Salt Lane Read online

  She led them to the kitchen at the back of the house where music from some retro digital station was playing loudly.

  ‘Mind if I turn it down, Mum?’

  Her mum had painted the kitchen lime-green in the 1990s. Where Cupidi had once done her homework on the kitchen table, there was now an ashtray and a copy of Time Out open at the Books and Poetry pages. Since her father died, her mother had started going out a lot. She bought tickets to the cinema at least once a week, or sat through free lectures at the Conway Hall. She ventured across to the Union Chapel to see rock bands sometimes. Cupidi couldn’t help thinking that her mother was deliberately making a point; that her husband and her child had held her back all these years.

  ‘Weird one,’ said Cupidi. ‘We just went to tell a man that his mother had been murdered over a week ago. He said he’s just seen her last night,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘This a ghost story?’

  ‘No. It’s real.’

  ‘Who was it, then?’ That had caught her interest, at least.

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Cupidi. ‘We don’t know. This woman just turned up out of the blue yesterday, claiming she was his mother, and then disappeared again. But the woman we found dead is his mother, so she can’t have been.’

  ‘I was saying, I think she was just a con woman,’ said Ferriter.

  ‘You’d think he’d know what his own mother looked like,’ said Helen, pouring water into the kettle.

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Ferriter, still standing in the big green kitchen. ‘He was adopted when he was two by his aunt and uncle. He never met his mum. He wouldn’t have recognised her anyway.’

  Helen looked at them. ‘I have mint, chamomile or blackcurrant,’ she said.

  ‘Not ordinary tea?’ said Cupidi, opening drawers and cupboards.

  ‘Mint’s great,’ said Ferriter.

  Cupidi found a box of Tetley’s at the back of the cupboard.

  ‘What about his aunt and uncle?’ asked Helen.

  ‘Dead,’ Ferriter answered. ‘Car crash when he was seventeen.’

  Helen nodded. ‘Poor lad. So who was this other woman? The one who turned up out of the blue?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘What if it was a ghost of the dead woman coming to see her son?’ Helen said, grinning.

  ‘Except his mother didn’t look nothing like the woman he saw,’ said Ferriter. ‘We showed him the photograph.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  ‘No!’ said Cupidi.

  But Ferriter was opening her shoulder bag and pulling out the photograph.

  She looked at it quietly for a while. All she said was, ‘About your age?’ and looked at her daughter.

  Cupidi nodded.

  They sat in silence for a while with the photograph, suddenly solemn, until her mother spoke. ‘And what about you?’ she asked Cupidi. ‘How are you fitting in down in Kent?’

  ‘I’m not sure I fit in anywhere. But I like it there.’

  She turned to Ferriter. ‘Is she making friends?

  ‘Mum!’ said Cupidi.

  ‘Well? Are you?’

  Cupidi didn’t answer.

  ‘My daughter has a knack of winding people up the wrong way. She did that very successfully with her last job.’

  ‘I can see where she gets it from,’ said Ferriter.

  Helen laughed loudly.

  She shouldn’t be annoyed by their instant intimacy, Cupidi thought. She took a sip from her scalding tea and said, ‘So I was thinking. What about coming and staying with us for a week?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said her mother. ‘I’ve got a lot on.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m learning Spanish. I’m having lessons with the University of the Third Age.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s summer. It’s glorious down there.’

  ‘Is that you as a child? You’re so absolutely cute,’ said Ferriter, pointing at the black-and-white photo in the frame on the wall.

  A teenage girl sat in a grassy meadow wearing flared trousers and a John Lennon fisherman’s cap on her head.

  Ferriter didn’t notice the glance Cupidi gave her mother; or the slight pause before Helen said, ‘No. That’s my sister, Alexandra. She died young. Alex was named after her.’

  ‘She’s beautiful.’ Ferriter turned. ‘Matter of fact, you look a lot like her, Sarge.’

  ‘Yes. She was beautiful,’ said Helen. Before Ferriter could ask anything more, she turned to her daughter. ‘What you actually mean is, you want someone to babysit Zoë.’

  ‘Obviously, yes. Not that she’s a baby anymore.’

  Ferriter stood awkwardly between mother and daughter, looking from one to the other.

  ‘I’ll think about it. I promise,’ her mum said, though Cupidi knew that meant no.

  Cupidi took the wheel for the drive back down to Kent. It took longer than it should have; a lorry had shed its load on the M20, scattering timber across three lanes. According to police radio, a woman had been seriously hurt. They sat in the car, not moving, listening to the traffic officers trying desperately to get an ambulance close to the site.

  ‘Your mum seems nice,’ said Ferriter.

  ‘Seems,’ said Cupidi. ‘We never really got along that well. It was my dad that wanted kids, not her.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Nope. Just me.’

  ‘That girl. The one you were named after. You look so much like her. She died, your mother said.’

  Cupidi looked at the constable, but ignored the implied question.

  ‘Sorry. Nosey,’ Ferriter said, when it was clear that Cupidi wasn’t going to explain. She pulled down the sunshade on her side of the car and looked at herself in the mirror. ‘What was that she was saying about you and the Met? Did you fall out?’

  ‘In case you didn’t notice, my mum is a stirrer.’

  ‘Difficult, though. I mean. For your career. Kind of like a step backwards, joining us peasants in the provinces, isn’t it?’

  ‘As DI McAdam would doubtless say, I prefer to see it as an opportunity.’

  A lorry driver ahead opened his cab door, got out, walked to the verge and began to urinate, in full view of the waiting traffic.

  ‘How disgusting.’ Ferriter wrinkled her nose. ‘So what was it then? Made you want to make the move?’ she asked.

  Cupidi turned to her. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘Nothing, really. I was just wondering… that’s all.’

  ‘Nothing, really? What are people saying about me?’

  ‘Oh it’s nothing like that. I was just, you know…’

  She eyed the constable. ‘They have, haven’t they?’

  ‘No. No. Nothing. Honest.’ Ferriter said, eyes wide.

  The police were the worst gossips. Just because Cupidi had changed forces didn’t mean stories about what had happened in London wouldn’t have followed her.

  ‘I was just trying to make conversation, that’s all,’ Ferriter said.

  The faint noise of a siren; she tilted the rear-view mirror and in it saw the blue lights. Behind them an emergency vehicle was trying to make its way between the vehicles. To make matters worse, the hard shoulder on their section had been blocked by roadworks. Cupidi got out.

  ‘Come on.’

  Pulling out a high-viz jacket from the boot, she put it on, handed another one to Ferriter, and started moving the traffic cones back so that she could direct a lane of cars into the vacant tarmac, making space for the ambulance that was edging along the long flat road towards them.

  The high-viz had its effect. Sitting in their cars, everyone could already see the problem, but nobody had felt like doing anything about it. Now they scuttled to obey.

  There was something about being a copper which made you despise ordinary civilians, Cupidi thought. But they were the ones you were supposed to be doing this for.

  She leaned forward and rapped on the window of a Nissan. T
he driver was asleep, head back, mouth open. He woke, startled, and, once he’d figured out what she was trying to tell him to do, stalled the vehicle in his panic to get it out of the way.

  Now fifty metres up the road, she looked back and saw Ferriter, radio receiver in one hand, waving wildly, shouting something, but she couldn’t hear her above the noise of the approaching ambulance.

  At first she thought she was yelling at the drivers, but then the ambulance’s wail paused for a second.

  ‘Body!’ Ferriter shouted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Another body.’

  Then the siren started again.

  SEVEN

  ‘So he literally drowned in shit?’ said the scrawny uniformed PC, trying to peer into the dark hole.

  ‘Keep back,’ the farmer said. ‘There may be fumes.’ He was a sandy-haired young man, skin red from working outdoors, dressed in jeans and a maroon polo shirt.

  ‘How did he even get in there, like?’ asked the copper. ‘Pissed?’

  Cupidi and Ferriter stood outside the barn, a little way off, waiting for the specialist body recovery team to arrive. This time there there was no question of a copper retrieving it. The body was submerged in a slurry tank full of cow excrement.

  They had come straight here instead of heading back to the station to write up their report, waved on by the police at the car-crash site; the motorway ahead of them had been deserted. ‘Horse Bones Farm,’ said Ferriter. ‘Charming name.’

  The farm lay on the southern end of Walland Marsh, north of Lydd. The old farmhouse had been sold off and a more modern one built close to the road. The cowsheds were well away from the new farmhouse, in the middle of flat fields.

  Sergeant Moon had arrived shortly before them and was on the phone attempting to get a CSI on site. Cupidi was trying to remember his first name.

  The air was thick with the smell of urine and cow dung, stirred up from the slurry pit below the concrete.

  ‘Ten yards back, please. It’s not safe,’ said the farmer. Even with his summer tan, he looked pale with the shock of discovering a body on his land, but was still determined to be in charge here; it was his farm.

  ‘It’s only shit,’ muttered the lanky copper.

  ‘Do as the man says, Constable,’ ordered Cupidi. ‘It could have been the fumes that killed him.’

  ‘Really?’ The constable took a step back, suddenly less cocky.

  The farmer looked at her. ‘You know about farms, then?’

  ‘Some.’

  Enough to know that a farm was a farmer’s kingdom and you did as they asked. And, with a body in his slurry tank, this farmer was in a whole lot of trouble and would be defensive. She was going to need his cooperation. She took her phone, squatted down and photographed the slurry-pit lid.

  ‘Stinks,’ grumbled the copper.

  ‘It’s a farm. It’s supposed to. If you don’t have something useful to do, go and see if the crime scene manager is here yet.’

  The smell of cow dung made her feel like a child again. How long was it since she had spent time on a farm?

  ‘Gentleman here says the cover was always shut. No way could it have been an accident,’ said Sergeant Moon, nodding at the farmer.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Cupidi quietly, ‘if he admits he left it open, the Health and Safety Executive will have his bollocks and we’ll be looking at corporate manslaughter.’

  ‘Oh. You reckon he’s lying?’

  ‘It’s definitely Option One. Did you notice that sign over there?’ She pointed to the end of the barn. There was a red warning sign fixed to the side of it: NOT A PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. ‘Bloke forgets to close the gate on his slurry pit by accident one night. Someone wanders along. Maybe it’s dark. Falls in. Next morning your man over there comes up and notices the thing’s open. Oh bugger. Quietly closes it thinking no damage is done. Think about it. You don’t fall in and then pull the lid shut after you.’ She looked at the farmer across the yard, rubbing his chin anxiously. ‘How did he say he found him?’

  ‘He went to agitate the slurry this morning. Slurry’s what they call all the—’

  ‘Cow shit,’ interrupted Cupidi. ‘I know.’

  ‘Right. Machine jammed and he took a look in the tank to see what was wrong. You reckon he was just making that up, then, about when he discovered the body?’

  A Massey Ferguson tractor was parked near the sluice with a giant galvanised-metal pole attached, with what looked like a muddy propeller on the bottom still dripping onto the concrete. Cupidi wandered over to look at the small, thick blades and and noticed redness among the brown sludge. She had seen a lot of bad stuff in her line of work, but her stomach heaved at the sight of it.

  ‘I think we can say he wasn’t making that up, no. That’s how he found a body in there.’

  ‘Oof,’ said Moon, looking over her shoulder. ‘That’s blood, is it? What’s that thing?’

  ‘It’s like you use for whipping cream. You stick that in the slurry and mix it up. Helps it break down into manure.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I know everything.’

  ‘Right.’

  The truth was, as a girl, she had spent summers on her grandparents’ farm in Devon while her parents stayed in London. The weather had always been hot and the grass had always been vividly green. She had loved it there.

  ‘So the body must have jammed up that propeller thing, I guess.’

  When her grandparents had both died, Cupidi had been in her late teens. The visits to the farm stopped. Her mother sold the house and the land around it, glad to be rid of the place. They had never been back.

  ‘So anyway, the farmer pulled out a mobile, leaned in and took a photo. Guess the rest.’

  Cupidi wandered over to the farmer.

  ‘Cross-breeds?’ she said, nodding at the herd in the fields beyond.

  ‘That’s right. Mostly Holsteins and Swedish Reds.’

  Cupidi nodded. ‘The sergeant here says you took a photograph.’

  The young man pulled a phone from his jeans, swiped the screen then handed it to Cupidi. At first it was hard to make out what she was looking at. The farmer had aimed his camera into the chamber below the barn floor into which urine and cow shit were swept every day. Finally she made out that the pale smudge in the centre was a man’s face, crusted brown with manure, and a little to the right, a finger was pointing up above the surface.

  She pinched out. The mouth was wide open, gasping for air, teeth a white oval against the darker brown.

  ‘What a horrible death.’

  ‘Awful,’ said the farmer.

  ‘How deep is it down there?’

  ‘Deep enough to stand up in, but he wouldn’t have lasted long. All sorts of gases come off it. We’re not supposed to go anywhere near it if it’s not ventilated.’

  ‘So he’d have collapsed into it and drowned?’

  ‘Pretty certain, poor bastard.’

  They stood well away from the opening, on clean concrete. The excrement would be sluiced down from the sheds and the yard. There were two big structures on either side of them; the larger was the milking shed; the other stored feed and hay. Lined up on the roof ridges of both, starlings chattered ceaselessly.

  ‘I saw the sign. You get many ramblers coming through here?’

  The farmer pointed to a thick hedge beyond the sheds. There was a track running west along the far side of it. ‘That’s a bridleway. Some of them try to cut through the yard to get back up to the main road. I give them a good bloody shouting-at if I see them. They don’t know how dangerous it is round here.’

  Cupidi nodded. ‘So how do you think he ended up in there? By accident?’

  The farmer removed his hands from his trouser pockets and rubbed his chin awkwardly. ‘Like I said, the cover on the slurry pit is always closed.’

  Cupidi could see it. Three hinged galvanised-metal struts that could be lifted easily; they had been raised now to let the agitator in.
The gap between them was wide enough to slip a foot through, but not a body. Someone could have only fallen in if all three were open.

  ‘You a hundred per cent sure about that?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘There’ll be an inquiry now, anyway. You know how it is.’

  ‘Yep.’ Farmers didn’t like officials coming to tell them how to run their farms at the best of times. A fatal farm accident would mean scrutiny and fines.

  She stared at him. ‘I’m going to ask you just once more.’

  He looked her in the eye. ‘I left it shut.’

  ‘And your farmhands?’

  ‘Wasn’t them. I only open it when we stick the agitator down there and I don’t let them go near it unless I am there. Swear to God. I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t happen.’

  ‘And someone didn’t come by one morning to do the cows and notice the cover had been accidentally left up. So that someone walking along that bridleway and not paying attention could have tripped…’

  ‘No,’ he said again. ‘Definitely not.’

  The birds chattered, jostling each other for position on the roof above them. She stared at him. ‘The thing is, if it’s not negligence, and you’re saying that it’s not, then that makes this a possible murder investigation. Because as I was just telling the sergeant here, you could hardly slip in there and pull the lid down after you, could you?’

  ‘No,’ said the farmer quietly.

  She looked around. ‘You realise that if it’s a murder, you’re not going to be able to use this yard till we’ve searched it from top to bottom. Forensics. Fingertip searches. The whole lot. Which means you’re going to have to keep those cows out of here.’

  She let that sink in. If he was lying to protect himself, it was still not going to go well for him. She was giving him a last chance to change his mind. ‘No, it was down,’ he said. ‘Swear to God.’

  She nodded. ‘One more thing. When did you last agitate the slurry?’

  ‘Last month. Four, five weeks ago, max.’

  Moon was standing making notes. In his low-slung skinny jeans and slim-fit shirt, she could understand what all the women saw in him.