No Good Reason (11 page)

“No,” Nelson said. “It’s all of a mile outside them.”

Carlyle misinterpreted the sarcastic response as acquiescence. “You and Jensen are to lead a small group through sectors C3, 4, and 5, and I think that will just about cover it.”

“What about you, Sarge?” one of the officers called out. “Your name on that list anywhere?”

Carlyle closed his notepad and slipped it back into his rucksack. “I’m going to lead the fingertip search at the cliff base where the woman was found. Apparently, there’s a path down from here that will save me from having to re-enact Detective Jensen’s heroic climb.”

His announcement was greeted with muted catcalls and a general air of disbelief, which he ignored as he settled his bag on his back and drank from a canteen of water. Sanne contemplated the vast area he had delegated to her and Nelson, and wondered at what point he had realised their task was insurmountable. Had he already been hatching a plot to abandon them as he walked up here? Or was it only on arriving at the ridge that he had decided to switch his own efforts to a search already half completed and with a far greater likelihood of finding something? She couldn’t bring herself to ask the questions, though. If he was going below the ridge, he would be nowhere near her, and that could only be a good thing.

He shouted across to her as the group began to break up. “You got your whistle, Jensen? I’d hate to have to tell the boss we lost the little one.”

She smiled sweetly at him. “No chance of losing you, is there?”

Several of her team sniggered as he jammed a cap over his conspicuous red hair and turned his back on them. Nelson managed not to react, but when no one was looking he grinned and dropped a toffee into her palm.

She stuffed the sweet into her mouth and spoke around it. “Are we set then?” An urge to get started and see what was out there had replaced her earlier weariness.

Nelson opened his arms, encouraging her to take the lead. “Ready when you are, partner.”

*

Sanne took the tea from Nelson and sipped at it where she stood. Aching, sticky all over, and thoroughly disheartened, she felt like sinking onto the nearest peat hag instead.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“Yep.” She swallowed the dregs from the plastic cup and gave it back to him. Other officers and volunteers were nearby, so she was reluctant to stop for long.

“You can take a break, you know. Most folk have already had a sandwich or something.”

“I’ll eat mine in a bit.”

Her tone ended the exchange. She didn’t want to tell him she was afraid that she would never get up again if she sat for any length of time.

It was late afternoon, and the haze had burned off hours ago, leaving the skies blue and the sun tempered only by a brisk but tepid wind. With nowhere for the team to shelter, energy levels were flagging. Nelson had already called up for fresh water supplies and then for a Mountain Rescue medic to treat two volunteers who were verging on heat exhaustion. The morale, so high at the outset, had been quashed by the enormity of the task: mile upon mile of inhospitable terrain, which had so far yielded no clues, but which was liable to snap ankles on a whim. Many of the volunteers were familiar with the moors and had known what they were letting themselves in for, but even they were stopping for more and more frequent breaks.

A perspiring young woman jogged over to present Nelson with an evidence bag containing a weather-faded crisp packet. As he nodded his thanks, the woman strode away, her head held high.

“I blame Gil Grissom,” he said, dropping the bag into his rucksack. He unwrapped a Twix and shared it with Sanne. “Everyone thinks a crime can be solved in forty-five minutes or less.”

The Twix melted all over Sanne’s fingers. She sucked them clean before she spoke. “You mean that the telly lies about us? That we’re not all stunningly photogenic and accompanied by a thumping soundtrack and moody yet flattering lighting?”

Nelson grinned. “Have you taken a close look at some of the SOCO lads recently?”

“I try not to. A couple of them scare me.”

They stopped laughing as someone waved them over to a dirty mass of white fluff, wedged among rocks near a small pool.

Sanne sighed. “Sheep or hare?”

“Sheep,” Nelson said without hesitation. “Unless it was a bloody massive hare.”

The volunteer was evidently pleased with his find. “Think it might mean something?” he asked as they approached. To their credit, the three older men standing with him rolled their eyes and smirked. The ewe had met her demise some weeks ago, and little other than teeth, bones, and fleece remained.

“You’re a bleedin’ halfwit, Ned,” one of the men said.

Ned looked hurt. “Lots of violent criminals start off by slaughtering household pets,” he said piously.

Sanne crouched by the carcass. “I think she probably lost her footing on these rocks, maybe trying to get to the water.” The position of the skeleton suggested the poor creature had ended up trapped between two of the boulders and died a slow, terrible death, but Sanne kept that to herself. She stood and clapped Ned on the back. “You’ve got a good eye, though, mate.”

His sunburnt face glowed even hotter. “Thank you, Officer Sanney.”

“It’s Sann-er,” she murmured, but she was already turning away, a familiar colour having drawn her attention. “Everybody just stay still,” she said, and they all froze like statues. “Nelson, look just to the left of the pool. The orange strand. Do you see it?”

“Got it.” He herded the men off the peat and onto the low rocks.

Taking a roundabout approach, her focus on the crumbling ground, Sanne walked over to the bog-fed pond. Beside two pronounced indentations in the mud, a shred of bright orange rope undulated gently as the wind played around it. Like the unfortunate sheep, one end of it had been trapped between two rocks, and she could clearly imagine the woman kneeling at the pond’s edge, lowering her head to drink, and placing her hands in such a position that the rope binding them became snagged.

“Get SOCO up here,” Sanne said, but Nelson was already making the call.

“Did you find something?” Ned asked her. “Was she here?”

“Yes, I think so.” The rope was securely held in place, so she left it for SOCO to document and collect and went to join the men on the rocks. With a boost from Ned, she climbed onto the highest boulder and surveyed the section of moor that surrounded them. None of the volunteers had made it beyond this point, about two miles west of Laddaw Ridge, well away from the path she had been running along yesterday. Several sheep tracks meandered across the moor, any one of which the woman could have been following, but given her condition it was unlikely she could have reached Laddaw from anywhere much farther than this.

“Well, that pisses on Carlyle’s chips a bit, doesn’t it?” Nelson said, hauling himself up to stand beside Sanne.

“It does.” She looked out at the wild, windswept plateau. “But where on earth would she have come from? You can’t drive here, and there are no buildings, not within our agreed boundary. So what the fuck did he do? Pitch a tent?”

“For all we know, that’s exactly what he did. If he hid it in one of these ditches, no one would have heard or seen a thing.”

“They’re called groughs,” Sanne said absently, trying to revise her theories to incorporate a portable crime scene. She couldn’t do it—the idea seemed ridiculous—and she found herself half-agreeing with the notion that the woman had only been brought to the moors once her captor had decided to get rid of her.

“What are?” Nelson asked, and it took Sanne a couple of seconds to realise he hadn’t moved on from her original statement.

“The ditches. They’re groughs, and the mounds of peat are called hags.” She formed the corresponding shapes with her hands, but her thoughts were elsewhere, wondering where the splinters in the woman’s heels could have come from if she had been marched out here to die, and why, if that was the case, she had been allowed to kneel by the pond to drink.

Sanne made a quiet noise of frustration and decided to go with what her gut had been telling her all day: that Carlyle’s cavers were looking in the wrong caves. She pointed to the sheep tracks, the easiest way to cross the bogland and knee-deep heather between her and Gillot Tor. “Is it worth regrouping and focusing on these paths? Maybe just use the uniforms? They’ll be less liable to wander over footprints or signs of a struggle. Half the volunteers are done in, anyway.”

“I’ll call everyone together,” Nelson said. “We’ve got, what? About five, maybe six hours of daylight left?”

She shifted around and gauged the position of the sun, already some way over to the west. “If we want to get back to the trucks in one piece, we’ve got less than that.”

“You didn’t pack a torch?”

She smiled. “I’ll be fine. I packed a
head
torch, mate. It’s you I’m worried about.”

They heard Ned’s voice raised in warning and jumped down to the lower rocks. He had run to greet the first arrivals, urging them to stay well away from “his” discovery.

“Do you want to tell them, or shall I?” Nelson asked in an undertone.

Sanne winced. No one would be happy about this. The officers would be nearing the end of their shift, while the volunteers were being disbanded just as things got interesting.

Keeping their hands out of public view, she and Nelson played a covert game of rock-paper-scissors.

“Bollocks,” she whispered, as Nelson’s “paper” wrapped over her “rock.”

Nelson’s attempt at a sympathetic expression failed gleefully. “I promise to intervene if they try to chuck you in the pond.”

She punched him in his biceps and strode over to break the news to the gathered crowd.

*

The three-year-old boy looked directly at Meg and emptied his cup of blackcurrant juice all over the bed sheets. His mum, who seemed barely old enough to tie her own shoelaces, let alone procreate, tittered and ruffled his hair.

“Oh, Bailey-Kaden, that’s naughty.” Her protestation was as impactful as a butterfly chastising a lion. “He must be feeling better,” she said to Meg and beamed at her son.

“Yes, it’s amazing what a dose of paracetamol will do,” Meg said with only the faintest hint of sarcasm. “I’m guessing you hadn’t given him any before you phoned the ambulance.”

“Oh, no!” The young woman looked aghast, as if Meg had just made the most outlandish of suggestions. “When I rang 999, they told me not to give him anything to eat or drink.”

Meg nodded. It was the same old song, over and over. The tune never varied, and it irritated the hell out of her. “And in the hours before that, when he was feverish and miserable, you didn’t think to give him any then, either?”

The girl stared at her, arms folded, her mouth curled into a sulky pout. “I didn’t have none in.”

“Of course you didn’t.” Meg only just managed not to snap at her. A bottle of generic paracetamol suspension cost about £1.50, was readily available in the supermarkets, and was a commonsense mainstay for anyone with a young child. “We’ll send you home with a bottle and one of these advice leaflets.” The girl needed an advice
anthology
, not a leaflet, but it was the best Meg could do. The child was well dressed and obviously loved, so there were no concerns regarding neglect. If she referred every dim parent to Social Services, she would singlehandedly collapse the system.

“A nurse will be in with the extra medicine in a few minutes,” she said, and left Bailey-Kaden splashing his hands and his mum in blackcurrant.

Outside the cubicle, she checked her pager, her phone, and her watch. It was almost five p.m., and she had no messages. She sank into a chair at a free computer terminal and began the process of discharging the child.

“Did you read her the riot act?” Liz called over. She was busy squirting blood into culture bottles at the sink beside the nurses’ station.

Meg hit
enter
and snarled as the screen froze. “No.” She tapped the key repeatedly and with increasing force. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I just don’t think my heart’s in it.”

“Your heart wandering out there on the moors, by any chance?”

Liz probably didn’t mean anything by that, but it was such a lovely, apt turn of phrase that Meg smiled, despite her dark mood. “You might have hit the nail on the head there.”

The needle tinkled in the sharps bin as Liz discarded it. “I’ve got a friend works up on ITU. She told me our mystery woman is as well as can be expected.”

“Max said as much this morning.” Meg began to type rapidly as the computer decided to behave itself. “He said he might try waking her in the next couple of days.” She hit the wrong key and erased everything she had just entered. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Liz’s hand closed over hers, stilling her fingers. “Have you had a break today?”

Meg answered with a shrug. She honestly couldn’t remember.

“Why don’t you take one when you’ve finished that? There are only four patients in the waiting room, and they’re all heading to Minors.”

The computer saved the discharge summary at the second attempt. Meg glanced around. The department had several beds empty and a number of medics chatting or trying to look busy. She was senior to many of them, but she wasn’t indispensable.

“You’ll page me if the Bat Phone goes?” she said.

“If it’s something we can’t cope with for half an hour, then yes,” Liz replied in her stern mum voice, her hands planted on her hips. It had the dual effect of making Meg laugh and realise how ridiculous she was being.

“I’m bloody starving,” she said, and hit
print
before she could jinx herself and make the phone ring.

*

The hospital canteen was on the verge of closing when Meg skidded to a halt in front of its counter. They’d run out of everything savoury, with the exception of a limp corned beef sandwich. Unwilling to risk it, she asked for apple crumble and custard, and came away with a portion generous enough to sustain her for the rest of the week. A glare from a cleaner warned her not to try sitting at any of the canteen’s tables, so she wandered back toward the A&E staffroom, but as she reached the stairs, she changed her mind and headed for the ITU. The nurses there were all familiar faces, who turned a blind eye to her carton of pudding, but the sight of someone far more unexpected made her pause on the threshold of room three.