Not Dead Yet

detectives down to the fishing club with the Crime Scene Manager, taking the piece of cloth we have, and see if the fabric matches. If it does, get the whole area sealed off as a crime scene and get a forensic strategy in place right away. We’ll need a land and water search. It sounds like a potential deposition site.’
    Leaving Grace in his office to finish off some urgent paperwork on the Venner case, before heading to the security meeting on Gaia, Glenn hurried back to MIR-1. He despatched DC Emma Reeves, together with David Green, the Crime Scene Manager, to the angling club.
    Then he sat at his workstation and began checking through the large number of other calls that had come in following his Crimewatch appearance. But there was nothing else of interest. A handful of the usual crank calls, and a couple from people who had called the Crimestoppers line anonymously to report suspicious neighbours. He delegated various members of his team to follow up each call, but at this moment, none seemed as positive as the one from a man called William Pitcher.
    An hour later Emma Reeves phoned Glenn Branson in great excitement to tell him that the fabric did appear to be an exact match. Also she said there were fresh-looking tyre tracks that had not been made by the vehicle belonging to the angler who had made the call. Feeling a thrill of excitement, he appointed her as the temporary scene guard. Then he asked her for the directions, and told her he would be on his way in a few minutes.
    He ended the call and looked around the Incident Room, wondering who else to take. He saw Bella Moy finishing a call and walked over to her. ‘Fancy a drive out into the countryside?’
    She shrugged, and gave him a strange look, followed by a hesitant ‘Okay, yes.’ She grabbed a handful of Maltesers from the box on her desk and stood up.
    She had been quiet during the early morning train journey back from Cardiff, and Glenn wondered whether he’d said something to upset her the previous night. She had appeared for breakfast wearing a top he had never seen before: although conservative it was far more modern than her usual style, and he wondered if it had been for his benefit.
    Disappointingly, she seemed strangely subdued in the car now, updating him as he drove with the latest bulletin on her mother, who was not doing well in hospital. Every few minutes the TomTom, clipped to the top of the dashboard, interrupted their conversation, barking out the route.
    For the final mile, Bella took over, reading aloud from the directions Emma Reeves had given them, then lapsing into her own thoughts. They headed down a narrow country lane, then turned left at a sign which read W EST S USSEX P ISCATORIAL S OCIETY , crossed a cattle grid, and drove down a steep, single-track road with tall hedgerows on either side.
    ‘Ever lived in the country?’ Glenn asked, trying to break the rather awkward silence that persisted between them. He wondered again, had he upset Bella in some way last night? He didn’t see how.
    ‘Doesn’t appeal,’ she said.
    ‘Nah, nor me. I’m a born townie. Too many inbred weirdos in the country, if you ask me.’
    ‘I grew up in the country,’ she said. ‘My parents were tenant farmers. They moved to Brighton when they retired.’
    ‘Ah,’ he said, trying to think of a way to recover from that. ‘Of course, I don’t mean everyone .’
    She said nothing.
    There was another sign to the angling club, pointing left, through an unfinished building development in a farmyard that looked as if it had been abandoned. There was a large, derelict-looking farmhouse, a half-finished barn conversion with a sign outside that read, DANGER , DO NOT ENTER , a grey breeze-block structure with no glass in the windows or doors, and a row of ancient, windowless flint cottages with a half-filled skip outside. Bags of sand and ballast lay around the area, along with a length of drainpipe and a large wooden reel of electrical cabling.
    Ploughing through a muddy puddle just beyond, they saw a white Scientific Support Unit van. It was parked on concrete hard-standing alongside a large, navy-blue off-roader. A strip of blue and white crime scene tape was secured across a narrow entrance which had a sign fixed to a post, NO VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT .
    Emma Reeves, a stern, good-looking blonde-haired DC, sensibly gowned up in a white oversuit, wellington boots and blue gloves, and holding a crime scene log, was acting as scene guard.