GONE TO GROUND

  A DCI BOYD THRILLER

  ALEX SCARROW

  Copyright © 2022 by Alex Scarrow

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by GrrBooks

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Untitled

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  DCI BOYD RETURNS IN

  About the Author

  Also by Alex Scarrow

  Acknowledgments

  To Jake, my son, my mate… and God help me

  competition one day, I fear :)

  PROLOGUE

  Boyd watched the coffin slowly edging forward into the crematorium oven, the squeaking rollers audible above the sound of Cockney Rebel’s ‘Come Up and See Me’. That track apparently had been one of his favourites. Okeke had told Boyd it was the most played track on his iPhone. ‘Ordinary Day’ by Duran Duran had been a close second.

  He looked to his left, to where she was sitting. He’d learned over the last year that his good friend and colleague preferred to keep displays of emotion to herself, often hiding her feelings behind a façade of caustic banter.

  For Samantha Okeke, tears were for bereaved mothers and favourite aunts. Snotty tears for scrotes in the dock who wanted to appear contrite. They were for family liaison officers to mop up in hospital waiting rooms or for a parent sitting on the end of a dead child’s unmade bed.

  Tears were not for her. No, sir.

  But this morning, as he waited for the coffin to slowly disappear behind the curtain, Boyd glimpsed – for the first time – a tear rolling down her cheek…

  TWO WEEKS EARLIER

  1

  Murray Schofield had always had big plans – Life Plans. Ever since he’d watched the first season of The X Factor as a kid, he’d known that not only did he have the talent to become the next Ed Sheeran but also the drive, the voice, the looks. Of course, with shows like X Factor and platforms like YouTube and TikTok, he had many possible winding avenues down which to reach his goal.

  And he really had given it his best shot. But… as the years had passed by, Murray had allowed his Life Plan to downscale by degrees. Okay, so maybe not Ed Sheeran then, but some level of success, any level that could be considered a career in showbiz.

  A stage-school course had helped him to finally get a job aboard a cruise ship, but he’d only enjoyed a few months of that particular career before it had all come to an end with the arrival of Covid.

  The furlough payments had sustained him for a while, but with no restaurants or bars open for cash gigs, it wasn’t long before reality placed its crushing size 10 boot on his throat and squeezed the life out of his dreams.

  And that’s how Murray had ended up in his new career as a bin man.

  Ironically, the other guys on his shift called him ‘Ed’ or ‘Eddie’ as in Ed Sheeran because he preferred to sing while he worked – his headphones on, accompanying various stage musical classics. You never knew when an audition opportunity might crop up and he wanted to keep his voice limbered up and ready, just in case.

  January, he’d quickly realised, was a shit month to do this job. The wheelie bins were choked and overflowing with Christmas tat, upended threadbare pine trees, wrapping paper and the like. Plus… getting up at ridiculous o’clock and going out to work in midnight darkness wasn’t much fun.

  And it was bastardly cold as well at this time of year, which was why he had large furry earmuffs over his woollen beanie and earphones (to the amusement of the rest of ‘the lads’) and those muffs were probably the reason he didn’t hear the shouting until it was too late.

  Murray was vaguely aware of Gazza frantically waving his arms at him as he hurried across Milward Road towards the back of the truck, trying to get Murray’s attention.

  Instinctively he had pressed the compactor button the moment the wheelie bin was returned to the ground, and he had just started pushing the bin back to where he’d collected it when he saw Gazza sprinting. From the expression on his face, something ghastly had just happened, or was about to.

  Murray pulled off his muffs and earphones. ‘What’s…?’

  ‘There was someone in there!’ Gazza yelled as he hurried past and slammed his gloved fist against the emergency stop button.

  The sound of the compactor’s motor ceased immediately, but the pneumatic hinges of Jaws – their name for the gaping serrated maw of the compactor – still had momentum left in them and a half-compression cycle played out with the sound of glass bottles shattering, tin cans clanking… and a crack that sounded like a dry branch under a clumsy foot.

  ‘Oh God! Oh Jesus!’ Gazza rasped. His beetroot-red cheeks and dark beard were topped with two cue balls of horror.

  Murray left his wheelie bin where it was in the middle of the road and hurried over to join him.

  And immediately wished he hadn’t.

  2

  Boyd had switched back to an old habit from his uniform days, which was setting his alarm an hour earlier than necessary so that the waking-dressing-making breakfast conveyor belt of getting up and out wasn’t so rushed. There was something to be said for allowing oneself an extra ten minutes to wake up properly before kicking off the covers and beginning the grind of another day.

  Ozzie was in no rush either apparently, displaying the perfect Spaniel Sprawl… flat on his back in the middle of the bed, arse-end pointing towards Boyd, legs spread like a hussy and snoring like a trucker.

  Boyd mentally catalogued the work sitting in his in-tray; there was a shopping list of items the CPS’s barrister wanted from him now that they’d started work on the Stephen Knight case. The trial would be six months from now. Boyd hoped that Knight would be sentenced heavily for the innocent lives he’d taken. Boyd, and Warren too, would almost certainly be called in by Knight’s defence council to testify. There was also spill-over work from DCI Flack’s ongoing operation – picking up on the paperwork and gopher jobs that Flack’s team were, apparently, far too busy with Important Things to deal with.

  He switched gears to matters that were non-work related. Namely Charlotte. The incident at the Martello tower had only been five weeks ago, which was no time at all when it came to processing such a traumatic experience. She’d been taken there by her ex-husband as a hostage and had thought he was going to stab her to death. Processing that level of visceral terror was going to be a years-long, probably decades-long endeavour for her. He needed to remind himself that it wasn’t anything personal, her need to get away for a while. She’d gone to visit her parents and was planning to stay with them for a few weeks to try to build a mental firewall between the past and the present.

  The last thing she’d said to him before departing was that she wanted them to stay close, to stay in touch, that she wanted, needed him in her life. But she’d said it in a way that could easily be interpreted as a ‘friends only’ sense. It was all too easy to misinterpret the inflection of a voice, the flicker of a smile. Given the horror she’d been through with her abusive ex-husband, Boyd couldn’t blame her for wanting to park whatever it was they had between them, for a little sanity check.

  Ozzie’s splayed rear paws kicked in the air at invisible rabbits or cats, catching Boyd on his jaw.

  ‘Ouch! Come on, you lazy lummox,’ he said, nudging him. ‘Time to get up.’

  The dog’s membranous inner eyelids sl
owly rolled back as he stirred from his slumber, and then a single clear thought had him leaping off the bed onto the wooden floor. He let out a volley of barks.

  ‘That’s right, me old sunshine,’ grunted Boyd. ‘Breakfast.’

  Boyd parked his Captur, grabbed his lunchbox and thermos flask from the passenger seat and opened the driver-side door, only for it to clunk against the vehicle next to him as he got out.

  ‘Shit.’

  It was Okeke’s brown Datsun. He ducked down to see if she was inside. And she was – glaring out at him from behind her steering wheel, phone glued to her ear in one hand, cigarette in the other.

  He mouthed an apology through the window and she shook her head in response, ended the call and climbed out. She hurried around to the passenger side of the car.

  ‘Oh, for fu– you clumsy ape,’ she said, inspecting the small mark.

  ‘Sorry about that… I parked too close.’

  She rubbed at it with her finger. ‘No shit, Sherlock. You’ve put a bloody dent in it.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ replied Boyd. He wasn’t actually being facetious; her car looked as though it had already had more than its fair share of encounters with shopping trolleys and bollards.

  She sucked air between her teeth as she ran her finger along the small groove he’d added to the collection. ‘Bloody idiot… sir.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Boyd said. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry. C’mon – I’ll buy, upstairs. To make it up. How’s that?’

  ‘It’s your round anyway,’ she huffed.

  He led Okeke into the lobby and they waggled their lanyards at the desk sergeant who buzzed them through to the stairwell.

  ‘Thank God it’s Friday, eh?’ he said. ‘Unless you’re in tomorrow?’

  She looked deadpan at him. Clearly she was.

  ‘Right,’ he replied, then grinned. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll be filling in Team Flack’s bloody paperwork tomorrow,’ she grumbled. ‘Yay, me. What I wouldn’t give for a nice juicy crime of our own to deal with right now. Where are all the bloody scrotes when you want one?’ She held her hand out to him. ‘I’ll dump your stuff if you’re going up to the canteen.’

  He handed her his thermos and lunchbox. ‘Black, no sugar?’

  ‘And a fried egg roll,’ she groused. ‘For the dent in my car.’

  Boyd arrived back downstairs at his desk twenty minutes later with a frothy cappuccino for himself and Okeke’s peace offering in a greasy paper bag. He placed the coffees and bag on his desk, shucked off his winter coat and took Okeke’s breakfast over. She was on the phone again…

  ‘OK. Thanks. We’ll be right over.’ She hung up and grinned at him. ‘We’ve got a body in a wheelie bin, guv.’

  3

  This time of year – January into February – was supposedly the high-tide mark for suicides. He’d read that somewhere. The months directly after the faux goodwill of Christmas and the misplaced hope of a new year. Bizarrely, in the same article, the suicide peak day had been calculated by someone (armed with a spreadsheet and too much time on their hands) to a very specific date and time – 16 February, 3 a.m.

  Boyd looked up at the grey sky and the mean-spirited drizzle tickling his face. The slate roof of the terraced houses on either side of the narrow road were slick with moisture and at least half a dozen windows were still filled with tired-looking decorations and spray snow, which looked, in his opinion, like white snot.

  Yup… January into February, that made sense.

  He let Okeke do the legwork, tapping details into her phone as she spoke to the bin men, while Boyd paced slowly around the truck sipping his still-hot cappuccino. The rubbish collection truck took up the width of the narrow street and he could see a pair of uniformed officers dealing with an irate bloke whose parked car was blocked in, leaving him unable to drive to work. The heated exchange involved a lot of hand-waving and finger-pointing.

  Boyd rounded the far side of the truck and saw that an inner perimeter of tape had been set up around the rear of the vehicle. And of course, just like a wasp hovering above an open Coke can, Sully was there in his bunny suit with one of his team, both of them leaning over to peer into the back of the truck.

  Boyd ducked under the tape and joined them. ‘Morning.’

  Sully stood up straight and turned round. ‘Ah, morning Boyd.’ He sounded cheerful behind his paper mask. ‘This is Karen Magnusson. She’s my new deputy. Karen, this is DCI Boyd.’

  Boyd nodded politely. ‘Welcome aboard, Karen.’

  He realised that for once he was addressing someone taller than him. She offered him an elbow and he replied with a gentle bump – a Covid habit that had lingered for kitted-up SOCOs. The only part of her face he could see were two bulging eyes behind a pair of rimless glasses. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t “sir” him, Karen,’ said Sully. ‘Only the plain-clothes and uniformed Neanderthals have to do that.’

  Boyd craned his neck to look past Magnusson into the rear of the rubbish truck.

  ‘Err… hold on, Boyd,’ said Sully. ‘You might not want to –’

  Curiosity compelled him. He got a glimpse of its interior and immediately regretted it. He stepped back and took a moment to shrug off the wave of nausea that raced in from nowhere.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he uttered. ‘That’s a mess.’

  ‘That’s what eight tons psi of hydraulic compression will do to you if you pick a fight with it,’ said Sully. He shrugged. ‘I did try to warn you.’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Bit earlier and more emphatic next time maybe, Sully?’

  Sully turned to look back in the rear of the truck. ‘I think we need to have this truck taken back to the station, empty its contents into a skip and pick our way through it,’ he said to his deputy.

  ‘Sounds good,’ she said a little too eagerly. ‘It’ll be like a lucky dip.’

  Christ, thought Boyd, There’s two of them now.

  Sully looked back at Boyd. ‘I’m afraid this time we’re going to be handing Ellessey Forensics a John Doe in kit form.’ He was smiling beneath his mask. ‘That’s going to be one hell of a fun puzzle… determining cause of death.’

  Boyd left the CSIs to it and continued his walk around the perimeter of the rubbish truck. Okeke was sitting on the kerb, beside a young man wearing a high-vis vest; his head was dangling between his knees. She waved Boyd over.

  ‘This is Murray Schofield,’ she said. ‘The one who tipped the body into the back.’

  Boyd squatted down. ‘You all right there, Murray?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really, no,’ Murray replied. He was as white as a sheet.

  Boyd patted his arm gently. ‘I can’t say I blame you. I just caught a glimpse too.’

  ‘I told him we have PTSD aftercare resources,’ Okeke said, tapping on her phone. ‘There,’ she said to Murray. ‘I’ve just texted you the link.’

  Murray nodded a thank you, then lifted his head to look at Boyd. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? The guy in the …’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Yes. Very. Look… Something like this is pretty hard to blot out. DC Okeke’s right. You should make sure you see someone about it, all right?’