The Vacant Casualty Read online

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  MRS ELIZABETH BOTTLESCUM always pottered around the garden in the very first moments of the day. Primarily this was because she always woke so early, but it was also due to the little gossipy titbits she could glean while she watered the azaleas.

  For there was much gossip to pick up in the small town of Mumford. On the surface it might appear a sunlit vision of English perfection, a sleepy idyll of old-fashioned good taste and family values, but if one knew where to look it was packed to the rafters with rotters of the first water.

  It had been many years since Mr Bottlescum passed away, and left her alone in this little house. She often thought of him now, not because he had been particularly interesting, or because he had any even mildly pleasant personality traits, but because he’d been in possession of an absolutely colossal wanger. On warm summer evenings, she often daydreamed about it for hours.

  The beauty of this setting could not be denied. The early sun rose slowly in the East over the hilltops, glowing pale orange. In the narrow streets, the cottages with their thatched roofs and whitewashed walls slumbered in silence. Ducks fretted playfully in the millpond, while a gentle morning wind drifted with dandelion seeds. And from the freshly tilled fields that surrounded the town at not a quarter of a mile’s distance drifted the aroma of twenty thousand tonnes of cow shit that had been spread there the previous afternoon. It was the country. What can you do?

  In just over an hour the local little darlings would be threading their way happily down the hill towards Pigfarts, the exclusive local school – and at the sight of them Mrs Bottlescum would wonder for the hundredth time why they always carried broomsticks and had what looked like gunpowder stains on their uniforms. The pips signalled the end of Farming Today on Radio 4 and the beginning of the morning in earnest.

  The blessing of being awake at this time was in the comfort to be taken from the various routines that one could always observe so early. First, one saw Mildred Penstroke’s dog, Glands, taking a colossal dump on the neighbours’ lawn, as she had painstakingly trained it to do. Then came Hetty McBride sneaking back from Bill Strange’s house, where she had spent the night, and pretending not to notice Mrs Bottlescum’s bald gaze. A minute later Hetty’s husband, Lionel, came out of the next-door-but-one house and scurried ashamedly in through his own back door.

  ‘So it begins. Do you know what, Pocket?’ she said to her cat, which purred quietly by her ankles, ‘I think it’s getting warm enough for us to crack out the old deckchair, you know . . .’

  And so she toddled off to the shed and shortly returned, set out the aforementioned apparatus and sat back in it with a deep sense of pleasant relaxation and a quiet thrill at the entertainment to come.

  Moments later, Mrs Glendinning from number 47 peeped round the door of the Smythington abode before making a dash back to her own house, shortly followed by three other women, who all dispersed in different directions.

  ‘Lesbo tryst,’ muttered Mrs Bottlescum, returning from the kitchen with her breakfast on a tray.

  Next it was Reggie Farmhurst and Oliver Patchbury who snuck out of the disused windmill, no doubt woken from their carnal slumbers by the crowing of the cock.

  ‘Gayers,’ said Bottlescum, munching a bit of toast. ‘They tie each other up in there, you know, Pocket.’

  She finished off her tea as she saw the entire local fire department abseil via their hose from the bedroom window of one of the town’s more notorious teenage girls – followed shortly afterwards by the first fifteen of the Mumford rugby league team.

  ‘Good Lord, how does she fit them all in that tiny bedroom?’ Elizabeth wondered. It brought to mind an incident from her own childhood in a similar rural village, when she had celebrated St Swithin’s Day 1944 by entertaining a dozen members of the Airborne 353rd Regiment of the United States Air Force. ‘The young do have to try and take things further these days,’ she tutted. ‘Perhaps young Penelope could hold one of her soirées in a Mini Cooper – invite a brass band along to play “Abide with Me” and we can get someone from Guinness World Records along. Hah!’

  The morning’s amusement was nearly at an end. Almost everyone in the town was now safely returned to their own beds. There were only a few last stragglers remaining – the local piano teacher sidling from the pet shop wearing a nasty smirk and some mysterious stains on his waistcoat, and someone in a nun’s costume leaving the Catholic church. But then, she supposed, it was possible that it was actually a nun.

  ‘Stranger things have happened, Pocket!’ she said, and her cat assented with a mew.

  At last, with nothing remaining of her breakfast but an empty cup and saucer, and some breadcrumbs scattered down her blouse, she was about to pack up her things and go upstairs to wake up the major and tell him to get back to his wife when she spotted something that was, for once, out of the ordinary.

  Down the lane that led out of town was tripping that man from the Parish Council. The nice one, what was his name? – Terry Fairbreath. He was known thereabouts as just about the only person who could be relied on to give an issue a fair hearing, the rest of the council being filled with ancient madmen, cranks and troublemakers. He was handsome too, and considered quite the catch by the local females (even the group Mrs Bottlescum had referred to under the appellation ‘lesbo tryst’ had considered making him the first male member of their little gathering), yet he always remained single, was always composed, thoughtful, polite and well turned out. It was a mystery to everyone.

  ‘Well, not that much of a mystery. Gay as a peacock, no doubt. But then the gayers had no luck with him either . . .’

  After re-entering the house she washed and put away her breakfast things, and it was only on the stairs that it occurred to her there was something strange about his appearance. It was not simply the fact that he was out so early, although that in itself was unusual. Perhaps it was that he had been carrying an axe.

  Was that it, she pondered, or was there something else as well?

  Yes, surely it was that he had been dripping blood from a conspicuously large wound in his back. But there was something else . . .

  Was it that he had been carrying a smoking shotgun under one arm? Well, he had, but that wasn’t what was niggling at the back of her mind. Was it that glimpse she had caught of someone leaning out from the bushes, pointing a bow and arrow at him? Perhaps. But there was another detail that lingered there, waiting to be found.

  Maybe it was that his coat flapped open and she had caught sight of what looked like a fat pack of dynamite strapped to his chest, with a jolly modern-looking digital countdown, and a string of hand grenades.

  ‘Yes, that was it,’ she nodded to herself. ‘It was that, and the fact that he was sprinting fast as he could go, screaming, crying and begging for his life. That was definitely what caught my attention . . .’

  She pondered this strange circumstance for a moment before shaking her
head. It was all too much for a sex-mad septuagenarian like herself to take in.

  ‘Ah well, I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation,’ she said quietly, hoisting herself up the few final steps before entering her room and slapping the major’s backside with all her might.

  And yet, when the town’s citizens rose (again) from their beds later that morning and went about their business, they would find that not only had Terry Fairbreath gone missing, but that his disappearance was just the beginning of the terrible sequence of events that would result in catastrophe.

  Chapter One

  THE POLICE STATION in Fraxbridge received the call at eleven o’clock on the Monday two weeks following. Mr Fairbreath’s cleaner, Mavis Ritter, had gone as usual to let herself into his home and discovered the front door wide open. Feeling somewhat concerned, she decided she ought to check with Mr Fairbreath that there was nothing amiss and so, once she had taken her customary four shots of gin from his ‘secret’ bottle in the airing cupboard and (after whipping her duster quickly across the top of the microwave) put in a couple of hours at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on his Xbox 360, she took the five-minute walk round the corner to the architect’s office where he worked. On enquiring after his whereabouts, she discovered that he had not been into work for ten days, and was not answering his mobile phone. She decided to put the matter in the hands of the police.

  Mumford itself had the smallest possible police station a village could have, a cubicle adjoined to the Town Hall not much larger than an old-fashioned police phone box. In fact, this is exactly what it had been until the town’s sole part-time community officer, PC Staplethorpe (in whose person was also made up the body of Mumford’s traffic police and its Territorial Army), converted it into a small kiosk in which he could sleep off his hangovers under the protection of the law, and away from his wife, Angela. The station was, therefore, so unused to receiving allegations of serious crime that when he got Mavis’s report, Staplethorpe had no choice but to give it pride of place in the centre of the orange plastic ‘My First Business desk’ children’s accessory, which was all that could be fitted into the office space underneath his hammock.

  This was Staplethorpe’s personal technique, which had until now proved 100 per cent effective. All crimes in Mumford came face to face with the complete indifference of the law, and eventually turned out not to be crimes at all (cats returned home, surreptitiously borrowed items were replaced in the dead of night), or were retaliated against in a petty enough way to teach the perpetrator a lesson.

  Thus Mavis’s report of the missing Terry Fairbreath remained under the scrutiny of the law (in the shape of PC Staplethorpe’s backside as it swung to and fro) until two weeks had passed, when, having achieved no results from the local force, Mavis deemed it advisable to put a call through to the police station in Fraxbridge, the next town across.

  Mumford, as I have attempted to convey, was a sleepy little town hardly worthy of the name – a swollen village, really, of perfect Englishness. It had a millpond; it had a cricket team; it had an ancient abbey that required millions of pounds for its upkeep, for no visible benefit; it had quaint thatched buildings, winding streets, curious little shops and hundreds of white-haired denizens who tended their gardens, waved happily to one another in the street and considered their lives to be blessed.

  Fraxbridge, by contrast, but five miles away, was considered by the upstanding citizens of Mumford to be a plague-ridden city of vice and corruption. It had, after all, a railway station, by which undesirables could come and go as they pleased. It boasted also a chain bookshop (‘The one that begins with W’, Mumfordians would tell you darkly, disdaining to actually say the word), and a Marks & Spencer. All these things placed the town beneath contempt and of course contributed to its need for a substantially larger police force.

  Thus it was that when Mavis Ritter telephoned Fraxbridge Police HQ in some considerable distress two weeks after her original report, the missing persons case found its way onto the desk of Detective Inspector Reginald Bradley. It arrived just as he received a call to tell him he had a visitor in Reception.

  ‘This isn’t ideal timing,’ he thought to himself, reading the report and starting to feel anxious. Bradley had never had a missing persons report. He had never had a report of any kind at all. The truth is Bradley had until this point spent his entire seventeen-year career policing in a small village twenty miles south of there, and had only the shadiest notion (gained from watching half an episode of NYPD Blue when he was fourteen years old, which he had switched off out of fright) of what ‘real policemen’ were like. The only exemplar to have crossed his path so far was the hard-bitten cop who occupied the desk next to his, Detective Brautigan, a physically huge man, hard-packed with loathing and frustration, who could regularly be seen punching the inside of his windscreen as the sports results were read out over the radio, and who sometimes chewed whole packets of cigarettes rather than walking seven paces to smoke outside on the fire escape.

  Bradley was not sure he could live up to this, this life of a cop in the ‘big city’, as he considered Fraxbridge to be, with its two betting shops, its amusement arcade and its Wetherspoon pub. In fact, shortly before he received the written report of a missing person named Terry Fairbreath and the telephone call telling him his expected visitor (one Mr Sam Easton) was waiting in Reception, he was wondering whether there was a chance that, after being promoted so suddenly a week before, he might be able to avoid ever getting any cases at all.

  ‘Perhaps if I take up smoking, I could always dart out for a cigarette whenever the phone rings,’ he had wondered, just as the phone had rung, and he had, without thinking, answered it.

  ‘Sam Easton in Reception for you,’ said the voice.

  Too late.

  He rose from his desk and marched to the stairs, thinking that at least a missing person case would give him something to talk to his visitor about. As he went down into Reception he spruced himself up in the reflection of one of the windows, and ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it onto his head.

  He reached the reception area, somewhat anxiously distracted, and as he spotted his visitor, a slim youth in a hoody top, he waved. Unfortunately at that moment Detective Brautigan came into Reception ahead of him. Like a furious bull fixing on a feeble matador, or some smaller creature it considers a natural enemy, he made a compressed grunting noise and charged over.

  ‘Detective Inspector Bradley?’ asked the young man, in a rather worried voice.

  Brautigan, already travelling at thirty miles an hour, reared somewhat.

  ‘Bugger off, shithead!’

  The youth thought about this for a moment and clearly decided it was some sort of joke, so he gave a high-pitched laugh.

  There were probably many things you could do in front of the astonishingly muscular Detective Brautigan to escape an immediately violent response. Setting off a nuclear weapon, for instance, might be one possibility. Escaping down a wormhole into another dimension in space and time could be another. Laughing, however, was not one. The large man picked the youth up, spun him round and bounced his face off the window five or six times before saying into his bleeding ear:

  ‘Listen up, gobshite. My colleague Bradley here’s got a writer from London coming in to talk to him later. The last thing he needs is a fucking teenage reprobate getting under his shoes and taking the piss, OKAY?’

  Having smashed the youth’s face against the glass a few more times, he noticed that this had left a rather unpleasant smeary mark, so he deemed it advisable to wipe the face up and down to try and buff the glass, and teach the lad a further lesson.

  It was as he was judging that he had done a fair clean-up job that some other more urgent thought popped into Brautigan’s head. He dropped the youth, darted out of the room, climbed the stairs and disappeared from sight.

  Bradley felt somewhat awkward as he made his way over to the young writer, helped him to his feet, dabbed some of the blood fro
m his nose, introduced himself and invited him to come upstairs for a sit down.

  The young man had not yet had the chance to recover fully, and simply nodded. As they walked, Bradley made an attempt to make light of the other detective’s behaviour.

  ‘That was an example of exactly the sort of thing which we don’t approve of here in the Fraxbridge police community. But my colleague has been investigating a number of murders in the local area, and I’m sure you understand, at times of stress, tempers run high. I don’t think he could imagine someone as young as you being a writer. Here you go, sit down,’ he said, before adding simperingly, ‘May I fetch you a coffee?’

  The youth nodded, looking dazed.

  ‘Latte? Espresso?’ enquired Bradley, almost falling over himself.

  The other cleared his throat and said a cappuccino would be great, and Bradley left him at his desk while he went to fill a cup with the foetid ash-grey froth that spewed from the hissing machine in the corridor.

  ‘Is that a cappuccino?’ asked the writer dubiously, looking down at the cup he was handed.

  ‘It came from the machine after I pressed the cappuccino button,’ said Bradley, before conceding, ‘but that is far from the same thing. I certainly don’t advise drinking it – the rats don’t touch that stuff. You’d probably get botulism or dengue fever or something.’

  The writer nodded somewhat mournfully and contented himself with sniffing the drink instead, discovering that Bradley was in fact right. The revolting smell made him snap his head back up, which sudden movement at least had a ghost of the revivifying effect that a bolt of caffeine would have done.

  ‘Again, I am most dreadfully sorry for my colleague’s earlier behaviour,’ said Bradley, leaning over the table. ‘It was most uncharacteristic.’

  The writer shook his head to rid himself of the shock.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘In fact, that was exactly the sort of behaviour I was hoping to come across.’

  Bradley looked confused.