He could smell the place from out here, he thought, although that might’ve been his imagination. Constable Tanaka had warned him about the dead pheasant, and he would’ve sworn he could smell the thing from half a mile back up the road. Now that he was right outside, it was overpoweringly pungent, and his gag reflex was already slipping out of its tracksuit and running warm-up laps in anticipation of what might happen next.
The DC was immensely grateful, then, that Hamza had volunteered to come with him. And it had only taken some mild to moderate begging on Tyler’s part.
“Imagine living in that,” he remarked.
“Apparently he didn’t,” Hamza said. “He… I don’t know. Worked there, I suppose. He slept in his tent.”
“Probably wise. I wouldn’t want to sleep in it, either. In fact, I don’t even want to go in it. I’m struggling just looking at it, in fact.”
“Aye, well, tough,” Hamza replied. “I said I’d come with you, I didn’t say I’d do it for you. We’re both going in.”
Tyler sucked air in through his teeth. “Looks a bit small for that. For the two of us, I mean.”
“Right, well you can go in yourself, then.”
“Actually, no. No, it’ll be fine with the two of us,” Tyler said, pulling a U-turn. He indicated the caravan door with a hand gesture. “Do you want to lead the way, or…？”
“Just get in,” Hamza said, giving the DC a dunt with his elbow. “Before I leave you here on your own.”
Tyler thought about begging some more, but the expression on Hamza’s face told him it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. So, following a series of deep breaths, he loosened his tie, pulled the neck of his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose, and cautiously entered the caravan.
The floor creaked as it took his weight, the caravan’s rusted suspension objecting to his presence. Tyler wholeheartedly agreed with it. He objected to his presence there, too, mostly because his thin cotton shirt was doing nothing whatsoever to block out the smell.
“Oh, God,” he muttered, staring in wide-eyed horror at the maggot-infested pheasant carcass hanging by its feet from the ceiling. “Oh, God. No. No, no, no.”
He about-turned, flung himself outside onto the grass, then bent double and swallowed back the urge to vomit.
“Bad?” Hamza asked.
Tyler couldn’t yet speak, and his frantic hand movements didn’t really help convey anything beyond a general sense of distress.
“It can’t be that bad,” Hamza said.
He plodded up the steps and disappeared into the caravan.
Then, a few seconds later, he plodded back down again, his face significantly paler than it had been before he’d gone inside.
“Aye, that’s grim,” he admitted.
“Did you see the—？” Tyler began, then he retched violently, his eyes watering. “The way it was—？”
He bent double again and spat onto the ground, shaking his head like he was trying to drive out the memory of the caravan’s interior.
“We need to get the bird out of there,” Hamza said.
“I’m not touching it!” Tyler cried, a little more forcefully than he’d intended.
“You’ve got gloves.”
“I don’t care if I’ve got a HAZMAT suit and a pair of fucking tongs, I’m not going near that thing,” Tyler insisted.
Hamza tutted. “Right. Well, I suppose I’ll do it, will I?”
“Well, I’m not, so…”
Hamza put his hands on his hips, looked back at the caravan for a moment, then returned his attention to Tyler. “I could order you to do it.”
“I’ll quit,” Tyler said. “I mean it, I’d quit. Call one of them Uniforms. Get them to do it.”
“Then we’ll look like a right pair of arseholes,” Hamza pointed out. “Can’t even unhook a dead bird from a caravan ceiling. We deal with dead humans all the time!”
“Aye, but I wouldn’t want to unhook one of them from a caravan ceiling, either,” Tyler retorted. “And most of the time they’ve no’ got maggots crawling out of their—”
He bent over again, made a sound like a blocked drain, then stared at a spot on the grass waiting for the moment to pass.
Hamza scratched his chin, considering the problem. There was an obvious solution, of course. It involved him going in, unhooking the dead bird’s feet from the hook, then carrying it outside. It was simple.