‘OK.’
‘Well, three hundred and fifty people died in Eyam. The names of the victims are recorded on some of the cottages. Plague victims couldn’t be buried in the churchyard, so their graves are in the fields around the village. Whole families together sometimes.’
‘Are these places well known?’
‘Well known? They’re a tourist attraction.’
Back at West Street, Diane Fry disappeared for a meeting with the DI before the evening briefing, and Cooper didn’t get a chance to remind her of her promise. So instead of listening to the tapes, he took the opportunity to spread out the photos of the human remains found in Ravensdale.
The quality of crime scene photography had improved tremendously since the photographic department spent money on replacing its printing equipment. Colours had started to bear some relationship to reality, instead of looking like snaps taken by a passing tourist with a Polaroid. Now you could see that the stuff on the floor near a body was actually blood, not the corner of a donkey-brown rug.
Outdoors, they sometimes managed to get quite interesting lighting effects. In one of the Ravensdale photographs, Cooper could make out the dappling effect of sunlight through the canopy of trees. The sun had swung round to the south by the time the shots were taken, so it must have been around the middle of the day. The photographer would have been wondering when he’d get a chance for his lunch.
There was also a sketch plan done by one of the SOCOs, complete with arrows indicating the points of the compass. It confirmed what Cooper had noticed at the site: the feet of
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the victim had been pointing to the east and the head to the
west.
He had a feeling there was some significance in that alignment. It was one of those half-remembered things, a vague superstition in the back of his mind. He couldn’t have said who had put the idea in his head, or when. Maybe it was only something he’d overheard as a child, a whispered conversation among elderly relatives at a funeral, a bit of local folklore. East to west. Yes, there was some significance, he was sure. But the alignment of the body was just as likely to be a coincidence, wasn’t it?
From the fragments collected at the scene, the dead woman seemed to have been wearing a rather plain, light blue dress, underwear, tights and blue strappy shoes with one-inch heels. No coat, nothing worn outside the dress. It was unlikely that she’d walked down to the stream at Litton Foot herself, but not impossible.
The skeleton had been incomplete when it was found, with several small bones missing. And there was no jewellery that might have been used for identification. No engraved bracelets, no wedding ring. This woman had been someone’s daughter and mother. But had she been someone’s wife, too?
Cooper knew he might never be able to get a lead on how the woman had died. Not from the remains, at least. Forensics could perform wonders, but not miracles.
And there was the question of what had happened to Jane Raven Lee’s body after her death. The possibilities were bothering him. The dead woman hadn’t been buried, she’d been laid out and exposed to the elements. The whole thing had too much ritual about it. Cooper wished there was someone on hand who could tell him whether he was discerning a significant fact, or just imagining things again.
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The evening briefing didn’t last long. There wasn’t much to report, after all. A forensic examination of the scene had found no signs of a struggle near Sandra Birley’s car, which suggested her abductor had given her no chance to make a run for it, and had probably used a weapon to subdue her quickly. The Skoda had still been locked, and there was no sign of the keys.
The concrete floor of a multistorey car park was hell for a fingertip search. Who could say whether an item found on the oil-stained surface had been dropped by Sandra Birley, her attacker, or one of a thousand other people who had used Level 8 in the past few weeks? Scores of fibres had been recovered from the retaining wall and the ramp barrier. Partial footwear impressions were numberless. And the SOCOs had collected enough small change to pay their coffee fund for a week.
‘One question I’d like answered,’ said DCI Kessen, ‘is whether our man knew which CCTV cameras were dummies, and which weren’t. And if so, how? There’s no way of telling just by looking at them, is there?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘Maybe he’d worked there himself, or he knows somebody who does. Anyway, DC Cooper is already on to the employees angle.’
‘What do we make of the husband? What are the odds we’ll find a green Audi on the CCTV footage?’
Hitchens shrugged. ‘He seemed genuine enough to me. He says he was at home when his wife phoned him. We should be able to confirm that from phone records.’
‘So not much to go on at this stage.’
‘We do have two confirmed sightings of Sandra Birley prior to her abduction,’ said Hitchens. ‘She was seen leaving her office and walking down Fargate in the direction of the multistorey car park between seven fifteen and seven thirty. Even allowing for a margin of error on the part of the witnesses, she ought to have reached her vehicle by around seven forty.’
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‘Hold on,’ said Fry. ‘When was the last sighting of her exactly?’
Hitchens consulted his notes. ‘No later than seven thirty. A shopkeeper in Fargate saw her passing his shop.’
‘He was in his shop at seven thirty? What sort of shop is this? I thought everything in Edendale closed by six at the latest.’
‘It’s a shoe shop. And yes, it was closed. As luck would have it, the proprietor was in the store room stock- taking he’s closing down and selling up soon, so he’s doing a full stock check. But he could see through the shop on to the street. He said he’d seen Sandra Birley many times, and he knew she worked at Peak Mutual, though he didn’t know her name. We showed him the photos, and he’s positive about the ID.’
‘OK.’
Fry picked up the transcripts of the two phone calls. The fax sheets had been sitting on her desk only since this morning, but already they were getting smudged and creased at the corners. It was a plain paper fax, and they were supposed to be a lot better than the old thermal rolls. Maybe it was something to do with her hands. Too much heat.
She checked the information at the top of the first page, though she knew both messages almost by heart.
