by Lee Weeks
Dead of Winter
( Detective Johnny Mann - 1 )
Lee Weeks
Lee Weeks
Dead of Winter
Chapter 1
Totteridge Village, London Outskirts, 7 December
Peter felt his back wheel slide on the ice and compacted snow as he turned off the gritted main road and onto the lane. The weather was getting worse.
Shit. . he swore to himself. . This is definitely the last call of the day. It was nearly dark at just three o’clock in the afternoon. He was looking forward to getting back to his woodburner and his supper.
As he crawled up the narrow lane the headlights on the old Jeep bounced back from the fast-falling snow and black hedges loomed up on either side of him. He rose another half a mile, out of the freezing fog, and saw the house on the right-hand side. Blackdown Barn was etched on a plaque fixed to a stone pillar on the right. He pulled over and leant forward on the steering wheel to get a better view. It was the first time he’d seen the house properly — usually the trees obscured it from sight. It was the first time he’d been this way since the leaves fell and the snow came.
No cars on the driveway, no lights. .
He thought about driving off. He was cold and hungry. He’d been dropping leaflets all day. But he hadn’t worked for three weeks and today the weather looked like it was improving. He had to get some money in for Christmas; his kids had lists a mile long. He spotted a mailbox on the opposite pillar to the plaque. Leaving the engine running and headlights on, he got out of the car and opened the box but shut it fast as soon as junk mail started spewing out. He looked up towards the house and sighed to himself — he’d come this far, he may as well drop a leaflet through the door.
Reaching into the car, he switched off the ignition and took out the keys then gave the door an extra shove with his hip to make sure it stayed shut. He’d have to change the car early in the New Year. The old Jeep was due for its MOT in February; it would definitely fail it this time round.
He paused before opening the gate, rattled the latch, and counted to ten. In his wild teenage years he’d stolen a car. Just as he was pulling away and wondering who would be silly enough to leave the keys in the ignition, he’d heard a low growl from the back seat and what he’d presumed to be a dark rug covering a large bag on the back seat turned out to be a sleeping Rottweiler that was waking up fast. Peter sustained bite wounds to his head and arms before crashing the car into a bus. Now he had a real fear of anything with fur, four legs and teeth. Ten came and went — no dog. Walking up the driveway he made a mental list of jobs to recommend to the owner. . they’ll need the tops lopping off those trees. . and that hedge needs cutting back. . The security lights didn’t come on. . maintenance as well. . ideal. At the front door he knocked and waited and then slipped a leaflet underneath as he turned to leave. Halfway back to the gate a scream pierced the freezing air. His boots dug into the gravel and he turned to listen.
‘Hello. .?’
His breath came out in a frozen cloud. It hung in silence.
Walking past the front door he followed the path around to the side of the house and unlocked the side gate. He inched forward, keeping close to the wall. Beneath his boots the soft path turned to hard concrete slab. His fingertips touched smooth glass and then nothing as the space opened up before him. He stopped. Something was moving in front of him in the darkness. Something had stopped to listen to him; was breathing when he did and was waiting for him.
‘Anyone there?’
He waited, listening, his heart thumping in his ears. A twig snapped to his right. He swung round. Two eyes glared up at him from the ground. Peter screamed, stumbled backwards and landed bang on hard stone. A flash of fur and the eyes were gone.
He sat there for a moment shaking his head. Cheeky bloody fox. . He smiled, embarrassed and relieved. Why hadn’t it run away earlier? It should have been off at the first sign of intruders. He lifted himself onto his knees and placed his hand down for support. It covered another’s. A bony hand reached for him from the ground.
Chapter 2
DC Ebony Willis knelt beneath the security lights that now shone down from the gables of Blackdown Barn. It was ten-thirty p.m. The snow had stopped falling; the night had brought a biting wind. She stopped what she was doing to listen to the sound of a car approaching; someone was over-revving, sliding on the ice as they crawled up the lane. She heard the engine cut and the slam of a door. Next she heard her new boss’s voice as Detective Sergeant Dan Carter stopped to talk to the officer guarding the gate.
‘Sorry, Ebb. . it took me for frigging ever. . I’m not usually late, honest.’ He began walking up the driveway towards her. He was rustling a packet of nicotine chewing gum in his fingers, trying to force a piece out. ‘There was a pile-up on the way. Cars were sliding all over the frigging place. I thought the big freeze had finished?’
Ebony stood and tucked her phone back into her jacket pocket. The jacket was zipped up to the neck: fitted, padded, small neat collar. She wore thick tights beneath her work trousers, thermals under that. Her breath was white from the cold.
Dan put the gum in his mouth, pulled up the collar of his coat and stuffed his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s arctic out here. What we got, Ebb?’
‘A gardener found a body at the back of the house, Sarge. They’ve been digging for a while now. Doctor Harding’s here.’ She stood and turned her face from the wind.
‘Did you get the gardener’s statement?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’ She dug in her pocket and opened her notebook. ‘Peter Gallway, lives in the area. He came here looking for work. He went round the back when he thought he heard a scream, he thought someone might be in trouble. Turned out be a fox.’
‘Do you think he was casing the place?’
Ebony shook her head. ‘He has form; but it’s not for burglary; he told me about it as soon as I asked. He was done for joy-riding when he was a teenager. I checked it. Looks like it was a one-off. I think he’s straight.’
‘You alright? You look freezing.’
Carter hadn’t quite worked out the new addition to the Murder Squad. She had one of those faces that was hard to read: angry, sad or just concentrating?
‘I’m fine, Sarge.’ Ebony wiped her nose surreptitiously with the edge of her forefinger. It felt wet. She dived into her pocket for a tissue.
On the rare occasion Ebony wore make-up it was to tone down her features, not exaggerate them. She had an over-large mouth, eyes too big set in a narrow face. Altogether it made for an interesting rather than pretty face.
He looked towards where she’d been scraping the gravel when he arrived. ‘Find something?’
‘I was looking at this.’ She knelt back down and shone her torch into the scooped-out hollows where tyres had been resting. ‘Must have been a big vehicle. . heavy.’
Carter squatted down beside her and looked along the driveway to a second set of indentations, now softly coated by a layer of white. ‘Yeah, about twelve feet long: big van, small lorry — too big for a domestic vehicle.’
Ebony scraped away the fine layer of snow. ‘There are leaves in the bottom here. The last leaves fell about two weeks ago.’
Carter straightened up. ‘Good work, Ebb.’ He tried to push his hands further in his pockets; they didn’t quite fit. ‘We’ll get a mould taken of those tyres.’ Carter swivelled; compressed snow squeaked beneath the sole of his expensive boots. ‘Nice place this.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘Kind of place I was thinking of retiring to. .’ He looked back to wink at her. ‘Course, have to get better on the take. .’
‘Not my cup of tea, Sarge,’ she replied, no smile. ‘Too remote.’
‘Yeah you’re right, Ebb. Never get a Chi
nese delivered out here.’ He turned three-sixty degrees. ‘It looks like it could do with some TLC. Looks neglected. A camera flashed at an upstairs window. ‘Did SOCOs say when they’d be finished?’
‘Yes. . It’ll be another couple of hours before we can go inside.’
Carter tried pulling his collar up further. ‘Lucky bastard.’ He looked up at the white-suited figure standing at the bedroom window twirling a brush in the bottom corner of the windowpane.
‘Sir?’ An officer appeared beside them and handed them a packet each with protective suits and over-boots inside. ‘Doctor Harding says she’s ready for you.’
For once Carter was glad to put the suit on; usually it made him sweat. He finished pulling up the hood as they followed the officer around the side of the house and through the open garden gate.
‘Is this the route the gardener said he took, Ebb?’ Carter shone his torch into the undergrowth to his right. It was too thick to see anything.
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘I wouldn’t have come round here in the dark.’
She shone her torch along the conservatory window and traced the smear of human contact across the grime. ‘He said he felt his way round against the glass.’
‘Bloody eerie sound a fox makes.’ Said Carter. ‘Must have been starving what with the snow. All the foxes I see round my place seem to prefer “à la carte”. Bold as brass. Big buggers. Swagger up to your back door and give you their order. Fries on the side.’
A blonde-haired woman in a forensic suit looked up from beneath the tent as they approached.
‘Sergeant?’
‘How’s it going, Doc?’ Carter walked over to her as she knelt by the side of the grave next to an open body bag. ‘What have we got?’
‘It’s a woman,’ said Harding. ‘The body’s been dismembered. We’re about to start digging it out now. I wanted you to see it first. This is what the fox had a go at. This was above ground.’ Harding picked up the woman’s arm from the body bag. The bones of the forearm were exposed. Skeletal fingers were chewed into a bony claw.
Ebony walked around to the far side of the hole and knelt down to get a better look. Inside the grave the woman’s legs were laid out side by side. Her shoulders and head rested close to the top of her legs.
‘Is it all there?’ asked Carter as he peered into the hole. ‘Her head looks like it’s where her torso should be.’
‘It’s normal for the thorax area to decompose first,’ answered Harding. ‘Especially if she was opened up, which it looks like she was.’ Harding pointed to the beginning of a slit at the base of the woman’s neck.
As Harding talked, Ebony knelt and reached inside the grave. She rubbed her fingers lightly across the flesh on the woman’s shoulder then examined the residue on her fingertip.
‘What is it, Ebb?’ asked Carter.
‘Grave wax, Sarge. She’s been in here some time.’
‘Clay soil. .’ said Harding. ‘Retains moisture. Enough of it turns them into soap. . eventually.’
Carter looked at Ebony curiously. He hadn’t heard a squeak out of her since she arrived at the Murder Squad two weeks earlier. But tonight, if someone could come alive around the dead, she just had.
‘Plus there’s decomposition of the head, hands and feet,’ Harding added. ‘That coupled with the depth she was buried means she’s been in here at least three, probably six months.’ Harding leant back and called to the photographer to stand where she was and take another shot of the grave. ‘I’ll let you know after soil analysis.’ Harding nodded to an officer standing by and waiting to start excavating the body.
Carter stood and walked across the paving slab towards the rest of the garden, a neglected orchard which began where the patio ended. Harding joined him. ‘You’d think. .’ said Carter as he took off his glove to find a way under his forensic suit and into his pocket, ‘. . they’d have buried the body in the garden, not the patio.’
‘Too many roots. Too many trees, I suppose,’ answered Harding. ‘You put her in a shallow grave and animals would scatter her bones all over the neighbours’ gardens; not what you want when you’ve got friends coming around for a barbecue. Plus you’d have to put up with the smell of rotting flesh in the height of summer, which is when I guess she was buried. No, they put her in here because they didn’t want her ever to surface again. It was unlucky — the small retaining wall that held the patio in place collapsed and exposed the foundations. The fox must have had access through there. .’ She heard Carter fiddling with the plastic wrapper from the nicotine gum. Harding was dying for a cigarette. She’d been at the house since seven p.m. She’d arrived just after Ebony. Now she needed a hit of nicotine and a triple espresso. She would have asked Carter for a piece of gum but she couldn’t bring herself to; there was no way she was prepared to own up to a base weakness like nicotine addiction. Harding prided herself on never letting her guard down, except when she was blind drunk and that didn’t count. ‘All the drains will need digging up under the house,’ she said.
‘Yes. We’re going to be here for weeks.’ Carter blew a silent whistle out of the side of his mouth. ‘It’ll cost.’
Back in the tent, Ebony watched the excavation. The grave had been dug out a metre extra at the feet of the woman’s body. The hole was three feet deep and now six feet long. Only one officer was allowed into the grave to carefully manage the excavation as he stood at the end of it and painstakingly scraped the soil away from around the body. Ebony watched his white back arch awkwardly from the grave as he wiggled, maggot-like, struggling to move in the tight space. Tracing the outline with his trowel, he scraped gently around the edges of the body. He removed the woman’s legs one at a time and handed them up to Ebony to place inside the body bag, then he stood and stretched to relieve his aching back.
‘Can you dig there for me?’ Ebony looked past him at an object that had been hidden by the legs. Her eyes focused on the rounded end of a hipbone and a dark shape the size of a melon nearby.
The officer crouched low, bent double to scrape away the frozen clay soil. She watched him as he picked his way around the object. It was beginning to loosen at the edges. He switched to working with a dental pick, delicately chipping at the stubborn soil until it lifted in small chunks. Ebony saw the object move slightly, then give way to the last of his efforts as he prised it from the clay and she saw it slide into his hands. It was muddied but perfectly formed and coated in white. He passed it up for her to take it from him. Ebony stood and carried it outside the tent. Carter and Harding had their backs to her.
‘Sarge?’
Carter turned round to see her holding the corpse of a baby in her hands.
Chapter 3
The lambs bleated in the cold. The wind and snow came driving off the Yorkshire Dales onto the small farm. It was a risky business lambing now. The Dorset Horn was a breed that could produce lambs all year long but they required more looking after if they were to thrive in this harsh environment.
Callum Carmichael ran his hand over the belly of the sheep. . she was overdue. She flinched at his touch. Jumper was an expert mother. She was one of a hundred ewes in the old barn.
Jumper had been with Carmichael for six years now. He had hand-reared her. In the field, she came when he called her name. In the summer months the sheep were allowed outside but now, in lambing season, they had to come into the pens: six feet by four. Foxes had claimed lambs before, as had badgers and buzzards. Everything was hungry now in the worst winter for a long time.
Carmichael looked into the stall next to Jumper where a newborn lamb was suckling on his mother, its tail wagging furiously. Carmichael looked back at Jumper and decided he was probably being overcautious and to let nature take its course, but to check on her again in half an hour. He called Rosie the sheepdog to follow him out of the barn. On his way down to the house he made a last check on his horse. Inside the stable, he slipped his hand between Tor’s back and his fleecy rug and was reassured that he was warm e
nough. He should be: it had taken Carmichael an hour that morning to bank the straw up high against the walls of the stable.
Stepping back out into the yard, Carmichael locked up and turned his face from the blizzard as he whistled for Rosie. Taking a last look around, he unlatched the back door of the house that had been his home for the last thirteen years since his wife died.
As he walked through the kitchen he pulled the pot of stew from the top of the Aga and left it to one side. He knew he should eat but he hadn’t the appetite. Instead, he walked through to the sitting room and took his Steyr Scout rifle from the gun cupboard, opened it and inserted a magazine. Then he locked it and left it leaning against the doorframe.
Logs were burning in the Inglenook fireplace. It must have burned the same way for three hundred years.
Carmichael went to the dresser, picked up the bottle of Scotch and carried it across to his desk and then he opened his laptop, waiting for it to fire up before he clicked on his music library. It had been a long time since he had listened to any music. Too many memories; too many feelings. Green Day blasted out. It made him smile. He could see his wife Louise’s face now as she’d pretended to hate it. She’d left him in the lounge with his music and his glass of red and she’d come back with Sophie; both of them wearing earmuffs. He smiled at the memory. He hadn’t allowed himself even the good memories for a long time. . he didn’t know why they were coming back tonight. Something in the weather or the world was overpowering him. It was going to be a long night. He poured himself a few fingers of single malt. It melted in his throat and burned as it slid downwards. Standing on the broad hearth he nudged a half-burnt log with his foot, sending up a spray of sparks. His face was bright from the fire, his dark hair wet from the snow. He picked up the photo of Louise smiling at him, Sophie in her arms, and took it over to sit in front of the fire and sip his Scotch. The bridge of his nose burned as his eyes filled. He ran a finger across the photo and held it to his chest as he sat back and listened to the crackle of the fire, felt its warmth through to his bones. He heard his Jack Russell terrier Rusty sigh from his basket as it watched him. Carmichael didn’t even realize he was crying.
