Sure, he’d seen all the ‘Westerly Wellness Centre’ adverts and the like on the wall in Bernie’s caravan, but so what? That wasn’t reason enough to deviate from the plan to go pay the local MSP a visit. Not when it meant driving all this way along that road at this time of night.
“Detective Chief Inspector?” André pressed, his inscrutable smile still fixed in place. “May I tempt you with that tea?”
“Eh, aye,” Logan said. “Don’t mind if I do.”
“There’s a lot of weird shit in here, eh?” asked Tyler, his voice muffled by his jacket sleeves. He had tied them across his face so they covered his mouth and nose, and the body of the jacket itself flapped down his back like Superman’s cape, only with greater water-repelling qualities.
Chucking out the dead pheasant may have removed the source of the smell, but the place still stunk to high heaven, and most likely would for the rest of its existence.
The detectives had no idea how many previous owners the caravan had, but it was a safe bet that they’d all been heavy smokers. The inside of the place was painted in a nicotine wash that coloured it in shades of yellow and brown.
“It’s like being inside one of them lungs you see in the photos on cigarette packets,” Hamza remarked. “Like, stop showing the rotten teeth and show a few pictures of this place. That’d put people off for life.”
Someone—presumably Bernie the Beacon—had been fighting a war against mildew and mould on several different fronts, and was getting roundly humped in every battle. It crept from the corners where the walls met the ceiling, blooming in all directions like a visual representation of the spread of the Black Death.
There were cleaner spots where he’d tried scrubbing it away, mostly around the areas where he’d pinned up his notes and photographs. It hadn’t been very effective, though, and several of his handwritten diatribes had been all but consumed by the oozing damp.
“We should have protective gear on for this,” Tyler said, unpinning another Polaroid from the wall.
He’d studied them closely to begin with, but was now gathering them up as quickly as possible so they could get the hell out of there and back into the fresh air. They’d taken enough photographs to be able to recreate the scene, if it came to it, and Palmer’s team had already swung by earlier to do the same.
“We do have protective gear,” Hamza said, waggling his gloved fingers.
“I meant proper protective gear. Like, I don’t know, oxygen tanks, say.”
“It’s no’ underwater.”
Tyler tutted. “You know what I’m saying. I mean, look at that.” He pointed to something that sat on a folding Formica table. It could have been anything—a piece of fruit or a dead rodent, perhaps—but mould had cocooned it, so now it was merely a shapeless furry lump of unknown origin. “I don’t want to breathe that in.”
“You’d have to take a hell of a big breath to inhale it from all the way over there,” Hamza pointed out. He looked from the furry thing on the table to the black stuff on the ceiling and walls. “I get what you’re saying, though. We should probably have masks, at least.”
“Exactly! Thank you!” He tucked the last of the Polaroids into the evidence bag he was holding and closed over the top. “So, can we go and come back tomorrow when we’ve got some?”
Hamza sighed. “Aye. Fine.”
“Great! And can you tell the boss, so he knows it was your idea?”
“How was it my idea?” Hamza asked.
He turned to face the other detective, and as he did, something tucked beneath the caravan’s fold-away sofa bed caught his eye. Lowering his head, he peered into the shadows and saw two matching metal clasps, separated by a handle.
“There’s a briefcase or something under there,” he remarked.
“Under where?”
“The couch. The sofa bed thing. Look.”
He pointed, and Tyler ducked to get a look.
“Oh, aye. So there is. You should get it out.”
“Why should I get it out? You’re closer.”
“Aye, but there might be something under there. Like a rat.”
“So, again, why should I be the one—?”
Hamza stopped talking, and both men turned when a figure appeared in the caravan doorway. He was an older man, painfully thin, and something about him struck Hamza as familiar. He’d seen him before, he was sure of it.
The man stood on the outside step, stared at the detectives for a few confused moments, then ejected a shrill, “Fuck!” and slammed the door shut.
“Oi! Get back here!” Hamza barked.
Tyler rushed to the door, partly to give chase, but mostly through fear of suffocating inside the caravan. He slapped at the area where he knew the catch to be, but found nothing to grab onto.
“There’s no handle!” he hissed.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s no handle! We can’t get out!”
“There must be a handle, Tyler!”
“There’s not!” the DC insisted. He stepped back. “Here, watch out,” he announced, then he threw himself at the door, driving his full weight behind a shoulder-charge.
The door, which had been flimsy when it was new, and was markedly more so after four decades of neglect, flew open at the first touch from Tyler’s shoulder.
Unfortunately, this meant that it did nothing to slow his momentum, and he let out a panicky, “Wargh!” as he sailed several feet through the air, crashed heavily onto the ground, then rolled down the embankment into a crop of stinging nettles.
He was on his feet again in an instant—mostly because of the nettles—and through the darkness, he heard the wheezing of the old man running.
“Up there. He’s going through the trees,” Hamza said, shining his torch in the direction of the sound. It picked out the outline of the scrawny figure just as he plunged beyond the tree line and into the woods.
Both detectives set off in pursuit, Tyler held back by the overwhelming urge to brush himself down and clear away the nettle debris. Pinpricks of pain nipped at his hands, arms, and face. His cape-like jacket had, ironically, fallen off mid-flight, and he could already feel his top lip swelling from one of the nettle stings.
“Hurry up, he’s getting away!” Hamza called, and his voice echoed back off the upcoming trees.
“Go! I’m jutht coming!” Tyler replied, and he winced at the lisp. “I mean, theriously,” he muttered, picking his way back up the slope. “Why doeth thith thit alwayth happen to me?”
Hamza launched himself into the woods, his torchlight dancing across the twisting trunks and grabbing branches. For an old boy, the man they were chasing had an impressive turn of speed. Hamza could no longer hear his puffing and panting, and it was only the snapping of twigs and the rustling of foliage up ahead that told him which way to run.
The face was bothering him. The familiarity of it.