The Backs (2013) (2 page)

He didn’t speak, just stared at her.

‘I’m a paramedic, what’s happened there?’

He took a step forward and she wondered if he’d been hurt too. ‘Help her,’ he breathed. He reached out to the nearby fence for support. ‘Help her,’ he repeated.

Genevieve pushed past him and headed into the back garden. She’d already dialled 999 and it was connecting by the time she knelt beside the young woman. She held the phone between her ear and shoulder while feeling for a pulse. ‘Ambulance,’ she said, ‘and police.’

She gave their location: ‘The back of Searle Street, the alleyway that joins Alpha Road and Carlyle Road. I don’t know the house number.’ She began to manoeuvre the woman on to her back, still speaking as she worked. ‘Early twenties, female. There’s a faint pulse. I’m putting down the phone now, trying resus.’

The woman lay at the edge of a paved area, the weight of her body forcing a large clump of Spanish bluebells to splay out around her. Genevieve slid her hand from behind the woman’s back, expecting the damp there to be from sodden leaves. Instead she recognized blood, diluted from the wet foliage, glistening on her palms in semi-transparent smears.

She wiped her hand clean on her thigh and pinched the woman’s nose, leaning forward to breathe regularly into her mouth. It was then, like previously, she heard a strange noise, not a yelp this time but a harsher grating sound – followed by a grunt.

She looked into the other woman’s face, stupidly intent on carrying on even though she knew that the grunt had emerged from herself, and that at any moment the pain would follow.

The other woman’s lips were pale, and without Genevieve she’d be gone in a minute. It was Genevieve who was hurting now.

She felt her strength fading and she slumped forward, the world contracting to encompass her left hand lying limply amid the flattened bluebell leaves. She spoke again, hoping her voice was loud enough to reach the phone. ‘I’ve been hurt.’ The words seemed just clear enough. ‘Help me,’ she breathed, then realized that helping them to catch him might be all she could achieve here. Only one other item came within her shrinking field of vision. ‘There’s something, a card on the ground, it’s . . .’

And her fingers twitched, as if there was a point in reaching out for it.

There was none.

She was dying, and the other woman would be dead too.

The thought hit Genevieve hard, in a final moment of clarity: the revelation that her entire life had been driven by her obsessional avoidance of guilt. What had that achieved today except leaving Jimmy to face bereavement? She should have thought of the pair of them first and stayed away. She should have learnt that guilt is just an evil little gremlin masquerading as something virtuous. It had needed flushing down the toilet like the toxic little shit it truly was.

Some lessons in life are learnt the really hard way.

And some lessons are learnt too late.

11 August

The call had come in at 11.47 p.m. A car burning out on the Gogs.

Burnt-out cars belonged to Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, or summer holidays, not Sundays. Usually it would be something easier to steal than this one, typically a mid-size saloon in the last few years of its life, and too often taken by kids who didn’t understand the dangers lurking on the apparently flat and straight Fen roads.

PC Sue Gully had attended too many of those incidents but, then, so had they all.

The ones that crashed them, and survived well enough to walk away, often burnt out the car in the process; the ones that didn’t crash often torched the vehicle in any case.

But this clearly wasn’t like that.

The vehicle itself was about a hundred yards behind her and, since she was facing towards Cambridge, she should have been able to recognize the amber smudges of the city’s lights tinting the sky. Instead she faced the oncoming traffic, diverting it back up the Babraham Road, the headlights dazzling her as they approached. Then, as each vehicle turned, she saw the occupants’ faces staring beyond her, oval with curiosity. And momentarily she would see the burning car reflected in their window glass, looking only about the size of an incinerating match. The next car swung round, and she caught sight of someone else in the window’s reflection.

She didn’t turn to look, but waited until he was almost at her elbow and had addressed her first. ‘So, what do you know, Sue?’

She glanced at him finally. As far as she knew, DC Goodhew had no reason to be there, but equally she wasn’t surprised to see him. ‘About the same as you, I suspect. Less, actually, since you’ve been up there. You wouldn’t know what’s happening, would you?’

‘It’s a car on the central reservation. But it doesn’t look like it crashed first.’

‘Gary, that’s not exactly illuminating. It’s a Lotus Evora.’

Goodhew half nodded, half shrugged, as though that name vaguely rang a bell.

‘Someone’s pride and joy. Not an easy steal, so the assessors will be looking closely at it if he tries to claim.’

‘He?’

‘Yeah, they have the name of the owner, but no trace of him yet.’ She’d heard it over the radio, so was a little surprised Goodhew hadn’t as well.

‘He’s not inside the car, then?’

Gully shook her head, ‘Obviously not one hundred per cent sure at this stage, but they don’t think so.’

Two fire engines were already on the scene, therefore soon it would be just a smoking and blackened shell, but the intensity of such an inferno could soon turn a human being to ash. Forensics would be testing the debris, just to be certain.

‘What’s his name?’

‘You’re not even on duty,
are
you?’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘Paul Marshall, thirty-eight. Married with two kids and a big detached house out in Linton.’

‘Heading home then?’

‘Unlike you, clearly. Rubbernecking an RTA isn’t your thing, Gary, so why are you here?’

‘Curious about something else,’ he muttered. And, although he’d answered her question, the tone of his voice told her that something had just distracted him. He stood in the inside lane of the road, gazing at the burning car.

‘Curious about what?’

There was a long pause before he answered. ‘Nothing . . . just a different case. Nothing, really.’ His response was monotone, not actually ignoring her, but intended to push the conversation aside. He was asking for space to think.

She took the hint but, following his gaze, tried to read his mind.

The Gog Magog Downs were a series of low chalk hills that would have been unremarkable in another landscape but here, lying alongside the resolute flatness of Cambridgeshire, they became surprisingly dramatic.

Daniel Defoe had referred to them as mountains. Legend suggested they might be sleeping giants, and long dead university students had been warned to stay away.

Goodhew stared at the dying blaze, then moved about thirty yards closer, towards the grassy strip that ran under the central crash barrier. Further along, this strip widened and the out-of-town carriageway took a higher route up the hill, with a band of trees and shrubs between it and the two lanes that guided traffic back into the city. He climbed the barrier, looking up at the wreck from this new angle, then clambered back down and stared in the other direction, across the adjoining farm land. After a few seconds, he moved further towards the fire site again.

Yes, Gully was already trying to read his mind, but of course she failed; nothing new, then. And she had no idea why he’d now turned on his mobile phone’s torch, before easing himself through the hedge and into the field beyond.

The sky was never totally dark at this time of year but, without the light from the flames, everything below the level of the horizon was black. For the first few steps, Goodhew was illuminated by the pulsing blue light of the nearest fire engine. A little further on and she could pick out his location only by the light from his phone, dancing like a firefly.

At the top of the slope the two figures nearest to the blue lights had stopped, also watching his progress. One turned and headed down the hill towards Gully, after a few yards solidifying into the familiar shape of PC Kelly Wilkes. She waited until she was up close before asking, ‘Where’s he going?’ The flash of light hadn’t travelled very far, but it was now only a pin-prick.

‘I don’t know, but he seemed pretty distracted.’

‘By what?’

Gully shrugged. ‘If it was something I said, then I missed it.’ They stood side-by-side and waited. The road behind them remained empty but, as she turned to check it, Gully ran her gaze over the nearest clumps of trees too. ‘Does it feel to you like we’re being watched, Kell?’

‘No, but it would do if I was Goodhew. What
is
he up to?’

A slow, single beat of silence followed, then, as if in reply, their radios responded simultaneously:
One oblique one.

They both understood instantly, but Wilkes said it anyway. ‘Shit, he’s found a body.’

Goodhew had studied maths right through until taking his degree, but it was during his mid-teens that he’d loved it the most. Later, as some of the theories became more abstract, he’d found it less appealing. He liked geometry and the truth and certainty of simpler numbers, the way seemingly random answers could turn out to be linked by the same formula, or a complex quadratic equation unravelled to reveal
x
as just a straightforward integer. Some people thought that those maths lessons had no bearing on the
real
world, but his present job was full of all those constants, variables and unknowns – and the pressures that squashed the shape of people’s lives from order into chaos.

And it was a subconscious distillation of all those things that had led him to suspect that there was more than just the burning vehicle at play here. This didn’t have the hallmarks of a theft gone wrong, or an insurance scam. The car hadn’t been quietly dumped and burnt out in any kind of remote location; instead they’d chosen just about the highest point visible on the Gogs. No, this was the place of beacons and the old semaphore line. It was all about communication.

The crash barrier and ridge between the carriageways was the only place to stand which would give him a better view of the area than the location of the car itself. He quickly realized, though, that on the Cambridge-bound side there was too much surrounding vegetation to allow a clear view of the Lotus.

The possibilities were narrowing now.

He crossed back over the barrier and moved closer to the car, staring into the darkness and using the repetitive flash of the emergency lights to check the trees and hedgerows for a viewing point. It took several seconds before he saw it. About twenty feet before the car itself there was a dip in the hedge, a six-foot-long section where it looked as though the trimmer blade cutting it had slipped and accidentally scooped away the upper eighteen inches. Beyond it was a field, and beyond that a thick line of trees marking the boundary between the farmer’s land and the perimeter of the Gog Magog Golf Club.

Goodhew drew an invisible line from the car, through the dip in the hedge, and found the silhouetted outline of a treetop that was a few feet taller than its neighbours. The end of his straight line lay just to its left.

DC Kincaide was within earshot but Goodhew said nothing, because explaining why he wanted to check out the best view of the burning car would have taken longer than simply walking over to it. He used the light from his mobile to pick the right spot, then plunged his way through the hedge. The field had recently been ploughed and Goodhew headed across the deep furrows, taking the most direct route he could, but still aware that he was drifting off course. He paused before getting too close to the trees, and it took him several seconds to locate the single tall tree, then he edged forward again, adjusting and readjusting until he was standing right on a direct line with the Lotus and the dip in the hedge. It was only a few steps from there to move under the edge of the canopy.

And during those few steps Goodhew glimpsed a flash of paleness in the grass. He knelt close to it, but didn’t touch. A mobile phone case. Cream leather. Feminine. Expensive.

He remained kneeling, then snapped a photo of it before peering deeper in amongst the trees. Half-word, half-groan: ‘Oh.’

The man was sitting upright, tied to a tree, his legs taped together in front of him, his hands secured behind his knees. Goodhew moved closer. Thick wire held the man to the tree, wrapped round in three places: waist, chest and neck. He’d suffered extensive head injuries and at some point during his ordeal the man had fought back. As a result, the wire had dug into him, blood seeping out in a heavy band around his throat, and the patches at his armpits were too dark to be sweat alone.

Dead, obviously and utterly. His face twisted in agony, even in death. Goodhew felt for a pulse in any case, and a remnant of body heat sank through his fingertips.

Goodhew kept very still; perhaps he’d already disturbed the crime scene, so it was vital nothing should be made worse. Clearly he needed some assistance. A boundary must be set up, a SOCO, the works. However, someone else needed to organize it, because, until they arrived with floodlights and a police photographer, he wasn’t intending to move.

He could see Kincaide’s figure standing close to the Lotus; Wilkes was up there too, and Gully would still be manning the roadblock, probably choking with boredom by now. He could have just shouted across but, instead, he phoned DI Marks, explained the situation, then waited within hand-holding distance of the corpse.

The first few minutes he spent on the Internet, then he used the rest of the time just to think. When Marks arrived, Goodhew passed him his phone with the Google image filling the screen. It was simply a head-and-shoulders shot but enough to give the impression of a solid man, a sporty type with a strong jawline and unweathered skin. Indoor sports maybe, or a gym membership, or maybe both? In the photograph his hair looked blow-dried, his face freshly shaven, and he could have modelled men’s grooming products.

Goodhew double-checked, but really there wasn’t any doubt. ‘The dead man is the Lotus’s owner, Paul Marshall.’