Die of Shame

by Mark Billingham

  ‘And no signs of forced entry.’

  ‘Only what the uniforms did,’ Fuller said.

  So, a victim who was trusting enough to let a stranger in, or a killer who was known to them.

  ‘Have we got a name yet?’

  ‘We found a couple of credit cards, got a name from the landlord. You might be able to get a formal ID later on today.’ Fuller gave Tanner the name and Tanner wrote it down.

  ‘Next of kin?’

  ‘The mother’s dead and the father lives up north. He’s on the way down, but like I say, he’s not got a lot left to identify.’

  Tanner knew it would come down to personal effects most probably, dental records to be absolutely sure. The correct way, and the kindest. No father should have to watch a sheet being pulled back, only to find himself staring down at bones and slop.

  ‘A couple of weeks?’ Tanner was scrolling through the pictures again. It never ceased to surprise her just how quickly a human being could be… reduced. Beneath a heavily stained white shirt, a chest collapsed in on itself; exposed flesh creamy at the edges and a glimpse of the cavity, blackened and hollowed out.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And definitely not a missing person?’

  ‘Nope. First thing I checked. Doesn’t appear to have been missed by anyone.’ Fuller sounded busy suddenly, keen to end the call and crack on with something of her own. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  This was what disturbed Nicola Tanner the most, over and above the routine problems that went with the death of someone who lived in isolation. Most people were killed by someone close to them, but where did that leave those conducting the murder investigation when the victim did not appear to be close to anyone?

  She thanked Fuller for the information and ended the call. She began to print out the pictures.

  It was hard to imagine anything more wretched. This was not the natural order of things. A death, especially a violent one, should leave a hole in the lives of the bereaved.

  Tanner trudged across to the printer feeling listless, heavy; nodded back at a colleague whose mouth was moving and whose eyes were turned in her direction.

  A hole in somebody’s life.

  … NOW

  It was at least ten hours since the forensic team had first arrived at the property in Victoria, and the crucial recording, collection and removal of potential evidence had already taken place. Given the choice, Tanner preferred access to an untouched crime scene, at least prior to the removal of the body, but a handover usually meant sloppy seconds. It was not without its benefits, though. There was something to be said for having the freedom to move around on her own, and she didn’t miss the unseemly chit-chat or the stream of tasteless jokes. She was certainly happy enough not to be creeping about, all too aware of her own clumsiness, done up like an oversized infant in a plastic Babygro.

  ‘Going to need a fair few bottles of Mr Muscle to clean that lot up.’

  Sometimes, there was simply no avoiding the chit-chat. It was not Tanner’s strongest suit.

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘Not exactly fragrant in there, either.’ The uniformed officer on duty outside the property seemed keen to continue the conversation, but Tanner kept her head down and went inside.

  It was like a smack in the face, meaty and sickly sweet. Before pulling on nitrile gloves, Tanner dabbed Vicks beneath her nose and began to breathe through her mouth; slow and shallow.

  She put her head round the bedroom door. The bed had been stripped, the wardrobes emptied. It was much the same story in the bathroom, and the whole place might have looked as if it had simply been abandoned in a hurry were it not for the state of the kitchen.

  Broken glass crunched beneath her feet and she nudged a few of the larger shards to one side with the toe of her black brogue. The cupboards and worktops were dusted with fingerprint powder and there was dried soil in the sink from the toppled-over plant pot Fuller had mentioned. The pot itself had been removed, along with almost everything else by the look of it. Tanner could find no cutlery, no drawer containing tea towels or utensils. There were no storage jars, no toaster or knife block, and only a plastic kettle and a manky-looking washing up brush had been left behind. Such wholesale removals were becoming increasingly common. Some forensic teams preferred to take as much away as possible, to run the necessary tests in their own fully equipped laboratory, rather than using portable equipment in what was often limited space.

  Or perhaps it was simply that there hadn’t been a great deal here to begin with.

  After staring at its rotting contents for half a minute, as though trying to figure out how she might knock up a spot of lunch, Tanner closed the fridge and turned to stare down at the human stain on the kitchen floor.

  Ragged and shocking against the dirty white of flaking boards.

  The classic ‘outline’ of a body was only ever seen these days on old film posters or the covers of trashy thrillers. Now there were digital recordings made from every conceivable angle, but who needed chalk anyway, when the human body did a very good job of leaving its mark behind in dried fluids and dead flesh?

  Tanner looked at the brown-black shadow where one arm had been stretched out and the expanse of dried blood that had spread from where the torso had finished up. Fuller was almost certainly right about it being a stabbing. Though the pathologist would be left with little that might indicate defence wounds, Tanner could not help imagining those moments after the victim had first laid eyes on the knife in the killer’s hand.

  A friend or a furious lover. An acquaintance or a stranger welcomed in.

  A scream and a struggle and that terrible realisation. Pots and glasses knocked over or sent crashing to the floor as the victim fought to stay alive. Scrambling, desperate, until there were only bubbles of blood and no breath left to beg with.

  Tanner leaned back against the worktop and it was only then that she noticed a line of small drawings on the wall. Three of them, mounted one above the other in clip-frames next to the kitchen door. She walked across, taking care to avoid the outline of the body.

  They were drawn in felt-tip pen; cartoonish, the borders shaded neatly in bright colours. A scattering of stars and smiley faces decorated a series of uplifting slogans.

  WE SUFFER TO GET WELL

  YOU ARE NOT ALONE

  WE ARE ONLY AS SICK AS OUR SECRETS

  Tanner straightened one of the frames which was hanging skew-whiff. She stood back and looked at them for a while, then left.

  Outside, the uniformed officer said, ‘Any joy?’

  Tanner did not even look at him.

  Back at the office, she looked through an inventory of everything removed from the crime scene, which had been sent across by the evidence officer. The details of what had gone where. Nothing seemed unusual or of particular interest and, in the end, all Tanner really had was a list of items needing to be tested or analysed and there was not a fat lot she could do until the relevant results were in front of her.

  Her partner always said the same thing on the many occasions Tanner found herself in this situation and was complaining about it.

  A nice big plate of wait and see pudding…

  She knew that even with a following wind, there would be no fingerprint results until the next day, so she put a call in to see if the forensic entomologist assigned to the case could provide even an approximate time of death. Dr Liam Southworth was in no mood to be rushed and said as much. Tanner pressed him. She knew that the entomologist’s final report was unlikely to narrow the time of the murder down to a specific day or even a specific few days, so surely a best guess at this stage would not be asking too much. It was, Southworth told her. He was a scientist and he did not believe in guessing.

  Searching around for someone else to bother, Tanner thought about two of the most important items that had been taken from the scene and rang the phone and computer forensic laboratory.

  A technician named Appleton was rather more willing to share a few
preliminary findings than the bug man had been.

  ‘Not much on the computer,’ Appleton said. ‘Well not by the usual standards anyway. Email activity was not heavy, by any means. One of those who didn’t bother to erase spam, so there’s plenty of crap in the inbox, but sent email was sporadic and nothing of any real interest, I don’t think. There’s a Facebook page, but not a lot of activity on there, and there’s not many friends.’

  ‘Nobody on Facebook has any friends, do they?’

  ‘Right, but none of these seem to be actual friends, if you see what I mean. There’s a few private groups visited regularly and most of them seem to be concerned with recovery from addiction. People swapping stories… drugs and booze, you know? Might be of interest.’

  Tanner reached for a notebook and scribbled it down in capitals, the information appearing to confirm something she had already begun to suspect. ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Aside from that, nothing I’ve come across so far is putting up any sort of red flag. Obviously we’re examining the hard drive, but it really doesn’t look like anything’s been hidden.’ There was a pause, a prolonged hum. He was looking through notes. ‘The phone’s a bit more interesting…’

  Tanner said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, the call history’s thrown up a couple of things. Oh… I’m guessing you want to know the time of the last call made?’

  Tanner said that she wanted to know very much and Appleton told her that the last outgoing call had been placed just after ten thirty pm, sixteen days previously.

  ‘Nothing after that, and judging by the pattern of use that’s probably the same night the murder took place, right?’

  ‘Probably. Tell me about the call history. Things thrown up, you said.’

  ‘We’re still checking all the contacts, but in the final week, several calls were made to the same mobile number in the early hours of the morning. None lasted more than a few seconds, so looks like they all went straight to someone’s voicemail. You want me to send all the info across?’

  ‘Sooner the better,’ Tanner said. ‘But you might as well give me that number now.’

  She wrote it down, underlined it.

  ‘There was a diary on the phone as well,’ Appleton said. ‘Unused, except for the same appointment in there every week. No idea what it is, just the same time every Monday night and a name.’

  Tanner took down the name, thanked Appleton for his time and said she’d be expecting his email.

  Sixteen days. She turned back a few pages of her calendar to check when that was and scribbled down the date. She felt like calling that pompous entomologist back, telling him where he could stick his maggots.

  … NOW

  Fifteen minutes after the examination had been completed, Tanner sat down with the pathologist in an office adjacent to the coroner’s at Westminster Mortuary. The room was cramped and chaotic. Files were piled high on several of the cluttered desks, illegible notes scrawled on a dusty whiteboard. A number of charts and health and safety posters had corners that were no longer fixed to the wall: torn or hanging loose.

  Tanner tried not to let it bother her.

  ‘The full report’s going to take a while. Three or four days, probably.’

  ‘For now, I only need the basics.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you that you didn’t hear while I was conducting the examination.’

  ‘I wasn’t taking notes,’ Tanner said.

  ‘OK, I can give you the headlines.’

  ‘Thanks, Philip. I appreciate it.’ She saw the pathologist lean back, failing to stifle a smile. ‘What?’

  ‘How many times have we worked together, Nicola?’

  Tanner thought about it. ‘Six or seven?’

  ‘You’re always so… formal. Only my mum calls me Philip.’

  ‘You think it’s wrong to be formal?’

  ‘I’m just saying. It’s unusual, that’s all.’

  ‘This is a serious business,’ Tanner said. She sat and watched the man in the chair opposite flicking through his notes. She took out her own notebook and a pen while she waited, turned to a clean page.

  ‘Nice notebook. Is that real leather?’

  Philip Hendricks was not Tanner’s favourite pathologist. There was no question about his competence or diligence, but he could be a little… flashy. Quite literally sometimes, if one of his facial piercings caught the light in the post-mortem suite. Who knew how many piercings, tattoos everywhere, the shaved head. It felt showy to Tanner, unnecessary. It seemed wholly unsuitable considering the nature of his job.

  ‘So, we’re looking at a body that’s well past bloat and somewhere between decay and post-decay stages,’ Hendricks said. ‘Time of death isn’t down to me on this one.’

  ‘I’ve already spoken to Dr Southworth,’ Tanner said.

  Another half-smile. ‘Yeah, he told me you’d called yesterday, pestering him.’

  ‘I was hardly pestering him.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Hendricks pulled a face, like he was unconvinced.

  Tanner hid her irritation. It was normal for the entomologist and the pathologist to confer, but something about the pair of them talking about her… bitching about her, disturbed Tanner. ‘As it happens we have a reasonably accurate time of death now, so Dr Southworth can take as long as he likes.’ She waited for Hendricks to look at her. ‘The victim’s phone.’

  ‘O2 are putting us out of a job.’ Hendricks smiled and went back to his notes.

  ‘Multiple stab wounds,’ he said. ‘Three at least. One in the back, though it’s hard to say if it was the first one or not, with the fatal wound puncturing the right ventricle. Death from a combination of external blood loss and haemothorax, which is a build-up of blood between the chest wall and the lung. Am I going too fast?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Death would have been a matter of minutes.’

  Tanner did not look up from her notebook. ‘Right-handed, left-handed?’

  ‘Wounds to the upper right chest would usually tend to indicate a right-hander. Impossible to say.’

  ‘How forceful would you say the stabbing was?’

  ‘Forceful enough.’

  ‘Frenzied?’

  Hendricks thought about it. ‘No slashings… well, none deep enough to mark bones, anyway. In and out.’ He formed a fist and demonstrated. ‘It’s hard to say exactly how much force was used or to be very specific about the type of knife, because the decomposition has eliminated the puncture wounds. But no, I wouldn’t say frenzied.’

  ‘So could be a man or a woman?’

  ‘Definitely one of those,’ Hendricks said. He smiled; at his own wry wit perhaps, or the fact that Tanner’s face had stayed so completely expressionless. He dropped his notes back on to the desk. ‘So, toxicology back in a couple of days and the full report a day or so later. Is that it?’

  ‘Any chance I could get the toxicology findings as soon as they come in?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘Possibly…’

  Tanner had come across words similar to the ones in those frames at the crime scene several times before. She had seen them at rehab centres and halfway houses and, standing in the victim’s kitchen, she had immediately begun to think that this murder might be drug related. People tended not to do drug deals in their own kitchens, but perhaps the killer was a disgruntled buyer or a user, already high and looking to steal. She had seen nothing to indicate that drugs had been found on the premises, but Tanner nevertheless considered it an angle worth pursuing. They were all worth pursuing, unless and until the evidence proved her wrong.

  Tanner noticed a dirty mug on the desk Hendricks was sitting at. A caption on the side: I SEE DEAD PEOPLE.

  Hendricks saw her looking. ‘Not mine, but pretty funny.’

  Tanner’s contempt for the flippancy did not last long. She was still thinking about the slogans on the wall of that kitchen in Victoria.

&n
bsp; Thinking about suffering and secrets and someone who had rotted into their own floorboards, as alone as it was possible to be.

  On her way out, Tanner said, ‘Doesn’t anyone mind about all that?’ She waved a finger towards Hendricks’ face.

  ‘Only you, Nicola.’

  Tanner was concerned about hygiene as much as anything else. Earlier, in the post-mortem suite, she had imagined Hendricks bending over the slab and some stud or hook popping loose and dropping into a cadaver’s guts. ‘Don’t the relatives ever say anything?’

  Hendricks stood up and shook his head. The smile was still there, but thinner. He folded his arms.

  ‘Really? Nobody ever complains?’

  ‘Only my boyfriend.’ Hendricks put his tongue behind his bottom lip, pushed out the pointed stud and leaned towards Tanner. ‘If this gets caught on his ballsack.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Tanner said.

  Walking back to the station, Tanner picked up a message from one of her DCs. Dipak Chall could do with a little more focus sometimes, but he was bright enough and was not a clockwatcher. She called him straight back.

  ‘This is all sitting on your desk, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but I thought you’d want to know straight away. We got three matches on prints from the crime scene.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘First one’s our victim. Done for shoplifting seven months ago. A five hundred quid fine and community service.’

  It had begun to rain. Tanner stopped beneath the awning of a café and dug her umbrella from her shoulder bag.

  ‘The other two are a bit more juicy. We’ve got assault, solicitation and possession of class A drugs. That’s all one person, by the way.’

  ‘Good.’ Tanner was pleased that her notion that the murder might be drug related was starting to look well founded.

  ‘Left the best until last.’

  Tanner said, ‘Right?’ and stepped out into the rain.

  ‘Drugs again, this time possession with intent to sell. We’re going back fifteen years, but considering what we know already, it’s still the most interesting.’