Born in a Burial Gown (3 page)

The poor spelling didn’t necessarily indicate age. Fluke knew the average criminal had the reading age of an eight-year-old and he already had a theory about who’d left the note. He didn’t know the person but suspected he knew the type.

Fluke looked at the site office and its proximity to the crime scene, easily identifiable by the forensic tent. ‘Who was first on scene?’

‘Dunno. But Don Holland was managing it when I got here.’

Fluke could see Chief Inspector Holland talking to a group of uniformed officers. They’d never really got on, although neither of them really knew why. Fluke walked over.

‘Chief Inspector!’ he called out, as he approached.

Holland looked up, said something to the group that caused them to laugh, and sauntered over. ‘What’s up, Fluke? Don’t tell me, you’ve found something to complain about already. I would say that under three minutes is a record for you but we both know I’d be lying.’

Holland laughed at his own joke. Fluke didn’t join in. ‘Who set up the cordons?’

‘Remember who you’re speaking to, Fluke,’ Holland said.

‘I know exactly who I’m speaking to,
Chief Inspector
,’ Fluke replied. ‘Who set up the cordons?’

‘I did. Why? It’s all correct.’

Fluke could feel himself getting angry. ‘Why’s the site office not in the inner cordon?’

Holland was about to respond but saw the evidence bag Fluke was carrying and realised his mistake. The office was also a crime scene and should have been cordoned off and access controlled. ‘Shit.’

‘I’m giving you five minutes to reset it, and in the meantime get those giggling idiots off my fucking crime scene!’ Fluke shouted, pointing at the officers Holland had been holding court with. ‘Don’t they teach contamination control on the chief inspector’s course anymore?’ The raised voices had caused them all to look over.
Jesus
, he thought,
any chance of footprint evidence had all but disappeared. Compromised crime scenes ruined cases. Defence solicitors drove tanks through them.

‘Now look here, Fluke. I will not be spoken—’

‘I haven’t got time, Chief Inspector,’ Fluke interrupted. ‘Just get it fucking sorted.’ For a second, he thought Holland was going to stand his ground. He stared at Fluke, nostrils flaring and lips white with anger. Eventually, he turned his back and left without saying anything. He didn’t really have a choice; Fluke had him over a barrel.

‘Useless wanker,’ Towler said, as Holland walked off.

There was no point reliving mistakes. Fluke needed to move on. ‘Who found the note?’

Towler pointed towards a grey-haired man talking to a police officer. ‘The Clerk of Works, Christian Dunn, spotted it soon as he got in. Always has a brew first thing.’

Fluke asked, ‘What’d he do?’

‘Had a look, saw nothing, but as it was due to be filled today, he got in with a shovel and found it.’

‘The body?’

‘No, the golf travel bag,’ Towler replied. ‘He opened it, saw her face and called 999.’

Fluke knew what they were. The big bags used when transporting golf clubs abroad. They had to be big enough to fit a normal golf bag in them.
The perfect way to transport a body surreptitiously. ‘Let’s go and have a word with him then,’ he said.

Normally when Fluke spoke to members of the public who’d discovered a body they were on the verge of a breakdown. At the very least, they were in shock. If Fluke were pressed, he’d have described Christian Dunn as irritated.

He looked up as they walked over. ‘Is this him? This the boss man, like?’ Mr Dunn said to the officer with him. He strode towards them, indignation all over his face. He was small man, closer to sixty than fifty, with a weathered face. Clearly someone who spent most of his time outdoors.

Fluke held out his hand but Dunn ignored it.

‘You the boss man? When can I get back to work?’ he asked, without preamble. He pronounced work as ‘wuk’. ‘It’s putting me right off my schedule, this is. I’ve nine tons of concrete coming within the hour. I need you to move that lassie.’

His understanding of personal space was about as well-developed as his awareness of volume control. Dunn wasn’t exactly shouting but Fluke could feel himself leaning back anyway. Ten minutes with him and he’d be reaching for headache pills.

‘This is a murder investigation. The site’s shut down, Mr Dunn,’ Fluke replied.

Dunn looked at him blankly. ‘My gaffer doesn’t pay me to sit on me arse all day with concrete getting hard in the mixer.’

‘I’m sorr—’

‘What she want to throw herself down there for anyway?’ Dunn interrupted. ‘I know it’s sad an’ all that, but it’s selfish. If she wants to kill herself, why can’t she do it away from my building site.’

It was Fluke’s turn to look blank. The idiot thought it was a suicide? She was in a bag and covered in mud.

Dunn wasn’t finished. ‘Look, I know you lads ’ave a job to do but my concrete’s going in that hole whether you like it or not.’

Fluke didn’t really know how to respond to that. Fortunately Towler did.

‘Listen, you little tit, this site’s gonna be closed for days. This is a murder investigation. If you go anywhere near that hole, I’ll arrest you.’

Dunn stepped back in the face of Towler’s aggressive outburst. ‘I’m telling my gaffer about this. You’ll be hearing from Mr Johnson today, don’t you worry about that. It’s putting me right off my schedule this is,’ he muttered, avoiding meeting Towler’s eye.

‘Look, Mr Dunn, we’ll be as fast as we can but it’ll go faster if you tell me everything I need to know,’ Fluke said.

‘How fast?’

‘Maybe an hour,’ Fluke lied. He saw Towler smirk as Dunn looked at his watch.

‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

‘Tell me about the hole and the office.’

Dunn explained that the holes were all due to filled with concrete and rubble, part of the foundations for the new outpatient wing.

‘Did anyone have a key to the site office other than you, Mr Dunn?’ Fluke asked.

For the first time, Dunn looked uncomfortable rather than angry. Shifty even.

‘No. Why should anyone else have a key? I’m the gaffer,’ he mumbled.

‘So you’re the only one with access to it?’

He mumbled something again. Fluke failed to catch it.

‘Speak up, please!’ Towler barked.

‘I’m the only one who can get in,’ Dunn said, in a clearer voice.

‘You sure?’ Fluke asked. He stared at Dunn. He knew something about the office, he was sure of it.

Dunn broke eye contact first, said he was sure, then stumbled off.

‘You want to bring him in?’ Towler asked.

Fluke thought about it. ‘Nah. We’ll wait and see. He’s not exactly going anywhere. Not when he has to “wuk”.’

‘Jesus, if it’d been filled in today, I doubt the body would ever have been found,’ Towler said, as they watched Dunn walk off, muttering to himself.

‘Not in our lifetime anyway,’ Fluke agreed.

‘You wanna go and have a look?’

‘Yeah, I’ll have a quick gander but I’m not getting in just yet,’ he said. ‘I want to clear the site office first. Sooner we get that done sooner it can be processed. We’ll have to wait for the pathologist before we can move the body. May as well let SOCO do something.’ Fluke, like a lot of older detectives, refused to call SOCO by their new name, CSI, believing it was one more unwelcome American influence. They were Scenes of Crime Officers and always would be.

As they walked towards the foundation hole, he saw Don Holland standing outside the hastily rearranged tape. He was glaring at Fluke and mouthed ‘fuck you’ when he caught his eye. Fluke ignored him.

‘He won’t forget that, Ave,’ said Towler, nodding towards Holland. ‘You humiliated him. He’ll be after you now.’

‘Yeah?’ Fluke replied. ‘Well, he’ll have to get in the queue. I think they have T-shirts.’

‘I had a quick look, just to make sure we weren’t pressing the button for a fucking mannequin or something.’ Towler said, changing the subject. ‘There’s always some fuckwit fancying themselves as Wilt.’

Fluke allowed himself a small smile. It was true. Up and down the country there’d been a spate of shop dummies being thrown down building site holes after Tom Sharpe’s
Wilt
had been published. ‘And?’

‘It’s fresh. I’m guessing less than twenty-four hours.’

‘Any obvious cause of death?’

‘Nope, and I didn’t want to open the bag any further.’

Fluke didn’t respond.

‘I know we don’t jump to conclusions, Ave, but it looks well planned,’ he added, cautiously.

Towler was right, it was dangerous to form opinions too quickly but Fluke was getting a bad feeling. There was something about it that just sounded professional, nothing tangible, but it was there. It was a miracle the body had even been discovered.

‘’Course, it could just be a fucking nutter who killed his wife and didn’t want to sit at home in his underpants talking to her till she smelt like cheese,’ Towler said, grinning.

Fluke smiled but said nothing.

After being met by Sean Rogers, the crime scene manager, they donned forensic suits and followed him down the route organised by the first officers at the scene, to ensure as much evidence as possible was left undisturbed.

Fluke turned and reviewed where he was. It offered him the chance to get his bearings, a sense of scale and to assess the work that had taken place before he’d arrived. Murder investigations started with the first officer on the scene, and other than Holland neglecting to treat the office as a crime scene, everything else was satisfactory. Luckily, the building site was self-contained so there weren’t going to be any egress or access problems later.

After entering the inner cordon, Fluke continued down the immediate route to the crime scene. As they got nearer, it was marked out with footboards, designed to keep any ground evidence closer to the scene intact. They’d been put in properly, which wasn’t always the case. Fluke had been to one crime scene on the side of a hill when the footboards were at an angle and he’d fallen off, much to everyone’s amusement.

Although it wasn’t raining at the site, SOCO had erected a large forensic tent. Fluke entered and looked down into the hole. It was about six feet across, roundish, and at least ten feet deep with steep sides. Fluke could see the excavation scars the digger had made. The mud was thick clay, too dark to see the bottom.

The ladder that Dunn had used was still leaning against the side of the hole. There had been some damage to the scene, probably during his scramble back out when he realised what he’d just uncovered, but Fluke could live with that. Rarely was a crime scene undisturbed. The most difficult ones to manage were when the victim was still alive at the point of discovery. Then, all hell would break loose, as whichever service was first on the scene tried to preserve life. In their efforts to keep the victim alive, firefighters, paramedics and police officers ignored what detectives arriving later would need to investigate.

He leaned over and looked down. Rogers passed him a torch to cut through shadows as dark as freshly poured Guinness.

The black golf bag was partially buried at the bottom of the hole and the zip had been opened about eighteen inches. It was enough to reveal the head of an obviously dead woman. Her skin was grey and frostbitten and cracking. An icy sheen clung to her, the warmth of life banished. Her mouth was open and her lips were shrinking back across the teeth in an eerie grimace. Towler was right; it was no mannequin. Fluke never ceased to be surprised at how quickly the body lost its healthy pink colour once death has occurred. It was a matter of minutes.

Some of her hair had been caught in the zip, twisting her head to the side and Fluke thought his torch picked up the sparkle of a diamond earring. Even from three yards away, they looked expensive. Too expensive to leave. That ruled out a robbery. It also ruled out a domestic. They looked too easy to identify, and why leave them? They could be turned into cash. Despite what TV shows portrayed, the police didn’t have legions of fences they could call on to find stolen goods. If you want to turn small items into cash it was easily done with little risk. But even a little risk seemed too much for whoever did this. Fluke felt uneasy.

It was hard to tell, but he didn’t think she was a very young woman. Mid-thirties would be his guess. Like Towler, Fluke could see no obvious cause of death but he knew he was only looking at a face and an ear in a dark hole in torchlight. Things would become clearer during the post-mortem. He swung the torch round the bottom of the hole. He could see a shovel, probably the one Dunn had used to search for the body. There was nothing else. He couldn’t smell any putrefaction, only wet mud. If she’d been put in the hole during the early hours of the morning then Fluke was willing to bet that she’d been killed no later than the day before. The pathologist would give him a time of death as well as the cause.

Fluke saw no reason to get into the hole to take a closer look. It would only add confusion to the crime scene. Patience was a discipline, and after six months in hospital, it was one he possessed in abundance. The first thing he needed to do was make sure that there were no errors made in the collection of evidence, and that meant taking the time to do it properly. Together, he and the pathologist would decide how to recover the body without disturbing anything important. He’d seen enough.

He left the tent and handed the torch back to Rogers.

‘What time’s the pathologist getting here?’ Fluke asked. Sometimes the body could be recovered without one, but it was a complex deposition site. He presumed someone had called for one.

‘Should be within the hour, Henry Sowerby’s coming up from Preston,’ Rogers replied. ‘I took one look and knew we’d need him at the scene. Sergeant Towler informed the coroner.’

‘Good.’ Fluke liked Sowerby. The pathologist was extremely professional, had a good forensic brain and was as bad tempered as they came. He’d watched him reduce senior investigating officers to quivering wrecks when he felt that good forensic practices weren’t being followed. Fluke had always got on well enough with him though, and he knew the bad temper was on behalf of the victims rather than any antagonism towards the police. Once an SIO had been chewed out by Sowerby for a forensic error, they never repeated it. They learnt their lesson quickly.