A Secret Worth Killing For. Simon Berthon

description of the field and where to dig, too. We found a few remains on the surface. Animal disturbance. We’ve done a preliminary dig. Skull’s well preserved. Fair bit of clothing.’

      ‘He didn’t say who or exactly when.’

      ‘Just you’ll find an unlucky young man. That was it, sir.’

      Carne looked down at the muddled remnants so far revealed. Fragments of what may have been dark-blue jeans, the rubber soles of shoes, the jacket oddly intact, the macabre shape of head. He imagined the different endgames. A simple execution of a known enemy – or an assassination – just a bullet in the head. More likely, the last hours of a tout. Kicks and punches, cigarette burns, electrodes, hammers on kneecaps, scalpels on skin, two bullets in the head.

      What must it be like to be the parent of whoever who had become this set of bones and rotted clothes? An offspring who disappeared, never to return. Would they have had any idea – or suspicions? Were they ever told? ‘We’re sorry to have to inform you, Mr and Mrs . . .’ Carne tried to imagine the platitudes of a ghastly conversation. If he and Alice had been able to have children, they would have come into this world at the time this young man was leaving it. They would now be the age his short life was extinguished. What might they have become? But no child had arrived. And as the years passed, her memory receded into a different, long-gone life whose future had died along with her.

      ‘Pathologist’s on the way, sir.’ The scene-of-crime officer shook him from his distraction.

      ‘Who’s on call?

      ‘Riordan, sir.’

      ‘Good.’ He looked again at the skull. ‘I don’t care how long he’s been there. Any tiny trace, we want it.’ Carne’s bleakness conveyed little optimism. ‘And no talking. No media, no publicity. You tell this lot, make sure they get it. I’ll instruct the press office. I don’t want anyone out there scurrying for cover.’ He retreated from the covering canvas into the drizzle still driving across the rolling fields. A few mournful sheep, huddled against stone walls, munched disconsolately, occasionally raising their heads at the unfamiliar activity. This was a place where nothing ever happened.

      A battered-looking Ford Fiesta splashed through the gate, halting with a skid of the front wheels. Out of it jumped a chubby woman with bouncing blonde hair, a pert snub nose and hint of double chin, accompanied by a male colleague. For the first time that morning a galvanizing beam illuminated Carne’s face. He removed his cap, transforming the policeman’s dourness to reveal a handsome, dark-haired man belying his forty-seven years. Working with Amy Riordan, in his eyes the single argument for the state pathology service, was guaranteed to cheer him up. He briskly greeted her.

      ‘OK, make my life easy. Tell me who did it, why, when, and how.’

      ‘Sure. I thought you wanted something difficult.’

      She gave him an amiable punch in the ribs, headed up to the grave, laid out her evidence bags and carefully pulled on inner nitrile gloves and latex covers. She knelt beside the remains, spreading her weight to avoid disturbing the mud walls, and gingerly stretched down one hand. One by one, she removed shreds of clothing, passing them to her assistant to place in individual bags and mark. The work tensed her, beads of sweat forming around her mouth. After ten minutes of concentrated foraging, she came up for air and stood gazing at the skull.

      ‘So, early 1990s,’ said Riordan.

      ‘Yes, the password he used dates him.’

      ‘That fits. Twenty, twenty-five years.’ She shrugged. ‘Give or take a few. Looks like he had a bashing around the face. Signs of bullet damage in the skull. Doesn’t seem much on the other bones that are bared.’

      ‘Will we get anything?’ asked Carne.

      ‘Possibly,’ she replied. ‘The jacket’s synthetic, so it’s pretty intact. Might be something on it, or inside it. Jeans were denim, natural fibre, so not much left. But you never know. I don’t want to poke around the shirt fibres yet. He had a plastic belt. It’s slipped down his thighs. That’s probably the result of the corpse swelling, forcing his lower clothing down below the waist.’

      ‘Is that common?’

      ‘Reasonably, though it’s not widely studied. It can sometimes be interpreted as an indicator of sexual interaction with the victim. But actually, during decomposition this kind of abdominal bloating is frequent. Then, as the flesh and organs continue to decompose, it leaves this curious-looking position of the belt.’

      As so often when watching and listening to Amy, Carne felt goose pimples of pride both at her manual dexterity and expert knowledge.

      ‘Mind you,’ she continued, ‘I might get something on sex. Saliva, semen, DNA. Maybe what type too if you’re dead lucky. Gay or straight, mouth or tongue.’

      ‘Let’s turn it into a musical,’ Carne chimed in.

      ‘Sure, you write the tunes, I’ll do the words.’ She gave him her full-on, inquisitorial stare. ‘Now you tell me something, Jonny Carne. What in the name of God, the Devil and all creatures in between is this young man doing lying in this grave in this field in this desolate part of this island of poets, artists and balladeers with bullet holes in his head?’

      ‘You tell me, Amy Riordan. Tout? Caught on the wrong side?’

      ‘Unlucky in love?’ she chipped in.

      ‘We need a name.’ Carne tensed. ‘We will investigate and we will find out what happened to him. Doesn’t matter who he is, or what company he kept. Or where it leads. Or who gets embarrassed. Or who ends up in a dock.’

      ‘That’s why I love you.’

      She approached him, gave him a kiss on the cheek and put her arm round him. They enjoyed the trust of a relationship where physical contact could not impinge. Amy made no secret of her sexuality and Carne felt revulsion at older men salivating after women half their age. Instead he almost saw her as his consolation – the daughter he had never had.

      He could feel a prickle in his eye; perhaps it was the life lost in the grave, the loneliness of the unpeopled hills, or the memory of loss. He needed to leave this place.

      ‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Just find me a smoking gun.’

      Instead of driving north to join the motorway, Carne turned east. He could not yet face the desultoriness of the weekend office and its few occupants counting up their overtime. He wanted air, space, and time. He headed towards his favourite sight: the sculpted shapes of the Mourne Mountains rising stealthily from the sea to form their elevated pattern, even on as grey a day as this. He drew up to the vantage point he had made his own, switched off the engine and sat as still as the mountains in front of him – a hiding place where memory could not be disturbed.

      There was something about the interdependence of each summit that made every peak play its part in a communal enterprise of nature, a harmony that never failed to restore his inner peace. They seemed to be saying temporary matters, lives, people will come and go – but we will always be here watching the absurdities of your brief lives. Perhaps they would be saying that about the loss of just one life more than twenty years ago.

      But then it struck him, unprompted by the word itself, that they would instead be mourning; and that, like each peak, all life was mutually dependent. To dismiss one was to dismiss all. Whatever the aloneness of his own life, he would not write off another human being for the sake of convenience.

      Enough poetic melancholy. A young man had not walked into a muddy grave in an isolated field to lie down for a rest: someone, more than one person, had buried him. This many years on, he knew there’d be pressure to let it lie – politics, amnesties, leave the Troubles behind. But, to him, a killing was a killing, wherever and why ever it happened. The rest was mealy-mouthed excuse-making. He would never allow himself to compromise with murder.

      Carne switched on the engine, accelerated hard and turned north. There was one man he needed to talk to. He pushed the number for Castlereagh switchboard