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

‘OK, thanks. I’m on my way.’

He shrugged on his suit jacket, patting the pockets for wallet, car keys, notebook and his own mobile. He grabbed a black nylon hold-all from beside his desk. His murder bag contained everything he might need for a scene, from Tyvek ‘Noddy suit’ with matching bootees to a set of lock picks and a selection of screwdrivers. He unplugged a slim black power pack from the wall and dropped it in. Most important of all, his policy book: an A4 notebook in which he recorded every decision on every case, including justification and possible consequences.

Moving through the Major Crimes command, he called out to a young DC, Julie Harper.

‘Jools! You’re with me.’

‘Guv?’

‘Double homicide. Wyvern Road.’

On the short drive over, Jools spoke without taking her eyes off the road. ‘You OK, guv?’

The concern in her voice made him want to lash out. He felt a flash of anger, then forced his jaws to unclench. ‘You’re the second person to ask me that today.’

‘Sorry. It’s just, today’s . . .’

‘Yes, Jools! I know. The anniversary of my wife’s death. Why is it that once a year everybody treats me like I’m made of porcelain?’

‘Because they care about you?’

‘I’m fine without, thanks. We’re here. Find a spot and let’s get on with it.’

A long, tree-lined street of mainly Victorian terrace houses, Wyvern Road stretched in a gentle incline from Castle Street in the west to the ring road carrying two lanes of traffic between the Southampton and London roads.

Two marked cars blocked off the street between Piccadilly Road and Chayne’s Close, sun flaring off the yellow squares in their Battenberg livery. Blue-and-white police tape fluttered in the summer breeze as they drew closer to the principal crime scene.

Ford and Jools nodded at the uniformed loggist stationed on the north-side pavement, who was sweating in the heat. She took their collar numbers then lifted the tape for them to duck under.

Outside 75, a white CSI van had been parked on a double-yellow line. Uniforms were already knocking on doors, talking to neighbours.

Another cordon to cross, this one yellow-and-black crime scene tape. Before they entered, Ford and Jools climbed into their Tyvek suits. He ignored the glances she kept shooting him.

A woman’s voice called out. ‘Sir?’

Ford turned to see Nat Hewitt hurrying across the road.

‘I wanted you to hear it from me before anybody else told you,’ she said as she arrived.

‘What? You look like you’re going to throw up. Bad one, is it?’ he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the house.

‘Yes, but that’s not it, sir. I had to walk right into it. The blood. I had to check the little boy wasn’t dead.’

‘And was he?’

‘Poor little mite.’

‘You did the right thing. Just see the CSIs get your boot prints for elimination.’

She nodded, and hurried away to the far end of the cordon. Ford tracked her as she approached a group of onlookers, phones held aloft. Why did they feel this compulsion to film horror and then upload it to their social media accounts? He hated it.

‘Bloody ghouls,’ he grunted to Jools, who stood behind him, rustling in her Noddy suit. ‘Come on. Let’s get inside.’

Ford paused at the door. Looked up. The three-storey house must once have been a spacious family home. Since its conversion into separate flats, it had slid a few rungs down the social ladder.

The downstairs hallway retained its turquoise, rust and cream encaustic tiles with their intricate geometric pattern. But the surface was dulled through neglect and several were chipped, the missing corners filled in with dirty cement. A grubby radiator cover was piled high with takeaway menus.

The hallway was wide enough for them to stand side by side, but the stairs were narrower. Ford led them up to the first floor, where the forensic pathologist was pulling a hood back from a sleek bob of silver hair.

Dr Georgina Eustace was in her mid-fifties. Her base was Salisbury District Hospital, but she liked to come out to the more ‘exotic’ crime scenes, as she called them. In Ford’s opinion, she took the concept of gallows humour to a whole new level. But she was a damn good pathologist, which, he felt, allowed her some leeway.

‘What’ve we got?’ he asked, not reluctant to venture up to the main crime scene, just keen to get her initial impressions while they were still fresh.

‘I’ll go on up,’ Jools said. ‘Make a start.’

Ford nodded, then turned back to the pathologist. ‘Cause of death?’

‘From the bruises around her throat and the amount of blood, I’d say strangling and exsanguination will have played their part in the young woman’s death,’ she said. ‘Although it’s always possible the killer may have found some other method of doing her in.’

‘The boy?’

She shook her head. ‘No obvious sign of trauma. I emphasise the word “obvious”. He’s not bled, or not from the side you can see, so I’ll have to wait till I get back to SDH,’ she said. ‘They’re both at the very early stages of bloating so, making allowances for the extremely hot weather we’ve been having, they’ve been dead no more than a day or two.’

Ford appreciated the way Eustace would give him more than the usual litany of exasperated headshakes and tutting whenever he, a lowly plod, dared to ask a pathologist for ideas before the post-mortem.

He nodded. He was thinking that fresh corpses meant recent murders. And recent murders were easier to clear up. The clock had started ticking. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘I’ve signed the ROLE form on both victims, by the way,’ Eustace said.

Recognition of Life Extinct. It was one of the first steps in the sad, bureaucratic process through which a once-living human being, a person, became transformed into a thing. A body. A case. A PM report. The property of the coroner. A deceased and sadly missed. A body smashed by a falling rock. Then washed off a ledge and dumped on a Welsh beach. Oh,