She Lies In Wait By Gytha Lodge: Everyone was getting hot and irritable. Jonah’s mouth was beginning to taste like bitter, hours- old coffee. His feet were fractious, impossible to keep still. And he had the kind of energy- sapping hunger that made it hard to focus.
‘Anything yet?’ Hanson asked, after wandering up to the car park and back a few times.
Excitement had turned into boredom, the one reliable constant in the emotional range of every detective.
‘I think it’ll be a while,’ Jonah said. ‘It’s an old corpse… time- consuming job.’
‘Is there anything we can be…?’
‘We can be here when they want to talk to us,’ he said with a half- smile.
Some twenty minutes later, Linda McCullough, the scene of crime officer, stepped carefully up out of the dip and approached him. He was glad it was McCullough. You needed someone obsessively careful on a site that would have only the barest traces of data left.
‘How goes it, Linda?’
‘We’re going to be bagging this up for some time.’ She lifted her mask and let it sit on the top of her white hood. Her weathered face was wet with sweat, as anyone’s would have been if they’d been wearing overalls in that weather. But McCullough seemed not to notice it. ‘But as initial feedback, it’s a pubescent female, in an advanced state of decay.’
‘How advanced?’
‘Rough estimate only, but more than ten years. Fewer than fifty.’
Thirty years, he thought. Thirty.
He found it hard, momentarily, to believe that so much time had passed. A feeling that he must be Rip van Winkle, and have slept through much of his life, ran through him. Rip van Winkle must have felt this strange mixture of anger and guilt, too.
‘Linda!’
McCullough turned, shielding her eyes from the sun. Another white bio- suit was leaning out of the tent to call to her.
‘I’m uncovering other materials. Can I get your opinion?’
‘Sure.’
She replaced her mask and climbed carefully back to the site, disappearing into the tent.
‘So if it’s murder, it’s an old one,’ Hanson said, and Jonah was half blinded by the white of the paper as she flipped her notebook to write in it. She sounded disappointed. Unaware of the huge implications behind those numbers. ‘And a teenage girl.’
‘It’s thirty years old,’ he said. ‘And it’s Aurora Jackson.
Extracted from She Lies in Wait by Gytha Lodge Out now in paperback