John Harvey - Cold Light

The runner had managed to start the van and now it lurched towards them, one of the officers hanging from the side, an arm through the window, grabbing at the wheel. Sharon jumped back as the vehicle slewed round and stuck, the driver’s foot on the accelerator serving only to dig deep into the ground, showering black earth high into the air. A fist landed on his temple and a cuff secured him to the wheel as the ignition cut off.

“Sharon!”

A warning turned her fast, pulling back her head to evade the butcher’s cleaver swinging for her face.

“Nasty,” Sharon said, and struck out with the club, catching her attacker’s elbow as the arm came back, hard enough to break the bone.

Only when their prisoners had been properly cautioned, farmed out into different vehicles for the drive back to Lincoln, the sun showing at last, faint through the horizon of sparse trees, did Sharon wander back across the churned-up ground to where the pigs were rooting eagerly. It took no time at all for her to realize what was at the center of their attention was a human hand.

The pig farm had been made secure: diversion signs were in place on all approach roads; attached to four-foot metal stakes, yellow police tape, lifting intermittently in the northerly wind, marked off the area where the body had been found. Men and women in navy blue overalls were moving out in a widening circle from the spot, carefully raking over the ground. Others were examining the track, preparing to take casts of tire tracks, boot marks. Nancy Phelan’s body, freed from its shallow grave, lay in the ambulance covered by a sheet. In a maroon BMW, smeared with mud, the Home Office pathologist was writing his preliminary report. Harry Phelan, driven through the morning traffic by a grim-faced Graham Millington, had walked off across the farm track and into the adjacent field as soon as he had identified the body. Now he stood, stock still, hands in pockets and head bowed, while, back inside the car, his wife, Clarise, wept and wanted to walk out and hug him but did not dare.

It was still well shy of noon.

Resnick stood in topcoat and scarf, talking to Sharon Garnett, his face pale in the winter sun. Close to five nine and bulked out by the duck-down jacket she was wearing, Sharon was in no way dwarfed beside him. She had known about the disappearance from the television and posters which had been circulated with Nancy Phelan’s picture-not so many women missing, thankfully, that the connection didn’t spark fast in her mind. Well before her pork butchers had been driven away, she had made her suspicions known, found herself talking to Resnick within minutes.

“How long,” she asked, “do you think she’s been in the ground?”

“Difficult to tell. But my guess, not too long. The pigs would have found her otherwise, even in temperatures like these.”

“Does it help?” Sharon asked. “Finding her here?”

“To pinpoint the killer?”

She nodded.

“It might narrow down the field. It all depends.”

“But there’d have to be a reason, wouldn’t there?”

“Go on.”

“I mean, why here? On the face of it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Resnick looked around at the flat landscape of broad fields. “It’s out of the way, you’d have to say that for it.”

Sharon smiled a little at the corners of her mouth. “Everywhere round here is.”

“It takes time to bury a body,” Resnick said. “Even if it’s only a few feet deep. And if anyone threatened to disturb you, you’d see them from a long way off.”

“He’d have to know it, though, wouldn’t he?” Sharon said. “Know of its existence, that for long periods of the day there was nobody around. Stuff like that. I mean, you wouldn’t just drive along with a body in the back, see somewhere, think, oh, that looks a likely place.”

“You could.”

“Yes, but is that what you think?”

Resnick shook his head. “No, I think whoever it was knows this area well, this farm, this track. My guess would be he already had the idea in his head, possibly even before he kidnapped the girl. Bury the body here.”

Sharon thought about her first sight of the hand, the rooting pigs. “But then he must have known, sooner or later, the body would be found?”

“Yes,” Resnick said, “I think that’s part of the point.”

“What point’s that?”

“I’m not yet sure.”

The pathologist was on his way towards them, trousers tucked down in green Wellingtons. “I’ll have to do the proper tests of course, but I’d say she’s been dead, oh, possibly three days, four. My guess is she was killed first, the body kept somewhere, then brought here. Signs of deterioration are remarkably few.”

“Cause of death?” Resnick said.

“Oh, you saw the bruising round the neck. Strangled, almost certainly.”

“How?” Sharon asked.

The pathologist glanced at her over the rim of his spectacles, as if recognizing for the first time that she was there. He made no attempt to reply to her question.

“How was she strangled?” Resnick asked.

The response was immediate. “Not with the hands. A ligature of some kind. Possibly a piece of rope, though that might have torn more of the skin. A narrow belt?”

“How soon,” Resnick asked, “before we can have a full report?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

“And before that?”

“I’ll get something to you as soon as I can. Early afternoon?”

Through this exchange, Sharon had been doing her best to rein in her anger. “You have any women in your team?” she asked Resnick, as the pathologist traipsed away from them, back towards his car.

“One, why?”

“You always back her up as well as you just did me?” Any thought that she might have been paying him a compliment was dashed by the look in her eyes.

Harry Phelan was standing in the same position, a scarecrow in the center of a ploughed field, nothing growing there to protect. Clarise had started towards him, ventured as far as the gate and no further. Resnick put an arm round her shoulders and at his touch she began to cry again, her head resting sideways against the broad front of his coat.

“It’s Harry I’m fretful for,” she said, sniffling into bits and pieces of damp tissue. “All of the energy he’s got, he’s put into willing Nancy still alive. Even on the way out here, he kept saying, she’s all right, you see, whoever this is, it’ll not be her. Not Nancy, it’ll not be her.”

Resnick left her to trudge into the field, Harry turning his head once to see who it was, but moving no farther. They said nothing for some little time, two men at either end of middle age. Not for the first time, Resnick felt useless, hopelessly inadequate to the task. How do you begin to comfort a man who has just identified the murdered body of what was once-in his heart still remained-his child? If he and Elaine had ever had children themselves, would he have known any better? Would circumstances, one day, ever have enabled him to understand?

“If the ranson had been paid this would never have happened.” There was no anger in Harry Phelan’s voice now, no passion. He was a man whose life had been sucked out.

“We don’t know that,” Resnick said.

“If it had gone all right, not got messed up, with the money …”

“It’s possible she may have been killed before.”

Harry looked at him, too numb properly to comprehend. Lapwings rose up as one from the farther end of the field, flew a half circle, and landed back down between where they stood and the side hedge. Vehicles were starting up back at the farm, revving their engines purposefully; Resnick knew that he should go but he kept standing there.