by Paul Finch
‘I’ve closed the business, if you must know,’ Briggs replied. ‘I’ve had enough and I’m moving on. Early retirement beckons, worse luck.’
‘Let me guess, you can’t compete with those big warehouse stores that are opening in out-of-town retail parks all over the country?’
‘Well … the annihilation of the town centres isn’t doing the likes of me any good. But the main thing is that since that incident last January, I’ve become a pariah in this neighbourhood.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Everyone’s on my side – slap me on the back when they meet me in the street. Buy me a pint in the pub. But they won’t come to the shop anymore. Those little bastards Dasby and Degton have got mates, you see. I’ve had paint on my windows, shit through my letterbox. I’ve had notes threatening to burn me out. Even customers who’ve come to the shop have been followed home, had their cars tagged, their own windows messed up.’
‘Why didn’t you report any of this?’
Briggs snorted. ‘I did, but just because your lot didn’t charge me with murder, that doesn’t mean they don’t suspect me of it. They’re not interested. Anyway, can I help you with something, or are you just here to pass the time of day?’
‘It’s actually to do with the burglary you had here on 15 October last year.’
Briggs looked surprised. ‘Yeah?’
‘The livestock you reported missing: a Brazilian wandering spider, a “brown widow” spider, an African sand spider, an Australian funnel-web and a Deathstalker scorpion from the Middle East.’
‘That’s correct. Cost me an arm and a bloody leg to assemble that collection.’
‘It’s an exotic list. Some of the top predators in the animal kingdom, or so I’m informed. Any particular reason behind it?’
‘I’ve always had stuff like that – before I was disqualified from holding a licence of course. Attracts the punters, doesn’t it? But none of them were ever for sale. All the animals were kept in adequate and secure facilities, properly fed, watered … all the requirements were satisfied.’
‘Between you and me, Mr Briggs, I’m surprised there wasn’t more of an uproar when these specimens got lifted; given how dangerous they are.’
Briggs shrugged. ‘I suspect that the officer who came to the scene didn’t really believe me. Thought I was spinning a line for the insurance. The other thing is, it’s not easy keeping animals like these. All of them were from the tropics or sub-tropics, and needed specialist care. The probability of some scrounging, jobless, pillhead bastards having the know-how is fucking laughable, if you’ll pardon my French. They wouldn’t have lasted long, poor little mites – I’m referring to the arachnids in case you were wondering.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Heck said. ‘But it does beg the question how they turned up in your car four months later.’
Briggs slammed the van’s rear door. ‘You know, I seem to remember going through all this sometime in the recent past. When would it be … oh yeah, when I was under arrest on suspicion of murder.’
‘Seeing as you’re a recognised expert handler, you can surely see why no one believed it was an accident, that they’d just escaped from their containers in the back of your car?’
‘I told you, I didn’t even have possession of them at the time. They got stolen the previous October. I would never have left them in my car, especially not overnight.’
‘So someone broke into your car the following January and planted them there?’
‘Obviously.’
‘It’s not inconceivable, though, Mr Briggs, that you staged the earlier burglary, reported the specimens stolen, and then planted them at a later date to try and get even with the kids who’ve been making your life hell.’
‘Good luck proving that.’ Briggs walked back into his shop. ‘The last lot didn’t have any.’
Heck considered this. The more he thought about it, the more difficult it was to imagine that opportunist thieves – the sort who were only after money so they could buy stuff to shove up their noses or down their necks – were responsible for this. As Briggs said, the specimens would have needed ultra-careful handling. That in itself would have required significant pre-planning. According to the crime report, other items had been taken as well: a small portable television kept upstairs and a laptop that Briggs had inadvertently left overnight, and even though the till was empty that too had been broken into – typical targets for opportunists, yet that could have been to provide cover for the real object of the exercise: the theft of the spiders. There’d certainly been no other signs of a routine break-in: for example, no random damage to indicate the raiders had searched for other valuables. At the same time, though, there’d been footprints on the mossy upper surface of one of the supporting walls out back; they’d been featureless, as if whoever had left them had first covered the soles of his shoes with cloth; a rare precaution for the average scrote to take.
Heck wandered back inside. Briggs had grabbed a broom and was now in the midst of a rather desultory and perhaps pointless sweep-up.
‘Okay, Mr Briggs,’ Heck said. ‘So if someone else planted those animals in the Volkswagen, do you have any ideas who?’
‘Forgive me if I haven’t got time to do your job as well as mine.’
‘You haven’t got any enemies – I mean apart from the local nightlife? No business rivals, no one you owe money to, no one who owes money to you?’
Briggs laid his broom aside. ‘I’m a small businessman – a tiny fucking businessman, if I’m honest. How is any of that stuff going to come into my life?’ He wiped sweat from his brow as he walked back outside.
Another indiscriminate target, Heck thought as he stood alone in the gutted shop. A guy who hadn’t really offended anyone – he just happened to be convenient. He skimmed again through the documentation. According to the accident report, none of the arachnids responsible had been recovered from the wreckage last January. In fact they’d only been identified as the culprits from the toxicology reports on the corpses. Experts from Chessington Zoo had said that all were likely to have gone to ground in the surrounding hedgerows, but had also concluded that none of them would have lasted long in the British winter, and thus wouldn’t pose any further threat, which – from the state of the bodies depicted on the accident scene glossies – was quite a blessing.
Outside, Briggs was busy rearranging the boxes in the rear of his van. It seemed like another pointless task, and perhaps was an unconscious means of delaying his departure from this place, which presumably had been the centre of his life for so long.
‘You say pillheads wouldn’t have a clue how to look after these specimens,’ Heck said. ‘How about everyday folk? Could a reasonably educated person keep a Deathstalker scorpion alive for four months?’
‘Well …’ Briggs gave it brief thought. ‘Someone like you could probably get the information off the internet – if you were prepared to put in the research.’
‘So if someone really, really wanted to keep the animals alive, they wouldn’t need any formal training?’
‘Probably not.’
Heck pondered this. Gail had used an interesting phrase: ‘psycho pranksters’. This would have been one hell of a prank: complex to prepare, risky to execute, and still with an uncertain outcome – at least, there’d be uncertainty about who the victims would be. And good Lord – he flicked again through the images of the crash site: the faces of Richard ‘Dazzer’ Dasby and Darrel ‘Deggsy’ Degton – necrotic blue, bloated like rotten fruit, their straining, jaundiced eyes popping (one had erupted from its socket and lay swollen like a crimson duck egg on the puffy cheek). Their jaws had sprung open so violently that they’d unhinged; their hands had twisted into blackened, rheumatic knots … anyone chuckling about this was either very bad or very mad.
Or maybe a bit of both.
Chapter 14
Gus Donaldson wondered if he was getting too old for this kind of thing. He’d been in security for the last fifteen years, and before t
hat had been a copper for twenty, so he wasn’t unused to spending lonesome night shifts, but these days, thanks partly to his age – he was only a year off sixty-six – he found it increasingly difficult to stay awake. He stood up, yawning, and for the second time that night crossed the cabin to the tea-making table, where he brewed himself a coffee and, taking a half-pint bottle from the pocket of the high visibility coat hanging over the back of his chair, liberally dosed it with Napoleon brandy.
He shouldn’t be drinking on the job of course, but at three in the morning no one else would be out here to stop him. And increasingly he felt it was the only way he could get through these long, tedious hours. The spicy cuppa hit just the right spot, but pretty soon torpor was stealing over Gus again, especially once he’d settled back into his chair. He tried hard to focus on the bank of monitors in front of him, the scene constantly switching from the Equestrian Centre to the main office, the workshops to the boating lake, and so on, though within a few minutes this itself became mesmerising, almost hypnotic. Abruptly deciding he needed some fresh air, he shook himself and stood up. Almost robotically, he pulled on his coat, slotted his torch into his belt, opened the front door, and stepped outside.
The security cabin, which was located on the east side of the Showground, wasn’t really a cabin as such – it was a flat-roofed prefabricated structure, which had originally been brought here on a trailer. It consisted of only two rooms if you counted its small toilet. Outside, a velvet summer night lay over the Showground, the air scented with grass and young wheat, warmth still rising from the sun-baked fields encircling it, courtesy of the recent heatwave. This was a bit more like it; peaceful yet at the same time invigorating.
There was scarcely a sound, only the slightest breath of wind ruffling the flags atop the two rows of poles that formed an honour guard inside the east gate. Aside from the lamp in the cabin, the only other light came from a distantly setting moon and of course the myriad stars spangling the purple/black sky, which, as so often at the height of summer, appeared to fade the further east one looked until eventually blending with a faint, salmon-pink horizon.
Gus’s car was parked round the back, but a couple of times now his supervisors had sternly advised him that foot patrols were a preferred option on the Showground itself, as that way he could hear if something was going on. That wasn’t a bad shout, if he was honest, despite the arthritic twinge he was currently feeling in his left knee. For one thing, having just downed his second pick-me-up of the shift, it wouldn’t do if the police turned up for some reason and caught him behind the wheel. For another, foot patrols were a good way to pass the time. The Southern Counties Showground covered several square miles in total, and Gus had already worked out that if he made two full circuits at a slow, easy pace, and then patrolled the central area too, dividing it up into quadrants, which he could explore one at a time in similar leisurely fashion, it could eat up an entire three hours – not to be sniffed at when he still had four hours to kill.
At first everything was fine. He perambulated along the central drag towards the Showground’s western edge; the only sounds the thud of his rubber-soled boots, or the occasional distant call of a nightjar. As the air was clear and dry, his vision seemed to adjust more speedily than usual. There wasn’t even any need to switch his torch on. Soon he was strolling down a long avenue between ranks of newly manufactured farming machines: harvesters and hay balers, the moon and stars glinting off their smooth chrome finishes. When he thought he spied a flicker of movement on the road ahead, he wrote it off as an optical illusion created by these shadowy, sleeping giants and their reflective surfaces. Nevertheless, he now felt better taking the torch from his belt, even though he still didn’t turn it on – it was large and heavy, and he’d always thought it would make a good substitute for the truncheon he’d used to carry on the beat.
He covered another hundred yards, seeing nothing else, and reached a small crossroads. He halted, glancing right to the main offices and left towards the Learning Centre. Once again, there was a faint flutter of movement down there – about sixty yards distant, as if some fast-moving form had flitted across the road.
Gus held his ground for several long moments, and then felt cautiously for the radio at his belt – only to discover that it wasn’t there. Frustrated, he recollected placing it on the desk alongside the CCTV monitors several hours ago. When he felt instead for the mobile phone in his pocket, that was absent too. Gus remembered leaving that near the kettle back at the commencement of his shift, after using it to call Marsha and wish her goodnight. He swore quietly to himself as he proceeded down the left-hand lane. It could still have been a trick of the light that he’d seen, but he knew he couldn’t afford to make assumptions. More neatly arrayed farm machinery passed him on either side: threshers, crop sprayers – heavy complex forms in the darkness, all silent and still.
Eventually he reached the Hatchlands Pavilion: a palatial tent-like structure that would serve as one of the Trade Fair’s official exhibition halls. He halted again, listening – aside from the canvas of the pavilion flapping in the breeze, there was still no sound. Glancing in through its wide-open door, he saw the vague shapes of empty tables and stands. They wouldn’t be empty for much longer of course. The exhibitors would be arriving first thing to set up. Gus stepped inside the roomy interior. Even at night, with no sun to beat through the thick canvas, it felt significantly warmer in there than it did outside – it was stuffier too: mingled odours of must and trampled grass. By this time tomorrow, it would also smell of manure. He smiled to himself. Even though the stables and animal pens, and the Pirbright Hall, where most of the livestock shows were held, were a good twenty minutes’ walk away, it would still smell of manure. Somehow or other, agricultural trade fairs always ended up stinking of poo.
A shadow rippled along the rear wall of the tent.
Gus blinked and it had gone.
Just as quickly as he’d jumped, he relaxed again.
The canvas awnings rustled and ruffled in the breeze. That was all he’d seen – a loose billow of material. But still he didn’t switch his torch on, even though he now clutched it in a hand that was moist with sweat. He glanced more closely at the far wall – and was shaken to see that his ‘loose billow of material’ had halted midway and resolved itself into the silhouette of someone standing very still on the other side, as though peering through the canvas at him.
Gus again tried to tell himself that it was an optical illusion, but his blood was tingling and his mouth had gone dry. He assured himself that it would still serve no purpose to switch his torch on – its bright beam would not illuminate whatever was standing on the other side of the pavilion wall. Not that he really needed to, because the more his eyes attuned, the more he was able to visualise that motionless figure: a broad, strong torso, two arms, two legs, a head. The real reason of course, and now he couldn’t help but admit this, was that if he turned his light on he would reveal his own presence here, assuming it hadn’t already been detected – and what would be the purpose of that? Suddenly, Gus Donaldson felt his age. He was sixty-five years old, overweight and had a bad knee, and he hadn’t tried to run anywhere in as long he could remember, much less attempt to apprehend someone.
The figure remained motionless. It knew that he was here – he could sense it.
Gus cursed himself again for not having brought his radio or phone.
Then it ran. As simply as that, the tall, stationary form turned and bolted away into invisibility.
Still Gus held his ground, though his courage was ebbing back, even more so as he heard thumping footfalls recede into the night – so the intruder really was running away. Well, perhaps it was understandable. Whoever it was, they’d halted out there to listen because they thought they’d heard someone inside the pavilion. On realising it was a night watchman, they’d fled.
‘Okay … okay,’ Gus said, treading back outside. He’d have a quick, cursory look around, to see if there was any sig
n of them. And then he’d scoot back to the cabin, where he’d give serious thought to reporting the incident. Slowly, he circled the flimsy structure, the torch gripped tightly in his shaking fist.
Alongside the Hatchlands, another portable cabin had been set up, this one a public lavatory. Gus sidled down the narrow passage between the two, having to step over pegs and guy ropes, tufts of elephant grass reaching as high as his knees. If he was honest, he hoped the intruder just kept on running – all the way until he’d vacated the Showground. Gus was definitely too old for this. His memories of distant days in uniform – real uniform – came back to him. When he was a strapping young beat bobby he’d never known the meaning of fear; there was almost no one he couldn’t handle, and even on the rare occasion when there had been, he’d had the biggest support network any man could want at the other end of a radio. Failing that, what was the worst that could have happened? He’d get battered, but be able to spend a few days off work on full pay, with no one able to criticise him. Things were so different now.
He emerged from the side passage. Open grass lay in front, and a few yards beyond that a dark row of brand new tractors, all glinting in the starlight.
Gus stumbled to another halt. It wouldn’t be difficult for someone to hide around here, to climb onto the back of one of the tractors, or conceal themselves underneath. How easily they’d be able to jump out on him.
And yet that was nonsense, surely? Why would they do that? Why would they even be here? They could hardly steal anything. Yet he’d seen someone, hadn’t he? Whoever it was, they’d been here for some reason. Perhaps they just wanted to cause damage? Perhaps they sought to play some juvenile game of cat and mouse? Either way, Gus decided that he’d done enough. He would head back to the cabin (keeping a constant watch over his shoulder as he did), and from there he’d call the police. Brandy-coffee be damned. But just as he was turning, he was stopped by something else – a dazzling light show in the sky to the south-west.