The Rotting Spot

by Valerie Laws

  THE ROTTING SPOT

  A Bruce and Bennett Mystery

  Valerie Laws

  Red Squirrel Crime

  Copyright

  Red Squirrel Press

  PO Box 219

  Morpeth

  Northumberland

  NE61 9AU UK

  ISBN 978-1-906700-53-9

  Copyright Valerie Laws © 2011

  All rights reserved

  Valerie Laws has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Prologue

  Extract from The Skull Hunter’s blog

  It’s not easy cutting off a head: sliding the blade between the cervical vertebrae, sly and slick as a credit card springing a lock. It might be a fresh kill, plump and juicy, the sinews stretchy and strong. Or it might be an old, seasoned corpse, the squatters moved in. Maggots. Those fast black spiders. Beetles, wandering through the delicate arches of bone like tourists through a cathedral. The eyes already gone. Sight and thought, first signs of life to go; eyes and brain, first parts cherry-picked by scavengers. Hell, a crow would take your living eyes, if it was sure you couldn’t move. You know the way crows look at you? Now you know what they’re thinking. But you’re a hunter, you’ve got to have that skull, even with the stench, the flies, and those sinews dried to flat dark ropes still stubbornly holding out. No, it’s not easy, cutting off a head.

  From http://www.theskullhunter.wordpress.com

  Buried in the skull hunter’s rotting spot, the skull waited, earth in its empty eyes. By now, it showed no visible sign of how cruelly its owner had been slaughtered. Someone had got away with murder. They would do anything to go on getting away with it. For life.

  1

  Friday 6th June

  Wydsand Seafront

  Geordie girls spilling out of tiny dresses and no-neck shaven- headed guys in football shirts progressed from bar to bar. Stacey and Leanne piled into the Pink Banana, fortified by happy hour tequila shots, unaware that Stacey was being watched from a car parked further up the street.

  ‘Leanne, man, Ah’m f ’kn’ sweatin’,’ Stacey screamed, swaying slightly while Leanne started a full frontal assault on the bar.

  Dark patches stained the off-the-shoulder white nylon top that tried to contain Stacey’s body. Shoe-string bra straps cut into her plump shoulders; large breasts rendered larger by pregnancy jostled with her stomach and the lifebelt of fat round her middle. Massive hams bulged, barely inside a tight black miniskirt, and her feet overflowed strappy high heels. She had small eyes, lank brown hair with blonde streaks. Fag-stained teeth showed in a scarlet mouth. Not pretty, but not unpopular either. Especially now.

  ‘If yer shag ’er when she’s pregnant already, she cannot land yer with child support,’ as one of her regular suitors was maintaining.

  ‘Ay, it was canny of Tel here to get her up the stick,’ called another of Stacey’s admirers, ‘hey Tel, you want to be more careful where you leave your DNA!’

  Stacey’s baby had been conceived in the lasses’ toilet. Anaesthetised by alcohol, she had barely noticed, just as well considering Tel’s lack of skill and finesse.

  ‘Haway Stace, have another Breezer man, you’re drinking for two now!’ quipped Leanne. Stacey expertly juggled fag and booze, held upright by the crush of bodies. Beneath the artificial fibres of her outfit, ripples of movement crossed her belly as her tiny daughter enjoyed her own private mosh pit, as dark, wet, hot, and crammed as the club.

  As they left in the early hours, leaning on each other and screeching farewells to their mates, the watcher in the car became alert.

  ‘There she is … that poor baby…’

  Pregnancy had made a vital difference to Stacey’s capacity for alcohol. The fresh salty air made her reel up the back lane and vomit into an overflowing dustbin. Her friends piled into a taxi, Leanne calling to her to join them.

  ‘Ah’m not havin that in my cab.’ The driver feared for his upholstery. This time of night, ‘taxi rank’ was a term rich with meaning. Leanne was yanked into the cab by her mates, and they drove off, leaving Stacey alone. Well, not quite.

  Stacey found herself lying on her back among the cold chips and bodily fluids already deposited there. A shape loomed, blotting out what little light penetrated. Stacey had a flash in her mind’s eye of a tiny face, and a quick stab of loss, before consciousness left her, and she lay, her enormous belly offering itself to the night.

  Nearby, Erica Bruce pushed back her sweat-damp hair. Vodka pounded in her veins. Her mate Hannah was snogging some loser, with teeth more ruined than the Roman Wall. She’d yelled into Hannah’s ear, the one without a tongue in it, that she was going home. One of those sudden shifts in perception had taken place, when the seductive decadence of night life abruptly switched to squalor before her eyes, and she wanted out.

  Unsteady in her high heels, just another girl with a very short dress and lots of bare flesh on show, with straightened hair and alcohol-heavy eyes, Erica set off to secure a cab. The trance music she loved had stopped, and over the muffled pounding of the sea below the promenade, she heard a groan. Peering down the alley, she saw, two figures was it? A glimmer of white clothing showed the vague outline of someone on the ground, another darker shape busy about the inert form. Another groan.

  A rape? A drunken shag? A mugging? Erica walked carefully into the alley, the stench of vomit making her grit her teeth as her best shoes squished through discarded take-aways.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded nervously, keying in ‘91’ on her mobile, ready to hit 1 in a nanosecond.

  The figure looked up, the face a pale blur.

  ‘This poor girl’s taken ill, and she’s expecting a baby.’

  It was a woman, a reedy little voice, Erica realised with relief. She reached the dark duet in the dirt. ‘Looks like she’s drunk not wisely but too well.’

  Stacey lay like a melted candle in the muck, while the woman who had spoken crouched at her head. Beside her was a capacious bag, with a glint of steel protruding from it; looked like knitting needles. Like some old-school back- street abortionist at work, albeit rather late, judging by the size of the groaning girl.

  ‘She’s in trouble,’ the woman’s voice was soft but intense. ‘She’s in mortal danger!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Erica soothingly. ‘Mortal drunk, that’s all. She’ll be ok.’

  ‘There are other kinds of danger,’ said the woman. Why did this child of Sodom have to appear? Just when she had the girl to herself.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose she’s a bit vulnerable lying here.’

  ‘You could be in danger yourself, pet. Perhaps you should get along home.’ And leave us alone.

  Erica curbed her irritation. There was something familiar about the voice … something almost threatening in the
biblical pronouncements, which was absurd. ‘I come here all the time. So does she, I know her by sight.’ A brief memory of Stacey dancing, skirt hoisted high to show her thong’s hopeless inadequacy as she tried to win the ‘get them out for the lads’ competition on a previous evening.

  ‘I’d think it would be more frightening for you.’

  ‘God is always with me, dear.’ Erica caught the flash of a smile in the dark.

  ‘Er, good.’ She hesitated, reluctant to leave the lass with her odd Samaritan. ‘I’ll hang around until we get her sorted out. Maybe it would be better to try to bring her round.’ Erica stooped over the body, and patted one cheek gently.

  ‘Are you alright, sweetheart?’ she called.

  ‘F’koff’ came the faint answer.

  ‘My little car’s up the street there, if you could help me get her into it.’ Then I can take care of her, I can do what is needed. The squat angel of mercy let go of Stacey’s shoulders, and peeled off her own baggy cardigan, laying it over as much of the girl’s chest as she could. There was still a lot of Stacey exposed.

  ‘Not a good idea, for her or your car.’ Erica touched Stacey’s wrist; it was cold, as the wind off the sea chilled her. Tel and friends, attracted by the moans, clustered in the alley, looking like a jar of mint humbugs in their Newcastle shirts.

  ‘Whyyebugga,’ Tel slurred, ‘there’s two lezzies shaggin our Stace!’

  Erica wished she had more than a tiny scrap of Lycra to keep her warm. Stacey, had they said? Stacey was heading for hypothermia, and she wasn’t far behind herself. The effects of the vodka shots were wearing off, leaving her cold if not sober.

  She looked the lads over. No-one there she’d shagged, as far as she could remember. She doubted she’d ever been that wasted. ‘Take your shirts off.’

  There was a delighted roar.

  ‘Why, she’s ganna take aal o’we on!’

  ‘As if,’ Erica sighed impatiently. ‘I just want your shirts to keep her as warm as possible. Jesus wept!’

  ‘There’s no need to blaspheme, dear,’ the other woman said reprovingly.

  ‘Nee way! She’s aal ower sick!’ ‘Me neether!’ ‘Cost iz a fortune, this shirt!’ the lads responded.

  ‘Haaway, yee’s lot, what’s gannin on?’ bellowed a deep, testosterone-fuelled voice. The bouncer, attracted by what appeared to be a fracas. And he was wearing a dinner jacket over his muscles. The lads parted as he barrelled forward.

  Erica faced him.‘Look, this girl’s hypothermic, and you and your club could be sued if she dies. So please give me that jacket to cover her with, and get rid of this zoo.’

  He hesitated, then laid his jacket over Stacey.

  ‘Oh, it’s that slapper,’ he said. ‘Fuckin’ typical. Right yous lot,’ he turned to the spectators. ‘Fuck off home or I’ll deck ye.’

  The lads began to melt away.

  Erica was digging into her bag. ‘I want to give Stacey a remedy. It might bring her round.’

  The cold sea breeze had picked up. The lads had been acting as windbreaks. Probably spent most of their time breaking wind, one way or another. She shivered, the sweat dried tight on her skin. She felt like the two halves of her life had suddenly got mixed up. Her drinking, dancing persona had abruptly had to morph into her alternative homeopath self. She pulled a little bottle out of her bag, and shook out two tiny white tablets into the lid. She bent over Stacey, who was groaning and swearing indistinctly.

  ‘No!’ cried the woman suddenly. ‘Giving that poor girl drugs! In her condition!’

  At the magic word ‘drugs’, the lads turned back.

  ‘E’s!’ went up the cry.

  ‘Divven’t waste them on hor, man,’ protested a lad. ‘Hand them roond!’

  ‘It’s a homeopathic remedy,’ Erica said, showing the little bottle labeled Carbo Veg. It was snatched from her hand by Tel, who was too quick for the bouncer.

  ‘Giz them! Management have an anti-drugs policy!’ he yelled, the magic words having been drummed into him by his employers in order to avoid police raids which would find most of the patrons underage.

  Erica tipped both tablets into Stacey’s open gob. The lads went whooping into the dark with the rest, convinced they were about to experience a free illegal high to round off the night. They were doomed to disappointment. The tiny sugar pills contained only the memory of vastly diluted animal, vegetable or mineral substances, in this case simple charcoal, which would stimulate the body’s own immune response.

  ‘They’re harmless,’ Erica told the woman and the bouncer. ‘Sainsbury’s sell them.’

  She had just straightened up, when a gush of hot liquid engulfed her already soiled shoes. Stacey’s waters had broken. They could have broken the Aswan Dam.

  ‘Oh, God, deliver her,’ moaned the woman, tugging desperately at Stacey’s titanic shoulders, forming an inflated pieta.

  ‘I hope not, not yet anyway. Best leave her horizontal and get help. You’ll injure yourself if you try to pick her up.’ Erica looked down at the puddle of amniotic liquid soaking up the other effluvia already there.

  Erica supported mothers in their desire to manage without medical intervention. But in this case, the girl was unknown to her. Was some reaction to a dodgy E causing an aborted pregnancy? Was the girl’s brain swelling in its case of bone even now?

  Erica called for an ambulance.

  ‘There’s a girl here giving birth,’ she shouted into her mobile. ‘She’s unconscious, may have taken drugs, or have head injuries, she needs immediate attention!’

  Better lay it on a bit. Saturday night, ambulance was the transport of choice for many a clubber. A&E would just be filling up with bloody-minded and bloody-headed drunks.

  Erica’s companion was still muttering in a sing-song chant. She had her eyes closed, her arms round the girl’s shoulders like she was trying to bring her back to life by magic.

  My girl, my poor little girl.

  Erica’s eyes were more accustomed to the dark. The woman was middle-aged, with a pudding-bowl haircut like Ann Widdecombe’s before she developed delusions of blondeur. Not the kind of person you’d expect to find outside a club at chucking out time. Erica looked around for a dog. The only reason such a person would be here. No dog, unless it was under Stacey’s fallen bulk.

  ‘My name’s Erica,’ she said to the woman. ‘I’ll wait with you. The ambulance might take a while.’

  Stacey groaned. The woman smiled down at her. ‘I’m here to help you, pet. Whatever you’ve done, you’re still very dear to Jesus.’

  Stacey gawped in befuddled astonishment. All her life, she’d used aggression to assert herself. Now here was someone saying she mattered. She responded as naturally as a flower suddenly brought into the sunlight.

  ‘Why yer pervy paedo cow! F’kn gerroff iz, yer maniac!’ Stacey’s bleared gaze lighted on Erica. ‘Ye, get her off iz, or I’ll deck the cow! It’s that Westfield woman from down wor street! Bleeding loony’s stalking iz! She wants to gerra f ’kn life!’

  Erica, though in every way except choice of nightlife the antithesis of Stacey, felt an urge to cheer this healthy manifesto of free will. The Westfield woman flinched, and went back to her muttered prayers. Erica heard ‘lust, gluttony, sloth, and wrath,’ – bloody hell, she was checking off the seven deadly sins Stacey had managed to chalk up. This was getting way too weird. She tried to start up something like normal conversation.

  ‘It was lucky you happened to be here when Stacey collapsed.’

  ‘I know her mam, Julie Reed … I keep an eye on Stacey, she needs me. Putting her innocent baby at risk, exposing herself to those drunken men!’

  ‘I haven’t seen anybody I’d classify as a man,’ said Erica shortly. She disliked religious zealots of any kind, but the poor dear was probably a psalm short of a bible.

  She spoke to the supine lardass. ‘Look, Stacey, your waters have broken. So you’ll have to give the decking a rest. Decking, God, I sound like Alan Titchmarsh.’
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  ‘Oh, now, I like him,’ the woman’s teeth gleamed in a brief smile.‘I thowt I’d wet meself,’ Stacey mumbled. ‘I’m fkn freezin’ mind. What’s this on iz?’

  ‘It’s my bleeding coat,’ boomed the bouncer, reappearing, ‘so watch what you’re doing with it, yer silly cow.’

  Stacey goggled up at him as if he was a cross between Justin Timberlake and Sir Walter Raleigh. ‘Hey, thanks, Craigie. Eeh, that’s dead nice of yer.’

  ‘Yer, well,’ muttered the bouncer. ‘Divven’t make a big thing of it.’

  ‘Me back’s buggered, lyin here.’ Stacey struggled. ‘Help iz up, Craigie?’

  ‘Nah,’ Craigie snapped back. ‘I divvn’t want my back buggered an’all. Jeeze, where’s that fkn ambulance?’

  ‘Ye worried aboot iz?’

  ‘Ah’m worried aboot me jacket man!’ said Craigie.

  The ambulance loomed ghostlike on the seafront road. The two paramedics repelled boarders as revellers from the taxi queue leapt in, claiming injuries real and imagined. As Stacey was lifted in, she clung to Craigie’s coat, suddenly scared, taken out of her natural habitat, into clinical cleanliness, no smoking and no mobile phones. Her own phone had racked up a stack of missed calls as her mates tried to contact her, but it had been sandwiched between the ground and her buttock, and no ring tone, however shrill, could penetrate that. Her baby though, beginning to feel the burden of gravity now her cushioning waters had flushed away, heard the piping of the Eastenders theme tune and wondered.

  Stacey spared a final thought for Erica, who’d been there for her in time of need.

  ‘Ye, ye want to get yersel a boyfriend, stead of poking yer neb into other folk’s business!’

  Erica laughed, rubbing her arms to flatten the goosebumps.