Land Rites (Detective Ford), Andy Maslen [best way to read ebooks .txt] 📗

with the 1940s matinee idols her gran used to love watching before dementia claimed her.

She approached the scratched glass-topped counter and showed him her ID. Hannah stood beside her, the bagged bullet secure inside a rucksack over her shoulder. She’d confirmed George’s hunch about the calibre the previous day in her preliminary analysis.

‘We’re investigating a murder,’ Jools said. ‘The victim was shot with a .308 expanding bullet. We think it was a ballistic tip. If we showed it to you, could you tell us anything about it?’

‘I’ll try,’ he said, pushing his glasses higher up his nose.

Hannah brought out the small red-taped evidence bag containing the bullet and laid it on the counter.

‘Please, only hold the bag by the taped end,’ she said hurriedly as he reached for it. ‘Don’t put any pressure at all on the bullet itself.’

He did as she asked, holding the bag close to his eyes.

‘Definitely a ballistic tip,’ he pronounced. ‘Hollow points have regular petals. These are ragged and uneven in size.’

‘Exactly! It’s because hollow points are pre-grooved,’ Hannah said to him excitedly. ‘The copper jackets split predictably. Ballistic tips split randomly once the plastic point breaks off in the tissue.’

Jools liked Hannah’s company, but she’d seen how eagerly she dived down informational rabbit holes. Or badger setts. What was worse – the shop guy was cut from the same cloth. They were talking eagerly about how bullets split open on impact, spin rates, calibres, propellant types and other firearms esoterica she didn’t have time for.

She jumped in, wanting to drag them back to the salient point. ‘We just need to know if you’ve sold ammunition of this type to anyone recently.’

The man pulled his mouth to one side. ‘How recently?’

It was a good question. Jools stopped to think. Yes, how far back did they need to go?

‘How much of that type of ammunition do customers usually buy in one go?’ Hannah asked.

Jools looked at her with admiration. God, the woman had a way of seeing different angles.

The young man smiled. ‘A hundred rounds at a time. On average.’

‘And how long would that last them?’ Hannah asked.

‘That’s impossible to say. It depends how many times they pull the trigger. And on whether they’re using them for hunting or target-shooting.’

‘A guesstimate?’ Jools asked.

‘If you were at a club, you could easily get through a hundred in a day. If you were hunting, on the other hand . . .’ He looked up at the ceiling for a couple of seconds, then back at Jools. ‘If you only came across a couple of deer, that might just be two rounds if they were clean, one-shot kills.’

‘Better go back a year, then,’ Jools said.

She looked around. The shop didn’t exactly feel like it was at the cutting edge of technology. A plaque above the door referred to the company’s founding in 1755. It didn’t look as if it had changed much in the interim. Her heart sank as she pictured waist-high stacks of cardboard boxes, each holding neatly piled white cylinders of till receipts.

‘It’ll take me a while to pull all the names and addresses together for you,’ he said. ‘I could email you, if you like?’

‘Perfect! Here,’ Jools said, handing him a card. ‘One last thing. Do you have a list of local gun clubs?’

He nodded and handed her a pre-printed sheet from a pile in a literature rack.

Outside, Jools’s vision dimmed. Had someone just turned the lights out? She looked up. The sky, so blue it hurt when she and Hannah had entered the gun shop, had taken on the colour of lead.

She and Hannah ran for the car as rain pelted the streets.

Four miles south of the city, Tom Adlam stared out of the window in frustration. He, his wife and their two grown-up sons farmed 560 acres in the Chalke Valley. They raised chestnut and cream Simmental cows and grew wheat, rape and barley.

This was the afternoon he’d set aside to move the Simmentals over to the new grazing. Trouble was, rain made them impossible to handle. He’d have to leave it till the morning.

The rain continued for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Adlam filled his time fixing a spring harrow in one of the barns.

The rain filled the soakaways at the rear of the farmhouse until they overflowed. It flooded the bottom of the garden and created an impromptu pond in the centre of the lawn. It ran in rippling sheets down the track from Fisher’s Lane to the farm gate, creating vast puddles around the tractor and combine harvester. It swelled the chalk streams that crossed his land until the meandering watercourses burst their banks and turned the fields into mirrors reflecting the sky.

In the centre of the farm, the River Ebble snaked across a tussocky meadow. Swollen by tens of thousands of gallons of highly alkaline rainwater that slid straight off the sun-baked fields into the river valley, it swirled through an ancient brick and stone sluice gate into a deep drainage pond, then out through a second, narrower gate and on, through the rest of their land, before heedlessly crossing the property line into the neighbouring farm.

The inflowing torrent carried a bulky object into the pond, where it sank to the silty bottom. Six feet long, it rolled over and over before jamming in the narrow gap of the outflow sluice.

Vegetable matter and dead branches washed downstream caught on its various protrusions. They wove themselves into an untidy yet solid mass that grew in height as more items snagged on it. The topmost pieces of debris lay just a few feet below the roiling surface.

The unabating water, having had its exit from the pond curtailed so severely, looked for an alternative. It found it to left and right, rising over the banks and flowing away through the grassy hillocks all the way to the single-track road leading from the farm back towards Salisbury, where Ford was meeting JJ Bolter in a dingy pub in