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

and you’re out. I’ll bring you in and stand you on the scales myself.

He counted to seven before Abbott answered.

‘Twelve stone, ten pounds, not that it’s any of your business. Is that all, or did you want my inside-leg measurement, too?’

Ford smiled at Jan, who stopped at his open office door and made a T with her two index fingers. Ford nodded and mouthed, ‘Thank you.’

‘That’s all for now. Thank you. You’ve been a great help.’

Later, Ford made his way to Forensics.

Hannah was bent over a microscope. He cleared his throat.

‘You can get lozenges for that,’ she said, without looking away from the eyepiece.

‘I was trying to get your attention.’

Now she did turn away from her kit. ‘Joke! I know. People clear their throats for two reasons. One, to loosen phlegm. Two, to make their presence known to somebody without using their name.’

He grinned. Her sense of humour was completely off-kilter, but it still made him smile. ‘I’m looking at ways to get under Abbott’s skin.’

‘And you want me to help?’

‘You mentioned you taught at Quantico. The psychology of lying, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. There are many aspects of lying, from facial expression to the use of contractions in speech, that we can use to determine levels of truthfulness.’

‘Do you think our killer’s a good liar?’

‘I haven’t met him, so I can’t answer that. But organised, in-control serial killers are often marked out by high levels of intelligence and/or cunning. The latter demands skills in dissembling, even if the former doesn’t.’

‘That’s a yes, then?’

She frowned. ‘I just said that, didn’t I?’

‘How do you fancy some fieldwork later on?’

‘Fieldwork?’

‘A chat with the god of haematology himself.’

Her dimples appeared. ‘Sounds like my kind of evening.’

Ford returned to Major Crimes and wandered over to Olly’s desk. The young DC looked up, as eager as a puppy whose master appears with a ball.

‘Yes, guv?’

‘Can you work up some background for me on Charles Abbott?’

Olly appeared at Ford’s office door two hours later with a sheaf of paper. Ford beckoned him in, and the DC spread out the papers on the desk.

‘Looks like a straight arrow. Did his medical training in London, worked up there at a couple of teaching hospitals and transferred down here about five years ago,’ he said.

‘What are these?’ Ford asked, picking up a stapled set of papers.

‘He’s written loads of articles. The magazines have these weird titles. My favourite one is just called “Blood”.’

‘What about outside of work?’

Olly riffled through the documents, unearthing a series of montages of colour photos. In each, pairs or small groups of people holding glasses of wine were mugging for the camera.

‘I got these from all the local society mags. You know, Salisbury Life, Wiltshire Society. That’s Abbott,’ he said, stabbing a long finger at one picture showing the man in a dinner suit and a woman in a short cocktail dress of a startling kingfisher blue with a plunging neckline. ‘His wife’s a bit tasty, don’t you think, guv?’

Ford took in the images of Charles and Lucinda Abbott rubbing shoulders, sometimes literally, with the great and the good of the city. Quite the local power couple, he mused.

‘Thanks, Olly. Good work.’

Olly beamed. The puppy praised.

DAY FOURTEEN, 6.50 P.M.

Ford and Hannah drove to Britford straight from Bourne Hill. Most of the houses were built of brick that glowed golden in the evening sunlight. They drew up outside a converted barn. Two cartwheels leaned against the black-painted clapboard wall; a stone well and an old horse-drawn plough repainted in scarlet flanked the iron-banded oak front door.

Hannah cocked her head towards the triple garage next to the house. ‘Nice car.’

Ford followed her gaze and saw the sleek profile of a metallic-grey Aston Martin resting on the gravel beneath the branches of a hazel tree.

‘And look at the other two. A top-end Merc and a Range Rover. That’s the thick end of three hundred grand, right there,’ he said.

‘I wonder if he paid cash for them?’

‘You think he’s in debt?’

‘It’s been shown to be a major stressor.’

‘Let’s go and see how stressed he is by a visit from the cops. I’ll do the talking, OK?’

Hannah nodded. Ford scanned the upper windows as they approached the front door, saw something and made a mental note. He leaned on the bell push and took a step back, straightening his tie.

The door swung inwards, revealing the master of the house. Abbott wore a floor-length cotton robe printed with characters in a language Ford fancied might be Thai, or Khmer. Lots of loops, anyway.

Abbott offered a ghost of a smile. ‘Well, well. If it isn’t Salisbury’s answer to Sherlock Holmes,’ he said, before glancing at Hannah. ‘And I see you’ve brought Dr Watson with you.’

‘May we come in?’ Ford said.

Abbott looked over Ford’s shoulder, then up and down the street. ‘Do I have a choice?’ he asked.

‘Of course!’ Ford said. ‘You’re not under arrest, Mr Abbott. No need to call your friend the chief constable.’ Though if I decide you’re our prime suspect, you’ll have a pair of Quik-Cuffs round your wrists faster than you can say ‘haemoglobin’.

‘We’re in the garden,’ Abbott said as he stood aside. ‘Lucinda and I, that is.’

He led them through an immense kitchen packed with oiled timber units Ford imagined were advertised as being ‘hand-built by craftsmen’. A six-burner range cooker jostled for space with a duck-egg-blue fridge large enough to conceal at least one body, if not two. Ford resisted the urge to open it and see whether it contained a neat row of blood bags.

Ford dismissed the word ‘garden’ as being wholly inadequate for the vista that opened up as they walked through a set of French doors.

The striped lawn stretched a couple of hundred metres to a river, on which Ford made out the prow of a clinker-built boat nosing out of a smart blue-painted boathouse. He glimpsed a fenced-off tennis court and a single-storey brick building abutting the house, which, he assumed, contained a swimming pool.

Abbott had turned