Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (9 page)

“Wouldn’t even pick up the barge pole, in case you made him officer in charge of barge poles,” he said wryly. “So the RCU hasn’t got anybody who can take charge, the regular police have got Bob who doesn’t want to, nobody’s quite sure what the super’s instructions are because he’s buggered off without telling anybody, and meanwhile we’ve got all these internal investigations bigwigs in ordering everybody about.”

“Oh, yes?” Pierce tipped her eyebrows at him over her tea cup as she raised it for another sip, trying to act casual though she was down to the sugary dregs. “So what happened with that, anyway? Were they investigating Palmer?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, as if someone might be listening in who gave a damn about police internal politics. But the sandwich shop was deserted except for the two of them, even the girl serving behind the counter disappeared into the back with only the slosh and clatter of half-hearted washing up to betray her presence. “No one really knew who they
were
, to tell you the truth,” he admitted. “Palmer just told us they were investigating this whole business with the shapeshifter case and we should give them our full cooperation.”

Now it was her turn to take a wholly unnecessary glance around, paranoia making her spine prickle. “You think it was that Counter Terror Action Team?” she asked. Not a real organisation, she was almost sure, but the name given by the group that had interfered with her investigation every step of the way. She’d been trying to put the skinbinder murdering people for shapeshifting skins behind bars; they’d been trying to secure his services for their own ends, and never mind the trail of bodies that he left behind him.

“I don’t know, Guv,” Deepan said, shaking his head apologetically. “It wasn’t any of the ones who tried to take those case notes off us before, but... we never saw any ID. Not that anyone asked—I mean, you keep your head down in that kind of witch hunt.” He frowned minutely. “Superintendent Palmer wouldn’t have let them just waltz in, though, surely? Not if they were the ones who cocked everything up in the first place.”

“He might not have had a choice.” For more reason than Deepan could guess. Pierce sighed heavily and set her tea down. “So, whoever it was, it’s all been swept under the rug, and we’re never going to find out who it was in the police or the government fucking us about. Sally injured, Tim killed, one of the officers from the Firearms Unit killed—”

“And you injured, Guv,” Deepan reminded her.

“That, too.” Though her shoulder wound was almost trivial at the end of that list. “And yet no one’s going to be brought to justice for any of it.” Pierce grimaced as she pushed her cup away. “Still, at least we caught the bloody skinbinder.” One small victory wrested from the jaws of total shambles. “Don’t suppose there’s been any word about a trial?” she said, without much expectation.

Deepan’s face twisted awkwardly as she began to stand. “Did you not get notified?” he said. “There’s not going to be a trial—the bloke’s dead.”

She dropped back down into her seat. “What? Suicide?” Arrogant little sod hadn’t seemed the type—too sure his unique gift for skinbinding would win him a reprieve, and too uncomfortably close to being right about it. And he ought to have been in high enough security accommodations to make any major self-harm impossible.

But Deepan was shaking his head in any case. “Transportation accident,” he said. “Lorry driver went through a set of red lights and smashed into the side of the police vehicle while he was being transferred. Both the lorry driver and the prisoner were dead on arrival.”

Pierce let out a small, bitter snort. “Oh, yeah? Pretty convenient.” She didn’t need to be a DCI to recognise a coincidence that neat wasn’t likely to be much of one at all.

Someone high enough placed in the police to know transfer times, even arrange them, removing a liability from the playing field?

Or merely making them
think
that he’d been removed, when he wasn’t really dead at all?

Pierce pressed her lips together as she cleared the remains of her meal with a clatter. These trails were weeks, months old. She’d been out of action too long to have much hope of catching up to anyone behind all this. There was nowhere to start.

But Pierce had spent thirty years of her life working for the RCU. Nowhere to start was practically routine.

CHAPTER SEVEN

P
IERCE LEFT
D
EEPAN
to liaise with the local police and see about getting them CCTV footage from the surrounding streets, and drove back to the station. No sign of her DI in evidence. “Dawson call in?” she asked Freeman.

The young DC shook her head, and Pierce tried not to grimace. It could be that Dawson was just caught up in the drudgery of routine police work and didn’t have anything to report, but she didn’t fully trust him out of her sight. If he
had
found some kind of lead, what were the odds he’d actually notify her instead of going off half-cocked to chase it down? She was all in favour of her team showing initiative—Lord knew the RCU was too small and too busy to keep officers tied to her apron strings—but it would help to be sure she could trust their judgement before turning them loose.

Time to get to know her new pair of constables. She drew their attention with a clap. “All right, these artefact thefts,” she said. “What do we know?” Always easier to get up to speed from a verbal briefing than reading dry reports, and it would give her some chance to take their measure as investigators.

Freeman was the first to speak up, sitting up smartly while Taylor was still sporting the stunned rabbit look that seemed to be his default response to snap tests of his abilities. “There have been four incidents that we’re treating as connected,” she said. “Five now, if we’re including last night’s theft from the Hemsfield Gallery.”

“It seems to be the same MO, but let’s stick with the earlier cases for now,” Pierce said.

Freeman nodded earnestly. “Erm... all of the break-ins occurred at night. Two museums, an antique shop and a private collection, at locations scattered across Yorkshire. The thefts look like they’re professional—alarms and internal CCTV disabled, no witnesses or useful trace evidence left at any of the scenes. Targeted, too—in each case, the thieves could easily have got away with far more than they took.”

“So what exactly have they taken so far?” Pierce asked. She’d skimmed this file yesterday, but the details of the items taken had been secondary in her attention to clues about the thieves and their operation.

By this time Taylor had riffled through his notebook and found the appropriate spot. “In the first museum heist they took a ceremonial dagger.”

“They opened up a glass case full of them, but only took the one,” Freeman added. “Quite plain, leather scabbard, nothing fancy in the design. There were others in the same case that would have been worth thousands.”

“But this one would be easier to fence,” Taylor countered.

“Possibly,” Pierce allowed, though she doubted that had been the motivation. “What else?”

He consulted his notes again. “The second museum theft was a wooden cup. Goblet, is that what you call it? Wine-glass-shaped thing.” He sketched it vaguely in the air, looking faintly worried, as if he might be marked down for failing to get the right word. “Chalice?” he hazarded.

“Cup’ll do.” Pierce waved the detail away. Facts mattered, not the terminology.

“Carved, but not very valuable,” he went on with greater confidence. “They also took a wooden box from an antique shop in Leeds.” He held his hands out to illustrate an object about the dimensions of a tissue box. “With little subdivided sections inside. The owner thought it might have been an old magician’s herb and powder store, but there was nothing in it, just an empty box.”

“And what was taken from the private collection?”

“A bag of rune stones,” Freeman put in. “Only twelve stones, though, not a complete set. The owner used to buy them up cheap at auctions—antique sets of stones with some runes missing.” Not much use to anyone for casting runes, then; Pierce was dubious towards most alleged forms of divination in the first place, but you certainly couldn’t get an effective reading with only half the runes available.

“Maybe the thieves have the other part of the set?” Taylor suggested.

“It’s possible,” Pierce allowed. “Or they’re looking for it.”

“Why this set, though?” Freeman bit her lip thoughtfully. “Why not grab one of the others instead? Why not steal a complete one, even? We know they’re capable of pulling off the thefts.”

“Obviously they’re after these specific items for a reason,” Pierce said. “So what links them together?”

A moment of contemplation, then Taylor shook his head. “Nothing, Guv,” he said. “It could be components for a ritual—the dagger, the goblet cup thing—but I don’t see how a box and a few useless rune stones fit into that.”

“It’s not just about the magic,” Freeman said, sitting forward. “We’ve got to think of it as a crime. What’s the motivation if it’s not about money?”

“Jealousy, revenge, obsession,” Taylor reeled off, and shook his head. “Maybe we’re looking for a rational connection when there isn’t one? They could be stealing things because the ghost of Elvis told them to. Or using some kind of ritual to divine what they ought to steal next.”

“Ownership,” Freeman suggested, with a self-deprecating shrug. “They think these objects are theirs by right. Maybe the thieves used to own these items, or have some reason to think they ought to.”

“But we don’t know the provenance of most of the items,” Taylor objected. “We don’t have any evidence they were ever linked together.”

“
We
don’t,” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “Maybe the thieves do.”

Pierce sat forward. “Maybe we’re thinking too recent,” she said. “The item stolen last night was a seventeenth-century carved mask. This is not necessarily about who owned these things ten years ago, or even fifty—maybe the thieves are trying to unite a collection from much longer ago.” She stood up from her chair. “Find me everything you can about the history of these artefacts before they ended up in collections.”

I
T WAS A
frustrating afternoon of effort without much result. The only thing their research into the history of the artefacts managed to dig up was that the dagger and carved box were both estimated to be of a similar age to the mask, supporting the idea that all five pieces probably had a common origin. But exactly what that might be proved impossible to track; the history of the dagger dead-ended with the man who’d sold it to the museum in the 1930s, and none of the others had even that much of a paper trail, picked up in house clearances and auction lots with no details attached. They weren’t visibly valuable enough for anyone to have bothered keeping records.

Dawson’s search for more detail on Vyner’s actions had come up similarly blank. He’d been checked out at the hospital but found to have nothing more obvious than a headache and some bruises, gone straight home afterwards, and no doubt his body would still have been lying there undiscovered if the constable sent to get a statement from him hadn’t been concerned he’d done a runner.

Deepan had secured them some CCTV footage from the cameras in the region of the Hemsfield Gallery, but none of them were positioned to show the building or the street in front of it directly, which left the needle-in-haystack task of watching the whole lot in hopes of spotting anything of interest.

“Any joy?” Pierce asked towards the end of the afternoon, walking round to rest her hands on the back of his chair. Deepan sat back and rubbed his face with a groaning yawn.

“None of the cameras we’ve got show anything unusual at the time of the theft,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m going back through the days before now, see if there’s any sign of anyone casing the place.”

“Need a fresh set of eyes?” she offered. Watching security footage for any length of time was hypnotically dull, but you had to stay alert for little details, especially when there was a chance some form of magic might be involved.

Deepan waved the offer away with a tired smile. “No, I’ve got all my recurring guest stars memorised by now,” he said. “Curly-haired woman with pushchair. Bloke walking overweight pug. So far the pug is my most likely suspect.”