‘I’m sorry, sir.’
He turned to Bryn Jones. ‘I’m getting a very bad feeling about this.’
Bryn nodded his concurrence morosely.
Jack Galbraith came back at me. ‘Tell us about it, Capaldi. What brainstorm made you decide to start mashing around this spot with that mechanical deathtrap?’
‘It was a lucky guess, sir.’
He winced. He didn’t think it was lucky. He could now see part of his future stretching out in front of him with an accompaniment of mud, drizzle and Inspector Morgan. ‘The doc reckons she’s been in the ground for anything between four and eight weeks,’ he reflected.
‘Only a guess at this stage,’ Bryn cautioned.
‘Close enough to start running a working hypothesis. When did the work start here?’
‘Just under five weeks ago, sir,’ I said. I had already asked Donnie.
‘So, he just managed to dump her in time,’ he mused.
‘If he was local he’d have known about the prospect of the wind farm for a long time, sir,’ I said.
He shook his head dismissively. ‘He’s not local. Give me the stats on the first one again, Bryn.’
‘Forensics are saying about six to eight years in the ground,’ he replied without consulting his notes. ‘Male, broad-spectrum middle-age. Zero identifying marks or indicators as to cause of death.’
Jack Galbraith spread his arms, an index finger pointing at each of the gravesites. ‘Six years … Six weeks … What the fuck is going on here?’
Bryn and I stayed quiet, we both knew that the question was rhetorical.
‘Head and hands gone in both cases,’ Jack Galbraith ruminated aloud, ‘both bodies naked. It’s too soon for a copycat, and there hasn’t been any publicity. We have to assume it’s the same workman.’
‘Different genders,’ Bryn observed, ‘and this latest one looks young, which would make different age ranges.’
So, no nice, tight victim pattern to work with. This guy is not particular. And why the time spread?’ Jack Galbraith looked at me when he said it. ‘Why six years between them?’
‘We don’t know that this is it, sir. The final victim count,’ I ventured.
‘You win the coconut, Sergeant Capaldi, for providing the answer we did not want to hear.’
‘There’s something strange, sir.’ I had to share the illogicality that had started screaming at me as soon as I had got over my first visceral response to the sight of the body.
‘Something strange …?’ he said sarcastically, raising his eyebrows, and letting me see his glance over at the corpse in the tractor’s bucket.
‘They must have known about the wind farm. I thought that was why they were trying to sabotage the diggers. To get the evidence out before we could get to it. But why bury another one here just before they started the site work?’
‘He’s not local,’ Jack Galbraith said with conviction, ‘this is a dumping ground, I’m sure of it. So he may not have known about the wind farm.’
‘The site would still have been advertised, sir. Even if he had managed to get the body up here before the work started he must have seen that they were going to be pulling the hill apart to build the wind farm’
He frowned. ‘I’m changing my mind on this one. I don’t think these are professional hits. I think we’ve got a nut job. I think we’re going to find more. I think this is his dumping ground, his squirrel’s nest.’
‘Why bury a fresh one, sir,’ I persisted, ‘if he knows it’s going to be discovered?’
‘You may be right, Capaldi. Either he hadn’t been keeping up with the news, or that’s what he wants. The thrill of exposure. His craftsmanship coming out into the light. So much so that he decides to welcome us here with fresh meat.’
I had a sudden bad feeling, which I was not about to share with my superiors. Could the sabotage of the diggers have been a double bluff? Was my reaction the one they had been manoeuvring for? Had I been led here to find this body? Had I been played for a patsy?
‘That’s when they fuck up, isn’t it, Bryn?’ Jack Galbraith continued, happily mining his new vein. ‘When they start to think they can play around with us.’
‘I’d be happier if he’d left us with more identifiers,’ Bryn replied morosely.
Jack Galbraith pointed at the torso in the tractor’s bucket. ‘That thing there has to be DNA soup.’
‘We’re working on getting a mitochondrial DNA profile off the skeleton, too. But where do we start the match process?’
‘Got any missing girls in your patch, Capaldi?’ Jack Galbraith asked with a smirk. ‘That aren’t covered in wool and say, “Baa”?’
‘I’ve got one that went astray two years ago.’
He frowned, he hadn’t expected that answer. ‘This one hasn’t been in the ground for two years.’
‘I know that, sir. But the parents will hear about this and I’d like to try and reassure them.’
He nodded towards the torso. ‘The sight of that is not going to reassure anyone.’
I showed him the image of the red shoe on my digital camera. ‘I can ask them if their daughter ever wore anything like that.’
‘If she’s been gone for two years, what’s to say she didn’t buy the shoes in the interim?’ Bryn asked.
‘It would be an elimination, sir,’ I pushed. ‘We can then start moving the ripple outwards.’
Jack Capaldi shook his head. ‘She’s not local. I expect the poor cow was a tart from somewhere. But not here.’
Bryn shrugged. ‘We’ve got to start somewhere. May as well clear the local field before we spread.’
David Williams had said that the Salmons’ smallholding was at the head of a crappy valley. In my book a valley was a piece of level ground where the hills had come down to rest. There was nothing level about this place. It was all on a slant. The tilt in the land affected everything, the runty trees, the stone field walls, even the weeds looked tired with trying to find the true vertical.
I walked the last fifty metres rather than risk my car’s suspension on the deeply rutted track. It was a low stone house with a patched slate roof, the rendered walls painted sky blue, which, with the wind chimes, marked the owners as outsiders. An old-model Isuzu Trooper was parked beside the grass-choked hulk of a Ford Sierra, which had probably died pining for the asphalt of Bromley.
Mr Salmon was in a field behind the house, bouncing on the seat of an open-topped tractor, dragging what looked like a rusty iron bedstead behind to scarify the grass. He waved, and cut across at an angle towards me, the tractor taking on the universal list of this place.
Mrs Salmon came round from the back of the house at the same time as he arrived. He cut the engine. They were both wearing blue overalls, and looked earnest and worried, as if they had been expecting a visit from the foreclosure man. Or perhaps it was the dressing over my injury, damaged cops being a not-too-reassuring sight.
‘Hello, Sergeant,’ Mr Salmon called out warily. His wife stayed tight-lipped.
‘Hello,’ I called back cheerily, ‘I thought I’d call by to allay any worries you might have.’
‘Worries about what?’ Mrs Salmon asked.
Oh, shit … I swore inwardly. The rumour-mill had stalled. The news hadn’t reached them yet. ‘We’ve found another body, I’m afraid.’