Catch the Fallen Sparrow (4 page)

‘Try social services,' Cathy said drily.

‘Well, his mother then?'

‘Come on ...' Cathy's eyes met hers. She turned to the trolley and picked up the ring. ‘What do you make of this?'

‘Either a present,' Joanna said, ‘maybe from a friend – or else he nicked it.'

Cathy peered at it. ‘It's got initials on it. And it's fairly distinctive. It should be a good lead.'

‘It's a start,' Joanna agreed.

Cathy crossed to the sink and began washing her hands as the mortician sewed up the body, then she turned back and stared for a while at the boy's face, still calm and waxen.

‘He must have been a very pretty child, you know,' she said, ‘with his blond hair and blue eyes and, I dare say, a cocky, confident manner, fashionable clothes and a swagger. Under other circumstances he might have been a choirboy, or a teacher's pet, a Little Lord Fauntleroy, or had doting parents.'

‘Unfortunately,' Joanna said, ‘he had none of that. Accident of birth and he ends up like this, on the slab aged ten.'

Cathy Parker replaced the sheet, covering the boy's face, and the mortician's assistant wheeled the trolley back into the refrigerated temporary grave.

‘So where do I look?' Joanna muttered more to herself than out loud. ‘And where do I begin?'

Cathy was drying her hands on the towel. ‘Have you heard anything from Matthew?' she asked casually.

Joanna flushed. ‘A letter,' she said, ‘before he went.'

Cathy Parker gave her a hard stare. ‘Jane Levin and I have been friends for many years.'

Joanna closed her ears to it.

She returned to the station and met Mike Korpanski coming out of her office. ‘So you're back?' he said. ‘How did the PM go?'

‘As we thought – manual strangulation. We've informed the coroner's office. They've set the inquest for next week. There doesn't seem much doubt about the verdict. Homicide.'

He nodded.

‘There were a few important facts brought to light that you should know about, Mike.' She looked at the tall DS with his black hair and muscular frame – the result of many hours spent at the local gym – and she thought how much she had grown to depend on him in the six months they had worked together. How very different was the easy, friendly relationship that had sprung up recently from the early weeks of resentment and hostility.

‘The boy was the victim of repeated abuse – from an early age, five or six, both physical and probably mental. Cathy Parker found unmistakable evidence of repeated sexual abuse. But none recently and the motive for his murder was not sexual. He had also been burned with a cigarette on more than one occasion and was a drug abuser.'

Mike gave a quick snort. ‘A typical teenager then?'

‘Hardly,' she said.

Mike frowned. ‘So it wasn't a sexual assault?'

‘No – it didn't look like it. No clothes torn, no recent scarring. He'd been left alone for a number of months – Cathy guessed a year. The abuse had stopped. Was there anything you particularly wanted?' she asked, nodding towards her office door.

‘Yes.' He grinned. ‘The soldier boys – the pair who found the body. They're here waiting to make a statement.'

She looked at him. ‘Anything I should pick up on?'

He shook his head. ‘Not really.' Then he added, ‘I suppose you noticed the one with the red hair had tattoos? Love and Hate.'

‘They're common enough.'

His eyes met hers. ‘They really do look the same. But you've seen the boy's tattoos closer than I have. See for yourself.'

She nodded, then hesitated. ‘I think I'll see the other one first. His name?'

‘Thomas Jones. Taffy was a Welshman ...'

Tom boy shuffled in awkwardly, still in bulky camouflage and heavy boots.

Joanna sat down behind her desk, switched on the tape recorder, recorded the date, time, two officers present.

‘Private Jones,' she said, ‘take your time and tell me what happened.'

He swallowed. ‘We was doin' exercises on the moors ...'

‘Roughly what time was it?'

‘About five.' He looked wary. ‘We thought it was some meat cooking, you see.'

‘Why don't you start at the beginning,' she suggested helpfully.

‘We was doing exercises up on the Roaches,' he said again, rubbing his chin and smearing the camouflage messily across his face. ‘They was just comin' up over the back of the hill.' His enthusiasm was growing. ‘It made it easier for us.'

She gave him a questioning look.

‘We was divided up into two teams,' he explained. ‘A and B team. They was shown up against the light, you see, quite clearly.'

She did see. An image of stealthy, moving camouflage, that strange illusion of seething ground. She had noticed it herself once when up on the moors, had watched the ground itself seem to boil before she had realized it was the soldiers, on their bellies, stealing through heather and scrub, splashing along puddles and streams, invisible to the eye, creeping up towards the Winking Man. ‘Go on,' she said.

‘I didn't notice nothing at first,' he said, ‘but I could smell something – like meat cooking. I said to Gary, “Fancy having a barbecue now.” ' He blinked, rubbed his eyes, looked at the black smears on the back of his hands. He giggled. ‘I bet I look a sight,' he said. Then he stared at her hard for a moment, his eyes a light contrast against the blackened face. ‘The next minute, Gary was chargin' down the hill like the bloody Light Brigade, screamin' and holdin' his gun out like the enemy was at the bottom.'

‘And what did you do?'

The soldier's shoulders dropped. ‘I ran after 'im. And then when I got to the bottom I saw the little heap of rags.' He looked at Joanna then swivelled around to stare at Detective Sergeant Korpanski. ‘I'll never forget the sight of that kid burnin',' he said, ‘for as long as I live – or that smell either. It was enough to make me sick.'

‘But you weren't sick?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I wasn't.'

‘Then what did you do?'

‘We pulled our jackets off, put the fire out, covered him up.' He blinked tightly against the suspicion of a tear. ‘By then the sergeant was wonderin' what the hell we were up to. It was him what rung the police.' He slumped forward in his chair his face still tight with shock. ‘That's about it,' he said, and Joanna nodded.

‘I thought it was probably like that,' she said. ‘Did you notice any cars when you first arrived at the lay-by?'

Private Thomas Jones shook his head. ‘Not a bloody livin' thing.'

Joanna licked her lips. ‘Tell me, Private Jones,' she spoke softly, ‘this is very important. Did you touch anything?'

He looked worried. ‘No,' he said, ‘on my honour I did not. Apart from puttin' our jackets over him to put the fire out we didn't touch anything.

Taking the tiny bunch of grasses out of her top drawer, Joanna asked, ‘Did you notice these?'

He looked genuinely puzzled and shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘I didn't see them.'

When the soldier had shuffled out Joanna turned to Mike. ‘As simple as he seems, Mike?'

He nodded. ‘I think that held the ring of truth.'

She jerked her head towards the door. ‘And the other one?'

‘I'm not so sure about him, Jo,' he said.

She stood up and opened the door. ‘Let's see, shall we?'

Private Gary Swinton walked in, his short ginger hair looking pale against the blackened face. It made it difficult to judge his expression but they both knew it would be truculent, aggressive. Years in the police force had taught them both to sniff out various attitudes – however hard the wearer might try to conceal them. To coin a phrase, Joanna thought she would not like to meet him alone on a dark night.

The usual formalities over she met the pale eyes. ‘We understand it was a little after five a.m. that you began to ascend the crag known as the Winking Man?'

Gary Swinton nodded. ‘Yeah,' he said carelessly, sitting on the edge of his seat.

‘You were about halfway up the hill when Tom caught the scent of charred flesh.' She knew she was questioning him with a particular care. The tattoos had already alerted her to one tiny link. But it was something else that was making her skin tingle. She felt sure that the dead boy, when alive, had worn this same air – keep away, stay out. Repel all boarders – no one too close, especially not the police. She met it increasingly now. In the last two years it had touched epidemic proportions.

‘Then what happened, Private Swinton?'

Gary stared at the floor. ‘I smelt it first,' he said gruffly. ‘Tom thought it was a bloody barbecue.'

‘But you didn't?'

‘Different smell.'

Joanna and Mike exchanged quick glances. ‘Not the smell of beefburgers, soldier?'

He looked pityingly at her, then the steel curtain of wariness dropped down heavily. ‘Dunno,' he said.

She let it pass. ‘Then what, Gary?'

‘I saw the clothes,' he said. ‘Knew there was something wrong.'

‘But you were a long way off.'

‘Good eyesight,' he grunted.

She left that one too for another day.

‘Witnesses say you were screaming as you ran,' she said.

‘Instinct. They teach us to do that in the army.' She leaned across the desk. ‘I thought,' she said softly, ‘that in the army they taught you to be quiet.'

He looked concerned. ‘Not when you're charging.'

‘Charging?'

He seemed even more uncomfortable. ‘You know what I mean.'

‘Then what?' The brevity of the question sounded brutal but she had a feeling Private Gary Swinton would respond better to that tone than to any other.

To her surprise his voice, when he replied, was husky with emotion.

‘I saw the kid,' he said, and smothered his face with his hands.

She waited.

‘I saw his legs first.'

She knew. They had been worst attacked by the fire. Thin legs, the jeans scorched and blackened, flesh charred, bone visible.

‘Then his body ...' The soldier was shaking. He glared at the floor. ‘I saw his face last.'

‘And?' she said.

‘We put the fire out. The way we were taught – with our jackets.'

‘Had you ever seen the boy before?' He shook his head. ‘Course not.'

She glanced at the L-O-V-E H-A-T-E on his hands but didn't speak.

When the soldier left the room Mike looked at her. ‘You didn't ask him about the tattoos,' he said accusingly.

‘No,' she replied, ‘I decided to leave that – for the time being.' She met his eyes. ‘I want their jackets to go to forensics.'

‘Both of them?'

She nodded. ‘Both of them.'

‘What are you looking for?'

‘Petrol,' she said, ‘splashed.'

Mike shook his head but she defended her action. ‘There's no harm in checking a statement.' She paused, then asked, ‘What do you think?'

He frowned. ‘Difficult to tell, isn't it, what's going on under all that war paint.'

‘No harm in checking them both out,' she repeated.

Joanna had been allocated a team of four POs and two DCs with a promise of more when she needed them. On top of this the whole of the Leek force would carry out the necessary checking of statements and house-to-house questioning. First priority was to find out who the boy was. So a police artist had visited the mortuary and spent an hour sketching the child as he would have looked – alive, eyes open, lips parted, hair tousled and wearing the unburnt clothes. And they had held the front page of the late edition of the evening newspaper with a blank panel.

At the briefing, some of the force copied down details faithfully, word for word. Others sat and watched with rapt attention. Each person present had his or her own way of dealing with the case of a young boy found murdered, his body then mutilated. But in the end they would all have to dovetail and produce a finished case – if it was possible. And this was their uniting hope – that they would bring the killer to the courts.

‘First of all,' Joanna said, turning to face them, ‘let me tell you the way I mean to work – with you. Butt in if you have a comment or question. Try all your ideas out here — in this room. Please do not hesitate – however far-fetched you think it might be. I do not intend to aim for haste but for a watertight conviction of the guilty party. In other words, we want the person who did this found guilty and locked away so other children are safe. But I also want it handled so properly they could film it and use it as a police training video. I want no assumptions made – no corners cut. Now ... We have a white Caucasian male. Age uncertain but roughly ten.' She indicated the police picture of the dead boy's waxen face. ‘The boy had blond hair, blue eyes, was one hundred and forty centimetres tall.' She paused. ‘Distinguishing marks – left ear pierced and tattoos.'

She held up the pictures of the dead child's hands. ‘Love, Hate ... Amateurishly done.' She looked around the room. ‘We've all seen this sort of thing. Kids get together – usually do it themselves or a mate does it. But you and I know the sort of background this child probably came from. Only children who feel they would not get a beating from their mother or father would have dared come home with tattoos like these on their knuckles. I am not being classist but I am being a realist.' She paused, expecting at the least muttering, at the most an objection. None came so she continued. ‘There is also a drugs connection – some nasty, scarred needle marks on both arms, the kind of scarring that comes from mixing drugs with talc, Harpic, flour.' She looked around the room. ‘You know the sort of thing. Drugs mixed with something. He was a slim child — bordering on being undernourished. However, I am bound to say the pathologist's opinion was that the child was not a frequent or habitual drugs user – just that he did have access to drugs and did use them on a number of occasions.'