Chapter 19
It had been a dog-walker who’d found him. Isn’t it always? Lauren thinks, as she changes into the stout boots she keeps in the boot of her car for just such occasions. She glances at -Fraser’s brogues. ‘Those are going to get wrecked.’
‘You’ll have to give me a piggy-back across the muddy bits.’
‘And put my back out before the wedding?’ Lauren shuts the car boot and zips up her jacket.
They’re parked next to a large wooded area, behind two marked police cars and a white CSI van.
There is a public car park three miles away on the far side of the forest, but the body has been found closer to this side, where vehicular access is barred by padlocked gates.
That hasn’t deterred ramblers, who have worn paths to the sides of the gates and into the dark, dense woodland.
Lauren and Fraser walk past a sign saying Private – no trespassing.
‘Presumably the woman who found the body can’t read,’ Fraser says.
‘All the locals ignore them.’
Lauren had spoken on the phone to the dog-walker, an overexcited woman with two lurchers barking incessantly in the background. ‘The private bit is much nicer,’ she’d told Lauren. ‘Fewer people and not so many dog-poo bags hung on trees. Why do people do that, do you think?’
Fraser shakes his head as Lauren recounts this. ‘Imagine if we all ignored the rules. It would be anarchy.’
‘Oh, give over, she’s not starting fires or dumping old tyres.’ A twig snaps with a crack beneath Lauren’s foot. ‘She’s walking her dogs. Apparently they jump up and people don’t like it.’
‘See? Anarchy.’ He grins, but Lauren knows he means it.
Fraser is only a few years older than her, but he has distinctly boomer-like views on the world.
She often thinks it’s a good job they decided against having children – Fraser would probably have them doing press-ups in the back yard every morning, on the grounds that it never did him any harm . . . She snorts.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ A glimpse of white can be seen through the trees. ‘There they are.’
Bodies are disposed of in many different ways. Throughout Lauren’s career she has been unfortunate enough to encounter human remains in suitcases, wrapped in black bags, rolled into carpets and stuffed into bins. Jamie Golding’s body is neatly zipped inside a body bag.
‘Schoolboy error on their part,’ says Tony Watkins, the lead CSI. He’s wearing a forensic suit, his words muffled by a mask. ‘I wonder if they had to get rid of him in a hurry, or if they were simply arrogant enough to think he wouldn’t be found.’
Lauren crouches beside the partially uncovered shallow grave, where strong black plastic pokes through the dirt and debris at either end.
‘Their fuck-up is our gain.’ If this is the bag in which Golding was taken from Nadeeka’s house, it’s the next best thing to having the original crime scene to examine.
‘The dogs started digging there.’ Tony points to a scrabble of earth at one end. ‘The owner called them off when she saw the zip on the bag.’
At the opposite end of the trench an area of earth has been more systematically scraped away from a section of body bag, dirt discolouring the silver metal zip that bisects it. A neat slit has been cut in the plastic to avoid contaminating the zip.
Fraser moves forward, leaning over the grave to take a look.
‘What are you, a probationer?’ Tony points to a plastic box a couple of metres away. ‘Masks are over there.’
‘Sorry.’ Fraser moves away instantly. ‘What a find, though. Thank God for rule-breaking dog-owners, I suppose.’
‘Yes, this is a huge step forward.’ Lauren takes the mask Fraser hands her. Suitably protected, they crowd around the grave again and Tony pulls apart the plastic.
Jamie Golding is still recognizable from the photographs Nadeeka sent to Lauren, but his bloated face has turned a mottled red. Lauren is breathing through her mouth but nevertheless the gassy, rotten-fruit smell of death hits the back of her throat, and she swallows hard.
‘We’ve filmed and photographed the grave,’ Tony says, ‘and taken measurements. I understand you’ve got a dog coming?’
Lauren nods. ‘After this amount of time I’m not hopeful, but it would be great to get a direction of travel and establish where they parked the van.’
The day before yesterday, they had established that someone from the fake police team had seized CCTV footage from a petrol station on the outskirts of town, indicating that at least one of the outstanding vehicles had stopped there.
The back-up, however, had not been deleted.
‘The lad on the tills at the time told the detective the system records over itself every twenty--four hours,’ the manager had explained to Kenric.
‘But it’s every twenty-eight days.’ He’d inserted a USB stick into the back of the computer.
‘Do you want me to download it for you?’ The driver of the black Mercedes had covered his face – as had the ‘detective’ who later seized the CCTV footage – but the van’s registration could clearly be seen.
Lauren’s exhilaration had swiftly evaporated when the numberplates had been traced to a Kia Picanto stolen some two hundred miles away.
The whole investigation felt as though they were taking two steps forward, one step back.
Progress was being made, but far too slowly for Lauren’s liking.
‘It feels like they’re laughing at us,’ she says to Fraser now, as they make their way back to the car. ‘The whole job is so brazen; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they’ve been hiding in plain sight all along.’
‘What do you mean?’ Fraser narrowly misses getting smacked in the face by a low branch. He holds it to one side for Lauren to pass unscathed.
‘Do you remember that search for the missing girl last year? The guy who kept giving us updates on where they’d looked? And all the time she was in his shed.’ Lauren grimaces. ‘I reckon we’ve already looked into the eyes of whoever killed Jamie Golding.’
‘Nadeeka?’
‘No, I think she’s on the level, and besides, I don’t see how she could have pulled off the cover-up.
’ Lauren steps over a fallen log. ‘And Adam Bennington, who might have had the contacts to do it, has provided a rock-solid alibi for the time of the murder: CCTV from his client’s offices.
If he was involved in Golding’s murder, it was from a distance. Which leaves us with Scott Hadley.’
‘Who also has an alibi,’ Fraser reminds her.
‘I didn’t trust him, though, did you?’
‘I’m a copper. I don’t trust anyone.’
Lauren laughs. ‘Not even me?’
‘Except you.’ Fraser takes her hand. ‘I hereby promise to love, honour and trust you, in . . .’ he looks at his watch, squinting to read the tiny date ‘ . . . precisely seventeen days’ from now.’
‘Seventeen?’ Lauren looks at him in horror. ‘We have to get those sodding wedding favours done tonight.’
It’s gone ten-thirty before all ninety-eight pieces of card have been folded into boxes, filled with sugared almonds and stacked in a plastic tub.
Lauren opens her laptop. ‘I just have a few emails to reply to.’
‘If you start working now, you’ll end up sitting down here till three in the morning.’
‘Fair point.’ She shuts the laptop and puts it under her arm. ‘I’ll do them in bed.’
Fraser locks the back door. ‘That’s not exactly the point I was making.’ He turns off the lights in the kitchen and goes into the living room to do the same there.
By the time he gets upstairs, Lauren is in her pyjamas, lost to the glow of her screen.
As he gets into bed, she minimizes the email she’d been reading about an officer’s sickness record.
If Fraser notices, he doesn’t say anything.
Lauren doesn’t like keeping things from him – they’ve always been straight with each other – but such is the nature of their working relationship.
‘Major crime are going to have a shock when we’re in -Mauritius.’ Fraser presses his lips against her bare shoulder, then moves back to his side of the bed. ‘Three weeks of everyone having to pick up their own shit.’
Lauren opens another email. ‘Matt’s a steady pair of hands and Rudi Macloskey will be overseeing from CID. They’ll be fine. Anyway, they can always get hold of me if they really need me.’
‘You are not answering emails on our honeymoon! It was bad enough last year, when you took that call in the middle of our champagne tasting.’
‘It was the chief constable—’
‘Who is obviously far more important than a private vineyard tour organized by your adoring fiancé.’ Fraser’s tone is casual, but Lauren cringes.
She had spent forty-five minutes of their two-hour tour on the phone to the chief, going over the details of something that, with hindsight, could have waited until her return to work the following week.
‘I’ll put my out-of-office on,’ Lauren promises, knowing full well that won’t stop her checking her inbox. ‘Oh, excellent!’
‘What?’
‘The body bag has a serial number. We should be able to trace it to the manufacturers and from there find out who bought that specific bag.’ Lauren starts making a list of actions. ‘I wonder if private individuals can buy body bags, or only hospitals, funeral homes and so on?’
‘I guess the mortuary would know,’ Fraser says. He gets out of bed.
Lauren looks up in surprise. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To make you a camomile tea.’
‘You, Fraser Hogan, are the perfect fiancé.’
‘I’m only doing it so I can go to sleep without feeling guilty.’
Lauren turns back to her screen, not bothering to hide her smile. ‘I know.’