Frances Fyfield - Trial by Fire

`You always do,' Helen repeated.

`You're right,' he sighed. 'I always do.'

Detective Constable Amanda Scott arrived early by fifteen minutes, always in advance of the boss, careful in this and all things to preserve the good opinion she had tried so hard to deserve. She stepped out of her neat car, unaware of its highly polished gleam, but pleasantly conscious of the shine on her leather pumps and the curve of her waxed and tanned calves as she stood away from the door with her precise movements.

She checked her hair in the side mirror, reproving herself for her own vanity while locking the car with automatic care. Miss Scott was dressed as she was always dressed in sensible but feminine clothes. White long-sleeved blouse with buttons, pleated cotton skirt in navy blue, matching the handbag and shoes, offset by tiny pearl earrings. Nothing flashy about Miss Scott – not a Mrs or a Ms – clad in good chain store clothes with an eye to economy and perfect presentation rather than the luxury of flair. She had liked the less nerve-racking days of uniform duty, still reflected in her conservative clothes, but she liked this better and knew herself to be modestly, only sometimes raucously, admired.

She sniffed the air. Woodland smells mingled with fresh Tarmacadam in the carpark, completed when? A day or so before, she would have guessed. No common access to the woods from here for over a fortnight. She gazed around her, saw the footpath into the trees, and mentally propelled herself above it all, forming in her mind a plan of the area. Maybe they would need an aerial photograph, but with a facility all her own, she imagined she could see herself and the scene of this demise from the air. A triangle, body in the middle. I stand, she told herself as she would have told a class, one mile from Branston on the Epping road, on the edge of Bluebell Wood. Here is a carpark, a picnic spot provided by the council, and here is a footpath that leads into the woods but peters out after half a mile; only proper walkers go farther, to their own disappointment because there isn't that much of it, really.

Only another half-mile, then a valley, uphill to a small field and a bit more woodland surrounding that awful hotel. You could walk straight across to the hotel if you could ever get through that jungle of a garden. About a mile from here to there, with woods extending a mile on either side of where I point, two more picnic spots on the other side. Not a particularly beautiful or pleasant place outside the footpath and even with the dearth of green trees on this border of London and country, strangely unpopular. Might have been less so if the establishment on the other side, which insisted on calling itself a hotel rather than the unfriendly pub it was, actually welcomed guests.

Amanda's single visit had coincided with that of a cockroach. She had never returned and could not remember what they called the place now – the name changed with each renewal of the licence and the whim of the owners. The Crown, that was it, and no one, surely no one, would brave entry into the woods and fields through their garden. Compared to that wilderness, the woods were as easy as a street.

Detective Constable Scott paced three steps left and three right, small, clipped steps.

Should she stay and greet the troops or walk down the path to the muslin-sheeted grave? She hated being still: she would walk; no, she would wait for the boss and walk behind him.

Bailey would talk and think at the same time, dividing the wood into sections for searching, throwing ideas and instructions over his shoulder, and Amanda would remember them all, watch, and learn. She was only there to learn, would never miss a single scrap of knowledge or let past her sharp blue eyes the slightest opportunity for making a quiet contribution.

She would be as she always was, his calm, efficient shadow, earning trust. It never occurred to her to wonder if she actually liked Bailey, or any of her colleagues. Amanda's concentration was streamlined. Her own feelings were irrelevant, suspended as Bailey arrived and greeted Dr Vanguard as an old friend. Both their cars were parked crooked, and she wondered why, on such respectable salaries, they drove such shabby vehicles.

The team assembled like the cast of a play, Bailey leading and Vanguard following, as daylight grew sharper, the signal for a hot day. More speed, said Vanguard. The sooner we get her out the better. Police Constables Bowles and Peters rose stiffly from camp chairs as the rest arrived in single file, not deviating from the footpath, as Bailey had told them.

Photographers, exhibits officer next with bags, labels, gloves, tweezers, strolling behind the ambulancemen, who were the only ones talking.

As I said, Fred, it ain't really my turn to do this shift.'

`Never mind,' said Fred. Ordinary grumbles in the mist.

The searchers, combers of undergrowth, pickers of detritus, carriers of bags, would follow, foot soldiers behind cavalry.

Vanguard never seemed to mind the dirt. He who had waded into stinking Thames mud to recover half-submerged limbs, who had pulled a leg away from a hip joint in a cesspit, found this dry earth relatively innocuous. He knelt by the grave and began uncovering the form beneath the soil with all the care of an archaeologist, sweeping away handfuls of leaves with systematic energy until the shape emerged. The photographer recorded each stage of the process. The others watched from either side as the figure came into focus, lying straight with legs uncrossed, face turned flat against the earth as if refusing to watch what was being done.

She was recognizably female in limbs if not yet in detail, and as Vanguard's hand dusted the face, Amanda could not suppress the rising nausea, glanced at Bailey, and maintained calm against her shiver of disgust. The face was discoloured green and black, alive with bright white maggots twisting in the cavities of empty eye sockets, active in the distended nostrils, full of hideous and indignant movement in the eyes and lipless mouth where their destruction had exposed teeth bared in an obscene grin.

Bailey wondered why they had attacked the face first, what dreadful lack of mercy; render to earth what must be rendered, but first distort, make unrecognizable what was once so human, may have been beautiful. No greater damage than the face; apart from the half-chewed hand without fingertips, the limbs were intact, stained like green marble, but whole.

No doubt the larvae would have found the other orifices, liquid, vulnerable private parts.

Amanda turned her head away as pathologist and assistants lifted the body on to the plastic sheet laid ready to receive it. She was ashamed for the woman's nakedness, knew disgust and contempt for one found in such condition, almost an acute dislike for the dead, resented her own squeamishness and the constant struggle to suppress it.

Thank God Vanguard would not be taking his vaginal and anal swabs here: they would be spared that sight until the thing was finally devoid of all humanity on the postmortem table. In the haze of her own disgust, holding her breath to avoid the stench, feeling her skin itch as if the larvae had attached themselves, Amanda shook her senses, forced herself to look harder.

She was not there to feel pain, noted the gash on the forehead, the gaping throat. Well. They would soon know better. The exhibits officer collected larvae from the face, put them in a bag without a word, treating them with gentleness. Amanda wondered what manner of man it was who analysed them.

`How long, Doc? Can you say?'

Vanguard was continuing a cursory inspection, calling up the ambulance boys for the tiresome walk back to transport, grumbling under his breath. 'How long? What, for a report?