by Penny Grubb
He strained to see as far as the low building but the path curved and his headlights were at the wrong angle to light the bottom of the slope. There would be nothing down there.
He returned to the car, backed off and drove slowly around the boundary as far as the road would take him. When it turned at right angles to head back to town, he eased it off the tarmac and on to the dirt track that traced the perimeter of the old site. He wouldn’t get far in a vehicle but it was the closest he could get to the far end of the site. As the car bounced in and out of giant ruts, the headlights flashed glimpses of the deserted scrubland up ahead, even showing a scrap of tape still flapping in the wind from where it had been cordoned off.
When he came to a pothole that was more of a cliff edge spanning the track, he had to stop. This time when he climbed out, he clicked the key fob to lock the car, zipped his jacket to the top and set off on foot trying to see by the inadequate light from his torch.
When he’d walked in with Suzie and the woman from the lab, they’d come through the main site, down the hill. He was approaching from a new angle. It was as he neared the tangle of brush that edged the makeshift graveyard, that his phone rang. He used the thick vegetation as a temporary shelter as he answered it.
The DI again, his voice animated. ‘Yes, they didn’t recognise anyone but the name Brown is on their paperwork. They inherited sitting tenants when they leased the plot. There are odd parcels of rented-out land the other side of the dual carriageway, no longer physically attached to the fishing site. The only paperwork they can dredge up is invoices which don’t show addresses or locations. The one person who might know detail is out and not answering his phone, but they think there are records in the office at the fishing lakes. I’ve sent someone up there.’
‘What about the scrubland at the back,’ said Webber, ‘where we found the bodies, up beyond that? That used to be allotments or something, didn’t it?’
‘The people we’ve found just don’t know. They’re focused on the fishing lakes and the business. We’re hoping to get chapter and verse from the records.’
‘I’m up there now, the scrubland round the back I mean. I took a detour on the way home.’
‘Have you found anything?’ The sudden excitement in the man’s tone irritated Webber. As if he wouldn’t have said something straight away.
‘No, nothing, but I’ll have a bit of a walk round.’
‘What made you home in on that bit?’
‘Because there were three bodies buried up here.’
He ended the call and peered forwards into the gloom trying to make sense of the topography. With the pitiful torch beam and dancing shadows he could walk right past something as big as a car without seeing it. There was no point in exploring further, but he carried on, placing his feet carefully on the bumpy ground, feeling suction from the cloying mud. The curve of the land took the ferocity out of the wind, but he could hear it whistling across the higher ground somewhere up ahead. He tried to track a straight path across the boggy expanse but it wasn’t easy with no solid landmarks and dusk swallowing the horizon.
An involuntary shudder rippled through him as memories leaked in of the early documentation on Robert Morgan’s death. A man trapped as night closed in, hearing the pad of giant paws on concrete … or hearing nothing until the striped death machines exploded out of the air.
Of course that was all garbage. He tried to shake the images out of his head. It hadn’t happened like that.
The squelch of his footsteps seemed to echo.
Sudden realisation … he wasn’t alone. In his mind, big cats crouched in the dark. He spun round with a gasp, torch beam scouring the vegetation behind him.
The blaze of a heavy-duty flashlight seared an iridescent blindfold across his vision.
Chapter 56
‘Martyn, is that you?’
The light veered away leaving a splash of colour dancing at the centre of Webber’s field of vision.
‘Ayaan? What are you doing here?’ He struggled to hide the wobble that lay just behind his words as he drew in a deep breath to slow the beating of his heart.
‘I came up here with the dive crew to get the records,’ Ahmed announced, breathless. ‘Then they said that you were round this side so I thought I’d come across.’
‘I thought you were on your way home,’ Webber said.
Ahmed spread his hands. ‘Yeah, but …’
Webber let it go. He too should have been on his way home. And as the momentary blindness from Ahmed’s powerful torch faded he became aware of a background glow, pulsing blue. It was coming from the direction of the main site, the area he’d decided not to check. ‘What’s happened? What have you found?’
Ahmed paused a moment catching his breath. ‘It’s Drake’s car … it was right there … round the side of the office building.’
A chill speared through Webber. ‘Suzie?’
Ahmed shook his head. ‘Nothing, no sign of anyone. But what’s his car doing up here? It’s supposed to be in for repairs. There are footsteps in the mud around it.’
‘Going where?’
Ahmed gulped before answering, ‘Across the path towards the grass, no clear trail, but it’s on a line towards the gravel pit. They’re waking Drake, going to get an explanation out of him.’
‘He’ll just say it was stolen.’ Webber dismissed the interrogation of Drake as a waste of time.
‘They’ve sent for proper lights. They’re going to look at the pit again.’
Webber stared across into the inky blackness of the encroaching night, pushing away the thought of anyone in that freezing water in the dark, and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They won’t be there. That’s not how he does it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Drake never intended to dump Tippet’s car all those years ago.’ As he spoke he set off again, traipsing through the mud, aware of Ahmed stumbling to keep close enough to pick up his words over the rush of the wind through the scrub. ‘After he’d finished with Morgan, he was going to give it a cursory clean and return it to Tippet. He wasn’t expecting anyone to focus on the car, not in relation to Morgan’s death. That was all going to be done and dusted with none of the quintets within miles of the crime scene. If it was spotted, it would be Tippet in the firing line, except that he happened to have a cast-iron alibi. It was that hapless eldest brother spotting it and stealing it for his post office job that put a spoke in the works.’
He sensed Ahmed’s puzzlement in a semi-articulated query, but he wasn’t looking for questions or formulating answers. He was thinking aloud.
‘Drake doesn’t dump people in lakes,’ he said, raising his voice to counter the weather. ‘Dumping Jenkinson was as near as he got to that and it went pear-shaped.’ He paused for a moment as he played out the scene in his head. ‘I bet he thought it would be child’s play, shove him under a bit of rubble, get Trent in with his concrete lorry. But it wouldn’t cover that jacket. That must have been a panicked few minutes.’
He thought of the heavy Scandinavian inflection he’d listened to on the phone barely a couple of hours ago. You have a tiger on your patch …
In his mind’s eye Webber imagined the unflappable Mr Drake in a fury when the bright-coloured jacket wouldn’t stay hidden under the inadequate layer of concrete that would have been drying out fast as he wrestled with it. He wondered why his mind imagined fury. The overwhelming impression of Drake was that he’d never experienced a strong emotion in his life. Then he recalled that comment about Tina Tippet. Rage, almost instantly smothered, had blazed to such fire in Drake’s eyes, the imprint remained burnt on his memory.
‘Must have been touch and go to get it off the boy at all and get him covered over,’ he said, setting off again. ‘And it was all for nothing. No, he’ll go back to his tried and tested ways.’
‘But why leave his car there?’ Ahmed said, hurrying in his wake. ‘It’d have been found in the morning anyway.’
‘Then he
must have expected to move it tonight. I’d guess he wanted a quick route home. Was he going to walk up here, do whatever he was going to do and then get the car so he could be back home before the shit hit the fan?’
‘But what was he going to do?’
‘Back to basics,’ said Webber. ‘Something a bit more sophisticated than a blunt instrument …’ Involuntarily he crossed his fingers as he said the words. Please God, let Drake have gone for the clever route and not the bludgeon or they might already be too late. ‘He’ll do something that’s worked before.’
‘You think he was going to bury Suzie and Tiffany up here?’
‘No. He can’t bury anyone any more. We’ve found the grave. But he doesn’t know that we know about Trent or Gary Yeatman.’
‘Do we know that he killed Gary Yeatman?’
Ahmed was thinking about the lack of evidence, but Webber was sure, even if it could never be proved.
‘The point is,’ he said. ‘It was the method that worked, the method that was still working as far as he knew. Whatever he did to his wife … wives … it was far too slow for the likes of Jenkinson and Trent. That talk about Suzie crashing her car and killing them both. That’s what he had in mind, but where in hell are they?’
It was slow going across the uneven scrubland. Even with torches, the shadows played tricks, disguising the shapes that reared up from the grass hillocks.
‘There must have been another way in,’ Ahmed said suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Those old workings when they had a go at a bypass and had to abandon it. They didn’t get vehicles in from this side. This stretch must have been boggy like this forever.’
Webber tried to visualise the map of the area, trying to pull detail from the dead area that was this useless scrub. ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Where would they get a road in?’
‘Old farm track I think. It must come in from right across the other way if it’s still passable.’
‘It’ll still be passable,’ Webber growled as he stumbled on a briar. He wished he’d thought of it sooner. Too late now to think about going back and getting the car. They were almost across the low marshy stretch and set to climb the slope to higher ground. ‘Call in, let them know.’
‘But we don’t know if there’s anything to find,’ Ahmed objected.
‘Call it in,’ Webber repeated. ‘This is it.’
He stopped to catch his breath at the foot of the sharp upward incline and then caught hold of the tough grasses to pull himself up. Drake and Stevenson had had access to this site since Tilly Brown’s family lived here. He wondered again, was it just Drake and Stevenson? They’d had Gary Yeatman in their clutches somehow, probably no more than the unwitting dupe. China Kowalski? Pamela Morgan? Those huge cash gifts. Had Pamela been using her money to keep certain of her old school friends at a distance?
As Ahmed floundered with the steep slope his phone rang. Webber watched as the DC grabbed at a sturdy root for balance and pulled the handset from his pocket, pressing it to his ear against the whistle of the wind.
‘There’s a turn-up,’ he told Webber as he ended the call. ‘Drake swore blind he’d taken his car to the garage, said it must have been stolen from there.’
Webber rolled his eyes. ‘It doesn’t surprise me in the least, and you forgot to ask for backup.’
‘Yes, but get this,’ Ahmed said. ‘The garage says the same. It was on their forecourt ready to be worked on tomorrow morning.’
‘Garbage! Sleight of bloody hand. Drake whipped it off the forecourt and he’d have put it back there. Everyone’s ready to rush in with alibis for Mr Drake. They always have been. Hell, he almost had me at it with those sodding clothes. Come on. We must be nearly there.’
‘But Tilly Brown,’ Ahmed called after him. ‘Why would she walk out of her own home and sneak 250 miles north? And how? She was only 16.’
‘I’m sure she thought she was going back home again,’ Webber called back. ‘And what’s the betting she thought it was all her own idea from the off? Tilly Brown was the first one. Maybe she was an accident, but Mr Drake had scores to settle.’
Even through the gloom he could see that Ahmed was far from convinced, still on a see-saw of emotion about Drake, unable to mesh a cold killer to the man with whom he’d interacted on a very human level, but it was no longer speculation to Webber.
The pieces were falling into place. The tangential close shave with organised crime in the persons of Streetwise and Boots Boy had been an unfortunate distraction. In fact Streetwise and Boots Boy had been smarter than any of them in recognising what they were dealing with. They’d backed off smartly and left Tom Jenkinson to his fate.
Drake had been a cancer that had both held the quintets together and then driven them apart. China Kowalski had run a long way away, putting real distance between herself and her old school gang. He didn’t feel he’d yet got the measure of Robert Morgan’s murder or Pamela’s – Drake’s throwaway comment about saving Pamela an expensive divorce was a poor excuse – but the answer was in one of those taped conversations, he was sure of it.
They scrambled to the top of the rise and out from the shelter of lower ground. Webber turned his head to avoid the full brunt of the wind. It was a firmer gravel surface beneath his feet, a track, useable and with some evidence of use. They played their torches all around and there ahead stood a row of four ramshackle garages.
Webber let the thin beam of light run back and forth as they approached. He leant into the wind as he peered through the gloom. One end of the row had succumbed to the ravages of time, its roof caved in. The other three doors sported padlocks but two of them looked ancient and rusted, their doors only held upright by the embrace of tangled brambles whose long barbed stalks lashed out in a frenzy at the gale that tore round the structure.
One door was clear of vegetation. One garage still in use. The lights of the city lit the distant horizon but everything nearby had melted into the night. He imagined how it would look on a sunlit day. Worn, deserted, uninteresting and with a clear path to the makeshift grave.
The padlock was conventional but heavy duty, it wouldn’t succumb to a penknife. He pointed at the abandoned buildings. ‘Find a jemmy or something,’ he shouted against the squall. ‘We need to get this open.’
Ahmed gave him an unsure glance but then pulled back a rusted hinge, heaved the rotten wood aside and squeezed through the gap. After a moment’s muffled banging and scraping, he re-emerged with a sturdy metal bar which he jammed behind the secure padlock, before jerking it in a swift downward sweep and snapping the hasp with a loud crack.
‘Now ring in and get some back up,’ Webber yelled as he dragged one of the doors open.
The smell that blossomed out hit him like a physical force. He staggered back, gasping. As he did so, his torch beam caught the sparkle of a reflective surface; the silver rim around a car headlight.
Chapter 57
Ahmed was aware of Webber’s stumble, but his stare had locked on to the front fender of the vehicle as shock flooded him. It was Suzie’s car. Webber had been right. He’d been telling him to ring it in. He grabbed for his phone as he pushed through the gap into the garage.
The stench hit him like he’d walked into a wall.
Sickly … sweet … suffusing his airways, stinging his eyes … the honeyed aroma of fresh cut flesh … the festering reek of ancient decomposition … Notes of decay and putrefaction seared the back of his throat.
Bile rose. The phone slipped from his grasp as his hands instinctively clamped a barrier across his nose and mouth. He leapt round, juggling to grab the handset, to stop it landing in the mud, as he dived for the open air.
Webber had spun away from the open doorway, gagging as the force of the wind hit him, his face puckered as he gasped for breath. Their eyes met. At once Ahmed punched the numbers into the phone and clamped it to his ear.
As he did so, Webber pulled out a handkerchief, fighting the storm that tried to s
natch it, and tied it across his face. They had to go in there. Whatever this hell-hole was, Suzie might be lying injured in the middle of it.
Ahmed rapped out as concise an account as he could manage into the phone, and tried to get an image of the map in his head to describe where he thought they would find vehicle access to this remote site. He wrestled one-handed to retrieve gloves from his back pocket, and hoped that he too had a hanky large enough to tie round his face.
Webber’s gloved hand reached out to take his flashlight. He surrendered it, taking the tiny pocket torch in return – the bad end of the bargain. He watched Webber, face scrunched in anticipation, ease his way through the gap and disappear into the darkness.
Call ended, Ahmed took in a deep breath before stepping close to the entrance, where he began to pull the wooden doors wider in hopes of dissipating the foul odour.
‘Careful,’ Webber called, voice muffled. ‘Don’t let anything blow about.’
He compromised on half-open and went inside.
Webber’s mind raced. The car sat motionless and silent, its windows fogged. What the hell had been going on in this place? The floor felt spongy and uneven beneath his feet, the air still, the whistle of the storm muted by the walls. The flashlight bounced its beam right back at him from the vehicle’s windows. He squeezed down the side, conscious of his clothes sweeping against the metal, compromising the scene. Standing the flashlight on the roof, he pressed his face to the side window, cupping his hands to focus.
And there was Suzie. She looked relaxed … just dozing, sprawled half across the seats. The thoughts reared up … this woman was corroding his marriage, destabilising Sam’s secure future. All he need do was fail to find her in time and she’d be gone from his life.
That’s what Michael Drake had hinted, confident it was what Webber wanted. But what he actually wanted was that the whole Suzie thing had never happened; it wasn’t the same as wanting her dead. Drake wouldn’t appreciate the nuance. As he shifted his gaze he realised she wasn’t alone in the car. Someone lay curled up on the back seat.
