Jack had slept soundly for the first time in a long time. He and Emily had sat and watched TV all evening. They barely said a word to each other, but that didn’t bother him. He was just pleased to have her there, and she didn’t seem to mind too much either.
He’d asked her whether her grandparents knew where she was. She said they did. She added that they weren’t particularly happy about it, but they understood. He knew he was going to have to call them and explain the situation from his point of view. He’d have to make sure she had her belongings and her schooling sorted, especially if she was going to be staying with him during school time. But right now he was still struggling to come to terms with what was happening.
In his mind, he supposed it was probably fairly normal for her to just rock up somewhere and dump herself. After all, she’d been shoved from pillar to post already. Her mum had taken her from her family home and left her with the grandparents while she swanned off to God knows where.
When he’d got up that morning, he was surprised to see Emily was already up and about. She’d been downstairs, got herself a bowl of cereal (without milk) and was listening to the radio. She’d told him she was going back to her grandparents’. His face had dropped, but he tried not to show it. When she said she’d be back later, he smiled. There was still a hell of a lot to sort out, but the signs were all positive.
Once he’d got to work, though, things were feeling far less positive. There was a note on his voicemail asking him to report to the Chief Constable when he got in. Charles Hawes, the current Chief Constable, was technically based at county headquarters in Milton House, but chose to keep an office at Mildenheath for much the same reasons as Jack Culverhouse wanted to keep away from HQ. It was a handy thing to sell to the public, too. The head of the county’s police force had chosen not to sit in a plush office in the countryside, but was instead positioned right in the nerve centre of CID and community policing in one of the most police-dependent parts of the county. Then again, spin was half the game.
Hawes had been threatening to retire for years. He’d even announced it to Jack a few months back, but since then things had gone quiet on that front. Charles Hawes wasn’t the retiring type. They’d be dragging him out of here in a box.
Jack knew exactly what Hawes wanted. He’d have heard about the shenanigans at Hilltop Farm the previous day and would want answers. Hawes always wanted answers. Not for himself — he trusted Jack Culverhouse more or less implicitly — but for the Police and Crime Commissioner, Martin Cummings. Hawes was the last of the old guard. He wasn’t quite as old school as Jack, but he nonetheless respected the DCI’s ways and let him get away with far more than he deserved at times. Cummings had been keen for Hawes to retire for some time. Jack supposed that was why Hawes had never gone through with it, secretly hoping that he’d last longer than the PCC’s electoral term and be able to leave on his own terms, rather than being pushed out by some sleazy no-mark politician.
But all Cummings was worried about were the column inches. It wouldn’t look good for the force to either be too heavy handed — particularly where religion was involved — nor would it be ideal, to say the least, for them to have been seen to have neglected their duties if there were serious suspicions of a crime being reported at Hilltop Farm.
Regardless, Jack made his way to the Chief Constable’s office and prepared to waste half an hour on a lecture he could already reel off word for word before he even got there.
Hawes smiled as Culverhouse entered, as he always did, and beckoned for him to sit down. The office was as smart as it could be in this dreary old 1970s building, but Jack liked it. It had a certain style.
‘I suppose you can guess why I’ve asked you to come and see me, Jack,’ the Chief Constable said.
Culverhouse raised both eyebrows for a moment. He wasn’t going to need three guesses.
‘Hilltop Farm,’ he replied.
‘Indeed. Can you run me through what happened?’
Culverhouse took a deep breath. ‘We received a call yesterday morning from someone reporting a death on the farm. We—’
‘Who received the call?’ Hawes asked.
‘Who on our team, you mean? DS Wing, I think, sir.’
‘You think? Were you not there?’
Culverhouse tried to let no emotion show on his face. Did the Chief Constable already know Culverhouse wasn’t in the office at the time? Was this all some sort of ruse to make him admit that he’d been sitting at home when he should’ve been at work as the duty Senior Investigating Officer? He decided to try and keep his language as professional as possible.
‘Not at that time, sir. I was late yesterday morning. I’m afraid it couldn’t be avoided. Personal circumstances.’
Hawes looked at him and nodded. He knew better than to probe into Jack Culverhouse’s private life right now.
‘And you heard about the call how?’
‘By text message. I met DS Wing and DS Knight at the farm. Uniformed first response officers were already there. They hadn’t entered the property due to the reinforced gates and the fact that the residents on the farm would not grant access. They were waiting for backup units to arrive to force entry. I managed to negotiate entry with the residents of the farm.’
‘Negotiate?’ Hawes asked, raising his eyebrows. The unspoken words were that it wasn’t like Jack Culverhouse to negotiate.
‘Yes, sir. I told them backup units were on their way and we’d be on the property within minutes whether they liked it or not. Subsequently, they let us in.’
‘And what did you find?’ Hawes asked, sitting back in his chair and interlacing his fingers.
‘Not much, to be honest. The call said the body was in the old grain store, but when we got there we could find no sign of it.’
‘And what about forensics? Were swabs taken?’
‘No, sir. To be perfectly honest, it was a musty, damp old grain store which probably had traces of all sorts of things. I decided that short of bringing in dozens of officers to search the entire farm, which is of considerable size, we had to treat the call as a false alarm. Especially considering the circumstances of the call.’
‘Which were?’
‘That the caller phoned in anonymously from a phone box in Mildenheath, that whoever called in presumably had little or no inside knowledge of the farm considering it’s a completely sealed religious community with no-one going in or out, and that no body could be found.’
The Chief Constable narrowed his eyes. ‘Are we sure that no-one goes in or out?’
‘I think so, sir. That’s what we were told.’
‘We’re told all sorts of things, Jack. We’re the police. It doesn’t make those things accurate. But listen. This isn’t going to be good for us either way. We’ve already received a complaint from the church leaders about what they called a raid, and we’ve also got the possibility that there’s been a murder on that farm and we’ve done nothing about it.’
Culverhouse clenched his teeth. Whatever he’d done, he would’ve been fucked. And things weren’t going to get any easier from here, either. He was simultaneously being roasted for both being too heavy handed and not heavy handed enough. He couldn’t win.
‘It’s a difficult situation, sir. One that needed handling delicately.’
‘Father Joseph Kümmel doesn’t think it’s been handled particularly delicately, Jack.’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Jack replied, quickly losing his sense of professionalism. ‘But between you and me he’s mental. But in my professional opinion the call was a hoax. I imagine the church has made enemies and that there are people who want to drag its name through the mud.’
‘Not like you to defend a religious institution, Jack,’ the Chief Constable said.
‘I’m not defending it. They’re a bunch of losers, crackpots and weirdos. But that doesn’t make them murderers.’
Hawes nodded, and took a sip from his glass of water.
‘I’m afraid not everyone agrees. There are officers who have graver concerns about Hilltop Farm and feel it needs investigating further. I’ll be honest: I agree with them.’
‘Which officers, sir?’ Culverhouse asked, knowing damn well who it’d be.
‘It’s not for me to name names. And anyway, like I said, I agree with them. You don’t have any major cases ongoing at the moment, do you? So I think it would be prudent to find out as much as we can about Hilltop Farm and the church that’s based there and to make sure our arses are covered. Put it this way — I’d far rather be hauled up for being too heavy handed and digging up the whole fucking farm and finding nothing than I would having to explain that we’d had a murder reported and not investigated it.’
Culverhouse didn’t reply.
‘Who’ve you got in at the moment, Jack?’ Hawes asked.
‘Myself, DS Wing and DS Knight, sir. Frank Vine, Debbie Weston and Ryan Mackenzie are off shift.’
It was yet another quirk of the local policing setup that the town’s CID office could run for days on end with just three officers. Then again, it was remarkable that Mildenheath still had a CID office at all. Fortunately, the amount of serious crime was just enough to keep them all in a job, but without being overloaded — except when a huge case threatened to swamp them, as had almost happened once or twice in the past.
‘Right. Well I want you to get them all back in,’ Hawes said. ‘As far as I’m concerned this is now an active investigation.’