Lee Child: MatchUp

And this was no haystack.

It was twenty acres of rotting bin bags full of soiled nappies, rotting food, dead animals, with aggressive feral rats running amok.

She and her five colleagues lined out to her right and left, steadily working their way through the rubbish, were constantly having to fend off rats with the rakes they were using to tear open and sift through the contents of every single bag. They’d been here since 7 a.m., and her back was aching like hell from the constant raking motions. It was now 2 p.m. and they would keep on going into the evening, for as long as there was light, until they found what they were looking for, or could conclude, for certain, it wasn’t here. She’d not eaten anything since arriving here, nor had any of her colleagues.

None of them had any appetite.

“Skipper,” a voice called out.

She turned to see PC Theakston at the end of the line to her right, dressed as they all were in blue overalls, face masks, gloves and boots, signaling.

“You’d better come and take a look at this.”

His tone was a mixture of excitement and revulsion, in equal parts. Perhaps more revulsion.

And she could see and smell why.

Through a mist of buzzing blowflies a rat was gnawing hungrily at one of two severed human feet, cut off above the anklebones, lying on the ground. The terrible, rancid, cloying smell of dead flesh filled the air all around them, and Sarah yanked a handkerchief from her pocket and jammed it over her nose. The feet were intact, but some of the flesh had turned a mottled green color. Specks of pink varnish dotted some of the nails.

“Where’s the rest of the body?” she said, wondering aloud.

“Done a runner?” the constable said.

NORMALLY, DURING HIS WEEK AS the on-call senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who was a few weeks shy of his forty-second birthday, wanted nothing more than a challenging homicide inquiry—a Gucci job, as he called them—that he could get his teeth into. One that would attract national press, and where he might have a chance to shine to his superiors. Most of the murders in the city of Brighton and Hove in recent months had been anything but. Lowlifes on lowlifes. A street drug dealer knifing another. Then a small-time drug dealer locked in the boot of a car that was then torched. Both of these, like most of that kind, were solved within days. A blindfolded monkey could have solved them in his view.

He knew it was wrong to be hoping for a good murder. But that’s what every homicide detective secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, was after. As he sat at his desk poring over the trial papers of a suspect he had arrested the previous year, a highly evil female killer, whose case was coming up at the Old Bailey next month, his phone rang.

He answered and listened.

Then hung up.

He should wish for things more often.

An hour later, accompanied by his colleague and mate Detective Inspector Glenn Branson—tall, black, and bald as a bowling ball—Grace drove up to the entrance to the West Brighton Recycling and Landfill Site. A marked police car as well as a white CSI van were pulled up beside a Portacabin that housed the site office, and there was a line of blue-and-white police tape across the road, with a uniformed officer standing in front with a clipboard.

Grace was pleased to see that the site was already secured. But the site manager, a burly harassed-looking woman in a yellow uniform, with the name Tracey Finden on her lapel badge, clearly was not. She strode over before they were even out of the car. As Grace rolled down the window, introduced himself, and showed her his warrant card, she replied, “You can’t do this, sir. We’ve got lorries and the general public coming and going all day. This is going to cause chaos.”

“I do understand that and we’ll be as quick as we can.”

“I thought your officers were looking for a bloody fire extinguisher.”

“They were—and still are. But now you have to understand this is a potential murder inquiry, and I’m treating this place as a crime scene.”

“For how long?”

“At this moment, I cannot tell you. It could be several days.”

“Several days? You’re joking?”

“I don’t think a dead human being is something to joke about.”

“It’s a pair of feet, right? That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Grace replied.

“They could have come from anywhere. You don’t seriously think whoever they belong to is wandering around the site looking for them, do you?”

“I don’t think anything at this stage,” he replied calmly. “Until I have more information. But I am going to need your help, Tracey. Is there CCTV here?”

“Yes, six cameras.”

“How long do you keep the recordings?”

“Two weeks before they’re automatically recorded over.”

“I’m going to need the memory cards. Also the details of all lorries that you’ve logged in the past month and any information you can give about them and their drivers.”

The two detectives climbed out of their car, wormed their way into their protective onesies, followed by overshoes, gloves, and face masks, then they signed the scene log and ducked under the tape.

“Yugggggh,” Branson said, wrinkling his nose at the stench.

Grace too had to swallow to stop himself from gagging.

Then they followed the long length of police tape that had been laid on the ground, guiding them in a straight line through the garbage toward a small knot of people in uniform, standing amid a cloud of buzzing flies.

Unsurprisingly, the home office pathologist, pedantic Groucho Marx look-alike Dr. Frazer Theobald, declined the opportunity to view the feet in situ at the waste site, requesting them to be recovered and taken to the mortuary. Sarah Dennison and her colleagues had completed their search by late afternoon and no other body parts had been found. This, both Grace and the pathologist agreed, indicated the place was more likely to be a deposition site than the crime scene itself.

Assuming it was a crime scene—and Grace was always wary of assumptions. Ass–u–me makes an ass out of u and me was something he frequently liked to remind people of. The feet could have come from a hospital mortuary, taken in a sick prank by medical students. Things like that had happened before. Or some sicko might have stolen them from an undertaker. A funeral director would be loath and probably too embarrassed to report such a theft.

He stood with DI Branson, gowned up in green protective clothing and white clogs in the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, along with his wife, Cleo, the chief mortician. Or senior anatomical pathology technician as the role was now known. Darren Bourne, Cleo’s assistant, a coroner’s officer, a crime scene photographer, and the crime scene manager.

So far Dr. Frazer Theobald had established the feet were female, size seven, and at some time recently, presumably prior to being severed, had been pedicured. He wasn’t able to date how long they had been severed precisely, and his best estimate from the deterioration of the flesh, and the generation of blowfly larvae, was somewhere between three to five weeks. Tissue had been sent to the DNA lab with an urgent request. But it would be a couple of days before they would know if the owner of the feet was on the national database. The absolute priority for both detectives was to identify that person.

One thing the pathologist pointed out to Grace and Branson, with the aid of a microscope, was the surgical precision with which the leg bones had been sawed through. There were tiny, matching serrations on both feet. What that indicated to him was that the feet had not been hacked off in anger, or as some form of torture or revenge. They’d been removed by someone with medical skills, or possibly with butcher training. But beyond that the pathologist could offer no further suggestion at this stage. Nothing that would help answer the one burning question Roy Grace had right now.