Shallow Ground (Detective Ford), Andy Maslen [ebook reader with built in dictionary .txt] 📗

after another they either failed to penetrate more than a millimetre or wouldn’t turn at all when they did slide home.

Ford called over to the MOE sergeant. ‘All yours, Danny.’ Then, to Olly and Jools, ‘We need to get round the back somehow. You two split up and see if there’s a lane or an alleyway we can get through.’

‘What about you, guv?’ Jools asked.

‘Old school. I’m going to ask the neighbours,’ he said, smiling with humour he didn’t feel.

Both next-door neighbours were either out or well into their morning naps. Ford moved to the next house on the left and leaned on the bell. Almost immediately, he heard frenzied barking from inside. Through the frosted glass in the window beside the front door, he saw a smallish dog leaping up and down.

A woman’s voice silenced it. ‘Walter, quiet! Quiet!’

The door opened. No chain, Ford had time to notice.

‘Yes?’ the woman asked. She was in her mid-sixties and had striking silver hair tied back with a leopard-print hairband. An air of a schoolteacher about that enquiring gaze.

‘Police, madam,’ he said, holding up his ID. ‘I need to gain access’ – Oh, Ford, ditch the cop-speak! – ‘I mean, get into number seven.’

‘Oh, you mean Nick’s?’

‘Yes. Have you got rear access? A garden. A gate, even?’

She smiled. Looked down at the terrier, whose nose was poking round her calf to sniff at Ford. ‘Of course! Follow me. How exciting!’

Ford followed her along a narrow hall hung with watercolour landscapes, through a large farmhouse kitchen and out into an immaculate garden filled with flowers.

‘The gate’s at the end. No lock. Just latch it after you. Is he all right? Nick, I mean? Only I haven’t seen him for a while. He’s a very private man, hates prying, as he calls it. But you know, good neighbours, and so forth.’

‘I’ll latch the gate,’ Ford called out, running down the garden.

The row of houses backed on to a small wooded area, mainly sycamores and ash with a few holly and yew trees sprinkled amongst them. Ford pulled open the gate, swung it shut behind him and found himself on a narrow gravelled track.

He ran towards the rear of Nick Abbott’s house and found his way barred by a tall wooden gate secured with a Yale lock. Beside the gate was a lockbox, closed with a four-wheel combination lock.

Swearing, Ford hoisted himself on to the top of the gate and dropped down on the other side, ripping his suit jacket on a protruding nail.

Here was his third suburban back garden of the day. More roses. Another pond, overgrown with water lilies and arching sword-leaved irises. And a shed to his left.

He pulled the unpadlocked door open and looked inside. The six-by-eight-foot space was immaculate. Everything stowed tidily. No Nick Abbott.

The kitchen door was open, and as Ford walked up to the house, Jools came out, accompanied by a couple of uniforms. She stood on the deck, raised above the sloping lawn by four feet or so.

‘Nothing, guv,’ she called. ‘He’s not here. You?’

Ford shook his head.

Then he glanced at the deck and noticed a dark space in the centre of the wooden facings. He ran up the long lawn, pointing.

‘What’s in the gap, Jools?’

Jools jumped down and turned to look at the gap.

‘Bloody hell!’ she shouted. ‘There are steps. And a door.’

Ford reached the short set of steps. At the bottom, a four-foot square of concrete lay before a sturdy-looking black-painted door. The timbers were banded with metal of some kind and the whole thing had an air of a medieval fortress.

Hanging from a hammer-finished blue-steel hasp bolted to the wood was a chunky navy-blue padlock. The brand was visible in the gloom.

SQUIRE

The key slotted home with a series of soft clicks. Ford gave it a firm twist and the chromed shackle popped open. He pulled it free of the hasp and opened the door.

A stench of excrement, urine and putrefying blood assailed his nostrils.

He reeled back, gagging, as flies swarmed out of the dark. Turning to look for a light switch, he cried out involuntarily. Charles Abbott was leering at him beside a bloody 167 on the wall of Marcus Anderson’s eco-hut. The oversized selfie was projected on to the cellar wall. As Ford watched, transfixed, it faded to be replaced with another, Abbott beside a bloody 333. And another: 500. And, finally, 666.

Holding his breath, he felt around on the inside of the door frame. Nothing on the right. But on the left, a switch.

The cellar flooded with light.

Bound by rope to a kitchen chair occupying the centre of a spreading pool of blackened blood sat an old man. His head, silver-haired, lolled on his bare chest. To his left stood a tall chrome metal stand from which hung a bag half-full of a clear liquid.

A thin tube descended from the bag into a needle emerging from his left elbow. From his right, a sinuous tube, plum-red, snaked to the ground. Halfway down, a plastic tap and clear cylinder interrupted the thin bore.

Ford observed, horrified, as a plum-red bead formed at the upper end of the cylinder, swelled, and dripped down.

He stepped into the centre of the pool of blood and closed off the tap. He withdrew the needle from the old man’s right elbow and called over his shoulder.

‘Jools, get in here. Put pressure on that and then hold his arm up high.’

Jools squeezed in beside him, muttering, ‘Nice,’ as she jerked her chin at the cycling images on the wall.

Ford jammed two fingers into the soft place beneath the man’s jaw. Waited, eyes closed, searching by feel for a sign of life.

There! Faint, but present: a tremor. A weak, fluttering pulse as Nick’s overstressed heart fought to pump the decreasing volume of blood around the body.

Ford reached for his phone and called for an ambulance.

DAY TWENTY-TWO, 7.59 P.M.

A stone’s throw from Bourne Hill nick, the Wyndham Arms was packed with police officers, CSIs and police staff.

In a