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They laughed. The countryside sped by. Sheep, trees, boring stuff. It was a glorious day, though, the sky so blue it made Declan want to hum that old ELO song, which would have got him thrown out of the Cure fan club years ago.

‘Well, look on the bright side. Only, what, seventeen years to go before you have a nice empty nest. Then what are you going to do?’

‘Fucking celebrate.’

‘You won’t, I bet you. Because then you won’t have anything to bitch and moan about. And let’s face it, Bob, you’re never happier than when you’ve got something to moan about.’

Bob looked at him sideways. ‘And you’re never happier than when you have a real ball-acher of a case to work on.’

‘If anyone else but you said that to me, Detective Sergeant Clewley, they’d be the one with the ball-ache. How is Isobel, by the way?’

‘Still lovely,’ Bob said, smiling at the thought of his wife.

They drove on for a while. They were based with the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team in Eastbourne but were heading for a tiny village called Stonegate, roughly halfway between Tunbridge Wells and Hastings. More accurately, they were heading to a farm several miles outside the village. It was beautiful around here, if you liked that kind of thing. Declan, who had grown up in a place similar to this, associated rolling hills and sheep with his stultifying teen years. He had fled to London the moment he could, ditched the black drainpipes, joined the Met, found noise and fumes and crowds far more to his liking than silence and fresh air and flocks, before circumstances had driven him back out of the city. But at least he lived and worked in a large town. This place wasn’t even a hamlet.

‘Watch
Serial Killers
last night?’ Bob asked.

Declan rolled his eyes. ‘You and your bloody crime documentaries. Don’t you get enough of that at work?’

‘It’s research,’ he said. ‘The one last night was awesome. You heard of BTK?’

‘A kind of burger, isn’t it?’

‘Lol.’

Declan looked at his partner. ‘Did you actually just say “lol”?’

‘Yeah. It’s what all the kids are saying these days. Sir.’

Declan sighed. ‘There really ought to be a law against it.’

‘Rofl.’ While Declan banged his forehead with the flat of his palm, Bob went on. ‘Anyway, BTK was this mild-mannered bloke who murdered at least ten people in Kansas. “Bind torture kill” – that’s what it stands for. That’s how he signed off his letters to the police.’

‘Oh, he was one of them, was he? A letter writer.’

‘Wouldn’t you love to work a serial-killer case?’

‘I worry about you sometimes. Actually, I worry about you quite a lot.’

‘Arriving at destination on left’, said the sat nav. It had instructed them to turn off the A-road and they had soon found themselves on winding country lanes framed by tall trees and strewn with roadkill, before emerging again into open countryside.

‘What, here?’ said Bob. ‘It’s just a field.’

‘Over there.’ Declan pointed. In the near distance, they could see a small cluster of farm buildings. They drove towards them down a dirt track, baked hard by the sun. As they grew closer, Declan got a better view of the farmhouse, which appeared to be held up by scaffolding, its thatched roof full of gaping holes, the red brickwork crumbling. Close by was a barn that was in an even worse state of repair. Yellow-and-black crime-scene tape had been strung up around an area between the house and the barn.

‘This reminds me of one of those places where teens in horror movies get butchered by psycho hillbillies,’ Bob said.

‘
The East Sussex Chainsaw Massacre
.’

They pulled up beside a parked police car, a sergeant from the local constabulary, sweating in his uniform, leaning against it. He looked up at them as they got out of their car. ‘Sergeant Alexander,’ he said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.

Declan introduced himself and Bob, then said, ‘So what have we got?’

Alexander led them towards the farmhouse. Declan looked up as something fluttered above them. ‘Was that a bat?’

‘Not at this time of day,’ said the sergeant. ‘More likely a swallow. Bats come out later. You’re not wrong though – apparently, the old farmhouse is full of them. The project manager was telling me they’ve been having a nightmare with the conservation people.’

Declan stopped and waited for him to continue.

‘This place is called Robertson Farm, after the family who farmed the land last century. But it’s been standing empty for years. Empty and forgotten until a couple from London decided to do a “grand designs” and bought it. They’re in the process of restoring it and converting the barn into a studio or something.’

The three of them approached the crime-scene tape. A couple of uniformed officers in short sleeves stood a few metres away on the other side of the taped-off area, chatting to a middle-aged woman wearing jeans and a vest-top, her shoulders pink with sunburn. ‘Go on.’

Alexander cleared his throat. ‘That’s the project manager over there. She’s a friend of the couple who’ve bought the place. She was down here this morning, supervising the builders—’

‘And they found a body,’ Bob interjected.

‘I don’t know if “body” is the word I’d use,’ said Alexander.

‘And what word would you use, Sergeant?’ Declan asked.

‘Remains. Whoever was down there looked like they’d been there a bloody long time.’

‘What do you mean “down there”?’

Alexander pointed to a hole in the ground, about the same size as a manhole in the street. The top of a ladder protruded from it. Declan suddenly had a horrible feeling, like a shadow passing over him, despite the warmth of the sun and the brilliant, cloudless sky.

‘In the cesspit,’ he said.

Declan’s grandad, who’d lived in a little cottage on the outskirts of Hastings, had a cesspit under his house because it was not connected to the main sewage system. He remembered how once, on a childhood visit, a truck had arrived to empty it. The smell was unbelievable. Years later, he’d been to the Glastonbury Festival and, looking down into the pit beneath the toilets, the smell of twenty thousand digested veggie burgers wafting up towards him, he’d been reminded of his grandad’s cesspit. Declan also remembered him warning Declan and his sister never to try to open it lest they fall in. ‘Nobody wants to drown in shit,’ he said. He was very down-to-earth, his grandad. He missed him.

As Declan approached the hole, Bob a step behind him, the project manager came over, rearranging her long ponytail as she walked.

She stuck out her hand. ‘Fiona Phillips,’ she said. ‘Bloody nuisance this.’

Bob eyed her. ‘Was it you who found the body?’

She shook her head. ‘No. One of the builders. We’ve only been on site for a few days and thought we should take a better look at the cesspit. We put a ladder down and he squeezed in. He came back up so fast it was almost comical. Like one of the moles in that whackamole game.’

‘Where are the builders now?’

‘I sent them home for the day. No point paying them if they’re just going to be standing around drinking tea.’ She laughed ironically.

‘We’ll need their names and addresses,’ said Declan. He turned to Bob. ‘We’d better take a look.’

Bob blanched. ‘I don’t think I’d fit through that hole.’

‘It’s all right. I’ll do it. Is it dry in there, Ms Phillips?’

‘Oh, yes. It must be twenty years since it was last used. So all the liquid will have evaporated and the excrement solidified long ago.’

Declan ignored the face Bob was pulling. ‘OK, good. Have you got a torch?’

Fiona fetched a Maglite and handed it to Declan. He got down on all fours and climbed backwards onto the ladder, treading carefully until he was fully underground.

‘Careful,’ Bob said, as Declan disappeared from view.

Twisting his body, Declan shone the torch downwards but couldn’t see the bottom. The air inside the cesspit was as fetid as he’d imagined, but at least all of the effluent had become almost fossilized. If the body had been found in an active cesspit, he wouldn’t be volunteering to go inside. But he imagined he was descending into a cave. A nice clean cave. As a former Goth, he wasn’t afraid of bats.

Declan descended another couple of rungs, then one more, sweeping the torch beneath him.

And there it was, lying on top of a solidified layer of waste.

Declan dropped a little closer. The skeleton stared at him from empty sockets and the bones were twisted at odd, jagged angles, one arm bent over its chest. The left leg at first looked cut off at the knee, until Declan realized the lower leg was folded beneath the femur.

He descended further into the darkness to get a closer look.

The skeleton didn’t make him feel scared or repulsed, just sad. Imagine ending up in a place like this. But stronger even than the feelings of sympathy were questions, bubbling up so fast that he couldn’t keep up with them. Had this person died in here? Who were they? How long had they been here? What had happened to them?

Did they fall or were they dumped? All his training and experience told him this had not been an accident.

Murder scenes were usually fresh, bullets or knives, ripped-open wounds or crushed throats, thickening pools of blood and the creeping stench of death. The buzzing of flies come to feast. This was very different. In this sealed chamber, years after death, the scene was curiously peaceful. Declan wasn’t a religious man but he had an image of this person’s soul being trapped down here, escaping when the cesspit cover had been removed, leaving behind a quiet calm.

He swept his torch around the area surrounding the human remains. There was no sign of any other objects. No jewellery glinted in the torchlight. No sign of a murder weapon. Just the body, alone in its tomb.

Shivering, he ascended the ladder and clambered onto solid ground, the skeletal face of the man or woman beneath fixed in his mind, staring at him – and asking him to find out what had happened to them.

‘Hang on, tell me again?’

‘The message from Becky wasn’t there when I went back to re-read it.’

They were in Gary’s kitchen, talking loudly to be heard over the top of a washing machine on the spin cycle, whose drum was banging as if it was in a marching band. The window was open because the day was growing hotter, the thermostat edging towards 30 degrees. Gary was wearing shorts, flip-flops and a
Star Wars
T-shirt. He handed Amy a beer, so cold it gave her a shock as she tipped and swallowed. But it tasted good. She noticed Gary watching her as she licked her lips.

‘Weren’t copies of the messages emailed to you?’ he asked. ‘When I get replies or messages on Twitter, they’re usually emailed to me.’

‘No. I have too many emails to deal with as it is. I turned that setting—’

‘Off.’

She smiled to herself. His annoying habit was becoming more endearing. Clearly, she’d been out in the sun too much.

‘And what about this guy, the one you sent the message to on CupidsWeb?’

‘Daniel.’

‘Yeah. Has he got back to you yet?’

She shook her head and took another sip of the beer. She watched Gary lift his bottle and found herself thinking what nice arms he had. He must work out. She wondered what gym he … She stopped herself. She had definitely had too much sun.

‘So … if he does contact you, what are you going to do? Go on a date with him?’

She shrugged. ‘That’s the idea. Find out what he knows about Becky. If anything. Probably clutching at straws, but—’

From nowhere, she was hit by a wave of emotion that rolled up from inside her. Tears sprung into her eyes and she felt herself wobble, having to put a hand on the worktop to hold herself up.

‘Are you OK?’ Gary said, stepping towards her.

His soothing voice opened something inside her and suddenly she was sobbing, her body shaking, unable to stop, the emotions of the last two days seizing control of her body. What if Becky was dead, or hurt? Her beautiful, stroppy, vivacious sister. She was the only person Amy really had in the world. She thought, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ but she couldn’t stop. She dropped the beer bottle and heard, as if from a great distance, the shattering glass, and then Gary’s arms were around her, pulling her face against his solid shoulder, stroking her back.

He made hushing noises until the sobs subsided. It had only been a minute but she felt exhausted. Gary continued to hold her and they stayed like that for a short while longer until Amy started to wriggle, feeling uncomfortable.

Gary stepped back and smiled at her. There was a damp patch on the shoulder of his T-shirt and he was standing in a puddle of beer and glass.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll clean up the mess.’

She expected him to tell her not to worry, that he would do it, but instead, he said, ‘I’ll get you the mop … Actually, I don’t have a mop. I think there’s a dustpan and brush. Somewhere.’

She laughed, and sniffed. ‘I’ll get one from Becky’s.’

After she’d cleaned up the beer and glass, Gary said, ‘You need a break from all this worry. Let’s go out for a drink.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Come on. It will do you good, honestly. You can’t do anything right now to help Becky, can you? Let’s go to the pub, have a drink, just try to forget about it for a little while.’

‘I can’t forget about it, Gary.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I meant, stop thinking about it. And yeah, I know you’re going to say you can’t – but you really do need a break. OK?’

She sighed and smiled at the same time. ‘OK. I give in.’

‘Cool. But you’d better sort your face out first.’ He grinned. ‘You’ve got mascara
all
over it.’

‘Busy in here tonight, for a Monday.’

Gary looked around for an empty table outside the Crown, but they were all full, crowded with smokers enjoying the evening sunshine. Inside, the queue at the bar was two bodies deep. ‘I think there’s a gig on tonight. Do you want to try somewhere else?’

‘It’s OK. Everywhere’s going to be rammed on a night like this.’

It was one of the things she loved about London – in the summer, when the pubs and the pavements outside would fill up with drinkers, the city buzzing with pheromones, the smells of sex and money in the air, the promise that something, anything could happen. Becky loved nights like this too … Amy stamped on the thought before it took hold and made her cry again.