Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘Up to five weeks. SOCO tried to get fingerprints off the partial hand we found, but changed their minds when they saw it. If he has previous, we’ll ID him from his DNA; if not, there’s always dental records.’

  ‘Good.’ Denkhaus put the car in gear. ‘Okay, McLusky, it’s all yours. We don’t expect DCI Gaunt back for several weeks, so you’ll report direct to me.’ The window slid up as the large engine surged and sped the car along the track. A few press photographers, corralled beyond the police vehicles, flashed their cameras at it, mostly from boredom.

  As McLusky ducked back under the scene-of-crime tape, Austin emerged gasping from the tent. He stared hard into McLusky’s eyes for a few moments while he greedily filled his lungs with pure forest air.

  ‘Well done,’ said McLusky.

  ‘Only because you insisted. I didn’t last long in there. Why did they have to put a tent over it? It just concentrates the smell. Coulthart is still happily poking around among the maggots. People like that worry me.’

  ‘Now that you’ve seen the body – any immediate thoughts?’

  ‘I definitely want to be cremated.’

  ‘Anything beyond that?’

  ‘His end must have been absolutely terrifying. Presumably they didn’t put the bag over his head after he’d died. They tied his wrists with galvanized wire.’

  ‘Yes. I think if someone ties your hands with fencing wire, you more or less know you’ve had it. Whoever has got you has no intention of letting you go.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  McLusky heard the pathologist call his name and nodded his head towards the tent. ‘I’ll go back in for a last look. You go on ahead and set up at Albany.’

  Inside, the pathologist was waiting for him beside the corpse. More of it had now been uncovered. ‘Do you see this slant? The way the body seems to rise up?’ He ran the spatula alongside the body, downwards towards the knees. Here, the leaf litter and earth cover was still undisturbed. He stabbed the spatula into the ground below the knees. ‘I expected the legs to continue there under the ground, but they don’t. They disappear into the ground at right angles.’

  McLusky signalled to one of the SOCOS. ‘Right, let’s have the chap’s legs out. Can we first dig down alongside them to see what’s going on there, please?’

  The scene-of-crime officer started excavating carefully with a hand trowel, throwing leaves and earth on to a waiting tarpaulin, where it would later be sifted. Nothing would remain unexamined. It made McLusky think of Laura and her archaeology studies. What they were doing here had much in common with field archaeology, and the disciplines shared many techniques. He wondered if right now she was also out in the cold somewhere, on a dig perhaps, or sitting in a cosy lecture hall, taking notes in her neat, always legible handwriting.

  ‘It’s very tightly packed around the legs,’ said the SOCO.

  ‘What about around the rest of the body?’ McLusky asked.

  ‘It’s much looser there. As burials go, it wasn’t very deep. Or even well done. Not exactly shallow, but very … lumpy. Uneven. Except here. I’m nearing the bottom now.’

  The last few scrapes with the trowel revealed stained boots. ‘Timberland,’ McLusky said. ‘Not cheap, those. The jeans didn’t come from a supermarket either. Okay, why are his shins in a deep hole? Was that just conveniently there?’

  ‘No. It was dug. The soil layers are disturbed and mixed up and there’s a definite cut edge to the hole.’

  ‘It looks to me,’ said Coulthart, ‘as though someone started digging a grave of a decent depth, then couldn’t be arsed to do it for the whole length of the body.’

  ‘Probably underestimated how long it takes to dig that deep a hole. Okay, I’ll look forward to your reports, gentlemen.’ McLusky had seen and smelled enough. Outside, he shed his paper suit, overshoes, mask and gloves into a waiting bin liner and walked towards his car. A few flashes went off, and two or three journalists shouted questions at him, all of which he ignored. The press office would give a sanitized version of what had been found and the papers would simply invent the rest – dead men don’t sue.

  The car was an ice box. With the heater on full, he bumped over the rough ground and on to the track, then drove off past the reporters as fast as the terrain allowed. Further on, close to the junction with the road, stood a woman in a long black coat, her neck and chin muffled with a silver scarf. She was drawing large clouds of smoke from a hundred-millimetre cigarette without the aid of her gloved hands. As he drew close to where she was standing, she took a step forward on to the track and stuck an ironic thumb out like a hitchhiker.

  Between cigarettes Philippa Warren worked as a reporter for the Bristol Herald. She was brighter, sharper and more dishonest than most of her colleagues; she and McLusky had made use of each other in the past, in an easy-going atmosphere of mutual distrust.

  He stopped and rolled down the window three inches. ‘What do you want, Warren?’ he asked through the ungenerous gap.

  ‘Lift into town? My car’s at the menders and the guy who gave me a lift out here took off without me.’

  ‘Professional courtesy is dead.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said when McLusky cleared papers and cigarette packets off the front seat for her. ‘Blimey. It’s colder in your car than out there.’

  ‘I can drop you at a bus stop, Warren, if you prefer.’

  ‘You can call me Phil, like everyone else.’ She drew her coat closer around herself. ‘First his hand, now the rest; tell me about it.’

  ‘Who told you about the hand? That’s not supposed to be general knowledge.’

  ‘Responsibly sourced. Like line-caught fish. And we’re not printing it until you release it, that’s how responsible we are at the Herald.’

  ‘Naturally.’ McLusky turned on to the road and speeded up. He wondered how Warren had got hold of that information. Pym? Purkis? She probably paid retainers to several officers who sold information to the papers. It could never be stopped completely, not while the rank and file felt undervalued and underpaid. McLusky himself occasionally leaked bits of information to the press, but only if he thought it helped his own investigations. ‘It’s a dead male. Shallow grave. Hasn’t been there all that long. We’ve no idea who he is yet.’

  ‘Not even a suspicion? Who’s missing?’

  ‘Someone’s son, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘That I genuinely don’t know.’

  ‘Meaning the rest you just told me was lies?’

  McLusky didn’t bother to answer.

  ‘You’re smiling, that’s always a bad sign. A body in the woods is what people want to read about. No one wants to know about dead junkies in toilets.’

  ‘You know about that as well?’

  ‘Come on, he was found in a public toilet. Funny thing was, though,’ she said with exaggerated carelessness, ‘he was rushed off to the mortuary, where he was autopsied immediately. Not normal procedure, is it? Who cares about dead junkies? I wonder.’

  McLusky was further peeved by Warren’s knowledge of the immediate autopsy, and kept quiet while he mulled this over.

  ‘Hey, talk to me, I’m a journalist. It’s my job to know stuff.’

  ‘It’s your job to help sell advertising. I’m not concerned with dead junkies. Not my department. You’re talking to entirely the wrong guy here.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think so myself.’

  They were approaching the triangle. ‘Where do you want me to drop you?’

  ‘Anywhere near Brown’s, actually.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks for the lift, Liam,’ she said and waved McLusky off from outside the restaurant. Then she took the first cab she found back to Leigh Woods, where her car was parked.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘You won’t get much out of him today, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said. They were standing in intensive care, separated from the patient by a thick glass window. It reminded DI Fairfield of th
e mortuary viewing suite, the difference being that this junkie was still alive. Just. His sallow skin was stretched tight across his skull, his arms covered in dark lesions. He was hooked up to heart monitor, oxygen and a drip. The diagnosis of anthrax had been confirmed.

  ‘Will he live?’ Fairfield asked.

  ‘We’re giving him high doses of antibiotics,’ the doctor continued. ‘It’s a lethal disease. It’s not invariably fatal. But close enough when it gets to this stage. He has a small chance of pulling through. His chances would be a lot better had he been brought in earlier. That’s what I told the girl as well.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The one who brought him in yesterday. She was here a minute ago. Still wouldn’t give her name. Or his.’

  ‘Damn. What did she look like?’

  ‘Thin. Mousy hair. Blue tracksuit bottoms, grey hooded top.’

  The inspector was already running.

  ‘Like a half-empty sack of potatoes,’ the doctor called after her. ‘The way they all do.’

  Fairfield ran along the corridors and took corners at a skid. If they were to stop the hospitals filling with half-dead junkies infected with anthrax, then they had to find out where the contaminated drugs came from. This was only the second victim they knew about, but across the city there could be hundreds of users infecting themselves. She didn’t see anyone fitting the girl’s description until she reached the main exit, when she spotted her getting into the passenger seat of an old red Polo, dull with grime. The hard-faced girl looked straight at her as the driver pulled away. Fairfield only got a partial look at him, but thought he was young, with very short hair. She noted the index number of the car, requested a check and waited behind the steering wheel of her Renault for the results. It came back after three minutes.

  ‘Car is logged as having no keeper. No insurance or MOT.’

  ‘Par for the course.’ She requested a marker to be put on it and drove off towards Albany Road. What she really needed was a decent coffee.

  There was now a permanent incident room at Albany Road station, which for obvious reasons many called the Murder Room. All information regarding the Leigh Woods murder was gathered in the incident room, all actions were planned and most briefings given there. CID officers and civilian computer operators worked side by side. The room had a wall map of the city and one of the county, picture- and whiteboard, printers, phones and desktop computer units, no air-conditioning, strip lighting and probably several miles of cable. There was a gap where, until recently, the kettle had sat. The windows afforded a similar view as the one in McLusky’s office, and the beige plastic blinds looked like they were 1970s originals and were permanently at half-mast.

  McLusky’s desk faced Austin’s and the door to the corridor. An internal window beside it allowed the inmates to see anyone approaching from the left; unfortunately the superintendent had a habit of approaching the incident room from the right. McLusky thought it might be a good idea to install a bicycle mirror as an advance-warning system, though he would be the first to admit that the superintendent was preferable to the universally disliked DCI Gaunt, who was at present safely hospitalized.

  In front of him on his desk he had spread out a series of photographs of the body in Leigh Woods, taken before the tent had been erected. They showed the grizzly find from all angles. It was easy to see how the six of them had missed it in the mist; from any distance it looked like so much twig, stone and leaf. Only from certain angles was it obvious what the camera had captured. The pictures of the partial hand were there too, not that there was much they could do with them. He was about to lift the receiver to try and put pressure on forensics when Austin came in.

  ‘Result! We got a preliminary ID from the body. He has distinctive tattoos on both upper arms, dragons of some sort. It’s on file.’

  ‘So who have we got?’

  ‘Wayne Deeming. Career criminal and first-class moron. We thought he might have had links to Ray Fenton, but we couldn’t find any at the time.’

  ‘Perhaps someone else had better luck,’ McLusky said.

  Austin brought up the results on his computer screen. ‘Born May ’83, convictions for theft, blah blah, taking without consent, burglary, ABH, GBH, assaulting police and possession of cannabis with intent to supply.’

  ‘Good riddance,’ DC Dearlove ventured from behind the safety of his monitor.

  ‘Less of that,’ McLusky said. ‘You’re allowed to think it, though perhaps you’re in the wrong seat if you’re thinking it too often. Do we have an address for him?’

  ‘Yup, place he was last arrested, eight months ago.’

  McLusky scooped up his car keys. ‘Worth having a look, then.’

  The address turned out to be an anonymous rented property in a terrace of narrow houses in Bedminster. The front-room window had dark blue curtains drawn, the front door was locked. There was no answer to Austin’s knock, and no one appeared to be at home on either side.

  ‘We can always ask the chaps from the drug squad to come and charge the door for us,’ Austin suggested.

  ‘And find the place is now occupied by an old lady who’s hard of hearing? Try two doors down.’

  Austin was in luck. The slightly crumpled, quiet man who opened the door didn’t recognize Deeming from the picture he showed him but was happy to allow them into his back garden. McLusky was hoping to jump the fences into the back of Deeming’s place and get a look through a window.

  ‘I pretty much keep to myself here,’ was how the man explained his failure to recognize his neighbour from the picture. ‘I don’t get involved in what goes on in the street. There’s a lot of students.’

  In the tiny, dispiriting garden, McLusky dragged an empty concrete planter to the fence and, standing on it, vaulted into the garden next door. This was equally bleak but also contained the trashed remains of a kitchen. Some of it looked more modern than his own. He used an upturned black bucket in which plaster had thickly set to get himself over the next fence into what he hoped was Deeming’s garden. The kitchen window at the back was obscured with net curtains, but an uncovered chink of glass afforded him a glance at the interior. ‘Bingo.’ Everything he saw spelled drug-fuelled chaos.

  ‘Do you want me to come across?’ called Austin, who had stayed behind.

  McLusky waved him off. ‘Front door, DS Austin.’ He looked around for something with which to smash in the kitchen door. A large mossy rock at the edge of the muddy lawn looked good. Then he changed his mind. He fished out a pair of fresh latex gloves from his jacket, put them on and tried the door. It was unlocked. ‘More taxpayers’ money saved.’

  The kitchen was small and in a mess. He had seen some of it through the window, but what he was looking at now went beyond the usual slobbery. Apart from unwashed dishes, empty cans and pizza cartons, there was disturbance here – the two chairs had been overturned, an ashtray spilled and a mug broken on the floor. It was warm in the house, the heating obviously running. The place smelled stale, slightly mouldy. As he passed an encrusted pedal bin, the smell got stronger. He flipped the lid open and lowered it again. Festering rubbish. He’d leave that to forensics; they always loved a nice mouldy bin. He gingerly made his way from the kitchen into the hall, where he let Austin in. ‘Gloves,’ he said automatically. Austin wriggled his fingers in mad-strangler mode: he was already wearing them.

  ‘This door wasn’t locked or bolted, just pulled shut. Back door was unlocked. I think he left through the front door but not necessarily of his own accord. Drops of blood on the floor.’ McLusky pointed to a circular pattern of drops on the carpet, turned almost black with age.

  ‘Could just be a nosebleed, of course.’

  McLusky pointed to a brighter spray pattern on the yellow wall. ‘This nose also bled sideways. Someone persuaded it to bleed. I’ve seen enough, no point trampling all over the house. I’ll call scene-of-crime; you see if any of the motors in the street are registered to Deeming. We’ll wait outside, make forensics hap
py.’

  ‘Shame, nice and warm in here.’

  A blue Ford Focus with a long scrape along the driver’s side turned out to be Deeming’s. It would be carted off to the pound for forensics shortly. McLusky wanted to cast his eye over the interior beforehand, but it was locked. Back in the house, he went through the front room and the kitchen. ‘Have we found any car keys?’ he asked the SOCOs. No one had. In the kitchen, he asked the nearest officer: ‘Where do you keep your spare keys at home?’

  The man thought for a moment. ‘In a tin in the kitchen with loads of other stuff.’

  McLusky lifted the lid on a china biscuit barrel and emptied the contents on to the counter. Mobile phone batteries, cigarette papers, plastic rubbish, painkillers and keys for a Ford. ‘Genius. Gold star.’

  The SOCO allowed himself a smile; he didn’t get much praise in his job.

  The car’s interior was as messy as that of the house. McLusky searched while leaving everything as he found it: among the empty cans and food debris he saw plastic wraps for parcelling up class A, a long kitchen knife in the driver’s door pocket, cigarette papers, crumbs of herbal cannabis on the seats and in the glove box another knife, a sharpened screwdriver and a blister pack of what looked like Viagra. All as expected.

  Traffic was building as he and Austin drove back towards Albany Road. ‘The papers are going to call it “another gangland killing”.’

  Austin agreed. ‘And they’ll be right, won’t they? Deedee called it “good riddance”.’

  ‘So will most people.’ They both knew that the citizens of Bristol would echo the sentiment expressed earlier by DC Dearlove: one less. ‘What they don’t see is that if one lot of dealers kill the other lot, all it means is that they’ve now been replaced with a more murderous mob than the first.’

  ‘Sound capitalist principles. Triumph of the greediest.’

  Traffic in the centre was at clutch-burning pace. While stationary in Baldwin Street, McLusky saw her.

  Even in an unfamiliar winter coat and with a huge scarf wound round her neck, he recognized her instantly. It felt as though his abdominal muscles had seen her first, so instant was the fist-in-the-stomach feeling at the sudden, unexpected sight. The man she was walking with took her arm as they slipped between cars. He had a mop of dark hair and looked to be barely in his twenties. McLusky was relieved to see him let go of her arm once they had gained the other side of the street. He craned his neck to see past the cars crawling in the opposite direction. Both seemed to be talking simultaneously, and their walk looked more like a dance. Then they turned a corner.