake, to see if his home could be seen from the water. It could, but only if you had binoculars and knew it was there. The engineers from Finland knew what they were doing.

  His wood ran all the way down to the shore so technically he had a lakeside property and one of the jobs he’d planned for the coming summer was to put a series of steps down the treacherous slope. He was toying with the idea of getting a small boat. A couple of nice pubs had their own jetties that were a twelve-mile drive but only a ten-minute boat ride.

  After leaving hospital, Fluke had endured an emotional rollercoaster that nearly finished him off but after his first few weeks in his new home, his troubles disappeared like cigar smoke on a breezy day.

  Fluke approached the mud track that led to his home. The sign on his American-style postbox was showing he had mail. He slowed, opened his window and retrieved it. A minute later, he’d parked under his self-made canvas carport at the back of the house and had walked round to the front. As he did every night, he paused for five minutes to take in the view.

  The fell on the opposite side of Ullswater was lit up in the moonlight, the bare splintered bones of shattered rock almost gleaming. He could see the network of dry stone walls that seemed to have grown directly from the land. It was a beautiful night. Fluke strongly believed that where he lived was as much a feeling as a physical location. He couldn’t explain it any more than he could explain why certain pieces of music evoked such strong emotional responses.

  Despite it being winter he decided to have his supper outside. He put some logs on the fire pit and lit it before going inside to put on some food and get a cigar. He browned off some lamb, chopped onions, added spices in measures he knew by heart and let the curry simmer. He’d leave it until the meat was tender; about two hours.

  He opened his mail while he was inside and there was some light. Nothing of note until the last one. His stomach sank as he recognised the postmark. He sighed as he opened it. It was another letter from the council. The tone had long before stopped being pleasant.

  When he bought the wood, the planning permission Fluke applied for had only been for a holiday home. It couldn’t be used as his main domicile, but he guessed that as no one knew it was there, no one would know if he lived there permanently. His guess was wrong. The county council knew. Fluke suspected it was the holiday home company owners who’d told them. Six months before, he’d returned home and found a letter in the postbox. They wanted to discuss two things. The log cabin wasn’t of the type on the original planning permission and it appeared to be his only home. They needed evidence he was living somewhere else in winter. It was all in an apologetic tone making it clear that the fault was all theirs and if he could provide what they needed, they would stop bothering him. Fluke wasn’t surprised to get a letter from the holiday company two days later, offering to buy his land. He ignored them both.

  Six weeks later, a second letter from the council arrived. Bureaucracy wasn’t quick, but it was thorough. The tone was no less apologetic but, right at the bottom, it mentioned court. And they’d continued to come with depressing regularity, each more threatening than the last. However, the latest was the first letter that actually had a court hearing scheduled. He would file it with the rest.

  He walked outside and pushed the letter deep into the fire pit, waited until it was burning, withdrew it and lit his cigar. He watched as the rest of the letter curled and blackened in the flames. The path he was on with the council only had one way of ending. He’d be made homeless with his savings decimated. He’d own a stunning bit of land that was next to useless. He doubted he’d even get permission for a caravan now.

  He smiled. It was strange but he worried about it less than he worried about lying to Doctor Cooper.

  He settled in one of his numerous outdoor seats and blew smoke out towards the lake. The mingling smell of the cigar smoke and curried lamb coming through the open door was pleasant and comforting. He relaxed, the tension of the previous twenty-four hours gradually leaving his body.

  As the curry cooked and his cigar shortened, he thought about the investigation, picking up where he’d left off. Best-case scenario was that when he interviewed Ackley the next day, he would get a workable description of the killer, but he had some doubts about how useful he was going to be. A doped-up smackhead, scared stiff. Not the most reliable witness. Still, it was all he had at that moment.

  He thought about the seemingly random numbers again. He had Jiao-long feeding them into every database he legally could, and some he couldn’t. Fluke was confident he’d have an answer by the morning. He hoped so. All they’d done so far was increase their ignorance. He resisted the temptation to ring Jiao-long now. If there were anything significant, he’d be contacted. During murder investigations, his phone was never turned off.

  As the curry continued to simmer, Fluke finished his cigar and watched the bats that lived in the wood ducking and diving as they chased their insect prey.

  Insects.

  He’d forgotten to ring Lucy.

  Helping her with her thes
is might mean he was owed an entomological favour in the future, and he had nothing to do while his curry cooked anyway. He retrieved the text with her number and called.

  But she didn’t want a favour, far from it. She wanted to do Fluke a favour.

  ‘Coffee,’ she said when pleasantries had been swapped and Fluke had asked her what he could do for her.

  At first, he thought he was being asked out by a woman fifteen years his junior.

  He was wrong.

  ‘I was in the post-mortem as you know, Mr Fluke.’

  ‘You don’t work for me, Lucy. You can call me Avison.’

  ‘Yes, well. Anyway, during the post-mortem, you may have noticed that I was interested in the brown substance Henry found under her nails, as well as the stuff SOCO recovered from her trouser turn-ups?’

  Fluke confirmed he had.

  ‘I’d thought it might have been blowfly puparium,’ she said. She paused, seeming to know Fluke was going to ask the obvious.

  ‘Remind me what they are, Lucy. It’s been a while since I got my doctorate in flies.’

  She laughed. ‘Sorry. The blowfly is the first insect on a corpse. It’s also the one that colonises the body in the greatest numbers and for that reason, it’s been studied the most.’

  Fluke paid attention. Henry had told him that, as well as helping with the time of death, insects could also help with where the victim was killed.

  She continued, ‘And it goes through four stages in its life cycle. An adult lays eggs and those eggs hatch into maggots, which go on to feed on the flesh of the corpse. We can measure that part of the life cycle accurately.’

  ‘There weren’t any maggots on the body.’

  ‘No, there weren’t but there was that brown substance. The next stage of the maggot is to turn into a pupa. This is the cool bit when the maggot turns into a blowfly.’

  Fluke resisted the temptation to tell her it was actually the disgusting bit.

  ‘And the shell it forms during this transformation is called a puparium. You’ll have seen them, they’re dark brown and barrel-shaped, they’re actually made of the dead skin of the maggot, it sort of hardens around itself,’ she continued.

  ‘And they’re brown?’

  ‘Exactly. Now, no way does your crime scene guy fail to identify a fully formed puparium and no way does one fit under someone’s fingernail. They’re about five or six mils big and easily recognisable. However, when the adult fly has broken out of the puparium, it leaves it in pieces, and sometimes they get broken up further. That’s what I thought the substance under her nails could have been.’

  ‘So it was insect activity? I’d have bet a month’s wages it had been too cold that night.’

  ‘No, no you misunderstand, Avison. It wasn’t bits of puparium at all. She hadn’t been dead long enough for that kind of activity. And if she had, there’d have been much more it.’

  ‘Oh. So what was it?’

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Coffee,’ Fluke repeated.

  ‘Coffee,’ she confirmed. ‘Ground-up coffee. I had a look at it under a microscope. Henry was kind enough to arrange for me to have supervised access to your lab. There’s no doubt.’

  Fluke thought for a moment. ‘So our vic liked coffee. That’s something else I know about her, I suppose. Doesn’t help much, though? Doubt the brand could be identified and even if it could, I don’t see where it would take us.’

  ‘I’ve more. Have a little faith,’ she laughed.

  Sometimes it was the most inane thing that opened a case. Sometime you needed that little bit of luck. The police officer who stops a killer for having a tail light out. The man arrested for drink driving, whose DNA matches a rape twenty years earlier. Was Lucy going to be his luck on the case?

  ‘I can’t tell you what the brand was because it wasn’t commercial. These were fresh beans, freshly ground.’

  ‘So?’ Fluke asked impatiently. If there was a point he wanted to hear it.

  ‘I’m a coffee lover, Avison. I’m a coffee snob if I’m being honest, although to be fair I’m not a snob about anything else. But I do like my coffee and I know a lot about it.’

  ‘So you can identify the bean then?’

  ‘Nope, of course not, no one could.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Fluke said, lying.

  ‘What I can tell you is that the substance found under her nails and in the turn-ups of her trousers wasn’t pre-ground. The beans weren’t even ground in a shop. She ground them herself.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’

  Fluke got up and walked into the house. He wanted to take notes. He wrote down “coffee beans” and circled it.

  ‘Because the grinder she used was worn. Most coffee enthusiasts use the new electric grinders that give a uniform grind, although I personally think the friction heats the beans too much.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or they have a manual burr-mill grinder.’

  ‘Burr-mill?’

  ‘Looks like a small sausage maker. About eight inches. That’s what I use. I have an old one my dad gave me.’

  ‘And that’s what she had, you reckon?’

  ‘I do. What a manual grinder, especially an old one, will do is give an uneven grind. The gears wear down and the burrs rotate slightly unevenly. You don’t want an uneven grind. Uniform grinds make a purer cup of coffee, the water is in contact with each grain for the same amount of time. So the only reason you would keep a grinder that didn’t work properly is—’

  ‘Because it’s personal to you,’ Fluke finished.

  ‘Exactly. I don’t care how uneven my grinds get, I’ll never get rid of my dad’s burr-mill. I love it too much. And only coffee lovers would get sentimental about a grinder.’

  There was a weird kind of logic to that. It was eccentric but entirely plausible. If they ever found where she lived, Fluke would give short odds on there being exactly what Lucy described in her house. ‘Okay, still not seeing how this helps. There must be thousands of real coffee drinkers in Cumbria.’

  ‘Tens of thousands probably, but the vast majority get their beans, pre-ground at the supermarket. Why wouldn’t they? It’s decent enough these days and most of it’s fair trade. You can also get whole beans at the supermarket now, to grind at home as and when you need them, but there’s far less choice.’

  ‘Where’d you get yours, Lucy? From the supermarket?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I have my favourite bean and I like to grind it up as I need it. The oils in the bean are at their freshest then. They start to dry as soon as they’ve been ground. Keeping ground coffee in the fridge helps but it’s always best to freshly grind them.’

  Fluke knew where she was going. ‘And a fiver says you can’t get your favourite bean at a supermarket?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Another fiver says you have to go to a specialist coffee shop.’

  Chapter 15

  Fluke was back at Carleton Hall by seven in the morning, still wiping the sleep from his eyes. The other early bird was Jo Skelton. Jiao-long was nowhere to be seen but a message on his desk said the computer search of the numbers had turned up nothing. He’d gone home but would be back in later. Fluke joined Skelton in the incident room. He summarised the previous night’s call from Lucy and the possibility that their victim may have been buying coffee from a specialist shop.

  Fluke left to check his emails. After he’d finished, he came back into the interview room to find Skelton with her face buried in the Yellow Pages. Intrigued, he walked over.

  She looked up as Fluke approached. ‘Was the bug lady sure it was specialist coffee, boss?’ she asked.

  ‘As sure as she could be, I suppose. Says she might have been a regular customer. Every other week at least, Lucy reckons,’ he said. ‘There can’t be many of these shops, surely.’

  ‘There’s loads of them. I’ve trawled through Yellow Pages and cross-referenced what I found with a search on the Internet.’

  ‘How m
any?’ Fluke was hoping the list would be manageable.

  In fact there were nearly eighty specialist tea and coffee shops in Cumbria and eighty wasn’t manageable. Not without bringing in more staff and he wasn’t prepared to go to Chambers with something that flimsy.

  He needed to narrow the list down somehow.

  Working on the assumption that a snob would avoid the international coffee chains, he removed them from the list. That left a smaller, but still unwieldy list of thirty that primarily sold what he imagined was gourmet coffee.

  ‘We need to triage the shops,’ Skelton said.

  Fluke had been thinking the same thing but didn’t know how to go about it. He’d been considering looking at the ones nearest the murder scene first then expanding outwards but decided that wasn’t scientific enough. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll have to search the Whitehaven area obviously, that’s where the body was found.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Common sense would suggest that we would then widen the search in an expanding radius around the body. Do all of Copeland, Allerdale, South Lakes next, then Barrow Eden and Carlisle last.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But the killer’s a pro. You said it yourself. So if he transported the body to the deposition site, it’s possible that the actual murder site was where she was living.’

  ‘Possible,’ Fluke agreed.

  ‘I’m going to take a guess at something now. The killer knew about the deposition site in advance. Means he has either been there before or had been talking to someone who had.’

  ‘Yep, I was thinking that yesterday. You can’t see it from the road,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t help with locations though.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. All we’re trying to do is triage the search rather than rule anything out.’

  She was right. It didn’t matter what order they searched, they were just trying to guess where was most likely. ‘What you thinking then, Jo?’

  ‘I’d do South Lakes and Barrow last. Neither are in West Cumberland Hospital’s catchment area.’