Читать книгу Remain Silent - Susie Steiner - Страница 9

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 ti

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.