Land Rites (Detective Ford) Page 8

‘Mine’s in for a repair. This belongs to His Lordship. I use it from time to time. He doesn’t mind as long as I put it back after I’ve finished with it.’

  ‘One last question. Do you look after Lord Baverstock’s guns as well as your own?’

  ‘Not just his. The whole family’s.’

  ‘What calibre weapons do they own?’

  ‘What calibre?’

  ‘Yes. You know, it means—’

  ‘I know what it means,’ Hibberd snapped. ‘Shotguns in 12 and 20 gauge. Couple of four-tens from when the children were little. A few more .22 vermin guns like this one,’ he said, holding up the rifle. ‘His Lordship’s got a Sako .243 rifle and an old Springfield Arms .30-06. Off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you all of them.’

  ‘Any .308s?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Just curious.’

  Ford wrapped up the interview with a polite request that Hibberd make himself available if Ford needed to talk to him again.

  He drove away thinking about the family who lived at Alverchalke Manor. Stephen in particular. The man had practically crowed over Tommy’s murder. Could he have been involved? His father had shut him down pretty effectively. Was that a sign of anxiety that he was about to incriminate himself?

  And what of Lord Baverstock himself? Another military man. And the employer of a gamekeeper who’d come off worst in a scrap with Tommy. Guns and grievances made terrible bedfellows. This family had both in abundance.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jools and Hannah were the only customers in Berret & Sartain Gunsmiths. The shop smelled pleasantly of leather, wet dog and gun oil. Jools spent a few minutes looking at the racks of shotguns and rifles while they waited for a member of staff to appear.

  ‘Can I help you, ladies?’

  Jools turned to see a guy in his mid-twenties, wearing a buttercup-yellow bow tie above a patterned waistcoat. His close-set eyes were magnified behind thick-lensed horn-rimmed glasses. He wore his hair in a style she associated with the 1940s matinee idols her gran used to love watching before dementia claimed her.

  She approached the scratched glass-topped counter and showed him her ID. Hannah stood beside her, the bagged bullet secure inside a rucksack over her shoulder. She’d confirmed George’s hunch about the calibre the previous day in her preliminary analysis.

  ‘We’re investigating a murder,’ Jools said. ‘The victim was shot with a .308 expanding bullet. We think it was a ballistic tip. If we showed it to you, could you tell us anything about it?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said, pushing his glasses higher up his nose.

  Hannah brought out the small red-taped evidence bag containing the bullet and laid it on the counter.

  ‘Please, only hold the bag by the taped end,’ she said hurriedly as he reached for it. ‘Don’t put any pressure at all on the bullet itself.’

  He did as she asked, holding the bag close to his eyes.

  ‘Definitely a ballistic tip,’ he pronounced. ‘Hollow points have regular petals. These are ragged and uneven in size.’

  ‘Exactly! It’s because hollow points are pre-grooved,’ Hannah said to him excitedly. ‘The copper jackets split predictably. Ballistic tips split randomly once the plastic point breaks off in the tissue.’

  Jools liked Hannah’s company, but she’d seen how eagerly she dived down informational rabbit holes. Or badger setts. What was worse – the shop guy was cut from the same cloth. They were talking eagerly about how bullets split open on impact, spin rates, calibres, propellant types and other firearms esoterica she didn’t have time for.

  She jumped in, wanting to drag them back to the salient point. ‘We just need to know if you’ve sold ammunition of this type to anyone recently.’

  The man pulled his mouth to one side. ‘How recently?’

  It was a good question. Jools stopped to think. Yes, how far back did they need to go?

  ‘How much of that type of ammunition do customers usually buy in one go?’ Hannah asked.

  Jools looked at her with admiration. God, the woman had a way of seeing different angles.

  The young man smiled. ‘A hundred rounds at a time. On average.’

  ‘And how long would that last them?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘That’s impossible to say. It depends how many times they pull the trigger. And on whether they’re using them for hunting or target-shooting.’

  ‘A guesstimate?’ Jools asked.

  ‘If you were at a club, you could easily get through a hundred in a day. If you were hunting, on the other hand . . .’ He looked up at the ceiling for a couple of seconds, then back at Jools. ‘If you only came across a couple of deer, that might just be two rounds if they were clean, one-shot kills.’

  ‘Better go back a year, then,’ Jools said.

  She looked around. The shop didn’t exactly feel like it was at the cutting edge of technology. A plaque above the door referred to the company’s founding in 1755. It didn’t look as if it had changed much in the interim. Her heart sank as she pictured waist-high stacks of cardboard boxes, each holding neatly piled white cylinders of till receipts.

  ‘It’ll take me a while to pull all the names and addresses together for you,’ he said. ‘I could email you, if you like?’

  ‘Perfect! Here,’ Jools said, handing him a card. ‘One last thing. Do you have a list of local gun clubs?’

  He nodded and handed her a pre-printed sheet from a pile in a literature rack.

  Outside, Jools’s vision dimmed. Had someone just turned the lights out? She looked up. The sky, so blue it hurt when she and Hannah had entered the gun shop, had taken on the colour of lead.

  She and Hannah ran for the car as rain pelted the streets.

  Four miles south of the city, Tom Adlam stared out of the window in frustration. He, his wife and their two grown-up sons farmed 560 acres in the Chalke Valley. They raised chestnut and cream Simmental cows and grew wheat, rape and barley.

  This was the afternoon he’d set aside to move the Simmentals over to the new grazing. Trouble was, rain made them impossible to handle. He’d have to leave it till the morning.

  The rain continued for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Adlam filled his time fixing a spring harrow in one of the barns.

  The rain filled the soakaways at the rear of the farmhouse until they overflowed. It flooded the bottom of the garden and created an impromptu pond in the centre of the lawn. It ran in rippling sheets down the track from Fisher’s Lane to the farm gate, creating vast puddles around the tractor and combine harvester. It swelled the chalk streams that crossed his land until the meandering watercourses burst their banks and turned the fields into mirrors reflecting the sky.

  In the centre of the farm, the River Ebble snaked across a tussocky meadow. Swollen by tens of thousands of gallons of highly alkaline rainwater that slid straight off the sun-baked fields into the river valley, it swirled through an ancient brick and stone sluice gate into a deep drainage pond, then out through a second, narrower gate and on, through the rest of their land, before heedlessly crossing the property line into the neighbouring farm.

  The inflowing torrent carried a bulky object into the pond, where it sank to the silty bottom. Six feet long, it rolled over and over before jamming in the narrow gap of the outflow sluice.

  Vegetable matter and dead branches washed downstream caught on its various protrusions. They wove themselves into an untidy yet solid mass that grew in height as more items snagged on it. The topmost pieces of debris lay just a few feet below the roiling surface.

  The unabating water, having had its exit from the pond curtailed so severely, looked for an alternative. It found it to left and right, rising over the banks and flowing away through the grassy hillocks all the way to the single-track road leading from the farm back towards Salisbury, where Ford was meeting JJ Bolter in a dingy pub in one of the city’s less salubrious quarters, between the railway station and the Churchfields industrial estate.

  Fo
rd had entered The Gundog five minutes earlier. The early-evening drinkers paid him no attention as he bought a Coke and took it to a table in a corner where he could watch the door.

  The pub smelled of spilled beer and, even though smoking had been banned inside for years, stale smoke. The moulded tin ceiling had once been painted cream. Now it bore a greasy-looking coat of brownish gunk that he imagined must be the exhaled nicotine of thousands upon thousands of cigarettes.

  The door swung inwards, admitting a wedge of grey light into the gloom. JJ strode in, a trench coat flapping open to reveal Burberry’s tan, red, white and black check. He scanned the room, saw Ford, then carried on to the bar. He returned a few minutes later with a tumbler of whisky clinking with ice.

  He folded himself into the chair facing Ford and took a pull on his drink.

  ‘What’s that? Rum and Coke?’ he asked, pointing at Ford’s glass.

  ‘Just Coke.’

  JJ snorted derisively. ‘God, you’ve really got no style, have you? Chain-store suits and bloody Cokey-Coley. Want me to buy you a bag of crisps to go with it?’

  ‘What did you want to see me about, JJ?’

  JJ leaned forward. He fixed Ford with a cold, hard stare. ‘I’ve just been up to the coroner’s office. Cagey old fart wouldn’t give me a straight answer before the inquest. But he suggested’ – JJ made mocking air quotes – ‘that he won’t release Tommy’s body to us, on account of you lot haven’t caught his murderer yet. Which means I can’t organise his funeral.’

  Ford felt a wave of relief wash through him. JJ had summoned him to tell him he was backing off. ‘I understand, and I’m sorry. But it’s standard practice.’

  JJ shook his head, then took another mouthful of whisky. ‘You’re missing the point. We’re having a wake first, and the funeral whenever we get him back. The wake’s in six days. You’ve got till then to arrest someone.’

  Ford shook his head. ‘This is pointless. It’s not how murder investigations work. You can’t just impose arbitrary deadlines.’

  JJ stared at Ford, then spoke quietly. ‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. You’re dealing with the Bolters now. If I say you’ve got six days, that’s how long you’ve got.’

  ‘And if we haven’t caught him by then?’

  ‘You’d better start looking behind you if you’re out at night. Maybe check under your car in the mornings. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have a word with your boss,’ he said with a slight lift of the corners of his mouth. ‘Tell Detective Superintendent Monroe her golden boy’s on the take. I bet that would put a spoke in your wheel, now, wouldn’t it?’

  Ford stood, briefly taller than the man he’d started to think of as his nemesis. He looked down at him. ‘Do what you like. I’m a clean cop.’

  He left the pub and reached the Discovery without looking back. Though his thumping heart told him the cost.

  Ford locked the door and pulled away. Six days. It wasn’t impossible, he told himself. Nothing was impossible.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  At 6.45 a.m. the following day, Tom Adlam wiped up his egg yolk with the last corner of fried bread and checked the big clock on the wall. He peered out of the kitchen window.

  ‘Thank heavens that rain’s finished,’ he said to his wife. ‘I wanted to move the cows on to the new grazing yesterday. But I can get to it this morning.’

  Tom took his quad bike, enjoying the smell of rain-soaked earth as he powered north-west from the farmhouse towards what the family called River Field. The Simmentals would be ready for a change of scene, he reckoned. Ushering the forty beasts from trampled mud studded with the last of the stubble turnips to a meadow thick with grass would be one of the easiest jobs in the month.

  He gunned the engine, loving the surge of power from the Yamaha’s punchy little engine as he crested the final incline and looked down at River Field. Which reflected the cloud-streaked sky across half its area.

  ‘Oh, bugger!’ he said, with feeling.

  Seeing him coming, and lowing in anticipation, the Simmentals ambled across to the gate between their field and the flooded meadow beyond, their curly-haired heads nodding. He shook his head. Daft things would have to wait, now, wouldn’t they? Something must’ve blocked the sluice. Washed downriver by the storm, most likely.

  Flicking open the throttle and churning up muddy ruts in the field, he powered back home. There, he swapped the quad for a tractor, slung a grappling hook and a coil of rope on to the floor of the cab, and arrived back at River Field thirty minutes later.

  With an audience of curious cows, he tied the rope on to the tow bar then carried the coil and grapple over to the pond, splashing through the floodwater. He peered down into the murk. Saw merely his own reflection looking back out at him and the outline of a thick mass of twigs and branches.

  He swung the grapple a couple of times and slung it out into the pond. Then he dragged it back towards the sluice gate. He tugged on the rope, jerking the grapple up and down, hoping to hook whatever lay at the bottom of the blockage. Feeling it snag on something, he increased the tension and noted with satisfaction the way the rope gave, then resisted.

  Looking over his shoulder, he eased the big John Deere forward, letting the rope tauten. The rope snapped tight, shaking a spray of water droplets into the air, where they caught the sunlight and refracted briefly into a rainbow.

  Little by little, the pond gave up its treasure. Twenty yards from the sluice gate, Tom stopped as he saw the rope begin to stretch. He put the tractor into neutral, climbed down and walked back to the sluice. He really hoped he wouldn’t look down and see one of his neighbour’s sheep.

  As he leaned down to hook the vegetation away with his hands, he realised it wasn’t a sheep. Someone must have dumped a scarecrow into the Ebble. City kids, most likely. He scowled. Or pikeys, having a laugh at my expense.

  The oddly humanoid figure had long, twiggy arms and a crudely shaped head. But as the water in the pond rushed through the newly cleared sluice and the level dropped, his opinion lurched sideways. Not humanoid. Human. Twisting in the turbid, outflowing water, the naked, vegetation-wrapped body rolled over.

  Before Ford had taken a second sip of his coffee, his phone rang.

  ‘Control, sir. Farmer just called in. Says he’s got a dead body in a drainage pond. On a grappling hook.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Roseveare Farm, sir. Between Coombe Bissett and Rockbourne. I’ll send you the details.’

  Ford picked up his murder bag. He knew Roseveare Farm. And Tommy’s body had been found not a mile away. Had Ford believed in coincidences, he might have written off the proximity of the two bodies as just that. But he didn’t. As he got behind the wheel of the Discovery, he was already wondering not if but how the two deaths were linked.

  He arrived at the crime scene to see a middle-aged man in waders and mud-spattered overalls leaning against the fat rear tyre of a bright green tractor. A rope ran in a straight, cobalt-blue line from the rear of the tractor to the edge of a pool of water.

  He climbed out and saw to his disappointment that the Discovery’s blue paintwork, which he’d recently washed, was now coated in claggy, greyish-white mud. A marked Skoda Yeti trundled over the grass to join him.

  The call from Control had been clear about what to expect at the end of the rope. He joined the farmer, having first paused to take a look at the body. The corpse bore the telltale signs of a body that had been submerged in water for more than a couple of days. The face was swollen but he saw no sign of the white jelly-like froth around the mouth that typically indicated drowning. That was interesting. If not drowned, then dumped?

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Ford asked the farmer.

  ‘I came up to move the cows in. But when I got here, the field was under six inches of water. So I figured something had blocked the sluice gate. I put a grapple in, and that’ – he jerked his chin over at the pond – ‘came up on the end of it.’

  Adlam’s concise
ness impressed Ford. The body had sunk. Had it been weighted down? That suggested foul play. Foul play suggested murder. And murder suggested Tommy Bolter. Again.

  ‘Have you seen anyone acting suspiciously on your farm in recent weeks?’

  Adlam shook his head. ‘Nobody. We get dog-walkers, of course. And the odd hiker with their maps and those daft poles they all use, but no. Just the usual.’

  Ford looked around. ‘Where’s the nearest road?’

  Adlam turned and pointed past the front of the tractor. ‘Fisher’s Lane. It’s pretty quiet. You think they came that way?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll get a search team to take a look.’ Ford paused. ‘Tell me, Mr Adlam, do you own your farm?’

  Adlam snorted. ‘Yeah, apart from what the bank does.’

  Ford smiled. ‘You’re not a tenant, then?’

  Adlam shook his head. ‘The farm’s been in my family for three hundred and seven years.’

  ‘How about your neighbours?’

  ‘That way, you’ve got the Baildons,’ he said, gesturing past Ford’s right shoulder. ‘They own theirs outright. All the rest are tenants of Lord Baverstock.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Another connection between Tommy Bolter and this new body. The Baverstock name had cropped up at both crime scenes. Ford frowned. Rural suicides were depressingly common. Rural murders, much rarer. Now he had two within a week of each other.

  He could hear the morbid chimes of a fruit machine as the connections piled up.

  Ching! Two murders.

  Ching! Rural body dumps.

  CHING! Lord Baverstock.

  Three death’s heads! Jackpot! You win!!

  Bloody coins tumbled into the tray. This murder was linked to Tommy’s. He could feel it.

  Ford arranged to have Adlam come in to make a formal statement, then left him and returned to the corpse.

  A team of four CSIs turned up on foot carrying bulging holdalls. They must have left their van on Fisher’s Lane, he thought; unlike the first body dump, this one had no convenient gravelled track. He saw Hannah. She waved and walked over, her Tyveked legs rustling against each other.