Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  She wondered if Dawson was planning to change that by gunning for her job. Under Superintendent Palmer she would have been sure that her boss had her back, but with Snow in charge now, there was no such reassurance. A big break in this theft case could give her some much-needed leverage, if the investigation had been stalled while she was gone.

  She grimaced as the shop owner brought up her photo of the mask, a small low-res snapshot of a wooden leaf mask that looked little different from a ton of other Green Man depictions you could pick up cheap in your average New Age shop.

  Of course, getting a break in the case might be easier said than done.

  The gallery owner seemed to have little more help to offer, so Pierce grabbed lunch with Deepan at a nearby sandwich shop. His disgustingly healthy veggie option inspired her to go for the virtuously low calorie end of the menu herself, which she was already sure she would regret in a few hours’ time. She tried not to eye the rack of chocolate bars by the till.

  “I don’t know how you stay awake living on rabbit food,” she said, stirring her tea.

  “It keeps me awake, Guv,” he insisted. “My energy levels always crash when I’m eating all that heavy sugary crap.”

  “Ah, but the solution to that is to eat more heavy sugary crap,” she said, filching another sachet of sugar from the tray to add to her tea. Baby steps.

  It was a relief to sit down and unwind after being on the go since early morning, but as usual her mind soon steered back to the job. “So how have things been with Dawson while I’ve been away?” she asked. This was the first chance she’d had to talk to Deepan without other ears listening in, and while he wasn’t the type to badmouth a colleague, she trusted him to shoot straight with her. “Any trouble?” She blotted the bottom of the dripping teacup on her serviette.

  He shook his head, absently twisting and folding the paper wrapper of his drink straw. “Nothing major. Teething troubles—well, obviously he outranks me, even if I’m the one with the RCU experience, so... bit awkward. You know.” He waved it away with a dismissive shrug.

  “Left you in the lurch a bit there, didn’t I, son?” she said, twisting her mouth in an unhappy grimace. Unavoidable—she could hardly have come back to work with a duff arm, and the first couple of weeks after the surgery she’d been no bloody use to anybody—but still, far from ideal. It made her grimly aware of just how easily her entire unit could be put out of action at a stroke.

  She supposed she ought to be grateful for Dawson, a second in command to hand the leadership off to in the event she was injured again, but she still had grave doubts about how much he could be trusted.

  “Wasn’t exactly your fault, Guv,” Deepan said, shaking his head with a faint snort. “I got off lightly compared to the rest of you.” There was a silence, and she knew they were both thinking about Tim. An inexperienced young constable, murdered on her watch; no matter how hard they worked towards it, sometimes it felt like there was no justice.

  And the thought of the disastrous outcome of that case was a stark reminder that there might be forces within the police actively working against it. Pierce leaned forward over the table. “So what’s your opinion of Dawson? Personally.”

  Deepan pressed his lips together, contemplating the question rather than brushing it off with polite pleasantries. “Headstrong,” he said ultimately. “He likes things done his way. Bit of a steamroller, too: he’ll take advice from people who know what they’re talking about, but he doesn’t much like listening to caution. Prefers to be taking action, even if it’s risky.” He sat back in his chair and shrugged. “Decent enough at the job though, and he doesn’t seem to be playing favourites or trying too hard to climb the ladder. Could’ve got a lot worse.”

  “Mm.” Probably true, even if it was faint praise. “What about the new superintendent?”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t really met him, apart from when he first came in and gave his big intro speech. You’re lucky you missed it—all very ‘standards,’ ‘targets,’ ‘media image,’ and all that guff. But then that’s pretty much what they all talk like, at that level.”

  “So what exactly happened with Palmer?” she asked. “Did he announce he was going?”

  “I’m not really sure, to be honest—I was out of the office a lot at the time,” Deepan said with an apologetic shrug. “This was back when we had the Oxford RCU guys in: we didn’t get the new personnel until Snow arrived. I did have to take a few things to Superintendent Palmer, since I was kind of de facto in charge, but he was pretty harassed—he basically just let me go off and do whatever. Didn’t want to hear the details.”

  “Not like him,” Pierce noted, keeping a neutral tone of voice. Not like him—because she was pretty sure it hadn’t been him, but the imperfect impersonator who had worn his skin. Yet there was no way to prove it; all she had to back her assertion was gut instinct, the disappearance of Palmer’s customary silver watch—the touch of which would have broken the enchantment on any shapeshifting skin—and the later disappearance of Palmer himself. It barely even qualified as circumstantial evidence.

  And Deepan certainly hadn’t known the man well enough to be able to corroborate her suspicions. He gave a faint shrug. “Like I said, he was stressed. He was looking pretty ill—I wasn’t surprised when they told us he’d taken time off for ill health.”

  She straightened up. “So he didn’t announce his retirement right away?”

  “Well, nah, but we could see it was on the cards,” he said. “It was obvious he wasn’t going to be coming back.”

  “So who was in charge in the interim?” There clearly hadn’t been any official handover.

  Deepan gave a wry smile. “It was a bit of a pig’s ear, to tell you the truth, Guv,” he said. “Nobody knew!” She got the impression, from the way that the words tumbled out, he’d been sitting on the built-up frustration of that era for some time. “I mean, there’s me, technically sort of in charge of the RCU, except obviously I’m only a sergeant, and then there’s Matheson from Oxford RCU, who outranks me but doesn’t know what he’s doing... then you’ve got the rest of the station’s operations, which is probably Bob Shannon’s job to run when the super’s not there, except you know what Bob’s like with additional responsibilities.”

  “Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,” she said. Oh, yes, she knew Bob of old. The turnover in the rest of the station was dramatically less rapid than that of her unit—even where it could probably use a good stir to shake things up.

  “Wouldn’t even pick up the barge pole, in case you made him officer in charge of barge poles,” he said wryly. “So the RCU hasn’t got anybody who can take charge, the regular police have got Bob who doesn’t want to, nobody’s quite sure what the super’s instructions are because he’s buggered off without telling anybody, and meanwhile we’ve got all these internal investigations bigwigs in ordering everybody about.”

  “Oh, yes?” Pierce tipped her eyebrows at him over her tea cup as she raised it for another sip, trying to act casual though she was down to the sugary dregs. “So what happened with that, anyway? Were they investigating Palmer?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, as if someone might be listening in who gave a damn about police internal politics. But the sandwich shop was deserted except for the two of them, even the girl serving behind the counter disappeared into the back with only the slosh and clatter of half-hearted washing up to betray her presence. “No one really knew who they were, to tell you the truth,” he admitted. “Palmer just told us they were investigating this whole business with the shapeshifter case and we should give them our full cooperation.”

  Now it was her turn to take a wholly unnecessary glance around, paranoia making her spine prickle. “You think it was that Counter Terror Action Team?” she asked. Not a real organisation, she was almost sure, but the name given by the group that had interfered with her investigation every step of the way. She’d been trying to put the skinbinder murdering
people for shapeshifting skins behind bars; they’d been trying to secure his services for their own ends, and never mind the trail of bodies that he left behind him.

  “I don’t know, Guv,” Deepan said, shaking his head apologetically. “It wasn’t any of the ones who tried to take those case notes off us before, but... we never saw any ID. Not that anyone asked—I mean, you keep your head down in that kind of witch hunt.” He frowned minutely. “Superintendent Palmer wouldn’t have let them just waltz in, though, surely? Not if they were the ones who cocked everything up in the first place.”

  “He might not have had a choice.” For more reason than Deepan could guess. Pierce sighed heavily and set her tea down. “So, whoever it was, it’s all been swept under the rug, and we’re never going to find out who it was in the police or the government fucking us about. Sally injured, Tim killed, one of the officers from the Firearms Unit killed—”

  “And you injured, Guv,” Deepan reminded her.

  “That, too.” Though her shoulder wound was almost trivial at the end of that list. “And yet no one’s going to be brought to justice for any of it.” Pierce grimaced as she pushed her cup away. “Still, at least we caught the bloody skinbinder.” One small victory wrested from the jaws of total shambles. “Don’t suppose there’s been any word about a trial?” she said, without much expectation.

  Deepan’s face twisted awkwardly as she began to stand. “Did you not get notified?” he said. “There’s not going to be a trial—the bloke’s dead.”

  She dropped back down into her seat. “What? Suicide?” Arrogant little sod hadn’t seemed the type—too sure his unique gift for skinbinding would win him a reprieve, and too uncomfortably close to being right about it. And he ought to have been in high enough security accommodations to make any major self-harm impossible.

  But Deepan was shaking his head in any case. “Transportation accident,” he said. “Lorry driver went through a set of red lights and smashed into the side of the police vehicle while he was being transferred. Both the lorry driver and the prisoner were dead on arrival.”

  Pierce let out a small, bitter snort. “Oh, yeah? Pretty convenient.” She didn’t need to be a DCI to recognise a coincidence that neat wasn’t likely to be much of one at all.

  Someone high enough placed in the police to know transfer times, even arrange them, removing a liability from the playing field?

  Or merely making them think that he’d been removed, when he wasn’t really dead at all?

  Pierce pressed her lips together as she cleared the remains of her meal with a clatter. These trails were weeks, months old. She’d been out of action too long to have much hope of catching up to anyone behind all this. There was nowhere to start.

  But Pierce had spent thirty years of her life working for the RCU. Nowhere to start was practically routine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PIERCE LEFT DEEPAN to liaise with the local police and see about getting them CCTV footage from the surrounding streets, and drove back to the station. No sign of her DI in evidence. “Dawson call in?” she asked Freeman.

  The young DC shook her head, and Pierce tried not to grimace. It could be that Dawson was just caught up in the drudgery of routine police work and didn’t have anything to report, but she didn’t fully trust him out of her sight. If he had found some kind of lead, what were the odds he’d actually notify her instead of going off half-cocked to chase it down? She was all in favour of her team showing initiative—Lord knew the RCU was too small and too busy to keep officers tied to her apron strings—but it would help to be sure she could trust their judgement before turning them loose.

  Time to get to know her new pair of constables. She drew their attention with a clap. “All right, these artefact thefts,” she said. “What do we know?” Always easier to get up to speed from a verbal briefing than reading dry reports, and it would give her some chance to take their measure as investigators.

  Freeman was the first to speak up, sitting up smartly while Taylor was still sporting the stunned rabbit look that seemed to be his default response to snap tests of his abilities. “There have been four incidents that we’re treating as connected,” she said. “Five now, if we’re including last night’s theft from the Hemsfield Gallery.”

  “It seems to be the same MO, but let’s stick with the earlier cases for now,” Pierce said.

  Freeman nodded earnestly. “Erm... all of the break-ins occurred at night. Two museums, an antique shop and a private collection, at locations scattered across Yorkshire. The thefts look like they’re professional—alarms and internal CCTV disabled, no witnesses or useful trace evidence left at any of the scenes. Targeted, too—in each case, the thieves could easily have got away with far more than they took.”

  “So what exactly have they taken so far?” Pierce asked. She’d skimmed this file yesterday, but the details of the items taken had been secondary in her attention to clues about the thieves and their operation.

  By this time Taylor had riffled through his notebook and found the appropriate spot. “In the first museum heist they took a ceremonial dagger.”

  “They opened up a glass case full of them, but only took the one,” Freeman added. “Quite plain, leather scabbard, nothing fancy in the design. There were others in the same case that would have been worth thousands.”

  “But this one would be easier to fence,” Taylor countered.

  “Possibly,” Pierce allowed, though she doubted that had been the motivation. “What else?”

  He consulted his notes again. “The second museum theft was a wooden cup. Goblet, is that what you call it? Wine-glass-shaped thing.” He sketched it vaguely in the air, looking faintly worried, as if he might be marked down for failing to get the right word. “Chalice?” he hazarded.

  “Cup’ll do.” Pierce waved the detail away. Facts mattered, not the terminology.

  “Carved, but not very valuable,” he went on with greater confidence. “They also took a wooden box from an antique shop in Leeds.” He held his hands out to illustrate an object about the dimensions of a tissue box. “With little subdivided sections inside. The owner thought it might have been an old magician’s herb and powder store, but there was nothing in it, just an empty box.”

  “And what was taken from the private collection?”

  “A bag of rune stones,” Freeman put in. “Only twelve stones, though, not a complete set. The owner used to buy them up cheap at auctions—antique sets of stones with some runes missing.” Not much use to anyone for casting runes, then; Pierce was dubious towards most alleged forms of divination in the first place, but you certainly couldn’t get an effective reading with only half the runes available.

  “Maybe the thieves have the other part of the set?” Taylor suggested.

  “It’s possible,” Pierce allowed. “Or they’re looking for it.”

  “Why this set, though?” Freeman bit her lip thoughtfully. “Why not grab one of the others instead? Why not steal a complete one, even? We know they’re capable of pulling off the thefts.”

  “Obviously they’re after these specific items for a reason,” Pierce said. “So what links them together?”

  A moment of contemplation, then Taylor shook his head. “Nothing, Guv,” he said. “It could be components for a ritual—the dagger, the goblet cup thing—but I don’t see how a box and a few useless rune stones fit into that.”

  “It’s not just about the magic,” Freeman said, sitting forward. “We’ve got to think of it as a crime. What’s the motivation if it’s not about money?”

  “Jealousy, revenge, obsession,” Taylor reeled off, and shook his head. “Maybe we’re looking for a rational connection when there isn’t one? They could be stealing things because the ghost of Elvis told them to. Or using some kind of ritual to divine what they ought to steal next.”

  “Ownership,” Freeman suggested, with a self-deprecating shrug. “They think these objects are theirs by right. Maybe the thieves used to own these items, or have
some reason to think they ought to.”

  “But we don’t know the provenance of most of the items,” Taylor objected. “We don’t have any evidence they were ever linked together.”

  “We don’t,” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “Maybe the thieves do.”

  Pierce sat forward. “Maybe we’re thinking too recent,” she said. “The item stolen last night was a seventeenth-century carved mask. This is not necessarily about who owned these things ten years ago, or even fifty—maybe the thieves are trying to unite a collection from much longer ago.” She stood up from her chair. “Find me everything you can about the history of these artefacts before they ended up in collections.”

  IT WAS A frustrating afternoon of effort without much result. The only thing their research into the history of the artefacts managed to dig up was that the dagger and carved box were both estimated to be of a similar age to the mask, supporting the idea that all five pieces probably had a common origin. But exactly what that might be proved impossible to track; the history of the dagger dead-ended with the man who’d sold it to the museum in the 1930s, and none of the others had even that much of a paper trail, picked up in house clearances and auction lots with no details attached. They weren’t visibly valuable enough for anyone to have bothered keeping records.

  Dawson’s search for more detail on Vyner’s actions had come up similarly blank. He’d been checked out at the hospital but found to have nothing more obvious than a headache and some bruises, gone straight home afterwards, and no doubt his body would still have been lying there undiscovered if the constable sent to get a statement from him hadn’t been concerned he’d done a runner.

  Deepan had secured them some CCTV footage from the cameras in the region of the Hemsfield Gallery, but none of them were positioned to show the building or the street in front of it directly, which left the needle-in-haystack task of watching the whole lot in hopes of spotting anything of interest.