A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

‘Stay right here, Karl. Oversee the APTs and Scientific Support.’

  Detective Sergeant Terry Mason walked past the body and looked at the mudflats as Sergeant Paul Price continued taking pictures of the woman’s body.

  ‘What are you thinking, Terry?’ asked Clay.

  ‘I’m thinking this is the crime scene from Hell,’ replied Mason. ‘If there was any evidence around the body it’s probably been washed away and could be anywhere between the Pier Head and the Irish Sea. Sorry to be so negative, but that’s the reality of it.’

  Clay stood up and, taking out her mobile phone, dialled Detective Sergeant Gina Riley on the shore.

  ‘I can see you from the promenade, Eve. What’s happening?’

  ‘I think the victim may well be from Liverpool.’

  ‘OK?’

  Clay heard a sliver of doubt beneath the neutral tone of Riley’s voice.

  ‘How do I know? A woman’s body was found in water in Warrington earlier this year. If this is what I’m pretty sure it is, our victim’s a girl local to us. Either on the Wirral or somewhere within a mile of here in the South Liverpool suburbs, Aigburth, Mossley Hill or the Sefton Park district.’

  ‘I know the case you mean. Warrington Police got nothing on the perpetrator. It was like she’d been abducted, murdered and dumped by the Invisible Man.’

  With deepening dismay, Clay remembered the same, looked at the pool of water surrounding the body and the rock that propped her up.

  ‘Gina, we need to know who this is. Can you please get in touch with Barney Cole and ask him to trawl through missing persons, Liverpool, recent weeks, female, blonde, twenty to forty years of age.’

  ‘I’ll do that right now, Eve.’

  ‘And line up victim liaison. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain we’re going to be breaking the worst news possible to her next of kin before today’s out. Thank you, Gina.’

  Clay closed down the call.

  She called, ‘Paul?’

  Sergeant Price stopped taking pictures and looked at

  Clay.

  ‘I’m going to lift her head. I want you to take pictures of the back of her head, please.’

  Clay slid the fingers of both hands between the muddy rock and the back of the victim’s head. The backs of her hands felt grainy and wet as they slid along the mud, and her fingers sensed the contours of the skull beneath the muscle.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Clay beneath her breath as she lifted the woman’s head from the rock. She looked at the back of her skull, at the thin wet muscles covering the bone and the skin at the base of her throat.

  ‘Paul, place a light on the skin beneath her jawline, on her throat.’

  As torchlight hit skin, Clay saw the rough smudges around her throat and said, ‘Strangulation, same MO as Warrington.’

  In a handful of seconds, she went through the killer’s logic: Strangulation, up close and personal, and full of sadistic joy, feeling the life drain out through his fingertips and thumbs.

  Clay lowered the woman’s head back into the water and noticed that Detective Sergeant Terry Mason looked like a man seeking for a wafer-thin slice of meaning in a storm of chaos.

  ‘Terry?’ she called.

  ‘It’s literally and metaphorically a fucking washout, Eve.’

  It was only the third time in fifteen years she had heard Mason swear. She looked at the mortuary van on the promenade.

  ‘The Anatomical Pathology Technicians, Terry?’

  ‘They might as well come down and pick her up right now.’

  ‘I’ll make that call, Eve,’ said Stone.

  In the sky, the finger of hazy light was widening, stretching out at either end, and Clay faced a grim conclusion.

  ‘Karl, come on, there’s nothing we can do here. I need to talk to the constables who found her.’

  She walked back towards the concrete steps that she had just climbed down.

  ‘Terry, as soon as the ATPs leave here, call me. I’ll meet them at the mortuary as she arrives there.’

  Clay took out her iPhone and dialled Detective Constable Barney Cole. As he connected the call in the incident room at Trinity Road police station, Clay heard his voice but was lost in the woman’s dead eyes staring from the raw muscles that once opened her missing lids.

  ‘Eve… Eve? Eve, are you there, Eve?’

  ‘Barney, when you’ve finished your trawl through missing persons, I need you to contact Warrington Police. Ask them for everything they’ve got on Sandra O’Day, the River Irwell victim, August, this year. I need to speak to the SIO on that case. Roll the ball as fast as you can, Barney.’

  2

  7.15 am

  From the front of her car, Clay watched two police constables walking past the larger-than-life statue of a bright orange bull looking in the direction of the River Mersey, a huge art installation aptly named Sitting Bull.

  I wish you could speak, Sitting Bull, thought Clay. And those blind and unblinking eyes of yours could see.

  She smiled briefly at the memory of a warm day last spring when she and Thomas had helped Philip to climb up Sitting Bull’s back, how intoxicated with happiness her son had been and how bleakly anxious she had felt, fearing in case he fell down on to the concrete below.

  Clay heard a tapping at the window and snapped back into the moment. She opened the window and weighed up the constables: PC Wendy White, late thirties, a Teflon veteran, and PC Thomas Ruddock, early twenties, rattled by what he’d seen, gazing at Clay as if she were some mythical creature.

  ‘Get yourselves into the back please. And thank you for what you’ve done here.’

  As they settled into the back of Clay’s car, they brought in the coldness of the morning, and Clay hit the overhead light to dispel the bleakness of the new day.

  She turned, looking each of them directly in the eyes as she introduced herself.

  ‘I’m DCI Eve Clay…’

  ‘I know, I know you are,’ said PC Ruddock. ‘And can I just say…’

  ‘All right, Tom,’ said PC White. ‘Listening time.’

  ‘Thank you, PC White,’ said Clay, drinking in the hint of a smile in the female constable’s steely eyes. ‘I’ll begin with you, PC White. And then I’ll ask you questions, PC Ruddock. OK?’

  ‘That’s good,’ said PC White.

  ‘Wendy. Please go right back to the beginning of what happened. Tell me everything.’

  ‘We were patrolling Riverside Drive from midnight onwards. There’s been a spate of burglaries on the houses across the way from the Festival Gardens, thieves breaking into houses through the early hours. That was our brief,’ said PC White. ‘Stop any cars and pedestrians heading away from the estate.

  ‘We were driving back from the tip at the bottom of Jericho Lane for the umpteenth time when a call came through from switchboard. There’d been a call from a man on Otterspool Promenade around the Mersey Road area. He said he thought he’d seen a dead body in the river close to Sitting Bull.

  ‘I turned the car round and high-tailed it to the location. I had to come off road and across the grass and down the straight narrow path leading to the prom.

  ‘We went up and down from the gate at the Cressington Promenade end to the path leading up to the Otterspool pub. There was no sign of anyone. We slowed right down and used the headlights to look for blood but there wasn’t a drop on the concrete. I was convinced it was a hoax call and, in my own head, I worked out it had come from the Riverside Drive burglars, pulling us away from their turf.

  ‘I decided we needed to use our headlights to look into the river. The tide was out. That was good. Tom saw something in the mud.’

  ‘Tom?’ said Clay.

  ‘We had the headlights full on to the riverbed. From the corner of my eye, I saw something light-coloured against the darkness. I thought it was, like, maybe, an animal, a washed-up animal. The caller got it wrong maybe. I said to Wendy, we need to check this out, there’s something in the mud. We got as close as we could to the rai
lings and hit the lights fully on in the direction of… the thing. I got out and walked up to the railings. I saw flesh tones and the shape of a body. It was a naked human body. I called but there was no reply. The victim looked stone dead. There was no way he or she was alive.’

  ‘I asked Tom to climb over the railings and down the concrete steps so he could get a look from ground level,’ said White.

  Clay saw the rising emotion in the young constable’s eyes.

  ‘I still feel emotional when I see a murder victim,’ said Clay.

  Surprise tripped into his eyes. ‘You do?’

  ‘Whatever you’ve got inside right now, bottle it. Never lose sympathy for the victim. Go on, Tom.’

  ‘I took a torch from the boot of the car and got down to the mud by the steps. I managed to get closer via the rocks in the mud. Wendy called to me not to get any closer. There was something wrong with the head. I could see from the shape of the body that the victim was female.’ He looked at his colleague. ‘There was no chance of saving her. And Wendy said we didn’t want to contaminate any evidence if there was any.’

  ‘That’s when we called in for help,’ concluded White.

  ‘Have either of you got anything to add?’ asked Clay.

  ‘No,’ said White as Ruddock shook his head.

  ‘Thank you for this, you’ve done very well, both of you.’ She looked directly at PC Ruddock. ‘The tide’s due back in within the hour. She could have been lost to us for ever.’

  ‘Yes, Tom,’ said White. ‘Well done. Deals don’t come much bigger than this.’

  Clay could feel the glow of PC Ruddock’s pride and the maternal affection just beneath PC White’s tough exterior.

  ‘You didn’t see any sign of anyone else in the vicinity?’ checked Clay.

  ‘No,’ said White. ‘We stayed in place to protect the body.’

  Clay got out of the car and opened the back door on PC White’s side. As the constables got out, she asked, ‘You’re based at Admiral Street, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch with Chief Superintendent Frankins. Great work.’

  As they walked away, a spark ignited a flame inside her head and, where memory had recently failed her, she recalled the lazy, summer drama of the tabloid press.

  ‘The killer has a name of sorts. The killer is human but the name isn’t.’

  It came to her like a curse through the river-bound fog.

  ‘The name of the killer is The Ghoul.’

  3

  8.44 am

  Alone in the incident room on the top floor of Trinity Road police station, Detective Constable Barney Cole, muscular and on the verge of middle age, looked at the landline phone on his desk and saw that half an hour had passed since the duty superintendent in Warrington had told him she’d get back to him within ten to twenty minutes.

  Cole looked down at the map of the north-west of England spread across his desk and willed the phone to ring.

  He picked up the black marker pen he’d already used to make a dot on the map. Warrington. A black dot on the River Irwell near the Moore Nature Reserve, dated 08/2021.

  Cole looked at the map and stopped at the point at Otterspool Promenade where he’d learned a second body had been discovered, deposited on the mud. He dotted the place and dated it 12/2021.

  Cole tried to visualize lines between the two highlighted places to establish the beginning of some pattern but he just couldn’t see one.

  He heard the door to the incident room open, continued gazing at the map, saw the blue of the water, and wondered, with grim certainty that it would happen, where the next body would show up.

  ‘Planning your holidays?’ asked Detective Sergeant Karl Stone, heading into the kitchen area in the corner of the open-plan room.

  ‘Something like that, Karl,’ replied Cole, taking the marked map to the glass noticeboard and putting it up with Blu-Tack. ‘You sound cold, matey.’

  ‘It’s bloody freezing down at the prom. Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘Get by the radiator. I’ll make it for you.’

  Dressed in a black overcoat that looked three sizes too big for him, to Cole’s eyes, Stone was the human incarnation of a vulture.

  As Stone headed for the warmth and Cole to the kitchen, their paths crossed.

  ‘Any more from Otterspool Promenade?’ asked Cole.

  ‘Young female victim. Water. Forensic nightmare. It’s a repeat performance.’

  ‘How far from the promenade itself was she discovered?’

  Cole spooned coffee into two cups, heard the rising rumble of the kettle.

  ‘It took Eve two and a half minutes to get from the shore to the body but it was like she was walking in quicksand. I’d estimate sixty metres.’

  Cole glanced over his shoulder as he poured hot water into the cups. Stone had his back to him and was looking at the map.

  ‘I’ve got pictures from the scene,’ said Cole. ‘But what was she like in reality?’

  ‘She looked half-human,’ said Stone. ‘From the neck up, she looked like someone had grafted an alien head on to a human body. I won’t forget it as long as I live.’

  As Cole walked over to Stone, his sympathy for his colleague intensified, knowing that he had a wife and two sons to go home to and all that awaited Stone at the end of a bad day was an empty flat and a history of broken relationships to dwell on.

  Cole handed Stone a cup of coffee and looked out as daylight oozed over the Mersey Estuary, in the direction of Warrington.

  He sat down at his desk, picked up a printed-out image of the Otterspool Promenade victim’s skinned face and scalped head and was glad he hadn’t been like Stone, an eyewitness to the carnage.

  The phone on Cole’s desk rang out. He snatched up the receiver, hit speakerphone and turned on record on his iPhone.

  ‘DC Barney Cole speaking, Merseyside Constabulary.’

  ‘Duty Superintendent Kate Johnson, Warrington Con­stab­u­lary.’

  ‘Thank you for getting back to me, Superintendent Johnson.’

  ‘I’m going to send you everything we’ve got on our River Irwell victim. I’ll send you a test email. Her name was Sandra O’Day. She was reported missing on August 1st and showed up dead on August 11th. The pathologist said she’d been dead for four or five days before she’d been discovered in the river.’

  A bell rang in Cole’s head as he went on to his emails on his laptop, and watched as Superintendent Johnson’s test email came through.

  ‘How are we doing, Barney?’

  ‘All good,’ said Cole, replying Thank you to the email.

  ‘Who’s the SIO at your end?’ asked Superintendent Johnson.

  ‘DCI Eve Clay.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘Oh, that’s such bad news for The Ghoul. And good news for us. Tell her I’m calling a meeting of everyone involved in the case. The SIO our end’s DCI Dave Ferguson.’

  ‘You’ve just answered the question I was going to ask you next.’ As he spoke, Cole wrote the name Dave Ferguson on his notepad. ‘DCI Clay has asked me to ask you if DCI Ferguson can make it over to Trinity Road police station so we can pick his brains.’

  ‘I’ll contact him for you right now.’

  Cole listened. In Warrington Police Station on Arpley Street, a door opened and a voice spoke with rising urgency.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Barney. We’ll be in touch.’

  As Cole opened the first email and the PDF attached to it, he felt Stone’s presence at his back, moving over him with slow, steady stealth.

  The screen of his laptop was filled with an image from the River Irwell from the tail end of the previous summer, a picture of Sandra O’Day’s remains, her bloated body half in the water, the top half caught up on the bank, a dead woman without a face or a scalp.

  ‘What does he do with their faces and scalps?’ asked Stone.

  ‘Time will tell,’ replied Cole, focusing on the next job Clay had asked him to do
as she stood in the mud on the bottom of the River Mersey: finding out if any women from Liverpool in their twenties to forties, blondes to begin with, had been reported missing in the last two weeks.

  4

  8.51 am

  Edgar McKee turned back the left-hand sleeve of his white tunic and saw that it was getting on for nine o’clock. The time was near for two significant arrivals into the Stanley Abattoir.

  The smudge of a cheap and ill-advised tattoo chipped into his line of vision and, not for the first time, he regretted having invaded his own flesh with ink and needle.

  The noise of the machinery revving up for the day’s labour was deadened by the red ear defenders sitting either side of the mesh that kept his hair where it should be and off the flesh of the beasts he had to process that day. He scratched his head, felt the velcro-like hooks of the hairs on his scalp irritate his fingertips.

  He looked out of the tall window overlooking Old Swan and saw the cattle truck turning into the abattoir compound from Prescot Road.

  Breathing in the disinfectant that the night cleaners had doused the walls and the floors with, and the chemicals used to sanitise the equipment from the beginning to the end of the killing and carving process, he could smell yesterday’s butchery beneath the surface, and beneath that the butchery of decades.

  As the cattle truck backed in to the reception area, Edgar removed his ear defenders and listened hard to what lay beneath the immediate noises around him.

  He closed his eyes and pictured the scene, the job he had first worked on in his early days in the abattoir, the meet and greet role.

  The tailgate opened and down the ramp came the first of the dumb cattle, eyes accustomed to open spaces and barns confused by the brick and concrete reception area. They lowed as the procession of flesh was sucked into the abattoir’s gaping jaws.

  Edgar felt his pulse thicken and his heart beat faster as memory collided with the sound of the present, the cattle’s disharmonious voices in the distance beneath the immediate and insistent thrum of the machinery close at hand.

  The leading cow moved into a bottleneck from which there was no turning back, the head of the cow behind her nudging her tail. Onwards and with no way back, the confusion in their eyes turned to fear and panic, and the emotion in the herd was contagious, registering in their voices, the lowing translating into blind terror, the sounds of extreme anguish bottled up in the confined space in which there was only one way to go: forward.