‘I should have done a lot of things in my time,’ he said gloomily.
She was pretty sure he’d come from church: he’d thrown an old gardening jacket on over a good shirt and trousers. Even more morose than usual, it was clear that he was taking the sacking of his wife pretty hard. ‘I think it’s Natalie Cobb,’ she said.
‘I’d say so,’ he said.
‘And you found her boyfriend’s prints on the stolen gear?’
Scobie nodded gloomily. ‘He’s done a runner, but I tracked him as far as Queensland.’
‘A big state.’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you think he knew she was dead?’
Scobie shrugged. ‘It’s possible. When I questioned him, he didn’t seem to know she was missing, but he might have put two and two together and come looking for her.’
Ellen glanced around at the deceptive folds in the land, the grass, weeds and clumps of old, unpruned apple trees. ‘An awful place to die.’
Scobie nodded in his mournful way.
Dr Berg glanced up at them. ‘Preliminary findings?’
‘Sure,’ Ellen said.
‘I found a student ID card in the name of Natalie Cobb, Waterloo Secondary College. Now, immersion in water does terrible things to the skin over time, but her clothing did protect her to some extent, and there are marks on her abdomen suggestive of seatbelt bruising. I also found the usual signs of exposure and putrefaction on the exposed areas, her face and hands. Her right hand appears to have been gnawed by animals. All in all, I’d say that she’s been in the water for at least two weeks. A body immersed in water decomposes at half the rate of a body left in the open-depending on temperatures, insect and animal activity and dampness, of course. But I’ll know more after the autopsy.’
‘But can you say for certain that her death was related to the accident?’
Dr Berg shrugged her expressive shoulders, humour in her dark eyes. ‘Sorry, Ellen. Her presence here, and manner of death, might be quite unrelated to it.’
‘More complications,’ Scobie muttered.
‘I’ll know more in the lab,’ the pathologist continued. ‘There appears to be some head trauma, and I might find internal injuries, and these might have killed her. Or she drowned.’
Ellen saw a twist of anguish in Scobie Sutton. All of his emotions were there on the surface. He felt things too keenly, too quickly. He imagined everyone’s heartache. For a moment then, Ellen sympathised, seeing her own daughter sprawled dead in the muddy grass. ‘Pam,’ she said, ‘you’re wet through. Go on home. It’s all under control here.’
The younger woman looked relieved. ‘If you’re sure, Sarge.’
‘I’m sure.’
Ellen watched her walk away, then called after her: ‘When you saw the driver legging it into the reserve, was he carrying anything?’
‘Not that I could see,’ Pam called back, slipping through the fence to her car.
Ellen brooded. She’d still have to search the reserve. The driver- this Andrew Asche-could easily have dropped something in the reserve when he fled, something that would tie him to the Toyota, to Natalie, to the burglaries.
And what if there had been two passengers, and another lay dead in the reserve?
Calling for Scobie and a couple of constables to accompany her, Ellen made for the railing fence and climbed through it into the reserve. An hour later, restless and frustrated, she found herself in a small clearing. She crossed it, bending occasionally to pull up pittosporum saplings in sympathy with Pam Murphy and the Bushrats. Her hands and back ached; a misty rain had blown across the reserve.
Pittosporum everywhere. Poor Bushrats. Ellen straightened the kinks in her back, then leaned over again to jerk a sapling from the rich soil. And some confluence of circumstances then-the light, the angle of her bent head, the sense that the surrounding soil and grass had been altered in some way, and, finally, knowledge and instinct-told her that she was looking at a shallow grave.
58
Challis found vehicles up and down the fenceline at Myers Reserve: photographer, video operator, exhibits officer, crime-scene technicians and the forensic pathologist. A couple of uniforms stood by the access track, one to sign in those authorised to attend, the other to keep onlookers away. Several uniformed police officers were searching the adjacent paddock in a grid pattern, supervised by Ellen Destry. Challis pulled on rubber boots and slogged through wet grass to join her.
‘Over here,’ she said.
She took him into the reserve, the ground soft under their feet. Bracken brushed their thighs and soon Challis’s trousers were hopelessly sodden. ‘What made you think it was a grave?’
Ellen grinned, oddly pleased with herself. ‘The ground looked different. A regular shape, rectangular, a faint depression of the surface, and the grass and weeds were somehow more vigorous.’
Challis grunted. They came to a clearing and an inflatable forensic tent, under which Freya Berg was brushing leaf mould and damp soil away from a body. A crime-scene technician was sifting the nearby soil for objects that might have fallen from the body or whoever had buried it.
‘So, Freya,’ Challis said, ‘two for the price of one.’
‘Wait until you get my invoice,’ Freya said. ‘I was halfway back to the city, dreaming of a long hot shower, and your good sergeant calls me and says “Guess what?”‘
‘What have we got?’ he asked in his ‘CSI Miami’ voice.
She grinned, speaking as she worked. ‘Youngish male, fully clothed, hard to say how long he’s been here.’
‘Approximately?’
She sighed. ‘There’s no adipocere, so we’re not talking months.’
Challis swallowed involuntarily. He knew all about adipocere, the crumbly, waxy substance that appears over large areas of the skin as body fats convert to long-chain fatty acids. He’d once touched the stuff: never again.
‘There are complicating factors,’ Freya went on. ‘Contact with the soil, the type of soil, its moisture content-all these affect the rate of putrefaction.’
As Challis and Ellen watched, Freya and the forensic technician lifted the body onto a stretcher, and then the technician peered into the grave. ‘There’s a section of matted leaves here, not fully broken down yet.’ He looked up, pointed silently at a stand of nearby poplars, on the paddock side of the railing fence. Skeletal now, but only weeks earlier they’d been losing their leaves.
Challis nodded. Now the technician was digging down to consolidated soil, ready to begin the process of sifting the loosened material. Challis touched Ellen’s forearm. ‘You’ve combed the area around the grave?’
‘Of course.’
He needn’t have asked. ‘Thanks.’
Ellen nodded.
‘The clothing hasn’t rotted,’ Freya said, ‘no root growth through the rib cage or pelvis, nothing interesting in fact, just a young man interred in a shallow grave-sometime in the past month or six weeks, would be my guess.’
‘You’re not paid to guess, Doc,’ Ellen said, attempting humour.
‘Until I get him into the lab, I am,’ said Freya said. She was peering at the body, a vaguely human shape covered in damp soil and leaf mould. ‘I can’t see any insect activity, so he was probably buried soon after he died. And no signs that the foxes had got to him. They would have, eventually.’
‘How did he die?’
‘It’s possible he was shot in the chest,’ Freya replied, glancing down at the body. ‘There’s a hole in his upper clothing and what appears to be blood. If so, there’s no exit wound, but I can’t at this stage confirm that it was a gunshot or that it killed him.’
She turned to Challis. ‘Release the body. I’ll do the autopsy tomorrow.’ She glanced at Ellen. ‘Who will attend for the police?’
‘I will,’ he said.
‘And the dead girl?’
Scobie Sutton opened his mouth to speak, but Challis stopped him. ‘No sense in tying two of us up, Scobie.’
Sutton nodded, relieved. ‘I have to inform her mother anyway,’ he said, trudging away from them to the collection of private and official vehicles parked at the side of the road.
‘I haven’t searched his pockets for ID,’ Freya said, as she backed away, peeling off her gloves.