Death on the Levels

by David Hodges

  For a start, her left knee had begun to develop an unwelcome wobble and she could also feel the muscles in the calf knotting up with the onslaught of cramp. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she willed herself to remain perfectly still, determined that her patience would outlast George’s, despite the cramp and the awful stink rising from the enclosure. But it was touch and go, and she had actually got to the point where the desire to stretch her legs and relieve the agonizing pain in her calf could no longer be ignored when she heard a muttered curse and the scrape of feet as George blinked first. There followed the sound of his receding footsteps, then a door slammed once more and she was left alone with just the silence for company.

  She forced herself to wait several more minutes before making a move, conscious of the fact that George’s departure may have actually been a ruse. But hearing nothing and sensing he had returned to the house, she climbed gingerly to her feet, bending down again almost immediately to massage her left calf with both hands and wincing as the returning circulation sent the muscles into erratic spasms. Even after the spasms had lessened sufficiently for her to be able to straighten up, her leg continued to feel weak and unresponsive, and she remained standing there for a while longer, stretching it out in front of her to flex the muscles and holding on to the low wall of the enclosure for support as she did so.

  It was while she was doing this that she happened to glance over the wall into what she now saw to be an old-fashioned slurry pit and abruptly stiffened. Whether a trick of the moonlight or not, it seemed to her that something bulky was floating in the midst of the glistening sludge – something, her brain told her, that should not have been there. At first, she couldn’t make out what it was and craned her neck to get a better view. But then, as she narrowed her gaze and focused more directly on the object, it suddenly dawned on her with a sense of horror exactly what it was; the body of a woman, with only the upturned face and part of the torso visible and an arm projecting just above the slurry, as if trying to affect a grotesque wave.

  *

  Ted Roscoe stood in the lane at the rear of Elsie Norman’s bungalow with an even bigger scowl than usual on his slab-like face. The young uniformed constable who had earlier been in his direct line of fire fidgeted uneasily with the radio clipped to the webbing of his tunic as he stood in the background behind the elderly black man who had just approached him as a witness.

  ‘So,’ the DI queried sharply, ‘you’re saying you saw this intruder breaking into the house, Mr … er—.’

  The witness nodded. ‘Patton,’ he replied. ‘Dr Gabriel Patton.’

  Roscoe raised an eyebrow. ‘Doctor?’ he echoed. ‘You are a medical man?’

  Patton smiled faintly. ‘No, Inspector,’ he replied. ‘I am a senior university lecturer – in Philosophy.’

  ‘And you rang the control room?’

  ‘I certainly did. Twice actually.’ Patton shook his head. ‘Breaking into that poor deceased woman’s home – absolutely disgraceful.’

  Roscoe nodded. ‘And I believe you told the officer here that you got a good look at the intruder?’

  ‘Yes, I live over there, you see.’

  Patton waved a hand towards a cottage a few yards further along the lane on the opposite side to Elsie Norman’s rear garden.

  ‘I happened to get up for a drink of water when I heard a vehicle pull up in the lane, then saw this character sneaking into the back garden of Mrs Norman’s bungalow. Shortly afterwards I heard the sound of breaking glass and realized he had to be burgling the place, so I rang the police. After about twenty minutes – when none of your lot had turned up incidentally – I saw him leaving again and rang the police a second time.’

  Roscoe winced at the implied criticism and quickly ploughed on.

  ‘So, can you describe him?’

  Patton shrugged. ‘Tall, thin, about six feet or more in height, I would say, wearing a dark coat and a woollen hat.’

  ‘What about his face?’

  ‘Too much in shadow to see, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And our officer – you saw her too, I understand?’

  ‘I didn’t know she was a police officer then, but I saw her shoulder-length, auburn hair in the street light over there and wondered why a woman would be following this man out of the house.’

  ‘Did you see her arrive?’

  ‘No, she must have entered the house originally from the front.’

  ‘Where did she go afterwards? Did you see that?’

  Another nod. ‘She stopped for a second in the rear gateway – evidently to see where the man had gone – then hurried after him. Unfortunately, at that point I was distracted by my wife calling me to ask what I was doing, and when I looked back in the lane, the Land Rover was pulling away again and the woman had disappeared, so I don’t know where she went.’

  Roscoe gaped. ‘He was driving a Land Rover?’ he exclaimed incredulously.

  ‘Yes, an old one with a canvas top. Green, I think. Not much of a driver either by the sound of his gear changes.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you mention this before?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me about a vehicle.’

  Roscoe glared at him, his bullet head thrust forward belligerently.

  ‘I don’t suppose you got the number?’ he grated.

  Patton chuckled. ‘Of course I did,’ he said and produced a crumpled piece of paper from his trouser pocket. ‘Shouldn’t take you long to trace him.’

  For a moment Roscoe seemed taken aback, but then recovered.

  ‘And you’re sure the woman police officer wasn’t still in the lane after the Land Rover had gone.’

  ‘Positive. There was that street lamp over there and quite bright moonlight, so I would have seen her.’

  ‘Do you reckon she might have climbed into the Land Rover voluntarily and driven off with the man?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. After all, why creep after him in the first place, if she was going to go with him anyway?’

  ‘So, you think she may have been abducted?’

  Patton sighed heavily, as if in frustration. ‘Well, you’re the detective, Inspector,’ he retorted. ‘But the fact that one of your colleagues seems to have found her police radio lying in the lane near where the Land Rover was parked is rather significant, don’t you think?’

  Arrogant bastard, Roscoe thought, but the alarm bells jangling in his head were almost deafening.

  *

  Kate had been violently sick and she was ashamed of herself for it – especially since she had criticized others in the past for letting such things get to them. After all, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen a dead body before. There had been plenty of those in the course of her police career and in some pretty gruesome circumstances too. But this was different and there wasn’t just a corpse either. She had spotted another one shortly afterwards, jammed face down in a corner of the slurry pit. A man, it seemed, with a balding head and part of his back clearly recognizable in the blaze of moonlight. There was the corpse of a dog too – some sort of collie by the look of it – draped over the wall at the far end of the pit like a bit of old carpet. It was like a scene from some gory horror film except for the fact that it was real, and even after throwing up Kate found it almost impossible to tear her gaze away from the sight.

  It was apparent now how George had managed to secure such a convenient bolt-hole – by simply removing the ‘opposition’ and callously dumping their remains in the pit, as if disposing of nothing more than farmyard waste and adding a new dimension to the term ‘cuckooing.’ Even after the particularly brutal murders of both Elsie Norman and Mabel Strong, this double killing had to come close to the top of the infamy list for its sheer barbarity, and Kate shuddered at the thought of where she herself was likely to end up if she was unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of this depraved creature.

  Caution was the watchword then – extreme caution. But at the same time, now she had succeeded in tracking the creature down, she had t
o do something to prevent him once more vanishing back into the mists of the Somerset Levels until he finally managed to locate Iris Naylor and add her and anyone else who got in his way to his list of victims.

  Her decision made, she tore herself away from the grisly scene and returned to the front of the barn, peering around the corner of the building to study the farmhouse a good hundred yards away. A single ghostly light still flickered in one of the downstairs windows, but otherwise there was no sign of life and after a moment’s hesitation, she darted diagonally across the hardstanding into the comforting shadow cast by the Land Rover.

  The window of the room from which the flickering light issued was wide open on its metal stay and she heard a chair scrape on what sounded like a tiled floor, followed by the clink of a glass. So, George was helping himself to a drink, was he? Well, that suited her just fine.

  Glancing through the front passenger door window of the vehicle, she saw that the keys had been left in the ignition. It would have been a simple enough matter to have climbed aboard and high-tailed it to the main road, but she had other ideas. If she had done that, George would have legged it again, defeating the whole object, while simply purloining the keys wouldn’t be guaranteed to prevent his escape as there was possibly a spare key in the house anyway. No, what she needed to do was to maroon him at the farm by immobilizing the Land Rover and trusting in fate that he wouldn’t tumble to the fact until she’d had time to get to a phone to summon help.

  Decision made, she crouched down beside the front wheel with the ignition key of her own car in her hand. Then, removing the dust cap from the tyre valve, she used the key to deflate the tyre completely before moving to the back wheel and repeating the process.

  She had just finished the job and returned to the other side of the vehicle when she heard the door of the farmhouse open again and from a crouched position by the front nearside wing, saw George re-emerge and stand for a moment staring about the farmyard. At first, she thought some sixth sense must have alerted him to her presence and she shut her eyes tightly in an involuntary spasm as she visualized him studying the Land Rover. If he came closer, he couldn’t fail to spot the deflated tyres in the bright moonlight and she gripped the top of the wheel beside which she crouched, the muscles in her legs now tensing for flight as she anticipated the thud of heavy feet rushing towards her.

  But it didn’t happen and, after a tense few moments, she heard the door slam shut yet again as he went back inside the house. Relieved that she had managed temporarily to immobilize his only means of transport without being detected, she leaned against the wing for a few moments to give her pounding heart time to return to its normal rhythm. Then, straightening, she left the cover of the Land Rover to head off back along the track towards the main road. But it was then that her luck ran out.

  ‘Going somewhere, bitch?’ George sneered from a few feet away. ‘I don’t think so – not after what you’ve done to my tyres!’

  The lisping voice had a strangely effeminate quality and in normal circumstances would have commanded little authority, but there was an almost tangible air of menace about the tall, thin figure blocking her way, while the twin barrels of the 12-bore shotgun aimed at her chest conveyed an authority all of their own.

  CHAPTER 18

  Roscoe wasted no time acting on the information the witness, Patton, had given him. Following an immediate registered owner check on the Land Rover, he pulled in every available unit via the control room and within half an hour a convoy of police vehicles was converging on the isolated farm near Glastonbury, just as the moon was beginning to wane and first light make its presence known on the far horizon.

  It may have been more in accordance with official police procedure to have set up a fully briefed operation, complete with a search warrant and back-up from one of the highly trained and properly equipped tactical police support unit teams, but with his DS likely to be in the gravest danger the crusty DI had reasoned that now was not the time for observing bureaucratic protocols. He was in no mood for softly-softly tactics either and while the police vehicles crept into the farmyard in a low-key silent approach with all lights extinguished, there was nothing low key about their entry to the farmhouse.

  There had not been time to obtain one of the steel enforcers – or battering rams – the police normally used in raids, and it would have involved too much red tape anyway. Instead, the boot of a burly constable directed at the weakest point of the front door served the same purpose and two hefty kicks sent it crashing back against the wall, enabling four or five of his uniformed colleagues to precede him into the hallway. Roscoe knew something was not quite right when the short, middle-aged man in boxer shorts staggered on to the landing of the ornate staircase in a blaze of light, clutching what looked like a cavalry sword.

  *

  Kate had faced shotguns in the hands of criminals before, but it didn’t make the experience any the less traumatic on this occasion and she felt her mouth suddenly dry up and a familiar little worm begin to crawl around her insides.

  Where George had got the gun from was unclear – probably somewhere in the farmhouse itself – but with only a few feet separating them she was acutely aware of the fact that however poor a shot he was, at that range there was no possibility of a miss.

  ‘Inside, ahead of me,’ he ordered and she sensed the anxiety in the lisping voice. ‘Any funny business and I’ll blow a hole in you big enough for someone to climb through.’

  She relaxed slightly and did as she was told, relieved that, for the moment at least, she was still breathing.

  She was conscious of her captor following very closely behind her as she walked slowly to the front door of the farmhouse. Obviously, George had somehow sussed her presence crouched beside the nearside wing of the Land Rover. He had then slammed the door to convince her that he had gone inside again, but had no doubt left the house by another door, doubled back behind the barns and crept up on her from the other side of the vehicle. A clever cookie, this one, it seemed.

  Pushing through the doorway, she found herself in a large, shabby kitchen, equipped with an Aga cooker and an old-fashioned Belfast sink, and illuminated by an intermittently flickering strip-light, which left deep shadows beyond its reach. She felt the shotgun dig her none too gently in the back, prodding her forward towards a pine table in the centre of the room. She saw that the table was bare except for a bottle of Talisker single malt whisky and a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry standing on a metal tray at one end. George was obviously making himself at home, she mused grimly, but the presence of the sherry took on more sinister connotations.

  ‘Sit there,’ her captor directed and, as she sat down, he backed away from her to the sink. Then, jerking the net curtain back from the window and with the shotgun still pointing in her direction, he peered out into the moonlight.

  ‘You’re that meddling cop, aren’t you?’ he accused. ‘I should have fixed you when we first bumped into each other in that bloody basement.’

  She didn’t answer. Her attention was on the shotgun instead.

  ‘Where’s your mates?’ he went on, still searching the night, and she could read the tension in his tone.

  ‘Nearer than you think,’ she lied.

  He pulled the curtain back into place and, reaching towards the door, turned the key in the lock and faced her again.

  ‘Bollocks!’ he retorted, suddenly a lot more confident. ‘So, where are they?’

  ‘On their way,’ she replied.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said with a sneer, adding: ‘They’d be here by now if that was true and there’s no sign of anyone else out there. You’re on your tod, aren’t you? A bloody lone wolf. So how did you get here? Sneak into the back of the Drover when it was parked behind the old girl’s bungalow, did you?’

  She said nothing and he joined her at the table, pulling out another chair and sitting down opposite with the shotgun resting on the table top, pointing at her chest.

  Pla
inly in the sixty-plus age group, he had gaunt, pallid features and was completely bald with inflamed abrasions on both sides of his head – suggesting the heavy-handed use of a razor – and a drop-style gold earring in his left ear. Unblinking eyes (now minus the gold-coloured spectacles he had been wearing in the basement at Talbot Court) appraised her from dark hollows and the thin lips were slightly parted in the semblance of a sardonic smile, as if he were actually enjoying her scrutiny. Like the timbre of his voice, it was a face with an indefinable effeminate quality, despite the shaved head, hinting at a deep and protracted biological challenge to the gender identity which had been assigned him at birth, and this impression was further enhanced by the long, delicate fingers which held the shotgun in what was now a deceptively casual grasp.

  ‘So how did you find me?’ he went on, his tone much harsher than before. ‘Someone see me break in and ring Old Bill, did they?’ The sneer returned. ‘You all they had to send?’

  She said nothing and his eyes narrowed briefly in the flickering light.

  ‘Cat got your tongue, Occifer?’ he taunted. When she still made no reply, he added, ‘So what do you suggest I do with you now, eh?’

  ‘That’s your decision,’ she replied in a strangled voice, her gaze still locked on to the shotgun. ‘Nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘Scared then?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be?’

  He nodded slowly, considering her reply. ‘I could blow your head off now.’

  ‘You could, yes.’

  ‘But if I’d wanted to waste you, I would have pulled the trigger when I caught you doing the tyres on the Drover.’

  ‘So, what stopped you then?’

  There was a short, humourless laugh. ‘Curiosity, I suppose. You see, you’ve become such a meddling nuisance that I thought we’d have a little chat first – besides which, it occurred to me that you might be just the person to tell me where I can find Iris Naylor. I think it’s high time she and I got reacquainted.’