Cut Short Read online

  M. W. Craven was born in Carlisle but grew up in Newcastle, returning after thirty-one years to take up a probation officer position in Whitehaven and eventually working his way up to chief officer grade. Sixteen years later he took the plunge, accepted redundancy and became a full-time author. He now has entirely different motivations for trying to get inside the minds of criminals.

  His first novel featuring Washington Poe and Tilly Bradshaw, The Puppet Show, was published by Constable to huge acclaim, and it has since won the CWA Gold Dagger Award and been shortlisted for the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards: Best Crime Novel, the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award and the Dead Good Reader Awards. His second book in the series, Black Summer, has also been longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award.

  M. W. Craven lives in Carlisle with his wife, Joanne. When he isn’t out with his springer spaniel or talking nonsense in the pub, he can usually be found at punk gigs and writing festivals up and down the country.

  Also by M. W. Craven

  Washington Poe series

  The Puppet Show

  Black Summer

  The Curator

  Avison Fluke series

  Born in a Burial Gown

  Body Breaker

  Cut Short

  Three original Poe and Bradshaw

  short stories

  M. W. Craven

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Constable

  Copyright © M.W. Craven, 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47213-504-9

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  To all the English springer spaniel lovers out there

  Contents

  The Killing Field

  Why Don’t Sheep Shrink?

  Dead Man’s Fingers

  The Killing Field

  Animals don’t die of old age.

  Well, some do, of course.

  The occasional Galápagos tortoise might make it all the way to the end.

  Or one of those ageless jellyfish.

  Maybe a beloved pet.

  But that’s not many. Not when you consider how many animals aren’t tortoises or jellyfish or beloved pets.

  For most animals, old age is a terrifying, hungry existence. Predators starve to death. Prey animals get eaten. Beef cows get slaughtered. Dairy cattle stop producing milk and become a financial burden. Elderly, incontinent pets become an inconvenience.

  But sometimes, just sometimes, something far worse comes along.

  More brutal than old age. Indiscriminate. Unforgiving. Devastating.

  And, in a roundabout way, it occasionally kills humans . . .

  Detective Sergeant Washington Poe wasn’t thinking about a terrifying and hungry existence that morning; he was thinking what a nice day it was. He and his friend and colleague, Tilly Bradshaw, were breakfasting outside and he was thinking he might have another piece of toast before they drove to the Sellafield Visitors’ Centre.

  He hadn’t wanted to go to the Sellafield Visitors’ Centre. He’d told Bradshaw that he’d rather set his teeth on fire than go to the Sellafield Visitors’ Centre. But she’d insisted. Said he should see it before it was demolished. She’d been three times and she lived in Hampshire, she’d told him. He hadn’t been once and he only lived half an hour away. Poe had told her that was everything she needed to know about his interest in nuclear fuel.

  In the end he’d compromised. That is to say, he gave in. As he always did.

  In truth he didn’t mind. They had a whole week off and he enjoyed her company. And there was a lovely pub nearby. It did steak and kidney pudding with buttered mash. Real gravy. If they didn’t hang around in the science place, which was what he called it, they could get to the pub before it stopped serving lunch.

  ‘It’ll be great, Poe,’ she’d said. ‘They have these interactive games where you can dress up as an isotope.’

  He’d looked at her. ‘Don’t make me change my mind,’ he’d said.

  Before they could leave, Poe had to navigate his way through their ongoing discussion about his diet. This one was about wholemeal bread, specifically Poe’s refusal to eat it.

  ‘Life’s too short to not eat white bread, Tilly,’ he said as he reached for the last piece of toast. He slathered it with salted butter and took a bite.

  ‘You keep saying that, Poe,’ she said. ‘But all you’re doing is stacking up problems for tomorrow.’

  He held it up. ‘It’s one bit of toast.’

  ‘That is one bit of toast, Poe. But so were the other seven bits you’ve eaten.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said. ‘You’re always saying I eat too much meat.’

  ‘You do eat too much meat, but eight pieces of toast is too much toast.’

  He sighed, tried to throw it back on his plate but only succeeded in dropping it on the ground. Luckily Edgar, his English springer spaniel, was off chasing curlews somewhere, so Poe was able to safely retrieve it. Grabbing food off the floor was the quickest way to get bitten on the hand.

  ‘Typical,’ he grunted. It had landed butter side down and was now covered in dry grass and dust. Probably sheep shit. Poe was a keen proponent of the five-second rule but he had limits. He put it on his plate in disappointment. Now all he’d be able to think about was toast. He picked it back up. Considered scraping off the worst of the muck.

  ‘What is typical, Poe?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You said something was typical?’

  ‘My toast, it always lands on the buttered side when I drop it. It’s typical of my bad luck, I suppose.’

  She gave him a look. One he recognised well.

  ‘It’s maths, Poe, not luck,’ she said without a trace of irony. ‘Toast usually falls from the table and is almost always butter side up when it does. Unless there are outside factors involved, the spin rate is rarely fast enough for it to go through a full revolution before it reaches the ground. If tables were ten feet high, we would say that toast always seems to land butter side up.’

  Poe said nothing.

  ‘Actually, I wouldn’t say toast always seems to land butter side up, but people who don’t understand fundamental physical constants would. I can show you the maths if you want.’

  ‘I’d rather dress up as an isotope.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘Someone’s coming.’

  Poe didn’t get casual visitors. His isolated former shepherd’s croft was on the wind-ravaged, sheep-heavy Shap Fell. It was two miles from the nearest road and could only be accessed on foot or by all-terrain quad bike. Even with directions most people couldn’t find it.

  But Bradshaw was right: there was someone coming. A man. They watched him approach. He was obviously a cop – the short hair and no-nonsense machine-washable suit were dead giveaways. Poe hoped his week off was about to get a day shorter.

  ‘Hello,’ Bradshaw said.

  ‘Hi,’ the man said. ‘I’m sorry, have I interrupted your breakfast?’

  ‘No, I just like holding toast,’ Poe said. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Mike Penhaligon. I’ve been asked to come and get you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We have a situation.’

  ‘What situation?’

  ‘I’ve been told your first impressions are particularly intuitive so I’ve been instructed to say nothing more than we’ve found two bodies.’

  ‘I don’t work for Cumbria police any more. Tilly and I work for the National Crime Agency’s Serious Crime Analysis Section.’

  ‘We know, Sergeant Poe, but Detective Superintendent Nightingale’s the senior investigating officer and she asked for you personally.’

  Which was odd. Nightingale was a great cop, a great SIO and had a solid team around her.

  ‘Why?’ Poe said. ‘Jo knows what she’s doing.’

  ‘The circumstances are . . . unusual. She thought you might be able to add value.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Poe said.

  Penhaligon drove. Up to Carlisle then left. It was a warm day. Poe and Bradshaw both had their windows down. The air began to smell unpleasantly sweet. Penhaligon turned towards Great Orton airfield and Poe put two and two together. He put his window up, told Bradshaw she might want to do the same.

  ‘We heading to where I think we are?’ he said to Penhaligon.

  ‘We are.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It might be best if you saw it for yourself.’

  The 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak ripped the heart ou
t of Cumbria. It was the most serious animal epidemic in modern times and it turned the usually peaceful county into a place of turmoil, carnage and despair. More than a quarter of Cumbria’s livestock, the majority disease-free, were culled. Accumulated breeding programmes of earlier generations wiped out by the slaughterman’s bolt gun. Legacies snuffed out.

  Poe remembered the thousands of chemical footbaths, the ‘Keep Out: Animals Under Observation’ signs, the ‘Do Not Leave the Road’ signs, the ‘Closed’ signs on parks, woods, even children’s playgrounds. He remembered how eerie the sheep-free fells had been. The empty pubs and towns. Foot-and-mouth had decimated the tourist industry. When the lakes and fells were out of bounds, Cumbria had little else to offer.

  With over two miles of mass graves, the long-abandoned RAF airfield at Great Orton was Cumbria’s foot-and-mouth graveyard. Known locally as the ‘killing field’, it is the largest mass burial site in the world. Half a million carcasses are buried there in twenty-six pits. Diseased animals, killed on their farms, had been transported there in leakproof containers on articulated lorries. Healthy animals had been taken there alive, lined up and killed by Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food slaughtermen. Tipped into pits twenty at a time.

  The animals are still there now.

  Rotting.

  Decomposing.

  Leaking . . .

  Penhaligon parked at the rear of a long row of vehicles. Mostly police, but there were Environment Agency vans there as well. Poe could see shapeless people in baggy white biohazard suits working inside a cordon hastily constructed around a recently opened pit. Some of them were inside, others milled around the edges. He couldn’t tell if they were Environment Agency or CSI. Probably both, he thought. A bunch of cops were hanging around the outer cordon, all of them wearing facemasks.

  ‘The boss is waiting down there for you, Sergeant Poe,’ Penhaligon said. He handed them a facemask each. ‘You’ll want to wear these. They won’t entirely stop the smell but at least nothing floaty will get into your mouth.’

  ‘I’d like six, please,’ Bradshaw said.

  Poe approached the group of cops outside the cordon, the rank, gamey stench getting stronger with each step. By the time he reached the cordon, the heavy, cloying smell of decaying tissue, the liquid slime of bodies breaking down, was leaching through the facemask’s permeable barrier. He remembered a previous case, one that had involved men being burnt alive in Cumbria’s myriad stone circles. One of the detectives involved in the case had described the smell as miasmatic. Poe had needed to look it up. It meant noxious vapours from decomposing organic matter. A word of the day if ever there was one.

  The smell got into his throat and he gagged.

  ‘Did you know that the nose is the only organ that can see into the past, Poe?’ Bradshaw said. ‘Smell is retrospective. It’s already happened.’

  Poe appreciated her attempt at distraction – he thought it was probably as much for her as it was for him. And it might have worked if he hadn’t started to hear buzzing. He stared into the pit. The carcasses appeared to be moving. He knew it was an illusion. It was flies. Millions of fat bluebottles, feasting on their rancid bounty. Laying their eggs. In a few days the pit would be crawling with maggots.

  ‘You can stay in the car if you want, Tilly.’

  She shook her head and set her face. Looked determined. She was in this for the long haul.

  A tall woman broke away from the group. She had short dark hair and the greenest eyes Poe had ever seen. She was called Jo Nightingale and they’d worked cases together before. She was one of the few police officers he respected.

  ‘It’s been a while, Poe,’ she said. ‘Hi, Tilly.’

  ‘Hello, Detective Superintendent Nightingale.’

  ‘Still trying to get Poe to stop eating like a teenager?’

  ‘What’s happened, ma’am?’ Poe said, eager to avoid another discussion about white bread.

  She pointed at the pit. ‘This is pit fourteen. The soil in its interceptor ditch, a sort of moat around the grave, was being routinely monitored for biosecurity and water quality when a rupture was detected.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The pit’s developed a leak.’

  ‘Aren’t they sealed?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘But it’s leaking? I thought these things were impregnable.’

  She shrugged. ‘They’re supposed to be. DEFRA used geosynthetic clay liners here. Half a metre thick. The pit has sumps and cut-off ditches. Boreholes to test the water table.’

  ‘But it failed?’

  ‘The prevailing theory is that one of the carcasses had rotted down to its skeleton. The weight of the animals above it had gradually forced one of the bigger bones through the clay. A bit like an invasive tree root.’

  She pointed at a fresh slash in the ground. It was a new burial pit, adjacent to the festering one being exhumed.

  ‘DEFRA constructed this yesterday. The plan was to exhume the carcasses from the leaking pit and transfer them into this new one. It has a more modern liner. The whole thing was scheduled to take one day.’

  Poe could see a mound of bones and rotting fleeces at one end. He reckoned they’d transferred about a fifth of the leaking pit’s sorry occupants.

  ‘And they found something they weren’t expecting?’

  She nodded.

  ‘The remains of two adult men,’ she said. ‘Hog-tied with barbed wire. Gagged with shorn sheep wool.’

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ Bradshaw said.

  ‘That’s not the worst of it. They’d been sewn inside the carcasses of cows.’

  ‘Blimey,’ Poe said. ‘That’s new.’

  ‘Indeed. Someone had slashed the bellies of two cows. Removed the lungs, stomach, intestines and heart to make room. The men were then put inside – alive, we think, as their lungs seem full of animal juices – and the cows were stitched closed with baler twine.’

  ‘Poe,’ Bradshaw said. ‘I think I will go back to the car now, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I think that’s a good idea, Tilly. You don’t need to see this.’

  ‘I can go and get you something to eat, if you want?’

  ‘It’s OK, I won’t be long.’

  Nightingale looked at him strangely but said nothing.

  ‘I assume they’ve been in there since 2001?’ Poe said.

  ‘Yes, they’re just as badly decomposed as the animals. Infected animals were destroyed at their farms of origin. It was sometimes a week before they were collected for burial. We assume whoever’s behind this snuck onto an infected farm at night and stitched them inside two of the carcasses. Left them there to be collected by the army. It would explain why they were gagged.’

  ‘What a horrific way to die,’ Poe said.

  ‘Your tone doesn’t match your words, Sergeant Poe,’ Nightingale said. ‘What do you know that I don’t? And why did you tell Tilly you’d be with her soon? I could do with your help on this.’

  Poe didn’t respond.

  ‘Do you want to see them?’ she said. ‘The Home Office pathologist is still in the pit as we don’t know how to recover the bodies intact. I suggested a sieve and I was only half joking.’

  ‘I’m good.’

  ‘I think we’re going to need a forensic anthropologist to help identify them,’ she said. ‘I’ve not dealt with corpses in this condition before. Not really sure where to start to be honest.’

  ‘Their names are Mark Strawbridge and Vince O’Connell and they’re from Newcastle,’ Poe said. ‘If you contact Northumbria Constabulary they’ll give you everything you need. There’s an open file on them.’

  Nightingale’s mouth opened in astonishment.

  ‘How the hell . . .’

  ‘Do you know what “hefting” is, ma’am?’ Poe said.

  ‘I’ve heard the phrase but I’ve never bothered to find out what it means.’

  ‘It’s an ancient shepherding technique. If somewhere – the Cumbrian fells are a great example – has low-quality grass, you need sheep that can roam and forage over large areas to survive. They need far more space than lowland species, which means fencing them in is impractical. Isn’t cost effective. So, generations ago, shepherds would persuade their flock to stay on their part of the fell without the need for dry stone walls or fences. They’d do this by feeding them at dusk in the same place every day. During the day the sheep wouldn’t stray too far. Eventually the shepherd had no need for food. When the flock’s knowledge became intergenerational, they could be considered “hefted”. They had a loyalty to a particular fell and would always have a loyalty to it.’