Pinned to the bottom of the victim’s trousers, at shin height, is a piece of paper with some incomprehensible words written on it.
Mirusieji negali kalb
ė
Davy is squinting at the letters, trying to decipher the handwriting accurately, then down at his phone as he types them into Google Translate. Google comes back with the answer:
The dead cannot speak
Standing so close to the trouser leg, Davy has been assailed by the stink of the cadaver – not decomposition, it’s fresh. Happened last night, would be Davy’s guess. It stinks because his bowels opened when he died and because he is an unwashed eighteen-year-old, or thereabouts. Young men kill themselves more frequently than anyone else, but that note puts the ball firmly in Davy’s court. It’s a threat or a confession. Either way, it smacks of murder as opposed to self-harm.
‘What d’you think?’ Harriet says.
‘That note pinned to the body,’ says Davy. ‘Translates as “the dead can’t talk”. It’s in Lithuanian.’ He gives Harriet a pointed look.
She nods. ‘You’re thinking Wisbech?’
‘Yup. Also, look at his hands.’
They both look at the cadaver’s hands, which are suspended conveniently at head height. They are butcher’s hands – thick fingers, curled, like a pair of well-worn gloves. Dark skinned. The backs of his hands are etched with multiple thin white lines.
‘Think we need to check in with Operation Pheasant,’ Davy says.
He doesn’t want to confess, even to himself, how much he’d like to check in with Bridget on Operation Pheasant (as the Fenland Exploitation Team is known); the feelings this inspires in him. He is spoken for, after all. And not by Bridget.
‘We can’t let this go on,’ Harriet says. ‘This is the third. Makes us look like we’ve got no control. Any CCTV?’
Davy shakes his head. ‘Not as far as I can see.’
‘Were the victim’s hands tied?’
‘It doesn’t appear so.’
‘But if his hands weren’t tied, did he try to haul himself up the rope?’
‘Derry Mackeith will tell us that when he does the PM.’
Davy can see Harriet thinking what he’s thinking. Hard to get a man into a tree with his hands tied. Even harder to hang him without his hands tied. If he was drugged or unconscious, it would’ve been close to impossible to get him into a tree.
‘We’ll need to tell Derry to look out for fibres under the fingernails, burn marks to his palms from the rope, that kind of thing.’
‘Yes,’ says Davy, adding it to his mile-long mental list.
Twelve hours in the darkness of an industrial chicken shed made him forget himself. The stink, the noise, being scratched, being exhausted. Perhaps Lukas is best off out of it.
In the van back to the house, his head lolls against the seat rest and he dozes a blank sleep. When they are disgorged from the van, he looks at the house, sees the prospect of being alone with his thoughts, and starts to shake. He grasps Dimitri’s arm.
‘I can’t go in. I feel sick,’ he says.
‘OK. We’ll get a drink.’
He can see Dimitri is exhausted and would rather lie on his mattress, boots off. He is grateful to him for his companionship.
As they walk down the street, a car pulls up outside their house. Two men, both in dark suits, get out and go to the front door. Some kind of officialdom, Matis guesses. The communist regime had loved officialdom, Lukas’s father told him. Matis admired Lukas’s father enormously. Jűri was a thoughtful, gentle man, in contrast to Matis’s own father. Jűri described languorous men in uniform, standing about pointlessly, feeling important. ‘Puffed up on their petty bureaucracies. Four suited guys to take your ticket at the museum. Welcome to full employment!’
Matis and Dimitri take their bottle of vodka and drink it in the park. The air is soft, the temperature mild.
‘Why don’t you tell the police what you saw?’ Dimitri asks. ‘Let them take care of it?’
‘Seriously,’ Matis says. ‘You trust the police?’
‘It is different here.’
‘Sure it is.’
Suspicion of authority is only a fraction of the reason why Matis won’t talk.
‘You must not say anything to the police,’ Matis tells Dimitri. ‘Promise me.’
Matis wakes to find himself laid out on the tarmac path, where he has fallen asleep. It is nearly dark. Someone has thrown coins at him. They have landed on the ground in front of his stomach. This kindness makes him cry.
The ID card, or maybe it was a driver’s licence – Davy can’t tell because it’s in Lithuanian – says the name: Lukas Balsys. A grainy photograph of a man who looks little more than a boy, though he was no less grey-faced when he was alive than after hanging.
‘Davy Walker as I live and breathe. This is a nice surprise,’ says Bridget as he walks into her Wisbech office, the ID card proffered for her to see.
Bridget is a senior officer on Operation Pheasant, whose offices are three rooms in a slope-ceilinged attic close to the town centre. ‘Ah, OK,’ says Bridget, looking at the card. She’s got her hair in a complicated plait affair, two rows on either side of her head, rather like a schoolgirl. She’s wearing a black cardigan over a patterned dress.
His attraction to Bridget is physical, primarily. Also the attraction of what he cannot have: the new and unknown and illicit. When all that is sanctioned is at home, there is a yearning for the unsanctioned. He realises it isn’t deeper than that, and that his fiancée Juliet offers him something real and complex, albeit cloaked in a somewhat pressurising commitment that he himself had wanted and brought on. It is Juliet, not Bridget, who puts up with his constant cancellations and late arrivals home because of work. The date nights postponed. It is Juliet who fights against the peevish feelings his unreliable shift pattern engenders. Bridget is a destructive impulse.
