Shallow Ground (Detective Ford)

by Andy Maslen

  The woman retreated to the staircase. Her husband delayed leaving, just for a few seconds.

  ‘We’re just shocked,’ he said. ‘The blood came through our ceiling. That’s why I went upstairs to investigate.’

  Natalie nodded, eager now to enter the death room and deal with the latest chapter in the Big Book of Bad Things People Do to Each Other.

  She swatted at the flies that buzzed towards her. They all came from the room at the end of the dark, narrow hallway. Keeping her eyes on the threadbare red-and-cream runner, alert to anything Forensics might be able to use, she made her way to the kitchen. She supported herself against the opposite wall with her left hand so she could walk, one foot in line with the other, along the right-hand edge of the hall.

  The buzzing intensified. And then she caught it: the aroma of death. Sweet-sour top notes overlaying a deeper, darker, rotting-meat stink as body tissues broke down and emitted their gases.

  And blood. Or ‘claret’, in the parlance of the job. She reckoned she’d smelled more of it than a wine expert. This was present in quantity. The husband – what was his name? Rob, that was it. He’d said on the phone it was bad. ‘A slaughterhouse’ – his exact words.

  ‘Let’s find out, then, shall we?’ she murmured as she reached the door and entered the kitchen.

  As the scene imprinted itself on her retinas, she didn’t swear, or invoke the deity, or his son. She used to, in the early days of her career. There’d been enough blasphemy and bad language to have had her churchgoing mum rolling her eyes and pleading with her to ‘Watch your language, please, Nat. There’s no need.’

  She’d become hardened to it over the previous fifteen years. She hoped she still felt a normal human’s reaction when she encountered murder scenes, or the remains of those who’d reached the end of their tether and done themselves in. But she left the amateur dramatics to the new kids. She was a sergeant, a rank she’d worked bloody hard for, and she felt a certain restraint went with the territory. So, no swearing.

  She did, however, shake her head and swallow hard as she took in the scene in front of her. She’d been a keen photographer in her twenties and found it helpful to see crime scenes as if through a lens: her way of putting some distance between her and whatever horrors the job required her to confront.

  In wide-shot, an obscene parody of a Madonna and child. A woman – early thirties, to judge by her face, which was waxy-pale – and a little boy cradled in her lap.

  They’d been posed at the edge of a wall-to-wall blood pool, dried and darkened to a deep plum red.

  She’d clearly bled out. He wasn’t as pale as his mum, but the pink in his smooth little cheeks was gone, replaced by a greenish tinge.

  The puddle of blood had spread right across the kitchen floor and under the table, on which half-emptied bags of shopping sagged. The dead woman was slumped with her back against the cooker, legs canted open yet held together at the ankle by her pulled-down jeans.

  And the little boy.

  Looking for all the world as though he had climbed on to his mother’s lap for a cuddle, eyes closed, hands together at his throat as if in prayer. Fair hair. Long and wavy, down to his shoulders, in a girlish style Natalie had noticed some of her friends choose for their sons.

  Even in midwinter, flies would find a corpse within the hour. In the middle of a scorching summer like the one southern England was enjoying now, they’d arrived in minutes, laid their eggs and begun feasting in quantity. Maggots crawled and wriggled all over the pair.

  As she got closer, Natalie revised her opinion about the cause of death; now, she could see bruises around the throat that screamed strangulation.

  There were protocols to be followed. And the first of these was the preservation of life. She was sure the little boy was dead. The skin discolouration and maggots told her that. But there was no way she was going to go down as the sergeant who left a still-living toddler to die in the centre of a murder scene.

  Reaching him meant stepping into that lake of congealed blood. Never mind the sneers from CID about the ‘woodentops’ walking through crime scenes in their size twelves; this was about checking if a little boy had a chance of life.

  She pulled out her phone and took half a dozen shots of the bodies. Then she took two long strides towards them, wincing as her boot soles crackled and slid in the coagulated blood.

  She crouched and extended her right index and middle fingers, pressing under the little boy’s jaw into the soft flesh where the carotid artery ran. She closed her eyes and prayed for a pulse, trying to ignore the smell, and the noise of the writhing maggots and their soft, squishy little bodies as they roiled together in the mess.

  After staying there long enough for the muscles in her legs to start complaining, and for her to be certain the little lad was dead, she straightened and reversed out of the blood. She took care to place her feet back in the first set of footprints.

  She turned away, looking for some kitchen roll to wipe the blood off her soles, and stared in horror at the wall facing the cooker.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  DAY TWO, 9.05 A.M.

  In metre-tall dark red digits, smeared and dripping, someone had daubed a number.

  666

  Feeling her heart thumping in her chest, and not enjoying the sensation, Natalie spoke into her Airwave.

  ‘Control from Sierra Bravo Three-Five. That G28 in Wyvern Road? Looks like a double homicide. Two deceased. Adult female and young child, a male. A boy, I mean. Christ! A little boy!’

  ‘Sierra Bravo Three-Five from Control. You OK, Nat?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Send the grown-ups.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  She glanced at the bloody number again. ‘All of them.’

  ‘OK, Nat. On it.’

  She saw a roll of kitchen towel on a pine spindle. Pulled off a half-dozen sheets. Cleaned her boot soles as best as she was able. Scrunched the bloody wad into a tight ball and stuck it in the bin. She’d have to tell the CSIs to take impressions of her soles for elimination purposes, even though she hadn’t seen any other footprints on her way in.

  Downstairs, she knocked on the front door of Flat 2. The wife opened the door, still in her gym clothes. Maybe she thought she could still make the class. Not. Going. To. Happen.

  ‘Mrs Gregory, can I come in?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She stood aside and Natalie entered the cleaner, brighter, not-smelling-like-a-butcher’s-shop version of the flat upstairs.

  ‘I need to take statements from you and your husband. Is he around, please?’

  The woman nodded and offered a tight smile. ‘Rob!’ she yelled. ‘The policewoman’s back. She wants to talk to us. Sorry,’ she said, turning back to Nat, ‘he’s a freelance designer. He listens to music while he’s working. It’s the only way I can get through to him. Do you need a tea or a coffee or something? I have herbal. Peppermint, chamomile, chai, ginger, or even some builder’s somewhere.’

  Nat didn’t answer at once. My God, you’re a cool one, aren’t you? Are you used to living underneath murder scenes? Did you have something to do with this one? She pushed the thought down. Above my pay grade.

  ‘Builder’s would be fine, thank you.’

  Ford was writing a report when his force-issued mobile rang. Grateful for the interruption, he answered without looking at the screen. ‘Ford.’

  ‘It’s Alan in Control, sir. Nat Hewitt’s at a crime scene. Says it’s a double homicide. You’re the duty DI.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Flat 3, 75 Wyvern Road. CSIs are already there. Plus, I called the coroner and the pathologist.’

  ‘OK, thanks. I’m on my way.’

  He shrugged on his suit jacket, patting the pockets for wallet, car keys, notebook and his own mobile. He grabbed a black nylon hold-all from beside his desk. His murder bag contained everything he might need for a scene, from Tyvek ‘Noddy suit’ with matching bootees to a set of loc
k picks and a selection of screwdrivers. He unplugged a slim black power pack from the wall and dropped it in. Most important of all, his policy book: an A4 notebook in which he recorded every decision on every case, including justification and possible consequences.

  Moving through the Major Crimes command, he called out to a young DC, Julie Harper.

  ‘Jools! You’re with me.’

  ‘Guv?’

  ‘Double homicide. Wyvern Road.’

  On the short drive over, Jools spoke without taking her eyes off the road. ‘You OK, guv?’

  The concern in her voice made him want to lash out. He felt a flash of anger, then forced his jaws to unclench. ‘You’re the second person to ask me that today.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just, today’s . . .’

  ‘Yes, Jools! I know. The anniversary of my wife’s death. Why is it that once a year everybody treats me like I’m made of porcelain?’

  ‘Because they care about you?’

  ‘I’m fine without, thanks. We’re here. Find a spot and let’s get on with it.’

  A long, tree-lined street of mainly Victorian terrace houses, Wyvern Road stretched in a gentle incline from Castle Street in the west to the ring road carrying two lanes of traffic between the Southampton and London roads.

  Two marked cars blocked off the street between Piccadilly Road and Chayne’s Close, sun flaring off the yellow squares in their Battenberg livery. Blue-and-white police tape fluttered in the summer breeze as they drew closer to the principal crime scene.

  Ford and Jools nodded at the uniformed loggist stationed on the north-side pavement, who was sweating in the heat. She took their collar numbers then lifted the tape for them to duck under.

  Outside 75, a white CSI van had been parked on a double-yellow line. Uniforms were already knocking on doors, talking to neighbours.

  Another cordon to cross, this one yellow-and-black crime scene tape. Before they entered, Ford and Jools climbed into their Tyvek suits. He ignored the glances she kept shooting him.

  A woman’s voice called out. ‘Sir?’

  Ford turned to see Nat Hewitt hurrying across the road.

  ‘I wanted you to hear it from me before anybody else told you,’ she said as she arrived.

  ‘What? You look like you’re going to throw up. Bad one, is it?’ he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the house.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not it, sir. I had to walk right into it. The blood. I had to check the little boy wasn’t dead.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘Poor little mite.’

  ‘You did the right thing. Just see the CSIs get your boot prints for elimination.’

  She nodded, and hurried away to the far end of the cordon. Ford tracked her as she approached a group of onlookers, phones held aloft. Why did they feel this compulsion to film horror and then upload it to their social media accounts? He hated it.

  ‘Bloody ghouls,’ he grunted to Jools, who stood behind him, rustling in her Noddy suit. ‘Come on. Let’s get inside.’

  Ford paused at the door. Looked up. The three-storey house must once have been a spacious family home. Since its conversion into separate flats, it had slid a few rungs down the social ladder.

  The downstairs hallway retained its turquoise, rust and cream encaustic tiles with their intricate geometric pattern. But the surface was dulled through neglect and several were chipped, the missing corners filled in with dirty cement. A grubby radiator cover was piled high with takeaway menus.

  The hallway was wide enough for them to stand side by side, but the stairs were narrower. Ford led them up to the first floor, where the forensic pathologist was pulling a hood back from a sleek bob of silver hair.

  Dr Georgina Eustace was in her mid-fifties. Her base was Salisbury District Hospital, but she liked to come out to the more ‘exotic’ crime scenes, as she called them. In Ford’s opinion, she took the concept of gallows humour to a whole new level. But she was a damn good pathologist, which, he felt, allowed her some leeway.

  ‘What’ve we got?’ he asked, not reluctant to venture up to the main crime scene, just keen to get her initial impressions while they were still fresh.

  ‘I’ll go on up,’ Jools said. ‘Make a start.’

  Ford nodded, then turned back to the pathologist. ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘From the bruises around her throat and the amount of blood, I’d say strangling and exsanguination will have played their part in the young woman’s death,’ she said. ‘Although it’s always possible the killer may have found some other method of doing her in.’

  ‘The boy?’

  She shook her head. ‘No obvious sign of trauma. I emphasise the word “obvious”. He’s not bled, or not from the side you can see, so I’ll have to wait till I get back to SDH,’ she said. ‘They’re both at the very early stages of bloating so, making allowances for the extremely hot weather we’ve been having, they’ve been dead no more than a day or two.’

  Ford appreciated the way Eustace would give him more than the usual litany of exasperated headshakes and tutting whenever he, a lowly plod, dared to ask a pathologist for ideas before the post-mortem.

  He nodded. He was thinking that fresh corpses meant recent murders. And recent murders were easier to clear up. The clock had started ticking. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘I’ve signed the ROLE form on both victims, by the way,’ Eustace said.

  Recognition of Life Extinct. It was one of the first steps in the sad, bureaucratic process through which a once-living human being, a person, became transformed into a thing. A body. A case. A PM report. The property of the coroner. A deceased and sadly missed. A body smashed by a falling rock. Then washed off a ledge and dumped on a Welsh beach. Oh, Lou! I wish you were still with me.

  Stuffing the memory back down, he took a small, flat rectangular tin from his pocket, and extracted two filters for rolling cigarettes and a small bottle of oil of menthol. Knowing his ‘stink-busters’ wouldn’t help, but needing the ritual, he squirted a couple of drops of the strong-smelling mint oil on to each of the filters, then stuck them into his nostrils. A smear of oil of camphor on his top lip and he was ready.

  He tugged his hood up, settled his face mask over his nose and climbed the final flight of stairs to Flat 3. He didn’t dread seeing corpses any more. Carrying one around with him at all times had dulled the shock to a constant, low-level ache.

  If the first-floor landing was tight, the third-floor landing was like a crowded train compartment.

  DAY TWO, 9.31 A.M.

  White-suited CSIs bearing bagged samples moved in and out along a common-approach path of bright-yellow plastic tread plates. Jools was talking to a uniformed sergeant.

  Kneeling beside them, the photographer worked at a laptop propped on a tall stool.

  ‘Backing up,’ he said, without turning away from the screen.

  Ford stepped across the threshold, losing his balance as one of the tread plates shifted beneath his foot. He swore, causing those inside the flat to turn. The common-approach path led along the hall to the kitchen, tight to the left-hand edge of the corridor.

  He picked out a set of bloody footprints leading away from the kitchen. Nat’s. He frowned with irritation. And then he thought of her instinct to try to save the little boy. And of his own wife’s desperate entreaty to him: You have to. If you stay here, we’ll both die. Then who’ll look after Sam?

  He felt his throat clutch: he pushed on, steeling himself. And then he entered the crime scene.

  It happened here. Obviously. You don’t murder somebody outside then bring the body back to dump it in their own kitchen.

  Rather than barging into the centre of the working CSIs, firing off questions and asserting his authority, he observed from the edge of the room.

  And he didn’t stare, either, or focus in so tightly on the heinous scene before his eyes – the intertwined bodies and the lake of blood – that he got tunnel vision and failed to see the bi
gger picture. Because that’s what he was there for: to see the scene as a whole. The CSIs and the snapper could pick up far more details than he ever could, or wanted to. One thing preoccupied Ford: the killer. Because Ford knew all about what it was like to kill.

  He felt it on the back of his neck first. Fresh sweat chilling his skin. His stomach lurched. He slid a black plastic bag from his inside pocket. As the scene impressed itself upon him, and the wave of nausea rolled through him, he opened the bag and threw up, as quietly as he could manage, then knotted it and placed it a corner.

  He noticed Jools watching him. Only her eyes were visible, but he’d seen that look before. The look that said, ‘I understand.’ No, Jools, you don’t. Not at all. He turned away from her and began to look. The nausea subsided to a background tremor. He knew where it was about to take him, was ready for the journey.

  Three chairs hemmed the table. Groceries had spilled from one of the bags, but nothing had rolled or fallen to the floor.

  Multicoloured paintings covered the fridge door, enthusiasm more in evidence than skill. They reminded Ford of Sam’s earliest artistic endeavours: plenty of finger paintings, a couple of stars that said ‘potato print’ to Ford, and a drawing of two figures. One a wobbly orange oval with two lines straggling down to the bottom edge of the paper, the other a smaller version, their ‘arms’ – more single spidery lines – linked. Dots and crooked curves that might have been faces were set within squashed circles balanced atop the bodies.

  Underneath, in coloured crayons, someone had printed ‘Kai and Mummy’. No Daddy, then? Was your mum bringing you up on her own, Kai? Bearing all the weight on her own? Did your daddy come back? Lose his temper?

  Coloured magnetic plastic letters held the artworks in place. None had been torn, swiped off-centre or knocked free. It meant ‘no struggle’ to Ford.

  He viewed each of the four walls in turn – registering the grotesque graffiti – then moved on to the ceiling, and finally the floor. He let his gaze soften, blurring sharp edges, rounding corners.