The body is this way, sir.

Chapter One.

‘The body is this way, sir.’

DI Callum MacLean followed Sergeant Daisy Donaldson along the wide grass track across Hale Purlieu in the New Forest. It had rained overnight, and the ground was damp beneath their boots. The few stands of straggly gorse bushes that edged the path, listed to one side as if they had bowed to the winter winds and forgotten how to stand up straight

Daisy had cordoned off the most direct route to their target, and they trudged along a narrow meandering path towards the crime scene tent. Heather stems snagged his jeans, dampening the denim and the keen March breeze bullied the spindly silver birch saplings into a shiver. Callum turned up the collar of his jacket and glanced at the overcast sky where heavy, grey-bottomed clouds scudded along the thumb-smudge of the horizon. He was planning to go for a run later and there was every possibility that he was going to get wet, again. Spring was dragging its heels.

A constable with a clipboard stood at the entrance to the cordon. Daisy wrote her name on the paper and passed it to Callum for him to add his own. He checked the names on the list. No one unexpected.

Inside the tent, a team of crime-suited figures moved silently around a body sprawled in a patch of deep heather. The victim wore running clothes and his bare limbs were pale. Callum speed-read the corpse. Medium height, medium weight with the beginnings of spare tyre around his waist, mid-forties, dark hair that was beginning to recede at the temples. Mr Average. The only visible abnormality was the bullet hole in his chest.

He stepped closer. The entry wound was neat and circular with a speckled pattern of black dots tattooed onto the surrounding flesh and fabric. Not a point-blank shot, but close range.

The figure kneeling next to the victim paused in giving instructions to a photographer and glanced at his boots.

‘MacLean,’ Dr Martha Jones said, twisting her torso around and looking up at him. ‘Thought you’d turn up. You’re just like a wasp round a jam jar.’

‘Morning, Martha. What have we got?’

She squinted up at his face. ‘Before I forget, when I was riding across the purlieu yesterday morning I met Rain. She’s moving very well for a woman who got hit by a car. You must be a good nursemaid.’

Daisy swallowed a laugh and looked down at her feet.

‘You’ll be handy to have around when you have kids,’ Martha continued, a glint in her grey eyes.

‘Martha, the body?’ He did not intend to get drawn into a discussion on his private life. Private seemed to have a different meaning to the women he worked with than it did to him.

‘Hmph.’ She turned back to the victim. ‘Our victim died from a single shot to the chest, and, within the last hour, faint whiff of accelerant was still sniffable when I got here. The weapon is a pistol, calibre currently unknown.’ She pointed a gloved finger at the powder burns surrounding the wound. ‘Intermediate range.’ She paused until he nodded his understanding.

Daisy tilted her head to one side, eyes on the body. ‘Most of what gets shot round here is game with a twelve-bore. Lots of little wounds from the pellets. Any chance he did it to himself?’

‘Unlikely,’ Callum said. ‘Suicides press the barrel against their flesh; they want to make sure. If that had happened here, the surrounding flesh would have blown out instead of just leaving powder burns.’

Martha looked up at Callum. ‘We’re just bagging his hands so we can check for gunshot residue but…’ she hovered a flat hand in front of her and rocked it gently from side to side, ‘I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you.’

‘And,’ Callum looked at Daisy, ‘if he shot himself, where’s the gun?’

‘Point taken, sir.’ Daisy looked back at the dead man. ‘Unless someone took it afterwards and removed it from the scene.’

In Glasgow Callum had dealt with dozens of shootings, too many to remember individually, but that was not the case down in Hampshire. It was the first such call out in the nearly three years he had been here. Daisy leaned in towards the corpse then stood back and tucked a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear. He wondered if this was the first shooting that Daisy had attended.

‘All right?’ he asked her. When she nodded, he turned to Martha. ‘Has the body been moved?’

‘No. This is where he fell.’

‘Any ID on him?’ Daisy asked.

‘Not so far,’ Martha said. ‘But I haven’t finished poking and prodding him, yet.’ She made hand gestures as if she was wielding a rapier. Gallows humour was a coping mechanism that Callum understood.

 ‘There’s no visible exit wound,’ Martha continued, returning her focus to the body, ‘and the trajectory was upwards. The bullet missed his ribs, not even a fracture as far as I can tell and went straight into the heart. Like I said, no exit wound. All supposition, you understand. I’ll be able to tell you more after the postmortem. Two o’clock this afternoon.’

‘Thanks, Martha.’ Callum dipped his head on the way out of the tent.

‘And, MacLean,’ Martha continued as if he hadn’t moved.

Callum paused and turned back to her.

‘Tell Rain I’ll sponsor her for £5 a kilometre for that 10k fund-raiser.’

‘Thank you. I will.’

‘I feel mean now.’ Daisy paused in the doorway. ‘I only said £1.’

‘Good cause,’ Martha said turning back to the body. ‘Women’s abuse needs a higher profile, in my opinion, MacLean.’

He turned away without comment. Was she accusing him personally of some failure within the constabulary that was beyond his control? The detectives moved outside, backs turned to the chill breeze, and Daisy hunched a little deeper into her jacket.

‘I’ll organise a finger-tip search,’ she said. ‘See if we can find the casing.’

‘Single shot, fixed position, low firing point, they might have taken it with them if they could find it in this tangle of stems.’ He nudged his boot against the matted maze of criss-cross growth a foot deep. ’Get a metal detector up here. That should speed things up.’

‘Good idea.’ She took her phone out of her pocket.

‘Then speak to the first responder, then whoever called it in.’

‘Onto it,’ she said. He turned away and she quickly added, ‘where will you be?’

‘About,’ he said over his shoulder. He ducked under the tape and left the controlled zone.

I hope you all have a great New Year,

Keep reading,

Carol Cole