And yet…
There really were a lot of maggots, and the carcass really did stink.
“Hold on! I’ve got a bag in the car.”
Tyler straightened up, but still appeared a little unsteady on his feet. “What do you mean?”
“Like a bag for life. From Tesco. One of the big heavy ones.”
“So?”
“So, we could put that under the bird, then just, like knock it off the hook.”
“Knock it off? With what?”
“I don’t know. A stick.”
Tyler thought this through. “Do I have to be involved?” he asked.
“Yes! I’m not doing it myself!”
“Then I don’t like this plan,” Tyler replied.
Hamza set off for his car. “Tough. We’re doing it. Unless you’d prefer to explain to Logan why you didn’t go over the caravan like he told you?”
Tyler groaned. “Fine,” he said, searching the line of trees behind the caravan for a decent-sized branch. “But if this goes pear-shaped, I’m running, and I’m not coming back.”
The bag was a sizeable sturdy thing with a fold-flat bottom, which made it perfect to sit beneath the hanging pheasant.
In theory.
In reality, the sides kept falling together, closing the top of the bag so that anything falling onto it would slide right off and land on what, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, Tyler was going to go ahead and call ‘the carpet.’
After some experimentation, both detectives reluctantly came to the same conclusion. Someone was going to have to hold the bag open while the other knocked the bird off its hook with the stick.
“I don’t mind what one I do,” Tyler announced. “As long as I’m not holding the bag. I’ll die. I mean it, Hamza, I’ll actually die.”
“You won’t die!” Hamza retorted. “I don’t even think you can die, given that you’re still here after everything that’s happened to you.”
“This would do it. Holding that bag would finish me off,” Tyler insisted, his voice a low, nasal drone now that he’d shut off his nostrils. “You hold it open, I’ll knock it in.”
Under other circumstances, this might have called for a, “Said the actress to the bishop,” type response, but neither man was in the mood. The stakes were too high, the smell was too bad, and this entire exercise had already taken them far longer than anticipated.
Hamza grimaced, squatted, then grasped the handles of the bag and pulled them apart to create the widest possible landing zone for the maggot-infested bird carcass to drop into.
“Ready?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know. Is that under it?”
“I think so, aye,” said Tyler from halfway across the caravan. “I can’t see from here.”
“Then get closer.”
“You get closer!”
“I am bloody closer! I’m right under the fucking thing! Just… go. Do it. Go.”
Tyler raised the metre-long stick he’d found, clutching it right at the end to maintain the maximum possible distance from where the action was. Unfortunately, the stick was quite heavy, and holding it in this way offered him almost no control over it whatsoever. It flailed around above Hamza’s head, clunked against the ceiling, then caught the bird a glancing blow that sent half a dozen maggots raining onto the floor below, missing the bag by several inches.
“You need to go left a bit,” Tyler said.
“I can… Get off, you creepy bastard!” Hamza slapped frantically at his arm. “I can see that, thanks. Be more careful.”
He slid the bag a little to the left, covering the maggots that had landed there. Another of the grubs fell from the bird and hit the bottom of the bag with a thack that made Tyler drop the stick in fright.
“Christ!” he ejected, covering his head with his arms. He peeked beneath an elbow, saw that the bird was still hanging there, then quickly tried to cover his overreaction with some reassuring words. “Right, everyone just relax. Calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” Hamza hissed through gritted teeth. “I’m not the one who threw the stick away. I’m just…” He sighed, shook his head, then sprang upright. “Right, bollocks to this,” he announced, snatching up the bag.
He covered the bird with the bag from below, clutched the handles together in one hand at the top, and unhooked the feet with the other.
The DS gave a little cry of triumph as the bird fell into the bag, then he thrust it out to Tyler, who was closer to the door.