Peter Lovesey - Cop to Corpse

The bullet holes had ripped through the grey crevices of the bark at head height. They formed three parallel lines, each formed of about eight shots. Three bursts of rapid fire, he guessed. The depth of penetration was impossible to judge from this distance. Certainly more than a couple of inches and perhaps several times that. Recovering them without further damage would be a challenge for the ballistics team. The striations on the sides would be the key to matching them to a particular weapon. It might be necessary to fell the tree and saw off the section of trunk and remove it to the lab.

Those bullet holes impressed him more than anything he’d seen or heard in this wood. Signs of someone sleeping out could be open to mixed interpretations. This was beyond argument. A gunman had fired at the tree, a gunman who was no beginner.

Chilling.

The link between this and the murders of three policemen was as yet unproved, but what justification would anyone have for using a gun — almost certainly an assault rifle — in a Wiltshire wood?

The line of fire was obvious, the range less so. By standing level with the bullet holes and with his back to the tree Diamond made a significant discovery. In this dense wood the gunman had found just about the only possible sightline of fifty yards or more. Trees and bushes blocked every other angle. He’d found a shaft between them as narrow as a laser beam. It ended at another massive oak maybe sixty yards away, approximately the firing distance of the shot that had killed Harry Tasker in Walcot Street.

Impressed without really wanting to be, Diamond started walking dead straight in that direction, an obstacle course over fallen trees, holly, brambles and springy beds of leaves that were liable to give way and leave him ankle deep in mud. His dogged character wouldn’t allow him to find an easier route. He persevered at some cost to his suit trousers and shoes until he reached the second oak and was able to turn and still have a finger-thin view of the target tree.

This was even more clever than he’d first appreciated, for the second oak had wide-spreading branches low enough to be climbed. It wouldn’t require much athleticism to scale it. From high on an upper bough the gunman could have simulated the angle and distance required to shoot Harry Tasker.

For Diamond, the climb would have to be taken as completed. He was damned if he would attempt it dressed as he was, with the extra burden of the body armour. But he firmly believed that was what had happened. He’d suggest it to the chief inspector. In the upper branches they might well find fibres torn from the killer’s clothing.

Crime scene procedure had not been at the forefront of his thoughts until now. With more consideration for the men in white coats and their painstaking methods he chose a different line back. It really was a path of sorts, perhaps a badger-run.

Progress was easier this way. He stepped out briskly, with more enthusiasm to rejoin the dragnet. They might be moving on by now.

He’d walked not more than twenty yards when he heard a snapping sound.

He halted and listened.

Woods can be like that, silent as the grave and then surprising you. This wasn’t of his own making, he was sure. A dead branch falling off a tree?

Subdued voices carried to him from some distance ahead. The police line, he decided. The sound had been closer. He could just hear the Avon passing over the weir deep in the valley.

There was no wind. Everything around him was still.

He moved on.

Immediately he heard two loud mechanical rasps followed by an engine blast. From the ground in front of him a black dome surfaced. The helmet of a motorcyclist. A crouching, leather-clad rider. A large machine, accelerating and bearing down on him.

How the bike had materialised from the floor of a quiet wood he had no time to discover. It was about to strike him. At this speed there was no escape.

Diamond could do nothing to save himself. There wasn’t the split second needed to leap clear of the oncoming motorcycle. An Olympic athlete wouldn’t have managed it, let alone a portly middle-aged detective. Yet there was time enough to know his number was up. The body may be slow to react, but the brain is super-fast in life-threatening moments.

A massive impact.

For a moment he was airborne and then he hit the ground like a tenpin, spinning with the force of the contact. No way out of this, the brain insisted. Fatal, such force, such weight. He resigned to being run over by bike and rider.

Lying helpless on his back, eardrums at bursting point, he glimpsed the black network of branches swaying high overhead against the grey of the sky. The last image he would ever see.

Not so.

The killer crunch from the bike didn’t happen. The roar of the engine continued some seconds and then reduced. The note changed from a blare to a wail to a buzz. He heard it recede down the valley.

The branches overhead continued to stir in the wind.

Spared, then?

He didn’t know how.

Every part of his frame felt numb. Impossible to tell the extent of his injuries. Unwise to investigate yet. He lay motionless until the engine sound was a hiss that merged with the distant swish of water from Avoncliff weir. Only then did he truly believe he might be safe.

The motorcyclist must have made a last-second decision to swerve, catching him on the shoulder instead of mowing him down. Flesh and bone had impacted with flesh and bone, destructive enough, but not lethal. Dead leaves had cushioned his fall. He was conscious of the not unpleasant smell of moulding vegetation. Scrabbling with his fingers he felt the damp layer below the dry ones on the surface.

Tentatively, he moved his right hand down his side, checking that he still had a ribcage, hip and thigh. All present. All in place.

That settled, his brain struggled to account for what had happened. He’d been upright, fit and striding through the wood to return to his place in the dragnet. It was a mystery where the bike had come from. How could it have sprung from the solid earth in front of him?

People came running. The first to reach him was one of the Wiltshire firearms officers.

‘You OK?’

He released a shaky breath. ‘Don’t know till I get up.’

‘Stay still. Don’t try and move. What happened?’

‘Must have been the sniper. He came from nowhere.’

Others in their body armour surrounded him. ‘Call an ambulance,’ someone said.

‘No need for that,’ Diamond told them. ‘I can feel my legs.’ He tried to move them and gasped as pain shot up his left thigh.

Jack Gull forced himself to the front and leaned over. No sympathy given or expected. ‘What the fuck were you doing?’

‘Walking through the wood, that’s what. I was on my way back to the search party when this motorbike appeared from nowhere, coming straight for me.’

‘What do you mean, “from nowhere”?’

‘Out of the ground. Straight ahead.’ He tried to point and felt a stab of pain in his shoulder.

Disbelief personified, Jack Gull stepped over to check. He thrashed around in the bracken.

‘Well, fuck me.’

‘What? What is it?’

‘Where he came from. You wouldn’t know it was here. Watch me.’ Gull took a step forward and dropped out of sight. ‘Impressive?’ His head and shoulders reappeared. ‘It’s a bloody great hole in the ground.’

‘I saw nothing.’

‘It’s overgrown, isn’t it?’ Now that he’d made this discovery, Gull wanted all the credit he could extract. ‘Looks to me like part of the quarry workings, squared off neatly inside.’

Some of the others moved closer to take a look. The injured Diamond was only a sideshow now.