Ewart Hutton - Dead People

I looked at the woman. She smiled, amused at my expression of surprise.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Jeff said, flustered, ‘I should have introduced you. This is Dr MacLean.’

‘Doctor.’ I nodded at her, trying to pull back my composure.

She grinned. ‘Don’t get too excited, Sergeant. I’m not a medical doctor. I won’t be able to help you out on any forensic technicalities.’ She was Scottish, a touch of east-coast inflexion in the accent.

‘Dr MacLean’s an archaeologist,’ Jeff explained, ‘she’s working on a dig farther up on the ridge of the hill. I asked her to come down. In case this was in any way connected to what she’s working on.’

‘We’ve discovered a medieval grave site,’ she elaborated. ‘Jeff wondered whether this body could have anything to do with ours.’

‘Does it?’ I asked. ‘Can you tell whether this is medieval?’

She hunkered down close to the remains. I dropped down beside her, our splayed-out knees almost touching. She took out a pen and used it as a pointer. ‘Can you see that?’ she asked, directing my eyes down to a point close to the elbow of the one uncovered arm.

I caught it. A scrap of something with a dirty-brown sheen to it, damp, a surface-texture like kelp. ‘What is it?’

She turned her face to mine. ‘Whatever variation on polyethylene sheet it turns out to be, Sergeant, I don’t think they were making it six hundred years ago.’

‘Could it have got here independently?’

‘I’m not the detective, but the material does appear to be under the remains.’ She smiled again, sympathetically, I thought, but before I could confirm it, she stood up. I joined her and heard Emrys Hughes smother a snort of laughter. He wouldn’t have known polyethylene if it turned up on his breakfast plate, but he obviously thought that I had just had my nose caught in a hinge.

‘So the plastic could have been used as a wrapping?’ I asked.

She shrugged. It wasn’t her business. It didn’t matter. I was airing the questions for my own benefit. ‘Or as a carrier? Something to stop the fluids leaking?’ I turned to Jeff. ‘What was here before your started your operation?’

‘Nothing. Just open hill.’

‘No track?’

‘A pretty rudimentary one.’ He pointed out a track that was little more than twin wheel ruts that ran up to the shoulder of the hill. ‘That’s a continuation of it. It goes up to Tessa’s … Dr MacLean’s dig.’

‘So you could have got a vehicle up here?’

‘It would have to have been a four-wheel drive.’

The wind gusted. I felt it cold in my face. ‘It’s going to rain. Have you got a tarpaulin we can use to cover the body and the excavated material?’

‘Sure. Are we going to be able to carry on and work round you while you do what you have to do?’

So that’s why he was looking so worried. ‘Not immediately, I’m afraid,’ I said sympathetically, ‘and then it’s going to depend on what we find before we can release the site back to you.’

‘ Jeff … ’

We all looked round at the man at the open door of one of the site huts who had just shouted. ‘There’s a call come in for the cops.’

I looked at Jeff quizzically. ‘There’s no cellular reception up here,’ he explained, ‘we had to put our own landline in.’

‘Jeff …’ Tessa put a hand on his arm. ‘I’m going to go back up the hill now. I’ll catch you soon.’

‘I’ll come over.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It looks like I’m going to have time on my hands.’

She bobbed her head at me. ‘’Bye, Sergeant.’

‘Goodbye, doctor,’ I replied, feeling the formal distance. I felt an irrational twinge of loneliness and wished that I was playing in the same movie as she and Jeff.

They left me to take the call in a partitioned-off area of the hut, with topographical-survey plans on the walls. The long table was home to a cluster of tannin-lined mugs and a bottle of tomato ketchup with a crust around the top like a botched circumcision. On the wall above it, an ironical placement if there ever was one, a calendar promoting drill bits featured a heavy-breasted, naked woman with rosy nipples and a blue hard hat.

DCI Bryn Jones’s steady deep voice came down the line. ‘Glyn, can you tell us what you’ve got there?’

I described it, sticking purely to the observational facts. The line emitted soft static. He had put his hand over the receiver. I knew exactly who he was relaying my information to.

‘Glyn, take an educated guess,’ he said, coming back to me. ‘How historic is this?’

‘It’s gone to full skeleton,’ I said, and started laying out my reasoning path for his benefit. ‘The ground is pretty compacted, and looks like it hadn’t been disturbed for a long time before the excavators arrived. No sign of any clothing, so it’s either been in the ground for long enough for it to have decomposed, or it was buried naked. There’s what looks like plastic sheeting present, so I would say that we’re not talking ancient, but not too recent either.’

‘So it’s unlikely that, as we speak, we’ll have the villain’s footprints scorching the mountain dust as he makes his escape?’

‘Highly unlikely, sir.’ I smiled; that wasn’t Bryn Jones-speak, it had to be a Jack Galbraith line that he had just recited.

‘And the clues are not withering on the vine?’

‘This particular vine resembles an opencast mine, sir.’

‘Not exactly a productive evidence farm then?’

‘No, sir.’ I knew where he was trying to lead me, but that was going to have to be their decision.

‘Capaldi …’ DCS Jack Galbraith’s heavy Scottish brogue boomed in. ‘We’ve got a SOCO team, the forensic pathologist and the forensic anthropologist all lined up. And I want to keep them as a happy and productive bunch. So is anything going to be served by them having to work under arc lights through a shitty night at the arse end of the known universe?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘I do not have a young, ripe, virgin girl in a communion dress in that hole?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I do not have a vast array of female relatives rending their garments and keening over the body?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So, Capaldi?’

‘I don’t think I should make that decision, sir.’ I braced myself.

‘It’s your fucking corpse, Capaldi, you’re the finder. You’re supposed to be a professional, you make the call.’

‘I would think it could all wait until the morning, sir.’

‘Wise move, son.’ He chuckled, but even that managed to contain a threat in it.

Wise move indeed. I had just saved them from a night of rain and bleak wide-open spaces. I just hoped it would be remembered and appreciated. But, knowing Jack Galbraith, I doubted it.

By the time I came out of the hut, we were losing light, and the rain was sweeping in. Some strange vortex effect in the cwm bringing it up the hill at us. But Jeff’s men had managed to rig a tarpaulin over the crucial areas, the half-exposed skeleton and the mound of excavated material, and Hughes and Friel had taped off the rectangle I had prescribed for them.

Vehicles were leaving, a procession heading down the access road. Jeff had obviously released his men. Mine were attempting their own escape, Emrys keeping his head down to avoid eye contact as he got into the passenger’s side of the patrol car. Which had been turned around and was now facing downhill, I noticed.

‘ Sergeant! ’ I yelled.

He froze in his crouch, half inside the car. He wanted to ignore me, but a conditioned reflex had kicked in at my shout.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I asked, approaching, as he unravelled himself. Inside the car, I could see Friel in the driver’s seat, craning past him to watch me.