‘Devon-style barbie,’ Calter said. ‘Lovely!’
A house stood to their right as they entered the farmyard, a pretty cottage built of stone with a thatched roof half-covered with moss. To their left a crumbling brick barn was a Health and Safety nightmare with a broken asbestos roof that had been patched with rusty corrugated iron. Ahead a traditional byre was also dilapidated, but surely ripe for conversion.
They parked next to an old Landrover with an out of date tax disc and a cracked side window. As they got out Savage caught a whiff of burning sheep mixed with an odour of cow shit and silage and the smell clawed at the back of her throat as they picked their way through the mud to the farmhouse front door. Savage knocked, and as they waited she heard loud classical music from inside the house. And the sound of machine gun fire.
‘Huh?’ Savage cocked her head on one side, trying to make out the cacophony coming from within. It sounded like a TV set on maximum volume.
‘Platoon, ma’am, the film, I recognise the theme,’ Enders said. ‘The DVD was free with the Mail a week or two back. I’d love to watch it again, but I don’t get the chance to see what I want these days. The missus seems to think the kids prefer Balabloodymory.’
‘Sensible woman.’
‘Funny thing to be watching when you’ve just found a dead body on your land,’ Calter said.
The sound from inside stopped and a moment later the front door swung wide to reveal a short and rather portly man with a large reddened nose and a wheeze that came before he spoke.
‘Yes?’
‘Detective Inspector Charlotte Savage. Can we come in Mr Isaacs? We need to ask you a few questions.’
‘What more? I’ve had you guys trampling over my land, blocking the road so the feed lorry can’t get up here, and now you? I’ve got work to do, not time for questions to answer.’
‘You were watching a movie,’ Enders said.
‘None of your bloody business what I was doing, lad.’ Isaacs paused. ‘Anyway, the wife was doing the watching. She likes a good war film.’
As if to confirm what he said a figure appeared from the gloom inside and stood beside him. Mrs Isaacs had an appearance and stature not dissimilar to Mr Isaacs except her nose was dripping instead of red. She brought out a large stained handkerchief to deal with the drips and the tears running down her face.
‘Willem Dafoe. He just got shot to pieces by the slanties. Always affects me that bit,’ she sniffled. ‘Anyway, come in won’t you? If you wait for Gordon to ask you in you’ll be standing on the doorstep ‘til Santa gets here with pigs pulling his sleigh.’ With that she turned and beckoned them in.
Savage made a gesture for Calter to stay outside and nose around while she and Enders followed the couple into the hallway. Newspaper was strewn across the floor and she was aware of her muddy footprints as she walked in. Enders nudged her and pointed down at the papers. The Daily Mail. She smiled and mouthed a silent ‘good work’. To the left was a living room, cold and unused, the furniture adorned with white dust-covers. To the right a smaller room, a snug she guessed you would call it, was more welcoming. Two armchairs and a sofa were arranged around a hearth, the coals glowing red and orange. A corner held a little television screen, on it an explosion with the same colours as the fire was frozen mid blast.
‘You’ll have some tea?’ Mrs Isaacs asked.
‘Thank you. That would be great.’ Savage said.
Mr Isaacs went over and slumped in the armchair nearest the fire, but made no invitation to Savage or Enders to sit. The two of them took the sofa and Savage began to ask about the discovery of the body. Mr Isaacs wasn’t interested. He had explained to the response team what had happened and was buggered if he was going to go through it all over again. Savage pressed him.
‘The problem is you said you discovered the body last night and yet you didn’t call us until this morning. I am wondering why you took so long to phone us?’
‘Work to do. Things to sort. Animals and the like. Farm’s got to come first. Always has and always will. I still had loads of jobs to do and I thought if I called you lot I wouldn’t get the chance to finish any of them.’
‘But a dead girl, Mr Isaacs? Wasn’t that more important? Do you realise you have committed an offence by not reporting the discovery straight away?’
‘She wasn’t going anywhere was she? I could see she was dead because I…’ Isaacs paused and huffed. ‘Well, I touched her, didn’t I? Had to, see? Didn’t know, did I?’
‘Didn’t know what, Mr Isaacs?’
‘I didn’t know if she was dead, did I? She might have been sleeping.’
‘So when you realised she was dead, why didn’t you call us? I mean she was hardly likely to have died of natural causes, was she? It was obvious a crime had been committed.’
‘You’d know that, being police. I wouldn’t. I am a farmer. Just a farmer. Anyway, I see death all the time. It’s not something alarming when you’ve got animals. Only yesterday I had to collect a ewe from down by the brook. Daft bugger had drowned herself, see? Brought her up here for disposal.’
‘We’ve seen the sheep. It’s not legal is it? Burning them like that?’
Isaacs huffed again and started a rant on the European Union and politicians and how they knew bugger all about anything apart from lining their own pockets. Savage wasn’t unsympathetic when it came to the government meddling in affairs they didn’t understand, but the conversation was leading nowhere so she asked Isaacs if he had seen anyone yesterday, noticed anything suspicious, something out of the ordinary?
‘If I had seen anyone on my land they’d have known about it, so no, I didn’t see anyone.’
As Isaacs spoke Savage heard a tap, tap at the window and she turned to see Calter’s face beaming through. Calter motioned at Savage to come outside. Savage left Enders to continue the questioning and let herself out of the front door.
‘Over here, ma’am.’ Calter stood by the corner of one of the barns next to a bulging, blue fertiliser sack.
Savage went over to join her, squishing through mud and God-knows-what on her journey across the farmyard.
‘Something interesting?’
‘Oh yes!’ Calter held the sack open for Savage.
The sack bulged with various items of farm rubbish and at the top she could see a couple of syringes complete with needles along with an empty dispensing bottle. There were some wood offcuts, a few dirty rags, sheep daggings, bent nails, a length of rubber tubing, an old piece of rusty iron…
‘My eyesight must be going, Jane, I can’t see much of interest.’
Calter grinned and took a pen from her pocket. She poked one of the rags, looped it on the pen, retrieved it from the sack and held it out in front of Savage.
‘Oh no.’
The material had a bit of dirt on, but now it was free from the rest of the bundle Savage could see it was no rag, it was too clean for that. The pure white cotton wafted in the breeze as if drying on a washing line.
‘Girl’s panties, ma’am. Sainsbury’s own brand. The Isaacs don’t appear to have any young children and they are a wee bit small for the Mrs.’
Savage heard a noise and looked round to see the farmhouse door open. Mrs Isaacs’s shrill voice sang out across the mud.
‘Milk and sugar, Inspector?’
Chapter 6
Harry lay on the bed watching the ceiling rotate above him. The plaster ceiling rose with the bulb hanging on the twisted wire went one way and the corners of the room went the other. After a while they each slowed down and almost synchronised before going in opposite directions again. Stagecoach wheels in cowboy films came to mind. He closed his eyes to remove the dizzying effect, but that only served to make him think about what he had done and what he had become.
Harry thought it was the blood that pushed him over the edge. If he was caught he would tell the doctors that. The blood from Carmel poured over his hands the way his own blood stained the sheet on his bed when he was a child. The doctors would like that, he knew they would. Regression or something they would call it. There were the pills as well. They had done evil things to him he was sure. When he stopped taking them he had flipped. And that was Mitchell’s fault.