Low pastures, p.1
Low Pastures, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Bill James from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
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
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Footnotes
Also by Bill James from Severn House
The Harpur and Iles series
VACUUM
UNDERCOVER
PLAY DEAD
DISCLOSURES
BLAZE AWAY
FIRST FIX YOUR ALIBI
CLOSE
HITMEN I HAVE KNOWN
Novels
BETWEEN LIVES
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
MAKING STUFF UP
LETTERS FROM CARTHAGE
OFF-STREET PARKING
FULL OF MONEY
WORLD WAR TWO WILL NOT TAKE PLACE
NOOSE
SNATCHED
THE PRINCIPALS
LOW PASTURES
Bill James
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Bill James, 2022
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Bill James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0572-8 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0574-2 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0573-5 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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ONE
Occasionally, the plain, matter-of-fact names for certain bits of the city gave Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur true and deep delight. It happened now, despite the deado lying prone quite close, his skull shattered by at least two shots from behind, in Harpur’s admittedly hurried estimate. Plentiful blood across the rear neck and shoulders of the victim seemed to confirm Harpur’s judgement, and so did the dead man’s cultured light grey wool suit, now patchily stained on the back. Harpur was alone with the body. He’d been told about it by one of those secretive, confidential whispers that detection depended on.
‘Sand and gravel wharf’ was the official label for this stretch of docklands. It struck Harpur as perfect. Dredging vessels came in on the tide from the channel through the lock gates and took their place alongside the wharf to unload cargoes of sand or gravel, or a mixture, sucked up mechanically through a wide pipe from the sea bottom where it had hung about for centuries, a lot of centuries. Now, or soon after, it would get transformed into cement. Harpur liked this notion – its purposefulness: the sand would help construct houses, schools, headstones, office blocks, jails, motorways, multi-storey car parks, perhaps good enough to last a couple of lifetimes, or a good many more lifetimes than this corpse’s. OK, that didn’t sound very long when compared with the sand’s slow grind-down creation, but it was not nothing.
A dredger like this one here now would cough up its pre-ordered offering – sand or gravel or mix – from the minor depths and this seemed to Harpur neat, tidy, logical. It had natural sequences. He saw beauty, also. For instance, ‘carapace’ was a word he reckoned could be quite reasonably used about the outer covering of a gravel grain. At daytime, if the sun shone, this carapace might glint brilliantly, beautifully for a while. Sand was different; it gave no glint whatever the weather. Sand in a pile on the wharf looked only serviceable, as though it had a job to do and would do it, adding itself to the cement powder in due proportion.
Because the dead man had been shot from behind he had pitched forward when hit, throwing his hands and arms ahead of himself on the ground, and the sleeves of his jacket were slightly pulled back in this collapse. He had on his left wrist what looked to Harpur like a very elegant and pricey simple-faced watch. It was secured by a brown leather strap, not one of those gold or silver jobs glowering like a fetter. The combination of modesty and wealth made Harpur think this must be someone from outside the area. He was pushed towards such a wider view as locals didn’t often, in his experience, favour understatement.
Now and then, when Harpur dealt with a murder, he got the idea that this particular death had meaning well beyond the ordinary and obvious. The feeling certainly did not arise with every murder case, but when it did the impression for Harpur was always very strong. And so it turned out now, with this splendidly dressed white male on the wharf floor at almost dawn. The soles of his nicely polished black shoes showed next to no wear. Harpur believed shoe soles could often tell a tale.
Harpur found himself thinking hard that this execution had a special, urgent and possibly widespread message. God, the flapdoodle term ‘overtones’ had somehow got into his brain: did this crumpled, very tastefully dressed clutter on the floor really have overtones? Often, someone talking about a murder might say, ‘this killing surely hints at something’, and Harpur would have replied: ‘yes it hints at no circulation, no oxygen, no life.’ Today he regarded that as stupidly negative, glib and useless. The present fatality probably spoke a warning, or more than one, and he knew he’d better listen hard and respectfully to its silent swansong.
Because the victim had apparently crumpled to the left, Harpur could see only part of his face on the floor and didn’t recognize it. Harpur was good on faces. He crouched to be nearer. The man’s jacket had been unbuttoned, and part of it lay spread out flat on the ground from under the body. Harpur enjoyed a hearty snuffle in the area of lining exposed there. It was like being wrapped in a friendly wall. Lingering darkness helped. Harpur admired the tailor’s bright skill – he, or she, had made the jacket’s lining resemble the oblong greystone of a formidable building, perhaps a jail.
Harpur lying close to the gaudy remains, could feel the hard bulk of a pistol over the man’s left breast. The lining was too heavy for him to recognize by touch the make of weapon, possibly an automatic, and not an imitation. This guesswork severely pestered Harpur while he was on his hands and knees touring the dead man, trying to keep clear of the scattered blood and fragments and to decide absolutely from a greater closeness how many bullets had shattered the skull, two or three. He acknowledged that, in a way, this kind of post-mortem accountancy was fairly superfluous because the man was dead and the number of bullets that killed him didn’t much matter. Harpur’s training edged him towards thoroughness, though, and he didn’t fight it.
In any case, he wanted to make an estimate of what the face might have looked like before being ripped by the double, and possibly triple, exit damage – back of the neck, maybe part of the jaw, then the nose. As far as Harpur could make out by a good stare at the former face, it definitely wasn’t somebody he knew, either through the job or personally. Half a nose taken away, as here, made a difference. It wasn’t just a missing nostril. The whole layout and balance of his features were affected. Harpur guessed that even close relatives might have had trouble recognizing him, if he had any. Harpur called in to headquarters and reported the find.
He took as good a grip as he could manage and gently drew the pistol from its shoulder-harness. As he thought, an automatic, a Walther. From its weight he guessed it to be fully loaded. He held it out in front of him, thrilled by its smooth lines. How elegant and shapely automatics were, in contrast to revolvers.
There was a sudden insulting yell: ‘Grand pose, Col. Suits you,’ Iles said. He had approached around the stern of the dredger.
Ha rpur decided the assistant chief must have an informant network as good as Harpur’s; perhaps better. Although it was 2 a.m., Iles had taken the time to dress formally in one of his silver-buttoned blazers, well-ironed shirts and hockey-club tie. He was a keen playing member, strong in attack from the right wing.
Iles’s arrival reinforced Harpur’s belief that the shooting was most probably more than itself, and the beginning of something extraordinary; something not altogether good, perhaps not remotely good and sickeningly bad, in fact.
An assistant chief constable didn’t normally attend a run-of-the-mill slaughter aftermath. But normality was not one of the ACC’s glistening talents. He would probably recognize the normal if he met it, but would decide this was no fun and not for him, thanks. Or, he had his own notion of what normal looked like, and not everyone agreed.
He could sense and sniff potentially major bother and he’d need to scrutinize it. So, here he was, svelte and gleaming in his lovely gear. Effortlessly, and at once, he got down on all fours with Harpur. This, Harpur realized, was not warm-hearted, simple matiness. To make sure he didn’t get left behind, Iles would place himself to see anything Harpur might discover. The ACC had a constant, raging, extremely warranted fear that Harpur would hold information back from him so that Harpur, not Iles, would control an investigation and pick up any kudos for resolving it.
Depending on what you knew of their background and history, you could decide the way Iles and Harpur worked harmoniously together on the body and clothing that they must be close, cheery, long-term pals, used to sharing a job and always ready to do it. But this would be about as wrong as you could get: life was not like that; not these lives, at any rate. Each dreaded with a miserable, undying intensity the possibility that the other might discover something unique and crucial to one of their projects and leave the other looking eternally inept and null.
Iles, especially, had a lot to lose. At his rank – almost top rank – he ought to brave a confrontation with wettish sand in a heap only as long as it brought more clear credit and gloire to his name. And Harpur didn’t see how this cock-crow dockside episode could boost the ACC. Rumour said he might be thinking about trying for a full chief post – not a mere assistant role – at a police force elsewhere, and he would need to be careful to keep his reputation sound.
Harpur wished intently that the Iles hadn’t turned up today. There was the matter of his roaming wife. Although Sarah Iles seemed to have settled contentedly into motherhood since the birth of their second child, some while back she’d suffered episodes of deep, very proactive sexual unrest. Harpur had tried to help. It was over. There was Denise now. But when Iles and Harpur were forced into exceptionally close contact by the job, it could still lead to notable stress and unpleasantness initiated by the ACC, and not at all now to do with the murder. Some who had known about Sarah Iles and Harpur thought it continued, would not believe it had finished.
‘Ah,’ Iles said.
‘I thought this death might interest you, sir,’ Harpur replied heartily, emptily. ‘Very much up your as-it-were street. As you see, terrific suit including waistcoat. We don’t come across many of those about lately.’
‘We’ve had this kind of situation once or twice before haven’t we, Col?’ Iles said.
‘Have we, sir?’ They had. Harpur remembered the occasions well. It was why he felt so troubled now.
‘Oh, yes,’ Iles said.
Oh, hell. ‘I haven’t been able to identify him or get a background,’ Harpur replied.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Iles said.
Harpur had known it wasn’t what he meant. Yes, there was the matter of the ACC’s wife. ‘I wondered if this savagery here had implications outside the immediate,’ Harpur said, seeking a diversion, any diversion.
‘The immediate,’ Iles said. ‘How exactly does the immediate look to you, Harpur? What is the immediate?’
‘Well, the body. The murder.’
‘And what is “outside” this immediate?’ Iles said.
‘The more general picture. Does it tell us about that?’
‘Which more general picture?’
‘We have to learn something from this dead man,’ Harpur replied.
‘Learn what?’ Iles asked. He pulled out the necktie of the corpse. It was blue and grey striped and genuine silk. Iles leaned forward, rubbed his right cheek appreciatively on it. ‘Pleasant,’ he said. ‘There’s a bit of body warmth still present. One should always spend that small amount extra for quality.’
‘It’s as if the tie knew you’d be along and waited,’ Harpur said.
‘You taking the piss?’ Iles said. ‘Let’s switch topics, shall we? Can we talk about my wife? As I said, we’re into repeats. I’m sure I’ve asked a certain type of question previously but let’s revisit, OK?’
‘Whatever you wish, sir.’
‘Tell me, do you think, Harpur, that in any other British police force, or indeed, police forces throughout the world, an assistant chief constable (Operations) might be at the site of an undoubted homicide and find he is in the company of an officer, subordinate officer, who has adulterously had his wife, and who might be confidentially savouring the memory of it though his attention should be entirely on the very present casualty. Do you want a rub of this?’ he said, offering the tie.
‘Nothing in his pockets. Systematically cleaned out post-death, I’d say,’ Harpur replied. Except, of course, it was no reply to what Iles had asked, but Harpur would profoundly like to get off the blistering Sarah theme. ‘Possibly yourself, sir, can help with identification. That would be an advance. I’ve no ideas.’
‘Sarah and I chew over it, that unsplendid fling,’ Iles said. Like Harpur, the ACC moved carefully so as not to get messed up near the incomplete head. ‘There’s no festering secrecy in my home. She regrets it all – regrets the past error. Sarah is like that. She will admit mistakes. She is even-handed. You may have heard of jot-and-tittles, Col. Well, the dismissive attitude she has currently towards you is total, all jots, all tittles wiped out.’
Iles began to shout across the murdered man at Harpur.
‘You might think you’re the one she favours more than her husband. Arrogance. Vanity. Self-delusion. You’re as nothing to her, zilch, nil, void. In her memory there is a gloriously spacious blank and you are entirely it. I pity you, yes, pity.’
The full Scenes of Crime unit in masks and white dungarees had arrived, responding to Harpur’s call, and waited considerately until the assistant chief completed his anguished résumé of this relationship, but now approached and began their work.
Iles lowered his tone, grew more or less sane in that famed, fast recovery fashion of his: ‘We’ve been convinced something like this – the ruthless death – was bound to happen and soon, haven’t we, Col?’ he said. ‘We see a kind of paradox in such an instance of thuggery, don’t we? This city’s success brings destructive, appalling peril. If he did but know it, this deceased is a trailblazer. It’s a kind of malign pay-back, a rough touch of hubris, meaning obnoxious, doomed pride, Col.’ Iles bent forward and now began to finger ecstatically the material in the left lapel of the corpse’s jacket. ‘A London creation, this,’ Iles said. ‘Brilliant ensemble, and it chimes so sweetly with his general deluxe aura, doesn’t it: the tie and highest-quality non-plastic buttons?’ Iles gave himself a brush down with his right hand. Harpur did the same for himself. They’d stood.
‘I,’ Iles said. ‘Yes, I.’
‘You, sir?’
‘I,’ Iles replied.
‘In which sense, sir?’ Harpur said.
‘When you look at this dead man, Harpur, you see implications. Implications are all very well. But me, when I consider the corpse, I feel not implications but responsibility. That might surprise you. I mean, though, that I have made this city, this area, this bailiwick so sweet and comfy that all sorts want to come here. So many of them want it that there is deadly competition. There is violence, there is killing, there is our friend here stretched out on the wharf.’
He had finished his brushing and pointed with his right thumb at the body. ‘I’m not in any way ashamed to say so. If anything, the reverse.’ The use of his thumb as a pointer, rather than a finger, seemed to take away what remained of the man on the floor’s dignity. It could be argued, probably, that there wasn’t, in fact, much dignity left anyway for someone flattened like this, despite the distinction of his garb. Harpur thought that almost certainly if he himself was shot and lying lifeless, Iles would indicate the Harpur body in the same curt, unhysterical style.
