How the Dead Speak

by Val McDermid

  ‘I’m DI Valente. I’m looking for DCI Fielding.’

  ‘Over in the big blue tent. Where they’re sorting out the bones.’ He returned to his screen.

  The big blue tent was impossible to miss. It stood beyond the car park, obscuring much of a dirty white crenelated building in the Victorian Gothic style. Sophie assumed it was the convent of the Order of the Blessed Pearl. She pulled open the flap and stared into something that she supposed should be horrifying but which struck her as actually quite banal. A dozen or more trestle tables were scattered round the tent, each with its own bundle of bones laid out in approximate skeletons. Figures in the regulation white suits, bootees and nitrile gloves were either intently examining the remains or taking pictures on mobile phones and making notes on clipboards. A tall man was moving from table to table, asking questions and scribbling answers. DCI Fielding, Sophie guessed.

  She waited till he approached the end of the tent where she stood then called, ‘Excuse me? DCI Fielding? I’m DI Valente from ReMIT.’

  He looked startled, then amused. ‘You think I’m DCI Fielding? Your investigative skills need a bit of work, love.’ He turned and indicated a small figure deep in conversation with someone pointing his way through an array of bones. ‘That’s DCI Fielding.’ He raised his voice. ‘Guv?’

  Fielding looked round. ‘What is it, Skip?’

  ‘Somebody here for you. From ReMIT.’

  She rolled her eyes in the unmistakable FFS expression. ‘Give me a minute. Let me finish here.’ Irritation made her Scottish accent unmistakable. ‘And you, from ReMIT? Wait outside.’

  Sophie backed out through the tent flap. Fuck. Why had nobody thought to mention that Alex Fielding was a woman? Was it a genuine oversight or had her supposed misjudgement on the team-building exercise made her a target for humiliation? Now she was stuck here, the only officer who manifestly had nothing to do.

  Thankfully Fielding didn’t keep her waiting long. She was probably the smallest police officer Sophie had ever seen. She’d heard Scottish people were shorter, so maybe their standards for joining the police were literally lower. Fielding sized her up, sharp eyes nested in wrinkles, mouth tight in a sardonic smile. ‘Nobody told you I was a woman, did they?’ Although she was small, her presence was substantial.

  Sophie shook her head. ‘No, ma’am. I just presumed . . . ’ She felt herself blush under the unsparing scrutiny. ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘Paula McIntyre still hasn’t learned how to play nice, even though she’s finally made DI.’ Fielding sighed. ‘So, why are you here?’

  This was just getting worse. Clearly Rutherford hadn’t bothered to tell Fielding he was swiping her case out from under her. Suddenly she wanted urgently to pee. She cleared her throat. ‘ReMIT are taking over the lead on the case. I’m here to introduce myself as the case manager. DI Valente. Everything will be going through me.’

  ‘Is this some kind of a joke? This is not a ReMIT case. I’ve got a team on the ground who actually know what they’re doing. As opposed to a shop assistant.’ Fielding scowled. ‘Yes, DI Valente, your reputation precedes you.’

  ‘DCI Rutherford believes we’ve got particular skills. He can provide valuable leadership,’ Sophie tried.

  Fielding’s expression shouted scorn more eloquently than words could have managed. ‘So you are going to manage the room? And I suppose you’ll be expecting me to provide bodies to do the donkey work? Because you haven’t got that many bodies, have you? Christ, I’ve got more bodies in that tent than you’ve got in your whole team.’

  ‘That is what DCI Rutherford envisages, yes, ma’am. I’m here as a courtesy. I’ll be setting up the room back at Skenfrith Street as soon as I’ve walked the crime scene.’ Sophie had no idea where that came from, other than the instinct that the only way to deal with bullies was to pay them back in their own currency.

  Fielding waved her arm in a mocking bow. ‘Good luck with that,’ she said, no possibility of missing the sarcasm in her voice. ‘Be my guest. We’ll just get on with the grunt work like the good second-class citizens we are. I’ll liaise with Rutherford about how we staff up the room. Just remember, though. He’s not my boss. He’s my equal in rank. Be careful where you walk, DI Valente. Literally and figuratively.’

  She turned on her heel and stalked back inside the tent. Sophie’s sense of relief was palpable. She walked to the far end of the tent, considering Fielding’s parting shot. She took her time to absorb the scene before she messed up by walking through the middle of it.

  Now she could see the former convent in its full decaying glory. It was a huge sprawl of a building, with a central castellated tower in the middle, flanked by smaller versions at the four corners of the three-storey building. The stucco that covered it had probably been white originally, but it was flaking off in places. Spreading rust stained the areas round the joins in the drainpipes, moss crawled up unevenly from ground level. In its heyday, it must have been an awe-inspiring sight. Considering the backgrounds of the kids she imagined ending up here, it was more likely to have made them think of horror movies.

  The perimeter of the property was marked out by a high stone wall lined with dense shrubbery and mature trees. The open ground to one side of the main frontage was the site of intense activity. A couple of dozen people in white suits were working with trowels and hand spades in a series of holes of different depths, breaking up what had obviously been a lawn. Surrounding the house was more lawn, surprisingly well-tended. It didn’t look like the grounds of somewhere abandoned five years before.

  She walked to the far corner of the frontage and turned down the side. Once she was a few yards from the corner, the activities in the rest of the grounds were invisible. Just the subdued mumble of generators and the occasional raised voice indicated what was going on out of sight.

  Another grassy area, and beyond it, near the shrubbery, neat rows of vegetables. Beyond them, raised beds full of healthy-looking plants. The nuns might have gone but someone was taking care of these grounds. Sophie rounded the next corner and beyond a narrow strip of grass she saw a walled graveyard. Curious, she crossed the lawn and entered via a double wrought-iron gate, wide enough to accommodate a coffin and pall-bearers. There must have been a couple of dozen grey granite crosses, all similarly inscribed. On the top section, IHS. Across the middle, the names of nuns in plain lettering. Sister Mary Catherine, Sister Theresa, Sister Mary Joseph, Sister Margaret Mary, and so on. Dates of birth and death. Then RIP. It reminded her of a small-scale version of the military cemeteries she’d visited on a school trip to the First World War battlefields. In the furthest corner stood a slightly larger version of the cross. Same lettering, but this time the long arm of the cross read, Father Joseph Peter Toner, 1912–1975.

  She couldn’t have explained why, but Sophie found herself gazing up above the treetops to the sky where thin skeins of cloud straggled across the blue. In spite of her suspicions about what these nuns had presided over, she was strangely moved by the little cemetery. She gave herself a mental shake and returned to the here and now, her eyes sweeping across the last corner of the grounds. To her surprise, through the trees she saw the outline of a cottage. Intrigued, she retraced her steps through the graveyard and headed towards it.

  Set behind a low wall surmounted by iron railings, the cottage was a squat stone building, cramped windows flanking a front porch the size of a sentry box, two more dormer windows upstairs that couldn’t have let in much light. But it was trim and well-kept. A greenhouse sat in one corner, filled with luxuriant greenery, the occasional red of a tomato showing through. At the foot of the back garden, she glimpsed the wall of the convent grounds.

  Sophie opened the gate and walked up the flagstone path. No doorbell, just a heavy brass knocker, polished to a high shine. She raised it and let it fall with a heavy thud. No response. She decided to take a look through the windows, because why not? The living room on the left featured a long leather sofa well past its prime and a cou
ple of armchairs that had seen less use. Opposite the sofa, hanging above the fireplace, was a massive flat-screen TV. A single mug sat on a low coffee table; she was pleased with herself for recognising the logo of Bradfield Victoria FC.

  She turned to check out the other ground-floor windows and nearly screamed. On the path, a few feet from her, a man stood, a hammer dangling from one hand. He wore a Bradfield Vics replica top over his bulky torso. Heavy denim jeans that owed no debt to fashion and a pair of well-worn work boots completed his ensemble. Sophie took all this in as she collected herself and finally checked out his face. Somewhere in his thirties, she estimated. A mop of thick straight dark hair. ‘Can I help you?’ He looked East European, but he sounded local.

  ‘I’m with the police. Detective Inspector Valente.’ She pulled her ID from her pocket. ‘And you are . . . ?’ Trying very hard to sound calm and authoritative while her heart continued its pounding. She hadn’t heard him approach, nor sensed his presence. That was what freaked her out.

  ‘Jerome Martinu. Everybody calls me Jezza. I’m the groundsman here.’

  ‘And you live here?’

  He sighed. ‘Look, I’ve explained all this already to you guys. I bought the cottage off the church. This is my property. The church pays me to keep the grounds from getting out of hand. End of. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’ He moved towards the cottage.

  ‘What’s the hammer for?’

  He stopped and shook his head. ‘Knocking in nails.’ He glanced over his shoulder, probably to see whether she was smiling. She wasn’t. ‘One of the raised beds needed a bit of attention.’ Then he was gone, surprising her with his turn of speed as he rounded the corner and made for the rear of his property.

  She hadn’t seen him over by the raised beds. But then, she hadn’t been paying that much attention. If he’d already been checked out, there was no need for her to repeat someone else’s work. Now she had a sense of what things were like out here, it was time to head back and set up the operations room back in the Skenfrith Street police station. The sooner she got that up and running, the sooner she’d be able to impress Rutherford – and the rest of the team. She had ground to make up, so she’d better start running.

  18

  Babies are biologically programmed to smile from birth. It makes them more appealing to adults, who are also programmed to respond. But beyond that, when it comes to forming relationships, we shift into the realms of learned behaviour. And too many people fail to learn what they need to be comfortable in their skins. Mostly because they never encountered anyone to learn from.

  From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL

  Steve Nisbet hadn’t imagined his first assignment with the Regional Major Incident Team would be talking to a social worker about a bunch of nuns. He’d applied to join ReMIT when Carol Jordan had first set it up and been bitterly disappointed when he’d failed to make the cut. He’d followed their every step from a distance, longing to be part of what he believed was the absolute pinnacle of modern coppering. His mum was always singing a song by some Irish bloke, Pierce something or other, ‘I am the boy to be with’. And for Steve, ReMIT were definitely the boys to be with.

  Until the day when the all wheels came careening off so catastrophically. But even then, even as his mates were telling him he’d dodged a bullet, he secretly regretted not being one of the shattered team left licking their wounds and picking up the pieces.

  When the news got out that a revamped ReMIT was to be launched, the word in the locker room had been that signing up was most likely to be career suicide. None of his crew could understand why Steve, tipped as ‘most likely to succeed’, would want to leave a well-set billet for such a precarious berth. But Steve knew this was where he wanted to be. It might no longer be led by the legendary Carol Jordan, but he couldn’t believe her DNA wasn’t still running through the squad.

  His eagerness had taken a bit of a dent on the supposed team-building day. And during the briefing, the old hands – Paula, Stacey, Alvin and Karim – had stuck together, constantly sharing glances, checking each other out before they expressed an opinion, clearly not quite sure which of their new colleagues they could afford to trust yet. He’d hoped his collaboration with Alvin had done enough to break down some of those barriers but he recognised there was a way to go yet. He’d win them over in time, he was sure of that. He was good with people. He never went long between girlfriends.

  The big disappointment was Rutherford. Everything he’d heard about Carol Jordan signalled that she was one of a kind. He didn’t think Rutherford had that degree of individuality or originality. The briefing that morning hadn’t done anything to change that opinion. It had felt sketchy, not thought through. And now here he was, kicking his heels in some social worker’s office while she tried to find someone who had actually had any face-to-face dealings with the nuns of the Blessed Pearl.

  The woman had been flustered, unwilling at first to cooperate. But Steve had laid it on thick. This could be a murder inquiry, he reminded her. It wouldn’t look good if it came out later that the council’s social work department hadn’t gone out of its way to try to identify some of these child victims. He could see the calculation going on behind her eyes, remembering the way social work bosses had been destroyed in the media over perceived past failings. So off she’d scuttled to track down one of the poor sods whose names were on the files.

  Steve was on his third game of online Scrabble when the door opened and a head appeared round the edge. Hair in a neat brown bob, glasses with oversized black frames, an anxious expression and a nervous half-smile. ‘Sergeant Nisbet?’ The voice was surprisingly confident, warm and cultivated.

  Steve sprang to his feet. ‘That’s me. Come in.’

  A different woman entered, plump and self-effacing, a folder clutched to her chest, a plain wedding band tight on a chubby finger. He imagined her married to some Guardian-reading couch potato. She gave a nervous smile. ‘Sarah said we could use her office.’ She looked around for somewhere to sit that wasn’t her boss’s chair but had to give up. She edged round the desk and perched uneasily on the chair. ‘I’m Jackie Johnston. Sarah said you wanted to talk to the social worker who dealt with the children at the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She nodded. ‘That would be me, certainly for the last few years they were up and running.’

  ‘You’ll have heard about the discoveries that have been made in the grounds of the convent of the Blessed Pearl?’ Unless you’ve been walking around with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears.

  She closed her eyes momentarily. ‘It’s appalling. And I know we’re going to end up carrying the can for it.’

  ‘It’s not my job to dish out blame, Jackie. I’m just trying to get a picture of what the home was like. How it was run. How much you knew about the lives of the children there.’

  She made a nervous sound in the back of her throat. ‘The answer is, a lot less than you probably expect.’ She picked up a pen from the desk and fiddled with it, clicking it on and off continuously.

  ‘You’re going to have to explain that to me, Jackie.’ Keep using her name, remind her she’s here, now.

  ‘We didn’t technically have responsibility for most of the girls in the home,’ she said in a rush. ‘Very few of them were placed there by the local authority. And those were the only ones we actually had any authority for. We had no records of anybody else.’

  ‘What? There was an orphanage full of girls on your patch and you had no idea how many? Or who they were? Or where they came from?’ Steve couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice or his face.

  Jackie shuffled backwards in the chair. ‘The nuns turned evasiveness into a fine art,’ she said, a hint of defiance in her tone. They weren’t the only ones, Steve thought. ‘They’d deny that any of the other girls were permanent residents. They’d say the girls were there for a visit. Or to give their mothers respite after a new
baby, a difficult birth. Or to get fresh country air. Or because their parents had split up and the family hadn’t made alternative arrangements yet. It was all very plausible, very matter-of-fact. There was no way we could disprove it, not without records. And we had no right to their records.’

  ‘I’m struggling to credit this.’ Steve scratched his head furiously. ‘So where did these other girls come from?’

  ‘The Mother Superior, Sister Mary Patrick, she said they were mostly there on the recommendation of their parish priests. She said they came from various parts of the country. Some were even from Ireland.’ Jackie sighed. ‘I tried, I really tried. But it was impossible. It wasn’t like they were going to a local school where we might have been able to get access to their names and their records. They were educated in the convent. Perfectly properly, I might say.’

  ‘It sounds like they were prisoners, not residents.’

  ‘Whenever I visited, there was no sign of duress. They all seemed well-behaved and contented.’

  ‘How many did you have responsibility for?’

  ‘St Margaret Clitherow’s was on my caseload for four years. I had seven girls there permanently for those four years. Six of them were orphans and the other one, her mother had died and her father wasn’t able to take care of her. They were all Catholic girls and the refuge seemed like the best option.’

  ‘How often did you visit?’

  Jackie opened her file. ‘Every six months.’ She looked up swiftly, fearful. ‘Look, I know that sounds bad. But like everybody in this department, I don’t have a caseload so much as a case overload. I had – I have to deal with domestic violence, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, mental health problems, threats of eviction, allegations of child sex abuse, teenage runaways, issues with benefits. The home was run on proper lines, the girls were divided up into small family-style groups in the care of two or three nuns. The girls we sent to the nuns seemed well nourished, well cared for, well educated. They never had much to say for themselves, they were always quite subdued. It’s easy to say with hindsight that they might have been cowed into submission. But I had no reason to suspect there was any kind of issue. To be honest, it felt like a relief to have seven kids on my books that didn’t seem to be at risk.’ Her lips trembled and she closed her eyes again.