Howard Linskey: The Dead

The dead are left with nothing, except the power to destroy the lives of those they leave behind. The girl’s body lay on dry land, her head lolling over the edge of the river bank. She was face up, her eyes open and her long, dark hair dipped into the water. The steady, regular movement of the current made the strands sway gently like tendrils. Her left arm trailed behind her, the fingertips of one white, slender hand suspended there, as if she were about to dip it into the cool water. Her appearance gave the illusion there might still be life left in her, but DS Fraser knew better.

‘Are you gonna call him?’ asked DC Thomas, ‘I reckon you should…’ and when Fraser frowned at him, he added an uncertain, ‘prob’ly’.

Fraser gave the Detective Constable a withering look that managed to efficiently convey the words ‘don’t tell me how to do my job’ and Thomas retreated without another word, busying himself at the edge of the crime scene.

Fraser watched the SOCOs as they went about their business. They moved slowly and methodically, taping off the area around the girl and the route her body had taken from the main road to her resting place here by the river bank. The river ran through a small copse at the edge of a farm around fifteen miles north of Newcastle, a dip in the land too deep to be cultivated that had been left to its own devices. The bushes were overgrown here and the tall tree branches stretched forwards to meet each other as if in greeting, forming a canopy of leaves that, in parts, blocked out the moonlight.

It seemed she had been dragged from a car on the main road up above them. Whatever her killer’s initial intention, he must have panicked and simply thrown her body over the hedge and Fraser understood why. Whoever had done this probably intended to follow the girl down here to bury her or, at the very least, cover her with something, to delay the discovery of the body, but he would have felt exposed out there on the main road in the middle of the night. Any passing motorist could have clocked him and given the police a description of the vehicle, maybe even the registration number.

He must have known every second magnified his chances of being caught, so he had heaved the girl over the hedge and driven away. Judging by the flattened grass and weeds this side of the hedge, the girl’s body hit the ground hard, then gathered momentum, rolling down the hill, before finally coming to a halt when the ground levelled off at the edge of the river, where she now lay, staring mournfully up at the stars.

She’d been found by a man out walking his dog. Weren’t they always, thought Fraser? At least she hadn’t been there too long, before nature could get to work on her, breaking her body down; all those microbes, all that bacteria, the insects and the wild, gnawing animals. That was the thing about Mother Nature. She didn’t fuck about. It didn’t take long out in the open before you could become unrecognisable, even to your nearest and dearest.

Fraser could tell she’d been a pretty little thing; long dark hair, brown eyes, fresh face, full red lips. Was that why she was killed, he wondered; a jealous boyfriend who’d been dumped and couldn’t cope with the crushing realisation that someone else would eventually have her? Sexual jealousy was as strong and likely a motive as any other, in Fraser’s experience, particularly when the victim was young.

Fraser wondered if he would soon be interrogating another fucked up ex-boyfriend or if this time they had a random on their hands. Was this poor lass unlucky enough to be out, in her skimpy little skirt, with the oh-so-thin blouse, when a rapist or killer-for-kicks drove by and spotted her? Maybe the intention had been rape but the guy panicked afterwards, knowing she wasn’t going to go home and just forget all about it, so he’d made sure she could never talk. Perhaps it was the murder itself that got the killer off and sex had nothing to do with it? Shame they couldn’t just ask the victim, so they could find out whose face she’d been staring up into as she gave out her last breath.

One of the SOCOs turned on the light he’d been assembling, then he turned to DS Fraser, ‘are you going to call him?’

‘Don’t you start,’ warned Fraser, but he was already reaching for his phone.

Detective Inspector Robert Carlton had already grown weary of the black-tie do, long before his mobile phone began to vibrate silently against his chest from the inside pocket of his dinner jacket. He exhaled wearily, then reached for it. Carlton was feeling the after-effects of a heavy meal; duck and Armagnac terrine, chicken supreme with Jersey Royals and a generous portion of sticky toffee pudding for afters.

‘Carlton,’ he answered above the din in the room, caused by the chatter of two hundred police officers with copious amounts of beer and wine inside them.

‘Boss, it’s me,’ it was Fraser, that much he could make out but the rest was lost, drowned out by loud, braying laughter from the next table, a reaction to one of Superintendent Connor’s borderline racist jokes.

‘Hang on,’ Carlton commanded, ‘I can’t hear you.’

He climbed to his feet and left the room, turning sideways as he did so to squeeze between fellow diners who, as always at these functions, were packed in too tightly, so that navigating his way between tables was like tackling an obstacle course. The room was sizeable and full to the brim with ranking police officers, each one looking for a leg up and feeling obliged to shell out on tickets for a charity dinner, which cost far more than the sum of this mediocre meal’s parts. Everyone was expected to support the latest cause adopted by the Northumbria Police Force to justify its obscene annual piss up, which would go on well into the early hours. Already there were some familiar faces looking distinctly worse for wear.

Carlton was grateful to be free of the noise and stifling warmth of the dining room. He crossed the Royal Station Hotel’s lobby and went out through its main door. Only when he was on the steps outside and the cool air hit him, did he turn his attention back to the mobile phone in his hand.

‘I can hear you now,’ he told the Detective Sergeant.

‘Sorry to bother you, boss. I know you are at that black-tie do but I thought you’d want to know. It’s a young girl.’

‘What is?’

‘The reason I’m calling. We found one; on the bank of a stream, out in the sticks. She was just lying there. No attempt to even hide the body.’

This piqued Carlton’s interest. If he was ever going to make DCI he needed as many high-profile cases under his belt as he could get. He listened while Fraser gave him the facts. The girl’s approximate age, ‘somewhere between fifteen and twenty,’ it was always hard to tell with girls, particularly if they had a bit of slap on; what she was wearing, the usual clubbing uniform of short skirt and skimpy top, and the exact location of her body, a smattering of woodland with a stream running through it, a few miles north of the city. The site was about fifteen minutes’ drive from Carlton’s current location. Finally there was the suspected cause of death, which, from the abrasions on her throat and bulging, blood-shot eyes, looked like strangulation.

‘No ID?’

‘No purse or handbag, no credit cards, not even a mobile phone, just the clothes she was wearing. I wondered if you would like me to send a car… or I could just call it in?’ He meant if the DI had been drinking. Nobody could afford to have a pissed up detective at a murder scene, screwing everything up. Carlton had only had one pre-dinner pint and two small glasses of acidic white wine, which hardly counted.