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

‘Don’t look at me like that, you little poofter!’ his father shouts. ‘You can go crying to your mummy, but you clean up that mess first,’ he adds, jabbing a thick finger at the arc of scarlet spattering the bedroom wallpaper.

Later, when he can hear his father’s drunken snores, he retrieves his sketchbook from under his mattress. He opens his box of ninety-six Caran d’Ache coloured pencils – a present from Granny and Grandpa – and frowns. The reds are always so much shorter than the others.

As he colours in the splashes and streams, the spots and the spatters, he thinks of his dead twin.

He turns the pages, looking for a clean sheet. Past a dead rabbit, guts spread out like butterfly wings each side of the torso. A deer, missing its eyes. A man, dismembered, legs where arms should be, arms splayed from the pelvis. Red. Always lots of red. He smiles, turns over the page, and begins a fresh image.

A quiet double knock at the door jerks him out of his reverie. He snaps the sketchbook shut just in time. His mother twists the knob and enters, a shy mouse compared to her roaring lion of a husband.

She purses her lips when she sees his swollen, scabbed lip.

‘Did Daddy lose his temper with you again?’ she asks, kneeling beside him.

‘Yes, Mummy. I wish he was dead.’

‘Oh, no, darling! Never say that. Not ever. Daddy is a good man. He does love you.’ She pauses. ‘In his own way. But losing Luke, it made him so very unhappy. We both have to try to understand him. Poor Daddy.’

Then she encircles him and draws him close. But while he stays inside her protective embrace, all he’s thinking is, When you’re gone, I will kill him. I promise. Even if it takes the rest of my life. I’ll make him watch his own blood leaking away.

DAY THREE, 2.55 P.M.

Ford had been right, Hannah mused. Forensics was quiet. Which was just how she liked it. She could manage an hour or so in the noise and hubbub of the CID office. Or outside of work, in a busy pub with a friend. But eventually it all got too much and she needed to find somewhere quiet to recharge her batteries.

Here, though, in her corner of the office, noise-cancelling headphones clamped over her ears, the overhead fluorescent tubes removed in favour of an Anglepoise lamp on her desk, she could focus. And focusing was her superpower.

The pathologist had sent over a sample she’d recovered from the woman’s body. Hannah took a scalpel and slit the red tape sealing the transparent plastic evidence bag. Using a pair of slender tweezers with angled tips, she picked the tiny scrap of material from the corner of the bag and mounted it on a slide.

For larger items of physical evidence, like this one, she liked to begin with a hand-magnifier before going to the microscope. Sometimes that was all she needed. And it was a bit like Sherlock Holmes, so obviously that was good.

‘Elementary, my dear Ford,’ she whispered, as she bent her head to the fat circle of precision-ground glass.

She found herself looking at an irregular corrugated fragment of turquoise paper, tinged red across one half, and measuring, according to a transparent plastic ruler she placed next to it, six millimetres by two.

Using the scalpel tip and the tweezers, she stretched the fragment out flat. The lower half of a set of characters became visible: printed characters, white out of the turquoise. She copied them on to a sheet of paper.

‘It’s a postcode,’ she said, before sketching in the upper halves. ‘SE1 9SG.’

She swivelled round to her PC and tapped it into Google. Nothing meaningful. Just a list of sites offering postcode look-ups. She tutted and tweaked her search terms.

Companies in SE1 9SG

She scanned the first page of results and smiled as the underlying turquoise beneath the blood stain fired the connection in her brain. ‘Heinz!’ she said. ‘You hit her with a tin of baked beans.’

She liked the fact that here, in the quiet, ordered calm of Forensics, nobody said mean things when she talked to herself. Everybody did it.

She took a cotton bud, dipped the end in distilled water and lifted a sample from the paper. She put it into a second evidence bag and sealed it, writing, Halpern, A, Blood sample from PM head wound fragment, and a computer-generated reference number on the label.

Alec Reid wandered over. ‘Find something interesting, Hannah?’

She looked up, pleased that he was standing one metre back from her chair. ‘I think she was knocked out with a Heinz baked-bean tin.’

‘I dare say Henry would be interested to know what you’ve discovered.’

She frowned. ‘You “dare”? Are you worried, then?’

He smiled. ‘It’s just my way of saying I think you should go and tell him.’

‘OK. Then I will.’

Ford looked up from his screen to see Hannah striding across the room towards his door. Whether he’d sensed her or whether it was simply that her distinctive gait sounded different to anyone else’s, he didn’t have time to consider further. She walked into his office without knocking. He didn’t mind in the least, but it showed a certain level of confidence from the new girl.

‘I’ve got two pieces of evidence for you.’ She paused. ‘Henry.’

She laid the bags before him, like a cat depositing a dead mouse in front of her owner.

He peered at them. ‘What have we got?’

‘That’s a fragment of the label from a tin of Heinz baked beans. That’s a sample of the blood it’s soaked in: Angie’s. We have the weapon used to stun her.’

He smiled up at her. ‘That’s excellent, Hannah, really good. Listen, I’m a bit short-handed here, everyone’s out. Could you get over to the crime scene and see if you can find any tins of Heinz beans? Bring them all back here. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a print.’

Grinning, she nodded, and about-turned.

Ford returned