Beneath the Bleeding

by Val McDermid

  Paula dropped her cigarette and ground it out with her heel. ‘And you got the results this morning?’ she said, trying to keep the excitement from her voice.

  ‘That’s right. That’s why I’m calling you. Ah Jesus…’ Flanagan’s voice cracked and he coughed to cover it. ‘I don’t even know if I should be telling you this. I mean, it was days before he died.’

  ‘There was something on Robbie’s test?’

  ‘You could say that. According to the lab…Christ, I can’t bring myself to say it.’ Flanagan sounded close to tears.

  Paula was already through the kitchen door and moving towards the stairs. ‘I’m coming round right now, Martin,’ she said. ‘Just sit tight. Don’t say anything to anyone. I’ll be with you inside the half hour. OK?’

  That sounds fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in my office. I’ll tell them you’re coming.’

  To her surprise, Paula felt tears pricking her eyes. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, knowing it was a lie and knowing it didn’t matter.

  The pathology suite at Bradfield Cross Hospital was the home ground for Carol Jordan’s specialist team. This was where the bodies that interested them ended up, under the careful knife and watchful eyes of Dr Grisha Shatalov. Shatalov’s great-grandparents had emigrated from Russia to Vancouver eighty-five years before; Grisha had been born in Toronto and liked to claim his move to the UK was part of the family’s slow migration back east. Carol liked his soft accent and his self-deprecating humour. She also liked the way he treated the dead with the same respect she felt he’d give his own family. For Carol, the morgue helped to reaffirm her personal commitment to finding justice. Faced with the victims, the desire to bring the villains to justice always burned that little bit brighter inside her. Grisha’s consideration for those victims had resonated with her and built a bridge between them.

  Today, she was here for Robbie Bishop. The post mortem should have been done the day before, but Grisha had been in Reykjavik at a conference and Carol hadn’t wanted anyone else working on this particular body. Grisha had started work early and by the time Carol arrived, he was almost finished. He looked up as she walked in, acknowledging her presence with a curt nod. ‘Ten minutes and we’ll be done, DCI Jordan.’ His formality was for the benefit of the digital recording which might one day be produced in court. Off-mike, she was Carol to him.

  She leaned against the wall. Impossible not to feel sadness seeping through her at the thought of what Robbie had been. Lover, son, friend, athlete. Someone whose grace had been beamed round the world, whose talent had made people happy. All that gone now, gone because some bastard’s need not to have him in the world outweighed all the positives. It was her job to find who that bastard was and to make sure they never got the chance to repeat their act of destruction. She’d never relished the job nor hated its difficulties more than she did that day.

  At last, Grisha was done. The body approximated wholeness again; the samples were taken, the organs weighed and the incision stitched. Grisha peeled off gloves and mask, stripped off his apron and stepped out of his lab boots. In stocking soles, he padded down the corridor to his office, Carol in his wake.

  The office was a defiant gesture against the concept of the paperless workplace. Crammed folders, loose sheets, bound stacks of paper covered every surface except for the chair behind the desk and a lab stool against the wall. Carol took up her customary perch and said, ‘So what have you got for me?’

  Grisha dropped into his chair like a stone. His perfectly oval face was grey from lack of sleep and daylight, a combination of the job and a baby who had yet to discover the delight of unbroken sleep. His grey eyes, shaped like long, low pyramids, had matching shadows underneath them and his full lips seemed to have become bloodless. He looked more like a prisoner than a pathologist. He scratched a stubbled cheek and said, ‘Not much that you don’t know already. Cause of death, multiple organ failure as a result of ricin poisoning.’ He held up one finger. ‘I should qualify that by saying my conclusion is based on the information supplied by the doctors treating him at the time of his death. We’ll have to wait for our own tox screening before we can confirm that officially, let’s be clear about that, eh?’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  Grisha smiled. ‘I could tell you all about his physical condition, but I don’t think that would take you any further. There is one thing that may or may not have some bearing on how he died. There’s some ano-rectal trauma-nothing much, just some internal bruising in the anal area. And also some faint irritation of the tissue just above the anal sphincter.’

  ‘Provoked by what?’ Carol asked.

  ‘The bruising is consistent with sexual activity. I’d say the rough side of consensual. Not rape. Well, not rape in the sense of him being held down and forcibly penetrated. But quite forceful. No semen traces, so I couldn’t hazard an opinion as to whether he was penetrated by a penis or something else. A dildo, a bottle, a carrot. Could have been anything of a reasonable size, really.’ He smiled. ‘As we both know from this line of work, it takes all sorts.’

  ‘Does it look like this sort of sexual activity was something he did regularly?’

  Grisha stroked his chin, a hangover from a recently departed goatee. ‘I’d say not. There’s no evidence of Robbie indulging in regular anal sex. He might have gone for a neat little butt plug, but nothing the size of a penis.’

  ‘And the tissue irritation? What about that? What does that tell us?’

  Grisha shrugged. ‘Hard to say. Given where it is, whatever caused it, any trace is going to be long gone. It’s the sort of thing you might get if some foreign substance was inserted into the anus.’

  ‘Like ricin? Would that produce a reaction like this?’

  Grisha leaned back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Theoretically, I suppose.’ He returned to the vertical abruptly. ‘I thought he was presumed to have inhaled it?’

  Carol shook her head. ‘We assumed his drink or food had been spiked.’

  ‘No way. Not if Dr Blessing’s account of the process of his dying is correct. What it is, Carol…the symptoms manifest in a different way if you ingest ricin rather than inhale it. But if you absorbed it through a sensitive mucous membrane like the rectum, then your symptoms would be more like inhalation than ingestion. Now, until I did the PM, I would have gone for the inhalation theory.’

  Carol shook her head. ‘Everybody we’ve spoken to is adamant he didn’t do drugs. I don’t think they’re trying to protect his memory. I think they’re telling the truth. Besides, the hospital labs tested their samples and found no traces of recreational drugs.’

  Grisha raised his eyebrows, obviously mildly sceptical. ‘Depending on what he was given and when he took it, there might not have been traces by the time they took their samples. But if he genuinely didn’t snort drugs, I’d say this is maybe how the ricin got into his system. It would have had a vehicle-a Hard Fat NF suppository, a gel capsule, something like that. But again, we’re not going to find any traces, not this long after the event. I’ve taken samples, obviously. We might just get lucky, but don’t hold your breath.’

  Carol sighed. ‘Great. This is shaping up to be the case from hell. I’ve got the brass and the media jackals all over me, looking for a quick resolution. Which frankly is about as likely as Bradfield Vics signing me as Robbie’s replacement.’

  Grisha leaned forward and clicked his mouse. ‘I’ll do what I can to help, but you’re right, it’s a tough one.’ He flashed her a sympathetic smile. ‘But while I’ve got you here, it’s been too long since we had you over for dinner. I know Iris would love to see you.’ He peered at the screen. ‘How would Saturday be for you?’

  Carol thought for a moment. ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘Seven?’

  ‘Make it eight. I have some hospital visiting to do first.’

  ‘Hospital visiting?’

  ‘Tony.’

  ‘Oh, of course, I heard about that. How is he?’ Before Carol could a
nswer, there was a tap at the door. ‘Come in,’ Grisha called.

  Paula stuck her head round the door. ‘Hi, Doc. I’m looking for…’

  ‘You found her,’ Grisha said.

  Paula grinned and walked in. ‘It doesn’t hurt that you’re here too, Doc.’ She waved an envelope at them. ‘I think we’re finally cooking with gas, chief. I’ve just come from a meeting with Martin Flanagan. He really didn’t want to come clean-’

  ‘But you’d already worked the McIntyre charm on him,’ Carol said. She’d seen enough of Paula’s killer interview technique not to be surprised.

  ‘I think it’s that he cares more about us catching Robbie’s killer than the reputation of the club, to be honest. Anyway, according to Mr Flanagan, it totally slipped his mind that the club did a routine drug sweep on Friday. Like all the rest of them, Robbie peed into a bottle. Unlike the rest of them, in his case, out came roofies.’ She pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope and proffered it to Grisha.

  ‘Positive for rohypnol,’ Grisha read. ‘I’ve heard of this lab, they’re supposed to be pretty thorough. But you should contact them, ask if they’ve got any of Robbie’s sample left. I’m not seeing enough detail here to get any accurate sense of how much and when.’ He handed the paper to Carol.

  ‘I think we know when. Thursday night in Amatis,’ Carol said sourly.

  Grisha frowned. ‘Probably not, actually.’ He tapped keys, clicked his mouse. ‘That’s what I thought. The forget-me pill. It starts to take effect between twenty minutes and half an hour of being ingested. So if Robbie had been given it in the nightclub, by the time he left he’d have been acting like he was totally off his face.’

  ‘Nobody’s even suggested he was drunk,’ Paula said. ‘And he was moving OK on that CCTV footage.’

  ‘So he must have trusted whoever he was with enough to go somewhere else with him. Somewhere he was given a drink spiked with rohypnol,’ Carol said, thinking aloud.

  ‘Its effects are aggravated by alcohol, so given that he’d been drinking earlier, he’d likely be out of it within an hour of taking it,’ Grisha said. ‘He’d go along with whatever was happening to him. He wouldn’t resist anal penetration. He wouldn’t mind having a suppository inserted rectally. And he wouldn’t remember anything about it afterwards. It’s the perfect murder, really. By the time your victim dies, his connection to you is a long way away.’

  Carol handed the paper back to Paula. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘But this is a bitch of a case. Every scrap of information we get seems to make things harder.’

  Half an hour later, they were harder still. Carol sat in her office, door closed, blinds drawn to avoid distraction. Elbows on the desk, one hand held the phone to her ear, the other clutched a chunk of her hair. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ she said.

  ‘Actually, you did. But it’s just as well, there’s shit I need to get sorted,’ Bindie Blyth said, her voice rusty from sleep. She coughed, cleared her throat then sniffed. Carol could hear her moving.

  ‘There’s something I need to ask you. It’s a bit personal.’

  The unmistakable snap of a lighter, then the inhalation of smoke. ‘Isn’t this where I’m supposed to say, “It’s all right, nothing’s personal in a murder investigation”?’ Bindie said in a passable American accent.

  There was, Carol thought, no easy answer to that one. ‘I think it’s more that nothing’s private in a murder investigation. We need to find out everything we can about our victims, even if it turns out to be completely irrelevant. We’re not being prurient. Just prudent. She tutted at herself. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded glib. It wasn’t meant to be. I mentioned my colleague, the psychologist. He always reminds me that you can never know too much about the victim of a murder. So I hope you’ll forgive me for what might feel like prying.’

  ‘It’s OK, I’m kind of hiding behind flippancy. Fire away with your questions, I’m not going to take offence.’

  Carol took a breath. There was no point in coyness here. ‘Did Robbie like anal sex?’ she asked.

  A surprised snort of laughter exploded down the phone. ‘Robbie? Robbie take it up the arse? You have got to be joking. I tried to talk him into it, but he was totally convinced that any straight man who liked pegging was a secret gay.’

  ‘Pegging?’ Carol felt ancient and out of touch beside Bindie.

  ‘You know. Bend Over Boyfriend stuff. Shagging your bloke with a dildo. It’s called pegging.’

  ‘I’d not heard the term before.’

  ‘That’ll be living up North,’ Bindie said. Her tone said she was teasing, but Carol felt hopelessly provincial nonetheless. ‘My ex, the guy I was with before Robbie, he was really into it. I still have the harness and the dildos and all the gear. I tried to get Robbie to go for it, but honestly, you’d think I was suggesting we went out and found some stray dogs to shag. He didn’t even like having a finger in his arse when we were fucking.’

  ‘We found a butt plug in his bedside table drawer,’ Carol said neutrally.

  A moment’s silence. ‘That would be mine,’ Bindie said. ‘It’s all right, I don’t want it back.’

  ‘Right,’ Carol said. ‘Thanks for being so frank with me.’

  ‘No problem. Now, what was the personal question?’ Bindie gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Sorry. I told you I was being flippant. Why do you want to know what Robbie liked to do in bed?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you details of an ongoing investigation,’ Carol said, aware she wanted to give Bindie something in return. ‘We’re pursuing several lines of inquiry. But I’ll be honest, it’s a slow process.’

  Time’s not the issue, Chief Inspector,’ said Bindie, never more serious than now. The issue is catching the fucker who did this.’

  Imran opened and closed the drawers in his bedroom once again. That made five times, Yousef reckoned. ‘You gotta have everything you need by now, man,’ he said. ‘You checked a million times already.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. I don’t want to get to the airport and bang, no iPod. Or get to Ibiza and find my number one Nikes are still under the bed here, know what I mean?’ Imran dropped to the floor and raked an arm under the bed.

  ‘You’re not going to get to the airport at all if you don’t get your arse in gear,’ Yousef said. That’s a clapped-out Vauxhall van you’ve got, not the Batmobile.’

  ‘And it’s not like you’re Jeremy Clarkson, cousin.’ Imran bounced back on his feet again. ‘OK, I’m sorted.’ He zipped up his holdall, still looking mildly uncertain, patted his pockets. ‘Passport, money, tickets. Let’s get gone.’

  Yousef followed Imran downstairs and waited patiently while he said goodbye to his mother. Anyone would think he was going for a three-month trek in the Antarctic, not a three-night freebie to Ibiza. Eventually, they managed to get out of the house. Imran tossed the van keys to Yousef. ‘You might as well get used to it while I’m there to sort out any problems,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the clutch sticks a bit, know what I mean?’

  Yousef didn’t care about the clutch. What he cared about was taking possession of a van that had ‘A1 Electricals’ emblazoned along the side. ‘Whatever,’ he muttered, starting the van and slamming it into first. The stereo cut in, blasting out some Tigerstyle drum and bass remix so loud it made Yousef flinch. He reached for the volume control and turned it right down. ‘Cut it out, Imran,’ he complained. ‘My ears.’

  ‘Sorry, man. Them Scottish soldiers know how to hit it.’ Imran punched him gently on the shoulder. ‘Man, I’m gonna hear some great sounds in Ibiza. I really appreciate this, cuz.’

  ‘Hey, it’s cool. I mean, clubbing’s never been my thing,’ Yousef said. As soon as he’d realized their plan would be made much easier if he could lay hands on a proper tradesman’s van, he’d known his cousin Imran was the answer. The question then became how to separate Imran and his vehicle for two or three unsuspecting days. They’d talked it over a few times, trying to come up with a plan that would work, then Youse
f had his brainwave. It wasn’t uncommon for customers and suppliers to hand out freebies, supposedly to encourage loyalty. Neither Yousef nor Sanjar was big into the club scene, but Imran loved to dance the night away. Yousef could pretend that he’d been given a three-day clubbing break in Ibiza then pass it on to Imran as a gesture of goodwill. Imran would be in Ibiza, and Yousef would have access to the van. It had worked like a dream. Imran had been so chuffed that he hadn’t even thought to question why they were going to the airport in his van rather than Yousef’s. Now, ‘You’re welcome, man,’ Yousef said. And he meant it.

  ‘Yeah, but, I mean, you could have sold it on to somebody, made some readies.’ Imran rubbed fingers and thumb together.

  ‘Hey, you’re family.’ Yousef half-shrugged one shoulder. ‘We should be there for each other.’ He felt a twinge of guilt. What he was planning would drive a stake through the heart of his family. It would twist the kaleidoscope and create a completely different picture of his actions. He didn’t think any of his relatives would be praising his family spirit any time soon.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what everybody says, but when it comes to putting money in their pockets, it’s a different story,’ Imran said cynically. ‘So yeah, I’m totally impressed with you, cuz.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you take it easy out there.’

  ‘I’ll be cool.’ Imran’s fingers crept towards the volume knob. ‘Just a little bit, yeah?’

  Yousef nodded. ‘Sure.’ The music filled the van. Even at low volume, the bass reverberated in his bones. There were only two years between him and Imran, but he felt like his cousin was still a kid. He’d been like that himself not so long ago, but he’d changed. Things had happened to him, things that had made him grow up and take responsibility. Now, when he looked at Imran, he felt like they were from different generations. Different planets, even. It was amazing how someone else’s interpretation of the world could lead you to question what you’d taken for granted all your life. Recently, Yousef had come to understand the way the world really worked and it made a nonsense of pretty much everything he’d been encouraged to believe in.