Free Four Below by Peter Helton

dark, dirty and chewed. Ants were crawling over it, and through it. It looked like it had
belonged to a man. He thought he could catch a nostrilful of its sickly smell and quickly straightened up. ‘You need sharp eyes not to walk straight past that. How does that woman walk her
dog, on all fours?’
    ‘Do you want me to ask her?’ Austin hadn’t bothered to get close to the find; he was happy to take everyone’s word for it. Bits of body. He could imagine it, thanks.
    ‘Her dog found it,’ Pym said.
    ‘All right, this time we’ll get all the manpower we need for a systematic search. We’ll go over the whole area, including the part we covered ourselves; there were so few of
us, we could have missed it.’ He walked back with Austin. ‘Get the surgeon to take a look at it and get it bagged up before the ants make off with it.’
    ‘Could still turn out to be just a walker who died of natural causes, of course. Keeled over in the wood somewhere.’
    McLusky sniffed the air. Despite the mist and cold he had to admit the place smelled better than the city centre. ‘No. It’ll be a shallow grave. Somewhere back there.’
    The dog-walker stood her ground beside her silver car. Her Jack Russell stared out through the back window of the hatchback. ‘Thank you for calling us promptly today, Mrs …’
Did he know her name?
    ‘Walker.’
    Appropriate. ‘Mrs Walker. Has someone taken a statement from you yet?’
    ‘Yes, the woman constable took a long statement, asking all sorts of irrelevant questions.’
    ‘Then there’s no need for you to remain here.’
    ‘I know that, Inspector.’
    McLusky walked with Austin to their cars. ‘Let’s get back to the nick. We’ll get a search organized, and you and me can sit this one out until they find the rest of the
body.’
    The call came through late that afternoon. ‘They found the body of a man. Shallow grave, remains disturbed by animal activity.’
    Just as McLusky had suspected, they had completely missed the body in the mist and gloom. Things looked different now. The track was choked with vehicles; generators and arc lights had been set
up. Despite the mist, the scene was thrown into sharp focus by the lights and the occasion.
    ‘You lot must have walked straight past it,’ DSI Denkhaus told McLusky as they were donning protective gear beside the scene-of-crime tape. A white tent had already been erected over
the body. ‘If you hadn’t missed it two days ago, it would have saved a dozen officers a lot of man hours.’
    McLusky got on with kitting up, putting on overshoes and face mask. He knew that the less you contradicted Denkhaus, the sooner his lectures petered out. Sometimes he suspected the
superintendent simply thought it was part of his remit to harangue junior officers.
    Inside the cordoned area a narrow path had been established along which everyone and everything now travelled to avoid further contamination of the site. A suspicious death always invited the
professional attention of scores of people: police officers of all ranks, from the bored constables guarding the site against unauthorized persons to the senior investigation officer; crime-scene
co-ordinators to manage the site, surgeon, pathologist, scene-of-crime officers, forensics technicians and CID, from freshly minted detective constables up to superintendent. As he followed
Denkhaus along the path to the tent, it struck McLusky just how crowded this lonely spot in the woods had become. Many people wouldn’t attract such attendance figures at their funerals,
especially if they had died quietly of natural causes, and would get shorter notices in the papers, too.
    Just then the surgeon dived from the tent, pulled off his mask and took a few gulps of cold, uncontaminated air.
    ‘Is it bad?’ Denkhaus asked.
    ‘It’s pretty rank, yes, Superintendent. I’ll never get used to the smell of human decay, I’m afraid.’
    ‘In that case, aren’t you in the wrong job,