Human Remains Read online

  DC Hollis, if you’re in the station, please contact Custody. That’s DC Hollis, contact Custody thank you.

  Penny Butler, Penny Butler, please call 9151. That’s Penny Butler, 9151. Thank you.

  Could the driver of a blue VW Golf parked in the rear parking lot please move it immediately.

  I gave up trying to drive in about a month after I started working at Briarstone. There were only three spaces allocated for the Intel Unit, and in fairness I didn’t need my car during the day as some of the others did. It cost twelve quid a week for the Park and Ride, but at least I didn’t have to fart around moving my car every five minutes because I was blocking someone in.

  I always got in at least an hour before everyone else. It gave me a chance to get settled, to do things quickly that needed to be done. A chance to brace myself for another week of it.

  There was no telling what order they’d roll in. It depended on traffic, the sort of weekend they’d all had, the weather and, in the case of the uniforms, whether they’d been called out for any reason. But one thing was sure: Kate would always be last, pushing it as far as she could, and when she arrived she would say hello to everyone in the office except for me.

  “Morning, Trigger. Kettle on, is it? Morning, Carol—good weekend? Morning, Jo, Sarah. Where did you get to on Friday? I lost you after the pub! Did you go to Jaxx? What was it like in there?”

  Eventually—a good twenty minutes after she’d taken her coat off and hung it on the back of the door—she’d turn the computer on and complain about how damned slow the system was. And maybe twenty minutes after that, Jo or Amy or Sarah or someone from the office next door would call for her and they’d all go up to the canteen on the top floor for breakfast.

  Today it was Carol.

  “You coming?” she said.

  Kate was already on her feet, purse in hand. “Absolutely. I’m ravenous.”

  “Morning, Annabel,” Carol said to me sweetly. “Do you want us to bring anything back?”

  Sometimes they asked me this. They never asked me if I’d like to go with them, of course, because they were afraid I’d say yes and then they’d have to make conversation with me.

  “No, thanks.”

  They’d already turned away from the door and the office was blissfully quiet again. If any of them had asked about my weekend, I would have told them. If they’d bothered, they could have heard all about how I found the body next door. I could picture their faces, rapt, over their platefuls of bacon sandwich, toast, and cheese scones. For once, they would listen and not interrupt. For once, my news would trump anything they could offer.

  But they didn’t ask, and so I kept it to myself.

  I’d forgotten to ask Kate to get a pint of milk in the canteen, and there was no way she would think of it herself, so after ten minutes of enjoying the peace in the office I got up, found my purse in my bag, and took the elevator to the top floor.

  They were all gathered around a table near the register, heads together. I could hear snatches of the conversation as I found a pint of 2 percent in the fridge and checked the sell-by date.

  “You see. I told you. Didn’t I?”

  “He’s only just moved out, Kate. He’s not even taken all of his stuff with him yet . . .”

  So, Carol had kicked poor old Rick out of the flat, then. I waited behind two PCs in their full patrol gear: stab vests, Airwave radios bleeping. Behind the counter Lynn was adding a generous glug of vinegar from an industrial-size plastic bottle to the poached-egg pan. It already had an ugly brownish scum of vinegar and egg-white froth floating on the surface. I looked away.

  “You started talking to the walls yet, then?” Sarah was asking Carol.

  “Don’t laugh. It is horribly quiet without Sky Sports on every bleeding second of the day though.”

  “You’ll be getting a cat next . . .”

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” Kate said. “It’s only her cat that stops Annabel from going completely batty, you know.”

  “Don’t be mean,” Amy said. “She’s not batty.”

  “She’s heading that way, if you ask me.”

  I stared at them, wondering if they really hadn’t noticed I was standing right there or if they were being deliberately rude.

  “Is that all you want, Annabel?” asked Lynn. She’d plopped eggs into the pan and was spooning brown water over them to hurry the cooking process along. I turned toward the register, opening my purse.

  “Yes,” I said. My cheeks were burning.

  “Oh, shit,” I heard someone say from the table behind me.

  They were all silent, then. I handed over a pound coin and took the milk and hurried away, not looking at the table, not looking at Lynn even though I heard her say, “Wait—your change!”

  The Chief’s Summary arrived by e-mail at half past nine, just as Kate came back into the office. In the twenty minutes or so since the scene upstairs in the canteen, I’d had a few private tears, washed my face in the ladies’ room, and decided to put it behind me. I knew they talked about me, after all. They talked about whoever wasn’t currently in the room, so I couldn’t consider myself special.

  Kate put the kettle on behind me and cleared her throat. “You want a tea?”

  “Yes, please. I’d love one.”

  She’d obviously been hoping I’d say no, but it gave me a perverse pleasure to take her up on the offer. When it was plonked onto the desk, it was very milky. I was thirsty enough for it not to matter. She was making some sort of an effort, after all.

  “Thanks, Kate. Looks smashing, just how I like it.”

  The summary normally contained about five or six items of note: crimes and incidents that had taken place on the previous day. Anything classed as a critical incident was included—armed robberies, sudden and suspicious deaths, suicides. Rapes and murders were the ones that were of particular interest to me, in case any of the offenders I was supposed to monitor had crossed the line. Although I could search through the overnight crimes on the system, the summary was a handy shortcut, since the most serious offenses would always be included.

  And there it was.

  Suspicious Death

  At approximately 2032hrs on Friday patrols attended an address on Newmarket Street, Briarstone. The neighbor had noticed a strong smell coming from the address and had entered the property and discovered the decomposed remains of a female in the living room. The deceased is believed to be a 43-year-old who lived at the address. Next of kin have been informed. Major Crime Department attended the scene and, although investigations are ongoing, the opinion was that there are no suspicious circumstances.

  That was all. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting—some sort of fanfare maybe—but it was a bland description, deliberately designed to inform those who needed to know and to obscure things from those who didn’t.

  The house next door had been full of people for much of Saturday. The forensics van parked outside my house, and, although I’d spoken to the first patrol that turned up, I waited around all day to be interviewed properly.

  My emotional state had been fragile, spinning from nausea and shock at what I’d seen and done, to annoyance that they were taking so long about it all, and guilt that I hadn’t called them right away, instead of breaking in like some lumbering real-life Jessica Fletcher.

  After I found the body, I went back home and shut the door. Then I’d opened the door again and thrown the cat out and shut the door behind her. In putting my hand under her belly I had felt—instead of soft fur—cold, wet, slimy muck all over her.

  The smell of it, on my hands, on my tights, my skirt. Black and green and brown, the colors you get when you mix together all the colors in the paint box, combined with the odor of putrefaction. I took my clothes off, right there in the kitchen, and put them in the washing machine. I turned the temperature up to hot and was about to turn it on when I suddenly realized that I shouldn’t. Maybe it was evidence.

  Of what?

  I washed my
hands with antibacterial hand wash that had a strong perfume, but even when I rinsed it off my hands still smelled bad. I got some paper towels and dampened them, then squirted some of the blue soap on them and rubbed at my legs, in case the substance had come through my tights onto my skin.

  And all the time, I was struggling not to vomit. Every so often I’d catch the smell at the back of my throat and cough, and gag.

  When I finally felt clean, I called the police.

  “Kent Police, how can I help?”

  “I just found a body in the house next door. It’s badly decomposed.”

  “Right,” said the female voice on the other end. I could hear her rattling away at her keyboard already, entering the opening code 240B for “suspected body.” “Can I take your name?”

  “Annabel Hayer.”

  I went through all the responses—address, phone number, all the details of what I’d seen (the light on) and heard (nothing) and smelled (putrescence) and seen (a body in the armchair)—until I’d convinced myself in my head that I’d imagined the whole thing.

  “We’re very busy tonight,” she said. “But a patrol will come out to you as soon as one is free.”

  I went upstairs, took a shower, washed my hair, and dressed in clean clothes, yet I could still smell it, fainter now but nevertheless there. I looked outside but there was still no sign of the patrol.

  The cat cried to be let in, and I shut the kitchen door and ran her a makeshift bath in the kitchen sink. I’d tried to bathe cats before and this was every bit as traumatic as all my previous experiences. She scratched my arms to shreds as I sponged her back and undersides down with my best organic pH-neutral additive-free shampoo and warm water. I got most of it off. She’d been licking herself too, her fur sticking up in spikes. The thought of it, and the smell of her, even when she’d been washed and rinsed and dried off with a dish towel, was enough to make me heave. As soon as she struggled free of the towel she started hurtling about the kitchen in a panic, knocking things flying. Fearing for my dishes, I opened the back door and she shot straight out.

  The patrol had arrived by then, and having gone next door, called in that there was indeed a body, and asked if they could please have someone else to deal with it, they had agreed that I could go off to bed.

  In the cold light of day on Saturday morning, everything had looked very different. The cat was sitting on the back step, looking exceptionally pissed off. She came in when I opened the door and immediately turned her back on me, sitting in the corner of the kitchen and only moving when I filled her bowl with food. The fur on her back and belly stood out in sticky spikes, but at least the smell had faded.

  I’d never met the Major Crime DC who eventually interviewed me, and, although he showed me his warrant card when I let him in, I instantly forgot his name. He told me he’d worked at Briarstone police station for the past year, and, when he said that, I recognized him from the canteen.

  “How are you?” he asked me at last, coming into the living room. “Must have been quite a shock.”

  It was late afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten all day. Every time I thought about it, I remembered the horrible inflated shape of the body, the color of the skin, and the puddle under the chair.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I think I was kind of expecting it, given the smell.”

  “Yes, it’s quite bad in there.”

  “You want a tea? Coffee?”

  “Coffee would be great, thanks. Two sugars. All right if I use your restroom?”

  I pointed him in the direction of the bathroom and then I went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, waiting for it to boil. On the windowsill of the kitchen was a little statue of an angel that I’d bought in a new age store in Bath. It was lit up by the sunshine, shining as though surrounded by a halo of glory.

  I brought the coffees into the living room. He was already sitting there, his pocket notebook out on his lap, writing something, head bent over the task.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You work in Intel, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m the public protection analyst. And I’m also one of the divisional analysts.”

  “You’re doing two jobs?”

  “Pretty much. There were four of us and I just did public protection, and then two of the team were redeployed last year and now there’s just me and another analyst. We share the stuff for the division between us.”

  He wasn’t remotely interested in our job descriptions but I was always hopeful that someone would eventually take note of the injustice of having to do twice as much work for no extra money. I nearly added something about how Kate just did the analysis for the North Division, and I did that and the public protection work, too. But, as always, I bit my lip and said nothing.

  “So,” he said. “You went in through the back door. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There was a light on. I thought that was a bit odd because I didn’t think anyone was living there.”

  “There was a light on? Whereabouts?”

  “In the dining room. There was a lamp on the table.”

  He was writing. I waited for him to finish, tense. “Let’s go back a bit. You said on the phone that you broke a window?”

  “No,” I said. “Not on purpose, anyway. I pushed at the door and the pane of glass was loose and fell inside the kitchen and smashed on the floor. One of the panes at the bottom of the door was broken already.”

  “But the door was open?”

  “No. The key was inside. I unlocked it.”

  More writing.

  “And you said there was a light on . . .”

  “Yes. In the dining room.”

  “Was it still on when you left?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t turn it off?”

  I stared at him, baffled. Of course I hadn’t turned it off. Why would I do that? Stumble back out in the dark? But then I hadn’t been thinking straight. Maybe I had turned it off after all.

  “I don’t think I turned it off,” I said doubtfully.

  He made a noise that sounded like a “hmm.”

  “Am I going to get arrested for breaking and entering?” I asked, accompanying the question with a laugh that sounded forced even to me.

  “Not right now,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got enough to do.”

  Taking my statement seemed to take forever, even though it was less than an hour. He got me to read his scrawled handwriting and sign his notebook to say I agreed with what he’d written. He said he’d type it up and get me to sign the proper version some time at work on Monday. Then he went back to the house next door, and left me in peace.

  Not long after that, there was a knock at the front door. A man I didn’t recognize: an ill-fitting jacket and jeans, a full head of gray hair swept away from his face in what might once have been swept off his face.

  “Hello. Sorry to trouble you,” he said, and of course what I should have done was shut the door there and then. But foolishly, and because I was polite, I didn’t.

  “I’m a reporter with the Briarstone Chronicle,” he said. “I’m here because of your next-door neighbor. I wondered if it was you who called the police?”

  I bit my lip. “I don’t know who called the police,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “They told me it was a neighbor. There isn’t a house on the other side, so I thought it must be you.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “Now, I’m really busy—sorry.”

  “Right. Thanks for your time.”

  I didn’t give him a chance to say anything else. Shut the door firmly. A few hours later there was another knock. I looked out through the peephole this time, and saw another man I didn’t know, definitely not someone in uniform. He was youngish, casually dressed, with dark hair that needed a cut, glasses. There was a woman standing a few paces behind him, with a huge camera dangling by its strap from her wrist. I didn’t open the door.

  Despite three showers and washing all my clothes, I
kept sniffing the air, the smell in my nostrils still. Maybe it was my imagination. The cat had curled up on the sofa, tucked into an indignant ball, her back to me and the room. It would probably be some time before she felt ready to look me in the eye again.

  It was nearly ten o’clock already and I’d hardly achieved anything useful. But I still couldn’t face starting the tactical assessment, so I opened up the dispatch system and searched for my name and address. This was, strictly speaking, against the rules, but if anyone asked I could probably argue a legitimate business interest for looking.

  CALLER STATES THERE IS A BODY NEXT DOOR

  *

  THERE IS NO ONE LIVING THERE

  *

  CALLER STATES THE CAT HAS COME IN SMELLING OF SOMETHING BAD AND HAS A SUBSTANCE ON HER FUR

  *

  CORRECTION: THIS IS INFTS CAT NOT THE NEIGHBOR’S CAT

  *

  PATROLS: AT55 UNAVAILABLE AZ31 UNAVAILABLE AL22 IN CUSTODY

  *

  INFORMED INFT THAT PATROLS WILL BE SENT AS SOON AS FREE REQUEST

  *

  INFT STATES SHE WILL WAIT UP FOR PATROLS

  *

  FROM VOTERS: RESIDENT SHOWN AS SHELLEY LOUISE BURTON

  *

  PLEASE CALL IF FURTHER DEV

  *

  2032 AL22 AT PREMISES

  *

  NO ANSWER TO DOOR

  *

  REQUEST MAJ CRIME ATTENDANCE—DET INSP PRESTON ON CALL

  *

  KEYHOLDER ADVICE, NO KEYHOLDER ON RECORD FOR THIS PREMS

  *

  REFER TO INTEL TO ADD TO LIST

  It went on beyond that for several pages. Various teams were called out, according to the protocol. The efforts to locate a next of kin for Shelley Burton were dutifully recorded; eventually they found an elderly aunt in Norfolk. No mention was made of the partner, Graham, if indeed I’d remembered his name correctly.

  “Did you see the Chief’s Summary?” I said. “There’s been another one.”

  “Another what?” Kate asked, peering over the top of her computer screen at me.

  “Another decomposed corpse. Only forty-three years old.”