Peter Robinson - Careless Love

‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t commit himself as to how or where, just to the indication of her having been in water. She could have just taken a shower before she went out, for example.’

‘Dumping her where she was found would certainly guarantee she’d be discovered fairly quickly, so whatever the reason, it can’t have been to hide the body. More to put it in plain view. And POLICE AWARE? I mean, was that meant to be some sort of sick joke?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it some kind of message from a killer? You know, rubbing it in our faces, like saying, “Be aware of this, then.” What are we supposed to be aware of? That Adrienne committed suicide? Of something she did? Is her death an example of something we’re aware of and ignoring, supposed to be doing something about? I mean, why tell us that?’

‘You’ve got a point there,’ Banks admitted. ‘Maybe it is supposed to mean something and we haven’t figured it out yet. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just reading too much into it, grasping at shadows. But we’ll keep it in mind.’

Winsome glanced at her watch and knocked back the remainder of her orange juice. ‘Come on, guv, sup up. Time to go and visit the parents. Maybe they’ll be able to enlighten us.’

There had been no other vehicles parked in the moors car park from which Annie and Gerry had just walked except the walking club’s minivan and the police patrol car, and Annie doubted very much that the dead man had walked all the way from Eastvale, or even Helmthorpe. The surface of the car park was tarmac, and if any other cars had pulled up there recently, no traces would remain, especially after the weekend’s rain and today’s wind. Unless, of course, the driver/killer had flicked a cigarette end out of his window, which had become caught in the weeds and would lead to an immediate DNA match. Dream on, Annie told herself. That only happened on television and in books. Besides, not even killers smoke these days.

Annie gestured towards the body. ‘Anyone recognise him?’ she asked, conscious that her words were almost ripped away from her lips by the wind before she uttered them.

The members of the walking club mumbled and turned away or shook their heads.

There wasn’t much else to do but question the walkers one by one as they all waited for the mountain rescue team to lift the body out of the gully. That would not be done, of course, until Peter Darby had arrived and extensively photographed and videoed the scene, then Dr Burns would have to pronounce death before the body was released to the coroner.

The preliminary questioning of the walkers didn’t take long, so as she waited, Annie took a few snaps of her own with her smartphone. It wouldn’t be long before Peter Darby was made redundant, she thought sadly. These days it seemed anyone could be a photographer, even a crime-scene photographer.

When the experts started to dribble in, Annie arranged for the walkers to be escorted out of the wind and back to their minivan by the uniformed officers. In the relative comfort of the nearest police station, in Helmthorpe, they could give their official statements and leave their names and addresses.

As Annie stood at the edge of the moors and watched the green van drive away, she looked at the valley spread out below her. She could pick out Banks’s isolated cottage easily enough, just a couple of miles to the north, next to the terraced falls of Gratly Beck, and below that the square tower of Helmthorpe church, with its odd turret attached. Beyond lay the meandering River Swain, then slowly, the dale side rose on the other side, a patchwork of drystone walls marking fields where sheep grazed, all the way to the sheer limestone curve of Crow Scar, like a grinning skeleton in the winter light.

Annie fastened her coat high around her neck and made her way back to the scene.

Peter Darby did his work, even going so far as to scramble down the gully from a nearby access point to get pictures he claimed he couldn’t get with his telephoto lens. The drop was only about fifteen or twenty feet, Annie reckoned, but certainly enough to break a man’s neck and crack open his skull if he fell at the wrong angle. On the other hand, it would have been quite possible for someone to survive the fall with only a broken leg and lie there screaming for help until some came, or until he died of exposure.

When Peter Darby had finished, Annie gave the signal for the rescue team, who had been fixing up their winches and slings, to bring the body up to the surface, which they did quickly and smoothly in as fine a coordinated and choreographed operation as Annie had ever witnessed.

Now the body lay on a stretcher at their feet, ready for Dr Burns’s examination before being shipped to the mortuary. The man was of average height, Annie noted, and definitely overweight, though somewhat short of obese. He was in his mid-sixties, with thinning grey hair, a grey Van Dyck beard, wrinkles and a few liver spots on his wrists and the backs of his hands.

Dr Burns knelt before the broken figure, touching the skin here and there, checking front and back, taking the body temperature, making calculations and recording observations on his notepad. After a while, he stood up with some difficulty and massaged his knees.

‘Getting old,’ he said, with a fleeting grin.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Annie agreed.

‘You two speak for yourselves,’ Gerry chipped in.

Annie rolled her eyes. ‘Ah, yes, the mere child.’

Gerry gave her a look. ‘Well...’ she said. ‘Don’t count me in as a member of your old fogeys’ club. Not yet.’

Annie smiled and turned to Dr Burns. ‘So, what have you got for us, old fogey?’

‘Not a lot, I’m afraid. Probably not much more than you could see for yourself. Neck’s broken at C five.’

‘Would that cause paralysis?’

‘More than likely. There certainly wasn’t much chance of his crawling out of there once he’d gone in.’

‘Is that what killed him?’

Dr Burns shook his head. ‘No. I’d say it was the blow to the back of the head, and the blood loss it caused.’

‘From the fall?’

‘Almost certainly. No doubt in his post-mortem Dr Glendenning will be able to match the wound more closely with the rock it hit, but the impact certainly fractured the skull, and it would have caused definite brain damage and severe bleeding, as you can see for yourself.’

‘He bled out?’

‘More or less.’

‘Would he have been conscious?’

‘Unlikely. Not for long, at any rate.’

‘Thank heaven for small mercies,’ said Annie with a shudder, imagining what it must be like being trapped all alone at the bottom of a gully where no one was likely to venture for some time, with a broken neck, paralysed, aware of your life’s blood leaking away. ‘Now for the question you hate most of all.’

‘Time of death?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Going by body temperature, rigor and the extent of damage done by the local fauna, I’d say at least three days, no longer than four. That’s allowing for the low temperatures we’ve had since the storm last week. Probably sometime last weekend, in fact. But don’t quote me on that.’

‘So what happened?’ Annie asked, mostly of herself. ‘He wanders up here in his Burton’s best, for whatever reason, trips over a heather root, tumbles down the gully, breaks his neck and smashes his skull and dies.’

‘Something like that,’ the doctor agreed. ‘From what I could see, the blood has gathered where you expect it to be if he fell and died in the position he was found in. When Dr Glendenning gets him stripped off on the table, he should be able to give you an even better idea whether your man died here or was transported from elsewhere and dumped, but I’d say it happened here. Dr Glendenning will also be able to tell you whether a stroke or a heart attack or drug overdose was involved. But unless you want me to strip him right down here and now and open him up, I’ve told you all I can for the moment.’