After the Flood Read online

  ONE

  …After the flood

  THURSDAY, 31st MARCH

  The flood came in late March. It remained for just three days but in those three days the citizens of York were once again reminded of the drawback of living in the beautiful, ancient city. At its height, the flood waters were two feet deep above pavement level; the terraced houses that were close to the River Ouse were, as usual, badly affected, cellars flooded completely and everything therein ruined. The householders had to carry what they could to upstairs rooms and just wait for the waters to recede, after which, with good humour if possible, they brushed the remaining water from their living rooms, pumped out their cellars, jettisoned carpets and other possessions that had been ruined and then wrote for an insurance claim form. The city of York will flood once every two or three years, to greater or lesser levels of seriousness, and sometimes with the occasional fatality, as with a man comatose because of alcohol excess lying in an alley, or the down-and-out sleeping in a shed on an allotment. Equally tragically, for humans often bond with animals more than they do with other humans, there will be the loss of pets that could not escape the rising waters of the River Ouse. York will flood in the autumn because falling leaves clog the drains and the rainfall cannot run off. But most often, if it floods it floods in the spring when the Ouse is swollen with rain and snow-melt from the upper reaches of Swaledale. After each flood, the first thing that any property owner does—whether the occupier of a small terraced house or a large farm—is to walk his or her property to assess the extent of the damage.

  John Brand walked his farm. Eight hundred acres of arable, but the meadows which banked on to the Ouse he gave over to pasture, for he bred Gloucester Old Spots as an indulgence, as a contribution to keeping, if not a rare then at least an obscure breed of pig from extinction, rather than as a commercial venture. Though he did have an arrangement with a maker of ‘real sausages’ in York, who would buy a pig for slaughter and with its sweet meat produce pork-and-beer sausages, which sold well. Very well indeed. Brand’s arable land had escaped the flooding and, having taken his stock to higher ground when the rain showed no sign of letting up, he walked the pasture really more as a psychological exercise, a man reclaiming his land from the river. With his a flat cap, wax jacket over a green military-style pullover, corduroy trousers and Wellington boots, and two border collies at his feet, an observer would see him as the very image of a countryman. The landscape about him was flat, desolate, brown and green, sodden; pools of water stood trapped in the fields and the sky was grey and overcast.

  John Brand walked to the river’s edge and stood on the bank looking down at the smooth but powerfully flowing Ouse. Brand knew she was not a river to mess with; she had claimed her lives over the years. He turned to his right, walking northwards with the low townscape and the square tower of the Minster behind him on the southern skyline, and walked the edge of the river, lamenting the carcass of a black-faced ewe which had clearly been caught up in the Dales and had fetched up here on the river’s edge just to the north of York. Brand took solid canvas working gloves from his pocket, put them on, knelt down, took hold of the rear leg of the sheep and pulled it further up the bank to where it was unlikely to be reclaimed by the river. The ‘townies’ and the tourists, he reasoned, were sensitive souls and would not care to see the carcass of a sheep floating by. The sheep might still be fresh enough to be of interest to a fox; if not, the rats and other creatures of the riverbanks would begin the process of decomposition, and when it had dried out a little, and the weather become warmer, the flies would arrive and complete the process. He took the gloves off, put them back in the pocket of his wax jacket and walked on towards the beck. The beck flowed from a distant source but cut across his land and joined the river at an angle of ninety degrees. It cut a deep trough, about four feet wide and in places equally deep. At that moment it was as he expected, in a state of spate, as the last of the flood drained into the river. The beck was too fast-flowing, too wide and deep, to permit him to jump across and continue his walk along the bank and so he turned and followed the curve of the beck inland, away from the river, towards his fields of arable.

  Then one, and then the other, of his dogs pointed. Every dog points, but each in a different way and not all as clearly as the classic raised paw and straight tail of the ‘pointers’. Brand long ago recognised the point of his dogs: standing rigidly still, heads cocked to one side, eyes fixed on the object of interest. He followed their point, and saw it too—an arm, human, bones, a skeleton. He approached it cautiously; his dogs followed reluctantly. The skeleton was wedged half in and half out of the bank of the beck, one arm rising and falling in a grotesque waving motion with the movement of the rushing water, the skull grinning at him.

  He stepped back, turned and hurried to his house. Not one for mobile phones, he had to use a landline to call the police. He hurried because, although the person was long dead, he believed the working of the beck would dislodge the skeleton. The beck had already exposed it; it would eventually be dislodged, taken into the river and lost.

  Louise D’Acre took the call at 10.30 a.m. She sat in her office next to the pathology laboratory at the York City Hospital, reading a report she had put in for typing the previous day and which had been returned for checking. She had notoriously bad handwriting which the clerical staff at the hospital had slowly learned to decipher but which often still resulted in the occasional howler. This particular report was a post-mortem of the suicide of a young man whose personality tended to deep depressions and the report had been returned to her speaking of a ‘black whore’ of depression in respect of the state of mind of the young man when he took his own life. As powerful as the image might be, and amusing in its mistake, it had to go. D’Acre took her pen, crossed out ‘whore’ and wrote wave above the word.

  It was then that her telephone rang. She picked up the receiver, answered it, and at the same time reached for her notepad and listened as she scribbled down directions in a hand only she could read. She replaced the phone and wound herself into a trench coat which was too large for her but with a tightened belt looked very fetching, placed a waterproof hat on her head, picked up her black bag and left her office. She walked out of the slab-sided medium-rise hospital to the car park and drove out of the city to the north, following the directions she had been given. She reached the village of Coddington and parked her car in the high street, placing a DOCTOR ON CALL sign in the windscreen.

  The village seemed to be linear, built on either side of a long street, and the houses didn’t seem to extend back very far beyond the main road. There was a post office, a pub with a wagon wheel mounted high on the wall, a shop, another shop, another pub…The road was wet and muddy, and the tidemarks on the buildings spoke of the recent flood. The whole mood of the village, it seemed to her, was tired after exertion, effete, in a word. It was still and, save for the cawing of rooks, quite silent. It was, she thought, like a boxing ring where a title fight had just taken place, where there was emptiness but still an ‘atmosphere’, where you could still smell the sweat. Except in Coddington that Friday morning it wasn’t sweat which teased her nostrils, it was the smell left by swollen and burst drains. Just one other figure was in the main street, a young constable. He stood a few hundred yards from where she had parked her car, raised a hand and began to walk towards her. Louise D’Acre picked up her bag from the rear seat of the car, locked the vehicle and walked towards the officer.

  ‘Dr D’Acre?’ The constable asked deferentially when within speaking distance.

  ‘For my sins, ‘tis me,’ Louise D’Acre said.

  ‘I’ve been asked to escort you to the scene, ma’am. Chief Inspector Hennessey told me what car to look for—distinctive, h
e said.’

  ‘Very.’ D’Acre and the constable began to walk side by side. ‘This is the first time it’s been out for a few days…I rent a car during the floods.’

  ‘Sensible, ma’am: she looks too valuable to risk losing.’

  ‘More sentimental value to me. It was my father’s first and only car, though, having said that, I have had some very interesting offers for her.’

  ‘Really? Sorry, ma’am, may I carry your bag?’

  ‘Thank you.’ D’Acre handed her black bag to the officer. They continued to walk side by side, the constable perhaps half a step behind D’Acre and on the outside of her, and in silence until the officer said, ‘Just down here, doctor.’

  ‘Down here’ proved to be a narrow pathway in which the gravel had been deeply cut by running water and which, D’Acre could see, led to muddy green-brown fields, a flurry of police activity, a white Land-Rover and a blue and white police tape encircling something on the ground. D’Acre stepped over a wooden stile into the field and regretted not bringing stronger shoes. Her shoes were not dainty, but she should have read the signs: the telephone message had told her of ‘apparent human remains in a field’; she knew what the weather had been like for the last few days. She also regretted not changing into green coveralls at the hospital; she felt the flimsiness of her clothes and yearned for riding boots, jodhpurs and a warm jacket. But she pressed on and was met by a smiling Chief Inspector Hennessey who, she noticed, had tucked his trouser-bottoms into his socks.

  ‘You missed the fun,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ D’Acre returned the smile but permitted only the briefest eye contact.

  ‘Spent the morning building mud pies, didn’t we, constable?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the constable replied sheepishly.

  ‘Mud pies?’ D’Acre took her bag from the constable.

  ‘Well, diverted a stream—plenty of manpower and a small earthmover that was requisitioned. It was in the village anyway, digging out silted-up ditches. The fella was only too pleased to help.’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘Diverting the stream. This way, I’ll show you.’ Hennessey led the forensic pathologist across the field, holding up the blue and white tape for her to lower herself under, and towards the mound covered by a sheet of heavy-duty plastic.

  Closer at hand Louise D’Acre saw that the sheet of plastic was draped over the side of the path of a stream, now without running water but still very muddy. She glanced up the stream and saw that a dam had been built and that the stream, as Hennessey had said, had indeed been diverted across a neighbouring field and into the Ouse. She turned to him. ‘Bet you thought you’d dammed up your last stream?’

  ‘Indeed I did. More years ago than I care to remember.’ Then a pained look crossed his eyes and Louise D’Acre didn’t pursue the conversation. ‘So, what have we?’

  ‘Constable.’ Hennessey addressed a second, older constable, who bent down and lifted the plastic sheeting.

  ‘Female.’ Dr D’Acre looked at the remains. ‘Definitely a she…completely skeletal, so she must have been buried for a good number of years. These wet clays will preserve flesh quite well. Strange place to bury a body, so close to a stream.’

  ‘The farmer…’ Hennessey nodded to the constable, who let the plastic sheet fall back into place, ‘he found the body. He told me that the stream “wanders”, as he put it. Noticeably so, over a period of years.’

  ‘Yes…I have heard that watercourses do that. You know, in Ireland, they can’t pinpoint the actual site of the Battle of the Boyne like we can pinpoint Naseby or Marston Moor, because the Boyne has altered its course so much in the last four hundred years. So she probably wasn’t buried so near the stream after all, but time and flood…Well, I can’t do anything here. I can do the p.m. this afternoon. It’s been quiet in the Vale, no recent murders whose post-mortems have to take priority. She could have been down there for several hundred years, of course. I didn’t see any clothing or modem knick-knacks like watches.’

  ‘That would be a pleasantly neat end to the working week. I have this weekend off.’

  ‘More than seventy years in the clay and you lose interest, I gather?’

  ‘That’s the cutoff point.’ A sudden gust of wind tugged at Chief Inspector Hennessey’s silver hair. ‘Little point in opening an inquiry when the perpetrator is going to be in his late eighties at the very least. More pressing crimes to solve with limited resources.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Louise D’Acre looked at the skeleton, the top side of the skull protruding from the wet soil, the lower left arm also protruding, as was the left pelvic bone. ‘She—and it’s definitely female, as I said—she’s still more concealed than revealed. I’ll have to supervise the removal…a careful peeling-away of the surrounding soil, and sifting of the same, for your ends, not mine.’

  Hennessey glanced at her questioningly.

  ‘Well, you could shovel away the murder weapon and not know it.’

  ‘Of course…’ Hennessey felt a surge of embarrassment. ‘Of course…right, sergeant!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Two constables with spades, please.’

  ‘Sir!’ The sergeant turned and called to a group of officers. ‘Constable Cheapside, Constable Neilson…shovels…Take your directions from the pathologist…Come on, sharply now!’

  Louise D’Acre stood close by the side of the route of the original stream, which was by now a trench, though not so close as to intimidate the two constables, who dug gently, one spit of a spade at a time, into the sodden clay. One constable slowly, carefully excavated the skull, and the other, at D’Acre’s suggestion, worked downwards from the pelvic bone towards the foot, so as not to get in each other’s way. Both constables placed the clay they removed into a sieve, which, when full, was removed by a third constable and replaced with an empty sieve. George Hennessey stood further back from the crime scene, close enough to show interest but far enough away to enjoy the luxury of being able to look around him: the flatness of this part of England, the huge sky it afforded, distant church spires, a skein of geese flying north, two magpies hopping about the hedgerow. A traditionally rare bird, Hennessey had noted, and had read in the press that the numbers of the species had grown in recent years, but would, the newspaper article promised, subside to normal numbers in time.

  ‘Oh!’

  The sudden cry from one of the constables brought Hennessey’s attention back to the matter in hand. He saw the constable who had been asked to dig around the skull leap backwards. Louise D’Acre stepped forwards. ‘Don’t touch it,’ she said, softly but authoritatively. She turned to Hennessey. ‘We’ll need a stretcher now, please.’

  ‘Sergeant! Stretcher.’

  ‘Sir!’

  Hennessey strode forwards as D’Acre grittily, he thought, no longer worried about getting her city clothing muddy, clambered into the stream bed, knelt and picked up the skull. She turned it over in her hands, examining the base and the cranium.

  ‘Whoever did this was making sure all right.’ She raised her voice for Hennessey to hear her but didn’t look at him, continuing to focus on the skull. The head was severed from the rest of the body. Somebody was making sure she was dead.’

  ‘Murder?’

  D’Acre now turned to Hennessey and smiled. ‘Don’t be in a rush to be the policeman. Medieval beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery often drove folk to chop off the heads of people whose condition defied current medical knowledge. Not usually in England, though, but it wasn’t unknown. The Dracula legend and the concept of “undead” comes from eastern Europe, as does the practice of driving a stake through the heart of those who weren’t awake but refused to decompose. The “undead” concerned would be in a coma or a persistent vegetative state, but to superstitious people such a condition could only be the work of the devil. We don’t know how old this skeleton is…it could be centuries old.’ She continued to examine the skull. ‘There’s nothing…Hello!’

  ‘Found something
?’

  ‘Yes.’ She brushed away a thin film of clay and then Hennessey saw it too, glinting in the modest amount of daylight that prevailed.

  ‘A filling. A gold filling.’

  ‘Well, that’s not medieval,’ he sighed.

  ‘It isn’t, is it? But gold won’t rust, so it still could be the victim of a murder that occurred more than seventy years ago. I can’t…I won’t say any more until the post-mortem.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Dr D’Acre clambered out of the ditch and placed the skull in a productions bag, sealed it and placed the bag on the stretcher, which had been placed close to where the constables had been digging.

  ‘Frighten you?’ Hennessey heard D’Acre ask, smiling, of the constable whose spade had dislodged the skull. He liked her for that.

  ‘A little, ma’am, yes.’

  ‘Means you’re human. How long have you been a police officer?’

  ‘Less than a year, ma’am.’

  ‘Thought I hadn’t met you before. Constable…?’

  ‘Cheapside, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, what happened to you just then. Constable Cheapside, is nothing compared to what you will experience. Ever scraped the victims of a road traffic accident off the road?’

  ‘No…not yet, ma’am.’

  ‘You will…when you’ve done that a time or two, you’ll take skeletal remains in your stride.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Now, use your spade and work down from where the skull was. You’ll come to the shoulder blades and ribcage.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  A camera flashed as the scene-of-crimes officer photographed the procedure. The man didn’t need to be told what to photograph; his brief, as always, was simple: photograph everything from every angle, in colour and in black and white.

  Constables Cheapside and Neilson continued to chip delicately away by the skeleton, placing the muddy soil in the sieves, which were taken to the route of the diverted stream, where the mud was sifted for any artefacts. Presently, after ninety minutes’ careful, painstaking work, the skeleton lay fully exposed in the side of the original course of the stream. The SOCO stepped forward and took more photographs, again from all angles.