Dead People. Ewart Hutton
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that bad?’
‘No, it’s good. Good for us,’ he corrected himself. ‘It means that we can get a firm base down without having to go too deep. But it’s bad for you.’
By which he meant that it was not ripe grave-digging strata.
‘What about over there?’ I pointed to where a large rectangle had been pegged out where the ground sloped away from us. It was dotted with tussocks. The grass, reed and heather cover was charred. There had been a fire over this area. ‘Is that deeper soil?’
He nodded cautiously. ‘Probably. That’s the next turbine base to be excavated. But it doesn’t fit in with your theory.’
‘How?’
‘The roadway access to this turbine goes round the top.’ He described an arc in the air with his finger.
His deflation was catching. I felt my energy levels sag. Then I looked down at the pegged-out area again without a civil-engineer’s hat on. ‘They wouldn’t know that.’
‘Wouldn’t know what?’
‘That you wouldn’t excavate until you had the roadway in above it.’
I ran down to walk the perimeter of the base while Jeff brought the tractor over. I looked at it again, trying to see it the way a guy who was already pissed off with digging would see it. A guy with a bag over his shoulder, the hefted weight of a human head and a pair of hands in it.
I looked behind me and got a fix on the tent that covered the grave. Taking a straight-line bearing on it I walked slowly away. I stopped when the ground began to rise. I tried to get into the guy’s mind. You’ve already dug one big hole, you’re weary, so does your mind work some sort of psychological delusion on you? If you started going up a slope, does it tell you that the hole you’re going to dig would have to be deeper?
I waved Jeff over. ‘Start here,’ I yelled.
I watched the blade of the bucket slide in easily. The ground was soft. Jeff started to carefully peel the top layer off. I waved for him to stop.
‘What’s the problem?’ he shouted.
‘We haven’t got the time for precision. We may have a lot of ground to cover. Just scoop the stuff up and dump it for me to go through with the spade. Hopefully, if there is something in there it’ll come up clean in the bucket.’
‘Aren’t you meant to do this systematically and scientifically?’ he asked, looking concerned.
‘I’ll take the risk.’ I said.
After all, I thought, as I sifted through the second pile of spoil that Jeff had dumped beside me, if you accidentally break a couple of fingers off, or crack a skull, there’s bound to be systems in place for rectifying things. The vital thing was to locate them. Weld in another link.
I had my back to the tractor. It took me a beat to realize that something had changed.
Silence.
I turned around. The front attachment of the tractor was raised. Poised in front of me. There, minus its head, minus its hands, minus its legs, perched upright in the tractor’s bucket, like it was sitting on a designer fucking sofa, was a rotting, naked torso.
The stink hit us with the olfactory equivalent of a water canon. Jeff vomited over the side of the tractor. I cupped my hand over my mouth and nose, checked my gagging reaction, and forced myself to look, distracting myself from the ghastliness by trying to remember the stages of decomposition a forensic scientist I had once dated had taught me.
Autolysis had caused skin slippage on the chest. The green tint of putrefaction was present, but the worst of the bloat had gone, the gas and fluid accumulations already purged out. Insects were crawling or dropping out of the huge wound the tractor’s bucket had made. But no adipocere yet. I tried to remember. How long for the soapy deposits of adipocere to form?
Her breasts had collapsed into triangular flaps on the slumped chest skin. But they were still recognisable as breasts. This was a she. This one was fresh.
I sent out a silent prayer to the angel who watched over my hunches. Don’t do this to me. Don’t let this be Evie.
Evie left two years ago. This one still had skin. Skeletonization would have occurred if she had been in the ground for two years. It came back to me. Those gruesome pillowcase lectures I had had with my forensic scientist. Adipocere formation takes from several weeks to months to form. There was no adipocere formation yet.
And Evie had been gone for two years. I clutched at that.
I found the legs. Down on my hands and knees with a trowel, an old T-shirt of Jeff’s soaked in aftershave and wrapped around my lower face, keeping the worst of the stench at bay. I had left Jeff with Donnie at the site huts, still in shock. I had called this one in from down there before I had come back up with my jury-rigged face mask.
I knew I should have left this bit to the experts, but it was personal. I felt that I had desecrated her. She had been chopped in half as a result of my instructions. I had to do the best I could to make her at least symbolically whole again.
The bastard had left her shoes on. It turned her back to human, and I felt my stomach churn again. Raised heels, thin strap at the back, wickedly pointed, and still recognizably red.
One had been partially dislodged by the swelling that accompanied decomposition. I took a photograph of it and the leg in situ with my digital camera. For the forensic record. Then I grasped the heel, closed my eyes, and pulled it away. I took another photograph of the shoe, zooming in so that the grotesque dead foot was not in the shot. If I was going to have to show this picture around I wanted to keep it as trauma-free as possible.
I stood back and looked down at the legs, still lying where I had uncovered them. We hadn’t scooped them up from the deep. This was a shallow grave. Much more so than the other one. And, given the condition of the body, it had to be much more recent.
Why? The illogicality of it had started to crowd in on me. Why bury something on a construction site just before the work has started?
Because, in other respects, they had been clever. By setting fire to the surrounding vegetation they had disguised the freshness of the excavation. Just another one of the many burned or blighted patches that scabbed the hillside. And they would probably have had to bury her in daylight as the torched heather would have shone like a beacon in the night. Or wouldn’t that matter around here? Was that why this place had had been chosen? Because even God had His blind spots?
Jack Galbraith and Bryn Jones turned up shortly after the SOCO team and Bill Atkins. We were now all wearing white gauze respiratory masks and white sterile suits, which gave us the look and the fuzzy sound of the survivors of an alien virus.
They both stared at the dressing on the side of my head. ‘Husband came home unexpectedly, eh? Had to close her legs a bit too quickly, did she, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith quipped, deadpan.
I assumed that I wasn’t meant to answer that.
He made a big deal of taking in the whole scene and groaned theatrically. ‘How do you manage it? Didn’t I say it, Bryn? On the way back to Carmarthen the last time we were here. “Just you watch,” I said. “Just you watch Capaldi fuck up the serenity. Watch him turn a nice, cold, total cul-de-sac case into a fucking Hollywood spectacular.” He looked around him with unfeigned disgust. ‘In Indian fucking territory.’
Bryn was taking in the remains. ‘Looks like this one’s coming off the desktop.’ He glanced at me as he said it. I couldn’t tell whether it had contained a smile or a frown.
‘Where’s your big black box and your saw, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked eventually, breaking the silence that had accompanied his ruminations over the corpse, which was still sitting in the tractor’s