Текст книги "The Bug House"
Автор книги: Jim Ford
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Jim Ford has been a journalist for 25 years. Born and bred in the North-east, he began his career in Newcastle and has since worked for national newspapers, magazines and broadcasters.
Read more about Jim Ford and the Bug House series at www.bughousefiles.com.
The Bug House series
The Bug House
Punch Drunk
In Vitro
THE BUG HOUSE
Jim Ford
Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by C&R Crime,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014
Copyright © Jim Ford, 2014
The right of Jim Ford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-47211-204-0 (ebook)
Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Cover copyright © Constable & Robinson
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Krystyna Green for getting it and Marcus Trower for making sense of it.
For my girls
Part One
ONE
It is 9 a.m. Friday morning, and in a joyless room in central Newcastle two men sit opposite each other. One is Detective Chief Inspector Theo Vos. The other is a trauma assessment counsellor.
‘You know, maybe I’m not cut out for this job,’ Vos says.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I can’t help thinking I lack the requisite baggage.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I don’t have a drink problem.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘I’m not depressed.’
‘And?’
‘And I fucking hate jazz.’
The counsellor gives a watery smile. ‘But you’re talking to me, Mr Vos,’ he points out.
‘Only because I’ve been told I have to.’
‘You wouldn’t have come otherwise?’
‘No.’
‘It’s been two weeks. You haven’t felt the need to talk to somebody about what happened?’
‘Like who?’
‘Friends? Colleagues?’
‘No.’
‘What about family?’
‘What about them?’
‘You have a son, yes?’
‘He’s sixteen years old. We talk about cars and girls.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘Ex-wife,’ Vos says. ‘I forgot about her. Maybe I do fit the profile after all.’
‘Do you ever speak to her about your work?’
‘She lives with a dentist in Orlando. We don’t speak, as a rule.’
‘What about when you were married?’
‘She made it perfectly clear she wasn’t interested in my work when she divorced me.’
The counsellor sips from a glass of water on a table beside him and studies Vos carefully. From the file in his lap, he knows his subject is forty-two years old and has held the rank of detective chief inspector with Northumbria Police for three years. But the details seem patchy to him; it looks like pages have been carefully excised from the file, leaving only the bare bones of his career.
‘I understand Mr Peel fell from the roof of a warehouse?’
‘No,’ Vos says. ‘He fell from the fire escape of a casino.’
‘But it is correct to say that just before he fell, you were chasing him.’
‘Your point is?’
‘How does that make you feel?’
Vos considers this. ‘Pissed off.’
The counsellor sits forward. ‘Go on.’
‘Pissed off that I wasn’t able to catch him first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he made a hell of a mess on the pavement.’
The counsellor eases back in his chair. He taps the end of his pen against his teeth. ‘And your colleague Detective Sergeant Entwistle. I understand he was badly injured during the same incident?’
‘A thug called Terry Loomis shot him in the back with a .22 pistol,’ Vos says. ‘It’s unlikely he’ll walk again.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah. Me too. And Vic’s daughter isn’t too happy about it either. He was supposed to walk her up the aisle next year.’
The counsellor’s eyes light up again. ‘Would you say, then, that you feel anger about what happened to DS Entwistle?’
‘Of course I feel anger. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Has it affected you in any other way? Have there been any physical repercussions? Anxiety? Sleeplessness?’
‘No.’
‘But the fact that you feel anger about DS Entwistle shows that you are capable of emotional response,’ the counsellor insists. ‘I’m just interested to discover why those responses appear muted when it comes to Mr Peel’s death.’
‘Look,’ Vos says, trying to keep the weariness out of his voice, ‘Jack Peel was a villain. He made a lot of people’s lives miserable. I won’t be losing sleep over the fact he died while evading arrest.’
‘Leaving aside Mr Peel’s alleged background—’
‘There’s nothing alleged about it.’
‘Leaving that aside for a moment, the fact remains that a man died. That you saw him fall to his death, Mr Vos. Some people might have issues about this.’
‘Issues?’
‘Feelings of remorse. Guilt, even.’
Vos stares at him balefully. ‘You’re determined to pin some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder on me, aren’t you?’
‘Not at all. I—’
‘Is that why I’m here? Because I’m supposed to have issues about Jack Peel’s death?’
‘Do you?’
‘Listen,’ Vos says. ‘That bastard hit the ground ten feet from a young WPC. His brains went all over her trousers. I’m no expert, but I’d say she has some issues. It’s her you should be talking to, not me.’
‘The counsellor seems to think you may have a borderline antisocial personality disorder,’ says Detective Superintendent Mhaire Anderson, area commander of the Major Crime Unit, peering at the report on her desk through a pair of cheap half-moon spectacles. She’s only recently started wearing them. They give her a professorial air that is not in keeping with a hard, thin face, and she does not look comfortable using them. ‘He suggests you continue with the sessions.’
‘I’ve had two,’ Vos reminds her. ‘That’s the obligatory number, isn’t it?’
‘He seems to think you’re an interesting case.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘I wouldn’t be if I was you.’
‘Are you ordering me to go?’
‘I couldn’t give a damn if you go or not, as long as it’s on your own time,’ Anderson says. ‘I’ve got a department to run.’
‘It doesn’t bother you that one of your senior detectives shows signs of an antisocial personality disorder?’
A thin smile. ‘The whole country has got an antisocial personality disorder, Theo. What makes you so different?’ Behind her, beyond the grimy pane, it is raining from a sky the colour of dishwater. ‘Peel’s people are agitating for an independent inquiry.’
‘Peel’s people?’
‘His lawyer. His friends.’
‘So let them agitate.’
‘I would. However I don’t know if you’ve noticed recently, but we are living in the age of recrimination. You step on a crack in the pavement and there’ll be an inquiry about it.’
‘Well, good luck to them,’ Vos says. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Good, because the IPCC are sending an investigator to ask you a few questions.’
Vos shakes his head. ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking, guv’nor! I was already cleared by the internal inquiry.’
‘At this stage they’re only interested if there’s a case to answer,’ Anderson says. Then her expression hardens. ‘Which is why you’re going to play this absolutely by the book, Theo. You’re not going to give Peel’s lawyer or the IPCC any leverage. I will expect you to cooperate fully with the investigator. And if I was you, I would keep your visits to the counsellor to yourself. It won’t look good if they find out the last person to see Jack Peel alive has an antisocial personality disorder.’
‘Borderline,’ he reminds her. Then he throws his hands in the air. ‘Dah, this is bullshit.’
‘Do you want me to suspend you?’
‘Suspend me?’
‘Because believe me there are people with bigger hat badges than me at headquarters who would like that very much.’
‘But that’s precisely what Peel’s “people” want!’
‘No, Theo, they want the moral high ground. And I don’t give a damn how inconvenient it is for you or this department or the brass, I am not prepared to give them it.’ She sighs and sits back in her chair. ‘You know as well as I do that Jack Peel was always going to come back and bite you in the arse sooner or later.’
Vos picks at the stitching on his shoe like a recalcitrant child. ‘How long will this last? The squad’s a man down as it is.’
‘I’m aware of that. I’ve just had the latest medical report on Vic Entwistle. It doesn’t look good.’
‘Does the IPCC know this?’ Vos says venomously.
‘The point is, Theo, with Bernice Seagram stepping up to acting DS, you’re going to need a replacement in the ranks.’
‘So give me someone from one of the other squads.’
‘I wish I could. But they’re all stretched tighter than the Chief Constable’s wallet.’
‘So what do you suggest, guv’nor?’ Vos says drily. ‘Britain’s Got Talent?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of a spot of mentoring. A bright young DC from the sticks who is looking for a more exciting life.’
A deep, ugly silence descends on Anderson’s office once again. ‘Now you are fucking joking.’
‘Mentoring, Theo, not babysitting.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘You really are a miserable bastard,’ Anderson says. ‘Is it so long since you were wet behind the ears?’
‘I was only saying. Who is he?’
‘There are a couple of candidates I’ve got in mind.’
‘With respect, guv’nor, the Bug House is hardly the place for some greenhorn from the sticks.’
Anderson smiles thinly. ‘You never know, you might enjoy it. A captive audience to regale with all your old war stories.’
‘I’m forty-two years old, guv. You make it sound like I’m an old man.’
‘The average age of a detective constable on this force is twenty-five,’ Anderson points out. ‘As far as they’re concerned, you are.’
TWO
Vos lives in a thin three-storey town house at St Peter’s Basin, an inlet of the Tyne just east of the city centre that was optimistically developed as a marina during the height of the housing boom. The house has no garden, but screwed to the balcony outside Vos’s bedroom is a rectangular mat of artificial grass that he inherited from the previous owner, a bonds trader with one of the London finance houses that set up shop in Newcastle at around the same time as they were building St Peter’s Basin. From here the bonds trader used to fire golf balls across the river with a 3-wood, attempting to reach the Gateshead side. Apparently it helped to relieve the stress of his high-pressure job, although it could not save his job, which he lost when the finance house went bust. Vos keeps the mat because he enjoys the feel of the bristles on his bare feet when he drinks his morning coffee or his late-night whisky. He’s installed an old foldaway picnic chair and he can spend hours sitting there like some mild eccentric, staring out at the empty marina.
It’s Monday, a crisp autumn morning today in contrast to what has felt like a month of unbroken drizzle. On the street below a gang of teenage kids dawdle idly past on their way to school. Vos watches them, calculating that it is maybe thirty feet from the balcony to the pavement – about half the distance Jack Peel fell. He can see Peel’s florid face now, the arrogance draining from it as he realizes that there are just two of them, that nobody else is coming, and that Vos cannot be bought.
‘Oi, mister!’
One of the kids, scrawny and tousle-haired, with the arse of his jeans slung down to his knees, looks up and flicks Vos the bird, much to the amusement of his friends. Vos grins back and throws the dregs of his coffee over the little bastard. Then he turns to the sliding door leading to his bedroom and enters the house.
‘What is it with jeans that make it look like you’ve shit yourself?’
Alex Vos looks up from his breakfast and stares at his father across the kitchen. ‘What?’
‘Is it cool?’ Vos asks him. ‘Have I missed something? I’m genuinely baffled.’
Alex shrugs and digs his spoon into his bowl of cereal. ‘Speaks the man who buys his jeans from Asda.’
Vos stalks across to the sink and refills the kettle. ‘Yeah, well . . .’
‘And sits in a deckchair in his dressing gown,’ Alex continues. He picks up the remote and activates the DAB radio on the counter with a stabbing movement of his left hand. ‘Like someone from a psychiatric unit,’ he adds, sotto voce, for good measure.
Vos reaches over and yanks his son’s long, dark fringe. ‘You can get that cut as well, you bloody yob.’
They listen to the breakfast show until the presenter’s relentlessly upbeat jabber is drowned out by the roar of the kettle; then Alex puts his empty bowl in the dishwasher and goes upstairs while Vos spoons Nescafé into his mug and wonders how anyone can possibly eat muesli when there is a café no more than two hundred yards down the road that serves the finest bacon rolls in Christendom. Then the kettle clicks off and he refills the mug, stirring the contents absently as he listens to a fragment of a story on the 8 a.m. news bulletin about a row over queues at the airport – and he wonders, as he always does, what is really going on today, and what grim human drama has unfolded while the city slept.
* * *
In the bathroom, Vos stares at his face in the mirror. It is not a pleasant sight. He has clearly slept for several hours with his right cheek hard against the orthopaedic pillow, so that the loose skin around the eye has rippled upwards like a Shar Pei’s in a wind tunnel. When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, it’s threadbare and there are hatched fissures at the tip – the result, the dentist says, of age, like the incipient gum disease festering between his increasingly snaggled teeth.
But then he can’t blame it all on age and decrepitude. The layer of khaki slime on his tongue is pretty much all down to the whisky he drank last night; the ivory hue to his teeth he can blame on excessive smoking. Yet it wasn’t a heavy one – three or four glasses of Grouse and a couple of Café Crème cigars – and what with the Astroturf against the soles of his bare feet and the view out over the marina, it had been a very pleasant evening, thank you very much.
‘Dad!’
‘What?’
‘Your phone’s ringing.’
‘Well answer it.’
‘What do I say?’
‘Try “Hello”. Then tell whoever it is I’ll call them back in five minutes.’
Naked, he steps heavily into the shower. Every movement he makes seems to be heavy these days. Nimbleness is a thing of the past. He has not been lithe for about twenty years. OK, maybe it was a couple more than three or four glasses of Grouse. And he’ll have to check the crushed butts in the tin lid to confirm the number of mini-cigars he puffed his way through during the course of the evening, although judging by the tightness in his chest and his stinking fingers and hair, he’d guess it was all of them. The scalding water drums against his head. Café Crème cigars, he thinks. The last refuge of a scoundrel trying to quit cigarettes.
Downstairs, Alex is teasing his hair in the hall mirror and staring ruefully at a swatch of acne that has materialized on his cheeks. He is, thinks Vos, the very picture of a gawky teenager. How the hell has he got so tall? When the hell did he get to be sixteen?
‘I’m off,’ Alex says, swinging his haversack over one skinny shoulder and heading for the door.
‘Who was it?’
‘Uh?’
‘On the phone.’
‘Someone from work, I think. Can you call them back.’
‘Did they give a name?’
‘Dunno. It was a woman, though.’
‘Superintendent Anderson?’
‘Nah.’
‘Bernice Seagram?’
‘Yeah. That was it. Look, I got to go.’
‘Done your homework?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got an apple for teacher?’
‘Er, no.’
‘I don’t know what’s happened to this country,’ Vos says. ‘No respect.’
Alex shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘Tragic, old man,’ he says. ‘Truly tragic.’
Vos watches him go and winces as the front door slams behind him. The hell of adolescence. At least the next logical step is rebellion. This, Vos thinks, will be easier to deal with. Right now Alex is a cerebral kid with a sweet nature, but sometimes his almost supernatural placidity gives Vos the creeps. When Vos was sixteen years old he’d already laid his feckless wife-beater of a father on his back and warned him that if he ever came back, he’d kill him. And while he would never in a million years want Alex to end up like him, Vos thinks it would be nice to see just a molecule of his own DNA making a fleeting bid for recognition. Alex’s mother walked out six years ago, but in many ways Vos sees her every day of his life.
He picks up his mobile from the kitchen counter and punches in the number of Acting DS Seagram, who answers on the second ring.
‘You ever hear of a Newcastle United player called Enrico Cabaljo, boss?’ Seagram says.
‘The No-Goal Wonder from Venezuela? What about him?’
‘I’m standing in his back garden.’
THREE
Enrico Cabaljo cost £10 million from Caracas FC and failed to find the net in twenty-five starts. He is currently on loan to a team in Italy while a way is found to terminate his £120,000-a-week contract. Meanwhile his £2 million house stands empty, the security gates locked except on Monday mornings, when the gardener turns up to cut the grass, tend the flowerbeds and check there are no dead koi carp floating belly-up in the pond.
It was the gardener who found the body.
The house is situated on the outskirts of Stannington, a village fifteen miles north of Newcastle populated mainly by lawyers, stockbrokers and other wealthy commuters. Today they have been obliged to find an alternative way to work, because the narrow road through their adopted village has been blocked off at either end by a clot of police patrol cars, emergency vehicles and cordon tape.
Vos abandons his car outside the village hall, walks towards the flashing lights, ducks under the flapping tape and picks his way through the uniforms and white-suited Crime Scene Investigators to the gates of Enrico Cabaljo’s house. Here he pauses to slip on a pair of polythene overshoes and a paper suit and continues up the long gravel path and round the side of the house to the garden, where DC Mayson Calvert is emerging from a white protective tent that has been erected on the lawn like the marquee for a summer drinks party. Calvert has horn-rimmed glasses perched on a beaky nose, and his suit hangs from his thin frame like a sloughed skin.
‘Extraordinary,’ he says, blinking as if he has just witnessed a particularly awe-inspiring chemical reaction, so lost in thought he does not recognize Vos at first. ‘Morning, boss,’ he says.
‘Where’s Bernice?’
‘She’s ah—’
Seagram’s voice comes through the doorway of the tent. ‘In here, boss.’
At thirty-six, Bernice Seagram is the most experienced of the junior detectives on the squad and the obvious choice to step into Entwistle’s shoes. Indeed there are some who wonder why she hasn’t already been promoted, if maybe she lacks the ambition required to move up the ranks in CID. But they don’t appreciate that if that happened, Seagram would have to leave the squad – and while ambition is one thing, loyalty is another. The only reason Seagram would ever leave Vos’s squad is if Vos told her to.
She is a squat woman with short, spiky hair who favours dark eyeliner and just a hint of lipstick. She is also an inveterate smoker, and you can always find her at the end of a trail of menthol butts smudged with plum-coloured Revlon. Right now she is standing with a knot of CSIs, staring down at the body of a man lying on the grass.
Or at least what remains of the body.
The man is mid-thirties, with a Middle Eastern appearance, wearing a white shirt and grey chinos. He is lying on his back with his right arm and leg splayed out; his other arm is jammed in tight against the left side of his ribcage and sternum, which in turn have been crushed almost flat, like a collapsed concertina. His left leg is missing, torn away at the hip.
‘He’s not a Venezuelan footballer, is he?’ Vos says, peering at the dead man’s face, which, considering the catastrophic damage to the rest of his body, seems remarkably intact. Peaceful, almost.
‘We don’t know who he is, boss,’ says Seagram. ‘The gardener found him shortly after seven this morning when he opened up.’
‘No ID?’
‘No.’
‘And what about that?’ Vos says. About six feet away from the body, two of the CSIs are hunkered down with a tape measure, calculating the dimensions of a lozenge-shaped divot in the lawn.
Seagram shrugs. ‘Difficult to be certain, boss – but it looks like that’s where he landed.’
One of the CSIs stands up from the hole and comes across. His name is Gordon Watson and he is the head of the Crime Scene Investigation team. He nods a rueful greeting to Vos, then pushes back his elasticated hood and runs a hand through his brush-like silver hair.
‘Hell of a way to start the week, Theo,’ he says briskly.
‘When is it not, Gordon?’ Vos says. ‘So what do you think?’
‘We’ll have to do the sums, but judging by the depth of the impact crater I’d say our friend wasn’t wearing a parachute.’
Vos looks at Watson and then Seagram and then back again. ‘You’re telling me he just fell out of the sky?’
Watson shrugs. ‘I don’t know what I’m telling you. All I know is what I can see – and that’s a bloody great impact crater and a body with injuries that would appear consistent with a fall from a great height.’
Vos looks from the crater to the body. He frowns. ‘Have you moved him, Gordon?’
‘That’s how far he bounced,’ Watson says. ‘Two solid weeks of rain, the ground’s like a sponge.’
‘Where’s his other leg?’
‘Still looking.’
There’s a sudden rumble and a shimmering pulse of metallic noise, and two hundred yards away, beyond the trees at the end of the garden, a high-speed train explodes into view. Everyone in the garden stops to watch the carriages racing past and then, just when it seems it will go on forever, the train has gone.
Vos hunkers down next to the body. ‘If he did fall out of a plane, how fast would he have been travelling when he hit the ground?’
‘Terminal velocity of a falling body is between 120 and 125 mph,’ Watson says. ‘Look on the bright side – he could have landed in a built-up area. But these footballers love their privacy.’
‘Every cloud, eh, Gordon?’ says Vos.
Maybe it is prolonged exposure to nature’s relentless cycle of life and death, but the gardener who found the body does not seem terribly traumatized by his discovery. In fact he seems more concerned by the unsightly hole in his pristine lawn, and by the army of police and forensic officers trampling all over his flowerbeds.
‘Do you live locally, Mr Souter?’
The old man swivels his eyes beneath the brim of his tweed cap and fixes them on DC Phil Huggins. His lips remain clamped around a needle-thin roll-up and he says nothing, but the implication is clear – do I look like the sort of person who could afford to live locally?
The gardener’s blue Ford panel van is parked in front of the house. Huggins has already checked it for obvious bloodstains or anything else that might indicate it was involved, and forensics will want to do the same, even though the idea that the old man transported the body here, dug an impact crater, then called the police, is patently ridiculous. But at this stage it’s all about going through the motions and nobody, least of all Huggins, wants to be the one who overlooks the vital piece of evidence just because it’s patently ridiculous.
In any case the reason they are all gathered here today is because it would appear a Middle Eastern guy fell out of the sky and landed in Enrico Cabaljo’s garden. Enrico Cabaljo, who cost Newcastle United £10 million and scored no goals in twenty-five appearances, whose every clumsy, pigeon-toed touch ended up being jeered by the 52,000 fans – including DC Phil Huggins – who had paid upwards of £500 for a season ticket to pay his £120,000-per-week wages. Patently ridiculous? Don’t get me fucking started, Huggins thinks.
The gardener is staring at him through his cigarette smoke.
‘I’ve got to get on,’ he says.
Huggins thanks him and puts his notebook in his pocket. He walks down to the gate and out onto the main road. He pulls out his mobile and speed-dials DC John Fallow, who is somewhere in the village coordinating the house-to-house inquiries with the local uniforms. Fallow informs him that if he turns left and walks for two hundred yards he will come to a village shop run by a sweet and enterprising old lady who is dishing out bacon rolls and mugs of tea. Huggins informs Fallow he will meet him there in five minutes.
Huggins is six feet five inches tall, and his long, loping stride takes him beyond the cordon tape to the shop in less than two. When Fallow arrives, Huggins is already sitting on a wall outside the shop munching cheerfully on a sandwich and talking football with a uniformed sergeant from Morpeth station and a reporter from the local newspaper who has got wind of some action on his patch. Fallow, who has already had a sandwich this morning, goes inside for another mug of tea. The old lady’s face lights up, but then he has that effect on all old ladies, who are immediately reminded of their own cherubic grandsons when they see him. At the age of thirty, Fallow curses his persistently boyish features – the smooth, glowing cheeks; the dimpled satsuma chin; the puppy fat that tenaciously obscures the lines of his lower jaw. He envies Huggins’s gothically pronounced cheekbones and Vos’s rugged, lived-in face. He draws the line at Mayson Calvert – who the fuck would want to look like Mayson Calvert? – yet even so he cannot help but think that even Mayson has the potential to look vaguely interesting if he did something with his hair, or got a more fashionable pair of glasses, or wore a suit that didn’t look like it had been handed down to him by his old history professor.
The reporters have gone when he comes out of the store. For a while he and Huggins talk shop with the uniformed sergeant, then the sergeant is summoned back to the front line. Fallow watches him trudging back up the hill towards the cordon tape, his shoulders visibly stiffening as he slips back into official mode.
‘So what do you think?’
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ says Huggins, brushing some stray crumbs from his tie. ‘Illegal immigrant.’
‘What?’
‘It makes perfect sense. Illegal immigrants jump into the undercarriage of a plane just about to take off from some godforsaken Third World country and hang on for grim death in the hope of making it to the Promised Land. Trouble is, most of them are either crushed to death by the wheels or else freeze to death because of the altitude.’
‘I’ve heard about that,’ Fallow nods. ‘When the plane comes in to land, it lowers its wheels and – bang – the body drops out.’
‘Happens at Heathrow all the time,’ says Huggins. ‘There was one last month: guy walking his dog in the park in West London, right on the flight path about ten miles out – next thing he knows this fucking stowaway from Africa lands on the path in front of him. Fell out of the undercarriage of a 747.’
‘Have you mentioned your theory to the boss?’
‘No,’ says Huggins, ‘the boss is in a foul mood.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s been told he’s getting a replacement for Vic Entwistle, that’s why.’
Fallow looks at him. ‘But there’s no way Entwistle was ever coming back.’
‘You know that, and I know that,’ says Huggins. ‘But don’t you think if the boss could have found a way to get Entwistle’s hospital bed moved to the Bug House, he would have done?’
A tractor is approaching along one of the single-track lanes leading from the main road through the village. The driver is a young man wearing blue overalls and a woollen hat pulled down over his ears. He stops outside the shop and turns off the engine.
‘You coppers?’ he shouts.
‘Can we help you, sir?’ Fallow says.
‘Aye. I found this. Thought you might be looking for it.’
The driver reaches down to the footwell and retrieves a plastic feed sack with something in it.
‘Phil, you’d better come and look at this,’ Fallow says, peering in the sack.
‘What is it?’ Huggins says. ‘Some magic beans?’
‘Nah,’ Fallow says. ‘It’s someone’s leg.’
Mhaire Anderson arrives shortly after 10 a.m. and, once she’s decked out in a paper suit, is immediately taken to see the body. She emerges ten minutes later, purse-lipped, and is escorted back to her car, which is then driven back through the village and along the lane, a circuitous route which terminates at a metal five-bar gate. Beyond the gate is a muddy track leading to a rusting iron cattle bridge over the railway line.
Vos is waiting at the gate. Gordon Watson and his team are on the bridge itself, while a dozen uniformed officers are down on the embankment and the track.
‘Morning, guv’nor,’ Vos says.
‘I hope you’ve stopped the trains,’ Anderson says.
‘Replacement bus service only between Newcastle and Morpeth.’
‘Good. So what have we got?’
They go through the gate and begin walking up towards the apex of the bridge.
‘The farmer found the leg in the field on the other side of the bridge,’ Vos says. ‘I say leg, but it’s actually just the thigh. Huggins and Fallow checked out the bridge itself and found the shin and the foot attached to a rope tied to one of the struts.’
‘Christ.’
‘The driver of the 8.30 p.m. East Coast Main Line train to Edinburgh reported hitting something last night,’ says Seagram. ‘He thought it might have been a deer.’
‘A deer?’ Anderson says. ‘Since when do deer hang down from railway bridges?’
‘He was going at 80 mph,’ Vos says. ‘It was dark and it was pissing down.’
‘He’s got eyes, hasn’t he?’
They have reached the middle of the bridge now. The CSIs have already erected a small tent, and inside it Gordon Watson is hunched down over one of the iron struts. He is examining a length of black, man-made rope that has been knotted to the strut. The other end of the rope hangs down for five feet above the northbound railway track; attached to it is the lower part of a man’s leg, sheared off at the knee.
‘I’ve seen it all now, guv’nor,’ Watson says to Anderson. ‘Looks like our victim was tied by his left leg to the bridge and just left there hanging until the next Edinburgh train put him out of his misery.’
