Stephen Booth – Dying to Sin (страница 10)
‘And the wonderful care he gets here, I’m sure.’
‘Why, thank you, Inspector.’
Hitchens nodded, turning on his most charming smile. Cooper couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. Personally, he didn’t think Raymond Sutton would love a day out at Pity Wood Farm at all, but perhaps he was wrong about that, too.
‘Yes, if the weather is decent, we’ll put a wheelchair into the minibus and Colin will drive Raymond up to Rakedale to visit the farm. But you won’t tire him out, will you?’
‘Not at all. We’ll send him back as soon as he wants to come.’
‘Fine, Inspector. Can we give you a call when we think he’s ready?’
The DI produced his card and handed it over with a gesture almost like a small bow. Cooper felt like gagging. But then, he wasn’t the person the Hitchens charm was being aimed at.
‘Sir,’ said Cooper as they were leaving, ‘do you think Raymond Sutton knows who buried the body at the farm?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Could he be in danger? Might someone want to make sure that Mr Sutton doesn’t talk?’
‘They might. But how would they get to him in The Oaks? Their security is pretty good, and the staff know where every resident is twenty-four hours a day.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Cooper.
With a weary curse, Nikolai Dudzik tipped his yellow hard hat back from his eyes. ‘Look at these outbuildings. All the roof structures are rotten. Completely rotten. The whole lot will have to be stripped off, you know. We’re talking about a massive amount of new timber for the joists alone.’
Fry could see that Dudzik’s workmen had dug a network of trenches behind the barn for the new drainage and water supply. No pipes had gone in yet – they still lay in heaps at the edge of the field. But the trenches were half full of water, thanks to the rain that continued to fall intermittently on Pity Wood Farm. She could see that the clay must be non-porous. Further north, the limestone would let rain water through like a sieve. It was one of the few geological facts she’d learned since leaving Birmingham for the Peak District.
‘There must be some old drains over that way somewhere,’ said Dudzik, gesturing towards the tumble-down ruins of a cowshed. ‘We haven’t found them, and we’re not looking for them any more. God knows what state they’ll be in. They must be very, very old.’
Inside the outbuildings, someone had started chipping the old plaster off the walls. Layers of dust covered the floor, and the exposed stonework looked inexplicably damp.
‘If it was up to me, the whole thing would come down,’ said Dudzik. ‘Then we could start from scratch and do a proper job. But we have to retain the original features. Original features! Bits of old stone and rotten timbers. What’s the point? I ask you.’
Fry let him talk for a while longer. Then she thought of a question. ‘Why haven’t you dug up the old drains, did you say?’
Dudzik shrugged. ‘There’s no way of knowing where they are exactly. There are no records for these old places, no proper site maps, yes? And the drainage often goes off at odd angles, when it’s so old. It will be sections of clay pipe, you see – useless by now. Useless. Besides, there’s nothing in the new plans for that area. It’ll just be a bit of garden or a paddock, so what’s the point of us digging it up?’
‘And this area where Jamie Ward found the body – there wasn’t supposed to be a wall here at all?’
‘No, no. There was no wall here. It was a job I gave to Jamie, you know – to keep him out of the way.’
‘Can I have a look at the plans, please?’
‘Sure.’
Dudzik pulled a rolled-up plan out of his back pocket and handed it to her.
‘It looks as though this area was going to be left pretty well untouched,’ she said. ‘It’s shown as grass on the drawings.’
Dudzik shrugged. ‘I know. But what a waste. This is the perfect place for a nice patio. Some good paving, you know. A water feature maybe. We could have made it nice.’
‘That’s pretty much what Jamie said too.’
‘That boy. He’s not stupid – just not practical, you know.’
‘He would have noticed soon enough that no wall was being built, wouldn’t he?’
‘I guess so, Detective.’
Fry had been listening to his accent. She knew he was Polish, but it was only the sound of his vowels that gave him away. His command of idiom was very good, and he hadn’t faltered on the use of tenses, which was often a problem for nonnative speakers.
‘Your English is excellent, Mr Dudzik. How long have you been in this country?’
The builder looked wary. ‘Eight years, Sergeant. I learned English back home, when I was a kid at school in Poland. When I came here, I talked English all the time with the people I met. Some of my fellow countrymen, when they come now, they don’t think they have to bother to learn English. It’s too much trouble for them. They think things will be translated into Polish for them, because they are so many. But I was one of the first to come, before my country was a member of the European Union, even. I always wanted to live in England, so I learned English. It’s the only way to fit in, yes?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He looked at her, still uncertain. ‘My papers are in order.’
‘I’m not doubting it,’ said Fry. ‘But you could do one important thing for me. Would you give my colleague, Detective Constable Murfin, a list of the men who have been working on your team here at the farm?’
Raymond Sutton stood to one side of the window and watched the police officers get into their car at the end of the drive. Quietly, he muttered a sentence to himself.
‘
As the car passed out of sight, he let the curtain drop. He turned back to face the room, looked around him for a moment, and finished the quotation.
‘
‘I’m sorry, Raymond? Did you say something?’
Sutton stared at Elaine, confused by her presence. He hadn’t noticed her come into the room. He’d been thinking that he was somewhere else, far away, in another life almost.
‘The Gospel of St Luke,’ he said. ‘Chapter seventeen, verse thirty-seven.’
‘I see, Raymond. Are you ready for your tea yet?’
‘King James version. Obviously.’
‘I’ll fetch it in, shall I?’
‘You can do what you like. It makes no difference now.’
A team from Sheffield University had been unloading equipment – shovels and trowels, wire-mesh screens for sifting bone fragments from the soil, evidence bags, tape measures and orange markers. One of the students was already using a video camera to record the position of the remains from every angle before the team approached it.
Fry knew that digging a dead body out of a grave was never as easy as burying a fresh one. When an unprotected corpse was placed in the ground, it formed an intimate union with the earth. Flesh rotted, fabric disintegrated, the skull, spine and pelvis became embedded in the soil. A casual digger would soon despair of freeing the entire body, even after it had spent a year or so in the ground. If anyone removed a body to bury it elsewhere, they were bound to leave a few bits behind.
‘We’re being allowed to approach for a few minutes’ consultation with the anthropologist,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘But then we have to keep clear. Dr Jamieson says he wants to protect himself from assumptions.’
‘Whose assumptions?’
‘Ours, I think.’
The forensic anthropologist’s task was the recovery of human remains, and the determination of age, sex, stature, ancestry, time since death, and any physical trauma that might indicate manner of death. Beyond that, he was not part of the investigation.
Fry laughed. ‘Are we allowed to speak to him at all?’
‘You could probably wish him a Merry Christmas.’
When he heard the laughter, the anthropologist looked up from the excavation with a suspicious scowl. He had a pale, bald head, almost the same colour as the paper scene suit he was wearing. Water gleamed on his scalp. From rain or sweat, it was impossible to tell.
‘How is it going, Doctor?’ called Hitchens.
‘Mixed fortunes, I’m afraid. A dry soil would have preserved the body better. But this is, well …’ He scooped a handful of mud that seeped through his fingers.
‘Too wet?’
‘Correct.
‘But there’s some good news, I take it?’
‘Well, you know, there are plenty of opportunities on an isolated farm for disposing of a body. If your aim is to reduce the remains to something unidentifiable, then burial is actually one of the slowest and least successful ways to achieve that.’
‘It’s much quicker just to leave it exposed somewhere, if you can get away with it,’ suggested Cooper.