Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

First to arrive were a pair of uniformed PCs. One of them waited at the bridge while I took the other to the creek, and shortly afterwards the rest of the orderly circus that attends a crime scene began to troop up as well. By the time Lundy and Frears got there the creek’s level had dropped as though a plug had been pulled, exposing loops of barbed wire that coiled from the water like rusty brambles.

Inch by inch, the body emerged. The head first, its crown breaking through the surface like the dome of a jellyfish. Then the shoulders, chest and arms. It wore a heavy leather jacket that could have been either black or brown, although it was too filthy and waterlogged to be sure. The body was suspended face down. One elbow was bent the wrong way, and the hands had fallen away to reveal stubs of bone and gristle inside the jacket cuffs. Tilted at a sideways angle, the head also looked on the verge of coming loose, supported more by the barbed wire than any remaining connective tissue.

Frears had waited until the water level was low enough for him to get a look at the body and then headed back to the mortuary. It was obvious that freeing the fragile remains from the barbed wire without damaging them was going to be a slow process, and the pathologist didn’t strike me as the patient sort. Not that there was much point in his staying. Clarke was tied up in court, but Lundy was more than capable of overseeing the recovery until she got there.

There was no reason for me to stay either: as a witness I’d technically no right to even be there. But no one suggested I leave, so I sat down on a convenient hummock with a plastic cup of coffee Lundy had provided and watched as the tide slowly revealed its secret.

‘Not something you’d want a kid to see, is it?’ the DI commented as the CSIs began to wade into the creek. ‘Bad place for her dog to go for a swim. You reckon it could smell it?’

‘Probably.’

I’d had time to think it over as I’d been waiting. A dog’s sense of smell would be sensitive enough to detect a badly decomposed corpse when the ebbing tide brought it closer to the surface. Rachel had told me that Trask had only bought his daughter’s pet after his wife disappeared, so they’d owned it less than seven months. It had been a long, wet winter that would have discouraged walks in the Backwaters. It was possible — likely, even — that the excitable young animal hadn’t had a chance to discover the intriguing scent coming from the water until today.

The CSIs began negotiating the barbed wire to get closer to the body. They were wearing heavy duty gauntlets and chest-high waders, but I still didn’t envy them the task. Lundy continued to watch them as he spoke.

‘I spoke to Trask on my way here. He said you’d told him it’s male.’ His tone made it a question as well as a reproach.

‘I thought he’d got enough to worry about without wondering if this was his wife.’

‘And if you’re wrong?’

‘Then I’ll apologize. But even if this is a woman I don’t think it’s Emma Derby.’

Lundy gave a sigh. ‘No, me neither.’

The lower half of the body was still under the water, so it was hard to gauge its height. But, even allowing for bloating and the thick leather jacket, there was no mistaking the broadness of chest and shoulders. Whoever this was, it had been a heavy-framed individual.

That didn’t necessarily mean it was male. Determining the gender of a body, particularly a badly decomposed one like this, wasn’t always as clear-cut as it might seem. While male and female skeletal characteristics did exist, the line between them was often blurred. The skeleton of a juvenile male might superficially resemble an adult female, for instance. And not all fully grown men conformed to the traditional stereotype of large-boned masculinity, any more than every woman was petite.

I’d once worked on a case involving a skeleton over six foot tall. The skull had a heavy, square jawbone and thickly pronounced eye ridges, all strong male indicators. The police thought it could be a missing father of two who’d disappeared eighteen months before, until the oval-shaped pelvic inlet and width of the greater sciatic notch revealed the body to be female. Dental records eventually identified her as a forty-seven-year-old teacher from Sussex.

As far as I know, the missing man was never found.

Even so, from what little I could see of the body hanging on the barbed wire, one thing was clear. It was much too big to belong to the slender woman whose self-portrait I’d seen in the boathouse.

The level in the creek had fallen about as low as it was going to. The sandbank formed an effective dam on this side, trapping a pool of water perhaps twenty yards long and several feet deep. The efforts of the CSIs had exposed the body to its hips, but both legs were still hidden beneath the surface.

There was a debate between Lundy, the CSIs and the crime scene manager about the best way to get the body off the wire. ‘Can you drag the whole thing out?’ Lundy asked as the CSIs sloshed through the murky water.

One of them, a young woman rendered sexless and unrecognizable under the protective gear, shook her head. ‘Too heavy. I think the wire’s caught on the bottom. We’re going to have to try and get the body off.’

‘OK, but watch out for those barbs. I don’t want to have to fill out any accident forms.’

That merited a snorted laugh. Lundy stared at the body contemplatively. ‘How long would you say it’s been here?’ he asked me.

I’d been wondering that myself. Until Trask and I disturbed it, the body would have been submerged in the deeper water dammed by the sandbank even at low tide. That would make it decompose at a slower rate than if it had been exposed to sunlight and air, and with the barbed wire holding it in place it wouldn’t have suffered the wear and tear of being dragged around by tidal currents.

Still, there were too many unknowns to offer anything better than a rough guess. ‘It’s started to come apart and there’s quite a build-up of adipocere. That’s slow to form, so several months at least.’

‘But we’re talking months, not years?’

‘I’d say so.’ Any longer than that and the head would have fallen away. Submerged or not, the creek’s waters were relatively shallow and warm, and constantly moving with the in-and-out of tides.

‘Has anyone else local been reported missing?’

‘Only Emma Derby, and we can rule her out. But just so I’m clear, you think this has been in the water longer than the body from the Barrows?’

Lundy’s face gave nothing away, but I knew what he was thinking. Finding a second body so soon after the first was a potential — and unwelcome — complication, especially if the evidence suggested they’d died around the same time.

I could reassure him about that much, at least. ‘A lot longer for it to be in this condition. It’ll have decomposed more slowly underwater than on the surface, but a lot depends on how long it was drifting before it got caught up.’

‘If it was drifting.’

I looked at him. ‘You don’t think it was?’

He made a see-sawing motion with his head. ‘Not sure yet. Looks a bit too well trussed to me.’

I’d been focusing on the body rather than what it was caught on, assuming it had been deposited here by the tide. Now I paid more attention to the wire coils. Tatters of grass and torn plastic trailed from them like tired party streamers. The barbs were buried as deep as fishhooks, gouging indiscriminately into clothes and flesh. That could have happened as the creek rose and fell, the body’s own weight progressively working the rusty points deeper. But would that have snared it in so many places? Or entangled it quite so much? There were even strands of wire caught on the back of the remains, apparently by chance. That could have been caused by the natural motion of the water in the creek: as well as twice daily tides, storms and tidal surges which would have caused both body and wire to shift around.