by Peter Helton
‘Mints.’ McLusky turned back to Coulthart. ‘Cause of death?’
‘Not mints, Inspector. I couldn’t say.’
‘How long?’
Coulthart stood up, signalling to the SOCOs that he had finished his examination. ‘How long has he been dead, or how long has he been here?’
‘Either. I mean both.’
‘Difficult to say with any degree of confidence because of the frozen conditions. But he hasn’t been lying here for long.’
A SOCO stopped his quiet cursing of the muddled footprints long enough to add his observations. ‘He had about an inch of snow on him. There’s a little bit of shelter here from the bushes, but that’s about the amount that’s fallen since three in the morning.’
‘So to have an inch on him, he would have to have been here since the middle of the night.’
‘Correct.’ The SOCO, who had an encyclopaedic memory of local weather conditions, returned to the puzzle of footprints and began brushing at the snow.
Well away from the deposition site, McLusky lit a cigarette and looked around him. As a dumping ground this was pretty perfect. There was access from the A369 a few yards from where the body had been found. Austin stood next to him, sniffing nostalgically at the cigarette smoke and stomping his feet to keep them from going numb. McLusky could no longer feel his. He’d buy winter boots at the first opportunity. ‘First impressions, Jane?’
‘Shame about the footprints.’
‘It’s a SOCO nightmare. They’re hoping to find some under the snow. Or in between layers. But it’s pretty much buggered. The couple who found the body trod all over the site, then an ambulance crew, then a couple of constables, then the rest of us.’
‘There’s no CCTV here and no one about at night. Yet it’s very close to the city. Couldn’t be better, could it? Dumping a body is always a risky business, so this place is quite convenient.’
‘Yes, but leaving a body lying about where it can easily be found is also a risky business. It’s ten feet from the river. Why leave him here if you can simply tip him into the water? Even without being weighed down, he’d likely drift a bit and give us a headache.’
‘Perhaps they thought someone might hear the splash. Or they meant to chuck the body in and someone came along and interrupted them. Along the path or by boat. So they dumped it and legged it.’
‘Boat. Good thinking, Jane. Make sure someone does a house-to-house, or boat-to-boat rather, in the harbour and the moorings on this side, too. Establish if anyone came by here at night and saw anything.’
‘There’s not a great deal of boat traffic at this time of the year. Even less at night.’
‘I know that.’ McLusky flicked his cigarette butt towards the slow-moving water, where he instantly lost sight of it. ‘I still think the river is a missed opportunity if you want to get rid of a body.’
Fairfield shoved the tiny cup under the nozzle, pressed the button and watched the evil-looking liquid dribble from the machine. Espresso was the one other vice she admitted to, and she tried to keep her daily total to fewer than five. Last night she had felt the need to open a second bottle of wine; consequently she needed all the caffeine she could get today. Why had it unsettled her so much? There were photographs of two dead people on her desk, both of whom she had also seen in the flesh, yet none of it had unsettled her as much as Paul’s voice on the phone, even down a bad line. It had been her who had finished the relationship, because of his constant absences due to his job, their rows about when to have children, whether to have children, his career, her career. Why now, she had asked him, why divorce now after three years of separation? She had guessed the answer all along. Paul was thinking of getting married to his current girlfriend, also an electrical engineer. How quaint. Lots to talk about there then, she was sure. They could engineer a wonderful life together for themselves. Paul and Carrie.
She took a sip from the cup and found she had a slight tremor. Last one for today, she vowed silently. She pulled a stack of forms towards her and started reading.
Divorce. Her thoughts kept coming back to it despite her best efforts to get some paperwork done. Uncontested divorce. It was so easy now. He’d already initiated it; all he wanted now was for her to sign some papers. Or was it? She had told him to put them in the post, but he had said something about being between addresses and she had ended up arranging to see him on Sunday. They were meeting at the Nova Scotia, for a drink and a quick divorce. She had agreed and now she couldn’t stop thinking about it. When the phone on her desk rang, she was grateful to hear she had business out on the streets.
‘Number three.’ Sorbie stepped out of the way to let the photographer take pictures of the car from all angles. The dead junkie was barely visible through the windows of the clapped-out Renault. The snow had covered the windscreen and part of the rear window and there was frozen condensation on the side windows. The body had only been discovered because the car was illegally parked in a narrow residential street off Ashley Down Road, and a traffic warden had raised the alarm, saying he could not wake the person lying across the rear seats. At first it had been thought the man had simply frozen to death, but the duty doctor’s suspicions had been aroused when he saw the lesions on the dead man’s arms, something he had been told to watch out for.
On the other side of the car, DI Fairfield looked on stony-faced. The dead man had been young, still in his twenties. Another set of relatives to inform. Often they took it as something they had half expected; sometimes it came as a devastating shock. A good child. A normal child. A wasted child. Her mobile rang. She reluctantly took her gloves off to answer it. An icy wind was driving the snow flurries through the streets, making it feel twice as cold. ‘Did he have any more visitors?’ she asked the caller. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know, Doctor.’ She pocketed the mobile and pulled her gloves back on before correcting Sorbie. ‘You were wrong, it’s number four. That was the hospital. Our nameless chap didn’t make it.’
‘I thought they said he had a chance of recovery?’
‘I know. Apparently these things are unpredictable. He got worse overnight. No one came to see him and we still have no ID for him. Dead loss. I’d best let the super know.’
While Fairfield made the call, she watched the coroner’s van and a tow truck arrive. Soon the street would be clear again, another body on its way to the morgue, another car on its way to the vehicle pound. She folded the mobile again and nodded her head towards Sorbie’s Golf. ‘Drive me to my coffee machine, Jack. The super wants a word. For that I’ll need all the drugs I can get.’
Outside the superintendent’s office, she found that her tremor had returned. She now regretted her last coffee. She also regretted having turned up five minutes early because now she had to wait in the presence of Lynn Tiery, the superintendent’s secretary. She had no idea why, but somehow she found the impassive, steel-eyed woman more intimidating than Denkhaus himself. It was more than five minutes after the appointed time when the super’s ‘All right, send her in’ squawked from the old-fashioned intercom on her desk.
‘What’s this new epidemic all about?’ he wanted to know even before Fairfield had managed to sit down.
‘I wouldn’t call it an epidemic yet, sir.’
‘Well it looks like one to me: five junkies dead in one week? They’re dropping at an alarming rate.’
‘Four,’ Fairfield corrected him.
‘Not according to this,’ Denkhaus said, tapping his computer monitor with a fleshy finger. ‘Drug-user found dead in Totterdown.’
‘That’s news to me; must only just have come up.’
‘Perhaps.’ Denkhaus knew it had, yet he liked to keep his team on their toes. ‘But I expect you to stay on top of developments.’
With difficulty Fairfield suppressed the urge to point out that she had just spent ten minutes sitting outside his door. And that she wasn’t psychic. ‘I’m sure Sorbie is taking care of it as we speak.’
‘Anthrax, that’s no
t something I wanted to see in our city.’ He managed to make that sound like an accusation too, as though she had somehow failed to keep it out.
‘The lab says it’s contaminated heroin. The most likely source is Afghanistan or eastern Turkey. It may be the cutting agent that carries the contamination, but they haven’t isolated it yet.’
‘Not that it matters: the result is the same and we can’t do a thing about it. Is that it?’
‘If we go with the theory that the contamination happened over there, then no.’
‘And are we? Is that the presumption?’
‘If it is the cutting agent. It normally arrives in this country already cut. About ten per cent purity is normal at the moment, but it does fluctuate. It’s usually cut with stuff like lactose, paracetamol or caffeine.’ Fairfield felt her fingers tremble and folded her hands.
‘So the contamination is accidental?’
‘Almost certainly. Hygiene is appalling over there and anthrax in cattle is rife. According to the pathologist, this isn’t the first case. It has cropped up before, in Europe.’
‘In Europe? This is Europe.’
‘Sorry, on the Continent, I should have said.’
‘Quite. So no one is trying to poison drug-users?’
‘They’re doing a pretty good job of that themselves, sir.’ The image of the dead woman, slumped forward on her bed, intruded on her mind. ‘It’s not impossible, but I don’t think it’s likely that someone has deliberately infected the heroin supply. If you wanted to kill heroin users, you’d stick something fast-acting into the batch, like, I don’t know, rat poison. That would be much easier to get hold of. And less dangerous to yourself. Just inhaling this stuff can be lethal.’
‘Granted. Right. We have a rogue batch of accidentally contaminated heroin in the city. How much of it is there likely to be?’
‘There’s no telling.’
‘Then we must get a press release done immediately, tell people that this stuff is about and to avoid it at all costs.’
‘Yes, sir, I’ll see to it.’ When Denkhaus dismissed her with a nod, Fairfield stood up, then stopped by the door. ‘I doubt it’ll make much difference, of course.’
‘Oh?’
‘You can’t tell if your supply is contaminated from looking at it, and there’s no test a drug-user could do.’ To tell a junkie not to use heroin because it might kill him was like telling a man who was dying of thirst not to drink pond water because it might give him a tummy upset. ‘They’ll go on using anyway, whatever is in it, whatever the risks.’
‘I expect you’re right. Yet it would amount to a dereliction of duty not to warn them. At least we can tell them what the symptoms are so they can seek help before it’s too late. There is a cure, isn’t there?’
‘For anthrax or heroin addiction? I think the prognosis is pretty bleak for both, sir.’
Chapter Ten
More snow was falling, making even Broadmead shopping centre look a little less bleak, less commercial. Suddenly the stalls selling hot soup and made-to-order doughnuts seemed like essential services. Snow mellowed many things. We are all infected with Dickensian stories, thought McLusky, for ever in the clutches of Victorian Christmas cards. Inside the shoe shop, he walked up and down along the aisle in the winter boots he had chosen, stomped his feet experimentally and decided to buy them. His mobile chimed and he dug it from the unfamiliar pockets of his new, thickly padded winter jacket.
It was Austin. ‘Just thought I’d let you know, the forensics and accident report from the crashed Beemer have arrived.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve only just glanced at it, but it looks interesting. The bag we saw in the boot of the car was definitely used to transport heroin.’
‘So whoever got to the wreck first probably helped himself to a large amount of the stuff and could now be tooled up with a nine-millimetre semi-automatic into the bargain.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘All right, I’m on my way.’ He would have a quick look at the report himself, then pay the farmer another surprise visit.
At the door, a young shop assistant laid a hand on his arm. McLusky looked at her in surprise. ‘S’cuse me, sir, but you haven’t paid for those yet,’ she said, nodding her head at his feet.
He turned around. The shoes he had come with stood forlorn at the back of the aisle. ‘Oh. Sorry. I got distracted.’
The girl didn’t take her eyes off him for one second while he collected his old shoes and came to the till. She had heard that excuse before. Most ran out of the shop, but some tried the casual approach, like this one. It just showed you couldn’t trust anyone, however nice or normal they looked.
Five embarrassed minutes later, McLusky left the shop in his new boots, carrying his old shoes in a carrier bag. He was ninety-eight per cent certain he had paid for his new jacket.
‘You wouldn’t have a magnifying glass, would you?’ Philippa Warren squinted at the photograph, what there was of it. ‘I can’t make it out at all.’
Ed, who had been at the Herald longer than anyone could remember, gave her a look that was probably meant to say something like ‘How did you get this far in the business without owning a magnifying glass?’ then went back to his own workstation to fetch one. Warren dropped the photo on her desk and picked up the note that had come with it. These days, most correspondence addressed to the Herald came via email. Sometimes torrents of the stuff, especially if the readership had found a contentious bone to worry. Email of course was fast and saved the price of a stamp, which meant hardly anyone sent letters these days. Ironically, this made letter-writers immediately stand out and their contributions were read before anyone found the fortitude to dive into the dreaded inbox.
The note was handwritten, too, in a neat hand and black biro. The first instalment. But why not print it anyway? If not, keep this safe. It’ll make sense later.
‘I’m glad it says later, because it doesn’t make sense so far,’ Warren said, taking the glass from Ed’s hand and bending over the photo again. It consisted of only a sliver of a picture, no more than a finger’s width. There was a narrow strip of golden yellow, another strip of dark grey and what could, with a bit of imagination, be the beginnings of a person. ‘Okay, let me know if any more comes in. I’ll hang on to this.’ She swept the note into a drawer and Blu-Tacked the piece of photograph to the rim of her computer monitor. She hoped it would make a story eventually. Readers liked a bit of a mystery, and you didn’t get many of those to the pound. Local newspapers had been dying on their feet for ages, and even a publication as old as the Bristol Herald wasn’t immune to the way things had changed. If you could get the news on your phone, why buy a paper? It was the kind of news you couldn’t get on your phone that local papers had to deliver, the double-yellow-line story and the supermarket protests and cuts in local services. But a mystery was good. And a murder or two never hurt the circulation figures. No one cared about dead junkies, of course. After all, that was for the authorities to deal with. Warren pulled the keyboard towards her. But what if the authorities didn’t care either? Now that might get a few readers exercised.
At Albany Road station, McLusky stopped just long enough to skim the accident and forensics report. It mentioned that a motorcycle track had been found, made after the accident. So someone else had come past, apart from the farmer. He’d read it properly later. For now he dropped the report on the growing pile on his desk.
It was forty minutes later when he let the Mazda crawl slowly along the lane where the BMW had crashed. There had been several opportunities to add his own car to the RTA statistics, since these narrow lanes had been neither cleared nor gritted. Apparently no one had foreseen the arrival of winter, which meant salt was in short supply and only main routes were being kept open. At the next crossroads he turned right, skidded sideways, caught the car before it hit the bank and drove slowly on. He could make out Gooseford Farm on the far right, beyond what had to be the field he and Austin had w
alked across, though it took him a moment to get his bearings. The landscape here had changed beyond recognition. Details were lost under the snow, colour had vanished, contours were eliminated, landmarks buried. There were no animals to be seen.
At the turn-off to the farm, he slowed and stopped. The track was covered in compacted snow, deeply grooved by tractor tyres. He switched off the engine. The last bit he would walk, not wanting to push his luck. Perhaps this way he’d be able to approach the farm without giving advance warning of his visit. Then he remembered what he was wearing; he’d stand out crow-black against the brilliance of the snow. Not that it mattered. Surprise was not the important thing here, but persistent nuisance was. He walked beside the tractor tracks, taking pleasure in crunching down on untouched snow. Nothing else brought back childhood memories so readily as the creaking of virgin snow underfoot. When he reached the farm gate, he briefly stopped and reminded himself that the farmer might now be in possession of a Beretta 9mm. But then most farmers had shotguns anyway. Both the Volvo estate and the Land Rover were in the yard, and he could see the back of the tractor sheltered in one of the large sheds. It proved that a tractor could easily cost as much as a Land Rover and was worth giving preferential treatment to, since much of the farm depended on it. There was no sign of the dog, but the barking started as soon as he knocked on the door of the farmhouse.
It was Mrs Murry who opened the door to him. She looked unsurprised, even unmoved. She showed no sign of recognition, so McLusky held up his warrant card. ‘Is your husband in, Mrs Murry?’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘Could I speak to him?’
‘Is it about the car crash again?’
He ignored the question. ‘I won’t take up much of his time.’
Mrs Murry left him standing, leaving the door half-open. He strained to hear what was being said inside, but couldn’t distinguish any words.
When the farmer appeared, he stood solidly composed in the door. ‘More questions?’ he asked.
