But there had been too many instances when small items of forensic evidence had been overlooked until it was too late.
Li/ was lighter than Cooper, and had perfected that effortless rhythm that allowed her to float down in easy steps. She had already undipped her belay and removed her harness by the time he touched bottom. She shouted up to a colleague at thetop, and her case was lowered down to her.
‘Right,’ said Liz, as Cooper undipped his straps. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’
The floor of the quarry was littered with lumps of gritstone blasted away from the walls. To the cast, a vast stack had been heaped up to block access to the site. Li/. Petty took some shots of the quarry floor. Then she crouched by a large rock, opening her case and unfolding a tight stack of evidence bags.
‘We’re looking for clothes, right? Well dressed? Casual, or what?’
‘Yes, well dressed.’
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‘We can discount the donkey jacket, then.’
Cooper leaned over her shoulder. She was pointing to a dark, sodden mass on the ground. It reeked of mould, and patches of the fabric were turning green with mildew. There were rips in the leather patches on the shoulders.
‘It’s been there too long, anyway.’
‘Pity. It could probably have told you a lot about the owner. What he had for breakfast, for a start. Those encrusted stains have survived well.’
Much of the debris and rubble from the quarrying operations had simply been left in place, and there were still lethal shards of buried metal and invisible holes to fall into. Cautiously, they picked their way among the stones, glad of the boots that protected their feet from the sharp edges and the sudden shifting of the ground that could turn an ankle.
Cooper pointed up to the edge of the quarry. ‘If the clothes were thrown over the side oi the quarry, it would have been from up there somewhere.’
Liz tried to push her helmet back from her eyes, but it soon slipped forward again as she bent to clamber over a boulder that must have weighed a couple of tons. Now and then, she stopped to examine something more closely. Cooper waited patiently each time, holding out little hope that the grubby-coloured scraps of material lying among the debris had belonged to the Snowman.
‘This is more like it.’
She was taking photographs again, maneuvering for different angles to identify the exact spot, then going for a close-up.
‘What have you got?’
Li/, held up a blue garment, her tweezers gripping a corner of fabric. ‘Knickers. They’re quite recent. A bit damp, but no more lhan lyin^ in the snow would cause.’
Cooper considered the scrap of material. ‘If those are out of the Snowman’s bag, it casts a new light on the enquiry.’
‘It tells you something about his sexual inclinations, perhaps.’
‘I was thinking more of a woman accompanying him. We had assumed we were looking for male clothing.’
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Li/ chose a paper bag as a temporary container for her rind. The blue pants would have to be allowed to dry out naturally in the air, rather than sealed in airtight plastic that would encourage the proliferation of microorganisms.
There were shouts from on top of the cliff again. Cooper turned, gave them a thumbs-up and pointed at the bag.
‘DI Hitchens says this quarry is a Knightsbridge boutique,’ he said.
Liz held up the bag and studied the underwear critically. ‘It you ask me,’ she said. ‘We’re in an Age Concern charity shop.’
Diane Frv found herself feeling a little guilty about Ben Cooper’s
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allocation in his absence to the quarry job. But she reassured herself by reflecting that, if he had actually been at the meeting, he would certainly have volunteered anvwav. He was that sort of man. No sense at all.
But to help him out she went to have a look at what he had on his desk, in case there was anything urgent that needed to be dealt with. The first file she1 noticed was the one on Eddie Kemp, the window cleaner. Since Kemp had been arrested, there had been a positive snowstorm of calls, accusing him of every offence in the book. According to the callers, he had been getting up to everything from flashing to stalking, from social security fraud to child abuse. And there were at least three calls naming him as the killer of the man found on the Snake Pass.
The information had been copied to the incident room, but the reports were lacking in convincing details like names, places and times. An absence of detail was usually the giveaway for malicious calls. Eddie Kemp wasn’t top of the popularity stakes among his neighbours, by the look of it. So it might come as a shock to some of them to find out that he had already been bailed and was back at home. What the police really needed was reliable intelligence on his associates, and witnesses to the assault or the events just before it.
But there was one useful piece of information that had come through. One of the rolls of blue plastic sheeting from Kcmp’s car had revealed the impression of two objects shaped like baseball bats, and traces of both human blood and sweat had
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been obtained (rum the plastic. DNA analysis could provide a match it the division was willing to pay (or samples to he sent to the Forensic Science Service laboratory. So progress on that had become a budgetary decision.
Fry wrote a note tor Ben Cooper to read when he eventually returned to his desk. There were other enquiries piling up tor him, too, and most of the Hies had messages attached to them phone calls from the Crown Prosecution Service, officers in other departments or other sections, and even the victims of crimes themselves, wondering what was happening to their case, desperate to contact the person they naively thought was busy investigating it. But they would all have to wait. She just hoped that Cooper was wearing a safety harness. The last thing they needed was another casualty.
Fry’s phone rang again. It had that tone which usually meant a call she didn’t want to answer. This time it was the control room informing her that the search of the quarry had been abandoned. The mountain rescue team had
