by L. J. Hutton
Bill was fascinated. “Well that’s an oddity, and no mistake. What’s going to happen next, then?”
Carol shrugged. “No idea. I think the coroner is going to have to bring in an open verdict. With not a scrap of evidence pointing towards foul play, we can hardly even go for manslaughter, let alone murder. Yet if it’s suicide, it’s the bloody weirdest one I’ve ever come across. Yes, he’d been drinking, and given that your lot found his car not far away, far too much for him to have been at the wheel had he tried to drive back home again – wherever that was, because we’re still struggling to identify him – but nowhere near enough for excessive booze to have been a cause. No drugs in his system – so nothing to suggest he was having a dreadful trip on some substance or other, which had his own imagination dredging up something which terrified him to that degree. Just a big fat nothing on every score.”
“How bizarre,” Bill agreed, but privately thinking that in his time he’d come across enough weirdness that might have had an adverse affect on the susceptible or the unwary. Certainly there was something about the landscape between here and the border with Wales which seemed to be a magnet for the strange and unusual, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he ever shared with his colleagues on the force, who’d have whisked him off to the police psychiatrist in a heartbeat if he had. Carol and Sylvia had been on the periphery of a couple of those oddities, but hadn’t been involved enough for him to now say something like, ‘do you remember that case when...?’ And so he asked instead, “So where was this body found, then?”
Their response gave him a cold shiver down his spine for having assumed a connection to Wales.
“Propped up against an apple tree in an orchard close to Presteigne, right over on the Powys-Hereford border,” Carol replied with a grimace. “Hardly your hotbed of vice, Kington! And to complicate matters, the actual site is right on the edge of your lot’s TPU F,” by which Carol was referring to the Territorial Policing Unit F which encompassed Herefordshire, rather than TPU C, which was South Worcestershire where Bill worked. “It’s right on the edge of West Mercia’s territory where it adjoins the Welsh Police Force’s patch. That’s probably why you haven’t heard about it. The Herefordshire lads are the ones who’ve done the leg work trying to find family and friends, although without success yet. And without any proof that it’s a suspicious death, it probably hasn’t passed over the desk with any of you. I got called in to consult on it because my junior colleague who caught the case first was out of his depth.”
“An odd place to leave a body, though,” Bill mused, forcing himself to dismiss his own musings on the weird and wonderful when the location was so mundane, for want of a better word. “I mean, in one of the Forestry Commission’s plantations you could say that you’d possibly wait years before anyone found a body. Those trees get planted very close together, and it’s dark as hell in there once you get away from any fire breaks. You’d never spot a body that had got dragged a few yards back into the trees. The first on the scene would likely be the lumberjacks felling the whole plantation maybe decades into the future. But an orchard? They get pretty regularly tended, if only by people going and checking for disease or insect damage. It’s hard to think that anyone plotting a crime would actively choose such a place as somewhere either remote or disregarded.”
“That’s what I was saying to Sylv’ when you arrived. It’s not that I’d never expect to find a body in an orchard, but if I did, I expect it to be as the result of a fight, maybe something domestic, even. Something spontaneous. But there’s no sign of that there. Jeff,” the forensic scientist who often worked with Carol, “combed the ground around where the body was. No signs of a scuffle. No signs of him having been killed elsewhere and then deposited there – and my examination of the body fits with that, he died sitting leaning against that tree, I’m positive on that. But I can hardly write that he walked to there of his own accord, and then got frightened to death by an apple tree, can I?”
Bill grunted in disgust. “Why is it that sometimes you just get the weird and wonderful arriving as a job lot, eh? How is it that once you’ve had one really bloody strange one, there’s always two or three others just lurking around the corner waiting to keep it company? Not all murders, I know, and sometimes just oddities; but if I was that way inclined, I could almost believe what the pagan lot think about planets misaligned and others going retrograde, like you joked Sylv’, because there’s no sensible alternative explanation as to why you get clusters like this.”
He huffed again, and then stood up. “Enough of this shop talk! Come on, they’ve got a pie on the menu at the moment that I’ve been drooling at the thought of all day. Let’s go and eat. I’m, starving!”
Chapter 2
IT WAS A MONTH AFTER his conversation with Carol and Sylvia when Bill walked in to work to be greeted by,
“Go back home. Pack a bag. You’re going to Shropshire!” It was not the usual greeting Bill got off his friend Sean on a Monday morning, which was why he found himself halted in his tracks saying,
“Eh?”
“Sorry, Bill,” Sean said apologetically, “Williams,” referring to their superintendant, “is off on a course. So his secretary shunted the call from them-who-must-be-obeyed down to me as the first one in this morning. It seems that the lads across the county border are in trouble. Being more rural than us they only have the three DIs, and of those, Lucinda Smythe is off on maternity as of last week, so a DS called Rayshaan Villavarayan from West Mids has only just arrived to cover for her on a temporary promotion. That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that Wally Mitford is somewhere in the air between here and the Maldives – apparently he and his missus are celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and he’s already had two lots of leave cancelled this year! So understandably the brass aren’t keen on hauling him back. But it all went to hell in a handcart when Si’ Ralph got rushed into hospital last night with a strangulated hernia, and at the same time they had a body turn up.”
“Blimey!” was Bill’s aghast response.
“I know! Rotten luck or what? So there they are, with two local and experienced DSs – but who probably aren’t running at the same speed as those of us in more populated areas – trying to hand-hold a lad who’s almost certainly had more experience of suspicious deaths than the pair of them have had in their entire careers, but doesn’t know one end of the division from the other. You can see why the scream for help got made!”
Recovering slightly, Bill nodded. “Of course. And you’ve got that shitty supermarket case coming to court this week for its first hearing ...and with Jason’s lad back in hospital again, they can’t ask him ...whereas I’ve no family ties, and I was already up to catch the next case that came in. ...Oh well, looks like it’s off to Shrewsbury for me, then!”
“Err, not even that, I’m afraid,” Sean said ruefully. “They need you at the scene of the crime a.s.a.p., and that’s on the Powys border near Clun.”
Bill blinked in surprise. “Oh! ...In that case I suppose I’m better off going via Ludlow and turning off at Craven Arms.”
Sean gave him a sympathetic smile. “I think it was the fact that ‘them-upstairs’ know that you’ve at least gone out hiking in that area, which was behind them calling for you. I believe the thought was that you wouldn’t be such a fish out of water in that environment – not like some poor DI from the West Mids force, anyway – and the rest of our Mercian divisions are skinned to the bone already.”
Technically the West Mercia Police Force was divided into Territorial Policing Areas or Units, with South Worcestershire where Bill was based being designated as ‘C’, and North Worcestershire as ‘D’. Herefordshire was area ‘E’; Shropshire, where Bill was headed, was ‘F’; and Telford, which also encompassed the county town of Shrewsbury, was ‘G’. However amongst the ‘old sweats’ like Bill and Sean, in conversation the tendency was to slip back into calling them divisions rather than descending into a chat punctuated by endless
acronyms.
“Think of it as a holiday,” Sean said with a wink, which earned him a snort from Bill, and a swiftly snatched up and well-aimed eraser bouncing off his chest.
“‘Holiday’, my arse!”Bill riposted with a theatrical rolling of his eyes. “Stuck out in the sticks, with two old turnip-munchers and a lad who still hasn’t worked out why the ‘Just Eat’ app’ on his smart phone hasn’t found anywhere within forty miles, isn’t going to be any sort of a holiday for me. ...Do we know anything at all about this body? Or am I going in totally cold?”
“Oh, you’re going to love this,” Sean declared, though this time with far more sympathy. “Apparently, some bloke’s been found dead sitting under an apple tree. No signs of violence, but the word as I got it, was that he looks as though he’s been frightened to death.”
“You what?” Bill’s mind flipped back to that meal with Carol and Sylvia. Another case like that? Surely that couldn’t be a coincidence?
Sean grimaced. “I know, weird or what? But that’s what I got told to pass on to you. It doesn’t look like suicide, and the initial examination by the pathologist says that it doesn’t bear any of the appearances of a normal heart-attack or a stroke. But they said you’d understand more when you get there.”
“Oh joy,” Bill said wearily, “another strange case. Why do they always find me?”
It didn’t take him long to get back over the bridge from the centre of Worcester to his riverside flat, and once there he swiftly packed a holdall, and then on second thoughts packed another. If this situation was as messy as it sounded, he could well end up over there for quite some time, and if nothing else, he wanted to be able to go back to wherever they were putting him up, and be able to have a shower and change on a regular basis. Thanking his lucky stars that he’d recently put his beloved classic Mini Cooper into storage, he put his bags into his new acquisition – a Subaru Outback which his friend from Traffic had found for him. The powerful four-wheeled drive would cope with the hills and twisting roads of western Shropshire even better than the Mini would have done, and in considerably more comfort. And just for good measure, Bill went back into the flat and picked up the CDs of Finnish folk music he had been left by Tapio – a reminder of his previous oddity of a case that he had unofficially got entangled in. He couldn’t say why he felt better for having picked them up alongside the i-player which he normally plugged into the car’s sound system, but something was tweaking his subconscious to do it and he had learned not to ignore that.
It didn’t take Bill long to get out onto the Tenbury Wells road, and amazingly, considering that it was a bank holiday Monday, the roads weren’t bad. Given that, it was also astonishing that the body hadn’t been stumbled across by tourists, but by the owner of the land. Mercifully, most mums and dads would have spent this weekend praying for pay-day, having been skinned out during the long school summer holidays, rather than taking the offspring out today, so at least the chances of some kids turning up at the crime scene had reduced. What on earth modern kids, always glued to some device, would make of a dead body under an apple tree could have been the stuff of nightmares for Bill and the team he had yet to meet.
Fully aware of how satnavs could take you astray in rural areas, Bill had also raided his collection of Ordnance Survey maps before leaving home, and so once he got close to the area, he pulled over and got the relevant map out. Foreign truck drivers in particular often came to grief when their satnavs took them down tiny country lanes, and this part of the world was riddled with single tracks leading up to farms and not much else, so Bill needed to know which one was going to take him to Ruggles Farm. He realised that he didn’t have to go as far as Craven Arms, but could turn off at Bromfield and go through Leintwardine. From there, though, he was on the B road until he crossed from Herefordshire into Shropshire, immediately then turning off on unclassified tracks not on any larger scale road atlas.
As he got out of his car to see other vehicles clustered around a field gate, he checked his GPS and was surprised to see that he was almost exactly on the border between the two shires. “Oh this is going to make for a bloody mess,” he muttered under his breath. Please God the Hereford lads weren’t going to get territorial over this, because it would be almost impossible to decide whose this case officially was. However, before informing anyone more senior of the impending entanglement, Bill strode over to where his new colleagues were clustered, and as they turned to look at him, introduced himself.
“DS Charlie Houseman,” a middle-aged man introduced himself back. “You made good time getting here! We weren’t expecting you until later this afternoon – not that I’m not glad you’re here, because this one’s a puzzle and no mistake.”
“Acting DI Rayshaan Villavarayan,” the youngest of the men announced, holding out his hand with a friendly smile. “I hope you can make more of this than me, sir, because I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
There was a grunt from the other DS, and Bill instantly took a dislike to him. That grunt had been clearly aimed at the young acting-DI more for his ethnicity than his inexperience, and Bill knew he might have a problem here. “And you are?” he asked the oldest of the three.
“Eddie Norrington. Reckon you’ve been sent out here for nothing. This is just some bloody daft townie come out here and started snorting crap. Nothing sinister about that at all.” And without waiting for Bill to reply, Norrington shambled off towards the unmarked police car that was alongside Bill’s.
“Sorry about Eddie,” Charlie immediately apologised. Then with a sigh added, “His retirement can’t come soon enough for most of us. Thank God he’s only got six months to go! He’s been anything but helpful to Ray, here, and I don’t know whether you’ll agree with us, but this isn’t some druggie’s suicide. Come and have a look at this, gov’.”
As he led Bill forward to the body, Bill noted that at least Charlie was clearly on familiar terms with the young acting DI. That was good. Friction within the team was something they could all do without. And then he was looking down on the body, which was just as Carol had described her earlier body to him.
The man sat propped up against one of a small cluster of apple trees in a very small orchard, hands in his lap, and yet with an expression of utter terror on his face, just as if he had been frozen in time at the moment he died.
“Bloody hell,” Bill murmured without realising.
“My thoughts exactly,” Charlie said with a wry grimace. “Don’t see many like that, do you?”
“But Eddie might be right about one thing,” Rayshaan said with a sigh. “I think he comes from well away from here, and that’s because he bears a strong resemblance to someone I know.”
Bill turned to him in surprise. “Really?”
Rayshaan nodded. “A nasty piece of work called Vijay Bose, who’s well-known to the Walsall lads. They’ve never been able to get enough evidence to nail him, but he’s suspected of being a key figure in a grooming ring. And if this one isn’t his cousin or even his brother, I’ll be very surprised.”
“And do we have this Vijay’s DNA on record, do you know?” Bill asked hopefully.
“Not his, because he’s a crafty shit and stayed one step beyond where we could demand he give a sample, but I’m sure we have his cousin Abadi on record after a nasty rape case.” Rayshaan gave a sniff of disgust. “That piece of garbage didn’t get anything like the sentence he deserved, though he’s still doing time if I’m not mistaken.”
Bill turned and looked down at the young pathologist who was kneeling by the body. “Let’s get a comparison done then, shall we? And you might want to give Carol Whitmore a ring. She’s had another case like this turn up on the edge of Hereford’s patch. Whether this is some new drug we’ve not seen before, or some vigilante taking revenge on these men, let’s at least see if we can narrow it down a bit. Carol’s other victim has remained a mystery so far, so if we can at least put a cause of death to this guy, we’re already one step ahead.” He
looked to the lead forensic scientist who was just closing up his cases. “Anything you can tell me?”
The man sighed. “I’d say everything points to him dying here. No signs of him being dragged here, nor of anyone carrying anything as heavy as a body, because in this long grass there’d surely be signs of that. As best I can tell, he walked in here on his own. There’s no sign of a scuffle, much less an actual struggle.”
“And he doesn’t seem to have been restrained,” the pathologist added, looking as baffled as Bill felt.
“Right get him out of here and off to where you can do your stuff,” Bill said with a sigh. “Now then Charlie, and ...is it okay if I call you Ray?”
“Sure.”
“...can we go and find somewhere where there’s a decent cup of coffee and a sandwich and talk this over?”
By the end of the day, Bill was booked into a B&B and had done as much as he could to sort out the puzzling death. The higher authorities had been informed of the possible complication regarding the location, and to Bill’s relief they had decided that since there was nothing yet pointing to a need for the Hereford team to become involved, that it would stay as Bill’s case for now. However, they had already had an unexpected success in identifying their victim. Ray had made a call to a contact of his in Walsall, and as his friend emailed across the photos of Vijay Bose’s wider crime family, they had only got to the third one before both Ray and Bill exclaimed,
“That’s him!”
“Which one?” the disembodied voice on the other end of the speaker phone asked.