The Assassin King

Elias had witnessed too many protestations of innocence over the years to worry overmuch about the words themselves. He’d learned to study tone instead, to watch hands and faces. And so he found himself intrigued by the way Gregory Scott kept turning to his wife, as though she were the one he most needed to convince. She knew something, Elias was sure of it. What was more, he was fearful that she’d tell. ‘And your metal detector?’ he asked, when finally Scott was done. ‘Or has that vanished too?’

‘I can’t see how,’ said Scott unhappily. ‘I saw it just the other day, I know I did.’ He led the way inside their home, to a closet beneath the stairs. ‘There!’ he said. He was about to pull it out when Elias asked him to step back. A metal detector was indeed leaning against the wall: a Minelab CTX 3030, with its own monitor and headphones, and with a hooded battery lamp on the floor beside it. What was more, a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board and a pair of brooms were all stored behind it – a curious arrangement for something so rarely used.

Elias photographed it with his phone. ‘You’ve not taken it out in years, you say?’

Scott looked utterly deflated. He must have realised how thin his story sounded. ‘We’ve obviously moved it around a few times. To get at other stuff.’

‘Does it store data?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A top of the range piece of kit like that, I’d assume it logs all your searches. Date, time, GPS location, things like that.’

Scott closed his eyes as the quicksand sucked him ever deeper. ‘I never set it up that way.’

‘Then why spend so much on it?’

‘Because it saw deeper underground than any of the others.’

‘Is that so?’ He called Scene of Crime to have them come here first, before the hotel. They waited in uncomfortable silence until they arrived. Elias showed them the closet and gave them the keys to the hotel storeroom too, then left them to it and returned to his Leaf to write up his notes while everything was still fresh in his mind. That done, he muted his phone, pushed back his seat and closed his eyes to think.

Gregory Scott was clearly now the prime suspect in the murder of Dunstan Warne. It wasn’t just his demeanour and missing spade. The man himself had admitted his interest in King John’s lost baggage train. And while metal detecting was indeed a common enough hobby, most practitioners didn’t own state-of-the-art machines capable of seeing further underground than other models. Nor had they been offered the chance to buy the farm next door.

How tempting it must have been for him to check out those fields while considering whether or not to bid. By night, of course, and wearing headphones to dampen any eureka shriek, and using a hooded lamp to see by, degrading his night vision enough not to notice Warne’s van until it was almost upon him. And then? Easy to imagine Warne getting out to confront him. Easy, too, to imagine Scott being so terrified of exposure and disgrace that he’d turned his spade sideways and wielded it like an axe, killing Warne on the spot. Panic would then have replaced fear, causing him to do the obvious rather than the strategic things, burying Warne’s body in the hole he’d already dug before thinking to recover his keys.

Dawn would already have been breaking. The first dribble of morning traffic. So he’d fled while he still could, taking his spade with him, lest it give him away. Now what? A bleach bath would get rid of the blood and hair and brain, but what innocent person bleaches their spade? Better to dump it altogether then try to replace it before anyone noticed. But driving off with it at such an early hour would have drawn attention, and maybe left traces in his boot. So he’d have sought another solution.

Elias opened his eyes again. He gazed out over the hotel gardens down to the high earthen bank that separated the land here from open sea. Except that it wasn’t open sea on the other side, of course, but rather acres of salt marsh inundated by each high tide, only to reappear again at the ebb. And it occurred to him suddenly that maybe their previous search hadn’t found the murder weapon simply because it had been conducted at the wrong time of day. So he checked the tables on his phone, and found that the next low tide was in just forty minutes.

Elias’s ex-wife Julie had been brought up on the north Lincolnshire coast, where her parents still lived. Whenever they’d gone visiting, their constant bickering had driven her nuts. She’d therefore bought him a pair of field glasses one birthday, to pack him off with her birdwatcher dad so that she and her mum could spend some quality time alone together. To his surprise, he’d come to enjoy it, less for the birds themselves than for the stakeout thrill. Until, at last, her dad had confessed that birdwatching was how he got to go out for a pint or two without getting moaned at. So they’d mostly gone pubbing after that. But he still had his field glasses in the boot.

He fetched them now, along with a pack of latex gloves and his towel. He made his way through the hotel gardens to the seawall, then up the flight of stone steps to the footpath upon its top. It was a popular local walk that continued on past Warne Farm before turning sharply inland to run alongside the River Nene. A small crowd had gathered at the boundary between the two properties. He went to check it out. Police tape had been strung up across the path and a privacy tent had been erected in the gap between the fields where those bootprints had been. They’d clearly found what he’d feared. The only surprise was that Mason hadn’t called to let him know. Except, of course, he’d muted his phone. He checked it now and found a pair of messages from him, the first about forty-one additional silver pennies they’d recovered from Dunstan Warne’s burial site, the second alerting him to the discovery of a mass grave.

Trevor Wharton had called too. Because of course he had. Mason would have alerted him at once to the new bodies, and he’d have seized upon them as his ticket out of Grimsby. Yet Elias was on the verge of nailing Warne’s killer, and he’d be damned if he’d let Wharton simply swoop in to steal the credit. He turned his phone completely off, therefore, then showed his warrant card to the onlookers and asked them to disperse, which they did with surprising good grace.