Annie pulled a face and handed it over.
‘I assume you want me to wait, sir?’ the pilot asked Banks.
‘Yes, if you would, Mal.’ Banks glanced at Annie. ‘DC Cabbot might hitch a ride back with the CSIs, but I’ll be needing you. Others may, too.’
‘Right you are, sir.’
Banks and Annie trotted off towards Stefan Nowak, whom they had spotted directing his men to mark the positions of various bits and pieces of wreckage. Neither spoke about Annie’s reaction to the helicopter flight. Banks knew something of what she felt like. As a child he had suffered from carsickness until he was fourteen, when all of a sudden it had simply gone away. But the combination of stark terror and nausea Annie had just experienced could be very disorienting, he knew. The further they got from the draught of the slowly turning helicopter blades, the worse the smell of raw decaying meat became.
Nowak was standing beside something made out of metal and human body parts, resembling a Damien Hirst sculpture or some Giger-designed creature from the Alien series. That bits of it had once been a man, a car seat, an engine and a steering wheel was just about possible to discern, but it wasn’t as easy to estimate where one began and the other ended. Both Banks and Annie stood with their backs to it as they spoke to Stefan. Banks wondered if Annie was wishing she still had her paper bag. He almost wished he had one himself.
‘I know,’ Nowak said, looking at their expressions. ‘I’ve seen tidier crime scenes. We think it’s the driver.’ He pointed up the steep daleside to a rocky outcrop. ‘It looks as if he plunged over the edge and hit that rock full on. Most unfortunate.’
Banks winced, while Annie turned paler and swigged some more water from the plastic bottle. ‘That’s putting it mildly,’ Banks said. ‘But it’s not why we were called out here. The chief super wouldn’t authorise a helicopter for a road accident.’
‘Too true,’ said Nowak. ‘The investigators will do their jobs, of course, but it was an accident, all right. The fellow going the other way reported it. He wasn’t hurt, but he’s very shaken. The paramedics took him to Muker to get him some hot sweet tea and keep an eye on him for a while. You can talk to him there later if you need.’
‘What did he say?’
‘There was a brief but heavy hailstorm. Our chap here was in the middle of the road. A sheep ran out, in front of both the car and the van, and when this driver hit the sheep and swerved to get out of the way of the oncoming car, he ran the van over the edge. Anyway, you’re right, it’s not him you’re here about. Had to be a bit circumspect on the phone, but I don’t suppose it matters much now.’ He looked up at the news helicopter arriving from the south. ‘Want to follow me?’
‘Do we have to?’ Annie muttered. ‘I just know this isn’t going to be good.’
Nowak favoured her with a heart-melting smile. ‘Not if you don’t want to, my dear,’ he said.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’
‘Careful where you tread.’
Nowak led them away from the driver’s crushed and broken body, treading carefully between scraps of metal and bits of engine. Banks had noticed that the ground was also scattered with black bin bags, most of them broken or split open and spilling their loads. The flags of black plastic flapped in the wind that roared eternally along the narrow channel of the valley bottom. That was how the pass had got its name: ‘belder’ was Old English for ‘bellow’ or ‘roar’.
Here and there, Banks could make out the carcass of a dead sheep, pig or calf, a stillborn lamb, some of them whole, some just parts: a head, torso, hindquarters. Most of the animal bodies had split open to reveal inner organs, trails of glistening intestines and snail-tracks of blood. It was a gruesome and surreal sight, he thought, and for a moment he could have sworn they were all museum animals, like the lions and tigers that had ended up on the overhead tramlines when the Germans bombed Leeds Museum in 1941. But when he looked more closely, there was enough blood and gore to convince him that they were real. The scattering of animal body parts and van wreckage seemed to spread across the whole valley bottom, as if it were some sort of battlefield. The field at Towton, Banks remembered from a book he had read, had been so drenched in blood that the becks and rivers had run red when the thaw came. Annie wasn’t showing any reaction, but Banks found himself feeling a bit sick. Mostly, ‘it was the smell.
‘As I told you on the phone,’ Nowak said, ‘the driver, Caleb Ross was his name, worked for Vaughn’s ABP, so this’ – he spread his arm in a gesture to take in the whole area – ‘is only to be expected.’
Vaughn’s Animal By-Products was a company that dealt in the removal and disposal of fallen stock. If a farmer had a dead animal on his farm, it was Vaughn’s, or someone like them, that he called. Caleb Ross would have driven from farm to farm, following a list of orders to pick up, and when his van was full he would take his load to the incinerator out back at Vaughn’s yard. Banks had seen the distinctive white vans often around Eastvale, and woe betide you if you got stuck behind one on a slow winding road.
Banks heard the sound of another helicopter and wondered if Mal had taken off for some reason. But when he looked up, he saw the logo of yet another news station. There was also a line of vans way up the steep valley side, parked on the pass road, which had been sealed off to regular traffic. The media were here already. Hardly surprising, Banks thought, when he considered the drama of the crash and the scene. They’d be getting great visuals from their helicopters, too, and there was no way to stop them short of calling out the RAF.
‘Peter Darby here yet?’ he asked Nowak.
‘No. He’s waiting for a mate to come over from Salford. Some specialist in crash-scene photography. They should be here soon. Geoff Hamilton and his team are here, though, and Dr Burns. In the meantime we’ve been asked not to touch anything, just put down markers where we think they’re necessary. We’re taking plenty of photographs of our own, though. We’re also arranging to have some lighting brought in. It’ll be dark before long, and it doesn’t look as if any of us will be going anywhere for a while yet.’
‘The wonders of the modern mobile phone,’ said Banks. ‘These days, it seems everyone’s a photographer.’
‘Just as well they’re useful for something,’ said Nowak. ‘There’s no reception down here. I had to get one of the local officers to call you from Muker, the lad who went with the other driver. I think one of the crash-scene specialists has a satellite phone, though, if you need to use one.’
When they found Dr Burns, he was kneeling by something on the ground, obscuring it from Banks’s view. When Banks got close enough to see round him, he wished he hadn’t. It was half a human body, the left half, by the looks of it, both armless and headless.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Banks said tasting bile in his throat.
Dr Burns looked up. ‘I don’t think He had much to do with it.’
‘The crash did this?’
‘The crash spilled the load and crushed the van driver,’ said Dr Burns. ‘But this was just a part of it, wrapped in that black plastic bag there like some of the animal parts. I very much doubt it happened in the crash. The butchery is far too neat for that. You can see the—’
‘I’ll take your word for it, doc. Since when did Vaughn’s get into the human body disposal business?’
‘They’re not, as far as I know,’ said Dr Burns. ‘This, you might say, was superfluous to the load.’