Peter Robinson: Watching the Dark

The CSIs were busy inside the house, and outside two of them were digging up areas of the lawn they had decided offered the most potential for buried bodies. Viktor had said Joosep told him he had buried Rachel’s body in the garden, but not exactly where. Banks wondered why he hadn’t just dumped her in the lake, but dead bodies in the water all float eventually, and perhaps he had worried that there was more chance of someone seeing her, even in such an isolated place as this. Others must live not so far away, and surely ramblers, cyclists or boaters came by occasionally.

Banks and Joanna stood on the deck with Ursula Mardna, watching over the scene. A small motorboat lay moored to the dock at the end of the garden, alongside a rowboat. The opposite shore was about a quarter of a mile away, and as far as Banks could see, there were no lake houses or dwellings of any kind over there. It seemed as if Joosep and his friends had the lake to themselves. Banks could smell the fresh pine and hear the birds singing up in the trees.

There were no signs of recent inhabitation, the Crime Scene Manager told Ursula Mardna; in fact, he said, there were no indications of anyone having being there at all recently. Other than the occasional discussions between CSIs, it was perfectly quiet, much like Banks’s own cottage by the beck outside Gratly. The lake house itself was large enough for four bedrooms upstairs and a poolroom in the basement, and the outbuildings were fitted with bunks for extra guests.

The main floor consisted of one large open room incorporating living area, dining table and kitchen. It smelled musty and stale, as if it had been locked up for a long time, and dust motes danced in the rays of sunlight as Banks walked the uncarpeted floor. A few rugs had been thrown here or there, but mostly it was bare boards. There was a wood-burning stove in the living area, which must have been nice and cosy on a winter’s night. There were a few battered armchairs, a decent stereo set-up, along with a pile of punk and heavy metal CDs, a collection of hash-pipes, a large flat-screen TV with DVD player and a pile of martial arts movies and Korean bootleg porn. The walls were covered with stylised prints from the Kama Sutra mixed in with cubist and abstract expressionist works.

Banks was happy to go outside again, and when he did, one of the CSIs digging in the garden called out. Banks and Joanna hurried over with Ursula Mardna to join him, as did several of his colleagues, standing around the edge of a three-foot deep pit. Banks could see Erik straining his neck behind the tape, no doubt snapping away with his smartphone camera.

The CSI, a forensic archaeologist, Ursula Mardna explained, carefully brushed away soil from an empty eye socket. The bones had darkened from years underground, where various compounds had leached into the soil. The CSI worked carefully with his brush, and Banks and Joanna watched as the skull slowly came into view. It was going to take a long time, he explained, so there was no point their standing over him. He would call them when he was finished, then would begin the difficult and painstaking process of getting the body from the earth to the mortuary. Only the photographer remained as the archaeologist continued his delicate work.

Banks, Joanna and Ursula Mardna paced the deck as they waited. Someone had a flask of hot coffee, and Banks was grateful for the loan of a plastic cup to drink from, even though it was a warm day, and he would have preferred a cold beer. It was at times like this that Banks also wished he still smoked. When Ursula Mardna brought out a packet of cigarettes and a small tin to contain the ashes, so she wouldn’t contaminate the scene, he was tempted to ask her for one, but he controlled the urge.

Everyone seemed vaguely interested in the arrival of the English detectives, especially in Joanna Passero, casting them curious glances every now and then, but nobody paid undue attention to them. Fewer people seemed to speak English here than Banks had encountered in Tallinn. It was early evening, and though it was far from dark, the shadows were lengthening over the water, and the light through the trees was taking on that muted, filtered evening quality.

Eventually, the archaeologist and his assistants called the three of them over. The skeleton Banks looked down on could have been male or female as far as he was concerned, though the pathologist, who also now arrived at the graveside, quickly assured them it was female.

When Banks and Joanna stood at the edge of the shallow grave with Ursula Mardna, Banks knew he had found what he had come for, though he felt no sense of triumph, just a kind of sad relief. It was impossible to see the yellow colour, of course, but fragments of the dress still clung to the darkened bones, as did the white open-toed high-heeled shoes, though they were no longer white, and pieces had disintegrated. There were also the remains of a small handbag, a metal clasp and decayed leather strap. Everything looked as if it might have been tossed on top of the body, and Banks wondered if Rachel had been naked when she was buried.

After all the photographs had been taken, and soil and vegetation samples carefully removed and packaged, one of the CSIs very carefully retrieved the handbag. The fabric had rotted, but some of the contents were still intact: a tube of lipstick, a tattered, mostly rotted leather purse, a plastic hairbrush, keys, some loose coins, mostly Estonian kroon, along with some British pounds, and a Meriton Hotel ballpoint pen. If there had been anything else, it had decomposed over the years, like the flesh.

The pathologist knelt by the body and borrowed the CSI’s brush to clear more soil from the neck area. After much umming and ahing, in addition to the use of magnifying glass and a delicate physical examination with gloved fingers, he stood up. Banks heard his knees crack. The man spoke with Ursula Mardna in Estonian. She turned to Banks and said, ‘He cannot say for certain, but he thinks she was strangled. There are many small bones broken in the throat.’

‘However she died,’ Banks said, ‘somebody buried her. There’ll be an investigation, I assume?’

Ursula Mardna nodded. ‘Of course.’

Banks asked whether he could examine the purse, and after a quick glance at Ursula Mardna, who nodded briefly, the CSI handed it to him, after first having him put on a pair of protective gloves. It wasn’t because of fingerprints, Banks knew — none would survive after so long — but simply crime scene protocol.

With Joanna Passero by his side, Banks opened the purse carefully. The one thing you could usually depend on surviving most of the elements except fire was plastic, and sure enough, there it was. Or there they were. Tesco, credit and debit cards, Co-op, Boots, Waterstone’s, and half a dozen others. All in the name of Rachel Hewitt.

He had found her.

The last thing Banks took out of the purse, stuck in the slot behind her credit card, was a small laminated card inscribed with an image of a man in tails and a top hat helping a voluptuous woman into a coach. Or was he pushing her?

Chapter 14

Late June sunshine flooded the market square as Banks looked down from his open office window on the shining cobbles, smelling coffee and freshly baked bread, listening to the ghostly harmonies of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Awakening from the iPod dock. The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at a quarter past five. A group of walkers dribbled into the square in ones and twos, gathering at the market cross after three or four hours out in the dale, all kitted out with the latest boots, red and orange anoraks, rucksacks and walking sticks, trouser legs tucked into their socks. One of them was clearly the leader, and he carried an Ordnance Survey map in a clear plastic cover around his neck. Already the little wooden platform and tables with umbrellas had been set up on the cobbles outside the Queen’s Arms, reminding Banks of his evenings in Tallinn, eating out in the Old Town with Joanna Passero.