by John Harvey
Despite the occasional remark, the groups that grew silent and closed circle as she entered the room, the excrement-filled envelope with “Eat Me” stenciled on the front found one day in her locker, Sharon’s training passed pretty much without incident.
Surprise, surprise, her first posting was Brixton, policing the front line. Out on the streets with her black woman’s face and shiny uniform, she exemplified the ways in which the Met was changing; black men called her whore and her sisters spat at her feet as she passed.
Three applications for detective were turned down; finally, back to Hackney with the domestic violence unit, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She had done her share of caring and consciousness raising already; if she’d wanted to be a social worker, Sharon told her inspector, she would never have applied to join the police.
Fine: back on the beat.
Eighteen months on, a relationship splintering around her, she left London, joined the Lincoln CID; nice, quiet cathedral city, Sharon as out of place as papaya in a Trust House Forte fruit salad. Oh, there was burglary and plenty of it-the recession bit deep here, too-drug-dealing in a minor kind of way, anything and everything you could imagine to do with cars as long as they were other people’s. The most excitement Sharon had was when a small-scale row about shoplifting on a prewar council estate suddenly flared into a riot: youths throwing petrol bombs and insults, ten-year-olds hurling stones as the police retreated, outnumbered, behind their shields. It had taken reinforcements from outside the area and the arrival of a specialist support unit to regain control.
Since then she’d been seconded to King’s Lynn. Even quieter.
It was quiet now, thirty minutes shy of sunrise, frost heavy across the hawthorn and the oak, the dark ridges of ploughed fields. Sharon was hunkered down behind an ancient Massey-Ferguson tractor, with two of the other officers, passing back and forth a thermos of coffee unofficially laced with Famous Grouse. The coffee was hot and their breath, dove-gray in the clearing air, testified to the cold. She drank sparingly and passed it on; last thing she wanted to do, crawl off somewhere and squat down for a pee, difficult enough without wearing tights over her tights the way she was that morning.
“They’ll never bloody show,” one of her colleagues said. “Not at this rate.”
Sharon shook her head. “They’ll show.”
She had been working this investigation for five months now, ever since the first incident had been reported, seven pigs slaughtered on a farm this side of Louth, dragged off and butchered in the waiting van. Market stalls the length and breadth of Kesteven had flourished special offers of pork belly, legs, chump chops.
“Times like these,” Sharon’s governor said, “people do what they can.”
She supposed it was true: reports of sheep rustling on Dartmoor and in the Lakes had tripled in the past two years.
“Look! There!”
Her heart began to pump. Headlights, dull in the slow-gathering light, steered between the intervening trees. Sharon spoke into the radio clipped to the shoulder of her padded jacket, instructions that were concise and clear.
“Good luck,” somebody said as he moved swiftly past her.
The breath inside Sharon’s body threatened to stop. The lights were clearer now, funneling closer, the van shifting out of silhouette against the slowly lightening sky. Resting on one knee, the other leg braced and ready, Sharon’s mouth ran dry. Over by the sheds, a few of the animals moved around morosely, rooting at what remained of the straw that had been thrown on to the frozen ground.
The skin beneath her hair tingled as the van slowed and slowed again. Before it had come to a halt, three men jumped out, dark anoraks, black jeans, something bright in one of their hands catching what little light there was.
“Wait for it,” Sharon breathed. “For fuck’s sake, wait!”
Two of the men launched themselves at the nearest pig, one seeking to club it hard behind the head. The animal squealed, terrified, and slithered as the club came down again. Running to join them, the driver of the van lost his footing and went sprawling, longbladed knife jarred free from his hand.
“Go!” Sharon called, sprinting forward. “Go! Go! Go!”
“Police!” The shouts sang out around them. “Police! Police!”
Sharon jumped at the man who had already gone down, the heel of her trainer driving into his back and flattening him again into the ground. Satisfied, she carried on running, leaving whoever was in her wake to wield the handcuffs, drag the man away. The hardwood stave that had been used as a club lay in her path and, without stopping, she scooped it up.
Angry voices tore around her, curses and the sharpening clamor of the pigs. One of the thieves broke free and took off in a run towards the van. Sharon watched as two of her colleagues set off in pursuit, feet catching in the ruts that rose like frozen waves from the ground. Two of the others were involved in scuffles, while a third was already on his knees, head yanked backwards with a choke-hold tight about his neck.
The runner had managed to start the van and now it lurched towards them, one of the officers hanging from the side, an arm through the window, grabbing at the wheel. Sharon jumped back as the vehicle slewed round and stuck, the driver’s foot on the accelerator serving only to dig deep into the ground, showering black earth high into the air. A fist landed on his temple and a cuff secured him to the wheel as the ignition cut off.
“Sharon!”
A warning turned her fast, pulling back her head to evade the butcher’s cleaver swinging for her face.
“Nasty,” Sharon said, and struck out with the club, catching her attacker’s elbow as the arm came back, hard enough to break the bone.
Only when their prisoners had been properly cautioned, farmed out into different vehicles for the drive back to Lincoln, the sun showing at last, faint through the horizon of sparse trees, did Sharon wander back across the churned-up ground to where the pigs were rooting eagerly. It took no time at all for her to realize what was at the center of their attention was a human hand.
Forty-five
The pig farm had been made secure: diversion signs were in place on all approach roads; attached to four-foot metal stakes, yellow police tape, lifting intermittently in the northerly wind, marked off the area where the body had been found. Men and women in navy blue overalls were moving out in a widening circle from the spot, carefully raking over the ground. Others were examining the track, preparing to take casts of tire tracks, boot marks. Nancy Phelan’s body, freed from its shallow grave, lay in the ambulance covered by a sheet. In a maroon BMW, smeared with mud, the Home Office pathologist was writing his preliminary report. Harry Phelan, driven through the morning traffic by a grim-faced Graham Millington, had walked off across the farm track and into the adjacent field as soon as he had identified the body. Now he stood, stock still, hands in pockets and head bowed, while, back inside the car, his wife, Clarise, wept and wanted to walk out and hug him but did not dare.
It was still well shy of noon.
Resnick stood in topcoat and scarf, talking to Sharon Garnett, his face pale in the winter sun. Close to five nine and bulked out by the duck-down jacket she was wearing, Sharon was in no way dwarfed beside him. She had known about the disappearance from the television and posters which had been circulated with Nancy Phelan’s picture-not so many women missing, thankfully, that the connection didn’t spark fast in her mind. Well before her pork butchers had been driven away, she had made her suspicions known, found herself talking to Resnick within minutes.
“How long,” she asked, “do you think she’s been in the ground?”
“Difficult to tell. But my guess, not too long. The pigs would have found her otherwise, even in temperatures like these.”
“Does it help?” Sharon asked. “Finding her here?”
“To pinpoint the killer?”
She nodded.
“It might narrow down the field. It all depends.”
“But there’d have to be a r
eason, wouldn’t there?”
“Go on.”
“I mean, why here? On the face of it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Resnick looked around at the flat landscape of broad fields. “It’s out of the way, you’d have to say that for it.”
Sharon smiled a little at the corners of her mouth. “Everywhere round here is.”
“It takes time to bury a body,” Resnick said. “Even if it’s only a few feet deep. And if anyone threatened to disturb you, you’d see them from a long way off.”
“He’d have to know it, though, wouldn’t he?” Sharon said. “Know of its existence, that for long periods of the day there was nobody around. Stuff like that. I mean, you wouldn’t just drive along with a body in the back, see somewhere, think, oh, that looks a likely place.”
“You could.”
“Yes, but is that what you think?”
Resnick shook his head. “No, I think whoever it was knows this area well, this farm, this track. My guess would be he already had the idea in his head, possibly even before he kidnapped the girl. Bury the body here.”
Sharon thought about her first sight of the hand, the rooting pigs. “But then he must have known, sooner or later, the body would be found?”
“Yes,” Resnick said, “I think that’s part of the point.”
“What point’s that?”
“I’m not yet sure.”
The pathologist was on his way towards them, trousers tucked down in green Wellingtons. “I’ll have to do the proper tests of course, but I’d say she’s been dead, oh, possibly three days, four. My guess is she was killed first, the body kept somewhere, then brought here. Signs of deterioration are remarkably few.”
“Cause of death?” Resnick said.
“Oh, you saw the bruising round the neck. Strangled, almost certainly.”
“How?” Sharon asked.
The pathologist glanced at her over the rim of his spectacles, as if recognizing for the first time that she was there. He made no attempt to reply to her question.
“How was she strangled?” Resnick asked.
The response was immediate. “Not with the hands. A ligature of some kind. Possibly a piece of rope, though that might have torn more of the skin. A narrow belt?”
“How soon,” Resnick asked, “before we can have a full report?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“And before that?”
“I’ll get something to you as soon as I can. Early afternoon?”
Through this exchange, Sharon had been doing her best to rein in her anger. “You have any women in your team?” she asked Resnick, as the pathologist traipsed away from them, back towards his car.
“One, why?”
“You always back her up as well as you just did me?” Any thought that she might have been paying him a compliment was dashed by the look in her eyes.
Harry Phelan was standing in the same position, a scarecrow in the center of a ploughed field, nothing growing there to protect. Clarise had started towards him, ventured as far as the gate and no further. Resnick put an arm round her shoulders and at his touch she began to cry again, her head resting sideways against the broad front of his coat.
“It’s Harry I’m fretful for,” she said, sniffling into bits and pieces of damp tissue. “All of the energy he’s got, he’s put into willing Nancy still alive. Even on the way out here, he kept saying, she’s all right, you see, whoever this is, it’ll not be her. Not Nancy, it’ll not be her.”
Resnick left her to trudge into the field, Harry turning his head once to see who it was, but moving no farther. They said nothing for some little time, two men at either end of middle age. Not for the first time, Resnick felt useless, hopelessly inadequate to the task. How do you begin to comfort a man who has just identified the murdered body of what was once-in his heart still remained-his child? If he and Elaine had ever had children themselves, would he have known any better? Would circumstances, one day, ever have enabled him to understand?
“If the ranson had been paid this would never have happened.” There was no anger in Harry Phelan’s voice now, no passion. He was a man whose life had been sucked out.
“We don’t know that,” Resnick said.
“If it had gone all right, not got messed up, with the money …”
“It’s possible she may have been killed before.”
Harry looked at him, too numb properly to comprehend. Lapwings rose up as one from the farther end of the field, flew a half circle, and landed back down between where they stood and the side hedge. Vehicles were starting up back at the farm, revving their engines purposefully; Resnick knew that he should go but he kept standing there.
“Shall you catch him, d’you think?”
Resnick took his time about answering. “Yes,” he finally said, thinking on balance that he meant it.
“Nothing will happen to him, will it? Even if you do. Some crackpot with a bunch of letters after his name’ll stand up in court and spout something and they’ll shut him away in some hospital for ten years and then let him back out.”
Resnick didn’t reply.
“If you do set hands on him,” Harry Phelan said, voice flat as before, “for pity’s sake keep me clear of him. Because if you don’t I’ll not be responsible for what happens.”
After a few more minutes, Resnick turned side on and looked at Harry waiting till the other man returned his gaze; then, together, the two of them set off back across the field.
Sharon Garnett was waiting for him back at the car, slightly tense, legs a little apart, her face set with determination. Resnick thought it likely he was about to get another lecture. “I was wondering,” she said, “you ever have vacancies in your team?”
Resnick took a moment to collect his thoughts, not what he had been expecting. “From time to time,” he said, “people get promoted, transferred.” He didn’t tell her that not so very long back one of his men had been stabbed to death when he sought to break up a scuffle between youths in the city center.
“What happened here,” Sharon was saying, glancing back across her shoulder to where the body had been found, “I did all right, didn’t I?”
Resnick nodded. “I should think so, yes.”
“So if I were to apply,” the slow smile starting up again near the edges of her mouth, “I could rely on you for a recommendation.”
“After what you said before, I’m surprised you’d even think about working with me.”
She stepped back and gave him a slow once-over, amused. “Basically, sir, I’d say you were okay. You just need somebody around to give you a bit of a nudge.”
Resnick held out his hand. “Thanks for the help. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“Right,” said Sharon, “maybe you will.” And she turned to get back to her own business, too much to do to stand there and watch him drive away.
Forty-six
They were heading east, back through Newark towards the city and not a decent passing space in sight. Frustrated behind the wheel, Millington chewed instead mint after extra-strong mint, never letting them remain in his mouth long before crunching them between his teeth.
“Drop a plumb-line down from the first ransom drop to the second,” Resnick said, “what do you get?”
Millington flicked on the indicator, changed down ready to overtake. “Long as it had a kink in it, where we’ve just come from.”
Resnick sighed and shook his head. Out through the nearside window, a farmer was forking feed from the back of a tractor, cattle making their way towards it, waveringly across cold land.
“I wonder what it’s like,” Resnick said. “To be in Harry Phelan’s position. Something you must have half-known all along, there in the back of your mind, and then … Jesus, Graham! Dug up in a ploughed field. How the hell d’you begin to live with that?”
Millington didn’t know. Tight on the wheel, his hands were smeared with sweat. How could either of them really know? Two middle-aged men, neither
of whom had ever fathered a child.
Resnick got through to the station on the car phone and asked for Lynn Kellogg. Briefly, he filled her in on what they’d found. “Get yourself over to Robin Hidden soon as you can,” he said. “Take Kevin along if he’s free. Best if Hidden hears it from you if you can get to him in time. He’s going to have the media crawling all over him any time.”
“Right,” Lynn said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“And, Lynn. That friend of his, up in Lancaster or wherever, suggest he goes up there for a bit, keeps his head down.”
“Right.”
Millington cursed quietly, forced to pull in behind a high-sided lorry which the single carriageway left him no room to overtake. Fingering another mint from the packet, he offered one to Resnick, who shook his head.
The phone sounded and it was Lynn calling Resnick back. “Just to be clear, when I talk to Hidden. We’re no longer looking at him as a suspect here?”
“No,” Resnick said. “Just another victim.”
When Millington dropped him off at the London Road roundabout it was so gloomy the floodlights at the County ground, some quarter of a mile up the road, could scarcely be seen.
“Tell Skelton I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“He’s going to love that,” Millington said. Resnick didn’t care; this was something he had to do himself. Climbing the slight hill towards the Lace Market and turning left on to Hollowstone and up towards St. Mary’s Church, he stepped into the full force of the wind. There was a hole in the stone wall a third of the way up the hill, giving way to a space large enough for a short man to stand up in. Two figures were huddled inside, newspaper and cardboard around their legs and feet; Resnick guessed another three or four had slept there that night.
When he turned right in front of the church, there was Andrew Clarke’s red Toyota illegally parked outside the architects’ office, Clarke’s name, the senior partner, in tasteful lower case on the glass beside the door.
