Blind to the Bones Page 20

  ‘I should say. They say there were nearly fifteen hundred men working here at the height of the tunnel project. They would have taken food in with them to where they were working. I expect there would have been plenty left on the floor for the rats.’

  ‘It reminds me of a story that a coal miner told me after the strike back in ’84–85,’ said Cooper. ‘He said there had always been lots of mice underground in the mines. He saw them all the time, hundreds of them, right down at the coalface. But the men were on strike for a year. And when they went back to work, there were no mice at all. They had all died. That was because they had relied on the presence of the miners for their food supply – without the crumbs of bread and pastry, and bits of fruit and chocolate that had dropped from the miners’ snap boxes, the mice starved.’

  ‘Arthur Scargill killed our mice,’ said Murfin. ‘Bastard.’

  Cooper remembered Scargill, too. He had been the miners’ leader during their turbulent strike in the 1980s. The strike had resulted in many bloody pitched battles between police and pickets, and it wouldn’t be easily forgotten in Derbyshire.

  ‘I think he’s retired now.’

  ‘Damn, I forgot to send him a card,’ said Murfin.

  ‘But the thing is,’ said Cooper, ‘I would have thought all the rats would die out when the tunnels were finished and the trains began running. Surely the navvies would move on to another job somewhere, and their shanty towns would be demolished? The rats’ food source would have dried up.’

  ‘Maybe they did die out,’ said Norton. ‘But they’re back again now. They seem to eat as much poison as I can put down, and thrive on it.’

  ‘Super rats?’

  ‘If you want to call them that.’

  Thanks to mild winters, the rat population had been rising fast, and they were getting bigger year by year. They could grow to the size of a small dog where they fed on the leftovers from fast-food outlets. In the country, rats normally ate crops out of the fields and were supposed to be smaller, and easier for a terrier or a cat to deal with. But an increasing volume of human visitors had made a big difference to country rats.

  ‘How often are the tunnels checked?’ said Cooper.

  ‘The cableway is inspected regularly. The others not so often. Why?’

  ‘If feasible, it might be an idea for someone to check inside the old tunnels. At least as far as the first air shaft.’

  Norton looked at him, but for some reason he didn’t ask the obvious question. Perhaps it was the expression on Cooper’s face that told him the answer would be something he didn’t want to know.

  ‘How long have the high-voltage cables run through the other tunnel?’

  ‘A long time. Since 1969, well before the line was closed in the new tunnel.’

  So four hundred thousand volts had been buzzing below the hill for the last thirty-four years. Maybe that was what had re-energized the rat population.

  ‘Of course, it’ll be different if they re-open the railway line,’ said Norton.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Through the newer tunnel, of course, not these old ones. They’ll have to re-electrify it. Twenty-five thousand volts, they say. Because the Channel Tunnel won’t take diesels.’

  ‘Channel Tunnel? What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘I suppose it might not come off,’ said Norton. ‘But that’s the plan. A rail link all the way from Liverpool to Lille in France, through one of these tunnels here. Nine trains an hour in each direction. They reckon it could take two million lorries a year off the motorways. Imagine driving your lorry on to a train in Liverpool and driving off in France. And all thanks to these tunnels. Just think about the men who blasted their way with gunpowder through these hills for three miles to make them.’

  ‘They were navvies, like the men who built the canals?’

  ‘That’s right. Not Irish, though. For some reason, almost all of the navvies on the Woodhead tunnels were English. The conditions must have been pretty awful for them up here.’

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ said Murfin. ‘It isn’t exactly the Riviera now, is it?’

  ‘No. Actually, a lot of the men died, in one way or another. Accidents of various kinds, and illness. The first tunnel killed thirty or forty men, and injured over six hundred. They built the second tunnel from arches in first bore, and that killed dozens more. Woodhead was known for death and disease in those days. They called it the Railwaymen’s Graveyard.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Murfin. ‘You’re starting to scare me. I think I prefer Diane Fry.’

  Norton looked at him, puzzled. ‘Well, they were short of food, and had no clean water,’ he said. ‘They worked seven days a week in appalling conditions, constantly soaking wet and freezing cold in the winter. It’s not surprising so many of them died. Someone worked out that the death rate among the Woodhead navvies was higher than among British soldiers who fought in the Battle of Waterloo.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Cooper. ‘Waterloo?’

  ‘It was about twenty years before the first tunnel was started.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The navvies were very superstitious, you know. They had so many disasters that they thought their digging and blasting had disturbed some evil spirit that had been sleeping deep under the hill. According to the stories, they carved symbolic faces over these portals to control the evil.’

  Cooper followed his gaze. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘No.’ Norton sighed. ‘No one cared about those navvies at all, you know. It was only afterwards that the conditions they worked in came to light. There were springs that caused flooding, and the men were always soaking wet. They had fumes and gas to deal with, and there was twenty-four-hour shift work, with no time off. Those first tunnel builders just had a shanty town, with mud huts shared by fifteen men at a time, and all their supplies brought over the moors. They paid into a club for a doctor for themselves – the company gave no help. The only thing that was cheap was beer, so a lot of them would have been alcoholics by the time they finished the tunnels. There were no old navvies, anyway. They were lucky if they lived to forty.’

  ‘Do they send you down here to entertain the tourists?’ said Murfin. ‘Or are you practising for a job at the Count Dracula Experience?’

  But Norton ignored him. ‘And you know what?’ he said. ‘There were steam shovels available for tunnelling by 1843, but they didn’t use them here. Men’s lives were cheaper.’

  ‘Where was this shanty town?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Where was it? What are you asking me that for? You said you’ve just come from there.’

  Cooper stared at Norton. ‘From where?’

  ‘Withens, of course.’

  ‘Withens started as the navvies’ shanty town?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred men used to live up there when they were working on the tunnels. All they had were huts made out of mud and piles of stones, with heather chucked on top for a roof. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Not in the winters they get up here.’

  Cooper looked at the dark mouths of the old railway tunnels again, expecting to see rats scuttling across the dirt floor. Apart from steel fences and gates, the newer tunnel had been left unobstructed. With a new trackbed, it was almost ready for those Euro expresses to go through.

  Somewhere along the three-mile length must be the lower opening of the air shaft that emerged on Withens Moor, two hundred feet above. He wondered if the rats could run up the inside of the air shaft, too. He could picture them spiralling their way upwards between the courses of stone, jerking and stopping, sniffing the air, then running ahead again. He imagined they would climb almost in silence, dragging their tails on the stone as their pale feet and long claws found a purchase in the crumbling mortar and they gradually emerged from the darkness on to the moor. On to the moor where Neil Granger had lain dying.

  17

  ‘Smashed like a clay flower pot,’ said Juliana Van Doon, running water on to her dissection table to
rinse away the blood and body fluids.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Diane Fry. ‘But that doesn’t sound very scientific.’

  She looked at the pathologist curiously. There weren’t many cases that moved Mrs Van Doon to metaphor. The killing of children, yes, or something else particularly tragic. But a young man who had met a violent death? She must see plenty of those.

  ‘The skull,’ said the pathologist. ‘It’s a wonderful thing, the skull, and it does a terrific job of protecting our brain. But hit it hard enough, and you soon find out how brittle it is. The seat of our intelligence becomes no more than a few dying roots, and dirt trickling from a smashed flower pot.’

  Fry shivered at the tone of the other woman’s voice. Her own fragility was something she didn’t care to think about just now. She was already seeing the bones. She didn’t want to see what else lay beneath.

  Mrs Van Doon looked at her, and smiled sadly. ‘I’m sorry. Memories, you know. Even pathologists aren’t entirely immune from personal feelings. We can’t all keep up a constant stream of jokes as we fillet a fresh cadaver.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Fry, though the apology and the reference to memories had made her feel even worse. If Mrs Van Doon was going to burst into tears, Fry would have to leave the room, or she’d be liable to join her.

  DCI Kessen was standing with the Scientific Support Manager. He gazed at Fry over his mask, with that air of infinite patience that seemed so unnatural.

  ‘We have an open skull fracture,’ said the pathologist, returning to her usual brisk tone. ‘The scalp laceration is consistent with an impact on the stones found at the scene, which are rather rough and sharp. I think we’ll get an exact match. The dura mater membrane is broken, which resulted in considerable leakage of cerebrospinal fluid. And there’s a compression of the brain in the area adjacent to the site of the injury.’

  ‘It looks like his head hit the stone when he fell.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The pattern of the blood spatters seems to tell the same story.’

  ‘And that was the injury that killed him,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘You’re sure? Could he have survived?’

  ‘Without rapid surgical closure of the membranes, infection would have set in very quickly.’

  ‘There was a lot of blood at the scene, too.’

  ‘Scalp injuries bleed a lot,’ said Mrs Van Doon, with a shrug.

  ‘What about the other head injury?’

  ‘There’s a contusion to the back of the head, caused by a hard, smooth object. This blow caused a diffuse brain injury, probably resulting in concussion from the impact of the brain against the inside of the skull.’

  ‘How serious?’

  ‘A short period of coma. And he would almost certainly have had a bad headache when he woke up, maybe nausea and dizziness.’

  ‘If he had woken up.’

  ‘Of course. The blow to the back of the head would probably have rendered him unconscious and caused him to fall. But it wasn’t fatal. The impact with the stone was.’

  DCI Kessen spoke then, and everyone turned towards him to listen.

  ‘You realize this is crucial? It might be the evidence that makes the difference between a charge of murder and manslaughter. The blow to the back of the head may have been intended only to stun, and the victim’s death wasn’t intentional.’

  ‘You’ll have the full opinion in my report, Chief Inspector,’ said Mrs Van Doon.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The pathologist looked at him for a moment, expecting another question, which didn’t come.

  ‘Then we have the face …’ she said.

  Cleaned up and with his eyelids closed, Neil Granger’s face looked almost normal. But it hadn’t been like that when the firefighters had found him.

  ‘The face was painted with some kind of water-based theatrical make-up. Black.’ The pathologist looked up at the police officers. ‘Do you know of any reason for that?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘And the eyes?’ said Fry. ‘The eyes were full of blood. Were they injured separately?’

  ‘Injured?’ said Mrs Van Doon. ‘They were removed.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Now you are cracking jokes.’

  ‘No. But don’t worry.’

  ‘Don’t worry? You say the victim had his eyes removed, and you’re telling us not to worry?’

  ‘It was done postmortem.’

  ‘Great. A killer who steals his victim’s eyes.’

  ‘And it wasn’t done by the killer, I’d say.’ The pathologist indicated a couple of evidence bags being sorted by the scenes of crime officers. They contained Neil Granger’s clothes and various traces scraped and swabbed from them. ‘You have a feather, black. And some bird droppings, white. The eyes have been torn out roughly, not cut. I’d say one or more members of the crow family did the damage.’

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  ‘Yes. Also, the victim had blood on his hand. And not only blood, but cerebrospinal fluid.’

  Fry screwed up her face in distaste. ‘From the skull fracture. He touched the injury. But didn’t you say …?’

  ‘The victim was already unconscious before his head hit the stones, yes. So it’s very unlikely that he touched the head wound himself. Impossible, I’d say.’

  ‘Just spell that out for us again,’ said Fry.

  ‘Well, I would suggest the blood and cerebrospinal fluid were transferred to his hand by means of some third party.’

  ‘Someone else. Someone touched his head wound, and then his hand. His killer? Or one of the firefighters who found the body?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Maybe even a police officer. Some of them can’t keep their hands to themselves at a crime scene.’

  ‘But there’s one other injury to consider,’ said Mrs Van Doon.

  ‘Really?’

  Fry looked at the head, but could see only the lurid colour of the bruised and broken skin near Neil Granger’s right temple.

  ‘Somewhere else on the body, then?’

  ‘You can’t help sounding hopeful,’ said Mrs Van Doon, with a small smile. ‘You’d like evidence for a murder charge, after all. That’s usually what investigators want. A manslaughter conviction just isn’t satisfactory, is it?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Fry impatiently. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’

  ‘There’s an ulna fracture.’

  ‘Wait a minute – ulna? In the arm?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘He had a broken arm?’

  The pathologist lifted a side of the plastic sheet. ‘See?’ she said.

  Neil Granger’s left forearm was badly swollen and bruised. But something else looked wrong with it. Fry bent to look more closely, then pulled away suddenly. The skin below the forearm was broken or torn. Burst was the word that came to her mind. Granger’s skin hadn’t been broken by a blow from the outside, but ripped open from the inside. The end of a bone was poking through the hole, like an obscene creature emerging from its cocoon, a white grub seeking the light.

  The idea of things emerging from the body made Fry feel sick and cold. It was the most horrible thing she could imagine. During her teens she had consistently refused to watch a video of the film Alien with her schoolmates, because she had heard about the scene in which a creature burst from the body of actor John Hurt, where it had been growing in his chest. She knew she would probably have fainted, and that would have ruined the tough-girl image she was cultivating at the time. Even now, she never wanted to see the film. Nor did she ever want to see internal organs spilling from a belly wound. She never wanted to see the bones under the skin. Neither real, nor imaginary.

  Fry swallowed. ‘Was his arm broken in the fall?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Van Doon. ‘By another blow. Possibly from the same weapon that caused the head wound. We can make the comparisons for you here.’

  ‘Two blows. I don’t suppose
there’s any way to tell which came first? That would be too much to expect, I’m sure.’

  ‘Actually, it isn’t.’

  ‘You can tell?’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave the deductions to you, as usual. But what I can say is that the blow to the head was probably struck while the victim was standing. If you find the weapon, we’ll have a good chance of establishing that more definitely.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But the injury to the arm was inflicted when the victim was already lying down. There’s bruising on the other side of the arm, where it was impacted on the ground. Again, if we had a weapon, we could do some angle tests. A heavy wooden stick of some kind. That’s what you should be looking for. Unfortunately, the weapon doesn’t seem to have splintered, as it hasn’t left any splinters in the wound that I can see. So unless the lab can find some traces, there’s no way of telling what kind of wood.’

  ‘Someone knocked him unconscious, then hit him again, breaking his arm?’

  ‘Perhaps. But remember that he struck his head when he fell.’

  Fry looked up, dragging her eyes away from the protruding bone. ‘You mean he was already dead when his arm was broken?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have happened quite so quickly,’ said Mrs Van Doon. ‘But he was certainly dying.’

  ‘Neil had lived in Tintwistle for about nine months,’ said Philip Granger. ‘His house is right on the main road.’

  ‘Yes, we know. You went there with DC Cooper and some other officers yesterday,’ said DI Paul Hitchens patiently.

  Granger nodded, but didn’t look at Ben Cooper, who was sitting next to the DI. Cooper gathered the impression that Philip Granger didn’t remember him. He’d already made a formal statement this afternoon about his brother, which had been pretty comprehensive. There were details in it that would be gone over again later, but not just now.

  In the interview room at West Street, Granger looked as ill as he had the day before. Either he hadn’t shaved before he came out, or he had a bad case of five o’clock shadow. Cooper wanted to ask him if he was experiencing the survivor’s guilt that members of a victim’s family often suffered from – the irrational feeling that the wrong person had died. It should have been me, not him. And all those ‘if onlys’. Maybe it was even worse for an older brother.