The day began, as it so often did, with a phone call. I fumbled for the phone, squinting against the morning sun that had found a gap in the curtains. The light speared through my head, pinning me to the pillow.
‘Maeve? You busy?’ Chris Pettifer was two shades too loud for me at the best of times, and this was certainly not the best of times.
‘Not as such. What time is it?’
‘Coming up on six.’
I didn’t want to work out how much sleep I’d had: not enough, anyway. My eyes felt gritty, the skin around them puffy and tender, and all I wanted to do was phone in sick and go back to sleep. That had been my plan but Chris had got in first. He was on call, I remembered, so if he was on the phone it was because he needed to be.
‘What’s up?’ I had enough practice at waking up instantly to sound as if I was alert even if that was far from the case.
‘Hampshire Police have been on. They’ve got a body they wanted you to know about.’
‘That’s kind of them but I’ve got plenty of my own to worry about.’
‘This is one of yours.’ Chris really needed to tone down the heartiness, I thought. He sounded altogether too cheerful for that time of day.
‘What do you mean, mine?’
‘He’s got your card in his wallet.’
‘Shit.’ I sat up properly. ‘Do we have an ID?’
‘Not officially. Twenty-something IC1 male, brown hair, cause of death suicide. That’s all I know.’
‘Brown hair … did you say twenty-something male?’ Fear slammed into me with physical force. Not Luke, please, not Luke … not when he’s only just found him … I managed a grotesque impression of a casual enquiry. ‘Anything in the wallet to give us a name?’
‘Cards in the name of Roderick Asquith. Mean anything to you?’
It meant the world. I didn’t say it. ‘I interviewed him a couple of days ago in the Paige Hargreaves case.’
‘There you are. That’s how he had your card.’ Pettifer sounded pleased. Mystery solved. Poor, sweet Roddy. In the absence of any concrete details I imagined him lying on a hillside or hanging from a tree, his worries at an end. Was it something I said?
‘What happened?’
‘Suicide is all I’ve got. They wanted to let you know in case it was relevant that your card was in his wallet.’
I frowned. ‘Have they moved the body?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Tell them not to. I want to take a look.’
‘They won’t be pleased. They want to get the scene cleared up.’
‘I’ll get there as soon as I can.’ I threw back the duvet and started to get out of bed, slowing down as stiffness and bruising and raw grazes set up a morning chorus of complaint. ‘Actually, where is there?’
‘Middle of nowhere. I’ll let them know you’re on your way and send you the postcode.’
I rubbed my face, trying to think of something useful to ask. ‘When did it happen?’
‘No idea. The local CID called me a couple of minutes ago. I bet they’ll be thrilled if you’re getting involved.’
The county forces were overstretched, bogged down with targets and time limits. It was getting harder to find resources to allocate to major crimes. Much better to get the Met’s deep pockets and infinite manpower involved, which was fine except that I was the infinite manpower in question and I’d almost reached my limit. I yawned. ‘Right. I’m on my way. Want to come?’
‘Nah. I’ve got a stabbing. You’re on your own.’
On my own. I was glad of it as I drove down the A3, and very glad that no one had been in the flat to see me wince and hobble through an abbreviated version of my morning routine. I’d taken a handful of painkillers to deal with the physical aftermath of my fall, and they’d kicked in at last, but the emotional side was going to take longer to stop hurting. I thought about Roddy instead, and why he might have taken his own life, and if I had done the right thing by him. The satnav knew where she was going, even if I didn’t, and I turned the green fields into a blur as I sped away from the congestion of London.
The address Pettifer had sent me truly was in the middle of nowhere, through a tiny village I’d never heard of. The satnav directed me confidently down a lane as narrow as a footpath and I swore, hoping I wouldn’t meet anyone coming the other way. The trees met overhead and branches swept the sides of the car.
‘Your destination is on your left,’ the satnav purred.
I slowed down, watching for the entrance. I almost missed the faded board with hand-painted letters: Bladewell Brickworks. A police car was parked near the entrance, almost blocking access. It was a good way of discouraging any curious passers-by from investigating what was going on there if you didn’t have enough people to leave someone at the gate. I nosed past it and parked beside two unmarked cars. No one came to greet me, which was fine by me. I got out of the car and walked slowly towards the huge shed that took up most of the site, trying to get my bearings. The roof was pitted with holes and big double doors sagged open, revealing rusting machinery. Behind the shed, a square-sided chimney stretched fifty metres into the sky.
I looked in through the open doors but nothing moved inside the enormous shed except for a couple of birds that shot up towards the rafters, panicked. A narrow roadway skirted the outside of the building, the tarmac fractured and peeling. Weeds had seized control, spiralling up through it wherever they could find a fissure to exploit. The abandoned brickworks was giving me the creeps. It felt completely isolated, with no other properties in view and trees crowding close around the site. I heard voices in the distance and headed in that direction, following the road.
As I came around the side of the building I saw a small knot of men standing together in what must have been a loading yard at one time. It was big and bare, and the only thing that was out of place was a twin streak of tyre marks across the cracked concrete that led to a vehicle smashed against the base of the chimney. I stopped dead, staring at it. The front of it had folded as if it was tinfoil. All the glass had shattered and lay around the car like snow. The vehicle was half the length it should have been and barely recognisable. A slick of dark liquid pooled on the concrete beneath it.
‘Can I help you?’ A grim-looking man in a suit detached himself from the group and came to intercept me.
I introduced myself and explained why I was there, and he looked relieved.
‘I’m DC Frank Steele. We’ve been waiting for you to turn up. Once you’re finished here we’ll get a crew of firefighters to extract the body, get the vehicle recovered and have this place cleared up.’
Not so fast, I thought, but I smiled as he introduced me to the other detective, the response officers and the pathologist, a Dr Sunbury.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Steele answered me, taking the lead as before. ‘The deceased drove in here some time before four this morning. There’s no working CCTV, no guard on site, so we’re a bit stuck on the exact timings. He came around the side of the building and stopped on the other side of this yard. Then he floored it. There’s a farmhouse a bit further down the road. They heard the impact and called it in.’
‘We got here about ten past five,’ one of the response officers chipped in. ‘No one here, no sign of any other cars. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and there was an empty bottle of whisky in the car. Looked like a suicide to us.’
‘And me.’ The pathologist was short and round. ‘I’ve taken blood samples but there’s a strong smell of alcohol in the car. He would have been killed instantly. Massive head injuries.’
‘Are you sure of the ID?’
‘He took most of the impact on his forehead and the top of his head. The lower part of his face is fairly intact and it matches his work ID which was in his wallet. We’ll double-check, of course.’
The relatively undamaged rear end of the car had a round blue-and-white badge that I could see from where I stood. ‘It’s a BMW. The airbag didn’t deploy?’
‘On the passenger side only.’
‘I thought you couldn’t switch off the driver’s one.’
‘You can take the fuse out,’ the second response officer volunteered. ‘If you’re fixing something on the dashboard of the car you can set them off by accident, so it’s safer to disable it. Dead easy. You wouldn’t need to be a car mechanic to do it.’
‘Who’s the registered keeper of the vehicle?’
‘It’s a hire car.’
I considered that briefly. ‘Any note?’
‘No, and his phone was smashed.’ The other CID officer held up a bag with the remains of the phone in it.
‘I’d better have a look at the body.’
‘It’s messy.’ That was Steele.
‘I’m used to it.’
‘Yeah, of course. I didn’t mean to suggest you weren’t.’
I smiled. ‘I should be OK, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it.’
He looked relieved that I wasn’t taking offence, and I walked away, knowing that they were all watching me. If only Steele knew that I was essentially immune to sexist remarks after working with Derwent for so long.
Derwent. I sighed and put him out of my mind so I could concentrate on what I was doing, stopping a few feet from the car so I could walk around it and take in the damage. The metalwork gleamed where it wasn’t damaged: a new car, hired for the occasion, cleaned between uses. I came round to the driver’s side and looked in, deliberately separating the body in the car from my memory of Roddy as he’d been, except to confirm that this was the man I had met and interviewed. The force of the impact had pushed the engine block back into the vehicle, wrapping the car around his body like a fist. Impossible to guess at what damage he might have sustained to his lower half. It would take the firefighters a while to disentangle him from the wreckage, I anticipated.
The door was buckled so badly it couldn’t be opened. I did as everyone else had done and leaned through the window to get a close look at him. As Sudbury had said, the smell of alcohol was overpowering, and stronger as I got closer to him. Blood and brain tissue had cascaded down from a massive wound on the top of his head, streaking his face and soaking into his clothes. The front of his shirt was saturated. His hands were still on the steering wheel, the signet ring shining. I took out my torch and took a closer look at his mouth and jaw.
‘Problem?’ Sudbury was right behind me, with Steele behind him.
‘I’d say so.’ I straightened up. ‘Not suicide.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Roddy was epileptic. He wasn’t allowed to drive and he’d never learned. He didn’t have a licence and he wouldn’t have been able to hire the car on his own. Even if he’d got someone else to hire it, he’d never have been able to drive down the A3 without attracting attention from a traffic unit – that’s a fast road and someone inexperienced would stand out a mile. And even if he managed that, he’d never have been able to cope with the narrow lane that leads here in the middle of the night. It would have been dark.’
‘Desperate men can do extraordinary things,’ the pathologist said.
‘I looked up this place before I got here.’ I’d done my homework and I didn’t mind them knowing it. ‘It’s on a handful of urban exploring forums, precisely because there’s no security and no CCTV and no close neighbours and the gate isn’t working any more. The only people who come here since it closed down are kids who get a kick out of abandoned buildings and criminals looking for somewhere quiet to go about their business.’
Steele nodded. ‘It’s fairly well known locally.’
‘And further afield. I tried searching for “abandoned factory rural location near London” and it came up on the first page of results.’
‘Even so,’ Steele began and I held up a hand.
‘I met Roddy recently and his teeth were perfect. Look at them now.’ I stood aside to let them see. The two front teeth were chipped, a neat half-moon taken out of them.
‘That could have happened in the crash,’ Steele objected.
Sudbury was shaking his head. ‘No. There was no impact on the lower half of the face and there’s no bruising on his mouth.’
‘This mark – what does it look like to you?’ I shone my torch on Roddy’s jaw.
‘A bruise. A finger mark, maybe.’ Sudbury bristled. ‘I’d have seen it at the PM.’
‘I was looking for it,’ I said, which was generous of me, because he should have thought of doing the same. ‘I think someone held his face and made him drink. Look at the amount that must have spilled down his shirt. When he was injured, the blood spread, as if the material was wet already. No droplets, just saturation. He was set up. This was staged.’
‘People aren’t in their right minds when they kill themselves, as a rule. You might spill your drink, mightn’t you?’ Steele said. ‘And he could have got that bruise somewhere else. He could have been in a fight before he came down here. None of this is making me think murder.’
‘OK, well, look at the car. This window broke inside the driver’s door when it buckled. The window was open before the crash. Someone had to take the handbrake off, which isn’t a job I’d have liked myself because the accelerator was already pushed down as far as it would go. When they recover the car, they’ll need to look for something in the driver’s footwell – a block, something heavy like that. The way the car was damaged, whoever arranged this accident wouldn’t have been able to retrieve it, assuming that was their plan. If you check, you’ll find it.’
‘Who would do that?’ Steele asked.
‘I don’t know yet. Someone connected with the murder I’m investigating, I presume.’ I looked down at Roddy soberly. ‘He knew something about it, I could tell, but he wouldn’t talk.’
He looked appalled. ‘And someone killed him anyway? Even though he didn’t cooperate?’
‘They’re absolutely ruthless.’
‘They must have a lot to lose,’ Steele said, and I shivered in spite of myself.