Catch the Fallen Sparrow (7 page)

It was not until their second glass of wine that Joanna broached the subject that had brought her here. He listened while she related all the details of the boy found on the moors.

‘I need your cleverness,' she said.

Immediately Tom set his glass down on the small occasional table to his side and settled back in his chair in what Joanna laughingly called his ‘Legal Position'. His thin face almost quivered with alertness and intelligence.

‘What is it?' He studied her carefully. ‘Is it something to do with the case?'

She nodded. ‘Why would someone fake a burglary?' she asked.

‘That one's easy, Jo,' he said quickly. ‘People fake burglaries for financial gain.' He stopped. ‘To claim off the insurance.'

‘But if they didn't claim off the insurance? If the pieces were intrinsically valueless?'

‘I think,' he said, then laughed, ‘this one's more tricky. I would venture to suggest that there are one or two possible reasons. Either to explain the absence or presence of an object.'

She looked at him. ‘Translate,' she said, laughing.

‘Well, either ... Either to explain the fact that something was missing,' he said, ‘or to explain away the fact that it was in the possession of someone in whose possession it should not have been.' He grinned. ‘Do I make myself clear?'

She nodded. ‘I think so.'

But her mind was still pondering that strange mix of objects.

‘And why hasn't anyone come forward to claim the boy?'

‘Possibly,' Tom said, ‘because no one knows he's missing.'

It was late in the day when Mike took the car out on the moor. He pulled up at the lay-by and stared out. Miles and miles of nothing. No houses or trees. Nowhere for anyone to hide – just the dark, menacing moor guarded by the craggy outcrop. And already, late on this gloomy September afternoon, the scene looked grey and menacing. A fitting setting for a violent crime, a graveyard of nature's making. He shivered. Though it was warm in the town he knew the minute he swung open the car door the wind would almost tear it off its hinges and the damp chill rising from ground that never dried out, summer and winter alike, would seem to penetrate his bones. This scene had been his own private nightmare, uncharted ground, unexplored and remote. He had always visualized undiscovered bodies on this high ground.

He got out of the car and immediately the elements beat around him. He walked slowly towards the navy van and found the uniformed police sergeant with his hands cupped round a beaker of steaming soup. He grinned and accepted one himself.

The sergeant winked. ‘Courtesy of the publican,' he said. ‘Reckon he has a guilty conscience?'

Mike shook his head. ‘Probably nothing worse than serving after hours. Up here they seem to think the law doesn't apply.'

The sergeant peered through the windscreen of the van at the bleak surroundings. ‘You can see what they mean, can't you? It seems a lawless sort of place.'

Mike tightened his lips. ‘Nowhere is outside the law. The DI wants to know – have you found anything?'

The sergeant shook his head. ‘Hardly anything, sir. A couple of burnt-out matches, a plastic bottle that smelt of petrol. That's been bagged. Those plastic bottles can be quite good at holding prints. That is, if he didn't wear gloves.' He gave a wry smile. ‘Plenty of used Durexes. We didn't find any recent tyre marks near here – and that is puzzling us. Am I right in thinking he was murdered elsewhere?'

Mike frowned. ‘We can't be absolutely sure. I'll have to talk to DI Piercy about it. I do know from observation that the soles of his shoes looked clean. We don't think he walked here. As soon as we get the forensic report in writing we'll let you have it.'

‘Did you get a lead on the shoes yet, sir?'

Mike shook his head. ‘Haven't had a chance to speak to anyone about that yet,' he said. ‘I was anxious to see whether you'd found anything.'

The sergeant gave him a quick look. ‘We'd feel a lot happier if we knew who he was and how the hell he got up here.' He sighed. ‘We haven't found any tyre tracks that look recent and the ground's soft. You'd have thought a car would have skidded ... maybe got stuck. We've got the soil samples. But ...' he paused, ‘we could almost think he was dropped from above. We can't see how he got here. It doesn't make sense, sir and it's nearly half a mile from the road. Carrying a dead body would have weighed him down.'

Mike frowned and scratched his head. Then together the two policemen climbed the hill towards the point where pink plastic tape was marking an area. He looked down at the scorched, flattened grass, a short length, not much more than four feet. In a long line, stretching right across the hillside, the police were hunting for something – anything that would lead them to the ... he voiced the word ‘Bastard'... who had done this to the kid he had seen lying with a pale face in the damp heather. Mike had a healthy, policeman's dislike of the criminal, and as though in answer a sheet of heavy, grey rain suddenly blotted out the sky and thundered on to the moor.

Alice sat at the edge of the cave early that morning, watching the figures in their clean white overalls as they combed the moist heather and scrub. She wrapped her topcoat around her and fastened it with the piece of string. The moors would yield little to their unpractised eyes. Only she and Jonathan were able to read the signs. She shifted a little; the wind was biting this morning. She pulled the scarf over her face. In the gloom of the dull day she looked like a huge, immobile scarecrow. The boy had already been dead when he was brought to his torching. Alice, Queen of the Roaches, held her hand over her eyes to shield a sudden glare – a hole in the low clouds and a silver streak of sunshine as though the Lord was offering a silver pathway for the boy's soul to climb heavenwards. She turned to Jonathan. ‘I never seen so many people up here,' she said. ‘It's been a bad thing, the child being put here.' Her voice took on a grumbling, self-pitying tone. ‘It's took our privacy.'

Jonathan too was crouched in the entrance to the cave. ‘They'll be gone,' he said, but Alice was not to be consoled.

‘And then the trippers will start,' she said. ‘Lookin' to see where the boy lay.'

He too watched the men in their white suits hunt the ground. ‘Maybe you should tell them,' he said gruffly.

Alice turned on him fiercely. ‘Tell them what?' she challenged.

‘What you saw.'

She gave a sudden low laugh. ‘You don't know what I saw, Jonathan. You was sleepin'.'

‘But I do know,' he insisted, and he looked at her sideways, scratching the side of his mouth. ‘You saw it all, didn't you?'

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘What business is it of yours, Jonathan Rutter? Or of theirs either?' She jerked her head towards the slope of the mountain and wiped her nose on her filthy sleeve. ‘And do you think, Jonathan, that they will leave us alone if I tells them? Do you think that will be an end to it all? No. No, I tell you, I would have to go to the court – like when they had a go at evicting us from here. I would have to testify and identify and the newspaper people would be taking pictures and then they would all know we was livin' 'ere.'

He grunted. ‘And why shouldn't we stay? We don't do no harm.'

She gave him a quick look. ‘You don't understand, do you, Jonathan, they don't like us up 'ere.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘Because most people don't live in caves no more.'

‘More fools them,' Jonathan sneered. 'Avin' mortgages for places when there's good, dry caves for the takin'.'

‘They don't like us bein' 'ere because we is different. People only trusts what is the same as themselves. We is different, so because we is they don't like it. That's why they wants us to live in one of the council places in the town. Conformin', the social workers calls it.'

‘Well, I don't want to live in one of them council places,' he said, flinging another stiff brown blanket around his shoulders. ‘I is perfectly comfortable livin' ere. These moors 'ave provided an 'ome for me all o' my life 'ceptin the years I spent in the war. I won't never leave now.' His voice was low. ‘Perhaps you're right. We should leave well alone. Then maybe they'll leave us alone.'

‘Huh.' She grunted and sat back on her haunch.es, a motionless figure watching the search.

‘It might already be too late,' she said quietly, an hour later. ‘Look.'

A red car was winding along the road, furiously swinging round the corners. At the foot of the crag the car screeched to a halt. A slim woman with yellow hair climbed out, with a man holding bulky camera equipment, and another man dressed in a thick, white sweater and Wellington boots. The woman glanced upwards and Alice and Jonathan moved back inside the cave, hidden from view by the tall rock that stuck out into the skyline like a dark, granite tombstone.

The three put their heads together, then one of them returned to the car and pulled out a large floodlight lamp.

The two in the cave watched fearfully. Alice spoke first. She was crying now. ‘Why did they have to bring the child here? Why did they have to come to our part? We don't want you here.' She stood up. ‘Go back.'

The camera crew clumped around the car seemed to be in deep discussion. A decision was reached and slowly the man with the huge camera began aiming it at the wide sweep of moors and moving it slowly around ... the granite crag of the Winking Man, the jutting rocks, down the smooth hillside and finally into the massive dish of the valley far down below as though viewed from an aeroplane. He seemed to keep the camera trained, for a while, on the distant town of Leek. Then he removed the bulky equipment from his shoulders, and the woman stood in front of the camera and, lit by the white lamp, spoke into it.

Jonathan shook his fist from the mouth of the cave. ‘Leave us be!' he shouted. ‘Leave us be. Go back!' His words were lost in the wide sweep of the moors, dotted by the men in white and the strange trio clustered around their massive equipment

Jonathan was flailing his hands around in panic. Alice folded him into her arms and held him to her, rocking him like a child.

‘This is it,' she said. ‘The end. We'll not be left in peace now.'

Joanna was sitting opposite Mike in her office, a large notepad in front of her. ‘Right,' she said. ‘The preliminary forensic report on the shoes is that they were brand new. Had been worn for six or so hours at the most. Probably along a street... traces of dog faeces, dust and a small amount of mud. A few dark fibres, probably from a carpet, and some longer ones that just could be from the inside of a car. Apparently these particular sports shoes retail at about sixty pounds. Compared to the rest of the boy's clothes they would seem expensive. He could definitely not have walked a single step on those moors. He was killed elsewhere, Mike, and then brought to the Roaches. We have to assume he was taken there by car with the sole purpose of burning the body. I think it's reasonable to assume that the killer was hoping to destroy the body completely. It's just possible that the arrival of the army diverted him from finishing the task. He might have still been there when the army arrived.'

Mike objected. ‘We asked them, Jo. No one noticed a car there.'

Joanna crossed the room to a huge map of the area. ‘There is a back road,' she said. ‘Look ... The army drove up here, approaching from this side.' She ran her finger along the main Leek to Buxton road.

‘But the killer, carrying the body of the boy plus petrol, would have had to cross the top of the Roaches,' Mike objected again. ‘Why should he do that?'

‘I've thought of a reason,' Joanna replied. ‘He might have known that the army would be arriving later for exercises and wanted to conceal his car from the main road.'

‘Then why take the body back towards the road to burn it?'

‘We have to go out there,' Joanna said. ‘And we need to speak to the army – find out whether they always do their exercises in the same place. Also ...' she jabbed her finger at the end of the small track that led to Flash ‘I think there's a farm here. It might be a good thing to speak to the farmer and to the landlord of the Winking Man.'

‘If he wasn't disturbed by the army it is also possible that he left the body burning, assuming it would be completely destroyed,' she continued. ‘I've spoken to the fire people, and they are sure that the body would not have been destroyed in half an hour, but the boy would have been unrecognizable by his clothes or his features – even his fingerprints – or by anything other than dental records.' She looked at Mike. ‘That would still have been before six thirty a.m.'

‘I want to see Private Swinton again,' she said suddenly. ‘I still believe that the body was burned to destroy forensic evidence. And one sure piece of evidence was the tattoos on his fingers. It could be an embarrassing link for Private Swinton. But there was not quite enough petrol, the clothes were not saturated and the ground was very damp. So luckily we have a body only partially destroyed.'

‘But we still don't have a name for Burning Boy,' Mike said.

She glanced at him, startled. ‘Is that what you've called him?'

He looked apologetic. ‘It was Scottie who called him that, said it reminded him of Moses and the Burning Bush – you know, the mountain in the Ten Commandments ... It looked sort of bleak and very high ...'

She stared at him. ‘Have the boys found out anything about the source of the shoes?'

‘Not so far.' He grimaced, glad to leave an uncomfortable subject. ‘It would be half-day closing yesterday afternoon, wouldn't it?'

‘And the children's homes?'

‘They've covered a couple – going to some more this morning. Nothing so far.'