Remain Silent. Susie Steiner
arc of piss, warm and high, hits the hedge. She’s wondering whether to ring Mark to tell him to nudge Fly, make sure he isn’t oversleeping. He’s in an important moment at school (GCSEs) and she permanently feels he’s too lackadaisical, but then she argues with herself about allowing him to grow up and make his own mistakes. So much of her internal monologue these days revolves around where she is going wrong as a parent. To micromanage or to let go, that is the question.
The swings and slide were wet. Teddy went on them anyway. She was too comatose to object (should she start taking iron, for the tiredness?) despite knowing he would swing from happy and absorbed to freezing wet and miserable in a nanosecond.
She looks up. The sky is an ominous thumb smudge, the light low and the air damp. Classic British summer. The chestnut tree twenty yards away billows in the wind, its candelabra flowers bobbing wildly.
The air smells wet, fresh, with a trace of dog turd on its skirts.
She sniffs again, sensing something.
The wind is making things creak and knock.
She can hear a sound that is wrong. Wrong place, wrong context. She scans about, while Teddy concentrates on weeing.
There.
In the billowing tree that is twenty yards away.
She sees two black boots, high among the tree branches. She straightens, squinting to see better. Ankles, trousers. Swaying at head height. The creaking sound might be rope against branch.
She tucks Teddy back into his trousers, swivels him by the shoulders and lifts him. He is too big to be carried, they’re always arguing about it, him standing in front of her – his block move – with arms in the air and her saying ‘No, you can walk’. So he’s bewildered at being lifted, but is certainly not about to argue. He is a dead weight; damp trousers, his legs banging against her body. But she is in flight not fight, holding his head down against her shoulder so he won’t spot the legs, though it’s unlikely he would notice.
Her boy is a strange combination of beady and myopic. If she has her head in one of the kitchen cupboards, eating an illicit biscuit, he can fix her with a steely gaze.
‘What’s that you got Mummy?’
‘Nothing,’ she’ll say, over the rubble of a full mouth.
Yet if she were bleeding to death in the street, she has a feeling he’d stand over her, saying, ‘Need a drink. I’m urgent.’
She is running away from the tree, carrying Ted with one arm and digging into her pocket with the other for her phone to call it in.
First time she’s ever run away from a body.
‘Control, this is Officer Bradshaw 564, we have a deceased in Hinchingbrooke Country Park close to the car park. Repeat cadaver unattended in country park. Urgent attendance needed, send units. Cadaver is unattended in a public place. In a tree. Hanging from a tree.’
‘Can you attend please, Detective Inspector?’ says the control room.
‘No, I am with a ch— a minor.’ Manon is trying to use language Teddy cannot understand. Deceased. Cadaver. Not dead. Not body. ‘I cannot attend, you need to send units.’
Despite her tone and use of jargon, Ted has sensed the rise in her vital signs, is prickling all over with transferred tension, and he lets out a wail – a combination of confusion and alarm. ‘All right, Ted,’ she says. ‘It’s all right. Mummy’s all right and you’re all right. Just a work call, that’s all. Shall we go home and watch Fireman Sam?’
At home, once he’s parked contentedly in front of the telly in dry clothes with a custard cream, Manon calls Davy.
‘I’m at the scene,’ says Davy.
‘And?’
‘Looks like another one from Wisbech.’
‘Fuck’s sake. I was with Teddy.’
‘Is he okay?’
‘Yeah, he’s okay.’
They cannot cut him down until the scene photographer has got everything. And SOCO. They’ve cordoned a wide area – don’t want members of the public rubbernecking the grey face or the snapped neck. And they would. They’d form a crowd, just like they did in medieval times at public executions. The public can’t get enough of death in Davy’s experience.
Pinned to the bottom of the victim’s trousers, at shin height, is a piece of paper with some incomprehensible words written on it.
Mirusieji negali kalb
ė
Davy is squinting at the letters, trying to decipher the handwriting accurately, then down at his phone as he types them into Google Translate. Google comes back with the answer:
The dead cannot speak
Standing so close to the trouser leg, Davy has been assailed by the stink of the cadaver – not decomposition, it’s fresh. Happened last night, would be Davy’s guess. It stinks because his bowels opened when he died and because he is an unwashed eighteen-year-old, or thereabouts. Young men kill themselves more frequently than anyone else, but that note puts the ball firmly in Davy’s court. It’s a threat or a confession. Either way, it smacks of murder as opposed to self-harm.
‘What d’you think?’ Harriet says.
‘That note pinned to the body,’ says Davy. ‘Translates as “the dead can’t talk”. It’s in Lithuanian.’ He gives Harriet a pointed look.
She nods. ‘You’re thinking Wisbech?’
‘Yup. Also, look at his hands.’
They both look at the cadaver’s hands, which are suspended conveniently at head height. They are butcher’s hands – thick fingers, curled, like a pair of well-worn gloves. Dark skinned. The backs of his hands are etched with multiple thin white lines.
‘Think we need to check in with Operation Pheasant,’ Davy says.
He doesn’t want to confess, even to himself, how much he’d like to check in with Bridget on Operation Pheasant (as the Fenland Exploitation Team is known); the feelings this inspires in him. He is spoken for, after all. And not by Bridget.
‘We can’t let this go on,’ Harriet says. ‘This is the third. Makes us look like we’ve got no control. Any CCTV?’
Davy shakes his head. ‘Not as far as I can see.’
‘Were the victim’s hands tied?’
‘It doesn’t appear so.’
‘But if his hands weren’t tied, did he try to haul himself up the rope?’
‘Derry Mackeith will tell us that when he does the PM.’
Davy can see Harriet thinking what he’s thinking. Hard to get a man into a tree with his hands tied. Even harder to hang him without his hands tied. If he was drugged or unconscious, it would’ve been close to impossible to get him into a tree.
‘We’ll need to tell Derry to look out for fibres under the fingernails, burn marks to his palms from the rope, that kind of thing.’
‘Yes,’ says Davy, adding it to his mile-long mental list.