Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(44)

‘It would be good to be a fly on the wall, wouldn’t it?’ said Maxwell. ‘Davidson fundamentally failed Heather and all the others. He deserves prosecuting, but it would never happen.’

They noticed Dermot looking for them further down the lane. He beckoned to them to get back.

Sandford was sitting in the driver’s seat of his van and drinking coffee when they returned to where the vehicles were parked at the bottom of the field. The dig was still ongoing.

As Willis and Maxwell approached he turned his tablet round to show them the results of the scan.

‘We’re going to be busy. These are the areas identified by the LiDAR, approximately fifteen to twenty feet apart from one another all within ten feet of the edge of the field and the hedgerow. If we start with the one that’s at the top of the field . . .’ began Sandford.

‘We need more equipment,’ said Maxwell, looking around at the radar machine being unloaded from the back of a specialist firm’s van and wheeled up the field in front of them.

‘No,’ answered Sandford, politely, firmly and almost as if talking to a child, ‘we don’t because we are going to deal with one site at a time.’ He looked back at Willis and resumed explaining the process. ‘We begin with site one at the top of the field and work our way down. Treat each site individually and we can bring in the dogs if it looks promising before we start digging.’

‘It’s clay soil, we might struggle to get a good reading,’ said Maxwell, looking at the ground.

‘We should be able to get a good reading down to fifteen feet,’ said Sandford. ‘No one’s going to have buried a body that deep.’

‘Don’t be nervous, Chris,’ said Dermot. ‘You’re not used to all this fresh air, are you?’ He gave a laugh.

Maxwell looked irritated and confused by the remark at first, but then he relaxed as they watched the ground radar machine being made ready. Alex Copeland, the operator, had just begun.

‘Chris? You feeling lucky?’ asked Dermot.

Chris frowned at him, not understanding his humour. ‘It’s not really a case of luck.’

Dermot grinned, nodded; he had decided that Maxwell didn’t have a sense of humour. Even Sandford had more of one than Maxwell, and he appeared to be enjoying the lack of understanding.

‘Eb, did you research the man?’ asked Dermot.

‘Douglas?’ Willis asked.

Sandford groaned. ‘He’s been spending all day looking up every detail of Douglas’s debauched lifestyle and his weird bunch of disciples.’

‘He’s definitely scary,’ said Willis. ‘According to people who have interviewed him over the years, he stares a lot, and he smiles all the time.’

‘He’s started,’ Maxwell interrupted as he set off up the field towards the graves and the radar machine, which had begun to sweep the areas identified.

Copeland diligently manoeuvred the machine in vertical sweeps up and back across the small patch of field, stopping sometimes to mark the ground with a spray of chalk. When he’d finished he unclipped a tablet computer from the handlebars of the machine and brought it across to show them his findings.

‘You see this area here, which forms a break and a change in pattern? That’s the edge of your site, your walls of the grave. That corresponds to the mapped-out area from the LiDAR scan. It extends down for one metre. This is definitely manmade. Here, where the area turns dark? Here’s your void, initial depression as the ground is not level from the top, and here is your second depression, probably where the thorax on your victim decomposed and collapsed. I marked it on the ground with a cross.’

‘Okay, we have the dogs standing by to double-check the results. Nothing is a substitute for digging out the graves to make sure, but this gives us a starting point,’ Willis said.

After pipes were inserted at intervals into the grave area, a springer spaniel named Izzy, a victim recovery dog, was brought up to the field and walked in a zigzag pattern from the top. When she reached the tubes she went at will, weaving in and out. Suddenly she stopped, wagged her tail furiously and barked at her handler. She stayed absolutely still, her nose an inch away from the top of the tube above the collapsed thorax, just her tail wagging furiously.





Chapter 25


Carter drove to Upper Street in Islington and found a parking space on a side road. Ex-Superintendent Davidson, the senior investigating officer from the Heather Phillips case, was waiting for him inside the restaurant for an early lunch. They shook hands.

‘Thanks for agreeing to see me so quickly.’

‘It’s no problem. Bad weather for golf anyway.’

Carter saw a lonely man in front of him who had decided there had to be give and take if they needed his help. It was worth lunch in the newest and the most expensive restaurant, just to eat moss and dried Bambi. They waited until the waiter took the order. It was one of those niche places that had adopted the term Nordic and involved rare breeds of animals and pickled carrots.

‘How can I help you?’ Davidson straightened the cutlery in front of him.

‘Do you remember the Heather Phillips disappearance?’ asked Carter.

‘Of course I do. Jimmy bastard Douglas. We were unlucky. On another day we’d have had him for Heather Phillips and a few more besides. We were coping with a difficult time in the country then. The foot and mouth epidemic made our investigation very difficult.’