Land Rites (Detective Ford) Read online

  She’d spent the first part of the morning consumed with the tool marks on Tommy Bolter’s bones. The photos Dr Eustace’s photographer had taken in the post-mortem would come in useful when they had a suspect in custody, and knives or saws recovered in a search, but the image on her screen now could help them find that suspect.

  Humming to herself a tune Ford had played for her once on his red electric guitar, she imported the image into Photoshop. It was actually rather beautiful.

  ‘You had a good eye for composition, Tommy,’ she said, hearing her own words as fluffy buzzes through the bones of her skull. She recited their names mentally, a calming mantra as she worked: temporal, occipital, parietal, sphenoid, ethmoid, frontal. But then other, less calming, thoughts intruded: memories of conversations in other departments, other forces, other countries.

  . . . multiple blunt force trauma to occipital bone . . . entry wound through right temporal bone, massive exit wound destroying left parietal bone . . . blade entered through left orbit, penetrating optic canal into frontal lobe . . .

  Anxiety swelled in her chest. Her breath came in short gasps. She squeezed her eyes shut. Hummed louder.

  The memories receded. The horrific images faded. Her pulse slowly returned to normal.

  She’d noticed the way Henry looked at her whenever they were talking about America and the memories came back. He’d ask if something was the matter. She’d shut down, tell him she didn’t want to share that. And he would back off. So far, it had worked. She hoped he wouldn’t keep probing.

  She opened her eyes again and returned to the photo. Her right index finger trembled on the shiny surface of the mouse. She shook her hand out and tried again. Better.

  The cursor skated around the control interface of the image-editing software. She felt her breathing slow and deepen. Permitted herself a small smile. She had friends who scoffed at TV crime shows where, with a few mouse clicks, CSIs turned blurry pictures into magazine-quality artwork. But they were starting with a poor-quality image. Tommy’s had been excellent. She just had to fine-tune the information already present in the pixels.

  She saved the image as a new file: Bolter_image_1_hi-res_HF_edit-1, then maximised the window until it took up the entire screen.

  First, as she’d been trained, she looked at the image as a layperson would, making notes as she went. She saw rough grass in front of her. A sharp-edged shadow spread its fingers across the ground.

  On the left, she could see a deep-green hedge speckled with white blossom. ‘Hawthorn,’ she said. Then, ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out. Because May is a month and also a common name for hawthorn, whose scientific name is Crataegus.’

  To the right, a hedge and a tree with spreading branches. From its shape, she identified it as an oak – Quercus robur. The land sloped away towards the city in the distance. The cathedral spire glistened on the horizon. Above its needle-tip, clouds that looked like those painted by young children – limbless sheep – dotted the sky.

  She placed a grid of fine yellow rules over the image and took a second look, this time working methodically from left to right and top to bottom. ‘Because you can walk the grid on a photo as well as on the ground,’ she said.

  In the middle of the meadow, she saw two small brown shapes. Now she did start to enlarge the photo.

  ‘Control-Plus,’ she murmured, ‘Control-Plus, Control-Plus.’

  With each tap, the image jumped in size. She kept going until the shapes resolved into a pair of hares, up on their long hind legs, forepaws raised in pugilistic poses. ‘Lepus europaeus,’ she said with a smile.

  She returned the image to its normal size and kept scanning. Just above the hawthorn hedge she found a hovering kestrel – ‘Falco tinnunculus!’ – its wingtips blurred.

  And then, in the second to last of the gridded squares, at the bottom-right corner of the image, she saw a figure. Heart racing, she clicked the mouse in a series of stuttering movements, enlarging the figure so that it grew in jerky increments, from a few millimetres until it – he – occupied a quarter of the screen.

  ‘Who are you, then?’ she asked the blurry figure.

  Because at this level of magnification, and despite her Photoshop skills, the face had dissolved into a simple trio of dark splotches. A greyish scrim covered the lower half of his face.

  Frowning, she opened the post-mortem report on Owen Long. The attached photo showed he wore a neatly trimmed beard. A neatly trimmed grey beard.

  The man in the photo wore blue trousers that might have been jeans, and a maroon short-sleeved shirt. A mark on his left arm caught her eye. Even though she knew it would reduce the clarity still further, she zoomed in on the area of skin between the wrist and the inside of his elbow.

  She could make out a general shape and colour. An organic form wider at the base than the top, in shades of green. She clicked away, back to the PM report, and paged through to the section she wanted.

  Her breath caught in her throat as she looked at the distinguishing marks.

  Tattoos: Naked green female sitting cross-legged, cradling planet earth in front of breasts.

  ‘Hello, Owen Long,’ she whispered.

  A shadow crossed her desk. She looked up from her pad to see Ford waving.

  She took off her headphones. ‘Look.’ She pointed at the figure on her screen.

  Ford screwed up his eyes. ‘Is that Owen Long?’

  She nodded, pleased he’d reached the same conclusion she had. ‘I think it is.’

  ‘Can I?’ Ford asked, coming to stand beside her and staring at the screen.

  She moved her chair back to let him squat in front of her workstation. ‘Press “Control” and “Plus” and zoom in on his left arm,’ she said. ‘I think it’s his Gaia tattoo.’

  Ford did as she instructed. ‘I think you’re right. He’s got a beard, too. Where did Tommy take this? Any idea?’

  ‘That’s my next task. We know when he took it. The time and the date. And if you look at the cathedral, you can just tell it’s the west front. The shadow extends straight out down the midline of the photograph. If we extend it, it will eventually reach the spire.’

  ‘Go on, I’m still just about keeping up.’

  She smiled. She liked the way he listened closely, not butting in with his own ideas or mocking her abilities. ‘I calculated the height and position of the sun in the sky for the time and date of the photo. We can draw a straight line extending out from the cathedral at a 225-degree angle and be reasonably sure that Tommy was somewhere on that line when he took the photo.’

  Ford rubbed his jaw, pleased with where this was going. They were zeroing in on the exact spot where Tommy had witnessed Owen being shot. With a bit of luck, they might find evidence that would identify Gwyneth’s mysterious ‘person’.

  ‘Gwyneth told me they parked at the start of a lane opposite Pentridge Down,’ Ford said. He straightened, patting his pocket for his car keys. ‘Let’s go and find the scene of the crime.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes, now. This is a two-person job and you’re available, which the others aren’t.’

  She felt a squirm of nerves in her stomach. And she labelled it as excitement. Not anxiety, Wix. Excitement. Before she left, she called Ruth Long’s FLO and asked her to confirm whether Owen owned a maroon short-sleeved shirt. She timed the wait using the stopwatch function on her Casio. Two minutes, eleven seconds.

  ‘Yes.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Ford drove out of Salisbury, heading for the Chalke Valley. Beside him, a map open on her knees, Hannah traced her finger along a straight red line she’d drawn just before they left.

  The Discovery entered a long tunnel of trees, through which sunlight speared down in flickering bands of bright and dark.

  ‘Sorry, Henry,’ Hannah said, ‘I have to close my eyes until we’re through these trees.’

  ‘Not good for your Asperger’s?’

  ‘Not good at all. It feels lik
e a swarm of bees in my head.’

  He put his foot down and cleared the final arch of overhead branches, doing eighty.

  ‘You can open them again,’ he said.

  She sighed. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. I think Owen’s GoPro may have had an automatic upload to the Cloud. If we could find his account, could you try getting in?’

  ‘I can try. But I’ve seen his password. A man who takes that much trouble over it won’t have used anything simple to guess. We might be better off approaching GoPro themselves for help.’

  ‘I’ll put Olly on it.’ Ford pointed ahead. ‘Here we go.’

  A road sign pointed left to Pentridge Down and right to Woodyates. Ford indicated right and turned into the side road. It led past some chocolate-box thatched cottages with roses growing round their ancient timbered porticos, and began climbing and narrowing at the same time.

  ‘How are we doing on the red line?’ Ford asked.

  ‘We were veering south of it but we’re going to cross it in about half a mile.’

  Slowing down as the hedges on each side of the narrow lane reduced visibility to fifty yards or less, Ford came round a bend to find a rudimentary crossroads. To the left, a track led into a wheat field. To the right, a metalled road would take them back to Salisbury. Straight ahead, past a white house with a grey slate roof, the lane carried on northwards.

  Hannah looked up from her map. She pointed straight ahead through the windscreen.

  ‘Up there,’ she said.

  Ford motored on, and after a few more minutes they emerged on to a grassy plain offering an uninterrupted view all the way to Salisbury, and the spire.

  In the absence of a lay-by, he simply pulled off the road and parked on a wide grass verge, the Discovery canted at an angle so he had to climb out over the sill. Hannah had to grab the door pillar to avoid falling out.

  ‘Which way?’ he asked.

  Hannah consulted the map, then, shielding her eyes with the folded sheet, pointed off to the right. ‘Thataway!’

  Ford saw a gate, secured with a heavy chain and a padlock. The sign screwed to the bars bore an unequivocal message:

  ALVERCHALKE ESTATE – PRIVATE LAND

  NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  Ford climbed over the gate and waited for Hannah to join him. They set off across a stretch of grassland, pockmarked here and there with cones of crumbly soil.

  ‘What are they?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Molehills,’ Ford said.

  ‘Are you a nature expert, then?’

  He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t say expert. But we used to take Sam on nature rambles. He used to love finding feathers, birds’ eggs, owl pellets. Anything he could take home and display on a table in the garden.’

  ‘Look over there,’ she said. ‘That dead tree.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘The branches remind me of the shadow in Tommy’s photo.’

  Ford looked again. He could see what Hannah meant. They spread out like grasping arms. At some point, lightning had struck the tree and killed it, splitting the massive trunk. It had burned the bark away, too, turning the once-magnificent tree into a bleached skeleton.

  ‘Where are we in relation to the red line?’

  ‘We’re close. The scale’s not large enough and the margin for error in my calculations means this is as precise as we’re going to get. But if we can find the right spot and look back towards the cathedral, we’ll know.’

  ‘It’ll look right?’

  ‘A tree behind us, a hawthorn hedge to our left. A single oak tree in leaf. A hedge falling away on the right.’

  ‘And the spire in the distance.’

  By the time they reached the blasted tree, Ford’s shirt was soaked with sweat. He took off his suit jacket and folded it over his arm. A breeze from the west brought a sweet, sappy smell. He flapped the front of his shirt in and out, enjoying the cool sensation.

  Overhead, on a thermal rising off the hillside, a buzzard wheeled in circles, keening.

  Standing side by side, they faced the tree and looked over their shoulders. The shadow stretched away from them on the grass. In the distance, the spire gleamed in the sun, the same golden hue as in Tommy’s photo. Sheep and cows grazed in the neighbouring fields. For a moment, Ford allowed himself to enjoy the freedom of being out here, away from the forms and the admin and the paperwork.

  Hannah pointed. ‘Look, a hawthorn hedge.’

  ‘Lone oak,’ Ford said, nodding towards a broad-branched tree.

  Ford looked towards the spire. Beside him, he could hear Hannah’s breathing.

  ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘I was right.’

  ‘Were you in any doubt?’ he asked, unused to her expressing anything other than total confidence in her ability to solve problems.

  She shrugged. ‘I had to make more assumptions than I would normally feel comfortable with, but I had no alternative.’

  Ford turned to the tree. ‘I wonder,’ he said.

  He peered inside the hollow trunk. Insects or fungi had eaten the wood and transformed what they hadn’t digested into a thick layer of soft powder resembling ground cinnamon. He saw two footprints of regular diamonds, dots and chevrons. Half-buried in the sawdust, he noticed a couple of cigarette butts.

  Ford saw how it had unfolded. Tommy taking the selfie to send to Gwyneth waiting in the truck. Unknowingly, capturing Owen striding up the hill in the distance. Then clambering into the hollow tree to hide while he scanned the landscape, imagining people betting on which lurcher would catch the unfortunate hare.

  ‘Come and look,’ Ford said. ‘I think Tommy sat in here.’

  Hannah joined him and peered in, then started taking photos with her phone. When she’d finished, she took a clear plastic evidence bag and a pair of tweezers out of her pocket and collected the butts.

  ‘Why bother hiding?’ she asked. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘You saw the sign. This is private land, and he had hare-coursing in mind. Trespass is a civil tort. But coursing’s a criminal offence. He wanted cover for his recce.’ Ford frowned. ‘Do we know where Lord Baverstock plans to build that housing development?’

  Hannah nodded. She pointed back the way they’d come. ‘You know that white house we passed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you’d turned right at the crossroads and gone on for another mile, you’d have arrived in the centre of the plan.’

  ‘I wonder why Owen didn’t make his film there, then. Why come up here?’

  ‘Better backdrop? Or he filmed it there and came on up here to get some footage of the unspoiled version. It doesn’t matter, though, does it? The point is, the evidence puts Tommy and Owen within feet of each other at the exact same time.’

  Ford nodded. He’d leaped beyond the evidence, where Hannah felt most comfortable, and into the realm of the imagination, where he knew she struggled. Because they could also put the shooter there, couldn’t they? Tommy watched Owen get shot by someone he knew. He waited until the coast was clear and then he went back – ran, probably – to his truck and told Gwyneth about the golden ‘effing’ ticket.

  Ford pictured a confrontation. Owen ranting against Lord Baverstock’s ‘unbridled rapacity’ or some such high-flown phrase. Hibberd turning up, outraged at the trespass. Telling Owen to clear off. Owen refusing, probably asserting that he was following a higher calling, or obeying a greater authority. Hibberd unshouldering the .22 and threatening Owen, maybe at that point not intending to shoot.

  He closed his eyes and the scene became real. After watching so many of Owen’s videos, he could hear the man’s accent and distinctive phrasing.

  Owen is unfazed by the gun. He laughs at Hibberd. ‘What are you going to do, shoot me?’

  ‘I could. You’re trespassing. Who’s to say you didn’t attack me?’

  Owen spreads his arms wide. ‘You’re right. Nobody her
e but us chickens. But our sins find us out, you know. My life is as nothing compared to the great interconnected world that is Gaia.’

  Then he surprises Hibberd by going for the gun. Probably planning some dramatic move like throwing it as far as he can, into the hedge. Or over it, with a bit of luck.

  The two men tussle over the rifle.

  Hibberd is by far the stronger of the two. He’s an ex-soldier up against an ex-vicar. He yanks it back. The gun goes off with the muzzle jammed under Owen’s chin. He falls dead at Hibberd’s feet. Hibberd panics, but only for a second. He runs back and fetches his Land Rover. Drags the body into the load bay and hurtles away. Under cover of night he dumps the corpse into a deep part of the Ebble, not knowing the storm surge will ruin his plan.

  Hannah’s voice broke into the vision. Ford opened his eyes to see her looking at him, not with impatience, merely curiosity, as if studying a new species of rural wildlife.

  ‘Should we get back to Bourne Hill now?’ she asked. ‘I have a lot of work to do. And I think we should put a rush on DNA profiles from those cigarette butts.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Ford said.

  On the walk back to the car he reminded himself not to get fixated on Hibberd. Plenty of other people on the estate had access to firearms. Not least the aristocratic family with the silly boarding-school nicknames. Maybe it was time to pay them another visit. He could talk to Stephen. He’d probably been the least visible of the quartet.

  Ford’s first mentor on the force, a whip-thin DS with a mind as sharp as his features, had told him on his first day as a DC, ‘People don’t like the idea of it, but being a good copper is all about being nosey. Never be afraid to stick yours in where it isn’t wanted.’

  He dropped Hannah off at Bourne Hill, then turned the Discovery round again and drove out to Alverchalke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  On arrival, Ford was told that Stephen was out shooting. The maid gave him directions and, ten minutes later, heart pounding from the climb through woodland, he emerged on to a wide grassy avenue flanked by towering oaks, elms and cedars.