Shallow Ground (Detective Ford) Read online

  ‘Call her Angie. Please. She hated being called Angela. Said it reminded her of Mum.’

  ‘Sorry. I need to build up a picture of Angie as a person. The people she knew. Who she worked with, socialised with. Who she confided in. Did she have any enemies? People who might have wished her harm?’

  Cherry dragged the tissue across her eyes, reducing it to a soggy, frayed scrap. He offered a fresh one from a packet in his jacket pocket.

  ‘I need to think. Oh, God, what do I do about the funerals? There’s so much I don’t know.’

  Like, how do you tell your relatives? How do you stop yourself weeping through her funeral? Beating your fists against your father-in-law’s black-suited chest and sobbing uncontrollably as he pats your heaving back? There’ll a grief counsellor. But you can’t tell her why you’re so fucked up. You’d go to prison. Sam would grow up an orphan. Work’s good, though. Work’s always there for you. You can forget about your grief if you keep working.

  ‘I’m going to assign a family liaison officer to you,’ he said quietly. ‘She’ll help you get through this, Cherry, I promise. But I need you to know that we won’t be able to release the bodies until all our tests are done and we have all the evidence we can find from’ – from their bodies, from their dead bodies, don’t say it – ‘a careful examination.’

  She’d passed from the heightened emotion he’d seen so many times before into a passive state. She looked at him, but her eyes barely focused. She twisted and picked at the second tissue until it was a pile of damp shreds on the table in front of her.

  She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have to go. I’m sorry.’

  He handed her his card and repeated the mantra about getting in touch with information, however insignificant it might seem.

  Back at Bourne Hill, Ford passed his own office and headed for its neighbour, bigger by a factor of two and with much better furniture. Time to inform the big boss: Detective Superintendent Sandra Monroe. He knocked and entered.

  DAY TWO, NOON

  The woman behind the desk looked up from a phone. She pushed her ash-blonde hair out of her eyes. ‘Henry! What news from the frontline?’

  ‘Double homicide. Bad.’

  ‘And when you say “bad”. . . ?’

  ‘Mother and child. Posed together in a lake of her blood. The number 666 daubed on the wall in blood. No robbery. No sexual violence. No witnesses.’

  Sandy said nothing at first. Ford waited. He knew what she was doing. Running through the scenarios that could affect the progress of the case, from investigative to legal to public relations. The higher up the ladder you went, the more politics you had to worry about.

  ‘We’ll issue a basic press release. No conference yet,’ she said. ‘If you can catch him inside a week, we won’t have a media circus on our hands.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Anything you need?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m good.’

  ‘That’s my boy. Because my budget’s enough to pay your wages and toner for the printers, and that’s about it.’

  Ford gathered his team together in a conference room. And now, surrounded by cops rather than dead bodies and blood-gorged flies, on his home turf, he felt the nerves kick in good and proper. His guts squirmed.

  He surveyed the officers and police staff sitting round the U-shaped table. His ‘inner circle’ in particular.

  To his left sat Jan Derwent, a steady detective sergeant with fifteen years in. Her moans about her big-hipped figure and her habit of bringing in home-baked cakes were, Ford felt, somewhat at odds with each other. Jan was the team’s POLSA – police search adviser. She’d earned the team’s admiration when she’d uncovered a Yorkie bar missing from another officer’s lunchbox in Mick Tanner’s desk.

  Mick was his second DS, by his own admission ‘an old-school copper’. He’d joined the police straight from school. At thirty-eight, Mick had built up an impressive network among the city’s criminals, along with a physique honed by many hours in the gym. During a recent red-faced rant on the topic of compulsory diversity-awareness training, Jools had quipped that Mick’s black goatee and shaved head made him look like ‘a bald Satan’.

  His two detective constables were on the way to making a decent team, if they could channel their professional rivalry into policework and not undermining each other. Julie ‘Jools’ Harper had, after boarding school in Salisbury, followed her father and grandfather into the army and spent her last three years as an MP in the Criminal Investigation Branch. With her slight but muscular runner’s build, pixie-cut red hair and flashing emerald-green eyes, she resembled a feisty elf; the kind who would follow the evidence, build a case, interview suspects and make arrests with a single-minded determination born of a lifetime’s adherence to rules.

  Completing the quartet was Olly Cable, a fast-track boy with a degree in criminology. At twenty-four, he was five years Jools’s junior. He still had to learn the difference between knowing something and letting everyone else know he knew it. Olly had rowed at university and carried his six-foot frame well, clothing it in designer suits, and wore his dark hair in a fashionable forties look. Ford had noticed him bestowing longing glances on Jools when he thought he was unobserved.

  Until recently, Ford would have been sitting among them, a DS like Jan and Mick. Then he’d got the coveted DI’s post after the previous holder left for the Met. Overnight, those comfortable, banter-filled relationships changed. Not least with Mick, who’d made no secret of the fact he’d felt the job was his by right.

  ‘Mine for the asking, Henry,’ he’d crowed, just before Sandy had made the formal announcement a month earlier. Sandy had already given Ford the good news the previous evening, shaking his hand then enveloping him in a tight hug.

  Some who’d been on the receiving end of a ‘Monroe Special’ alleged they were the reason for her nickname: the Python. Frowned upon by HR, no doubt, but a sign she’d accepted you. Others swore blind it was her habit, when a front-line copper, of squeezing the truth out of suspects in muscular coils of evidence, forensic questioning and, when all else failed, a good old-fashioned dose of intimidation.

  Was she in tune with the times? Nobody would accuse her of that. Was she a gold medallist in bringing villains to justice? Guilty as charged.

  And now, here he was, about to lead his own team into battle in their first major case since he’d taken over. The inner circle, the police staff investigators and CSIs, the uniforms. He looked at each of them in turn, waited for complete silence.

  ‘Angela Halpern. Known from now on as Angie. And Kai Halpern, her son. Angie was a single mum. A widow. Murdered sometime in the last forty-eight hours.’

  ‘COD, guv?’ Jan asked, prodding her heavy-framed glasses higher on her nose.

  ‘While we wait for the PM report, it’s all conjecture, but it looks as though Angie was throttled, and Kai – well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘No obvious signs of violence, so poison? Doc Eustace will tell us.’

  ‘What about the scene?’ Mick asked.

  ‘The primary scene was a bloodbath. She bled out. And someone – the killer, we assume – wrote the number 666 on the wall in blood.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Mick said with feeling, running a palm over his shaved skull.

  ‘Satanic murderer hits Salisbury!’ one of the police staff investigators called out.

  Ford waited until the banter evaporated under his stern gaze. He turned to the left side of the table. ‘Jan, I want you to set up a search. The house, obviously – all three flats – then, what, a fifty-metre perimeter?’

  She nodded and made a note. ‘Should be about right. Anything you want me to look for in particular?’

  ‘There was a lot of blood. Gallons of the stuff. If he got away without leaving some sort of trail, I’d be amazed.’

  ‘Lose your breakfast again, did you, guv?’ Mick muttered, just loud enough for Jan to hear.

  ‘Leave it, Mick,’ she hissed. ‘You know
what today is.’

  ‘Joke.’

  ‘Right. So, blood drops, footprints or partials?’ Jan asked.

  ‘Exactly. Other than that, the usual,’ Ford said, offering her a small smile of gratitude. ‘I’d like to recover whatever he used to wound her, too. The murder weapon might be his bare hands, but he must have used some sort of edged or pointed weapon to bleed her out as well.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, Olly.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, but you keep saying “he”. Shouldn’t we be a bit more open to the idea of a female killer?’

  Ford caught Mick Tanner’s eye-roll. ‘Let’s settle on “they” for now. Now, what about motives-slash-lines of enquiry?’

  ‘Robbery gone wrong?’ Jan asked.

  ‘Nothing taken. Next?’

  ‘Jealous partner?’ This from Mick.

  ‘Husband’s deceased, but we’ll check for boyfriends. Next?’

  ‘Stalker,’ a civilian investigator suggested.

  ‘Possible. Can you look into that, please? Anything else?’

  ‘Work colleague with a grudge?’ Olly offered.

  ‘Seems a bit over the top for a professional rivalry, but yes, possible.’

  ‘What if the woman was only collateral damage?’ Nat, standing at the back of the room, asked.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We’re all talking about Angie. Her ex, her stalker, her colleagues. What if the killer was interested in Kai?’

  Ford frowned. Please don’t let it be a child killer.

  ‘That’s an interesting idea, Nat. Let’s look at all the nonces in our patch with convictions for violence as well as their usual scumbaggery.’

  ‘Sir?’ It was Olly again. ‘Aren’t we all avoiding the obvious?’

  Ford sighed. Bloody graduate fast-trackers. ‘Which is?’

  ‘Stranger murder.’

  ‘They’re very rare. But then, so are murder scenes like ours. How do you explain the lack of evidence of forced entry or defensive wounds on Angie Halpern’s body? Wouldn’t she try to fight off a stranger?’

  Olly frowned. ‘He rings the doorbell and gives her a line. Something to make her trust him. Then he bashes her over the head to subdue her so he can bleed her out.’

  ‘Olly could have a point, boss,’ Mick said. ‘After all, she’s hardly going to let a stalker in, is she?’

  ‘I don’t think a woman living on her own would let a stranger into her home just on the strength of a line,’ Jan said, making air-quotes around the final word. ‘Especially not if her little boy was in the flat with her.’

  ‘Fine,’ Mick said. ‘Say she knows him, then. Maybe not well. But enough to trust him. He’s not a threat, so she lets him in.’

  Ford decided it was time to refocus the discussion. ‘What about the blood?’ he asked the room. ‘It’s obviously not just a by-product of an attack. Angie and Kai were posed. No violence to the bodies, beyond the obvious. Does blood mean something to our killer? Let me hear your ideas. Word association. Blood.’

  ‘Horror films,’ Jools said.

  ‘Menstruation, childbirth,’ Jan said, to a groan from Mick Tanner.

  ‘Do we have to?’ he complained.

  She glared at him. ‘You’ve got a female victim, a mother, posed with her child. You saw the photos. She had her trousers pulled down and Kai’s curled into her lap like a foetus. If that doesn’t say her gender mattered, you need to think harder.’

  ‘A&E,’ Nat said. ‘We’ve all been up there in our careers. Place is awash with it. My youngest cut his hand on a new penknife last year. I took him up there with blood leaking all over my new upholstery.’

  ‘Those LA gangs, Bloods and Crips,’ someone added.

  Then the flood gates opened.

  ‘The bucket of blood in Carrie.’

  ‘Haemophilia.’

  ‘Rambo First Blood.’

  ‘Dracula.’

  ‘My Bloody Valentine.’

  Ford held his hands up for quiet. ‘Well, well. I didn’t realise what a creatively out-there team I had. Well done, everyone. That was illuminating. Not sure where it gets us at the moment, but keep in mind that the blood probably means something to our killer.’ He started gathering his papers together. ‘Assignments. Jan, you’re sorted. Mick, can you take Olly and start looking into Angie’s background? Jools, I want you to run a search on the PNC, HOLMES, all the usual databases for murders and/or violent assaults where blood played a role over and above the usual spillage. I want reader/recorders for all the data we pull in.’

  Ford hated the alphabet soup of acronyms spawned by modern policing. PNC, the Police National Computer, wasn’t too bad. But he reckoned whoever had thought up HOLMES – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – should be shot.

  ‘Sir?’

  Ford bit back a sigh. ‘Olly, yes.’

  ‘What about a psychologist? You said we shouldn’t focus on the weirdness, but the number painted in blood and everything. I mean, shouldn’t we call in a psychologist or a profiler?’

  ‘No. I’m not going to waste money on some minor-league academic out to make a name for themselves. They’ll charge a fortune then tell me what my gut does ten times better and for nothing. And it’s the easiest thing in the world to dip up some blood and do a little bit of finger painting. If I’d just killed my wife’ – he swallowed, and continued – ‘and I wanted to throw the cops off my scent, I’d give it a go.’

  Olly folded his arms across his chest and looked away.

  ‘When’s the PM, boss?’ Jan asked as people started shuffling papers together and leaving their seats.

  ‘Tomorrow morning. I’ll grab a few of you to attend with me. Thanks, everybody.’

  The meeting broke up with much chatter as the teams discussed their assignments.

  ‘Do you want me to have a word with Olly?’ Jan asked from beside Ford.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You were a bit sharp with the lad. He’s only being keen.’

  ‘He’ll be fine. Just needs to learn to walk before he can run. Like we all did.’

  She smiled. ‘I know, boss. But I could just . . .’ She paused. ‘. . . fill him in on why you’re extra-moody today.’

  ‘Because of Lou, you mean?’ Ford asked in a low, hard-edged voice. ‘Is that what you’re driving at?’

  She held his gaze. ‘I’ve known you how long, boss?’

  ‘Eight years.’

  ‘Nine. I was here when it happened,’ she said. ‘Maybe you don’t remember, but I took you home a couple of times after you’d had a few too many at the Wyndham Arms. Made sure Sam was staying with your neighbours.’

  He frowned. Of course he remembered. ‘What’s your point, Jan?’

  ‘My point is that you need to forgive yourself.’

  His heart flipped. A wave of nausea rolled through him. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s called survivor guilt. I read a book about it. You weren’t to blame, but you feel you were because you lived and Lou – well, Lou died. And you can be a bit hard to be around on the anniversary.’

  He forced himself to smile. Felt the muscles and ligaments in his jaws creaking. ‘I’m OK. Really. But don’t talk to Olly. If I’m the worst boss he ever has, he’ll look back on this time with great fondness.’

  Jan shrugged. ‘You’re the guv’nor.’

  She left him alone in the meeting room.

  Ford checked his watch. Four hours gone out of the magic twenty-four, the so-called ‘golden hour’. Nobody knew when inflation had turned one hour into twenty-four. He had a sneaking feeling this one wasn’t going to be filed in the ‘Solved inside a day’ file, where the vast majority of brawl-based homicides and domestics resided.

  THREE WEEKS EARLIER

  Is there a God? he wonders, smiling, as he squats in the crook of two thick tree branches. Because if He does exist, He must have a soft spot for me.

  His pleasure stems from his discovery that his chosen victim lives in the middle of nowhere. Some sort of e
co-cottage on the edge of a farm. It squats between a bramble-choked copse and a boggy field cut in two by a fast-flowing river.

  He is hyper-alert, senses fine-tuned. A crow hops towards a greyish-cream clump in the middle distance he suspects is a dead sheep. Stink from muck-spreading in a field three over drifts on the breeze. The bark is rough against his skin. Then he catches sight of his quarry through the lenses of his binoculars, and everything else fades away.

  Marcus will be his first human. But he’s not inexperienced. Far from it. The cats will testify to that. And the rabbits, the badger and the lamb he stole from under its mother’s nose in the depths of the night. But this is different. This is for the project.

  Marcus strolls towards the cottage, swishing at the long grass with a stick. He resembles a tramp, in an old army jumper and greasy-looking jeans. He’s tied his long, raggedy blond hair into disgusting tangled lumpy strings. What do they call them? Dreads?

  Well, Marcus, my boy, you’ll have a lot of dreading to do when you meet me for the first time.

  He waits for the tree-hugger to go inside, then climbs down, straightens his jacket and saunters over to the door.

  He pastes that dopey smile on to his face, the one that charms the old dears up at the hospital, and he knocks. Three times.

  The door opens. Marcus smiles at him. Stupid, trusting human beings.

  ‘Hi, Marcus. My name’s Harvey. From the food bank. May I come in?’

  DAY TWO, 6.30 P.M.

  Ford finished updating his policy book and grabbed his car keys. On the way out to the car park, a shout made him turn round. Hannah was hurrying towards him.

  ‘DI Ford, wait!’

  He waited for her to reach him.

  ‘Can I speak to you, please?’

  ‘What is it?’

  She was twisting the ring around her finger again. ‘When DS Cable asked about psychologists in the briefing, you dismissed the idea.’

  ‘Only because it’s unnecessary. The young ones always want to go outside for profilers at the merest sniff of something unusual, instead of doing proper coppering.’