by Faith Martin
‘Is it? Oh damn, sorry about that. You coppers then?’
Patrick smiled briefly and flashed his ID. ‘Would you like to step out of the vehicle, sir?’
The older man obliged at once, and followed Mulligan around to the rear of the truck, leaving Davis free to give the cab a quick once-over.
Nothing.
Casually, Ian Davis strolled around to join the two men at the back, who were earnestly discussing the number plate. Standing on tiptoe to see over the flatbed truck, his eyes darted everywhere. Tarpaulin covered what were obviously large round paint cans. There were several wooden ladders laid across it — pressing the tarpaulin down just enough to show that there was no possibility of anyone hiding underneath it. Just to be sure however, Davis passed behind his partner and the old house-painter and went around to the other side of the truck. There he reached in and lifted one corner of the tarpaulin and took a quick peek underneath.
The smell of paint wafted out at him. But nothing stared back at him apart from paint cans, rollers, trays and brushes.
He went back to join Patrick, giving a quick shake of his head.
‘Well, sir, be sure to wash off the mud when you get back. It’s an offence to drive a vehicle without a properly displayed number plate.’
‘Sorry again. And yes, I’ll be sure to do that, Constable.’
Patrick gave him a hard look. ‘I’ll just take down the details from your driving licence, sir.’
The old man, far from looking worried, merely nodded, and went back to the cab and reached into the glove compartment. Both coppers momentarily stiffened, then relaxed when his hand emerged with nothing more frightening in it than a plastic envelope encasing his driving licence.
Ponderously, Mulligan wrote the details down.
* * *
Many miles away, in a field in Wales, a cadaver dog called Millie, a beautiful black, glossy cocker spaniel, set off with her owner into a small copse, not far from the caravan where Gary Firth had gone missing.
It didn’t take Millie long to sit down and bark sharply once, her indication to her handler that she wanted a treat for locating the smell her master seemed to like.
Her handler, PC Geoff Walker, put a hand to the radio attached to his shoulder and bent his head to talk into it.
* * *
Back in the car, Mulligan and Davis trailed the dirty truck back to a B road, and watched it drive away.
‘Guv, nothing,’ Davis was reporting in on the radio. ‘The driver was not Myers. I repeat, he was not Myers.’
DCI Evans’s sigh could clearly be heard over the radio. ‘The vehicle was empty?’
‘Yes, guv. I got a good look in the back. As you know, I couldn’t officially ask to search it, but I had a good view of it. There were paint pots and the usual paraphernalia that goes with them and a couple of ladders, all covered by a tarpaulin.’
‘Tarpaulin?’ Evans repeated sharply.
‘Don’t worry, guv, I got a peek underneath it. Nobody was hiding there, I’ll swear to that in court.’
Back in HQ Evans mumbled under his breath that the young PC might have to, then gave him the order to return to the Myers house.
Next he contacted the two remaining constables still at the residence. ‘OK, I want you to go in. Make sure Myers is there,’ he informed them curtly. ‘Use any excuse you like — you smelt gas, a neighbour reported a prowler, whatever. Just make sure you see and speak to Myers. Then radio back at once.’
* * *
In Wales, a team of grim-faced PCs with shovels stood back as the first waft of decomposing flesh hit them.
Two, more hardy than the others, got down on their knees and began to scrape away the soil carefully. They found the first hints of material a few minutes later. Then they unearthed a trainer — with a foot still inside it.
‘OK, that’ll do.’ The sergeant in charge pulled them back. ‘We’ve seen enough to know it’s not a dead dog or sheep. Now we’ll have to get the experts in. Cordon off the area. I’ll go and report in.’
* * *
Back in Kidlington, DCI Evans waited impatiently. He glanced at his watch.
What the hell was keeping those two? They should have reported back by now. How long did it take for them to check that one man was still in his house?
* * *
In a narrow country lane, a dirty red truck pulled on to the grass verge near a five-barred gate and an old man dressed in painter’s overalls turned off the engine. Somewhat stiffly, he climbed out and walked round to the side of the truck and glanced about him. The lane was single-track and deserted.
He listened for a few moments, then nodded, and banged on the side panel of the truck. A moment later, he heard a snick, then stood aside as the dirty panel dropped down, and a man’s head emerged.
He watched, without offering to help, as Clive Myers wriggled out and, somewhat awkwardly, got one foot down on the ground, then hopped and jiggled to get the other one out.
Wordlessly, the old man looked up and down the road on lookout, whilst Clive Myers jogged on the spot and rotated his shoulders, stretching and staving off imminent cramp. Then he reached into the cavity in the truck and drew out a long, narrow canvas bag. This he put down beside him, then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a fat white envelope. This he handed over to the old man.
‘Cheers, Clive.’ The old man slammed the panel back in place.
‘Thanks, Dave.’
The old man gave a brief, somewhat ironic salute, climbed back into the cabin and pulled away.
Clive Myers waited until the truck was completely out of sight before climbing the gate and making his way around the edge of the farmer’s field.
A mile or so further on, down a rutted stone track, he came across an empty barn. In the barn, hidden behind rusty doors, he climbed into a plain white van and carefully drove down the stone track.
He had places to go and things to do.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PC Ray Porter knocked on the door to Clive Myers’s house and glanced across at the man beside him. Porter, a slightly built man with thinning fair hair, had been drafted into this inquiry from DCI Evans’s patch, and didn’t know the Thames Valley man who’d been assigned to this watch with him all that well.
His partner was a large, quiet man, in his early forties, Ray supposed, with a distinct Oxford country burr to his voice and a thick mane of prematurely grey hair. His name was Mervyn Jones.
‘Merv, can you hear anything?’ Porter asked nervously, aware that, back at HQ, his guv’nor would be waiting for their report.
‘Nope,’ DS Jones said laconically.
‘Shall I try the door?’
‘Might as well. The guv said to make sure Myers is definitely here,’ Jones pointed out.
Ray nodded and turned the silver handle on the outer porch door. It turned easily, and allowed Porter to step in and knock on the inner door. There wasn’t room for both of them in there, especially when one of them was built like Jones, so the older man stayed on the step.
‘Mr Myers, sir, it’s the police,’ Ray shouted politely. ‘Can we come in?’
Both men listened closely. It had been apparent for some time that the visit by the so-called house painter just a short while ago had been the prelude to some kind of funny business and both men now felt distinctly edgy.
‘Mr Myers. We need to check that you’re all right. A neighbour of yours reported the smell of gas,’ Ray lied, bending down to shout through the letterbox.
Both men waited again. Still, only an unbroken silence met all their efforts.
‘Try the door,’ Jones ordered brusquely.
Ray nodded and tried the small metal button that indicated a Yale lock. Somewhat to his surprise, the small knob twisted easily under his hand, and the door gave a slight sighing snick as it opened. Ray glanced across at his partner with a raised, enquiring eyebrow, and was glad for once of Jones’s comforting bulk.
Everyone on the case knew that Mye
rs was ex-army, and handy not only with a rifle, but could probably kill with his bare hands as well.
Jones gave a brief nod. ‘Let’s go in, then,’ he prompted gruffly. Since he was in front, Ray went in first, somewhat reluctantly, pushing the door wider open, and looking around warily before stepping into a tiny, neat hallway. He didn’t know that the door had been rigged with an almost invisible fishing wire that tautened at the inward movement of the door. But even as the two policemen stood there, looking around, the tug on the line travelled along the base of the skirting board where Myers had rigged it, and all the way through the open door to the lounge. There it had been attached to a small device, connected to a switch that now turned, and set off the second phase of the mechanism.
* * *
In Wales, a forensics officer with a degree in medicine from Oxford, biochemistry from Durham and forensic anthropology from a redbrick university on the east coast of the United States of America, knelt down in the dirt and peered almost comically into the soil.
With his qualifications he could, of course, have been teaching anywhere in the world. But this was what he liked doing — so much so that he was willing to take a substantial cut in salary in order to indulge himself.
He was a whippet-lean man with a rather pointed head and a chin capped by a little pointed goatee beard to match. Nobody much liked him, but everyone respected him, and when the top brass back in Cardiff had been apprised of the situation, it had been Dr Norman Fielding who had been promptly dispatched to the scene.
Apart from his undoubted expertise, the man was also a demon in court, and was universally hated by all barristers, as he’d been known to tie them in knots. Furthermore, he could out-sarcasm the best of them, and had a rapier wit. He was, in short, the kind of man any police force would want on their side, should a contentious or controversial trial be likely to arise.
‘Is it Gary Firth, sir?’ a young, wet-behind-the-ears constable asked. He’d been assigned to the search party and was now, like the rest of them, hanging around to watch the proceedings. His question earned him the amazed stares of several of his more experienced colleagues, and a long, level look from Dr Fielding.
‘We haven’t even uncovered the face yet, son. Who do you think I am? Gypsy Rose Lee, the fortune teller?’
The youngster blushed and tried to melt into the background.
With a sigh, Fielding reached into his bag for a large brush, and began, painstakingly, to clear the dead leaves and rich dark humus from the face of the young man buried in the woods.
* * *
In Thame, Ray Porter nearly jumped out of his skin as he suddenly heard a voice.
‘Hello? I’m in here, in the lounge. Come on through.’ The voice was definitely that of Clive Myers. After spending hours of listening to his tapped phone calls, both men recognised it as such at once.
Ray breathed a sigh of relief, and led the way to the open door, relieved to find that Jones was right behind him. After he’d pushed the ajar door fully open and walked in, he stopped in the middle of the room and looked around in puzzlement.
The room, tastefully furnished and perfectly clean though it was, was also undeniably lacking its owner.
Unseen behind the two puzzled officers, a coiled spring, attached to a gizmo at the bottom of the lounge door, reacted to the ten-second delay on a timer, and contracted with a loud snap.
‘Shit! What was that?’ Ray yelped, then leapt around as the lounge door crashed to with a resounding bang. He felt the skin of his scalp contract with fear.
Jones looked at the door thoughtfully. Beside him, Ray held a hand over his fast-beating heart and patted his chest, swallowing down hard on the taste of bile that had risen to his throat. Being in this house was beginning to give him the willies.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Ray whined plaintively. Then, more sharply, ‘Is that a note on the door?’
‘Looks like it,’ Mervyn Jones said. Slowly he approached the square of white paper that had been pinned to the door. As he did so, he reached into the top pocket of his jacket and withdrew a pair of old-fashioned, black plastic-framed reading glasses.
Ray stayed where he was in the centre of the room and looked around. The first thing he spotted was a small mini-cassette recorder in the middle of the coffee table. When he went to it and lifted it, he felt an unusual resistance, and discovered the fishing wire.
So that explained the invitation to come in. Myers had pre-taped his invitation, and rigged it up somehow to play when someone came through the front door. Unless it was a double bluff, and he was waiting in ambush somewhere in the room!
Giving in to his incipient paranoia, Ray glanced swiftly around the room and checked behind the only large piece of furniture in it — a three-seater settee. Only when he’d satisfied himself that Myers was not in the room did he allow himself to relax.
So, somehow, Myers had booby-trapped the door to slam shut behind them as well. It made Ray wonder, anxiously, what other surprises the ex-army man had in store for them.
‘Huh,’ Mervyn Jones said.
‘What?’ Ray quickly joined his colleague at the door now, and read the note pinned on to the door over Jones’s massive shoulder.
It wasn’t particularly short, but it was very much to the point. And it made Ray’s blood run cold.
Hello, Mr Policeman You are now in a house rigged with more than fifty pounds of explosives. Use your mobile phones to call in to HQ and we all go BOOM!
Try to open any of the doors or windows in this room, and we all go BOOM!
Try to use the landline to phone your superior office and — guess what? Yes, you’ve guessed it right.
We all go BOOM! Just in case you’re wondering, I’m upstairs in my bedroom, lying on the bed that I used to share with my wife. You may remember her — the woman who killed herself rather than live with the knowledge of what had happened to our poor, broken, mad daughter.
Of course I killed Superintendent Philip Mallow.
Of course I killed Gary Firth.
Of course I’m going to kill myself. What have I to live for? The only question now is — do I take some coppers with me, or not?
And do you know, Mr Policemen, I’m not sure.
Yours sincerely
And the note, which had been printed by a computer in large bold letters, was signed with a flourish in pen by the man himself. ‘Oh shit,’ Ray Porter whispered.
‘Huh,’ Mervyn Jones agreed.
* * *
Back at HQ, Hillary Greene picked up the now hefty bulk of the Murder Book, and began at the beginning. Already her eyes felt gritty and tired, and the day was a long way from over yet.
She had no idea then of just how long a day it was going to be.
* * *
Dr Fielding, a white mask covering the lower half of his face, breathed carefully through his mouth. The putrefaction of the body was not yet too pronounced, leading him to suppose the body hadn’t been in the ground all that long.
But he was not going to say so. Until he had the body fully unearthed, prepared and ready for autopsy on his table, he wouldn’t be speaking to any high-ranking police officer.
And they all knew his stringent methods.
‘The body looks to be that of a young male,’ he felt prepared to say. ‘He has brown hair, is roughly five feet nine inches tall, lean of build and,’ he raised a swollen angry eyelid on the cadaver, and several of the curious young police officers around him looked away hastily or took a step backwards. ‘Yes, he has light brown eyes.’
‘That matches Oxford’s description of Gary Firth, sir,’ one of the constables said to a DS. ‘Unfortunately, it also matches the description of another missing lad, one of our own, who left his home in Abergavenny Tuesday night,’ the DS responded. ‘Until the doc can run some tests, we won’t know who the poor sod is. Not for sure.’
‘Should we tell Oxford, sir?’
‘Tell them what, laddie?’ the sergeant asked testily. ‘That
we’ve found a young man’s body? They already know that. We won’t know who this is until the doc’s got the body cleaned up and has run some tests. And I daresay the parents of the boy in Abergavenny will want to see the body without delay,’ he added.
He didn’t need to add that they looked after their own first.
‘Well, that won’t be until tomorrow morning at least,’ Dr Fielding broke in grimly. ‘I have to take samples of fly eggs and larvae, soil samples and take clothing scrapings, before we even move the body from this site.’
The DS sighed heavily. It would be dark, he reckoned, before this pernickety bugger was satisfied. He only hoped that the brass in Oxford weren’t waiting too anxiously for news about this body. Because if so, they were going to be disappointed.
* * *
Janine Mallow took a sip of tonic water, and glanced at her watch. She could see DI Peter Gregg through his kitchen window. He was making tea.
She’d passed the time by playing ‘spot the guards’ and had already pinpointed five officers, in various guises, but imagined there were probably more scattered around, some of them in a rotating pattern. She had no idea if any of them had spotted her yet, and at this point, didn’t much care.
She put the cap back on her bottle of tonic, and glanced up into her rear-view mirror as a plain white van turned left at the intersection behind her, and turned towards her.
She saw one of Gregg’s guards, a woman walking a dog, lift her arm and take a crafty picture of it with a tiny digital camera which she had in the palm of her hand. Janine smiled, remembering doing duty just like this not so long ago.
The woman carried on walking, but Janine knew she probably had a ‘round’ that took in the same streets, and that within a half an hour, she’d be back where she was now, to report any suspicious behaviour to her DS.
Janine glanced across without much interest as the white van passed her. There was a single white male driving, which was probably what had triggered off the woman officer’s need to take the snapshot. It seemed unlikely, after all, that Myers would have an accomplice with him.