by Andy Maslen
George had been amused at Ford’s request that she perform an autopsy on a rabbit. Once he’d persuaded her it wasn’t a joke, she’d agreed readily. ‘A bit different to my normal work. It could be fun,’ she’d said.
She was waiting for him in the dissection room, gowned and masked, her instruments resting on a wheeled tray.
‘Thanks for doing this, George. It’s going to break the case.’
‘Let’s hope so, eh?’ She pointed at the bag swinging by his side. ‘Is that the deceased?’
Ford laid the defrosted rabbit on the dissection table.
George peered at the bullet hole. She rolled the soft little body over.
‘No exit wound. Right, let’s see what we can find, shall we?’
She took a pair of long thin forceps from the tray and gently inserted them into the entry wound. Ford found he was holding his breath, and let it out in a controlled sigh.
After a few more seconds, George nodded. ‘Got it,’ she said.
In a slow, deliberate movement, she withdrew the forceps. Gripped in their serrated tips was a small, dark grey bullet. She dropped it into a stainless-steel kidney bowl with a tinny clink.
‘Looks like a .22. I’ll just clean that up for you,’ she said.
Having run it under a tap for a few seconds, she handed Ford the bullet. He held it up to the light. The tip had deformed on impact, but not by much. The real result for him was the shaft, which was intact. He dropped it into an evidence bag, thanked George, who reminded him of his offer of a drink, and was on his way to Bourne Hill five minutes later.
Once there, he took the stairs up to the third floor and ran down the corridor to Forensics to see Hannah.
He gave her the bagged bullet. ‘Can you photograph this for me and run it against the .22 from Owen Long? It’s urgent.’
She smiled. ‘Yes, of course. Where’d it come from?’
‘The rabbit Stephen Martival gave me.’
Hannah nodded. ‘Give me an hour.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
While he waited for Hannah to report back on the bullet from Joe Hibberd’s .22, Ford went to see what Olly was up to.
The DC swivelled round in his chair. ‘Guv, you should see this.’
‘What is it?’
Olly pointed at the screen. ‘Lord Baverstock’s service record. He was a major in the Grenadier Guards. He served in Afghanistan and got the Military Cross for exemplary gallantry.’
‘Brave man.’
‘Yeah, but look, guv. The details are totally relevant to our case.’
Ford dragged over a chair and sat to read the narrative entry.
In an action against the Taliban, Major Philip Martival’s sniper was killed and his spotter badly wounded by a dug-in enemy fighter using a heavy machine gun. With no concern for his own safety, only that of his men, Major Martival advanced single-handedly under heavy fire and killed the enemy machine gunner with the fallen sniper’s rifle. He then carried the wounded spotter back to their own lines.
Ford read on. The spotter’s name was Hibberd. Sergeant Joseph Hibberd.
‘Nice work, Olly. Now, can you pull His Lordship’s firearms certificate for me?’
‘Yes, guv. Oh, and I spoke to Ruth Long. She’s the executor of Owen’s will. She’s getting in touch with GoPro for us.’
Back at his own desk, Ford closed the door.
He’d been keeping a close eye on Sam, looking for changes in his mood or his routine, anything that might indicate Rye had tried anything again. But it looked as though his own threat had done the trick.
Would he carry it out? The answer came fast.
Yes. In a heartbeat. If they hurt Sam he’d press the nuclear button. It would put him forever on the wrong side of the law he’d pledged to uphold, but there were things he valued far more highly.
He needed to arrest someone, fast. He needed to prove to JJ he’d got there before him, so he’d call the dogs off.
Hannah burst into his office. Her eyes were shining and her cheeks were flushed.
‘You’re going to be pleased. Look.’
She crossed the office to the meeting table and gathered all the papers into a rough pile before placing them on the carpet. In their place she laid out a sheet of A3 paper, on which he saw the characteristic split-screen image of a ballistics comparison.
Ford already knew what he was going to see, but was excited to have it confirmed. Hannah’s enthusiasm was contagious. She pointed to the left-hand half of the composite image. ‘Exhibit A: a .22 bullet recovered from Owen Long’s skull.’ She pointed to the right. ‘Exhibit B: a .22 bullet recovered from Mr Flopsy.’
He looked and found he didn’t even have to squint. The striations on the bullets lined up perfectly.
‘They’re identical, Henry. You’ve got the murder weapon.’
Ford smiled. ‘Not quite. But I know where to find it.’
He waited until Hannah had gone before opening a blank arrest template on his PC. Was he convinced it was Hibberd? No. He was not. Lucy and Stephen Martival, and their father, hovered on the periphery of his thoughts. But protecting Sam meant making a dramatic move now.
He had more than enough circumstantial evidence to arrest Joe. It would have to do. He had to keep JJ and Rye away from Sam. Nothing mattered more to him than that.
He now had definitive ballistics evidence that the bullet George had recovered from Owen Long’s skull matched the one recovered from the body of a rabbit shot by the suspect.
And unless Joe had got rid of the .22 rifle, it had to be on the Alverchalke estate – either in the gun cabinet at Alverchalke Manor, at Joe Hibberd’s cottage or in another building.
So, there it was. More than just circumstantial evidence. He had ballistics, too.
He rewrote his reasons for the arrest. The means hardly needed spelling out. Hibberd had handled the rifle forensically proven to be the weapon used to kill Owen Long. As the murders were inextricably linked, that also made him the prime suspect in Tommy’s murder.
He’d shot Owen in an altercation over trespassing. How about the motive for Tommy? Joe had two, both powerful: revenge and sexual jealousy. The two men had history, and most recently they’d been involved in an altercation, in the course of which Tommy gave Joe a bloody nose. And both were romantically involved with Gwyneth Pearce.
He’d also had ample opportunity. Ford pictured Joe agreeing to meet Tommy somewhere remote on the Alverchalke estate. But instead of handing over the cash, he hid some distance away and shot him with Lord Baverstock’s .308 Parker-Hale rifle. He then chopped up the body and – alone, or with help – disposed of the parts down a badger sett on land farmed by Mark Ball.
Those were the entries on the credit side. The debit side was daunting and Ford took extra care over the risk assessment. Hibberd was a former British army sniper. That meant he was intimately acquainted, and extremely deadly, with firearms of all kinds.
And the man was a combat veteran, for God’s sake. Ford thought it entirely possible that Joe was suffering from PTSD. He’d personally witnessed his volatile temper, hadn’t he? That added the possibility that things could go sideways during the arrest. In his report he used the more official-sounding phrase, ‘significant risk of escalation in violence’. They both came down to the same thing. Bullets flying.
He concluded that with the suspect presenting a high risk of fight or flight, especially fight, his recommendation was for a firearms deployment.
He went to see Sandy.
‘You look like a dog with two dicks,’ she said.
‘One and a half, maybe. I want to arrest Joe Hibberd for Owen’s murder. I have ballistics that put the murder weapon in his hands.’
Sandy went into business mode. ‘What do you need?’
‘It has to be a firearms deployment, just in case things turn nasty.’
‘Are you expecting them to?’
‘No. But we’ll do it by the book, which contains my risk assessment, by the way. I
put my maverick hat down when there’s the chance of bullets flying.’
Sandy offered him a wry smile, then jotted a few words in her red notebook. ‘I’ll put the call in to Gordon Richen at HQ after this, tell him to get his firearms team on standby. Anything else?’
‘Yes. I want to talk to Lord Baverstock again. It looks like a member of his staff may have murdered one or possibly two men on his land. One of them was making a protest film about his development plans. If it had gone viral, or been picked up by the mainstream media, protests could have meant planning permission being withheld, which would have cost him a lot of money.’
‘OK, go and talk to him. But Henry . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Be nice. The gamekeeper looks good for it, but you’ve nothing on Lord B. I don’t want you getting a reputation as some sort of officially sanctioned class warrior.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, tugging his forelock. ‘Absolutely, Your Grace. Ever so ’umble I’ll be, oh my goodness, yes. What wiv me bein’ a lowly DI and ’im wot lives in that there big ’ouse being a lord an’ ev’ryfing.’
She grinned. ‘Get out of my sight, you horrible little wretch, and bring me results!’
Ford went to find Hannah, who was hunched over her keyboard.
‘Can I drag you away from your desk for a while?’ he asked. ‘I’m going out to see Lord Baverstock and I’d like you to do your FBI voodoo.’ Seeing the beginnings of a frown, he anticipated her question. ‘By which I mean, just size him up. I think he may have been involved in one or both of the murders.’
‘How exactly?’
Ford hesitated. How could he tell Hannah he needed to arrest Hibberd fast to fend off JJ and Rye Bolter, even though he had his doubts about the man’s guilt? He told himself it didn’t matter. If Hibberd was innocent, Ford would find evidence pointing to the true killer. If he wasn’t, the problem disappeared.
‘I’m not sure. Call it a feeling,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little surprise up my sleeve that might unsettle him. If it works, and he loses his temper, stay calm and just listen more carefully, OK?’
She nodded. ‘Stay calm. Listen carefully. Sacrifice a black cockerel and sprinkle its blood over a photograph of Lord B.’
Ford grinned. ‘Was that a joke, Wix?’
She smiled broadly. ‘It was. Was it any good?’
‘Not bad.’
On the drive over, they discussed other possibilities that would explain the ballistics while letting Hibberd off the hook.
‘What if, for some reason, Hibberd didn’t use his own rifle to shoot the rabbit?’ Hannah asked.
‘Then it must have been an Alverchalke gun.’
‘Which means anyone with access could be the murderer.’
‘Let’s hope it’s a small list, then,’ Ford said.
He pointed to the sign ahead. It bore the simple phrase:
Alverchalke Manor ½ mile
CHAPTER THIRTY
At the manor house, a maid directed them to the rose garden, where Lord Baverstock was tending to his blooms. The garden was a five-minute walk from the main building, behind a wall of old red bricks punctuated halfway along by a wrought-iron gate. Ford pushed the gate open and walked into a sun-drenched square of colour: reds, pinks, oranges, deep plums and creamy whites.
Some ancestor of Lord Baverstock had laid out formal beds in a geometric pattern, divided by raked gravel paths. Pervading the whole garden was the heady scent of ripe peaches and a zingy smell that reminded Ford of lemon sherbet. The air vibrated with the low hum of thousands of bees going about their business.
Lord Baverstock stood beside a galvanised zinc wheelbarrow, about fifty feet away, a pair of secateurs in his right hand. A battered Panama hat shaded his eyes from the bright sunlight, casting the upper half of his face in deep shadow. As Ford and Hannah crunched towards him down the path, the sound alerted him and he looked up.
Seeing them, his face broke into a smile. ‘Inspector! And Wix! Come to help me deadhead the roses?’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Ford said. ‘Mine are only just coming into flower.’
Lord Baverstock pointed at the brickwork behind Ford and Hannah.
‘Walled gardens create their own microclimate. That, and the early spring created perfect conditions this year. But I assume you didn’t come all the way out here to discuss horticulture, Inspector.’
‘I’d like to ask you a few more questions, if that’s all right?’
‘Do you mind if I keep working?’ Lord Baverstock indicated the spread of roses with an extended arm. He wore tan leather gardening gloves.
‘Not at all.’
‘Good. Ask away, then,’ he said, resuming his clipping and snipping, and dropping the spent blossoms into the barrow.
‘Can you tell me what sort of firearms you have in your gun safe?’
‘Oh, the usual. Shotguns, rifles.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘Of course. Shotguns first, eh? Four Beretta 12-gauges. Two Purdey 20-gauges. Rifles: couple of Remington .22s, a Sako .243 and my old Springfield Arms .30-06.’
‘That’s it?’
Lord Baverstock stopped pruning and looked upwards for a moment. ‘Yes, of course. I have a couple of little four-tens from when the children were little. Little more than popguns, really. Stephen and Lucy had one each. Brownings.’
‘No others?’
Ford watched Lord Baverstock. If he didn’t own up to the Parker-Hale, Ford would take great pleasure in reminding him.
Lord Baverstock sucked air in over his teeth. ‘Yes, I did forget one. A .308.’
‘That’s a rifle, isn’t it?’ Ford asked in an innocent tone.
Lord Baverstock smiled indulgently. ‘Last time I checked, yes.’
‘What make would that be?’
‘A Parker-Hale Safari Deluxe.’
‘Accurate?’
‘Very. It’s a fine gun.’
‘You said the other day that Lucy and Stephen have had access to the gun safe since they were young. Who else has access?’
‘Well, this might be where I get a little lecture from you, Inspector.’
‘Why?’
‘I keep the key in a box in the main house. Obviously, the rest of my family know where it is and use it whenever they like. Apart from Coco. Poor thing couldn’t hit a barn door with a blunderbuss. Then there’s Joe, of course,’ he said. ‘And my estate manager and his deputy. I’m afraid so many people want a shotgun or a vermin rifle that it’s easier just to make sure they all know where the key is.’
Ford smiled, though he could see his carefully constructed theory fraying. ‘It’s not my place to lecture responsible members of the public about their gun safety. Though that does sound a little risky.’
‘Life is full of risks. I feel that’s one I can manage.’
‘Roughly how many people have access to the gun safe, would you say?’
Lord Baverstock looked upwards and Ford watched his lips moving. Jesus! How long a list was it?
He looked back at Ford. ‘In total, I should say somewhere between ten and fifteen.’
Ford made a note. Even if Hibberd turned out to be innocent, that wasn’t such a huge pool to get through.
‘Joe Hibberd served under you in the army, I believe,’ he said. ‘As a sniper?’
Lord Baverstock frowned. Clipped off another brown-edged bloom. ‘Yes, he did. Bloody good sergeant, too.’
‘He owes you his life.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘The people who dish out gallantry medals seem to think so.’
‘Have you been researching my past?’
‘It’s a matter of public record.’
Lord Baverstock sighed. ‘In the heat of battle, Inspector, you do what you have to. A couple of my lads were in trouble. I did what I could. It’s the training.’
‘He’d go a long way to protect you, wouldn’t he?’
‘You’d have to ask him that.’
Frowning, Lord Baverstock laid the secateurs on top of the short thorny lengths of rose stems piled in the wheelbarrow. He removed the gloves and mopped his forehead with a spotless white handkerchief he drew from a pocket. He folded it into squares and replaced it.
‘I rather resent your insinuation, Inspector,’ he said in a quiet, level voice. ‘But I understand you have a job to do. I think it would be better for both of us if you were to confine your questions to these dreadful murders.’
Ford nodded, readying himself. He planned to ask Lord Baverstock if he’d asked Joe to murder Tommy Bolter. That was conspiracy to murder. He’d be admitting to a crime carrying a life sentence.
It wasn’t so much the answer that interested Ford. It would be a no, he knew that. It was the manner in which it was delivered. He hoped Hannah was paying close attention. Then he admonished himself. Of course she would be! It was the only kind of attention she knew how to pay.
Ford registered his increased pulse and sweating palms. He fought down the urge to wipe them on his thighs.
He inhaled. ‘Just one more question. Did you ever talk to Joe Hibberd about wanting Tommy Bolter dead?’
Lord Baverstock’s face changed in an instant. Gone was the smile. In its place a wild-eyed look of utter astonishment. ‘Sorry. Say again?’
‘Did you ask Joe Hibberd to shoot Tommy Bolter for you? You’ve ordered him to kill in the past; why not now?’
Lord Baverstock took a step towards Ford. His face had paled and he’d clenched his fists. Ford fought the urge to back away.
‘Have you ever served your country, Inspector?’ Lord Baverstock asked, in a quiet voice. Ford saw a muscle firing in his cheek.
‘It’s what I’m doing right now.’
‘We could debate that. I meant in the armed forces.’
‘No.’
‘If by ordering people to kill, you mean have I led men into battle, then I plead guilty. I have closed with the enemy with rifle, bayonet and grenade. The infantry’s mission. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ Ford said.
