by Andy Maslen
At the wrists, shoulders, neck, waist, groin, knees and ankles, lines of ugly black spiders marched across the green-purple skin. Crude knotted Xs of thick surgical thread with nasty little wounds trying to burst open beneath them. And the genitals. Jesus Christ! Ford looked away, tried to pull JJ with him by the shoulder.
JJ wrenched himself free and staggered into the table. Which Ford could now identify as a standard hospital gurney. Pete had locked the wheels; good practice normally. But it meant it couldn’t move when JJ went into it. Or not along the carpet, at any rate. Instead, it toppled over, throwing Tommy Bolter’s mortal remains to the floor.
Pete rushed in. He was too late. Howling, JJ picked up the gurney and flung it at the viewing window. It shattered, showering him, Ford and Pete with shards of glass.
JJ barged Ford aside and ran out. Through the jagged-edged aperture Ford watched, in shock, as JJ grabbed Rye by his elbow and dragged him to his feet, then out the door.
The mess at the mortuary would mean even more form-filling than was usual at the start of a murder investigation. Ford tried to see the positives in the whole sorry situation. They had an ID. And, given who it was, they could start on victimology straight away.
After a decent interval, he returned to the Bolter place and sat down with JJ. The meeting did not go well.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ford sat opposite JJ in a room furnished with a long boardroom table and eight chrome-framed office chairs upholstered in white leather. Through a picture window that gave on to the garden at the rear of the house, he could see Rye pacing up and down. He was lighting a cigarette from the butt of another. In one meaty paw he clutched a bottle of golden liquid, which he brought to his lips every ten seconds or so.
Dry-eyed and staring at Ford as if he was the person responsible for dismembering Tommy, JJ worried him more than Rye. Rye was a bruiser who enjoyed inflicting pain for its own sake. But JJ was the cunning, ruthless brother who’d built on his parents’ business and turned it into something more akin to a big-city crime gang. He was concealing his grief so effectively, all that was left was this emotionless exterior.
‘Who killed Tommy?’ he asked.
‘That’s what I’m going to find out. You can help me. I need to know if Tommy had any enemies.’ As he said it, he was aware of how lame it sounded.
JJ confirmed his opinion. ‘You do know who you’re dealing with, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Well, then.’
‘Fine. Has Tommy had any run-ins with anyone recently? Anything serious enough to have caused’ – he paused – ‘all this?’
JJ shrugged. ‘Not that I know of. He was our baby brother, but he wasn’t a kid anymore. He did what he wanted. He had plenty of places to bed down if he didn’t want to sleep here. Girls loved Tommy.’
He clenched his fist on the polished tabletop as he spoke these words, and sniffed loudly. For a moment, Ford thought he was about to burst into tears. He found himself wondering if he’d brought a packet of tissues with him.
The bang as JJ slammed his fist down startled Ford. JJ leaned across the table and pointed a thick finger between his eyes like a pistol. His eyes were cold, and his face had paled so that blue veins were clearly visible at his temples.
‘Somebody,’ he ground out, ‘some bastard murdered my little brother. Murdered him and then cut him up and chucked him down a hole like he was rubbish. I want him found and I want him punished.’
‘And I do, too. I promise you we’ll do all we can to—’
‘No!’ JJ shouted. ‘Not good enough. Don’t give me all that bullshit. I’ve got a funeral to organise. I reckon it’ll take a week to get it sorted. You’ve got till then to find the fucker who killed Tommy.’
Ford had a terrible suspicion he knew where this was going, but he forced himself to continue. ‘We’ll do our best, JJ. But murder investigations don’t always run to plan. They can take longer than—’
‘I said a week. After that, we’ll do it our way. We’ll find out who did it. And we’ll punish them. And that’s a promise I will keep,’ JJ said. ‘As for you, your cosy little career will be over. You built it on that dodgy arrest of me and Rye just after you pitched up down here. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.’
‘You were covered in the victim’s blood. I’d hardly call that dodgy.’
JJ waved his hand as if dismissing a servant. ‘Old news. Give me your card. I want your number.’
There didn’t seem any point staying after that. Ford was used to working under pressure, but it was usually the reasonably good-natured pressure from Sandy. Or the interfering but easy-to-ignore bleating from Martin Peterson, Wiltshire’s busybody police and crime commissioner.
A threat from JJ Bolter belonged to a completely different place. A place where industrial-strength cable ties stood in for Quik-Cuffs, iron bars for extendible batons, shuttered outbuildings for interview suites, and, from time to time, deserted woodland for sentencing hearings.
He pushed the thought down. He could cope with it. He had to. He had no choice.
Ford left the station at seven feeling frustrated with the lack of early progress. In the lift, he texted Sam to say he’d cook as soon as he got home.
He got behind the wheel of his Discovery. His phone pinged. Sam’s reply couldn’t have been any shorter.
K
He sighed. Sam had been going through a stroppy phase. He texted again.
How about pizza out instead?
cool where
Italian place on New Canal?
Ye
I’ll pick you up in 5.
K
As they ate their huge thin-crust pizzas, slice by slice, Ford looked across the table at Sam. He saw, as always, echoes of Lou’s face beneath that mop of dark curls. Not in the eyes: Sam’s were brown. But the expression.
Sam’s lanky frame hadn’t filled out yet, but Ford had noticed a broadening of his shoulders recently. The man beginning to emerge from the boy.
Ford asked his standard question. He used it as a way in, more than a genuine enquiry. ‘How was school today?’
Sam swallowed his mouthful then took a gulp of water. What would he get, Ford wondered, the ‘OK’ or the thumbs-up?
‘We had a careers talk today.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Mrs Chantry asked if anyone had any ideas about what they wanted to do.’
‘And did they?’
Sam groaned. ‘Darius Finney said he wanted to be a hedge fund manager, ’cause he wants a Lambo by his thirtieth birthday. He’s such a posh twat.’
‘What did Mrs Chantry say to that?’
‘Once we’d all stopped laughing, you mean? She said in that case he should definitely do maths and economics for A level. And psychology, ’cause he’d meet a lot of psychopaths.’
Ford raised his eyebrows. ‘She sounds kind of cool.’
Sam nodded as he bit off the corner of a new slice. ‘She is,’ he mumbled around the pizza. ‘I volunteered too.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told her I wanted to do something I loved.’ He paused. ‘Like my dad does.’
Ford felt tears prickle behind his eyes and had to fight down the urge to round the table and hug his son.
He swallowed and nodded. ‘Thanks, mate. I caught another case today.’
‘Murder?’ Sam asked, the slice of pizza stopping halfway to his mouth.
‘Usual rules, yes?’
In a sing-song voice, Sam said, ‘Don’t repeat anything. Don’t post anything. On pain of no Wi-Fi. So?’
Ford looked around. The nearest diners were far enough away that he could keep his voice low and not worry about being overheard. ‘Looks like it. A dead body in thirteen pieces stuffed down a badger sett.’
Sam frowned and looked up at the ceiling for a second, then back at Ford. ‘D’you think thirteen means something?’
Ford shook his head. ‘Head, hands, feet, arms, lower legs, thighs and tw
o chunks of the torso. Just the logical number.’
‘It would have made it easier to take the body and dump it down the hole, wouldn’t it?’
Ford nodded. He remembered the promise he’d made to himself when he’d been squeezed into a black funk in the badger sett. That he’d let Sam into his world a little more. A world that clearly didn’t frighten him. Here was his chance.
‘Much easier. Say a grown man weighs twelve stone. As a dead weight, that takes a lot of muscle to carry, or even to drag.’
‘How much does just a leg weigh?’
Ford rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘Hannah would know. I haven’t got a clue.’
‘She likes to be called Wix now,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll text her.’
Ford watched in amazement as Sam pulled out his phone. He hadn’t realised they’d swapped numbers or that they were on nickname terms.
Sam’s thumbs danced over the screen. A few moments later he smiled, tapped in a final few words and put the phone down. ‘A leg is roughly ten per cent of your body weight. For a twelve-stone man, that’s sixteen point eight pounds.’
‘Which is typical Wix, but also interesting. So, over a stone.’
‘Yeah, but you could still carry one.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Why dump it down a badger sett?’ Sam asked.
‘When you’ve committed a murder there are two big things you have to do pretty much as soon as you can. One, dispose of the murder weapon. Two, dispose of the body,’ Ford said.
‘Yep. I’ve seen CSI, Dad. I just watched the whole of the first season on Netflix.’
‘So, you just killed a guy. Now you need to get rid of the evidence. And the body is the biggest piece.’
‘Not if you’ve chopped it up, it isn’t.’
‘Thank you for that. Which just goes to show that teenagers have the same black sense of humour as coppers.’
‘If you think that’s bad, you should come to Chequers with me one day and hang around at break.’
Ford shook his head. ‘Not sure I could cope with that much testosterone in one place.’
Sam smiled. ‘Why not bury it properly? Dig a hole?’
‘People with bodies to bury are often in a hurry. And, to be honest, buried bodies have a habit of popping up again,’ Ford said. ‘Farmers plough fields. Forestry people plant new trees. Disturbing the earth enough to bury a body makes a big visual change to the ground. It’s noticeable. Maybe not straight away, but grass can grow differently, or the ground can subside.’
‘Do you know who he was?’
Ford sighed. ‘Yes. And right now that’s my biggest problem.’
‘Who is it?’
Ford hesitated. But Sam would hear about it on social media or on the radio. ‘A guy called Tommy Bolter. Part of a bad family who live up towards the racecourse.’
Sam just shrugged. ‘OK.’
Ford felt relief that at least the Bolters hadn’t touched Sam. Their world and his didn’t intersect at any point. He prayed it would always stay that way.
Sam’s phone buzzed. He looked at Ford pleadingly. They had a strict rule at home: no phones at the table. But Sam’s friends were important to him and Ford felt he could relax the rule today. He nodded and smiled. ‘Go on then.’
While Sam engaged in a long series of messages on whichever social media app he and his mates currently favoured, Ford reached behind him and picked a magazine off the windowsill: one of the local glossies, Salisbury Life. All the local shops and cafes had them lying around, on counters, tables, racks by the door. The cover featured a photo of a goldfinch.
He flicked through and came to another bird photo. ‘Lords and Lapwings’, the headline blared. The article profiled one of the local landowners, Lord Baverstock. In it, he expressed a passion for birdwatching. He’d taken the front cover image himself.
‘I’m playing Mortal Kombat with Josh later,’ Sam said. ‘Can we go now? I don’t want any pudding.’
At home, the house Ford and Lou had named Windgather – after the place where they’d first started climbing – Ford and Sam went their separate ways: Sam to do biology homework, Ford for a twenty-minute music break playing his guitar before returning to the day’s paperwork. Because it all started in earnest tomorrow.
Upstairs in the small bedroom Ford had converted to a home office cum music room, he flipped the catches on a battered brown leather case and lifted the lid. There lay his prized 1962 Fender Stratocaster. The red paint was showing its age, but wasn’t everyone? Lou had given it to him as a wedding present.
While he waited for the valves in the amp to warm up, he strummed a few chords with the guitar settled across his knee. He thought back to Sam’s questions. The boy had the makings of a detective, though Ford knew better than to even think of suggesting career choices. Instead, he ran through the lines of enquiry – LOEs – coalescing in his copper’s brain.
Witnesses. A second dog-walker? Earlier on the scene than Polly Evans. Someone who saw the body being dumped. It would have been the middle of the night, though. Had to be. Who’d risk something like that in broad daylight? OK, so an insomniac dog-walker.
The tinny sounds emanating from the unamplified strings deepened and rounded out as the amp kicked in. He played a few old B.B. King blues licks, enjoying the pressure on his fingertips as he bent and released the thin steel strings.
How about motives? Not always the most fruitful LOE. As JJ had said, he did know who Tommy was. Narrowing down the pool of potential aggressors meant acknowledging its sheer size in the first place. Forensics could be the best route forward for now. And the search. He turned his attention to the nature of the cover-up.
People killed each other all the time. Sad but true. But they often panicked afterwards. They’d leave the body in full view. Run away, tracking perfect bloody footprints that led right back to the crime scene. Tell people. Even boast about it in the pub or, bafflingly, online.
But not this guy. And Ford knew he was looking for a man. He’d taken Tommy somewhere quiet. And he’d butchered him. Calmly, efficiently. Rendering a human body into more manageable pieces.
He played the introduction to ‘Cold Weather Blues’ by Muddy Waters. ‘Cold’ just about summed it up. What kind of man would have the mental strength, as well as the physical, to dismember a human body?
‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard,’ he said to the empty room as he ended the song. ‘And I’m going to find you.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grateful that the autopsy was taking place in the morning and not after lunch, Ford looked around the forensic post-mortem suite. He’d taken up position at the head end of the stainless-steel dissection table. Georgina Eustace stood opposite him. They’d known each other for ten years. During that time, they’d become good friends. She’d supported him when Lou died; he’d helped her through her divorce. They’d even shared a drunken kiss at Sandy’s New Year’s Eve party the previous year. Nothing had come of it, but she did allow him to call her George at work. Everyone else stuck to Dr Eustace, or Doc.
As well as Ford and George, the brightly lit space had room for Pete the mortician, who also drummed in Ford’s band; a photographer; the coroner’s officer; and Hannah, Jools and Olly.
Today, a teal cap obscured George’s silver bob. A hinged transparent visor took the shimmer out of her vivid blue eyes. Mask, gown, white rubberised apron, wellingtons and two pairs of rubber gloves completed her professional garb. She looked at Ford, and he nodded.
‘Right,’ she said briskly, ceasing her humming along to the Mozart playing softly in the background. ‘Let’s begin, shall we?’
She pulled the sheet back from the pieced-together body to a few stifled gasps.
Ford turned his gaze to the body. He felt no disgust. No horror. Instead, a profound sense of curiosity. Reassembled by Pete, Tommy was asking him questions. Who killed me? Why did they kill me?
George turned to Pete, who was waiting patiently. ‘PM40, please.’
&
nbsp; He handed her a long-handled scalpel fitted with a large blade, curved on its cutting edge. Using it as a pointer, she gestured to the left side of the head.
‘Look at this.’
Ford noticed the way Olly and Jools were trying to follow George’s instruction without looking at the grotesque parody of a human face.
‘There is a great deal of clotted blood in the acoustic meatus,’ George said, touching the scalpel tip to the ear hole. ‘The tragus and concha have suffered some form of trauma,’ she added, gesturing this time to the ridges on the left and right of the opening.
‘What could have caused them?’ Jools asked.
In the slender area of exposed skin between her cap and mask, Ford saw George’s eyes widen. ‘I should have thought just about anything, DC Harper. A cricket stump whacked in with a mallet. A tent peg. A butcher’s steel. Something with a circular cross section, rather than a blade.’
Ford leaned towards Olly as George went back to her description for the digital recorder. ‘Keep your eyes and ears open. You can learn a lot in the mortuary, and Doc Eustace is a good teacher,’ he whispered.
He stopped, aware that people were looking at him.
‘Something you need to share with the group, DI Ford?’ George asked him pointedly, her scalpel poised over the corpse’s face.
Sniggers.
‘Sorry, Doctor Eustace.’
‘Hmm,’ she sniffed, though he saw her eyes twinkling above her mask. ‘Please note the extreme exophthalmos, or proptosis. Bulging eyes, in layperson’s terms.’ The scalpel tip hovered over the left eyeball.
Ford noticed Jools wince. Not Hannah, though. She leaned forward, watching avidly.
‘This could be caused by a thyroid problem,’ George said. ‘However, I notice petechial haemorrhaging on the sclera. See? These scarlet marks on the whites?’
‘Aren’t they usually caused by choking, Doctor? Could that be the cause of death?’ Olly asked.
‘Usually, yes. A point for you, DC Cable. But in this specific instance, I think not.’ She held out her right hand, palm upwards. ‘Magnifier, please.’
