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

a deep-green hedge speckled with white blossom. ‘Hawthorn,’ she said. Then, ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out. Because May is a month and also a common name for hawthorn, whose scientific name is Crataegus.’

To the right, a hedge and a tree with spreading branches. From its shape, she identified it as an oak – Quercus robur. The land sloped away towards the city in the distance. The cathedral spire glistened on the horizon. Above its needle-tip, clouds that looked like those painted by young children – limbless sheep – dotted the sky.

She placed a grid of fine yellow rules over the image and took a second look, this time working methodically from left to right and top to bottom. ‘Because you can walk the grid on a photo as well as on the ground,’ she said.

In the middle of the meadow, she saw two small brown shapes. Now she did start to enlarge the photo.

‘Control-Plus,’ she murmured, ‘Control-Plus, Control-Plus.’

With each tap, the image jumped in size. She kept going until the shapes resolved into a pair of hares, up on their long hind legs, forepaws raised in pugilistic poses. ‘Lepus europaeus,’ she said with a smile.

She returned the image to its normal size and kept scanning. Just above the hawthorn hedge she found a hovering kestrel – ‘Falco tinnunculus!’ – its wingtips blurred.

And then, in the second to last of the gridded squares, at the bottom-right corner of the image, she saw a figure. Heart racing, she clicked the mouse in a series of stuttering movements, enlarging the figure so that it grew in jerky increments, from a few millimetres until it – he – occupied a quarter of the screen.

‘Who are you, then?’ she asked the blurry figure.

Because at this level of magnification, and despite her Photoshop skills, the face had dissolved into a simple trio of dark splotches. A greyish scrim covered the lower half of his face.

Frowning, she opened the post-mortem report on Owen Long. The attached photo showed he wore a neatly trimmed beard. A neatly trimmed grey beard.

The man in the photo wore blue trousers that might have been jeans, and a maroon short-sleeved shirt. A mark on his left arm caught her eye. Even though she knew it would reduce the clarity still further, she zoomed in on the area of skin between the wrist and the inside of his elbow.

She could make out a general shape and colour. An organic form wider at the base than the top, in shades of green. She clicked away, back to the PM report, and paged through to the section she wanted.

Her breath caught in her throat as she looked at the distinguishing marks.

Tattoos: Naked green female sitting cross-legged, cradling planet earth in front of breasts.

‘Hello, Owen Long,’ she whispered.

A shadow crossed her desk. She looked up from her pad to see Ford waving.

She took off her headphones. ‘Look.’ She pointed at the figure on her screen.

Ford screwed up his eyes. ‘Is that Owen Long?’

She nodded, pleased he’d reached the same conclusion she had. ‘I think it is.’

‘Can I?’ Ford asked, coming to stand beside her and staring at the screen.

She moved her chair back to let him squat in front of her workstation. ‘Press “Control” and “Plus” and zoom in on his left arm,’ she said. ‘I think it’s his Gaia tattoo.’

Ford did as she instructed. ‘I think you’re right. He’s got a beard, too. Where did Tommy take this? Any idea?’

‘That’s my next task. We know when he took it. The time and the date. And if you look at the cathedral, you can just tell it’s the west front. The shadow extends straight out down the midline of the photograph. If we extend it, it will eventually reach the spire.’

‘Go on, I’m still just about keeping up.’

She smiled. She liked the way he listened closely, not butting in with his own ideas or mocking her abilities. ‘I calculated the height and position of the sun in the sky for the time and date of the photo. We can draw a straight line extending out from the cathedral at a 225-degree angle and be reasonably sure that Tommy was somewhere on that line when he took the photo.’

Ford rubbed his jaw, pleased with where this was going. They were zeroing in on the exact spot where Tommy had witnessed Owen being shot. With a bit of luck, they might find evidence that would identify Gwyneth’s mysterious ‘person’.

‘Gwyneth told me they parked at the start of a lane opposite Pentridge Down,’ Ford said. He straightened, patting his pocket for his car keys. ‘Let’s go and find the scene of the crime.’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes, now. This is a two-person job and you’re available, which the others aren’t.’

She felt a squirm of nerves in her stomach. And she labelled it as excitement. Not anxiety, Wix. Excitement. Before she left, she called Ruth Long’s FLO and asked her to confirm whether Owen owned a maroon short-sleeved shirt. She timed the wait using the stopwatch function on her Casio. Two minutes, eleven seconds.

‘Yes.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ford drove out of Salisbury, heading for the Chalke Valley. Beside him, a map open on her knees, Hannah traced her finger along a straight red line she’d drawn just before they left.

The Discovery entered a long tunnel of trees, through which sunlight speared down in flickering bands of bright and dark.

‘Sorry, Henry,’ Hannah said, ‘I have to close my eyes until we’re through these trees.’

‘Not good for your Asperger’s?’

‘Not good at all. It feels like a swarm of bees in my head.’

He put his foot down and cleared the final arch of overhead branches, doing eighty.

‘You can open them again,’ he said.

She sighed. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. I think Owen’s GoPro may have had an automatic upload to the Cloud. If we could find his account, could you try getting in?’

‘I can try. But I’ve seen his password. A man who takes that much trouble over it