Hilary Bonner: When the Dead Cry Out

The banter with Ethel had been fairly typical of Karen Meadows. It was automatic for her to respond to people in that way. She lived her daily life on a kind of personality autopilot. She didn’t know how else to do it. It wasn’t contrived. It wasn’t altruistic. After all, it worked for her, too, as well as for those around her. She knew that by the end of a halfway good day she would probably be believing in her own image again, almost as much as did all those she encountered.

As she made her way out of the building and across the parking area towards her car she lit a third cigarette and inhaled deeply. Tomorrow she would give up, she told herself for the umpteenth time.

Her mobile phone rang just as she was about to unlock her car door. She dropped the car keys as she rummaged for it in her big shoulder bag, overstuffed like the wardrobe. Swearing to herself she went down on one knee to pick up the keys with her left hand as she finally located the phone in the bottom of the bag and pushed the speak button with her right one.

“It’s Phil, boss.”

Detective Sergeant Cooper’s voice was pitched slightly higher than usual. He sounded excited.

“Those divers out off Berry Head, the ones exploring that old Nazi U-boat that’s been in the news. They’ve found something; bones, parts of a skeleton, inside the hull.”

Karen stopped scrabbling for her keys at once. Cooper wouldn’t have called to tell her they’d found the remains of some poor German sailor. In any case that was pretty unlikely after getting on for sixty years in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Go on,” she encouraged.

“It was wrapped in tarpaulin and wound around with heavy chains. So we can pretty well forget any thoughts either of one of the original crew or any sort of freak accident at sea. Looks almost certain some bastard just threw it into the sea from a boat.”

Karen remained motionless on one knee, oblivious to the small sharp pieces of gravel digging into her skin through the thin cotton of her trousers. Her mouth felt dry when she opened it to speak again. Her brain was buzzing. She ran her tongue around her lips. The sharp moment of suspense, albeit so brief, while she considered the possible meaning of what she had been told, made it difficult for her to formulate the words she wanted to say.

“Anybody taken a guess at how long the skeleton may have been there?” she asked eventually, aware that her voice was perfectly calm. Karen always managed to sound calm whatever she was feeling inside. It was one of the many tricks she had developed which made up her persona.

“No way, boss. But the divers did say that it had been pretty securely wrapped in the tarpaulin, and also that it had drifted or been swept inside the hull of the U-boat where it was wedged in such a way that it’s been protected from the currents and the fish. So it could well have been there much longer than you’d normally reckon possible from its condition.”

Karen thought quickly. She always did. That was what made her so bloody good at her job.

“You said parts of a skeleton? What about the head?”

Phil Cooper would know at once what she was getting at. If the head were intact that might mean teeth still existed. Dental records gave swift irrefutable identification. DNA might be obtainable but it was not always as straightforward as people assumed, and certainly not when only bones were left of a corpse.

“Most of the torso and the arm and leg bones are there apparently, but the tarpaulin had worked loose around the neck freeing the head to all the destructive elements of the Atlantic Ocean,” Cooper replied. “Nothing of it left at all, they don’t reckon. Sorry, boss.”

Karen grunted. Her brain was still buzzing as if a swarm of honeybees had crawled inside it. She closed the fingers of her free hand around her dropped car keys and rose slowly to her feet.

“Are they certain it’s just the one body?”

“I think I can guess what you’re getting at, boss.”

Karen had been pretty sure that he would, but she had no time for the niceties of game playing.

“Well?” she enquired sharply.

“Seems so. The amount of bones, and even the way the skeleton was bundled up, suggests a single adult corpse only. We don’t have an expert opinion yet, though.”

Karen grunted.

“Where’s the skeleton now?”

“On its way to the morgue at Torquay Hospital.”

“Meet you there in fifteen.”

She snapped off her phone without waiting for a reply. Her heart was pumping very fast, as if she had been exercising hard. When she opened the car door and slipped into the driver’s seat she was aware that her mouth was drier than ever. Her hands on the wheel trembled very slightly. Her eyes gleamed with excitement. Apart from any other considerations, this was what she had joined the police force for. Until Phil Cooper had called, her day ahead was to have been devoted entirely to paperwork and admin, the aspects of her job which held no appeal for her at all. Now she could cast that aside with a clear conscience, for once.

She gunned the engine into life and swung her sleek convertible sports car out of the car park. It was one of the new MGs. Her long-time journalist friend John Kelly, a devotee of the original MGBs, whom she was sure she would encounter very soon as he had a nose for a story that would shame your average bloodhound, was derisory of what he called “the pale imitations.” But then Kelly, who always seemed to be in trouble of one sort or another, was barely qualified to speak as his most recent series of misadventures had led to him being banned from driving for the foreseeable future.

The sky was beginning to lighten a little as Karen pulled into the main seafront road, so out of habit she reached up with one hand, unfastened the hood and swung it back — a trick she had taught herself as soon as she acquired the car. Karen was not the type who had either the time or the inclination to pull into a lay-by and stop in order to lower a car hood. Her hair shifted only slightly with the draught caused by the vehicle’s forward motion. She had one of those cuts which rarely moved out of place. It was, she sometimes thought, possibly the only intrinsically tidy thing about her and she was extremely fussy about her hair, washing it daily and fussing over it constantly. If Karen’s hair didn’t look right, she was inclined to feel unable to function at all.

She reached into the glove compartment for a pair of dark glasses and coasted to a halt at the first set of traffic lights, the determined upward tilt of her jaw and the inexplicable aura of excitement she now exuded from every pore making her appear particularly attractive.

She was quite unaware of the admiring glances of the driver of the car adjacent to her. But Karen’s image, maintained always in such a fragile manner, was firmly reinstated, both in her mind and that of others. She had already forgotten the empty blackness of her early morning mood, which was, in any case, not for public consumption. Neither did she remember how tired she had felt just a few minutes earlier. Her brain was on overdrive. The adrenaline raced through her system making every nerve-end tingle with anticipation.

It couldn’t be , she thought. Not after all this time. Not after twenty-eight years. It really couldn’t be. Could it?

On a sunny afternoon in June twenty-seven years earlier, Karen Meadows, then a gawky thirteen-year-old, had been on her way home from school. As she approached the little street just off Braddons Hill Road, high above Torquay, where she had lived all her life she broke into an easy long-limbed trot. She was late for tea, again, and likely to be in trouble, again.