Simon Beckett - The Chemistry of Death

'No problem.'

With a last smile she'd hurried inside. I'd waited until I heard the snick of the lock before turning away. All the way back through the dark village I could feel the pressure of her hand on my bare arm.

I could still feel it now. I sipped my drink, wincing at the memory of how flustered I'd become just because a young woman had accidentally touched me. No wonder she'd gone quiet.

I finished the whisky and went inside. There was something else pricking my subconscious, a nagging sense of something I had to do. I thought for a moment before I remembered. Scott Brenner. I wasn't confident his brother would let him tell the police about the wire snare. It might be nothing, but Mackenzie needed to know about it. I found his card and dialled his mobile. It was almost one o'clock, but I could leave a voicemail message for him to get first thing.

He answered straight away. 'Yeah?'

'It's David Hunter,' I said, caught off-guard. 'Sorry, I know it's late. I just wanted to make sure Scott Brenner had got in touch.'

I could hear his irritation and fatigue in the pause. 'Scott who?'

I told him what had happened. When he spoke, the tiredness had gone. 'Where was this?'

'Near an old windmill a mile or so south of the village. You think it might be connected?'

There was a sound it took me a moment to identify – the rasp of his whiskers as he rubbed his face.

'Ah, what the hell. We're going to have to go public with this tomorrow anyway,' he said. 'Two of my officers were injured tonight. One got caught by a wire snare, the other stepped in a hole someone had stuck a sharpened stick in.'

There was no mistaking the anger in his voice.

'So I think we've got to assume that whoever took Lyn Metcalf expected us to come looking for him.'

There was no shock of transition from the dream that night. I simply found myself awake, eyes open and staring at the spill of moonlight falling through the window. For once I was still in bed, my nocturnal wandering this time confined to the dream. But the memory of it remained with me, as vivid as if I'd just walked from one room into another.

It was always in the same setting. A house I'd never seen in my waking life, a place I knew didn't exist but that nevertheless felt like home. Kara and Alice were there, vibrant and real. We would talk about my day, about nothing in particular, just as we had when they were alive.

And then I would wake, and confront again the stark fact that they were dead.

I thought again about what Linda Yates had said. You have dreams for a reason. I wondered what she would make of mine. I could imagine what a psychiatrist would say, or even an amateur psychologist like Henry. But the dreams defied any neat rationalization. There was a logic and reality to them that was far from dreamlike. And, although I could barely acknowledge it even to myself, a part of me didn't want to believe that's all they were.

If I let myself believe that, though, it would be the first step on a road I was scared to take. Because there was only one way I could ever be with my family again, and I knew taking it would be an act of despair, not love.

What scared me even more was that sometimes I didn't care.

Next morning two more people were injured in traps. They were separate incidents, neither of them anywhere near those of the previous night. I knew because our surgery lacked a permanent nurse, so I treated them both. One, a policewoman, had impaled her calf on a stick embedded point up in a concealed hole. As with Scott Brenner, I did what I could and sent her to hospital for stitches. The other injury, to Dan Marsden, a local farmhand, was more superficial, the wire noose having only partially cut through his tough leather boot.

'Christ, I'd like to get my hands on the bastard who put it there,' he said through gritted teeth as I dressed the wound.

'Was it well hidden?'

'Bloody invisible. And the size of it! God knows what they were hoping to catch with something that big.'

I didn't say anything. But I thought it was likely the traps had caught exactly what had been intended.

So did Mackenzie. He called a temporary halt to the search for Lyn Metcalf and had a first-aid station set up outside the mobile incident room. He also issued a statement warning everyone else to stay out of the woods and fields around the village. The result was predictable. If the mood before had been largely one of numb shock, news that the countryside around Manham was no longer safe brought the first touch of real fear.

Of course, there were those who refused to believe it, or stubbornly insisted they weren't going to be scared away from land they'd known all their lives. That lasted until one of the loudest objecters, fuelled by an afternoon's drinking in the Lamb, put his foot into a hole that had been covered with dried grass and snapped his ankle. His yells drove home the point far more effectively than any police warning.

As more police were drafted in and the national press finally woke up to what was going on, descending on the village with their microphones and cameras, Manham began to feel like a place under siege.

'There's just the two different kinds of trap so far,' Mackenzie told me. 'The wire one is pretty much a basic snare, same sort of thing any poacher might know how to make. Except these are big enough to take an adult's foot. The stakes are even worse. Could be ex-military or one of these survivalist buffs. Or just someone with a nasty imagination.'

'You said "so far"?'

'Whoever laid them knows what he's doing. There's real thought been put into this. We can't assume he hasn't planted some more surprises.'

'Couldn't that be what he wanted? To disrupt the search?'

'I daresay. But we can't afford to take the chance. The ones we've found have only caused injuries. We carry on blundering through the woods and next time someone might get killed.'

He broke off as we came to a junction, drumming the steering wheel impatiently as he waited for the car in front to pull out. I looked out of the window, my anxiety returning in the silence.

I'd called Mackenzie first thing that morning to tell him I would examine Sally Palmer's remains if he still wanted me to. The knowledge had been with me from the moment I'd woken, as if the decision had been made while I was asleep. Which, in a way, I suppose it had.

Realistically, I didn't know how much use I would be. At best I might be able to give a more precise idea of the time-since-death interval, assuming my rusty knowledge hadn't deserted me. But I was under no illusions that it would do much to help Lyn Metcalf. It was just that doing nothing was no longer an option.

That didn't mean I was happy about it.

Mackenzie had sounded neither surprised nor greatly impressed when I'd told him. Just said he'd check with his superintendent and get back to me. I hung up feeling left in limbo, wondering if I'd made a misjudgement.

But he'd rung back within half an hour to ask if I could make a start that afternoon. Mouth dry, I'd said I could.

'The body's still with the pathologist. I'll pick you up at one and take you over,' he'd told me.

'I can make my own way.'

'I've got to go back to the station anyway. And there's one or two things I'd like to talk about.'

I'd wondered what they might be as I went to ask Henry if he would cover for me during that evening's surgery.

'Of course. Something come up?'

He'd looked at me expectantly. I still hadn't got round to telling him why Mackenzie had been to see me in the first place. I felt bad about that, but it would have meant more explanations than I'd been ready to go into. I knew I couldn't put it off much longer, though. I owed him that much, at least.

'Give me till the weekend,' I'd said. By then I should have finished what I had to do, and there wouldn't be a surgery to worry about. 'I'll tell you everything then.'