Mud, Muck and Dead Things Read online
Mud, Muck and Dead Things
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Author's Note
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
The Campbell and Carter Mysteries
About the Author
Copyright
Mud, Muck and Dead Things
Ann Granger
Author's Note
Readers of the Mitchell and Markby stories will perhaps recognise Jess Campbell, who appears in the last book of that series, That Way Murder Lies. With this new book, I have now launched Jess on her own career, also in the Cotswolds. I hope readers will enjoy her sleuthing as much as so many have kindly told me they did the earlier series.
Chapter 1
‘Mud, Muck and dead things,’ muttered Lucas Burton. ‘I hate the country.’
The words burst from his lips although no one was there to hear him except the crows he’d scattered in a flurry of black wings from the road kill by the entrance. An unpleasant squelching noise beneath his foot had led him to look down and see thick slime rising inexorably round his once highly polished shoes. The crows flapped down to resume their feast. They hopped about jostling for position in an unruly scrum, chortling harshly. Their sharp eyes gleamed with joyful wickedness. It was hard to believe these ruffians of the bird world weren’t laughing at him.
Lucas pulled his foot free. There was an ominous sucking noise and the imprint of his custom-made brogue began at once to fill with water. He hobbled to a nearby stack of rotting wooden pallets and attempted vainly to scrape the gunge off the soles. Whatever the components of this particular muck were – and Lucas didn’t like to think too much about that – the stuff stuck like glue. With a sigh of resignation he gave up and put his feet back squarely into the mire. He was marooned now and, whether he carried on or turned back, he was going to get filthy.
The appointed rendezvous was a neglected, apparently abandoned, farmyard at the side of a B road where it crested a hill. The view from up here was spectacular, but Lucas was in no mood to appreciate it. On three sides stretched rolling greenery. On the fourth, going downhill, a copse of tangled native woodland provided a thick screen against whatever lay at the bottom of the steep slope.
‘Miles from anywhere!’ Lucas mumbled again, finding even the sound of his own voice obscurely comforting. But that was the whole point of being here, wasn’t it? Why this desolate venue had been chosen as a meeting place. It was both remote yet accessible by road and there was little chance they’d be disturbed, except by wildlife. He’d thought the suggestion brilliant at the time. Now he wondered uneasily whether the person he was due to meet here had a quirky and unattractive sense of humour; in fact just like those damn crows out there.
It had at least been as easy to find as he’d been assured. ‘It used to be called Cricket Farm,’ his informant had told him. ‘Don’t ask me why. We don’t have crickets in this country, do we? I suppose it might refer to the game.’
‘You’re certain the damn farm isn’t in use?’ Lucas had demanded. ‘You know what it’s like in these places. Not a soul to be seen, like the bloody Marie Celeste, and then, before you know it, you’re surrounded by cows.’
‘Relax, no one’s farmed there for years. The buildings are all deserted and the house is derelict and boarded up. Trust me,’ the speaker had concluded.
That was what Lucas didn’t quite do. Their acquaintance had fairly recently been renewed after a gap of some years. Back then it had been productive; and Lucas had high hopes of it being so again. Up to this moment he’d had no doubts. But, standing in this forsaken spot, he was uneasily aware how little he really knew about the other. Generally he trusted his own judgement but basically he was a gambler; and any gambler knows that, sooner or later, you get it wrong.
He should have brought gumboots. No, correct that. He should have picked the place for their meeting himself. Lucas looked about him with increasing misgiving.
‘The Merc will be out of sight of the road!’ he’d been promised.
He wasn’t at all sure about that. Abandoned barns and outbuildings lined two sides of the yard, sinking into ruin beneath the leaden sky. On the third side stood the former farmhouse, windows and door boarded up. The barricading was weathered to a pale grey. Years had passed, he decided, since the house had been a family home. Now only a pile of junk heaped in one corner of the yard suggested anyone ever came here. The heap attracted his attention to the extent that he spent a couple of minutes studying it. It appeared a curious mix of old washing machines, cookers and sundry metal items. All was rusting gently away and he wondered where on earth it had come from. Perhaps some fly-tipper had surreptitiously dumped a load of scrap before speeding off. Yet there was money in scrap, metal scrap, thought Lucas, pursing his lips. Not enough in this instance to be worth his bothering about, however.
There was a sizeable gap where the yard met the road. A pair of corroded posts leaned at drunken angles to the ground. But the heavy five-barred gate that had once hung between them had disappeared, probably, thought Lucas, gone for scrap like the stuff over there. Yet the posts still composed an entrance of sorts and led the eye of any observer towards his cherished Mercedes in its undignified surroundings. Better get it under cover. But where?
The obvious shelter was the open-fronted cowshed ahead of him, roofed with corrugated-iron sheets. They were coming loose, creaking and quivering in the stiff breeze sweeping over the hilltop. He squelched over to it and peered in. Little could be made out. It was dark and still smelled faintly of its former occupants, or rather, their bodily functions. He took a few cautious steps inside. No point in driving in and risking a tyre being ripped to pieces by some discarded piece of metal junk such has he’d seen outside.
His eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He could make out stalls. Ancient scraps of straw mouldered underfoot. Despite himself, Lucas became curious about the fate of this once-busy place, reduced to such misery. What was more, disused farming land, if it were for sale and if he could get planning permission, would be worth acquiring at the right price. Now, that was an idea worth serious consideration. Nowadays it’d be a project much more to his taste than a small heap of discarded scrap, something big and profitable. You could get six cottage-style homes around this yard alone, eight if you squeezed them up a bit. People, townies with a romantic yearning for country living, liked that sort of thing. They wouldn’t think of buying a home that small in the city. But they’d shell out good money for a rabbit hutch with a reproduction inglenook fireplace and ‘a view’.
He saw these desirable dwellings in his imagination: Cotswold stone (not the real thing, but a cheaper fake version), pointed wooden hoods above the front doors, and a residents’ parking area. Individual garages added to building costs and took up valuable space. Reluctantly he thrust this vision of a shining investment from his mind. He hadn’t come here to look for building land, but Lucas prided himself that he had an eye for an opportunity. Some of the best bits of business he’d ever done had begun like this: a chance encounter and a quick decision. See a gap and go for it.
He walked deeper into the shed. Behind him the silver-grey car was framed in the open square of light and, glanc
ing back at it, it seemed to Lucas the Mercedes belonged to a different world from the one he now stood in: an ‘out-there’ world where things were unpleasant but normal. He’d entered an ‘in-here’ world where different rules applied and he wasn’t sure what they were. He had a brief, irrational sensation of not being able to return, cut off the moment he took an irrevocable step under the rattling roof, its gaps letting in daylight and rain. In here it wasn’t just a different place, but a different time belonging to a vanished culture. He’d stepped through the looking-glass. He felt a flicker of something he hadn’t felt in years – panic – and turned back towards the daylight and the familiar universe he’d so rashly quitted.
He’d almost reached the doorway and (as his mind insisted on seeing it) safety, when he noticed the huddled form on the floor to his left. He must have passed within inches of it on entering but because his eyes hadn’t then been accustomed to the darkness, he’d not made it out. He paused. The panic sensation was growing like a lump in the pit of his stomach. He felt nauseous.
‘Don’t be a bloody fool!’ he admonished himself. ‘Just a pile of rubbish like all the rest.’
But it drew him closer as if it exerted some magnetic force. He had to investigate if only, he told himself, to prove it was nothing important, to dispel the fears. It now lay at his feet. Yes, just an old coat. What’s the matter with you, Lucas? he admonished himself. Seeing spooks? This was just an old pink coat: no more, no less. A woman’s garment, probably, if the colour was anything to go by. For a moment his fears faded and then returned. It wasn’t so very old actually, and come to think of it, not very dirty. Not nearly tattered and dirty enough to have been chucked away like this. It didn’t belong here. A piece of torn sacking lying right nearby did very much belong in this setting. But why had quite an expensive-looking coat been tossed down alongside it?
His shoes were now so muddy he no longer worried about dirtying them further. He put out a foot and prodded the coat. There was something solid beneath it which – another prod – continued beneath the sacking. Someone had wanted to conceal something: a large object that had taken both sacking and coat to do the job.
Lucas flinched and took a step back. But he couldn’t turn and run, much as he wanted to. A powerful urge to investigate the shrouded heap conflicted with an almost equal reluctance to touch it. The whole idea of physical contact, putting his naked palm against it, repelled him. He looked round and saw an old pitchfork leaning against one stall. Lucas retrieved it and stretched it out to hook the sacking with the bent tines and gingerly lift it free of what lay beneath.
A pervasive sweet odour was released and flooded over him, eliminating the lingering odour of cattle. A pair of legs in denim jeans, feet in trainers, sprawled on the dirt at his feet.
‘No, no, no…’ whispered Lucas. ‘That’s not what it is. It can’t be.’ His hand was shaking. ‘Go on, you wimp!’ he ordered himself. He lunged at the coat in turn, and tossed it aside to reveal the rest of the thing on the ground. A roaring noise filled his ears. The walls of the cowshed receded and then rushed in. He had experienced the mud and the muck and now he had found the dead thing.
Not a fox like that being torn to shreds in the road outside, but a human being, staring up with clouded bloodshot gaze that seemed to accuse him. A girl, a young girl. Rictus had drawn back her jaw to show even white teeth. Her bluish tongue protruded slightly and her lower lip was bloody as if she’d bitten it badly.
Lucas retched and hurled aside the pitchfork. He staggered away and blundered out of the cowshed across to the Mercedes. He scrambled inside heedless of the filth his shoes spread over the carpet, his fingers scrabbling at the key swinging in the ignition. The engine sprang into life. He backed the car across the yard and then, spinning the wheel, shot forward and out through the entrance into the road.
Luckily no other vehicle was coming from either direction or he’d have slammed right into it. If by some miracle he’d avoided a collision the driver would still have seen him. It was important no one did. Lucas drove away furiously, not stopping until he reached the bottom of the hill, beyond the copse, where the entrance to a field allowed him to pull off the road. He fumbled for his mobile phone.
Thank heavens the call was answered.
‘Listen!’ he croaked. ‘Don’t go! I mean, don’t go to that place, Cricket Farm, confound it! Where are you now? Then turn round and go back home. Don’t argue! I’ll explain later. Just do it, all right?’
He was sweating and fought for control of the bile that bubbled up into his throat. In his haste to get away from that place before anyone saw him, he must have left any number of traces behind: the tyre marks of the Mercedes; his footprints; his fingerprints on the pitchfork handle. Well, it didn’t matter, did it? The chances were it would tip down with rain again before the day was out. They’d had enough lately to float Noah’s Ark and the forecast had promised more. It would wash away the tyre marks and footprints. The fingerprints? Oh, come on, they would be smudged, incomplete. They might not even check the handle. Who? The police, of course.
Why should the police go to Cricket Farm? No one went there. Except himself, worse luck. No one would find the – no one would find it for weeks, months. The most important thing was that no one should ever know that he had been there. Only the two of them had known of their arrangement. He wouldn’t talk and the other daren’t.
A rattle and engine growl, becoming swiftly louder, announced that another vehicle was approaching at a fair lick. Lucas cursed aloud. It was coming down the hill past Cricket Farm and straight towards him. He had no time to pull out and drive off. He did the only thing he could. He flung himself down and hoped whoever drove by would assume the car was empty.
The vehicle rattled past. Lucas, emerging cautiously to peer over the dashboard, just glimpsed the rear of a horsebox. It was the sort designed for a single horse, with a ramp at the back of the trailer that pulled up to make a half-door, and usually towed by a Land Rover or similar; just what you’d expect around here. The trailer disappearing round the bend appeared to be tenantless, which explained why the driver had put his foot down. Some country type about his business and not interested in Lucas.
He’d got himself under control and began to plan his actions. First, get out of here. But was there anything he ought to do first? And what about afterwards?
A good citizen, of course, would phone the police and report the grisly find. But good citizens didn’t have bad consciences and Lucas? Well, Lucas’s conscience had always been an obliging entity. It rarely objected to anything. What he had instead was a strong sense of self preservation which kicked in now with a vengeance. He’d made a mistake in coming here; he’d made a mistake in getting involved in the whole stupid affair. To contact the authorities would be another mistake, compounding all the others. He couldn’t afford to make explanations. The police always promised to be discreet when they wanted to encourage faint-hearted witnesses. But there was never anything discreet about a couple of coppers, in uniform or not, trudging up to your front door – or office – or wherever they chose to appear. Being a pillar of society, inspiring confidence in others, was a big part of Lucas’s stock in trade. Having some idiot telling everyone within earshot in the bar at the golf club or down the local pub that the police had been to see Lucas Burton (‘honest truth, saw them myself as they were leaving’), wouldn’t be forgotten in a long time. That was the thing about coppers: even if they were in plain clothes, it was always obvious to anyone with half an eye who they were. Even if he managed to spin them some convincing yarn, fob them off, his reputation would remain that little bit tarnished.
Well, then, how about an anonymous call? Not on his mobile. Far too risky, the call would eventually be logged and traced to the area, perhaps even to this phone. There were no public call boxes around here; the nearest would be in the next pub and someone would notice him, a stranger, and might even overhear. Scrub anonymous call. So, let someone else find it, or prefer
ably not find it.
He got out of the car and walked slowly round it. It was plentifully splashed with mud and if someone saw him arriving home like that, they’d notice. There was a puddle of water nearby. He squeezed out his handkerchief in it and attempted to wipe off the mire but only succeeded in making it worse. He would have to hope no one saw him arrive back. He made a similar ineffectual attempt to clean up his shoes.
Eventually he gave this up and glanced at his wristwatch. He’d wasted almost twenty minutes! Was it possible? Someone else could have driven past and seen him making a fool of himself trying to wash a car with a pocket handkerchief. Spots of rain began to land on the windscreen and struck him in the face. Now it was going to tip down again. He was getting out of here, going home. He’d wash down the Merc, remove all traces of that wretched place, later.
He sped away reflecting that the unwelcome adventure had confirmed his feelings about the countryside. It always had a nasty surprise in store for you. If not cows it was dead bodies.
Chapter 2
The Land Rover and its attached empty trailer rattled past the sign that read Berryhill Stables, Livery and Equestrian Centre. Prop. P. Gower. It turned left immediately and carried on down the track until it drew up in the middle of the yard.
The loose boxes stood in facing parallel lines. The water trough was an old enamelled bathtub. Penny (aka P. Gower) herself and any available helpers laboured to keep the place tidy but it would be nice, she thought wistfully, if it looked just a little bit smarter. People would pay more to keep their animals in a ‘proper’ stable yard with brick buildings and a cinder all-weather exercise circuit and… oh, well. Penny sighed. Dreams were nice but cost money. You had to invest to make a profit, people kept telling her. But you can’t invest what you haven’t got. And she was pleased with what she had got. The yard might not be swanky but, when she’d bought it, it had been derelict. She’d worked wonders here. Sadly, few visitors realised it.