Especially if it was Jerome Monk’s graveyard.
After Simms’ telephone call I’d searched the internet for background to the case. Monk had been a journalist’s dream. A misfit and loner who supplemented his precarious living as a casual labourer with poaching and theft, he was an orphan whose mother had died during his birth, leading some of the more lurid tabloids to claim that she’d been his first victim. He was often described as a gypsy, but that wasn’t true. While he’d lived most of his life around Dartmoor in a caravan, he’d been shunned by the local traveller population as well as the rest of society. Unpredictable and prone to outbursts of terrifying violence, his personality matched his exterior.
If anyone looked the part of a murderer, it was Monk.
Freakishly strong, he was a physical grotesque, a sport of nature. The photographs and footage from his trial showed a hulk of a man, whose bald cannonball of a skull housed deep-set, sullen features. His black, button eyes glinted with all the expression of a doll’s above a mouth that seemed curved in a permanent sneer. Even more unsettling was the indentation on one side of his forehead, as though a giant thumb had been pressed into a ball of clay. It was disturbing to see, the sort of disfigurement that looked as if it should have been fatal.
To most people’s minds it was a pity it wasn’t.
It wasn’t so much the nature of his crimes that had been so shocking, though that was bad enough. It was the sadistic pleasure he seemed to take in selecting vulnerable victims from the Dartmoor area. The first, Zoe Bennett, was a dark-haired and pretty seventeen-year-old, an aspiring model who never returned home after leaving a nightclub one evening. Three nights after that a second girl disappeared.
Lindsey Bennett, Zoe’s identical twin.
What had been a routine missing persons investigation suddenly became front-page news. No one doubted that the same individual was responsible, and when Lindsey’s handbag was discovered in a rubbish bin, effectively ending any hope that the sisters were still alive, there was public outrage. Bad enough for a family to suffer that sort of loss once, but twice? And twins?
When Tina Williams, an attractive, dark-haired nineteen-year-old, went missing as well, it sparked the inevitable false alarms and hysteria. For a time it seemed there was a definite lead: a white saloon car was picked up on street CCTV cameras and reported by witnesses in the areas where both Lindsey Bennett and Tina Williams had last been seen.
Then Monk claimed his fourth victim, and for ever sealed his reputation as a monster. At twenty-five, Angela Carson was older than the others. Unlike them she was neither dark-haired nor pretty. There was also a more significant difference.
She was profoundly deaf and couldn’t speak.
Afterwards, neighbours described hearing Monk’s laughter as he’d raped her and battered her to death in her own flat. When the two policemen who responded to the 999 calls broke down her door they found him with her body in the wrecked bedroom, bloodied and crazed. They were big men, yet he’d beaten them both unconscious before disappearing into the night.
And then, apparently, off the face of the earth.
Despite one of the largest manhunts in UK history, no sign of Monk was found. Or of either the Bennett twins or Tina Williams. A search found a hairbrush and a lipstick belonging to Zoe Bennett hidden under his caravan, but not the girls themselves. It was three months before Monk was seen again, spotted by the side of a road in the middle of Dartmoor. Filthy and reeking, he made no attempt to resist arrest, or to deny his crimes. At his trial he pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, but refused to reveal either where he’d been hiding or what he’d done with the missing girls’ bodies. The popular theory was that he’d buried them out on the moor before going to ground there himself. But Monk just smiled his contemptuous smile and said nothing.
With the killer behind bars, the story faded from the public eye, the missing girls just more victims whose fates were unknown.
That might be about to change.
Standing out like a beacon on the drab moorland was a bright blue forensic tent. It was roughly halfway between the road and the rock formation, a short distance off to one side of the rugged dirt track that linked the two. I stood for a moment in the fine drizzle, breathing in the fecund scent of wet peat as I wondered what I’d find inside.
Then I set off along the track towards it.
2
A corridor of police tape had been strung from the midway point of the track out to the forensic tent. The moor had been churned into black mud by the constant tramp of feet, and my boots squelched as I walked between the parallel lines of flapping tape. The area around the tent had been cordoned off, and a uniformed dog-handler stood guard at the opening. He shifted from foot to foot to keep warm as he and the dog, a German Shepherd, watched me approach.
‘I’m here to see DCS Simms,’ I said, a little out of breath.
Before he could say anything the tent flap was thrown back and a man appeared in the gap. He was in his forties but seemed to aspire to be older. His face was remarkably unlined, and as if to offset the blandness of his features he’d cultivated a moustache that gave him a military bearing. The white overalls he wore somehow didn’t look right on him. He’d pushed back the protective hood, and the black hair beneath it had managed to stay so neatly combed it looked moulded.
‘Dr Hunter? I’m Simms.’
I’d have guessed as much even if I hadn’t recognized his voice. It was peremptory and officious, confident in its authority. His pale eyes flicked over me and in that moment I felt that, for better or worse, I’d been swiftly assessed.
‘We were expecting you half an hour ago,’ he said, before disappearing back inside.
Nice to meet you, too. The dog-handler moved aside to let me through, tightening his grip on the dog’s harness. But I was uncomfortably aware of the German shepherd’s unblinking stare as I went past them and into the tent.
After the open space of the moor it seemed cramped and crowded inside, a confusion of overalled figures. The diffused light from the blue walls had an ethereal quality. The atmosphere was moist and clammy, with a mustiness disconcertingly evocative of camping. Beneath it was another odour, of freshly turned soil and something far less benign.
The grave was in the centre.
Portable floodlights had been set up around it, steaming slightly in the damp air. Metal stepping plates had been put down around a rectangle of dark peat, framed by a grid of string. Someone I took to be a SOCO knelt over it, a big man who held his gloved hands poised in the air like a surgeon interrupted in theatre. In front of him, a muddy object was poking through the peaty soil. At first glance it could have been anything – a stone, a knotted root – until you looked more closely.
Thrusting out of the wet earth, its bones visible through rags of flesh, was a decomposing hand.
‘I’m afraid you’ve missed the pathologist, but he’ll be coming back when the body’s ready to be removed,’ Simms said, pulling my attention from the grave. ‘Dr Hunter, this is Professor Wainwright, the forensic archaeologist who’s going to be supervising the excavation. You may have heard of him.’
For the first time I took stock of the figure kneeling by the grave-side. Wainwright? I felt my stomach sink.
I’d heard of him, all right. A Cambridge don turned police consultant, Leonard Wainwright was one of the highest-profile forensic experts in the country, a larger-than-life figure whose name lent instant credibility to an investigation. But behind the donnish public image Wainwright had a reputation for being ruthless with anyone he considered a rival. He was an outspoken critic of what he dubbed ‘fashionable forensics’, which amounted to pretty much any discipline that wasn’t his own. Much of his ire had been focused on forensic anthropology, an upstart field that in some respects overlapped with his own. Only the previous year he’d published a paper in a scientific journal ridiculing the idea that decomposition could be a reliable indicator of time since death. ‘Total Rot?’ the title had crowed. I’d read it with amusement rather than annoyance.