Page 6 of Dead Serious: Case 3 Mr Bruce Reyes

“You should get some sleep, sweetie,” Dusty says softly and spoons up behind me.

Ever since we shared the same body space, I seem to be able to feel her whenever she touches me, and it’s comforting. I close my eyes against the throbbing in my head and feel her cool fingers stroking my feverish forehead. It’s nice.

I let out a little hum of contentment as she starts to sing. Unlike when she’s trying to force me into doing something she wants and belts her way through chorus after chorus of West End hits, eighties chart-toppers, and sixties classics, this time she quietly croons the Mamas and the Papas’ version ofDream a Little Dream of Me.

Dusty’s comforting voice and the patter of the rain mix with Jacob Marley’s rusty-old-tractor purr to wrap around me and I find myself slipping easily into sleep under her touch.

2

Iclimb out of the car, pulling the collar of my coat up higher against the vicious wind and slapping rain, for all the good it does me. There’s no point in attempting to use an umbrella and I’m soaked through in minutes.

I glance across at my partner Maddie and find she’s fared only slightly better than me. She at least had the sense to wear the brightly coloured weatherproof hiking jacket I’d seen in a photo of her with her wife Sonia on Maddie’s desk. They were grinning wildly and being rained on at the summit of Ben Nevis. Just like in the photo, Maddie grips the hood of her jacket for dear life, her grasp so tight that her knuckles turn white.

“Lovely day for it,” she yells above the howl of the wind.

I resist rolling my eyes at her grin. Turning away from the car, I take one step and grimace as my feet sink into a deep and muddy puddle, its water instantly soaking through my shoes and socks. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those days.

“Come on, I think it’s this way.” Maddie points with one hand and at the same time loses her grip on her hood with the other. It snaps back, and she gets blasted in the face by the stinging rain. “Argh, fuck.”

“Lovely day for it,” I repeat her earlier statement, laughing as she wrestles her hood back up.

She chuckles. “Shut up.”

We set out across the carpark—and I use the term very loosely. It’s a mishmash of uneven gravel, divots, and potholes. Somewhere ahead of us is a small, rusted spectator stand which has seen far better days, and as we near, I can see it’s been sealed off with aDanger, Do Not Usesign.

My feet squelch inside my sodden shoes as we begin our trek across waterlogged ground and patchy, overgrown wild grass. Squinting through the rain, I try to take in the details of the location as much as I can.

It’s not every day I find myself in a disused rugby pitch in the middle of Surbiton during a storm of biblical proportions because someone, convinced they’d found human bones, called in. Part of me wishes we could just pass it off to Cold Cases, but they’ve still got their hands full with the Maeve Landon investigation. So, instead of sitting comfortably at my desk with a mug of tea and a stack of boring paperwork, I’m stuck out here, trying to avoid drowning while searching for bones.

It’s not as strange as you might think. Back home in Yorkshire it might’ve been considered out of the ordinary, but you’d be amazed at how often human bones are uncovered in London. With the city itself dating as far back as the Roman city of Londinium, there are layers and layers of history beneath our feet. Every time the city is excavated to make room for new buildings, something else is uncovered.

If these are human remains, they could be anywhere from a couple to several hundred years old. I have to admit, as much as I hate the constant ice-cold trickle of rain down the back of my neck right now, I love my job; as hard as it can be seeing the worst side of humanity, sometimes unravelling the mystery of it can also be compelling.

We cross the old pitch to where a white forensic tent is already erected, with two drenched and miserable police officers guarding it. The tent itself snaps and bends alarmingly in the wind, and I wonder how long it’s going to hold up if this insane weather doesn’t let up soon. We flash our IDs as we approach, but the officers just nod and wave us through.

Grateful to be out of the downpour and feeling bad for the officers on duty, I unzip the edge of the tent flap and step back to allow Maddie to enter first.

“Close the blasted entrance,” an irate voice snaps.

Following Maddie in, I quickly zip the flap closed again in an attempt to shut out the weather. When I finally turn around, I find a short, gruff man in green wellies and a yellow rain mac. His shiny head glistens with raindrops and a few long, dark strands are combed across his scalp, as if those skinny train tracks of hair could cover that amount of baldness. His grey-streaked brows, in contrast, are so thick and bushy they practically coil over the top of his slightly misted glasses like overgrown shrubbery.

“Detective Wilkes and Detective Hayes, Scotland Yard,” Maddie introduces us.

“Dr Roger O’Hara,” he huffs, his thick, untidy moustache twitching with his breath. “Forensic anthropologist.”

“What have we got?” I ask.

“See for yourself.” He nods toward the ground and my gaze follows his.

I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at.

There’s a huge, almost egg-shaped mound rising from the earth. It’s split open at the top, with four neat segments of sod folded back to reveal its contents, and for a moment it reminds me of the face-hugger eggs fromAlien.

I crouch down to peer at its contents. Tucked in a hollow in the soil is a grinning skull settled atop a pile of neatly stacked bones.

“Is it real?” I frown. “Or are we looking at some kind of weird prank?”

“Oh, there’s no doubt the bones are authentic,” he replies, but his frown matches mine. “Have to say, though, this is all very strange. Usually when I’m called to a grave site, the skeleton is laid out as the body would have been in death. When the tissues and organs decompose and are absorbed into the earth, it leaves the bones in situ. I’ve only seen bones stacked like these in very old cases of ritualistic killings from back during my student days when I helped excavate ancient heritage sites in Peru and Cambodia.”