Already Dead(25)

His mate pointed into the trees. ‘Up above. Something’s not quite right up there in the woods.’

In the CID room in Edendale, Gavin Murfin took a call. He looked at Diane Fry as he put the phone down. ‘We’ve got a body,’ he said.

Fry couldn’t resist that old surge of excitement. It was what she’d gone to the Major Crimes Unit for. It was what made her life worth living most of the time.

‘A body?’ she said. ‘What are we waiting for?’

‘Well, it might only be—’

But Fry had already stacked her paperwork back in her in-tray and was putting on her jacket.

‘Where is it, Gavin?’

‘A place called Sparrow Wood. It’s just off the B5056, west of Brassington.’

Fry hesitated and looked round the office. ‘Okay, that’s er…?’

‘South,’ said Irvine. ‘It’ll take about half an hour.’

‘We’d better get going, then.’

‘Me?’ said Irvine.

‘Of course. Are you coming?’

‘You bet.’

Grabbing his jacket, Irvine almost ran after Fry as she headed for the door. Hurst watched him go with a sour expression. Fry noticed it only for a second as she turned in the doorway.

‘It’s going to rain again, you know,’ called Murfin.

‘It’s always bloody raining.’

The water running through the edge of this wood had been no more than a trickle three days ago, according to the local farmer who owned the fields above. It was only a narrow drainage channel, taking a bit of water off the hillside, not even worth the name of a stream or brook.

There was a bigger watercourse to the west where a torrent crashed over rocks and scoured away the roots of trees growing too close to its banks. But some of the flood water had diverted this way and found a route into the channel where the body lay. The past forty-eight hours had filled the channel and overflowed its side, so that the ground for yards around was a swamp, boots squelching six inches deep into sodden peat. The water had dredged soil and debris from both sides. Much of the detritus carried down from the woods up the hill had come to a stop here, clogged up by a blockage in the channel.

The blockage was a man, naked and sprawled out in two feet of muddy water. He was lying on stones with his head tilted slightly backwards, his eyes staring up into the trees, the white protrusion of a toe or a shoulder bizarrely incongruous. From Fry’s vantage point on a rocky outcrop, the crime scene looked like a thick soup floating with pale, unidentified vegetables.

‘This will be a long job,’ said Wayne Abbott, the crime scene manager. ‘We’re trying to dam the water upstream and divert the flow. At the moment, the water is washing away our forensic evidence even as we watch.’

‘What about the water he’s lying in?’ asked Fry.

‘It’ll have to be pumped into a temporary reservoir and then sifted through carefully. We can’t see what might be in it otherwise. We’re working on the practical details. But, like I say…’

‘… it’ll be a long job, yes. Did he drown?’

‘The medical examiner thinks not.’

‘You can drown in a couple of inches of water.’

‘True. But only if you’re lying face down, I think,’ said Abbott. ‘Our victim is on his back, and well jammed in between the banks. The water would need to be at least nine inches deep to cover his face, wouldn’t it? Besides, the doctor says he’s been dead too long. Between thirty and forty hours. The water has only built up since then. We’ll know more when they can get him on the slab for a post-mortem.’

Fry nodded. ‘Of course.’

Luke Irvine was beside her, looking down at the victim, jotting down details and first impressions in his notebook like an assiduous student.

‘Wondering who he was?’ asked Fry.

‘Obviously. And I’m wondering who he met in these woods for this to happen to him.’

‘Do you think it would have been a stranger?’

Irvine seemed to take her question as a test. Would he remember what he’d been taught in detective training?

‘Well, an investigation begins with the assumption that there’s no such as thing as a stranger murder,’ he said. ‘In almost all murders, the assailant is known to the victim.’

Fry hadn’t really meant it as a test at all. But she could see that Irvine regarded her as some kind of strict schoolteacher who might put him in detention if he forgot his lines. There was no point in trying to explain what she’d really meant – it would take too much time and effort. So she might as well play up to his expectations.

‘Well done, Luke. That’s almost word perfect.’