Four Below (19 page)

McLusky answered for him. ‘You’re right, and I raised it with our super. I was told there was no dog available and to start the search anyway in case we got a heavy snowfall. That
could have been the end of searching for a while.’

‘Well can you at least call them back now? There’s no point me letting him out while there’s a crowd of people staggering about.’

The sergeant took a deep belligerent breath. He did not appreciate having his line of officers described as a crowd of staggering people.

McLusky forestalled any exchange. ‘Sergeant? Rest your men, let them run the engines, warm up in the vans.’ When the sergeant had stomped off, he turned to the dog handler.
‘Are we hoping for a miracle?’

‘If the body is under that mess, then you are. But the dog’ll love it. Harry hasn’t seen snow before. He thinks it’s great stuff.’

‘Yeah? DS Austin thinks so too.’

Harry turned out to be a young German shepherd who was visibly excited at being out in the snow. McLusky watched with Austin from inside the Nissan as the handler let him run in what looked like
confused patterns all over the area, holding him on a long retractable lead and calling out short commands from time to time.

McLusky squeaked his finger through the condensation on the passenger window. ‘I’m not sure this is best use of manpower. Nineteen police officers sitting in cars watching one man
and his dog.’

‘And I’m not even sure I want him to find anything … oh, there we go.’ The dog was indicating and its handler squatted down, scraping at the snow. He waved, and McLusky
and Austin quit the shelter of the car and crunched across.

‘Training shoe.’ The handler pointed at part of a black and white trainer he had exposed.

‘Anyone in it?’ McLusky asked.

The handler gave him a look under raised eyebrows, then squeezed the shoe. ‘No one at home.’

When it had been freed from the snow, it turned out to be one of a pair, tied together by the laces. Size four. ‘A kid lost it. Nothing to do with Mr Hands,’ McLusky decided.
‘Carry on.’

Once more they closed the car doors against the cold. The two vans containing the dozen or so uniformed officers were steaming up with condensation and boredom and McLusky was wondering about
how much daylight was left when the dog indicated again by digging excitedly, just to the right of the previously searched area. This time the handler moved the dog away and waited for them a few
yards from the indicated site. ‘I’d say that was your missing body. Or part of it. Arm, I think, clothed.’

‘You stay here,’ McLusky said, and keeping to the existing footprints approached the patch that the dog handler had cleared. Among the dirtied snow and earth he could make out a pale
checked shirt with the bony outline of an elbow underneath, frozen solid. He brushed lightly at the surrounding snow, but uncovered nothing but mouldering leaves. ‘Good work, Harry.’ To
Austin he said: ‘You know what to do.’ Then he turned and walked back in his own footprints.

‘Another body, DI McLusky?’ Warren popped up from behind a tree into his path.

He trudged around her and on towards the cluster of police vehicles. ‘Get out of here, Warren, back into your pen with the rest of your lot.’

Warren was keeping pace with him. ‘The morgue is filling up nicely this week. What with you coming up here to dig up bodies every so often, pensioners dying of hypothermia and junkies
popping their clogs all over town.’

He walked on, ignoring her.
No comment
was what Denkhaus wanted him to say. He could think of a few sentences he would like to add to that, but swallowed them down.

He stopped by his car. ‘Keep walking, Warren.’

She did. ‘It’s Phil,’ she called back without turning around. ‘How many
times
?’

‘Can you tell yet whether he was killed at the same time as the first victim?’ McLusky, standing under the tent next to the pathologist, stuck his hands deep into
his pockets to keep them warm. He’d had to take his leather gloves off to put the latex ones on, and they did nothing to stop his fingers from going numb. An icy wind was blowing up here and
the tent flapped and snapped. They watched two crime-scene technicians uncover the body with infinite care and patience. Time spent now would save time later. Or so they were constantly told.

‘After such a cursory examination of the body, I’m inclined not to comment.’ Coulthart looked up to see if the inspector felt like protesting, but McLusky seemed unmoved.
‘It looks to me like he was killed more recently,’ he conceded. ‘Taking into account that the the ground hasn’t frozen all that deep down yet, and this one was lying a good
eight inches below the surface, I’d say he died around two weeks ago. Not someone you recognize?’

This time McLusky did react. ‘His own mother wouldn’t recognize him, and you know it, Doc.’

‘At least this time his face hasn’t been eaten away. But it took a hammering.’ Half of the body had now been freed. It was clothed in a pale blue checked shirt and pale blue
jeans; both were darkly stained with dirt and blood in many places. The wrists were again tied with thick wire in front of the body, and most of the hands, which had been closest to the surface,
had been gnawed away. The face was almost black and the features distorted. The nose was flattened and burst. The eyes had disappeared under broken tissue. The mouth was half open, the shredded
lips shrunken back from the gum tissue. All front teeth were either chipped or broken off completely.

‘Okay then … After your
cursory
examination of the body, would you agree we might be looking for the same perpetrators?’

This brought forth a rare smile from Coulthart. ‘I’d put money on it. Probably not my own money, but yes, I’d have to agree. It looks like the same type of wire was used, too.
However, one or two immediate differences between this killing and the previous one I can point out right now. This man is obviously much older. In his fifties, I’d say. And this chap
wasn’t gagged.’

‘He wasn’t?’ McLusky took a step to the door flap of the tent and lifted it. Snow was falling thinly but steadily. ‘Not that you can see it now, but we’re closer to
the road and houses here than the other site was. If he was killed here and these injuries were inflicted without him being gagged, then someone would have heard him scream.’

‘One would assume so,’ Coulthart agreed. ‘I didn’t say he was killed here, of course.’

McLusky turned to the SOCOs, who were still gradually uncovering the body. ‘Have a go at the other end. Show me his legs.’

The technicians shifted their attention without comment to the lower part of the body, uncovering the legs, which were not twisted, like those of the previous victim. McLusky squatted down to
get a closer look. One foot was shod in a good-quality brown shoe; the other was shoeless, covered in a grey sock. The ankles were wound tightly with the same type of thick wire that secured the
wrists.

‘This one wasn’t standing in a hole,’ one of the technicians said.

McLusky looked at the SOCO, but didn’t recognize him under all that protective gear. ‘No. At least not here he wasn’t. Okay, gentlemen,’ he said, straightening up.
‘I look forward to reading your reports. Preferably somewhere warm and cosy.’

Coulthart stood up too. ‘Yes, I heard rumours that the heating at Albany Road station was less than adequate for this type of weather.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself. If you run out of space at the morgue, you can send the bodies straight to us. Albany Road is the biggest refrigerator in town. When’s
the autopsy?’

‘Can’t say yet, we’re very busy. I shall send you my usual invitation.’

Outside, it looked as though a film director had decided to reshoot the body-discovered-in-the-woods scene, only this time with snow, which was coming down more heavily now. Generators were
powering arc lights, set up against the approaching dark. Crows had appeared on a nearby tree, from where they watched the comings and goings. The officers of the original search team had nearly
all been replaced by a fresh lot, and SOCOs and a forensics team had swelled the numbers at the locus. A photographer documented every move inside the tent, and as usual, a force cameraman with a
shoulder-held HD camera filmed the entire operation.

A tea urn had made a welcome appearance, dispensing a virtually tasteless but nearly hot liquid from the back of a van. Austin stirred sugar and whitener into his polystyrene cup, then held it
away from his body while he sneezed loud enough to startle a few crows into flight. He caught up with McLusky, who was standing near his car, a burning cigarette in his mouth, his hands buried deep
in his jacket pockets. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Austin asked.

McLusky watched the crows return and settle on the same tree. ‘I hope not, for your sake, Jane.’

Austin turned away to sneeze again, then went back to sipping his tea.

‘Please don’t tell me you’re getting a cold. Go on, don’t be mysterious, what
are
you thinking?’

‘I was thinking, perhaps we shouldn’t have sent the dog handler away so soon.’

McLusky held up his hands, catching thick snowflakes on his palms. ‘I know. But another few hours of this and it all becomes academic. I’m with you. I’m glad it’s snowing
again. We’ve got all the bodies we can cope with.’

Right away it had felt like a mistake. A mistake to meet at the Nova Scotia for a start. Yet it had seemed natural when they had arranged the meeting. They’d often had a
drink here when they’d first gone out together, and even after they got married, even though there were far more interesting pubs in town. In summer they’d take their drinks outside and
sit by the moorings, look at the boats. Paul had entertained dreams of buying a boat one day, of going sailing on a grand journey, though taking a rented dinghy out on Chew Valley Lake was as far
as he had got with it. She’d told him she got seasick, but it had made no difference to his dreams. That should probably have rung a warning bell straight away, but of course you don’t
start analysing until much later.

She watched him now as he queued at the bar to get another round of drinks. His clothes were suspiciously neat. He’d never dressed like that after they got married; it was strictly courtship behaviour with him. Once he felt safely married, it had been jeans and favourite sweaters that looked like
he’d already sailed around the world in them, and she’d soon given up nagging him about it. So this was courtship again. Not that she had learnt much about his new girlfriend yet; she
was
great
and they
got on really well
, which was hardly an in-depth profile of someone you intended to spend the rest of your natural with. So far all Paul had done was reminisce
about their own shared past, and like an idiot she had fallen right in with it.

‘Cheers, Kats.’ He put a fresh pint of lager in front of her and immediately launched into another episode of their life together. ‘Do you remember when we took Ian down here
and he met that drunk Canadian girl outside …’ It was difficult to recall their rows clearly now, with him so close in front of her, radiating goodwill and aftershave and looking no
older at all, as fresh as the day she threw him out, in fact. His eyes were as green, his teeth as regular and white, his hair as thick and wavy as she had tried to forget. And he still made her
laugh; it was one of his best features, the ability to be effortlessly funny, whether he was drunk or sober. She couldn’t help giggling about his story now, even while the grown-up part of
her, the one that didn’t answer to Kats, chided her to
get it over with
. They stopped laughing and lifted their pints together. Paul’s eyes sparkled with good humour and alcohol.
He put down his glass, moved forward a little and let his hand rest close to hers on the table.

She withdrew her hand and leant back on her chair. ‘So are you
engaged
to Carrie now?’

‘Well, no, not officially. Not at all, really. After all, we’re still married, Kats.’

‘I’m aware of it. But you’ve set a date?’

The pub seemed unnaturally quiet, as though Paul had ordered silence for his next sentence to hit home. ‘We don’t have to go through with it, you know. We could give it another try,
Kats. No, no, wait, I don’t mean moving back together. Not straight away, obviously, but we could try … seeing each other? We could give it another go, couldn’t we?’

She picked up her pint and slowly drained it, her preferred way of counting to ten.

‘Let me get you another one,’ Paul offered.

‘No. It’s my round.’

She had to wait her turn at the bar, giving her time to calm herself. It wasn’t often you were offered the choice between married life and divorce in between pints. Married life, perhaps
even children … The end of microwaved moussaka for sure. ‘Same again,’ she said to the barman, relying on the man’s memory, since she had no idea what kind of beer Paul was
drinking at the moment. Did she really want to find out? Was it possible to go back? How much future was there in travelling backwards?

When she set the drinks down, Paul looked at her with a soft, sincere smile, then opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off. ‘Did you get me here under false pretences? All that
marrying Candy stuff?’

‘Carrie. No. No, of course not. We did talk about getting married.’

‘On the phone you made it sound like it was imminent. I thought perhaps you’d got her pregnant or something.’

‘No. No, it’s not like that.’

‘What
is
it like? I’m mystified.’ She also felt nervy and raw and poured more drink on it.

‘I simply had more time to think about us since I called you. And seeing you again just made me realize how much I miss being with you.’

‘So you came here bearing divorce papers but after a couple of pints and a chat decided it isn’t Cathy you want, it’s me.’

‘You make it sound like it’s something that’s just occurred to me, but it isn’t. I thought about it a lot.’

‘Between girlfriends?’

Paul looked hurt. ‘There’s only been Carrie.’

‘And you’re prepared to dump her to give us a second chance?’