MIKE CREW WAS the most boring man on the planet.
Calvin Bridge had only been in his company for half an hour, and yet he had already mentally moved him to the top of that chart in the face of tough competition from his old European History teacher, Mr Branch, and the desk sergeant, Tony Coral, who had an extensive collection of railway memorabilia and didn’t care who knew it.
‘People think mud is just mud. They could not. Be. More. Wrong,’ said Professor Crew, with all the excitement of a member of the Magic Circle who has decided to blab.
Calvin glanced at DCI King from the corner of his eye and saw the same glazed look on her face which spoke of a monumental effort to give a shit. He was going to have to work very hard not to drift off.
Or laugh.
Would that be so bad? Calvin hadn’t laughed for ages. Last week he’d tried to make a joke about the bridesmaids’ dresses, but it had backfired. Then he’d committed the cardinal sin of not knowing what frangipani was. He’d thought it was a kind of cake, but Shirley told him he was just being ‘difficult’. He realized that the few minutes when DCI King had forced him to engage with her over Frannie Hatton’s corpse had been the most fun he’d had all week.
That couldn’t be right, could it?
‘These are your two samples.’ Crew was holding up two glass slides. ‘I have taken the liberty of labelling them OS 2425 by 1265 Interdental 45, identifying the geographical location according to the Ordnance Survey, and the physiological area from where the sample has been extracted – in this case interdentally – and finally a code relating to my own files and order of work, which is really just for my personal reference—’
‘And what did you find?’ said King, rubbing her hands together and leaning forward a little in the universal body language of ‘Let’s cut to the chase.’
Crew stuck his hand in front of her face and said imperiously, ‘Culm down, dear!’
King looked coldly at his palm.
‘Old pedology joke!’ Mike Crew laughed all by himself while King and Calvin exchanged strained looks. Then he continued, ‘So, the other sample has been labelled OS 2425 by 1265 Gateway 46.’ He stopped – almost daring King to try to hurry him up, but Calvin could see her mentally biting her lip. You couldn’t hurry some people. Professor Crew was going to say what he wanted to say and any attempt to curtail him would only result in prolonging the agony. It was like talking about seating plans, which was fast becoming the Rubik’s Cube of the wedding. Everyone had a back to be got up, an offence to be taken; everyone bore a grudge. Shirley assured him that there would be a way to make it work, but they just hadn’t found it yet.
God forbid people should just sit down and shut up and be grateful for a free lunch.
‘So,’ said Crew, ‘sample OS 2425 by 1265 Interdental 45 is basically a Capers series soil of heavy clay with particulate inclusions. However, sample OS 2425 by 1265 Gateway 46 consists of Manod soils, which are typically Brown Podzolic, which is a silty loam most prevalent over rock typical of the area between Bideford and the village of Abbotsham.’
He stopped again and they both waited for the next bit, but Crew just got a disappointed look on his face, and said a little tetchily, ‘That’s it.’
Apparently they’d missed the punchline.
‘Oh!’ said King. ‘Sorry, I was just… engrossed.’
That placated him. ‘I know!’ he enthused. ‘We walk on it every day, build our homes on it, grow our food in it, bury our dead in it, and yet how many people really think about soil? How many people really care?’
Calvin had to turn his head so he wouldn’t catch King’s eye.
‘So these are two different soils?’ she said.
‘The fine earth fractions are entirely incompatible,’ nodded Crew.
‘So you’re saying that Frannie Hatton was killed somewhere else?’
‘Of course,’ said Crew. ‘As we say in the business – mud don’t lie.’ He affected a bad Al Jolson voice and matching racist hand-waggle, but King remained utterly straight-faced. She was a better man than Calvin. She cleared her throat. ‘And do you have any idea where that somewhere else might be?’
Crew milked it, of course. He made a great show of finding an ordnance Survey map of North Devon, which was in his desk drawer all along. Then he spread it across the pens and books and in-trays on his desk so that it was almost as bumped and hilly as its printed surface swore it should be.
Finally he hummed and hawed and waved a pencil over it like Harry Potter, until he settled on an area between Westward Ho! and Appledore.
‘Around there,’ he said.
‘That’s the Burrows,’ said Calvin.
‘What’s the Burrows?’ said King.
‘It’s this sort of… flat bit. Behind the pebble ridge.’
‘What’s the pebble ridge?’ said King.
‘It’s a ridge, Ma’am,’ said Calvin. ‘Made of pebbles.’
‘Aah,’ King smiled. ‘The clue was in the name.’
Crew hurried to regain the lead role in this play. ‘If you could send me a sample, I could be more specific. Close to the sea, given the presence in OS 2425 by 1265 Interdental 45 of particulate glucosamine.’
‘Sugar?’ said Calvin.
‘Shells,’ said King.
‘That’s right!’ Crew rushed to expand. ‘Tiny particles of crustacea, either fragmentary or granulated, interspersed with the parent pedogenic structure.’
‘Ground-up shells,’ King translated firmly. She had her message; apparently she no longer needed to massage the messenger.
‘Have a look,’ said Crew, and at his urging, Calvin stepped over to the microscope and peered through the eyepiece while the professor twiddled things.
The smear of mud they’d collected from Frannie Hatton’s front teeth blurred and unblurred and was suddenly in focus – and unexpectedly beautiful, with a thousand tiny fragments which Calvin assumed had once been shells, glittering like mother-of-pearl stars in a chocolate sky.
Even though he was looking at a blob of mud down a microscope, Calvin suddenly felt very small. He wished he could be that tiny, that insignificant.
That hard to find.
‘Are the Burrows near the sea?’ asked King.
Calvin straightened up. ‘Without the pebble ridge, Ma’am, the Burrows are the sea.’
DCI King glanced over as she swung the Volvo out of the car park and said, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘You did warn me,’ admitted Calvin. ‘But I still wasn’t ready.’
King laughed. ‘The mud lets the boyfriend off the hook, wouldn’t you say?’
Calvin looked at her blankly. He had no idea why she was asking him or what the right answer might be.
‘They lived together…’ said King encouragingly, and then stopped speaking to allow him to pick up the thread.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘So… that… means…’ he went on, speaking slowly to give himself time to think.
She helped him out. ‘If you lived with someone and you wanted to kill them, where would you be most likely to do it?’
Calvin thought about killing Shirley. He’d have to avoid the corduroy sofa.
‘In the bath?’ he said. ‘With a knife?’
King raised her eyebrows. ‘I wasn’t thinking of specifics,’ she said. ‘But you’d kill them at home, right?’
‘Probably,’ he agreed.
‘You wouldn’t take her out to a field and push her face into mud until she died, and then load her body into your car and drive it somewhere else and dump it, would you?’
‘Probably not,’ said Calvin again. He wasn’t crazy about mud in his car.
‘That would be too much like hard work,’ King went on. ‘Too organized.’
‘Yes, it would,’ he agreed.
‘Especially for a junkie who doesn’t own a car,’ she said, and Calvin finally caught a glimpse of how her mind worked.
It was apparently quite different from the way his worked.
In fact, Calvin was starting to worry that his mind worked differently from everybody else’s.
For instance, he had gone out last Saturday and brought Shirley an engagement ring, but instead of postponing everything for a couple of years the way he’d imagined it would, the ring had only seemed to make her worse. Suddenly there was a church booked, and he was being bombarded by wedding-invitation designs and something called swatches, and he was expected to pore over The Big Book of Baby Names on date nights, instead of watching Korean gangster movies and having sex on the sofa.
Calvin had committed to a ring; he hadn’t realized that the ring had committed him to pretty much everything Shirley claimed it did – including three children, because ‘It’s a nice round number.’ He’d wanted to point out that in fact three was uneven and also a prime, but was afraid that Shirley would actually agree with him – and push for four instead of dropping back to two.
Calvin sighed and wondered what having kids would be like. Better or worse than puppies? Probably very similar, he thought. Messy and tiring to start with, and then after a few months they learned your routine and things got a lot easier.
He could always do extra shifts at work until then.
‘Calvin!’
Calvin blinked at DCI King. He had the distinct feeling she’d said his name more than once.
‘Are you deaf?’
That confirmed it. ‘No, Ma’am,’ he said.
‘Well then, try to pay attention, will you? I don’t want to keep repeating myself like those idiots you see calling their dogs in the park.’
‘Sorry, Ma’am.’
Calvin touched his sleeve to his brow. Trying to keep up with life was making him sweat.