‘What are you saying?’ Jen asked.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Harry said, and moved from the kitchen and back into the hall to head through to the lounge. The blood caught his eye again. ‘This…’
‘This, what?’ Gordy said.
Harry looked at the blood, then at the door through to the kitchen, then at the front door to the house.
Harry pointed to the step outside the front door.
‘Gordy? Can you stand there for a moment please?’
Gordy moved and Harry came to stand in front of her. He stared at her for a moment, turned to look at the blood, grumbled under his breath, then turned to stand in front of the door through to the kitchen. Again, he looked at the blood.
‘Jen?’
‘Boss?’
‘Come stand here, in the kitchen, in front of me, will you?’
Jen did as instructed.
‘Right then,’ Harry said, his mind whirring away now. ‘We’re supposed to think that someone broke in through that door, yes? All that broken glass, that’s what it’s there to make us think, isn’t it?’
Jen and Gordy both agreed.
‘But see this blood spatter here?’ Harry said, gesturing down to the red drops on the wall. ‘If it’s Arthur’s, then how did it get here?’
‘Whoever broke in attacked him,’ Jen said.
‘Attack me now, then,’ Harry said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t mean for real, obviously, but come at me like you’ve broken in. I’ve come out here to investigate, and here we are. What would you do?’
Jen looked shocked.
‘How the hell should I know?’
‘Come on, Jen,’ Harry said. ‘You’re a burglar. Someone’s found you out, so what are you going to do?’
Jen stared at Harry, at Gordy, looked around the kitchen.
‘I’d run,’ she said.
‘I’ve seen you,’ Harry said. ‘I know who you are now. And you’re angry and desperate, maybe you’ve got some alcohol in you, drugs, who knows? But you can’t just leave, not now. So, what do you do?’
‘Hit you?’ Jen suggested, clearly not comfortable at all with even the thought of imparting violence on another.
‘Pretend to do exactly that,’ Harry said. ‘Throw a punch, anything!’
Jen hesitated.
‘Just do it, Jen! Come on!’
Jen raised her arm and threw it at Harry, who stepped back.
‘Come at me again!’
Jen did exactly that, following Harry out into the hall.
‘What’s this leading to what, exactly?’ Gordy asked from outside the house, peering in through the front door.
‘Look where I am,’ Harry said. ‘I’m backed up into this corner. I’m nowhere near that blood. Even if I’d tripped, if Jen had lamped me one hard enough to end up on the floor, I’d still be over here, wouldn’t I? Not there.’
Harry gave neither Gordy nor Jen time to reply, instead, going to stand in front of Gordy.
‘So, what about if you attacked me?’ he asked, staring at the detective inspector.
‘Tempting, but no,’ Gordy said. ‘I wouldn’t want to hurt a precious lamb like you now, would I?’
Harry laughed at that.
‘Do what Jen did,’ Harry said. ‘Come at me!’
‘Well, if you insist.’
‘Get on with it!’
Gordy faked a lunge at Harry, who stepped back.
‘Keep coming,’ Harry instructed. ‘Come on! Attack me!’
Gordy stepped into the house. As she did so, her hands raised in an attempt to look threatening, Harry lowered himself to the carpet, leaned back, and looked at the wall.
‘See?’ he said, and pointed at the blood spatter.
‘See what, exactly?’ Jen asked. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘The blood,’ Harry said. ‘It’s here, isn’t it? It’s not over there, where I was after you attacked me from the kitchen. But when Gordy came at me from the front door, look where I’ve ended up…’
Harry pushed himself back up onto his feet.
‘Whoever did this,’ he said, ‘and I know we’ll need the report from forensics to confirm it, but that broken glass and the smashed door, that’s staged. It’s a red herring.’
‘The attacker came through the front door, then?’ Gordy said.
‘They did,’ Harry said, ‘and you know what that means, don’t you?’
‘What?’ asked Jen. ‘That Arthur knew them and let them in?’
‘Possibly, yes,’ Harry said. ‘Or they came out here with no other motive than to do him harm, by which I mean, enough to kill him.’
With that bombshell dropped, Harry remembered something. ‘Molly!’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Who’s Molly?’ Gordy asked.
‘Arthur’s dog.’
‘I thought that was Jack,’ said Jen.
Harry shook his head.
‘Molly is an old thing,’ he said. ‘She was here this afternoon. Didn’t Grace mention her? Molly’s the dog that found the body of that Charlie Baker chap a few months back.’
‘The author?’ Gordy said. ‘How could I forget?’
Harry remembered then that Gordy had been a huge fan, and had even attended a launch event of Charlie’s in a local bookshop a day or so before he’d wound up dead, his head obliterated by a shotgun blast.
‘Grace didn’t mention another dog,’ said Jen. ‘What with the state her dad was in, I don’t think there was much else on her mind, to be honest.’
‘No, that’s understandable,’ Harry said. ‘But I still want that dog found sharpish. Can’t have Arthur losing another.’
‘Might she have got out?’ Gordy said.
‘God, I hope not,’ Harry said. ‘Two dogs gone would be too much for Arthur I think. He looked at Jen. ‘And you’re sure you’ve not seen her?’
‘Absolutely,’ Jen said. ‘Could whoever did this have taken her?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Harry. ‘Too much hassle taking a dog with you. Which is another thing that doesn’t sit right with all this—breaking into a house that has a dog! No one does that! And if they do, they kill the dog. But she’s not here, is she? So, where, then?’
‘Some people are pretty stupid,’ Gordy said. ‘We’ve all met them.’
‘And arrested them,’ said Harry. ‘But even so, none of this strikes me as stupid. It’s deliberate. Glaringly so. So, where’s Molly?’
Harry was about to head into the lounge when he glanced up the stairs.
‘Jen?’
‘I’ll go and check,’ she said, reading his thoughts.
‘She might be injured,’ Harry said. ‘Be careful.’
Jen headed upstairs and Harry moved into the lounge, Gordy with him.
‘What an absolute bloody mess,’ Harry said, taking in the destruction. ‘Really went to town, didn’t they?’
‘Makes you wonder what goes on in the minds of some people, doesn’t it?’ Gordy said. ‘Assuming anything is going on in the mind of the kind of person who does this.’
‘Oh, something was definitely going on in their mind,’ Harry said. ‘We just need to work out what, exactly.’
The room, which earlier had been a small, cosy haven filled with happy memories of a father and daughter, was now a smashed and broken mess. Cushions from the sofa had been cut, their guts spilling fluff onto the floor, which itself was strewn with photos from the wall, broken glass and shattered frames. A small coffee table was on its back, legs broken. The television had been kicked onto the floor. The only thing which was undisturbed was the fire, still smouldering in the grate.
Harry saw blood and felt the temperature of his start to rise.
‘Grace found Arthur just over there,’ Gordy said, pointing at a spot on the floor where a dark stain of blood was clearly visible on the carpet. ‘But judging by the spatter, he was certainly kicked around a fair bit beforehand.’
Jen appeared in the doorway. In her arms
was Molly, the dog resting its head on her shoulder.
‘Where was she?’ Harry asked, then he saw that the dog was bleeding.
‘Under one of the beds,’ Jen said. ‘Poor thing’s terrified.’
‘And lucky to be alive,’ Harry said, walking over to see what was beneath the blood.
Molly whimpered as Harry touched near the blood, but it was clearly out of fear rather than pain, as the dog didn’t flinch at all.
‘I think that’s Arthur’s blood,’ Harry said. ‘Either that, or it’s from whoever did all of this.
Harry stroked the old dog’s head and Molly’s tail wagged just a little. Then he gave the animal a quick check over, feeling her legs and down body. As he did so, her tail just wagged harder.
‘Yeah, she’s okay,’ he said, his voice quiet.
‘You sound surprised as much as relieved,’ Gordy said.
‘I am,’ Harry replied. ‘Come on, let’s get some fresh air.’
Outside, Harry checked in with Jadyn, who’d not heard anything back yet from Jim about Eric Haygarth, and instructed him to call forensics, then moved away from the house and stood back to stare at the building, his thoughts a jumble. Jen and Gordy joined him.
‘There are three things here that don’t make a blind bit of sense,’ Harry finally said, lifting his right hand and counting them off as he spoke. ‘When it was done, how it was done, why it was done.’
Jen crouched down, placing Molly on the ground. The dog sat down, then just slumped and lay on her side on the grass.
‘We need a sample of that blood,’ Harry said, nodding at Jen. ‘Go and see if you can find any scissors in Arthur’s kitchen, then we can snip some off and bag it.’
Jen headed off.
‘You’re right, by the way,’ Gordy said, as Jen entered the house. ‘About this. Doesn’t smell right at all, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Harry replied. ‘It smells rotten, if you ask me. Every single bit of it has a stink on it that turns my stomach.’
‘Looks like we’re going to be busy then, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘It does. Which means we’ll need everyone together tomorrow morning to sort out what we do next.’
‘I’ll let them know,’ Gordy said.
Chapter Seventeen
A while later and having just driven down a dark lane that seemed to lead only into thicker darkness, Harry was standing outside the kind of cottage he thought would look rather good on the cover of a horror novel. It was small, squashed almost, as though hunkering down out of the wind, and around it hung trees seemingly weighed down with silent horrors only they had witnessed.
The work over at Arthur’s cottage had continued into, as Gordy would say, the wee small hours, and he’d stayed around until forensics had done their bit. This time, Rebecca Sowerby had been accompanied by the rest of her team, and they had done a thorough job as always. A clean-up team would be out in a day or so to put the house back into as good an order as possible. Once it was all done, and with Jim having found Eric Haygarth’s address for him, Harry had then set off over the fells from Redmire and down into Swaledale. Driving through Reeth, he’d then headed on up into Arkengarthdale.
With the blanket of night still thick, despite the fact that the light of morning would very soon be swooping in, Harry had been unable to see much of the scenery. What he had noticed, however, was that for a good deal of the journey, the road was not lined with the usual drystone walls, but instead cut its way through open moorland. This sense of rolling, hidden vistas gave the journey, draped as it was in thin threads of moonlight hanging like threads from a vast torn blanket above, an eerie sense of creeping openness.
It was difficult for Harry to put his finger on what exactly made him feel ill at ease. He knew that it surely had much to do with what had happened over the past twenty-four hours. However, as his headlights mined their way ahead, silently carving a flickering tunnel into the darkness for him to drive through, he found it impossible to shake the feeling that out there, beyond the safety of the light, and right at the edge of the night, something wasn’t just hiding, but watching. The moors were a place of ancient whispers and Harry wondered if he wound down his window, would he hear something calling to him, and just the thought of it raked his skin with a harsh chill.
Having arrived at his destination a few moments ago, Harry was now standing outside his vehicle, staring up at the dark windows of the building, wondering why and how the usually sweet air of Wensleydale was, in this place, considerably less pleasant. He couldn’t quite put a name to what it was he could smell exactly, but it was as though the air was stale, like the breath of a tomb.
Harry closed the driver’s door behind him and wandered along the front of the cottage, looking for the truck Grace had mentioned, though what kind he wasn’t sure. Jim had provided him with an address and a phone number, but there had been no answer when he’d called, so ignoring the fact that it had been gone midnight, he’d travelled over regardless. If Mr Eric Haygarth was in and fast asleep and thus not answering, he would soon find out.
Though the cottage had no garden to the front, to the side was a brick shed and beyond that, an overgrown garden cast in a deep gloom that Harry suspected would be there in the middle of the brightest day as much as it was right then, when the night was at its thickest.
Harry found no vehicle, though tyre tracks were visible at the front of the house, which was not so much a drive as a rutted farm track suffering from a rapidly expanding population of potholes.
Walking up to the door, Harry gave a hard rap against the weathered wood with his knuckles. If Eric Haygarth was in, Harry was prepared for him to be not entirely happy at being woken at such an hour. He’d experienced it too many times before, bleary-eyed members of the public bellowing at him about the time of night and of course, they were asleep and what else did he expect, knocking at their door at such an ungodly hour. But a lead was a lead, and that meant that he had to check up on what Grace had said. Leaving it till the morning wasn’t an option, not with the seriousness of what had happened to Arthur.
Nothing stirred from Harry’s knock and the cottage remained still and quiet and dark. He tried again, this time with the heel of his fist, his banging on the door enough to wake the neighbours, had there been any. But there weren’t, because this was a lonely cottage just far enough away from the nearby hamlet of Arkle Town, the closest collection of other dwellings to be ignored.
Harry tried once again, this time the pounding of his fist bringing with it the sound of something inside falling to the floor. But still, nothing. Not a sound, not a hint of another living being inside the cottage.
With no justifiable cause to break into the house to make absolutely sure that Eric Haygarth wasn’t ignoring him, or hiding in a cupboard, or both, Harry turned to head back to his vehicle. A shiver down his spine caused him to pause, and he turned back around to stare at the cottage. The windows of the building stared back, dead eyes in a broken face.
Reaching over into his vehicle’s glove compartment, Harry removed a torch, then wandered back over to the cottage. He shone the bright beam into the windows to the left and right of the front door and saw nothing that looked in any way suspicious. The rooms were little more than a simply furnished lounge and dining room, although the table in the dining room was somewhat hidden beneath boxes of goodness knew what. Harry then walked to the side of the house and slipped through a small gate between the house and the brick shed.
Wading through the thick tufts of grass and weeds of the garden, Harry crept down the side of the house until he was around the back. Beyond the garden, the beam of his torch fell on a thick wall of trees, the brown-grey of their trunks skeletal against the night.
At the back of the house, Harry peered in through a large window to the right of a door, the smaller window to its left being frosted and offering Harry no view of what lay beyond. The glass was clue enough though and Harry assumed it was a downstairs bat
hroom.
Through the larger window, Harry stared into what he knew was a kitchen, but the room seemed to have more in common with a medieval butcher than anything to do with the twenty-first century.
Sweeping his torch slowly around the room on the other side of the glass, Harry saw the carcasses of a number of animals hanging from hooks attached to the ceiling. Most were rabbits and hares, though he also caught sight of a few pigeons and a couple of crows. There were also what looked like three very large chest freezers in the room. With the amount of death Harry could see, he was surprised he couldn’t smell it outside. On one of the walls, Harry saw the taxidermied head of a fox and hanging from a hook to its side was a leather apron.
Harry didn’t know what to think. This eerily silent cottage and gamekeeper’s home was certainly strange. The fact that the owner was not around didn’t necessarily tie in with Grace saying she’d seen Eric Haygarth leave her dad’s house earlier that night. For all Harry knew, the man was out doing whatever it was that gamekeepers did. And as for what he could see on the other side of the window? Well, a gamekeeper’s life involved shooting and trapping, so that would explain the animals on the hooks; probably just there waiting to be butchered. Though he didn’t really see why anyone would want to eat a crow.
Making his way back around to the front of the house, Harry decided to try the door of the brick shed. There was a padlock on the door, and he almost walked on, but then noticed that although the lock looked snapped shut, it actually wasn’t. Perhaps the key had been lost, Harry thought, as he slipped the padlock off the door then opened the latch.
Bringing the beam of his torch around and into the shed’s interior, Harry jumped back as the beam picked out sharp, bared teeth. Swearing under his breath, his heart racing now, Harry calmed himself down and looked again. Facing him, he saw a table in the centre of the space. Against the walls were rolls of wire mesh and various hand tools. On the table itself, was the oddest creation Harry had ever seen. Skeletal legs held up a body comprising wire mesh moulded into the shape of an animal’s body. Attached to this was a skull, the bone a pure white, the teeth sharp and shining in the light of his torch.
Blood Sport: A Yorkshire Murder Mystery (DCI Harry Grimm Crime Thrillers 7) Page 13