A Shroud of Leaves Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for A Baby’s Bones

  Also available from Rebecca Alexander and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Praise for A Baby’s Bones

  “An intricately plotted mystery…bittersweet and haunting.” LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Steeped in dark drama and rich historical detail.”

  M.L. RIO

  “An engrossing read that perfectly blends the historical and contemporary for a brilliant story.”

  THE CRIME REVIEW

  “Enthralling and immensely satisfying.”

  KAREN MAITLAND

  “One of my favourite reads of the year.”

  CRIMINAL ELEMENT

  “A compelling read.” MAUREEN JENNINGS

  “Gripping, atmospheric and emotionally satisfying.”

  RUTH DOWNIE

  Also available from Rebecca Alexander and Titan Books

  A Baby’s Bones

  TITAN BOOKS

  A Shroud of Leaves

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785656248

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785656255

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: July 2019

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Alexander. 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.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  For

  LILY ALISON BAVE

  who made me a grandmother.

  1

  Monday 18th March, this year

  Chorleigh House, Fairfield, New Forest

  The victim had been buried in a carved hollow in the grass and shrouded in fallen leaves. Dr Sage Westfield accidentally brushed one slate-blue hand, which the pathologist had uncovered. Even through gloves, she could feel the cold, waxy flesh, unlike anything she had experienced before at an excavation.

  ‘Sorry,’ she breathed, as much to the corpse as the pathologist.

  Dr Megan Levy grimaced back. She was a sandy-haired woman who looked like she was in her forties. ‘I’m guessing this is your first burial scene?’

  ‘The first one less than a hundred years old, yes. I’ve done a lot of classes and observed a couple of recent post-mortems, but I wasn’t expecting to be called to a recent murder.’ The grave reminded Sage of an Egyptian sarcophagus, rounded at the head end and tapered to the feet. The forensic suit rustled when she moved; she was wearing a hood and overshoes as well. The investigation team looked like ghosts drifting in the late afternoon gloom; pools of artificial light from lamps sharpened the silhouettes of the people huddled around the grave.

  She checked her field bag again. Camera, extra batteries, notebook, tablet, phone, charger for the car. Evidence bags in different sizes, trowels, labels, marker pens, brushes, hand lenses. Most of her classes were about the law and rules of handling and preserving evidence; she didn’t feel at all prepared for an actual burial that wasn’t hundreds or even thousands of years old. It was all about local, recent stratigraphy of soil layers; how someone had dug the grave and covered it up. Her supervisor, Trent, was probably just there so the police could prove they had covered all the bases. She glanced up to see an older man, stocky, staring back at her. He gestured with a curled finger and she stood up.

  ‘Dr Westfield?’ She nodded. ‘The archaeologist from the island, I presume. Where’s Trent?’

  ‘I’m one of his students. Well, I’ve known him for more than a decade – we trained together.’

  He looked over his shoulder. ‘Stay out of the woods!’ he barked at someone working beyond the scrubby lawn, towards the trees that encroached on the space in front of the house. ‘And lay some more forensic pads.’ He turned back to Sage. ‘I need the real thing, not a student. I want to know how that grave was dug, what it means.’

  Sage swallowed the first three things she wanted to say. ‘I phrased that badly. I am a fully qualified, experienced scientist. Until last year I was the county archaeologist for the Isle of Wight, and I lecture at the university with Trent. I’m completing additional training in forensic techniques.’

  He stared at her a bit longer, until she felt uncomfortable. ‘I’m the SIO, DCI Lenham.’

  SIO, DCI. Senior Investigating Officer, Detective Chief Inspector Lenham.

  She looked him in the eye. ‘Trent is supervising me. He’s working on the road verge; he’s found some anomalous tyre impressions.’ All around was the New Forest, a national park on the south coast just a few miles from Sage’s home on the Isle of Wight. The property was a large one, an imposing Victorian house in a garden with woodland all around. Originally, the rank grass would have been part of about an acre of lawn, possibly surrounded with flower beds. Now straggly shrubs were intertwined with brambles and spindly trees.

  ‘OK, then. Yesterday we had a missing girl and at fifteen years old, the most likely scenario was that she had run away.’ He turned to look at the house. ‘Now we have a body, found by a local woman walking her dog. Megan, let me know as soon as you find something. First impressions, anything. Trent thinks there might be footprints into the trees; I’m keeping everyone else out.’

  Sage knelt down on the plastic sheet beside the grave, avoiding Dr Levy. ‘Charming,’ she muttered to the pathologist. ‘What do you need me to do first?’

  ‘Don’t mind Graham. He’s a good man, really experienced, just a bit impatient. This might be quite an easy investigation. They’ll interview the owner of the garden first – he’s top of their list as a suspect, then family and friends. That normally identifies the main suspects. What I need you to do is catalogue all the materials covering the body, systematically, so the prosecutors can build the case.’

  Sage sat back on her heels. The corpse was covered in thousands of leaves, mainly, it seemed, holly and ivy, which looked deliberately placed. ‘We can’t number each one.’

  Megan raised a sandy eyebrow. ‘We sometimes have to, bu
t honestly, I think some are falling apart and there are too many. No, you photograph stacks in situ, lift, bag and catalogue. The person who buried her had to do that; they couldn’t have carried the whole lot. That way if we find anything anomalous we can say where it was in relation to the remains.’ She smiled at Sage, the white light gleaming on a crooked tooth. ‘We’ll chill the leaves down to preserve evidence. Then you and the forensic team can examine them in the lab for fibres, fluids, even fingerprints if the glossier leaves will hold one.’

  Sage took out her camera, checked the battery and focused on the leaves at the head end of the grave. ‘OK.’ After a few flashes and some more taken under the light from the lamps, she was able to lift a small stack of wet leaves, pressed together and smelling musty. She wrote the picture numbers and location on the bag as she’d been taught. She stood up to take a larger picture of the whole site and added a grid to the image.

  Megan asked to see. ‘Nice idea. We use laser scans but they are always moving. I have to make measurements on the ground. Send me a copy and I’ll use the same grid for my observations too.’

  Sage started snapping a handful of leaves near the body, the flash picking up the first threads of blonde hair underneath.

  Megan was crawling over the plastic sheeting on the other side, peering at the exposed hand. There was glittery nail varnish, a little flaky and growing out, and three parallel scratches. ‘I think we can say it’s probably a female from the small hands and the polish,’ the pathologist said. ‘We can’t be certain yet, but Lenham suspects this is River Sloane, the missing teenager from Southampton. I wonder how she ended up here, in the forest.’

  Sage swallowed and looked away. The fingers were swollen; they didn’t look real. Her experience as a county archaeologist was mostly about bones and artefacts. This was too real, someone that she could have seen on the street a few days ago had actually died. ‘What happens when I’ve got all the leaves off the top?’

  ‘We’ll remove the body, then you and Trent will start working on the grave cut itself.’

  Sage looked around. ‘It’s not obvious where they put the spoil. There should be some pieces of hacked-off turf somewhere around. It’s very neat, deliberate.’

  ‘We’ll have to identify anything they moved,’ Megan said. ‘Log all your observations as you go. I use a voice recorder but your phone will do. Send in the file along with your finished notes. We want everything.’

  The remains had been nested in a blanket of leaves, laid in a cut roughly the shape of the body. It widened at shoulders and hips. Sage lifted a few more leaves, revealing the purpled chin, and tried to avoid touching it. The colour made the areas of exposed skin look stretched by gases building up, and Sage knew that the faint smell heralded a cascade of decomposition processes. She glanced at the face revealed as she lifted the next batch: definitely female, young, the milky eyes staring up at the sky, beginning to bulge. Textbooks and research on forensic archaeology hadn’t prepared Sage for the sadness, the horror of it. Even mortuary visits had been distant, factual. This was intense. She bagged more leaves, trying not to touch the body, and wrote on the label.

  Megan leaned forward to zoom in on something. She sat back and breathed out, making her mask billow. ‘OK, Sage. What can you tell me from our initial survey?’

  ‘She’s covered with leaves. I suppose that’s odd, not to cover her with the soil they dug out.’

  ‘Which means?’

  Sage thought. ‘I’m not sure – maybe they wanted her to be found quickly?’

  ‘Maybe. With all this work they could have buried her deeper in the same amount of time. And something else.’ She eased a few large leaves off the neck. ‘Look at these leaves. They weren’t shovelled on, they were placed very carefully.’

  ‘Overlapping, almost tenderly?’ said Sage.

  ‘That’s possible,’ Megan said. ‘Although in some murders it would mean the killer wanted to revisit the body. The “ick” range of tenderness. We worry more about a sexual motive if the body is undressed.’

  Sage looked around the slight mound of leaves. ‘Oh.’ She lifted more piles of leaves, took photographs, bagged them and recorded their location. Slowly, the body emerged, naked so far. On the right side of the face were dark smudges. The regular pattern caught Sage’s eye and she leaned in. ‘What is that?’ Trying not to touch the skin, she pointed at a few dark spots in a line. ‘Bruising?’

  ‘You’ve got a good eye,’ Megan said, snapping a few close-ups. ‘I don’t know what caused it. It could be something she was hit with, or fell onto. It’s diffuse and looks ante-mortem. Sometimes marks on the skin develop further in the morgue. I’ll look into it at the post-mortem examination and we’ll swab it for trace.’ She smiled up at Sage. ‘Well done.’

  Sage bagged another stack of leaves and sat back to write up the label. The grave was beyond the house, away from the road. Sage could see a glazed door in the outbuilding that might have looked over the garden originally, but several of the panes were missing and filled in with cardboard. The looming house had a dozen windows along the front, the painted sashes were peeling and there was cracked glass on the top floor. Someone had carried the body past the front door with its stone steps, past the dark frontage and the outbuilding, and buried it without being seen.

  As Megan adjusted the light Sage could see purplishred stippling on the opposite side from the bruising. Sage understood the post-death processes from recent reading but the reality was making her shiver inside. For a moment, she remembered finding her dead student the year before and her heart pounded in her ears. The pathologist flexed the girl’s fingers, moved her jaw. ‘Rigor mortis isn’t completely gone. In these temperatures, I wouldn’t expect to see that before thirty-six to forty-eight hours, but with a wide margin of error. Her temperature is less than six degrees, a little warmer than ambient because soil retains heat. Can you see the post-mortem staining there?’

  ‘Livor mortis.’ Sage had to swallow hard again as she caught another whiff of something from the body. Maybe it was just the mouldering leaves. The girl looked as if she was emerging from the forest floor like some sort of tree spirit. ‘Hypostasis,’ she managed, looking down at the plastic sheeting, trying to get her emotions back under control. ‘Where the blood has pooled and stained the skin.’

  ‘Exactly. Here it’s on the left side of her face.’ The pathologist gently lifted a few more layers of covering and shone her torch underneath.

  ‘She does appear to be naked,’ Sage said, concentrating on keeping her voice steady as she lifted another pile of leaves. ‘Does that mean a sexual motive?’

  ‘Possibly but it might also be a forensic countermeasure. Even criminals know about transferred trace evidence and DNA now. Look here, on the left side of the torso. Why is there no post-mortem staining on her shoulder?’

  ‘Pressure stopped the blood concentrating there,’ Sage said through rising panic from flashbacks of a face in the black water of a well. ‘Maybe she was lying on a hard surface on her side? The blood would have collected in the lowest tissues, except where the blood vessels were compressed.’ She counted the flashbacks away.

  ‘Deep breaths,’ Megan said, staring so intently at the body that for a moment Sage thought she was talking to the dead girl. ‘Deep breaths will help you avoid the dizziness. We tend to hold our breath because of the smell and dizziness can make the nausea worse.’ She glanced up. ‘Pathologist’s trick. You were looking a bit blue.’

  Sage took a few breaths, closed her eyes and accepted the definite sweet-vile hint in the air. It smelled like rotten meat somehow sprinkled with cheap perfume. ‘It’s just cadaverine and putrescine,’ she murmured, half to herself. ‘Just chemicals, normal breakdown.’

  Megan half laughed. ‘Honestly, this is nothing. Try and focus on the smaller tasks and the bigger picture fades.’

  The details burned into Sage’s brain, like the plastic bags Megan was taping onto the hands, like the insect scurrying along the g
irl’s lips to hide away in her mouth. Sage swallowed and looked up. She saw Trent, her supervisor, approaching.

  ‘So, what do we do after we have collected all the leaves?’ she asked him as he knelt beside her on the plastic sheet.

  ‘Well, as you know, our job is to tell people what we need them to leave as part of the primary forensic survey. The initial briefing divides the evidence into what each specialism will concentrate on.’

  Sage thought back to her classes. ‘So, the pathologist gets the body, obviously, and records the position and relationship to the grave site. Forensics will look for any transfer, footprints, fibres and fingerprints. We do the grave and surrounding areas.’

  ‘The layers of covering materials like the leaves need to be documented and preserved,’ he said, nodding. ‘You’ve made a good start. We’ll make a site plan of the scene and advise what samples need to be taken. Someone dug the hole; we need to be able to say how and what with. What they covered her with will say something about what they were thinking. Archaeology will tell the investigation what was there. The police and other investigators will read that evidence, suggest why it was done. Sometimes we use a forensic anthropologist too.’

  ‘OK.’ Sage struggled with the taste of bile in her throat. ‘Sorry. The smell is getting to me a bit; I’m used to historical sites where we only date to a century or so. Do you have an anthropologist involved?’

  Trent half smiled in sympathy. ‘No, so we’re doing both jobs here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘If you feel sick, there’s a bucket in the car. If you can’t make it, throw up in an evidence bag. We can’t contaminate the scene.’ He bagged a few more leaves. ‘I still feel rough, occasionally. Kids are harder. We probably won’t need an anthropologist, there’s a lot of crossover between us and them. We do know about burial rituals, so we can look for evidence of religious or cultural traditions as well.’

  ‘OK.’ Sage swallowed, hard. ‘I’m OK.’ She looked across the mound of leaves and twigs. ‘There’s evidence of some digging in the surface area around the site. We should photograph that. And take samples, in case they covered her up with soil from somewhere else. I can’t see any trees that these leaves might have come from.’