Page 16 of The Girl in the Grave
Sam looked at him. ‘He’d have a reason to exhume her if hewantedus to find the dead girl hidden beneath her coffin.’
Beth nodded. ‘Because he put her there?’
Josh shut his eyes and slowly shook his head. ‘We’d never have known about her if he hadn’t made up this story.’
Sam spoke then. ‘They’re not going to find him. He’ll have given a false address and probably had a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that he’s thrown away.’
All three of them looked at each other. Beth stood up. ‘I need to do the post-mortem on the girl. I can’t put it off any longer. Abe will have prepared the mortuary, and you need all the evidence you can get to find this mystery man. You do know we might be completely wrong, and it could all be a genuine mistake.’
‘Somehow, I don’t think we are. At least we have something to work on; it gives us a sense of direction for the time being.’
Josh and Sam both stood up. Sam followed Beth into the ladies’ changing room to get gowned up, while Josh went into the men’s to do the same.
Twenty-Six
When he’d realised his plan wasn’t going to work, he’d panicked. It had seemed like the perfect murder, killing the girl and burying her in a grave dug for someone else, but once she was in there, hidden away, he hadn’t experienced the thrill from it he’d imagined. It was all very well him knowing where she was, but what now? It was the excitement of the chase, recognition for his hard work and admiration of his audacity he wanted, he realised. Killing was easy.
As he sipped his latte from the cardboard cup, staring over the top of his newspaper, he felt a tingle of excitement in the pit of his stomach as a police van pulled up opposite the hotel and an officer got out. He had thought about booking himself into the hotel for a couple of days, to be near her and nearer the action. It might be a little bit too risky though. She was drunk last night, there was no doubt about it, but not that drunk that she wouldn’t remember him. It was vain, but he liked to think he’d made an impression. Instead, he’d spent the day drinking endless cups of coffee and watching the hotel from afar.
He’d already witnessed last night’s conquest come into the coffee shop around an hour ago; he’d slid down into the armchair, put his baseball cap back on and held the newspaper up so she couldn’t see his face. It hadn’t mattered, though, because he could tell she was preoccupied. She hadn’t even glanced around the busy café; her focus had been on the barista and no one else. Which had suited him just fine.
He smiled to himself as he stared across at the cemetery opposite. He’d always had a morbid fascination with cemeteries. He loved the peace and quiet; they’d been his safe haven as a teenager. In fact, it was whilst sitting, propped against a huge gravestone reading a library book about famous American serial killers that he’d first realised he was not at all repulsed by what he was reading. He knew that he should have felt shocked and sickened, but the words made his pulse race and his loins stir like nothing he’d ever experienced before. From that moment on he had read about the lives of every twisted killer he could find until books were no longer enough…
His first kill had been such a bittersweet experience. He’d admired the girl from afar, for months, in that awkward schoolboy way. He’d watched her until he knew everything about her. He’d followed her home from school every day but she never took any of notice of him, always too busy laughing with her friends or flirting with the college boys much older than him. His moment came one night he saw her stumble out of a pub arguing with a lad she was with. He’d watched from across the road as she’d slapped his face. The lad had gone to hit her back, then stopped himself, shoving her to the ground and walking off. He’d rushed to help her up, taking her arm and offering to walk her home. She didn’t even flinch. Walking past the cemetery he’d noticed the gates had been left open and took it as a sign, steering her into the darkness.
What happened next happened quickly, too quickly. Next thing he knew he was straddling her dead body, panting and panicking as the realisation of what he had just done set in. He stared at her for a few moments, talking in the beauty of her lifeless face before running all the way home.
The next few days were torture as he waited for the police to come knocking. But they never came. They arrested the boy she’d been seen arguing with outside the pub but eventually let him go for lack of evidence. He would have liked to have had someone to share the experience with back then, but he’d never had any friends and seemed to attract every bully in a three-mile radius. He’d used the cemetery, back where he lived in Barrow, as a shortcut from his home to school and back. When he wasn’t dodging beatings by hiding behind the tombstones he knew like the back of his hand, he was spending time wandering around them with his notebook. He loved reading the inscriptions on the graves, especially the really old ones.
‘Of Your Charity, Pray For The Soul Of…’ was a popular one. Whoever had died and needed so many prayers always piqued his interest: did the people who buried them know all their deep, dark secrets? What would be on his gravestone, he wondered: ‘Forever Burning in the Depths of Eternal Hell’?
He looked across at the small churchyard of Saint Martin’s, with its pretty little graveyard that looked like something off a picture postcard. Some of the graves were adorned with posies of fresh flowers. There were no faded plastic flowers to be seen; no one buried here had to endure that. He inhaled deeply as the memory of the sweet smell of death mingled with the heady, coppery scent of the soil as he’d pushed the girl’s body into the freshly dug grave filled his senses. The flash of her pretty yellow dress, torn and streaked with mud forged into his mind forever. He really was having the most pleasurable of days. Drinking coffee, as near to the police investigation into the missing girl as he could be, with a view of the graves opposite. There wasn’t much more he could ask for, was there? Except maybe for one thing…
Twenty-Seven
Beth noted who was now present in the room: Abe, Josh and Sam had been joined by the two CSIs, Carl and Claire, plus her made six of them. She watched Abe cut the tag from the body bag. As he slowly unzipped it, the sweet, cloying smell of decomposition filled the air. She glanced around the room to see if everyone was coping, because this was the moment of truth; if someone was going to pass out it was generally because of the stench of decay, but everyone looked okay. Between her and Abe they checked inside the bag for any trace evidence, then lifted the legs as they slid the bag down. The body had been wrapped in a sterile white sheet to keep it together. Unwrapping the sheet, they revealed their victim. The soil-encrusted wet rag of a once-sunshine-yellow dress covered most of her body. Beth checked the toe tag which had been placed on the body at the scene.
One of the Jane Doe’s eyes was half closed, as if she’d desperately tried not to fall asleep, and failed. Her once pretty face had been flattened with the weight of the heavy oak coffin that had lain on her for the last few weeks. Her skin was covered in dried mud, like a soldier in the trenches. Her clothes were covered in the brown, sticky soil which was common to the area. The heavy rainfall over the past few weeks had washed away the exposed soil from the slopes behind the cemetery, turning the grounds into a rain-soaked mud bath. She might have fared better had she been buried on higher ground, Beth thought. Abe measured her height and they weighed the body, as Claire began to photograph her from all possible angles.
Beth took her time walking around the table, examining every part of her. Removing the paper bags off first her left and then right hands to reveal her fingers were broken, bloodied and bruised; three of the nails on her right hand had been ripped right off.
‘Looks like she tried to claw her way out of… somewhere.’
Beth noticed Sam shudder at the thought. This poor girl must have been terrified, but Beth knew she couldn’t think about that now;all eyes were on her. She gently let go of the victim’s hand she’d been holding and looked up at Abe. He smiled at her; she knew he was trying to let her know it was okay. She nodded at him as he passed her some nail clippers and a paper bag to put the trimmings in. She proceeded to clip the nails that weren’t bloodied stumps, dropping them into the bag to be sent off for forensic examination. Then he passed her an ultraviolet black light. Turning off the overhead lights, Beth used it to scan the girl’s clothes and body for signs of semen which would fluoresce under it if present. Nothing of any interest showed up. She passed the torch back to Abe, switched the lights back on and began the painstaking task of collecting trace evidence, one hair at a time. These were put into small envelopes, and the date and time marked onto them to be sent off for analysis. There were no pockets in the dress to search.
‘We’ll remove her clothes now,’ Beth instructed, and Abe moved closer to help her remove the girl’s outer garments. Once they were off, they delicately rolled down her torn and shredded tights. They worked together carefully in respectful silence removing every last item of underwear, Claire photographing each piece as Abe carefully laid them out on another table for Beth to examine. There were no obvious injuries to her body that Beth found, and the torn tights were intact on the crotch which had surprised her. The underwear, too, was intact; no rips or tears in her fuchsia lace panties. If there was any evidence of sexual activity, it looked as if it would have been consensual. Unless, of course, the killer removed her underwear, raped her then put it back on. Which she didn’t think was likely. Beth began to speak into the digital recorder, loud and clear so Sam, who was scribing, could take notes as well.
‘This is the body of a female in her late teens, early twenties. This will be confirmed on closer examination and positive identification. She is Caucasian and has bleached blonde hair with quite a large regrowth of at least two inches of dark brown hair from the roots. She is thin but doesn’t look malnourished. There is a large, well-healed scar on the inside forearm of her left hand which runs vertical from her wrist to her elbow. She has a tattoo of a bee on her left ankle and a heart on the top of her right foot.’
She pointed to them and looked at Josh, who took out his phone. He snapped a couple of pictures, then sent them to Sykes and Bell, who were on their way to speak to the local authority homes in the area. Hopefully someone might recognise the tattoos.
Beth opened the mouth and looked inside, giving a detailed description of her teeth. As she moved the head, a single, dark brown shell fell out of the left nostril.
‘Ah, this is interesting.’
Josh frowned. ‘Why?’
Picking it up with a pair of tweezers, Abe passed her a jar to put it into.
