A Quiet Death

by Cari Hunter

  “What about vehicles? Have you seen any of them driving a silver car or van with a B at the start of its registration?”

  “Absolutely not.” Mary shook her head. “Hardly anyone on this side of Phelot has a car, and that lot have never driven anything unless they’ve nicked it. I’d remember if I’d seen them in one, because I usually take the reg for when the coppers turn up.” She smirked, displaying chocolate-smeared gums. “The local bobbies know to come here first.”

  “I’ll bet they do.” Sanne could imagine her posted by her window, binoculars in hand, television remote primed to mute the programme the instant anything occurred in the street. She was a one-woman Neighbourhood Watch, the only problem being that everything she’d said assisted the Beswicks far more than the investigation.

  Sanne finished the last of her tea and placed one of her cards by Mary’s saucer. Her phone buzzed as she slipped her notebook into her pocket, the caller ID showing Zoe’s name. “Sorry, do you mind if I get this?” she asked Mary, who waved her consent with a bourbon. She ducked into the hall and answered the call before Zoe gave up.

  “San? Can you talk?”

  The straight-to-business nature of the question put Sanne on alert. “Yeah. Everything okay?”

  “I’m not sure,” Zoe said, sounding uncharacteristically rattled. “Is there any chance you could come out here to take a look at something?”

  “Where are you?” Sanne didn’t have a clue what Zoe’s assignment had been that day, but she assumed they were still working the same case.

  “We’re in a barn. It belongs to Nab Hey Farm, just off Old Road. Our sarge sent us, and it sounded like nothing at the time, just a woman who thought she’d seen lights one night while she was driving home and eventually called the hotline when she read about the body at Greave.”

  “And?” Sanne asked. All the hairs on her arms were standing up.

  “And someone’s been here, San.” Zoe’s voice dropped a notch. “They tried to clean up, but we’ve found stuff they missed. I didn’t know who else to call. I don’t want to set all the bells and whistles off and then have it turn out to be a waste of everyone’s time.”

  Sanne checked her watch, trying to plan for an unanticipated detour. It was 2:15 p.m. If Nelson wanted to stay on Phelot, she could pick him up on her way back or arrange for someone to collect him.

  “I can be with you in about an hour, hopefully less,” she said. “Treat it as a scene, if you think it might be one, and preserve as much as you can.” She went into the kitchen and closed the door. “Zoe, do you think the vic was held there?”

  Zoe took a shaky breath. “Not just her,” she said. “San, we might be wrong about this, but it looks like several women have been kept here.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  As her profession required her to render aid should she happen across a medical emergency, Meg always carried a bag of kit in her car, which left her well-equipped to make an unofficial house call on thirty-two Windermere Avenue.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” Teresa Jensen said, giving her a quick hug on the doorstep. That she kept her voice to a whisper implied she hadn’t told her husband anything about Meg’s visit. The house, as usual, smelled of fresh baking, her cheeks were dusted with flour, and two children could be heard squabbling in the kitchen.

  “I’m minding Kiera and Kerby while Keeley has a rest,” she said. “We’ve been making buns.”

  Meg put an arm around her shoulders. “When do you get a rest?”

  “When they’re all in bed. Are you going to see him now?” Teresa nodded at the first door on the right. It was always shut, keeping the children out and the smell of John Jensen in.

  Meg nodded, keen to get it over with. “Aye. Wish me luck.”

  As Teresa went back to referee the kids, Meg tapped on the door and opened it without waiting for permission. The room was dark, with its curtains drawn against the daylight, and the television on standby. She stood on the threshold and allowed her eyes to adjust. She crinkled her nose at the stench of an unwashed body and stale alcohol, but beneath that was something more troubling, a smell she recognised from work.

  “Shut that fucking door, Teresa. How many times do I have to fucking tell you?” John growled from his usual corner.

  Meg did as he demanded, able now to discern the empty cider bottles and cigarette packets littering the carpet. Several darkened patches amid the detritus suggested he had failed to reach the toilet on numerous occasions.

  “It’s not Teresa, John. It’s Meg Fielding.” She walked over and set her bag on the coffee table. “Sanne asked me to come. She said you’ve not been well.” Meg hoped he might be too addled to connect any of this back to his wife. Even in the dim light, she could see that Teresa’s concerns were well founded. He was jaundiced and emaciated, with a belly so distended that he looked nine months pregnant. The bucket by his side was a quarter full of coffee-ground vomit and cigarette butts.

  He glared up at her, his yellowed eyes alive with spite. “Sanne can fuck off, and so can you. I don’t need nobody checking up on me or telling me what to do.” He lit a cigarette with trembling hands and exhaled the smoke toward her.

  She let the cloud dissipate and then leaned down low. “I’m not here for your sake,” she said quietly. “I don’t give a flying fuck if you want to drink yourself into oblivion and stroke out in this miserable room in your shitty little chair. I just don’t want Teresa to come in here one morning and find your body. So let me take some blood tests and examine your belly. I can already see you need admitting to hospital, but whether you let me arrange that is up to you.”

  He drew on his fag again, though he directed the smoke away from her this time. “I’m staying here. Do your fucking tests, but I’m not going nowhere.”

  She shrugged. He was lucid enough to have mental capacity, so he could make his own decisions, however ill-advised. “That’s your choice. At least I’ll be able to give Teresa an idea of what to expect and when to expect it.”

  His baseline observations, when she took them, were predictably deranged: pulse too high, blood pressure too low. His temperature was fine, but that was scant consolation. She found a vein at the third attempt and drew off multiple samples.

  “How often are you being sick?” she asked.

  “I’ve not been counting.”

  When she tilted the bucket, he flicked his cigarette into it, making the vomit sizzle and sending up a smell of raw liver.

  “Does it always look like this?”

  “Yeah, mostly. So what?”

  “So it’s blood, that’s what.” She palpated his abdomen, noting where he was tender and guarded. “You probably have an ulcer that’s bleeding, but I won’t know for sure unless you go to the hospital.”

  “You got wax in your ears?” He tried to shove at her but could barely keep his arm raised long enough to make contact. “I’m not moving from this chair.”

  She began packing her kit away. “Fine. I’ll run your bloods and send the results to your own doctor. Maybe he’ll be able to talk some sense into you.”

  John unscrewed a fresh bottle of cider, slopping it over the arm of the chair as he tried to aim it into a pint glass. “You finished?”

  “Yes, I’m finished.”

  Opening the door was like finding a gateway to the Promised Land. She took her shoes off at the threshold, not wanting to trek anything down Teresa’s spotless hallway. Teresa was watching from the kitchen, Kiera in her arms and Kerby hanging on to her apron.

  “Will he go to the hospital?” she asked.

  Meg shook her head. “I’ll speak to his doctor this afternoon. Perhaps John will listen to him.”

  “He won’t,” Teresa said. “The only person John listens to is John.”

  “I think we might be past the point of changing that.” Meg placed her shoes on the mat by the door and took Kerby’s hand. “C’mon, kiddo, how about we do the washing up with Kiera and let Nana have a sit down?”

&nbs
p; *

  Old Road was slightly easier to navigate in daylight than darkness, but Nelson—no fan of the Peak District’s serpentine passes under any conditions—had handed Sanne the car keys mere seconds after deciding to accompany her to Nab Hey Farm. A sharp shower had slicked the frost-pocked tarmac, forcing Sanne to concentrate on her driving rather than admire the fresh covering of snow on the hilltops. Although travelling in the opposite direction from last time, she recognised the stretch where she’d found the crash debris and the mangled sheep, and she slowed for the bend that followed.

  “The farm is about a mile before the start of Smithy Reservoir,” she said, accelerating out of the curve and clipping a pothole that rattled her teeth. “If I remember rightly, it’s stood empty for more than a year, though I’m not sure why. Ron Stanton might be a good one to ask about it. He’s usually clued up on the local gossip.” She glanced left toward Brabyn’s Tor, but she couldn’t see the stones on its summit, just a layer of white fading in and out of low cloud.

  Nelson had followed her eye line and noticed the weather rolling in. “What’s the forecast for tonight?”

  “More snow over the tops. Rain and sleet in Sheffield. Lows of minus three,” she said, reciting what she’d read on the BBC website.

  “Crikey. Do you think we’ll get home?”

  “I bloody hope so. I don’t fancy bivouacking out here.”

  Indicating right out of habit, even though there was no one behind her, she eased the car onto the farm’s access lane. Empty fields bordered both sides of the track, large sections of them overgrown, with floodwater in the dips. It was obvious that no stock had been grazed there for months, nor had anyone bothered to maintain the approach road. Unkempt hawthorn squealed against the car’s paintwork.

  “Here we go,” Sanne said, spotting the patrol car parked by the first of the farm buildings.

  As Sanne manoeuvred around a puddle and into a space, Zoe climbed out of the patrol car, raising a hand in greeting. She barely managed a smile, though, and her hair—usually held in an immaculate twist—was falling from its clips and blowing in her eyes.

  “Hiya,” she said. “We’ve been trying to make some notes while everything’s fresh. My mate’s going to stay here and finish them off, if that’s okay?”

  “That’s fine.” Sanne grabbed torches from the car boot. Neither she nor Nelson had speculated much upon what Zoe might have found, preferring to see the evidence instead of formulating wild theories en route. Now, listening to the wind rushing through the narrow gaps between the empty buildings, she felt a thudding at her temples as her blood pressure rose.

  “Best suit up,” Zoe said. “We’ve already tromped in a load of shit that we shouldn’t have.” She donned the forensic clothing that Sanne gave her and set off without further explanation, leading them along another track that curled and climbed beside a stream, eventually tapering out at the entrance to a field. She pointed to a large stone barn with a smaller building a few yards away from it. “It’s this one.”

  “How many other buildings are there?” Sanne asked.

  “I’m not sure. We checked here first because you can see it from the road. Then I called you, and we decided to stay out of the rest in case we buggered something up. The door wasn’t locked, just held by string looped over a nail. We figured anyone needing shelter could’ve gone inside, so we didn’t try to get permission.”

  The door started to open when Zoe pushed on it, but it snagged on an uneven section of floor, leaving them to squeeze into the space beyond. They stood shoulder to shoulder, the darkness ahead alleviated only by a single dirty window and the tiny cracks in the mortar between the stones. An unpleasant smell hung in the air, nothing that Sanne could readily identify, though it seemed to crawl along her skin. She and Nelson switched on their torches almost in unison, Sanne aiming hers at her boots, reluctant to direct it anywhere specific until she had an idea of what it might illuminate.

  “Over here,” Zoe said. “We marked out a path.” She used her own torch to highlight a thin walkway, its edges created by scraping two lines in the hardened layer of muck that covered the floor. The smell became stronger the farther into the barn they went, and Zoe paused just as Sanne resorted to covering her nose with her sleeve.

  “We think this was the toilet. Someone’s tried to dig it over, but they only did half a job.” Zoe indicated a small pen with low stone walls and a lip where a gate could have sat. The beam of her torch picked out the shreds of tissue paper still visible amid the churned-up filth.

  “What the hell has been going on here?” Sanne asked.

  “Nothing good.” Zoe moved on to another walled section, twice the size of the first, with its gate still in situ.

  Sanne stepped through the gate and panned her torch around.

  “Right-hand side, about twelve inches up,” Zoe said. “See where the daylight’s peeking in?”

  “Yeah.” Treading in the fresh boot prints, Sanne crossed the pen and crouched by the wall to examine the stone that Zoe had picked out. It sat at an odd angle, the crumbling mortar around it and its neighbour mostly scraped away. She touched her gloved fingers to the block. Dots of crimson had splattered its surface where bare skin had torn on it. Although someone had managed to loosen and nudge it, they hadn’t been strong enough to force a way through. “Fucking hell,” she whispered. “They were so close to getting out.”

  She could hear Nelson on the radio. Apparently convinced by the findings, he was requesting EDSOP backup and SOCO.

  “Look on the floor, in the corner.” Zoe came up behind Sanne and took hold of her torch hand, guiding the beam to the right place. “My mate caught it when the sun shone.”

  Sanne caught it as well, a flash of yellowed metal, almost completely buried, the earth around it newly disturbed.

  “He dug a bit before I could tell him not to.” Zoe pulled two small evidence bags from her pocket. “We think they might have hidden something from each of them.”

  Sanne raised the bags into her light. The first bore a strip of patterned cloth edged with red brocade, the second a scrap torn from a photograph. The woman in the image wore a hijab and had averted her eyes from the camera. She was older than the girl found on the moors, perhaps in her early twenties. The dusty rural setting suggested the photograph had been taken overseas.

  “There’s a partial print on the back,” Sanne said, passing the bags to Nelson. “Her hands must have been bleeding when she ripped it.”

  “What are you thinking, San?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.” She turned again to the corner with its potential register of victims. “We’ll need SOCO to confirm whether more than one person really has been held here, but it does seem that way, doesn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Judging by that picture, trafficking is the most feasible explanation. The demographics aren’t typical, though.”

  “True, but it marries up with our vic’s absence going unreported. Her family could still be waiting to hear from her.” Sanne shook her head, imagining the news they would be receiving instead, and then had a minor attack of the collywobbles as she considered the potential implications of their findings. Three people struggling in the dark with crap equipment were nowhere near adequate to perform an effective search. They needed forensic expertise, and Eleanor to be there calling the shots. “Did the boss give an ETA?” she asked.

  “An hour. SOCO said ninety minutes.”

  On the other hand, she thought, Eleanor would wonder what the hell they’d been doing wasting precious daylight if they called it quits after one barn. “We should check the building next to this one,” she said. “Our perps can’t have been in here all the time or they’d have heard the attempts to break through the wall, but they were probably close by.”

  “Why choose this place?” Zoe asked as they walked single-file toward the door.

  “Sorting house?” Nelson suggested. “Pakistan International flies into Manchester or Leeds Bradford, and this is a g
ood halfway point between the two.”

  “Secluded and abandoned, and off a road that barely anyone uses,” Sanne said. “Perfect as a stopover. Well, perfect until one of your lasses escapes and the police start sniffing around.”

  The sudden brightness of the sun made her stumble on the first clod of grass she encountered. Shielding her eyes, she started toward the neighbouring barn. A more recent adjunct to the first, its roof was sound and its stone walls showed no signs of degradation. A shiny, heavy-duty padlock secured its door.

  Nelson turned the padlock in his fingers and pressed on the hinges, assessing their worth. “There’s reasonable suspicion, it’s doable, and we’ll be able to preserve the lock,” he concluded.

  Sanne had no problem with that, and Zoe was already limbering up. They took turns to kick at the lowest hinges, their boots pounding against the metal. The brackets gave way almost simultaneously, the door collapsing inward as Nelson shoulder-charged it.

  With one hand on her Taser and the other aiming her torch, Sanne yelled “Police!” into the void. When nothing stirred or responded, she crept forward, scanning for signs of life or recent inhabitation. She found the latter almost immediately: an upended Calor gas stove and empty food tins. Leaving them untouched, she headed for the largest of the barn’s pens. A gas burner had been placed in this one as well, carefully positioned between two single mattresses.

  “So we could be looking for at least two perps,” Nelson said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed absently, her attention focused on the dirt and straw adhering to the surface of each mattress. “Nelson, help me flip this over.”

  He gave her a puzzled look but did as she asked. As the mattress fell back into place, they stepped away from the thick cloud of dust and let it settle.

  “Oh God.” Sanne froze, her torch beam fixed on the vivid stains that had made her catch her breath. Behind her, Nelson swore with rare vehemence, and Zoe kicked something solid. Sanne turned to face them. “We should get out of here and leave everything for SOCO. We can’t risk making a mess of this.”