Call again, he thinks. Talk to me. Let me know what—
Bang!
The noise almost results in two more bodies on the autopsy table, their hearts stopped with the shock. Cody whirls round to see Stroud wielding the short, stocky lump hammer that he has just crashed onto the counter, causing the instrument trays to leap into the air.
‘Jesus!’ says Cody.
Stroud raises the hammer skywards. A poor man’s Thor.
‘Behold the murder weapon,’ says Stroud. ‘Or something very much like it. This one’s from my personal toolbox at home. Last time I used this I was knocking plaster off my bedroom wall.’
Cody says, ‘Too many cracks in it from all the headboard action?’
Stroud smiles, but refuses to be diverted. He moves closer to the body. Brings the end of the hammer to within a millimetre of an indentation in Mary Cowper’s deformed skull.
‘See how well it fits? And these marks on the neck . . .’
He indicates large circular bruises. Demonstrates to the detectives how well the hammer overlaps them.
Cody watches and nods. He thinks about Grace Meade’s assessment earlier in the incident room.
He stretches a hand towards the hammer. ‘May I?’
Stroud hands over the implement. Cody hefts it, feels the weight and solidity. Grace was right: you wouldn’t secrete something like this on your person unless you had the intention of imminently assaulting someone. For self-defence you might carry something small and easy to conceal – a knife, perhaps – but this was intended as an instantaneous means for disabling and then destroying the victim.
‘How many blows?’ says Webley.
An intake of breath from Stroud. ‘Hard to determine, exactly. I’d say at least half a dozen.’
A weapon like this, thinks Cody, just a couple of whacks would have done the trick. There was hate in this killer. A thirst for obliteration rather than a mere desire to end a life.
Says Stroud, ‘But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Shall we begin the formal proceedings?’
Stroud takes the hammer back from Cody, then turns on the overhead microphone. He slips into his precise and objective scientific language as he starts his external examination of the deceased.
Cody stands there observing for as long as he thinks it takes to convince Webley that he’s not going to freak out. He waits until the body has been sliced open and for Mary Cowper’s internal organs to be scooped out before flashing a smile at Webley. She doesn’t fire one back at him, of course.
He wanders off then, deep in thought. He suspects that the post-mortem will not turn up anything else of relevance. He’d bet his salary that Stroud isn’t about to announce that the victim was pregnant, for example. Although her name was Mary, and it is getting close to Christmas. Do all three of the people here count as wise?
He stops at a table on which Mary’s clothes and possessions have been laid out in evidence bags. Little of interest here, although Mary seemed to have been in the habit of stuffing all kinds of junk into her pockets: twelve pence in copper coins; a comb with several missing teeth; two biros; a cheap-looking teardrop-shaped pendant with no chain; a brass button with a sailing ship on it; an empty tissue packet; a mirror that could have come out of a Christmas cracker; an appointment card for the dentist; a half-empty bag of dog treats; and a shopping receipt from Asda – or the Asda, as Yuri Demidov called it.
It seems a desperately sad and incomplete summation of what Mary Cowper was.
So what’s missing?
9
He remembers . . .
He is five years old. Just five. An age that should be filled with innocence and joy and blissful ignorance of the problems of the world at large.
But he is filled with paralysing fear. His milk-white legs tremble beneath the dark wooden slab of the kitchen table.
He is waiting, because that’s what he must do at mealtimes. He must not rise from his chair. Must not question. Must not make a squeak that could be interpreted as any form of dissatisfaction with this simple but unbreakable ritual.
His mother has her back to him, but he can sense the all-too-familiar rigidity in her frame. She has been getting like this more frequently lately. The aggression building up, waiting for any excuse to be unleashed. He doesn’t know what causes her to be this way, but he can always sense it when it’s there. He has learnt to tread softly on these occasions – to make himself as small and unnoticeable as he can be.
But today is especially difficult. He feels sick. Has done since lunchtime. He doesn’t know why. He’s too young to reason about food poisoning or viruses. He just knows he’s unwell.
Worst of all, he knows he will be unable to eat the food his mother is about to place in front of him. The thought of how she might react is making him even sicker.
He goes alternately hot and cold as he sits here. He slides his clammy hands along his bare legs, trying to smooth away the goose pimples. His intestines clench painfully, then slacken with an audible gurgle. The smell of the beeswax on the table makes him want to retch.
His mother brings a casserole out from the oven. She strains to lift the cast-iron dish in her gloved hands. When she removes the lid and places it on the hob with a clang, steam billows into the air and rolls across the kitchen.
He holds his breath for as long as he can, and when he can contain it no longer he tries breathing in through his mouth rather than his nose. But still the food odours manage to announce their presence with little subtlety, and he wants to cry with the effort of holding their effects at bay.
He tries thinking of other things. Nice things. A cartoon he watched earlier on the television. A picture book he likes to look at in bed. His favourite toy car.
Gradually, the waves of nausea subside. He hopes this is the end of it. He’s okay now. He can get through this without incident.
And then his mother brings the food over to him. Sets a huge plate on the raffia placemat before him. It’s running with thick chicken casserole, mounded with creamy mashed potato and green beans. He doesn’t like green beans at the best of times. Right now they are but one tiny element of the torture.
He feels her eyes burning into him, and he manages to dredge up a weak smile of gratitude to appease her. When she turns away to plate up her own meal, he twists his head to divert his senses away from the cause of his discomfort.
The relief is short-lived. His mother returns, and he knows he must act as though all is well.
As usual, she announces that she will say grace. He bows his head, bringing his nose even closer to the steaming food, but it at least gives him the opportunity to close his eyes for a short while, to pretend that it’s not there.
And then it’s time to eat. He can avoid the inevitable no longer.
His mother tucks in, her every movement graceful, precise. He picks up his knife and fork. Starts to herd together some chunks of chicken. He feels the heat rising within him again, the perspiration beading his brow.
It doesn’t take long before she asks him what’s wrong, and when she does it’s delivered in a sharp, accusing tongue that spikes him.
‘Feel sick,’ he tells her. But his voice is small – internal almost.
‘What? Speak up, lad!’
‘Feel sick. I can’t eat my dinner.’
What he would like now – what he desires more than anything else in the world – is the sympathy only a mother can give. Isn’t that what should happen here? Isn’t this where she cuddles him and strokes his hair and tells him everything will be all right?
But that’s not what he gets. What he gets is a venom-filled stare and sub-zero voice that tells him to ‘Eat. Your. Dinner.’
And now he wants to cry. He knows this is just the beginning. He has been here before. It is an impasse. He so wants to do her bidding. He craves her approval. Needs her love. But he physically cannot execute her command. His body won’t allow it, and he hates the fact that he is in this impossible situation. He doesn�
��t know how to deal with it.
He is only five.
‘Can’t,’ he says.
The clatter of his mother’s cutlery being banged onto the table makes him jump. She follows it up with a barrage of questions. What, she asks him, will Jesus think of this? Do you know how important food is? How difficult it is for some people to get enough to eat? Have you heard of the starving people in Africa? All those pot-bellied little children sifting through rubbish heaps and drinking dirty water? Do you know what they would give for just a spoonful of that mashed potato? Do you even care? Well, do you?
He hears the words being spat at him from across the table, and now the tears are flowing and his whole body is trembling. He really doesn’t want to upset his mother, and he doesn’t want to upset Jesus, but he doesn’t know what to do. He has no answers, because this is too hard, life is too hard.
His inaction is the trigger for his mother to come around the table. His impulse is to get out of there, to run away. But he knows from experience that it would only make things worse. She would chase after him and she would catch him and she would drag him screaming to an appointment with her leather belt.
She stands behind and to one side of him. Waits there for what seems an age. He sits on his hard chair, pale and tense, quivering at the thought of what she is going to do to him.
‘Eat,’ she says, her voice quiet but dripping with the threat of retribution if she is disobeyed.
‘Mummy. Please. I can’t.’
A hand reaches out in front of him. Grabs his dessert spoon. Uses it to scoop up some mash.
‘Eat it.’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t want to, Mummy. I feel—’
Her free hand grabs a hunk of his hair. Twists it savagely so that he cries out. And as he opens his mouth she rams the spoon into it.
‘You will eat,’ she says, ‘because the Lord is watching you. He has provided this food and you need to stop being so ungrateful.’
And if that were the end of his lesson, he might be able to cope. But she doesn’t stop there. She fills the spoon again, crams it into his mouth, and he is trying to swallow it, trying not to choke, trying to breathe, but she has found the fervour of her mission now, she is accelerating in her zeal, calling out the name of Jesus as she piles mash and chicken and mushrooms and those hateful green beans into his overflowing mouth, yelling at him about the poor little babies of Africa as she suffocates him with sustenance, drowns him with her beneficence. The shrillness of her voice assaults his ears, cutting off the sound of his own muffled cries, which don’t seem as important to God. Only her voice counts. This is God’s will. She tells him so as she spreads the gelatinous mess across his face, blocking his mouth and his nostrils and his eyes.
And then his body can take no more.
It erupts.
A geyser of food and vomit and saliva and snot shoots out of him. It catches his mother’s hand in mid-delivery. Lands with a heavy splash on his plate and fans out across the table.
He falls silent after that. He wants to sob, to bawl, but he is too afraid. He knows he has done a terrible thing.
But his mother is silent too, and for a brief moment he wonders if she has come to her senses. Perhaps she realises now that he really is ill, and that he doesn’t deserve such meanness. Perhaps she is sorry for her actions.
‘Go to your room,’ she says, her voice calm and quiet once more.
He hears her, but doesn’t quite catch the emotion behind her words. Could that be pity? Affection, even?
He turns to get a look at her face, to search for the truth in her eyes.
‘Sorry, Mummy. I didn’t mean to—’
He is stopped by the sudden contortion of her features. The mutation of her mouth, her eyes, her whole face into a mask of utter contempt and fury. She draws her hand up to the opposite shoulder, as if in readiness to backhand him across the face, and he feels her hot breath and spittle on his skin as she roars at him.
‘GET TO YOUR ROOM!’
He doesn’t need telling twice. He is off that chair faster than if it were red hot. He flies across the kitchen and up the stairs as though his life depends on it. And when he gets to his bedroom and flings himself onto the bed, he pulls the covers up to his neck and cowers, his eyes and ears on the door in case she might be following.
Feeling sick and feverish and alone and unloved, he cannot prevent the tears flowing more freely now. He wipes his eyes on the sheet, but when he pulls his face away he sees that he has smeared the white cotton with dinner and vomit and mucus, and that makes him even more afraid, even more tearful.
Why is this happening? Dear God up there in heaven, why is my mummy always so angry with me? Are you angry with me too? I didn’t mean it. I’m trying to be good. I promise I am.
He prays then. Long, intense prayers while he sniffs and cries. Prays for all the things he is supposed to pray for, including all the starving little children in Africa who have never tasted chicken casserole.
Eventually he falls asleep, still fully clothed.
When the nightmares come to him – this time in the form of a two-headed serpent that keeps coiling itself around his legs and pushing its forked tongue into his mouth – he wakes up shivering and drenched in sweat. The blackness of the room is oppressive, and he thinks there might be other demonic creatures lurking in the corners, and so he begins crying again.
‘Mummy,’ he calls softly. Then louder: ‘Muuummyyy!’
But she doesn’t come.
He is only five years old, and there is an unbearable ache in his chest for the need of his mother.
But she never comes.
10
She waits patiently for her moment to shine.
Putting herself centre stage does not come naturally to Grace. Her stomach churns at the prospect of it. But she will force herself to do it, just as she did earlier in the day. It’s the life she has chosen.
She nearly backed out of it this morning. She listened to all these seasoned detectives discussing the case and she thought to herself, I am not one of them. I am just a civilian. Not one of the elite. They don’t want to hear my voice, my views.
She could easily just have knocked on Blunt’s door. Presented her findings in private, quietly and without ceremony, and then left it to Blunt to use them in whatever way she saw fit.
But she has decided she needs to be more assertive, more attention-seeking. She deserves respect. She is worth that much.
Still, that walk to the front of the incident room seemed to take an eternity. She almost threw up when she got there. All those eyes on her. She dreaded making a mistake, of giving them an excuse to laugh at her.
But afterwards! The exhilaration! She had stunned them with her performance. Left them speechless with admiration. It was worth every second of the gut-twisting anxiety.
And she will do it again. And again. Keep doing it until they see her as one of their first ports of call when they need help in solving a case. She has skills they cannot even imagine.
But it won’t be easy. She is a wallflower. One of life’s unseen. She blends into the background, disappears from people’s vision. Her presence is dismissed almost as soon as she is introduced to others.
That’s how she feels. That’s what needs to change.
I can be interesting, she thinks. I can be fun. I can be a friend. Just give me a chance. Say hello to me when you come in the door. Look in my direction when anyone has a question they can’t answer. Ask me what I’d like to drink when you’re heading out for coffee.
She’s had a lifetime of being left out.
Not sporty enough for many. Too clever for the rest. Always the last to be picked for any team.
Computers became her obsession at a young age. They were her way of exploring worlds few others could visit. She could see and discover things denied to most. That power was the antiseptic to her daily pain.
At school, she soon discovered how to hack into the internal servers. She peeked at th
e reports that teachers wrote about her and other students. She read internal memos. Discovered that one teacher had gone off sick after a nervous breakdown. Learnt that another had left after being accused of sexual misconduct.
She could have looked at exams and tests in advance, but never did. She didn’t need to cheat to excel academically. What would be the point?
She was never malicious either. She never altered or corrupted data. Never deleted files or infected the system with viruses. She saw herself as a ‘white hat’ hacker – her mission being to find ways of improving rather than destroying.
Well, except once.
It was in the sixth form. She discovered that two girls were posting things about her on Facebook. Saying that she was a man in drag, that she killed cats for experimentation at home. Nice things like that.
She cried for days.
And then she got even.
She hacked into the computers of both girls. Found out that one of them had already had sex.
So Grace posted out that information. Using the other girl’s account.
The pair didn’t remain friends for long after that. For Grace, it was a pleasure to watch the relationship disintegrate to the point of physical blows. Grace was no longer of interest to them. It was exactly what she wanted.
She hoped things might improve at university. Hoped for an elevated level of intelligence and liberal thinking that would provide the ideal environment for her. She envisaged herself holding court with a large cohort of friends as they chewed over matters of global importance and scientific relevance. Perhaps she might even enter into a romantic relationship or two.
She was to be disappointed.
It was little better than school. The vast majority of her contemporaries on the computing course were male, and it wasn’t difficult to work out that most of them viewed her as far too nerdy. Even the geeky lads had interests that differed from hers. Try as she might, she could not summon up the same level of fascination as they did for online gaming and Star Wars.
Hope to Die: A gripping new serial killer thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series) Page 6
