Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  “So how did our Sanay die? Is you gonna be able to match up any bullets?”

  That, Bill thought, said a lot about the world in which the Costas moved. The presumption that he would have been shot, or possibly knifed.

  “I’m afraid it’s not as straightforward as that,” Bill had to say. “Can you tell me, did your brother have any health problems? Only it looks as though he died of a heart-attack.”

  Caesar’s jaw dropped. “A heart attack? Our Sanay was as fit as a flea! There weren’t nothin’ wrong with him! Why’d you say such a thing?”

  Bill found himself sighing again. “I said ‘looks like’ a heart-attack, but the truth is, Mr Costa, that all the evidence points towards your brother having been frightened to death.”

  “Don’t be so bleedin’ daft. Our Sanay weren’t scared of anythin’!”

  Reluctantly, Bill produced the photo of Sanay again, handing it over to his brother for him to see Sanay’s horror-stricken expression for himself. “He was found in an orchard on the edge of Shropshire.”

  “In an orchard?”

  “Specifically, an apple orchard on a farm,” Bill clarified, briefly wondering whether someone like Caesar even knew what an orchard was, when he probably had never seen fruit coming from anywhere other than off a supermarket shelf.

  “What was he doin’ there?”

  “Well that was what we were hoping you could shed some light on, Mr Costa. If it hadn’t been for DI Villavarayan, here, recognising the family resemblance, it might have taken us a lot longer to identify him than it did, because Sanay was a very long way from where anyone might have expected him to be. And you were lucky that he got spotted as fast as he did. It was only the farmer going back to check that he didn’t need to spray his crop again that meant he was found within the day. It was a pretty isolated spot, and even on the farm it was in a fairly invisible part.”

  For the first time Caesar was looking genuinely upset. “How long was he out there for?”

  “Oh, probably only overnight, luckily,” Bill consoled him. “Whatever happened seems to have taken place the night before he was found.”

  “But what was he doin’ out there?” Caesar asked again plaintively. “Was there some rave goin’ on? I thought Sanay had grown out o’ them, but I suppose if he saw some business opportunity...?”

  That Bill took to mean, ‘if there was a chance to move some drugs’, but made no further comment on that. The local lads no doubt had the Costas under surveillance for such illicit trading, and didn’t need any prompting from him.

  “No, there’s no evidence at all that there was anyone with him. Certainly there was no gathering of several people there, let alone anything like a rave.”

  Caesar was just sitting shaking his head, at which point the two younger brothers, Romeo and Darius, came in and had to be told the details. Yet both of them remained as perplexed as Caesar, and for once in their lives, Bill thought that they were telling the truth. This had them as baffled as the police. And so with a promise from Caesar that he would come and formally identify the body, Bill and Ray left the Costas to their grief.

  On the drive back across into Shropshire, though, they found themselves returning to the subject of the mystery woman.

  “That’s got me totally flummoxed, gov’,” Ray confessed. “All four of the Costa lads have a nasty reputation with women, and they don’t exactly keep it hidden, if you know what I mean. I can’t imagine any woman with a bit of brains and personality would hang around long. She’d be more likely to be running hard in the opposite direction.”

  “Yet she’s the only clue we’ve got,” Bill sighed, tutting as a truck driver changed lanes with little warning in front of him on the motorway. “Let’s show Sanay’s photo around in the villages closest to the farm. Ask and see if anyone has heard of a woman who’s suddenly got a bit of rough on the side – or as decorously as we can. ...What’s your take on why Sanay, and maybe his brothers were out that way in the first place?”

  Ray pulled a face. “That’s a bit easier to guess, but just as hard to prove. You know I said their cousin is chief suspect in running a grooming ring? Well we have our suspicions that if the girls put up a fight, then they don’t last long after that. What’s been holding us up is that we’ve not found any bodies yet. Doesn’t help that half of the girls they target are under the radar in the first place. Kids who’ve been kept cloistered at home by immigrant families who don’t see the value in educating girls, and who finally manage to escape only to end up in the clutches of Vijay Bose and the Costas, or actual illegal immigrants.”

  “God, that’s a grim thought,” declared Bill with a wrinkle of his nose. “Poor little buggers. To escape one prison and find yourself in another one. I really hate traffickers.”

  “Me too,” confessed Ray. “I’ve got two little girls of five and two, and the thought of anyone hurting them like that is the stuff of my worst nightmares. But one of the reasons we’ve been watching the Costas has been that my DCI, in Walsall, is convinced that they’re the ones who are getting rid of the bodies. Or it might be that the girls are still alive when they get taken out of the city, and that’s why we haven’t been able to pin anything on these bastards. But we were becoming increasingly certain that if a girl outlived her usefulness, then she was being disposed of, not being sold on. However, this is this first hint as to which way they might have been taking them, because until now we’d been thinking more of them using the motorway network to get far from here.

  “You know that the Serious Crime lads are hot on picking up hints of people being sold, and they’ve never had so much as the faintest whiff of that leading back to the Costas. Nothing’s coming up in their bank accounts, and even if it’s cash transactions, they’re not getting a hint of it from the more usual places where other girls have been sold on to. So that’s why we’re convinced that these poor kids are dead. Where they’re putting them, though, has been another matter.”

  Bill thought on that for a while, then asked, “You don’t suppose that one of these girls could have fought back? I know I’m grasping at straws here, because there’s not a shred of forensic evidence that Sanay was in any sort of a fight.”

  However Ray was shaking his head. “The kind of girls they target are too cowed to do anything like that. They’re scared to death of the Costas and the rest of Bose’s gang.”

  “Then who the hell has killed Sanay?” Bill mused. “Because I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that he didn’t die of natural causes. If his heart gave out, it was because he’d been given a serious push to the brink of what terrified him the most. But what was that piece of garbage that frightened of that it would have affected him so badly?”

  Sanay

  August

  SANAY DROVE HIS BMW up the twisting, turning roads towards where Helyglys said she would meet him. Part of him was angry and frustrated at the way she was keeping him running around like this, but the other part of him was deeply aroused at having a woman who kept just that bit out of reach. And he did desire her. In fact, he couldn’t remember another woman who could give him an erection just at the thought of her. Normally Sanay liked to be the dominant one, the one in control. If he wasn’t on top, then he was telling the woman very specifically what he wanted her to do, and if she didn’t do it, then woe betide, because Sanay had no compunction about using his fists and feet to instil obedience into his women.

  He’d seen her watching him when he’d gone out with Vijay and that silly cow from Estonia who had tried to make a run for it. Well she’d certainly had a run, he remembered, laughing out loud at the memory of her thin, stick-like legs trying to get away from them over the rough ground. Stupid mare hadn’t even realised she was running straight towards where she was going to die, and he laughed out loud at that.

  What a great idea it had been of Vijay’s mate, Tufty, who’d been in the army. Take a girl over the border into Wales to the old disused quarry. Who ever went there except some farmer’s s
heep dog? You wouldn’t take a quad bike over most of that terrain, and it had given him, Vijay and Uncle Indrek’s man ‘Tank’ some fun chasing after her, then taking turns at her up there in the deep, damp grass. Who cared that they were making her more slippery with every turn, and holy crap, who’d have thought that ‘Tank’, having been the first one in, would have it in him to be the last one too? What a man! And ‘Tank’ had been ploughing her that hard by then he was shoving her uphill with every thrust. That had been a couple of months ago, though, and before Vijay had fucked off to who knew where. There hadn’t been much fun to be had since then except for Helyglys

  “Fuck it!” he groaned, so hard now having thought about that rough sex that he could barely focus enough to drive. Gotta take care of this, he thought, pulling over into a farm gate, and standing close to the hedge, unzipped his pants and with only a few pulls of his fingers, was orgasming as he gasped, “Oh yes! Oh fuck yes! Oh I’m going to make you pay for this, bitch! ...Oh God, that’s better!”

  As he leaned weakly against the gate, panting, he thought, You won’t get me so hard I can’t think straight this time, wench! I gotta recover a bit first before I give you the shaftin’ of your life, you just see. You don’t play the cock-tease with Sanay Costa, no you don’t.

  Yet as he got back into the car and carried on driving towards this Knighton place, which he’d never heard of until Tufty had told them about it, as he thought of what he was going to do to Helyglys, he felt stirrings down in his pants again.

  “God-all-fucking-Mighty!” he moaned, as the thought of pinning Helyglys face down in the heather and taking her doggy fashion gave him a full hard-on again.

  What was it with this woman? He’d never been like this in his life. Okay, he’d always been able to get it up at every opportunity, especially if things were getting a bit rough. Nothing got Sanay’s cock standing to attention than a woman fighting back a bit. It made the domination all that sweeter. But to be ready to go again so fast? No, not even his older brother, Caesar, the acknowledged cock’s-man of the family, recovered this fast normally.

  So it was with great relief that he found himself coming up into Knighton, slowing down and driving carefully through the village as he’d been told to do back when they’d bought the girl up here.

  “We can’t alert the turnip-munchers,” Vijay had laughed. “Fucking ejits that they are, they can still call the cops, so we don’t give ’em no cause, right? No revving the engine, keep to the speed limit. Make ’em think there’s nothin’ to see here.”

  Well you’ll have plenty to see when I’ve finished with her tonight, Sanay thought with savage satisfaction. I d’ain’t ever tell her where I come from. Nobody knows that, so good luck to the filth tryin’ to pin anythin’ on me. She’ll be walkin’ into town with her knickers in her hand cryin’ like a bab’ after I’ve done with ’er! And he laughed out loud again.

  Yet as he pulled up beyond the town, hunting for the narrow lane she’d told him to come up the last time he’d seen her, there was a small part of him that was screaming in his subconscious not to wreck this. That little voice that wanted this exquisite torment to go on and on. The part of him that recognised that he was getting more out of this woman’s taunting of him than all of his other conquests put together. She was unreachable, unconquerable. And while the one side of him wanted to tarnish this pristine goddess-like woman and cut her down to size, the other part knew he’d never find the like of her again. There couldn’t be two like her in the world, could there? So why destroy something unique when it gave him so much pleasure? Because she could walk away from you, but you can’t walk away from her, his bitter side snarled. Why should she have that much control over you?

  So he pulled into the gateway she’d described and got out. Being an inner city boy, Sanay had never been in an orchard before, and so the neat ranks of apple trees perplexed him. Why here? What was there about these trees that made her want to meet him here?

  “Yo! I’m here!” he called, but not too loudly. He’d passed a farm on the way here, and he didn’t want some farmer setting his dogs onto him for trespassing. “Hoy! Helyglys, where you hidin’, woman?”

  “I’m here,” her soft sultry voice said from in the darkness. “Come here, my lovely. Come and show me what sort of man you are.”

  With the pressure on his fly-zipper reaching unbearable point, Sanay yanked the zipper down and released his unruly member with a sigh of relief. “See this? This is all for you, woman! Come and get it!” and he waved his penis around with a laugh of wild abandon.

  “Over here,” the silky voice said, and he saw her leaning seductively against one of the trees.

  Whatever he’d resolved to do, in the heat of the moment it was forgotten, and it was all he could do to not run over the uneven ground to get to her.

  “Sit down!” she commanded, sliding out of reach of his grasp with an ease he couldn’t believe. “Down on the ground against the tree!”

  She smiled at him and it was like the stars had come out and lit up the sky. Reaching for the diaphanous gown she was wearing, she coyly pulled it aside, revealing a snow-white breast and a nipple already aroused. Or was he actually seeing that or simply fantasizing it? He blinked hard, feeling strangely hazy and not sure what he was seeing anymore. Fuck it, it was so bloody dark here, yet right now he was past thinking straight

  Even as he collapsed onto the ground by the tree, Sanay was pleading, “Oh please! Come here! Come and ride me ...please!”

  Like a dog scenting a bitch in heat, he was already panting and starting to hump air, and as she glided gracefully towards him he vowed never to harm a hair on her head. This was too good, too sweet, too absolutely erotic on a level he’d never known existed before. How could he ever have thought of harming her?

  But as she came up to him, she suddenly began to change. Gone was the compliant lover. Instead she seemed to grow in stature. And what had been dark and sultry now became menacing. Not sexy – dangerous! Not hot stuff but bitingly cold, and her eyes – those eyes like pools of starlight – were looking at him not with love or lust, but utter loathing.

  For the first time in a very long while, Sanay became actively frightened. “What’cha doin’?” he squeaked in horror, as his once-seductive lover towered over him.

  “Making you pay, you disgusting, foul creature,” she replied in a voice as cold as the night air. In fact he was sure that the warm autumn night had plummeted to nearly frosty around him.

  “Pay? What for? What I dun?”

  “That girl. The one you brought up here with the others. The innocent young thing who you took turns at and then throttled.”

  “Eh? The Estonian bitch? What’s that gotta do with you?”

  “It has everything to do with us! You pollute our land with your foul games. How dare you! We heard her. We heard her cries for help, her pleading with you. It’s only a shame that we got here too late to stop you.”

  “Oh fuck off!” Sanay screamed, even as some dim corner of his brain wondered how the hell this woman knew Estonian, when the girl had been screaming in her native language, not English, which she barely spoke. “Who’s ‘we’? Who you got that can stand up to our Uncle Indrek and Vijay, eh?” God-all-fucking-mighty, this bitch wasn’t some rival gang’s local leader? No, surely not. They didn’t employ women anymore than Uncle Indrek did.

  Then out of the corner of his eye he saw three other figures. Not clearly. Not so that he could have recognised them. But he knew that they were there. And if two of them were possibly women, going by their swirling skirts, then the other one he was sure was a man, but there’d be no calling to this man for help. What was that he’d got? A knife? No! A sword!

  “Waah!” he squealed. “Get away from me! Go on! Fuck off!”

  Then he became aware of just how close Helyglys had come to him. She was looming over him now, terrible and yet beautiful like the deepest frost, and she was suddenly blocking his view of everything else.

&nbs
p; Spreading her arms, the diaphanous drapery fluttering ominously on the slight night breeze, she declared,

  “Now it is time for you to pay!”

  And as Sanay watched her, hypnotised like a rabbit in car headlights, she began to change. Gone was the woman he’d thought he could dominate, gone was his would-be lover, and in her place was something terrible. Terrible and yet awe-inducing. Something as old as time and eternal. Relentless as the tide against the shore. Impossible to stand against. And as Sanay’s terror rose higher and higher, his heart began pounding in his chest.

  The once ruby lips parted, and yet he felt her words within his mind rather than heard them, saw with his mind’s eye not his physical ones what she showed him. Too terrified to even call out, he could only sit there as sensations washed over him. Feelings of being pinned down, of being violated in the worst possible way, of hurt beyond anything he’d ever imagined, let alone felt.

  And the eyes! What had eyes like that, a part of his nearly numb brain whimpered in terror? Dark as the winter skies and yet swirling, as if he was travelling at great speed through time and space.

  Oblivious to his body, he wasn’t aware that he was now wetting himself, all thoughts of sex having vanished like a puff of smoke. And before his heart finally gave out as the inserted memory of unbearable pain sunk in deeper and deeper, there was still a deep-down part of him asking, Why? Why are you doing this?

  Chapter 4

  OVER THE FOLLOWING couple of weeks, not a single shred of evidence came up in the investigation into Sanay Costa’s death, and although it wasn’t much fun for Bill to be living in a B&B, there was a part of him that was very glad that he was here. It would have been too easy to have blamed Ray’s inexperience for the lack of results, and Bill was developing a growing respect for the young acting DI. Certainly enough that he didn’t want to see Ray’s chances of a permanent promotion shot down by this oddity of a case.