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

invited anyone. So nobody should have been there, ringing her doorbell at night.

She pushed Uta Frith off her lap and went downstairs, feeling a squirm of anxiety in her stomach. She could see a dark shape through the frosted glass panels in the upper half of the door. Her heart beating rapidly, she put the safety chain on and then peered through the spyhole.

A man stood there, looking around. Early thirties. She forced herself to be more precise. Thirty-one- to thirty-three-year-old male IC1. Height between five-eight and five-ten. Stocky, bordering on fat. Short light-brown hair swept back from a high, oddly bulging forehead. Narrow eyes. Clean-shaven.

She opened the door and looked through the narrow gap the chain permitted.

‘Can I help you?’

‘You Hannah Fellowes?’ His accent was local, his voice rough.

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘This is for you,’ he said, and thrust a padded envelope through the gap before turning and leaving, shaking his head.

She didn’t like people turning up at her front door uninvited and ringing her doorbell. Especially not when they pushed unmarked packages into her hands. But he’d gone, and that was good.

Her pulse calming, she closed the door and took the envelope upstairs. At her desk, she examined the exterior of the envelope. It was new. No previous labels stuck over with paper or scribbled out with black marker. She pressed it experimentally. No lumps, bumps or protrusions.

She turned the package over in her hands, wanting to open it but frightened of what might happen. Might the flap conceal a trigger of some kind?

She told herself off. This was Salisbury. People didn’t drop off bombs in Jiffy bags at eight in the evening.

Then she had an idea. She took a modelling knife out of her desk drawer and used its razor-sharp blade to slit the side of the envelope. Grey fluff spilled from the gaping cut and she tutted as it tumbled to the floor. That would have to be vacuumed up immediately after she’d seen what was inside the package.

She lifted the top of the envelope using the point of the knife. She saw the edges of sheets of paper. Breathing more easily, she slid out a stapled report of some kind. No images, just a lot of text, set in long, dense paragraphs. The headline intrigued her.

ACCIDENT REPORT: CONFIDENTIAL – INTERNAL USE ONLY

The spilled fluff forgotten, and with Uta Frith reinstalled on her lap, she began reading. It was a report into the death by drowning of Louisa Kathryn Ford, written by the Maritime Operations Controller at Milford Haven Coastguard Operations Centre.

Half an hour later, she put it down. In many respects, it echoed and reinforced the findings of the coroner’s inquest. She spent another half an hour cross-checking it against her own research.

But when she’d finished, she had underlined a few sentences in the final paragraph of the coastguard report that weren’t anywhere in the other documentation she’d unearthed online.

My only concern is, why did Mr Ford leave his wife in the first place? He says he dislodged the rock that broke her leg. And we confirmed it wasn’t securely bedded into the stack. But surely the sensible course was to stay with her? He could have roped them both on higher up, and either kept trying to get a signal or simply ridden out the tide.

Frowning, Hannah put the report aside and looked at her own summary of the death of Ford’s wife.

Although not attempting one of the nine (9) established routes, Henry and Louisa were experienced climbers.

Any new route likely to have been within their capabilities.

Climbing is a leisure activity. No coercion or pressure involved, unlike, for example, military training.

Accident investigation revealed dislodged block (underlying fissure result of natural wear) broke LF’s right femur (compound fracture), causing severe blood loss and limiting her mobility, making a climb out impossible.

Unusually high tide caused by ‘once in a century’ freak alteration to Gulf Stream.

HF roped LF to rock to prevent her being washed off platform.

HF soloed out in order to effect rescue of LF.

HF called coastguard as soon as mobile signal restored.

Weakened by injury, shock and blood loss, LF drowned as tide rose.

No arrest of HF by police: no criminal charges brought.

Coroner’s inquest verdict: death by misadventure, i.e. death caused by accident while taking known and voluntarily accepted risks. No negligence.

Point Four worried her. She could see a different version of events now. One where Henry didn’t dislodge the rock by accident. Had he kicked it down on to Lou on purpose? Or wrenched it free and aimed it down on to her? Maybe he wasn’t even going for her leg. He might have tried to kill her outright.

‘No!’ she said, startling Uta Frith, who mewed plaintively and jumped down, scattering envelope padding as she left.

She ignored the cat. Henry wouldn’t do that. She knew him. OK, so she didn’t have the same easy emotional insights as people like Jools did. Or Henry himself. But she had analysed him. She had thought hard about everything he’d told her. And she’d done all that research herself. It couldn’t be true. It wouldn’t be true. She had found a family at Bourne Hill. Now somebody was trying to take that security away from her. This was malice at work.

She wouldn’t talk to Henry about it. Not in the middle of a case. She could wait. She wanted, needed, him as a friend. She wanted to help him heal. To move on. To unstick. Was that the right word? It would do.

She had a brainwave. She knew that inviting someone for dinner was a good way to open up the conversation. She could do that, present her research findings and then show him the coastguard report and tell him about the man who’d delivered it by hand. They could discuss it together. She resolved to ask him to dinner after the case was closed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

At 5.50 a.m. the next day, Ford raised the binoculars Richen had passed him and focused on the kitchen window of