Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(23)
“As far as we know—yes. My sergeant’s trying to get his hands on any available CCTV footage, so we can check that against the statements we’ve had from the other staff at the school, as well as the monks who reside in the abbey. The problem is, the list of potentials isn’t limited to people on school grounds,” she said. “They publish the school timetable online, including when there’s a movie night, so anybody could feasibly have planned the right time to pay a visit.”
“What about the kids?” Phillips asked.
Much as Patel hated to think any child could have perpetrated so heinous a crime, she had to consider the possibility.
“Them too,” she said, bleakly. “We’re coming to this with an open mind.”
They reached the edge of the treeline, where a natural opening led through to a meadow, inside which an enormous apple orchard had been planted.
“This way,” she said, taking care to use the plastic walkway that had been laid out by forensic staff, rather than stomping over the soft turf as they meandered through the bare trees. “The abbey owns the orchard, and the monks have a cottage industry making their own cider from the apples. In the season, it’s full of people, including external visitors who can tour the orchards. At this time of year, it’s deserted. Father Jacob was found in the cider mill at around half past eight this morning.”
“He didn’t die at the boarding house?” Ryan queried.
“Highly unlikely,” she said. “You’ll see what I mean, soon enough. How he came to be in the mill is anybody’s business, but we’ve found tracks leading from the back of St. Cuthbert’s House to the sports hall that suggest he might have been running towards the main building. We found drag marks and some evidence of minor blood loss, where the pathway forks.”
“Where the perp caught him, before he could call out for help?” Ryan wondered.
“It would fit,” she agreed. “The forensics team have a job on their hands to cover this kind of area—they’ll be here for days. Then, there’s the problem of the dog prints.”
Both men frowned in confusion.
“There’s a dog?”
“There’s a pack of them,” she said. “The college keeps its own hounds—for farming and grousing purposes, naturally.”
Another bone of contention with his father, Ryan thought sadly. He, who had grown up on the land and was a qualified firearms specialist, didn’t like to kill another living thing—whereas his father had been raised to manage the land and, having served in the military, took a different view of the matter.
They tended to avoid any discussion of politics, as a general rule.
“When they couldn’t find Father Jacob, they brought in the Captain of Beagling and his best sniffer dog,” Patel was saying.
Ryan frowned.
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me that, when they thought Father Jacob was missing, rather than calling in the police they brought in one of their pack dogs?”
Patel wasn’t overjoyed about it herself.
“Destroying trace evidence, in the process. The dog scrambled all over the route Father Jacob took last night, not to mention the footprints of everyone who trampled after him. If they’d told us sooner, we could have used our own trained dogs, if need be.”
“It’s a self-contained community here,” Phillips pointed out. “Places like this tend to close ranks, and they like to run things their own way, without outside interference.”
“You mean, the kind of people who believe they’re answerable to a higher power, rather than to man-made justice?” Ryan wondered aloud.
“Maybe,” Phillips nodded, thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s exactly the kind of place this is.”
CHAPTER 11
There should be a word for it, Ryan thought.
A word was needed to describe the unique emotion a murder detective experienced when they looked upon the decaying carcass of what had once been a living, breathing person. It was another kind of privilege, he thought, because only a handful of people would see the remains of Father Jacob Jamieson in such a compromised, vulnerable state; only they would know how to treat those remains with respect and care—which mattered, whether or not the person who’d once inhabited that body turned out to have been good or bad.
Sadness, disgust, nausea, impotence…
Ryan felt them all, yet none of those words was adequate to describe the whole, raw experience. He, and every other murder detective, forensics officer, mortician and pathologist were the ferrymen, who carried the dead to their place of final rest.
At times, the burden weighed heavily.
Ryan stood alongside Phillips and Patel inside the doorway of the cider mill, which was protected from the elements by a large forensics tent that billowed in the breeze. As the air whipped through the cracks in its material, they were afforded an occasional reprieve from the ripening aroma of decomposing flesh and dried blood, which mingled with the lingering scent of rotting apples that clung to the walls of the mill and inside their noses.
“Poor bastard,” Phillips muttered, and was forced to look away, or else embarrass himself.
Father Jacob’s body had not yet been moved, the forensics team having decided to leave it in situ to allow them to complete their work as fully as possible. Moving a body ahead of time could mean losing vital trace evidence, so this was done only with the approval of the Supervising CSI and the SIO managing the case. It made for difficult viewing, but it was better to see exactly how the man’s killer had left him.