Carver

59

Paxford, Gloucestershire

On the fringes of a village on the northern edge of the Cotswolds, where the last boxy little houses of a newly built estate met the first drab fields of farmland, stood a run-down scrap metal site. Its single-page website was dotted with contemporary, eco-friendly buzzwords like recycling and reclamation. But that didn’t alter the reality of a grimy, litter-strewn graveyard for abandoned cars and piles of metallic junk — from shopping-trolleys to radiators and old library shelves — run by three oil-stained, boilersuited men fuelled by PG Tips and nicotine. None of them were present as Uschi Kremer — alias Magda ‘Ginger’ Sternberg, alias Celina Novak — drove up the dusty lane that led beneath the arch of a long-abandoned railway and turned in through the scrapyard gates, ignoring the sign that said the yard was closed. The two black Range Rovers were waiting for her. Braddock was leaning against one of them, smoking. As she drove up, he threw the cigarette on the floor and ground it under his heel. The driver of the other Range Rover got out and walked towards his boss.

‘This is Turner,’ Braddock said as Ginger emerged from her car.

She did not bother to shake their hands or say hello. ‘There’s no one else here?’ she asked.

‘No. Gone to lunch,’ Braddock replied.

‘And when are they coming back?’

‘When they’ve pissed away the five hundred quid I gave them down the bookies and the pub. We’ve got a while.’

‘OK.’ Ginger looked around the yard, noting the CCTV cameras at the gate and by the front door to the Portakabin that served as an office. ‘What about these?’

‘All off. The video-machine’s not working. Something seems to have gone mysteriously wrong with it.’

‘Good. Then let’s get on.’

She opened up one of the rear doors and pulled away the blanket that had been covering the bodies of Gryffud and Smethurst. Braddock turned away in disgust at the stench that emanated from the corpses. Ginger looked at him contemptuously. ‘Their bowels evacuated at the moment of death,’ she said, speaking with a technician’s precision. ‘A man like you should be used to that.’

‘Shit still stinks, however much you’re used to it,’ he said. Then a thought struck him. ‘I’m not having that fucking smell in my car!’

Ginger looked at him with utter contempt, then gave an impatient sigh. ‘All right, let’s clean it all up.’

There was a standpipe outside the Portakabin, with a bright yellow hose attached to it. Braddock and Turner pulled the two bodies out of Ginger’s BMW, before they and the car’s passenger compartment were drenched with water, rinsing away all the filth. Braddock took a roll of green plastic sheeting out of the back of the Range Rover and cut off a couple of metres of it, which he then laid on the ground. The two men dragged Brynmor Gryffud’s body on to the sheet, then rolled it over twice, so that the body was entirely wrapped in plastic. Braddock used gaffer tape to secure the package, and then he and Ginger hefted the body into the back of one of the Range Rovers.

The process was repeated for Dave Smethurst’s remains.

‘Good thing I’ve got blacked-out windows,’ Braddock said, breathing heavily as he closed the tailgate.

‘If you drive sensibly, there will be no problem,’ said Ginger bluntly, wasting none of her charm on him. ‘You are confident that the bodies will be disposed of securely?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Braddock assured her. ‘This bloke Gryffud was obsessed with the environment, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’ll love what’s going to happen to the bodies, then…’

‘Just so long as no trace of them is ever found.’

‘It won’t be, trust me.’

‘Huh… So, now we deal with the car. Can you operate a forklift?’

‘I can’t… but he can.’

Turner got behind the controls of the scrapyard’s forklift. There was a compactor on the far side of the yard. It consisted of two massive steel slabs, supported by hydraulic lifts at either end. The forklift picked up the BMW and carried it across to the compactor. The car was slid on to the bottom slab, side-on, then given another couple of prods with the forklift’s two sharp prongs to make sure it was as far in as possible. Braddock pressed the button that operated the compactor, and the whine of the hydraulics combined with the sound of crumpling metal as the top slab descended with grinding inexorability, reducing the BMW to a mechanical sandwich filling. Braddock pushed another button, the two slabs parted again, and the forklift removed the crushed remains of the car and placed them on a pile of other flattened vehicles.

Ginger watched the proceedings from the passenger seat of the second Range Rover while she made a call to Derek Choi.

‘Do you know any more about the project we discussed?’ he asked.

‘No, I’ve been busy on other affairs.’

‘But you still anticipate activity tomorrow?’

‘I’m sure you heard the speech that our mutual friend made. The original schedule is being maintained, with a higher public profile than ever. So my original estimates still hold true.’

‘I agree. And I will proceed on that basis. Incidentally, your friend Samuel had company last night — a woman, Alexandra Petrova Vermulen. I believe you are old friends.’

Ginger caught the taunting edge to Choi’s voice, and was infuriated to realize that he had succeeded in getting to her. Of course, she did not want Carver. She had only seduced him for professional reasons. It wasn’t personal. So why did it annoy her so much to think of that pathetic little bitch Petrova getting her claws into him?

She had not even mustered a reply when Choi said, ‘Please contact me immediately if you receive any further information. Goodbye.’

Ginger used the five minutes between the end of the call and Turner’s return to the car to refresh her make-up, though she only applied her lipgloss and mascara with a fraction of her full concentration: the rest was devoted to Alexandra Petrova and what she would do to her if she ever got the chance. Turner gave her a lift to Moreton-in-Marsh Station, where she took the train back to London. She sat in the first-class compartment in a foul mood. With just a couple of sentences Derek Choi had ruined what should have been a triumphant day. She would not forget or forgive that, either.

An hour later Braddock drove his Range Rover up a broad track, deeply rutted by the tracks of heavy vehicles, that ran like a disfiguring scar across the side of a once picturesque hill. At the top of the hill a massive pit had been dug, a wound to the landscape made worse by the continuous slurry of concrete being poured into it from a line of giant truck-mounted mixers. This despoliation of the countryside was largely subsidized by government funds, despite the blatant flouting of every known planning regulation pertaining to conservation areas and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. (A scattering of rare orchids and several species of butterfly had once added their fragile beauty to the hilltop, only to be obliterated by the first few scoops of the digger’s bucket.) But then, the destruction of the environment didn’t seem to matter if its end result was a gigantic, noisy, bird-shredding wind turbine. That this was made of steel and rooted in concrete — two substances whose manufacture generated vast amounts of CO — was neither here nor there. Nor did anyone seem to care that the turbine, like virtually all others, would be very lucky to operate at more than ten per cent of its full capacity, and would require constant backup from oil- or gas-fired power stations to make up for the times when the wind ceased to blow. Wind turbines were magically going to cut greenhouse gases, keep temperatures down, lower sea levels, and prevent polar bears from falling off melting icebergs. Therefore they were good.

Braddock owned the farm on which the turbine was being erected, and was collecting a substantial subsidy accordingly. It made him laugh, getting paid to wreck the landscape just so a bunch of sandal-wearing, lentil-eating eco-twats could feel better about the environment. The fact that turbines were such obvious cons only made it even funnier. And bunging a couple of dead Greens into the hole, so that they could spend the rest of eternity under thirty feet of concrete, supporting a propellor on stilts, well, that was fucking hilarious.

As the Range Rover went back down the hill again, minus the bodies that had been in the back, there was a smile all over his face.