Dead of Winter Tr (2 page)

Carter straightened up. ‘Good work, Ebb.’ He tried to push his hands further in his pockets; they didn’t quite fit. ‘We’ll get a mould taken of those tyres.’
Carter swivelled; compressed snow squeaked beneath the sole of his expensive boots. ‘Nice place this.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Kind of place I was thinking of retiring to . .
.’ He looked back to wink at her. ‘Course, have to get better on the take . . .’

‘Not my cup of tea, Sarge,’ she replied, no smile. ‘Too remote.’

‘Yeah you’re right, Ebb. Never get a Chinese delivered out here.’ He turned three-sixty degrees. ‘It looks like it could do with some TLC. Looks neglected. A camera
flashed at an upstairs window. ‘Did SOCOs say when they’d be finished?’

‘Yes . . . It’ll be another couple of hours before we can go inside.’

Carter tried pulling his collar up further. ‘Lucky bastard.’ He looked up at the white-suited figure standing at the bedroom window twirling a brush in the bottom corner of the
windowpane.

‘Sir?’ An officer appeared beside them and handed them a packet each with protective suits and over-boots inside. ‘Doctor Harding says she’s ready for you.’

For once Carter was glad to put the suit on; usually it made him sweat. He finished pulling up the hood as they followed the officer around the side of the house and through the open garden
gate.

‘Is this the route the gardener said he took, Ebb?’ Carter shone his torch into the undergrowth to his right. It was too thick to see anything.

‘Yes, Sarge.’

‘I wouldn’t have come round here in the dark.’

She shone her torch along the conservatory window and traced the smear of human contact across the grime. ‘He said he felt his way round against the glass.’

‘Bloody eerie sound a fox makes.’ Said Carter. ‘Must have been starving what with the snow. All the foxes I see round my place seem to prefer “à la carte”.
Bold as brass. Big buggers. Swagger up to your back door and give you their order. Fries on the side.’

A blonde-haired woman in a forensic suit looked up from beneath the tent as they approached.

‘Sergeant?’

‘How’s it going, Doc?’ Carter walked over to her as she knelt by the side of the grave next to an open body bag. ‘What have we got?’

‘It’s a woman,’ said Harding. ‘The body’s been dismembered. We’re about to start digging it out now. I wanted you to see it first. This is what the fox had a
go at. This was above ground.’ Harding picked up the woman’s arm from the body bag. The bones of the forearm were exposed. Skeletal fingers were chewed into a bony claw.

Ebony walked around to the far side of the hole and knelt down to get a better look. Inside the grave the woman’s legs were laid out side by side. Her shoulders and head rested close to
the top of her legs.

‘Is it all there?’ asked Carter as he peered into the hole. ‘Her head looks like it’s where her torso should be.’

‘It’s normal for the thorax area to decompose first,’ answered Harding. ‘Especially if she was opened up, which it looks like she was.’ Harding pointed to the
beginning of a slit at the base of the woman’s neck.

As Harding talked, Ebony knelt and reached inside the grave. She rubbed her fingers lightly across the flesh on the woman’s shoulder then examined the residue on her fingertip.

‘What is it, Ebb?’ asked Carter.

‘Grave wax, Sarge. She’s been in here some time.’

‘Clay soil . . .’ said Harding. ‘Retains moisture. Enough of it turns them into soap . . . eventually.’

Carter looked at Ebony curiously. He hadn’t heard a squeak out of her since she arrived at the Murder Squad two weeks earlier. But tonight, if someone could come alive around the dead, she
just had.

‘Plus there’s decomposition of the head, hands and feet,’ Harding added. ‘That coupled with the depth she was buried means she’s been in here at least three,
probably six months.’ Harding leant back and called to the photographer to stand where she was and take another shot of the grave. ‘I’ll let you know after soil analysis.’
Harding nodded to an officer standing by and waiting to start excavating the body.

Carter stood and walked across the paving slab towards the rest of the garden, a neglected orchard which began where the patio ended. Harding joined him. ‘You’d think . . .’
said Carter as he took off his glove to find a way under his forensic suit and into his pocket, ‘. . . they’d have buried the body in the garden, not the patio.’

‘Too many roots. Too many trees, I suppose,’ answered Harding. ‘You put her in a shallow grave and animals would scatter her bones all over the neighbours’ gardens; not
what you want when you’ve got friends coming around for a barbecue. Plus you’d have to put up with the smell of rotting flesh in the height of summer, which is when I guess she was
buried. No, they put her in here because they didn’t want her ever to surface again. It was unlucky – the small retaining wall that held the patio in place collapsed and exposed the
foundations. The fox must have had access through there . . .’ She heard Carter fiddling with the plastic wrapper from the nicotine gum. Harding was dying for a cigarette. She’d been at
the house since seven p.m. She’d arrived just after Ebony. Now she needed a hit of nicotine and a triple espresso. She would have asked Carter for a piece of gum but she couldn’t bring
herself to; there was no way she was prepared to own up to a base weakness like nicotine addiction. Harding prided herself on never letting her guard down, except when she was blind drunk and that
didn’t count. ‘All the drains will need digging up under the house,’ she said.

‘Yes. We’re going to be here for weeks.’ Carter blew a silent whistle out of the side of his mouth. ‘It’ll cost.’

Back in the tent, Ebony watched the excavation. The grave had been dug out a metre extra at the feet of the woman’s body. The hole was three feet deep and now six feet long. Only one
officer was allowed into the grave to carefully manage the excavation as he stood at the end of it and painstakingly scraped the soil away from around the body. Ebony watched his white back arch
awkwardly from the grave as he wiggled, maggot-like, struggling to move in the tight space. Tracing the outline with his trowel, he scraped gently around the edges of the body. He removed the
woman’s legs one at a time and handed them up to Ebony to place inside the body bag, then he stood and stretched to relieve his aching back.

‘Can you dig there for me?’ Ebony looked past him at an object that had been hidden by the legs. Her eyes focused on the rounded end of a hipbone and a dark shape the size of a melon
nearby.

The officer crouched low, bent double to scrape away the frozen clay soil. She watched him as he picked his way around the object. It was beginning to loosen at the edges. He switched to working
with a dental pick, delicately chipping at the stubborn soil until it lifted in small chunks. Ebony saw the object move slightly, then give way to the last of his efforts as he prised it from the
clay and she saw it slide into his hands. It was muddied but perfectly formed and coated in white. He passed it up for her to take it from him. Ebony stood and carried it outside the tent. Carter
and Harding had their backs to her.

‘Sarge?’

Carter turned round to see her holding the corpse of a baby in her hands.

The lambs bleated in the cold. The wind and snow came driving off the Yorkshire Dales onto the small farm. It was a risky business lambing now. The Dorset Horn was a breed that
could produce lambs all year long but they required more looking after if they were to thrive in this harsh environment.

Callum Carmichael ran his hand over the belly of the sheep . . . she was overdue. She flinched at his touch. Jumper was an expert mother. She was one of a hundred ewes in the old barn.

Jumper had been with Carmichael for six years now. He had hand-reared her. In the field, she came when he called her name. In the summer months the sheep were allowed outside but now, in lambing
season, they had to come into the pens: six feet by four. Foxes had claimed lambs before, as had badgers and buzzards. Everything was hungry now in the worst winter for a long time.

Carmichael looked into the stall next to Jumper where a newborn lamb was suckling on his mother, its tail wagging furiously. Carmichael looked back at Jumper and decided he was probably being
overcautious and to let nature take its course, but to check on her again in half an hour. He called Rosie the sheepdog to follow him out of the barn. On his way down to the house he made a last
check on his horse. Inside the stable, he slipped his hand between Tor’s back and his fleecy rug and was reassured that he was warm enough. He should be: it had taken Carmichael an hour that
morning to bank the straw up high against the walls of the stable.

Stepping back out into the yard, Carmichael locked up and turned his face from the blizzard as he whistled for Rosie. Taking a last look around, he unlatched the back door of the house that had
been his home for the last thirteen years since his wife died.

As he walked through the kitchen he pulled the pot of stew from the top of the Aga and left it to one side. He knew he should eat but he hadn’t the appetite. Instead, he walked through to
the sitting room and took his Steyr Scout rifle from the gun cupboard, opened it and inserted a magazine. Then he locked it and left it leaning against the doorframe.

Logs were burning in the Inglenook fireplace. It must have burned the same way for three hundred years.

Carmichael went to the dresser, picked up the bottle of Scotch and carried it across to his desk and then he opened his laptop, waiting for it to fire up before he clicked on his music library.
It had been a long time since he had listened to any music. Too many memories; too many feelings. Green Day blasted out. It made him smile. He could see his wife Louise’s face now as
she’d pretended to hate it. She’d left him in the lounge with his music and his glass of red and she’d come back with Sophie; both of them wearing earmuffs. He smiled at the
memory. He hadn’t allowed himself even the good memories for a long time . . . he didn’t know why they were coming back tonight. Something in the weather or the world was overpowering
him. It was going to be a long night. He poured himself a few fingers of single malt. It melted in his throat and burned as it slid downwards. Standing on the broad hearth he nudged a half-burnt
log with his foot, sending up a spray of sparks. His face was bright from the fire, his dark hair wet from the snow. He picked up the photo of Louise smiling at him, Sophie in her arms, and took it
over to sit in front of the fire and sip his Scotch. The bridge of his nose burned as his eyes filled. He ran a finger across the photo and held it to his chest as he sat back and listened to the
crackle of the fire, felt its warmth through to his bones. He heard his Jack Russell terrier Rusty sigh from his basket as it watched him. Carmichael didn’t even realize he was crying.

‘Enough,’ he said out loud, stood, drank the whisky down, and called for Rosie as he pulled on his overcoat.

The bitter wind sliced his face as he opened the back door and walked back up to the barn. He switched on the light. The barn was musty with the smell of lambing. He couldn’t see Jumper.
He walked through the barn slowly, as if walking in tar. In the orange hue the sheep’s eyes stared at him as he passed. The lambs stopped suckling to watch his slow progress. Carmichael kept
walking; kept moving one heavy foot in front of the other. Walking in a dream, in a memory. His mind was spiralling back thirteen years, to the day he had walked towards the open door of a small
holiday cottage where his wife and child were staying for the weekend. His breathing quickened until it wheezed in his chest as he stepped inside a world that should have been filled with the sound
of laughter and chatter and heard only the droning of flies. He turned his head to look at the ewes but instead he saw his wife Louise looking at him, her face splattered with blood. She reached
out a bloody hand to him. A cry caught in his throat; the ewes heard it; they turned their heads to listen. The noise jolted him back to the barn and Louise was gone. Jumper was on the floor of her
pen. He could smell the stench of the lamb. Its body half out, stuck, breach position. It had died inside her womb and turned toxic and now she could not be rid of it. He ran back to the house and
pulled out the box of medical supplies from the tack-room cupboard . . . he cursed as he searched for the antibiotics he needed and found just a small amount. She needed a big dose to save her. He
had barely any. The vet hadn’t had any on him the last visit and then the snow had come. He picked up the supplies and carried them back to the barn then he knelt beside the ewe and injected
what he had into the muscle in her leg before starting to cut out the lamb. For three hours Carmichael worked with the stench of the lamb in his nose . . . By the time he finished the task Jumper
was dead.

‘You alright, Ebb?’

She nodded but her eyes stayed focused on the house. They were sitting in his car at the edge of the driveway, still waiting for permission from the SOCOs to go inside. The first lot of
furniture had been loaded into a van and was headed back to the lab. Ebony hadn’t said much since the discovery of the baby. Carter looked at her profile. ‘Not nice,’ he added.
She shook her head but didn’t speak. ‘Those tyre prints, Ebb? Someone must have noticed a big vehicle sat on the driveway. Must have been at least the size of a pick-up truck. Surely
the neighbours saw what cars were parked here. Did they know who lived here?’

‘They keep themselves to themselves, Sarge. I went round to speak to them after the gardener left. They never saw anyone move in or out. They had no idea who lived here.’

‘So much for people being friendlier in the country. If this was in the East End the neighbours would know everything.’

Ebony watched curiously as Carter squished the old piece of nicotine gum back into the empty space in the packet and popped a fresh one in his mouth.

‘Does that stuff help?’

‘I hope so. Tried cold turkey but couldn’t hack it. Trying to give up . . . you know . . .’ He glanced across at her. ‘For the baby . . . My girlfriend’s
pregnant.’