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

the sluice. He really hoped he wouldn’t look down and see one of his neighbour’s sheep.

As he leaned down to hook the vegetation away with his hands, he realised it wasn’t a sheep. Someone must have dumped a scarecrow into the Ebble. City kids, most likely. He scowled. Or pikeys, having a laugh at my expense.

The oddly humanoid figure had long, twiggy arms and a crudely shaped head. But as the water in the pond rushed through the newly cleared sluice and the level dropped, his opinion lurched sideways. Not humanoid. Human. Twisting in the turbid, outflowing water, the naked, vegetation-wrapped body rolled over.

Before Ford had taken a second sip of his coffee, his phone rang.

‘Control, sir. Farmer just called in. Says he’s got a dead body in a drainage pond. On a grappling hook.’

‘Where?’

‘Roseveare Farm, sir. Between Coombe Bissett and Rockbourne. I’ll send you the details.’

Ford picked up his murder bag. He knew Roseveare Farm. And Tommy’s body had been found not a mile away. Had Ford believed in coincidences, he might have written off the proximity of the two bodies as just that. But he didn’t. As he got behind the wheel of the Discovery, he was already wondering not if but how the two deaths were linked.

He arrived at the crime scene to see a middle-aged man in waders and mud-spattered overalls leaning against the fat rear tyre of a bright green tractor. A rope ran in a straight, cobalt-blue line from the rear of the tractor to the edge of a pool of water.

He climbed out and saw to his disappointment that the Discovery’s blue paintwork, which he’d recently washed, was now coated in claggy, greyish-white mud. A marked Skoda Yeti trundled over the grass to join him.

The call from Control had been clear about what to expect at the end of the rope. He joined the farmer, having first paused to take a look at the body. The corpse bore the telltale signs of a body that had been submerged in water for more than a couple of days. The face was swollen but he saw no sign of the white jelly-like froth around the mouth that typically indicated drowning. That was interesting. If not drowned, then dumped?

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Ford asked the farmer.

‘I came up to move the cows in. But when I got here, the field was under six inches of water. So I figured something had blocked the sluice gate. I put a grapple in, and that’ – he jerked his chin over at the pond – ‘came up on the end of it.’

Adlam’s conciseness impressed Ford. The body had sunk. Had it been weighted down? That suggested foul play. Foul play suggested murder. And murder suggested Tommy Bolter. Again.

‘Have you seen anyone acting suspiciously on your farm in recent weeks?’

Adlam shook his head. ‘Nobody. We get dog-walkers, of course. And the odd hiker with their maps and those daft poles they all use, but no. Just the usual.’

Ford looked around. ‘Where’s the nearest road?’

Adlam turned and pointed past the front of the tractor. ‘Fisher’s Lane. It’s pretty quiet. You think they came that way?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll get a search team to take a look.’ Ford paused. ‘Tell me, Mr Adlam, do you own your farm?’

Adlam snorted. ‘Yeah, apart from what the bank does.’

Ford smiled. ‘You’re not a tenant, then?’

Adlam shook his head. ‘The farm’s been in my family for three hundred and seven years.’

‘How about your neighbours?’

‘That way, you’ve got the Baildons,’ he said, gesturing past Ford’s right shoulder. ‘They own theirs outright. All the rest are tenants of Lord Baverstock.’

‘Thanks.’

Another connection between Tommy Bolter and this new body. The Baverstock name had cropped up at both crime scenes. Ford frowned. Rural suicides were depressingly common. Rural murders, much rarer. Now he had two within a week of each other.

He could hear the morbid chimes of a fruit machine as the connections piled up.

Ching! Two murders.

Ching! Rural body dumps.

CHING! Lord Baverstock.

Three death’s heads! Jackpot! You win!!

Bloody coins tumbled into the tray. This murder was linked to Tommy’s. He could feel it.

Ford arranged to have Adlam come in to make a formal statement, then left him and returned to the corpse.

A team of four CSIs turned up on foot carrying bulging holdalls. They must have left their van on Fisher’s Lane, he thought; unlike the first body dump, this one had no convenient gravelled track. He saw Hannah. She waved and walked over, her Tyveked legs rustling against each other.

‘Hello, Henry. We need to get the body out of the water without damaging it any further. Do we have police divers anywhere near?’

Ford shook his head. ‘We use Avon and Somerset’s. They’re based in Bristol. That’s ninety minutes’ drive away.’

‘An extra ninety minutes won’t make an appreciable difference to decay at this point.’

‘I’ll make the call.’

Ford returned to Bourne Hill, leaving the CSIs and the uniforms to establish a perimeter around the crime scene. He called the dive team sergeant in Bristol and secured a promise of ‘a couple of my guys’.

His next appointment was at Salisbury Coroner’s Court on Endless Street. The inquest into Tommy Bolter’s death opened at 11.00 a.m. Ford rubbed his jaw. Could he avoid running into JJ? Yeah, right!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Some coroners were fortunate enough to work in modern, purpose-built surroundings. Courtrooms bristling with IT. State-of-the-art on-site mortuaries. Air conditioning. Seat cushions.

Salisbury was different. The courtroom was elegant in its way, with paintings of former coroners, antique furniture and a high, vaulted ceiling. However, being listed, it had no air conditioning. On this May day, it was sweltering.

The coroner deemed it inappropriate to have open windows that might allow passers-by to eavesdrop on the proceedings. Even though any one of them could walk in and listen for free inside.

For those attending, a slide into heat-induced drowsiness was prevented by the hard, upright benches ranged in front of the coroner’s table. From his seat at the back, Ford