Death by Dark Waters

by Jo Allen

  In passing, he peered through the doorway. A pile of rubble and charred wood, stacked against the wall, looked strangely out of context. With no more than the tired curiosity of a man on his way back home, Joe took a few steps inside the blackened shell, his eyes fixed on the gaping window with its view of a blackened hillside. He didn’t see the charred mass just inside the doorway until he’d stumbled over it. In irritation, he kicked it away, turning it over.

  That was when he knew the beer was going to have to wait.

  *

  Mikey had drained his pint of Jennings and Jude was rattling the ice in his empty glass of Coke by the time the waitress made it across with their meal. The thunder that had been threatening all afternoon had broken over them just as they’d reached the pub and the rattle and patter of solid raindrops flung down on the slate roof drowned out the sound of Sunday evening.

  ‘That’s been a while coming,’ the young woman said, setting the two plates down on the tables. ‘The rain, I mean, not your meals. Though they could’ve been a bit quicker. Sorry. We’re short staffed.’ She gave Jude an apologetic look and Mikey a more flirtatious one before she whisked off to the next customer, ready to serve up a side order of apologies alongside the steak.

  ‘I’d have asked her for another pint.’ Mikey, back inside and with the distant prospect of food finally made real, had resumed his natural cheerfulness. ‘But I don’t think she’d thank me for hassling her.’

  ‘Run over to the bar.’ Jude dug in his pocket for a ten pound note. Along with the role of surrogate father came the requirement to pick up the tab, but at least it meant he didn’t have to stir himself to go over and fetch the drinks. ‘I’ll have the same again.’

  ‘Have a pint. You could leave the car and walk.’

  ‘I could. It’s only five miles back home. But even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’m on call.’

  Mikey’s eye roll was surely an ironic one, because he’d have been counting on Jude as his taxi back home to Wasby. Though Jude made a note to keep a very careful eye out for Becca the next time, and every time after that that he was back in his home village, and make sure he took avoiding action.

  It would be impossible to avoid her all the time – or rather, to do so would mean giving in, changing his normal pattern of activities to suit other people, choosing what he did around others when they gave no thought to him. He shook his head as he watched Mikey standing at the bar. Becca had been the same age and stage in life, twenty and back from university for the summer, when he’d first realised that the girl he’d grown up over the road from had somehow metamorphosed from a friend’s irritating younger sister into an attractive woman. He replayed the moment in his mind. He’d been kicking a football around in the garden with Mikey when she’d come swinging down the road and smiled at him. The smile, and the realisation that Becca Reid was a beautiful butterfly looking for a flower on which to rest, had knocked him off his normally confident stride. It had taken him a year to ask her out, though she’d needed barely a second to accept. Eight years of semi-domestic bliss had followed, the two of them embedded in a relationship that seemed destined to end in forever. And then there had been that one moment of choice, the decision he made that had ended everything.

  He didn’t think he regretted it, and sometimes he wondered whether she did. Though there was never anything but animosity when she spoke to him, she didn’t have to seek him out the way she did. The opposite of love, after all, was not hate but indifference, and she was anything but indifferent to him. Which might have made perfect sense, if she didn’t keep on carping away at him as if he were the one who’d ended it and she the one who’d been hurt.

  His phone rang and he looked down at with a sigh. He’d got through the best of the weekend without a call so he should be reasonably grateful for that. Nevertheless, he let it ring a couple of times before he answered it. ‘Jude Satterthwaite.’

  ‘Hey, Jude.’ It was the joke everyone made, thinking it original. Not for the first time, he cursed his mother’s fondness for Thomas Hardy. ‘Busy just now?’

  ‘Not at all.’ He didn’t recognise the disembodied female voice at the end of the line. All the call centre operatives seemed to know him, all of them assuming a familiarity that irritated him. He was a man who liked to know the people he spoke to.

  ‘Good. I’ve got a Signal Seven for you.’

  He sighed. A Signal Seven meant a dead body, the end of his evening and, if he wasn’t mistaken, a late night. Even something straightforward would be time consuming, and he suspected this was complicated, or it would have been referred to someone of lesser rank. ‘What do we know? Male or female? Age?’

  ‘I don’t have any details. All I know is that it was a fire.’

  ‘Where?’ Already, Jude was pushing aside his plate, trying and failing to signal to Mikey and cancel the order for the Coke.

  ‘The west bank of Haweswater. South of Burnbanks.’

  In Jude’s head, the vivid image of the afternoon’s fire reignited, making such rapid progress along the lakeside and up the hill. The speed of its spread, so unusual, now made tragic sense. The chances were that whoever had got so casual with their campfire had paid a grim price for it. ‘I know where you are. I can be there in fifteen minutes. Are there uniformed officers on the scene?’

  ‘Yes. They were already on site and secured the scene the moment the body was found.’

  ‘Just the one body?’

  ‘Just the one that’s been reported. The fire brigade are still in attendance, but the fire’s out.’

  ‘I’ll need a CSI. Who’s on call?’ He stood up, digging out his wallet, peeling off a couple of notes and tossing them on the table. ‘Mikey. That’ll cover the drinks and the food. And a taxi back, if you can’t get a lift.’ Then he turned back to the call. ‘Tammy Garner, did you say? Good. I’ll pick her up.’ Tammy lived just outside Penrith and it would cost him a few minutes in the way of a diversion to pick her up on the way, but the time would be well spent in discussing the case. ‘And thanks. Bye.’

  He rang off. ‘It’s just as well you’re hungry, Mikey. That’s two meals for you to polish off.’ But he helped himself to a chip or two knowing that it would be a long night, dialling Tammy even as he ate. ‘Jude here. I’ll be with you in ten minutes. Get a bite to eat if you haven’t already. And it would be good if you could rustle up a flask of coffee.’

  Mikey set the two drinks down on the table and slid into his seat. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t used to this; his older brother had been running out on him at inconvenient moments for fifteen of his twenty years. ‘It’s a pity I don’t like Coke.’

  Jude took a swig of it. ‘See if Mum will come and pick you up.’

  ‘I can walk. It’s only a couple of miles.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Mikey. Really sorry.’

  ‘At least you didn’t run off and leave me up on the hill to fry to a crisp.’ Mikey picked up a knife and fork. ‘I hope it’s worth it.’

  ‘I’ll see you before you go back to Newcastle.’

  ‘I’m off tomorrow. I changed my plans.’

  Jude lingered for a second, even though duty called. If one thing haunted him it was the fear that Mikey would need him when he wasn’t there. ‘I’m really sorry. I can’t help it.’

  ‘Is it murder?’

  ‘A dead body. Unexplained.’

  ‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’ Mikey’s face closed in as he spoke, just as Becca’s used to do when she’d demanded to know what preoccupied him and he couldn’t answer. Sometimes the bleakness of his chosen path was too great for comfort, some of the things he saw too grim to share with those who hadn’t been there and didn’t understand.

  Today, promising him a pile of ash that had once been human, would be another one of those times. ‘Yes. Some poor sod with a family. We’ll need to find out who it is, and who misses them.’

  ‘And what happened.’

  ‘That too.’ At last, Jude tore
himself away, turning his back on his brother. Outside the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had come upon them, so brief a storm that the grass at the edge of the village green was barely damp under his feet. With a sigh, he got into the car, started the engine, and headed off to work.

  3

  You could tell from the attitude of the firefighters, clustered around their fire engine where the road petered out beyond the dam, that this was going to be a bad one.

  ‘The poor buggers look scunnered.’ Tammy Garner shook her head, composing her expression into what Jude recognised as her ‘crime scene’ face. He supposed he did the same thing himself, trying to approach whatever awaited him with a neutral expression, a cool and rational head. Quite what they had in front of them was unknown, but it was wise to be prepared for the worst.

  ‘It may not be a crime,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Come on, Chief. I know that. I’m just saying you can tell they don’t like what they’ve found.’ There was a sober expression on her face. The threads of silver in her brown hair, the earnest expression and the glasses always reminded Jude of a crusading librarian, but Tammy had the soul of a spaniel, sniffing out every possible clue. She was already jotting down some notes as he drove.

  Two police cars were parked a hundred yards or so further up the track, at the point where it narrowed so that they could get no further. Jude wound the window down as he bumped his car along the rough track to where a policewoman stood in conversation with a group of firemen, and flashed his warrant card at her in identification. A wave of hot air, part smoke, part summer evening, blew in. ‘DCI Satterthwaite and Tammy Garner, CSI.’

  ‘Evening, sir.’ The woman checked the card. ‘PC Fry and PC Sanders are up at the site. I’ll radio up and let them know you’re coming.’

  Jude dropped down to first gear and eased the car further along the track. The smell of burning still hung in the air, mixed into a peculiar cocktail with the fresh, uplifting scent of trees after rain and the bonnet of his car was already spotted with ash. ‘Ready for a long night, Tammy?’

  ‘We’ll need lights if we’re going to get this scene looked at tonight.’

  ‘The boys in uniform will organise that for us.’ Unable to go any further, he pulled the car up at the side of the track and got out. ‘We’ll walk from here.’

  ‘Sure.’ Abandoning her notebook, Tammy was already feeling in her bag for a pair of protective overshoes and Jude, getting out and going round to the boot, unearthed a pair for himself, along with a camera, clipboard and radio. That would do for the time being.

  ‘Let’s get on.’

  The dark blue surface of Haweswater glinted through the trees. Round the bend in the track, four walls rose up to a height of eight feet or so, framing a collapsed, roofless building that might once have been a home or a barn, exposed on the hillside. A plantation of trees on the downhill side of it had taken the brunt of the fire and stretched their skeleton boughs, still smoking, to the sky. Two firemen tramped around the edge of the plantation, watching out for flare ups.

  A uniformed constable, standing on the track in front of a line of blue and white tape tied between two sad, singed trees, nodded as they came into sight. Seeing him, Jude relaxed a little. Charlie Fry was an old hand, unrufflable, with a black sense of humour and a solid gold heart backed by thirty years’ experience. With Charlie there, he could rest assured that every proper procedure would be followed. ‘Everything under control, Charlie?’

  ‘I’ve asked for a doctor to be sent up. And we’ve secured the site, as far as possible.’

  ‘As far as possible?’

  ‘The fire officers need to be on site until the fire can be declared out.’ Charlie’s face showed his disapproval of this intrusion on his turf.

  ‘How long will that be?’

  ‘They’ll want someone here overnight. These things can flare up.’

  Jude sighed. Too many people on site would make his job, and Tammy’s in particular, complicated, but even the first glance at the scene showed him that the destruction wrought by fire and water would have compromised any forensic evidence far beyond any damage a few boots could do. ‘Fair enough. But I want as few people as possible around.’

  ‘Are you okay, Charlie?’ Tammy, in brisk mood, was always keen to get on with these things, get the unpleasantness out of the way and then go on to solve the problem.

  ‘I’ve been better. It’s not a pretty sight in there. Poor devil.’ Charlie looked into the middle distance as he gestured towards the building. ‘In here. Looks like whoever it was got caught up here by the fire. It came up very quickly.’

  Jude, pausing to let Tammy take a first look at the scene, gazed around him. The ground was wet under his feet, but the damp grass was already drying in the warmth of the summer evening. Months of sun had baked the ground until the thin soil was hard as brick, and the rain and the water from the fire appliance hadn’t penetrated, but had run off down towards the lake. He took out his camera and snapped a few shots, frowning. Singed grass and bracken scarred the fellside further away, but the fire, as it descended, seemed to have climbed over the building. With care, he took a few steps and checked the uphill side of the walls. Smoke and flame had marked those, burned what was left of the roof, and then leapt down to the trees, leaving the downslope walls of the building almost unmarked.

  A cloud of midges formed around his head and he waved them away in irritation. ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘A fireman called Joe Stevenson. He lives up at Helton and works on the family farm. He’s been a retained firefighter for ten years.’

  ‘I take it he’s still on site?’

  ‘He’s down by the fire engine with the rest of his crew. With PC Turner.’

  ‘That’s good. I’ll go down and have a word with him later. Did he go into the building?’

  ‘He did, but only briefly.’

  That was good news, if there was any good news to be had. It meant that there wouldn’t be too much damage inside, and if there was anything to be found Tammy, with her bloodhound instinct and her eagle eye, would find it. He walked round to the front of the building where she was standing in the doorway, snapping away with her camera.

  ‘Hey, Jude. What do you think?’ She stood back to let him look.

  His brows creased into a frown. Inside, the building showed the hallmarks of an inferno, the walls blackened with soot. He sniffed, picking up the sickening stench of burning flesh. A yard from him, inside the doorway, a blackened, contorted mass lay pressed against the wall. He took an involuntary step back as his stomach heaved. ‘The body?’ As if it could be anything else.

  ‘Yep.’ Tammy kept her voice as neutral as she could, but he thought he detected something in it that showed she felt as bad as he did. He’d been in the job long enough, seen enough to have hardened him against the worst damage that man or nature could produce, but the first sight of a body, someone deprived of life ahead of their time, was always the hardest thing.

  He forced himself to look at it again. Bodies shrank in the heat of the flames, so he couldn’t gauge whether the figure, its limbs contorted in the stance of a prize fighter, was adult or child, male or female. Whatever it had been wearing had fused into the flesh. There wouldn’t be many clues to be found on it, and looking for them was Tammy’s grisly responsibility. With relief, he moved on to look elsewhere. ‘Has it been disturbed?’

  ‘Unfortunately so.’ Charlie Fry referred to his notebook. ‘Joe didn’t see it when he entered the building. Tripped over it.’

  ‘Okay. Can’t be helped.’ If there was much useful evidence to be recovered from this scene, he’d be surprised. The fire and the water would have degraded it, if they hadn’t destroyed it, but there was always something. His gaze flicked around the rest of the interior. On the far side of the small building the scorch marks on the wall were lighter, and you could see what else was in there. What looked like a heap of charred wood on the far side of the floor might have been the remain
s of a collapsed roof. He looked up. Had the building had any roof left? And some stones, also charred, as if part of the wall had collapsed.

  Stepping back, he turned to Tammy, found her shaking her head at him. ‘You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you, Chief?’

  ‘I reckon so.’ He moved away from the building. ‘Charlie. We’ll need a tent set up over it. And lights. I’m going to get a team up here to go over this place as soon as we can.’

  ‘That’s already in hand, sir.’

  Charlie could have gone far, if he’d ever wanted to, but he seemed happy to spend the rest of his career standing guard over crime scenes and facilitating the actions of experts. So much the better: it was a necessary job and needed someone who would do it properly. ‘Great. Tammy.’ Jude motioned her along the path, beyond the building, to where the blackened ground extended up the hillside. If anyone had left the scene that way, they must still be in the hills. If they’d left it via the track, they’d have had to go through Burnbanks. If.

  ‘What do you think?’ She jerked her head back towards the scene, keeping her voice down.

  ‘I’m not going to say whether I think it’s murder or suicide. But a fire inside the building and one outside? I’m going to suggest that what happened in that building is arson, even if the grass fire turns out to be an accident.’

  ‘You have too kind a view of human nature, Jude.’ She shook her head at him, blinking ash out of her eye and flapping a be-ringed hand at an evening gnat. ‘Do you really need me to put a hypothesis together for you? That fire was set deliberately and whoever the poor sod is who was in there, whatever happened, the death isn’t an accident.’

  ‘That’s an option. Or it’s an accident and the fire was to cover it up.’

  ‘It’s a possibility, I suppose, but I think not. I got a closer look than you.’