The Gathering Man (A DI Erica Swift Thriller Book 7)

by M K Farrar

  “Help you with what?” the boy asked suspiciously.

  “Our investigation. Were you here last night?”

  “No, it was Monday night. I was home.”

  Erica looked around at the others. “What about the rest of you?”

  The teenagers all exchanged glances. A few heads were shaken, but no one said anything.

  Shawn continued. “When were you here last?”

  “Saturday night,” the ringleader said.

  “And when you were here, did you see anything strange? Was there anyone odd hanging around, or any strange vehicles on the streets nearby that caught your eye?”

  “The only one is that weirdo park warden,” one of the girls said, drawing their attention.

  “What’s your name?” Erica asked.

  “Allysa,” she replied. “Allysa Morgan.”

  “Thanks, Allysa. Why do you say he’s weird?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just a vibe he gives off. Stares a bit too hard sometimes, even when he’s saying we’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Stares?”

  “Yeah, you know.” She widened her eyes and dropped her gaze down to her chest.

  “Right, I’ve got you. So, he makes you feel uncomfortable?”

  “Like he’s a dirty old man,” the girl added.

  “Has he ever done or said anything that’s outwardly violent?”

  “He shouts and threatens to call your lot, but otherwise no. Like I said, it’s just a vibe.”

  Erica took out the photograph she had of the victim from the inside of her jacket pocket. She didn’t like having to show it, especially with the cuts on the girl’s face, but she didn’t have a second option.

  “Do you recognise this girl at all?”

  The teenagers crowded in to get a closer look.

  The boy who seemed to be heading up the group spoke first. “No, I don’t recognise her.”

  They passed around the picture. The girls winced and pulled faces at the graphic image.

  “Oh my God. That poor girl,” Allysa said.

  “Do any of you recognise her?” Erica asked again.

  “No, sorry.”

  “What about these symbols?” Erica showed them a couple of close up photographs of them, and hoped the kids wouldn’t guess that they’d been cut into the girl’s skin.

  They all shook their heads.

  Erica tried not to show her frustration. This was a wasted trip.

  “Okay, thank you for your help. I am going to need all your names and addresses. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, it’s just in case I need to speak to you again.”

  She knew there was a chance they’d give her incorrect addresses, but since they were of the age where they didn’t carry official ID, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She just hoped at least one of them gave the right one, so she’d then be able to track down the others.

  She and Shawn jotted them all down, and then they left the kids to their evening and headed beneath the canopy of almost bare branches, to step out onto one of the park’s numerous paths.

  “I guess we won’t be writing off the park warden just yet then,” Shawn commented.

  “I’m not sure. They might have a vendetta against him and be trying to make trouble.”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Or they might be telling the truth.”

  “He hasn’t actually done anything,” Erica pointed out. “It’s his job to look after the park.”

  “Possibly. Have we got enough to search his home?”

  “Not at this point. Everything is circumstantial. Having a criminal record doesn’t make him guilty of every crime that happens in his vicinity, and neither does being creepy. Those kids see him as the enemy anyway. He could probably be the nicest man in the world, and they’d still find a reason to hate him. But I don’t like that he’s the best lead we have.”

  “So far,” Shawn said. “It’s still early days.” He took his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. “You want to grab something to eat? Or do you have to get back to Poppy?”

  “Natasha’s got her tonight. I didn’t know how long we would be, so I asked her to keep her for a sleepover. Poppy was excited to go. I think she finds the house a bit quiet with it just being the two of us. She’s getting older now, and hanging out with her mum every evening isn’t much fun.”

  “I’m sure Poppy doesn’t think that. You’re a fun mum.”

  Erica arched an eyebrow. “Seriously? She asks if we can watch a film, and I put it on, and I’m asleep after ten minutes. She pokes me and says, ‘You’re sleeping again, Mum’, and I’m like a granddad on the sofa claiming I was only resting my eyes.”

  Shawn chuckled. “You work hard. That’s not really surprising.”

  “Maybe not, but still not much fun for a kid. I’ve often thought that Poppy would prefer to live at Natasha’s.”

  “No, she wouldn’t. She loves you, and your house is her home.”

  She smiled up at him gratefully. “Thanks, I appreciate that. Now, I believe I promised to buy you that pint. There’s a halfway decent pub on Upper Clapton Road.”

  He grinned. “As long as it’s not a pint of cheap, warm cider, I’m in.”

  Chapter Nine

  Erica got into work early, keen to get a head start. Her sister, Natasha, was taking Poppy into school, which made it easier for her to get in before everyone else.

  She helped herself to a black coffee from the machine and dropped down into her chair at her desk. A touch of her mouse brought her computer to life, and she took a moment to run back through the case file.

  It didn’t look as though there had been any developments overnight. They still didn’t have an ID on the girl’s body, which was frustrating. Her prints weren’t in the system, which wasn’t surprising, given her apparent age, and she didn’t match any of the missing persons’ cases either.

  Erica didn’t understand that part.

  Someone had to have noticed her gone.

  She mused over the possibilities. Perhaps the girl was an illegal immigrant and had been trafficked here. It wouldn’t be the first time Erica had worked on one of those cases and struggled to ID the victim. Or she might be a runaway who’d been missing for some time, perhaps from a different part of the country. A lot of young people thought of London as being somewhere glamorous with plenty of opportunities, when in fact the opposite was true.

  The main thing that held Erica back from coming to that conclusion, however, was that, other than the obvious point of being dead, the girl had seemed healthy. She hadn’t had that half-starved appearance of a runaway or a human traffic victim, and her skin had been clear from the blemishes she’d have expected of an addict. Then there was the strange outfit to take into account. What young woman dressed that way? None that she’d ever come across, though she’d be the first to admit she wasn’t exactly up to speed on any of the latest fashion trends.

  Had there been any labels on the inside of the smock? Perhaps a clue as to where it had come from? She made a note to check with forensics.

  People began to arrive in the office. She smiled and said good morning to each of them in turn. Once everyone was in, she’d need to call a briefing to ensure they each knew what actions they were working on for the day. Most would need to continue whatever they’d been doing the previous day.

  Her phone rang, and she answered. “Swift.”

  “Good morning, Detective. It’s Lucy Kim.”

  Erica immediately warmed to the phone call. Lucy Kim was their local pathologist, and Erica had always had a soft spot for the alternative young woman.

  “Kim, hi. How are you getting on?”

  “Good. I got an early start this morning and wanted to give you an update on our Jane Doe.”

  Looked like Erica wasn’t the only one who’d decided to get a head start on the day.

  “I can come down.”

  “You sure? We can do it over the phone?”

  “No, you kn
ow how I prefer to be there. I want to see her again. It helps with the process.”

  “No problem. I’ll be here. See you soon.”

  Erica ended the call right as Shawn walked in.

  “Hey, I’m going down to the mortuary. Do you want to come?”

  He hadn’t even had a chance to take his jacket off. “How could I possibly turn down an invite like that? You know how to treat a man.”

  She rolled her eyes at him but smiled. “And don’t you forget it.”

  She grabbed her bag and joined him.

  “Any developments overnight?” he asked when they got to her car.

  Erica climbed behind the wheel, and he slid into the passenger seat. She pulled out into the morning London traffic. It would be slow going. “No, but I’m hoping Kim can give us something.”

  “Like the ID of the victim?”

  “She didn’t say so on the phone, but maybe she’ll be able to give us something that would narrow it down. I was thinking about the smock-thing our victim was wearing, too. Did anyone think to check it for labels? If it was purchased at a certain shop or even online, we might be able to trace who bought it.”

  “Good thinking. Do you think the girl purchased it, or the person who put her in the dress?”

  “Until we get confirmation that she didn’t do this to herself, I’m afraid I don’t know.” She sensed him frowning at her. “What?”

  “You don’t think she did this to herself, do you?”

  “Honestly, no, but we have to keep our minds open to that possibility.”

  “Or someone just staged it to make it look like she did it to herself.”

  “Hopefully, Kim will be able to tell us more.”

  After spending half an hour crawling through London’s busy morning traffic, Erica finally arrived at the mortuary. She found a space in the carpark, switched off the engine, and climbed out. They’d been to this place plenty of times before and knew their way around it as well as one of the employees. After signing in at the front desk, they made their way down to the basement level where the pathologists’ examination rooms were located.

  They met Lucy Kim walking down the corridor towards them, a roll of some kind in one hand and a mug of something hot in the other. Her dead-straight shiny black hair had been cut even shorter and flipped over to one side, and Erica thought she caught a glimpse of a tattoo partially hidden beneath the hair growth of her undercut.

  “Sorry, breakfast.” She waved the roll in their direction.

  “I hope that’s bacon,” Shawn said.

  She grinned. “Nope, egg and mushroom. I don’t eat meat.”

  “You don’t eat meat, but you spend all day cutting up dead people?”

  “I like animals more than people.”

  He shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  Kim beeped herself into the examination room and continued to take bites out of her roll. Erica and Shawn exchanged a glance, and Erica pulled a face. Kim was clearly used to the smell.

  The surgical table closest to them was covered in a sheet, the bumps and shadows alluding to what lay beneath. Kim finished chewing the last mouthful of her breakfast and walked up to the table. She removed the sheet to reveal the naked body of a girl beneath, her torso sporting the telltale Y-incision used to open the breast plate.

  “Our victim is a Caucasian female of five feet six inches, fifty-eight kilos. I’d put her at being between fifteen to nineteen years of age. She was killed somewhere between eleven p.m. Monday and four a.m. on Tuesday.”

  Erica picked up on something. “Killed? You don’t think we’re looking at a suicide case then?”

  Kim turned to her. “I believe she was murdered. She didn’t do this to herself.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The amount of blood loss from these cuts for one. When they happened, her heartbeat had already slowed and was close to stopping. There’s no way she could have made such precise cuts while she was almost unconscious.”

  “But what caused her heart to stop?” Shawn asked.

  “That was puzzling me for some time, too. Other than the multiple cuts, which were not the cause of death, since they were all superficial, I was stumped. It wasn’t until the tox screen came back and showed an overdose of fentanyl in her system that I understood what killed her.”

  “Fentanyl,” Erica checked. “That’s an opioid, like morphine, right?”

  “That’s right. It’s a synthetic opioid used for chronic pain and it’s a very powerful drug, normally given in patches or in tablets, lozenges, or as a nasal spray. It can be injected, but that would normally only be done in a hospital setting.”

  “So it’s possible whoever did this has access to medicines.”

  “I’d like to say yes, but unfortunately anyone can get anything these days, if they know how to use the dark web, or have the right contacts.”

  Erica knew that to be true.

  Kim continued. “In the case here, I was confused at first, because I couldn’t find an injection site, but then I realised why.” She moved around the table and went to the inside of the girl’s elbow. “Do you see these cuts? Initially, I thought that’s all they were, but then I realised they’d also been used to disguise the injection site.”

  Erica shook her head. “Why would someone do that?”

  “To make it appear as though she did this to herself?” Kim said.

  “And we did consider that possibility,” Shawn pointed out.

  Kim moved around the table. “I’d guess that whoever did this was hoping that would happen. If the cuts had been done while she’d still been fully conscious, there’s a possibility we might have still thought that.”

  The idea of the poor girl being cut up while she was still conscious chilled Erica. She hoped the teenager hadn’t suffered too badly.

  “Something I did find interesting,” Kim said, “was that, other than the cuts, there aren’t any defensive marks. No scratches, or even bruising from where she might have been grabbed and held tightly. I was able to extract dirt from beneath her nails, but so far no DNA, other than her own.”

  “She didn’t fight whoever killed her?” Erica checked.

  Kim shook her head. “From the lack of defensive marks, I doubt it.”

  Erica couldn’t help the disbelief in her tone. “Do you think she let someone do this to her?”

  “Not necessarily. She may have been incapacitated in another way, for example, with the fentanyl, though someone would have had to really know what they were doing, in that case. To administer the right dosage just to sedate someone would need a professional.”

  Erica turned to Shawn. She knew he was thinking the same thing; it would help to narrow their list of suspects, once they had one.

  Kim continued. “There’s no sign of any form of sexual abuse, or even sexual activity. No semen or saliva was found on the body.”

  “You think she might have been a virgin?” Erica asked.

  “It’s possible, yes, though it’s almost impossible to tell for sure these days. We’re not living in the eighteen hundreds anymore where girls were protected from all things physical. Cycling, swimming, horse-riding can all tear or stretch the hymen.” Kim glanced up at her. “Why do you think it’s important?”

  “The marks cut into her skin seem ritualistic to me, though my detectives have been searching online for any that match, and we haven’t come up with anything yet.”

  Kim pursed her lips. “They’re not something I recognise either, but they do resemble symbols of some kind. Do you think her being a virgin might play into that?”

  Erica huffed air out through her nose. “Possibly, but then maybe I’ve watched too many horror films.”

  “Who needs horror films in our job,” Shawn commented. “The things people do to each other in real life is bad enough.”

  Kim pointed at one of the marks on the victim’s arm. “The cuts were done with a very fine blade, most likely a scalpel rather than a knife.”

&nbs
p; Erica leaned in closer. “Could that point towards a medical setting again?”

  “Possibly, but like I said, people can get anything online these days if they know where to look.”

  “One thing I noticed,” Kim continued, “was that she was killed not long after she’d eaten. Her stomach contents were some kind of milky coffee and rice and raw fish. I assume before it was partially digested, it was sushi.”

  Erica frowned. That didn’t quite ring true with her. “But you believe she died in the early hours of the morning? What was she doing drinking coffee and eating sushi at that time?”

  Kim shrugged. “I’m not sure, but the food is almost completely undigested, which suggests she ate within an hour or so of her death.”

  “Could it have been a date?” Shawn suggested. “Maybe she went out for dinner with someone right before she was killed?”

  Erica glanced his way. “Possibly, but who drinks coffee at that time?”

  “Someone who wants to stay awake?” He grinned. “Maybe she worked for the Met.”

  Erica couldn’t help but smile at his joke, despite the circumstances.

  She changed the topic slightly. “What about any distinguishing marks that we could use to identify her? Any tattoos or birthmarks?”

  “Yes, both. She has a birthmark on her left elbow.” Kim twisted the victim’s arm slightly so they could see. “And she has a small tattoo on the inside of her wrist.”

  Erica was hoping to see a date they might be able to use, but the tattoo was of a small line of birds taking flight.

  “I’ve taken photographs and uploaded them for you,” Kim said.

  “Thanks.” Erica turned to Shawn. “Anything else we need to ask while we’re here?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I can think of.”

  “Okay, thanks for your time, Lucy. If anything else crops up, don’t hesitate to call me.”

  Kim saw them to the door, each of them removing their protective outerwear as they went.

  “I hope you’re able to identify her soon. Someone must be missing her.”

  Erica offered the other woman a grateful smile. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”