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

against the Taliban, Major Philip Martival’s sniper was killed and his spotter badly wounded by a dug-in enemy fighter using a heavy machine gun. With no concern for his own safety, only that of his men, Major Martival advanced single-handedly under heavy fire and killed the enemy machine gunner with the fallen sniper’s rifle. He then carried the wounded spotter back to their own lines.

Ford read on. The spotter’s name was Hibberd. Sergeant Joseph Hibberd.

‘Nice work, Olly. Now, can you pull His Lordship’s firearms certificate for me?’

‘Yes, guv. Oh, and I spoke to Ruth Long. She’s the executor of Owen’s will. She’s getting in touch with GoPro for us.’

Back at his own desk, Ford closed the door.

He’d been keeping a close eye on Sam, looking for changes in his mood or his routine, anything that might indicate Rye had tried anything again. But it looked as though his own threat had done the trick.

Would he carry it out? The answer came fast.

Yes. In a heartbeat. If they hurt Sam he’d press the nuclear button. It would put him forever on the wrong side of the law he’d pledged to uphold, but there were things he valued far more highly.

He needed to arrest someone, fast. He needed to prove to JJ he’d got there before him, so he’d call the dogs off.

Hannah burst into his office. Her eyes were shining and her cheeks were flushed.

‘You’re going to be pleased. Look.’

She crossed the office to the meeting table and gathered all the papers into a rough pile before placing them on the carpet. In their place she laid out a sheet of A3 paper, on which he saw the characteristic split-screen image of a ballistics comparison.

Ford already knew what he was going to see, but was excited to have it confirmed. Hannah’s enthusiasm was contagious. She pointed to the left-hand half of the composite image. ‘Exhibit A: a .22 bullet recovered from Owen Long’s skull.’ She pointed to the right. ‘Exhibit B: a .22 bullet recovered from Mr Flopsy.’

He looked and found he didn’t even have to squint. The striations on the bullets lined up perfectly.

‘They’re identical, Henry. You’ve got the murder weapon.’

Ford smiled. ‘Not quite. But I know where to find it.’

He waited until Hannah had gone before opening a blank arrest template on his PC. Was he convinced it was Hibberd? No. He was not. Lucy and Stephen Martival, and their father, hovered on the periphery of his thoughts. But protecting Sam meant making a dramatic move now.

He had more than enough circumstantial evidence to arrest Joe. It would have to do. He had to keep JJ and Rye away from Sam. Nothing mattered more to him than that.

He now had definitive ballistics evidence that the bullet George had recovered from Owen Long’s skull matched the one recovered from the body of a rabbit shot by the suspect.

And unless Joe had got rid of the .22 rifle, it had to be on the Alverchalke estate – either in the gun cabinet at Alverchalke Manor, at Joe Hibberd’s cottage or in another building.

So, there it was. More than just circumstantial evidence. He had ballistics, too.

He rewrote his reasons for the arrest. The means hardly needed spelling out. Hibberd had handled the rifle forensically proven to be the weapon used to kill Owen Long. As the murders were inextricably linked, that also made him the prime suspect in Tommy’s murder.

He’d shot Owen in an altercation over trespassing. How about the motive for Tommy? Joe had two, both powerful: revenge and sexual jealousy. The two men had history, and most recently they’d been involved in an altercation, in the course of which Tommy gave Joe a bloody nose. And both were romantically involved with Gwyneth Pearce.

He’d also had ample opportunity. Ford pictured Joe agreeing to meet Tommy somewhere remote on the Alverchalke estate. But instead of handing over the cash, he hid some distance away and shot him with Lord Baverstock’s .308 Parker-Hale rifle. He then chopped up the body and – alone, or with help – disposed of the parts down a badger sett on land farmed by Mark Ball.

Those were the entries on the credit side. The debit side was daunting and Ford took extra care over the risk assessment. Hibberd was a former British army sniper. That meant he was intimately acquainted, and extremely deadly, with firearms of all kinds.

And the man was a combat veteran, for God’s sake. Ford thought it entirely possible that Joe was suffering from PTSD. He’d personally witnessed his volatile temper, hadn’t he? That added the possibility that things could go sideways during the arrest. In his report he used the more official-sounding phrase, ‘significant risk of escalation in violence’. They both came down to the same thing. Bullets flying.

He concluded that with the suspect presenting a high risk of fight or flight, especially fight, his recommendation was for a firearms deployment.

He went to see Sandy.

‘You look like a dog with two dicks,’ she said.

‘One and a half, maybe. I want to arrest Joe Hibberd for Owen’s murder. I have ballistics that put the murder weapon in his hands.’

Sandy went into business mode. ‘What do you need?’

‘It has to be a firearms deployment, just in case things turn nasty.’

‘Are you expecting them to?’

‘No. But we’ll do it by the book, which contains my risk assessment, by the way. I put my maverick hat down when there’s the chance of bullets flying.’

Sandy offered him a wry smile, then jotted a few words in her red notebook. ‘I’ll put the call in to Gordon Richen at HQ after this, tell him to get his firearms team on standby. Anything else?’

‘Yes. I want to talk to Lord Baverstock again. It looks like a member of his staff may have murdered one or possibly two men on his land. One of them was making a protest film about his development plans. If it had gone viral, or been picked up by the mainstream media, protests could have meant planning permission