van. This”-he waved a hand towards the fountain, now moved to one side-“wasn’t the original plan. He was going to put in a fishpond, quite a deep one. They’d already dug for it, and delivered the pavers to go round it, but they hadn’t taken away the earth that had come out of the hole.
“Then Alexander rang them the morning they were scheduled to concrete the pond and said he’d decided on something else and was going to do the work himself. They thought he’d just got a cheaper bid at the last minute, because he wasn’t the type to get his hands dirty. But then he called them back a few days later and asked them to put in the fountain.”
“So, he found himself with a body on his hands and took advantage of an opportunity,” Kincaid said. “He had a hole, and the materials to fill it, and he needed to do it as quickly as possible-”
“Wait,” interrupted Kaleem. He turned to Cullen. “Did your landscaper say how deep they dug? This body is actually quite close to the surface. If there’s loose soil beneath her-”
Kaleem and the female tech looked at each other, then went to the edge of the pit and knelt, leaning down. The tech eased herself flat onto her stomach, and Kaleem steadied her while she seemed to be probing carefully in the bottom of the hole.
“Shit,” she said, suddenly still. “Get me a damned bucket.”
The other tech hurried forward and eased himself down flat as well, lowering an empty tub.
Kaleem watched intently as the female tech moved again, and Gemma heard the soft sound of earth falling into the plastic tub. Then Kaleem looked up.
“There’s another body, lower down.”
The two techs worked silently, easing soil from around the edges of the upper body. After a quarter of an hour, the woman said, “I think that’s all we can do without disturbing the upper remains. But fortunately the lower body was a bit to one side, so I think you can get some idea of what we’ve got.”
Kaleem knelt down again and peered in. “There’s a hand and forearm visible. From the size, I’d say they belong to a child. And there’s hair. Long and dark. So I would guess, given the suspect’s history, that this victim is female.”
“Oh.” Gemma drew in a breath as an added weight of sorrow descended upon her.
The little girl had stopped appearing in the window, not because she’d been passed on to another man, but because she had died.
“Was the girl there longer than Sandra, do you think?” she asked Kaleem.
“Can’t say for certain without tests, but it looks like decomposition is a little more advanced. There’s no lime over these deeper remains, however, so decomposition might have progressed more rapidly.”
Gemma frowned. “Why no lime over the girl, I wonder?”
“Maybe the girl’s death was an accident,” Melody suggested. “He got too rough with her, or…well, anyway, whatever happened…maybe he just took advantage of the work in progress.” She gestured at the garden.
“And then when it came to Sandra,” continued Gemma, “he must have figured that what had worked once would work again. But he had to put her body closer to the surface, so he risked taking the time to get the lime. It was a Sunday, after all. He could have just driven to a garden center that afternoon. He wouldn’t have buried her until after dark.”
“It must have been backbreaking,” said Kincaid, without the least trace of sympathy. “I’ll bet we find he took a few days off work afterwards.”
“But why didn’t he bury Naz?” asked Gemma.
“He was running out of room. And maybe the lime hadn’t worked as well as he’d thought.” Kincaid shrugged. “Or maybe he just didn’t want to dig up his pavers again. But whatever the reason, it was a bad decision. If Naz Malik had disappeared without a trace, we might never have learned what happened to Naz or Sandra. Or this girl.”
“We found a pair of glasses, guv,” said the female tech. “Almost forgot, in all the excitement. They were under the shrubs, covered with some leaf mold.” She gestured towards the fill buckets, and Gemma saw a small evidence bag pushed to one side. She crossed the garden and picked up the bag, studying it. They looked just like the glasses Naz had been wearing in the photos on Sandra’s corkboard.
“I’m certain these belonged to Naz,” she said. “Do you think”-she hesitated, hating the idea-“do you think he left them deliberately?”
“If Alexander invited him out here for a drink-and I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea appealed to him, the twisted bastard”-Kincaid grimaced-“then kept him here, drugged, until dark, Naz might have had periods when he was conscious enough to realize what was happening.”
Cullen was shaking his head, not in disagreement, but in an expression that bordered on wonder. “Maybe that’s what Alexander was looking for that day in the mortuary, when we thought he might have gone through Naz’s effects,” he said. “He realized he’d slipped up. But, my God, what a nerve.”
The enclosed space of the garden was beginning to bake in the afternoon sun, and the odor rising from the pit was unmistakable. Gemma stepped back until she stood partly in the shade cast by the house. She looked up at the dark brick wall. “What we still don’t understand is what brought Sandra here that day.”
“They found a camera inside,” said the tech. “In the bedroom nearest the bathroom upstairs. There were some girls’ trinkets in a drawer, and a folded sari. The camera was tucked underneath, in the folds of the cloth.”
Gemma imagined Sandra, driven by an impulse they might never understand, perhaps asking to use the loo, then darting across the hall for a quick look in the bedroom. Had she meant to take a photo of the sari, but tucked her camera beneath the silk when she heard Alexander coming?
“Were there any pictures in the camera?” she asked.
“I don’t know, guv,” the woman answered. “But I don’t think they’ve sent it to the lab yet.”
“I want to see it,” Gemma said. She turned and went into the house, and Kincaid followed her.
While he went upstairs, she waited in the kitchen, listening to the murmur of his voice as he talked to someone on the upstairs search team.
When he came back, he held a small camera with gloved hands. “There was only one photo on the memory card.” He held the camera up so Gemma could see.
She gazed at the bright square of the view screen. There was an arch of dark brick, and within it, a peeling poster. It was a street artist’s fading work, so damaged that Gemma couldn’t be certain whether it was a painting or a photograph.
It didn’t matter. The young woman in the picture seemed to gaze back at her, unconcerned by her nakedness, her serene face innocent and as ageless as time itself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
– George Eliot,
“Why don’t you sit down for a minute,” Kincaid had said. “It’s hot, and you look a bit done in.” He’d fetched her a glass of water, then gone back into the garden.
Gemma had emptied the tumbler into the sink, then scrubbed it with soap and hot water before filling it again. It was stupid, she knew, and she was thirsty, but she didn’t want to drink from Alexander’s glass.
When Kincaid came back, she had rinsed it once more.
“I think I know her name,” he said. “Cullen did some digging this morning. According to Immigration’s records, the last girl Alexander brought in from Bangladesh was called Rani. He never divorced her.”
“What about Lucas Ritchie?” asked Gemma. “Did he identify any of the men in the photos?”
“All of them. Cullen will get started on the warrants. Listen.” He came over to her and took the glass from her hands, setting it in the sink. “There’s not much else we can do here at the moment. I think, if we left right now, we
