“I saw him.” Grace clung to the door-pull as Nick sent the Impreza careening into a tight series of bends. She flicked her eyes across, took in the clenched concentration in his face. “I met him and I never knew.”
“At the Retreat?”
“Yes. That day we had lunch in Staveley. I called in on my way back, looking for Edith. A man came out of the old byre, told me to try the farmhouse, but she wasn’t there.”
“Would you know him again?” Nick asked as the car went light over a vicious crest. She braced her knee against the camera bag wedged into the footwell as they landed hard, sped on.
“Probably, although I didn’t get close. There was a pale blue Land Rover parked outside. I looked right at it—” She broke off abruptly as he skimmed the apex of a right-hander and almost exchanged paint with a dark red 4x4 coming the other way, drifting wide from its own excess speed.
“Sorry,” he said between his teeth as they rocketed out the other side, miraculously unscathed. “If it’s any comfort, I got top marks on all my defensive driving courses.”
“Mm,” Grace said. “Perhaps I should point out that I went quiet so as not to distract you, rather than because I was struck dumb with fright.” She flashed him a quick smile, added diffidently, “My mother drove rally cars for Sunbeam in the ’sixties. I was eight before I realised the handbrake was intended just for parking.”
He gave a short bark of laughter but, she noted, nobly resisted the temptation to drift the car into the mouth of the Retreat driveway when they reached it shortly afterwards.
“There it is,” Grace said as they reached the yard, pointing. “And you’re right—it’s been repainted.”
She remembered the first time she’d asked him about the Land Rover in the lay-by at the top of the hill above Orton. The last letter of the plate was L for Lima, as he’d suggested, but it was an old number without the later prefix or suffix indicating the year of registration. As a vanity plate, it was worth more than the vehicle it was attached to.
“The door’s open.” Nick slowed to a crawl. “Do we go in, or wait for the bomb squad?”
“My head says we wait, of course. But my heart…?” She shrugged. “If the man who killed Richard is here, I want to catch him—before he kills anyone else.”
Nick pulled up close to the farmhouse, far enough away from the byre to avoid obliterating trace evidence. Doesn’t want his nice car blown up, either, Grace thought.
They climbed out. Nick scanned the yard with narrowed eyes. As they cautiously approached the open doorway, Grace slid her hands into a pair of nitrile gloves. Nick paused by the water trough just outside the door, squatted by the dark stains on the concrete.
“What do you make of this?” he asked quietly.
Grace put the bag down, knelt, bent low and sniffed. “Blood. Not yet fully congealed.” She looked at him. “It could be Edith’s.”
“Or anyone who got in her way,” Nick said darkly. He took a pained breath. “We have to go in, don’t we?”
Grace felt the tightness in her own chest echoed in his voice. He’s scared, she realised, and was somehow comforted by his vulnerability. That makes two of us.
He put a hand on her arm when she would have led the way. “I don’t always believe in women and children first,” he said with a tight little smile, moving past her.
She managed a cool smile of her own. “I prefer to think of it as CSI before CID.” But she let him take the lead.
There was more blood in the kitchen, much more. It lay pooled on the floor by the doorway into the living room, scraped and smeared down the woodwork of the frame, like someone had been holding on with their last breath.
Grace studied the pattern with as much objectivity as she could manage, attempting to push aside the knowledge that the scene was unsecured, the dangers unknown. At last, she stepped carefully over the bloodstain and moved into the living room.
The body of a man lay awkwardly between the sofa and the coffee table, the area around him saturated with blood. One side of his head was missing, the skin of his face ingrained with burned powder. His lips were parted as if in surprise.
Grace had never met Ian Hogg, so failed to recognise his corpse. She put gentle fingers to the dead man’s cheek, gave it a little wobble.
“I don’t claim to be an expert, but I don’t think you’ll bring him round that way,” Nick said from the doorway. “Even I can tell he’s been shot.”
Grace accepted the grim humour as a release of tension. “Rigor mortis usually starts in the small muscles of the face,” she said over her shoulder. “And he’s still warm.” She got to her feet. “We need to call this in.”
“Wait a moment,” he murmured. “Let’s just check there are no other nasty surprises in store first, shall we?”
Without waiting for a reply, he moved through the other rooms. His nerves seemed to have settled, she noted, as though his sudden fear before they’d entered the byre was an aberration.
What happened to you, Nick?
Alone, she looked carefully at the blood-soaked wingback chair, the spattered walls and sodden carpet by the kitchen door. Who was the dead man? Had Edith come in, brandishing a weapon, only to be met with a more deadly force? If so, did the empty cottage signify the mysterious Bardwell had gone to dispose of her body? And had not gone far, or he would have taken the Land Rover…
Grace was enveloped by a sudden chill that sent goosebumps springing up in its wake. She was glad of Nick’s return.
“All clear. Is that the man you saw?”
“No—he had a full beard,” she said after a moment, studying the victim, her imagination infusing him with the animation of life, thought, emotion. “If he’d shaved in the last few weeks, he would have an uneven tan.” She straightened. “And he was bigger all round—taller, heavier. This isn’t him.”
“Great,” she heard Nick mutter. “So the body count just went up again.”
“And may do so again. There are two distinct bullet holes in the wall. Here and here.” She pointed to one, surrounded by a spray of blood and bone, and a second behind the chair. “From the amount of blood I’d guess at a second gunshot victim. I couldn’t say what calibre at this stage, but large enough to go through-and-through—furniture as well as flesh. We may have to take half that wall out to recover the rounds.”
“It was an AK,” Nick said.
“Just because we think that’s what Edith took, we can’t make assumptions.”
“OK, what about this?” He nodded to an assault rifle lying half-tucked underneath the valance of the sofa.
It was a sad sign of the times, Grace thought, that she had no difficulty recognising the distinctive curved magazine of the AK-47. This was not the first time she had come across one at a crime scene. He reached towards it.
“Don’t,” she said quickly. “Not until I’ve photographed it at least. I’ll get my gear from outside.”