Peter Robinson - In A Dry Season

As he crossed the packhorse bridge, a woman walked toward him and stopped him in the middle. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, arm extended, palm out. “This is a crime scene. I’m afraid you can’t come any further.”

Banks smiled. He knew he didn’t look like a DCI. He had left his sports jacket in the car and wore a blue denim shirt open at the neck, with no tie, light tan trousers and black wellington boots.

“Why isn’t it taped off, then?” he asked.

The woman looked at him and frowned. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, by the look of her, long-legged, tall and slim – probably not much more than an inch shorter than Banks’s five foot nine. She was wearing blue jeans and a white blouse made of some silky material. Over the blouse she wore a herringbone jacket that followed the contours of her waist and the gentle outward curve of her hips. Her chestnut hair was parted in the middle and fell in layered, casual waves to her shoulders. Her face was oval, with a smooth, tanned complexion, full lips, and a small mole to the right of her mouth. She was wearing black-rimmed sunglasses, and when she took them off, her serious almond eyes seemed to appraise Banks as if he were a hitherto undiscovered species.

She wasn’t conventionally good-looking. Hers wasn’t the kind of face you’d find on the pages of a magazine, but her looks showed character and intelligence. And the red wellies set it all off nicely.

Banks smiled. “Do I have to throw you off the bridge into the river before I can cross, like Robin Hood did to Little John?”

“I think you’ll find it was the other way round, but you could try it,” she said. Then, after they had scrutinized one another for a few seconds, she squinted, frowned, and said, “You’ll be DCI Banks, then?”

She didn’t appear nervous or embarrassed about mistaking him for a sightseer; there was no hint of apology or deference in her tone. He didn’t know whether he liked that. “DS Cabbot, I presume?”

“Yes, sir.” She smiled. It was no more than a twitch of one corner of her mouth and a brief flash of light behind her eyes, but it left an impression. Many people, Banks mused, probably thought it was nice to be smiled at by DS Cabbot. Which made him all the more suspicious of Jimmy Riddle’s motives for sending him out here.

“And these people?” Banks pointed to the man and woman talking to the uniformed policeman. The man was aiming a video camera at the outbuilding.

“Colleen Harris and James O’Grady, sir. They were scouting the location for a TV program when they saw the boy fall through the roof. They ran to help him. Seems they also had their camera handy. I suppose it’ll make a nice little item on the evening news.” She scratched the side of her nose. “We’d run out of crime-scene tape, sir. At the section station. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever had any in the first place.” She toyed with the sunglasses as she spoke, but Banks didn’t think it was out of nervousness. She had a slight West Country burr, not very pronounced, but clear enough to be noticeable.

“There’s nothing we can do about the TV people now,” Banks said. “They might even be useful. You’d better explain what happened. All I know is that a boy discovered some old bones here.”

DS Cabbot nodded. “Adam Kelly. He’s thirteen.”

“Where is he?”

“I sent him home. To Harkside. He seemed a bit shaken up, and he’d bruised his wrist and elbow. Nothing serious. Anyway, he wanted his mummy, so I got PC Cameron over there to drive him and then come back. Poor kid’ll be having nightmares for months as it is.”

“What happened?”

“Adam was walking on the roof and it gave way under him. Lucky he didn’t break his back, or get crushed to death.” She pointed at the outbuilding. “The rafters that helped support the flagstones must have rotted, all those years under water. It didn’t take much weight. I should think the demolition men were supposed to pull the whole place down before it was flooded, but they must have knocked off early that day.”

Banks looked around. “It does seem as if they cut a few corners.”

“Why not? They probably thought no one would ever see the place again. Who can tell what’s there when it’s all under water? Anyway, the mud broke Adam’s fall, his arm got stuck in it, and he pulled up a skeleton of a hand.”

“Human?”

“Don’t know, sir. I mean, it looks human to me, but we’ll need an expert to be certain. I’ve read that it’s easy to mistake bear paws for human hands.”

“ Bear paws? When was the last time you saw a bear around these parts?”

“Why, just last week, sir.”

Banks paused a moment, saw the glint in her eye and smiled. There was something about this woman that intrigued him. Nothing in her tone hinted at self-doubt or uncertainty about her actions. Most junior police officers, when questioned about their actions by a senior, generally either let a little of the “Did I do the right thing, sir?” creep into their tone, or they became defensive. Susan Gay, his old DC, had been like that. But there was none of this with DS Cabbot. She simply stated things as they had occurred, decisions as she had made them, and something about the way she did it made her sound completely self-assured and self-possessed without being at all arrogant or insubordinate. Banks found her disconcerting.

“Right,” he said, “let’s go have a look.”

DS Cabbot folded up her sunglasses, slipped them in her shoulder bag and led the way. Banks followed her to the outbuilding. She moved with a sort of loose-limbed grace, the way cats do whenever it’s not feeding time.

On his way, he stopped and talked briefly to the TV people. They couldn’t tell him much, except that they’d been exploring the area when they saw the lad fall through the roof. They rushed over immediately, and when they got to him they saw what he’d pulled up out of the earth. He hadn’t seemed particularly grateful for their assistance, they said, or even pleased to see them, but they were relieved he wasn’t seriously hurt. True to their profession, they asked Banks if he would mind giving them a comment for the tape. He declined politely, citing lack of information. As soon as he had turned away, the woman was on her mobile to the local news channel. It didn’t sound like the first time she’d called, either.

The outbuilding was about six or seven feet square. Banks stood in the doorway and looked at the depression in the mud where the boy had landed, then at the two heavy slabs of stone on either side. DS Cabbot was right; Adam Kelly had been very lucky indeed. There were more slabs strewn around on the floor, too, many of them broken, some just fragments sticking up out of the mud. He could easily have landed on one and snapped his spine. Still, when you’re that young, you think you’re immortal. Banks and his friends certainly had, even after Phil Simpkins wrapped his rope all the way around a tree trunk, jumped off the top branch and spiraled all the way down onto the pointed metal railings.

Banks shook off the memory and concentrated on the scene before him. The sun shone on the top part of the far wall; the stone glistened, moist and slimy. There was a brackish smell about the place, Banks noticed, though there was no salt water for miles, and a smell of dead fish, which were probably a lot closer.

“See what I mean, sir?” said DS Cabbot. “Because the roof kept the sun out, it’s a lot more muddy in here than outside.” She swept some stray tresses from her cheek with a quick flick of her hand. “Probably saved the kid’s life.”

Banks’s gaze lighted on the skeletal hand curled around the edge of a broken stone slab. It looked like a creature from a horror film trying to claw its way out of the grave. The bones were dark and clotted with mud, but it looked like a human hand to Banks.