Dead And Buried

But this … well, the person now sitting in front of Fry was a different man. He was the real Henry Pearson, the face behind the mask. And the face was a pitiful one, broken and wretched. This was a man who’d had to wait more than two years for the moment when he was allowed to grieve for his son.

‘I didn’t know whether they’d gone or not,’ said Pearson. ‘All this time, I thought they might actually have got away, that they’d just left the country a bit sooner than they originally planned. I assumed that David didn’t get a chance to tell me or his mother what they were going to do. Or that … well, perhaps that he’d wanted to break all contact with us, too.’

‘So you kept on with the pretence that your son and his wife must have been attacked and murdered here in Derbyshire. That was your agreed role, a way of distracting attention from the real story, from David and Trisha’s actual whereabouts. The only trouble is, Mr Pearson — it wasn’t a pretence.’

‘In the end, we didn’t know what to think. It was part of the plan that there would be no communication for a while, until we judged it to be safe. That time should have come over a year ago, when the police inquiry was shelved and the publicity had died down. Surely then, we thought, it would be safe? But no word came from David.’

‘And you just kept on playing your part?’ asked Fry. ‘How could you do that?’

Pearson threw his hands out in a desperate appeal. ‘What else was there for me to do? Please, can you tell me that? What else?’

26

The two bodies had been tightly rolled in heavy-duty black bin liners. The plastic wrapping meant that some areas of flesh had been protected from exposure to the air. If there was any good news, that was it. The uneven pattern of decomposition would increase the chances of a positive identification.

Fry shuddered as she joined the small group of people gathered on the edge of the hole. For her, the blackened heather further up the hill heightened the nightmarish nature of the location on the shoulder of Oxlow Moor.

The sight of the yokels playing open-air charades with their sheep down in the fields below didn’t make things any better. It must be some kind of rural festival taking place. When she looked around, Fry felt as though she was trapped between two different kinds of hell.

‘Wasn’t this one of the mine shafts searched during the original missing persons inquiry?’ asked DCI Mackenzie.

‘It must have been. They all were.’

‘So how is it we have this?’

‘A secondary crime scene,’ said Fry.

Wayne Abbott looked up from where he was crouching in the shaft.

‘Well I can tell you one thing for certain,’ he said. ‘They haven’t been here for two and a half years. The condition of the plastic is too good. In fact, the bodies look generally too well preserved. The pathologist will be able to tell you a lot more. She should get plenty of information from the post-mortem, given the state of the remains.’

Mackenzie looked at Fry, who allowed herself a smile. Where’s the best place to hide something so that it won’t be found? Where it’s already been looked for. She wished she could remember who’d told her that, so she could thank them. It had been well worth repeating.

‘So Henry Pearson wasn’t expecting this outcome after all?’ said Mackenzie.

‘Not at all. It knocked the ground from under him completely. He won’t be doing any more media interviews for a while.’

‘Interesting.’

‘More sad than interesting. He was still clinging to the belief that David and Trisha had managed to get out of the country and change their identities. Somehow he’d convinced himself that they’d covered their tracks so well that no one could make contact with them, not even him. So he just carried on playing his part regardless.’

‘And yet his son and daughter-in-law have been dead for … well, how long would we say?’

‘Shall we say about two years, four months, at a guess?’ said Fry.

‘From the moment they disappeared, then.’

‘Yes.’

Mackenzie looked at the remains in their makeshift grave. The edges were crumbling, and the thick plastic was scattered with debris, stones and lumps of peat. The damage had been done by the fell runners. The impact of scores of feet pounding over the cover had shaken it loose and broken it into two pieces, which lay just inside the shaft. According to the initial reports from witnesses, one of the back markers had almost fallen right through.

‘Is it possible,’ said Mackenzie, ‘that someone knew David Pearson was planning to do a bunk and followed him up here to stop him?’

‘To make sure he didn’t escape justice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s possible,’ said Fry. ‘We’d have to go through his business records again, follow up on everyone affected by his activities. But …’

‘What?’

‘Well, if the bodies haven’t been buried here the whole time since the Pearsons disappeared, where were they until now?’