Shallow Ground (Detective Ford) by Andy Maslen (to read list txt) 📕

able to release the bodies until all our tests are done and we have all the evidence we can find from’ – from their bodies, from their dead bodies, don’t say it – ‘a careful examination.’

She’d passed from the heightened emotion he’d seen so many times before into a passive state. She looked at him, but her eyes barely focused. She twisted and picked at the second tissue until it was a pile of damp shreds on the table in front of her.

She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘I have to go. I’m sorry.’

He handed her his card and repeated the mantra about getting in touch with information, however insignificant it might seem.

Back at Bourne Hill, Ford passed his own office and headed for its neighbour, bigger by a factor of two and with much better furniture. Time to inform the big boss: Detective Superintendent Sandra Monroe. He knocked and entered.

DAY TWO, NOON

The woman behind the desk looked up from a phone. She pushed her ash-blonde hair out of her eyes. ‘Henry! What news from the frontline?’

‘Double homicide. Bad.’

‘And when you say “bad”. . . ?’

‘Mother and child. Posed together in a lake of her blood. The number 666 daubed on the wall in blood. No robbery. No sexual violence. No witnesses.’

Sandy said nothing at first. Ford waited. He knew what she was doing. Running through the scenarios that could affect the progress of the case, from investigative to legal to public relations. The higher up the ladder you went, the more politics you had to worry about.

‘We’ll issue a basic press release. No conference yet,’ she said. ‘If you can catch him inside a week, we won’t have a media circus on our hands.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Anything you need?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m good.’

‘That’s my boy. Because my budget’s enough to pay your wages and toner for the printers, and that’s about it.’

Ford gathered his team together in a conference room. And now, surrounded by cops rather than dead bodies and blood-gorged flies, on his home turf, he felt the nerves kick in good and proper. His guts squirmed.

He surveyed the officers and police staff sitting round the U-shaped table. His ‘inner circle’ in particular.

To his left sat Jan Derwent, a steady detective sergeant with fifteen years in. Her moans about her big-hipped figure and her habit of bringing in home-baked cakes were, Ford felt, somewhat at odds with each other. Jan was the team’s POLSA – police search adviser. She’d earned the team’s admiration when she’d uncovered a Yorkie bar missing from another officer’s lunchbox in Mick Tanner’s desk.

Mick was his second DS, by his own admission ‘an old-school copper’. He’d joined the police straight from school. At thirty-eight, Mick had built up an impressive network among the city’s criminals, along with a physique honed by many hours in the gym. During a recent red-faced rant on the topic of compulsory diversity-awareness training, Jools had quipped that Mick’s black goatee and shaved head made him look like ‘a bald Satan’.

His two detective constables were on the way to making a decent team, if they could channel their professional rivalry into policework and not undermining each other. Julie ‘Jools’ Harper had, after boarding school in Salisbury, followed her father and grandfather into the army and spent her last three years as an MP in the Criminal Investigation Branch. With her slight but muscular runner’s build, pixie-cut red hair and flashing emerald-green eyes, she resembled a feisty elf; the kind who would follow the evidence, build a case, interview suspects and make arrests with a single-minded determination born of a lifetime’s adherence to rules.

Completing the quartet was Olly Cable, a fast-track boy with a degree in criminology. At twenty-four, he was five years Jools’s junior. He still had to learn the difference between knowing something and letting everyone else know he knew it. Olly had rowed at university and carried his six-foot frame well, clothing it in designer suits, and wore his dark hair in a fashionable forties look. Ford had noticed him bestowing longing glances on Jools when he thought he was unobserved.

Until recently, Ford would have been sitting among them, a DS like Jan and Mick. Then he’d got the coveted DI’s post after the previous holder left for the Met. Overnight, those comfortable, banter-filled relationships changed. Not least with Mick, who’d made no secret of the fact he’d felt the job was his by right.

‘Mine for the asking, Henry,’ he’d crowed, just before Sandy had made the formal announcement a month earlier. Sandy had already given Ford the good news the previous evening, shaking his hand then enveloping him in a tight hug.

Some who’d been on the receiving end of a ‘Monroe Special’ alleged they were the reason for her nickname: the Python. Frowned upon by HR, no doubt, but a sign she’d accepted you. Others swore blind it was her habit, when a front-line copper, of squeezing the truth out of suspects in muscular coils of evidence, forensic questioning and, when all else failed, a good old-fashioned dose of intimidation.

Was she in tune with the times? Nobody would accuse her of that. Was she a gold medallist in bringing villains to justice? Guilty as charged.

And now, here he was, about to lead his own team into battle in their first major case since he’d taken over. The inner circle, the police staff investigators and CSIs, the uniforms. He looked at each of them in turn, waited for complete silence.

‘Angela Halpern. Known from now on as Angie. And Kai Halpern, her son. Angie was a single mum. A widow. Murdered sometime in the last forty-eight hours.’

‘COD, guv?’ Jan asked, prodding her heavy-framed glasses higher on her nose.

‘While we wait for the PM report, it’s all conjecture, but it looks as though Angie was throttled, and Kai – well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘No obvious signs of violence, so poison? Doc Eustace will tell us.’

‘What about the scene?’ Mick asked.

‘The primary scene was a bloodbath. She bled out. And someone