See the Dead Birds Fly: A terrifying Swedish serial-killer mystery (The DI Stella Cole Thrillers Book 7), page 1
SEE THE DEAD BIRDS FLY
ANDY MASLEN
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT FROM SHALLOW GROUND, THE FIRST BOOK IN THE DETECTIVE FORD THRILLERS…
Prologue
Day One, 5.00 p.m
Day Two, 8.15 a.m.
Day Two, 8.59 a.m.
Acknowledgments
About the Author
In memoriam
Richard Harry Maslen 1935 - 2022
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
—William Blake
1
Ted Sondersson didn’t always enjoy hauling a load of timber from the forests of northern Sweden to the mid-country sawmills.
Too much anxiety about the price of diesel. The risks of being bushwacked by a biker gang.
Even the temptations of lone female hitch-hikers worried him. Suppose they suddenly turned out to have strung-out boyfriends with hunting knives and a wayward look in their red-rimmed eyes?
But today was different. The run had been long, but quiet. And, most importantly, profitable.
He was on his way home with a fat bank transfer sitting snugly in his account. Enough to pay for the repairs to the summer house and maybe even a little left over for a new set of skis.
He thought of Inga, wearing an embroidered peasant top with no bra beneath it, and those jeans she knew he liked. The low-slung ones that showed off her arse. His cock stirred and he allowed himself a brief but enjoyable fantasy of taking his wife of thirteen years from behind.
He glanced in his mirrors. The road was clear. Ahead, too. One of those rare but exquisite moments when the motorway seemed his and his alone. Truckers had a name for the phenomenon. The ghost road.
You could imagine, for a brief while, that all the other vehicles that slowed you down or made you hiss in anger as they chopped and changed lanes without indicating or even keeping pace with the rest of the traffic, had simply vanished. Removed from the road by a friendly god who looked down kindly on those who drove the big rigs for a living.
Ted glanced across at his iPhone, resting atop the paperwork fanned out on the passenger seat. No cop cars in sight. Nobody to see him making a call and wag a finger up at him. Maybe he’d call Inga.
He leaned sideways for the phone. He grunted with the effort: the Scania had a wide cab and the passenger seat was a stretch. Finally, taking his eyes off the road for as little time as he could possibly manage, he snagged the phone and hauled himself back into an upright position, juggling the phone into position so he could thumb the icons that would dial Inga.
He glanced up at the road as the call connected.
‘What the fuck!’ he yelled.
Was it an angel, staggering onto the smooth, dark tarmac of the E18? The outspread wings must have been two metres across at least. Three, even. But what kind of angel had wings that colour? Black as sin. Black as night. Angels weren’t real, anyway. And why would an angel be making that face? Eyes panicked circles. Mouth an ‘O’ showing white teeth and red tongue. Black fur of pubic hair against bone-white skin. Did angels even have genitals?
While these brief, chaotic thoughts raced around Ted’s brain, his body was performing other movements, without any conscious control. He’d dropped the iPhone and grabbed the wheel with both hands. His right foot had leaped from accelerator to brake and his thick, muscled right leg was extended, exerting fierce pressure on the pedal.
His arms were locked out at the elbows. It was one of the things you learned early on driving a big rig. You absolutely did not swerve to avoid animals in the road. Maybe in a sports car or even a family saloon, you might wrench the wheel over and give a moose or a wolf the scare of its life as you slewed around it before regaining the carriageway, heart hammering, adrenaline making your knees shake and your leg muscles tremble.
But in a forty-tonne Scania eighteen-wheeler? Even without a couple of hundred pre-processed pine logs on the trailer? No. You did not swerve. Not unless you wanted the whole damn rig ending up on its side with you smashed up in the cab like a raw egg in a blender.
Ted hit the angel at sixty three kilometres an hour. The bang reverberated through the cab. Blood and feathers flew up and coated the windscreen. A giant wing cartwheeled crazily left to right trailing long streamers of red and white…stuff…before landing in the field of sunflowers to the right of the motorway.
The airbrakes screamed and whistled like a locomotive entering hell. Ted yelled in horror as the angel’s face slammed into the windscreen right in front of him and bounced away, leaving a bloody imprint in which he could clearly see the outlines of the eye sockets.
He brought the truck to a stop. His heart felt like it might burst free of his rib cage and leap, pumping blood, out onto the dashboard.
‘What the hell? What the shit-Godammit-to-hell?’
He swung himself down from the cab and ran around to the front of the truck.
Gobbets of flesh, wet and stringy, were stuck between the chromed teeth of the Scania’s vast grille. He saw a penis and turned aside to vomit onto the ground. The black feathers were everywhere, clinging to the grille, the headlights, the air intakes beneath the licence plate. Most were attached to thin white bone fragments. Others adorned the metalwork, glued there with dark, sticky blood.
Ted ran up and down the verge, searching desperately for the rest of the angel, yet terrified by the thought he might find it.
‘Oh God,’ he wailed, as he saw the ruined remains of the body ahead of his truck, splayed and broken.
The ghost road was full again. But Ted was oblivious to the cars and trucks passing him, heads turning, curious, to see what was causing this burly trucker to stumble on rubber legs back to his rig. He scrambled up into the cab and grabbed his phone.
‘Come on, come on, shit-of-the-devil, come on!’ he shouted as his fingers, suddenly as dextrous as work gloves full of sand, refused to obey his instructions to call the police. Finally, he managed.
‘Hello, Emergency. What service do you require?’
Ted swallowed.
‘All of them,’ he croaked.
2
The detective in charge of CID at the district station in Vällingby, a suburb on the western side of Stockholm was, in Stella’s opinion, a rare kind of policeman indeed.
Kriminalkommissarie Daniel Magnusson had gone out to the crime scene in person. But on being shown what had occurred, he’d called her immediately, requesting she come over from HQ to help him out. No territoriality. No hogging a ‘bloddig biff’ – a ‘rare steak’ in English but Swedish cop-slang for a case with lots of blood and plenty to get your teeth into.
‘I know my way around a murder scene, Stella,’ he’d said once he’d been put through by reception, the wind at the crime scene setting up a loud rustle on the line that made it hard for Stella to hear him. ‘But I also know when I’m looking down the barrel of a weird one. So I thought I’d get the opinion of the—’
Stella took a moment to translate the Swedish phrase he’d just used. What the hell did konstigheternas drottning mean? She hadn’t come across it before, even though she’d been speaking Swedish for two years since moving from the UK.
Her eyes widened as she mentally translated his colourful phrase.
‘“Queen of Weirdness.” Is that what they’re calling me in Vällingby these days?’
Daniel laughed. ‘Actually, that was your receptionist. Maybe you should have a word.’
‘No. I like it,’ she said with a smile. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can.’
She grabbed her murder bag. The black nylon holdall held everything she might need for the first day of a new case, from a forensic suit and bootees to notebooks, power pack for her phone, torch and even a spare pair of knickers and a washbag.
‘Jonna, with me, please,
She and Jonna had become friends since Stella’s first case in Stockholm. They went running together most days and had even double-dated with Jonna’s new girlfriend Emmelie, and Magnus, a Danish journalist Stella had been seeing. Neither relationship had survived the six-month mark, which, as Jonna had remarked caustically at the time, left the two female detectives with, ‘less time for sex, but more for catching weirdos’.
Yet for all her excellent qualities as a friend and a cop, Jonna had one fault. She needed more whip than a two year old at Solvalla racecourse to exceed the speed limit. Unless there was a genuine emergency and not just her boss’s characteristic eagerness to reach a new crime scene as quickly as possible. Stella was already thinking she’d better drive before Jonna got her tight little bum in the driver’s seat.
Sure enough, ‘He’s dead, Stella,’ she said as they were leaving the rear of the station on Kungsholmsgatan towards the force’s small fleet of pool cars. ‘No emergency. We can get there in plenty of time without breaking the law.’
In response, Stella held her hand out for the keys to the Volvo.
‘Ever hear of the Golden Hour, Jonna?’
‘But you said Daniel told you the truck hit the victim at 11:00 am.’ She checked the time on her phone. ‘And it’s after twelve now.’
Unsure if Jonna was being overly literal on purpose, Stella simply blipped the fob and swung herself in behind the steering wheel.
‘All the more reason to get there in a hurry.’
They made the fourteen-kilometre journey along the E18 in a brisk twenty minutes, blue lights acting on slow-moving traffic ahead like a municipal snow-plough on a winter morning.
Stella pulled up behind a white forensics van after a uniformed officer lifted a flapping length of yellow crime scene tape. Traffic had put a diversion up at junction 155 on the E18, but the other side of the motorway was slammed with crawling vehicles.
Phones held up like magic amulets, drivers and passengers alike craned to get a look at whatever horrors lay behind the white nylon tent the forensics officers had erected directly in front of the truck. A second tent bellied and snapped in the breeze about thirty metres further down the road. In the field of sunflowers beside the motorway, the CSIs had set up a small, white-roofed gazebo.
A couple of media helicopters clattered overhead, and Stella was grateful for the CSI tents. The last thing they needed was pixelated footage of a murder victim hitting social media and the evening news before they knew what they were dealing with.
She stepped out of the car and wrinkled her nose as the faint spring breeze wafted a stench of blood and shit in her direction.
Traffic cops knew that smell and they weren’t shy about sharing the details with their colleagues in plain clothes. It was the inevitable result of a collision between a body and a fast-moving vehicle whose plastic bumpers, crumple zones and air-bags were designed to protect those on the inside. Anything more than a glancing blow would rip and tear through soft tissue, mixing and spilling body fluids and waste products before splashing them all over the road.
Wordlessly, Stella and Jonna slid into their white CSI suits. Each discreetly smeared oil of camphor onto her top lip, out of sight of Traffic, who were always ready to sneer at the faint hearts of the rena händer – ‘clean hands’ – brigade.
Ahead, the big truck sat on the hard shoulder, leaning at a slight angle where its nearside wheels had begun to dig in to the soft earth beyond the tarmac.
Stella turned to Jonna. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
They rustled their way over to the big tent at the front of the truck. Inside, out of the breeze, the smell intensified, making Stella’s eyes water. CSIs, dressed identically to the two detectives, were collecting scraps of flesh in clear plastic evidence bags, laying down numbered yellow plastic evidence markers, taking photographs and tweezering material from the tarmac into debris pots.
One of the white-suited figures detached itself and made its way over to Stella. She recognised the gait, and the generous build: Signe Arrhenius, Head of Forensics.
Signe pulled her mask down to speak.
‘Hey, Stella. Good to have you here. This is right up your street. Want to come and see?’
‘Show us.’
Signe resettled her mask and led Stella and Jonna to the front of the truck. A Scania, Stella noted, taking in the red griffon wearing a silver crown. Inside the tent, Signe pointed to the bloody grille.
‘The victim was hit dead-on, excuse the pun, and thrown thirty metres. He’s in the next tent.’
‘Victim?’ Jonna asked. ‘That implies homicide. Are you sure this wasn’t just a road traffic accident?’
‘I think you’d better just come with me,’ Signe said. ‘Vällingsby CID would hardly have called you out for an RTA, would they?’
Fair point, Stella thought, her detective’s senses already sharpening as they approached the second, larger forensics tent.
Stella gasped. Partly it was the smashed remains of the body. But mainly the dozens of ink-black feathers plastering the scene. What had happened here? Some sort of motorway bird-strike? Was that even a thing?
The man – the victim, Signe had called him – or what was left of him, lay on his back. Several gaping parallel wounds disfigured the front of his torso. Stella thought back to the Scania’s grille. The blood-smeared chrome bars told their own, eloquent story. Hit head-on by the truck and mashed into the grille by the force, then flung to the ground as the brakes finally brought the rig to a stop. She made a mental note to check with a traffic cop before they left.
Stella checked out his face first, trying to avoid thinking about the arms just yet. The nose was broken, mashed flat between his cheeks. Both eye sockets were broken and rimmed with blood. The mouth just a pulpy mess of flesh and teeth.
Dark hair, worn longer than the average office worker. Strong jawline, stubble beneath the blood. Maybe he’d been good-looking, once. She shook her head. It was one of the random observations that homicide cops puzzled over for a second or two before parking it to return to the horror of the scene in front of them.
Her gaze kept flitting from the corpse’s face to his shoulders, then back again. Finally, like a nervous bird alighting on a dangling feeder in a suburban garden, her eyes came to rest.
At first, Stella couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Gradually, as her eyes and brain started collaborating, she inhaled slowly through her mouth and let it out in a controlled breath.
‘What the devil is that?’
‘Is that a wing?’ Jonna asked, beside her.
Stella squatted beside the body. The left arm was missing, ripped out of the shoulder joint. Presumably beneath the forensics gazebo in the sunflower field.
But the right was present. Or at least a limb was present. Human from the midpoint of the upper arm to the shoulder, but below that, as Jonna had exclaimed, it was a huge black wing.
‘It must be a metre or more,’ Stella said.
‘One-point-five, as far as I can tell with it folded like that,’ Signe confirmed.
‘How’s it fastened on? Are those stitches?’ Stella asked, peering at the mess of bloody tissue at the intersection between human and avian anatomy where she could discern black threads knotted along the join.
‘I think so. Now you see why I said we had a victim, yes?’
