He walked past the trench, keeping well away from the edge. Halfway along, an officer was standing with a clipboard. As he drew near, Alvin recognised him as one of the CID aides at Skenfrith Street. He couldn’t remember the lad’s name, but he could be fairly sure he’d be recognised. Even now there weren’t many black detectives in Bradfield, and certainly none as distinctive as him.
Alvin stopped beside the aide and nodded a greeting. ‘You registering finds?’
‘Yeah. I just make a brief note and send them inside. That’s where the real work’s being done.’ He sounded wistful. Alvin couldn’t blame him. Nobody wanted to be a glorified clerk on an investigation like this.
‘Tell me what I’m looking at,’ he said.
The lad flashed him a quick look of surprise. ‘The developers sent the bulldozers in yesterday morning. First off, they sent a ripper down. That’s a sort of blade they put on the back of a ’dozer to literally rip the ground up. Behind it goes the actual bulldozer with the big blade that kind of digs the trench. The driver of the second bulldozer was about halfway along when he saw the ripper kicking up what looked like a skull. By the time he’d stopped and shouted to the foreman that there was a problem, the ripper had gone right along to the end. And when they looked closer, they could see what looked like a lot of bones. They were a bit stained from being in the earth, but they could still see they were bones.’ He pulled a face. ‘Especially the skulls. Little skulls, Sarge. It turns your stomach.’
Alvin had children. He understood the power of finding remains like these. ‘I bet,’ he said. ‘So who’s doing the excavations? We don’t have enough forensic specialists round here for something on this scale, surely?’
‘They contacted Manchester University. They’ve got a big archaeology department. They sent a whole team out this morning. More to come tomorrow, apparently. There’s a squad from the forensic science course at Bradfield Uni in the tent, helping to sort out the bones. It’s massive, Sarge.’
‘A bit of a nightmare,’ Alvin agreed. ‘And we don’t even know if there’s anything criminal gone on.’
This time the aide didn’t hide his surprise. ‘Well, there’s something. I heard DCI Fielding telling her team that they’ve spoken to the top nun at the Order of the Blessed Pearl and there’s been no authorised burials here aside from the nuns round the back. So at the very least, it’s illegal disposal of the bodies.’
‘I get that. But we don’t know yet when that happened. They’ve been here since 1930. We don’t have any professional interest in anything older than seventy years. So it might not be anywhere near our remit.’
His face fell. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. That’ll be why Fielding’s in such a bad mood. This’ll totally bust her budget. And she might not have owt to show for it.’
She might not have anything to show for it either way, Alvin thought. If there was glory to be had here, he had a hunch DCI Rutherford would be hugging it to his chest like a newborn. ‘It’s got to be done, though.’ Alvin clapped the aide on the shoulder and carried on along the trench. When he reached the end and rounded the corner of the convent building, he noticed the raised beds and neat rows of vegetables arrayed along the far side of the grounds. It wasn’t the horticulture that interested him, however.
It was the dog handler moving towards the cultivated area with her golden retriever. What piqued his curiosity was that Alvin happened to know this was no regular police dog partnership. He recognised the woman trotting alongside the handsome dog because he’d encountered her back when he’d still been with West Mercia, before Carol Jordan had recruited him for ReMIT. Sergeant Josy Rivera had brought her dog Paco along to one of the regular training weekends officers had to attend to maintain current knowledge of procedures and forensic developments.
The course had been held in a hotel with a health club and swimming pool. Josy had asked them to meet her in the locker room at the start of the session for a practical demonstration. Even Alvin’s human nose could detect a variety of scents – chlorine, sweat, the chemical fragrances of deodorants, hair products and colognes. ‘In one of these lockers is a dead rabbit,’ Sergeant Rivera had said. ‘It’s wrapped in clingfilm and double-bagged in sealed plastic bags. One of your colleagues brought it here this morning and decided where to put it. Even I don’t know which locker it’s in.’ She waved a key at them. ‘I have the key, but as you can see, there’s no number tag attached to it.’
She’d brought Paco in and immediately the dog had reacted with excitement, his tail sweeping to and fro, sniffing the air and casting back and forth. Within two minutes, he’d jumped up on a bench and directed their attention to one locker in particular. When Sergeant Rivera opened it, there was the packaged rabbit, just as she’d described it.
There had been a talk afterwards. Because the demonstration had been so effective, even to this day he could remember bits and pieces of what she’d said. Dogs have a sense of smell that’s up to a thousand times more powerful than humans. The man sitting next to Alvin had leaned across to mutter, ‘And yet they sniff each other’s arses. No accounting for taste.’
It took up to two years to train a cadaver dog, mostly because human bodies produce more than four hundred different volatile chemicals as they go through the five basic stages of decomposition. To help train the dogs, an American chemical company had produced synthetic corpse scents. Among them, Alvin vividly recalled, were ‘recently dead’ and ‘decomposed’. Not the sort of fragrance you’d be spraying on if you were hoping for a romantic evening.
‘If you’ve been
