Two people were already waiting behind police tape when John Schofield arrived. A constable held the log sheet for him to sign in. ‘Sorry I’m late, it’s Monday.’
A shadow loomed over him. ‘Actually, it’s Tuesday morning, 3.10 a.m. to be precise…’
‘You’re right, Hannah. Good to see you again, we’ll have to stop meeting like this.’
The crime scene manager smiled. ‘Fat chance in Manchester these days.’ She was already wearing a full protective suit.
A small, rotund man stepped forward. ‘Good morning, sir. DS Dave Connor, local CID.’ He stuck his hand out and then retracted it, stepping backwards to maintain distance, remembering that lockdown protocols still existed. ‘Sorry, force of habit.’
The sky was still dark, the house looking even more sinister reflected in the flashing blue lights of the police cars. Off to one side the film crew were hanging around impatiently, stamping their feet, arms wrapped around their bodies to keep out the chill and damp of a Manchester morning.
‘What have you got for me?’ asked Schofield, his high-pitched voice almost boyish rather than that of an experienced pathologist.
‘A film crew found a backpack with what they think is a human hand inside.’ Dave Connor pointed towards the four members of the film crew, now whispering to each other. One of them began filming with a phone. ‘They called 999 and we responded. I looked inside the backpack and called you and Hannah.’
‘You didn’t touch anything else?’
The detective shook his head. ‘Of course not.’
‘No body?’
‘None we can see, Dr Schofield,’ replied the crime scene manager.
‘Are you sure this isn’t a prank, or a publicity stunt?’
Hannah shrugged her shoulders. ‘No, but they were adamant there was a human hand inside the backpack—’
‘And if there is, you have to call me out.’ He shook his head. ‘Have you checked it yourself?’
‘Not yet, waiting for you.’
‘And the other CSIs are on their way?’
‘Me first, I’ll call the others out after you’ve checked out the backpack and confirmed the hand is human and not some plaster model.’
‘Right, give me a second while I put on my gear and you can show me where it is.’
Five minutes later, Schofield returned in a full Tyvek bodysuit complete with mask and eye protectors, carrying his medical examiner’s bag. ‘You can’t be too cautious when dealing with human remains.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Connor dubiously.
While the detective sergeant stayed outside, Hannah Palmer and the pathologist stepped carefully though the open door, avoiding the detritus on the floor and, using stepping tiles, edged along the hall to the kitchen.
‘What was this place?’
‘According to the film crew, it was a children’s home, but it closed in 2006.’
The backpack was sitting on the table, exactly where the producer had left it.
‘Is that it?’
‘It is, Doctor.’
‘And nobody has touched it?’
‘Only the person who found it. A Ms Pamela Best, the producer of the film.’
‘What were they doing here late on a Monday night?’
‘They’re paranormal investigators.’
Both Schofield’s eyebrows and voice rose. ‘What?’
‘Apparently it’s all the rage on the internet. Film crews visit old houses looking for ghosts. My son watches them.’
Schofield grunted. ‘OK, let’s take a look at what we’ve got. I hope this isn’t some stunt pulled by the film crew.’
‘If it is, they’ll be spending the rest of the week down the nick, charged with wasting police time.’
‘Isn’t that a hanging offence?’
‘Should be.’
They both stared at the backpack. The only light was provided by the arc lamp left behind by the film crew. Schofield took out a lamp attached to a headband from his examiner’s bag, putting around it around his head so the bulb looked like a giant third eye in the centre of his forehead.
He switched it on and the light immediately illuminated the faded green canvas of the backpack, a large white label sticking out from one side with the word CLAK in bright red letters.
Hannah followed suit, pointing her luminescent white-light torch at the dark opening. The top of the backpack looked like the mouth of a giant toad, the inside dark and forbidding.
Schofield reached into his doctor’s bag and took out a pair of stainless steel forceps. ‘You’d better have an evidence bag ready in case there is something inside.’ Cautiously, he peered into the top.
There was something there.
In the light from his headband, it looked greenish white and slightly scaly with a hard, discoloured yellow top.
He widened the opening in the top of the bag with the forceps, the light revealing something longer with a hard dirty yellow nail at the end and a green tinge to the cuticle.
‘Is it human?’ asked Hannah.
‘Looks like it,’ he answered.
He sniffed the air. No smell of putrefaction. Strange.
He reached in with the forceps and pulled. The hand gave a little, then stuck fast.
‘Damn.’ He widened the opening in the bag. He could see the whole hand now. Quite large, short fingered with a masculine heaviness, the hand of a middle-aged man, perhaps.
He reached in again with the forceps, gripping the hand on either side of the palm and pulling. ‘Got you.’
He held the hand up to the light from his lamp. ‘A human hand severed from the arm though the scaphoid and lunate bones, all metacarpals and phalanges intact, it would seem.’ He examined it carefully. ‘A right hand, from the position of the thumb.’
Hannah held open the evidence bag and he dropped the hand into it.
She took it off to one side, sealed it and wrote her name, time and location on the cover. When the CSIs arrived, she would catalogue it, assigning the correct number.
‘When you’ve finished, can you send it on to my lab? And make sure it’s placed in some ice. I don’t want it to decay any further.’
‘No problem, Doctor. This is a crime scene, then?’
He pointed to the hand. ‘Well, it’s human, separated from the arm through the wrist. I could see saw marks on the bone.’
‘Where’s the rest of the body?’
Schofield looked around the old house. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
He was about to call for Dave Connor to come in when it occurred to him to re-check the interior of the backpack. He looked inside, noticing a zipped-up internal pocket.
‘Hang on, there may be something here.’
With his gloved hand, he reached in and pulled the zipper across. It moved smoothly, as if it had been recently opened.
Hannah Palmer moved closer to him, directing her light inside the new opening.
Another hand.
More decayed this time, as if it had been in the bag for longer, the flesh sloughing off to reveal the gleaming whiteness of a finger bone beneath.
Schofield reached in with the forceps and grasped it firmly, pulling it out to hold under the torch light.
‘Is this the left hand?’
Schofield thought for a moment, stared intently at the hand and then shook his head. ‘This is another right hand. And from its smallness and the length of the fingers, I would say a female.’
‘Jesus,’ said Hannah.
‘No, this one is female.’
‘I meant—’
‘I know what you meant, and I would prefer it if you didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.’
Hannah Palmer ignored the admonishment and held open another evidence bag. Schofield dropped the smaller hand into it.
As she wrote on the outside of the evidence bag, he peered into the backpack once more.
‘You’d better get me one more of those.’
‘What?’
‘There’s another. It’s a right hand too.’
‘Jesus,’ whispered the crime scene manager under her breath.
It was going to be a long night.