Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) Read online

  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 fille
d 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.’

  ‘Yes, what’s that?’

  ‘It’ll be in the report, but I may as well tell you now. Those injuries to the skull. They would have left an awful lot of blood - head injuries do. There would have been blood all over the place.’

  25. Riverbank

  ‘SO THIS is where it was found?’

  ‘According to the records, yes.’

  They’d reached the end of Fulford Main Street, the southern edge of the city. Terry Bateson and his new assistant, Jane Carter, had spent the last few days reading the file on the case of the murder of Brenda Stokes. A key piece of evidence against Jason Barnes had been the bloodstained torch, which had originally been believed to be the murder weapon. Now they had come to see where it had been found. The place, according to Jason, where he had last seen Brenda alive.

  Terry turned the car right across the traffic onto an unmade track. There was a metal bar overhead to prevent access by lorries or gypsy caravans. A sign on the right read Landing Lane. The track wound right and left under overhanging trees, and in twenty yards they were in a different world, away from the buzz of people and traffic and housing, in sudden rural solitude. The car bounced in a pothole, a rabbit scurried into the undergrowth.

  ‘Just the place for a spot of nookie,’ Jane Carter murmured. ‘Or murder, if that’s your preference.’

  ‘You’re all right with me, love,’ Terry said, regretting it instantly, as her plain, earnest gaze met his. ‘Anyway, there’s a copper on duty, just in case,’ he added. Poor girl, she thinks I’m insulting her, he thought desperately. Probably no-one’s ever flirted with her in her life.

  As they came round a corner they saw a parking place with an old red hatchback in it. Beside the car was a burly man in an old tweed jacket; Detective Superintendent Bob Baxter, retired. As they pulled up beside him, he glanced pointedly at his watch.

  ‘Fifteen minutes I’ve stood here, young man,’ he said, as Terry got out. ‘Trying to waste my time, are you?’

  Terry sighed. He found it hard to be polite to the old man. Maybe this was why Will Churchill was glad to be away. ‘No. Just trying to find the truth, that’s all.’

  ‘The truth is that Jason Barnes murdered that young girl,’ Baxter growled. ‘Just as I always said he did.’ He scowled at Terry’s blank, non-committal face, then glanced at Jane, hoping for more support. ‘And this, in my view, is where he killed her.’

  They looked around. It was certainly an appropriate spot. Even now, in the middle of the day, it was quiet here. Just a couple of bluetits peeping to each other in the trees, and the distant swoosh of traffic, like the sound of the sea, from the A64. This major road, Jane worked out, was a short distance away to the south, over a field that rose like a low hill to their left. She saw a horse grazing under some large parkland trees. Straight ahead of them, the track diverged, with a white gate marked Private on the left, and an old rusty one across the track beside it. Both appeared to lead into further wooded seclusion. On the right of the track where they stood was an overgrown hedge, with what looked like a marshy meadow behind it, overgrown with willowherb and nettles. If it was quiet like this now, Jane thought, what must it have been like at three o’clock in the morning, 18 years ago?

  ‘So where did you find it?’ Terry asked.

  ‘The torch? Just down here. I’ll show you.’

  Baxter led them a few yards down the track, through the rusty gate. There was marshy untended ground on either side, and to their left, Jane realised, a glimpse of the river Ouse.

  ‘Just in there.’ Baxter pointed to a patch of grass with docks and nettles, the far side of a small ditch on the right hand side. ‘Didn’t find it straight away, of course. Took three days before he admitted he’d been here, the little shite.’

  ‘And this torch was covered with blood?’ Jane asked, peering at the ditch.

  ‘That’s right. Her blood,’ Baxter emphasized firmly. ‘We didn’t have the benefit of DNA then, of course, just matching blood groups, but that definitely matched hers. Today we know the DNA closely matches her mother’s, even if we can’t check it against Brenda herself.’

  ‘We’ll need to check it against this body,’ Terry said. ‘Then we’ll be absolutely certain.’

  ‘Sure, go ahead.’ Baxter shook his head, like a bull bothered by flies. ‘But it’ll be hers, all right. So as far as I was concerned we had the murder weapon, years ago. A torch covered with her blood and his fingerprint in it. What more did we want?’r />
  ‘Hairs, bits of skin,’ Terry said quietly. ‘To prove he’d hit her with it. Did you look for those?’

  ‘Of course we did,’ Baxter said grimly. ‘I went to the lab myself. But you’ve got to remember, that torch had been lying in long wet grass for three days before we found it. And it had rained. So what do you expect?’

  ‘They’d probably have found some trace today, on the torch or in the grass where it was lying,’ Terry said. ‘But things have changed.’

  ‘We looked all round here for the body,’ Baxter said. ‘Never found it, of course.’

  ‘It’s a fair bit to search.’

  ‘It is that.’ Baxter strode on, as though to illustrate the point. In ten or twenty yards they were on the riverbank. The wide slow-moving Ouse flowed quietly in front of them. Willow trees wept over the bank in spots favoured by fishermen. There was a metal picnic table and chairs, and sheep grazing on the far side. A footpath ran north and south along the riverbank; a jogger loped past as they watched.

  ‘Where does this go?’ Jane asked.

  ‘North into the city, south under the A64 to the meadows opposite the archbishop’s palace,’ Terry answered. ‘It will have taken some time, to search all this,’ he said to Baxter.

  ‘Forty men for a week,’ Baxter said. ‘Plus divers, of course. We searched the river for five miles downstream; it took ages. And then the little bastard came up with his tale about the slurry pits. We even checked Naburn sewage works.’

  ‘You did that because of what Jason Barnes said when he was arrested?’ Jane asked, reminding herself of the details she’d read in the files.

  ‘That’s right.’ Baxter lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, watching a brightly painted canal narrow boat chug slowly past on the water. ‘We took it seriously at the time, but now we know he was just taking the piss. Buried her under the ring road instead.’

  ‘So the question is, how did she get from here to Copmanthorpe?’ Terry said thoughtfully. ‘What is it, about four miles?’