by Ann Granger
Her concentration was broken by a sharp snapping sound away to her right. Her heart gave a painful leap. She peered into the thicket. Nothing. Probably something falling from a tree. Then, to her surprise, she heard a car engine. Although you couldn’t access the woods from the car park by motor vehicle, there was another way in on the far side, down a track used by maintenance traffic. Visitors’ cars were not allowed to use it, so this must be a Trust worker. The engine was cut. Sally decided to move to a different area. There was too much going on here, and she couldn’t focus her mind. She found her way out of the trees on to one of the marked paths, crossed it, and plunged into the trees on the further side. For a while all went well; until she heard a noise unlike any other. It sounded as though someone or some creature was panting and groaning in considerable distress. The noises stopped. Then they began again, as if whoever or whatever was doing it had just paused to catch breath.
Sally’s instinct was to turn and run. But that would be to admit that the origin of the sounds was something bad and dangerous, and she would never be able to come to the woods again, for fear of another encounter with ‘it’. She had to find out what it was because, obviously, she reasoned, there was a simple explanation. Once she knew it, her fears would be dismissed, all would be well and she’d be able to wander the woods with her phone camera as before.
She made her way cautiously towards the sounds, camera held up at the ready. But the noises stopped again. Sally snapped off a couple of shots anyway. She was nearly back at the walkers’ path. The trees were thinner. Click, click with the mobile. If anyone was there, he might clear off if he realised she was taking photos. Then, making her jump, the car engine started up again. The vehicle seemed to be reversing out the way it had come in, back towards the service road. Whatever had been causing the sounds had gone.
But Sally had had enough. Clearly, it hadn’t been anything sinister, only some worker clearing debris. But she didn’t want to linger. She’d taken a number of photos and one of them might offer the subject she was after. She turned her back on the path and set off on a different way back to the car park, negotiating a route through the undergrowth and the trees. Emerging into the open, she saw with relief that her bike was still there. It had been joined by a silver SUV. Could the owner of that have been responsible for the spooky noises? She wasn’t going to hang around and find out. She hastened to unlock the chain and cycled off home, as if competing in a road race.
Tom, meanwhile, in another part of the wood, had been happily – or more or less happily – walking the red path. But now he had reached a point where the way split into two. A red arrow painted on a stubby post helpfully indicated the right-hand path. A blue arrow pointed to the left. Tom made an impulsive decision to abandon the red route and throw in his lot with the blue. Perhaps he’d only picked red in the first place because it reflected his anger. Setting aside thoughts of both Madison and the unknown driver, he turned left on to the blue path. From such impulses can dire consequences result.
The path broadened, wide enough now for emergency or work vehicles accessing it from the opposite direction. Traffic had been here recently. He had to pick his way through rutted tracks, crisscrossing, and including, possibly, those of a small tractor. Maintenance work had been going on. Overgrowing blackberry bushes had been cleared and a tree felled. The brambles and most of the tree had been taken away, presumably on a trailer pulled by the tractor. The main section of the trunk remained by the path and someone was sitting on the ground, propped against it with his legs stuck out straight in front of him. Why on earth was the idiot sitting on the ground when he could be sitting on the felled trunk or the stump? If he sat there, like he was doing, the damp must be seeping up into his clothing in a most unpleasant way.
There was something wrong about the position of the body and particularly the angle of the man’s head, tilted back; something wrong with the face. A prickle of unease ran up Tom’s spine.
Drawing nearer, he could see that much of the lower part of the face simply wasn’t there, not in an intact form. It was a mess of ruined, bloody flesh through which, incongruously, broken teeth stumps protruded. Tom turned aside and gagged, inured though he was to gruesome sights. Back in control, he stepped cautiously towards the seated figure. The man wore corduroy slacks and a scruffy old Barbour. On his feet were strong boots not unlike the ones Tom himself was wearing. A shotgun had fallen to one side and lay partly across his outstretched legs. The man’s hands had released their grip and lay uselessly by his sides, his fingers stiffening into claws. Above the ruin of the lower face, the brow and the eyes, the very top of the bridge of the nose, were relatively undamaged. He had long blond hair. Perhaps he’d been proud of it. Now the small vanity seemed pathetic.
Why did the poor beggars try to kill themselves that way? Tom asked himself. ‘Blowing your brains out’, as it was usually called, wasn’t so easy. Horrible wounds resulted, but not necessarily death. A millimetre or two would have made the difference, leaving the victim a wrecked gargoyle but alive. Possibly, the autopsy would show that pellets, taking an upward course through the roof of his mouth, had entered the brain.
Tom stepped over the cropped brambles, worked his way to the rear of the body, and studied it from that angle. He then squinted at the tree trunk against which the poor fellow was propped. Lastly, his gaze moved to the collar of the Barbour.
Tom returned to where he’d first stood, stooped and gently took hold of the man’s wrist. He didn’t expect to find a pulse. He wanted to establish how far rigor mortis had got. The cool conditions would delay its progress; the seated figure was barely beginning to stiffen. A layman would have noticed nothing at all. Tom made an ad hoc judgement and decided the man had been dead under an hour, possibly forty minutes. He remembered the wise words of one of his more experienced colleagues. Beware of being too inflexible over times of death. When was the victim last seen alive? When was he found? Between the two events, he died. That is the only definite piece of knowledge you’ve got.
He straightened up and took out his phone, relieved that he could get a signal out here. The ordinary citizen would call 999. But Tom was part of the system, he thought wryly, as he scrolled down the list of stored numbers. He rang Jess Campbell.
‘What do you mean, you’re out and about in the woods?’ her voice squawked in his ear. ‘You’re sick and supposed to be at home!’
‘I’ve found a body.’
‘What do you mean, a body? What sort of body?’
‘Bloke shot himself.’
A pause. ‘Stay right there. Keep anyone else away. I’ll be right out.’
Duty done, he crossed the path and leaned against a tree with his arms folded, waiting for the cavalry to arrive. It was very quiet now. The birds seemed to have fled the branches above his head and nothing scuttled through the undergrowth. He kept a sharp eye and ear out for the approach of anyone else. Those were Jess’s orders and, in any case, Tom didn’t want more walkers stumbling on the grisly sight. If he had continued down the red route, he thought ruefully, and not made the spur-of-the-moment decision to switch to the blue, he wouldn’t have seen it himself.
The sense of feeling better that he had begun to experience had vanished as a result of events. His symptoms had returned. His nose and throat itched. His head was beginning to ache again. He could feel a sneeze building up and managed to scrabble in his pocket for a paper handkerchief before it erupted, making a noise not unlike a gunshot.
Thinking of gunshots, had no one heard a shot earlier? More thoughts struck him. He’d like to go back to the body, but he’d mess up the mud around it even more than he had done. You should keep away from a scene of – not crime. Poor devil had probably just decided to end it all. Tom scowled. He squinted at the seated figure a few feet away. Something about the way it sat there wasn’t quite right. Heedless of the sodden mulch beneath his feet, Tom dropped down to sit with his back propped against the tree and re-enacted what might have occurre
d, using a thick stick lying nearby as a shotgun. The poor chap had probably pointed the barrel of the gun at his own face, contrived to fire it and fallen back as shot peppered his lower face and neck. The weapon had dropped from his hands. Tom released the stick. He let his hands fall to his sides as the dead man’s were at his. The stick gun fell on to his lap and rolled off on to the ground.
He got up, wiped his trousers clean of wet vegetation and peered across at the corpse. He recalled his first thought on seeing the man; how stupid it was to sit on the wet ground. Just sitting for a few minutes had left the seat of Tom’s trousers uncomfortably wet. The material of the dead man’s trousers should be soaked.
‘Not wet enough!’ said Tom aloud. He went back to his tree, propped himself against it, arms folded, and continued to contemplate his silent companion.
‘Something not right about you, mate,’ he said after a moment or two. ‘You haven’t been sitting there more than fifteen to twenty minutes. You didn’t die there, in my view. Some blighter’s moved you.’
Eventually, when Tom was beginning to think he’d be here, getting steadily colder and iller, until whatever he’d got turned to pneumonia, he heard the distant sound of motor vehicles, then of voices approaching.
A couple of uniformed men appeared first and, recognising Tom, called ‘Morning, Doc!’ before they began to look into the undergrowth around the spot. Two more figures came into view, one of them female, of medium height, with short red hair. Tom raised an arm and waved at Jess Campbell.
‘Nasty,’ she said when she reached the scene and had briefly studied the seated figure and the shotgun. She had moved away and joined Tom by his tree. For all her professional composure, her blue-grey eyes held deep shock.
‘You’ll want a print of my boots,’ said Tom. ‘I tried not to mess up the ground but I did take a close look at him.’
‘We didn’t request the police doctor. We thought you could certify that he’s dead.’ She crossed her arms and tucked her bare hands under her armpits to warm them. ‘We’ll get some screens up around him and cordon off the area. Photographer and mortuary van are on their way.’
The man with her – Tom identified the bulky form and morose expression of Sergeant Phil Morton – said, ‘Poor devil. Wonder what made him do it?’
‘How long do you think he’s been dead, Tom?’ Jess asked next.
Tom told her and added, holding Morton’s gaze, ‘But he didn’t die there – or I don’t think so.’
They both looked at him.
Morton, always a contrary sort of bloke, as Tom recalled, objected. ‘He couldn’t have moved far with the lower half of his face blown away.’
‘Clothes are too dry,’ said Tom. ‘Back of his trousers, where his legs rest on the mud, should be wet right through. They’re only fairly damp, despite the fact he’s as good as sitting in a puddle. Also, although there is blood on his coat, there are no fragments of bone or flesh on that tree trunk behind him; it’s as clean as a whistle. Nor are any pellets that might have missed his face embedded in the tree trunk or in the trees around. I’m not a firearms man, so I could be wrong, but would the gun have fallen like that? And then there’s the nature of the injuries. I’ve seen a few shotgun deaths in my time. To me, that pattern of damage suggests that someone else blasted him in the face from a distance of, oh, a couple of metres away? Only a suggestion, mind you,’ he finished, on an apologetic note. ‘Check with Ballistics.’
Morton swore softly.
‘In fact,’ added Tom, warming to his theory, ‘victims can survive that sort of blast, from that distance. This poor devil didn’t. My guess is that pellets entered the brain.’ He paused. ‘I suppose I can’t do the examination?’
Jess asked, her voice suddenly sharp, ‘Of course you can’t! You’re ill! You’re supposed to be at home, keeping warm and nursing that cold, not roaming around out here finding corpses.’
‘Can’t keep away from them,’ said Tom weakly, almost managing to summon up a rueful smile before another sneeze caught him unawares and shattered the silence again.
‘Oy!’ protested Morton crossly. ‘Don’t give us all your blooming germs!’
‘You haven’t seen or heard anyone else around, I suppose?’ Jess asked him.
Tom, his face smothered in his handkerchief, shook his head. When he could speak he croaked, ‘Not a soul. I don’t know what happened to that cyclist.’
‘Which cyclist?’ she asked abruptly.
‘The one who left a bike chained to the fence post, back there in the car park.’
Morton muttered something under his breath and stalked away down the path. A few minutes later he was back.
‘No bike there now,’ he informed them.
‘Then it looks like we’ve lost a witness!’ Jess grumbled. ‘Phil.’ She turned to Morton. ‘Better arrange for SOCO to come out here. We may have a scene of crime, after all. Hello! What’s this?’
A sable and white rough collie had appeared, bounding down the track towards him. A voice yelled, ‘Fred! Come back here!’
The dog skidded to a halt before the trio by the tree and panted happily at them, its bright eyes, above its long, pointed nose, fixed on them as if it expected something of them.The owner of the voice came running around the bend in the path and was revealed as a tall, strongly built woman in her forties with a weather-beaten complexion and wild, curling, grey hair. She wore a heavy knitted sweater under a shabby padded gilet and cord slacks tucked into gumboots. She staggered to a stop before them, saw the body, and exclaimed, ‘What the hell’s that?’
The collie had seen the body also, abandoned the group and rushed across to examine it. Morton darted after it and, having failed to catch its collar, tried to shoo the animal away.
‘I’ll get him!’ shouted the woman, and ran across the muddy ground around the body to grab the dog’s collar. Her animal secured, she remained staring down at the grisly sight.
‘Madam!’ shouted the exasperated Morton. ‘Please take your dog and keep away from the area!’
‘Decided to end it all!’ said the woman with remarkable objectivity. She leaned towards the corpse and asked it, ‘Why do it, you silly beggar? Giving everyone trouble!’
‘Just go away!’ snapped Morton. ‘Take the dog with you and keep him on a lead. Look, you don’t want to be here . . .’
She took no notice of him. She pursed her lips and considered the dead man. ‘I’m not squeamish, officer, I won’t faint or throw up.’
‘I’m not worried about you!’ snarled Morton. ‘I’m worried about a crime scene.’
‘Crime?’ She looked up at last. ‘What crime? Suicide isn’t an offence these days, is it?’
Morton took a deep breath.
Before he could speak, Jess joined them. She had been listening to and watching the woman carefully.
‘Can we have your name and address? We’ll need prints of your footwear to eliminate them from the scene.’
The woman looked startled and transferred her attention from the body and Morton to Jess. ‘Briggs. Mrs Tessa Briggs at the Old Farmhouse. Down there.’ She pointed into the distance back the way she’d approached, though nothing could be seen for the trees. ‘I walk my dog here nearly every day,’ she said defiantly.
Morton muttered something that, fortunately, was indistinguishable. The collie was pulling against the grip the owner had on its collar. It whined and writhed in obvious distress, trying to reach the body.
‘Stop that, Fred!’ snapped the owner. ‘Nothing to do with you!’
But Fred had a mind of his own on that. He raised his nose into the air and let out an eerie howl.
Jess said gently, ‘Looks as if your dog knows him.’
Morton asked, squinting at the woman because a winter sunbeam had broken through the cloud and dazzled him, ‘Do you by any chance recognise the deceased, Mrs Briggs?’
The woman looked even more startled. ‘Not much left to recognise, is there?’
‘You didn�
�t, for example, see anyone around earlier, anyone dressed like this man?’ Morton moved to avoid the sun and peered at her again.
His scrutiny troubled Mrs Briggs. In fairness, Jess thought that Morton’s glum face scowling at you was enough to unnerve anyone. She’d seen perfectly honest citizens get the jitters after a few minutes of it. The woman chose to get defensive.
‘If I had, I’d have paid no attention. Around here every other walker is dressed much like that.’ She indicated the body with an irritable gesture of her hand but did not look down again at the grisly scene. The collie, however, kept its eyes fixed on the dead man, and distressed whines sounded in its throat.
‘You live not far away from these woods, you say. Did you hear a shot?’ Jess prompted.
‘Hear shots all the time. Don’t take any notice of them,’ she snapped. ‘There’s a place not far from here that’s set up for clay-pigeon shooting. It’s on land that used to belong to Crooked Farm. When the wind’s in a certain direction, I hear bang, bang, bang all ruddy day. All kinds of people go there. Companies set up days out for their employees. Team building, they call it, don’t they? Girls turn up in high heels, I’ve been told.’
As she listened to this, Jess was thinking that the woman was talking too much. Waffle, she judged it. It was probably the result of shock. The collie had now slumped dejectedly on the ground, his nose pressed on his outstretched front paws, keeping a mournful watch on the body. Jess felt frustration mounting in her, but there was no point in expressing it. She thought, I wish Fred could give a statement.
Chapter 4
