The Pandemic Plot by Scott Mariani

Author:Scott Mariani [Mariani, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-04-16T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

It was a UPS delivery driver who found the gunshot body of Emily Bowman’s grounds manager in the yard of the big house in Boars Hill just after four o’clock that afternoon and called the police. When the officers arrived on the scene, they made the grisly discoveries of three more corpses inside the house and a fifth elsewhere in the grounds. In response to the bloodbath, Thames Valley rolled out an armed response SWAT team, and soon the property was cordoned off and resembling a war zone swarming with troops, while a helicopter thudded back and forth overhead. The usual show of force that the cowboys liked to put on when the actual threat was long since gone.

In the midst of the mayhem, Tom McAllister’s black Barracuda was waved through the cordon and rumbled into the yard to join the fleet of marked patrol cars and armed response vehicles, ambulances and coroner’s vans already there. A forensic tent had been set up around the body out front. They were still in the process of bagging up the housekeeper’s corpse in the front hallway as McAllister walked in. ‘Thins’ Waller, head of Forensics, was taking a momentary break from the slaughterhouse and had just got off the phone to his wife to say he was going to be working late.

‘Jesus wept, I’ve seen some godawful bloody messes, but never anything quite like this,’ Waller muttered, shaking his head.

‘What’ve we got?’

‘Two unidentified shooters and about a million spent rounds of forty-calibre ammunition. Mrs Bowman copped one in the shoulder, one in the back and one in the back of the head. Execution style. This was a professional hit, make no mistake.’

‘Until someone hit the hitters,’ McAllister said.

Waller nodded. ‘Looks that way. Or a couple of them, at any rate. One’s got his guts blown out with a shotgun, the other’s been stabbed, drowned and beaten half to death. Looks like a bloody battlefield out back.’

‘So there’s another shooter still at large,’ McAllister said. ‘A third player, with a different agenda. Except he turned up here too late to stop them.’

‘These people have been dead since this morning. Long enough for your mystery shooter to be a thousand miles away by now. I don’t envy you, McAllister.’

‘Thanks. I was hoping you might have some brilliant ideas to share with me.’

‘That’s your department,’ Waller said sourly. ‘My job’s to gather evidence, not to have brilliant ideas. And I’ve got enough work on here to keep me busy for weeks. I’m getting too damn old for this crap.’

‘Aye, you’re not the only one. Yowch.’ McAllister winced and pressed his hand against his right cheek.

‘Toothache?’ Waller said, knowingly.

‘Just a twinge. Started last night.’

‘Now I envy you even less, Detective Inspector.’

As McAllister threaded his way through the house, a coroner’s team passed him on the stairs, carrying Emily Bowman’s body on a covered gurney. Anger rose inside him, thinking about her 999 distress call after seeing the black Mercedes. If that fool Forbes had allowed him to post a patrol car outside the house, none of this might have happened.

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