Annie made herself as comfortable as possible in the passenger seat, rubbing at the steamed-up window beside her. Unlike Banks, whom she felt always needed to be in control, she didn’t care who was driving. In fact, all the better if it wasn’t her. She didn’t like driving, especially in this weather. And there were too many arseholes on the roads these days, no matter what the weather. This week wasn’t starting out well, she thought. It was only mid-morning on Monday, but already her back was aching, and she wanted nothing more than to go home and have a long hot bath with a pile of trashy gossip magazines.
When DS Winsome Jackman arrived at the abandoned airfield, there was already a patrol car parked at the gate and two uniformed officers, one of them enjoying a cigarette, were talking to a man through the chain-link fence. The man was tall and slim, wearing a camouflage jacket, waterproof trousers, sturdy walking boots and a baseball hat, black with a stylised white ‘A’ on the front. He was taller than Winsome, but stooped a little and leaned on a walking stick. Whether it was a rambler’s prop or a genuine need, she couldn’t tell. It was also hard to tell how old he was under the baseball cap, but he seemed too young to be needing a walking stick unless he’d had an accident. A beagle sat quietly by his side, nose twitching as Winsome appeared.
The uniformed constable introduced herself and dropped her cigarette and trod on it as Winsome approached. Winsome had been told by dispatch that someone had reported seeing what he thought was a bloodstain in a disused hangar near the railway line. It was her job to go over there and assess the situation, weigh up the pros and cons of bringing in an expensive CSI team. The wind tugged at her hair and seemed to permeate the very marrow of her bones. The rain felt like a cold shower.
‘What have we got?’ Winsome asked.
‘They’re padlocked shut, ma’am,’ said one of the officers, pointing at the gates. ‘There’s nothing urgent, so we thought it best to wait for you.’
Winsome looked at the man inside. She couldn’t help but see him as a man imprisoned in some sort of prison camp or compound. He had a military air about him, though she would have been hard pushed to put her finger on what made her think that. ‘How did you get in there, Mr…?’
‘Gilchrist. Terry Gilchrist. There’s a gap round the side. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. It’s a tight squeeze, and it’s mucky down there.’ He gestured to the mud-stained front of his jacket and knees of his trousers. Winsome was wearing black jeans and a belted winter coat, not exactly her best outfit, but not something she wanted to drag through the mud, either. She guessed that the uniformed officers also hadn’t liked the idea of crawling through a hole in the fence and getting their uniforms dirty. ‘Do you know who owns the place?’
‘Government, probably. You coming in?’
Winsome sighed. ‘A good detective always comes prepared,’ she said, and returned to her car. She opened the boot, took out a torch and a pair of bolt cutters and approached the gates. She handed the torch through the fence to Gilchrist, and with one quick, hard snip of the bolt cutters she snapped open the padlock, which clattered to the concrete. Then, with Gilchrist’s help, she pushed the gates open. They grated as they followed the semicircular grooves already etched in the crumbling concrete. They might not have been opened frequently, Winsome noted, but they had certainly been opened occasionally, and quite recently by the looks of the tracks.
Gilchrist smiled at her. ‘Thanks for rescuing me,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to feel I’d never get out of here.’
Winsome smiled back. ‘You won’t. Not for a while yet.’
Gilchrist turned. ‘Follow me.’
As he walked towards the hangar entrance, the dog trotting by his side, his stick clicked on the concrete. Winsome could see by the way he limped that the walking stick was no affectation. What had happened, then? An accident? A war wound?
Winsome paused in the doorway and took in the hangar. She imagined you could fit a few planes in here, at a pinch. She had no idea how many Lancasters or Spitfires there were in a squadron, or even if the hangar had been used during wartime. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had fought in the Second World War, she remembered, and he had been killed somewhere in Normandy shortly after the D-Day landings. She doubted that there were a lot of fellow Jamaicans with him; he must have been very scared and lonely for his own people. A place like this made her think about such things.
Gilchrist stood by an area of the concrete floor and the dog’s tail started wagging. Winsome went and stood beside him, taking her torch and holding it up, at eye level, shining the light down on the floor.
On the patch of cracked concrete Gilchrist pointed to Winsome saw a large dark stain shaped like a map of South America. It certainly resembled congealed blood. There was the familiar smell of decaying matter, too. She squatted closer. Just around where Brazil would have been, she saw fragments of bone and grey matter stuck to the scarlet stain. Brains, she thought, reaching for her mobile. Maybe they were both wrong, maybe it was paint, or a mixture of water and rust, but now that she had seen it for herself, she could understand exactly why Gilchrist had been concerned enough to ring the police. It could be animal blood, of course, but a simple test would determine that.
Winsome keyed in the station number, explained the situation and asked for AC Gervaise to be informed and for the forensic bloodstain analyst, Jasminder Singh, and DC Gerry Masterson to come out to check the blood at the hangar.
The Lane farm seemed a lot less grand than the Beddoes’ spread, Annie thought, as DC Doug Wilson parked behind a muddy Rav 4 outside the front porch, a cobwebbed repository for inside-out umbrellas, wellington boots and a couple of rusty shovels. The farmhouse was smaller and shabbier, with a few slates missing from the roof and a drainpipe leaning at a precarious angle, water dripping from the gutter. The yard seemed neglected, and the outbuildings were fewer in number. They looked old and in need of repair. One barn was practically in ruins. A couple of skinny chickens pecked at the wet ground inside their sagging wire coop. Annie doubted that Frank Lane had a Deutz-Fahr Agrotron locked in his garage, if his garage even had a lock, and she wondered what the relationship between the two farmers really was. Beddoes hadn’t given much away, but surely Lane had to envy the newcomer’s obvious wealth? Or resent it? And was Beddoes patronising or honestly supportive of his neighbours? Perhaps in their eyes he was merely playing at being a farmer while they were living the very real hardship of it. He had hinted at so much himself. These considerations might matter down the line, she told herself.
They got out of the car and tried to avoid the worst of the mud, which seemed even squelchier than that at the Beddoes’ farm. At least the rain had abated to a steady drizzle over the short drive, and there were now a few patches of blue sky visible through the cloud cover. Not enough ‘to make baby a new bonnet’, as her father used to say, but a small handkerchief, perhaps.
Annie knocked on the door, which was opened by a broad-shouldered man in his mid-forties. Wearing jeans and a wrinkled shirt, he had a whiskered, weather-beaten face that conformed more closely to Annie’s idea of a farmer. Satisfied by their credentials, he invited them in. There was a weariness and heaviness about his movements that told Annie he had perhaps been overdoing it for years, maybe for lack of help, or because the stress of survival was eating away at him. Farming was a hard physical job and often involved long hours of backbreaking work with little or no relief, though it was also seasonal and subject to the vagaries of the weather. But whereas Beddoes had seemed fit and fluent in his movements, Lane seemed hunched over and cramped up.