Simon Beckett: Whispers of the Dead

This trip there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for me when I came back.

The taxi was late, but I had plenty of time to catch my flight. Still I found myself restlessly checking my watch. A few feet from where I stood, the black and white Victorian floor tiles caught my eye. I looked away, but not before the Harlequin pattern prompted the usual connection in my memory. The blood had long since been washed off the area next to the front door, just as it had from the wall above it. The entire hallway had been painted while I’d still been in hospital. There was no physical reminder of what had taken place here the previous year.

But all at once I felt claustrophobic. I carried my bags outside, careful not to put too much strain on my stomach. The taxi pulled up as I closed the front door. It shut behind me with a solid thunk that had a sound of finality about it. I turned away without a backward glance and walked to where the taxi was chugging out its fug of diesel fumes.

I took the cab only as far as the nearest tube station and caught the Piccadilly line to Heathrow. It was too early for the morning rush, but there were still people in the carriage, avoiding looking at each other with the instinctive indifference of the Londoner.

I’d be glad to leave, I thought, fervently. This was the second time in my life I’d felt the need to get away from London. Unlike the first, when I’d fled with my life in tatters after the death of my wife and daughter, I knew I’d be coming back. But I needed to escape for a while, to put some distance between myself and recent events. Besides which, I’d not worked in months. I hoped this trip would be a way of easing me back into things again.

And of finding out if I was still up to the job.

There was no better place to find out. Until recently, the facility in Tennessee had been unique, the only outdoor field laboratory in the world where forensic anthropologists used real human cadavers to study decomposition, recording the essential clues that might point to when and how death had occurred. A similar facility had now been set up in North Carolina, and also in Texas, once local concerns about vultures had been overcome. I’d even heard talk about one in India.

But it didn’t matter how many there might be: in most people’s minds the research facility in Tennessee was still the Body Farm. It was in Knoxville, part of the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center, and I’d been lucky enough to train there early in my career. But it had been years since my last visit. Too long, as Tom Lieberman, its director and my old teacher, had told me.

As I sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, watching the slow and silent dance of aircraft through the plate glass window, I wondered what it would be like going back. During the months of painful recovery after I came out of hospital—and the even more painful aftermath—the promise of the month-long trip had been something to work towards, a badly needed fresh start.

Now I was actually on my way, for the first time I wondered if I hadn’t invested too much hope in it.

There was a two-hour stopover in Chicago before I caught my connecting flight, and the tail end of a storm was still grumbling as the plane landed in Knoxville. But it quickly cleared, and by the time I’d collected my baggage the sun was starting to break through. I breathed deeply as I left the airport terminal to collect my hire car, enjoying the unfamiliar humidity in the air. The roads steamed, giving off the peppery tang of wet tarmac. Against the slowly receding blue-black of the thunderheads, the rainfall gave the greens of the lush countryside around the highway an almost dazzling vibrancy.

I’d felt my spirits lift as I neared the city. This is going to work.

Now, barely a week later, I was no longer so sure. I followed the trail as it skirted a clearing in which stood a tall wooden tripod that resembled a bare tepee frame. A body lay on a platform beneath it, waiting to be hoisted and weighed. Leaving the trail—and remembering Alana’s warning—I crossed the clearing to where several rectangular pads of concrete were set into the soil, starkly geometric in the woodland setting. Human remains were entombed in them, part of an experiment to see how effective ground-penetrating radar was in body location.

A tall, gangly figure in chinos and a floppy bush hat knelt a few yards away, scowling as he examined a gauge on a length of pipe protruding from the ground.

‘How’s it going?’ I asked.

He didn’t look up, peering through his wire-framed glasses as he gently nudged the gauge with a finger. ‘You’d think it’d be easy to catch a smell this strong, wouldn’t you?’ he said by way of answer.

The flattened vowels betrayed his East Coast roots rather than the curling southern drawl of Tennessee. For as long as I’d known him, Tom Lieberman had been searching for his own Holy Grail, analysing the gases produced by decomposition molecule by molecule to identify the odour of decay. Anyone who’d ever had a mouse die under their floorboards could testify it existed, and it continued to exist long after human senses failed to detect it. Dogs could be trained to sniff out a cadaver years after it had been buried. Tom theorized that it should be possible to develop a sensor that would do much the same thing, making body location and recovery immeasurably easier. But, as with anything else, theory and practice were two very different things.

With a grunt that could have been either frustration or satisfaction he stood up. ‘OK, I’m done,’ he said, wincing as his knee joints cracked.

‘I’m heading over to the cafeteria for some lunch. Are you coming?’

He gave a wistful smile as he packed away his equipment. ‘Not today. Mary’s packed sandwiches. Chicken and beansprouts, or something else disgustingly healthy. And before I forget, you’re invited over for dinner this weekend. She seems to have got it into her head that you need a proper meal.’ He pulled a face. ‘You she wants to feed up; me, I just get rabbit food. Where’s the justice in that?’

I smiled. Tom’s wife was a great cook, and he knew it. ‘Tell her I’d love to come. Do you want a hand with your gear?’ I offered, as he hoisted his canvas bag on to his shoulder.

‘No, it’s OK.’

I knew he didn’t want me to exert myself. But even though we walked slowly back to the gate I could see that the effort left him breathless. When I’d first met Tom he’d already been well into his fifties, happy to give encouragement to a fledgling British forensic anthropologist. That was longer ago than I cared to remember, and the intervening years had left their mark. We expect people to remain as we remember them, but of course they never do. Still, I’d been shocked at how changed Tom was when I saw him again.

He hadn’t formally announced when he was stepping down as director of the Forensic Anthropology Center, but everyone knew it was likely to be before the end of the year. The local newspaper had run a feature on him two weeks earlier that had read more like a testimonial than an interview. He still looked like the basketball player he’d once been, but encroaching age had lent a gauntness to his already lean frame. There was a hollowness to his cheeks that, with the receding hairline, gave him an air that was both ascetic and worryingly frail.

But the twinkle in his eyes remained unchanged, as did his humour and a faith in human nature that was undimmed despite a career spent trawling through its darker side. And you’re not exactly unscathed yourself, I reflected, remembering the ugly striation of flesh under my shirt.

Tom’s station wagon was in the car park adjacent to the facility. We paused at the gate, pulling off the protective gloves and overshoes we’d been wearing before going out. With the barrier pulled shut behind us, there was nothing to suggest what lay on the other side. The trees behind the fence looked mundane and innocuous as they rustled in the warm breeze, bare branches shading green with new life.