‘If there’s no gingerbread cottage at the end of this, I’m going to be really hacked off.’
He paused and checked their sketched map. ‘Should be round about here, somewhere...’
And on they squelched.
Moore looked over his shoulder at her. ‘You done many of these? Murder inquiries?’
‘Millions of them. Well, at least fourteen, anyway. Maybe sixteen? Kinda lose count after a while.’
‘Wow.’ Genuinely looking impressed.
‘You hear about the Flesher case? I worked that.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Couldn’t eat sausages for a month. Absolute torture.’
The path jinked around to the right, and as they followed it the woods opened out into a clearing of ropey grass dottedwith the stumps of long-dead trees – their dark bloated wood peppered with pale pustulant mushrooms.
Sergeant Moore just stood there at the edge of the clearing, mouth hanging open.
Couldn’t blame him. Because if you were looking for grade-A creepy, this was the mother lode. A cottage sat in the middle of the clearing, its steep roof sagging around a stone chimney – pale smoke curling away into the low grey cloud. Mean little windows glowered out from beneath the eaves, the wooden cladding festered with lichen. It looked...malevolent. Like the kind of place a serial killer would skin his victims. Then eat them.
A porch ran along the front, complete with rocking chair. A wood shed caught in the act of slow-motion collapse. What was probably an outhouse just visible at the back of the mouldy property.
But that wasn’t what made Roberta stare. It was the bones. Big bones. Small bones. Some on their own, some joined together in bundles. Here and there they made an almost complete skeleton – skull, spine, ribs, and pelvis, with only the limbs missing. Deer, dogs, badgers, you name it. All trussed up and dangling from metal poles driven into the clearing floor.
She huffed out a breath. ‘Wow... Talk about a “fixer-upper”.’
‘Or a “stay-the-hell-away-from-er”.’
13
The path snaked its way between the bone offerings to the cottage’s ratty wooden porch.
Roberta grimaced. ‘Aye... don’t know about you but I’m promoting our sinister gamekeeper to Suspect Number One.’
‘Right.’ Moore squared his shoulders. ‘Let’s go rattle the bugger’s cage.’ He marched along the path, back straight, head up. Hotel umbrella held high and proud.
She stayed where she was, watching him go.
This, right here, was the start of pretty much every horror movie that ended up with everyone dead and eaten. And she was far too pretty to end up in some fusty old git’s casserole dish.
But it wasn’t as if Sergeant Moore could cope on his own, was it? Man was about as useful as a chocolate soup bowl.
Which meant, like it or not, she had to follow the daft bugger into the monster’s lair.
‘Bah.’ She squelched along after him, rain thuddering against her brolly, cascading off the brim in teeny waterfalls.
Up ahead, Sergeant Moore came to a complete halt halfway down the path, as bottle-tops and empty tins rattled on either side of him. Was that atripwirewrapped around his left ankle?
Yeah, that wasn’t suspiciousat all.
He backed away a couple of paces, shaking his foot free of the line. ‘Maybe we should—’
The cottage door banged open and the gamekeeper stepped out, face a collection of hard angry wrinkles, the shotgun pointing right at them. ‘What doyouwant?’
Roberta picked her way past Moore – putting herself between him and the gun – and treated the old psycho to a nice unthreatening smile. ‘Albert? Albert Nairn? Police.’ Just so there was no confusion, she grabbed Sergeant Moore’s shoulders and spun him around to show off the word ‘POLICE’ picked out in reflective silver letters on the back of his high-vis jacket.
