so incredibly cold. In a moment he was calf-deep, then knee-deep, and with his feet in the mud, it was a huge effort to actually take a step. It was like walking through molasses.
Ahead of him, the body did a quick spin.
Flynn then felt the power of the tide at the back of his legs, pushing his knees — but he forced himself on, keeping upright and walking like a toy robot as he dragged his feet.
Then the body twisted into an ugly angle and ran against a muddy bank, pausing as if to take breath. The head seemed to pop up at a loose angle and look at Flynn.
He saw his chance. He pushed himself on, trying to run before the body moved again out of reach. He lunged to grab hold of a sleeve, missed, lunged again and this time grabbed the dead woman’s left hand, which felt terrible, cold, delicate and awful.
Flynn’s face creased in horror, but he held on, conquered the urge to recoil, and pulled the body towards him and took hold of the neck of the jacket.
He waded back against the flow of the tide, but felt like he was losing hold, so, as unpleasant as it was, he scooped her up into his arms as though she was a corpse bride, then stumbled across the channel and up the nearest bank to lay her as delicately as possible on a grassy mound and sank down on his sodden knees alongside her.
Having gone as far as he had, Flynn thought it only right and proper to finish the job and carry the body up onto dry land, to a point where the emergency services could easily get to her. Not that she needed an ambulance now, but paramedics usually turned out to such incidents and did the job of transporting the corpse to the mortuary. The cops would definitely come, too.
She was quite light and for a moment Flynn had the horrible thought that her lolling head might drop off as he made his way from grass bank to grass bank, leaping over the narrow channels, so he cradled it in the crook of his arm to stop it flopping about.
His eyes were drawn to her face, the skin wrinkled from immersion in water. He noticed the remnants of fine white foam and mucus under her nostrils and at the corners of her mouth — one of the few external indications of drowning, though he was no expert in such matters.
Not so long ago, he guessed, she would have been very good-looking and her long black hair would have been quite spectacular. Now clods of it had fallen out and she had some ugly bald patches on her head.
‘What a shame,’ he breathed.
She was wearing a variety of rings on her fingers that looked expensive, he also noted. Including a wedding band.
He stumbled up to the side of the road that led to the picnic area he had been planning to walk through, and placed her gently on the grass and exhaled.
Not that he was out of breath. Five years of playing and landing big game fish, some marlin in the region of 1,000lb, and most heavier than this woman, had made him into a fit, strong guy.
He shuffled out his mobile phone and tapped out treble-nine, standing by the body as the line connected.
Her eyes were still wide open, but now they seemed to be staring imploringly at him.
Henry had mentally switched off.
Professor Baines, foolishly prompted by Henry, was now on a roll, explaining energetically to the detective about his lifelong obsession with the teeth of dead people.
‘Problem was, you see, there was, is, no internationally accepted standard for ante-mortem dental records and there are several hundred types of dental charts used around the world… no consistency
… which is where I came in and then got my gong, as it were,’ he spouted proudly.
A blank-faced detective superintendent sipped his coffee.
‘Symbols and designations were — are — by no means standard, and, of course, the general record-keeping of overworked dentists is pretty appalling too. And some use their own systems anyway… so I devised an ID database that cross-checks between all known ways of cataloguing records.’
Baines went on to triumphantly explain the intricacies of the system he had been researching and devising for over twenty years.
‘Still not foolproof, of course,’ he admitted. ‘Human error, bent and lazy dentists and all that. But it’s still pretty good and from my own research and knowledge I’m pretty certain I can already put some geography on what I’ve seen in the girl’s mouth.’
Henry suddenly perked up. ‘Really?’
‘Which could help to pinpoint exactly where she came from. I’d put her as Eastern European, possibly Russian or one of its surrounding states. I’ll do X-rays and take a sample from the fillings, the gold one and the concrete ones, and look at the other dental work in there.’
‘Russian?’ Henry queried with arched eyebrows.
Baines shrugged enigmatically. ‘First guess.’
‘I’m impressed.’
Henry’s mobile phone rang before he could ask Baines the next question. His ringtone was a jaunty James Blunt number all about sunshine and making love, reflecting his currently happy state of mind.
‘Detective Superintendent Christie, how can I help?’
It was the Force Incident Manager, or FIM, based in the communications room at police headquarters at Hutton, just to the south of Preston. The FIM was the officer who contacted and turned out SIOs. Henry got a lot of calls from that source.
The FIM, a uniformed inspector, outlined the nature of the incident and asked Henry if he wished to attend.
He said yes. There was rarely an occasion when Henry refused to have a look at a dead body. He finished the call with an estimated time of arrival and looked across at Baines with a grin. Who better to be having a coffee with at such a time than a Home Office pathologist?
Henry and the professor made their way back to the mortuary where Henry climbed into his car, a Mercedes coupe, and Baines said he would follow on a short while later when he’d finished in the office. Leaving the mortuary car park, Henry was instantly on the A588 and by turning right and travelling south a few miles he was soon at Conder Green. He slowed and turned off the road in front of the Stork and drew up in the car park at the front of the pub.
From where he was, he could see activity about a hundred and fifty metres dead ahead at the old railway bridge over the River Conder. There was an ambulance, a marked police car, a couple of other vehicles on the grass verge and a huddle of people.
Henry went to the boot of his car, where he always kept the bits and bats of paraphernalia that a good detective always carried. This included the water-and-windproof jacket that he hunched into and zipped up. Even in the few moments exposed to the weather here he had shivered at the cold of this bleak location.
He always preferred to approach the scene of a death on foot if possible. He thought it gave him some sort of psychological insight into what might have happened, although he had no evidence to back this up. Not that he had any reason to suspect that this death was anything more than a tragic accident and his presence at it was simply a procedural thing.
That said, he never made the assumption that any sudden death was straightforward. He always thought murder, then backtracked from there. A thought process that had been ingrained in him since the year dot — ever since his first-ever lesson about dealing with sudden deaths at the police training centre when he was but a ‘sprog’, the derogatory term used to describe probationer constables.
And death by drowning was always worth a proper look, even though few such deaths were the result of homicidal foul play, which is why he had been asked to attend. If anything was amiss, he could kick-start the appropriate level of investigation.
He had only been given sparse details.
The FIM had told him that it was more than likely the body in the water was that of Jennifer Sunderland. She had been missing from her home for three days and it was thought she might have fallen into the River Lune, close to where she lived — further upriver in the village of Halton. The night she had disappeared had been stormy, the river high and running fast from heavy rainfall up in the hills, and if she had gone in she could easily have been swept away out to sea and never seen again.
