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

Ford turned to see that JJ had been joined by his younger brother. Where JJ was well over six foot and looked gym-fit, Rye was shorter by a head and built like a barrel. His forehead bulged oddly above pale blue eyes buried in puffy cheeks.

Grateful that he wouldn’t have to drive JJ and Rye back from the mortuary, Ford nodded. He didn’t know which he feared more – showing them the preliminary photos or the actual body.

Once they arrived at the hospital, JJ cracked jokes as the trio walked from the car park. In the mortuary, Ford ushered JJ and Rye into the family room, officially called the Chapel of Rest. No outside sound penetrated the softly lit space. Ford gestured at the sofa, but neither man sat.

JJ had stopped joking. Ford knew why. Coppers didn’t bring you to a mortuary for a laugh. JJ knew he was about to be shown a body and asked whether it belonged to Tommy. Amusement had been replaced by hope. And fear.

Rye had sunk into a silence so total it felt like it exerted its own gravity. Now he, JJ and Ford stood in an awkward triangle. A black vinyl folder lay on a low table in one corner of the room.

Ford fetched it. ‘I’m going to show you a photo first. If it’s not him, tell me and we can get out of here. If you think it’s him, just nod or say yes and then we’ll go next door and see him’ – horrified, Ford realised he was about to say ‘in the flesh’ – ‘for real. I want you to prepare yourselves. It’s not pretty. Ready?’ he asked.

Dumb question. Who was ever ready to see a photo of a corpse that could be their dead brother?

JJ nodded.

Ford opened the cover. As JJ stared at the ravaged face, Ford saw a vein begin to pulse in his left temple. His broad chest heaved in and out and the whistling breath through his pinched nostrils broke the silence.

Rye crowded in next to him and looked down. He gasped. ‘No! Tommy!’

He backed away and flopped on to the sofa, staring dead-eyed at the curtained viewing window.

‘Is it him?’ Ford asked quietly.

JJ nodded. Lifted the cover of the folder with his index finger and closed it with a small slap as it hit the plastic sleeve containing the photo.

Pete had entered the room. He stood ready to the left of the curtains, his hand on the pull cord. He raised his eyebrows at Ford in a mute question. Now?

But JJ forestalled the answer. ‘Not through that,’ he said. ‘I want to see him.’

Ford shook his head. He’d been dreading this moment. ‘I don’t think that’s such a great idea. You know why.’

JJ whirled round and grabbed Ford’s lapels. Stuck his face, contorted now into a mask of fury, into Ford’s. ‘Yes, I do know why. Now, either you take me to him or I’m going to go through you and Lurch over there and see him anyway.’ A beat. ‘Your choice.’

Ford took hold of JJ’s thick wrists and pulled them out and down. Jesus, the guy was strong! ‘Come on, then.’

Pulse bumping in his throat, Ford signalled with a shake of his head that Pete could go. He followed him out into the corridor with JJ close behind him. Turned right through the next door. Took JJ into the room where Tommy’s corpse waited.

The family room smelled of lavender. Pete had told him once that it had a calming effect. Hadn’t bloody worked on JJ, had it? The body room – its informal name – didn’t smell of lavender. Instead, a mixture of pine disinfectant and the sharp, sappy, broken-branch smell of formalin swirled in the air. And beneath both, the whiff of decay. Well advanced in Tommy’s case, but never pleasant, even with fresh ones.

Ford led JJ to the table. Pete had draped the corpse in a sheet of a soft dusty blue. No doubt this colour had also been chosen by the hospital authorities for its so-called calming properties. Ford had his doubts.

He turned to JJ. ‘You sure you want to do this?’

JJ nodded. A stiff jerk of his head. He turned his gaze to Ford. A deep, unfathomable hatred burned in those dark brown irises. At that moment Ford knew he’d be under additional, unwelcome pressure to solve this one fast. God help the man who’d slaughtered JJ Bolter’s kid brother. And then a most unpolicemanlike thought chased the other away. He shouldn’t have killed him and cut him into bits, then, should he?

Ford took the edge of the sheet at the top end of the table and drew it down slowly to reveal Tommy’s face. JJ hissed in a breath.

Beside him, Ford couldn’t take his eyes off Tommy. Pete had done an amazing job of patching up the badger bites, or whatever the hell they were. But the cheeks had the uneven look of car body panels loaded with filler. And the skin colour was wrong. Under the foundation and powder, that horrible greenish-brown shade still showed through.

Only an idiot would say he looked peaceful. Something had happened to the skin. It didn’t look properly joined to the muscles beneath. Wrong, somehow.

Ford knew the source of the problem. Whatever gave the skin its elasticity – collagen, presumably – had broken down. That’s why Tommy’s face looked the way it did.

No, not Tommy. He was staring at a joke-shop ‘Tommy’ horror mask.

With a sharp tug, JJ whisked off the sheet and flung it into a corner. The scream he emitted raised the hairs on the back of Ford’s neck.

Ford knew Pete had put Tommy back together. But he hadn’t followed the thought through to its real-world conclusion. Now he knew. Now he could see. And so could JJ.

At the wrists, shoulders, neck, waist, groin, knees and ankles, lines of ugly black spiders marched across the green-purple skin. Crude knotted Xs of thick surgical thread with