Bad Blood (45 page)

A number of people helped me navigate to this point. To everyone involved, I’m very grateful.

Special thanks to: my agent, Claire Roberts. She’s unfailingly cheerful and does what all agents should do – laugh at an author’s jokes; to my editors at HarperCollins/Avon, Caroline Hogg and Lydia Newhouse. To use a footballing analogy, Caroline provided a perfectly weighted pass into the box and Lydia slotted the ball home for the winning goal; to the rest of the hard-working team at Avon, especially Claire Bord who has left to do something much more exciting and demanding (twins, in case you are wondering). Without Claire, DI Savage might never have made it into print.

Friends from worlds both real and virtual provided help and distraction in equal measure (without you lot I’d probably have written the book in half the time!). And, as always, my wife and daughters were supportive and my parents encouraging. Thank you all.

Finally, the biggest shout-out must go to you, the reader. Without the complimentary reviews, emails and tweets, and the knowledge so many people enjoy reading about Charlotte and want more, Bad Blood may never have seen the light of day.

Read Mark Sennen’s first serial-killer chiller, TOUCH, out now

Read on for an extract from Mark Sennen’s next novel,
Cut Dead
, due in 2014.

Back then

The song ends and Mummy and Daddy clap. The candles on the cake flicker in the draught and Mummy tells you to blow them out. You lean forward and purse your lips, your baby brother moving alongside you to help, and you both puff for all your might. One, two, three, four, five, six. All out. The room plunges into darkness and you feel a sudden fear.

‘Lights on!’, Mummy says and Daddy switches the lights on and marches forward, the big knife in his hand, the blade shiny, sharp, ready for cutting.

The big knife lives in the kitchen, stuck to the wall above the cooker by magic. At least that’s what Daddy calls it. The knife winks at you every time you pass by, a flash of light reflecting off the stainless steel, the glare mesmerising. You don’t like being in the kitchen alone with the knife, especially not at night.

Because that’s when the big knife talks to you.

‘I am temptation,’ it says. ‘I am the explorer. I am the light.’

You’ve heard someone else speak like that too, in the cold of the church, but although the words are similar you don’t think they can mean the same thing.

‘OK, so who’s going to have the first piece?’ Daddy says and for a moment you forget about the knife and instead concentrate on Daddy’s words, knowing he is trying to trick you. You mustn’t be greedy, must always be polite, if you aren’t you’ll get hit. You point to your brother. He smiles and claps his hands.

‘Can I, Daddy, can I?’

‘Of course you can, here, let’s see.’

Daddy takes the knife and rests it on the white icing, using his other hand to push the blade down into the cake. He cuts again and then slides the knife under the cake and withdraws the slice. He stops. Doesn’t give the piece to your brother after all. Daddy frowns. The inside doesn’t look right, the yellow sponge is soft and mushy, not cooked properly. Daddy doesn’t like that. He turns to Mummy and sneers at her.

‘What’s this?’ Daddy’s face reddens. ‘I’m out working all day and you can’t prepare a cake on this, of all days. Our special day. What do you think, boys?’

‘Naughty Mummy, bad Mummy, naughty Mummy, bad Mummy.’ You and your brother start the chant, the chant your Daddy has taught you. You hate singing the words, but if you don’t there’ll be trouble. There’s been a lot of trouble in recent months because Daddy’s changed in some way. You don’t understand why, but you wonder if it’s your fault, something you’ve done.

‘Yes, boys. Naughty Mummy.’

Daddy steps forwards and slaps Mummy in the face. She raises her hands but it’s too late. The blow catches her and knocks her sideways. Then Daddy has her by the hair. He is dragging her out of the room into the hall, pulling her up the stairs. Mummy is screaming and Daddy is shouting. They are upstairs now, the door to their bedroom slamming shut. You know what’s going on up there because once you peeked through the keyhole. Daddy is doing something to Mummy and she doesn’t like it. Afterwards Daddy will be sorry and Mummy will say everything is going to be alright, but this time you wonder if Mummy’s words will come true because the big knife has gone. Daddy has taken it with him. You wonder how you will be able to cut the cake without it, but then you remember the cake is bad.

Your baby brother is crying and you tell him to pull himself together. You whisper the words Mummy says about everything being OK, but even as you say them you know they are lies. Parents lie to their children all the time. They tell them things called white lies. But there are other types of lies as well, other colours. You’ve learnt that.

‘It’s OK.’ You repeat the words to your brother as you touch him on the shoulder, but you know something has changed today and nothing is ever going to be OK again.

Now

‘Evening, Charlotte,’ someone says as she climbs from the car. Another person nods. Not a greeting, just a simple recognition that she’s here to share the load. The dirty work.

She walks across the field. Except it isn’t a field, the mud is more sludge than earth, pools of water in footprints showing her the way from the gate to the tent. Not a tent for camping. Not a gas stove and plastic plates and mugs, squashed bread and sausages spitting in a frying pan. Not sleeping bags to slip into at night, snuggle down, cool air on face, stars above visible through the opening of the tent.

No, there are no stars tonight, only cloud from which rain tumbles in streams, as if from a million hosepipes. There are bags, yes, although these ones are black, the tent white, vertical sides flapping in the breeze, and inside the light comes not from a weak torch but from halogens. The people here aren’t on holiday, not smiling, not laughing apart from one joke about the weather, the incessant rain, the lack of a decent bloody summer. Even then the laughter is nervous, not genuine, as if the banter which proceeded the joke was merely to take minds off the task in hand, away from the hole in the ground which the tent covers. But words can’t do that, can’t take her thoughts away from the horror down in the pit where a pump thrums, slurping water up a hose to discharge it a few metres away. A generator chugs somewhere in the background, and every now and then the halogens dim for a moment as the engine misses a beat.

She wonders who set this all up, who coordinated everything, who the hell is in charge of this nightmare. But really those details don’t matter at the moment. The only thing that matters is that she doesn’t throw up, doesn’t cry, that she keeps her mind on the job.

Job, what a laugh. They don’t pay her enough for this, couldn’t. Nothing is worth this. Staring down into the hole, seeing the pitiful sight within, smelling the adipocere, thinking about her own little girl, dead years now. Thinking about her other children too, knowing she loves them more than anything. Knowing that nothing can be worse than this for a mother, for a parent, for anyone with an ounce of humanity inside them.

And while the others are talking, making comments, offering suggestions, she’s letting her mind go blank, allowing just one thought in: a promise to the three souls dissolving down there in the clay that she will find who did this. A promise that she will do more than just find them.

Joanne Black had managed the farm for ten years, ever since her husband had run off and left her for a younger model. At first it had been a real struggle, a steep learning curve for a woman who had never even liked gardening and who used to get squeamish if the cat brought in a mouse. Needs must though, and within a few years she was looking after the five hundred acres as if she had been born to the task. Help had come from a neighbouring farmer and from her two workers, and if they had been sceptical at first they’d never showed it beyond a raised eyebrow or a ‘are you sure about that Mrs Black?’

Ms Black.

She’d reverted to her maiden name when her husband had left and now she wondered why she had ever abandoned it in the first place. Why she had ever married Mr William Tosspot Granger as well.

The farm had come to them by way of an uncle who had no other relatives, and all those years ago the initial plan had been to sell it and do something with the money. But somewhere down inside, Joanne had felt that was wrong. She had visited Uncle Johnny as a child and remembered helping him bottle-feed an orphan lamb. ‘He needs you, he does,’ her uncle had said and Joanne felt a warmth in knowing that. Back home her mother said Joanne’s eyes had sparkled when the lamb nuzzled the bottle and sucked down the milk. Somehow the uncle had seen that sparkle and years later, when writing his will, he’d taken a gamble. Right at the moment William and her had been going to see the land agent about selling the farm, Joanne had changed her mind. Taken a gamble too. Uncle Johnny may have thought Joanne was a long-shot, but hell, she was going to see to it that his bet paid off.

William had thought she was crazy. What did they know about farming? Wouldn’t a couple of million in the bank be better than feeding lambs on a cold, frosty January morning?

No, it wouldn’t.

Joanne chuckled to herself now as she opened the post. Bills, yes, but a letter from Tesco confirming a contract to supply them with organic lamb and two bookings for the holiday cottages. There was also a large cardboard tube. Joanne pulled off the end caps and extracted a roll of paper which turned out to be a poster. There was a note too: ‘Hope you like this, sis. Happy Birthday, love Hal.’ Hal was her brother and he lived in the US and worked for a large software company. Joanne unrolled the poster and gasped when she saw it was an aerial photograph of the entire farm. She had looked at maps on the web where you could load up such an image, but this was much better quality and at poster-size the detail was amazing.

Spreading the picture out on the kitchen table, Joanne spent a good ten minutes examining every last nook and cranny on the farm. It was while she was looking at one edge of the poster, where a corner of a field had been left to seed because the combine harvester couldn’t turn in the odd little space, that she spotted a strange marking on the ground. She remembered how archaeologists used aerial pictures to find and map the extent of prehistoric monuments and wondered if the markings could be something similar. If it had been in the middle of the field she would have been worried about preservation orders and all sorts, but this was in a useless patch of muddy scrub.

Interesting.

She’d finish her coffee and then head out there on the quad bike, see what the ground looked like up close. Maybe there’d even be something worth finding there, like Saxon gold?

Two hours later, and if it
was
Saxon gold then Joanne was wondering whether somebody had got there before her.

‘Here, Joanne?’

Jody, her farm worker, was manoeuvring the little mini-excavator into position at one end of the patch of earth. The excavator had a bucket claw on the end of an arm, the machine most often in use for digging drainage channels, and Jody had placed the claw above an area of disturbed ground.

Earlier, Joanne had zoomed down to the corner of the field on the quad bike and found the odd little piece of ground easily enough. She was surprised she had never seen it before, since the outline of a rectangle was visible where the dock and nettle and seedlings grew at a different density from the rest of the scrub. At one end of the rectangle the seedlings were this year’s, the grass and weeds not so well established. Somebody had dug the muddy earth within the last twelve months or so. It was then she had decided to get Jody down with the digger.

Joanne nodded at Jody and the mechanical arm creaked as the claw hit the ground, the digger lifting for a moment before the shiny steel blades penetrated the top soil and Jody scooped up a bucketful of earth, swinging the digger round and dumping the spoil to one side.

Twenty minutes later the hole was a metre deep and about the same square and still they could tell they hadn’t reached the bottom of the disturbance. Joanne began to think the exercise was futile, not the best use of Jody’s time nor hers. She looked at the heavy clouds: imminent rain. Time to give up and head for a cup of tea. Even as she thought it little specks started to fall from the sky. ‘Pittering’ her uncle used to say. Next it would be pattering and then the heavens would open.

‘Joanne?’

She turned to where Jody had deposited the last bucket of soil. Amongst the earth and stones a piece of fabric stood out, the shiny red incongruous against the grey-brown sludge. She moved over to the spoil heap and peered at the scrap of material. Saxon? Unlikely, she thought, not in nylon. And not with a Topshop label either.

‘Fuck!’

Jody didn’t often swear. Maybe when he thwacked his thumb with a hammer when fencing or if a cow trod on his foot, but otherwise never. Joanne looked back into the hole to see what had caused him to utter the obscenity.