Lying Dead
Lying Dead
Aline Templeton
Also by Aline Templeton
Death is my Neighbour
Last Act of All
Past Praying For
The Trumpet Shall Sound
Night and Silence
Shades of Death
Marjory Fleming Series
Cold in the Earth
The Darkness and the Deep
Copyright © 2007 by Aline Templeton
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette Livre UK Company
The right of Aline Templeton to be identified as the Author
of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A Hodder & Stoughton Book
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Epub ISBN 9781848948341
Book ISBN 9780340922279
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For Ian again, with all my love and thanks
for support, encouragement, and the title.
Chapter 1
The wind had dropped with the sunrise. It was a beautiful May morning, with the soft, pearly light so typical of the south-west corner of Scotland, but it was cool still; vapour clung to the tops of the trees and there was a sweet, damp, earthy smell after a heavy dew. He got up to have a chilly shower – he must see if something couldn’t be done about the hot-water supply – then dressed in his working jeans and checked shirt and went down the rickety staircase and across the living room to open the door.
The wooden shack, his home since he was freed on licence six months ago, had walls weathered by time and the elements to a soft silvery grey. It stood in a clearing surrounded by rough grass studded with the stumps of felled trees, crumbling and mossy now. Beyond that, a tangle of undergrowth formed a natural enclosure: at this time of year the grass had feathery seed heads and the creamy flowers of hawthorn and cow parsley gleamed against the lush dark green of nettles and docks. From a snarl of brambles, a robin was shouting a melodious challenge to all comers. Sitting down on the dilapidated bench outside the back door, he drank in the peace and freedom which remained a novelty still.
He enjoyed his work as a forester; his hands were hardened now and his muscles had strengthened so that he didn’t suffer as at first he had from the physical demands it made. He had nearly finished repairing a path for ramblers; after that, he would be putting up owl nesting boxes as part of the Forestry Commission’s wildlife protection programme. When he heard the eerie cries on a moonlit night, he would enjoy thinking that the bird sweeping through the clearing on great, silent wings might have been a scrawny chick in one of his boxes.
Yes, he was a contented man in this simple, solitary existence, with only his books for company, though he would once have pitied someone who earned a meagre living by the work of his hands and didn’t own a house or a car or even a shower with reliably hot water. But after eighteen months when there had been little else for him to do for hours at a time but think, he had come to the conclusion that serenity came from lack of expectation. Not happiness, no, but that was a luxury he had been forced to realize he couldn’t expect. The nearest approach to it was this pleasure in the warmth of a spring morning and the tranquillity of his solitary world. It was tempting him to linger now, when he should really be getting ready for the day’s work. Just five more minutes . . .
When the mechanical, insistent call of a mobile phone – a silly, chirpy little tune – broke the spell, his first reaction was one of alarming rage. He had believed himself alone and he was being spied on; it seemed a violation as gross as if he had been sitting on the bench naked. He had been under surveillance for too long to be rational about it.
Jumping to his feet, he headed towards the sound which seemed to be coming from the edge of the clearing where it joined a forestry road, his hands unconsciously balled into fists, angry enough to take on any intruder.
But there was no one to be seen. In front of him the track was empty and a moment later the ringing stopped. He looked about him uncertainly.
Could it be some rambler who had dropped the mobile nearby without noticing? It was a popular walk, winding up through the forest to a panoramic viewpoint. Perhaps, if it went on ringing, he could trace it and restore it to its owner. It wasn’t likely to be far off the track.
Provokingly, the sound stopped again just as he emerged from the clearing, but it didn’t take long for him to establish its source. There was a woman lying on her front, her head turned to one side, just beyond a screening hawthorn bush at the very edge of the track. She was wearing jeans, a white shirt and a light blue tailored jacket. She was dead.
It wasn’t hard to tell. The long dark hair veiling her face was sticky with blood and on one side of her head a wound gaped, showing a glint of bone and a mess of tissue.
He staggered as if someone had struck him. With the random irrelevance of shock, he found himself thinking,
That’s why you say, I’m staggered
. He shut his eyes as if it might be a bad dream, as if when he opened them a blink would have wiped away the monstrous sight.
Of course it didn’t. She was still there, still as shocking in ugly death. He had never seen a dead body before. He steeled himself to look directly, to walk towards her. He saw that she was wearing trainers and her clothes were glistening with dew, then his eye travelled reluctantly to focus on the mutilated head. He was beside her now; he bent down and gingerly put out his hand to push aside the curtain of hair.
The shock this time dropped him to his knees. He knew who she was, though her hair, when last he saw her, had been close-cropped like a boy’s and hennaed red. How could he forget that seductive mouth, the tiny diamond glinting in the side of her nose? – they had tortured him in dreams. But the mouth was sagging open now, the olive skin waxy and discoloured. The huge dark eyes, which had looked at him with what he had believed was love, were closed, one of them puffy and sticky with congealed blood.
The last time he had seen her was in court, when she had looked at the jury with those same limpid eyes and delivered the evidence which had put him behind bars. And if he called the police now, what would they assume? She was lying outside his house; there were his footprints in the dew-wet grass beside her body.
His world splintered about him. The sun was still shining, the birds were still singing, but it was as if a stone had been thrown at a looking-glass, showing up his tranquil, contented existence for the illusion it was.
At any minute there might be ramblers. Soon there would be other foresters on their way to a project up by the viewpoint. There could be no concealment then.
He wasn’t going back to prison
. That was his only coherent thought, and moving like a zombie he went back into the house to fetch a tarpaulin he used sometimes when the roof leaked.
As he walked back out again carrying it, his face was set in hard, emotionless lines. Turning his head aside, he wrapped it round her slight frame, then levered the package, rigid and bearably anonymous now, on to his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. The inanimate body was surprisingly heavy, though, and he faltered a little as he took the weight. Then, regaining his balance, he set off through the belt of undergrowth, ignoring the thorns which snatched at his legs as he carried her in her tarpaulin shroud, the fading sound of the robin’s song from the bramble bush an impromptu requiem.
It was eerily dark and quiet as he stepped into the green shade of the forest. On all sides, the trunks of the larches rose high above him, bare apart from the jagged spikes of old broken branches, with low cloud still lurking in their canopy of foliage. As he climbed the sloping ground, there was thick soft grass to deaden his footsteps and even when he stumbled on a concealed stone or snapped a twig the sound was muffled. With no scrub for nesting there was no birdsong; the silence, too, added to his sense of unreality.
This section of the forest was unfamiliar territory. He’d never worked here, or felt tempted to explore; he had no idea how far it might extend before he would come to a track or one of the swathes of ground where timber had already been harvested. His every instinct was to take – it – as far as possible from his own back yard, but fit as he was, his burden seemed to be growing heavier and heavier. He blanked out the thought of how small, how slight she had been; all he was carrying was a dead weight which very soon he would be forced to set down, at least for a rest.
He could hear a sound now: the soft babble of water over stones which indicated one of the countless little burns running down the steep sides of the valley. He headed towards it, his breathing laboured, and saw that on the other side the trees were thinner, sparser and of more recent planting. He paused.
On the near side of the burn lay three great fallen trees, their branches dry as tinder and their exposed root systems linked, elaborate as a vipers’ knot, to form a bank. They must have stood at the outer edge of the old plantation, unprotected against the winter storms which topple the giants of the forest as a man might blow down a house of cards.
Grimacing, he set down his load and sat down himself, leaning his head back against the gnarled root mass and closing his eyes. Despite the cool damp air, he was sweating and his heart was racing with fear as well as physical effort. Time was passing. He checked his watch: in half an hour a truck would come to take him to the project he was working on and by then he must not only be ready, but calm and normal.