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Flynn crouches down on his front paws, barking now, nudging the thing with his nose. What is it with dogs and shoes?
‘Thank you, Flynn, but I think this would be happier back where it came from, don’t you?’
She extracts a poop bag from her pocket and picks the thing up gingerly between finger and thumb, trying not to focus toomuch on the scummy debris that’s caught inside it. She remembers only just in time to grab Flynn’s collar to stop him playing fetch, then heaves the vile thing as far out into the water as she can.
‘OK,’ she says, ‘home now.’
She retraces her steps along the shore and up the slope, then is distracted by a beech tree with a huge chicken of the woods fungus, which she’s never seen here before, so it takes her a moment to realize there’s no longer any sound from the dog.
‘Flynn? Where are you?’
Still nothing.
Stifling a prickle of unease – it’s not her dog, and she doesn’t want a disaster on her watch – she hurries a bit further along and breathes a sigh of relief when she hears grunts and snuffly noises from the thicket beyond that horrible old oak tree people are always going on about.
She calls again, but the dog still doesn’t obey. Which is annoying because she definitely isn’t dressed for hauling him through a hedge backwards. She pulls on her gloves, just to be sensible, and pushes through the brambles to a hollow beneath the old tree. It’s towering above her now, the trunk split in two and the ancient branches twisted out on either side like grasping fingers.
She can see Flynn busily hauling away at something and she starts towards him, then stops, frowning. She wouldn’t claim to be any sort of plantswoman, but surely this is weird. There are decades of fallen acorn shells crunching beneath her feet, scattered here and there with grey-green burdock. But the patch where Flynn’s digging is a riot of bright new nettles. And it’s not just that – it looks just like the raised beds in her garden, so regular, so tidily rectangular. And those dimensions – length by width – anyone would think it was a –
Flynn gives one last huge tug and his prize comes away with a lurch and hangs there, from his mouth.
Her scream sends the wood pigeons detonating into the sky.
***
‘Have you seen my trainers? I need them for practice.’
Janet Gislingham is on her hands and knees, distracted by the washing machine, which once again has developed a mind of its own. ‘I have no idea, Billy. Where did you last put them?’
He frowns at her. ‘I tried there. Someone’s moved it.’
‘Well, it wasn’t me.’ She bangs the machine door shut and looks up, suddenly concentrating. ‘Did you just say “it”?’
He nods.
‘So you’ve only lost one of them?’
Billy looks a little sheepish. ‘Sorry, Mum.’
‘Honestly, Billy, who loses onlyoneshoe?’
He shrugs. ‘I didn’t do itdeliberately.’
She gets to her feet, feeling her knees complaining.
‘OK, let’s go and find your dad – see if he can find it After all, he’s the one who’s supposed to be a detective.’
***
DS Triona Bradley crouches down next to the CSI. ‘OK, Markey, so what have we got?’
‘That old favourite, a shallow grave,’ she says, sitting back on her haunches. The top layer of soil has been carefully removed from most of the area, but there’s a deeper, more ragged hole where she’s crouching. Bradley can see the pale glint of bone, a tangle of dark hair.
‘We have the mutt to thank for finding it. As per.’
‘Ah, the doggy detectorists,’ says Bradley with a thin smile. ‘What would we do without them.’
‘Apparently it was digging about in this area, and when the owner came to drag him out, she spotted this nice grave-shaped nettle clump.’ She makes a face. ‘The partly decomposed hand was just the icing on the cake.’