Chapter 118
The Red Chamber guy at Brampton Golf Club checked Océane was still in the car then sent them on their way. The entire exchange took ten seconds. Poe was back on the road before he had a chance to read where their next destination was. He passed the slip of paper over his shoulder.
‘Great Orton airfield?’ Towler said. He screwed his eyes. ‘Did you have a case there? I don’t remember reading about one.’
Poe nodded. ‘Tilly and I consulted on a double murder. Got called in during the first COVID lockdown. There’s a foot-and-mouth mass grave at the airfield.
Over half a million carcasses are buried there.
One of the pits started leaking, and when they dug it up, they discovered two men had been hog-tied inside a dead cow and buried alive. ’
‘Jeeeesus,’ Towler said. ‘Did you solve it?’
‘Took me two minutes to identify the victims, but it wasn’t my case. Don’t think they ever caught the perpetrator.’
‘Who were the dead guys?’
‘During the foot-and-mouth crisis I’d heard a rumour about two men who’d been offering infected carcasses to farmers.’
‘Because it was often better to have the virus than not?’
‘Yep. If you got it, the government culled your herd and compensated you. If you didn’t have it, you got nothing, but you couldn’t sell your livestock as there was a travel ban. I’d been hearing about these two grifters then suddenly I was hearing nothing about them, if you know what I mean?’
Towler nodded. He did.
‘I’d been waiting for them to show up somewhere. I thought it would be a slurry pit or a shallow grave. Seems they offered foot-and-mouth to someone with a sense of humour.’
‘This is such a fucked-up place,’ Océane said, shaking her head in disgust. ‘How can you live here?’
‘The fresh air,’ Towler said. He sniffed, grimaced, then covered his mouth and nose. Océane did the same. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘That, Matt, is half a million dead farm animals,’ Poe said, turning onto Great Orton airfield. ‘Still a bit gamey, aren’t they?’
He stopped the car. The airfield was triangular and vast. Twenty-six foot-and-mouth burial pits had been dug in and around the runways.
There were signs warning visitors not to climb on them.
Poe didn’t think anyone in their right mind would climb on a foot-and-mouth pit, but a long career had told him that people were seldom in their right mind.
Not permanently, anyway. He was just about to say, ‘Where is he?’ when a small vehicle flashed its headlights.
He put the car back in gear and slowly approached it.
He went to the car’s left, so his driver’s window was next to the Red Chamber guy’s driver window.
They went through the same rigmarole. A quick check to make sure Océane was still in the back, then handwritten instructions for the next location.
As soon as the paper had been handed over, the Red Chamber guy sped off.
Poe unfurled the next instruction. He read it and sighed.
He’d been right. They were going to a stone circle. The exchange was taking place at Long Meg and Her Daughters.