Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

‘Only enough to get me through the pub quiz at the Brack Arms.’ They stopped outside the front entrance, letting people bustle past on their way to the car park. Darkness had fallen, but the night was still warm. ‘Speaking of pubs, how about a drink before we head back?’

‘Thanks, but I’ll say no.’ She smiled. ‘It’s been a lovely day, Daniel. I’ve enjoyed seeing you again, and thanks for filling me in on your conversations with poor Orla Payne.’

‘Any time.’

As he bent forward to kiss her cheek, a ringtone pierced the chatter of the passing theatregoers. Hill Street Blues .

‘Shit, that’s me,’ Hannah murmured. ‘Lousy timing, as ever.’

She plucked a phone out of her bag and took a few paces to one side as she listened. He watched as her expression changed from annoyance to alarm.

‘What is it?’ he asked as she finished the call.

‘That was Mario Pinardi,’ she said hoarsely. ‘He’s investigating Orla’s death. And now he has another corpse on his hands.’

‘Unbelievable.’ Mario Pinardi yawned as he took a weary swig from the polystyrene coffee cup, and spilt as much as he drank. Lucky the carpet tiles were the colour of mud. ‘Two bodies found on the same farm inside a week. I mean, what are the odds on that being a coincidence?’

‘When the deceased are a woman and her long-lost half-brother? When they both worked together? When the farm belongs to their father?’ Hannah bit into the Cox’s Orange Pippin she’d stuffed into her bag before driving out to Keswick. ‘A zillion to one, I’d say.’

After a night without sleep, Mario’s face was as grey as the fells in winter. His eyes had a haunted look, as if he kept replaying in his mind the vision of the crime scene at Lane End. Big mistake. The first time Hannah ever saw a butchered body, Ben Kind advised her that some sights are best forgotten, if you want to stay sane. One horror was all it took to send some people into a tailspin. And it didn’t get any worse than watching as a corpse with a crushed skull was dredged out of a slurry tank.

Mario tossed his cup towards the waste-paper basket. Short by a clear six inches. ‘The stench soaked into my sinuses; it feels like I’ll never breathe fresh air again,’ he muttered. ‘Christ, what a way to go.’

‘You could do with a couple of hours’ kip,’ she said. ‘Must be twenty-four hours since you last saw Alessandra.’

‘No time.’ Mario gritted his teeth. ‘Got to keep going.’

She didn’t try to talk him round; he had to show a lead. Keswick’s incident room scarcely ever buzzed like this, let alone at one o’clock on a summer Sunday, but all available staff had been hauled in at short notice to help out. An admin assistant chewed her biro as she listened to a voicemail message from the coroner’s officer; the fingers of her colleagues raced across keyboards, inputting data from the crime scene. A printer spewed out pages of typescript; in the corner, a scanner whirred. They were already more than halfway through the crucial first twenty-four hours of the murder enquiry, and nobody was agonising about the overtime bill. Yet.

Hannah and Mario perched on plastic chairs either side of a whiteboard on which he’d scrawled a crude map of the farm with a red marker pen. This morning the brass had confirmed Mario as SIO in the Lane End murder enquiry. A no-brainer, given his involvement in the Orla Payne case, and the absence through holidays and sickness of more senior officers, even though he was only a DI. He’d feel the pressure of overpromotion, nagged by the knowledge that if he didn’t achieve a quick result someone was bound to be brought in over his head. When she’d called to suggest they share intelligence, Mario didn’t think twice before saying yes.

‘Sheikh had a bedsit in Crosthwaite. So far, we’ve found two separate sets of ID. Fake papers in the name of Aslan Sheikh, which he used to get into this country. Another has his first name as Nuri Michael Iskirlak.’

‘ Michael ?’

‘Yeah, seems like his mum named him after Hinds, even though the feller dumped her.’ Mario sighed and said again, ‘Unbelievable.’

Why is life so often one unbelievable thing after another? Hannah wondered. Aloud, she said, ‘Any leads from Crosthwaite?’

‘Not a lot. Plenty of stamps in both his passports, real and false. We’ve established that he grew up first in Turkey and then in Germany. He travelled light, and he didn’t give much away about himself to anyone. His landlady lives on the ground floor, but she’s a turn-a-blind-eye sort who thinks he’s brought one or two women back since he moved in, but doesn’t know if any of them stayed overnight. She can’t help us with his movements yesterday, and her other tenant is off trekking across Europe. Thanks for nothing, eh?’

‘Anyone talking to the people he worked with at St Herbert’s?’

‘My DS is there now — apparently the library is open seven days a week. I’d no idea people still read so much. What we’ll learn, God knows. Sheikh doesn’t sound the bookish type to me. There are no books at Crosthwaite except a battered copy of one of the Narnia books and a paperback of On the Road . His iPod holds some crap music and no photographs. Thirty years old, but never settled down. Bit of a chancer, if you ask me.’

‘Last night he took one chance too many.’

Aslan had made two 999 calls. The first cut off after three seconds, with nothing said. In the second, moments later, a man had shouted something. It was wild and unintelligible and on the recording it sounded to Hannah like a bitten-off yelp. A crashing noise was followed by a low groan that reminded her of the air hissing out of a punctured tyre. Another crash, then the line went dead. By identifying the mobile phone mast which picked up the strongest signal from the phone, the call had soon been tracked to the vicinity of Lane End Farm. The same area from which Michael Hinds had called earlier in the week to summon the emergency services after he discovered his daughter’s corpse in a tower of grain. But the call had not come from the same phone.

Mario was finishing his shift when he was alerted, due to his familiarity with Lane End Farm. He’d decided to call there himself, along with a young DC. The lights were on behind curtained windows, but Hinds and his wife took an age to answer the door. When they did, it was clear they’d been interrupted in the middle of a drunken sex session. They denied any knowledge of a 999 call, and insisted they’d heard nothing. The Polish workers had long since finished for the day and headed back to their rooms in Keswick in Hinds’ van. Leaving Lane End to just the farmer, his wife and their animals.

Hinds wasn’t happy about being disturbed, but he didn’t have his scythe to hand, and it’s difficult to get too stroppy when you’re naked under a grubby old dressing gown. Mario insisted on taking a look around outside, and after a short argument, Hinds bowed to the inevitable. When Mario climbed a ladder to shine a flashlight into the slurry tank, he saw that the crust on top of the slurry had been smashed through.

‘When I realised there must be a body in the tank,’ Mario had said, ‘I watched Hinds, to study his reaction. Fear, horror, shock, guilt? Not a muscle in his face moved, I swear. Not so much as a twitch. He might have been the Man in the Iron Mask, for all the emotion I saw.’

They’d needed to summon support and special equipment to fish the body out of the tank, and it wasn’t recovered until the early hours. By then, Mario had obtained a provisional ID. There had been some sort of struggle on the cobbles close to the slurry tank, and a bank debit card had slipped out of the dead man’s pocket. It bore the name of Aslan Sheikh.