The Kill Call

she knew that time of death should be based on witness reports and not on physical evidence. Measuring body temperature was prone to error, and the degree of rigor mortis wasn’t as accurate as it was sometimes cracked up to be. But in this case, her stiff was, well … hardly stiff at all. The corpse had been pretty fresh when it was first spotted.
    She looked across the moor. Somewhere over there were the remains of the agricultural research station. Although units had been despatched in response to the 999 call some time ago, the airwaves had been ominously quiet since then.
    ‘Let’s see what we’ve got across the way then,’ she said. ‘With luck, body number two might explain everything.’
    * * *
    It took Fry so long to find her way to the collection of derelict buildings on the hill above Birchlow, the site had already been searched by uniformed officers, and Wayne Abbott had moved on from the field to supervise the scene.
    Most of the site consisted of little more than cracked foundations, weed-grown concrete yards and broken fencing. The surrounding bracken and gorse were gradually encroaching on to the site, and weeds had burst holes through the tarmac road.
    She stepped through a door sagging from its hinges and gazed at the scene of dereliction inside. The buildings hadn’t been occupied for many years, of course, and the site had reverted to the landowner. Health and Safety might have something to say about the lack of security, though. No locks, no warning signs, no measures to prevent anyone from suffering injuries through collapsing roofs or broken shards of glass.
    ‘There’s no body here, Sergeant,’ said an officer who had been searching the building. ‘But we’ve found what look like bloodstains on the concrete in the largest hut.’
    Fry turned to gaze back across the fields in the direction from which she’d come. The white body tent was clearly visible from here.
    ‘Well, unless we’ve got a dead man walking, this call wasn’t to a body at all. Our victim was still alive when he came in here – and then he made it across at least two fields before he gave up the ghost.’
    ‘Why would someone phone in and give this location for the body, then? It doesn’t make sense.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ said Fry, ‘whoever else was here believed the victim was already dead.’
    Murfin came up alongside her, shaking himself like a dog. ‘It seems the 999 call was made from a mobile,’ he said. ‘The caller refused to give a name, but we’ve traced the number, and the phone is registered to a Mr Patrick Rawson, with an address in the West Midlands. Control have tried calling the number back, but it just goes to voicemail. The phone is switched off, probably.’
    ‘Has anyone checked the barn over there?’
    At that moment, the sight of Wayne Abbott making his way towards her again through the rain came as a relief to Fry.
    ‘No drier up here, is it?’ he said.
    ‘Who’d live in England?’ said Fry.
    ‘It rains in other countries, you know. I went to Texas for a conference once, and it rained the whole week.’
    ‘Somehow, that doesn’t sound too bad.’
    Fry was wondering how CSMs managed to get sent to conferences in Texas. Perhaps she’d been in the wrong job all this time. No one had ever suggested sending her to Swindon for a conference, let alone the USA.
    ‘Have you found something?’ she said.
    Abbott pushed back the hood of his scene suit. The last time Fry had seen him at an incident, he’d had a shaved head. Now, his hair had begun to grow back in ragged patches, so that his skull looked like an old tennis ball that had been chewed by the dog.
    ‘Well, we’ve got a series of impressions in the soil within a two hundred-yard radius of the hut,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of impressions, actually.’
    ‘Shoe marks?’
    ‘Well, sort of.’
    ‘I thought the rain would have obliterated them by now.’
    ‘In the usual way of things, yes – that’s what I would have expected, too. Light prints on soft soil like this would have deteriorated beyond use. But these prints are a bit different.’
    ‘Different how?’
    ‘The amount of weight behind the shoe marks has imprinted them deep enough into the ground to preserve them in the drier subsoil, where the rain hasn’t affected them so much.’
    ‘Weight? That makes such a difference?’
    Abbott nodded, a knowing smile on his face. ‘This amount of weight does. That, and the fact the shoes in question were made of