Blood Harvest (38 page)

‘Can I sit down?’ she asked, after a moment.

He pulled a chair in front of the desk and she sank into it, a frown of pain creasing her forehead. Then she looked up at him. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Can’t answer that one in a hurry. Does any of it make any sense?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really. But I think I’m getting closer to finding out who Ebba is. That’s why I came up. My laptop’s in my bag. Could you get it, please?’

Harry retrieved Evi’s large, black leather bag from where she’d
left it by the door and put it on the desk in front of her. While she pulled out and switched on the slim computer, he brought a chair round the desk so that they were sitting side by side. Evi opened up a window and turned the screen so that Harry could see it. It was a page from a medical reference site. His eyes went to the title at the top.

‘Congenital hypothyroidism,’ he read and turned to her for confirmation. She nodded.

‘Once Tom had Joe’s drawing to jog his memory, he was able to give me a very detailed description of the girl,’ she said. ‘The goitre is what really gives it away, though.’

‘What is it, exactly?’ asked Harry, who’d been scanning the text beneath the heading, unable to make much sense of the medical jargon.

‘Basically, a shortage in the body of the hormone thyroxin,’ said Evi. She was just inches away from him. He could smell her sweet, warm scent, too delicate to be perfume, maybe soap, body lotion. He had to concentrate.

‘Thyroxin is produced by the thyroid gland in the neck,’ she was saying. ‘If we don’t have enough of it we can’t grow properly and we can’t develop as we should. The condition is rare now, luckily, because it can be treated, but in the old days, it was quite common, especially in certain parts of the world.’

‘Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it,’ said Harry, shaking his head.

‘Oh, you will have,’ said Evi. ‘The less politically correct name for it is cretinism. I think Tom’s friend – shall we call her Ebba, it makes life a bit easier – is what we used to call a cretin.’

Harry rubbed both temples, thinking for a second. ‘So, she’s what?’ he asked. ‘A child?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Evi, with a tiny cat-like smile on her face. ‘People with the condition rarely grow taller than about five foot so an adult could easily appear much younger. And they usually have the mental age of children, would act in a childlike way. Do you need some paracetamol?’

‘If I take any more I’ll rattle. How is it caused?’ asked Harry. ‘Is it genetic?’

‘In some cases,’ said Evi. ‘But mainly the causes are environmental. For the body to produce thyroxin we need iodine, which we
get primarily from food. In the days when people grew their own food and fed on local livestock they were much more vulnerable. Certain soil conditions, typically remote mountainous regions like the Alps, were deficient in iodine. So if you lived in an area where there was no iodine in the soil, your thyroid gland would swell up in size to suck up as much iodine as possible. That’s what causes the goitre on the neck.’

‘We’re a long way from the Alps,’ said Harry.

‘Parts of Derbyshire were very vulnerable not too long ago,’ replied Evi. ‘Derbyshire neck was quite a well-known medical condition. Look.’

She changed the screen and Harry was looking at a picture of a woman in late-nineteenth-century dress. A massive swelling on her neck pushed her head out of position, forcing her to look upwards.’

‘That’s a goitre,’ said Evi, indicating the lump. ‘And we’re really not so far from the Peak District here, are we?’

‘So the girl that’s been frightening Tom is a local woman suffering from this condition? I can’t believe no one’s mentioned her.’

‘It does seem odd,’ agreed Evi. ‘But the Fletchers are still very new. Maybe people were just being discreet.’

Harry thought for a moment. ‘I need coffee,’ he said, standing up and crossing to the sink. Kettle in hand, he turned back. ‘And you say the condition can be treated?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Evi, nodding her head. ‘That’s what’s puzzling me. Newborn babies are routinely screened these days. If they’re found to be deficient in thyroxin, it can be administered artificially. They have to take it all their lives, but their development will be normal.’

Harry switched the kettle on and found clean mugs.

‘The only explanation I can think of is that she was born to relatively uneducated parents who haven’t maintained her treatment,’ continued Evi. ‘Maybe they suffer from it themselves. I spoke to DCI Rushton this morning, suggested he start looking at outlying farms and farm-workers’ cottages. Whoever this family are, I’m guessing they don’t come into town too often.’

‘OK, big question now,’ said Harry, spooning instant coffee into the mugs. ‘Could this girl – woman, whoever – be responsible for the deaths of Lucy, Megan and Hayley? For the threat to Millie?’

Evi flicked the screen back again. ‘I’ve spent most of today finding out everything I can about the condition,’ she said. ‘There’s no evidence I can see of these people behaving in violent or aggressive ways. Even Tom doesn’t think it was she who tried to abduct Millie now. He claims it was a much bigger person.’

‘It was dark, he was scared,’ said Harry. ‘He could have got confused.’

‘Yes, but it doesn’t feel right somehow. These people are known for their gentleness, their harmlessness. Even their name suggests that. The word "cretin" is believed to come from the Anglo-French word “
Chrétien
”.’

‘Meaning what?’ asked Harry, as the kettle came to the boil and switched itself off.

‘Christian,’ said Evi. ‘Cretin means Christian. It’s supposed to indicate the sufferers’ Christ-like inability to commit sin.’

He really couldn’t concentrate this morning. ‘How so?’ he asked.

‘They don’t have the mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong, so nothing they do can be considered sinful in the true sense of the word. They remain innocent.’

Harry almost shook his head and stopped himself just in time. He was never drinking again. ‘That doesn’t mean they can’t do anything wrong, just that they don’t know they’re doing wrong,’ he said. ‘What if this Ebba person likes the look of little blonde girls, sees them as some sort of plaything, and it all … oh, hang on a minute, this is ringing bells.’

‘I’d say the last thing you need right now is bells ringing in your head.’ She was laughing at him.

‘What I need right now can’t be discussed in a house of God,’ he replied. She was right though, he could really do without a hangover today. ‘Innocent Christians,’ he said, as though trying out how the words sounded in his mouth. Then he had it. ‘Innocent Christian souls,’ he said. ‘We need the burial register.’

‘Sorry?’

Harry was already reaching into the cupboard where the register was kept.

‘Look,’ he said, when he’d found the right page. ‘Sophie Renshaw, died in 1908, aged eighteen, described as
An Innocent Christian soul.
’

‘There’s another one,’ said Evi. ‘Charles Perkins, died in 1932, aged fifteen. How many are there?’

He counted quickly. ‘Eight,’ he said. ‘Six girls, two boys, all under twenty-five at the time of death.’

‘The condition’s more common in females,’ said Evi. ‘You think all these people could have been like Ebba?’

‘I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. I even remember that old bugger boasting about it. “Ninety-five per cent of the food I’ve eaten my whole life comes from this moor,” that’s what he said to me. I’ll bet the soil up here’s – what did you call it?’

‘Iodine deficient. We really need to find her, Harry.’

T
HE COACH
STOPPED AND FIFTY
EXCITED CHILDREN LEAPED
to their feet. Through the steamed-up windows Tom could see the huge banner and posters outside King George’s Hall and the massive lights of Blackburn’s Christmas decorations.
The Snow Queen
, bit of a girly pantomime but who cared? It was an afternoon off school, and then tomorrow – the Christmas holidays.

Tom felt himself being pushed towards the front. ‘Climb down carefully,’ Mr Deacon, the headmaster, was saying. ‘I do not want to spend my afternoon in Accident and Emergency.’

Grinning to himself, Tom stepped down to the pavement. A second coach had pulled up on Blakeymoor Street and the Key Stage One children were climbing down. Most of them had never been on a school trip before and they gazed around, mesmerized by the Christmas lights. As Tom watched, Joe jumped out, making light work of a step that was half the size he was. He caught Tom’s eye and waved.

Following the line, unable to keep from jumping up and down as he went, Tom made his way into King George’s Hall.

‘D
O YOU
THINK WHERE IT
HAPPENS IS IMPORTANT?’
ASKED
Evi, as Harry walked her back through the church. ‘That of all the high places in the world small children can be thrown off, it has to be this one?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ he replied. ‘This is the killing ground.’

Evi allowed her eyes to travel upwards, to the gallery that was almost directly above them. ‘That’s revolting,’ she said.

Harry looked up too. ‘There’s something wrong in this church, Evi. I think I knew the first time I set foot in it.’

He felt her fingers brushing softly against his hand.

‘Buildings absorb something of what goes on in them,’ he continued. ‘I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree with me, but I’m sure of it. Normally, churches feel like peaceful, safe places because they’ve taken on decades, sometimes centuries of hope, prayer, goodwill.’

‘Not this one?’ Her fingers were closing around his hand.

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘This one just feels like pain.’

For a second they didn’t move. Then, just as he knew she was going to, Evi turned and reached up to him. It was just a hug, he knew that, a moment of comfort, but it was impossible to be this close to her and not bend his head down to the skin at the side of her neck, to find that freckle, to press his face against her hair and breathe in deeply. Then she moved in his arms, pulled back her head, and it was completely out of the question that he not kiss her.

Moments passed and the only thing he could think of was that
the world couldn’t be too bad after all because Evi was in it; and would he be damned for all eternity if he picked her up, laid her gently down on the pew beside them and made love to her for the rest of the afternoon?

Then Evi made a gasping sound that had nothing to do with passion. She’d stiffened in his arms, had pulled away from him, was staring over his left shoulder. Cold air on the back of his neck told him the front door of the church was open. He stepped back and turned.

Gillian stood in the open doorway. For a second Harry thought she was going to faint. Then it looked as though she might hurl herself at them in rage. She did neither. She simply turned and ran.

M
ILLIE
WAS IN THE DOORWAY,
WATCHING SOME CHICKENS
strut up and down in the lane. Across the drive, her mother was unloading shopping from the car. She straightened up and headed for the door.

‘Will you go back inside?’ she said to the toddler, bending down towards her. ‘It’s freezing.’ She squeezed past the child and disappeared. A moment later her hands caught hold of Millie round the waist. ‘I mean it,’ she said, as she lifted her daughter up and took her out of sight. ‘You’ll fall down those steps.’

For a moment the doorway was empty and then the mother appeared again. She crossed quickly to her car and found the last of the bags. As she straightened up and pressed the button on the thing in her hand that would lock the car, the child appeared in the doorway again. She stole a brief, sly look at her mother before turning to the chickens that had wandered into their garden. Then she climbed down the steps to the drive.

The car hadn’t locked itself. The mother pressed the button twice, three times and then gave up, using the key to lock the car instead, just as Millie set off across the lawn. The mother crossed the drive and went inside. The front door closed. Silence.

Nothing to see, nothing to hear for a minute, maybe two. Then the front door was pulled open and the woman, her face white and her hands clutching her upper arms, appeared in the doorway. ‘Millie!’ she called, as though afraid to shout too loudly. ‘Millie!’ she called again, a bit louder this time. ‘Millie!’

‘W
HERE DID YOU FIND THESE?’
ASKED HARRY.

‘Environment Agency archives,’ said Gareth Fletcher. ‘Watch those crisps, I’ll get throttled if I get grease on them.’

Harry put his crisp packet down and leaned over the maps. ‘Catchment maps,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

Gareth lifted his pint and drank. A week before Christmas, the White Lion in the middle of Heptonclough was busy and even at nearly five o’clock in the afternoon the two men had been lucky to get a table. Harry almost wished they hadn’t, that he and Gareth Fletcher had been forced to reschedule the chat they’d had planned for days. He’d wanted to help Evi find and talk to Gillian. That was not something she should have to face on her own.

‘No reason why you would,’ said Gareth. ‘The water authorities produce them. They show the countryside from the point of view of the water resources.’

‘And that means what, exactly?’ asked Harry. Across the room, a party of office workers were in high spirits. Several wore paper hats. When they stood up, most seemed unsteady on their feet.

Evi had refused to let him go with her. Gillian was her patient, she’d said, her responsibility.

‘Most maps are about roads, towns and cities, right?’ said Gareth.

‘Right,’ agreed Harry.

‘This one is about rivers. See, this is the river Rindle. Starts as a
spring way up in the hills and gradually makes its way down to where it joins the Tane. All these other streams and rivers are its tributaries.’ Gareth leaned across the map, pointing out faint, wiggling lines with his finger. ‘They all feed into it and it gradually gets bigger and bigger. The area they all cover is called the catchment.’