Born in a Burial Gown

Book 0: Avison Fluke

by M.W. Craven

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Mystery

Synopsis

The first gritty thriller in the Avison Fluke series by M. W. Craven, the acclaimed author of The Puppet Show.

Detective Inspector Avison Fluke is a man on the edge. He has committed a crime to get back to work, concealed a debilitating illness and is about to be made homeless.

Just as he thinks things can't get any worse, the body of a young woman is found buried on a Cumbrian building site.

Shot once in the back of the head, it is a cold, calculated execution. When the postmortem reveals she has gone to significant expense in disguising her appearance, Fluke knows this is no ordinary murder.

With the help of a psychotic ex-Para, a gangland leader and a woman more interested in maggots than people, Fluke must find out who she was and why she was murdered before he can even think about finding her killer.

Release date: May 12, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 100000

Sample

It started as it always did, with a breeder. A married man with a burning need he couldn’t sate at home. A married man wanting something discreet, something the boy had and was willing to sell. He’d met him in the toilets of a club in Whitehaven. Nervous at first, the man had quickly gained his confidence and let out a stifled yell as he finished. After the money had exchanged hands, he’d made the boy a proposition. In no position to negotiate, the arrangements were made quickly.

Each transaction the boy made carried a risk, he knew that. He was in the highest-risk group of what was statistically the most dangerous profession in the world, but sometimes there were no more choices left. Some breeders paid extra to bareback, increasing the risk of disease tenfold. Others hated what they’d just done and became violent. For some, violence was part of what they wanted, what they enjoyed, as if paying for sex gave them unlimited rights over someone else. The boy’s profession attracted a disproportionate amount of sadists. It wasn’t just the breeders he feared. Roaming gangs of youths, eager to find someone with no social value to vent their frustrations on, were a constant threat. Even the police had been known to stick the boot in.

Sometimes after enjoying the boy’s companionship.

Occasionally the violence went further than a beating. Sometimes men killed to keep their secrets. He’d known four others like him who’d died before they’d reached thirty. One had been murdered, two had died from complications after being assaulted and the fourth had simply given up and hanged himself. It was a fool who thought he could beat the odds for ever, and the boy was no fool. How would his time come? At the hands of a breeder or in a hospital bed, wasting away? He thought about his own mortality often.

But he wasn’t thinking about it that night.

This breeder had been different. He was kind. He’d found the boy somewhere to sleep. So, that night he was warm, he was safe, and had something to look forward to. Earlier, he’d played the game and won. Now he could enjoy the spoils.

That night he wasn’t thinking about death.

Perhaps he should have been.

Kicked out of the family home at the age of eleven, when his stepfather had made his mother choose between them, the boy had spent years in various children’s homes before finally being abandoned by everyone.

A friend, and despite what had happened to him since, he still thought of him as a friend, had lured him into the trade with promises of more money than he’d ever seen before.

For the first few years, his friend had been right.

He often thought of what he called his ‘golden age’, when the heightened value of youth meant he was in demand. He could charge what he wanted, choose whom he wanted, and always had cash in his pocket. He’d thought he was happy then. But boys in his line of work reach a sell-by date. It was a gradual decline. Previously loyal customers moved to younger, fresher products. His value decreased at the same rate his age increased and before long he was struggling to survive. Without the USP of youth, he had no choice but to drop his prices. Ten years earlier a breeder would have happily paid two hundred pounds for an hour of his time. Now he was struggling to get twenty pounds for what were becoming increasingly extreme acts.

And, like countless boys before him, he tried to blot out the violence and depravity meted out to him. As his drug use spiralled out of control, his appearance deteriorated and his value plummeted until he was reduced to selling blowjobs in dank pub toilets for a fiver a time. Unable to afford essentials such as rent or food, he became a street creature; homeless and penniless, surviving any way he could. In the previous year, he’d been strangled to unconsciousness twice, raped four times and beaten more times than he could count.

But two weeks ago, he’d had that break. The man he’d been with had offered him a place to stay during the night. Free of charge. The only cost was repaying the favour every morning.

A favour for a favour.

Somewhere warm and safe in exchange for something he’d done a thousand times before. The boy had happily accepted. He was still there. Sleeping safely at night, repaying the favour first thing when the man arrived. The boy had to leave after the act was over, forced to stay away during the day until the place was empty and he could let himself in again. A daily routine he and the man were happy with.

Earlier that day he’d scored another job and, surprisingly, the man paid more money than normal. He supposed he was new to the game and didn’t know what was a fair price. With cash in his hand and somewhere free to stay, the boy bought the only thing he ever wanted these days: heroin.

He took the key the man had given him and let himself in.

Experience had taught him that carrying as little paraphernalia as possible was preferable to carrying dirty kit with trace residue. Residue was enough to get you locked up on a possession charge, and while brushes with the law were an occupational hazard in his line of work, he never took risks he didn’t need to. A new syringe, citric powder and sterile water, all provided by the NHS, and an empty Coke can were all he carried. Nothing he could be arrested for. Dirty spoons, covered in heroin residue, were for beginners.

Bending the can until it was thin enough to tear in half, he used the concave base as a dish to mix the citric powder, water and heroin. With his only real possession, a Zippo, he heated it until the solution bubbled and darkened.

The real amber nectar.

Liquid sunshine.

Trembling with anticipation, he drew the brown solution through a cigarette filter into the syringe. Carefully setting it to one side, he removed his trousers.

A nurse had once described him as the most unsophisticated injector she’d ever seen and it had been a long time since his abscess-strewn arms and legs had offered up viable veins. He had to inject into his foot and he didn’t need experts to tell him it was one of the most sensitive parts of the body. Flinching at the excruciating pain, he persevered and pushed the needle between his toes. He found a vein and pressed the plunger. The pain was replaced instantly by the rush.

This was what he did it for. That perfect moment when he was in his bubble, when nothing mattered but the high. When his ruined life made some sort of sense. That was what the nurses, outreach workers and probation officers would never understand. Why he would never, could never, quit. He didn’t want to. For a brief moment in time, he could forget who he was. Why would he not want that? The initial rush was replaced by the familiar warmth and sense of well-being that spread throughout his whole body. At peace, he settled down on the carpet to enjoy it for as long as he could. Eventually, his breathing steadied and slowed.

The boy slept.

A noise woke him. For a second, he thought he’d overslept and panic set in. He didn’t want to upset his breeder. He was supposed to be ready and waiting, with brushed teeth and combed hair. Sitting up, he realised he was wrong. It was still dark. He didn’t have a watch but instinctively knew it could only be a couple of hours past midnight. Carefully, he peered out of the window to see what had woken him.

A dark vehicle was parked twenty yards away. The headlights were off but he could hear the engine running. The internal lights didn’t come on when the driver’s door opened but there was enough light coming from the old hospital building for him to see the silhouette of a man get out and stretch. The boy moved closer to the window to get a better look. It was the first time anyone had ever been there after dark.

The man walked away, switching on a torch to navigate the darkness. For thirty yards he walked, casting his torch left and right as he searched for something. Whatever he was looking for, he must have found it because the torch stopped moving and shone downwards instead. Apparently satisfied, the man turned and walked back towards his car. A sixth sense, developed over years of avoiding violent punters, told the boy something was wrong and his curiosity turned to apprehension. The man walked to the back of the car, looked around carefully and opened the boot. The boy shrank back into the darkness of the room. He instinctively knew nothing good would come from the man seeing him. Apparently satisfied he was alone, the man reached into the boot and dragged out something large and heavy. Despite being twenty yards away, the boy heard a sickening thud as it fell to the floor.

It could only be one thing.

The boy gasped in recognition. His apprehension turned to abject terror.

That night, he hadn’t been thinking about death …

Detective Inspector Avison Fluke stared at the dripping blood without making a sound. It was crimson, almost black in the subdued lighting, and he watched as each drop grew in size until it could no longer resist the pull of gravity and fell, only for the process to start all over again.

The drips were slowing. It would be over soon. Until the next time.

Fluke hadn’t used his bed in nearly a year, preferring an armchair as he waited for exhaustion to give him the temporary release of sleep. He was still tired and the metronomic drip of the blood had helped him achieve an almost Zen-like state. He looked at his watch and realised he’d lost nearly an hour. He felt oddly refreshed at the thought. An hour was more than he’d managed at home the previous night.

His peace was interrupted when his mobile phone rang. A nurse at the other end of the cramped ward gave him a dirty look. Fluke mouthed ‘sorry’.

He looked at the caller ID: Detective Superintendent Cameron Chambers. Fluke had hoped to be left alone that morning. He stared at the phone for a moment before deciding he’d better answer it.

Chambers didn’t wait to be acknowledged. ‘Fluke, where are you?’ He was the type of man who mistook plain-spoken for rude.

‘Home,’ he replied.

‘Home? What the hell are you still doing at home? It’s nine o’clock, man.’

Fluke didn’t answer and there was an uncomfortable pause, one he knew Chambers would fill.

‘Yes, well. I need you in West Cumbria. There’s a dead woman waiting there for you. I’m still on this armed robbery and will be all week, so it’s your case.’

Fluke had seen the bank depot robbery update on the news the previous night and watched his boss being interviewed. There was no way Chambers was giving up that limelight. He had ambitions to be chief constable and a high-profile case like that was a wet dream for him. In his mind, he was earmarked for great things. In everyone else’s, he was a self-absorbed careerist. Everything he did irritated Fluke. They were going to come to blows before long.

‘Who can I have?’ Fluke said. Most of the Force Major Incident Team were still on the robbery but he’d need help. He also knew that Chambers equated a big team with importance so would want to keep everyone he could.

‘You can have Towler, Vaughn and Skelton. Can’t let you have anyone else. The robbery’s at a crucial stage. Get local help if you need more. Towler’s already at the scene. Get the details from him.’

Towler, that was expected. The only person people liked working with less was himself. Towler was too unpredictable, too violent. Jo Skelton, as a middle-aged mother of two, didn’t conform to Chambers’s vision of a young, dynamic detective, and Vaughn was just plain weird with his whole ‘I don’t like to be touched’ thing.

With Fluke, the four of them represented FMIT’s untouchables. They referred to themselves as the outcasts and preferred working independently when they could. Sometimes, managing them was like herding cats but Fluke wouldn’t have swapped any of them. Because what Chambers failed to see was that they were all brilliant detectives. They’d have been an asset to his precious robbery case if he hadn’t been so concerned with how the team looked on the evening news.

Fluke was distracted by someone pausing then looking in as they walked past the open-style ward. Whoever it was, he got the impression they’d recognised him. Before he could turn and look properly, they’d disappeared. Probably a gawper. Embarrassed to be caught looking. People often didn’t know how to act round certain wards.

‘And Fluke?’

‘Sir?’

‘Don’t milk it. It’s almost certainly a domestic. Identify the dead woman and arrest the husband.’

Fluke jabbed the end-call button. ‘Arsehole,’ he said. It had been a strange thing to say, though. What did Chambers know that he didn’t? If it was straightforward, there was no way Chambers wouldn’t have led on it, taking a day away from the robbery to solve a murder would, in his mind, only enhance his reputation. If he didn’t want it, there was something wrong.

Fluke scrolled down his recent contacts and rang Matt Towler. He answered on the first ring.

‘Boss, we’ve got a body, a woman. I’ve shut down the scene until you get here.’

‘Where?’ Fluke asked.

‘West Cumberland Hospital, part of the site they’re still developing there. She was under some mud in a foundation hole. The foreman found her at eight this morning.’

Which almost certainly ruled out a natural death or a suicide – as a rule, dead people didn’t bury themselves. A concealed corpse usually meant a homicide. Murder or manslaughter. Statistically, the street was the most dangerous place for men and the home the most dangerous place for women and, as unpleasant as he was, Chambers was right: when a woman was killed, her partner or ex-partner was usually the culprit. Most of the time for the police, it was a ‘whydunit’ rather than a ‘whodunit’. Few perpetrators of domestic homicides are forensically aware. There were always breadcrumbs to follow when crimes were committed in anger, jealousy or passion. The weapons used were chosen for expediency rather than efficiency and their murders were normally solved within twenty-four hours.

‘What do we know so far?’ Fluke said.

‘Nothing really. Probably a relationship gone bad. Maybe premeditated,’ Towler said. ‘She was in a golf travel bag. It’s a deposition site, not the murder site.’

So that was why Chambers didn’t want anything to do with it. If it were premeditated, it could take time to get to the bottom of it, time away from the robbery, and more importantly time away from the TV cameras. Anything longer than a day and he risked handing the limelight over to someone else.

By making Fluke the senior investigating officer, Chambers could sit back and poke holes in his efforts. If he charged someone it would be because Chambers had delegated correctly and if he didn’t, then he’d have someone to blame. He’d either take the glory or distance himself from a badly run investigation. A win–win for Chambers and a lose–lose for Fluke.

‘She was under a foot of mud so couldn’t be seen either,’ Towler said. ‘Even when looking directly in.’

‘So how did—?’

‘And she’s only been in there six hours.’

‘What? How’d you know that?’ Fluke said, taking Towler’s bait.

‘We have a witness. They left a note.’

Fluke jabbed the assistance button above his bed until the ward nurse came to see him.

‘I need to go, nurse,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly finished anyway.’ He pointed at the bag of blood that was clearly not empty.

‘Marion,’ she replied automatically. ‘Do I call you “patient”? And you’re not going anywhere. I’ve got a bag of plasma in the fridge for you.’

Plasma? Sod that. Plasma took even longer than blood.

After five minutes of argument and counter-argument, Fluke gave up.

‘Fine,’ he sighed.

As soon as she left the room, Fluke stood up. He couldn’t afford to wait. The first few hours were the ‘golden hours’: witnesses remembered things clearly, forensic evidence was at its freshest and easiest to detect. Alibis weren’t yet fully formed.

After checking he couldn’t be seen from the corridor, he removed the cannula from the back of his hand. Nice and easy, just like he’d seen doctors do countless times. He didn’t have a cotton swab so he used a tissue to stem the flow of blood from the puncture wound. He looked for somewhere safe to dispose of the needle. He settled for wrapping it in his hanky and putting it in his rucksack.

He knew he’d stepped over an unseen line in hospital etiquette and would be in trouble with Doctor Cooper later. She’d probably be on the phone before he’d even reached the car park but that was nothing compared to the trouble he’d be in if anyone at work ever found out where he’d really been. Arriving two hours late to your own crime scene was unexplainable. Anyway, he didn’t want to see Doctor Cooper. Every time he saw her, it triggered another bout of insomnia. He’d been lying to her about his side effects for over a year now and the guilt was keeping him awake. He knew she only wanted what was best for him but the truth had to stay hidden. And the truth was that five months ago, he’d involved her in a crime. A crime she didn’t even know about.

He hoisted his rucksack onto his shoulders, avoided the disapproving stare of the man opposite and walked out of the ward.

The more he went to the Cumberland Infirmary the more it seemed to tire him. Physically, he was getting stronger and stronger, but each time he had an appointment he came out feeling weary. It didn’t seem to matter how much he’d rested or how healthily he’d eaten, like a badly earthed battery, the hospital seemed to drain him of energy.

He put it down to being so sick of them that even being in a hospital tired him. Or perhaps Doctor Cooper had been right and he had needed the blood. He put it out of his mind and was out of Carlisle and on the A595 driving west in less than five minutes. The thermometer in his car showed 5 ºC. It was biting outside. The trees were bare, their dead leaves long gone to the strong winter winds. Brown, rotten vegetation littered the verge. The countryside on the wane. A few evergreens were still battling the elements but everything else was waiting for spring. He turned the heater up.

His mobile rang and the caller ID displayed the ward’s number. Fluke pressed the decline button.

A layer of fog descended the farther west he drove. Thick and white. It wasn’t raining yet, but it was going to. He hoped proper forensic practices had been followed. He didn’t want evidence being washed away before he got there. Chambers had the main SOCO team working the robbery so he knew he’d get whoever was left. It didn’t matter. When it came to crime scenes, he preferred to be in total control. The crime scene managers didn’t like having their autonomy removed but he didn’t care. His case, his rules.

The drive would take at least another forty-five minutes, and without any details of the crime to think about, Fluke searched through the car’s mp3 player for some music with a bit of pace and energy. He selected The Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope, and turned up the volume. FMIT were responsible for investigating the most serious crimes in Cumbria, and when the county was the third largest in the UK, if you didn’t like driving, you were in the wrong job.

As the opening chords to ‘English Civil War’ rang out – the only guitar riff he’d bothered trying to learn when he and Towler had attempted to form a band when they were kids – he smiled and started thumping the steering wheel, glad to be alive.

An hour after leaving Carlisle, Fluke arrived at the rendezvous point. Towler had set it up on some hardstanding between the main building site and the smaller site where the body had been discovered. It was where all the yellow earth-moving vehicles, which all building sites seemed to need, were parked, their enormous tyres thick with dark mud. It was also full of police vehicles, marked and unmarked, some still with their flashing lights on. He was obviously one of the last to arrive.

Whenever possible, Fluke used rendezvous points out of sight of the crime scene to ensure everyone was fully focused on what he was saying, rather than rubbernecking at the site. Towler knew that and Fluke nodded appreciatively as he saw the site’s own security fences made the scene self-contained. People were milling round, waiting to start. Most of them had white forensic suits on and from a distance it looked like a convention of Scottish sunbathers.

Fluke got out of his car and stretched. A lone seagull circled overhead. It screeched and a uniformed policeman threw it the last of the sandwich he was eating. Fluke watched as it dived down to catch it. With no more food, it lazily gained height then headed off in the direction of Whitehaven Harbour. Fluke could smell the sea coming off the inland breeze. It reminded him of Plymouth and his time with the Marines.

Matt Towler, a foot taller than everyone else, was speaking to a group of suited forensic staff. He saw Fluke, broke away from the group and walked over. He could tell his friend was worried, and when something worried Towler, a veteran of a Gulf War, Sierra Leone and three tours of Northern Ireland, he also worried. Although FMIT officers weren’t officially paired up, Fluke and Towler invariably ended up working together. Barely hidden disdain of anyone below their own high standards, barrack-room sarcasm and a willingness to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week when needed meant other detectives weren’t exactly falling over themselves to join them. It was something Fluke cultivated rather than tried to rectify.

‘You OK, Ave?’ Towler said.

‘Fine. Tell me about this note,’ he said, as they walked towards the scene. The ground was cold and slippery and threatening to sprain his ankles. They struggled to the outer cordon and stopped.

Towler handed him a plastic evidence bag. It had a piece of paper inside.

Fluke read it.

Look in the secund whole from the door. sum1 has put a body in there

It was written on stationery with a building company logo, the same logo as the ones on the fences that surrounded the site. It looked like the witness had used whatever had been to hand.

He turned it over. There was nothing on the back.

‘Not exactly Shakespeare, is it?’ Towler said. ‘It was by the kettle in the site office.’

The poor spelling didn’t necessarily indicate age. Fluke knew the average criminal had the reading age of an eight-year-old and he already had a theory about who’d left the note. He didn’t know the person but suspected he knew the type.

Fluke looked at the site office and its proximity to the crime scene, easily identifiable by the forensic tent.

‘Who was first on scene?’

‘Dunno. But Don Holland was sticking his massive beak in when I got here.’

Fluke could see Chief Inspector Holland talking to a group of uniformed officers. They’d never really got on, although neither of them really knew why. Fluke walked over.

‘Chief Inspector!’ he called out.

Holland looked up, said something to the group that caused them to laugh, and sauntered over.

‘What’s up, Fluke? Don’t tell me, you’ve found something to complain about already. I’d say that under three minutes is a record for you but we both know I’d be lying.’

Holland laughed at his own joke. Fluke didn’t join in. ‘Who set up the cordons?’

‘Remember who you’re speaking to, Fluke,’ Holland said.

‘I know exactly who I’m speaking to, Chief Inspector,’ Fluke replied. ‘Who set up the cordons?’

‘I did. Why? It’s all correct.’

Fluke could feel himself getting angry. ‘Why’s the site office not in the inner cordon?’

Holland was about to respond but saw the evidence bag Fluke was carrying and realised his mistake. The office was also a crime scene and should have been cordoned off and access controlled.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘I’m giving you five minutes to reset it, and in the meantime get your giggling sycophants off my bloody crime scene!’ Fluke shouted.

‘Now look here, Fluke, I will not be spoken—’

‘I haven’t got time, Chief Inspector,’ Fluke snapped. ‘Just get it sorted.’

‘Useless wanker,’ Towler said, as Holland stalked off.

There was no point reliving mistakes. Fluke needed to move on.

‘Who found the note?’

Towler pointed towards a grey-haired man talking to a police officer. ‘The Clerk of Works, Christian Dunn, spotted it soon as he got in. Always has a brew first thing.’

Fluke asked, ‘What’d he do?’

‘Had a look, saw nothing, but as it was due to be filled today, he got in with a shovel and found it.’

‘The body?’

‘No, the golf travel bag,’ Towler replied. ‘He opened it, saw her face and called triple nine.’

A travel bag would have to be big enough to fit a normal golf bag in it. The perfect size to surreptitiously transport a body.

‘Let’s go and have a word with him then,’ Fluke said.

Usually members of the public who’d discovered a body were on the verge of a breakdown. At the very least, they were in shock. But if Fluke were pressed, he’d have said Christian Dunn was irritated.

He looked up as they walked over. ‘Is this him? This the boss man, like?’ Dunn said to the officer with him.

He strode towards Fluke, indignation all over his face. He was a small man, closer to sixty than fifty, with a weathered face. Clearly someone who spent his time outdoors.

Fluke held out his hand but Dunn ignored it.

‘You the boss man? When can I get back to work?’ he said. He pronounced work as ‘wuk’. ‘It’s putting me right off my schedule, this is. I’ve nine tons of concrete coming soon. I need you to move that lassie.’

His understanding of personal space was about as well-developed as his awareness of volume control. Dunn wasn’t exactly shouting but Fluke could feel himself leaning back anyway. Ten minutes with him and he’d be reaching for the headache pills.

‘This is a murder investigation, Mr Dunn,’ he said. ‘The site’s shut down.’

Dunn looked at him blankly. ‘My gaffer doesn’t pay me to sit on me arse all day with concrete getting hard in the mixer.’

‘I’m sorr—’

‘What she want to throw herself down there for anyway?’ Dunn interrupted. ‘I know it’s sad an’ all that, but it’s selfish. If she wants to kill hersel’, why can’t she do it away from my building site?’

It was Fluke’s turn to look blank. The idiot thought it was a suicide? She was in a bag and covered in mud.

Dunn wasn’t finished. ‘Look, I know you lads ’ave a job to do but my concrete’s going in that hole whether you like it or not.’

Fluke didn’t really know how to respond to that. Fortunately Towler did.

‘Listen, you little tit,’ he said. ‘This is a murder investigation, your site’s gonna be closed for fucking days.’

Dunn stepped back in the face of Towler’s aggressive out. . .