The Death Collector (24 page)

‘It’s a case I’m working on. Hugh used to be involved with it.’

That made her frown. ‘Which one?’

‘Aidan Molloy.’

‘Still thinking about that?’ Kim exhaled loudly. ‘You don’t mind making yourself unpopular.’

‘It goes with the job, unpopularity.’

‘But why are you involved with that case? It’s long dead.’

‘Not to Aidan’s mother. And it just piqued my interest.’

Kim’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is there some development?’

‘Come on, I can’t spill stuff like that.’

‘So there is.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Joe said, and sighed. ‘Okay, maybe I am thinking there is something. Do you know David Jex? A detective?’

Kim frowned as she thought about that. ‘Is he the one who’s gone missing?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I remember people talking about it. He’d been acting a bit strange so people think he’s just gone wandering, maybe even dead somewhere.’

‘His son was arrested the other night, creeping around someone’s house, and he wanted someone from Honeywells. I turned out but he wouldn’t tell me anything about it. Now he’s gone missing too, so his mother came to see me. She said they were both obsessed with the Aidan Molloy case, that it started with David and then Carl started looking when David went missing. When I saw Mary Molloy campaigning I spoke to her. I’m not getting paid for this but I’m trying to do the right thing, except I don’t even know what the right thing is.’

‘You’re drifting, Joe,’ Kim said, her tone softening.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can see it in your eyes when I see you in court. Your heart isn’t in your job any more. Don’t use Aidan Molloy’s case to rescue yourself.’

Joe frowned. He wanted to tell her that she had read it wrong, that it was justice for Mary, because something wasn’t right about the case. But he knew Kim was right.

‘What do the people in your office think about the Aidan Molloy case?’ he said, drinking his coffee. ‘Am I wasting my time?’

‘If we weren’t sure about the conviction, we would say so. I don’t know that much about the case, I wasn’t involved in it, but I have heard people talk about it, and no one seems concerned about it. Just that Mary Molloy is like the annoying wasp that won’t go away.’

‘She’s fighting for her son.’

‘She’s wasting her own life.’

‘What about DCI Hunter?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There are many officers I trust,’ Joe said. ‘They brief me truthfully about the evidence before the interview, even though they know it means showing their hand. But there are those I’m never sure about, where it’s like a slow game of reveal. They only tell me what they think I should know, keeping back the surprises, so you never know if what you’re being told is the whole truth.’

Kim smiled. ‘I know that feeling.’

‘What, they play games with you too?’

‘Not in the same way. Sometimes it’s a battle about whether to charge someone, and the stuff that will make a charge less likely has to be teased out rather than volunteered. But like you say, that’s the game.’

‘And DCI Hunter?’

Kim took another drink of coffee. ‘He’s a powerful figure. Involved in a lot of big cases.’

‘That doesn’t tell me much.’

Kim put her cup down, empty now, and stared at it for a few seconds. ‘Is this just between us?’ she said, when she looked up again.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t like him. He’s from a different era. He was popular a few years ago but most of the old guard have gone, retired or taken redundancy. Most of the lawyers are a lot younger than Hunter and trained in a different time. Hunter acts like a sheriff, you know, riding in to clean up the town, his little team of deputies with him. He creeps me out a bit. Stares that linger a second longer than they need to, and treats prosecutors like an inconvenience. It’s like he wishes he could run the cases through the courts himself.’

‘He was there the other night, when Carl Jex was arrested. It wasn’t his case, but he seemed interested, was loitering.’ Joe grimaced. ‘I should have paid more attention to him. I didn’t make a note of the address where Carl was arrested. It was late, and it was a routine case.’

‘I can’t help you there,’ Kim said. ‘If Carl is charged, you’ll find out, but I’m not ringing round for you.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’ A pause. ‘Do you trust Hunter?’

Kim raised an eyebrow at that. ‘I don’t trust anyone with that much power.’

Joe smiled. ‘Thank you. That’s what I wanted to know.’

Carl put his head back against the wall. He was finding it hard to focus. His eyes were heavy, his body aching. Sounds seemed to come to him on a slow loop, as if everything was dragged out, his head moving too slowly. His knees trembled, his shoes wet from his piss. His legs were cramped up but there was no safe way to ease the pain. His cut leg made him shriek through his gag, but he had to use it to support himself.

He was going to fight it, though. His mother would be out there looking for him. She had the files; she’d speak to the right people.

His mind was twisting things. The sounds from upstairs came as loud echoes and his memories of the rest of the house seemed like something from another lifetime.

He knew it was daylight because the cellar had got warmer. Was this to be the last morning he saw?

The cellar door opened and the man came down the stairs. His shirt collar was up, and a tie hung loosely around his neck. He was carrying a glass. He didn’t seem as concerned about being seen.

‘You still here?’ the man said, and laughed to himself.

Carl nodded. ‘Let me go,’ he said, the words muffled through the gag. ‘Please.’

The man stepped over Emma’s body. He didn’t even look down. ‘I’m going to work. I’ll be gone for hours. That’s how long it will continue at least. Do you think you’ll last?’

Carl didn’t answer.

The man raised the glass to Carl’s lips and let a small amount of water dribble over the gag. Carl sucked at the cloth in desperation, but just as quickly the glass was pulled away.

The man grinned and placed the glass on the floor close to his feet. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘Precious water. You just need to bend down for it,’ and he laughed again.

He started to knot his tie. ‘Goodbye, Carl. If you don’t make it through the day, it’s been a pleasure. No, it really has.’

And with that, he turned and left the cellar.

Carl closed his eyes as tears came once more. It was hopeless. He wouldn’t last the day. All the fight he had started to store up inside just leaked out of him.

He kicked out in frustration, sending the glass across the floor. It shattered against the wall and the cellar fell back into silence.

Sam was sitting in his car with the door open. He had been there for a few hours now, watching the pitch of the forensic tent and the arrival of the crime scene investigators, and fatigue was setting in. His legs were restless and it took just a few moments of quiet for a blink to turn into a rest and then into a short doze, jerking awake each time.

He was drinking the last of his coffee when his phone rang. It was Joe.

‘Hi, Joe,’ he said, his weariness showing in his voice.

‘I need to ask you a favour,’ Joe said.

Sam sighed. He didn’t need this.

‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Things are getting a bit crazy.’

‘But this might be important.’

‘No, Joe, not now,’ Sam snapped, and clicked off his phone. Irritation swept through him, fuelled by tiredness. He wasn’t going to let Joe use him as a shortcut. Sam hadn’t joined the force to be a defence lawyer’s man on the inside.

DI Evans arrived on the scene. She’d parked much further down the hill, the verges already clogged with forensic vehicles and squad cars. Sam noticed more press interest too, with a helicopter in the air and television vans parked in the distance. Evans looked tired as she walked towards him, her short hair bedraggled, as if she’d foregone a shower to get to the scene quickly.

He raised his cup to her but didn’t smile.

‘So you were proved right,’ she said, as she got closer.

‘I don’t feel much pride in it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had no sleep and when everyone else was eating their breakfast, I was running my hands over a buried corpse.’

‘Well, put that way, I can see why you’re not celebrating.’ She looked over to the forensic tent in the distance, pitched in the same place as the day before, a white block surrounded by small white figures. ‘So what did you see?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I saw the shirt and felt the ribcage, and I knew I shouldn’t dig any further. I called it in.’

‘So if you could feel the ribs, it had been there for some time.’

‘It certainly didn’t feel fleshy, thank goodness.’

‘Could you tell anything about the body? Was it male or female, adult or child?’

Sam thought back to his sight of the body, the feel of it under his hand, and said, ‘I’m guessing a man, from the style of the shirt and the size. It certainly wasn’t a child, which is perhaps the thought that is interesting them so much.’ And he pointed down the road, to the press cameras.

Evans followed his gesture. The evil deeds of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley still haunted the moors and it only took a police forensic tent on the barren slopes to get the media twitching. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ she said, and reached down to the box of paper suits wrapped in cellophane. ‘Come on, get suited up. Let’s take a look.’

Sam groaned as he eased himself out of his car, his knees cracking as he straightened. As he ripped open the plastic to unwrap the plain white coveralls, he said, ‘Have you heard from Hunter?’

‘He’s with the superintendent now. You got lucky. Hunter is angry about your insubordination, but the discovery of a body should save you.’

Sam smiled at that, before putting the paper mask over his nose and mouth. ‘You’ll take some of the credit, I suppose,’ he said, his voice muffled.

‘The joys of command,’ she said, and Sam saw the twinkle of her eyes above her own mask. ‘Come on, let’s walk. You’re the hero of the hour.’

Sam followed her along the same track he had taken before, past where he had stopped with the sack of logs. ‘He could have stopped here,’ he said, making Evans turn round. ‘The headlights missed me when a car went past and it’s still a long way to go before you get to the body. That’s what made me dig. It just didn’t make any sense.’

‘Logic always works best,’ Evans said. ‘People like Hunter think it’s all about instinct and hunches, but instinct is just ego. A proper case theory is about logic.’

Their suits rustled as they walked, the heather scraping against their legs. They stepped to one side to let two crime scene investigators walk past carrying plastic crates filled with soil. From the redness of exertion showing above the masks, Sam guessed that they were feeling heavier with every step. Someone would have the job of going through that later, just to see whether anything had been dropped into the hole as the body was buried.

When they got to the forensic tent Evans held the flap open for him. It was warm inside, even though it was still early and the day hadn’t acquired any heat on the outside. There were four people squashed in there. A forensic scientist he recognised from the bushiness of his grey eyebrows and the way his stomach pushed out at the paper suit, and three crime scene investigators, one with a camera and two more with small brushes, treating the body like an archaeological dig.

The hole Sam had dug earlier was still there, but it was deeper, the soil being removed from around the body. There seemed less doubt now about gender. The face looked well-preserved, although the features had grown tight to the skull and looked leathery, as if the dead person was very old and had spent too long in the sun. It was undoubtedly a man’s face. The clothes were dirty, with empty-looking jeans and a hollow blue checked shirt, except for where the ribcage stuck up.

‘How long do you think it’s been there?’ Evans said.

The forensic scientist looked up and tilted his head as if he was thinking about it, although Sam guessed that he had been trying to work it out ever since he arrived.

‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘In peat soil like this, the bodies can stay preserved for years. What rots a body is oxygen and it lets the insect world in to munch away at it. Peat soil doesn’t let in much oxygen and it’s very acidic, so it makes the body go waxy like this. It’s more than a couple of months though, because there has been some decomposition. The coldness in winter will have slowed it down, but I reckon it’s months rather than years.’

‘It gives us some kind of starting point,’ Evans said, looking back into the hole, her forehead creased.

One of the crime scene investigators was brushing away the soil behind the body’s neck when she knelt up. ‘We’ve got something here,’ she said.

That made everyone pay attention. Sam moved closer, Evans with him.

The investigator brushed at some more soil before she reached in with her gloved hand and pulled at something. It was a blue ribbon, wet and soiled, but still bright enough to see. As she pulled, there was something white and plastic attached to it. Once it came free, the crime scene investigator looked at it and drew a sharp intake of breath.