Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  But what was that?

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed involuntarily, because there, lying closer to the track was Bose’s body. He was well off the road, and once again he was propped up against a tree, but this time he was much closer to the trickle of a stream which had carved its route down to here than he had been back up at the gully top. Far enough back from the track to still have been unnoticed unless someone got out and walked along here, it was just about conceivable that he would have remained unspotted, even by walkers. And then Bill had to shake himself and remind himself that no rambler could possibly have been along here in quite some time, because otherwise the quarry’s grim secret would have been headline news long ago.

  “Hold it together, Scathlock!” he told himself firmly. “Remember, you’ve only just discovered all of this. Nobody’s going to expect you to have any explanation for what’s happened here.”

  And then he saw them – two women standing far back in the trees up the slope, hardly visible at all through the tangle of branches.

  Cautiously he raised a hand and waved at them. They waved back, but then turned their backs and seemed to vanish from view. Not simply move behind a tree, but wink out of existence.

  “Bloody hell!” he muttered, even more shaken. Had the warrior returned and told them of what was to come? And had Bill’s questions about the apple trees made them realise that it would not be good for another body to be found under one? Or was it that the trees themselves were something to do with those ‘ways’ the warrior had talked about? In which case, whatever these ‘people’ were, they didn’t want a whole herd of other humans grubbing around right on what amounted to their doorstep?

  You’re going to have to try and speak with them again, Bill told himself firmly. We can’t keep on having these bodies turning up across the countryside like dead flies on a car windscreen! I don’t even want to think what might happen if some chief constable decides to send an armed response unit out to a site like this if it gets found while it’s still fresh. And sooner or later, they’re going to be unlucky enough that someone does turn up right at the wrong time, even if it’s only some poor farmer out early to get some ploughing done. It’s up to me to sort the real mess out here, and compared to that, even Carol’s got an easier job!

  Chapter 17

  IT TOOK ANOTHER HOUR before his phone rang, but then after that Bill was kept busy as one group after another contacted him for directions as to how to get to the quarry. First on the scene were Likesh Setty and his DS, who must have blue-lighted it the whole way from Walsall to get there so fast. Luckily he had already pulled the Subaru down to the rough pull-in and was able to flag Setty’s car down and direct them in to behind him.

  Likesh Setty turned out to be a slightly-built, dapper first-generation UK Indian, with scarcely a trace of any Indian accent, but as he got out of the car, Bill thought he looked a little pale.

  “Hello, I’m Bill Scathlock,” he introduced himself. “Are you okay?”

  Setty gave a small wan smile. “DS Chaudry, here, spends his spare time rallying,” he said in the tones of one who’d been in fear of his life for the entire journey.

  “Don’t worry, gov,” DS Chaudry said with beaming cheerfulness, “I wasn’t going to lose you.” He held out his hand to Bill. “DS Harbir Chaudry.”

  “DI Bill Scathlock,” Bill responded, unable to keep from smiling back at the huge DS, who towered even over him, and exuded an air of boundless enthusiasm. “You clearly didn’t have any trouble finding this place.”

  “My dad used to bring me rallying up around Craven Arms,” Chaudry responded with a proper broad Black Country accent, indicating that he was at least a second-generation resident. “Loved it up there! Is that your Subaru?”

  “It is,” Bill confirmed with pride, seeing how Chaudry was looking at it with envy.

  “Great cars! We were on a rally back when the Land Rover Discovery had just come out. Despite how they were marketed, they weren’t the best vehicles for going off-road up in the forest with. Didn’t we ever laugh when we had to send the Subarus in to pull them out of ditches!” And he grinned broadly at the memory.

  “Well you nearly had to stop for me to lose my breakfast in a ditch,” Setty said darkly. “So come on then, Bill, what have you found? Your governor passed on the photos you sent her. Are you seriously saying that there might be more bodies?”

  Bill’s good humour dropped away. “Hmph! Well there’s one more out here for a start off. You’ll know better than me, but isn’t that likely to be Vijay Bose?” and he pointed into the trees to the body.

  Setty jumped as if he’d had an electric shock, then peered harder at the slumped remains. However, it was Chaudry who immediately said,

  “That’s him, alright. He wore that jacket and those stupid shoes all the time. Reckon he thought they made him look cool, you know, like some New York gang leader.”

  Bill beckoned them towards the quarry itself. “We’ll have to leave him for forensics to deal with, but even without going far into the quarry, you can see what I found.” He led them up and around to the opening.

  “How many of them are there?” Setty asked, aghast as he took in the women as well as Tufty’s body.

  “Quite a few, I’d say, gov’,” Chaudry estimated. “DI Scathlock’s right, look at the way those magpies are still lurking around. There must be something up the back there that’s attracting them.”

  Bill nodded. “Knowing what thieves those birds are, I suspect that they might be after whatever sparkly bits of earrings or piercings are left. The bodies themselves must be long past them wanting to eat by now.”

  “Why do you say that?” Setty demanded, but before Bill had to answer, Chaudry said,

  “Well it’s obvious, isn’t it, gov? We’ve already confirmed that it’s been months since Bose and Harbottle were seen, so if those are their bodies left lying here, then it’s pretty unlikely that anyone else has been up here since then. And crows and magpies don’t eat road-kill that’s that old. Even a city kid like me knows that!”

  Setty threw him a dark glare, but Bill was warming to Chaudry every time he spoke. He was beginning to have a suspicion that if Setty had a good clear-up rate, then most of that was probably down to his sharp DS, and he’d never been a fan of the kind of senior officer who claimed all the glory for other people’s work. He also didn’t like the way that Setty kept looking at his watch, as if already working out how long it was going to take him to get back.

  “Are you in a hurry, DI Setty?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking, now not quite able to be on such chummy terms as on the phone. Then saw Chaudry turn away to hid his smile. So this happened a lot, did it?

  “No, no,” Setty blustered. “It’s just that my governor sent us over to make sure that it gets established that this is our case. After all, we were the ones who put out the alert out on Bose and Harbottle, and they tie in to our local organised crime.”

  So that was it – an ambitious superior wanting to claim the solving of several murders for his or her division. Then Bill mentally added on the revision that Likesh Setty sounded as though he wanted the credit too. He must check with Ray at some point and find out if Chaudry had been Setty’s DS for long, because there was something niggling in the back of his mind about Ray saying that he also had been his DS for quite a while. In which case, maybe Setty was smarting at the promotion of one very able DS, and dreading the loss of another one with Chaudry, especially if he was leaning on their abilities rather harder than he ought to be?

  “We’ll just hang on until the locals get here,” Setty was saying, “and then once that’s sorted we’ll be off. It’s not as though we can do much until the forensics and pathologists have done their stuff.”

  Bill could see that Chaudry, on the other hand was dying to stay and see this through, which made him say,

  “Why don’t you leave DS Chaudry with me? You can get back to Walsall, but he can answer any questions the technical guys might h
ave for you.”

  The look of gratitude Chaudry shot him was proof that he’d hit the mark there, and sure enough, as soon as the unfortunate DS Jane Stennett had turned up – more than a little shocked at finding herself face to face with Bill, and with multiple bodies again – Setty was staking his claim in vigorous style, but then vanished down the hill at speed.

  “Duw, I’m glad he’s not my DI,” Jane said with audible disgust once he’d gone. “I don’t think I’d last long with him taking that attitude.”

  “What’s your DI like?” Chaudry asked amiably.

  “Dafydd Parry? Oh he’s a great bloke!” Jane replied without hesitation. “He’ll be along as soon as he can. He’s got farther to come than me, see? But he won’t be clearing off in a hurry. Not with a case like this on our doorstep.”

  “Why don’t you bring Jane up to speed on the case, Harbir?” Bill suggested as his phone rang again.

  This time it was the forensic team, and one look at the site and the number of bodies had them radioing in for more help. This was going to be a very big job requiring all the reinforcements they could get. And so it wasn’t many hours later that Bill saw Carol’s familiar van winding its way up the track.

  “Good grief, Bill,” she greeted him with. “Can’t you stay out of trouble for five minutes? I thought you were supposed to be on holiday?”

  “I was,” he declared loudly for the benefit of the others, but then said much more softly, “You wouldn’t believe the game I’ve had with this, because this was another place I was guided to.”

  She stopped and stared at him, but kept her wits about her enough to keep her voice low as she said, “Nooo! Really?”

  “Really! The thing is, Carol, I got told that the body by the Hilux – who we have every reason to think is Tufty Harbottle – was killed not by the sword-wielder who killed Damien, but by Vijay Bose. He’s the body down the track. You’ll be familiar with the way he died, even if you can’t place the means, but I’ll tell you more about that in private. It’s nothing you could put onto any post-mortem, anyway.”

  “Apple tree?” she asked quietly.

  “Originally, yes. He’s not where I first found him, though. That was further up the hill.”

  “Could you take me there?”

  “I could, but I don’t think I should. Let’s just say that there are some ‘people’ who are a bit protective about that site, and since it’s not going to make a ha’porth of difference to what you can write on your report, I’d really rather not.”

  By now they had reached the point where the forensic team had begun laying out the metal ‘stepping stones’ which everyone would use from now on to get in and out of the site to prevent contamination.

  “I’ll let you get suited up,” Bill said, “but I’m going to hang on to give DS Chaudry some support until the local DI gets here. If I’ve read his own DI right, there’s going to be nothing like the amicable settling of who has what claims to this as there was with Justin Pickersleigh’s dump site. By the sound of it, there’s an ambitious DCI at the very least involved, and they and DI Setty appear to want to get as much departmental political credit out of this as possible.”

  Carol grimaced. “Oh great, I hate it when I get caught up in the inter-departmental bun fights. Give me the dead any day, they’re far less trouble.”

  By the end of the day she was beginning to revise that statement. While the morgue vans had come to cart the first set of remains away, Carol had declared herself too shattered to make the drive back to Worcester safely, especially since she would need to go back in the morning, and so she and Harbir Chaudry were joining Bill at the pub for the night. Harbir surprised Bill by gratefully accepting the offer of a pint of Shropshire Lad, then admitting that he wasn’t that strict in his faith, although his father would be horrified if he could see him right now.

  “I am veggie, though,” he admitted, as he ordered the vegetarian lasagne with an extra portion of chips on the side, “but that’s as much because I just don’t like the taste of most of the meat that gets sold close to home. I like fish, though.”

  “Well I’m going to go for the homemade quiche,” Carol decided. “If I eat anything heavy when I’m this tired I’ll be crippled with indigestion all night, so the salad with it will suit me nicely.”

  Bill nodded but decided, “I like the sound of the local lamb casserole. I’m practically fading away for want of food!”

  Carol sniffed. “How you aren’t the size of a house is beyond me. If ate even half of that I’d be huge!”

  “Lean-burn engine, me,” Bill responded with a chuckle, “though I’ll admit that at home I’d have just boiled potatoes, not chips.”

  “Me too,” agreed Harbir, then patted his waistline. “Got to keep trim for the cricket team!”

  Discovering that Harbir was another sportsman like himself meant that Bill could keep the conversation amicably going all through the meal, and so it was only after the young DS excused himself on the grounds of going to ring his girlfriend that the conversation turned once more to the crimes. Keeping it to the point, Bill took Carol through his experiences of the last few days, glad to be able to talk things over with a friend who wouldn’t think him totally barmy.

  “Honestly, Carol,” he finished, “I was sweating buckets over how I was going to call this one in. You’ve no idea how relieved I was to have Setty ask me to check on the cars – good luck doesn’t even come close to it!”

  “You don’t seem very taken with him,” she said curiously.

  Bill nodded. “I know. I’m actually quite surprised about that myself. I was expecting someone very like Ray in attitude, but it really pissed me off the way he kept looking at his watch. And there was no curiosity about how someone like Bose could even find a place like that, or where all those bodies had come from – I mean in the sense of ‘bloody hell, how did we miss that many girls going missing.’ I know he’s got a fair idea that it’s the Estonian behind this, but he was acting liked he’d now ticked the right boxes and it could all be left to you guys from here on in.

  “It was young Chaudry who stayed and kept asking all of the right questions. I really like him, and I think it would be a shame if he gets held back by being saddled with Setty as a DI, because for no other reason than the twitching of my cat’s whiskers, I’ve got the distinct impression that Setty is a glory hunter. He’ll do all the right things to end up at the front of some news conference, and I’m sure he’s more at home in the city streets – which might account for his attitude out here – but he still should have been a lot more curious about how many other bodies there are in that quarry.”

  At that, Carol winced and took another large slurp of her red wine. “Yes, we haven’t gone all the way to the back yet. How many more did you think you saw?”

  “Hard to tell. I’d say that someone other than Tufty and Bose ...or perhaps that might be more like just Bose on his own, came and dumped more women there. The way the farthest group I saw seemed to be all over one another, rather looked to me as though they were already dead when they were dumped. Not like the ones by the rocks in front of the cars. I didn’t need you to tell me that those poor souls had been lined up and shot like a firing squad.”

  Carol pulled a face. “Yes, that was grim. And if that miserable little shit Bose was still alive, I’d be able to match the bullets from some gun he undoubtedly had. We found those okay.” She took another long drink of her wine.

  “What’s the matter with men like him?” she then asked rhetorically. “How can they look at another human being and treat them like cattle for the slaughter? Honestly, Bill, Sylvia and I have practically become vegetarian these days because we can’t stand how animals are kept, and yet there are men like Bose who seem immune to even the most basic sense of compassion for anyone or anything. I can’t say that I’ll feel a thing for him when he comes across my autopsy table.”

  “Me neither,” agreed Bill. “I’ll be very interested to know whether your resu
lts confirm that Tufty was killed by Bose, though. That was a real revelation by that warrior bloke.”

  “You believed him?”

  “Oddly, yes I did. And it’s just a feeling I’ve got, Carol, but I think they were almost surprised that those other men died when they showed them their crimes. I may be hopelessly wrong, but I’m beginning to think that they thought that what they were doing was teaching them a lesson, not killing them.”

  “Fascinating. So you think that the other deaths were accidental?”

  “Not necessarily accidental, but more incidental, if you get my drift. If whoever they are were fully human, I certainly think we’d be talking about manslaughter not murder. I have no reservations about that. I don’t think for one moment they set out to deliberately kill Justin Pickersleigh, Sanay Costa or Thomas Mulligrew. The warrior seemed almost perplexed that they would have died quite so easily when their victims had lingered for so long.”

  Carol nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I can get that. Even with all of my years of experience, it still surprises me at times what one human being can withstand, and yet only a fraction of the same violence kills another – and it often has nothing to do with health or bodily strength.”

  She paused and thought, then asking, “So what are you going to do about it? Or rather, what can you do about it? Presumably you can’t really leave these whatever-they-ares thinking that this can go on regardless?”

  “No. I have to warn them off. And yet I can’t help but think that this has been one horrible set of coincidences. You and I know how rare it is to find multiple dumped bodies on the scale of what we’ve seen in the quarry. That’s a real one-off. So it’s unfortunate that these ‘folk’ have been subjected to so many deaths right on their doorstep, and from just one gang. But for Justin Pickersleigh to have chosen a place quite so close to where Damien Farrah had been coming to brutalise his women, and close to where Thomas Mulligrew had kept his daughters virtual prisoners ...well that really is just a horrible coincidence. In a big city, such a clustering wouldn’t have been seen as quite so weird, because the few miles distance between each crime would have taken them into another district of the city.”