Land Rites (Detective Ford) by Andy Maslen (best ereader for manga TXT) 📕

deflect attention from the document he’d glimpsed on her screen?

‘Come on, then.’

Inside the cordon again, they walked over to the partially excavated sett and stood shoulder to shoulder at its rim.

Ford looked down at the disturbed earth. ‘Have you—’

‘Taken a soil sample? Yes, several. We’re analysing them right now. It’ll give us an index reference when you arrest a suspect.’

He turned to her. ‘Your confidence is welcome. Thanks.’

‘You’ll get your man, Henry. Like the Mounties. They’re the—’

Now Ford finished her sentence. ‘Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Did they consult you, too?’

‘They did, as a matter of fact.’

‘Serial killer?’

‘The Wapawekka Strangler. He killed eight college students and dumped their bodies in the lake of that name.’

‘Did you catch him?’

‘Mm-hmm. Epithelial cells on a rope fragment in his garage.’

‘So what do you think about this one?’ he asked her.

She compressed her lips and frowned. Ford waited.

‘I think,’ she said after at least a minute had elapsed, ‘we are not looking at a domestic killing.’

‘Agreed. The MO is way off.’

‘And I also don’t think we’re dealing with a lust-rage murder.’

‘Care to explain?’

‘I saw no evidence of sexual injuries as the body parts were being brought out.’

‘And the killer had done the opposite of posing his victim.’

‘Exactly. He went to some trouble to hide the evidence.’

‘Serial?’

‘It’s possible. But for Salisbury, statistically unlikely.’

Ford stared down into the sett’s gaping maw. Pictured himself lugging heavy pieces of flesh from a tractor trailer of some kind and dropping them into the black depths.

‘If he’d been serious about stopping us finding the body, he could have burned it, smashed up the bones and ploughed them under,’ Ford said. ‘Or run it through a wood chipper and fed the slurry to pigs. Plenty of ways you could do it in the countryside. Every farm for miles around would offer at least one of those methods.’

‘Not a farmer, then?’

‘But he knows the area. Look around you.’ Ford swept his arm in an arc that took in the fluttering crime scene tape, the uniforms on guard, a CSI van, and a dozen uniforms on their hands and knees conducting a fingertip search. ‘You can’t see a house, a road, even a power line. It’s the middle of nowhere.’

‘Polly Evans found it, though,’ Hannah countered.

Ford nodded. ‘True. And she said she often saw other dog-walkers.’

‘I don’t think it’s feasible to use dog ownership as a suspect identification criterion.’

‘That takes me back to the point about knowing the area. That sett’s huge. I’ve seen others, but they’re much smaller. You could get a hand down one but not the rest. He knew about it.’

‘Who would have that sort of detailed local knowledge?’

Ford scratched at his stubble. He’d forgotten to shave. Again. ‘The dog-walkers. The farmer.’ He looked over at the shallow chalk stream. ‘That’s not deep enough for anglers.’

‘Birdwatchers?’ Hannah asked, pointing up as a charm of goldfinches twittered overhead.

‘I’m not seeing a demented twitcher as our killer.’ He paused. The goldfinches had reminded him of the magazine in the pizza place he and Sam had eaten in the previous night. And the article about Lord Baverstock.

‘Henry?’

The vision dissipated. Ford blinked.

Hannah pulled her mouth to one side in a quirked smile. ‘You went far away.’

‘Sorry. I was thinking. What if Mr Ball’s a tenant farmer? Then somebody else owns the land. And if they did, they might know about the sett, mightn’t they?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t know very much about lords and ladies.’

An admission of ignorance from Hannah was so rare, even in their limited acquaintance, that Ford couldn’t help himself.

‘I’ll make a note of that,’ he said. ‘Our deputy chief CSI has a gap in her knowledge base.’

Even as he said it, he knew he’d blundered again. Hannah’s face fell.

‘I’m sorry. There aren’t any in the US, and before that I was at university. I should do some background reading.’

Ford reached out and laid a gentle hand on her arm. Smiled. ‘It’s fine, honestly. You know more than anyone else in the department – hell, the whole station – put together. I was just twitting you. I shouldn’t have.’

He let his hand fall. Not wanting her to misread the signal.

‘Landowner. Farmer. Dog-walker. Birdwatcher,’ Hannah said. ‘Or it could be a random stranger scouting a body-dump site.’

Ford had to agree. But he desperately wanted it not to be. ‘It could be. But he’d be more likely to dump it somewhere familiar. That would mean he lived close by, and there are no houses for miles around.’

‘When Dr Eustace gets me the bullet, we’ll have something concrete to go on. Well, metallic.’

Hannah’s abrupt change of topic didn’t surprise Ford. He knew she preferred science to instinct. Evidence to inspiration. Data to daydreaming. Which was fine. She was an investigator. It was what she did. But in the absence of investigative factors, all activity ceased. Or didn’t even begin.

And that was where a case needed a detective. Someone who could close their eyes and paint a crime scene into being. Someone who could imagine, with a greater or lesser degree of success, the thoughts running through a killer’s mind in the moments before, during and after a murder. Since Lou, Ford had experienced not merely a greater degree of success, but a one-to-one match. He knew what killers felt.

On the drive back to Bourne Hill, Ford waited for a long straight stretch of road. He flicked a quick glance at Hannah. Inhaled.

‘What were you working on when I came to find you?’ he asked, striving to keep his tone light.

‘Working on?’

‘Yes. On your PC. Fingerprints? Blood spatter?’ He paused. ‘Report-writing? I saw you’d typed something about mountaineering risks. Was Tommy a climber, then?’

If Hannah picked up on the irony, she didn’t show it. She hesitated before answering – something of a tell from a self-professed and highly qualified expert in the psychology of lying. ‘It’s for a friend. He’s interested in mountaineering but he’s worried about the risks.’

Ford nodded. ‘Kind of you. To do some research for him.’

‘Thank you.’

He drove on in silence