by Andrew Lowe
The track popped and creaked. He turned his head again.
The horseshoe of yellow at the front of the driver’s carriage. The lights, close enough to dazzle.
Sawyer ran harder. At the crossing, he vaulted a low dividing fence and snaked around the boom barrier. He was exposed to the train driver now and, as he lunged for the rails, the horn sounded: two tones. More greeting than warning, but still piercing through the music.
He was seconds from the track, from the crossing point. The wool had gathered around the balaclava eyeholes, constricting his peripheral vision. He angled his head to the right and saw the driver leaning out of his cab window, arms waving, shouting.
The horn sounded again.
Sawyer faced forward and sprinted for the track.
He knew the risks. If he was lucky, the train would hit him square on, and it would be an instantaneous shutdown. A millisecond flash of impact, and then emptiness.
If he was unlucky, he would survive.
He knew the risks, and yet felt nothing.
No panic for life. No pain of potential loss.
No fear.
His running shoes crunched into the trackside gravel.
The train rattled and roared, somewhere to the right. Impossibly close.
At the nearside rail, he dug in his foot and launched himself over the sleepers, onto the other side.
He scrambled forward, stumbling into the scrub at the edge of the field. Into safety.
Behind, the train clattered past his crossing point.
He crouched, out of sight, in a shallow ditch rendered boggy by the weekend’s first dousing of autumn rain. He pulled off the balaclava and listened to himself, straining for something deeper than the familiar surface prickles of adrenaline.
But still, there was nothing.
2
Sawyer drove over the private driveway bridge and parked his orange-and-black Mini Convertible at the side of the cottage. He killed the engine and sat there, alone with the silence, gazing out at the single track road separated from the cottage by a thin stream of reservoir run-off. He liked to think of the divide as a moat, but it was barely a ditch, and easily jumpable. A few weeks earlier, the light had been dappled by the dense canopy of birches. But now, the trees were shrinking back from the road, shorn and skeletal, revealing a shallow climb of farmland that blended to a tangerine blush of sphagnum moss on the lower slopes of Kinder Scout.
He had taken the cottage on a long-term rental—annual, rolling—from a sheep farmer who seemed keen to hand off the tourist turnover. It was an old outbuilding, barely converted. No hot tub or underfloor heating, but, miraculously for the area, the phone signal and Wi-Fi were tolerable, and Sawyer had worked fast to carve it into his own corner of the world.
Inside, he closed the blind on the sitting-room window and crouched beside the modest TV. He sifted through his stack of old-school DVDs, acquired in an eBay head rush: Paranormal Activity, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Suspiria, Halloween, Don’t Look Now, The Orphanage, The Strangers. The room was low-beamed and L-shaped: long section with the window, sofa and TV, and, round the corner, a galley kitchen and dining table, with bedroom and en suite bathroom at the back of the house. A side door opened onto a scruffy patio with a wooden picnic bench. When he had first moved in, he had used the bench as an outdoor reading retreat. But the air now carried a wintry sting, and he had hibernated to the overheated interior: one man and his horror.
Sawyer’s phone blipped with a message alert. He ignored it and switched on the PlayStation, settling too close to the screen, cross-legged. As the Japanese logos announced his favourite retro shooter, Bullet Symphony, he saw a flash of the train’s yellow front, heard the two-tone horn. If he had died, the coroner would have probably called it accidental: he was in the running zone, didn’t hear the train over the music. Death by guitar solo.
It would have been an edgy way to go, affording a noble eulogy from his freshly saved father.
He checked his message. Maggie.
Jake. Talk to me. Remember Wild At Heart? Don’t turn away from love? I’ve found someone who can help. But you need to blink first. x
David Lynch had been their thing at university; Sawyer had been drawn to Maggie as the first woman to show an unironic appreciation of Eraserhead. He had wanted more from her, at a time when she wasn’t ready to give it. And when she finally got round to him, he had moved on.
He ground through the first few waves of Bullet Symphony: weaving his insectoid spaceship through the pixel-wide gaps in the geometric downpour of pink and blue pellets. To the uninitiated observer, the game was comically hostile, but for Sawyer it was respite: a chance to divert his churning brain to the sole business of smiting his digital enemies.
He paused the action, opened his message app, and navigated to his chat history with Eva Gregory. He scrolled through the string of blue speech bubbles. The messages were all marked as ‘Read’, but there were no corresponding grey replies. Two signs of madness: talking to yourself, repeating the same thing and expecting different results.
The trimphone ringtone broke through; the screen turned black and switched to a call alert. One-word Caller ID.
Keating.
He could have screened it. He was technically off duty, on holiday.
Sawyer restarted the game and watched, passive, as a phalanx of enemy craft flew in and sprayed a barrage of glowing pellets towards his ship’s position. When the missiles were millimetres away from his ship’s vulnerable core, he paused it again and tapped the ‘Answer’ button.
‘Sir.’
‘It lives!’
‘Technically. Social call?’
‘Whatever gives you that idea?’ Traffic in the background. Birdsong.
‘It’s Saturday.’ Sawyer turned off the PlayStation and took a sip from a glass of tepid Coke, poured yesterday.
‘You’re due back on Monday. We stopped working five-day weeks back in the eighties, DI Sawyer.’ Keating’s Welsh twang broke through when he was joshing.
Sawyer gagged at the Coke. ‘You’ve spoken to Maggie. She’s worried about me. She asked you to check I was okay to come back.’
Keating sighed. ‘Three out of three.’
‘Any movement on Crawley since I’ve been away?’
‘Pre-trial hearings. Psychiatric reports. Insanity plea won’t hold. They rarely do. Too much load on the defence.’
‘He’s nodded for manslaughter?’
‘Yes. Diminished. Abnormality of mind.’
‘Where is he now?’
A pause from Keating. ‘Manchester. Although I still think of it as Strangeways. DI Sawyer. Are we done?’
‘With what?’
‘The pleasantries. Catch-up.’
Sawyer fell back onto the sofa and rocked forward, reaching for the coffee table. He rummaged in the fruit bowl: Club biscuit wrappers, Haribo, a blackened banana. ‘I was going to ask after the wife and kids.’
Keating scoffed. ‘You need a mission.’
‘Like Apocalypse Now? For my sins?’
‘Never seen it.’
‘It’s a bit of a plunge. Maybe start with Hamburger Hill and work your way up.’
Keating cleared his throat. ‘We have something.’
3
He took the scenic route: through Hayfield and the western moors, weaving along the Snake Road to the alpine lakeland of the Hope Valley. He had thrown on a white T-shirt and black blazer, but hadn’t bothered to shave. As he joined the forest road that led to the Fairholmes Visitor Centre, Sawyer calculated the last time he had spoken to another soul, face to face: almost two weeks.
He drove past the roadblock signs and parked in a lay-by near a huddle of FSIs, de-suiting and transferring equipment into a Scientific Services Unit van. A tall, fifty-something woman with a crop of peroxide blonde hair directed the group with short, sharp commands. She was the only one who kept on her Tyvek suit. Turquoise.
Sawyer drew in a slow breath and released it thr
ough pinched lips. He got out of the car and approached the cordon manager: a swaggering young officer in a new uniform, probably pressed by his mother. He rummaged for his warrant card.
‘He’s with me!’ The blonde woman strode away from her charges and squinted at Sawyer, looking him up and down.
He nodded at her. ‘Sally.’
She waved a hand. ‘Excuse me. I’m looking for a man called Jake Sawyer. Good detective. Dresses a bit like you.’
Sally O’Callaghan was posh, strident. She sounded like royalty alongside Sawyer with his languid Northern vowels.
He shook her hand. ‘Comedy isn’t your thing, Sally.’
She smiled. ‘Fuck it. I’ll stick to tragedy.’
The cordon manager logged Sawyer’s attendance, and Sally angled her head towards the trees. They trudged, in silence, up a slope, into thinning woodland. As they stepped over the inner cordon tape, Sally turned to him. ‘Channelling Walter White, Jake?’
‘I’m on holiday.’
‘Not any more.’
The forensic tent had been erected over a stone wall that marked an underused walking route up to Lockerbrook Farm. The fabric flapped and scraped against an overhanging branch as Sally led Sawyer inside.
DCI Keating stood at the far side with his back to them, finishing a phone call. Sally had left a pair of suited male FSIs to oversee the tent, and one of them—short, with calm, kind eyes peering over the top of a face mask—handed him a pair of latex gloves.
‘Scene is fully documented,’ said Sally. ‘But I’ll be taking the bag, obviously.’
Sawyer snapped on the gloves and crouched by the extra-large black leather holdall. He unzipped the main compartment. His green eyes glinted in the Paladin light as they moved over the contents.
Keating loomed behind. ‘Nice of you to make an effort, Detective.’
Sawyer didn’t look back. ‘Sally’s done that one, sir.’
The bag contained the naked body of a woman in her early sixties. She was white and pale, with long black hair matted into the grooves of her collarbone. Her arms had been crossed over her chest and she had been tightly rolled into a polythene sheet, sealed by several strips of silvery grey gaffer tape. No blood, no immediate sign of injury. She looked clean, fresh. Like shrink-wrapped meat.
Sawyer pinched at his beard. ‘Who found her?’
‘Dog walker,’ said Keating. ‘Fella who works at the Visitor Centre. Early morning. He brings his dog to work some days. He says it ran up here and didn’t respond when he called. He came up and found the dog sniffing around the bag.’
‘Who is she?’
‘No ID,’ said Sally. ‘Dabs and DNA in the system.’
Sawyer peeled away one of the strips of tape and lifted the polythene from the woman’s head and shoulders, as if he wanted to give her a chance to breathe. He lifted her left arm; it was rigid, and, as he tucked the left hand under the right, the movement raised the other arm. He checked over the chest area and rested the arms back in place. He lifted two more tape strips at the body’s lower end and slid his hand underneath the woman’s ankles, lifting the legs, as if weighing them. ‘Nothing else found? No jewellery? Watch?’
‘No,’ said Sally.
Sawyer replaced the tape strips. He turned and stood upright. Keating and Sally had been joined by a young detective, almost as short as the FSI who had handed him the gloves. His suit was well fitted, but his tie knot was rushed and untidy.
‘Good to see you, sir,’ said DC Matt Walker.
Sawyer gave him a dimpled smile. ‘Dedication, Detective. Not the most life-affirming way to start your weekend.’
Walker shuffled slightly. ‘Heard you were coming, sir. Wanted to get in at the beginning.’
Sawyer nodded, glanced at Keating. ‘Moran? Myers?’
‘Not around. Shepherd’s in Liverpool. Family stuff.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘I’d say she’s been dead for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Rigor is just leaving her legs.’ He looked at Walker. ‘It comes in head to toe but leaves toe to head.’
Walker frowned. ‘I knew that.’ He crouched by the bag, mirroring Sawyer’s previous position. ‘He bothered to cover her breasts. Wouldn’t it have been easier to get her in the bag with her arms by her sides?’
‘It would,’ said Sawyer. ‘So what does that tell you?’
Walker thought for a moment, then turned. ‘Could be that he has respect for her. Doesn’t want to leave her exposed.’
‘In my experience,’ said Sally, ‘men with genuine respect for women don’t kill them.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘Maybe he sees those breasts as belonging to him, and he doesn’t want anyone else looking. Or he might just be a bit anal. Likes things to be just so. The strips of tape are all pretty much the same size. And he’s cut them with scissors rather than tearing them off. How’s the rest of the scene, Sally?’
‘Clean. Plenty of footprints on both sides of the wall. Lots of footfall round here.’
Walker stood up. ‘Trace and eliminate?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Sawyer. ‘Let’s look into sexual motive first.’
Keating clicked his tongue. ‘Wasn’t she a bit old for a predator?’
‘Maybe that’s his bag,’ said Sally.
‘Get her to Drummond. We need to know who she is and why someone would want to stab her.’
Sally stepped forward. ‘Stab?’
‘Single entry wound, just below the left breast. Looks like he’s sealed it, too. Cauterised. That might explain why it’s all so clean.’
Walker leaned in and studied the body. ‘Left breast?’
‘Yeah,’ said Sawyer. ‘Straight through the heart.’
4
The Murder Investigation Team occupied the whole of the first floor at Buxton Police Station. It was supposed to be interim, while the permanent premises were set up in Sheffield. But the positive outcome in the Crawley case had cast the project into bureaucratic limbo, and the unit had gone native.
Keating had parked Sawyer in a large room next to his own, on the back side of the building. They both enjoyed an expansive view of the Tarmac Silverlands football stadium: currently hosting the second half of an afternoon game. The planners had positioned Sawyer’s desk facing away from the window, but he had shifted it side-on, so he could keep one eye on the street and the other on approaches from the open-plan office outside.
A shadow filled the frosted glass of his door. Two taps.
Sawyer waited, rolled his eyes. ‘Come in.’
DS Ed Shepherd entered and made for the chair in front of Sawyer’s desk. He was a big man, and struggled to disguise the waddle in his walk. But he seemed fresh, clear-eyed. He had lost his dated goatee and, by Sawyer's reckoning, at least twenty pounds.
Sawyer sat back in his chair. ‘Thought you were up in the homeland?’
‘I got Keating’s message,’ said Shepherd, taking a seat. ‘Family wedding. Good excuse. Daggers from the better half, but duty calls.’
‘You don’t have to wait to be admitted, you know. This isn’t the headmaster’s office.’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘Says Mr Approachable now. Never know when I might catch you on a bad day. Pick up a bollocking.’
‘How’ve you been? Looking good. Although I don’t mean that to imply that you didn’t look good before.’
Shepherd smiled. ‘Thanks. Running, cycling. No booze, no sugar. And not a single carb passes these lips. Don’t stress. It gives me a pass to comment on your new look.’ Sawyer nodded, waiting. ‘Bass player in a nineties rap-metal band. Standing at the back in a press shot, trying to out-cool the singer.’
Sawyer studied him. ‘“Bass player”. That sounds like an insult in itself.’
‘If I was trying to insult you, I’d have gone for keyboards.’ Shepherd looked around. ‘Nice place. Keating keeping you close. As a friend?’
‘I assume so. He’s finally given me HOLMES access. Are you up to date?’
He nodded. ‘Can you cover t
he first briefing, though? I’ll take it from there.’ Cheers from the football crowd. Concentrated, but muted. ‘Away goal. Sounds like they’re getting a spanking. Although you wouldn’t know about that, being a glory hunter.’
Sawyer flinched. Either Shepherd’s banter was cloying, or Sawyer just hadn’t calibrated yet, after his time out of touch. ‘I’m a Liverpool fan. I know better than to hang my hopes on silverware.’ He opened a drawer. ‘Speaking of trophies, I’ve got something of yours.’ He took out a chunky metal tactical pen with a textured grip.
Shepherd shook his head. ‘Keep it. I got a new one. Better than that.’
‘I’m not going to engage in pen envy. How’s the head?’
Shepherd shifted his gaze to the window. ‘Better. Exercise is helping. No problems lately.’
‘You getting some help?’
Shepherd craned his neck, as if to catch a better view of the football. ‘I’m dealing with it.’
‘At around six-thirty this morning, an employee at the Fairholmes Visitor Centre up in Bamford followed his dog up a walking trail and discovered the body of a sixty-one-year-old woman, Susan Bishop.’
Sawyer took a breath and looked around. The MIT detectives had gathered in their usual cliques, facing the briefing area. Most were perched on desks to get a better view, while DC Walker stood beside Sawyer and DS Shepherd, head raised, surveying the audience.
‘DC Walker was FOA,’ said Shepherd.
Sawyer glanced at Walker; he was struggling to suppress an odd little smile. Behind Sawyer, the whiteboard carried a large monochrome headshot of Susan Bishop. Posed, side-on, pouting to camera. It was a professional shot, not a selfie. ‘Susan’s professional name was Suzie Swift. She was an actress and model who did a lot of TV work in the seventies and eighties. Variety shows, a few bit parts.’
Walker stepped forward and checked his notebook. ‘She was a regular on something called The Dicky Emery Show.’
Titters from a group near the back. Keating emerged from his office and they fell silent.
