It was just after seven the next morning when Julian returned to Maiden Hall. If he hadn't explored every possible site from Consall Wood to Alport Height, he certainly felt as if he had. Torch in one hand, loud hailer in the other, he'd gone through the motions: He'd trudged the leafy woodland path from Wettonmill up the steep grade to Thor's Cave. He'd scoured along the River Manifold. He'd shone his torchlight up the slope of Thorpe Cloud. He'd followed the River Dove as far south as the old mediaeval manor at Norbury At the village of Alton, he'd hiked a distance along the Staffordshire Way He'd driven as many as he could manage of the single lane roads that Nicola favoured. And he'd paused periodically to use the loud hailer in calling her name. Deliberately marking his presence in every location, he'd awakened sheep, farmers, and campers during his eight hours’ search for her. At heart, he'd believed there was no chance that he would find her, but at least he'd been doing something instead of waiting at home by the phone. At the end of it all, he felt anxious and empty.
He was hungry as well. He could have eaten a leg of lamb had one been offered. It was odd, he thought. Just the previous night-wrought up with anticipation and nerves-he'd barely been able to touch his dinner. Indeed, Samantha had been a bit put out at the manner in which he merely picked at her fine sole amandine. She'd taken his lack of appetite personally, and while his father had leered about a man having other appetites to take care of, Sam, and wasn't their Julie about to do just that with we-all-know-who this very night, Samantha had pressed her lips together and cleared the table.
He'd have been able to do justice to one of her table-groaning breakfasts now, Julian thought. But as it was… Well, it didn't seem right to think about food-let alone to ask for it-despite the fact that the paying guests in Maiden Hall would be tucking into everything from cornflakes to kippers within the half hour.
He needn't have worried about the propriety in hoping for food under the circumstances, however. When he walked into the kitchen of Maiden Hall, a plate of scrambled eggs, mushrooms, and sausage sat untouched before Nan Maiden. She offered it to him the moment she saw him, saying, “They want me to eat, but I can't. Please take it. I expect you could do with a meal.”
They were the early kitchen staff: two women from the nearby village of Grindleford who cooked in the mornings when the sophisticated culinary efforts of Christian-Louis were as unnecessary as they would be unwanted.
“Bring it with you, Julian.” Nan put a cafeti`re on a tray with coffee mugs, milk, and sugar. She led the way into the dining room.
Only one table was occupied. Nan nodded at the couple who'd placed themselves in the bay window overlooking the garden, and after politely inquiring about their night's sleep and their day's plans, she joined Julian at the table he'd chosen some distance away by the kitchen door.
The fact that she never wore make-up put Nan at a disadvantage. Her eyes were troughed by blue-grey flesh. Her skin, which was lightly freckled from time spent on her mountain bicycle when she had a free hour in which to exercise, was otherwise completely pallid. Her lips-having long ago lost the natural blush of youth-bore fine lines that began beneath her nose and were ghostly white. She hadn't slept; that much was clear.
She had, however, changed her clothes from the night before, apparently knowing that it would hardly do for the proprietress of Maiden Hall to show up to greet her guests in the morning wearing what she'd worn as their hostess at dinner on the previous night. So her cocktail dress had been replaced by stirrup trousers and a tailored blouse.
She poured them each a cup of coffee and watched as Julian tucked into the eggs and mushrooms. She said, “Tell me about the engagement. I need something to keep from thinking the worst.” When she spoke, tears caused her eyes to look glazed, but she didn't weep.
Julian made himself mirror her control. “Have you heard from Andy?”
“Not back yet.” She circled her hands round her mug. Her grip was so tight that her fingers-their nails habitually bitten to the quick-were bleached of colour. “Tell me something about the two of you, Julian. Please.”
“It's going to be all right.” The last thing Julian wanted to force upon himself was having to concoct a scenario in which he and Nicola fell in love like ordinary human beings, realised that love, and founded upon it a life together. He couldn't face attempting that lie at the moment. “She's an experienced hiker. And she didn't go out there unprepared.”
“I know that. But I don't want to think about what it means that she hasn't come home. So tell me about the engagement. Where were you when you asked her? What did you say? What kind of wedding will it be? And when?”
Julian felt a chill at the double direction Nan's thoughts were taking. In either case, they brought up subjects he didn't want to consider. One set led him to dwell upon the unthinkable. The other did nothing but encourage more lies.
He went for something that both of them knew. “Nicola's been hiking in the Peaks since you moved from London. Even if she's hurt herself, she knows what to do till help arrives.” He forked up a portion of egg and mushroom. “It's lucky that she and I had a date. If we hadn't, God knows when we might've set out to find her.”
Nan looked away, but her eyes were still liquid. She lowered her head.
“We must be hopeful,” Julian went on. “She's well equipped. And she doesn't panic in a tough situation, when things get dicey. We all know that.”
“But if she's fallen… or got lost in one of the caves… Julian, it happens. You know that. No matter how well prepared someone is, the worst still happens sometimes.”
“There's nothing that says anything's happened. I looked only in the south part of the White Peak. There're more square miles out there than can be covered by one man in total darkness in an evening. She could be anywhere. She could even have gone to the Dark Peak without our knowing.” He didn't mention the nightmare Mountain Rescue faced whenever someone did disappear in the Dark Peak. There was, after all, no mercy in fracturing Nan's tenuous hold on her calm. She knew the reality about the Dark Peak anyway, and she didn't need him to point out to her that while roads made most of the White Peak accessible, its sister to the north could be traversed only by horseback, on foot, or by helicopter. If a hiker got lost or hurt up there, it generally took bloodhounds to find him.
“She said she'd marry you though,” Nan declared, more to herself than to Julian, it seemed. “She did say that she'd marry you, Julian?”
The poor woman seemed so eager to be lied to that Julian found himself just as eager to oblige her. “We hadn't quite got to yes or no yet. That's what last night was supposed to be about.”
“Was she… Did she seem pleased? I only ask because she'd seemed to have… Well, she'd seemed to have some sort of plans, and I'm not quite sure…”
Carefully, Julian speared a mushroom. “Plans?”
“I'd thought… Yes, it seemed so.”
He looked at Nan. Nan looked at him. He was the one to blink. He said steadily, “Nicola had no plans that I know of, Nan.”
The kitchen door swung open a few inches. The face of one of the Grindleford women appeared in the aperture. She said, “Mrs. Maiden, Mr. Britton,” in a hushed voice. And she used her head to indicate the direction of the kitchen. You're wanted, the motion implied.
Andy was leaning against one of the work tops, facing it, his weight on his hands and his head bowed. When his wife said his name, he looked up.
His face was drawn with exhaustion, and his growth of peppery whiskers fanned out from his moustache and shadowed his cheeks. His grey hair was uncombed, looking windblown although there wasn't any wind to speak of this morning. His eyes went to Nan, then slid away. Julian prepared himself to hear the worst.
“Her car's on the edge of Calder Moor,” Andy told them.
His wife drew her hands into a fist at her breast. “Thank God,” she said.
Still, Andy didn't look at her. His expression indicated that thanks were premature. He knew what Julian knew and what Nan herself might well have acknowledged had she paused to probe for the possibilities that were indicated by the location of Nicolas Saab. Calder Moor was vast. It began just west of the road stretching between Blackwell and Brough, and it comprised endless expanses of heather and gorse, four caverns, numerous cairns and forts and barrows spanning time from Paleolithic through the Iron Age, gritstone outcroppings and limestone caves and fissures through which more than one foolish tripper had crawled for adventure and become hopelessly stuck. Julian knew that Andy was thinking of this as he stood in the kitchen at the end of his long night's search for Nicola. But Andy was thinking something else as well. Andy was knowing something else, in fact. That much was evident from the manner in which he straightened and began slapping the knuckles of one hand against the heel of the other.
Julian said, “Andy. For God's sake, tell us.”
Andy's gaze fixed on his wife. “The car's not on the verge, like you'd think it should be.”
“Then where…?”
“It's out of sight behind a wall, on the road out of Sparrowpit.”
“But that's good, isn't it?” Nan said eagerly. “If she went camping, she wouldn't want to leave the Saab on the road. Not where it could be seen by someone who might break into it.”
“True,” he said. “But the car's not alone.” And with a glance towards Julian as if he wished to apologise for something, “There's a motorcycle with it.”
“Someone out for a hike,” Julian said.
“At this hour?” Andy shook his head. “It was wet from the night. As wet as her car. It's been there just as long.”
Nan said, “Then she didn't go onto the moor alone? She met someone there?”
“Or she was followed,” Julian added quietly.
“I'm calling the police,” Andy said. “They'll want to bring in Mountain Rescue now.”
When a patient died, it was Phoebe Neill's habit to turn to the land for comfort. She generally did this alone. She'd lived alone for most of her life, and she wasn't afraid of solitude. And in the combination of solitude and a return to the land, she received consolation. When she was out in nature, nothing man-made stood between her and the Great Creator. Thus on the land, she was able to align herself with the end of a life and the will of God, knowing that the body we inhabit is but a shell that binds us for a period of temporal experience prior to our entering the world of the spirit for the next phase of our development.
This Thursday morning things were different. Yes, a patient had died on the previous evening. Yes, Phoebe Neill turned to the land for solace. But on this occasion, she hadn't come alone. She'd brought with her a mixed breed dog of uncertain lineage, the now-orphaned pet of the young man whose life had just ended.
She'd been the one to talk Stephen Fairbrook into getting a dog as a companion during the last year of his illness. So when it had become clear that the end of Stephen's life was fast approaching, she knew that she'd make his passing easier if she reassured him about the dog's fate. “Stevie, when the time comes, I'm happy to take Benbow,” she'd told him one morning as she bathed his skeletal body and massaged lotion into his shrunken limbs. “You're not to worry about him. All right?”
You can die now was what went unspoken. Not because words like die or death were unmentionable round Stephen Fairbrook, but because once he'd been told his disease, been through countless treatments and drugs in an effort to stay alive long enough for a cure to be found, watched his weight decline and his hair fall out and his skin bloom with bruises that turned into sores, die and death were old companions to him. He didn't need a formal introduction to guests who were already dwelling within his house.
On the last afternoon of his master's life, Benbow had known that Stephen was passing. And hour after hour, the animal lay quietly next to him, moving only if Stephen moved, his muzzle resting in Stephen's hand until Stephen had left them. Benbow, in fact, had known before Phoebe that Stephen was gone. He'd risen, whimpered, howled once, and was silent. He'd then sought out the comfort of his basket, where he'd stayed until Phoebe had collected him.
Now he raised himself on his hind legs, his plumed tail wagging hopefully as Phoebe parked her car on a lay-by near a drystone wall and reached for his lead. He barked once. Phoebe smiled. “Yes. A walk shall make us right as rain, old chap.”
She clambered out. Benbow followed, leaping agilely from the Vauxhall and sniffing eagerly, nose pressed to the sandy ground like a canine Hoover. He led Phoebe directly to the drystone wall and snuffled along it until he came to the stile that would allow him access to the moor beyond. This he leapt over easily, and once on the other side he paused to shake himself off. His ears pricked up and he cocked his head. He gave a sharp bark to tell Phoebe that a solo run, not a walk on a lead, was what he had in mind.
“Can't do it, old boy,” Phoebe told him. “Not till we see what's what and who's who on the moor, all right?” She was cautious and overprotective that way, which made for excellent skills when it came to nursing the housebound dying through their final days, particularly those whose conditions required hypervigilance on the part of their caregiver. But when it came to children or to dog ownership, Phoebe knew intuitively that the natural hovering born of a cautious nature would have produced a fearful animal or a rebellious child. So she'd had no child-although she'd had her opportunities-and she'd had no dog till now. “I hope to do right by you, Benbow,” she told the mongrel. He lifted his head to look at her, past the scraggly kelp-coloured mop of fur that flopped into his eyes. He swung back round towards the open moor, mile after mile of heather creating a purple shawl that covered the shoulders of the land.
Had the moor consisted of heather alone, Phoebe would not have given a second thought to letting Benbow have his romp unrestrained. But the seemingly endless flow of the heather was deceptive to the uninitiated. Ancient limestone quarries produced unexpected lacunae in the landscape, into which the dog could tumble, and the caverns, lead mines, and caves into which he could scamper-and where she could not follow-served as a siren enticement for any animal, an enticement with which Phoebe Neill didn't care to compete. But she was willing to let Benbow snuffle freely through one of the many birch copses that grew in irregular clumps on the moor, rising like feathers against the sky, and she grasped his lead firmly and began heading northwest, where the largest of the copses grew.
Although it was a fine morning, there were no other walkers about yet. The sun was low in the eastern sky, and Phoebe's shadow stretched far to her left as if it wished to pursue a cobalt horizon that was heaped with clouds so white, they might have been giant sleeping swans. There was little wind, just enough of a breeze to slap Phoebe's windcheater against her sides and flip Benbow's tangled fur from his eyes. There was no scent on this breeze that Phoebe could discern. And the only noise came from an unkindness of ravens somewhere on the moor and a flock of sheep bleating in the distance.
Benbow snuffled along, investigating nasally every inch of the path as well as the mounds of heather that edged it. He was a cooperative walker, as Phoebe had discovered from the thrice-daily strolls she and he had taken once Stephen had been completely confined to bed. And because she didn't have to tug him along or pull him back or encourage the little dog in any way, their jaunt on the moor gave her time to pray.
She didn't pray for Stephen Fairbrook. She knew that Stephen was now at peace, quite beyond the necessity of an intervention-Divine or otherwise-in the process of the inevitable. What she prayed for was greater understanding. She wanted to know why a scourge had come to dwell among them, felling the best, the brightest, and frequently those with the most to offer. She wanted to know what conclusion she was meant to draw from the deaths of young men who were guilty of nothing, of the deaths of children whose crime was to be born of infected mothers, and of the deaths of those unfortunate mothers as well.
Phoebe had at first believed that there had to be a message in the symphony of death that she'd been taking part in for the past years. But she was beginning to find that this kind of death had too many tentacles, and those tentacles sought to curl tenaciously round victims too diverse to form a pattern. From years of experience, she knew that death was perfectly impartial, claiming great and small, important and utterly insignificant, rich and poor, strong and weak. No matter one's power, prestige, or potential, one did not bargain when the reaper came. But this death, this particular ending during which the medical fire brigade put out one inferno only to be confronted by another… This was the worst.
So she walked and she prayed. And when Benbow wanted to pick up the pace, she was willing to do so. In this manner, they strode into the heart of the moor, ambling along one path, forking off onto another. Phoebe wasn't worried about becoming lost. She knew that they'd begun their walk southeast of a limestone outcrop that was called Agrícolas Throne. It comprised the remains of a great Roman fort, a windswept outlook shaped not unlike an enormous chair that marked the edge of the moor. Anyone sighting off the throne during a hike was unlikely to get lost.
They'd been trekking for an hour when Benbow's ears pricked up and his stance altered. From shuffling along happily, he came to a sudden halt. His body elongated, back legs stretching out. His feathery tail stiffened into an immobile quill. A low whine issued from his throat.
Phoebe studied what lay before them: the copse of birches she'd intended to allow Benbow to gambol in. “Gracious me,” she murmured. “Aren't you the clever one, Bennie?” She was deeply surprised and just as touched by the mongrel's ability to read her intentions. She'd silently promised him freedom when they reached the copse. And here the copse was. He knew her mind and was eager to be off the lead. “Can't blame you a bit,” Phoebe said as she knelt to unhook the lead from his collar. She wound the rope of braided leather round her hand and rose with a grunt as the dog shot ahead of her into the trees.
Phoebe walked after him, smiling at the sight of his compact body bouncing along the path. He used his feet like springs as he ran, bounding off the ground with all four legs at once as if it was his intention to fly. He skirted a large column of roughly hewn limestone on the edge of the copse and vanished among the birches.
This was the entrance to Nine Sisters Henge, a Neolithic earth-banked enclosure that encircled nine standing stones of varying heights. Assembled some thirty-five hundred years before the time of Christ, the henge and the stones marked a spot for rituals engaged in by prehistoric man. At the time of its use, the henge had been standing in open land that had been cleared of its natural oak and alder forest. Now, however, it was hidden from view, buried within a thick growth of birches, a modern encroachment on the resulting moorland.
Phoebe paused and surveyed her surroundings. The eastern sky-without the clouds of the west-allowed the sun to pierce unimpeded through the trees. Their bark was the white of a seagull's wing, but patterned with diamond-shaped cracks the colour of coffee. Leaves formed a shimmering green screen in the morning breeze, which served to shield the ancient stone circle within the copse from an inexperienced hiker who didn't know it was there. Standing before the birches, the sentry stone was hit by the light at an oblique angle.
This deepened its natural pocking, and from a distance the shadows combined to effect a face, an austere custodian of secrets too ancient to be imagined.
As Phoebe observed the stone, an unaccountable chill passed through her. Despite the breeze, it was silent here. No noise from the dog, no bleating of a sheep lost among the stones, no call of hikers as they crossed the moor. It was altogether too silent, Phoebe thought. And she found herself glancing round uneasily, overcome by the feeling that she was being watched.
Phoebe thought herself a practical woman to the very core, one not given to casual fancies or an imagination run riot. Nonetheless, she felt the sudden need to be away from this place, and she called for the dog. There was no response.
“Benbow!” she called a second time. “Here, boy. Come.”
Nothing. The silence intensified. The breeze stilled. And Phoebe felt the hair stirring on the back of her neck.
She didn't wish to approach the copse, but she didn't know why. She'd walked among Nine Sisters before. She'd even had a quiet picnic lunch there one fine spring day. But there was something about the place this morning…
A sharp bark from Benbow and suddenly what seemed like hundreds of ravens took to the air in an ebony swarm. For a moment they entirely blocked out the sun. The shadow they cast seemed like a monstrous fist sweeping over Phoebe. She shuddered at the distinct sensation of having been marked somehow, like Cain before being sent to the east.
She swallowed and turned back to the copse. There was no further sound from Benbow, no response to her calling. Concerned, Phoebe hurried along the path, passed the limestone guardian of that sacred place, and entered the trees.
They grew thickly, but visitors to the site had trod a path through them over the years. On this, the natural grass of the moor had been flattened and worn through to the earth in spots. To the sides, however, bilberry bushes formed part of the undergrowth, and the last of the wild purple orchids gave off their characteristic scent of cats in the tough moor grass. It was here beneath the trees that Phoebe looked for Benbow, drawing nearer to the ancient stones. The silence round her was so profound that the very fact of it seemed like an augur, mute but eloquent all at once.
Then, as Phoebe drew near the circles boundary, she finally heard the dog again. He yelped from somewhere, then emitted something between a whine and a growl. It was decidedly fearful.
Worried that he'd encountered a hiker who was less than welcoming of his canine advances, Phoebe hastened towards the sound, through the remaining trees and into the circle. At once, she saw a mound of bright blue at the inner base of one of the standing stones. It was at this mound that Benbow barked, backing off from it now with his hackles up and his ears flattened back against his skull.
“What is it?” Phoebe asked over his noise. “What've you found, old boy?” Uneasily, she wiped her palms on her skirt and glanced about. She saw the answer to her question lying round her. What the dog had found was a scene of chaos. The centre of the stone circle was strewn with white feathers, and the detritus of some thoughtless campers lay scattered about: everything from a tent to a cooking pot to an opened rucksack spilling its contents onto the ground.
Phoebe approached the dog through this clutter. She wanted to get Benbow back on the lead and get both of them out of the circle at once.
She said, “Benbow, come here,” and he yelped more loudly. It was the sort of sound she'd never heard from him before.
She saw that he was clearly upset by the mound of blue, the source of the white feathers that dusted the clearing like the wings of slaughtered moths.
It was a sleeping bag, she realised. And it was from this bag that the feathers had come, because a slash in the nylon that served as its cover spat more white feathers when Phoebe touched the bag with her toe. Indeed, nearly all the feathers that constituted its stuffing were gone. What remained was like a tarpaulin. It had been completely unzipped and it was shrouding something, something that terrified the little dog.
Phoebe felt weak-kneed, but she made herself do it. She lifted the cover. Benbow backed off, giving her a clear look at the nightmare vignette that the sleeping bag had covered.
Blood. There was more in front of her than she'd ever seen before. It wasn't bright red because it had obviously been exposed to air for a good number of hours. But Phoebe didn't require that colour to know what she was looking at.
“Oh my Lord.” She went light-headed.
She'd seen death before in many guises, but none had been as grisly as this. At her feet, a young man lay curled like a foetus, dressed head to toe in nothing but black, with that same colour puckering burnt flesh from eye to jaw on one side of his face. His cropped hair was black as well, as was the ponytail that sprang from his skull. His goatee was black. His fingernails were black. He wore an onyx ring and an earring of black. The only colour that offered relief from the black-aside from the sleeping bag of blue-was the magenta of blood, and that was everywhere: on the ground beneath him, saturating his clothes, pooling from scores of wounds on his torso.
Phoebe dropped the sleeping bag and backed away from the body. She felt hot. She felt cold. She knew that she was about to faint. She chided herself for her lack of backbone. She said, “Benbow?” and over her voice she heard the dog barking. He'd never stopped. But four of her senses had deadened with shock, heightening and honing her fifth sense: sight.
She scooped up the dog and stumbled from the horror.
The day had altered completely by the time the police arrived. In the way of weather in the Peaks, a morning that had been born into sunshine and perfect sky had reached its maturity in fog. It slithered over the distant crest of Kinder Scout, creeping across the high moors from the northwest. When the Buxton police set up their crime scene tape, they did it with the mist falling on their shoulders like spirits descending to visit the site.
Before he went out to join the scenes of crime team, Detective Inspector Peter Hanken had a word with the woman who'd stumbled upon the body. She was sitting in the back of a panda car, a dog on her lap. Hanken normally liked dogs a great deal: He was the master of two Irish setters who were almost as much his pride and joy as were his three children. But this pathetic-looking mongrel with his unkempt coat of mangy fur and his sludge-coloured eyes looked a likely candidate for the dog meat factory. And he smelled like a dustbin left in the sun.
Not that there was any sun, which lowered Hanken's spirits even further. On every side of him, he encountered grey-in the sky, on the landscape, and in the grizzled hair of the old woman before him-and grey had long had the capability of sinking his ship faster than the dawning knowledge of what a murder investigation was going to do to his weekend plans.
Over the top of the car Hanken said to Patty Stewart-a WPC with a heart-shaped face and breasts that had long been the objects of fantasy for half a dozen of the younger DCs-“Name?”
Stewart filled in all the blanks in her typical competent manner. “Phoebe Neill. She's a home nurse. From Sheffield.”
“What the hell was she doing out here?”
“Her patient died yesterday evening. She took it hard. She brought his dog out here for a walk. It helps, she said.”
Hanken had seen plenty of death in his years of policing. And in his experience, nothing helped. He slapped his palm against the roof of the car and opened the door, saying to Stewart, “Get on with it, then.” He slid inside.
“Is it Miss or Missus?” he said after introducing himself to the home nurse.
The dog strained forward against her hands, which she'd placed on his chest just above his legs. She held him in position firmly. She said, “He's friendly. If you'd just let him smell your hand…” and she added, “Miss,” when Hanken obliged.
He excavated the particulars from her, trying to ignore the mongrel's rank odour. When he was satisfied that she'd seen no other sign of life besides the ravens who'd fled the scene like the marauders they were, he said, “You didn't disturb the area?” and narrowed his eyes when she flushed.
“I know what's appropriate in the situation. One does watch police dramas on the television occasionally. But, you see, I didn't know there would be a body beneath the blanket… only it wasn't a blanket at all, was it? It was a sleeping bag that'd been slashed to bits. And as there was rubbish all round the site, I suppose that I-”
“Rubbish?” Hanken interrupted impatiently.
“Papers. Camping things. Lots of white feathers. There were bits and pieces everywhere.” The woman smiled with a pitiful eagerness to please.
“You didn't disturb anything, did you?” Hanken asked.
No. Of course she hadn't done that. Except for the blanket, which she'd moved. Except that it hadn't been a blanket, had it, but a sleeping bag. Which was where the body was. Beneath the bag. As she'd just said…
Right, right, right, Hanken thought. She was a real Aunt Edna. This was probably the most excitement she'd had in her life and she was determined to prolong the experience.
“And when I saw it… him…” She blinked as if afraid to cry and recognising, correctly, how little stock Hanken put in women who shed tears. “I believe in God, you know, in a greater purpose behind all that happens. But when someone dies in such a way, it tests my faith. It surely does.” She lowered her face to Benbow's head. The dog squirmed round and licked her nose.
Hanken asked her what she needed, if she wanted a WPC to take her home. He told her that there would likely be more questions. She was not to leave the country. If she traveled from Sheffield, she was to let him know where she could be reached. Not that he thought he'd need her again. But there were some parts of his job that he did by rote.
The actual murder site was irritatingly remote and inaccessible by any means other than foot, mountain bike, or helicopter. Given these options, Hanken had called in a few favours at Mountain Rescue and had managed to hijack an RAF chopper that was just concluding a search for two lost hikers in the Dark Peak. He used the waiting helicopter now to ferry himself to Nine Sisters Henge.
The fog wasn't heavy-just wet as the dickens-and when they made their approach, he could see the popped lightning of flash bulbs as the police photographer documented the crime scene. To the southeast of the trees, a small crowd milled. Forensic pathologist and forensic biologists, uniformed constables, evidence officers equipped with collection kits, they were waiting for the photographer to finish his work. They were also waiting for Hanken.
The DI asked the helicopter's pilot to hover above the birch copse for a minute prior to landing. From two hundred and fifty feet above the ground-sufficient distance so as not to disturb the evidence-he saw that a campsite had been set up within the perimeter of the old stone circle. A small blue tent domed against the northern face of one stone, and a fire ring burned black like the pupil of an eye in the circle's centre. On the ground lay a silver emergency blanket and nearby a square sit mat coloured bright yellow. A black and red rucksack spat out its contents, and a small camping cook stove tumbled onto its side. From the air, it didn't look like the nasty piece of business that it was,
Hanken thought. But distance did that to you, giving a false assurance that all was well.
The chopper set him down fifty yards to the southeast of the site. He ducked beneath the blades and joined his team on the ground as the police photographer strode out of the copse. He said, “Ugly mess.”
Hanken said, “Right,” and “Wait here,” to the team. He slapped his hand against the limestone sentry marking the entrance to the copse, and alone he started down the path beneath the trees, where the leaves dripped condensation from the fog onto his shoulders.
At the entrance to Nine Sisters proper, Hanken paused and let his gaze roam where it would. From the ground now, he saw that the tent was a size suitable for one, and that fact was in keeping with the rest of the gear scattered round the circle: one sleeping bag, one rucksack, one emergency blanket, a single sit mat. What he hadn't seen from the air he saw now. A map case gaped open with its contents half torn. A single ground cloth crumpled against the solitary rucksack. One small hiking boot toppled into the charred remains of the central fire and another lay nearby discarded. White feathers clung wetly to everything.
When at last he moved from the entrance, Hanken engaged in his usual preliminary observation of a crime scene: He stood over each noticeable physical item and considered it with his mind clear of possible explanations. Most officers, he knew, went directly to the victim. But Hanken believed that a body-brought to its death through human brutality-was traumatic enough to deaden not only the senses but also the intellect, leaving one incapable of seeing the truth when it lay openly before him. So he went from one object to the next, studying it without disturbing it. And thus he made his initial examination of the tent, the rucksack, the mat, the map case, and the rest of the equipment-from socks to soap-that was tossed round in the inside of the circle. He took the most time over a flannel shirt and the boots. And when he'd seen enough of these objects, he turned to the body.
It was a gruesome corpse: a boy of not more than nineteen or twenty. He was thin, almost skeletal, with delicate wrists, dainty ears, and the waxlike skin of the dead. Although one side of his face was badly burnt, Hanken could still tell that the boy had a finely bridged nose and a well-shaped mouth and an overall appearance of femininity that he seemed to have tried to alter by growing a wispy black goatee. He was drenched with blood from numerous wounds, and beneath the mess he wore only a black T-shirt, with no jersey or jacket of any kind. His jeans had faded from black to grey in spots where the wearing was most apparent: along the seams, the knees, and in the seat. And he wore heavy boots on his overlarge feet, Doc Martens by the look of them.
Beneath these boots, half hidden now by the sleeping bag which had been carefully moved to one side by the police photographer in order to document the body, a few sheets of paper lay stained with blood and limp with fog-born condensation. Crouching, Hanken examined these, separating them carefully with the tip of a pencil, which he removed from his pocket. The papers, he saw, were anonymous letters, crudely written, creatively spelled, and assembled with letters and words cut from newspapers and magazines. Thematically, they were all of a piece: They threatened death, although the means that were suggested differed each time.
Hanken directed his gaze from these papers to the boy on the ground. He wondered if it was reasonable to conclude that the recipient of them had met the end augured by the messages left at the scene. The deduction would have seemed reasonable had not the interior of the old stone circle told another tale.
Hanken strode out of it, along the path beneath the birches.
“Start a perimeter search,” he told his team. “We're looking for a second body.”