LITMIR.BIZ

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‘Maybe you can help me,’ I said, undeterred by his blank expression. ‘About a mile back that way, on the right-hand side, there’s a concrete track with a gate across it. Can you tell me where that goes?’

      He gave it a moment’s thought. Probably figured it was nothing I couldn’t look up on a map anyway. ‘The old airfield,’ he said.

      ‘It’s not an airfield any more?’

      ‘Not since the war. Bomber base.’

      ‘So what is it now?’

      ‘Wheat and barley now.’

      ‘Can you tell me who owns it?’

      ‘That’ll be Giles.’

      I waited for him to crack a smile, but his poker face was strong. ‘And Giles is a farmer?’

      ‘That’s right.’

      ‘Farmer Giles.’

      He nodded slowly. ‘I never heard it like that before,’ he said. ‘That’s funny,’ though he still didn’t smile.

      I quit while I was ahead.

      Farmer Giles timed his arrival perfectly. I knew full well that the creepy shopkeeper would phone him the second I was out the door, so I saved myself some hard work and just sat in the entrance to the old airfield until he turned up, which he did, in a brand-new Range Rover, just as I was nibbling the last of the chocolate from my ice cream stick.

      ‘Giles, is it?’ I said, stepping from the car as he did the same. ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly. I’m Detective Sergeant Green. I was wondering if you might be able to help me out with something.’

      ‘Giles Wynne-Parker.’ He extended his hand to shake mine. ‘What can I do for you?’ Cut-glass accent. Neatly cropped hair, greying at the edges. Strong, dimpled chin.

      I flicked the Magnum stick away to shake his hand. He watched it fly with a raised eyebrow. ‘Oops,’ I said. ‘There’s probably a law against that.’ I paused, just long enough for his face to register that his jig was up. ‘Your tractor could do with a service,’ I suggested, indicating the trail of oil on the ground.

      Giles sighed and nodded at his strangely unmuddied Buckler boots. ‘I know,’ he conceded with a resigned smile. ‘It’s hydraulic fluid. I’ve got a leaking piston.’

      ‘I’d get that seen to before you leave any more anonymous donations,’ I said, ducking my head to peer up into his eyes. ‘But thanks for giving us our car back, we’ve been wondering where it went.’

      He snapped his head up at that, and the eyes that met mine now were a little wider than they had been a moment ago. ‘Your car?’

      ‘Oh,’ I laughed, ‘yeah, it’s a police car. That’s not really the worst of it, though.’

      ‘Oh bloody hell,’ he said. ‘How much trouble am I in?’

      I chewed over that for a moment; let a few scary thoughts roll through his head, just for the sake of it. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s not worry about that. I mean, yes, you’ve been a bit of a plank, honestly, and you did dump it right next to the sign telling you not to dump anything, which, you know, we could easily take as you sticking two fingers up at us, and on a personal level, I’m not actually supposed to be at work today, so I kind of wish you’d waited until Monday, but right now, what I really need more than anything is for you to take me to wherever you moved it from because there are a few bits still missing, and it’s also potentially a murder scene.’

      The colour drained from his face faster than piss from a flushed toilet. ‘Murder?’

      ‘Why did it take you two months, Giles?’

      ‘Two months?’

      ‘That’s how long we’ve been looking.’

      ‘I . . .’ He shook his head, eyes wide, nervous. ‘We were away. Florida. We’ve only been back a fortnight, and I don’t really use this gate. The main one’s at the other end of the runway. There’s nothing over here. I only came because some of the chickens got out. I . . .’

      ‘Why didn’t you call us?’

      ‘Wh—’ He puffed out a sigh and shook his head. ‘Honestly?’

      I waited for him to tell me that we wouldn’t have bothered coming, that the council wouldn’t have been interested in removing a burned-out car from a private field. And he’d have had a fair point, but he didn’t go there; he just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Relax. Don’t worry about it. Just how about you show me the spot, okay?’

      He took a moment to breathe, and then nodded and said, ‘Sure. Okay.’ Then he took a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and unhooked the gate and opened it a crack and said, ‘You won’t need your car. It’s right over here.’

      It was barely inside the gate, on a barren patch of clay off to the right of the track, shielded from the road by a grassy bank and from the rest of the farm by a clump of trees and overgrown bramble bushes. A twenty-foot black square, dotted with lumps of twisted, melted stuff, identifiable only by guesswork and its relative placement; a bumper here, a tyre there.

      The ground was hard, but two months ago it hadn’t been; there were wheel tracks leading to the burn site, until this morning cast into the earth but now crumbled and flattened by Giles’ tractor, its hefty tyres overlaying them with a patchwork of deep chevrons. I tutted at him quietly, although it made no real difference; this was quite evidently the crime scene, however much he’d trampled on it.

      And more than that, Giles had approached and retreated from the spot in a straight line, and hadn’t strayed around the edges of the square, and this, I realised as I surveyed the scene, might be very good news indeed. I turned to him as he stood awkwardly beside the Range Rover, picking at the skin around his thumbnail, and pointed at his car and asked him, ‘Giles, did you drive that over here at any point?’

      He took a few steps towards me and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

      I indicated the patch of ground between the scorch marks and the road. ‘You didn’t pull up alongside the car to have a look?’

      ‘No, definitely not.’

      I nodded thanks, and looked back to where a second set of churned up tracks splintered off from the rest and curved around the burn site at the foot of the roadside bank, coming to an abrupt end a few yards beyond where the car had sat. As they straightened, they became clearer, and where they ended they were very clear indeed.

      They were perfectly preserved, the tread pattern pressed into soft clay and then baked in the persistent sun, this heatwave of which the Great British Public had grown weary within a matter of days, but for which I now offered up a silent prayer of thanks.

      ‘So you’re telling me,’ I called, ‘that there’s no reason you know of for anything to have been parked here?’ He shook his head. I nodded mine, and took out my phone. Still no signal. I stood, gritted my teeth through a twinge in my hip, and joined him beside his car. ‘Next question,’ I said. ‘Have you got a phone on you that works? I need to make a call.’

      I surveyed the scene as he mumbled and fumbled in his jacket. I didn’t know the circumstances. I didn’t know whether John and Julian had died here, and if so, whether they’d come of their own free will. But common sense told me this would be a strange place to arrange a meeting, especially with the kind of man who’d shared their final farewell.

      Because, yes, as much as I didn’t know the order of events, I sure as hell knew who was responsible.

      Sort of.

Chapter 4

      I can’t remember his name, or what he looks like.

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