infiltrating their boiler suits and being absorbed into the perspiration on their bodies. It was worst for the men working on top of the heap, where the heat rising from the compost itself made them feel as though they were slaving in the heart of a blast furnace, or stoking the boiler of a vast steam engine. They stopped for frequent rests, their places being taken by other officers who had been moving the manure aside, turning and separating it as they did so to make sure no evidence went unobserved.
As the digging went on, the smell got steadily worse and
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Cooper became more unpopular. Many venomous glances came his way as the top of the compost heap shrank and nothing more incriminating appeared than a tangle of blue baling twine or a rotted apple core.
Then a fork hit a solid object. Immediately, an officer dropped to his knees and used his gloved hands to dig into the stinking debris. Someone spread a plastic sheet on the ground, and the next few inches of manure were carefully transferred to the sheet, in case the material had to be packed up and sent to the forensic laboratory. The SOCO, who had finished with the fire, knelt alongside the officer, oblivious to the muck staining his knees and the swarms of flies that hovered around their sweating foreheads.
Finally, as a large clump of manure was scraped away, something white appeared among the dark fibres. It had been pierced by a tine of the policeman’s fork, and now a burst of exposed muscle and tendon appeared like a bullet hole in the middle of the bare, white flesh.
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IT
19
rry switched channels on the TV in her room until she landed on a news programme. She watched an item about a sex scandal involving a government minister, heard about a breakdown in
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talks in Northern Ireland, and listened to news of a long-running war in some African country where thousands of people had already died in an inexplicable tribal conflict. It was all very predictable.
She lay sprawled on her hard bed, nibbling one of the complimentary biscuits from a cellophane-wrapped packet on the bedside table. She had kicked off her shoes and taken off her sweaty clothes, and was wearing her black kimono over her underwear. She was wishing she had been able to find the time to call in at a shop in Skipton for some chocolate.
Then a shot of the woods at Moorhay came on the screen. It looked as though the camera had been positioned on Raven’s Side, where the bird-watcher, Gary Edwards, had stood. It focused in on the site where Laura Vernon had been found, but all that could be seen was the police tape. Then a reporter with a microphone appeared with a brief summary of the enquiry, and the scene switched to a shot of Edendale Police HQ, followed by a crowded room full of lights and microphones. At a table sat DCI Tailby, a police press officer and Graham and Charlotte Vernon. The familiar photo of Laura appeared in a corner of the screen. They were about to broadcast the appeal recorded that morning.
Several minutes were given over to coverage of the Vernon enquiry. To be of real interest to the media, Fry knew that these days murders had to involve children or teenage girls, or possibly young mothers. But it also seemed to make a difference what part of the country they happened in. Somehow it seemed to strike at the heart of English middle-class conceptions for a murder to take place on their own rural doorstep. If Laura Vernon had died on wasteland in a run-down area of London or
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Birmingham, it would not have been seized on so eagerly. But this was a murder in scenic, sleepy Moorhay, and the tabloid newspapers had been full of it all week. Where Diane Fry had come from, there were murders for the papers to report every day. Some weren’t given a high profile, even locally. And there were other crimes that hardly seemed worth mentioning. Like rape, for example.
After a few words of introduction from Tailbv, it was Graham Vernon who was doing the talking. Fry knew that the film clip would be recorded and played back over and over again at Edendale, where they would be looking for little giveaways in the Vernons’ performance, for discrepancies between the account they gave on screen and the statements they had given the police.
It was accepted practice to encourage the relatives in such cases to tell their story under the glare of the lights and cameras, knowing their words were being heard by millions of viewers. It put a pressure on them in a way that could no longer be legally done in the privacy of an interview room.
But Vernon looked well in control. He appealed in a steady voice for anyone who had seen Laura on the night in question, or who knew anything about her death, to come forward and assist police. He encouraged people to consider whether they had noticed anything strange about the behaviour of their husbands, sons or boyfriends. Any bit of information, however trivial it might seem, could prove useful to the police. He sounded as though he had been coached in the phrases by Tailby himself.
Then Vernon changed to a slower, more intimate tone as he
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talked about Laura. He called her ‘our little girl’ and described her as a bright, clever teenager who had had her whole life to look forward to, but had been brutally struck down. He talked of how well she had been doing at school, and described her
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love of music and her passion for horses. He told the watching millions that Laura had been due to take part in a horse show today. But her horse, Paddy, was still in his stable, wondering where she was. As an actor, he was only second rate. But that
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was how some people coped with these things.
Finally, the microphone was presented to Charlotte Vernon.
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Her eyes were dry and staring, and Fry wondered if she was still on some form of medication. She didn’t say much, but at
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least she sounded sincere.
‘We’re pleading with everybody: just help the police to catch whoever did this to Laura.’ And she stared directly into the cameras, gaunt and grief-stricken, while her husband put an arm round her shoulders to support her. It was the image that would appear in all the newspapers tomorrow.
