Hidden Depths by Ann Cleeves

‘He’s tied up later in the morning. Say an hour?’
    ‘Fine. I’ll be there.’
    She stood, leaning against the bonnet of her car, listening to the waves breaking beneath the watch tower, until he’d driven away.
    Her mind drifted back to the group sitting outside that strange white house which seemed so out of place in the Northumberland countryside. She’d gone to visit them because she’d had nothing better to do while the scene of crime team was working. They’d found the body, they’d all be together for the night and after that they’d disperse. The PC first at the scene had established that much. She thought she’d catch them while they were still in the area, check if they’d seen anything odd. She’d been hoping, she supposed, for the description of a car similar to the one Julie had seen in her road the night Luke was killed. But they’d caught her interest. It wasn’t just that there was a connection to the dead young woman. Or that the men reminded her of her father, sitting in the kitchen at home with a bunch of cronies after an illicit raid on the raptors’ nests in the hills. Something about the conversation had made her feel they’d need closer looking into. A smugness which irritated her and had something of a challenge in it. She tried to work out which of the individuals had so got under her skin, but couldn’t pin down the source of her unease. In the end she got into her car and followed Wainwright down the track to the road.
    John Keating, the pathologist, was an Ulsterman in his fifties, with a bluff, no-nonsense attitude which scared some of her younger officers. The only time she’d seen him show any emotion during a postmortem was when he was investigating the death of a three-year-old child. And talking about a rugby match to a Welsh sergeant. He’d played when he was younger, still had a squashed nose. He made her coffee in his office before he changed for the autopsy.
    ‘What were your first impressions?’
    ‘She was strangled,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have gathered that.’
    ‘Similarities with the Armstrong lad?’
    ‘I didn’t have time to do a great examination in the field. Imagine your worst nightmare for a crime scene and this was it. A few hours later and the body would have been washed out to sea.’
    ‘Then we’d never have seen the flowers, might not even have linked it to the Seaton case.’ She came back to the point which had troubled her at the lighthouse. ‘Is that what the murderer wanted? Was it a private ritual? Or did he gamble on the body being found earlier?’
    ‘Hey! Don’t ask me. I deal with dead bodies not live minds.’
    She watched the post-mortem through the glass screen, not because she was squeamish but because she was conscious of her size and was always worried that she was in the way. There were so many people gathered around the stainless-steel table – the technicians, the photographer, Billy Wainwright.
    They unwrapped the corpse from the polythene sheeting and to the flash of continual photography they began to undress Lily Marsh. They removed the blue cotton skirt and the embroidered white shirt. Vera saw she was wearing matching white bra and pants. But hardly virginal. The bra was deep cut, lacy, revealing. The pants had little red-silk bows at each side, a red-silk crotch. While Billy Wainwright bagged each garment, Keating gave a commentary, glancing at her occasionally to check that she’d noted the significance of what he was saying. ‘There was little disturbance to the clothing. No apparent sign of sexual assault.’
    Unless he dressed her afterwards, Vera thought. Let’s wait for the results from the vaginal swabs before we come to a decision. But there’d been no evidence of sexual assault on Luke and she was already certain that the cases were linked.
    Keating continued. ‘No bruising. No lacerations. Can we have photographs of the eyes and lids, please. Note the petechiae.’
    Vera had already noted them,