Human Remains Read online

  Kate tutted at me. She always glossed over those, since technically there wasn’t any crime. Bodies found in the comfort of their own homes with no apparent suspicious circumstances weren’t our concern. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d found the latest one, I probably wouldn’t have given it much thought either. But there was something else that had been nagging away at the back of my mind: that Major Crime guy had queried what I’d said about the light being on. Clearly, when they went into the house, the light had been off. This in itself wasn’t what was worrying me; after all, maybe I did turn it off without thinking when I left, or maybe the first patrol had turned it off, or maybe the bulb had finally blown. But I remembered how I’d thought there had been someone in the house. I’d felt something—a presence—and at the time I’d put the feeling down to there being a person in the armchair, and any noises I heard as being the cat. But what if there had been someone else there all the time?

  “I just think it’s a shame,” I said. “Lying there all that time, and nobody even notices you’re gone.”

  “Mmm,” Kate said, but she wasn’t really listening.

  “I wonder how many there’ve been this year?”

  No answer at all this time. I wasn’t really expecting one. Kate was pretending to be engrossed in writing the biweekly report that we’d have to present to the management team on Wednesday, although what she was actually doing was updating her Facebook status on her phone.

  What the hell—I wasn’t busy. I set up a search to look for all calls and incidents where a body had been found since the start of the year. I added the wildcard search terms: “decomposed” or “decomposition.” Surely there couldn’t be that many I thought.

  But I was wrong.

  “Twenty-four,” I announced.

  “Twenty-four what?”

  “Bodies. Twenty-four since January. In Briarstone borough.”

  Kate sighed and put down her phone. She craned her neck around the edge of her screen and regarded me steadily. “What bodies? What are you talking—about?”

  “All bodies found inside a property in a state of decomposition.”

  “What are you looking at that for? We’re supposed to have this finished by lunchtime.”

  “And,” I said, pausing for an inaudible drum roll, “guess how many there were in the whole of last year?”

  She shrugged. “Twenty? Ten?”

  “Four.”

  She stared at me for a moment, her interest piqued at last, and came around to my desk to look over my shoulder. The figures were all there—the same criteria search for the two date ranges, showing a surprisingly high figure for this year so far, and a curiously low one for last year.

  “What about previous years?” she asked.

  “I think that’s what I’m going to check next.”

  “Can’t see the point myself,” she said. “Nobody’s going to be interested. It’s hard enough getting them to do anything when a crime’s been committed, let alone when there definitely hasn’t.”

  “Ah,” I said, tapping one finger on the end of my nose. “It’s all about the packaging. Community safety. Fear of crime. Social cohesion. Neighborhoods, all that.”

  Kate was right, unfortunately. Working as civilians in the police force was often a battle of cultures, trying to persuade senior officers that we had a worthwhile contribution to make to an investigation, to resource planning and to strategic initiatives, just as much as officers who had real experience of going out and arresting people. The nearest I was likely to come to a criminal was living in blissful anonymity two streets away from my local serial sex offender, or passing someone in the front office as they waited to be dealt with. I was never going to have to calm down someone who was holding a knife, nor tell someone that a loved one was dead. I was never going to have to try to persuade a woman to leave her violent partner, or tell a parent that their child was being abused. Instead I looked at all the figures, all the raw data that churned in day after day after day—forming it into patterns, looking for a way in. Even then, after finding something that was potentially interesting, trying to persuade the senior management that my recommendations were worth following up was often a battle. As I’d just said to Kate, phrasing it carefully to suggest that there were added benefits in terms of achieving home office targets was always a good idea.

  I looked at my list of incidents: twenty-four people, all found dead, alone, sometime after they’d died. Unfortunately, because the deceased weren’t classed as victims of crime, there was no way to search for other parameters such as age or sex, but scanning through a couple of the incident reports it was already clear that they weren’t all elderly people.

  I ran the same report going back to the start of 2005 and exported the data to a spreadsheet. A quick table showed just how interesting the latest results were—just three decomposed bodies in the whole of 2005. In the seven years between 2004 and 2011, twenty-two bodies—the highest in 2010 with eleven, but then it had been a very cold winter. And in 2012—there were twenty-four bodies in the first nine months of the year.

  At lunchtime I went out, walked up the hill to the town center, puffing a bit. On the other side of the road, Kate and Carol were also heading in the same direction, talking animatedly. They hadn’t seen me, or had chosen to pretend I wasn’t there. They were walking twice as fast as I was, anyway, and in a minute or two they would be at the top of the hill and around the corner, out of sight.

  On the way back to the police station I looked at the rows of terraced houses lining Great Barr Street, rows of dirty-looking steps and graying net curtains. Piles of mail against the inside of one frosted glass door; a couple of dead flies, legs up, on the windowsill of another. How many more people were out there, waiting to be found?

  I drove from the Park and Ride to the supermarket in the rain, the radio on, going through the list in my head of all the things I was going to do to treat myself after the trauma of the weekend. Maybe order some takeout. Have a long soak in the bath. Read a book, or watch a film.

  I had lived on my own for years, and I liked it. Besides, I had the cat. I had the angels to protect me.

  My mother was becoming frail. Since she’d had a fall last year, even though she’d only been bruised she had been too nervous to go out. So she issued me with shopping lists, instructions to collect her prescriptions and mail things for her, and on the way home from work I would stop at her house two or three times a week, make her dinner, and do the dishes. Technically she could cook for herself and do her own dishes, but when she’d been ill with a chest infection in December I’d cooked for her, and even though she was now well again I hadn’t quite managed to get out of the habit when I was over there.

  Her house was an old Victorian terrace just outside the town center. Still parked outside was her old Nissan Micra, rusting to pieces and yet she insisted on insuring it just in case she suddenly felt the urge to leave the house. I pulled in behind it and sat for a moment, savoring the feeling of being alone, being quiet.

  I opened the front door with my key, which I kept on a separate key ring as a kind of message to myself that this wasn’t a permanent arrangement. “Only me, Mum!” I called. From the back room I could hear the sound of her television, loud—one of the soaps, as it always was at this time of the evening.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, without looking up. “Can you turn the thermostat up a little bit? Getting a bit chilly.”

  I reached over her head and twisted the dial until I heard the whoomph of the gas boiler in the kitchen firing up again.

  “I got you one of those carton soups,” I said. “Broccoli and Stilton.”

  She made a face but said, “All right, dear. If it needs eating up.”

  It was my favorite, this one. I opened the spout and put it in the microwave, even though she always made a fuss if I didn’t do it in a saucepan. The small pan was in the sink, crusted hard with what looked like scrambled egg that she’d made for her breakfast. While I was wa
iting for the soup I ran the hot tap into the pan and squeezed a jet of dishwashing liquid into it. I stopped the microwave before the telltale ping and stirred the soup into a bowl, added it to a tray with a buttered whole wheat roll on a plate, and took it to her.

  “No white rolls?” she said plaintively.

  “The Co-op didn’t have any,” I fibbed. “Anyway, whole wheat’s better for you. You need more fiber, Mum, especially if you’re having scrambled eggs every day.”

  She’d gone back to the television.

  I washed the dishes, scrubbing the pan clean and wishing she would at least leave it to soak, and then I cleaned the kitchen surfaces. After that, I went back into the living room. She’d eaten all the soup, despite claiming not to like it.

  “While you’re here,” she said, “can you have a look for my bankbook?”

  There was usually a “while you’re here” moment, invariably just as I had my coat on and was about to leave.

  “Which one?”

  “The savings one.”

  I went into the other room and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where she kept her expired passport, driver’s license, warranties and instruction manuals for every electrical item she’d purchased in the last thirty years—all the documents of life she was never going to need again, and buried underneath them the ones that she would: bank statements, her disabled parking permit, family photographs.

  “Mum, it’s right here.”

  I looked at the open drawer, at the passbook right on the top where it never was—and noticed how everything in there was neat and tidy, as though someone had given it a good cleaning-out. She must have done it herself, put some order into the chaos for once, and forgotten all about it.

  She was getting old and forgetful I found myself thinking as I took the book to her. Until now she’d always been sharp as a pin even though physically she was frail. How much longer would she be able to cope in her own house, even with me coming in to check on her?

  BRIARSTONE CHRONICLE APRIL

  Body of Missing Rachelle Found in Baysbury Home

  Police called to a flat in Baysbury Village on Tuesday night were shocked to discover the decomposed remains of Rachelle Hudson, 21, who was reported missing from her Hampshire home last December.

  Neighbors told of seeing a young woman moving into the property early in the New Year, but had assumed she had moved out again as they had not seen her after that. “We went over to say hello, but she didn’t invite us in,” Paula Newman, 33, told us. “She seemed busy. We didn’t knock again and when we didn’t see her after a while we thought she’d gone. I can’t believe she was in there the whole time.”

  Miss Hudson’s family reported that Rachelle left the family home in Fareham after an argument. She had been suffering from depression for some time. It is not known why she decided to move to Baysbury, or how she died. Her body was only discovered when police were alerted by the private landlords of the property in Balham Drive, after rent payments stopped.

  A police spokesperson said, “Police were called to an address in Baysbury where the badly decomposed body of a young woman was discovered. The death is thought to have been due to natural causes.”

  Rachelle

  They all said in the newspapers that they didn’t know why I went, or where I’d gone. They said that it was completely out of character. They said I had friends and a loving home. They said I must have been taken by somebody because I would never have left. My mother said I was doing well at college and I had a good career ahead of me. That I had my whole life to look forward to. She said I was a beautiful girl, and that I was loved by my whole family.

  All of that was lies.

  She appeared on the telly—I saw her, tears in her eyes—appealing for me to get in touch. And then she appealed to whoever had taken me: “Someone, somewhere must know where my Rachelle is, where my baby is . . .” She asked them to get in touch with the police, to put a mother’s mind at rest.

  My baby. I actually heard her say those words. I was sitting on the sofa in my new flat in a state of complete shock at seeing my own mother on the television appealing for me to get in touch. I was wrapped in three sweaters, cold, too worried about money to put the heat on. I was always cold, even in summer.

  Still it meant I couldn’t go out, for a while, after that. I’d already seen the neighbors once and I was hoping that they wouldn’t have recognized me. I’d dyed my hair black, given it a rough choppy cut—hard to see the back but better than nothing; at least my hair was thick enough for the uneven bits not to really show. With a bit of makeup smudged around the eyes I looked like a proper emo. I doubt my own mother would have recognized me, in truth, but then she had a hard time looking at me even before the makeover.

  I ran out of medication after two months here but I couldn’t go and find a doctor. So I did without, and it was OK. I was sick of the medicated numbness anyway. At least with the black cloud you knew where you were. It was always there anyway; it was just like with the pills it was hidden out of sight. I liked to know it was there. Even if it was bad, at least it was real.

  After I saw my mother on the news, I couldn’t go out for a few days. If I didn’t go out, then I couldn’t buy food. I would just have to stay in and go without. And by the time I really needed to go out and get things, maybe I would have lost—what? Four pounds? Maybe even seven? It had been a long time since I’d had a good weight loss like that. I would lose a pound here, half a pound there. Every so often if I had a really bad day I’d put weight on, but usually I made sure that I lost it again, quickly. I would say to myself that by the time I go back (if I ever want to go back, that is) I’ll be thin and beautiful and maybe then they’ll all start listening to me and treating me better.

  I like this flat. It’s tiny, of course, but it’s furnished and they let me have it for six months. I used the money Gran gave me. They didn’t know about that. She gave me seven thousand pounds before she died, told me to put it in a bank account and not tell them. She left me some other money in her will, but she knew that they would take that away.

  Gran was the only one who loved me no matter what, the only person who understood my drive toward perfection. She never once told me I was wasting away, or too thin, or needing to put a few pounds on. She never once told me I was ugly looking like this, nor did she ever tell me I was beautiful. To her, I was just Rachelle. I was the same little girl who’d played in her backyard when I was small, who’d dressed up in her cocktail gowns and high heels.

  Whenever I thought of Gran, of being at Gran’s house, it would make me smile. It was the only thing that made me smile.

  I wanted to start running. I thought about going early in the morning before anyone was awake. When I was at school I loved running, I loved the feeling it gave me, and I got on with the gym teacher better than any of the other stupid teachers who were always going on about coursework and deadlines and vocational qualifications. Miss Jackson didn’t give a shit about any of that. She liked me because I never begged off sick, always helped her clear the equipment away. In years gone by the school had funding specifically for athletics, for transporting students to track events with other schools, but they didn’t do that anymore. I was the only one bothered, in any case. In the end I got so bad that I had to leave school, even though I needed to run still and who knows, I might have gotten better if I’d been able to run properly and do weights and spinning classes and things other schools got to do.

  But the running was a mistake. I put the effort in but my legs didn’t really work the way they used to. It was like my body had already died and was just waiting for my mind to catch up. And maybe that’s what the black cloud is, after all. Maybe the black cloud is death and I just didn’t recognize it for what it was. And so many of us are still walking around the world but we are all just dead because of the cloud inside us and outside and all around us.

  I was under the cloud and there was no way out of it, no escape from it. It was like being in a
maze where every path you choose is the wrong one; every path leads to a dead end. Except for one. There’s one path, which is the way out. I just needed to find it.

  Colin

  Another mind-numbing day at work, although at least it’s Tuesday again, which means it’s gym night, which means I shall manage to sleep. Last week’s effort is dutifully recorded on my fitness app, ready and waiting to be beaten.

  I’m finding it quite disturbing the amount I’m masturbating. So far this week it’s been hours every night. I think it must be a combination of boredom and too much porn, this obsession.

  So I find comfort—of a sort—in my routines. Monday is study night. Tuesday I go to the gym. Wednesday is laundry and housekeeping. Thursday is college. Friday is takeout and film night. Saturday and Sunday—well—I like to keep my weekends flexible shall we say. And of course there are the visits I make to my friends. I like to keep up with them.

  The main focus for my attention, however, is always the study. Although the last degree course I did was very interesting, I didn’t find it a particular challenge. All my essays were on time—some of them were even early—and I got an A without even trying.

  When that course came to an end last year I looked at the options for part-time study and there were very few left that appealed. I even considered taking biology again, as that had been the most enjoyable. But then I saw “NLP and behavioral analysis techniques for business and social interaction.” The business part is neither here nor there. I have no interest in furthering my career. But I was intrigued by the idea that a course might grant me some insight into the thoughts and intentions of others. And it has been fascinating, if undemanding. Very few of the courses I have undertaken at the college have been taxing, and this was no exception. No, the intriguing thing for me has been the additional avenues I’ve been able to explore as a result: thought transference, hypnotism (as distinct from hypnotherapy, another matter entirely), neurolinguistic programming (a misnomer if ever there was one), and brainwashing. I rarely do a course without undertaking some additional study, especially if the subject captivates me, and this one in particular has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Although it’s unusual for me to continue with a subject beyond a year’s study, unless it’s a degree course, I have found this one particularly absorbing, and so I have moved on to the higher-level course. Quite surprising that some of the other participants have done the same; they have never struck me as being especially intelligent.