Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘What’s in the bag?’

  The sergeant, who was wearing latex gloves, held it open for him. ‘Not a lot now. Some old shirts and T-shirts and a crumpled bin liner. Can you see how the rolling and the impact of the crash has moved all the contents of the boot into one corner? There’s a first-aid kit and a big torch right in the back there. But not this bag. The bag is as we found it. Sitting on top and open. The way the shirts are placed suggests to me that they were surrounding something that sat in the middle of the bag.’

  ‘And someone had it away,’ McLusky said.

  ‘That’s robbing the dead.’ DS Austin’s allegiance shifted slightly. The man was almost certainly a criminal and most definitely stupid – the two naturally went hand in hand – but he’d been robbed while dead, or worse, still dying, and it offended his sensibilities. ‘I’d like to get my hands on the scrote.’

  McLusky looked grimly thoughtful. ‘Any chance there were other occupants?’

  Damn, thought Austin. I hadn’t even thought of that.

  ‘I think we can rule that out,’ Lynch said. ‘There’s no sign anyone crawled out of that heap after it crashed.’

  ‘Right, you have got my attention. We’ll need to wait for a complete forensic examination of the car, of course, and a close search of the surroundings.’

  ‘We’ve got it in hand.’

  ‘When forensics is finished, tell the coroner the body can be moved.’

  ‘Anything else, sir?’

  ‘I want to talk to the farmer who reported it.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll get you the details. The farmhouse is just over there. Well, somewhere hidden in that mist, anyway.’

  Excuse me. Yes, I know is shocking, letting cleaner use same lifts as the pretty folk that come to spend the money. But you must not care too much, is good remind for you that life can be much more worse than what you are complaining about on your mobile. Ah, lost signal now, poor lady, going down. Gents’ toilet next, low point of day. One of many low point. At least today Anastazja has cold and cannot smell. Gents’ is for gentlemen’s toilet. Is not full of gentlemens. Is full of people who cannot piss straight. Who do not use soap and water after. Who do not flush after shit. Leave condoms, rubbish, hypodermic needles.

  Excuse me. Cannot see Jez. Jez is nice security man who checks gents’ toilet for her sometime and tell people is time for cleaning. After drunk man tries to chase her away with dick out and pissing at her. Not funny. There, put up sign to say ‘Cleaning in Progress’. Two more men come out, one more want in. Sorry, sir, other toilet please or else wait. Leave trolley in doorway since some English gents not good for reading signs. Still somebody in last cubicle. Dark shadow under door. Start other end and hope man is finished when all is done. Sing song to myself quietly but loud enough so man hears is woman cleaning. English mens embarrassed when fart many times then open door and see Polish woman with mop.

  Cubicle before last now. Is man’s hand sticking out through gap under wall from last cubicle. Looks funny colour. Hand should not be blue.

  Excuse me.

  Chapter Four

  ‘I thought you said Goosefoot.’

  ‘No, Gooseford Farm,’ Sergeant Lynch corrected him.

  ‘Shame, I liked Goosefoot better.’

  ‘If you look through the gap in the hedge there, you can just make it out, Inspector.’

  McLusky peered through the hedge. ‘Is that it?’ He could see a vague outline of buildings in the mist, a few fields away. It didn’t look too far. The road was still blocked and the turn-off was just a few hundred yards down the road. ‘We’ll walk.’

  The lane curved away before getting to the turn-off. When they reached it, the buildings had once more sunk back into the gloom. They walked for another five minutes and still there was no sign of any farm entrance.

  Austin quite enjoyed the walk. It beat sitting at a computer, typing pain-in-the-arse reports. Of course that pain would still be there, waiting. The sound of their footsteps seemed unusually loud. ‘It’s quite spooky in the countryside with all this mist. Well, if I believed in spooks.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ McLusky wasn’t so sure himself. Not ghosts, he didn’t believe in ghosts. And yet. A bloke with a baseball bat, a samurai sword or even a gun he hoped he knew how to handle. It was the stuff you couldn’t square up to. Where you couldn’t call for backup. The things you couldn’t see were the ones you couldn’t fight so easily. Unease, doubts, premonitions. It trotted alongside you in the dark, in the mist, just beyond your grasp, just beyond reason. Not covered in the manual. Ever since his ‘accident’, when he’d been deliberately run over, he’d had flashes of unease he had never experienced before the incident. Not driving, not people, not running after suspects. But crossing the street. Being a passenger. Tall structures. He was okay as long as he was doing things; ‘being proactive’, as the counsellor had put it. It was the empty places, the unexpected moments, the quiet stretches that sometimes produced the strangest feeling. Keep busy, in other words, and he was fine. ‘The farm could be one of those ghost things that only appear every hundred years or so.’

  ‘You mean like paid overtime? Or promotion?’

  McLusky nodded gravely. ‘Exactly like that.’

  They heard it before they saw it, the quad bike pulling a trailer full of hay bales that came bumping out of what had to be a track leading to Gooseford Farm. The quad disappeared away from them into the mist, driven by nothing more defined than a huddled shape under some kind of hat. By the time they reached the track it had vanished and the dark loom of buildings had solidified into a squat 1920s farmhouse and assorted outbuildings surrounding a yard of much-repaired concrete. A fairly new Land Rover provided contrast to a dented green Volvo estate near the gate.

  They aimed at what they took to be the front door of the house. From the yard a large mongrel of a dog on a retractable chain shot towards them with a rattle and a growl. Austin tried soothing the tethered animal by telling it in unconvincing tones what a good dog it was.

  Neither the dog nor McLusky was convinced, but the DI didn’t care as long as the beast was firmly tied up. He was not keen on farms. He remembered isolated scenes from a childhood holiday where his father had lifted him up and set him on the back of a milk cow in a dim and evil-smelling shed full of enormous animals pissing on the concrete floor. The unimpressed animal had twisted its horned head back and swivelled an enormous eye at him and he had wet himself with fear. Since then he had given cows all the respect they deserved. But it wasn’t childhood memories that made him wary of farms. It was the way they sat in their own world, their own realm, and seemed to be governed by different rules than city dwellings. Usually their denizens had seen you coming from a long way off. It was difficult to surprise a farmer. Perhaps that was why they never had any damn bells on their doors. Or maybe that was what they kept dogs for.

  ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ A middle-aged woman in green plastic dungarees and black wellingtons called from across the yard where she had appeared from one of the sheds.

  McLusky introduced himself and Austin, with IDs held aloft. The woman nodded, though with the entire width of the yard separating them, they might have been showing their library cards. ‘Could we speak to the farmer?’

  ‘Is it about the car wreck?’ she asked without showing any inclination to close the distance between them.

  A good answer, thought McLusky. Perhaps there were other questions she expected. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You just missed him.’

  ‘Was that him on the quad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  McLusky had enough of shouting already and made a move towards the woman. The dog sprang fiercely forward again, renewing its barking. McLusky stopped and shouted some more. ‘Where has he gone? Will he be long?’

  The woman reeled the animal in and tied off the tether. She met them halfway, in the centre of the dank yard. ‘He’s gone to the upper paddock. Putting extra feed down for the sheep. Then he’ll see to the f
encing on Ten Acres.’

  ‘Does he carry a mobile we might call him on? We’d really like to speak to him.’

  ‘He keeps it turned off.’

  ‘We’d best walk up there, then. Ten Acres, where is that exactly?’

  She looked dispassionately down on their wet shoes, then nodded her head back towards the shed. ‘Other side of the ford.’

  There it was. Everything in the countryside was difficult. ‘Is there a definite time you expect him back here, Mrs …’ McLusky consulted his notes. ‘Murry?’

  ‘Definite? Sunset. Though he’ll have lunch here when it suits him.’

  Having been given directions and turned his back on the farm, McLusky was about to make the difficult admission that taking the car, even the long way round, would have been the better choice when the quad bike came bumping back towards them on the unmade track, pulling the now empty trailer. ‘Thank God for small mercies,’ he said instead. He flagged down the driver, since he showed no intention of slowing down. ‘Mr Murry?’ He showed his ID.

  Mr Murry’s stout figure was made even more voluminous by many layers of clothing topped by a green quilted waistcoat. The farmer’s face failed to show even a flicker of interest. He seemed quite content to sit astride his mount and wait.

  ‘Could we have a quick word? About the accident.’ McLusky hitched a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the crashed car.

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘Perhaps you could turn the engine off for us,’ Austin suggested. The exhaust note of the bike had an irritating edge to it.

  ‘Thanks,’ McLusky said as silence fell. ‘Just a few quick questions. Did you actually see the accident?’

  ‘Nah. I saw nothing.’

  ‘Did you hear the crash, perhaps?’

  Murry shook his head. ‘Too far away.’

  ‘You couldn’t say what time the accident took place then, Mr Murry?’

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ he said without apparent irony.

  ‘So … what time did you make the call?’ He made a show of consulting his notes.

  ‘I’d say about seven.’

  ‘Is that when you first spotted the wreck?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘And the driver was already dead?’

  ‘I didn’t see the driver. I didn’t go near the car.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I wasn’t on that side. I was in the field. I saw a BMW stuck in the hedge. Called a couple of times but heard nothing. So I dialled 999. That’s all.’

  ‘You didn’t go to see if you could render any assistance?’ Austin wanted to know.

  ‘I’m a farmer, not a doctor. If an animal is sick, I call out the vet. Or else I shoot it to save the expense.’

  ‘How soon after that did the ambulance arrive?’ McLusky asked.

  ‘Oh, they took a long time to come. We’re used to that here in the country. You don’t want to have an emergency in the country. Especially now that no one can read maps any more.’ He waved an arm towards the road. ‘They drive around following their sat navs into every field and ditch before they have the sense to ask directions.’ The farmer looked away from them as though the question had deeply offended him. ‘If that’s all,’ he said after a moment, reaching for the ignition.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ McLusky laid a hand on the man’s arm to delay the starting of the engine. ‘One more thing. Do you still keep geese?’

  Murry nodded without looking up. ‘The wife does.’ Then he started the engine and pulled away.

  McLusky set off back towards the nearest piece of tarmac. ‘You see, it’s all nonsense, the clichés about unfriendly farmers. He didn’t shout or point a shotgun at us. Didn’t once say you city folk have no idea.’

  ‘He didn’t tell us much of use, though.’

  ‘No,’ McLusky agreed. ‘And what he did tell us was mostly lies.’

  Ten in the morning and the place was full of shoppers. And it wasn’t even like it was half-term. If he had to do some shopping he had to wait till the end of a shift or preferably his day off, but everyone else seemed to have time to saunter round a shopping centre. On a weekday. They couldn’t all be shoplifters. And they couldn’t all be unemployed; they wouldn’t have money to shop. DS Sorbie looked more morose than usual as he kept pace with DI Fairfield. ‘Look at all these people. Does nobody have to work? Is it just us?’

  ‘Actually it’s just you, Jack. You carry on, I’ll be in Topshop if anyone wants me.’

  ‘A dead guy in the toilet. Why do we always get the shitty end of the stick?’

  ‘There isn’t a shitty end,’ Fairfield said as she marched past her favourite shoe shop, keeping eyes front. ‘Both ends are shitty.’

  ‘That explains it.’

  Despite its shops and criss-cross of escalators, the Galleries mall always reminded Fairfield of a small cruise ship. One that had run aground. Likewise, cruise ships reminded her of shopping malls afloat. Which was of course exactly what they were. She pointed with her radio. ‘It’s that way.’ The directions she’d been given were very clear. All she had to do was follow the shops the manager on the phone had mentioned.

  ‘You know your way around here, I can tell.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mind you, putting a bored-looking uniform and half a ton of scene-of-crime gubbins in front of the bogs helps as well.’ The PC knew their faces and let them pass unchallenged.

  Inside, the place was crowded. Sharing the space were a PC who seemed to be simply keeping station there, two crime-scene technicians, the duty doctor and the Home Office pathologist. The addition of Fairfield and Sorbie made it uncomfortably close. Fairfield asked the constable to wait outside. The police doctor, who had been less than enjoying a one-sided conversation with Coulthart, the pathologist, seemed relieved to be able to make his excuses, too, and follow the PC.

  Coulthart turned his bespectacled gaze on the newcomers. ‘Ah, the beautiful inspector.’ The pathologist was in his late fifties, carried two extra stone in weight around his middle and had what looked to Fairfield like a suspicious amount of dark and static hair.

  She took his fleshy outstretched hand and shook it. ‘If I’m the beautiful inspector, then what does that make DS Sorbie?’

  Coulthart gave a perfunctory glance at Sorbie over his rimless glasses. ‘What indeed?’ He released her hand. ‘You are wondering why our paths must cross in these clean yet somewhat insalubrious surroundings?’

  Fairfield felt tempted to say something on the lines of ‘Indeed I do, good doctor.’ She always found Coulthart’s deliberate archaism strangely infectious. ‘Enlighten me,’ she said instead.

  The crime-scene technicians withdrew and made way for them in front of the last cubicle. Inside, the body of the dead man lay collapsed over the toilet bowl, with his head almost behind it. His jumper and T-shirt were pushed up to his chest, revealing pale, mottled skin. His trousers were hanging loose. The centre of his narrow face, what Fairfield could see of it, had turned an inky dark; his fingers, too, had turned blue from the effects of lividity. The sleeve of his left arm was pushed up high.

  Fairfield leant around to get a better look at the dead man’s face. His eyes were wide open. ‘Is this how you found him?’

  ‘No, we had to move him a little to take a rectal reading,’ explained Coulthart. ‘He slumped over into the corner a bit more during that.’

  ‘This is how he was found.’ A crime-scene technician with a blond walrus moustache lifted up a large digital camera and offered her a view of the screen. The body had been in a kneeling position in front of the toilet bowl. A black zip-up jacket lay on the floor beside him. Some of the paraphernalia of heroin injection could be seen on the floor. The technician zoomed in on a syringe stuck in the dead man’s arm just below the crook of his elbow. ‘The syringe fell out when he was moved.’ With a nod, he indicated evidence bags on top of his aluminium case by the sink. ‘Plunger depressed.’

  ‘It’s a dead junkie.’ Sorbie shrugged.
He tried not to let his impatience get the better of him but couldn’t resist adding: ‘Case closed. Especially for him, of course.’

  Fairfield shot him a silencing glance. ‘What’s all that discoloration on his arm?’

  ‘I can’t tell you yet, though I have suspicions I’m not quite ready to share. I just wanted you here at the beginning in case this turned into anything.’

  ‘Could it be deliberate overdose?’

  ‘With the needle still in the arm like that it is always a possibility. He is definitely a long-term drug user, definitely injecting, too. You don’t recognize him as one of your flock?’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of them come and go, but not this one. Jack?’

  Sorbie pretended to take a closer look, but his eyes remained unfocused. ‘Nope.’

  ‘As always, we’ll know the deceased a lot better after the post-mortem.’ Coulthart picked up his briefcase. ‘I’ll do it this afternoon. I’ll see you there, I hope, Inspector? You may effect the removal of the body with my blessings now.’

  Sorbie turned his back on the corpse and waited for the door to close behind Coulthart. ‘Well I do feel blessed. We’re pretty much finished here, aren’t we?’

  Fairfield looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose so. Nothing for us to do. Coulthart is always careful with what he says, but this time he’s being downright mysterious. He seems to think there’s something going on here. Other than the obvious.’

  ‘Shame they don’t have CCTV in the toilets.’

  ‘I’m not sure people would feel comfortable with that.’

  Sorbie shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t bother me, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Yes, so you keep telling me, Jack.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘Lies? What kind of lies?’ Austin asked, a little out of breath from trying to keep up with the inspector.

  McLusky was walking away from Gooseford Farm towards the road, marching fast in order to return some warmth to his limbs. ‘Are you saying you don’t feel lied to?’