Kelly drove with a heavy heart. It was what she’d dreaded, but expected at the same time. She’d authorised for the family to be told that a body had been found, but that it hadn’t yet been formally identified. She prayed it wasn’t her.
A crowd had gathered in Braithwaite, and Kelly found it difficult to get through. News had travelled fast, and it looked as though the journos were there already. She saw a van from Sky and realised that Christmas Day was just another day for other bearers of bad news too. A few uniforms struggled to keep a route open and rolled their eyes at her in sympathy as they waved her through.
The start of the Whinlatter Pass was running with water, and it poured down the road like a river. Kelly wondered if the poor girl had been up here since Sunday, hidden under the snow, ready to reveal her secrets when the weather turned. It made her shudder.
She parked at the Revelin Moss car park and walked up to the police tape. Stan MacIntyre was on duty; he raised his eyebrows at her, indicating that he’d rather keep his desk job than be in her shoes. A forensic officer was already at the scene. He nodded and gave her some covers for her shoes. Kelly heard flies and shook her head; they were never far away, even if their meal was frozen.
The thing she saw first was the short top that Colin Shaw had forbidden Faith to wear. The long green jumper that had been found with her backpack, three miles away in the centre of town, had been swapped. It was the kind of detail that was likely to stay with the father beyond all the others. She forced herself to look at the face, and then looked away again.
She made a quick call to Emma to confirm that it was Faith, then bent down to study the girl, who looked like a doll. Tears sprang to her eyes and she had to turn away for a few seconds to control herself. Faith’s skin was white and her eyes were open. Her gorgeous long brown hair was straggled around her young, sweet face. She was in the foetal position and her trousers and pants were pulled down.
Kelly bit her lip and anger welled up in her chest. Bastards.
She mustn’t jump to conclusions until the coroner had had a chance to perform the post-mortem, and she willed herself to be as objective as she possibly could. She had come across frozen bodies before, and she knew that often, before they succumbed to the cold, people in the late stages of hypothermia clawed at their clothes, desperate to take them off. It was called paradoxical undressing, and scientists reckoned that it was to do with the muscles trying urgently to contract to warm the core up, eventually causing fatigue and a surge of hot blood. But she couldn’t get sexual assault out of her head either.
She knew that the temperature in Whinlatter Forest last Sunday evening had been around minus four degrees: easily cold enough to freeze someone to death. But she wanted to know why Faith had been here. The obvious answer was that her tormentors were still up to their old game of leaving her somewhere alone after tricking her to come with them. She imagined Luke enticing her into his car, and Sadie encouraging her. Kelly felt hot anger flood her gut. Again she willed herself to calm down.
Faith was only wearing one shoe, a light grey Adidas Cloudfoam: an early Christmas present from her parents. Kelly walked towards a uniform, asking him to help search for the other one. They soon found it. She beckoned the forensic officer, who took photos. Faith would have to be bagged carefully to collect the detritus around her. The likelihood of vital evidence in the immediate vicinity was immense.
‘She’s still pretty rock solid,’ the forensic officer said. Kelly knew that this meant Faith would have to be thawed out in a carefully controlled environment at a specific temperature of thirty-eight degrees, to make sure that her extremities didn’t begin to decompose before her internal organs were defrosted. It could take a few days before she was ready to autopsy. She’d have to call Ted, though he’d know soon enough anyway.
She looked around. The body lay in a shallow ditch not far from the road. Faith could have burrowed there to keep warm once hypothermia was advanced and she’d begun to experience hallucinations and amnesia; if she was still alive at that stage. Kelly’s biggest question was how the girl had died: exposure or murder. She wouldn’t know until Ted got her on his slab.
Another forensic officer arrived and Kelly agreed that it was time to get the body bagged up. They didn’t want it out here warming up; a process that could allow vital evidence to slip away. She called Ted, but there was no answer. He and Wendy must be asleep, she thought. She envied them, full of Christmas dinner in front of the fire in her lounge.
She walked back to her car and called Emma again. The Miles family lawyer had been in with his client for over an hour, and had a statement prepared. That was, until the discovery of Faith’s body: they were now in renewed intense negotiations as far as Emma could tell, and the exchange was heated.
‘The most important thing is that he won’t want to take the rap for this on his own,’ Kelly said. ‘We need to get him to start giving us some names. Has the CCTV footage come back yet?’
‘That’s another thing, guv. It came through to the office email, and I only checked it an hour ago.
‘Please give me some good news,’ Kelly said.
‘There was a Highways Agency CCTV camera at the A66 roundabout, where traffic turns into Whinlatter. It was disconnected for replacement by a newer model, and sent to be recycled by the DVLA in Swansea.’
‘Shit,’ Kelly swore.
‘But the images were downloaded onto the Highways Agency computer before it was decommissioned.’
Kelly held her breath.
‘They found it.’
She closed her eyes, and fist-pumped the air subtly, walking away from the forensic officers as they began to carefully wrap Faith’s hands, feet and head in plastic before lifting her into a black body bag. Moving a frozen corpse was a tricky operation, and Kelly didn’t really want to witness it. Not after getting to know Faith as a living, breathing, beautiful and intelligent young woman with a full life to lead. She still hadn’t accepted her death as real; it would probably take a few days, like it always did. They’d ploughed so much energy into finding her alive. She just wasn’t ready to let that go yet.
‘Go on, Emma.’
‘We’ve got a positive for Luke’s Hyundai travelling west at 9.17 p.m.’
A wave of emotion caught in Kelly’s throat and she looked away into the forest. Faith had got into that car willingly, she knew that, perhaps for drugs, perhaps because she was in love with Luke Miles, or perhaps because her friends had said she’d be safe.
‘It drives back east at 10 p.m.’
This was unexpected. It wasn’t a long time to have a party, and it didn’t make sense.
‘Can you see the occupants?’
‘It’s not clear enough, guv. Seventy-six other vehicles passed through the roundabout between 9 p.m. and midnight. When I checked them through the ANPR, Danny Stanton’s Ford Ka came up too.’
‘Say again?’
‘It drives west from the A66 at 9.55 p.m. but doesn’t come back again. There’s a motorbike that goes in and out around similar timings too. It travels west towards Whinlatter at 9.52 p.m. and east again at 10.21 p.m. It’s registered to Maria Volantyne.’
‘The woman who owns the lease on the fair,’ Kelly said. ‘Emma, can you run a national check on the ANPR for all three vehicles. Get someone to isolate all their hits and find a link. I want to know what ties them together.’
‘Of course, guv.’
Craig Lockwood had told Kelly that Bobby Bailey had been taken in by Maria Volantyne as a teenager when his mother died, and she’d covered for him ever since. And that before his violent murder, Bobby had driven a motorbike.