Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (18 page)

Pierce was losing air, a deeper darkness than the night beginning to bloom around the edges of her vision. She pressed the edge of the cuffs against Davenport’s hand, and the skin sizzled like pork crackling at the touch of the silver.

But it wasn’t enough. Even as his body burned, he still kept up the pressure. Her rushing blood was pounding in her ears, and she could feel her struggles weakening, fading...

A furious explosion of barking, and Magnus burst out of the trees, the light from her dropped torch painting the dog in hellhound shadows. Davenport didn’t react, heedless of the sound or perhaps already deaf to it as his body decayed. Something about his scent was clearly driving the dog wild, and it growled and barked madly before rushing forward in a frantic lunge. Jaws closed on Davenport’s leg, but his dead face showed no sign of pain as he loosed his grip with one hand to backhand the dog away.

Pierce wrenched away from him the moment that he let her go, scraping her back on the tree behind her as she lurched sideways. She fell to her knees in the mud and wheezed, grabbing at a tree for balance as she tried to force enough breath back into her body to get moving again. Her vision was a chaos of light and shadow, torches through the trees and driving rain. Magnus was still barking, and she could hear people shouting somewhere nearby in the woods as well as over the radio.

Focus. Davenport. She staggered upright, trying to resolve the blur. He was still close, he had to be—shit! She stepped back from his swinging fist and grabbed at his arm, trying to force it away before he could go for the throat again. Even though she could feel his flesh slip like well-cooked meat off the bone, he was still impossibly strong, and she was using her weak arm because in the other hand she still had the—

—Fucking
handcuffs
, for fuck’s sake. She shook the cuffs open and snapped the first loop around the wrist in her grip, turning her head with a hiss as the rotting skin began to smoke. Still panting, breathless, she lunged around behind him, succeeding in wrenching his arm behind his back because he lacked either the wit or the pain centres to turn with her. Instead he twisted round the other way to meet her, snatching at her clumsily with his free hand, and she grabbed at it to close the second cuff.

Even with his arms pinned back Davenport was still too strong for her, throwing himself backwards to smash her aside with a blow of his shoulder. He tossed his head back, trying to headbutt, trying to bite, the movement carrying them both skidding and staggering down the slope. A police torch shone on the two of them in a blinding burst of light. Freeman, Archer, someone else? Couldn’t tell.

“Mirror, need a mirror!” she gasped, thinking of Vyner. His might have been enchanted, it might be useless, but still—“Try to reflect his eyes!” Of course he didn’t bloody
have
eyes left, not physically at least—but something was steering him, and symbol was as powerful as fact in ritual magic.

Her own compact mirror was still in her bag in the car, no bloody use to man or beast right now. Would Freeman have one? Probably not, for the same reason: you didn’t carry crap around while you were on the job.

As Davenport swung round again, Pierce darted back from him. He was clumsier now at least, both from the cuffs and his rapid decay, but no less determined to do violence to anyone who came near.

“We found Winters, Guv,” Freeman tried to report to her. “He’s—” She had to leap out of the way as Davenport charged at her full tilt. In the momentary flash of torchlight Pierce could see that his skin had turned an ugly greenish black, beginning to split. His body was decaying faster than a corpse in any natural conditions, but it wasn’t slowing him down nearly as much as it should.

She glimpsed a flash of hi-vis yellow at the corner of her eye. Archer. “Stay back!” she said. He wasn’t trained for this kind of confrontation—not that any of them bloody were, but he was just a PCSO.

But he dodged around the hand that she’d held up to warm him off. “No, I’ve got...” He fumbled something out of his pocket, running towards Davenport but jerking back as the butting head and gnashing teeth snapped his way.

As Davenport turned away from her, Freeman darted forward, grabbing hold of the silver cuffs that chained his hands. “I’ve got him!” she said—over-optimistically. He bucked and fought in her grip, and she had to bend backwards to escape a crack to the chin.

“Watch it!” Pierce yelled, not sure who she was warning. Archer ran forward again and shoved whatever he held in Davenport’s face. For a moment the trio were a struggling tableau in the rain, and then Davenport went limp in Freeman’s arms.

Entirely, horribly limp, dissolving from an upright if decaying figure into a lifeless, putrefying heap of flesh. Freeman stepped back with a yelp as the corpse slithered out of her arms, pouring from the tattered uniform like so much slurry.

And it was now, unquestionably, a corpse. Pierce finally found some breath from somewhere and sagged against a tree. “Mirror?” she asked Archer.

Not exactly: he turned to show her the dark screen of his switched-off smartphone. “Guess it was reflective enough,” he said.

She nodded wearily. “Good thinking, that man.”

He grinned briefly in triumph, but the expression slipped from his face as he looked down at the half-liquefied corpse and seemed to register for the first time that it had been not just a person but one wearing a uniform that matched his.

“Oh, God, is that
Terry
?” he moaned, and twisted away, managing to stagger only a few steps before he was noisily sick in the undergrowth.

Pierce looked away, her own stomach lurching in sympathetic nausea. No point chiding him for fucking up her crime scene; he wasn’t trained for anything like this, and her crime scene was already pretty fucked. She could hear the dog still barking somewhere further off in the woods, and in the distance sirens spoke of backup arriving.

Too late for Davenport for sure, and probably for Winters too. Collins hadn’t exactly been in promising shape either. It was raining, the crime scene had been trampled, and she still wasn’t even certain where Davenport and Collins had found the three skulls. Or where
she
was, for that matter; she’d lost all sense of orientation with respect to the road. She reached for her radio.

The cleanup for this was going to be miserable as hell. But it was all that there was left for them to do.

I
N THE DARK
and the rain it felt deceptively like the middle of the night, and it was only after she’d trudged back out to join the group gathering on the road that she checked her watch and found that it was barely half past five.

The one sliver of good news was PC Collins, returned to consciousness and apparently mostly concerned for the fate of her missing dog as she was led off to the ambulance in a semi-dazed state. “Let me go and get him,” she was repeating to anyone who came near. “He’ll come when I call him. Let me look for him.” Pierce hoped for her sake the dog would prove to have calmed now the possessing spirit was gone, and wouldn’t be too traumatised to rehabilitate.

The spirit’s other victims were sadly beyond help. Davenport had more than likely been doomed from the moment that he was taken over, and PC Winters had been dead by the time the paramedics got to him. COD would have to wait for the pathologist’s pronouncement, but in the meantime, Pierce could only hope that he was already gone by the time she’d tripped over his body and had to run on without stopping.

Either way, she knew that this one was going to haunt her.

She spotted Freeman re-emerge from the woods a short distance away, looking distinctly wearier than the perky young officer she’d started the afternoon as. She’d been in the thick of the action, and Pierce knew too well how that could prove a big shock to the system. Freeman would have done her time as a uniform constable—in Manchester, to boot, not just a sleepy village beat—so she’d undoubtedly seen some unpleasant scenes before, but the RCU had its own unique standards for investigations going pear-shaped, and all the standardised tests in the world couldn’t necessarily predict which officers would be able to hack it.

So far, however, Freeman seemed to be holding up well. She gave Pierce a tired nod as she approached. “We’ve found the last of the skulls, Guv,” she said, pushing her hair back to flatten the stray frizz that had worked its way loose from her bun. “From what we can tell, looks like Davenport unearthed one of them, possibly touched it or interfered with the scene in some way.”

“And that’s our vector of possession.” A theory they could run with, at least, though it opened as many questions as it closed. Why had he done it? Just straightforward failure to listen to her advice? Even as a PCSO he should have had the training to know better. Maybe he’d been trying to make sure of his find, eager to prove himself or fearful of making a stupid mistake.

Or maybe the enchantments on the site had acted as some kind of lure, making him act more foolishly than he usually would. Maybe it had even been an accident, fresh dug mud sliding away in the rain, the dog starting to dig...

They could try to reconstruct the scene, but with the limited evidence already trampled and rain-soaked and the only surviving witnesses a head-injured woman and a dog, it was likely most questions would go unanswered. She sighed.

The sound of tyres on the wet tarmac drew her attention. A car approaching down the lane, without blue flashing lights. One of the local uniforms went to intercept—they’d suddenly managed to produce a whole army of them from somewhere, and Pierce knew it was bitter hindsight to resent not having had them available for the search, but it still pissed her off all the same.

She expected the officer to send the car off to seek another route, but instead he waved it on and it rolled up to park nearby. Her headache intensified at the sight of DI Dawson getting out.

“Dawson,” she said, voice neutral, though her mood was anything but. “What are you doing here? I didn’t call you in.” There was nothing for another senior RCU officer to do here that couldn’t be done just as well by the local police force.

“Superintendent sent me to relieve you,” he said. “He wants to see you back at the station before he leaves.”

She bristled at the micromanagement. Whose idea had that been—Snow’s or Dawson’s? Either way, she wasn’t used to being brusquely ordered home from a scene before she was done with it; Palmer had always given her more rein.

But Palmer was gone, more than likely dead, and the prospect of finding the truth behind his disappearance seemed as remote as every other dead-end case that she was working right now. The urge to duke it out with Dawson in a pointless fight deflated. The order had been given, and even if it was at his instigation it wasn’t his to countermand.

Besides, if she was honest, she was too bloody tired to turn down an excuse to get off of her feet.

“All right,” she acknowledged with a nod. “Sergeant Mistry will fill you in.” And hopefully restrain him from antagonising the already unhappy locals, though she couldn’t ask for miracles. She turned to Freeman, still hovering nearby. “Freeman, you can drive me back.” Her shoulder could use the break, and so could Freeman, no doubt. “It’ll give you a chance to get cleaned up.” The slackening rain was no substitute for a proper shower when they’d both been up close and personal with a decomposing corpse.

The interior of the car made a merciful escape from the worst of the elements, though it also made her freshly aware of just how soaked she’d become—and not just with rain. Now that they were inside the enclosed space of the car the nauseating scent of death had returned with a vengeance.

The drive passed in brooding silence until they left the rural roads behind and joined the rush hour traffic. Freeman looked sidelong at her as they paused at the end of a line of cars tailing back from a junction. “Guv, was there something more we could have done?” she asked, biting her lip.

Pierce grimaced, and then sighed. “There’s always something more we could have done,” she said. “Doesn’t mean it would have made much sense to do it at the time.”

You could second-guess your decisions for ever in their aftermath, but in the end, the only way to sleep at night was to trust yourself enough to believe you’d done what you could with the info you’d had at the time.

Freeman made a vague noise, somewhere between acknowledging and dubious. All to the good; just because Pierce had a few hard-earned platitudes to offer didn’t mean she had much truck with officers who accepted them too readily. A little second-guessing and self-doubt didn’t hurt, as long as it didn’t cross the line into complete self-flagellation.

They arrived back at the station to find the group of druids still occupying the car park despite the puddles suggesting they’d suffered some of the same heavy rain. A larger camper van had pulled up beside the VW bus, and they’d even set up tents, apparently planning on spending the night. At least the continuing drizzle seemed to be keeping them from protesting too visibly, the only evidence a drooping banner strung between the vans that insisted they should
Save Our Nation’s Sacred Sites From Government Depredation!

“Oh, it’s the bloody government’s fault now, is it?” she muttered to herself as they passed it. Probably lucky for the protestors they were tucked up safe inside their vans: she didn’t have the patience to deal with time-wasters right now.