Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  He’d only begun to edge around the next boulder when he saw her, and for the briefest instant found himself again praying, this time that it wouldn’t be one of Mulligrew’s daughters. Don’t be bloody daft, he promptly chastised himself. What would they be doing here? And that’s peroxide blonde hair you can see the remains of. I can’t imagine those poor lasses even knew what hair dye was, much less have been allowed to use it. But he knew it was a measure of how much the farmhouse had got to him that he should think that. Whoever this was, she had ended her life under the most miserable of circumstances, and probably scared witless, but hopefully she would’ve at least had a happy childhood back wherever she’d come from. Someone somewhere would mourn her loss, unlike Grace and Hannah Mulligrew.

  Being even more careful now, Bill leaned in as far as he dared to take a photograph of her with his compact camera – he wasn’t going to risk putting these images onto his phone where some technical wizard might pull them off, even if he’d already deleted them from the main file – then retreated back to the edge of the quarry’s circuit. To his growing horror, he found another, and then another girl, yet none of them looking as though they’d been dumped within recent weeks. These were all the victims of Vijay Bose or Tufty, unless he was very mistaken, because they looked as though they’d been here for months. But what really had him having to sit down and take some steadying breaths was turning a corner and seeing more bodies. How many girls had this gang disposed of up here? And what truly made him shudder was that they had clearly got away with it for quite a long time, because some of those he could see had been picked clean by scavengers to little more than white bones.

  The gang had clearly been very crafty about this, not coming out here even as much as every month, if Bill’s estimations were close to accurate, but then had brought two or three of their now ‘redundant’ sex workers out here at a time. And then he saw the telltale flapping of khaki coloured cloth. That had to be Tufty’s body, and as Bill had suspected, he’d once been a big man. Bill didn’t dare get any closer to him, but even from several meters away, there was what looked very much like blood in the centre of the camouflage-patterned combat jacket’s back, and a slit-like tear in the centre of the dark patch.

  “Christ! Not another sword thrust!” he involuntarily gasped. God, Carol was going to love him for this if it came into her autopsy room! Another mystery she wouldn’t be able to shed any light on! Because what evidence was there going to be left after all these months which could tell her more than Damien’s fresh corpse had?

  What bothered him even more was that there was no sign of Vijay Bose’s body by the time he had completed his circuit of the quarry’s floor. What had happened to him? Why wasn’t he here with his henchman? On the one hand, Bill didn’t think that Bose would have been as easily lured to his death by a woman in the way that Damien and Justin had, nor as easy to frighten as even the dour but reclusive Thomas. But on the other, he wouldn’t necessarily have put up as much of a fight as Damien had, and now also as Tufty had presumably done.

  That intrigued him. Clearly the violence was reserved for those who actively fought back, and that spoke of someone with a lot of self-control. This wasn’t some maniac on the loose, mindlessly hacking away at those he or she thought of as needing punishment. If scaring them into a heart-attack worked, then this perpetrator had enough control to leave it at that, and that made them far more dangerous in Bill’s opinion. Someone who could lose it in the heat of the moment was someone who would eventually make a serious mistake. This person, however, was very unlikely to, and that made them doubly dangerous.

  So the next question was, if Bose hadn’t put up a fight and died as Tufty had done, where was he? Was his corpse propped up against some remote apple tree somewhere, just waiting to be discovered? Because that was a scenario that Bill found hard to believe. Bose had vanished in June, right at the height of the summer, and even with the vagaries of English summer weather, it defied belief that someone could remain undiscovered for more than four months out in the open beside an apple tree. Somewhere along the line, whoever owned those fruit trees would surely have checked on them in that time, even if they were on land not open to the general public?

  Yet that train of thought set Bill off on another tangent. Yes, the trees that Thomas, Damien, and Justin had been found under were used for cider apples. But weren’t many of those also crab apples? In which case, that might open up a whole other set of possibilities. Because crab apples also grew wild, not needing any tending by man to flourish as a native hedgerow species here in the UK. So might it be that Bose’s body was lurking up in a normal wood somewhere, not simply an orchard?

  That really made Bill groan out loud, because how on earth could anyone hope to comb every stray bit of woodland in search of a lone crab apple? On the other hand, there was little doubt in his mind that the Audi TT would turn out to be Bose’s, so unless he’d been driven off to another location altogether, then he would be somewhere within walking distance of here. And what made him doubt that Bose had been driven anywhere was precisely because that TT still sitting there in the quarry. Why not use that and really throw an investigation off the scent?

  The niggling thought about the cars was enough to get him finding a way across to the TT, which was closer to the edge of the quarry than the Hilux, and then pulling on a couple of the plastic gloves he invariably had with him – one of the banes of his job was getting called in when he was least expecting it and needing to deal with a crime scene, so he always had a packet of gloves in either his jacket or his rucksack. Approaching the passenger side, he very carefully tried the door handle, gripping it right at the outer edge so that he wouldn’t blur any finger prints where someone would normally reach out and grasp it. And as he’d expected, the door opened without any resistance, proving that it had been left unlocked. Even more revealing, there were the keys still in the vehicle. So why hadn’t Bose’s killer used his car?

  Standing staring at the untouched car interior, a thought crept into Bill’s mind that he found himself rather wishing hadn’t. When they kill outright, they kill with a sword, it went. And yet they almost seem to not know what to do with modern technology. So are we dealing with something that isn’t wholly human? Is that why you keep having these strange promptings? And if so, what in heaven’s name is it this time?

  Tufty

  May

  DRIVING ALONG THE NEAR deserted roads heading farther out into the countryside, Tufty Harbottle came to the conclusion that he was depressed. There was no other word for it. Depressed, plain and simple.

  He looked into the rear-view mirror at the three girls lying doped up and barely conscious on his back seat and shuddered. This wasn’t what he’d signed up for. Somewhere behind him that sneaky little scrote, Sanay Costa, was tailing him, otherwise Tufty would have been tempted to pull over somewhere and just let the girls out. But with Sanay only a minute or so away, he knew it would take him too long to even get them out of the cab of the Hilux, much less off into a field somewhere out of sight of the road. And Sanay would tell Vijay, there was no doubting that. In fact Tufty had a nasty suspicion that Vijay had stopped trusting him at all, and that was why Sanay had been sent with him again.

  He heaved a miserable sigh. He was a fighter, not a killer. And especially not a killer of girls like these, who couldn’t raise a finger to fight back. That poor Nigerian cow in the middle seat, for instance. Where had she come from? She wasn’t one of Vijay’s girls. This was doing the dirty work for that bloody uncle of Vijay and Sanay’s, the Estonian one. Vijay wanted to move up in the dark world of the gangs, and this was his test, of that Tufty was almost certain. And if it all went wrong, and he got caught, well the big men were safely distanced from it all.

  Disgust at them and himself filled Tufty until he could barely focus enough to keep driving. But what chance had he ever had? That stupid bitch of a mother of his, it was all her fault. Who gave a kid living on the worst council estate in t
he Walsall area a name like Gaylord, for fuck’s sake? And with him being ginger-haired and freckled too, it was as though he’d had a bloody great target painted on him from day one.

  Kids in the scabby primary school might have struggled to print their own names, even by the time they left for secondary school, but they knew what ‘gay’ meant. Or rather, they might not have known the details at five or six years old, but they’d been told by older brothers or sisters, or even parents, that it was someone who did ‘dirty things’ with other men, and that they were perverts. And with kids’ logic, they’d assumed that if Tufty was called Gay, then he must be gay. Political correctness didn’t exist on his home estate.

  That had put Tufty in more fights than he could recall even in the first couple of years at school, and there was a certain viewpoint that said that since he was a common factor in all of them, then he must have been part of the cause. The fact that he had been a victim back in those days had gained him little sympathy or help. So it was no wonder that he’d grown up to be a fighter. He wouldn’t have grown up at all if he hadn’t, because sooner or later he’d have ended up down on the ground getting a good kicking, and probably several.

  He sighed again, thinking back to his teenage years. The only way to stay even halfway safe had been to join a gang. By that time a whole succession of men had made their way through his mother’s scruffy two-bedroom flat, and she now spent her time shooting up, too busy getting numbed to her own miseries to be bothered about his. Yet his role in that gang and the ones which had followed it had always been to be the muscle. The one who could put down anyone who threatened the leaders; the one who could be sent to give a beating to anyone who stepped out of line. Only a beating, mind. Tufty was good at making it painful without crossing the line into permanent harm, because what the gangs wanted was someone who’d carry on paying, not a corpse, nor a cripple sent into some nursing home.

  And that was what he thought he’d signed up for with Vijay. He’d been quite proud to discover that this up-and-coming gang leader had approached his old crew, and had told them that Tufty would be working for him from now on. In his mind, that was like what happened with people in top jobs – they got poached by others who wanted their skill – and so for the first year or so he’d done his job with pride.

  But then something had changed with Vijay. Maybe it was Sanay coming to join them, bringing with him the link to the Estonian trafficker, but around that time, things had suddenly started to get much darker. Up until then, Vijay had taken on only local girls. Most of them were the kind of slags who’d been lifting their skirts for boys long before they’d left school, so there wasn’t much of a change in moving them over into full prostitution when at least they got paid for their efforts. Indeed to Tufty’s way of thinking, they were better off with him around. No customer got physical with them when he was on duty, and if he asked for a little sweetener on the side, well he’d always liked his sex straightforward, nothing kinky. And a couple of the working girls in Vijay’s stable had actually been fond of him because he was never rough with them.

  Yet within six months, most of the girls he’d known and liked had left, mostly thrown out by Vijay as past their best, or in the case of two of them, making a run for it after one horrendous night of ‘entertaining’ four of the Estonian’s so-called friends. As he drove on into the night now, Tufty wondered whether Vijay had somehow found out that he’d been behind helping Maria and Aoife get away and onto the ferry back over to Ireland, where their parents had come from and where they still had family to go to? If so, he’d taken his time over challenging him about it, which made Tufty think that maybe that secret was still safe.

  The new girls, though, worried him considerably. Some of them seemed ridiculously young even by the loose moral standards of their trade. And now most of them barely spoke any English at all.

  Vijay’s explanation of, “Safer for us, innit? They don’t speak no English, they can’t tell the filth on us, can they?” had never sat well with Tufty.

  Why would they need to go to the coppers if they’d chosen to work the streets? There was always movement in that community, with some women finding their way out of the trade – either by rehabilitation for the drugs they had to sell themselves to pay for, or by managing to get a proper job, though those were rarer – but unless someone was brutal with them, very few of the girls ever grassed on their pimps. So Vijay’s excuse had seemed weak to Tufty. Instead he feared that Vijay was starting to take on the girls the Estonian was smuggling in, with Vijay giving him a kick-back from what they earned.

  Quite why Vijay would want to split his profits with that one was beyond Tufty. Surely it was better to have your own dozen girls and keep everything except what you gave them, rather than share it with someone who’d then got a hold over you? But clearly Vijay didn’t see it like that. He was ambitious. He wanted to be a big gangland name. And the only way that you got there was by working your way up through the bigger ‘organisations’.

  Tufty sighed again. And that had been when he’d been told to find a disposal site. The first two girls he’d had to take out to the wilds and dump had died in one of the Estonian’s parties. That had been gruesome, because by the time he’d found somewhere, they’d been bloody ripe, and he’d had to have them bundled up in plastic sheets out in the open part of his truck. But at least they’d died by someone else’s hands.

  A few months later, with those bodies still not having been found, Vijay had come to him with the first of those they’d actually killed out there.

  “They’re trouble, bro’!” Vijay had said, Tufty noticing that his language had become even more gangsta of late. What was wrong with proper Black Country talk, eh? Why did Vijay feel he had to mimic some London Anglo-Asian crew, who in their turn were parroting what they’d picked up off American TV series and films?

  “How am they trouble?” Tufty had demanded, deliberately broadening his Black Country dialect. “They’m just wenches. What can they do?”

  Vijay had rolled his eyes, jiggling around like some rap singer from New York instead of a Walsall crook. “Tsk! You don’ get it, bro’. Ain’t for you to ask why. I say they go, they go, innit.”

  “Boss, we can’t just go around dumping girls out in the wilds,” Tufty had begun protesting, but had been cut off by Vijay with,

  “They in’t found them others, have they? So what you getting’ so jumpy for? An’ why do you care? They’s just trash. Trash what’s come to the end of its useful life. So we needs to dispose of it, innit? That’s what you do. You takes out the trash.”

  And at that moment, all of Tufty’s pride in his job had slid away. Oh, he’d taken the two girls out to the quarry, but at that point he’d already realised that he had very little choice. He himself had always carried a knife, but he’d been appalled to discover that Vijay had a gun, and a semi-automatic one at that. One burst from that thing, and he could be practically cut in two by the bullets, because from his time on the Territorial Army ranges, Tufty knew just what that gun could do – which was probably more than Vijay did. And he remembered what the army instructors had said, as well, about whatever weapon you carry being able to be turned on you. In a one to one fight, Tufty was confident of coming out on top, but he was enough of a realist to know that if he was set upon by several blokes, then the chances were that one of them might get their hands on his weapon. Well he’d probably survive a knifing, but a shooting was another matter, and so Tufty had always steered well clear of guns.

  However, Vijay clearly thought it made him more macho, and Tufty had seen him putting the bloody thing into his car as they’d been getting ready to leave. What he’d also not been happy about was having Sanay sitting up front with him.

  “He needs to know where to go if you in’t around, see?” Vijay had told him, and that had made Tufty start to think that it was time he got out of this game. Maybe it was time to think about going back-packing in Australia for a year, perhaps? Give it time for thing
s here to calm down, then come back but to somewhere totally different. And no big cities where one gang might report down the grapevine that he’d been seen again.

  That first time had been sickening for Tufty. Bloody Vijay wanted to try out the fucking gun!

  “Bleedin’ ‘ell, boss!” Tufty had protested. “The quarry’s out o’ the way, but there’s still farms around there! Y’ can’t go around blastin’ away at stuff out here in the quiet without somebody hearin’!”

  But it had been no good. After Tufty and Sanay had got the girls out of the Hilux, Vijay had started playing with them like a cat with mice. He told them to run, but they hardly understood a word, so he started shooting. At first it had been bursts at their feet, with Vijay and Sanay laughing hysterically as the bullets flung up sharp shards of stone, which cut the girls’ skin as they fled first one way and then another.

  Tufty hadn’t found it funny, though. It had been all he could do not to let his tears flow, excusing the need to rub his eyes as the dust getting in them, and with it being dark, luckily neither Vijay nor Sanay could tell the difference. And for his part, he’d been beyond relieved that it was only the weekend after Bonfire Night, and so hopefully any locals would just think the distant bangs were idiot kids still letting off fireworks even this long after November the fifth.

  Then Vijay had got bored, and with a callousness which shocked even Sanay, had sprayed the girls with bullets, before strolling back to his car. That was the first time Tufty ever saw Sanay looking deeply shocked and frightened. Vijay had crossed a line even with someone who licked arse as much as Sanay did. And though Vijay had told them to wait half an hour and then follow him, as soon as Vijay’s engine couldn’t be heard, Sanay had pleaded with him,