All Was Lost

Detectives Lynch and Carlin looked through their reflections in the glass. The glass was one-way and beyond was a purpose-built chamber, its walls raw concrete block fitted with ringbolts. Against the far wall lay an iron-frame bed, thin mattress wrapped in plastic, headboard hung with manacles. The cold glass eye of a wall-mounted camera gazed down at what lay piled beside the bed on the poured concrete floor.
 
‘What are we talking here?’ Lynch said.
 
They were standing in the viewing room, a dark and narrow space that ran the length of the chamber. Maybe out of reverence for the dead or owing to the oppressive dimensions of the viewing room, both men whispered when they spoke.
 
‘Communication breakdown,’ Carlin said. ‘Transaction failure.’
 
Male and female. Some barely adults. A death-camp pile yoked together by their necks with collars and chains. Hands and feet manacled. Three of them had fresh purple scars curving across the sides of their torsos. All had track-marked arms. All had been branded. All had been shot in the head. The blood under them flowing off into the trench drains had dried brown and begun to crack at the edges.
 
‘No sale, kill the product,’ Lynch said.
 
‘Don’t call them that. Just because they were treated like meat doesn’t mean we talk about them like meat.’
 
‘I know. Sorry.’ Lynch gestured to the small metal desk beside them where a high-end laptop linked to the chamber’s camera had been shot through its keyboard. ‘Wonder if we can pull anything off that.’
 
‘We’ll see.’ Carlin opened the steel door that led upstairs and looked back at Lynch, waiting for him to follow. ‘Let’s go.’
 
Lynch didn’t move. He stood staring through the glass at the murdered who lay exhibited in the dead fluorescent glare. One young woman naked from the waist down, sweater ridden up exposing the thin smile of a fresh caesarean scar. He guessed he was no more than five years older than her. His fists whitened.
 
‘Lynch.’
 
He came to and followed Carlin out of that bleak cubbyhole and up the concrete steps to the hallway where polished oak boards creaked under their shoes. Below brass picture lights, framed paintings of foxhunts hung from the burgundy walls of the hallway. A hooded forensic scientist in white coveralls approached carrying a clear plastic bag containing an old Nikon F camera and several 35mm film canisters.
 
‘These were found under the console table,’ she said.
 
‘Outside the living room?’ Carlin pointed down the hallway. ‘Right there?’
 
‘Yep. Maybe nothing.’
 
‘Maybe something.’
 
In the doorway of the green-painted living room they looked anew on the carnage before them. Several dead men among scattered pistols and rifles and shell casings. Sound suppressors had been fixed to most of the guns. Some of the dead had their eyes open and looked as if they were about to talk, mouths frozen in speech. Two wore dark suits and Kevlar-lined leather gloves, white shirts blood-soaked. One of these men lay supine on the chesterfield couch still gripping a pistol, gut-shot, his entire midsection darkly drenched. Another lay on his stomach across the rosewood coffee table, the back of his head blown out, bits of skull and brain strewn about him. Curled under the table lay a man wearing a black Adidas tracksuit who’d taken one in the throat. Two wore boilersuits and steel-toe boots, one with a bullet hole in his temple, the other double-tapped in his chest. On a sodden rug beside the stone hearth lay a biker in leathers with a spiderweb bullet hole punched through the mirrored visor of his full-face helmet, the helmet flooded, blood seeped out around the neck. Blood everywhere.
 
‘No wallets, no licences,’ Lynch said. ‘No ID at all.’
 
Carlin looked at the suited man dead on the chesterfield holding the Ruger pistol. He looked around himself at the doorway he and Lynch were standing in and behind them at the door across the hallway pelted with bullet holes. He turned and looked at the floor in the hallway and the console table under which the camera and canisters had been found.
 
‘Get these developed.’ He handed Lynch the plastic bag.
 
They stepped out of the shooting box and into the gritty light of a vast northern moor. Cold wind. Dawn sun boiling low in the sky yet offering only cold light and long shadows. A helicopter hung nailed to the sky, blades stirring the air, and then it was leaning forward, nosing toward the horizon, and banking sharply.
 
‘The air smells funny without the fumes,’ Lynch said. ‘Too clean. Never thought I’d miss the city.’
 
Carlin inhaled and looked around. ‘I could get used to it.’
 
They milled about the moorland and then turned and headed back, slowly, absorbing the grim acreage about them. Exposed gritrock risen though the dried heather and crowberry shrubs resembled great scabs grown across the back of the land. Small dark birds like windblown leaves blew over the burnt-yellow moor grass. Deep drainage grip channels coursed through heath and blanket bog. On the horizon of that spectral garden rose distant scarps and the ruins of an abbey.
 
The shooting box was a grand double-fronted building of many rooms and a chamber. Stone tile roof. Four chimneys. Floodlight above the front door. Four vehicles sat abandoned beside the building: two Audis, a Ducati superbike with jacked-up suspension and off-road tyres, and a Scania flatbed truck laden with twelve fifty-five-gallon drums. A tyre stabbed flat on each vehicle had left them slumped in the raked gravel, the superbike fallen on its side.
 
At the gable end they stopped at the body of a suited man dead on his stomach between an Audi and the shooting box.
 
‘Looks like he got the farthest,’ Lynch said.
 
‘Apart from her and the baby.’ Carlin pointed his thumb over his shoulder.
 
Lynch turned and looked across the moor where the other crime scene, smaller yet no less grim, had been cordoned off. The mother and daughter hikers who’d found the bodies and made the call were talking to uniformed officers among a fleet of ambulances and cruisers, lights strobing vibrantly in the pale light.
 
The woman lay sprawled in a peat bog, vivid pink hair flecked with blood flowing across the sedge. Ligature bruises clouded under the skin of her wrists and ankles. Scarfed about her throat hung a spit-soaked gag and a blindfold. A gutter dredged through her cheek as if by a chasing bullet. In her back, her latissimus, gaped a ragged black hole. The bullet had perforated her torso and entered what she’d been carrying. Dead in her track-marked arms lay a mute newborn. Both had been branded.
 
‘Fucking men.’ Lynch spat.
 
Carlin looked at him. ‘Bury that shit now. You hear me?’
 
Lynch grunted and looked away.
 
‘I mean it. Bury it now or it’ll eat you alive.’
 
Clouds massed into mountains and their immense shadows crossed the moor and the temperature, already low, dropped another couple of degrees.
 
‘One thing that doesn’t make sense,’ Carlin said.
 
‘Just one?’
 
‘There doesn’t appear to be any money involved. I mean, if this is some kind of a trafficking deal gone wrong, where’s the money?’
 
Lynch thought about this. ‘Maybe the money side of the deal was made over the phone or online. The laptop.’
 
The helicopter came back and swooped in low, the grass careening in the blades’ backwash, and then it was rising again and moving off, leaving behind a thrumming silence.
 
Lynch’s phone sounded. He took it out and looked at the caller ID. Kat. He pocketed the phone without reading the text and cleared his throat.
 
‘Just one of the lads.’
 
‘I didn’t ask.’ Carlin was examining the dead man’s outstretched hand. The wrist and digits bent in abnormal articulation. ‘What do you think?’
 
Lynch put on nitrile gloves and sat on his heels in the blood-spattered gravel and inspected the splayed hand. ‘Looks like his fingers were prised apart. Couple feel broke. Like someone was trying to take something from him.’ He stood back up. ‘A gun?’
 
‘Maybe.’
 
‘So what we have here is potentially missing money and a missing gun.’
 
‘Which means?’
 
‘We’re missing a man. Or men.’
 
‘And maybe a couple of other vehicles.’ Carlin nodded at the ground.
 
Lynch stepped back and looked at the marked-off tyre tracks intersecting gravel and grass. ‘More off-roaders. Big. Probably a Land Rover. The others, not sure.’
 
The clouds shifted and the sun flared and hit the truck. They squinted at the gleaming steel drums loaded on its back. All empty.
 
‘You think them people in the chamber were inside those?’ Lynch said. ‘Transported in them?’
 
Everywhere seemed to stop and fall quiet. A breeze in the downy cotton grass. The helicopter now a far-off murmur high over the distant abbey ruins.
 
Carlin didn’t answer.
 
‘Drums lined with Teflon,’ Lynch said. ‘I mean, what are we talking here, acid baths? They were going to dissolve them?’
 
Carlin palmed flat his thin grey hair and shut his eyes. He still didn’t answer.