by M A Comley
Chapter 1
Lorne had just finished showering when her mobile rang. She called out for Tony to answer it.
He opened the bathroom door and handed her the phone. “It’s the control room.”
“Damn. Thanks, hon.” Lorne swiftly dried her hand and took her mobile from him. She placed it close to her ear, careful not to get it wet. “DI Warner. How can I help?”
“Sorry to trouble you so early, ma’am, but we have a rather nasty murder on your patch.”
“Okay, why am I not surprised? Seems to be the norm these days. Give me the details.”
Tony was standing next to her, a pen and notebook in his hands. Lorne pushed the speaker button. He took down the details as the controller gave her the information.
“A warehouse down by Canary Wharf. It’s earmarked for construction, ma’am. The site manager was checking the interior and discovered the body, or what’s left of it.”
“Okay, give me the coordinates for the satnav, and I’ll make my way over there. Do me a favour and ring DS Katy Foster. Ask her to join me at the location. Has the pathologist been informed?”
“My colleague is ringing your partner now. And yes, the pathologist is en route to the scene.”
Tony jotted down the postcode.
“Thanks for that.” Lorne ended the call and turned to Tony. “So much for easing back into work gently on Monday morning. Bye-bye pleasurable weekend. Hello, gruesome murder victim.”
Tony laughed. “It’s all in a day’s work for you, love. You know where I am if you need any assistance.”
“Are you and Joe scrabbling around for work again?” Lorne asked as she finished drying herself. He followed as she left the bathroom and walked back into their bedroom. She opened the wardrobe door and extracted the first suit she laid her hands on. “This will have to do. I don’t have time to rummage around.”
“Any of your suits are good enough to attend a murder scene. To answer your question—yes, Joe and I are struggling again. Oh, we’ve got the odd marital dispute that we can dip our toes into, but we’ve been hoping, or should I say praying, that something far meatier comes our way.”
“You mean like the Emma Lansbury case you helped out on?”
“Yeah, that type of thing. Never mind, hey, maybe I should consider joining the force. That way, we’d have three coppers in the house. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Lorne stepped into her trousers. “Er, no, it would not. Don’t you think two coppers are enough?”
“Just a thought. Charlie seems to be a different person since she started at the station.”
“You’re not wrong there. I think she’s enjoying her role, not that I’ve had much time to sit down with her and talk to her lately to ask how she’s getting on. If she’s not working, she’s out with Brandon.”
“They’re in love. Leave them alone.”
Lorne smiled. “I know. It’s lovely to see. There was a time, not so long ago, that I feared she would never be able to cope in a relationship after what she’s been through over the years. I’m glad she’s proved me wrong. Maybe we could ask her and Brandon if they fancy going out on a double date sometime.”
Tony’s eyes widened. “Now I know you’re winding me up.”
“I am not. What makes you say that?”
He shook his head, a smile touching his lips. “Look at it from their point of view. How would you have liked it if your parents had suggested the same thing when you were Charlie’s age?”
“Crikey, you’re right. The trouble is, I still feel as though I’m in my teens and find it difficult to comprehend that I’m getting old.”
Tony stepped toward her and gathered her in his muscular arms. “We both are, love.” He kissed the top of her head then her lips.
Lorne slapped his arm and pulled away from him. “Get that glint out of your eye. I don’t have time this morning.”
He laughed. “Worth a try.”
Lorne studied her appearance in the dressing-table mirror. Stretching the slack skin around her eyes, she complained, “I’m sure those wrinkles weren’t there yesterday.” She looked up at Tony, who was shaking his head.
“You’re being silly. You’re still as beautiful and look as young as the first day I laid eyes on you all those years ago.”
She chuckled. “All of what? Eleven or twelve years?” She ran a comb through her shoulder-length hair and headed for the door. “I better give breakfast a miss. The girl on control hinted at it being a gruesome one.”
Tony followed her down the stairs and waved her off at the back door, their German shepherd, Sheba, sitting loyally by his side.
Lorne started the car’s engine and entered the coordinates into the satnav. Once the calculation was complete, she noted the journey time. “Forty minutes. Great, I hope I don’t get snarled up in the morning traffic.” She gave Tony a final wave and pulled out of the drive. She punched in the number four on her mobile. “Hi, it’s me.”
“Are you nearly there?” asked her partner, Katy.
“Not bloody likely. I’m just setting off. Ringing up to tell you I’m around forty minutes away from the scene. How far are you?”
“Half that, but the damn traffic is bad. Why the heck we have to get a bloody call-out first thing in the morning, I’ll never know. Keep in touch.”
“I will. Drive carefully.”
“Ditto,” Katy replied before the phone went dead.
To her annoyance, it was almost an hour before Lorne arrived at the warehouse. Katy was sitting in her car, keeping dry, awaiting Lorne’s arrival.
Lorne placed her coat over her head, shielding her from the heavy rain, and together, she and Katy crossed the rough terrain to join the pathologist and her team inside the building. Fortunately, the roof over where the body was situated was intact. However, rain was pouring into the building in several patches. Lorne and Katy managed to dodge the gaping holes as they walked towards Patti.
“Don’t come any closer, ladies, not without the necessary on. The crime scene is spread across a fair few feet.” Patti pointed to a black holdall off to one side. “Help yourselves.”
After getting suited and booted in the latest crime-scene fashion accessories, they joined Patti. Lorne looked down at the victim, who was sitting upright in a chair, and winced. “Glad I decided to give breakfast a miss this morning. God, that’s bloody macabre.”
“Someone tortured this man for hours by the looks of things,” Patti agreed, nodding.
Katy’s mouth gaped open as she pointed at the man’s fingers lying on the ground, next to his lower legs. When she finally found her voice, she asked, “Someone cut him to pieces while he was still alive?”
“Hard to believe, right?” Patti said. “But the proof is there, in the amount of blood lying, or should I say sprayed, around.”
“Gosh, that’s barbaric. I haven’t seen anything this gory since…” Lorne shook her head, refusing point-blank to voice her worst nemesis’s name.
The other two women looked her way, and it was clear in their eyes that they knew whom she was referring to. “I think this was a personal attack, in that whoever is responsible knew the victim.”
“My God. The lengths people will go to. What is wrong with some people? Why not shove a knife in someone’s gut or put a bullet in their head and be done with it? Why go to these extremes?” Lorne shook her head and surveyed the bloody scene. Blood, most of which appeared to have come from the man’s legs, surrounded the chair. She looked away and cleared her throat. “There’s only one word for the type of person capable of doing this—psycho! They must be sick in the head, a depraved individual.”
“I wholeheartedly agree with you,” Patti said. “I’ve had an initial hunt around and haven’t managed to find any ID on the victim. There were no other vehicles outside when we arrived, either.”
“Either someone abducted him and brought him here with this in mind, or perhaps there is more than one culprit and they took his car, likely dumping it els
ewhere,” Lorne said, thinking out loud.
“More than one culprit?” Katy asked.
“If the culprit arrived in his own car, he’d have to dump the vic’s car then come back to pick up his own vehicle. Purely speculation on my part at this early stage.”
“Makes sense to me,” Patti agreed.
“Want me to get uniform out here to search the area? His vehicle could be close by,” Katy suggested.
“Waste of resources doing it now. Let’s hang fire on that for a few days until we can ID the victim.” Lorne surveyed the victim’s wounds again. “Patti, any idea at this point what the likely instrument of torture was?”
“I’m thinking along the lines of a chainsaw.”
Lorne puffed out her cheeks as bile rose in her throat. “It gets worse. That poor man. I wonder what he did to enrage someone enough to make them want to resort to this.”
Patti shrugged. “Only time will tell on that one, Lorne. Do you need to take any photos?”
“I think we should, only a headshot, though. Thankfully, that’s still in one piece.” Lorne withdrew her phone from her pocket and took several photos of the victim from different angles.
“Maybe they were disturbed. Not wishing to appear bloodthirsty when I say this, but why do you think they stopped at cutting his fingers off and removing his legs below the knee?” Katy asked, moving to one side so Lorne could get a different angle of the corpse.
“Fair point,” Patti said. “Either way, the man suffered intolerable pain before his heart finally gave up.”
“It truly doesn’t bear thinking about,” Lorne replied, placing her phone in her pocket again. “Anything else we should know about, Patti?”
“Not really. I’m about finished with my initial examination. Think it would be better if we bag all the bits up and get back to the lab. I want to start the PM right away if possible.”
“I know I’m teaching you how to suck eggs here, but will you do the necessary and try and get a DNA match ASAP?”
“You read my mind. I’ll get the lab on that as soon as we return.”
“Here’s a daft question. I don’t suppose there’s evidence of him having a wedding ring on one of his fingers?”
“Not daft at all. I looked, couldn’t see anything. It’s not obligatory, I know, especially not these days, but there are also some trades where it’s deemed too dangerous to wear one.”
“That’s really insightful, Patti. You’re talking about manual labour, right? Or at least working with dangerous machinery in case the ring gets churned up in the mechanisms?”
“Just something I’ve learned to look out for over the years. It might help your initial investigation.”
Lorne smiled, grateful for the heads-up. “Okay, we’ll leave you to get on with things and have a quick scout around the perimeter before we leave.”
“I promise I’ll get back to you either this afternoon or tomorrow with the PM report.”
“You’re an absolute star.” Lorne turned on her heel and retraced her steps back through the warehouse with Katy close beside her.
“Other than the state the body was in, I can’t see anything else that might help with the investigation.”
“So, where do we go from here?” Katy asked, looking out at the terrain surrounding them.
“Haven’t got a clue. It’s definitely one of the more unusual cases we’ve stumbled across. Usually, we have an ID to guide us. No such luck on this one.”
Katy’s brow furrowed. “Why did you take the pic of the vic?”
“Maybe we’ll need to get in touch with the missing persons department in a few days.”
“I’m with you. It’s odd that they didn’t dismember him completely. Maybe the culprit or culprits did it intentionally—stopped, I mean.”
Lorne nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time a suspect has done something with the intention of leading the investigation down a long and winding road.”
“That’s true enough.”
“Let’s leave things at that for now and get to the station. I’m in dire need of a caffeine fix.”
“I take it we won’t be stopping off at the baker’s to pick up supplies en route?”
“You gather correctly, partner. I think my stomach would soon object. Actually, I doubt I’m going to eat for the rest of the day after witnessing that brutality.”
Chapter 2
The rest of the team, DS Karen Titchard and DS Graham Barlow, were hard at work when Katy and Lorne walked into the incident room. “Morning, guys. Well, Katy and I had a truly gruesome start to our day. I’ll just grab a coffee and bring you both up-to-date with what we have so far. How is the investigation going into the case you’re both working on?”
“We’re still typing up the reports, boss. Should be completed by lunchtime, if we’re lucky,” Karen replied, not looking up from her screen as her fingers flew across the keyboard.
“Good to hear. I think once this case gets under way, we’ll need all hands on deck for this one.” Lorne placed a fifty-pence piece in the machine and selected a white coffee with one sugar.
Katy joined her.
“White with one, partner?”
“Please.”
“Grab that. I’ll have the next one. I suppose I better see what’s lurking on my desk first before we start on the real police work.”
“Anything in particular you want me to do?”
Lorne chewed the inside of her mouth as she thought. “I think it’ll be too soon, but can you do me a favour and check with missing persons, see if there are any recent reports listed with them?”
“Recent as in the past twenty-four hours?”
“Go back three or four days, just to be on the safe side. If there’s nothing”—Lorne withdrew her phone from her pocket—“download a decent photo of the deceased and send it over to them. Ask them to get in touch if any reports come in within the next day or two.”
Katy’s mouth twisted a little. “What if the victim’s next of kin is unaware he’s missing?”
Lorne shrugged. “Let’s cover all the bases from the outset, just in case.” She walked into the office and felt sad when she didn’t smell the familiar waft of Pete’s aftershave. Where are you, matey? I could sure do with some guidance on this case. She glanced around the office, looking for a sign that he was around. Seeing nothing, she sat down behind her desk and tore open the first of a dozen brown envelopes vying for her attention.
It contained notification of yet more cutbacks the Met was about to experience in the coming months. She shook her head in disgust and prayed that Charlie’s job would be safe, especially as she’d only just joined the force in the last few months. The old adage ‘last in, first out’ sprang to mind.
Lorne feared that if Charlie got laid off so early on in her career, it would put her newfound confidence back years. She made a mental note to have a word with DCI Roberts about the situation. He owed her, after all. If it hadn’t been for Lorne and Tony putting up the ransom money for Emma Lansbury, Roberts’s goddaughter, she doubted the young woman would be walking the streets today. Not everyone thinks along the same lines as me, though, and to be fair, Sean has helped to save Charlie before in her young life.
She sipped her drink before tackling the next envelope. It was getting tougher by the day to be a copper in the UK, and to be honest, she couldn’t see the situation easing or improving anytime soon.
Twenty minutes flew by. She placed the post in the appropriate trays on her desk and left the office.
Katy looked up and signified she wanted a word.
“Any luck?”
Katy’s mouth turned down at the sides. “Not really. I’ve sent them the details, and they’ve promised to get in touch the second anyone new is highlighted on their database. What now?”
Lorne sighed heavily. “We’ll bring Karen and Graham up to speed on the case and then…” She paused, not really knowing what to say next. That was unusual for her, as she normally had an answer for e
verything. At least, that was what Roberts generally took pleasure in throwing at her when she was in the process of pissing him off.
“And then?” Katy prompted.
“I don’t have a clue. I’m open to suggestions on this one, partner.”
Katy’s head shook. “I’m in the same boat as you. Lost for ideas where to go or what to do next.”
“Okay, let’s get the information on the board and go from there. Gather round, ladies and gent.”
Chairs scraped as Karen and Graham moved into position. Lorne ran through what she and Katy had been privy to that morning at the scene of the murder.
“Did you have breakfast before leaving home, boss?” Graham asked.
She shook her head. “Thankfully, I didn’t. This is one of the worst cases of brutality I’ve stumbled across in years. Why? And who tortured that man? Those two questions will be where we need to start on this case. However, our attempts to find the answers will be thwarted for a while until we have obtained an ID on the victim. The pathologist has assured me she’ll try and get his DNA tested and run through the system, but you know as well as I do, if the man doesn’t have a record, the likelihood of coming up with a match will be pretty non-existent.”
Graham shrugged. “So where do we start?”
Lorne sighed heavily. “Other than running a media conference, which I’m loath to do at this early stage, with very little to go on other than discovering the man’s partially dismembered body, all we can do is wait until someone either contacts us or goes through the missing persons department. As the old saying goes, our hands are well and truly tied at present.”
A dark cloud appeared to settle over the incident room.
It was a full two days before that cloud lifted slightly. Around mid-morning on the Wednesday of that week, Lorne was sitting in her office, going through the latest directive from head office regarding staffing levels and possible cuts, when Karen entered the room, wearing a broad smile.
