The Assassin King

Elias stood in the gap between the fields and gazed down at the ground beneath his feet. His duty was clear enough. He needed to alert Frank Mason to the possibility of human remains being buried here so that he and his team could get to work at once. But the remains were at least several weeks old, which reduced the urgency; and while Mason was a fine Crime Scene Manager, he was also a protégé of Trevor Wharton, assigned this case in part to keep an eye on Elias and report back. Report this back and Wharton would likely use it as an excuse to abandon his thankless Grimsby knife hunt and take over here instead.

That would have been okay with Elias if Wharton had been a good detective. Unfortunately, he was barely a detective at all. His investigation technique was to hold numerous press conferences at which he’d list all the resources he was committing while hinting gnomically at promising leads. Then he’d sit back and hope that something turned up for which he could take the credit.

Elias wasn’t having that. He was invested in this case now. He meant to solve it.

He returned to the farmhouse for a glass of water to wash away the lingering taste of butyric acid. WPC Quinn was still at the kitchen table, gabbing away with PC Rodgers and the Scene of Crime team. Mason toasted Elias rather sheepishly with his mug. ‘They never came anywhere near here,’ he said, to excuse himself. ‘And Ms Warne said we were to help ourselves to anything we wanted. So we thought a coffee for the road…’

‘Another stabbing, would you believe? In Grantham, this time. Wharton said to call him if you had a problem.’

Elias gave a grunt. Wharton knew he’d never call. And it suited him just fine. ‘Anything I should know?’

‘It’ll be in my report,’ said Mason. ‘But basically no. No fingerprints, no hairs, no DNA. Only those bootprints.’

‘Any idea what they were looking for?’

‘We searched the barn pretty thoroughly,’ volunteered one of Mason’s team. ‘Maybe they’d already found it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Elias. ‘Maybe they had.’ He waited for them to rinse out their mugs and leave, then turned to Quinn. ‘You finished Anna Warne’s statement yet?’

‘Check your email,’ she said.

‘Great. Then thanks for everything. I’ll call if I need anything else.’

‘We can go?’ she frowned. ‘All of us?’

‘All of you,’ he said. ‘Though not a word about last night, please. Can’t be having a media circus. And if you could arrange for a car at the top of the drive…?’

Her puzzled look cleared. She suspected what he was up to. A sharp one, that. Worth keeping an eye on. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to it myself.’

He waited for her to leave, ran himself a glass of water. The cheesy taste still lingered, however, if only in his mind, so he put on the kettle and checked the biscuit tin. A pair of custard creams had somehow survived the general carnage. He took them out with his coffee. The barn was a cavernous tall affair with creosoted slat walls, a pitched roof of terracotta tiles and double doors at either end, large enough for the tractor, which was parked alongside the ditch digger.

Two ploughs, a harrow, a seeder, a front-loader and various other attachments were lined up against the walls, as were a pair of rakes, a wide-headed stiff-bristled broom and several sacks of fertiliser up on wooden pallets. The brick floor was rutted from decades of wear and tear, and covered by the pebbles of dried mud that got everywhere at this time of year, and which would have made it a nightmare to search for anything small.

No way had those two intruders found what they’d been looking for. If they had, they’d have left before Anna Warne could have spotted them. So then. What was it? And what had made it worth taking such a crazy risk for? Perhaps it had some great personal or intrinsic value. More likely, though, it was incriminating in some way.

Elias had enough respect for Mason and his team to know that they’d have found it had it been lying openly on the floor. But equally those men must have had good reason for looking in the places they had. He had a good idea now why they’d been out in the fields, which offered a clue as to why they’d searched in here too. Because every crime had been committed before. A few years on the force taught you that. And this particular crime, he strongly suspected, had been committed half an hour’s drive south of here, on the Norfolk side of the Great Ouse – though surely elsewhere too.

He finished his second custard cream, set down his empty mug and walked over to the side door at which Anna Warne had been standing when she’d been spotted by the two intruders. Then he paced out the distance to the other side of the tractor. A little over ten yards. In bad light and with uncertain footing, it would have taken a man in reasonable condition at most two or three seconds to cross. If they’d set off at once, and Anna had been as badly hampered by her gumboots and waterproofs as she’d said, falling in the courtyard and dropping her torch and keys, then they should have caught her easily before she got inside the house. The implication, therefore, was that they hadn’t set off at once. They’d attended to something else first.