Karen McMahon. 'Any chance of anything from the killer?'
Pettet almost managed a smile. 'Always a chance. There's a chance you'll win the lottery isn't there? Only possibility is the rope. Bits of skin caught in there, perhaps, but any cellular material will have been destroyed by the creosote.'
Thorne turned, raised his eyebrows.
Pettet explained, slowly. 'Creosote is used to weatherproof the railway ties. Same stuff you put on your garden fence. Over the years it's leached into the water running along these ditches. Ironically, if she'd been buried on higher ground, somewhere drier, the creosote in the soil might have acted as a preservative and we might have had a lot more of her left.'
To Thorne, the disappointment in Pettet's voice sounded strictly professional. Not sentimental like those silly parents with their jewelry boxes full of hair and fingernails…
Thorne glanced over to the other side of the tent where a small pile of dirty rocks stood in the corner. Petter caught Thorne's look. 'At least all the bones are there. The killer took the trouble to make sure the foxes didn't get at them.'
A layer of rocks laid carefully on top of the grave. Rocks too heavy to be shifted by the snout of something hungry. Rocks, then a layer of mud two feet or so thick and underneath it all, the body of a 14year old girl shrouded in bin-liners, rotting beneath an old carpet. Safe from foxes.
Safe from everything.
A few minutes later outside the tent, Thorne dropped a hand on to Phil Hendricks's shoulder. 'Don't get big- headed, but it's a treat to talk about death with someone who doesn't behave like he's suffering from it…'
'Wish he was,' Holland muttered. 'Miserable sod.'
Hendricks grinned. 'He was hard work, wasn't he?'
'Like I don't know what fucking creosote is!' Thorne shook his head, the wounded expression just what was needed to set them off. They all laughed then, as they desperately needed to. They laughed and shook their heads as they stepped clumsily out of their bodysuits. McEvoy lost her footing and her hand reached out to Holland for support. The laughter stopped quickly after that, and they all stood in silence for a few moments, taking in lungfuls of wonderful dirty London air.
'I don't understand,' Hendricks said, looking around. 'He obviously didn't want her disturbed, you know, by animals…'
Holland nodded. 'Must have taken him ages to find all those rocks. There's not many of them anywhere round here.'
'… but he didn't seem to much care where he buried her. She wasn't very well hidden.'
'She wasn't hidden at all,' Holland said. 'She wasn't hard to find. Nobody'd ever bothered to look for her, that's all.'
McEvoy lit a cigarette, spoke as she exhaled. 'Obviously he didn't think anyone would look for her.'
'Oh, he knew they wouldn't,' Thorne said. 'He made sure of it.' She got into a blue car, sir. A Cavalier I think they're called…
'He did this when he was fourteen,' McEvoy said. 'Then he disappears, and pops up again over fifteen years later. Fifteen years.'
Thorne nodded. He knew what was coming. He asked the question out loud, the one he'd asked himself as he'd stared down at Karen McMahon's remains. 'How many more bodies are there out there?'
It was warming up. There was no wind at all where they stood at the foot of the embankment and the smoke from McEvoy's cigarette rose straight up, blue against the concrete-coloured sky.
'No chance on the DNA then?' she asked.
Thorne shook his head.
'I told you,' Hendricks said.
Thorne shrugged. Worth a try. It was all academic anyway. They knew who it was lying back there inside the tent, in a hole they dignified with the word grave, and they knew who had put her there. There would be nothing in the way of concrete evidence on the Palmer-Nicklin case, on the Garner case, to present to anybody. But they had found a body. Bulls eye. Thorne had a corpse to offer up to his superiors. He saw himself rather like a cat, dropping a dead bird at the foot of its master. Stroke me. See? Look at how clever I am. Thorne had never felt less clever in his life.
They turned at a rustle of canvas from behind them, and saw Pettet emerge from the tent carrying a small plastic evidence bag. He pulled down his mask and strolled across to them. Thorne was pleased to see that he had been right about the bad skin.
'I thought you might want to see this.'
He held out the bag, and Thorne and the others clustered around, staring at what was inside. Whatever it was had once been a bright colour, but was now faded and thick with black mud. It was Holland who first made sense of the broken down and barely legible lettering.
'Bloody hell, I used to love those. Can you still get them?'
Hendricks leaned in a little closer, peering at the plastic bag. Its sides were streaked with muck. The bottom filled with dirty water, gritty with tiny stones and traces of bone marrow. 'What is it?'
'It's the wrapper off a chocolate bar,' Thorne said. 'And no, I don't think you can get them any more.' He guessed not anyway, unless Nicklin's tastes had changed. It wasn't the same brand as the one they'd found licked clean and clutched in Charlie Garner's hand, but its presence chilled him every bit as much.
Thorne took a few steps up the slope of the embankment towards the cars, stopped and looked back. He spoke to Pettet, staring over his head at the small white tent. 'Be careful taking her out of there, will you?'
Pettet opened his mouth to reply, but Thorne was already turning and climbing away up the hill. He clutched the white plastic bodysuit in his fist, wondering just how much protection it provided against what Hendricks had called the little pieces of death. Back in that tent, there would have been millions of c-hem floating around, settling unseen against the bright white material. Some would have got through and ended up sitting on the skin, nestling in the cuffs and trapped on the soles of shoes. Waiting to sparkle when the time was right.
When it was dark enough.
Thorne took a breath and started to climb faster. He was starting to feel the ache in his thighs as he took out his phone and dialed Vic Perks's number.
He would have liked to have stayed and waited until they brought her out. That would have been interesting. He wondered how she would look. Probably just one more stain on that manky old carpet he'd wrapped her up in and tossed across his shoulder. The outline of her reduced down and imprinted on it. Bodily fluids marking out her skinny frame in the cheap nylon pile.
He would have liked to have stayed, but he needed to get to work. He was annoyed but he was not letting it get to him. He was angry that his past was being disturbed, examined, when he had taken such great care, always, to ensure that to all intents and purposes, it had never really existed. He was in control of what lay behind him, every bit as much as he was of what lay ahead. It wound him up to see them taking a little of that control away. He felt usurped. But he wasn't going to let it spoil things.
Let them uncover a small piece of who he used to be. It wouldn't do them any good at all. He was about to take another leap into the future. He'd felt close to it the night before. It had been there, almost within his reach when Caroline had been going on about kids. Then afterwards, as she had sobbed and shouted, as he'd reached out to draw her into an embrace, it had come to him.
The way forward.
Two major changes to the way he was going to go about things, now that he was working alone again. Two. And each on its own enough to ratchet up the excitement, to get whatever it was that spewed out adrenaline working overtime. Even as he considered what he had decided to do, his exhilaration was tempered by the thought that he would never be able to top it. How could he?
He was being far too modest, of course. Hadn't he thought the same thing with his hands around a woman's neck, imagining Palmer's hands around another doing as he'd been instructed? When he'd put the gun to that young girl's head and pictured another gun being raised? A gun, as it turned out, in somewhat shakier hands. Now, things were about to change. He had his new motor. Never stay still and never go back.
This time, the victim would not be chosen at random. She, and it would be a she, would not be plucked from the crowd. She would be carefully selected.
