Bert Hickson had seen many mutilated corpses, but few as bad as this. When he was young he would have felt sick, but not now; not after ten years on the streets of Belfast in the 1970s. As he looked down on the shattered limbs and shreds of skin and cloth caught up in barbed wire at the river’s edge, instinctively he did what they’d told him back then: deep breaths; head back; eyes closed; clear the brain. Relax. Thirty years ago it used to work. But now his brain wasn’t so easily fooled. He could sense the panic rising. He felt in his pocket: no pills. He’d left them at home. His shaking hands grabbed at his phone. Somehow he dialled 999 and spoke. Then oblivion. He never heard the reply.
It was Detective Chief Inspector Richard Lane’s first call-out since his transfer back to Cambridgeshire, and Fenland CID. That had been back at the start of the week, but it could have been years ago. All evening he’d been kicking his heels in his office in Ely, supposedly familiarising himself with his new GDMPs (Grievance and District Management Procedures), when the desk sergeant downstairs got the call. At the time, every uniformed officer had been called out to deal with an end-of-week booze-fuelled disturbance in the City Centre. They weren’t that common in this quiet Fenland City, so the police turned out in force to nip it in the bud. By four o’clock Lane had waded-through enough management jargon and his head was reeling. So he decided to go home: a bad case of migraine, or so he muttered as he returned his key at the desk. The Sergeant was putting the phone down and Lane could see the frustration on his face. He shot him a questioning glance.
‘That’s all we bloody need, Sir: an emergency call and everyone out…’ His voice tailed off. There was a new email on the screen below the desk.
‘What’s it about?’ Lane asked, despite himself.
Again he broke off, and was looking at the screen.
Anything, even a possible body in a river, was more interesting than GDMPs.
Lane strode rapidly across the car park and as he put the magnetic flashing blue light on his car’s roof he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He was smiling.
Richard Lane had had second thoughts about taking-on a new project in his old force. After five happy and generally, he thought, successful years in Leicestershire, his last case had stirred resentment: he had been forced to question some of his colleagues’ past motives, attitudes and loyalties – and it hadn’t gone down well everywhere. Of course everyone had been friendly on the surface, but after a few months he could sense that deep down things had changed. So he’d had ‘a quiet word’ with the Chief Constable, who then spoke to his old boss in Fenland. As it turned out, Lane was just the man they were looking for to manage a particularly delicate assignment. So now he was back in the Fens – where he immediately felt at home. His wife Mary had been slightly less keen: she had put down roots in Leicester, but now that both their children were away at university, she had agreed to move. Richard was only too aware that it hadn’t been easy for her, and he was determined to find them somewhere she would really like: preferably somewhere with a garden. She had close relatives living in Peterborough and they had long been contemplating moving nearer them. So wherever he now went he kept half an eye on the estate agents’ For Sale boards, as he drove along. You never know, he thought, but not around here: locals called it ‘the Cambridge effect’; house prices were rocketing as the university city economy continued to prosper.
The main rush hour out of Cambridge had yet to build-up as Lane approached Fursby, so he dropped his speed as he passed through the little Victorian country estate village. Smiley’s Mill lay just outside, to the north. He drew up in the Mill car park and crossed the Mill Cut by the little iron footbridge through the tall willows. Several elderly people were taking their dogs for their late afternoon walks. He headed rapidly along the Cut bank, beside the partially-flooded meadow until he came to a barbed wire fence and a small gate with a large, neatly lettered, and quite recently erected, sign: Fursby Estates: NO ADMITTANCE Except by Prior Appointment. Ignoring this, Lane passed through the gate and headed along the now thickly wooded path beside the Cut.
Around the first and only bend he came across a very distressed elderly man, covered in mud up one side, from head to toe, kneeling on the wet ground and feebly feeling around for his lost phone, or glasses, or both. Lane glanced down at the water, and there below him was the body, semi-floating and snagged on rusty barbed wire. Although part of the face was missing, Lane could see it was a man, possibly in his thirties, and of medium height and build. Although his skin had been bleached in the cold water, he could see from its colour on his forehead, neck and hands that he worked outside. But he was plainly very dead. Lane looked up: the living man was now his immediate concern.
The sun was setting and the first few drops of the first night time shower were falling, as two paramedics helped Mr Hickson back to the ambulance in the Mill car park. By now Lane had been joined by a Sergeant and Constable and all three policemen were wearing the hi-viz waterproof overalls that were now standard issue on such assignments. Although it was only early October, Lane was grateful for the extra warmth, as the water was cold and the dead body, if anything, was colder. Before they tried to remove the corpse from the wire the constable removed any loose clothing, which included one rigger boot. It was steel toe-capped. This man probably worked in construction. They didn’t want anything important to be lost during the body’s removal from the water, so Lane began to search it. He handed a couple of coins from a trouser pocket to the Sergeant who bagged them. One of the outside pockets of his waterproof Gor-Tex jacket produced a 6H pencil and a draftsman’s eraser, plus the lid of an insulated plastic mug. The Sergeant took them. Then he gently rolled the body to one side and put his hand within the jacket. There were two inside pockets. One was empty, but he could feel the other was full of something. Carefully he unzipped it, then he cupped his right hand over the object and drew it out very slowly. It was what he had hoped to find: the dead man’s wallet. Even better, the zipped pocket had remained waterproof. Quickly they bagged it up, against the now persistent rain.
Lane stood aside as two wet-suited assistants arrived to help remove the body from the barbed wire. He walked back along the Cut to the mill car park, but as he stepped off the footbridge he was dazzled by the headlights of a car which had just drawn up. The lights went out and the driver got out. Lane was still wearing the waterproof police overalls. The man came across to him.
They walked across to a small side entrance in the Victorian brick and timber-clad mill building, which was quickly unlocked. Once inside, Smiley punched a code into a touch-pad. Suddenly the whole area was bathed in light.
‘Hm, there’s nothing obvious…’ He was hesitating.
There was a another, shorter pause. Slowly Smiley replied.
Lane smiled. For decades Cambridge had been notorious for cycle crime.
They walked back to the footbridge. As they approached the bike, Smiley couldn’t conceal his enthusiasm.
As Lane had anticipated, in his enthusiasm Smiley was about to take hold of the handlebars. Quickly the policeman placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
Even under the sodium lights’ glare it was clear that the manager was blushing deeply. His hand went up to his face in embarrassment.
‘Yes, and here comes the body, so we won’t be detaining you here for long.’ As he spoke, Lane could see a small group of people, led by an officer with a powerful flashlight, who was followed by two men carrying a stretcher, with two others behind them, both with bright lights. They were making their way slowly along the Cut. They’d be at least ten minutes. Time to ask that other question.
‘What, decayed; that sort of thing?’ Despite his better nature, Smiley was intrigued by what had been found.
There was a long pause. Eventually he replied.
‘Mr. Sebastian Cripps, who owns the Fursby Estate and all the land hereabouts. We’ve always worked very closely with them. In fact they still own some of the land and buildings around the mill itself, which my grand-father bought off the estate in 1950. In fact I’ve got a lot of time for both the brothers.
Sebastian’s name rang a bell with Lane.
By now they were looking down at the mill race. Lane had to agree, they’d made the best of a bad job: there was blue rope everywhere and any living person could certainly have grabbed hold of it and pulled themselves round to a steel access ladder by the main chute. The mesh of rope would probably have caught a dead sheep or cow; a human could just have passed through. But only just.
They could hear voices over by the footbridge. The party had returned with their gruesome cargo.
Back in his car, Lane put on rubber gloves and took the wallet from its police plastic bag. The Driving Licence identified the owner as a Mr. Stanley Beaton, born July 18, 1972. Current residence: 21 Priory Lane, Peterborough. Lane knew the road and the area well: to the west of the railway station, in the Longthorpe direction. Very nice middle class residential district. Not what he would have expected of someone whose clothes and weather-beaten features suggested site work. Slowly and very carefully he looked through the various cards, searching for clues. He left the usual ones in place: Visa, MasterCard, National Trust, English Heritage, but two caught his eye in passing: the dead man had been a member of the Council for British Archaeology and of the Institute for Archaeologists. Suddenly the clothes, and the few other items found in his pockets, began to make sense.
In the last fold of the wallet were the cards he was looking for; these were from people, not corporations. In amongst them, was a name he immediately recognised: Alan Cadbury. Lane smiled, that was more like it. This time he carefully pulled the card from the wallet. It was a corporate-style, quite well-designed and issued by Paul Flynn Consulting Ltd, to a Mr. Alan Cadbury, ‘Fieldwork Director’. Gingerly he turned it over. There were traces of a smeared muddy finger-mark, not a print, and a scrawled message: “Great visit, Stan. Many thanks, Alan.” This was followed by a clearly written mobile number. Just to be sure, Lane pulled out his own mobile and checked it against what he had. They were identical.
The next step was easy: he pressed the Call button.