by Andy Maslen
‘Natural England’d have a field day if they saw us doing this,’ Harry said.
‘Let’s hope they don’t find out then, eh?’
They watched as the farmer laboriously scraped away the red earth from the entrance to the sett and began digging down. The growl of the tractor’s diesel engine rose and fell as the scoop bit into the earth. Five minutes later, Hannah shouted. An arm, missing its hand and smeared with mud, tumbled from the clawed scoop.
The CSIs laid out an unzipped black body bag on the grass, and piece by piece they began assembling the filth-encrusted remains into a disarticulated corpse . . . missing its head.
Ford looked at the sad array of body parts. Here and there he saw traces of discoloration on the skin. He looked closer, holding his breath, and realised what they were.
He called over to Hannah. When she arrived he pointed at one of the arms. ‘I think those are tattoos. Do you think you could get them cleaned up? We could show some photos around today, see if anybody recognises them.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve got water in the van.’
It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Maybe he’d get lucky and the golden hour might actually last sixty minutes for once. He watched as Hannah squirted water over an arm and began gently swabbing the skin with a sponge. As she revealed the tattoo, of a futuristic, black and grey machine gun with a winged skull on the barrel, Ford’s mind whirled. He’d seen it before. Where the hell was it?
He closed his eyes. Heard a cocky young guy with a thick Wiltshire accent giving him lip as he snapped a pair of cuffs over his wrists: When my brothers hear about this, you’re going to be in so much trouble, copper, you’ll wish you never even saw me.
Muscular arms flexing in their restraints. And the same tattoo.
Ford opened his eyes. There couldn’t be two like that in Salisbury.
He was looking down at the right arm of Tommy Bolter, youngest of three brothers who were the nearest the city had to an organised crime group. The distance was still great, but they had ambition, which was always a dangerous quality.
As well as Tommy, Ford had once arrested the older two: Jason John, aka JJ; and Ryan, aka Rye. That case had been dismissed after a key witness failed to attend court. Nobbled, was the shared opinion of the cops who’d worked so hard to get the brothers before a judge.
He had to get out in front of this one fast, because JJ and Rye wouldn’t sit quietly and play the role of what the media liked to call ‘grieving relatives who just want to be left in peace to mourn’.
Ford heard the tractor’s engine rise in tone and turned to see the scoop angling down to take another huge bite out of the earth. Running back, he waved his arm at Ball. Having caught the farmer’s attention, he signalled with a slicing motion across his throat for him to kill the chuntering engine. He climbed up to the cab.
‘We need the head intact,’ he said. ‘I’m worried you’ll damage it.’
Ball shrugged. ‘Either that or I’ll just end up pushing the damned thing further in. You’d be surprised how far back those setts go. I nearly lost one of my dogs down one a year or two back.’
The story gave Ford an idea. A deeply unpleasant idea. An idea it would be wrong to foist on anyone he outranked. He sighed and climbed down. He retrieved a torch from his murder bag and climbed into a Noddy suit, booties and gloves.
DC Julie ‘Jools’ Harper, his bagwoman, had just arrived.
‘What are you doing, guv?’ she asked him as he returned from the Discovery.
‘I think I know who the dead man is, but I need to be sure.’
‘Who is it?’
‘I’m ninety-nine per cent sure it’s Tommy Bolter.’
Jools bit her lip. ‘Jesus! Let’s hope the one per cent comes up trumps, then.’
‘We need the last piece of the puzzle. Unless we’re facing someone who collects human heads, I’m betting it’s still down there.’
Her face contorted as nose, mouth and eyes all scrunched up into varying twists of disgust.
‘You’re not—’
‘I’m afraid I am. No other option unless we want to risk Farmer Giles over there turning it into a meat bowling ball or smashing it altogether.’
‘What do you mean, no other option?’ she asked, hands on hips. ‘We could send a cadaver dog down. Or get ground-penetrating radar over it. Or even find a caver to take a look for us first.’
Ford nodded. ‘We could do any or all of those. And they’d be safer. But what if it rains, Jools? Have you seen the forecast? The sett could flood and the head could be washed to God knows where,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘Or another animal could take it and drag it too deep to recover. I’ll put my risk assessment in the policy book, but I’m going. It’s wide enough to get into. I’ll be fine.’
‘I still think it’s too dangerous, guv. And you’d be breaking about a dozen health and safety rules. What if it caves in on you?’
‘I agree. It is dangerous. But if we go on the College of Policing website and look up protocols under “B”, I don’t think we’re going to find “Badger”.’ Ford made a concession. ‘How about this? Get a rope, say thirty feet, and tie it round my ankle. That’s as far as I’ll go. If it goes taut, you can give it a tug and I’ll come out. OK?’
‘I’m not happy, but yes, I suppose that could work. And Wix’ll be pleased.’
Jools went off to get some rope. She brought it back and accompanied him as far as the now-ravaged sett. The digger had turned the opening into a deeply grooved trench, at the bottom of which the black mouth, three feet across, waited to swallow Ford whole. Jools tied the rope around Ford’s right ankle.
‘Wait!’ she said sharply, as Ford kneeled at the sett’s gaping mouth. He looked over his shoulder at her. ‘What if there’s a badger down there? Don’t they have really sharp teeth? Or claws?’
The thought had occurred to him at the same moment. He derived no comfort from it. ‘Thanks for that. I’m hoping the torch will scare them off. Otherwise, if you hear me scream, pull me out!’
He went for a braver than I sound grin. Jools’s frown made him sure he hadn’t pulled it off. He was tempted to abandon his plan and join her in the reverence for the rulebook she’d brought with her from a stint in the military police. He looked over her shoulder and saw he’d attracted an audience. A dozen or so CSIs. Uniforms and detectives. The dog-walkers. Ball with a grandstand view from his tractor seat. That decided it. He was going.
Hannah proffered a large evidence bag. He folded it up and stuffed it into the hip pocket of his Noddy suit. He took a deep breath and slithered down the sett’s sloping sides.
With his head and shoulders in the shaft, he aimed the torch at the roof, hoping badgers had a natural equivalent of pit props. Tangled, hairy roots dangled from the earth like the long straggly whiskers of a tramp’s beard. Were they binding the soil? He hoped so.
He shuffled along on his elbows, concentrating on breathing evenly. He pulled himself forward another six inches and kept swinging the torch beam from side to side, searching for his prize. The earth smelled old, as if he were descending not just in space but also in time. Riding on the bass notes of iron and loam he detected a sweeter smell, tinged with putrescence. Decaying flesh. Here and there he saw dark smears.
Something white flashed at him a few yards further on. Trying to ignore the sense of a crushing weight above him, and the way the narrowing walls were scraping at his shoulders, he swung the torch up, down, left, right and – Ohmigod – saw it. Him.
He came face to face with a battered, bloody but still recognisably human head. Was it Tommy Bolter? It looked a little like him. But the eyes were milky and clouded, upturned in their sockets so only half the irises were visible. The skin, a sickly blend of greenish-brown and purple, had begun to sag and slip. Something – the badgers, he assumed – had taken a few bites out of the cheeks, leaving bone shining through. Blood and earth matted the hair. The stink made his eyes water. His guts churned and he had to exer
t himself not to throw up.
His fingertips were tingling and he found he couldn’t breathe. He heaved air into his lungs, sucking in small particles of dirt that produced a bout of coughing. He fought down a sudden wave of panic as sweat broke out all over his skin. How ridiculous to die down here in a senseless act of bravado.
He took in a breath and held it. He squeezed his eyes shut. His son’s face swam into view.
Sam was sixteen, on the cusp of manhood and taking more of an interest in Ford’s work. Ford thought he knew why. By connecting with his father’s work, Sam could make sense of death. A solved case meant a death explained. He’d asked about his mother’s death, too. Asking for explanations. Details. And, above all, reasons.
But how could Ford give him reasons, when he hardly dared examine them himself? Sam wanted to understand why his mother had died. He’d never cope if his father died, too. It was why Ford kept things back from him. No, give it its proper name. He lied to him.
He found thinking about Sam allowed his panic to recede. He offered up a heartfelt prayer to the saints of his own personal pantheon.
Dear Saint Ella, Saint B.B., Saint Rosetta and Saint Buddy. Saints Jimi, Eric, Jeff and Peter. Please let me get out of this hole, and I promise I’ll try to open up to Sam a bit more. Amen, brothers and sisters.
And he heard them answer, a bluesy chorus:
‘You ain’t gonna die down here, Ford.
You ain’t gonna die down here.
Now, get your ass in gear and pull yourself together,
’cause you ain’t gonna die down here.’
He counted down from ten and, when he reached ‘one’, he opened his eyes. He could breathe normally. The panic was gone.
He reached back for the evidence bag, but his arm wouldn’t go past his ribcage: the passage was too narrow. He groaned, dropping his head until his nose touched the cool, dank earthen floor of the tunnel. Idiot! He should have had the bag in his hand before getting wedged in tighter than a cork in a bottle.
The head lay just an arm’s length away. He hadn’t come all this way to leave it. Flinching, he extended his right hand and curled his fingers into the matted hair. He tugged lightly. The hair came away from the scalp. Wincing, he tried again. This time he hooked his fingers under the jawbone and clamped it with his thumb.
And then, already feeling Hannah’s disapproval as she saw her prime exhibit mishandled by the lead investigator, he shuffled backwards, dragging the head and trying to avoid that milky stare.
The light level increased. So did the space around him. He heard voices. Someone grabbed his ankles.
‘Don’t pull me!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got it.’
A few more awkward elbow pushes and he could finally bring his knees into play and free himself. He stood, the head swinging at his hip.
The watchers burst into applause. He told himself it was genuine, but every copper he’d ever met possessed a fine sense of irony. Add in the state of him and the clapping took on a satirical edge.
A CSI bustled over, a plastic evidence bag already held wide. Grateful to be free of his burden, he placed the head inside. Jools joined him and brushed some crumbs of dirt from his forehead before crouching to untie the rope from his ankle.
‘You look like shit, guv,’ she said.
‘I love you, too, Jools. Come on, let’s get back to Bourne Hill. I’m in need of soap and hot water.’
He walked back to where Hannah was photographing the tattoos. On the left shoulder, a red rose wrapped in barbed wire and pierced by a serrated dagger dripping blood. And on the right pectoral, a large-breasted, naked woman reclining on a motorbike, above script reading ‘I love to ride!’
Sighing, Ford left her to it. He peeled off his forensic gear and threw it all into the back of the Discovery. Freshening up would have to wait. He wanted to brief his boss, Detective Superintendent Sandra ‘Sandy’ Monroe, aka the Python, as soon as they got back.
Driving away, he asked Jools to call Dr Georgina Eustace, the forensic pathologist at Salisbury District Hospital, and put her on speaker.
‘You’ve got a body coming in this morning,’ he said. ‘In bits. I know who it is. Can you get him prepped for a viewing before you do the post-mortem?’
‘When?’
‘A few hours?’
‘That’s not really long enough, but it’s quiet today. Who is it?’
‘Tommy Bolter.’
There was a three-second pause.
‘Ah. I see. I’ll put Pete on it. I’ll tell him to do his best work.’
Jools looked at Ford as he ended the call. ‘This is going to be a shit-show, isn’t it?’
He nodded, thinking that they had ringside seats. The worst in the house.
As he cruised past the hospital’s main entrance with its fundraising thermometer graphic, the cathedral’s spire appeared on the horizon. Wherever you were in the city or the surrounding countryside, you’d either have a clear view of it or be within minutes of one.
When he and Lou had moved down ten years earlier, that soaring monument to man’s desire to connect with the eternal had taken their breath away; literally, on the day they took part in a sponsored climb to the top of the spire and looked out over half the county.
He’d wanted to bury her in the Cathedral Close, but apparently for that you needed a special dispensation from the bishop. Instead, she rested in a country churchyard where he could visit her undisturbed by tourists snapping selfies with their backs to the cathedral and its wonders. Probably for the best. Her graveside didn’t bring out his most rational side.
CHAPTER FIVE
Gripping two mugs of coffee, Ford walked into Sandy’s office. She looked up at him and puffed her cheeks out. Her normally sleek ash-blonde hair stuck out at angles as if she’d recently been pulling at it. Then he saw the spreadsheet on her screen and understood why. Faced with budget forecasting, Sandy liked to list increasingly painful physical procedures she’d rather undergo.
‘Henry,’ she said, accepting the proffered mug and taking a sip. ‘Please tell me you’re bringing me good news.’ Then she wrinkled her nose. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘My news. Not sure it’s good, though.’
Ford sat in the leather chair across the desk from his boss. Blew across the surface of his own coffee before taking a sip. ‘I’ve just watched a digger pull pieces of Tommy Bolter out of a badger sett. That’s the stink.’
She regarded him steadily. ‘You’re sure it’s Tommy?’
‘I need a positive ID, but I’m certain it’s him.’
‘Jesus! I knew Tommy when he was just nicking other kids’ lunch money in junior school,’ Sandy said with a grimace. ‘What a waste of a life.’
‘And before you hear it from anyone else, I had to go down the hole to get his head myself. Couldn’t reach my evidence bag, so—’
She frowned. ‘You’re not about to confess to contaminating evidence, are you?’
‘I had no choice. If you want the whole gory tale, I dragged it out by the jawbone.’
Sandy barked out a single laugh. He didn’t hear any mirth in it.
‘Sorry, Henry. It’s bad, I know that. It’s just you have no idea what a relief it is to be discussing actual crime instead of budgets and’ – she peered at her screen – ‘multimodal performance metrics, whatever the hell they are.’
‘I think it means, are we catching enough criminals?’
‘Well, go and catch this one, then. Give me a green tick to put in the bloody column.’
Back in his own office, he spread out the crime scene photos on his desk.
The way the body had been cut up was interesting. These were not the random hackings of a disordered mind. No trial-and-error cutting, looking for joints. No raking away at solid bone with a chainsaw. No practice cuts. No stab wounds. The dismemberment was – he hesitated to use the word ‘clinical’ – professional.
He decided on a quick briefing with the team to get them going. Because wha
t he really needed to do urgently was get out to see JJ and Rye Bolter.
Ten minutes later, he stood to address his assembled officers in the big meeting room in Major Crimes. They’d started calling it the ‘sugar cube’ after the Powers That Be had sent in decorators to paint the whole room white. Presumably drawing on a different budget to the one that consumed so much of Sandy’s time.
‘This morning, a member of the public out walking her dog found a human hand down a badger sett. We recovered the rest of the body. It’s a white male—’
‘IC1,’ DC Olly Cable murmured, already scribbling in his leather-covered notebook.
‘Well done, Fast-Track,’ Mick Tanner said, to grins from a couple of the older CID detectives and most of the uniforms.
Olly scowled at Mick. Ford had observed growing friction between the two men: Olly, the young ambitious graduate, and Mick, the long-serving DS and one-time rival for the job that was now Ford’s.
‘As I said, white male, chopped into bits,’ Ford said. ‘This isn’t confirmed yet, but I think it’s Tommy Bolter.’
A ripple of murmurs swept through the room. Only Olly looked confused.
‘Sorry, who’s Tommy Bolter?’ he asked.
Ford frowned with irritation. OK, Olly was a recent transfer, but he ought to have got himself up to speed by now.
‘Tell him, someone,’ Ford said.
Mick turned in his chair to address Olly. ‘Tommy, JJ and Rye Bolter are a bunch of wannabe Goodfellas. Or were, in Tommy’s case. Grew up watching too many Martin Scorsese films on stolen DVD players. They think they’re the crime lords of our fair city,’ he said, looking around the room and earning a few nods. ‘Drugs, nicking high-end agricultural machinery, sheep rustling, a bit of this, that and the other. Mum and Dad Bolter built the family firm on a scrap metal business. All dodgy, of course.
‘Since they died of drugs and alcohol abuse, JJ has ruled the roost. He’s ruthless and he’s made enough cash to employ a decent lawyer if we ever feel his collar. Rye’s the muscle. Borderline psychopath. And, until he recently took up caving, Tommy was the office junior, learning the ropes and chasing crumbs from JJ’s table.’