Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

The cleanup for this was going to be miserable as hell. But it was all that there was left for them to do.

  IN THE DARK and the rain it felt deceptively like the middle of the night, and it was only after she’d trudged back out to join the group gathering on the road that she checked her watch and found that it was barely half past five.

  The one sliver of good news was PC Collins, returned to consciousness and apparently mostly concerned for the fate of her missing dog as she was led off to the ambulance in a semi-dazed state. “Let me go and get him,” she was repeating to anyone who came near. “He’ll come when I call him. Let me look for him.” Pierce hoped for her sake the dog would prove to have calmed now the possessing spirit was gone, and wouldn’t be too traumatised to rehabilitate.

  The spirit’s other victims were sadly beyond help. Davenport had more than likely been doomed from the moment that he was taken over, and PC Winters had been dead by the time the paramedics got to him. COD would have to wait for the pathologist’s pronouncement, but in the meantime, Pierce could only hope that he was already gone by the time she’d tripped over his body and had to run on without stopping.

  Either way, she knew that this one was going to haunt her.

  She spotted Freeman re-emerge from the woods a short distance away, looking distinctly wearier than the perky young officer she’d started the afternoon as. She’d been in the thick of the action, and Pierce knew too well how that could prove a big shock to the system. Freeman would have done her time as a uniform constable—in Manchester, to boot, not just a sleepy village beat—so she’d undoubtedly seen some unpleasant scenes before, but the RCU had its own unique standards for investigations going pear-shaped, and all the standardised tests in the world couldn’t necessarily predict which officers would be able to hack it.

  So far, however, Freeman seemed to be holding up well. She gave Pierce a tired nod as she approached. “We’ve found the last of the skulls, Guv,” she said, pushing her hair back to flatten the stray frizz that had worked its way loose from her bun. “From what we can tell, looks like Davenport unearthed one of them, possibly touched it or interfered with the scene in some way.”

  “And that’s our vector of possession.” A theory they could run with, at least, though it opened as many questions as it closed. Why had he done it? Just straightforward failure to listen to her advice? Even as a PCSO he should have had the training to know better. Maybe he’d been trying to make sure of his find, eager to prove himself or fearful of making a stupid mistake.

  Or maybe the enchantments on the site had acted as some kind of lure, making him act more foolishly than he usually would. Maybe it had even been an accident, fresh dug mud sliding away in the rain, the dog starting to dig...

  They could try to reconstruct the scene, but with the limited evidence already trampled and rain-soaked and the only surviving witnesses a head-injured woman and a dog, it was likely most questions would go unanswered. She sighed.

  The sound of tyres on the wet tarmac drew her attention. A car approaching down the lane, without blue flashing lights. One of the local uniforms went to intercept—they’d suddenly managed to produce a whole army of them from somewhere, and Pierce knew it was bitter hindsight to resent not having had them available for the search, but it still pissed her off all the same.

  She expected the officer to send the car off to seek another route, but instead he waved it on and it rolled up to park nearby. Her headache intensified at the sight of DI Dawson getting out.

  “Dawson,” she said, voice neutral, though her mood was anything but. “What are you doing here? I didn’t call you in.” There was nothing for another senior RCU officer to do here that couldn’t be done just as well by the local police force.

  “Superintendent sent me to relieve you,” he said. “He wants to see you back at the station before he leaves.”

  She bristled at the micromanagement. Whose idea had that been—Snow’s or Dawson’s? Either way, she wasn’t used to being brusquely ordered home from a scene before she was done with it; Palmer had always given her more rein.

  But Palmer was gone, more than likely dead, and the prospect of finding the truth behind his disappearance seemed as remote as every other dead-end case that she was working right now. The urge to duke it out with Dawson in a pointless fight deflated. The order had been given, and even if it was at his instigation it wasn’t his to countermand.

  Besides, if she was honest, she was too bloody tired to turn down an excuse to get off of her feet.

  “All right,” she acknowledged with a nod. “Sergeant Mistry will fill you in.” And hopefully restrain him from antagonising the already unhappy locals, though she couldn’t ask for miracles. She turned to Freeman, still hovering nearby. “Freeman, you can drive me back.” Her shoulder could use the break, and so could Freeman, no doubt. “It’ll give you a chance to get cleaned up.” The slackening rain was no substitute for a proper shower when they’d both been up close and personal with a decomposing corpse.

  The interior of the car made a merciful escape from the worst of the elements, though it also made her freshly aware of just how soaked she’d become—and not just with rain. Now that they were inside the enclosed space of the car the nauseating scent of death had returned with a vengeance.

  The drive passed in brooding silence until they left the rural roads behind and joined the rush hour traffic. Freeman looked sidelong at her as they paused at the end of a line of cars tailing back from a junction. “Guv, was there something more we could have done?” she asked, biting her lip.

  Pierce grimaced, and then sighed. “There’s always something more we could have done,” she said. “Doesn’t mean it would have made much sense to do it at the time.”

  You could second-guess your decisions for ever in their aftermath, but in the end, the only way to sleep at night was to trust yourself enough to believe you’d done what you could with the info you’d had at the time.

  Freeman made a vague noise, somewhere between acknowledging and dubious. All to the good; just because Pierce had a few hard-earned platitudes to offer didn’t mean she had much truck with officers who accepted them too readily. A little second-guessing and self-doubt didn’t hurt, as long as it didn’t cross the line into complete self-flagellation.

  They arrived back at the station to find the group of druids still occupying the car park despite the puddles suggesting they’d suffered some of the same heavy rain. A larger camper van had pulled up beside the VW bus, and they’d even set up tents, apparently planning on spending the night. At least the continuing drizzle seemed to be keeping them from protesting too visibly, the only evidence a drooping banner strung between the vans that insisted they should Save Our Nation’s Sacred Sites From Government Depredation!

  “Oh, it’s the bloody government’s fault now, is it?” she muttered to herself as they passed it. Probably lucky for the protestors they were tucked up safe inside their vans: she didn’t have the patience to deal with time-wasters right now.

  “Hmm?” Freeman glanced back at her.

  “Nothing useful or informative,” Pierce said, shaking her head. She ran a hand back over her hair; it hardly seemed worth putting her hood back up when she was this drenched already. “You should get yourself cleaned up and head home,” she advised. “Paperwork can wait until we’ve got full details from the scene.” She drew a fortifying breath as they reached the door. “Meanwhile, I’ll go and see what’s got his nibs’s knickers in a knot.”

  Whoops, so much for thoughts of setting a good example for the newbies. Freeman just flashed her a momentary grin, though. Smart girl. Right attitude. She’d go far.

  Assuming she didn’t end up dying an ugly early death, like so many other young officers who’d had the misfortune to get mixed up in RCU work. Didn’t seem fair sometimes that Pierce was the one who kept on trucking while the youngsters fell like dominos around her, but that was the way it went sometimes: you had to be lucky for long enough to learn the art of s
urvival. Not everyone could be that lucky.

  Pierce sighed, and went to face the music.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE BOLLOCKING ABOUT the operation from Superintendent Snow went about as well as she could have expected, which was to say not very.

  “This operation was entirely mishandled from the start,” he said, peering at her sternly through his narrow glasses. He didn’t pace the way Palmer had when he was agitated, but stayed planted behind his desk where he could give her a supercilious look like a disapproving headmaster. “Rushed, shoddily put together—the local forces had no idea what they were getting into!”

  “Neither did we, sir,” Pierce said wearily.

  “All the more reason there should have been planning, consultation—why wasn’t this operation cleared with me?”

  “Sir, it was just an exploratory search operation, initially,” she said. “We were following up on some disturbed graves. There was no way to be certain that the ritual scene was even in the area, or to think that it might pose a danger to police personnel. The first scene in Bingley was excavated with no harm to the forensics team.”

  “Yes, until your unit came along and purposely called forth a supernatural effect that resulted in multiple injuries!” he snapped.

  Which had been Dawson’s bloody stupid idea, but as DCI in charge she couldn’t pass blame down the command chain, no matter how richly it was deserved.

  “That was... a miscalculation,” she agreed. She wasn’t going to say it had been hers. “But nothing like that was attempted at the Silsden site. We’re still working to ascertain how PCSO Davenport came to be possessed.” Or at least they had been before he’d had her unceremoniously yanked away from the scene.

  “And you used PCSOs for this!” Snow threw up his hands. “The media’s already been up in arms about them taking on too many police duties in place of regular constables. When it emerges that they were deployed in an operation that ended in multiple deaths...”

  That wouldn’t have been Pierce’s first concern when it came to the tragic deaths of two young men, whatever their roles. She pressed her lips together. The only self-defence that she had here was not to budge an inch. “I contacted the officer in charge of the local police,” she said. “They supplied me with the personnel that they felt would be adequate for the search.”

  Bollocks, of course: at best they’d provided as many as their overstretched force could spare, at worst as few as they could get away with, but what was the point of stating as much on the record? The locals couldn’t be blamed for not wasting more personnel on a needle in the haystack search, and it was their people who’d suffered for it. Just a miserable fuck-up of a situation that couldn’t be laid at anybody’s door—but of course, the people who dissected such things after the fact never wanted to hear that as an answer.

  “Well, don’t think that’s going to stop them blaming us for this!” Snow said. “There’s already been a history of complaints from other departments about the RCU using their personnel for tasks they haven’t trained for. This is only going to add fuel to that fire.”

  Nobody was trained for the kind of unpredictable situations that Ritual Crime cases dealt with, but if he thought it was a bad idea to keep relying on outside personnel, she wasn’t going to disagree. If Davenport had been one of hers, could he have avoided whatever mistake had led to him becoming possessed?

  “Sir, I know it’s not an ideal situation to rely so heavily on outside forces,” she said. “But without more dedicated RCU personnel—”

  He pressed his lips into a thin tight line. “This is hardly the time to campaign for a greater departmental budget,” he said. It seemed like the exact time to her, in all frankness, but for some inexplicable reason the political entities that played with their livelihoods seemed to view extra funding as an incentive for success rather than a remedy for shortfalls. The Catch-22 of target-setting: earn your cash injection by first proving that you could do without it.

  “Sir... this was not a situation that could have been foreseen,” she said tiredly. “It’s a terrible tragedy. People have died. But everybody involved was doing the best they could with the information and resources that they had available.”

  Snow sat forward in his chair to hold her gaze. “Then do better,” he said. “This is not the first police operation that’s ended with casualties on your watch, and I can’t allow your unit to just keep staggering from one disaster to the next without the slightest thing to show for it. I expect to see some results on your cases very soon, or we will have to think very seriously about a change of leadership.”

  Pierce didn’t trust herself to make any remark in response, so instead she just turned on her heel to go.

  “And one more thing,” he added, before she could leave. “I understand that there’s a group in the car park who are refusing to leave until they get the RCU’s attention. Why haven’t they been dealt with?”

  “They’re just your average neighbourhood cranks,” she said. “Protesting things that don’t have anything to do with the police. They’ll probably have given up by morning.”

  The way things were going right now, it was tempting to do the same.

  PIERCE SLEPT POORLY that night; in spite of all words to the contrary, she couldn’t help but keep turning over thoughts of all the things she might have done to ensure matters turned out differently. Joined up with the dog team herself, for a start; chosen to reduce the number of search teams rather than let anyone go out without an RCU officer to accompany them. Maybe if she’d been there she could have made a difference.

  Or maybe she’d have been caught unawares like Collins and poor Winters, just another name on the casualty list. The worst part was the fact that there was no way to know, only endless second thoughts to chase around.

  She woke in the morning feeling every one of her years, not to mention all the war wounds from the last few days. Too much running, and definitely too many scuffles with people who were younger and stronger. DCI wasn’t supposed to be this much of a front-line job, but in the RCU it came with all the management responsibilities and not nearly enough junior officers to delegate the scut work to.

  If she’d had more people, then maybe yesterday...

  But there she was, going back down that same futile path again. Ugly as yesterday had been, she had to put it out of her mind and focus on the next job.

  The half-arsed make-up patch job to cover the bruises blossoming on her neck and her jaw—never one of her greatest skills, but necessary if she was going to be interacting with the public—made her later than she’d planned to be. And that wasn’t the only problem. When she arrived at the station, she saw that the druids hadn’t given up as hoped, but had set themselves up a proper encampment, placards and banners everywhere.

  They weren’t the worst of it. Pierce grimaced as she spotted a news van parked on the corner, a woman with a vaguely familiar hairdo doing a piece to camera in front of the station’s main doors. She could see several other cameras taking shots of the protestors, and no doubt some of the milling crowd were journalists.

  The sad thing was that them being here to cover the protest was probably the best case scenario.

  She parked her own car across the road from the station car park, in defiance of the stern edicts of several circulated memos. With luck, and her lack of a uniform, she might be able to slip around the side unnoticed. Most people still defaulted to expecting to see men when they were looking for high-ranking police.

  Unfortunately, luck wasn’t with her, while a journalist who’d covered RCU business before apparently was. “DCI Pierce!” a brash voice called out as she attempted to nonchalantly slip past, and then the pack descended.

  “DCI Pierce! DCI Pierce!” A microphone was thrust into her face. “Can you comment on the RCU’s involvement in the deaths of two police officers in Silsden last night?”

  “DCI Pierce! Is it true that last night’s deaths are connected to the skulls that were excavat
ed in Bingley?”

  “Does the RCU accept any responsibility for the suicide of the necromancer Martin Vyner?”

  She hated this shit when it came in press conference form, and the ambush version was even worse. “I can’t comment on the details of any ongoing investigations,” she said, holding up a hand as she strode past. And they shouldn’t have those details to be quizzing her about. How had the press connected the dots so fast? A leak from any one of the crime scenes was perfectly plausible, but multiple spills at once started to seem like enemy action. Was someone deliberately feeding information to the press? That was all they bloody needed.

  The journalists chased her across the car park, the cameras swinging to follow. “Will there be an internal investigation?” someone demanded.

  “Does the RCU routinely employ necromancers?”

  “DCI Pierce! DCI Pierce!”

  Apparently the words ‘can’t comment’ didn’t translate well, since they didn’t stop baying questions until the doors were closed behind her. Then, giving up on her, they rapidly turned their attentions back to the group of druid protestors, who were doing their best to get their signs into every photo, aided and abetted by the cameramen. Pierce sensed news stories tenuously stitching the unrelated protest into a tale of widespread unhappiness with the RCU in her near future.

  And a headache. She rubbed her temples. The headache was here already.

  “How long have the hyenas been out there?” she asked Jill, on desk duty again.

  “Since first thing,” she said with a grimace. “The Superintendent’s livid.”

  “Quelle surprise. Oh, well, don’t tell him that I’m here, would you?” Snow would probably want to speak with her soon enough regardless, but with any luck there would be a lead or a new case that got her out of the office before he had a chance. She didn’t fancy starting the day with a louder, faster remix of last night’s bollocking.