Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“Can do.”

Annie glanced around at the crude stick figures and occult symbols on the walls and wondered how integral a part of Payne’s fantasy they were. Banks had also told her that the place was lit by dozens of candles, but they were all gone now, as was the mattress they had found the body on. One of the SOCOs was on his knees looking at something on the concrete floor over by the door.

“What is it?” Annie asked him. “Found something?”

“Dunno,” he said. “Some sort of little scuff marks in the concrete. It hardly shows at all, but there seems to be some sort of pattern.”

Annie knelt to look. She couldn’t see anything until the SOCO pointed to what looked like small circles in the concrete. There were three of them in all, pretty much equidistant.

“I’ll try a few different lighting angles,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe some infrared film to highlight the contrasts.”

“Could be a tripod,” Annie said.

“What? Bugger me – sorry, love – but you could be right. Luke Selkirk and that funny little assistant of his were down here. Maybe they left the marks.”

“I think they’d have been more professional, don’t you?”

“I’d better ask them, hadn’t I?”

Annie left him to it and walked through the far door. The ground had been sectioned into grids and the soil had been dug up. Annie knew that three bodies had been found there. She followed the narrow marked path across to the door, opened it and walked up the steps into the back garden. Crime scene tape barred her entrance at the top of the steps, but she didn’t need to go any farther. Like the anteroom in the cellar, the overgrown garden had been divided into grids and marked out with rope. Most of them had already been cleared of grass and weeds and topsoil, but some, farther back, remained overgrown. At the far wall, a large waterproof sheet used to protect the garden from yesterday’s rain lay rolled up like a carpet.

This was a delicate job, Annie knew from watching the excavation of a skeleton at the village of Hobb’s End. It was far too easy to disturb old bones. She could see the hole, about three feet deep, where one body had been dug up, and now there were two men gathered around another hole, taking off the soil with trowels and passing it to a third man, who ran it through a sieve as if he were panning for gold.

“What is it?” Annie asked from the top of the cellar steps.

One of the men looked up at her. She hadn’t recognized Stefan Nowak at first. She didn’t know him well, as he hadn’t been at Eastvale’s Western Divisional Headquarters for long, but Banks had introduced them once. Stefan was the man, ACC Ron McLaughlin had said, who would drag North Yorkshire kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Annie had found him rather reserved, a bit mysterious, even, as if he were carrying around a grave secret or a great weight of past pain. He affected a cheery enough demeanor on the surface, but she could tell it didn’t run very deep. He was tall, over six feet, and handsome in a clean-cut, elegant sort of way. She knew his background was Polish and had often wondered if he was a prince or a count or something. Most of the Poles she had ever met said they were descended from counts or princes at one time or another, and there was something regal and stately in Stefan’s bearing.

“It’s Annie, isn’t it?” he said. “DS Annie Cabbot?”

“DI, now, Stefan. How’s it going?”

“Didn’t know you were on this case.”

“One of them,” Annie explained. “Terence Payne. I’m with Complaints and Discipline.”

“I can’t believe the CPS will even let that one see the light of day,” said Stefan. “Justifiable homicide, surely?”

“I hope that’s how they’ll see it, but you never know with them. Anyway, I just wanted a look at the place.”

“I’m afraid we’ve made rather a mess,” said Stefan. “It looks as if we’ve just found another body. Want a look?”

Annie ducked under the tape. “Yes.”

“Be careful,” said Stefan. “Follow the marked path.”

Annie did as he said and soon found herself standing beside the partially excavated grave. This one was a skeleton. Not quite as stained and filthy as the one she had seen at Hobb’s End, but a skeleton nonetheless. She could see part of the skull, one shoulder and part of the left arm. “How long?” she asked.

“Hard to say,” Stefan answered. “More than a few months.” He introduced the two men who had been poring over the grave with him, one a botanist and the other an entomologist. “These lads should be able to help with that. And we’re getting Dr. Ioan Williams to come over from the university and give us a hand.”

Annie remembered the young doctor with the long hair and the prominent Adam’s apple from the Hobb’s End case, the way he had caressed Gloria Shackleton’s pelvic bone and leered over it at Annie.

“I know this isn’t my case,” Annie said, “but isn’t this one body too many?”

Stefan looked up at her and shielded his eyes from the sun. “Yes,” he said. “It is. Rather throws a spanner in the works, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed it does.”

Annie walked back toward her car. There was nothing more to be gained from hanging around The Hill. Besides, she realized, glancing at her watch, she had a postmortem to attend.

“What the hell do you mean, talking to press like that?” said Banks. “Didn’t I warn you about it?”

“This is the first I’ve heard we’re living in a police state,” said Maggie Forrest, arms folded over her chest, eyes angry and tearful. They stood in her kitchen, Banks brandishing the Post and Maggie in the midst of clearing away her breakfast dishes. After seeing the article at Millgarth, he had headed straight for The Hill.

“Don’t give me that adolescent crap about police states. Who do you think you are, a student protesting some distant war?”

“You’ve no right to talk to me like this. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Anything wrong? Have you any idea of the wasp’s nest you could be helping to stir up?”

“I don’t know what you mean. All I wanted to do was tell Lucy’s side of the story, but that woman twisted it all.”

“Are you so naïve that you didn’t expect that?”

“There’s a difference between being naïve and caring, but a cynic like you probably wouldn’t understand it.”

Banks could see that Maggie was shaking, either with anger or fear, and he was worried that he had given too free a rein to his anger. He knew she had been abused by her husband, that she was a bruised soul, so she was probably scared stiff of this man raising his voice in her kitchen. It was insensitive of him, but damn it, the woman irritated him. He sat at the kitchen table and tried to cool things down a bit. “Maggie,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, but you could cause us a lot of problems.”

Maggie seemed to relax a little. “I don’t see how.”

“Public sympathy is a very fickle thing, and when you mess with it, it’s like dancing with the devil. It’s just as likely to reach out and eat you up as anyone else.”

“But how would people find out what Lucy went through at her husband’s hands? She won’t talk about it, I can guarantee you that.”

“None of us know what went on in Lucy’s house. All you’re doing is jeopardizing her chance of a fair trial, if-”

“Trial? Trial for what?”

“I was going to say, ‘if it comes to that.’ ”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t agree.” Maggie put the electric kettle on and sat opposite Banks. “People need to know about domestic abuse. It’s not something that should be swept under the carpet for any reason. Especially not just because the police say so.”