Chapter Text
The earth moved, the soil rose, the brown dirt was scooped into the air in the darkness until it fell all around. The cemetery was empty except for the two figures in robes, and the two shovels digging into the ground, shovels that shone against the moonlight.
…
Moving his fingers through the box of sweets, digging deep into the assortment of colourful wrappers, Mansell pulled out an orange treat, twisted the paper and placed the sweet into his mouth. His painted green face with bolts attached to his neck did not hide that he was the same Mansell present for the annual Halloween party at Miles’ house. He smiled at Riley as she picked up a paper plate. She was dressed as a witch—complete with a pointy hat, a broomstick and a fake nose covered in warts.
“I see you’ve used your real nose, Meg,” he laughed.
“Funny!” she said, shoving him. “I see Erica’s come as a devil. Thought that was more you.”
“Nah, Frankenstein,” he said.
Buchan picked up another plate. “Actually, Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster.”
“And here he is, Dr. Pedantic.” Mansell looked up and realised Buchan was dressed head to toe in a pirate’s outfit, including a hat, eyepatch and a cuddly toy parrot attached to his shoulder.
“Nice costume, Ed,” Riley said.
“I’m Jeremiah Buchan, my own ancestor, though the costume is not exactly period accurate,” Buchan said, plumping his chest out. “Did I ever tell you my ‘many times great-grandfather’ was a pirate?”
“Yes you did…many times,” Riley replied, “on many occasions.”
“Oh.”
“Last time was when we had those after work drinks at the Jolly Roger.”
“So it was.” Buchan smiled as Miles came into view dressed as Count Dracula, the same as every year.
“Helping yourself to grub? Good. Judy does a good spread.” He looked at Kent who was hovering by the table. “You not tucking in?”
“Ok, Skip,” he said obediently as though he was still following the team structure.
“I’m not Skip here,” he said, swishing his cape over his shoulder and chuckling, his words muffled by the vampire fangs. “I’m the Count.”
Kent, tired and thirsty, resisted the urge to roll his eyes and was relieved when Miles turned away.
“Nice outfit!” Riley said, tapping Kent’s shoulder. “Where d’ya get it?”
“Erica put it together for me.”
They all glanced over his black top and jeans which had bones painted on so he resembled a skeleton. His face was also painted as a full skull.
“You couldn’t find no-body to go with eh?” Mansell said.
Miles turned back from mingling, finally noticing Kent’s costume as though the face of the skull was how he normally looked. “Great costume, kid. Guess you had no-body to come with eh?”
“I just did that one, Skip.”
Laughing, Miles pulled a reluctant Chandler into view. “Boss, join us. Is that…a costume?” He looked up at his DI’s black suit. “What are ya, a funeral director?”
Chandler pointed at his tie. “It has a cobweb design.”
Miles squinted his eyes to see it. “So it does. Well, tuck in, Judy does pukka nosh. Try the finger food.”
When Chandler looked down, he realised there was actual food in the shape of fingers as well as eyeballs, worms and little body parts and some sort of goo that resembled entrails from Llewellyn’s pathology department. He grimaced.
“I like your tie, sir,” Kent said, shoving Mansell aside to stand next to the DI. He felt he’d barely had a conversation with him since they’d mostly been dealing with the many domestics in recent months. He missed seeing him more. Chandler had placed a lot of responsibility on him and he felt more grown-up and confident but missed the closeness. Months ago they’d shared a drink together in the pub, they’d got on well, but since—everything had been so busy and so ordinary.
“Thank you, Kent,” Chandler replied, taking a glance over Kent’s costume and then everyone else’s.
Surrounded every day by dark figures, the Halloween costumes seemed tame in comparison and in some ways distasteful. His eyebrows nearly rose off his head when he spied Llewellyn waving at them from the doorway, dressed as some kind of gruesome doctor, wielding a plastic hacksaw. What was even more macabre was her few month old baby strapped to her middle with a harness covered in cobwebs. The little baby boy even had devil horns on. There were cheers as she joined them all.
“Joining us at last,” Miles said as he tickled the baby’s cheek and raised a glass that the entire team was there together for once.
After another few hours of merriment, when the children had ventured upstairs to watch a spooky film and the adults had gathered around to drink, the conversation had turned to love and relationships.
The team sat together in the living room, many of the guests having left with their own children, leaving the Whitechapel group alone.
“How was the date, Ed?” Mansell asked, placing his arm around Erica who was sat next to him on the sofa.
“I don’t kiss and tell,” he said. Buchan had been emailing the librarian of the local public library and they’d struck up a bond over historic crime. They had gone out to dinner to ‘discuss findings’.
Chandler had been a little bit envious of Buchan and felt that he was losing another member of his team to matters of romance. Everyone else seemed to have plans, families, dates, marriages, commitments other than work but work was all he had. Though he supposed Kent was also much alone in that regard though he at least did have a sister and parents but recently no longer any grandparents after his grandfather’s death. He had offered condolences at the time but wondered whether he should bring it up at any point.
“What about you, Emerson, any hot dates lately?” Riley asked, still rather tipsy from the special champagne Miles saved for special occasions and which she called her witches brew.
Kent was tipsy himself, staring at his beer can. “No,” he replied simply, not keen at all to discuss his love life or lack thereof.
“No one you’ve got your eye on?” Mansell said, nudging Riley.
“Piss off, Mansell.”
“Lizzie Pepper was in the department the other day,” Miles added, glancing at Chandler.
“Was she?” He had no interest in adding flames to Miles’ fire. Miles was desperate for gossip on any relationships on the horizon and he was tired of the same answers he would inevitably give to the same questions. No, he didn’t have any dates lined up or fancy anyone or want to go out with the latest woman in the office. He’d tried it, it failed. One had been too different from him, the other too similar to him, the third, well, she wasn’t around anymore to find out what might have been. He knew that if he were to find love it would be natural, familiar, in a place near where he hadn’t expected it to form, with someone who understood him and his eccentricities. Until that happened, he’d rather be busy with work. He wished people, even as caring as they were, would leave him to it. He was stuck in a world of couples and felt alien. He wanted to disappear and it was therefore a relief, if he could call it that, when a phone-call interrupted the party and they were all called to duty.
…
It was an amusing sight for uniform as the CID group walked into the incident room still in their Halloween make up and various states of unsuitable dress.
“Two bodies have been dug up from different graveyards, sir,” PC Hopper informed them.
“Halloween prank then,” Miles muttered.
Chandler was about to ask Miles to accompany him but looked over him and sighed. “You can’t be seen there dressed like that, Miles.”
“I don’t think it’ll look weird tonight, boss, let me take out my teeth.”
Chandler next turned to Kent who was wiping the skull make up from his face with one of Meg’s makeup removal wipes. He had placed on his jacket and aside from the trousers with bones on them, he looked decidedly more presentable for work than Mansell who was still green-faced. The only problem was that Kent was still a little tipsy.
“Miles, I’ll take Kent to the scenes of crime. You and the others get yourself sorted out and then join us later. Kent, grab a coffee on the way out, try and sober up a little.”
“Sorry, sir.” Kent felt a little called out on his behaviour and neatened his hair. He hadn’t anticipated a strange crime happening and was so determined as he put it to Mansell to ‘get as pissed as possible’. He attempted to keep up with his boss’ determined stride but Chandler was eager to leave, almost annoyed that Kent took so long to get to the car despite Chandler having insisted that Kent get a coffee first.
“Sorry, sir,” he repeated as he climbed into the passenger seat.
…
The crime scene was unlike any other the team had encountered and that was certainly something considering the strange and bizarre cases they had worked on since Chandler had arrived during the Ripper case. Sometimes Kent, who could be persuaded to occasionally think upon the side of superstition, wondered if the DI unintentionally brought the workings of the supernatural with him.
The location of this particular crime scene—a graveyard—was unremarkable, but the crime itself seemed very odd indeed.
Much to Chandler’s surprise and embarrassment, Lizzie Pepper was the SOCO officer that greeted them and having not seen her since he’d escaped their date a couple of years earlier, he felt terrible and awkward about the way he’d run out on her without much of an explanation. She was very diplomatic of course, professional, but there was a less than friendly attitude towards him than there had been before.
“It’s a peculiar one,” she said plainly.
Chandler looked to the hole in the ground where once a personal grave had been. The dirt and earth was everywhere, ruining the once well-kept place. “Grave digging?”
“Quite obvious really,” Lizzie replied.
Kent had only ever seen Lizzie Pepper in passing and knew little of her other than what Miles had told the team about her fancying the boss and their terrible date. Kent was sure if Chandler knew Miles had told them all he’d be mortified.
“So, the body’s missing?” Kent asked, placing his pen to his notebook.
“Absolutely,” Lizzie’s tone was altogether more pleasant to Kent. “You can see there’s tyre marks leading away from the cemetery.”
“So whoever did this dug up a grave, removed the body and then placed it into a van, whatever for?” Chandler scratched his head.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Who would go grave digging in this day and age?” Kent asked. “Unless it’s a Halloween prank.”
“Could be,” Lizzie replied, looking at Kent instead of Chandler. “Sounds like something forensic students would do! We all have a morbid sense of humour.”
“That’s more than morbid,” Chandler remarked. “This grave has been desecrated." He looked at Lizzie. “Ok.” It was all he could think of to say as he next suggested that he and Kent get to St.John’s next.
Before they left, Kent shivered as his eyes glanced to the tomb where he had discovered Josie Eagle’s lifeless body. He still thought about her sometimes. Noticing he was looking at the tomb,
Chandler paused. “Is everything alright?”
“Yes, sir, it’s just…”
“I know, Kent. I think about it too.” He didn’t elaborate further but he felt a lump form in his throat. The van crash after the events of the Doomsday cult had been ages ago and yet he was still plagued by his actions, or rather his in-action—and then there was how it had affected his team, how they all battled their own demons, how Miles had told them how battle weary they were and how hard they tried to ignore it. Kent in particular had suffered but Chandler still struggled to let him know that he understood. Instead, he simply shy-smiled and spoke little to his constable as they arrived at the other graveyard. It was a similar sight, an almost identical crime scene complete with a missing body which had been dug up as well as recent tyre tracks and a bewildered police force.
“Both bodies are recently deceased,” Kent said looking at the inscription on the grave. “This headstone’s not even complete.” He shuddered. His granddad had passed away a few months previously so death and grief was still around for him and he hated the thought of his relative’s body being dug up even if it was for a prank.
“We need to get back to the station and see if there’s a connection between the two missing corpses. When exactly did they die, who were the funeral directors, who the families were and were they linked in any way?”
Kent nodded, writing down some notes on his pad and despite the fact it was a creepy and unsettling investigation, he had to admit that he enjoyed being around the boss again in a more intimate setting, just the two of them.
When they arrived back at the station full of theories and unusual Halloween thoughts, Buchan was already gathering them around in the incident room as he wrote using a marker pen on the whiteboard. Kent was surprised and felt put out that Buchan was using his space for his own research and wondered whether Chandler had authorised this intrusion.
“Burke and Hare,” Buchan began as he handed out printed copies of his prompt research. He was still dressed as a pirate but with removed accessories.
“Yeah, yeah, everyone has heard of them,” Miles replied flippantly, still tired, annoyed his party was over and not in the mood for the idea that it was some nutter copying two grave diggers from the past.
“Well, they are indeed the most infamous,” Buchan began, “but it’s important to mention similarities.”
“But it aint a copycat,” Mansell added. “Burke and Hare lived in Edinburgh, didn’t they, not Whitechapel?”
Buchan sighed. “I’m merely stating a connection.”
Riley sipped her coffee. “But they wanted the money, didn’t they? They were selling the bodies for medical science or something.”
“Initially. Yes, it seems unlikely anyone would bother in today’s climate.”
“I suppose someone may need a body for science if they were a medical student or maybe just for a dumb prank,” Kent added.
“Or they want to practice cutting one up,” Mansell said morbidly. “For serial killer test purposes.”
“Burke and Hare turned to murder,” Chandler said. “Is it possible this person might do the same? Shall we expect a murder to follow?”
“Without knowing why they were taken, we can’t be sure of anything,” Miles added. “I’m willing to bet it’s students like Kent says, pissing about on Halloween.”
“It’s a bit more than a prank,” Chandler said. “But Lizzie Pepper’s team are working their way through the evidence, so hopefully something will stand out.” He looked over at Kent. “Kent, can you start on the links between the snatched bodies?”
“Yes, sir,” Kent replied, immediately typing onto his computer as he looked over his notes. Buchan had used his whiteboards so he knew he’d have to find another way of showcasing the information.
“Riley, Mansell, I'd like you to knock on doors with uniform, see if anyone heard a van, the digging, anything.”
Mansell rolled his eyes upwards. There was nothing worse than door to door. Riley grabbed him by his collar.
At that moment, as Chandler was discussing some more Burke and Hare theories with Buchan, Miles was called from the room by a uniformed officer. Chandler watched on as a moment later he returned. He called everyone back to the whiteboard.
“New development,” he said to the team. “One of the bodies has been handed in.”
His eyes widening in surprise, Chandler rubbed his temples. “Handed in?”
“Well maybe handed in is the wrong term. More like the body was dumped in a suitcase in reception.”
“How do you know it’s the same body?” Kent asked.
“Because the name is written on the label,” Miles replied.
“Why would anyone do that?” Riley asked as she sat back down at her desk.
“Did they see who dropped it off?” Chandler asked.
Miles shook his head. “It was busy in reception. Desk clerk was run off their feet with inquiries. They probably did it deliberately, noticing it was busy. Perfect time to dump in there without being seen.”
“But to just dump it after taking all that trouble to dig it up in the first place,” Chandler said, running his fingers through his hair. “Is this some sort of distraction for something else?”
Biting his pen, Kent sat up. “You mean someone wants us to think it’s grave digging, but it isn’t?”
“Exactly. The grave digging could be a misdirection. What about CCTV in reception?”
“Not much we can do there, sir,” Kent said, “it’s been playing up in and around the station for days.”
“Then let’s assume the person that dumped it knew that, and let’s expect the worst.” Chandler was always impressed by how much Kent knew and how much he kept track of all the vital information that was often overlooked.
“Looks like we might have some psycho running around the place,” Miles said. “Another Louise bloody Iver knowing our luck.”
“Kent, get back to your investigations into the victims, we need to get the body and scene properly secure and down to the mortuary.”
…
Kent was now alone in the office with only Buchan for company, who, with glasses hanging around his neck, stood at the board pursuing his own notes and muttering to himself about grave diggers handing the bodies back.
However, Kent, whose job it was to collate all the vital information, was suddenly deep in his computer investigation and before long he was rubbing some of Buchan’s notes off the third board.
“What are you doing?” Buchan protested.
“We don’t need all the Burke and Hare stuff, Ed, and I need it for my notes.” Kent wrote down the victims names, their funeral directors, their occupations. He found no link between them within family, friend groups or jobs but he did notice they both had been patients at the same hospice in the weeks before their deaths.
When Chandler returned back to the incident room, striding in his usual determined manner he approached Kent immediately, noticing the notes now written all over one of the whiteboards. He was always impressed with Kent’s thoroughness, his attention to detail. His DC had only grown in confidence and skill over the years and he always found himself interested in his thoughts, much like with Buchan.
“What have we got?”
“Sir,” Kent said, pointing his pen at the whiteboard. “The man in the first dug up grave, Stanley Walters, and the woman in the second, Ivy Palmer, were patients at the same hospice.”
“Interesting,” Chandler said.
“They both were pretty old,” Kent said, “late seventies.”
Miles chuckled to himself as he went past, realising that Kent thought anyone over fifty was ancient.
“They both were single, without children, and seem to have no families to speak of.”
“No families at all?”
“Well Stanley had a few friends the hospice said and one great-niece who lives in Scotland.”
“There you are, it’s the Burke and Hare connection,” Miles said with a chuckle.
“Ivy didn’t seem to have any family. According to her hospice nurse, she had no visitors in her last weeks, not even a friend.”
Chandler bowed his head. The idea of a woman dying without a single soul to miss her and a man with only a few friends to say goodbye. He suddenly felt strange, as though it was trying to warn him of his own future— a future without family or friends, just work, work and work, until he eventually died alone. “That’s sad.”
“So, without a deep circle of acquaintances, there’s not much to suggest any grudges.”
“They were alone…”
“Sir?”
“Well, what if the perpetrator deliberately dug up these bodies because they were alone, no one to miss them?”
“You mean they had a conscience?” Kent asked.
“Not exactly, they still desecrated two graves, but maybe it was their way of alleviating their guilt.”
“They knew no-one would miss them so they thought it would be the better of bad options?” Kent asked. “But why would they need to steal the bodies in the first place if not to dissect or sell on?”
“We don’t know what they’ve done with Ivy’s body yet. But they were both patients at the same hospice so we need to talk to all the staff there.”