Lee Weeks: Dead of Winter

‘Not my cup of tea, Sarge,’ she replied, no smile. ‘Too remote.’

‘Yeah you’re right, Ebb. Never get a Chinese delivered out here.’ He turned three-sixty degrees. ‘It looks like it could do with some TLC. Looks neglected. A camera flashed at an upstairs window. ‘Did SOCOs say when they’d be finished?’

‘Yes. . It’ll be another couple of hours before we can go inside.’

Carter tried pulling his collar up further. ‘Lucky bastard.’ He looked up at the white-suited figure standing at the bedroom window twirling a brush in the bottom corner of the windowpane.

‘Sir?’ An officer appeared beside them and handed them a packet each with protective suits and over-boots inside. ‘Doctor Harding says she’s ready for you.’

For once Carter was glad to put the suit on; usually it made him sweat. He finished pulling up the hood as they followed the officer around the side of the house and through the open garden gate.

‘Is this the route the gardener said he took, Ebb?’ Carter shone his torch into the undergrowth to his right. It was too thick to see anything.

‘Yes, Sarge.’

‘I wouldn’t have come round here in the dark.’

She shone her torch along the conservatory window and traced the smear of human contact across the grime. ‘He said he felt his way round against the glass.’

‘Bloody eerie sound a fox makes.’ Said Carter. ‘Must have been starving what with the snow. All the foxes I see round my place seem to prefer “à la carte”. Bold as brass. Big buggers. Swagger up to your back door and give you their order. Fries on the side.’

A blonde-haired woman in a forensic suit looked up from beneath the tent as they approached.

‘Sergeant?’

‘How’s it going, Doc?’ Carter walked over to her as she knelt by the side of the grave next to an open body bag. ‘What have we got?’

‘It’s a woman,’ said Harding. ‘The body’s been dismembered. We’re about to start digging it out now. I wanted you to see it first. This is what the fox had a go at. This was above ground.’ Harding picked up the woman’s arm from the body bag. The bones of the forearm were exposed. Skeletal fingers were chewed into a bony claw.

Ebony walked around to the far side of the hole and knelt down to get a better look. Inside the grave the woman’s legs were laid out side by side. Her shoulders and head rested close to the top of her legs.

‘Is it all there?’ asked Carter as he peered into the hole. ‘Her head looks like it’s where her torso should be.’

‘It’s normal for the thorax area to decompose first,’ answered Harding. ‘Especially if she was opened up, which it looks like she was.’ Harding pointed to the beginning of a slit at the base of the woman’s neck.

As Harding talked, Ebony knelt and reached inside the grave. She rubbed her fingers lightly across the flesh on the woman’s shoulder then examined the residue on her fingertip.

‘What is it, Ebb?’ asked Carter.

‘Grave wax, Sarge. She’s been in here some time.’

‘Clay soil. .’ said Harding. ‘Retains moisture. Enough of it turns them into soap. . eventually.’

Carter looked at Ebony curiously. He hadn’t heard a squeak out of her since she arrived at the Murder Squad two weeks earlier. But tonight, if someone could come alive around the dead, she just had.

‘Plus there’s decomposition of the head, hands and feet,’ Harding added. ‘That coupled with the depth she was buried means she’s been in here at least three, probably six months.’ Harding leant back and called to the photographer to stand where she was and take another shot of the grave. ‘I’ll let you know after soil analysis.’ Harding nodded to an officer standing by and waiting to start excavating the body.

Carter stood and walked across the paving slab towards the rest of the garden, a neglected orchard which began where the patio ended. Harding joined him. ‘You’d think. .’ said Carter as he took off his glove to find a way under his forensic suit and into his pocket, ‘. . they’d have buried the body in the garden, not the patio.’

‘Too many roots. Too many trees, I suppose,’ answered Harding. ‘You put her in a shallow grave and animals would scatter her bones all over the neighbours’ gardens; not what you want when you’ve got friends coming around for a barbecue. Plus you’d have to put up with the smell of rotting flesh in the height of summer, which is when I guess she was buried. No, they put her in here because they didn’t want her ever to surface again. It was unlucky — the small retaining wall that held the patio in place collapsed and exposed the foundations. The fox must have had access through there. .’ She heard Carter fiddling with the plastic wrapper from the nicotine gum. Harding was dying for a cigarette. She’d been at the house since seven p.m. She’d arrived just after Ebony. Now she needed a hit of nicotine and a triple espresso. She would have asked Carter for a piece of gum but she couldn’t bring herself to; there was no way she was prepared to own up to a base weakness like nicotine addiction. Harding prided herself on never letting her guard down, except when she was blind drunk and that didn’t count. ‘All the drains will need digging up under the house,’ she said.

‘Yes. We’re going to be here for weeks.’ Carter blew a silent whistle out of the side of his mouth. ‘It’ll cost.’

Back in the tent, Ebony watched the excavation. The grave had been dug out a metre extra at the feet of the woman’s body. The hole was three feet deep and now six feet long. Only one officer was allowed into the grave to carefully manage the excavation as he stood at the end of it and painstakingly scraped the soil away from around the body. Ebony watched his white back arch awkwardly from the grave as he wiggled, maggot-like, struggling to move in the tight space. Tracing the outline with his trowel, he scraped gently around the edges of the body. He removed the woman’s legs one at a time and handed them up to Ebony to place inside the body bag, then he stood and stretched to relieve his aching back.

‘Can you dig there for me?’ Ebony looked past him at an object that had been hidden by the legs. Her eyes focused on the rounded end of a hipbone and a dark shape the size of a melon nearby.

The officer crouched low, bent double to scrape away the frozen clay soil. She watched him as he picked his way around the object. It was beginning to loosen at the edges. He switched to working with a dental pick, delicately chipping at the stubborn soil until it lifted in small chunks. Ebony saw the object move slightly, then give way to the last of his efforts as he prised it from the clay and she saw it slide into his hands. It was muddied but perfectly formed and coated in white. He passed it up for her to take it from him. Ebony stood and carried it outside the tent. Carter and Harding had their backs to her.

‘Sarge?’

Carter turned round to see her holding the corpse of a baby in her hands.

The lambs bleated in the cold. The wind and snow came driving off the Yorkshire Dales onto the small farm. It was a risky business lambing now. The Dorset Horn was a breed that could produce lambs all year long but they required more looking after if they were to thrive in this harsh environment.

Callum Carmichael ran his hand over the belly of the sheep. . she was overdue. She flinched at his touch. Jumper was an expert mother. She was one of a hundred ewes in the old barn.

Jumper had been with Carmichael for six years now. He had hand-reared her. In the field, she came when he called her name. In the summer months the sheep were allowed outside but now, in lambing season, they had to come into the pens: six feet by four. Foxes had claimed lambs before, as had badgers and buzzards. Everything was hungry now in the worst winter for a long time.