Unusual Remains

by Oliver Davies

  “Mr Goodwin.” I nodded to the farmer.

  “Thank you, detective.”

  “It was your daughter that helped, not so much me.”

  “There are policemen who don’t pay much mind to what children say,” he answered, pulling his flat cap back on and looking out over his field. “So, what’s the story?”

  “Hughes was killed in the woodlands, over there,” I pointed, “but it’s not exactly easy to pass through from the woods into this field from that side. Unless there’s something we can’t see?”

  “No. I built it up that way, planted enough things to keep dog walkers out.” He frowned suddenly. “How’d they get in then?”

  “We think they must have gone up through the woods and into your farmyard, coming down from that top gate.”

  He looked nauseous. “They went through my home?”

  “We think so,” Mills said softly.

  Goodwin squared his shoulders. “Well then, shall we take a look?” He started off, leading us up the field to the large metal gate closing the field off from the farm.

  “Do you lock this gate?” I asked, looking for a chain.

  “No. Nothing in there worth stealing, my lad.”

  “So, it would have been easy for them to get through.”

  “Aye, so it would. It was open anyway, I believe,” Mr Goodwin said, “for lugging the bonfire bits around.” He pushed the gate aside, and we walked into the stone yard, the floor littered with clumps of mud and hay.

  “How often do you come out to this gate?” I asked.

  “Not often. Not since, to be honest, haven’t much wanted to come to the field.”

  “Don’t blame you there,” Mills told the farmer, looking around.

  “Woodlands come in just over here,” Goodwin led us from the gate and followed the slight curve of the yard to where the trees thinned out, dotting over into his land. It was sparser here, much easier to get through.

  I walked over, leaving Mills to ask him a few more questions about the yard, heading to the first cluster of trees and ferns. I bent down, to around where I imagined a wheelbarrow would reach, examining the floor. Leaves had fallen, most of them wet and slippery now.

  I pushed them aside, running my fingers along the cold earth, feeling for grooves that a big wheel might leave behind. There was a slight dent, as the ground rose slightly over a tree root, like something had been pushed suddenly very hard to get over it. A few twigs had been snapped off, scattered around, the blunt edges poking out into the path, narrow enough for one man, really. Some of the ferns that grew inwards had their leaves matted down with mud, rolled into the ground.

  I took a few, careful steps further into the woodlands. They came up here, without being seen, when nobody was around, up the woods, through the yard, down into the field using the slope to get Hughes into the bonfire.

  “Sir!”

  Turning back to the yard, I saw Mills waving to me, his phone pressed against his ear. I strolled over, giving Goodwin an acknowledging dip of my chin. He nodded back and made his way to the large brick farmhouse just across the yard. Shame about those cameras, I thought, could save a lot of time and energy.

  Mills hung up as I reached him. “It was Smith, sir. She says we need to go and meet her.”

  “Is she alright?” I asked as we jogged back to the car,

  “She says she found it, sir.”

  Twenty-Four

  Thatcher

  We drove out to the hotel, Smith waiting in the drive. I pulled over, crunching over the gravel and she led us out across the large garden, the vines that crawled up the hotel walls an array of orange and scarlet. Fallen leaves were dispersed over the grass, I kicked a few as we walked, Smith talking to us over her shoulder.

  “Spoke to maintenance, sir, like you said. They have a few places in the grounds used by the landscapers and gardeners, but they’re very highly protected. Usually not even locked.”

  A common trend around here it seemed. Obviously, nobody in the village was the sort to go stealing from their neighbours.

  “The gardener brought me out here.” Smith led us to a ram shackled metal shed, nestled in the surrounding trees of the hotel grounds, the door casually left open.

  “Does he go in much?”

  “No. Apparently, this place is more used for storage now, old tools and equipment just sort of gets dumped. He said that last time he came in was the end of summer, to throw in some old secateurs.”

  “What about new equipment?”

  Smith shrugged. “Didn’t say, sir.”

  “Probably kept somewhere a little more secure,” Mills muttered, opening the door wider.

  “Any reports on anything going missing? A sledgehammer, perhaps?”

  “Not his knowledge, sir,” Smith reported, “but he’s gone to do a quick inventory, just in case.”

  I walked into the shed, narrowly avoiding a very large spider web that stretched from one wall to the other. The wheelbarrow she had called us here for sat in the corner, looking very sad and neglected. It was an ancient thing, rusty and squeaky, and the only thing in there not covered in a thin trail of dust and webs.

  It had been moved.

  I took out my phone, dialling Dr Crowe as I went closer to the wheelbarrow, looking inside. Dried flakes, of what could be paint or rust, or blood, dusted the base.

  “Thatcher?” she answered.

  “Would you be able to check if that metal sample you collected came from a certain item?”

  “The wheelbarrow?”

  “I think so.”

  “Should be able to.”

  “Good. I’m at the hotel grounds, and there’s a wheelbarrow here that I think might be the one we’re after. Bring a team down and a few more uniforms, check it out.”

  “Will do. Hang on, Thatcher.” Her voice became muffled as she spoke to someone else. “Max?” she came back a moment later.

  “Still here.”

  “That was Sharp,” Lena said as she started clattering around her lab. “She wants you and Mills back at the station pronto.”

  “Say why?”

  “Wasco. He managed to get into that soggy laptop of yours.”

  “He did, eh?” I left the shed, waving to Mills.

  “But she wants you to wait until we get there. Doesn’t want Smith standing guard on her own.”

  “Better get a wriggle on then, Lena, hadn’t you?”

  “Don’t push me, Thatcher. I can change my mind about which DIs I like and don’t like.” She chuckled. “You don’t want to be the bottom of my list; you have no idea how long I can take with my reports.”

  “Please hurry, Dr Crowe.”

  “On my way. She hasn’t touched it, has she?”

  “What?”

  “Smith. She hasn’t touched the wheelbarrow?”

  I took the phone away from my ear. “Smith, did you touch the wheelbarrow?”

  “No, sir,” Smith replied.

  I pulled up the phone again. “No, she didn’t.”

  “Good. Shouldn’t go around touching rusty things like that without gloves.”

  “Right. I’m going to hang up now, Crowe. Tell Sharp that we’ll be there soon.”

  “Right-o.”

  I hung up, sliding my phone into my pocket. “Dr Crowe’s on her way. Smith, run up to the hotel, tell them that there’s going to be some more of us on sight, and that we might need to commandeer that wheelbarrow for evidence.”

  She nodded and immediately strode back up the drive.

  “Sharp wants us back as soon the team is here,” I told Mills. “Wasco’s into the laptop.”

  “He is? Good man.”

  “Not sure how much he managed to scrape together,” I cautioned, “but for the sake of getting another scolding from Sharp, I hope it’s enough.”

  “So long as it’s enough to make a full picture,” Mills said, “I think we’ll manage.”

  “Fingers crossed.”

  As soon as the team arrived with Cro
we dressed in her gleaming white gear, Mills and I high-tailed it back to the station. We jogged up the stairs to Sharp’s office where Wasco waited, the laptop in front of him.

  I headed in, Mills behind me, before kicking the door shut. “Well?”

  “Most of the system was shot, unsurprisingly,” Wasco began as he looked up. “It’s not exactly functioning as normal, but we managed to get access to the hard drive. Some of the folders are gone, but we salvaged a few.” He held up another stack of sheets. “Printed them off for you, since I know how much you love paperwork.”

  “Very kind of you, Wasco.”

  “I know.”

  “What are they?” I asked, nodding to the sheets.

  “Business contracts mostly and what looks like research.” Wasco shook his head. “None of it is very organised, I’m afraid, there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to any of it. A few personal documents, too, taxes I think mostly. There’s some more we might be able to get, but for now, this is all.”

  Mills took the sheets, looking at the sheer size of the stack with an already exhausted expression.

  “You boys are in for some fun reading today,” Sharp commented. “How did it go in the village by the way? Our farmer seemed pretty chuffed to leave.”

  “He certainly did, who could blame him?” I reported. “Smith found what we think might be the barrow they used to move Hughes’s body, one that belongs to the hotel.”

  “Trundled in a wheelbarrow to a bonfire,” Wasco muttered. “What a sad way to go.”

  “Crowe’s there?” Sharp queried.

  “Looking for a match with the sample that she found on Hughes’s body.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “We checked the field, access into and from it. We think they took Hughes up through the woodland and then through Goodwin’s yard, into his field from the upper gate.”

  Sharp nodded. “Which also helps us to understand why they left the hammer there. If they’d been in the area before, they’d know which of his barns he keeps open.”

  “And why nobody saw them there.” That was a steadily lifting weight, the sheer invisibility of all this. All a bit cloak and dagger, really.

  “Them,” Sharp repeated slowly. She gave a nod to Wasco, who scooped up the laptop and scuttled out of the room. When the door closed, she sat down, looking up at us. “You keep saying them.”

  “Well, we don’t know if we’re looking for a man or a woman, ma’am,” Mills offered diplomatically.

  “You think you’re looking for one of each, don’t you?” she asked, her stern eyes not moving from my face. “Them, as in plural.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Cynthia Renner and Kerry Johnson?”

  “Everything seems to lead there, ma’am, or at least allude to them. There are too many coincidences for me to think otherwise.”

  She studied me a moment longer. “Get to work,” she indicated the stack of papers, “find something in there that you can use to make an arrest.”

  “Ma’am,” Mils and I both nodded in unison.

  “And make a note of all of these coincidences,” she added, “I want to see what you see.”

  “Right away.”

  She dismissed us, and we headed into the office. “Start on those notes for her, Mills,” I ordered, shrugging off my coat, “I’ll get us some coffee and something to eat.”

  “Sir.”

  “It’s going to be another long day.”

  I very quickly realized that I could not understand business jargon. And Samuel Hughes, it seemed, used a lot of it. I kept my laptop open, constantly looking up words and terms that seemed even more confusing when explained. If I ever opened the coaching house back up, I’d need to find someone who understood this madness.

  To make matters worse, Wasco had not been understating the disorder in which these files had been retrieved. The documents weren’t in any kind of order at all, and we were slowly grouping them into piles. Documents from one deal, contracts from another, all to be sorted by date and place. Jeannie would have enjoyed this. Maybe I’d let her organise the desk in my living room to make her feel better. She’d been dying to get a hand on it since the first time I ever brought her home with me.

  Mills finished off his list of notes for Sharp, up to and including the cricket ball and Ridolfi book. I’d have to do some more history if he was sticking around, didn’t want to be caught short not knowing my plots to overthrow the monarchy. My own fault, I was always better at geography at school. Couldn’t tell you much about kings and prime ministers, but oxbow lakes? I was your guy.

  “Sir,” Mills looked over at me from the growing mess on his desk, “I might have something here. I think this from his deal here with Mrs Babbage.”

  I gladly let him disturb me from my thoughts. “Show me.”

  He wheeled himself around on his chair, sliding the sheet onto my desk, and wheeled himself back again, the whole time balancing his third cup of coffee in his other hand.

  It looked a little bit like a real estate listing, the plot of land Mrs Babbage was selling. Its dimensions, the soil quality, the stability, building regulations, all the usual criteria, I imagined when someone was buying land.

  “Anything else from the deal?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  I nodded, placing the document aside. Of the things Wasco managed to save, I really hoped there was something on here for us, rather than a statistical analysis of the water quality in Kent.

  It seemed that Samuel Hughes, not unlike Jeannie, did his research. He had documents of the history of places he bought in, the population of local areas, the geography and landmarks. There were more care and attention to detail here than I imagined, more so than Ms Renner had led us to believe, and it was his. His handwriting pitched up on a few of them, photographed or scanned, barely legible writing that was a far cry from what we had seen of Ms Renner’s.

  Scrawled notes that were hard to decipher, random comments about the local pubs or the attitude of the locals. Even one about the average rainfall of a certain plot. They were most likely to be more for him than anyone else, and these contracts were not the finished documents, not by a long shot. They were drafted to be redone and amended, several times over the same copy appeared, each time with some new comment or detail added in.

  It would have been Ms Renner, I believed, who made sense of all of these ramblings, who put them into understandable terms for the clients and typed up each new copy. I wondered, vaguely, if Mrs Babbage had seen any version of hers, if it had been edited or altered after he went to visit her. Maybe she had seen some brief insight into what he might have been planning. Or, and which may be the more likely circumstance, nobody but Samuel Hughes knew what he was doing until it was done.

  We occasionally stopped, stretching out from our desks, replenishing drinks and fetching food. At one point, Mills sighed, pushed himself away from his desk and paced around the station for ten minutes. He came with a cup of tea and looked down at his desk, still standing.

  “I saw Wasco getting tea,” he muttered.

  “Anything?”

  “Not yet, sir. Says there are a few more things he can get from the drive but them might be a bit damaged. We’ll have to do some filling in the gaps.”

  “We’ve been doing a lot of filling in the gaps,” I replied, stretching my arms over my head, wincing as my back protested painfully.

  Mills gave a dry chuckle, sitting back down at his desk, running his hand through his hair, mussing up the usually very tidy do. I turned back to the sheets I flicked through, trying to find which deal they belonged to, and paused on one of them.

  “Look here,” I said.

  Mills got up and walked round to my desk. “Is that a plan?”

  “Must be,” I said, reaching for the previous sheet he had found. “Dimensions match the plot.”

  “The field on the other side,” he pointed to the faint name, “that’s it. Mrs Babbage’s land.”

  The p
lot had been divided up into equal chunks, small lanes connecting them.

  “Looks a bit like…” Mills began.

  “Allotments,” I finished. “He wanted to build public allotments?”

  “Would a village like that had much call for allotments?”

  “Some of the small places won’t have very good gardens,” I told him, “and there’s always a call for them. People like to grow their own vegetables these days. It’s coming back into fashion if you can believe it.”

  “Not a fan of growing your own vegetables?”

  “My grandfather used to. Grew tomatoes in his greenhouse. That’s another thing,” I added, “people might use the allotments for greenhouses.”

  “A nice idea.”

  “Not his usual style,” I muttered. “I mean, look at it. It’s nothing revolutionary, nothing modern, or shiny and new. He wouldn’t be making much profit off of this, barely any.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Must have had another reason.”

  “Goes with your theory, that does, sir,” Mills said, sitting back at his desk, “of Ms Renner not wanting to lose out on her income. If he was starting on projects like those, that would be inevitable. Unless it was a one-off.”

  “I don’t think it was,” I answered, diving through more sheets. “He’d done a lot of research into it, similar sites across the country look, in Bristol and Manchester.”

  “His interest in nature reserves?” Mills recalled sharpy.

  “Hughes must have been branching out into a more eco-friendly world of business.”

  “You’d think that if anything, that would make him more popular.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you?”

  “I wonder if Mrs Babbage knew that was what he had in mind for the site.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Getting a bit late to head out there now, sir.”

  I looked out the window. It was. Already the sky was darkening, the glowing light of sunset dawning from between buildings. Night came early at this time of year.

  “Tomorrow,” I decided. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Would you like company?” Mills asked.

  “Goes against my better self-preservation instincts against Sharp’s wrath, but no. If Wasco has more for us to look through, we need to be on top of that.”