Soul Seeker Read Free

Rebecca Lancefield. Looking over her right shoulder, Lancefield replied, ‘Owen Gardner. Sixty-seven years old, widowed, no children. Been farming here all his life. No convictions, except two for tax evasion on red diesel.’
    Which, as far as Beverley was concerned, summed her up. Efficient, but efficient only to help herself; efficient only to gain a purchase on that oh-so-greasy, oh-so-high pole. Worse, she was nice. Beverley knew how to react to shitty – shitty was her currency, after all; she worked in shittiness almost every hour that she was awake, whether it be dealing with criminals or her real enemies, her colleagues – so she was well versed in it. She could close her eyes and recite shittiness without employing much more than one percent of her mental capacity. Niceness , though, required some thought; niceness was underhand because it might be genuine, might well be a subterfuge. Shitty people were straightforward, they did what it said on their tin; she was fairly sure that nice people split fifty-fifty down the middle, half being cunts, half being stupid.
    She had yet to decide about the curly-haired, snub-nosed blonde who was looking at her now with wide-open, friendly brown eyes, but she wasn’t about to give her the benefit of the doubt. Accordingly, she was getting on extremely well with her new detective inspector.
    â€˜Good work,’ she said and no one would have known.
    They stopped in the middle of a farmyard that was no more than ten metres across; it was immediately obvious that Owen Gardner was of the breed of farmers who had no interest in aesthetics; animals made him money, but they also made faeces and if there was no need to clear it up, he wasn’t about to bother. Beverley waited in the car while the driver got out and fetched wellingtons from the boot; they weren’t Hunters, but she said nothing. When she stood up in the yard, her feet sunk into nearly ten centimetres of some sort of animal shit and the smell that had been permeating the universe since they arrived intensified. She found herself longing – and not for the first time – for concrete, tarmac and halogen lighting, for odours of Indian takeaways and car exhaust.
    There were derelict pig-sheds on their left, open countryside to the right, the view broken only by a barn that was empty except for two ancient tractors, some tyres, a lot of barbed wire and a pile of sacks full of farm-type things. Straight ahead of them was a three-storey farmhouse in red brick; it was like a thousand others in the county, except that it was considerably more neglected than most; nine windows, each divided into twelve, and of the one hundred and eight panes, perhaps a quarter were broken and filled in with cardboard, while the curtains behind them (although poorly seen) seemed little more than dirty blankets. The paint could easily have been the original – although there was little left to judge by – and the small garden in front had become something akin to no-man’s-land at the battle of Ypres. There were three police cars and two unmarked cars already there, but no sign of human life, until a uniformed constable trudged his weary way around the right-hand side of the farmhouse. His progress was slow and, Beverley noticed, the suctioning effects of the viscous manure had produced its toll upon the blue serge of his constabulary trouser ware; his salute was tired and his tone equally so when he announced in a voice that was half respect, three quarters pissed off, ‘It’s round the back, ma’am.’
    â€˜It’, she noted. Lancefield asked, ‘Has anyone touched it?’
    Beverley found herself wondering how many times she had heard that question. The uniform – too callow, too scared-looking, just too bloody innocent, she thought – shook his head with the kind of nervous certainty that comes only from terrified uncertainty. ‘No.’
    They followed him around