The Body in the Marsh Read online

  The Body in the Marsh

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  —

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Also by Nick Louth

  Copyright

  The Body in the Marsh

  Nick Louth

  For Louise, as always

  She hated confined spaces and had always been terrified of the dark. But the tiny pantry was still the best place to hide from him. Somewhere he’d never think to look. She had crouched in this cubbyhole as a child playing hide-and-seek on seaside holidays. Empty shelves, lined still with parchment-stiff newspaper, rustling even as she breathed. Once, they had been stocked with her grandmother’s home-made jams, with Be-Ro flour, Atora suet and tin after tin of Fray Bentos. Translucent spiders, all stilted legs and no body, had tiptoed like glass ghosts on the high shelf, among her grandfather’s bottles of Bass and the tin of Rover biscuits. There had been seaside picnics, the scream of gulls and Wall’s ice cream in blocks like butter that fitted in oblong cornets. Memories steadied her breathing and stilled her fear like the grasp of a parental hand.

  She remembered the day when, aged seven, she had hidden for hours with a torch and read all the newspaper on the shelves. One article stood out: Daily Express, 23 June 1954. Grisly discovery. Detectives baffled. A young woman’s body in the marsh. Romney Marsh, just a mile away. A dismembered body. Dismembered. In pieces! She’d had to look the word up, and it gave her a frisson of fear and excitement. She’d read the article again and again. For two days she couldn’t sleep. Was the murderer still around? Would he come to get her too, she had asked her grandmother.

  The slow scrunch of tyres on pebbles, a gritty sound like the slow beating of butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, dragged her back to the here and now. The slam of a car door. Her heart was hammering as she heard the key turn in the rusted lock and the door squeak open just a few feet from where she crouched. He must not find her, or it would all end now.

  The prophetic shriek of gulls again: death, death, death. The body in the marsh.

  Dismembered.

  Chapter One

  Scafell, Lake District. Friday, 16 October 2016

  Three o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Freezing rain was driving in horizontally, the gunmetal rock face glossy. Craig Gillard gritted his teeth and risked a glance below. Two pitches up Botterill’s Slab on Scafell’s Central Buttress, one of Britain’s toughest rock climbs. Rags and banners of cloud cavorted beneath, masking the harsh fans of scree hundreds of feet below and the serpentine path further out towards Mickledore and Wasdale Head car park.

  A long weekend in the Lake District, 300 miles north of his Surrey base, was the way to forget about being a detective. Here he wasn’t a chief inspector, and there was no respect, just one 48-year-old man, a few slings and some slender bits of steel against the elements and the insistent pull of gravity. He was scared. But getting gripped here, on the hardest solo climb he’d ever done, was more intense than the flecks of fear that peppered police work. Over the years he’d faced down knife-wielding drug dealers, been wounded in a shotgun blast and felt the gnawing in the pit of his stomach before a drugs raid. This was different. More than the cold and the wind, it was him against himself. Pushing out to his own unknown limits. Mastering fear. Fighting fatigue.

  The next rain blast brought icy fingernails trickling down his neck and between his tensed shoulder blades. The weather had been okay when he started: overcast and a light south-westerly, but the strengthening westerly and rain had come earlier than predicted. His left hand was getting chilled from where he’d dug out the choss, bits of soil and rubble, stuck in one of the cracks lower down. He’d got a skin flapper from a graze, which was bleeding slightly, and he wanted to take a breather to tape the wound closed. Two of those left-hand fingers – third and little – were numb, which wasn’t a great sign as he wasn’t quite halfway up. He let go of the crimp, clipped his sling to the nearest bolt with a karabiner, and fished a roll of medical tape from an external pocket.

  A heavy squall blasted in, rocking Gillard on his precarious perch. Heavy cloud filtered only a sallow light, and rivulets of water ran down the rock face. As he wound the tape over the graze he glanced down, drawn by movement on the ground. There was a dog running around something by a boulder in the bracken. He reached around to his rucksack, undid the clips and rooted through for binoculars. He looped the Zeiss Terra’s strap around his neck, insurance against clumsy fingers, and pressed the freezing lenses to his eyes. A woman, lying on her side. She was wearing an olive-green cagoule, dark-blue hat and pink leggings. She was a good few hundred metres above the path and out of view of it. The hurrying walkers below, hoods up, faces to the path, had their backs to the driving sleet, everyone going in one direction. Down, away from her. No one could see her.

  A twisted knee or ankle, up here on a day like this. Potentially fatal.

  He bellowed down to the woman, but she was upwind. Hopeless. The howling gusts tore his words away. In return came a shower of polystyrene-like pellets of ice which bounced off every surface and stung his face. The temperature had dropped several degrees in just the last minute, and a slate-grey wedge of snow cloud was building to the west. The woman would need help. He reached into his jacket, slid out his iPhone.

  And dropped it.

  The plastic casing smacked once against the granite face and cartwheeled into the void, lost to sight in a second. He allowed himself two seconds’ inventive cursing, then returned methodically to the task in hand: rearranging his gear, and beginning a series of careful but rapid belay descents, wishing he’d brought a rope to be able to move faster. The wind was sometimes horizontal, sometimes from below, every gust laden with icy, lashing fragments. It felt like an hour, but he was down on the top edge of the scree in less than 20 minutes.

  He forced his unfeeling digits to unclip his rucksack, extracting mountain boots, gaiters and mittens. It was as hard as dressing with chopsticks. Then he hunted for heat pads, fumbling to tear the wrapping with his teeth. In the rucksack he had chocolate, water, an exposure bag, an orienteering compass, first aid kit and a powerful LED torch. Once finished, he turned back into the blinding sleet and threw himself diagonally across one scree gully after another, towards where he’d seen her. Long, sliding strides, each bringing a mini-avalanche of rocks and pebbles around his ankles. As he crested a ridge he saw her, now sitting with her back to a house-sized rock in the lee of the snow. She waved frantically at him, and he loped over.
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  ‘Thank God,’ she said, her face pink with cold and framed by fronds of dark wet hair. She was shivering, and her fingers bone-white. ‘I’ve hurt my leg chasing the bloody dog,’ she said. The young black Labrador wagged his tail and leaned against her winsomely.

  ‘I guessed as much. We need to get you off this mountain quickly.’

  She had on cheap-looking trainers – soaked, muddy and worn out. A thin cagoule, a soaking hat. No proper boots, no exposure bag, no gloves, no compass or map, no whistle. No idea, clearly. She looked 30 or so, old enough to know better. A lecture was playing in Craig’s head, but he had other priorities.

  ‘Put these on,’ Craig said, sliding off his mittens.

  ‘What about you?’ she said, putting them on anyway. ‘Your hands look frozen too.’

  ‘I have a thinner pair of gloves in my bag,’ he lied. ‘So what’s your name?’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘I’m Craig.’

  ‘Very pleased to meet you, Craig.’ She blew a sigh and squinted into the snow. ‘My God, how am I going to get down? It’s my sodding knee. I can’t put weight on it.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  She lifted the hem of her cagoule. The leggings were ripped, and her knee, already swollen, had bled a fair way down her calf.

  ‘I’m going to press gently; let me know if it hurts.’ He carefully pressed around the edges.

  ‘Ow! Jesus, you said gently.’ He then tried to flex the joint, and she raised her complaints by an octave. The dog began to bark wildly. ‘It’s all right, Boris, he’s trying to help.’

  Craig smiled and ruffled the dog behind his warm velvety ears, earning a slow wag of acquiescence. ‘I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s a bad sprain. Have you called the mountain rescue?’

  ‘There’s no juice on my phone.’ He must have given her a look, because she then retorted: ‘Look. I didn’t think I was coming all the way up here, did I? I was up to see my parents in Keswick for the weekend and they said Boris needed a good long walk, but then he got away from me and went piling up the fell.’

  ‘There’s a dead sheep just over there, he could probably smell it.’

  ‘Another couple of hours and I’d probably have been in the same condition,’ she said, and laughed. She had a lovely smile. ‘So are you going to phone them?’

  ‘Ah. I dropped my phone.’

  ‘You dropped your phone?’ She looked incredulously at him, and then began to smile. ‘Is it broken, then?’

  ‘I was up there,’ he said, pointing into the crags that were just visible through the cloud. ‘So I expect so, yes. I had got it out to call the mountain rescue…’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry! I suppose I owe you a new phone, then.’

  ‘No. It was my butter fingers. Still, it was an iPhone.’

  ‘Ouch.

  ‘One of the old ones.’

  ‘Still ouch. So how are we going to get help?’

  ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘Just about.’ With his help, she clambered to her good leg, but couldn’t put any weight on the other one. She tried to hobble a few steps with her arm around his shoulder, but he was too tall for her and the surface too uneven. After a few steps he stopped. ‘We’ll both die of cold this way,’ he said, letting her lean against the rock. ‘How much do you weigh?’

  She stared at him open-mouthed. ‘Well, I’m not exactly Kate Moss, in case you hadn’t noticed. You won’t be able to carry me.’

  ‘Well, if you prefer, we can always build the self-assembly helicopter I keep in my rucksack and fly out of here.’

  ‘Don’t be sarky.’ She let out a yell of frustration. ‘Christ, I take the dog for a walk and end up needing Superman to rescue me.’

  Craig laughed and packed Sam’s small rucksack inside his own, and strapped it on his chest. He crouched down with his back to her.

  ‘Have you done much elephant-lifting before?’ she said, as she put her arms around his neck. Despite her protestations, she wasn’t heavy, and slim enough for him to give her a piggyback and join his hands under her bottom. The heat was an unexpected bonus. He gradually began to pick his way down the slope.

  ‘Giddy-up,’ she said, sniggering in his ear. ‘I’ll get you a nice bale of hay in Wasdale.’

  He gave a little whinny in response.

  The first half-hour was the worst, the rough rocks hidden in the bracken and the uneven tussocks of grass sending jolts which made her cry out. ‘Sorry about squawking in your ear,’ she said. The sleet turned to unremitting snow, and suddenly there was nothing to see more than five yards ahead. Craig made a decision.

  ‘Change of plan. This will hurt, but we’ll be on the path in five minutes.’ He bucked her higher on his back, urged her to hang on, and began to run a long, steep scree trail. The dog bounded ahead, almost lost to the white-out. Craig was barely able to keep his footing with the extra weight, each giant stride a calculated but exhilarating risk. As he reached the path, breathless, a euphoric heat rose in his torso, perspiration gathered warm along his back and armpits, beating out the cold and finally reaching his aching hands. He set Sam down against a rock and shared his chocolate with her.

  ‘God, it’s even fair trade,’ she said. ‘You’re well equipped for rescuing modern women, aren’t you?’

  ‘I rescued an entire group of women on Ben Nevis one January,’ he said. ‘They were on the first-ever attempt to reach the summit with ice axes and tampons.’

  Sam groaned. It was an hour later when they finally descended into a snowy Wasdale. The lake was a brooding grey-green, flecked by pewter ripples. The car park was within sight, and beyond it the beckoning vision of a warm and welcoming pub.

  * * *

  Sitting steaming in the crowded stone-flagged inn with an obedient and sleepy Boris between her knees, Sam watched Craig ordering coffees at the bar. His tousled pepper-and-salt hair and rugged man-of-the-mountains face looked good on him, and for his age – perhaps mid-40s – he was clearly in great shape. He had carried her without complaint for several miles, stopping only twice. Her vile ex, Gary, for all his Parachute Regiment training, could not have done better. In fact, he would probably have made her crawl. Craig had bandaged her knee, dressed her cuts and slipped these amazing heat pads into her sodden trainers. He had thought ahead too. While she had refused his offer of a trip to hospital, he had borrowed a phone from a fellow walker so she could ring her parents. He had offered to drive her the 90-minute trip all the way back to Keswick to pick up her father and bring him here to retrieve her car which, because of her knee, she couldn’t now drive. Craig might be a decade older than Gary, but quite a catch. For someone of the right age, she reminded herself.

  In the meantime, she hobbled to the Ladies to make herself look human. The image in the mirror was a shock: her shoulder-length raven hair was wild and witch-like, her face bright red and her lips pale and chapped. A little lippy, a touch of eyeliner and a good brush made her feel a lot better. Self-respect restored, she emerged to find Craig waiting to help her thread her way back among the seats and tables to their space in the corner by the fire.

  ‘So you’ve warmed up now?’ Craig said, his eyes flicking to the heaped cagoule on the adjacent chair.

  ‘Yes, thank you. But my leg’s going to be a problem for work. I’m supposed to spend half my day on a bicycle.’ She had decided to trust him with what she did for a living, something she rarely did until she knew what the reaction would be.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I’m a hobby bobby. You know, Police Community Support…’

  He laughed and looked at the ceiling. ‘That is hilarious,’ he said.

  Maybe she had misjudged him. She had found that almost everyone had a fixed view on the police, one way or another.

  ‘Excuse me, we do a good job, for much less money…’ her voice was strident, and she found she was pointing at him.

  ‘I know you do.’ He held up his hands in surrender. �
��So where are you based?’ he asked. When had he found time to comb his hair?

  ‘At Caterham, in Surrey.’ She watched his jaw drop. ‘I just started last month. They’re going to think I’m such an idiot.’

  ‘No, they won’t. They’ll be happy to put you on the phones until your leg is better.’ He really grinned this time, like warm sunshine. His eyes looked grey-green in the light. ‘I’m in the Surrey force too, based in Guildford, but I live in Banstead. Not too far from your area.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. What do you do?’

  He took out his wallet and slipped her his business card. She held it up and started to read in a mock American drawl: ‘Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard. Hero and Rescuer. Prepared for every weather. Piggybacks a speciality.’

  * * *

  Half an hour later, with the darkness gathering, they were in Craig’s car heading on the A66 to Keswick. He asked her lots of questions, and she confided in him about Gary. How when she had broken up with him, he refused to accept it. How he had called her day and night, making threats, coming round to see her, especially at night. Even when he had broken into her house, the police had been reluctant to take action. So she had borrowed money from her dad to get a court order, which was due to be heard in a month’s time. Craig listened in silence.

  ‘So are you married, then?’ she asked suddenly, realizing she knew nothing about him.

  ‘Was once.’ His eyes narrowed, as if something on the road ahead could no longer be clearly discerned. ‘It was quite short. It didn’t work out. I suppose I’m quite difficult. That’s what Valerie told me anyway.’ He turned to Sam with a shrug. ‘But it’s partly the job, as you will discover.’

  Sam had already noticed that Craig’s car, a grey Nissan, was unusually tidy for someone who was a keen walker. No mud in the footwell, no discarded clothing on the back seat or parcel shelf, no sweet papers or other junk in the pockets, no stains on the seats or greasy marks on the steering wheel. Evidence of an ordered mind. But perhaps one entirely without passion. When they got to her parents’ street of stone-built terraced houses she said: ‘I’m so grateful for everything you did today, Craig. I don’t know what would have happened to me if you hadn’t seen me up there. You’ve probably saved my life, and wouldn’t even let me buy you a coffee.’