Cradle to Coffin (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 10) by Oliver Davies

Author:Oliver Davies [Davies, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Mills

With Thatcher’s promise of lunch in my hand, I offered no other objection as we left the city and drove back out towards the village and the church. It was still a grim, grey day, but at least the rain had decided to take some time off, saving us from sloshing around in the mud, if nothing else.

Still, the idea of hanging around a dug-up grave wasn’t all that appealing, and the weather didn’t contribute to that. I wondered how people stomached it. Death and dead bodies were difficult enough to deal with without getting the flu at the same time. Though I supposed in instances such as this, where the remains were often nothing more than a barely complete skeleton, this one without even a name, it was easy to remain detached from the memory of it once being a person. Unlike for us, when our victims had names and lives and loved ones and faces; once, one of them still had her eyes open until Dr Crowe had arrived and gently closed them.

There was something about a grave that seemed far more personal to me, though, the place where people rested after all of this. To be dug up and removed to a lab and poked and prodded with brushes and machines seemed disrespectful, however useful to history it was. I hoped that if we could identify the remains, at least then they could be properly interred again. They deserved that much, I was sure.

As I sat stewing, watching the world go by, Thatcher was also silent as he drove along. He wasn’t angry, I had checked. No steely grip on the steering wheel, no muscle twitching in his jaw. He was oddly calm, in fact, despite the fact that we had very little to make sense of with this case. I’d have thought that he’d be angrier or more annoyed by now, muttering under his breath as he was sometimes prone to do.

But not today, today he sat and drove quietly, the radio playing softly and occasionally spoke to comment on something we passed outside or to complain about a song that played. I was surprised he knew as many tracks as he did and imagined that Billie had something to do with that. Music seemed to follow that girl around, filling the silence that she had otherwise sat in until Thatcher had taken her under his wing.

“What are you hoping to find?” I asked eventually, unable to sit with my own thoughts for much longer without going mad.

“Honestly? I’m not that sure. Something we didn’t spot last time, I suppose. Something that might stick out now that we know a little bit more about Schmidt himself, something he would have seen. I’m prepared to take some pictures as well,” he added. “And we can always get another expert to give our findings another quick scan.”

“No doubt one of Schmidt’s colleagues will take over the remains at some point,” I said. “But finding those results now would make things easier.

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