Death

suit. He’d come into the woods from Old Hall, up the valley, so he came at the charred body from the opposite side of the clearing. He looked at Shaw. ‘You need to be this side, Peter. George.’ He pulled up a face mask which was over his Adam’s apple so that it covered his mouth.

They circled the burning body. Valentine saw it first because Shaw heard his breathing quicken, rattling in his throat. And then he saw it too — a human head, untouched by the fire, the skin still white, even the lips still red. The white flesh of the neck simply ended in the white ash of the rest of the body. It was a thought which shocked him, but Shaw thought it was as if the head was a cigarette filter, the rest of the body spent ash in an ashtray.

‘Christ,’ said Shaw, looking up at the tree tops, hoping to see a splash of blue sky, but finding only the drifting smoke. He’d let his eye return to the face for a nanosecond, but it had been long enough to know he recognized the victim, or recognized the birthmark on the unblemished cheek.

‘It’s one of the demonstrators — from up by the wind farm. George?’

Flames suddenly flickered within the body, crackling, so that the smoke thickened. Valentine covered his mouth with a handkerchief and stepped closer.

‘It’s him,’ he said.

‘Human candle,’ said Hadden. ‘Once the temperature’s high enough the body fat just goes on burning. The head’s the last bit left — the rest has gone. I’d say the source of the heat was on his back — there. .’

Shaw thought of the night-light left beside Arthur Patch’s bed, burning until it ignited the gas in the house, blowing itself out. These flames had proved more tenacious.

Hadden leant forward, using a pair of forensic callipers to mark the spot where the vertebra of the back showed through the white ash. The bone was black on the surface, but flaking away from the white calcium beneath, like a firestone in a chimney, set behind the hearth to collect and radiate the heat. ‘It’s a slow process, could go on for days,’ said Hadden. ‘We’re going to have to cover it, Peter, cut the oxygen supply, otherwise the head will burn. I’ll need a fire blanket. .’ he said, looking back at a fireman on the edge of the clearing. Then the CSI man let his eye run over the bundle of flesh and bone. ‘There,’ he said, using the pincers to point. ‘Looks like a torch to me.’

There was cylinder, reduced to the metal core, and what looked like a reflective disc.

So night time, thought Shaw. At Hendon they’d done work on victims of fire. There was a common belief that human beings can spontaneously combust — burst into flames, only to be found later, a pile of ashes in a room untouched by fire. But the science was clear. There needed to be a flame first — an intense source of heat, then the flesh burnt slowly, body fat feeding the flame, until nothing was left. The forest fire had flashed past the trapped victim, whatever had been in the rucksack had ignited and provided an intense source of heat for several minutes, igniting the body fat. Then the long, slow burn had begun. Question was: was he dead by the time the flames arrived, or did the fire overcome him?

The head was chin up, looking at the treetops, so Shaw got to within a few inches of the face. He thought if he did this now, quickly, the image wouldn’t end up in his nightmares. It was certainly the young man from the Docking Hill demo, the one who’d kept pace with the Porche. Had it only been last Friday? They’d been driving down to Wells for the East Hills press conference. The young man with the strawberry birthmark had put his hand on the passenger side sill, and Shaw had noticed the smart, stylish watch which showed the movement of the moon, catching the sunlight. ‘Should be a Rolex — separate windows for the sun and moon,’ he said.

Hadden began to sift some of the ash at the edge of the smouldering torso.

Shaw thought about Tilly Osbourne, up on the high lane with the demonstrators on the day her mother died. And Aidan Robinson, her uncle, had been up to the demos too, showing solidarity in the cause. And there’d been the placard, discarded in the hallway of No. 5, The Circle. .

Save Our Unspoilt Landscape.

SOUL

Hadden stood, a charred wristwatch held at arm’s length with callipers. ‘Sun and moon,’ he said.

Shaw edged one last inch closer. The mouth of the victim was open, revealing good teeth, still white. Shaw thought he could smell toothpaste, but wondered if it was just an olfactory hallucination, prompted by the pristine dentistry. Either way he had managed to put aside the stench of cooking meat, so that beyond it he could detect pine needles, which reminded him of Marianne Osbourne’s deathbed. Sweet pine needles. And then there was the scent he should have detected that day by her body: a thin trace of almonds in the air. The prickling hairs on his neck made his spine arch. ‘Cyanide,’ he said.

TWENTY-THREE

Valentine had taken a room at The Ship at Wells-next-the-Sea for the night. He lay on the bed for an hour, in the dark, his head on a pile of four pillows, so that he could look out the bay window towards the sea. A moonless night, the harbour was just red and green navigation lights, motionless between the dead black water of high tide. Downstairs he could hear life in the bar, a one-armed bandit shunting, the base note on the TV’s sound system, but no voices: Monday night, the hour for serving tourists food long gone, so maybe a local or two, but otherwise the bar would be empty, over-lit. There’d be a late rush from the campsites, but mid-evening was the graveyard shift.

The image he was trying to dispel was of the smouldering corpse they’d found in the woods. If he could erase that, free his mind from the moment, he could face a drink; that was Plan A. There was a Plan B: he could have the drink first, and that would almost certainly work; it had in the past. But he’d had a call from Jan Clay, who said she’d found out something that might help the East Hills inquiry and could they meet? He looked at his watch: 8 p.m. at Buccaneers’, a wine bar in the Dutch Barge on the quayside. For some odd reason it was important to Valentine that he turned up sober: cold sober. So he’d live with the image for an hour or two, pretending he was worrying away at the case: motives, suspects, evidence. But really he was just staring at that image, through the dark glass of the bay window.

He’d been on his feet for five hours since they’d found the corpse in the woods. They’d left the pathologist, Dr Kazimierz, at the scene. She’d been unable to find evidence of a cyanide capsule in the victim’s mouth, but was pretty certain that was how he died. The smell was distinctive and the man’s throat muscles were set in spasm, closing his windpipe — a classic sign, post-mortem, of cyanide poisoning. Shaw and Valentine had returned to The Circle to get a preliminary ID of the victim from his fellow demonstrator, Tilly Osbourne. The young man with the birthmark was called Paul Holtby. She didn’t know much: he was the regional organizer for SOUL! , and she thought he lived at Morston, along the coast. Single, committed, serious and efficient, Twine had got the local community copper at Morston round to the house. His nearest living relative was an aunt at the same address and she’d agreed to do a formal ID in the morning. Holtby had a flat in an old barn behind the main house on Morston quay. He’d last been seen by the aunt on Sunday afternoon at about five when he’d let himself into the main house to use the washing machine. Twine was running the name through the national computer. They’d get the team out to the demo at the wind farm in the morning, collect statements on the spot, try and build a picture. First question: why was Holtby in the woods at night? Second question: did he have any link to the original East Hills killing?

Out on the black water of the harbour a light winked out in a yacht cabin. Valentine slipped into an uneasy sleep. When he next looked at the Rolex it was a few minutes before eight. Buccaneers’ was below the deck of the Dutch barge, a central staircase dropping into what had been the main cabin. It was empty except for a party of German hikers, a family off one of the camp sites, the barman and Jan: she looked impossibly young, in jeans and a silk shirt, the neat blond hair lying perfectly. Valentine turned down a seat and ordered a pint — the Buccaneer served its beer from a barrel on the bar, and watching the barman took up another minute. Then they had to talk to each other.

‘We found a body in the woods,’ said Valentine, lifting the pint to his lips with a steady hand.

‘The barman told me,’ said Jan. ‘He’s pretty much Sky News round here. Not much left, right? And Joe Osbourne — arrested, charged?’ She shivered, but only in a make-believe way. She’d been married to a policeman for nearly twenty years so Valentine guessed she’d become inured to the intrusions of death. She popped a nut