Hidden Depths (10 page)

And one day, sitting in the hide at Seaton, waiting for a Temminck’s stint to emerge into view, they’d met Peter Calvert. The famous Dr Calvert, who’d written papers for
British Birds
and had once been the chair of the Rarities Committee. He was dressed in black, a suit, a tie, a white shirt. Not the usual birding gear. Perhaps he’d seen them staring and thought it needed explaining. Perhaps that was why he started talking to them. He’d said he’d just been to a funeral. The wife of his best friend. Everyone else had gone back to the house for drinks, but he couldn’t face it. Not yet.

Then he’d suggested that they might become trainee ringers. Casually. Not realizing that for them it was the most exciting suggestion in the world. There was another trainer, he’d said. Samuel Parr. He’d look after them. It was Sam’s wife who’d just died and he’d need something else to focus on. Besides, they could do with some new blood in the Deepden team. After that Gary and Clive had spent most of their weekends up the coast at the Deepden Bird Observatory, sleeping on the bunk beds in the dorm at the cottage, waking at dawn to set nets and ring birds. They’d all become friends.

Gary realized the detective was still staring at him. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What were you doing in the watch tower if you weren’t sea watching?’

‘There’s always a chance,’ he said, ‘that something good will fly past. But we’d gone for a walk. It’s Peter’s birthday. We do it every year.’

‘A ritual?’

‘Yeah. Kind of Gary wondered why someone else couldn’t join in the conversation. Why had they left it to him?

Vera continued to look at him. She had her legs stuck out in front of her, big, rather grubby feet in sandals.

‘What’s your name, pet?’

‘Gary Wright.’

She took a notebook out of a big, soft, leather handbag, flipped a page, looked at the squiggles written there. But Gary thought that was just for effect. She knew the facts already, had probably worked out who he was as soon as she’d sat down at the table.

‘You live in Shields?’

He nodded.

‘You’re sure you didn’t know the lass? Only it seems to me you’re a bit of a party animal. You’ve got a history. A couple of cautions for drunk and disorderly, a conviction for possession.’

Gary looked up, suddenly sober. ‘That was years ago. You’ve no right—’

‘This is a murder investigation.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘I’ve every right. Are you sure you never came across her?’

‘I don’t remember her. The town’s full of students.’

‘You didn’t meet her while you were working?’

‘I don’t mix business and pleasure.’ He couldn’t understand why she was picking on him, felt an irrational panic. The mellowing effect of the wine had quite left him. ‘I’m serious about my work.’

‘Tell me about that.’

‘I’m a sound engineer. Self-employed. It could be anything from an opera gig at the City Hall to the Great North Run. There are a couple of bands I do the sound for and I go on tour with them.’

‘Glamorous.’

‘Not really. Folk clubs, small arts centres. The same mediocre musicians singing the same boring songs. A night in a Travelodge before unloading the van somewhere equally forgettable.’ Until he’d started talking he hadn’t realized just how much he’d come to dislike it. He reached a decision he’d been hesitating over for a week. ‘I’m giving it up. The freelance work. I’ve been doing quite a lot of work at the Sage Music Centre, Gateshead, and now they’ve offered me a permanent job. Regular wages, holiday pay, a pension. Suddenly it seems quite attractive.’

‘So you’re going to settle down? Why now?’

‘Age,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s it. The late-night curries in small towns have lost their appeal.’

‘Not a woman, then?’

He hesitated for a moment, then thought: What business is it of hers? ‘No, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Not a woman. Certainly not Lily Marsh.’

He wondered if the use of the name was a mistake. Did that imply previous knowledge? But Vera Stanhope let it go and turned her attention to the others gathered at the table. Gary was relieved that he’d had to go first. He took a drink from his glass, surprised to find it still almost full. Now it was his turn to be the audience. Vera was about to speak when her phone rang. She got up, walked away from them to take the call and stood at the end of the veranda in complete shadow. They began to talk among themselves to prove that her conversation was of no interest to them, but when she returned they fell silent.

‘Sorry, folks,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’ll have to go. Don’t worry, though, I’ve got all your addresses. I’ll catch up with the rest of you another time.’

But she stood there, not moving.

Felicity stood up. ‘I’ll just see you to the door.’

‘Are you interested in how she died?’ Vera asked, looking at them all.

‘I thought suicide,’ Felicity said, shocked. ‘It was all so dramatic, so arranged.’

‘She was strangled,’ Vera said. ‘Hard to manage that by yourself.’

They stared back at her, silent.

‘One last question. Does the name Luke Armstrong mean anything to any of you?’

Nobody replied.

‘I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?’ she said irritably. ‘Only he was strangled too. Not so far from here.’ She looked at them, waiting for someone to answer. ‘And the cases have certain things in common. I don’t want you talking about this. Not to anyone and certainly not to the press. I hope you understand.’

Still there was no response and she followed Felicity into the house. Watching, Gary, who’d had one or two brushes with the law, thought he’d never come across police like her.

Vera Stanhope drove back to the crime scene. It was a bugger to work, the Crime Scene Investigator said. They just didn’t have the time to deal with it properly. The body had been found at low water. They had four hours before that stretch of the shore would be covered completely. And though it was mid-summer the light had started to go almost as soon as they arrived.

Vera parked by the lighthouse and saw that they’d almost finished. The body had been removed and the sea had slid up the gully and covered the pool. She wondered if they’d managed to retrieve all the flowers, imagined them floating out into the North Sea, tangled in the propeller of the DFDS ferry.

Billy Wainwright, the CSI, was still there, loading his bag into his boot. He was a pale, thin man and seemed not to have aged in the twenty years that she’d known him. She thought now that he had one of those faces which always look boyish. She got out of her car and wandered over to him. Even now, in the early hours, the air was heavy and mild. The beam of the lighthouse swept over their heads.

‘Anything unusual?’

‘A young woman. Strangled. Laid out in a public place in broad daylight. Flowers scattered over her body. Pretty unusual that, I’d have thought. What more do you want?’

‘Would it have been broad daylight?’

‘Must have been. Think of the tide. And anyway she can’t have been there long. The place would have been crawling with people during the day, with the weather we’ve been having. I know it’s a weekday and not school holidays, but all the same the sun always brings people out to the coast. My guess is she was put there not long before she was found.’

Not that public, Vera thought. You had to be right on the lip of the gully before you could see in. Getting her there, though. That would be quite a different matter. Someone must have seen that. And the killer must have wanted her seen before the tide washed all his elaborate stage set away. How would he have felt if James Calvert hadn’t got bored and gone exploring?

‘Do we know how long she’d been dead before she went in?’

‘Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the PM for that. John couldn’t really do much at a scene like this. By the time he arrived we had to be thinking of moving her.’

‘Are they doing it tonight?’

‘I hope not. At least until I’ve had time for a pizza. I was just sitting down in front of a vindaloo when I got called out. I’m bloody starving.’ Billy’s appetite was a standing joke. He was as thin as a bean pole, but voracious. She pondered briefly on the injustice of genetics. ‘We might leave it till the morning,’ he went on. ‘I’m waiting to hear from Wansbeck.’

On cue his phone buzzed. He walked away from her to talk. There were rumours he was having a fling with a new young pathology technician at Wansbeck General and Vera, who was a great one for gossip and saw it as a tool of the trade, tidied away the information about the whispered conversation to pass on to Joe Ashworth. Her sergeant would pretend he didn’t want to hear, but she knew he’d be interested. She wondered how Joe was getting on. They’d tracked down Lily Marsh’s parents to a village just outside Hexham and Joe had volunteered to tell them that their daughter was dead. He’d said he didn’t want just anyone doing it. He was a father himself. He couldn’t come close to understanding what it must be like to lose a child, but thought he’d make a better fist of it than some in the team.

Wainwright finished his conversation and came back to her. Even in the dark she sensed a studied nonchalance which made her want to tell him not to be a muppet. He was a married man. Happy enough, she’d thought. The young technician was lonely, playing games with him. Then she told herself it was none of her business and she was hardly a candidate for relationship counsellor.

‘John would like to do it soon,’ he said. ‘He’s tied up later in the morning. Say an hour?’

‘Fine. I’ll be there.’

She stood, leaning against the bonnet of her car, listening to the waves breaking beneath the watch tower, until he’d driven away.

Her mind drifted back to the group sitting outside that strange white house which seemed so out of place in the Northumberland countryside. She’d gone to visit them because she’d had nothing better to do while the scene of crime team was working. They’d found the body, they’d all be together for the night and after that they’d disperse. The PC first at the scene had established that much. She thought she’d catch them while they were still in the area, check if they’d seen anything odd. She’d been hoping, she supposed, for the description of a car similar to the one Julie had seen in her road the night Luke was killed. But they’d caught her interest. It wasn’t just that there was a connection to the dead young woman. Or that the men reminded her of her father, sitting in the kitchen at home with a bunch of cronies after an illicit raid on the raptors’ nests in the hills. Something about the conversation had made her feel they’d need closer looking into. A smugness which irritated her and had something of a challenge in it. She tried to work out which of the individuals had so got under her skin, but couldn’t pin down the source of her unease. In the end she got into her car and followed Wainwright down the track to the road.

John Keating, the pathologist, was an Ulsterman in his fifties, with a bluff, no-nonsense attitude which scared some of her younger officers. The only time she’d seen him show any emotion during a postmortem was when he was investigating the death of a three-year-old child. And talking about a rugby match to a Welsh sergeant. He’d played when he was younger, still had a squashed nose. He made her coffee in his office before he changed for the autopsy.

‘What were your first impressions?’

‘She was strangled,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have gathered that.’

‘Similarities with the Armstrong lad?’

‘I didn’t have time to do a great examination in the field. Imagine your worst nightmare for a crime scene and this was it. A few hours later and the body would have been washed out to sea.’

‘Then we’d never have seen the flowers, might not even have linked it to the Seaton case.’ She came back to the point which had troubled her at the lighthouse. ‘Is that what the murderer wanted? Was it a private ritual? Or did he gamble on the body being found earlier?’

‘Hey! Don’t ask me. I deal with dead bodies not live minds.’

She watched the post-mortem through the glass screen, not because she was squeamish but because she was conscious of her size and was always worried that she was in the way. There were so many people gathered around the stainless-steel table – the technicians, the photographer, Billy Wainwright.

They unwrapped the corpse from the polythene sheeting and to the flash of continual photography they began to undress Lily Marsh. They removed the blue cotton skirt and the embroidered white shirt. Vera saw she was wearing matching white bra and pants. But hardly virginal. The bra was deep cut, lacy, revealing. The pants had little red-silk bows at each side, a red-silk crotch. While Billy Wainwright bagged each garment, Keating gave a commentary, glancing at her occasionally to check that she’d noted the significance of what he was saying. ‘There was little disturbance to the clothing. No apparent sign of sexual assault.’

Unless he dressed her afterwards, Vera thought. Let’s wait for the results from the vaginal swabs before we come to a decision. But there’d been no evidence of sexual assault on Luke and she was already certain that the cases were linked.

Keating continued. ‘No bruising. No lacerations. Can we have photographs of the eyes and lids, please. Note the petechiae.’

Vera had already noted them, had seen them at the crime scene – the pinpoint haemorrhages caused by obstruction of the veins in the neck. The classic sign of strangulation.