Grave intent, p.1
Grave Intent, page 1
Grave Intent
A.M. Peacock
Contents
Also By A.M. Peacock
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Acknowledgments
Copyright © 2019 A.M.Peacock
The right of A.M. Peacock to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Bloodhound Books
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
* * *
Print ISBN 978-1-912986-44-6
Also By A.M. Peacock
Open Grave
For everybody who has helped along the way.
Chapter One
His breaths came in sharp, panicked gasps as he ran from the farmhouse. The rain was pounding down now, making it hard for him to see exactly where he was going. Stinging his face, as if scolding him for being out in such weather. His feet slipped in the muddy earth, nearly causing him to fall. He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes wide and fearful. He had to keep running. He just had to…
He hadn’t expected anyone to be home. The wheat field had provided good cover and he’d been told that the farmer wouldn’t be there.
‘Wait until well after dark, approach from the east, and stay low,’ they’d told him. ‘Three scarecrows and you’re there.’
He hadn’t banked on a light turning on as he opened the door, nor the shrieking of rusted hinges announcing his presence. Such was his shock that, at first, he hadn’t even seen the man with the shotgun sitting in the corner of the room.
That was when the growling had started.
The dog had lunged at him first, before the man had stood and cocked his gun.
He’d turned in sheer terror, feeling the warm trickle of blood moving down his leg as the Alsatian’s jaws locked in place. He’d gouged at the animal’s eyes and managed to wriggle free. He’d slammed the door behind him, and slipped on the wooden patio, smashing his chin against the damp wood.
And, so, he’d ran.
Cursing his luck, he moaned and carried on, dragging his injured leg away from the house in the pouring rain. He couldn’t see him, but he knew the man was not far behind.
The barking grew in volume.
Each time his right foot made contact with the ground his injured leg screamed at him. ‘Come on!’ he urged himself, fishing out his mobile with shaky fingers.
Rain smeared across the phone screen as he typed in the wrong pin. He swore as the dog clamped its jaws over his leg, once again, dropping the device as he lashed out into the night. The dog whimpered and hurtled back towards the confines of the house.
He continued past the first scarecrow as a shot rang up around him.
The sound of screeching birds evacuating their nests rose above the noise of the retreating dog’s barks. Allowing himself a stifled sob, he carried on past the second scarecrow.
‘I’m coming for you, boy!’ the farmer’s gruff voice bellowed from behind him.
Why had he agreed to the job? He didn’t know what was worse, having to go back to them without it or being chased through a field by a gun-toting maniac.
By the time the second shot came, he’d made his decision.
His adrenaline was up, blood pounding through his ears, as he passed the third scarecrow, which was sat askew on its frame. He could almost see the end of the field now as a set of headlights moved across his vision.
‘Help!’ he shouted.
The lights disappeared from view, leaving him alone with the man and his gun.
‘Fuck!’
The field rose in a steady incline and he could feel his calves burning as he pushed onwards. The stitch that had been throbbing away at his side now burst through, sending shooting pains up his body. He could feel the injured leg lagging and knew he was slowing down. Every step proved more difficult than the last, his feet sliding in the sludge of the churned-up field. Keep going, he told himself. Only one more scarecrow.
Suddenly, the atmosphere thickened. So confused was he that he barely registered the absence of sound around him. There’d only been three, hadn’t there? He’d passed all of them on his way to the farmhouse. Could he have been wrong?
He stood some fifteen feet away from it, its black cloak swirling around in the biting wind. Its head faced the ground, much like the others, with a pointed hat covering the upper features of its face.
He shivered, aware of how cold he now felt.
He could no longer hear the man, only the sound of heavy rain and his own thudding heart. He turned and looked back towards the house, noting that the light had now gone out.
He was alone in a field of four scarecrows when there should have only been three.
He snapped his head back around as the sound of a twig breaking cut through the silence. Sweat began to trickle down his back.
He edged forward. ‘Hello?’
The scarecrow hung before him, unmoved by his presence. Reaching out, he took hold of the thick, black cloak and gazed up into its misshapen features. He exhaled a sigh of relief. It wasn’t alive.
Thank God.
But he was sure there had only been three scarecrows, not four. How could…
Dread crawled up through his stomach as he realised. He’d been so distracted that he hadn’t fully registered what he’d seen. The third scarecrow hadn’t looked right, had it? It was askew on its frame. No, that wasn’t quite right. What was it?
It hadn’t been on a frame.
A blow to the head caused him to fall to the ground. The impact left the side of his face numb as he looked up and saw the third scarecrow staring down at him. It smiled a crooked smile, a thick, angry scar noticeable across its left cheek. He made to scream but was paralysed by fear. He tried to crawl away but his wounded leg wouldn’t let him.
Slowly, the scarecrow man stepped forward, heavy boots slapping into the wet earth. The grin spread wider over his face as he brought a gloved finger up to his mouth.
Quiet now.
When the pitchfork broke through his skin he found himself unable to comply.
Chapter Two
Jack Lambert rolled over in bed and tried to remember what dream he’d been having. The lack of sweat on his sheets told him it hadn’t been a nightmare. He found himself plagued less and less by those in recent times. After last year’s case, he’d initially been unable to shake the image of the Open Grave Murderer from his mind. After that, those dreams had been replaced with images of the Captain; the mysterious gangster who had threatened to find him at the beginning of the year. With the absence of a face, just about everybody he had ever known had appeared to him as the unknown criminal. With that threat unfulfilled, Jack had almost forgotten it had even happened now. He yawned, a satisfied yawn, and sat upright, correcting the crick in his neck.
‘What time is it?’
Jack was startled. He still wasn’t used to sharing his domain with another man. However, Ryan, a pharmacist in his mid-thirties, had entered his life, just a few short months ago—an internet dating success story, surrounded by a graveyard of failures.
Jack shuddered at the thought of graves. Perhaps some demons were harder to shake than others.
‘Half seven,’ Jack told him. ‘Don’t worry, just go back to sleep.’
Jack watched as Ryan buried his head in the pillow, bedraggled blond hair flopping from side to side as he groaned.
‘How can I when you keep waking me up so early?’
Jack laughed. ‘Sorry, occupational hazard.’
‘Are you at least going to make me a coffee?’
‘You hate the coffee I make,’ Jack told him.
Ryan turned to face him, his neat features set in a fake pout. ‘True,’ he said, reaching over to trace the outline of the scar across Jack’s stomach. ‘That’s because you’re supposed to make a drink, not mix cement.’
‘I—’ Jack began before his phone buzzed, cutting through his thoughts. He mouthed a ‘sorry’ to Ryan and moved to the doorway to answer the call.
Two minutes later he re-entered the room.
‘Problem?’ Ryan asked.
Jack nodded. ‘You’ll have to make your own coffee, I’m afraid.’
Ryan sighed. ‘Duty calls?’
Jack grabbed his jeans and wrestled with the left leg. ‘Duty calls,’ he mumbled.
Jack knelt in the wet earth and surveyed the scene.
‘What do we know?’ DI Russell asked, choosing to stay standing above him.
What did they know? Word had come in at around 7am that morning. The owner of the property, a farmer, had found the man in the field and made a panicked call to the police. Jack glanced at his cracked Rolex, a present from his late mother. It was now 9.13am exactly and the reality was they knew very little.
‘Well,’ he said, knees grinding as he dragged himself back up and brushed the mud from his white SOC suit. ‘I know he’s dead.’
DI Russell snorted and ran her painfully-thin fingers down her equally painfully-constructed fringe. ‘Yes, I noticed that myself.’
Jack managed to stop himself before biting back. It was no secret that Jane Russell disliked him, she’d made that clear for the best part of ten years now. Despite her cutting remarks and general aloofness from others, though, she was a great detective. She was a stickler for formality, and Jack was pretty sure he’d never seen her in anything other than her drab, grey work suit with too-square shoulders. Quick to temper and impatient with bluster, she’d acquired her Bulldog nickname from her colleagues for good reason.
He pitied the officer that ever called her it to her face.
Gazing out of the tent, across the field, he took note of the three scarecrows sat on their perches. Jack shuddered inside. He’d watched Worzel Gummidge as a child. Creepy. ‘Well we know what the murder weapon was, given that they’ve left it right next to him.’
‘I’m beginning to see why they made you a detective.’ DI Russell’s sarcasm was just the wrong side of banter.
The SOC unit hadn’t yet moved the pitchfork and the body was still in place under the recently-erected white tent. It wasn’t pretty. The man’s leg had been mangled by the fork but, having been the victim of something similar himself once, Jack was sure that the victim had also been bitten by a dog. The rock used to smash his head in lay next to what could only be described as a bloody pulp on the ground. The fact that the previous night’s rain was still sodden in the man’s clothes somehow made the whole thing seem even sadder.
‘Guv.’ DS Watkins strode over. ‘We’ve found a mobile phone not far from the house.’
‘Bag it up and put it in with the rest of the evidence.’
‘Already done, sir.’ Watkins was obviously pleased with his find, even the rain couldn’t wash the beaming smile from his face.
Jack was a fan of the DS and was happy to see him starting to act on his own initiative. The gangly, ginger detective was growing into the role, even if his pipe-cleaner limbs still struggled to fill out his baggy clothes.
‘The bloke has a shotgun in the house, can you believe it?’ Watkins added, eyes flitting to DI Russell.
Jack almost smiled at the man’s nervousness. Although an empathetic and social character, like many of his colleagues, he feared the wrath of Jane Russell. They’d never seen eye-to-eye and Jack knew that the DI didn’t rate him.
Good job he was the boss, then.
‘He’s a farmer, Watkins. They all have shotguns.’ He wasn’t interested in the firearm. The victim hadn’t been shot.
‘We have an ID already, right?’ Jane asked.
Jack nodded. ‘Twenty-two-year-old Robert Norris. He still had his wallet on him.’
‘Well it can’t have been a mugging then.’
He gazed back towards the farmhouse. ‘No, it looks more like he was the one doing the mugging.’
‘So you think the farmer meted out his own form of punishment?’ Watkins asked.
Jack bit down on his lip. ‘It looks that way, at first glance. But why call us? Surely he’d know he’d become a suspect?’
The detectives exited the tent.
‘Where is our vigilante?’ Jack asked.
DI Russell pointed to the left of the house. ‘Over there. I would have spoken to him but…’
Jack nodded. DI Russell only had a bad cop approach.
Jack looked up at the sky; last night’s rain wasn’t quite ready to finish, it seemed. ‘Why is it whenever we get a murder it’s always during a period of bad weather? It’s as if people lose their minds and decide to kill because it isn’t sunny,’ he mused, fishing out two paracetamol and crunching them down. ‘I’ll go speak with him. You stay here and co-ordinate with the pathologist.’
DI Russell nodded her affirmation and cast a withering look towards Watkins, whose face was doing its best tomato impression.
Jack left them to it and made the short journey from the murder scene back to the house, moving adjacent to the marked-off area where a number of very distinct footprints had been found. One of them clearly belonged to Norris, and given one set of prints emanated from the house, Jack could only assume that they belonged to the farmer.
Who did the third set belong to then?
‘Mr Fenwick,’ Jack greeted a rather shell-shocked man who was sitting at the side of the farmhouse.
The man’s eyes were as wide as saucers as Jack approached him. ‘Name’s Gus,’ he said.
‘I’ll stick with Mr Fenwick, if it’s all the same? I’d like to keep this formal.’
The man gulped, a protruding Adam’s apple bobbing up and down on his loose-skinned neck. He had the look of a crane, albeit one with an extremely high hairline.
‘I… I didn’t do it,’ the man protested.
Jack raised his hand. ‘This doesn’t look good does it, Mr Fenwick?’ He took a knee in the dirt, lowering himself to the man’s height. ‘What happened here?’
‘I told the other officer—’
‘Tell me,’ Jack interrupted. His voice firm, eyes unblinking.
‘I can’t explain it… But I damn well wish I had done it.’
‘Excuse me?’ Jack asked, taken aback.
‘Trespassing on my property? He’s lucky I didn’t blow his head off.’
‘Mr Fenwick…’
‘I told you, it’s Gus.’
Jack stood, his stocky six-feet two-inch frame looming over the thin farmer. ‘And I told you I’m going to keep this formal. Mr Fenwick, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Robert Norris.’
‘You can’t do that.’ The old man stood, pumping out his chest. ‘I have rights.’
He smiled. ‘Of course you do, and I’m about to read them to you now.’
Chapter Three
Watkins fidgeted with the recording device on the table as Jack motioned for Gus Fenwick to take a seat. Next to him sat Casey Clifton, smug duty solicitor and royal pain in the arse for all those who worked in the force. Jack hadn’t seen him since they’d brought in the wrong person during last year’s Open Grave Murder case. He forced the memory from his mind and surveyed the men before him.
