‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. The silver-grey eyes were bloodshot from the smoke in the woods.
No one answered.
He looked at Shaw. ‘I’ve been helping up in the woods, keeping the fires down. You need to come up — we’ve found someone.’
TWENTY-TWO
Dead air filled the woods, the midday heat cloying, the trees stifling the thin breeze from the distant sea. The path led through the clearing with the lightning tree and then deeper into the woods, where drifting smoke and steam threaded the tree trunks. The world was reduced to a fifty-yard circle, branches dripped water, the pine tops above lost in smoke, the colours washed out to leave just greys. By the path, nailed to a tree, was a single sign. .
THE OLD HALL ESTATE
PRIVATE PROPERTY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
‘Where we heading?’ asked Shaw. ‘And what are we going to find?’
Aidan Robinson turned. He pulled one of his fingers straight, making the joint crack. Shaw was struck again by the stillness of the man, as if time didn’t run as fast for him as the world around him. ‘Down the valley a bit, through the woods. Not far. I don’t know what’s there; one of the uniformed officers said he’d found remains — human remains — and wanted you up fast. They sent me because I know the woods.’
Valentine had caught up: ‘Fresh remains?’
Robinson shrugged, then turned and led the way.
Shaw ploughed on, concentrating on the rough path, watching each boot fall before lifting the next, avoiding the tree roots which occasionally arched over the track. Shaw tried to concentrate on the route ahead but he was worried about Joe Osbourne: he’d left him with DC Twine at the incident room, waiting for a squad car to take him into St James’. The stress had brought on an asthma attack and they’d arranged for him to see a doctor when he got down to police headquarters.
They reached a gully where a stream had dug down through the sandstone rock. Ahead, through the trees, they could see Old Hall far below them — a Georgian ruin, like an abandoned doll’s house, just the four walls left, and a thicket of chimney stacks. Just over the gully, on a stretch of bare hillside was what looked like a stone folly, a rotunda, graced with pillars, and a low dome. On the grass beside it lay something more modern that defied any easy identification — a concrete circle, its surface grooved with what looked like a pair of bronze rails. Shaw filed the image away and set off after Robinson.
The trees here were burnt, smouldering still. Ahead, for the first time, Shaw saw flames — a gout, quickly doused, so that the wood was full of the sound of sizzling steam. Around them now they could see beaters, working in short lines, and a hose crossed their path, leading from the stream up into the woods.
And then they smelt it: instantly, the three of them. Only Robinson kept walking, his limp less noticeable now they’d moved on to flatter ground. Shaw had it in his mouth, nose and lungs before he could retch. Cooked meat, like a hog roast. But sweeter, infinitely sweeter. He heard Valentine retch behind him but he didn’t turn to stare. He just stopped in his tracks and told himself this was a detail he’d have to make sure he didn’t take home.
Robinson came to a halt, looked back, then down at his feet, giving them time.
Shaw and Valentine paused, as if waiting for some hidden barrier to lift, and then they took the next step, together.
A young PC stood guard on the rough path. He held up a hand, searching their faces, relief flooding into his eyes when he recognized Shaw. ‘Sir, over there. .’ He pointed to a small clearing. ‘And there’s loads of this around. .’ In his hand he held a damp wodge of folding money, burnt at the edges, or blackened through. ‘It’s just blowing around,’ he added, as if that was the crime. ‘Twenty-pound notes.’
Whatever lay at the centre of the clearing it was still alight. While there were no visual clues Shaw knew it instantly as a corpse: the smell was beyond argument, but it was the emotional resonance that was indisputable. Even in death it radiated a personal space — diminished, diminishing, but still present. Thick white fumes pumped out of it like a smoke bomb. A single flame flickered on a limb-like projection which stuck up like a wick. The whole body was about the size of a large animal — a sheep, perhaps — and angled, like a collection of disparate bones and in a skin bag. But the surface was charred, furrowed, like wood left in a cold fire. Shaw’s eye skated over the surface, trying to find a face, a foot, a hand, something he could recognize that was human, but all he found was a single unambiguous shape: a semicircular curve — two curves, in iron, almost joined together.
‘Tom’s nearly here,’ said Valentine, taking a step back, working on the mobile.
Shaw took another step closer, put a knee down, and felt the warmth still in the ashes. ‘It’s a trap, right?’ he said. ‘An animal trap.’
Robinson was behind him, over his left shoulder. ‘Not one of the estate’s,’ he said.
‘They lay traps?’
‘Sure. Fox, badger, stoat. Keep the woods clear for the deer.’ Shaw heard Robinson crunch something in his mouth. A mint. ‘But nothing this size.’ Hadn’t Robinson said he didn’t come into the woods anymore — not since he’d been a child?
‘Can’t we put it out. .?’ asked Shaw, angry, but with no one.
They called in a fireman who set a fine spray on the burning corpse, turning smoke to steam. Shaw tried to see the shape of the jaws of the trap, which had sprung, then closed round a limb — a leg, but the foot had seared away, leaving a blackened stump. In the ashes he saw a buckle — metal, like a rucksack brace.
They heard footsteps coming through the trees and the sudden ghostly shape of Tom Hadden in a white SOC suit. He’d come into the woods from Old Hall, up the valley, so he came at the charred body from the opposite side of the clearing. He looked at Shaw. ‘You need to be this side, Peter. George.’ He pulled up a face mask which was over his Adam’s apple so that it covered his mouth.
They circled the burning body. Valentine saw it first because Shaw heard his breathing quicken, rattling in his throat. And then he saw it too — a human head, untouched by the fire, the skin still white, even the lips still red. The white flesh of the neck simply ended in the white ash of the rest of the body. It was a thought which shocked him, but Shaw thought it was as if the head was a cigarette filter, the rest of the body spent ash in an ashtray.
‘Christ,’ said Shaw, looking up at the tree tops, hoping to see a splash of blue sky, but finding only the drifting smoke. He’d let his eye return to the face for a nanosecond, but it had been long enough to know he recognized the victim, or recognized the birthmark on the unblemished cheek.
‘It’s one of the demonstrators — from up by the wind farm. George?’
Flames suddenly flickered within the body, crackling, so that the smoke thickened. Valentine covered his mouth with a handkerchief and stepped closer.
‘It’s him,’ he said.
‘Human candle,’ said Hadden. ‘Once the temperature’s high enough the body fat just goes on burning. The head’s the last bit left — the rest has gone. I’d say the source of the heat was on his back — there. .’
Shaw thought of the night-light left beside Arthur Patch’s bed, burning until it ignited the gas in the house, blowing itself out. These flames had proved more tenacious.
Hadden leant forward, using a pair of forensic callipers to mark the spot where the vertebra of the back showed through the white ash. The bone was black on the surface, but flaking away from the white calcium beneath, like a firestone in a chimney, set behind the hearth to collect and radiate the heat. ‘It’s a slow process, could go on for days,’ said Hadden. ‘We’re going to have to cover it, Peter, cut the oxygen supply, otherwise the head will burn. I’ll need a fire blanket. .’ he said, looking back at a fireman on the edge of the clearing. Then the CSI man let his eye run over the bundle of flesh and bone. ‘There,’ he said, using the pincers to point. ‘Looks like a torch to me.’