Shallow Ground (Detective Ford) Read online

  ‘I conducted a cursory examination first thing this morning. No BFT. No cuts. No signs of strangulation. You’d think he’d just gone to sleep, except—’

  ‘Except for what?’

  ‘Except for a needle prick on the left side of his neck.’

  ‘Another trocar?’ Jools asked.

  Georgina shook her head. ‘Regular hypodermic. I’ve sent a blood sample to toxicology.’

  ‘When will you know what it was?’

  ‘I fast-tracked it. Tomorrow?’

  ‘Excellent. Thanks, George.’

  They watched the rest of the PM, but Ford’s mind was already wandering. Away from the sterile confines of the autopsy suite and on towards the next couple of days. Because whether the killer was sane or not, he was a rat gnawing at Ford’s insides. And Ford was starting to suspect he’d have another body on his hands if he didn’t move fast.

  SPRING, THIRTY YEARS EARLIER

  His father towers over him, a rugby ball in one massive hand, his florid face a snarling mask of hatred.

  ‘I’d rather go for a walk, Daddy,’ the big man simpers, in cruel mimicry of his young son’s voice. ‘’Course you would. The idea you might, actually, want to do something manly . . . Jesus! You’re worthless, aren’t you? I can’t believe my blood runs in your veins.’

  The boy knows what’s coming and so he steels himself for the tirade. Maybe he can say something to pacify the ogre in front of him.

  ‘We could go for a walk in the countryside together, if you’d like?’

  ‘What, and bring back some disgusting roadkill like you did last time? I think not. You know, if Luke had lived, if he’d been born and you’d died in your mother’s belly, I bet I’d be out there now, cheering him on at a match, instead of this, this . . . charade of fatherhood.’

  Without warning, his father backhands him across the face. It’s his favourite blow. The chunky gold signet ring catches him on the lower lip, as it has so many times before. A spray of blood jets out and hits the wall.

  The taste of his own blood – salty, coppery – is as familiar to him as his morning cereal. He glares up at his father. One day, Dad.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, you little poofter!’ his father shouts. ‘You can go crying to your mummy, but you clean up that mess first,’ he adds, jabbing a thick finger at the arc of scarlet spattering the bedroom wallpaper.

  Later, when he can hear his father’s drunken snores, he retrieves his sketchbook from under his mattress. He opens his box of ninety-six Caran d’Ache coloured pencils – a present from Granny and Grandpa – and frowns. The reds are always so much shorter than the others.

  As he colours in the splashes and streams, the spots and the spatters, he thinks of his dead twin.

  He turns the pages, looking for a clean sheet. Past a dead rabbit, guts spread out like butterfly wings each side of the torso. A deer, missing its eyes. A man, dismembered, legs where arms should be, arms splayed from the pelvis. Red. Always lots of red. He smiles, turns over the page, and begins a fresh image.

  A quiet double knock at the door jerks him out of his reverie. He snaps the sketchbook shut just in time. His mother twists the knob and enters, a shy mouse compared to her roaring lion of a husband.

  She purses her lips when she sees his swollen, scabbed lip.

  ‘Did Daddy lose his temper with you again?’ she asks, kneeling beside him.

  ‘Yes, Mummy. I wish he was dead.’

  ‘Oh, no, darling! Never say that. Not ever. Daddy is a good man. He does love you.’ She pauses. ‘In his own way. But losing Luke, it made him so very unhappy. We both have to try to understand him. Poor Daddy.’

  Then she encircles him and draws him close. But while he stays inside her protective embrace, all he’s thinking is, When you’re gone, I will kill him. I promise. Even if it takes the rest of my life. I’ll make him watch his own blood leaking away.

  DAY THREE, 2.55 P.M.

  Ford had been right, Hannah mused. Forensics was quiet. Which was just how she liked it. She could manage an hour or so in the noise and hubbub of the CID office. Or outside of work, in a busy pub with a friend. But eventually it all got too much and she needed to find somewhere quiet to recharge her batteries.

  Here, though, in her corner of the office, noise-cancelling headphones clamped over her ears, the overhead fluorescent tubes removed in favour of an Anglepoise lamp on her desk, she could focus. And focusing was her superpower.

  The pathologist had sent over a sample she’d recovered from the woman’s body. Hannah took a scalpel and slit the red tape sealing the transparent plastic evidence bag. Using a pair of slender tweezers with angled tips, she picked the tiny scrap of material from the corner of the bag and mounted it on a slide.

  For larger items of physical evidence, like this one, she liked to begin with a hand-magnifier before going to the microscope. Sometimes that was all she needed. And it was a bit like Sherlock Holmes, so obviously that was good.

  ‘Elementary, my dear Ford,’ she whispered, as she bent her head to the fat circle of precision-ground glass.

  She found herself looking at an irregular corrugated fragment of turquoise paper, tinged red across one half, and measuring, according to a transparent plastic ruler she placed next to it, six millimetres by two.

  Using the scalpel tip and the tweezers, she stretched the fragment out flat. The lower half of a set of characters became visible: printed characters, white out of the turquoise. She copied them on to a sheet of paper.

  ‘It’s a postcode,’ she said, before sketching in the upper halves. ‘SE1 9SG.’

  She swivelled round to her PC and tapped it into Google. Nothing meaningful. Just a list of sites offering postcode look-ups. She tutted and tweaked her search terms.

  Companies in SE1 9SG

  She scanned the first page of results and smiled as the underlying turquoise beneath the blood stain fired the connection in her brain. ‘Heinz!’ she said. ‘You hit her with a tin of baked beans.’

  She liked the fact that here, in the quiet, ordered calm of Forensics, nobody said mean things when she talked to herself. Everybody did it.

  She took a cotton bud, dipped the end in distilled water and lifted a sample from the paper. She put it into a second evidence bag and sealed it, writing, Halpern, A, Blood sample from PM head wound fragment, and a computer-generated reference number on the label.

  Alec Reid wandered over. ‘Find something interesting, Hannah?’

  She looked up, pleased that he was standing one metre back from her chair. ‘I think she was knocked out with a Heinz baked-bean tin.’

  ‘I dare say Henry would be interested to know what you’ve discovered.’

  She frowned. ‘You “dare”? Are you worried, then?’

  He smiled. ‘It’s just my way of saying I think you should go and tell him.’

  ‘OK. Then I will.’

  Ford looked up from his screen to see Hannah striding across the room towards his door. Whether he’d sensed her or whether it was simply that her distinctive gait sounded different to anyone else’s, he didn’t have time to consider further. She walked into his office without knocking. He didn’t mind in the least, but it showed a certain level of confidence from the new girl.

  ‘I’ve got two pieces of evidence for you.’ She paused. ‘Henry.’

  She laid the bags before him, like a cat depositing a dead mouse in front of her owner.

  He peered at them. ‘What have we got?’

  ‘That’s a fragment of the label from a tin of Heinz baked beans. That’s a sample of the blood it’s soaked in: Angie’s. We have the weapon used to stun her.’

  He smiled up at her. ‘That’s excellent, Hannah, really good. Listen, I’m a bit short-handed here, everyone’s out. Could you get over to the crime scene and see if you can find any tins of Heinz beans? Bring them all back here. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a print.’

  Grinning, she nodded, and about-turned.

  Ford return
ed to the question that he wanted answering next. The sex of the killer. Ford’s every instinct said the killer was male. The odds on this being a female attacker were tiny. An amelogenin test on a DNA sample would confirm it, but until then he’d content himself with his hunch.

  In a notebook he wrote:

  Suspect profile

  Likely male, or muscular/strong female. (If female, cross-fit/bodybuilder/athlete?)

  At some point he would be drawing up a suspect matrix and assigning priority scores. He’d score women low unless they fitted this new criterion.

  Later that afternoon, he gathered the team together for a progress meeting. He’d put Olly Cable on victimology – compiling a detailed profile of Angie: her work, hobbies, clubs, where she went grocery shopping, her spending habits, medical history, past relationships . . . the works. It was to him he turned first.

  ‘Olly, tell us about Angie.’

  Olly lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. ‘We’re just starting out, but so far what emerges is a solid, hard-working single mum whom the neighbours all liked. Kept herself to herself, mainly on account of having Kai to look after.’

  ‘Anything stand out?’ Ford interrupted, not wanting a straight recitation of something they could all read for themselves.

  ‘The neighbour—’

  ‘The Gregorys?’

  ‘No, the ground-floor flat.’ Olly consulted his notebook. ‘A Mr Angus Fairford. Freelance IT worker. Said Angie had money worries. We’re waiting for her financial records to come in.’

  ‘Maybe she was borrowing off a loan shark,’ Mick said. ‘Got behind on her payments. He decides to make an example to put the frighteners on his other clients. Maybe he goes too far, panics, kills the kid.’

  Ford nodded. ‘Good. We’ll call that a line of enquiry. Check on the local nominals. See if anyone’s been throwing their weight around. Maybe even newcomers trying to muscle in.’

  ‘Any boyfriends?’ Jan asked. ‘Maybe the downstairs neighbours heard rows, stuff being thrown around?’

  Olly shook his head. ‘I talked to the Gregorys. They said, apart from Kai having the odd paddy, they were so quiet you wouldn’t have known they were there.’

  Ford surveyed his team. It was early days. Maybe not the golden hour any more, but everyone still had that sharp-eyed, eager look about them. He knew it wouldn’t last for ever. Time to broach the subject that was sitting like an uninvited guest in the corner.

  ‘Let’s speculate about the idea of a stranger murder,’ he said, glancing at Olly, who nodded back. ‘He gains entry using subterfuge. Tells her he’s from the gas company, or whatever. He’s plausible, charming, self-effacing, he makes himself appear unthreatening. And she invites him in. Jools?’

  The DC sat up straighter. ‘Right. It’s a stranger murder. But not like in a fight or a random street attack when the pubs close. I think he chose her. Her specifically – otherwise, why take the risk of going to her flat and encountering potential witnesses inside?’

  Ford nodded. It was good thinking, and once again demonstrated Jools’s background in the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Military Police. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The question we need to answer is, why did the killer choose Angie Halpern? And did he also choose Kai? Or was he just’ – she shrugged and pulled a face – ‘having fun?’

  ‘Why did he choose her, then?’ Ford asked the room as a whole.

  ‘She turned him on,’ Mick said. ‘He’s got a thing for petite blondes.’

  ‘No sexual assault, Mick, remember?’ Jan said.

  Mick thrust his jaw out. ‘He could still’ve had a thing for her type. He just wants to, I don’t know, possess them.’

  ‘The scene didn’t look like a sexual fantasy to me,’ Hannah said.

  Ford noticed her blush as the rest of the team looked round. ‘Because?’ he prompted.

  ‘Although her trousers were pulled down, her breasts and genitals were covered. And not mutilated, as we saw at the post-mortem. No bite marks. No semen or other bodily fluids found at the scene in any of the obvious places. Her underwear drawer, her bed, her body. But—’

  ‘She could still—’ Mick interrupted.

  ‘—the main reason I say this is the positioning of Kai. He was sitting in her lap, hands tucked up under his chin, head turned in towards her chest. To me it was a tableau of motherhood. Caring motherhood.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Mick asked her, turning fully round in his chair to face her head-on. ‘We’ve got a killer with mummy issues?’

  ‘I’m saying it doesn’t look sexual, as I think I said a moment ago.’ Hannah, though pink to the tips of her ears, held her ground.

  Ford was impressed. ‘I’m with Hannah. I don’t see sex as the motive. I think it’s the blood.’

  ‘You think he’s drinking it, boss?’

  The questioner was a retired general CID detective sergeant with thirty years under his belt and a new job as a police staff investigator.

  Over brief banter about vampires, Ford said, ‘I hope to God not.’

  ‘You don’t need to hope to God,’ Hannah said. ‘Ingesting more than a few millilitres of blood produces an emetic reaction.’

  ‘You’re saying he’d vomit,’ Ford said.

  ‘It’s the combination of the iron-rich haemoglobin, the warmth, the salt and the viscosity. It also leads to kidney failure.’

  ‘So any more than that—’

  ‘—would be far too much to keep down. I took a random sampling at twenty spots in the pool. No saliva. And no vomit at the scene.’

  Ford ran a palm down from his forehead to his chin. He groaned. ‘Great. Not sex. Not robbery. No sign of a stalker-ex. No vampirism. Fine. Let’s forget motive for the moment. I want us to be all over her life tomorrow. Interviewing friends, former partners if we can find any, people she worked with up at the hospital, any volunteering she did. I want a suspect pool.’ Before he does it again.

  He gave out actions, listened to reports from each team, then dismissed them with an instruction to remember to eat and to get some sleep when they went home. He saw a long evening at his desk stretching ahead of him. Possibly a night, too. He had to make a call before he resumed working. To his neighbours.

  Miles and Eleanor Pitt were good people – and their son and his were best friends. Sam often stayed over with Josh. But he didn’t want to have to explain the situation on the phone. Not to a civilian. He texted Miles instead.

  Can Sam stay with you guys tonight, pls?

  A few minutes later, the reply pinged back.

  Of course, mate. Take care.

  K. Thanks.

  He texted Sam.

  Working late. Tea at the Pitts and a bed, too.

  Ping.

  K

  An hour later, his concentration waning, Ford was relieved to see Hannah standing at his open door.

  ‘You’re working late.’

  He spread his arms out to indicate the mass of papers on his desk. ‘It would seem so.’

  ‘I was thinking about Kai Halpern.’

  He beckoned her in. ‘What about him?’

  ‘The way the killer posed him says that whatever motivated him to kill Angie didn’t translate to Kai,’ she said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The bludgeoning, the strangling: they say the killer was angry at her. Angry enough to kill her, even though he probably didn’t know her.’ She pushed a stray strand of hair back behind her ear. ‘But he took care to arrange Kai so he looked peaceful and cared for. Protected.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, you could be looking for a man who felt unloved as a child. It’s no good for profiling,’ she added hurriedly. ‘But when you arrest a suspect, it could be useful in your interviews.’

  Ford nodded. ‘Did your parents shout at you? Call you names? That sort of thing?’

  ‘Exactly. Childhood abuse often figures in the psychopathology of murderers.’

  Something told him the young woman
sitting opposite him was wasted in Forensics. ‘That’s really interesting thinking. Thank you. Any news on the physical evidence?’

  ‘I’m starting on the fingerprints next. We retrieved a couple from the grocery items on the table. I’ll let you know what we get as soon as I possibly can.’ Hannah turned to go.

  ‘Wait! I’ve been thinking about trophies. What do you think about the idea that he took a photo of the scene? It was so carefully staged, he’d feel it was a waste never to see it again, don’t you think?’

  ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ she said. ‘We know men tend to be visually orientated, sexually, so although he didn’t carry out any sexual activities at the crime scene, he may be using the photo, or photos, as masturbation aids.’ And with that, she left.

  DAY FOUR, 3.15 A.M.

  Matty checked the time. Three fifteen. Perfect. He approached the old woman’s bed. He knew her name. June Evans. He knew all their names. He made a point of it. They loved him for it.

  June was asleep. Her dementia had worsened since she’d come in for her surgery, and now she didn’t know where she was half the time. Which, in some ways, was a blessing. For Matty, anyway.

  He looked around the darkened ward. The only nurse on duty, Marisol, was nowhere to be seen. He bent over June and felt under the covers for her left wrist. Found it, as thin as a bird’s leg. He could break the fragile bones like that!

  The gold bangle was warm, from her blood, he supposed. It was loose around her bones and he had no trouble slipping it off. Just as he pocketed it, she awoke and screamed.

  ‘Help, I’m being murdered!’

  Matty’s heart jumped into his throat, and he patted her as she sat bolt upright in bed. Around them, her neighbours were waking or turning over in their sleep, asking what was wrong, then, seeing it was June, tutting or sighing and flopping back down again.

  ‘Nobody’s trying to murder you, Mrs Evans,’ he crooned. ‘You had a nightmare, that’s all. Look, it’s Matty.’

  She held a thin arm up, the veins blue under the papery, liver-spotted skin. ‘My bracelet. He stole it!’ she said, quieter now.