Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (20 page)

‘He can now,’ Sarah said. ‘The government’s amended the law of double jeopardy. So if significant new evidence is discovered - from this body, for example - then, yes, he could be tried for the same offence twice.’

‘And you’d defend this man, would you?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘If I was asked, yes. Why not? That’s my job.’

‘Hm. Rather you than me.’ He frowned, rather disagreeably, Sarah thought. This was an old argument about the ethics of her profession. She didn’t want to go through it again, though she would if she had to.

Michael changed the subject, and the evening ended, agreeably enough. But somehow the sparkle had gone from it. He seemed quiet and withdrawn as he drove her home, and the anticipated decisions about whether she should let him kiss her, or ask him in for coffee, didn’t materialise. He simply smiled, and asked if she’d like to go out with him again. ‘I could show you the windmill, if you like? And go for a walk on the Wolds. We could make a day of it.’

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ she said, with an attempt at sincerity. ‘Give me a ring.’

‘All right, I will.’ He smiled again, shook her hand, and waited with his headlights illuminating her drive while she walked to her door. She turned and waved as he reversed.

She stood for a moment, watching his tail lights fade into the darkness. What happened there exactly? He seemed so lively earlier, with the skating and the meal. Then his mood changed. Was it my work, interfering again, as it used to do with Bob? Probably. I should have switched my phone off.

But then, perhaps it was me. I didn’t really want anything more. Perhaps he noticed.

She smiled as she turned to go in.

At least he shook my hand.

24. Digging Up the Past

T
ERRY BATESON slept little that night. He usually enjoyed running - the sensation of his limbs moving smoothly and easily, the clean air in his lungs, the glowing warmth of the endorphins flooding through his veins at the end - it all helped to relax him and settle his mind. But not this time. Not after he met Sarah, laughing in the arms of another man.

If it had been her husband it wouldn’t have mattered. Terry had met Bob Newby several times, and while he had hardly warmed to the man, he accepted him as a fact of Sarah’s life. She had a husband, a rather wimpish school teacher with a beard; well, too bad. Sarah must have been fond of him once, and she valued her marriage above the risks of an affair; she’d made that clear enough in the past.

So what had happened to change her behaviour? Perhaps I misunderstood, Terry thought. Perhaps what she meant before was, she valued her marriage above an affair
with me
. That’s how it appears tonight, anyhow. She looked quite happy when I first noticed her, walking towards me. And then when she did see me, what?

He re-ran the painful meeting in his mind. She’d seemed surprised, he seemed to remember, a touch embarrassed.

But no more. Not ashamed or guilty, as she should be.

The shock shattered Terry. He ran on into the night, heedless of where he was going. His stride lengthened, his feet bounced off the footpath, faster and faster. He ran until his legs shook and his lungs were on fire, but it made no difference.
How could she do that?
he asked himself, bent over and gasping on a bridge by the river. Sarah, who had told him her family and career mattered so much.
Who was this man, anyway?
Her brother, perhaps? But she didn’t have a brother, surely - and anyway, the way he’d looked at her wasn’t brotherly at all. No, it’s quite simple, he told himself grimly. She’s having an affair.

But not with me.

Well, it’s her choice, he thought, jogging home in the dark. Such things happen all the time. So why should I care? She’s just not the woman I thought she was, that’s all. Not the woman for me.

So why does this hurt so much?

Ever since he’d first met Sarah Newby he’d been attracted to her. He’d worked closely with her on a number of cases - on several of which, particularly the trial of her son, they’d had moments of bitter disagreement - but always, when he looked back on them now, the moments he’d spent with her had been somehow special. Even the arguments had been like that. They mattered to him in a way that arguments with others didn’t. He’d replayed them often in his mind.

Not any more.

It wasn’t that she was strikingly beautiful - she was slim, moderately pretty, no more. Mary, his wife, had a nicer smile in the photo he kept by his bed; every pin-up in a magazine had a better physique. Nor, he told himself savagely, was Sarah Newby even a particularly nice person. Tonight was just proof of it. She could be sharp, strong-willed, stubborn, aggressive, sarcastic, dismissive and even downright cruel to people who threatened her or got in her way. It was part of what made her so effective in court, and, he guessed bitterly, so difficult to live with. Both of her children, he knew, had had problems. Probably her husband had too.

But to Terry, until now, none of this had mattered. With her he felt something he’d felt for no one but Mary, and Mary was dead. He’d been drawn to Sarah like a moth to a flame - a cruel, heartless flame, he now told himself sternly, which could burn him up without caring. Each time he’d come close to her, she’d turned him away. He should have taken warning from that. She was married, she’d told him, and he’d respected that. An affair between them could wreck her family and both their careers. So over the past few months he’d tried to see less of her, put her out of his thoughts. He’d thought he’d succeeded, until tonight. There she was.

Glowing with happiness, in the arms of another man. Not her husband.

So it was me she rejected. Not the idea of an affair.

These jealous thoughts went on long into the night. Somehow he finished the run, went home, showered, changed, looked in on his sleeping daughters, ate something and talked quietly to Trude, all in a trance liked a man who’s been wounded and is waiting for the bruise to come out. Then he lay on his bed and listened to the voices arguing in his head.

She’s worse than I thought, that woman. She’s a total bitch. No she isn’t, you’re just jealous. She has every right to have an affair, of course she has. Then why didn’t she choose me? Because you backed away, you thought it was wrong. No I didn’t, it was
her
,
she told me it was wrong!
Well, maybe things have changed since then. You don’t know what’s going on in her life. Maybe she just fancies this other guy better. Great, thanks a lot.

Or maybe things have got worse with her husband; they weren’t very good before. So why didn’t she talk to me about it? I could have offered, well ... comfort. She didn’t have a chance to talk to you because you’ve been avoiding her, you know you have, trying to get her out of your mind. After all she has a life of her own, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s best to stay out of it, then you won’t get hurt.

It would hurt more if I talked to her, would it?

Yes, it would, you know it would. Forget her, Terry, stay away.

It already hurts like hell.

The excavation took a week, even with contractors working night and day, and the inside lane of the dual carriageway had to be coned off, causing huge tailbacks and hassle for the traffic division. A team of archaeologists were recruited, to advise on the best way of extracting the body from the concrete without unnecessary damage to the road. The expense was considerable, but the body was there, just as Will Churchill had hoped. The body which now lay on the pathologist’s table in front of them. The body of a young female, with a missing left hand.

Terry Bateson stood with Robert Baxter beside him, both in white coats. Churchill, typically, was away on a management training course. Peter Styles, the young forensic pathologist, was almost puppy-like in his enthusiasm. Clearly he was delighted by this change in his routine.

‘Well, it’ll all be in my report,’ he said, ‘but there are a number of significant items which I can show you straight away. In the first place, as you see, this is a young female, late teens or early twenties, no sign of childbirth. The body is significantly decayed - at least ten, possibly twenty years underground. But the soil where she was found was relatively damp, anaerobic, and that and the effect of the concrete, which served as a sort of massive coffin lid, have preserved a small amount of flesh. You will see the greatest decay was around the left arm, the lower part of which I understand has recently been exposed to the air.’

The sight - and even worse, the smell - of dead bodies cut open on the pathologist’s table were a rite of passage for most young detectives at some point in their career. Terry Bateson had vomited the first time - many did. Since then he thought he had become hardened to it, but this blackened, shrunken flesh of a corpse that had been many years underground was no easy thing to look at. He thought with alarm of the sausage, eggs and bacon which had started his day, and concentrated firmly on the young man’s report.

‘There is some difficulty in establishing the cause of death, I’m afraid. That’s not because we have no evidence, but too much, oddly enough. You see on the one hand this strip of grey cloth around the neck. You may want to send this for more detailed forensic examination, but I’ve had a preliminary look under a microscope, and it looks like a scarf. A silk scarf, in fact. And as you will see it’s pulled very tight - in fact there are even strips of skin attached to it ...’ Terry Bateson swallowed quickly and took a deep breath ‘... so it seems pretty likely the young woman was strangled. Certainly she would have been unable to breathe with something this tight around her neck.’

‘Where’s your difficulty, then?’ Robert Baxter asked gruffly.

‘Well, not in the scarf itself,’ the young man answered smoothly. ‘But here, do you see? At the back of the skull.’ He turned the head sideways. ‘Significant injuries here too. The skull is cracked, as if by a fall or blow. Several blows, in fact - you see the impact in several places. This could well have caused brain haemorrhage. She would have been unlikely to survive it alive.’

‘So you’re saying her head was smashed in, and she was strangled with a silk scarf. Is that right?’ Terry Bateson asked carefully.

‘Precisely. And there, you see is my problem. You want to know which came first, and unfortunately, in a body of this age ...’ The young man shrugged. ‘It’s almost impossible to say. If I could examine her lungs or airways, but ... they’re almost totally shrivelled. As is her brain - the worms have been at that. Are you all right, Inspector?’

‘If you have a glass of water,’ Terry Bateson, said, cursing himself. The young pathologist filled a glass from a tap at a sink beside which were several skulls and a hand pickled in brine. He handed the glass to Terry. Robert Baxter watched, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his white coat, a wooden scowl of contempt on his face.

‘So as I say there appear to be two possible causes of death,’ the young man resumed. ‘She was either strangled first and then beaten, or beaten first and then strangled. Or maybe damaged her head in a fall. That’s as far as I can go. But there are several other points of interest which may help you.’

‘Yes?’ Terry sipped his water cautiously. ‘What are those?’

‘Well, first of all this hand, or rather lack of hand. My colleague’s report on that says it was chewed off the wrist by a fox, which matches with what we have here. Several marks of the teeth of a mammal. But as the report also points out, the wrist was semi-detached already - the main bone was broken long before your fox arrived.’

‘Presumably at the time of death?’ Bateson asked.

‘I would assume so, yes. Or if not, very near to it. This is a severe injury, a broken wrist. No normal person would walk around with it untreated. But if she’d taken it to hospital, they’d have put it in plaster. There’s no sign of such treatment here.’

‘And the hand is definitely hers?’

‘Yes. A perfect match.’

‘Good. That’s one thing at least. Anything else?’

‘Yes. Two things that may help. Firstly, I’ve scraped under the fingernails. Of both hands, but the right was more productive than the left. Look here.’ He led them to a microscope. ‘Mostly mud and soil, of course, but look there! Those might be fragments of skin, do you see? Microscopic, invisible to the naked eye, but they’re there all the same. And if I’m right, we may be able to find enough DNA to trace whose skin it is. In which case ...’

‘We’ll know who she scratched!’ A smile cracked Robert Baxter’s face for the first time. ‘Good work, lad. We’ll have that lad Jason Barnes yet.’

‘If this
is
Brenda Stokes,’ Terry warned cautiously.

‘Well of course it is,’ Baxter said impatiently. ‘Her hand, her body - look at these clothes! What are these, lad? Have you been able to establish that?’ He pointed at the brown muddy threads of clothing draped here and there around the bones.

‘I’ve had a look at them, yes. They’re pretty perished but they look to me like ... well, the remains of a school uniform.’

‘Exactly!’ Baxter said. ‘It’s her, without a doubt of it! No need to wait for DNA - check her dental records! They’re in the file somewhere - we had them ready, years ago, when we were searching for this body the first time.’

‘We’ll do that. But then we have to find out who put the body there, and how,’ Terry Bateson said cautiously. ‘Just because it’s Brenda doesn’t mean that Jason killed her. After all, how did the killer - whoever he was – get her to the A64? And then bury her under all that concrete?’

‘That’s for you to find out, son. But when you do, you’ll find that it’s Jason Barnes,’ Baxter answered grimly. ‘You mark my words. And then if you’ve got any gumption about you, you’ll put him back inside where he belongs.’

‘That won’t be easy,’ Terry said. ‘Not now he’s won his appeal. I’m not sure it’s legally possible.’

‘Even if it isn’t, you can publish the evidence in the papers. That’ll be enough for me.’

Baxter turned and marched towards the door. Terry was about to follow him when the pathologist said: ‘Oh, there’s one other thing.’