Four Below

by Peter Helton

  McLusky pretended to leaf through his notebook. ‘Yes, just a couple of things that seem to be missing in my notes. Did you tell us what time you discovered the wreck?’

  ‘A lot of questions about this accident, I must say.’

  ‘A man died. We like to be as thorough as we can. What time was it?’

  ‘About seven.’

  McLusky paused, as though thinking about it. ‘Right, seven. It would of course have been quite dark, that time in the morning.’

  ‘That’s right. I was riding the quad bike.’

  ‘Along the lane …’

  ‘In the lower field, I told you that. I wasn’t in the actual lane.’

  ‘Quite foggy, too, that morning, I imagine. Out here. What were you doing in the field? Sorry if I asked you this before; I can’t seem to find any notes to that effect.’

  ‘Moving the sheep. To a place where there’s more shelter. I knew snow was coming.’

  ‘O … kay.’ McLusky pretended to scribble furiously in his notebook with a dried-up biro. ‘I knew … snow … was … coming.’ He delivered the full stop with a satisfying punch, looked up at Murry and smiled. And smiled. And smiled. The farmer broke eye contact and looked past him, squinting at the snow.

  McLusky snapped his notebook shut. ‘Thank you, Mr Murry. That’s all I need for now.’

  ‘You came out here for that?’

  McLusky nodded as he walked away. ‘Oh yes.’

  Murry shut the door, and from behind a net-curtained window watched the inspector as he walked down the track, pausing every so often to look around him and take pictures on his mobile phone. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said when his wife joined him silently by the window.

  McLusky turned the car around with difficulty. At least it had stopped snowing, and visibility was good. He was tempted to stop at the crash site, not because he thought he might find something all other investigators had missed, but because he found it easier to think out in the field, in the places where whatever he was investigating had happened; sitting in his office, he often felt as though he was working with a blindfold. But when he passed the site again, the temptation faded; it was covered so deeply in snow, he’d have found it difficult to identify the spot had it not been for the lonesome tree. Continuing on at ten and fifteen miles an hour, depending on the state of the road, he had time to take in the transformed landscape. On the left, Gooseford Farm had sunk out of sight. No more buildings were visible now, and only fences gave an indication that he was looking at a landscape inhabited by humans. Not quite, though, he now saw. Five hundred yards to his right, following the crest of gently rising fields, stood a patch of woodland, stretching for a quarter of a mile or so in the direction he was travelling. From his vantage point on the road, there was no way of telling how deep this stretch of trees ran. He saw no roofs or buildings, but he knew there was human life. From just inside the dense thicket of trees rose a pale column of smoke. It was a timeless view, if he disregarded the fact that it was framed by a car windscreen. He slowed even further and rolled down the window just as he passed a narrow track leading in the general direction of the woodland. He could smell the wood smoke on the clean winter air, and as he reached a passing place in the road he let the car come to a stop. He locked it and walked back to the track.

  The snow-covered field and trees and the clearly defined smells around him had a quality that reminded McLusky of the snow-capped-mountain scenes on the walls of the Indian fast-food place by the arches; there was the same serenity and uncontaminated emptiness, except that this emptiness also had the possibility of warmth in it. He took a doubtful look back at his car, then set off along the track; wasn’t it amazing what a warm jacket and winter boots could do? The going was easier than he had expected. A small tractor had come through here, judging by the tyre tracks he was walking in. The smell of wood smoke came and went as he progressed along the gentle rise. He couldn’t have said what had made him stop the car, even less what made him walk up the track or what he expected to find at the end of it. A tramp trying to stay alive in the woods? Perhaps it was a charcoal-burner, though he didn’t think you could get charcoal in the winter.

  As he neared the edge of the wood, another smell appeared on the air. It made him stop in his tracks and sniff doubtfully. You’re imagining it again, Liam. He could smell freshly brewed coffee, one of his favourite olfactory hallucinations. Soon, regretfully, he lost the smell. Then he found it again, stronger than before, which meant he probably wasn’t imagining it after all. He hadn’t gone far beyond the fringe along the curving track between the trees when he saw where it came from.

  It looked like a well-established camp. To the left of the track stood a large blue mobile home of the type that was mobile in name only. Red curtains were drawn at the windows. From the centre of the roof, a lum-hatted stovepipe protruded – the source of the wood smoke he had seen. A precariously rhomboid shed with a tree growing through its roughly thatched roof stood beside the mobile home. There were several snow-covered piles of wood nearby, not the ordered piles that one might have had delivered, but unruly branches of varying thickness. A snow-free, recently used chopping block stood close by. There was a jumble of containers and oil drums. In front of the caravan, near the door, a simply made wooden bench and table had been cleared since the last snow fall. On the opposite side of the track a small tractor and trailer, both circa 1975, were partially covered with a frayed tarpaulin to keep off the worst of the weather. A hippy camp, by the looks of it, but a well-organized one, McLusky thought.

  Without the faintest idea of what he was going to say to the denizens of the place, he knocked on the door. Not the flat-handed policeman’s knock, but a polite, knuckle-of-forefinger one. A thick red curtain moved at a window to his left, and a moment later the door was opened.

  ‘Yeah?’ The man confronting him was not quite what McLusky had expected. Neither his clothes nor his style of hair were particularly hippyish, and the expected wave of marijuana, incense and cooking aromas was not forthcoming. All he could smell was coffee. The man filling the narrow door was in his late thirties, perhaps forty, dressed in black cargo pants, tough work boots and an old blue sweater peppered with sawdust. His quick green eyes took the measure of McLusky, then looked beyond him left and right. ‘Walking?’ he asked.

  ‘I am now. I smelled your coffee from three hundred yards away.’

  ‘I was roasting some. It always travels. Knock the snow off your boots before coming in,’ he said, and turned back inside.

  After kicking his boots against each other, McLusky followed him in, shutting out the cold behind him. After the dazzle of the snow, his eyes needed to adjust, since all but one of the four windows had their curtains drawn against the cold. He found himself in a large, old-fashioned caravan. Immediately beyond the entrance door was the kitchen, dining area, which, apart from the expected, also contained a wooden table and chairs and a cast-iron wood-burning stove that pulsed with heat. Through an arch in a partition he could see into a small bed-sitting room. Worked wood was much in evidence.

  ‘How do you take it?’

  ‘As it comes.’

  ‘That’s good, because that’s how it usually comes. I’m Ben, by the way, though some people call me Fish.’

  ‘I’m Liam. Some people call me Detective Inspector.’

  ‘I see. Here.’ He passed him a mug. ‘Sit down if you want.’

  ‘Why Fish?’

  ‘Benjamin Alexander Fishlock.’

  ‘Blimey.’ He sipped coffee. ‘You’ve been here a while. By the looks of it.’

  ‘This is my fifth winter.’

  ‘Then presumably the owners don’t mind you camping here.’

  Fishlock relaxed back into the chair opposite him. ‘You really are just out walking, then. Detective Liam.’

  ‘McLusky. What makes you say that?’

  ‘If you’d come in order to see me, you’d know that I own these woods. And the fields to the east of them.’ He incl
ined his head, indicating east.

  ‘Ah, that’s different then, my apologies.’

  ‘Oh, it never stopped them from trying to evict me from my own land. I had a small wooden house before, back there, closer to the stream. For two years no one even knew it was there. Then they dragged me into court. No planning permission. I lost. They made me take it down. If you try and leave it all behind, they’ll hate you for it. They’ll come after you.’

  ‘What was it you did leave behind? This is good coffee, by the way.’

  ‘It is. I buy the beans raw and roast them myself. The way I want them. What did I leave behind? Nothing important. An IT career. I made a lot of money quite quickly. Remember the millennium bug? Complete nonsense, but we made a fortune; that’s how it started. A couple of lucky investments… But I always knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Then other things happened in my life and I sold up. First I bought the woods. Later the fields adjacent.’

  ‘What do you do with them?’

  ‘I’m a woodsman. Coppicing, charcoal-burning. I make hazel hurdles, things like that. And I grow field mushrooms. Some of the best restaurants in Bristol take my mushrooms. And I supply some hotels.’

  ‘So you do make a living, then?’

  ‘Not a luxurious one, that’s for sure.’

  McLusky rose and stood by the window. He looked out into the woods, savoured the silence. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, it depends how you define luxury.’ There was a long pause during which McLusky was content to sip coffee and look into the woods, where nothing stirred. Then Fishlock spoke again. ‘Okay, you’re welcome to warm yourself by my fire, you’re welcome to drink my coffee. But I find it hard to believe that that’s what you came for if you’re really a policeman.’

  McLusky drained his coffee and set the mug into the sink. Then he produced his warrant card. ‘A man died in a car crash not far from here.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Rolled it. No seat belts, I heard.’

  ‘How did you hear that?’

  ‘On the radio, Inspector.’

  ‘So you have electricity here?’ He could see no electric appliances or lights.

  ‘I make my own. Low-voltage, just enough to run a radio and power a laptop, charge my phone.’ McLusky formed a silent ‘oh’ with his mouth. ‘I said I was a woodsman, not a backwoodsman.’

  ‘Point taken. Did you see the car wreck?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I did hear a noise around that time, but didn’t pay much attention. Too far away.’

  ‘Did you hear a motorbike that morning?’

  Fishlock raised his eyebrows. ‘What kind of motorbike?’

  For the first time a false note had crept into the conversation. It was the wrong answer to a simple enough question.

  ‘Just a motorbike.’

  Fishlock shook his head. ‘Occasionally I can hear engine noise, on clear mornings when the wind comes from that direction.’

  ‘But not that morning?’

  Fishlock shook his head again and buried his nose in his mug, draining it. Again, a normal reaction, McLusky thought, would have been to ask what a motorbike had to do with it and why a detective inspector was interested in a car crash. No details about the drugs or ammunition had found its way into the press.

  ‘Well, thanks for your hospitality to a complete stranger.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Any time.’

  ‘I might just take you up on that,’ McLusky said as he stepped back into the snow outside, zipping up his jacket, digging his gloves from his pockets. Before pulling them on, he gave Fishlock his card. ‘In case you ever feel like a chat. You don’t ride a motorbike yourself, by any chance?’ He looked about him, eyeing up the shed.

  ‘It wouldn’t be much use to me, would it?’

  ‘Then how do you get around? Not on that, surely?’ He nodded towards the tractor.

  ‘Oh, I use that a lot. But I also have a car. It’s not here, it broke down. I’m having it mended.’

  ‘A green Volvo estate?’

  Fishlock looked at him unblinkingly for a few seconds. ‘You’re trying to make me paranoid.’

  McLusky strode off in the direction of the road. ‘Bye for now.’ But not for long, he thought. The things you found if you just followed your nose.

  The incident room was busy. With two separate killings to deal with, the mood was tense and the usual banter had all but died out. They were stretched. While on paper the personnel situation looked adequate, in reality they were constantly working below strength, due to illness, injury and people being away on courses. Contrary to gold-braided expectation, the lower the rank of the missing officer, the more impact their absence had. A missing detective constable or two left a big hole, while no one complained much about Detective Chief Inspector Gaunt’s hospital stay.

  McLusky quizzed Dearlove about any witness statements on the still unidentified body, then went to the quiet of his office to think things over. Denkhaus would disapprove of him spending time on the crashed drug carrier now that they had two unsolved murders on the books, but the thought of putting it on ice made him uneasy. He had an image in his mind of Farmer Murry with a kilo or two of heroin and a Beretta powerful and heavy in his hand, planning an alternative form of farm subsidy. How likely was it?

  He brewed tea with the aid of his illicit kettle and finished reading the forensic report. Apart from the confirmed presence of drugs, only one item attracted his attention. On the twisted metal of the rear door frame, tiny specks of twenty-four-carat gold were found. The report suggested that they had been transferred there from a heavy gold-plated item that hit the door frame during the accident. No such item had been found at the scene. McLusky was about to open the accident report when Austin knocked on his door, bringing the first witness reports of the cycle-path murder. McLusky dropped the accident report on a small pile of other papers already on the foor behind his desk.

  ‘I had another chat with Farmer Murry,’ he told Austin. ‘He of the excellent night vision. Says he was moving sheep that morning. I wonder, do sheep have good night vision too? He didn’t look happy when I left, so my journey wasn’t wasted.’

  ‘Should we search the farm for the drugs and gun?’

  ‘You’ve seen the place. How are you going to find a kilo of smack and a gun somewhere that size? You might find the drugs with a dog, if you can get the dog near it, but a handgun? Hardly. Even so, we’d never get a warrant to search the place. And right now, with two bodies on the slab, we haven’t even got the time. I just wanted to make sure he stayed nervous.’ He shrugged in his roll-neck jumper and laid a hand on the nearest radiator. It was no more than lukewarm. ‘I think the cutbacks have started. Oh yes, and on the way back I found another character I want to keep an eye on. A Mr Fishlock. Lives in a caravan in the woods nearby. Something about him doesn’t smell right. Though his coffee does. Anyway …’

  ‘The post-mortem for the cycle-path body is later this afternoon. I suppose you want me to attend?’ Austin said, with due emphasis on the me. McLusky stubbornly refused to go, even to accompany him. Austin had come to dread post-mortems and often had bleak dreams about them, before and after the event.

  ‘Naturally. We have no ID for him yet; let’s hope it won’t come to dental records.’ The Police National Computer had thrown up several vague matches for missing males in the age range, but any PNC check did that. There were always candidates for males of middle age, an age group that did more than its fair share of walkabouts, due to marital break-up, stress at work, unemployment, alcoholism or mental health problems.

  ‘None of the names were from around here; most were London, Manchester, Glasgow.’

  ‘DS Austin, I hate nameless bodies,’ McLusky said accusingly.

  ‘Yes, sir. Let’s call him Bob.’

  The phone on his desk rang. ‘Let’s not, Jane,’ he said and picked up the receiver. It was Lynn Tiery. DSI Denkhaus wanted to see him in his office. ‘Now?’ he asked.

  ‘This minute,’ came t
he curt answer.

  The superintendent’s secretary barely acknowledged him. Some people said you could gauge the amount of trouble waiting for you by the arch of her eyebrows, but today they gave nothing away. ‘Any idea why the super needs to see me?’

  Her finger hovered over the intercom button. ‘You haven’t seen today’s Herald?’

  ‘I haven’t had the pleasure yet.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll get much pleasure out of it.’ She depressed the button. ‘DI McLusky is here.’

  Denkhaus was standing by the window, looking out over the mosaic of snow-covered roofs. He ignored McLusky’s entrance. Since only two seconds earlier he had to have stood at his desk to press the intercom button, McLusky knew this to be a pose struck for his benefit. On the desk lay a copy of the Bristol Herald. He had no time to practise his upside-down reading skills on the headlines, because Denkhaus turned around and slammed a fleshy hand across the paper, then swivelled it around as though it was heavy as lead. Police Unconcerned About Drug Deaths ran the headline. When McLusky skimmed the long article and his name jumped out at him several times, he knew he was in trouble. ‘After the last debacle when you shot your mouth off to a reporter, had I not made it absolutely clear that you were not to speak to the press again? No officer on my force is allowed to make statements to the press without prior authorization, and you’d be the last person I’d get to do it! Here …’ Denkhaus sat down and picked up the paper. ‘ “I am not concerned about dead junkies,” said DI Liam McLusky.’ Did you say that?’

  ‘Yes. No. No, I probably said something like “dead junkies aren’t my department”; I never said I didn’t care about junkies dying.’

  ‘What you should have said was no comment! That’s all you’ll ever say to any reporter from now on.’

  ‘I was giving Phil Warren a lift. It was a casual conversation …’

  ‘Reporters don’t have casual conversations.’

  ‘I’m beginning to see that.’ McLusky, who had not been invited to sit down, stuck his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. It suddenly felt cold in this office.