morning was showing itself as a weak aura against the ridge above the site. But the watchman was on the ball. He was out of his caravan with a torch before I had shut the car door behind me.
‘Detective Sergeant Capaldi,’ I introduced myself.
He checked my warrant card under his torch beam before he looked up. ‘Hi, I’m Donnie Raikes, I take care of security here.’ He shook my hand firmly. He was shorter than me, but built better, and the light from the hut’s open door caught the gleam of two ring piercings in his right eyebrow.
‘All quiet?’
‘Nothing’s fucking happened here since the glaciers melted,’ he replied with a yawn. A Northern accent, Yorkshire, I thought.
‘We’ve got a dead body,’ I reminded him.
‘I saw it. It looks like something the glacier dumped.’
‘It’s probably a bit more recent than that.’
He shrugged. ‘It’ll be a long-lost hiker, then. Nothing more dramatic. Take my word for it, mysterious shit doesn’t happen in places like this.’
I nodded, acknowledging his wisdom, and looked round. Objects were beginning to take form. Machines, huts and the folds of the hills. ‘Where’s Jeff Talbot?’ I asked.
‘Asleep in his caravan.’
‘Alone?’
Donnie grinned. ‘Don’t worry, we haven’t gone native yet, we haven’t resorted to the sheep.’
I smiled dutifully at the tired old stereotype. I knew it was irrational, but the information soothed me. That Jeff wasn’t with Tessa MacLean.
I waited it out in the site hut, drinking strong tea dotted with atolls of powdered milk, until the SOCO team arrived. The light was establishing itself now, but it was still early, and from the way they bitched about the cold as we backed ourselves into the wind to don our sterile suits I knew that they were letting me know that they had had an even earlier start than me.
They looked even more miserable when I showed them the site.
‘Is it any better preserved under there?’ the leader asked me, bobbing her head at the tarpaulin.
I shook my head.
‘Where are we supposed to start?’ she asked despairingly. ‘There’s no surface left.’
I sidled away from her anguish, leaving them to unroll the tarpaulin and start erecting the tented canopy, while I went to greet a new car that had just driven up.
Bill Atkins, the forensic pathologist, was a dour old guy in his late fifties, who I had worked with before in Cardiff. His eyes flickered in recognition, but he made no comment. The forensic anthropologist, who introduced herself as Sheila Goddard, was younger and carried herself around in a bubble of enthusiasm, which even encompassed the wildness of the countryside. I could see, as we walked up the hill, that Bill Atkins was not sharing this.
I hovered behind them while they crouched over the remains. Whispering to each other. Exchanging observations.
Bill was the first to turn round to me. ‘I hope you’re not expecting anything too dramatic from the in-situ inspection.’
‘What will you be able to tell us?’
‘Bugger all.’ He shook his head and turned back to the remains. ‘Nothing on cause, or duration of interment, until we get it dug up and back to the lab. Unless we get lucky and find a bullet, or a knife, or an obvious trauma event.’
‘What about age and gender?’ I prompted.
He looked at Sheila, who shrugged happily. ‘Maybe,’ he answered for both of them. ‘We wait to see what’s uncovered, but the age is only going to be broad-spectrum.’
I thought of Evie. ‘Could this be a young woman? Buried two years ago?’
‘I think the pelvic structure’s male,’ Sheila offered.
Bill pursed his lips. ‘This soil could prove to be extremely corrosive, advance the deterioration. But …’ He tapped the ribcage with a stainless-steel spatula. ‘The patina and the pitting would make me think it has been in the ground for a lot longer.’
I wafted off a silent thanks to the angel who looked after my hunch skills. ‘It’s a possibility that the skull and the missing hand were accidentally dislodged by the excavator,’ I offered.
Sheila shook her head. ‘No,’ she said cheerfully, beckoning me down beside her, ‘not possible. See here …?’ She used her own spatula to indicate the points where the skull and the hand were missing. ‘There are definite indications of mechanical severance in both cases. And notice that the wounds have exactly the same surface encrustation and patination as the surrounding bone. If the separation had been recent I would expect to see a cleaner bone surface at the junction.’
I should have noticed that. The rocks that had been touched by the digger had shown brighter scores where they had been scraped. The same thing would have happened to bone, the surface crud would have been removed.
‘So their removal was contemporary with the interment?’ I asked.
‘Or before.’
Which meant that we were probably not going to find a hand on the end of the other arm that was currently under the skeleton.
So why remove them? The obvious answer was to eliminate the means of identification. The skull, if the teeth were intact, could yield dental records, or even facial reconstruction. But skeletal hands? Whoever had buried the body had not wanted to take the risk that it wouldn’t be discovered before decomposition had taken the fingerprints.
I stood up slowly. Black magic? There was also a possible ritual explanation that couldn’t be discounted.
I looked around me, screwing my eyes against the wind. Trying to see it. A featureless spot on an empty hill. What gave this place its significance?
Back down in the valley I chose Cogfryn Farm as my first port of call, on the scientific principle that it looked neat, cosy, and the dogs were shut away. It was also not in the Badger Face Welsh Mountain sheep-flock book.
I left the professionals up on the hill painstakingly excavating the skeleton. I had no authorization to start an official investigation, but I reckoned no harm could come from putting out preliminary feelers. Get the taste of local reaction.
Cogfryn was a low, two-storey stone farmhouse, with an attached stone barn, both recently whitewashed.
‘Mrs Jones?’
The woman who answered the door didn’t seem surprised that I knew her name. She was small, with her hair tied back in a bun, wearing an apron, and was as neat as her house. I showed her my warrant card and introduced myself.
‘You’ll be here about that body they’ve found up Cwm Cesty Nant, I expect?’
‘You’ve heard?’
She looked at me incredulously.
I laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I forget how quickly news travels around here.’
‘My husband’s busy with the lambing, but you’re welcome to come in.’
‘I’d be grateful.’
She opened the door and stepped back to let me through. ‘Watch you don’t trip over the suitcase,’ she warned as I followed her down the hall and skirted a red and well-travelled case, which looked cosmopolitan and incongruous in this rustic setting. ‘It’s my son’s,’ she explained, as if reading my thoughts.
‘This is Owen, my son, and his friend Greg Thomas.’ She introduced me to the two men who were sitting at the scrubbed pine table in the kitchen with mugs of tea and a depleted plate of chocolate digestive biscuits in front of them.
Owen Jones had a stocky build, close-cropped