Touching the Dead Read online

  Touching the Dead

  A Jo Wolfe Psychic Detective crime thriller

  Book 1

  © Wendy Cartmell 2019

  Wendy Cartmell has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. References to real places, real people, events, establishments, organisations, or locations, are intended only to provide a sense of authentication, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  This kindle edition published 2019

  By Wendy Cartmell

  Sgt Major Crane crime thrillers:

  Crane and Anderson crime thrillers:

  Emma Harrison mysteries

  Supernatural suspense

  All my books are available to purchase or borrow from Amazon by clicking the covers.

  Check out my website and blog, where I review the very best in crime fiction.

  Wendy Cartmell

  For Dad

  Thank you for reading every word I’ve ever written

  and for not pulling your punches!

  Table of Contents

  By Wendy Cartmell

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  ANUBIS

  8

  9

  10

  11

  ANUBIS

  12

  13

  ANUBIS

  14

  15

  16

  ANUBIS

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  ANUBIS

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  ANUBIS

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  Divining the Dead

  By Wendy Cartmell

  ‘Speak to him. Speak your truth. The Lord of the Night is listening.’

  Unknown

  In 2006, 28 British police forces responded to a query from the Association for Rational Inquiry to say that they did not and have never used psychics, one force saying, "We are unaware of any inquiries significantly progressed solely by information provided by a psychic medium."

  In 2009, when the Metropolitan Police had denied the use of psychics and were then presented with emails suggesting the use of a psychic they made a press statement authorized by the senior investigating officer that was much more ambiguous: "We do not identify people we may or may not speak with in connection with inquiries. We are not prepared to discuss this further.”

  Official Police response to use of psychics.

  Wikipedia

  Prologue

  The powerful animal, muscles rippling, moved beneath her legs. Knees tucked in. Toes hard down in the stirrups. Reins loose, one in each hand as she leaned over the mare’s neck. The world was filled with noise. The drumming of hooves, explosion of breath, creaking of leather, air being sucked into hungry lungs.

  Jo hadn’t ridden that horse before. Scarlet. Her usual mount was lame. But that was okay. Jo was confident in her abilities. The riding school she’d been attending on and off for a couple of years only had safe, predictable horses. In so much as you could apply those descriptions to an animal, she guessed. Neither was she riding out on her own. The other two riders were slightly in front of her.

  Racing across the fields of the South Downs was exhilarating. Wind in her hair, cheeks rosy red, nose a similar colour, breath puffing out. What better thing to do on a cold, frosty morning?

  They were quickly coming up to a low hedge. The lead rider turned and gave Jo a thumbs up sign. Was she okay? A returning signal to show that she was, and the two girls in front raced for the hedge, clearing it easily.

  Then it was Jo’s turn.

  And that’s all she remembers.

  She was told later that the horse wouldn’t take the hedge and reared up. That Jo fell off the back of the frightened animal, slithering and sliding as though the saddle had just turned to glass. She went one way. Her helmet went the other. As if slamming into the cold hard earth wasn’t enough, she then got a glancing blow on the temple from one hoof, and a kick on the top of her head from another. Curtains.

  Somehow she survived.

  No one knows how or why. The odds weren’t in her favour. Rushed to the hospital by air ambulance helped, they said. Being in good health to start with helped, they said. But there was no getting away from it, she was in a bad way. Fractured skull. Coma. Swelling of the brain.

  It took six months for her to regain consciousness.

  Six months.

  She had no idea.

  To her it had been a matter of, what? Minutes? Hours? Not six months. Surely not. It couldn’t be true. She couldn’t understand when they told her what had happened. Became upset. Tried to get out of bed. Fell down. Wasted muscles. Weak. She hated being weak. Refused to be weak.

  A doctor rushed in and injected something which made her feel warm and fuzzy instead of cold and angular and frightened as hell.

  Then they got her dad.

  He made it better, he made it possible. He never left her side. Not when she screamed at the physio that she couldn’t do anymore of his fucking stupid exercises. Not when she refused to eat because she couldn’t see much point in living. It was all too hard, she said. What was the point she asked?

  There was every point, he told her calmly. She was still young. She had time on her side. Stop trying to run before you can walk, he told her. Concentrate on the small achievements. Then the small achievements will pile up to become big achievements.

  And so she learnt to walk again. She learnt to run again. She learnt to speak again. Read again. Use a computer again. All that took another six months. But she did it. Her equivalent to Rocky running up all those bloody steps. She got there. She made it.

  And then it got weird. Really weird.

  1

  The cold wind whipped her black hair over her face, as DI Jo Wolfe climbed out of the car with little enthusiasm. A windswept bank at Bosham wasn’t the best place to be on a wintery early morning. She stopped at the boot of her car, a bright red Mini Clubman, the only thing of colour in the bleached landscape. After exchanging her shoes for wellingtons and tucking her trousers into them, she swapped her woollen tweed coat for her waterproof Barbour and followed her colleague, DS Byrd, out of the car park.

  ‘Come on, Guv, keep up!’ he shouted.

  ‘Why? The body isn’t going anywhere!’

  As she slid through the mud, Jo acknowledged she was in a terrible mood, exacerbated by the amount of vodka she’d drunk the night before and the lateness of the hour hitting her bed. It was all her bloody father’s fault. He was retired and didn’t have to get up for work in the morning, like she had to. He was a bad influence. She smiled at the irony. Normal
ly it was the child behaving badly, not the parent.

  She called out to Byrd to wait for her, but her words were snatched away by the wind. She saw him greet a couple of uniformed officers who were pointing the way to the body as she caught up with him.

  ‘It’s just round that bend, Guv,’ and Byrd strode off again.

  ‘It?’ Jo struggled to keep up with him as she slid on the wet ground, feeling as though she were on a fairground ride, one of the ones where the floor kept moving. Haunted house. Fun house. Something like that.

  ‘The body.’

  ‘I know that, but it’s male or female, not a bloody it. Really, Byrd, you know better than that,’ Jo grumbled.

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If its male or female.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘That’s why,’ and Byrd indicated what at first glance appeared to be a load of dirty rags on the bank of the Chichester Harbour.

  As Jo got closer, she realised what Byrd meant.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, pulling her hair out of her eyes. ‘Are those bandages? It looks like a mummy. Is it Halloween and someone forgot to tell me?’

  ‘Yes they are, yes it does and no it isn’t.’

  ‘Alright, Byrd, cut the wise cracks. What do we know?’ She squatted down to take a closer look.

  ‘Not much. A dog walker found the body, if it is a body, about 30 minutes ago. He was walking along, throwing sticks for his Labrador, when the dog made a bee line for what he thought was a pile of rags. He called the dog back and went to take a look. He said the dog didn’t do any damage, only had a good sniff. But his master couldn’t hold onto his breakfast and he threw up in the scrub, over there. He’s waiting back at the car park. A tent is being brought down to preserve the scene, and forensics and the pathologist are on their way.’

  ‘I don’t think the scene will be able to tell us much,’ Jo said, looking around the bank. ‘By the mud on the wrappings it looks as though she may have been buried in a shallow grave and the tidal water has washed the top layer of soil away. And the water will no doubt have destroyed any evidence.’

  Byrd nodded his agreement. ‘Our only hope is that there may be something we can use on the body or on the underlying layers of bandages.’

  Jo straightened as officers arrived with a white plastic tent to preserve the scene and moved out of their way.

  ‘Right, back to the car then. You can go and get some coffees and I’ll wait for Bill and Jeremy.’

  Byrd looked as though he was going to moan, but kept his mouth shut at a glare from Jo. As she followed her DS back to her car, she ran through her core team: herself DI Jo Wolfe, her partner DS Eddie Byrd, forensic specialist Bill Burke and back at the office, team manager Judith Thompson. The pathologist should be Jeremy Grogan. She needed to make sure her boss, DCI Alex Crooke gave her the case and she reached for her mobile to phone him.

  She woke a sleepy DCI who didn’t seem very pleased to hear from her. ‘Jesus, Jo, it’s my day off. What the hell do you want?’

  ‘Caught a new case, Boss. Dead body found down in Bosham. I’m there now.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it looks as though the body has been mummified.’

  ‘What?’ Jo heard bed clothes rustling and springs creaking. ‘Mummified?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said. Interesting, eh?’

  ‘Very. I’m on my way.’

  ‘Really? I only wanted permission to take the case and pick the team.’

  ‘Take that as read, Jo. This one’s too good to pass on. I’ll be there soon. It’ll be worth taking a look in-situ.’

  Jo was left holding a dead phone, a wry grin on her face as she thought about Crooke’s enthusiasm for the case, which matched her own. Her Major Crimes unit were the brightest and finest in the Sussex police. They got the best, or worst cases, depending on your point of view. The brass definitely used her for the nasty cases. Sometimes they made the headlines, sometimes not. If the public knew what really went on, if they knew about the close shaves and the gruesome murders, well they might not sleep well at night.

  But maybe they would, knowing Jo Wolfe was on the case.

  The haunting call of seagulls brought her back to the present and she got into the car to wait for Byrd to come back with a comforting hot coffee. She looked over the water, which glistened in the weak winter sunlight and realised what an isolated place the burial site was. If it wasn’t for the recent storms, the body would have lain undisturbed, lonely and forgotten, possibly forever. Out there somewhere was a grieving family and it was Jo’s job to give them answers and give the victim a decent burial and peaceful rest. And to catch the depraved murderer who’d done it. There was no doubt in Jo’s mind that it was murder, after all wrapping dead bodies in bandages was not a common practice in the UK. Nor would someone wrap themselves in bandages, dig a grave, then pop themselves in it and wait to die.

  It would be interesting to find out what lay beneath the bandages. What the body would be able to forensically tell them about the perpetrator and the victim, if anything. And then finally what it would be able to tell her. Jo would get her chance to touch the dead girl in due course. But for now, she needed to be patient and wait for the post-mortem.

  Tyres crunching on the gravel broke through her reverie and made Jo look up. She grinned as Byrd led a convoy of vehicles into the car park, her bad mood and hangover quite forgotten.

  2

  Back at the inauspicious Chichester police station, a 1970’s building with no character and quite possibly no longer fit for purpose, Jo and her team were bringing each other up to date with the case so far. She was frustrated already. It was late afternoon and there was still no identification of the body, which meant no impetus to the investigation. Their boss had met them at the burial site, but he hadn’t been able to add anything to the investigation, apart from saying that he’d never seen anything like it. He then left them to it and went home to his wife to enjoy a cooked breakfast. Jo and Byrd had wondered how he could eat after seeing a mummified body, but each to their own.

  ‘When is the post-mortem?’ she asked Byrd.

  ‘Jeremy said around 10 am tomorrow. He’s pretty backed up, what with a fatal car crash and a suspicious death in an old people’s home. But he’s prioritised this one for us, Guv.’

  ‘Thanks, Byrd. Until then, when the bandages will come off, there’s not much we can do about identification. I take it we still don’t know if the body is that of a male or female?’

  ‘No, sorry, but it’s looking more like it’s a female, given the you know what’s,’ and Byrd made a motion with his hands indicating breasts.

  ‘Alright, Byrd, we get the picture. Bill?’

  Burke said, as he smoothed down his beard, ‘As you suspected, Guv, there was little we could get from the scene. There was just mud, mud and more mud. No footprints, tyre tracks, shovel marks. The mud was as smooth as a baby’s bum thanks to the tidal water. We’re hopeful we can get something from the PM, after which we’ll get access to the bandages and anything found on the body. Sorry, Guv, there’s not much I can do in the meantime.’ He rubbed his bald head as if in frustration.

  Jo had the same feeling of impotence. ‘Has anyone got good news for me?’

  ‘I might, Guv.’

  ‘Thank goodness. Go on, Judith.’

  Judith tucked her pen behind her ear, where it kept her muddy coloured straight hair off her face. ‘If we look at the picture as a whole; mummification, body found on the bank of a body of water, and placed in a shallow grave, then those three elements together could be an indication of Egyptian tradition.’

  ‘Egyptian? Why the hell would Egypt have anything to do with our dead body?’

  ‘I can’t answer the why, but I’m pretty sure about the what.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Jo mused. Then deciding to run with it said, ‘Can you do some more research on that, Judith? The only thing I know about Egypt is th
at stupid song, “Walk like an Egyptian” by the Bangles and the lyrics never made much sense to me.’

  ‘What about an Egyptologist?’ said Byrd.

  ‘Nice,’ agreed Judith.

  Jo nodded. ‘Find one, Judith.’

  ‘Will do, Ma’am.’

  Judith coloured as Jo glared at her. ‘Sorry, Guv. My mistake.’

  Jo hated being called Ma’am. It might be a sign of respect for her rank, but as far as she was concerned it was an old fashioned, outdated form of address. She much preferred being called Guv or Boss.

  ‘Right, there’s clearly not much else we can do today. Wrap it up and head off home for a good night’s sleep. It may be the last opportunity we get in a while.’

  Chairs scraped and laptops closed, as Jo walked to the wall. All they had were pictures of the mummified body in situ, an enlarged map of the area where it was found and a whole load of questions. She shook her head in frustration. The beginning of a headache made her rub her temples, her fingers tracing the knobbly scar on the right-hand one, and then reach up to release her hair from its clip. Shaking her head and pulling her fingers through the resultant mess eased the strain on her forehead, but not the headache. Involuntarily her fingers caught the scar on the top of her head. There was no pain there anymore, but the accident and then the coma had left her with blinding migraine headaches when she became stressed. She knew she had to look after herself, ease back off the gas when she could. She still had days when she felt weak and fatigued, but they were infrequent, five years on from the accident. There was nothing else for it. She should go home as well.

  Driving to the home in Boxgrove that she shared with her father, she pondered the act of mummifying a body. Was it because someone was enamoured with Egypt and its history and was following their practices? If so, why? What was the fascination? Where did it come from? She hoped Judith would be able to find a specialist who could come and talk to them tomorrow afternoon. In the meantime she’d do a google search.