Cut Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

car park. Usually she takes the first bay next to the big metal bin, unless it’s taken. Then she’ll have a dilemma and might park in any one of the other fifty-seven spaces. But you really don’t need to worry about that now.
    No, you’ll see her again in a few days. Up close. And personal. Very personal.

Chapter Four
    Nr Lee Moor, east of Plymouth, Devon. Monday 16th June. 8.37 a.m.
    No sign of yesterday’s sun, the air cold, the drizzle getting heavier by the minute. Covert ops, DS Darius Riley thought, meant sitting in a car, dry, if not warm, with a newspaper to read and food and drink on tap. Not this. Not freezing your nuts off on a summer’s day in wildest Devon.
    To his immediate left DI Frank Maynard sat grinning at him. The DI pulled the hood on his Berghaus up. Mumbled something about ‘the right equipment’, something else about ‘soft city boys’. The joke was wearing thin, but the fact Riley was both black and from London meant it was open season. In Maynard’s eyes, if you hadn’t grown up shagging sheep on Dartmoor then you were a ‘bloody foreigner’ and open to ridicule.
    Riley adjusted his position in an effort to make himself more comfortable. Difficult since he knelt in what he could only describe as a ditch, although Maynard had assured him the pile of stone and earth topped with scrub was in fact known as a Devon hedge. Whatever. The only good thing about the barrier was the cover it provided. Twenty metres farther along the hedge DI Phil Davies stood with a pair of binoculars peering through a gap in the vegetation, his grey hair wet and plastered to the top of his head like sticky rice. His stance suggested to Riley he wasn’t enjoying the outing much either. Chalk and cheese the pair of them, but Riley had to admit a certain grudging respect for Davies. Earlier in the year the DI had likely as not saved Riley’s skin, and although the task involved some very dodgy dealing, Riley owed the man. Even if Davies usually moved in circles something akin to the mud squelching beneath Riley’s knees – the murkiest depths of Plymouth’s underworld, a place of backroom bars, wraps handed over in alleyways and girls standing under street lamps waiting for their next trick. But at least there you stayed dry.
    Not here. Not on Operation Cowbell .
    No. Operation Cowbell meant getting cold, wet and miserable while waiting for people to turn up and buy illegal red diesel from some farmer who was just trying to scrape a living from a few hundred acres of poor quality land. True, the farmer, a man by the name of Tim McGann, had some connection to organised crime over in Exeter, but Riley thought the whole investigation would have been better left to Customs and Excise.
    A rustle came from Riley’s left and he turned to see Maynard unwrapping a foil package containing ham sandwiches. Maynard took one out and munched on the wholemeal bread. He’d not be happy either, Riley reflected. It wasn’t his idea to have Riley and Davies along; their assignment to the case was down to DSupt Hardin. Both Riley and Davies had been involved in a failed drugs operation and being shunted to the backwoods of Cowbell was punishment. Three months in and they’d identified a handful of farms selling diesel and recorded dozens of people buying. They’d trekked across muddy fields, staked out isolated barns, and visited parts of Devon and Cornwall so remote that to Riley’s mind they seemed like the wilds of America. They’d witnessed illegal activity, certainly. But was it worth the hours the team had spent compiling the information?
    Riley reached into his pocket for his own sustenance only to find the flapjack he’d brought along had got wet and crumbled into a thousand pieces. The mush now resembled porridge. In the back of Maynard’s car there was a bag containing Riley’s lunch – a triple cheese selection and a can of Coke purchased from the M&S close to the station – but the car was several fields