‘The usual,’ he said, handing me a full-face particulate mask. ‘Dog walker. Said his dog wouldn’t stop barking at it, so he took a peek. Watches a lot of true crime shows.’
‘Him or the dog?’
‘Not sure.’
‘What time?’
‘Five thirty-five.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I sent him home. He’ll come in this afternoon if we need him to.’
‘You talked to him yourself?’
‘Yep.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘Genuine.’
I nodded and snapped the mask over my head and Kevin did the same. ‘Ogay,’ I said, waving to Sandra and getting a thumbs-up in return. ‘Ned dayg a nook.’
There was no denying it was my old partner’s Mondeo. I’d spent a lot of hours staring pointedly out of the window of that car, or gripping the sides of my seat, or instinctively thumping my right foot onto an imaginary brake pedal. I was in it when he creased the wheel arch against a bollard, and I was standing right where I was now when he kicked the dent into the front wing in anger at some humiliation or other. My seat was gone, just a buckled metal frame remaining. The worn carpet in the footwell was gone, too – in fact everything was gone; it was just a ravaged shell. But those dents were as good as a fingerprint.
It wasn’t blue any more. It was orange and black and brown, rust and soot and death. It sat sadly on its sills in the sand, one back door hanging limp on twisted hinges. The roof sagged from front to back, the tailgate bent on its frame so that the lid reared up, arched like a mouth shrieking in horror. And in that mouth was what I could only assume were the remains of my two former colleagues.
Bone is bone. It doesn’t really look like anything else. I suppose I could have convinced myself it was coral, or pebbles at a push, but I didn’t bother to try. It was a grey rubble of bone, fragmented, cemented with splatters of rain-pasted ash. To my untrained eye it could have been anyone, or anything. Sure, I know all the words; I read the same books you read. Skull sutures. Pubic symphysis. Phalanges, which just reminds me of Phoebe from Friends. I could even tell you what they mean, and relate the most reliable method of estimating the height of a person from their skeleton, or of determining the gender and racial profile of a skull. But I’m no more than an armchair expert; my opinion isn’t worth the calories I’d expend merely forming it, and the jigsaw puzzle in front of me now was far beyond my understanding of how a person could even begin to make sense of it. And so, knowing in my gut that this was the final resting place of Detective Inspector John Fairey and Detective Constable Julian Keith, I resisted the urge to plunge my hand into the ashes, pull out a shard of calcined something-or-other and shout ‘Aha’, and I walked away from the car.
‘Okay, first screamingly obvious things first,’ I said, once I’d flicked the mask off my face and could breathe again. I pointed at the square of blackened grass beneath my feet; one of a dozen I could see, evidence of a summer of careless barbecuing. ‘There are burn marks just about everywhere except under the car. Who’s out looking for the crime scene?’
Kevin looked from me to the car and back again, and scratched the back of his head. ‘Not organised that yet,’ he said, which I had to concede was an accurate if inexhaustive statement. ‘Been a little bit busy on my own here. I haven’t even had a cup of tea yet.’
Signed off till Monday. Not going to feel guilty for having breakfast. ‘You’ve done a good job,’ I said, although I knew Sandra had probably beaten him here and taken control of the scene herself. ‘We haven’t got the whole car here. The bumpers, the tyres, all of the plastic and rubber bits that have melted off. They’re not here. We’re missing a debris field. Plus there are no drag marks, but there’s a trail of mud and oil at least all the way back to the top of the road. See?’ I indicated a set of thick, wide-treaded tyre tracks printed in clods of earth and clay, leading to and from the Mondeo and punctuated by a circular swirl on the tarmac at the entrance to the picnic site. ‘Someone carried it here on a tractor, right? Frontloader, teleporter, whatever you want to call it.’
Kevin nodded. ‘Which was thoughtful of them.’
‘Ha. So who, and why now? It’s been two months.’
He thought about it for a moment. Scratched his head. ‘Is there anything significant about the date?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
I knew where he was going to go before he went there. ‘Well, if we were in a film, I’d say The perp is sending us a message, but . . . we’re not, are we?’
‘Well, you might be,’ I conceded, ‘but whoever dumped this here isn’t. We’ve got a convenient trail of breadcrumbs, but it’s just muddy tyre marks and you can’t really engineer those. If they lead all the way to the burn site, it’s an accident. Also, never say “perp” again. You sound like an idiot.’
‘Agreed.’
‘It’s a pretty thin theory, isn’t it?’
‘Kind of.’
‘So what am I going to find when I leave you here to chase around after Sandra and go follow that trail by myself?’
‘Oh, come on!’
No, you come on. I was tired, hungover, thirsty, more than a little confused, and I wasn’t even supposed to be here today or indeed any day this week, and I thought a nice gentle drive in the countryside would do me good. Frankly, I thought it was probably a waste of time; you can only load your tyres with so much muck, so the trail was bound to go cold in short order, leaving me free to pop into the nearby village and buy some sugary drinks for myself and maybe even Kevin, if I was feeling more generous by then.
He didn’t put up too much of a fight, either. He was obviously enjoying his moment, peacocking around the place as the only – and therefore most senior – detective on the scene. He probably had another hour to enjoy it, so I was happy to let him. And Geoff was clearly happy to let me go, too, because he lifted the tape clean over my head this time.
The trail was laughably easy to follow; clumps of earth and sand and clay, and weeds snatched out from the verge by a vehicle clearly a few inches wider than the single-track road. And leaky, too. Whether it was oil or hydraulic fluid, it shone beautifully in the sunlight, a spot the size of my fist every ten yards or so.
I was in no hurry. I didn’t even touch the throttle, just stuck it in second and let the clutch out and allowed the car to roll along at its own leisure. It was that kind of morning. The roadblock slid lazily aside to let me out, and we all exchanged smiles and waves as I idled by. Then I was free, turning right onto the little B-road that led to the village, and immediately I knew my hopes for a jolly to the shops were dashed because there were muddy tracks and spots of oil on the other side of the road, too, and I only had to follow them for a couple of miles before they arced left onto a wide concrete track and escaped under a three-bar metal gate.
I stopped the car, and sighed, and thought about what I might do next. I knew exactly
