Deadland

by William Shaw

  Noise filled the air. The Range Rover was sounding its horn in a long, angry note, swerving left and right as the driver tried to correct his steering after avoiding the youngster who had just run out in front of him.

  And, visible now the Range Rover had passed, the store guard, a shocked expression on his face.

  Tap realised that it wasn’t just his friend who had escaped being hit. The guard too had been about to dash out into the road after him.

  And Sloth, grinning like an idiot, almost at the other side as the guard stepped out into the road after him . . .

  *

  . . . And in that instant was slammed into, side on, by a motorbike travelling in the opposite direction to the Range Rover.

  Sloth, all smiles still, oblivious to what had happened, sprinted on. Behind him, the guard tumbled, his head bouncing off the black tarmac.

  The bike slewed on down the street, rider tumbling off onto the ground.

  The guard lay there, abruptly inert while everything else continued to move around him.

  *

  ‘Run.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Frickin’ run.’ Sloth grabbed Tap’s arm and dragged him away.

  Tap followed, but after what he had just seen, his legs felt like they belonged to another person.

  ‘Come on, bro.’

  They scampered up a side street, away from the main road. Something fell behind Tap and he turned his head to see a packet of digestives rolling down the tarmac behind him, disappearing under a parked car.

  Ahead, Sloth had tucked himself behind a wooden fence; Tap joined him. They paused, peering back. Nobody was following them. Sloth made to set off again.

  ‘Give us a sec.’

  ‘There’ll be a cop car along in a minute. C’mon.’

  ‘Did you see what happened?’

  Sloth, grinning still. ‘What?’

  ‘To the guard.’

  ‘Too busy running, mate. Come on.’ And he ran away up the small suburban street. ‘Got away, mate. That’s what matters.’

  Tap took a lungful or air, started to move again. At the end of the road was a footbridge over the A206. No police car coming this way would be able to follow them over it. They paused halfway across, watching the vehicles speed along the dual carriageway beneath them, gathering breath.

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘I think the guard’s dead,’ Tap said.

  ‘What?’

  The roar of the traffic was too loud.

  ‘The guard was hit by a bike. Must have been going sixty. Didn’t you see?’

  Sloth frowned. ‘What guard?’

  ‘The one from the shop. The one that was running after you.’

  ‘You’re joking? I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘No.’ Sweating now, Tap unzipped his jacket. Two packets of Jammie Dodgers and a cheese pie fell onto the path.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘My own eyes.’ He could never un-see it: the bounce of the skull, the sudden vacancy of the man’s face. ‘I never meant for that to happen. I swear.’

  Sloth was still clutching the bottle of wine.

  ‘Shit, man. Shit.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Shit, man. We better get away from here. They’ll be after us. CCTV and everything.’

  Again, Tap just nodded, too shocked for any more words.

  *

  Hoods up, shoulders down, they walked past building sites and empty new flats.

  ‘This way. Bloody hell, Tap. Is that you? Keep it in, mate.’

  The sewerage treatment plant lay between them and the wide reach of the Thames.

  ‘Not funny,’ shouted Tap, punching Sloth hard on the arm. ‘Not now.’

  ‘No. Sorry. Shit, man.’ Sloth rubbed his arm.

  Walking a little further, they turned off the road into Dartford Marsh, flat and dark. They sat out of sight beneath brambles.

  ‘We came here from school, didn’t we?’

  Sloth looked around. ‘Yeah. I remember. The workhouse, weren’t it?’

  It came back to him now. They had come here in minibuses and scuffed around the old foundations of the huge building, long torn down, sneaking cigarettes when teacher wasn’t looking. This is where they had once shipped London’s old, sick and the unwanted, carrying them down the Thames and dumping them here. After that there had been a firework factory nearby, until that too had been destroyed in an explosion.

  ‘We had to write an essay, remember?’

  ‘You did a drawing. I remember they pinned it up in the classroom till someone drew a dick on it. It was pretty good. You used to be great at drawing, bro.’ Sloth looked around him. ‘I used to frickin’ hate school. Don’t seem so bad now, does it?’

  ‘I remember the essay. We had to pretend to be an orphan, caught stealing a loaf of bread, and we’d been sent here as a punishment. I got an A minus.’

  ‘You never got an A minus for anything.’

  ‘Did.’

  Nothing remained but the odd derelict outhouse now.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Tap, looking around.

  ‘Keep our heads down. Nobody will look for us here. It’s a dump.’

  Beyond the sewerage plant, the Dartford Crossing rose up over the Thames, a string of red brake lights arcing over the wide river.

  The scrub land smelt of foxes and dog shit. It was covered in huge bramble thickets, skirted by muddy paths. Down one of the tracks, they found an old brick shed. There was no door.

  ‘This used to be part of the firework factory, wasn’t it?’ Tap looked around.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Remember? Everything blew up. My gran told me. She heard it.’

  ‘You’re making this up.’

  ‘No. It was massive. Friend of my gran’s was having dinner and a head came flying in the window.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘True. Swear to God. Human head. The glasses were still on and everything. My gran told me.’

  Sloth peered in.

  Someone had slept in here not so long ago. A few empty tins of cider were stacked next to some sheets of newspaper that some wino must have once used for a bed.

  ‘Here?’ questioned Tap.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a bit . . .’ Sloth made a face.

  ‘Least it’ll be dry if it rains.’

  Sloth nodded, took the packet of biscuits and fumbled to open it. They sat together on the cold, bare concrete inside the small shed. Sloth was on his fourth biscuit, but Tap struggled to finish his first.

  He was thinking of the guard’s head. The impact of a skull. The stillness of the body when everything around it was in motion, the bike skidding on past him, the Range Rover roaring on up the road.

  ‘You got to eat something, mate.’

  ‘Really thirsty,’ said Tap, starting to shiver.

  Sloth stood, gathered up the newspaper, then went outside and returned after two or three minutes with a pile of sticks.

  Tap watched him squatting to carefully build the fire, just inside the open door.

  He flicked a lighter several times at the damp paper, blowing the flame gently until it lit, filling the small space with white smoke. Once it caught, he disappeared again, returning with more wood, bigger pieces this time. It took a few minutes for the fire to warm the air around it, for the smoke to begin to drift out of the open door and broken windows.

  ‘Better?’ Sloth asked.

  Tap nodded, holding his hands in front of the flame.

  The wine had a cork in it. Sloth looked around for something to open it with. He tried pushing the stopper in with a stick, but the stick broke. Eventually he found an old door knob that was still attached to its spindle. He placed the spindle on top of the bottle and pushed down hard, until the cork gave way, dropping into the neck, spurting wine over Sloth’s hands. Face lit by the red of the fire, he handed the open bottle to Tap. ‘Go on. Drink.’

  Thirsty, his mouth dry from the biscuit, Tap took a
gulp and swallowed. ‘That’s horrible. I think it’s off.’

  Sloth took the drink off him, sniffed, then took a slug of it himself. ‘That’s what wine is supposed to taste like. It’s delicious, man.’

  ‘It’s vile,’ Tap announced, but he took another mouthful. The sandwiches were egg and cress. Tap picked them up. ‘’Kin’ hell, man. Couldn’t you get chicken?’

  For the first time, Sloth laughed. Side by side, they sat, backs against the brick wall, staring at the flames, passing the bottle back and forth.

  ‘You serious, about the guard? Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tap. In his stomach, the wine felt better than it tasted. ‘He didn’t stand a chance, man.’

  ‘His own fault for chasing us.’

  ‘Can’t say that, man. It was just his job. It was our fault.’

  Sloth’s face remained stony. ‘Can’t go to the feds now, can we?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Tap. ‘We can’t.’

  Sloth nodded. They watched the flickering light. ‘Bullshit, though. If that head was blown all the way to Dartford, how come his glasses stayed on? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s what my gran said,’ said Tap.

  At some point, Tap must have fallen asleep. He woke to see Sloth feeding the fire with more pieces of timber, sparks flying up, out of the open door, into the black sky.

  Maybe they could live out here. Nobody would find them. Not the man who had killed Mikey; not the police. They could be safe here, couldn’t they?

  FIFTEEN

  Michael Dillman had been a smiler. His face was projected from his laptop onto the whiteboard at the far end of the incident room. A middle-aged man, tanned, dark-haired, handsome in a well-used way.

  Most people looked resigned in arrest photos, their ears shadowed in flash against a white background, hair unbrushed, maybe a cut on their face from some altercation. A few still looked angry, or affronted. Only a few, like Michael, smiled, as if unable to resist the impulse when faced by a camera.

  Semi-circles of chairs were ranged around the board, dotted with officers, some with plastic cups of tea and coffee, notebooks open on their laps, stifling Monday morning yawns. Most had already worked the weekend.

  ‘Had no idea of how the victim got to the scrap yard, so we looked at vehicles registered under his name.’ A sergeant was standing by the whiteboard going through briefing notes.

  The man in the picture, shot in what looked like a gang-related killing, had been known to the police for a rich variety of offences, including theft, common assault, handling stolen goods and criminal damage. The concern was that if this was a gang assassination, there would be reprisals.

  ‘Turned out he has a BMW and a high-end Suzuki motorbike.’

  Cupidi looked around. Sergeant Moon was sat with some of the younger lads, near the back.

  ‘There’s a construction company on the Walhouse Road. They’ve got CCTV facing the street. Fortunately there’s not much traffic on that road. At 4.42 p.m. on Friday there’s this.’

  He clicked the space bar on his laptop. The face on the whiteboard was replaced by a fuzzy black-and-white image of a man hunched over a motorbike.

  ‘We’re pretty sure that’s the victim, Michael Dillman, on his way to the yard. The make and model of the bike appear to match.’

  ‘That a bag?’

  ‘Yes. He’s carrying what we think is a black shoulder bag. There was no sign of that at the crime scene. Nor of this motorbike. We can only assume that whoever killed him took the bag and the bike. It’s a valuable machine, worth several grand.’

  Cupidi stared. The photograph was fuzzy. Besides, the black visor was already closed on the man’s helmet. You couldn’t actually see his face. Was it a man who knew he might be heading towards his death, or not?

  ‘So we ran the plates of Michael Dillman’s bike on ANPR and look what we found.’

  He clicked the space bar on his laptop and a map of North Kent appeared.

  ‘The plate has been recognised in multiple locations around the town of Dartford, all between midday and three p.m. on Saturday. Since then, nothing. We’re running CCTV at those locations to see if we can find anything which has the rider on it, but don’t expect much.’

  ‘Was Dillman’s helmet left behind at the scene?’ asked Cupidi.

  The sergeant shook his head.

  ‘So presumably whoever nicked the bike, took the helmet too. Full face. So he could conceal his identity.’

  ‘Or her identity,’ interrupted Ferriter.

  ‘Obviously. His or her face.’

  ‘Why’s he hanging around in Dartford?’

  ‘Why would anybody hang around in Dartford?’

  ‘Any phone record?’

  ‘We’ve looked at all Dillman’s calls over the twenty-four hours leading up to the murder. Nothing that looks suspicious. Nothing that indicates any reason why he left to go to meet someone in a scrap yard in the middle of nowhere.’

  The sergeant pressed the space bar again. A photo of Michael Dillman, lying between fridges, dishwasher and washing machines, stacked to form a ramshackle street, eyes open still. The exit wound had left what looked like a strange swelling, a bulge of shattered bone beneath the skin.

  ‘Note the ring around the entry point, indicating that the victim was shot by a weapon held directly to his head.’

  A click. Another photo, this time a wider angle. Bright green shoots of nettles and grass, caught by the low light, among the discarded metal and mud.

  ‘Any idea what Dillman had his hand in this time?’

  ‘Last December, that’s four months ago, he just got out of a four-year stretch for ABH. Dillman was working as muscle for a local loan shark at the time. The assault appears to have been about a debt. Anyone remember it?’

  ‘Yeah. Battered a guy who owed a few grand, didn’t he? Broke the guy’s arm.’

  ‘We need to see if there’s some connection with that. Maybe revenge? We need to know who he might’ve pissed off over the years. Back in the nineties he was involved in a bit of dealing, a bit of protection. We’ve been asking all known associates. They all swear on their mothers’ graves he was going straight.’

  Older officers chuckled knowingly. Like that would ever happen.

  ‘There was a lot of indignation we would even be suggesting that Dillman was up to his old tricks. How dare we? But you don’t wind up shot in the side of the head unless you’re up to some shite, do you?’

  The Senior Investigating Officer, a heavyset DI in his fifties called Wray, handed out a few actions to officers, then looked up, checked his watch and said, ‘Next. The amazing arm-in-the-jar mystery. I’ve got, DS . . . Cupidi?’ He looked around the room.

  Cupidi shuffled her way to the whiteboard, through the chairs. ‘You all heard of this one, yes?’

  ‘On the news last night,’ said a constable in the front row.

  ‘Yeah. Couldn’t miss it.’

  ‘Right arm. Probably male. As you possibly know already, concealed in an artwork, two weeks ago or longer. No idea yet why . . . whether it’s some attention-seeking thing, or . . . It’s pretty strange.’ She looked up.

  The mood in the room had changed. Before, when they’d been talking about the supposed gang murder, the faces around her had been grim and serious. Now they were smiling. Already, the case was a joke.

  ‘The arm appears to have been placed in the jar before it was installed at the gallery.’

  ‘What’s a jar doing in a gallery?’

  ‘Can I get my laptop up on screen?’ asked Cupidi.

  ‘Oh. Right.’ The DI stood again, unplugged the other officer’s computer. ‘Let me show you. That goes in here,’ he said, pointing to a port at the side of Cupidi’s laptop.‘You need to sync it,’ he explained. And it was easier to just let him do it than to tell him that she knew how.

  The jar finally illuminated the screen behind her.

  ‘My nan does stuff like that in pottery class. Gives it to us as bir
thday presents.’

  ‘You’re a bunch of philistines,’ said Ferriter.

  Cupidi raised her voice above the chatter. ‘Packing material had been inserted into the jar around the arm, covering it from sight.’

  She looked around. The short attention span of the room was already moving on.

  ‘It’s a profound comment on the human condition,’ someone was saying.

  ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like . . .’

  ‘A little bit of help here.’ Cupidi shouted. ‘This is a potential murder investigation . . .’

  There was a second’s shocked silence. ‘Any sign of formaldehyde?’ someone suggested.

  ‘You mean, was this a medical specimen?’

  ‘Just a thought.’

  ‘And not a bad one,’ Cupidi said. ‘We’re expecting a preliminary forensic report at the end of the day. I’m guessing any trace of preserving fluid would show up early, so that may make things clearer.’

  ‘So is this a murder inquiry or not?’

  ‘Exactly. Two preliminary questions. One, have any other body parts turned up elsewhere in recent months? Peter? You were looking into that.’

  Sergeant Moon looked up. ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Nope. Not so far, anyway.’

  ‘OK. Two. Was this someone attempting to conceal a body part, or the exact opposite? Someone who was trying to hide it would not have been happy that it ended up on public display in a gallery. On the other hand, maybe that’s the point. To make us notice. Peter? In what you’ve been doing, have you come across anything else like this? Is there any kind of incident that makes this part of a pattern?’

  ‘Nothing similar I can find.’

  She looked around the room. People were starting to look at their phones; never a great sign.

  She raised her voice again. ‘Constable Ferriter is attempting to establish a timeline for the exhibit – where it was before it was delivered to the gallery. Would you like to update us on that?’

  Ferriter stood, held up her notebook and read, ‘The jar is owned by the Evert and Astrid Miller Foundation. I have contacted them to discover where it was previously. How it got there.’ She looked up. ‘Etcetera.’

  Either because it was a Monday, or because their minds were on the other case still, nobody seemed impressed.