by Paul Finch
‘They’d better be bloody big,’ he mumbled.
Once or twice he thought he heard something and stopped to listen. Usually, it was the screech of a hunting owl, or the distant rattling crash of a night train. But occasionally it was harder to pin down.
The first time, it was a heavy, hollow clatter, like some large metal drum being overturned. It echoed across the desolate ridges of the landfill, but it was loud, indicating that it hadn’t originated far away. Peabody stood rigid by the incident tape, wondering who might be so close. It was only to be expected that there’d be scavengers around. There was little here that looked to be of value, but tip-pickers were a breed, and they were more likely to come at night, because technically they were committing theft. The second time, it was slightly more sinister: what sounded like a rasping, snickering laugh. That time, Peabody turned his Maglite on and swept it up and down the slopes of refuse. He saw nothing odd, but there’d been something determined and intentional about that laugh – as if he’d been supposed to hear it, or as if whoever it was hadn’t cared whether he’d heard it or not.
A little unnerved, Peabody trudged back up the path. It was now more defined because of Lucy’s comings and goings on her Ducati, which had ploughed a visible trail. He followed it back through the canyon between the piles of boxes, all the way to the desiccated tree where the eyeless doll was hanging. He shone his light around again, pausing several times on unidentifiable shapes, though almost always they became recognisable eventually: heaps of rubbish bags, rust patterns on abandoned fridges, twists of thorny weed hung with tatters. He allowed the torch to linger on the track that led back towards the landfill offices, wishing he could simply head over there, though it would take a good fifteen to twenty minutes.
Peabody realised that he was sweating, and he wondered why he’d bothered putting his gloves and anorak on. Still no rain had fallen, and when he gazed up, he saw stars rather than clouds. If anything, the waterproof was making him hotter and damper. He pulled his gloves off, followed by the anorak, scrunching it up so that he could carry it in one fist as he headed back. Just as he reached the top of the depression, there was a crackle behind him, like the snapping of a rotted branch.
He spun around, dropping his torch, and scrabbled frantically for it around his feet. As he did, he glanced up; no immediate cause of the sound was obvious, but he now realised that he could see the full length of the cleft between the heaps of boxes without using his light. He glanced east, to a hummocky horizon previously banded with indigo but now turning pale violet.
It wasn’t exactly dawn, but at least things were going the right way.
He glanced at his watch, which told him that it was shortly after four. He’d still be stuck here for the best part of another hour, maybe longer, but if the darkness was gradually receding, that would be an improvement.
Despite this, he stumbled on his way back down the slope, and when he tried to right himself, his left foot slid along a moss-slicked sheet of cardboard, landing him hard on his thigh. It didn’t hurt, but it infuriated him.
‘Dickhead,’ he muttered, as he got up and plodded on down to the bottom.
He was soon back by the tent, which rustled in the breeze. He glanced at it, and then up to the rim of the depression on its eastern side – and started violently.
The figure of a man was silhouetted on the gradually paling sky.
Peabody switched his torch on again, but powerful though the Maglite was, the beam didn’t reach far enough. Whoever the guy was, he was about sixty yards away.
‘Hello?’ Peabody shouted, circling around the taped-off area. ‘Who are you, please?’ There was no response. The figure remained indistinct and motionless. ‘You need to clear this area. This is an official crime scene.’
The figure remained where it was.
Peabody was angry rather than alarmed. Primarily at himself. He’d stayed as sharp as he could, and he’d still let this creep sneak up on him. Not only that, he’d told him to get his arse out, and the guy wasn’t moving. Did he carry such little authority?
‘PC Peabody!’ he said, tromping uphill, his heavy feet crunching the trash.
The figure still didn’t move, though now the torch was picking him out. Peabody saw a grey suit, a white shirt, a green tie, dark hair – and a weirdly marked face.
‘What the …?’ he breathed. And then he smiled to himself.
This was a wind-up of some sort.
Back when he’d been a probie, he’d been subject to all kinds of mickey-taking, as they all were, of course. There was never a trick too nasty or scary for older coppers to play on younger ones, or that they didn’t find hilariously funny afterwards. He’d hoped all that was past him now, but apparently not. Except that he’d be surprised if anyone found this situation amusing, and the higher up the slope he ascended, the less amusing it seemed. Because the thinner and stiffer the watching figure seemed to be, the darker its eyes, the more weirdly streaked its face, and … the redder its mouth.
‘What the fuck?’ Peabody said again, this time aloud.
For half a second, he had the horrific notion that a corpse had been propped up. But over the last two or three yards, he realised the truth.
It was a shop mannequin, its suit ragged and filthy, its white shirt not a shirt at all but the mannequin’s own polystyrene flesh, its tie a piece of fuzzy-felt, its hair a ratty wig, its face gruesomely plastered with women’s makeup.
Peabody halted a couple of feet below the static figure. He half-expected a sniggering copper to come out from behind it. But no one did. The only sound was the rustling and flapping of the forensics tent down in the dip. Cautiously, almost gingerly, he scrambled up the remaining distance until he was face to face with it. When he looked down, he saw that its feet were embedded amid broken, twisted branches.
Okay, so it hadn’t happened by accident; someone hadn’t just discarded this thing. No doubt there were dozens of such objects scattered across the landfill, but someone must have set this one up deliberately. And in the last half hour or so, because if there was one thing Peabody was certain about, it had not been here earlier.
He circled around it to check the terrain, his light roving down another tilted moonscape. Rusted bikes, thrown-away prams, more newspapers, more bags of household waste. Nothing unexpected. He circled back to the front, staring at the figure’s luridly painted features.
If there was one thing Peabody really didn’t like it was anything he couldn’t figure out – and this was completely unexplainable. No doubt he’d laugh about it tomorrow, but before then, he’d be wondering, for however long it took for his relief to arrive, where this hideous scarecrow had come from. He stepped back, raised his right foot and struck the mannequin’s midriff. It was a lightweight thing and went bouncing and rolling down the slope. Still in one piece, but at least, when he returned to the tent, it would be out of his eyeline.
‘Good fucking riddance.’ He stumped back down into the depression, trying not to wonder if whoever had set it up there had been the person he’d heard laughing.
The one good thing, of course, was the gradual lightening of the sky in the east. Now it was even having an effect down on this lower ground. Both the tape and the tent were clearly visible. Peabody kept his light on anyway, prowling in no particular direction, zigzagging around the central pit, still trying to work out what had just happened. The tent’s material, meanwhile, rattled and rustled in the breeze, until it reached the point where it distracted him. He stopped in his tracks and turned to look at it, wondering how strange it was that he hadn’t heard such sounds earlier, and how even stranger that he couldn’t feel any breeze.
A very ugly realisation struck him.
‘Oh … crap,’ he breathed.
He went through the entryway in the tape as silently as possible, though inevitably he stepped on twigs, crisp wrappers and other bric-a-brac. It was hardly a real issue. Whoever it was, they already knew that he was here.
‘All right, enough’s enough!’ he said sternly, stabbing his light-beam at the flimsy structure. Nothing happened, except that the rustling of movement inside it continued. He yanked the flap back and went in, blasting his torchlight in front of him. ‘What in Christ’s name are—’
The sentence died instantly.
What seemed like a thousand pin-prick eyes had turned to face him. From all around the dog-pit, not just on its carnage-strewn edges but halfway down and even in the depths of it. Then, with frantic squeals, the rats evacuated, exploding up and out in a volcanic tide of mouldy fur, bloody whiskers and bared buck-teeth. They bolted every which way, under the sides of the tent or out via the exit flap. Peabody could only stand stock-still as they squirmed over and around his shoes, lashing his legs with their tails.
‘God …’ he breathed, sickened to his core. ‘Oh, Jeeesus …’
It seemed to take an age for the last of them to leave, and before it did, it stopped in the torchlight, hunched and hissing like a demonic, deformed imp, its eyes glimmering, before scurrying out of sight.
He remained in there, so drenched with the stench of rotting dog-flesh that he doubted he’d ever be able to get it out of his clothes, and yet so horrified by what had just happened that he really didn’t want to leave. It was a couple of minutes, at least, before he was able to turn and make his way outside, moving like a man intoxicated, barely able to put one foot in front of another. He swayed through the entrance, still nauseated, and even in fresher air found himself teetering, sweat streaming down his body. He staggered on another two dozen yards before jerking back to reality, wondering where the rats might be and if they could be slinking up again.
There was no sign of them when he glanced around, but that didn’t satisfy him. He swung his Maglite wildly, trying to cover every inch of ground, turning in drunken, feverish circles. It was only on the fourth revolution that he saw something that shouldn’t be there.
A girl’s pretty face, close up to his own. Rendered white in the torchlight. Etched with sadistic glee. Pink lips drawn back on feral teeth.
Peabody’s shout came out a shocked, unintelligible croak.
It was the last sound he made before a hefty blow smashed into the back of his skull.
‘They don’t make coppers like they used to.’ Ivana toed the unconscious body. ‘Scared of a few rats.’
Alyssa emptied the stone out of the sock. ‘It was the dummy that did it. Totally threw him off his guard.’
‘Soft bastards. When Dad was a lad, they were all ex-Paras fresh from Northern Ireland. They’d give you a good hiding just for gobbing on the pavement.’
‘Think we were in time?’ Alyssa wondered, nodding at the tent.
‘That thing looks second-hand to me. There’s no sign the real CSI mob have been here yet.’ Ivana hefted forward two of the four six-gallon petrol canisters. They were so bulky and full that when they touched each other, they clattered loudly. ‘I mean, how much have they found out? I reckon they’ve just stumbled across this site. They’re probably not sure what it means, or if it means anything. So they stuck a single sentry on it.’
‘Poor sod, eh?’ Alyssa grabbed the other two canisters. ‘Had no idea what he was getting into.’
‘We’ll worry about him later.’
Alyssa unscrewed one of the metal caps and tipped fuel over the walls of the forensics tent, walking around it so that she got every side. When she’d done that, they both took their canisters inside, and tilted them over the pit itself, rivers of petrol glugging out, glistening their way down into the ossuary below, drenching the twisted, tangled carcasses.
‘Use all of it,’ Ivana said. ‘Make sure it gets right to the bottom. Make sure there’s a lake of it down there. We’ve got to burn every scrap.’
‘You don’t think they could have linked this to the other jobs?’ Alyssa asked.
‘Don’t see how they could,’ Ivana replied. ‘But it’s weird, isn’t it? … and they’ll be asking lots of questions. Best to get rid properly.’
‘You put a torch to a police tent and it’ll look even weirder. They’ll know for sure that someone was trying to hide something.’
‘Yeah, but they won’t know what. Whatever line of enquiry this is, Lyssa, it’ll end here. Don’t fret, doll. They haven’t got enough men to worry for long about things that don’t make sense.’
When three and two thirds of the four cans were empty, they backtracked outside, Ivana trailing petrol behind them. As she’d calculated, there was just enough to get them forty or so yards beyond the tape. Alyssa then did the honours, dropping a lighted match onto it.
The fire-snake moved swiftly, winding sinuously away from them. When it touched the tent, the whole thing went up in an explosive cloud of flame whose brilliant glare flooded the tortured landscape. But that was nothing compared to the explosion when the flames ate their way down through the mangled canines and hit the lake of fuel at the bottom.
It was Vesuvius, Stromboli and Krakatoa all in one, a glorious upward torrent of flame and smoke, which seared their faces and frazzled their hair.
‘Who-hoa!’ Alyssa shouted, backing away further, shielding her eyes.
Just as quickly as it had risen, the inferno receded, but not greatly. The tent had all but vanished, only its blackened, blistered framework remaining, but fierce flames still roared from the charnel pit, feasting on bones and decay, the air greasy with the reek of melting, bubbling fat.
Ivana lowered her own hand and nodded, smiling. ‘That ought to do it.’
‘Hey … almost forgot.’ Alyssa edged forward, as close as the surging heat would allow her, and hurled the rolled-up newspaper. It disappeared into the conflagration, along with its small front-page story about police spokesmen refusing to comment on rumoured search activities out on the landfill site at Fairview.
‘Good job we saw that,’ Ivana said.
‘Doesn’t matter now.’
‘No.’
‘Good night’s work all round.’
‘Yep.’
‘Except …’ Alyssa indicated Peabody lying alongside them. ‘What about this one?’
‘You gave him a good whack, didn’t you? Won’t come around for a few minutes yet.’
‘Do we want that? Even in a few minutes?’
Ivana frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think?’ Alyssa laughed her eerie, whinnying laugh. ‘You said we need to finish the job properly. And he saw you, after all. So … let’s feed the flames some more.’
Chapter 35
‘Okay, gorgeous, up you get,’ someone said. ‘It’s not like you need any beauty sleep.’
At first, Lucy was too fuddled to make sense of things. She sat up in the armchair, blinking, hair hanging over her eyes. Then she realised that the person standing next to her, the one who’d just shaken her by the shoulder, was Priya Nehwal.
The short but authoritative figure, shabby as ever in anorak, faded military-style trousers and trainers, was carrying a plate of buttered toast in one hand and two large mugs of coffee in the other. She nodded towards the door and set off. Lucy got up from the chair still groggy. When she glanced at her watch, it was shortly after seven, which explained why there was an atmosphere of bustle elsewhere in the nick. The night shift would be going home, and the morning shift replacing them.
Yawning, she walked out into the main part of the rec room, where a cleaner was mopping down table-tops, and a couple of the night lads grabbing a game of snooker before they headed home. A smell of bacon issued from the canteen.
Nehwal found a table that had already been cleared and plonked herself down, indicating that Lucy should pull up a stool. She pushed the plate of toast into the middle and handed Lucy her coffee.
‘White without sugar,’ she said.
‘Erm, yeah … thanks, ma’am.’ Lucy took a sip; it was hot and tasted like nectar.
‘Get stuck into that.’ Nehwal nudged the plate. ‘We’ve got a long day ahead.’
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Lucy was famished, and it was all she could do not to fall on the breakfast ravenously. ‘What are you doing here, ma’am?’ she said, munching. ‘Do you mind me asking?’
‘Well, first of all –’ Nehwal took a bite of toast and a slurp of coffee ‘– I want to know what you and Wild Bill chatted about at the hospital last night.’
‘Ahh, right … he wanted to get in to see McCracken. I said no.’
‘Why?’ Nehwal asked, which took Lucy by surprise.
‘Well … I didn’t know what his purpose was. McCracken had already been shot once.’
‘Are you familiar with the Crew?’
Lucy was now wide awake and felt nervous about where this conversation was leading. ‘Only inasmuch as we all are.’
‘Because McCracken and Pentecost are supposed to be thick as thieves. No pun intended.’
‘I’ve heard that, ma’am. I just wondered if something had happened that could have turned them against each other.’
‘Well, if it has, and that’s possible, it’s highly unlikely that the Chairman of the Crew’s board of directors would deliver the death message personally. But I reckon you did the right thing. It’s anyone’s guess what would have happened in there. It was brave of you. Just out of interest, did you speak to McCracken?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy admitted, wondering if they were coming to the crux of it. Had someone overheard her conversation with her father, and did they all now know her dirty little secret? ‘But he was out of it … hadn’t really come around from the anaesthetic.’
‘Say anything interesting?’
‘Not really. Congratulated me on standing up to his boss. Said that he’d probably only turned up to check on an injured friend.’
It was only a partial lie, but again something inside Lucy twisted, left her feeling depressed as well as worried about the strange, intangible world she’d somehow slipped into, this limbo between law and disorder.
Nehwal nodded, seeming to accept this. ‘He didn’t say anything about who he thought might have shot him?’