Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) Read Free Page B

The MCT had CCTV footage of Robert Weil heading out through the Pease Pottage roundabout and off down the ominous sounding Forest Road – so called because it ran along the central axis of St Leonard’s Forest, a patchwork of woods that covered the ridge of high ground that ran from Pease Pottage to Horsham.
    Prime body dumping country, according to PC Slatt, easily accessible via footpaths and forest tracks and not covered by speed cameras. Wherever he’d gone, Robert Weil hadn’t returned to Pease Pottage for over five hours so he could easily have been anywhere in the forest. But they’d caught a break because Lynda Weil had phoned her husband at nine forty-five, presumably to ask him where the hell he was, and that allowed the Sussex Police to triangulate the position of his phone to a cell just short of the village of Colgate. After that, it was just a matter of checking the appropriate stretch of the road until they spotted something – in this case tyre tracks from a Volvo V70.
    The grey overcast was darkening to countryside black when we arrived at the murder site. There wasn’t a proper turn off, so I had to park the Jag further up the road and walk back.
    PC Slatt explained that the landlord had only recently blocked off the entrance to an access route through the forest here.
    ‘Weil probably remembered the turn off from a walk in the area,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t planned on it not existing any more.’
    Important safety tip for serial killers – always scout out your dumping locations before use. We had to clamber over an artificial hillock made of sticky yellow mud and discarded tree limbs, because the marginally visible path was still being checked forensically.
    ‘He had to drag the body,’ said PC Slatt. ‘It left a trail.’
    ‘He doesn’t sound very prepared,’ I said. The rain was making silver streaks in the beam of my torch as I shone it back to guide Nightingale over.
    ‘Perhaps it was his first kill,’ he said.
    ‘God, I hope so,’ said PC Slatt.
    The path beyond was muddy but I walked with the confidence of a man who made sure he packed a pair of DM boots in his overnight bag. Town or country, it doesn’t matter, you don’t want to be wearing your best shoes at a crime scene. Unless you’re Nightingale, who seemed to have an unlimited supply of quality handmade footwear that were cleaned and polished by someone else. I suspected it was probably Molly – but it might have been gnomes for all I knew, or some other unspecified household spirit.
    On either side of the path were stands of slender trees with pale trunks that Nightingale identified as silver birch. The gloomy stand of dark pointy trees ahead were apparently Douglas firs interspersed with the occasional larch. Nightingale was aghast at my lack of arboreal knowledge.
    ‘I don’t understand how you can know five types of brick bond,’ he said, ‘but you can’t identify the most common of trees.’
    Actually, I knew about twenty-three types of brick bond if you counted Tudor and the other early modern styles, but I kept that to myself.
    Somebody sensible had strung reflective tape from tree to tree to mark our path downhill to where I could hear the rumble of a portable generator and see blue-white camera flashes, yellow high-viz jackets and the ghostly figures of people in disposable paper suits.
    Back in the dim and distant past, your victim was bagged, tagged and whipped away to the mortuary as soon as the initial photographs were taken. These days the forensic pathologists stick a tent over the body and settle in for the long haul. Luckily, back in civilisation it doesn’t take that much longer. But out in the country there’s all sorts of exciting insects and spores feasting on the corpse. These, so we’re told, reveal ever so much information about time of death and the state the body was in when it hit the ground. Getting it all catalogued can take a day and a half and they’d only just started when we