‘So, what have we got?’ Harry asked.
‘About as much evidence as I’ve got for Nessie,’ Gordy said. ‘Anything from the CSI bods?’
The room fell silent.
‘HOLMES is coming up with the usual ABA,’ Matt said, pointing at the screen in front of him.
‘ABA?’ Harry asked. ‘And what’s that?’
‘Absolutely bugger all.’
As acronyms went, the Home Office Large and Major Enquiry System, was a world-beater, Harry thought, and had often wondered how many focus groups and millions of pounds were spent coming up with it. Commissioned by the Home Office to provide a computer solution to vast amount of data being held by the police across the country, it hadn’t exactly gone smoothly. Numerous systems were developed by different companies and all implemented at different times, and the reassurances given by the smooth-talking sales people had turned out to be little more than smoke and mirrors. Things had improved over the years, with different systems actually being able to communicate with each other, but it was still a monster to get to grips with. It was accessed through a private cloud service to ensure that individual forces could use it and security could be maintained.
Harry was pretty surprised to see Matt deftly searching through what HOLMES was, or wasn’t, giving him. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well,’ Matt explained, ‘we’ve got nothing really to lead with, have we? No one saw anything, no one found anything, blah blah blah.’
‘What about the pathologist?’ Jim asked.
‘She’ll be on with the autopsy,’ Harry said, ‘though I doubt we’ll hear much till tomorrow morning. She’s not got an easy job of it, what with the state of the body.’ He looked over at Jenny and Gordy. ‘Anything from the door-to-door?’
‘No one liked him,’ Gordy said. ‘And that’s about it.’
Harry leaned back, letting his head fall so that he was then staring at the ceiling. Then he pulled his head forward again to stare at the board in front of Jenny. ‘Bill reckons he saw John driving up the field early Saturday morning, with Nick in the tractor cab. So, where the hell is he?’
‘Still missing,’ Jim said. ‘No one’s seen him.’
‘So what do we know about him?’ Harry asked. ‘Friends? Family? What does he do?’
Liz jumped in. ‘Nick’s just a bit dodgy, I guess,’ she said. ‘One of those people who’s always been around and always been into things that he shouldn’t.’
‘Like what?’ asked Harry.
‘Nothing big,’ Liz said. ‘He’s been done a few times for possession, got beaten up once by a parent or two for supplying their kids with booze and a few joints, that kind of thing.’
‘Rough justice, there, then,’ Harry said.
‘Yep, and no one was charged because he wasn’t about to go grassing someone up, because then everyone would know and, well, I guess he figured it was just easier to let it go.’
‘Well,’ Jim laughed, ‘Wensleydale is a bit like the Wild West of Yorkshire! Oh, and the doctor dropped off John’s medical stuff. Doesn’t tell us much other than the fact that he was physically a bit of a mess, drank too much, didn’t eat properly, was over-weight, and had a few broken bones.’
‘Can’t say I give a stuff about what the doctor dropped off,’ Harry said, his voice growing louder, like the rumble of an approaching rock fall. ‘We’ve got Bill’s possible sighting of Nick, who just sounds dodgy anyway, with the deceased on Saturday morning. We know Nick found the body earlier today. And we’ve also got the message that he said he received from the deceased. Whatever his involvement, it isn’t good, is it?’
Harry knew he was shouting, but it wasn’t at anyone in the room, more at the situation they were facing.
‘Remember that little fact?’ he continued. ‘The weird and impossible call from beyond the grave? It’s not something someone would lie about, is it? And it’s basically the single sodding reason we’re here in the first place and why we had everyone out in the field today! We need Nick and his phone so that we can check that he actually received a call at all, and if he did, to see who the hell sent it. Because it’s pretty bloody clear that Mr John Capstick didn’t!’
Harry rose to his feet, weariness suddenly swooping in from all around and making him feel a little bit unsteady on his feet.
Jenny quickly wrote on the board about Bill seeing Nick on Saturday morning, the call Nick had supposedly received Monday from John, despite him being dead, and that Nick was still missing.
‘Right now, I reckon we all need to sleep on it,’ Harry yawned, moving away from his chair and resting his now empty mug on a table. ‘Go home, all of you. Watch television. Have a beer. Come back tomorrow with fresh heads. By then we should have at least something from the pathologist. And I’ll want a renewed effort on finding this mysterious Nick bloke.’
Harry was now at the door and before he left, he eyeballed everyone in the team.
‘Let’s not give old Swift any reason to think we can’t handle this,’ he said. ‘We all know when something doesn’t smell right, and John Capstick dead in a field doesn’t, and not just for the obvious reason either. Nick knows something. That phone call doesn’t sound right at all. And hopefully we’ll have something from the pathologist.’
Jim then asked, ‘What about that feather?’
Jenny added that little nugget to the board.
‘And there’s that as well,’ Harry said. ‘Maybe when we know what species it is or
