Page 8 of Dying Breath
Mattie nodded. Lucy’s phone began to ring and she tugged it from her pocket. ‘DI Harwin.’
There was a pause as whoever was on the other end relayed their message.
‘Tape off the area, start a scene log. I’m on my way.’ She ended the call. ‘Some workmen have found a skeleton in the woods behind the old asylum.’
Mattie stood up, relieved that Lucy’s interrogation had been momentarily suspended even though his heart felt heavy at the thought of another body.
Lucy drove in one of the brand-new, white, unmarked cars that had a built-in satnav and touchscreen radio, which was a complete novelty. Mattie had spent ten minutes playing with the radio until Lucy had growled under her breath at him to pack it in. He’d put his hands down, sitting on them to stop them from straying back towards it.
They reached the woods and the car began to bump along the rough, stony path until it reached the police van at the other end. There were a few dog walkers around, but not many, and whoever the first responding officer was had done a pretty good job of clearing the area. They made their way to the footpath, then followed it into the woods until they reached a clearing to one side where a small digger truck was parked up. A tall man in a pair of orange overalls and a white hard hat was leaning against it, a cigarette in one hand, his phone in the other. It was clamped to his ear and Lucy could hear him swearing and muttering to whoever was on the other end as she approached. A uniformed officer strode towards them, pointing at a mound of soil in front of the digger.
‘I think it’s real and I’m pretty sure it’s human, although I’m not one hundred per cent. It’s been here a very long time if it is.’
Lucy walked across to peer into the exposed hole beside the mound of soil. She could see that the soil covered parts of a ribcage and a spinal column. She bent down to take a closer look. Mattie did the same. Reaching out with a gloved hand, she pressed her finger against a rib to make sure it wasn’t some rubber Halloween prop that had been buried out here for a joke. It wasn’t spongy; in fact it was hard. Standing up again, she put her hands on her hips.
‘We need a pathologist, an archaeologist and a forensic anthropologist. I want CSI here now. Until we know for definite that it isn’t, we’re treating this as a crime scene.’
‘Whoever that is has been here a while.’
‘Yes, Mattie, it looks that way.’
‘How come no one has ever found it before?’
She shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I think the recent heavy rain and the fact that there’s a mini digger clearing the area for new paths could have something to do with it.’
Mattie looked at the bright yellow machinery. ‘I suppose that would have a lot to do with it.’
‘Have we got any outstanding missing persons cases that you can think of?’
He shook his head. She could only think of one man whose body had never turned up since she’d joined the police, and that was fourteen years ago. There were the regular cases of teenagers who only went missing because they’d been grounded by their parents or carers. Then there were the suicidal mispers who, fortunately, were usually found before it was too late. There were some bodies that turned up months after they’d gone missing. Usually by a dog walker or someone out for a leisurely stroll along one of the many beaches or woods surrounding Brooklyn Bay.
She closed her eyes, trying to think of anyone she’d forgotten about, and couldn’t. Forgetting wasn’t something that Lucy did often; she remembered every murder and serious case that she’d worked on. Sometimes she wished that she could forget – lying in bed at 4a.m. remembering what state of decomposition some victims had been found in didn’t really do much to help with her sleep pattern. She looked at her watch; she had no idea how long it would take to assemble the relevant professionals. At a guess she would say a couple of hours, maybe longer.
‘If CSI put a tent up it will preserve the immediate scene while we decide what we’re going to do and wait for everyone to turn up.’
She was talking to herself because Mattie was already questioning the driver of the digger, who was now sitting on a tree stump, head bent, staring at the ground in front of him. Lucy approached them, grabbing Mattie by the elbow.
‘Have you radioed for more patrols? This whole area is going to have to be sealed off – we can’t have every dog walker in a five-mile radius trampling through the crime scene.’
‘They’re on the way, boss.’
As if by magic, she heard the sound of approaching sirens, and they waited for the small army of black and luminous yellow to descend on the woods like a swarm of angry wasps.
Chapter Nine
April 1990
He found the letter from the prison. It was tucked behind the terracotta plant pot, with the shrivelled-up spider plant inside it, on the kitchen windowsill. It mentioned the wordscancerandendstage. It was a request from John to see them both one last time. He’d shown it to his mum and begged her to let him go with her. After hours of arguing and crying she’d finally said yes.
The prison looked much smaller than it had two years ago, but that was because they were in a different part than the last time and he was so much older. Two years made a big difference; he knew things now that he didn’t understand before. His mum had said she was only visiting John because he was ill and in the hospital wing. He still didn’t understand the hold that John had over his mum. He was no longer scared of the man who sat there, chained up behind a plastic table, staring at him as if he were devouring every inch of his body.
He was also much wiser; he had studied his mum’s office from top to bottom whenever she was out of the house. The pictures on the board had changed; he didn’t like the new ones. They were grainy black-and-white images of kids of many different ages; all of them were alive and wearing old-fashioned clothes. He’d desperately wanted to ask her why she’d taken the photos of his dead girls away, but of course he couldn’t. She would know that he’d been going in there and would probably freak out.
There was a bookshelf above the desk and on it were three different books with his mum’s name on. He’d found a couple of boxes in the corner of the room underneath sheets of paper, with spare copies of the books inside, and he’d taken one of each. Stashing them in his bedroom, he read them whenever he could. He didn’t understand a lot of what she’d written in them, but he liked reading about the murders. He wondered if his mum felt the same way as he did and maybe that was why she liked writing about dead people so much. He’d tried to quiz his friends at school to see if everyone had a morbid obsession with death.
None of his friends had ever seen a dead body, apart from Jake, who’d had to go and visit his gran at the funeral home when she’d died. He’d said it was horrible – that she hadn’t looked anything like his gran had the day before. She’d been yellow and looked like she was made of wax. Jake said he’d almost peed his pants when his dad had told him to give her one last kiss goodbye. He’d listened to Jake, fascinated, and wished he had grandparents who would die so he could go and see what they looked like. He didn’t say this to Jake because Jake had gone pale and his eyes had got all watery just talking about his gran.
Right there and then he’d known that he was very different from most kids, probably most people. They were all scared of death and dead people, whereas he was fascinated with them and couldn’t get enough. He needed to see a real dead person – he wanted to see if they looked as beautiful as his girls had. He wanted to touch one, stroke their skin, run his fingers through their hair. He wouldn’t think twice about kissing one; he wanted to know what it would feel like to put his lips on theirs. He thought about Carrie. He would have kissed her.
