Cages by David Mark (acx book reading TXT) 📕

Drifts off into a sleep filled with locked doors and cobwebs.

Feels more at home within the nightmare than he did when awake.

TWO

‘You think he did all of them, then?’

‘Best not to pre-judge, Andy. Preconceptions can muddy your thinking, the boss always says that.’

‘Yeah, but she says lots of things then goes and does them herself, doesn’t she?’

‘She’s allowed. She’s the boss.’

‘So it’s one rule for her and one rule for the rest of us? How’s that fair?’

‘Privilege of being better than us.’

‘Is she better than us?’

‘Well, yes. She’s got the Queen’s Police Medal. She’s Head of CID and she’d be chief constable if she didn’t think the uniform made her hips look like two badly parked vans. And most importantly, she’s not guarding a hole. That’s the main thing, for me, Andy. She’s not keeping a patch of mud from coming to harm.’

‘You make a good point.’

There is a long pause. A light aircraft putters slowly overhead: a speck of white on a grey canvas. Detective Constable Ben Neilsen starts counting backwards from ten. Lets the cold, rain-speckled gale slap damply against his face. Smells the damp earth; the fusty reek of rotting wood and untended crops: potatoes and turnips turning to mulch beneath the churned earth. Gets to four before his colleague gives him a playful nudge in the ribs.

‘Pre-judging apart … you think he did all of them, then?’

Neilsen smiles. Nods. ‘Yeah, I think he did all of them.’

Beside him, Detective Constable Andy Daniells pulls a shocked face: a perfect circular emoji of surprise. ‘Ommm,’ he says, in a schoolboy voice. ‘I’m telling.’

For the past half an hour they have been staring into a hole. They find themselves at Chappell’s Farm: the nearest neighbour to Humberside Airport, near the tiny Lincolnshire village of Kirmington. It’s a place of big skies and green fields: dotted with pretty little hamlets and old churches. A place of pitted country roads, where colossal tractors chug along at the head of mile-long tailbacks; the drivers making complex calculations about whether to risk their lives by overtaking, or stay where they are and lose their minds. There’s a smell of industry in the air: the docks and the oil refinery conspiring to add a chemical tang to the forest-and-farmyard scents of the immediate locality. Both men have been here before. They are officers within the Serious and Organized Unit within Humberside Police, though they are currently working in concert with half a dozen other forces under the overall command of the National Crime Agency. Both are secretly rather thrilled at being able to introduce themselves as such, though DC Daniells went too far when he told the absentee owner of the abandoned farm that he and his colleague were with the FBI. It takes a lot to embarrass the portly, ever-cheerful DC, but his jolly round face did turn a school-sock grey when he replayed the sentence in his head.

‘So, we just stand here, do we?’

Neilsen shrugs. He’s not in the best of moods. He’s a handsome, snappily-dressed thirty-something who prides himself on always looking freshly laundered and flatteringly photoshopped. He’s wearing wellingtons, and he is wincing internally as he pictures what they are doing to his trouser legs. Beneath the bottle-green Crombie, his two-piece suit is a tailored woollen number from French designer Pal Zileri. It cost enough money that his boss had taken him aside and warned him that he ran the risk of catching the eye of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. He hadn’t worried. Neilsen spends most of his salary on looking good, though he wouldn’t consider himself vain. It’s more a product of a thirst for self-improvement. He wants to be the best at everything he does – not in a spirit of competition, but more through a pathological need to be the ultimate version of himself. It makes him a very good police officer.

‘And they said she’s down there? Like, that exact spot?’

‘Wouldn’t be here if not, Andy,’ says Neilsen, in the manner of somebody who has been repeatedly asked ‘are we there yet?’ by an infant. ‘I didn’t just wake up and think, you know what – let’s pop over to Kirmo and look in a hole.’

Daniells turns and looks at him. Sticks out his lower lip. ‘Cheer up, Buttercup.’

‘I’ve told you about the Buttercup thing, Andy. Makes me sound like a cow.’

‘You didn’t like Sweetcheeks, either.’

Neilsen puts his hands in his pockets. Closes his palm around his phone and says something a little like a prayer. He wants it to ring. Wants to be told that the cadaver dogs have arrived with their handlers and that he and his colleague can go get in the van.

‘Bronwen, yes?’ asks Daniells, for what Neilsen reckons to be the ninth time.

‘Bronwen Roberts. Last seen, April 4th, 1998. Known to have been a participant in a music contest attended by one Griffin Cox. Known to have become an object of affection for somebody in the weeks leading up to her disappearance. Somebody was sending her letters. Books. Pictures, posh soaps. Not the sort of thing a teenage lover would naturally send.’

‘And a nightingale, you said …’

Neilsen nods, a smile on his face. ‘Yeah, a bloody nightingale. I’m a romantic, Andy, but I’ve never sent anybody a nightingale.’

‘And it was Cox?’

‘Nobody thought so at the time. He was just a passing acquaintance. It was years before the family even thought he could be in any way connected. He came to the memorial service, you see. And then, when he was arrested for the abduction …’

‘I can see how that might get them thinking, yeah.’

Daniells kicks at a long, damp thicket of grass and twisted crops. Makes a show of peering into the patch of exposed earth at their feet. ‘What happened to the nightingale?’ he asks, conversationally. ‘And all the stuff? The letters, the books …’

‘She burned them before she left the house. That’s why the original team treated it more