Paul Finch - Sacrifice

Ernshaw gagged, clamping a hand to his nose and mouth. Rodwell worked all the harder, smashing away the last vestiges of brickwork.

They stood back panting, wafting at the dust, retching at the stink.

‘Good God!’ Rodwell said as he focused on what they’d uncovered.

Though it stood upright, this was only because it had been suspended by the wrists from two manacles fixed above its head. It had reached that stage of early putrefaction where it could either have been a shrivelled corpse or a wax dummy, its complexion somewhere between sickly yellow and maggoty green. It had once been an elderly man – that much was evident from the scraggly white beard on its skullish jaw, plus it was bone-thin, an impression only enhanced by its baggy, extremely dirty garb. This consisted of a red tunic hanging in foul-smelling folds, trimmed with dirt-grey fur, and red pantaloons, the front of them thick with frozen urine, their cuffs tucked into a pair of oversized wellingtons.

It was not an unusual experience, even for relatively new bobbies like Ernshaw, to discover corpses in a state of corruption. Not everyone handled it well, though Ernshaw usually had – until now.

He laughed. Bizarrely. It was almost a cackle.

‘S-Santa,’ he stuttered.

Rodwell glanced at him, distracted.

‘Fucking Santa!’ Ernshaw continued to cackle, though his glazed expression contained no mirth. ‘Looks like there was no one nice waiting for him at the bottom of this chimney. Only naughty …’

Rodwell glanced back at the corpse as he recalled the words on the sign – Ho Ho Ho . He noticed that a red hood with a filthy fur trim had been pulled up over the wizened, hairless cranium.

‘Christ save us,’ he whispered. The corpse wore a tortured expression, its eyes bugging like marbles in a face twisted into a rigid, grimacing death-mask. ‘This poor bastard was walled up in here alive.’

If it was possible for a newsagent billboard to shriek, this one did.

Detective Sergeant Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg observed it through the driver’s window of his Fiat while he waited at a traffic light. Homeward-bound commuters darted across the road in front of him, muffled against the February evening. Much of the heavy winter snow had cleared, but dirty, frozen lumps of it lingered in the gutters.

Heck eased his Fiat forward, glancing continually at his sat-nav. Milton Keynes was a big place; it comprised about two hundred thousand citizens, and like most of the so-called ‘new towns’ – purpose-built conurbation designed to accommodate the overspill population after World War II left so many British cities in smoking rubble – its suburbs seemed to drag on interminably. After half an hour, the entrance to Wilberforce Drive appeared on his left. He rounded its corner and cruised along a quiet, middle-class street – though, in the current climate of terror, all these streets were quiet after nightfall, particularly in towns like Milton Keynes, so close to the M1 motorway.

The houses were semi-detached, nestling behind low brick walls or privet fences. All had front gardens and neatly paved driveways. In the majority of cases, cars were already parked there, curtains drawn. When he reached number eighteen, Heck halted on the opposite side of the road and turned his engine off.

Then he waited. It would soon get cold, so he zipped up his leather jacket and pulled on his gloves. Eighteen, Wilberforce Drive seemed almost impossibly innocent. A snug pink light issued through its downstairs window. A child’s skateboard was propped against its garage door. There was even the relic of a snowman on its front lawn.

Heck took his notes from the glove-box and checked through them. Yes – eighteen, Wilberforce Drive, the home of Jordan Savage, thirty-three years old, a married man who managed the local garden centre for a living. The homely environs made it altogether less menacing a scene than Heck had expected. It would be easier than usual to walk up the path and rap on the door here – this wasn’t the sort of place where cops normally got their teeth knocked out. But Heck was still nervous that he might be on the wrong track.

Not that he would ever know sitting behind his steering wheel. But before he could open the car door, another door opened – the front door to number eighteen. The man who stepped out could only be Jordan Savage: his solid build and six-foot-two inches made him unmistakable; likewise his shock of red, spiky hair. No doubt, up close, those penetrating blue eyes of his would be another give-away.

Savage was wearing jeans, a sweater and a heavy waxed jacket. As Heck watched, he moved the skateboard aside, took a key from his pocket and opened the garage door. There was a vehicle inside; a green Mondeo Sport. The registration mark checked out as well. It was the same car the Traffic patrol had become suspicious of and had stopped that dank October night. The Mondeo’s engine rumbled to life, its headlights snapped on and Savage eased it down the drive. If he noticed Heck seated in the car opposite, he gave no indication, but turned right along Wilberforce Drive, heading for the junction with the main road. When Savage was a hundred yards ahead, Heck switched his own engine on and followed.

Tailing a suspect was never easy, especially when you were doing it unofficially – but Heck had performed this task dozens of times. Once they were on the main road, he stayed about three cars behind – not too close to attract attention, but close enough to keep a careful eye on his target. Even so, after two and a half miles, when the Mondeo suddenly veered left onto what looked like another housing estate, he was taken by surprise.

This neighbourhood was less salubrious than the previous one. Its houses were council stock, some terraced with communal passages between them, some with front gates hanging from broken hinges. But its central artery was called Boroughbridge Avenue, and that rang a bell of familiarity. Heck didn’t need to rifle through his notes this time to know that this was where Jason Savage, Jordan’s twin brother, lived.

The Mondeo stopped outside a two-flat maisonette. Jordan Savage didn’t get out, but sat there, his exhaust pumping winter fog. Heck slowed to a halt as well – just as a glint of light revealed that a door to the upstairs flat had opened and closed. A figure trotted down a narrow flight of cement steps.

Even from fifty yards away, the similarities between the two men were startling. Jason Savage, who was a mechanic by trade, wore an old donkey jacket over what looked like black coveralls, but he too was about six-foot-two and had a thatch of bristly red hair. He climbed into the Mondeo’s front passenger seat, and it drew away from the kerb. Heck remained where he was, wondering if they were about to make a three-point turn, though apparently there was another exit from this estate – the Mondeo drove on ahead until it rounded a bend and vanished.

Heck nosed forward. This was better than he’d hoped for, but it could also mean nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time that two brothers had spent an evening playing darts together. That said, when he swung around the bend and found himself at a deserted T-junction, he briefly panicked.

Trusting to luck, he swung his car right and got his foot down. Leafless trees closed from either side as he passed through public woodland – this didn’t look promising, but then it gave way to the high fencing of an industrial park, and about fifty yards ahead a red traffic light was showing, a lone vehicle waiting there. Heck accelerated and, to his relief, recognised the Mondeo. He’d be directly behind them now, but he couldn’t afford to worry about that. His police instinct – the ‘hunch’ honed through so many criminal investigations (or alternatively, ‘his imagination’, as Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper called it), told him he was onto something.