He heard her curse under her breath.
‘The air is damp, and so long as we don’t disturb the stuff, we should be fine,’ he reassured her.
They moved on, with even greater care, and came to a scratched and rusted green door at the end of the passage. A hasp was bolted in place, secured with a padlock.
‘How come the scavengers didn’t just break it?’ Simms asked.
‘My guess would be the padlock was put in place after the building had been stripped of anything useful.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d say we’ve hit a dead end – unless you have a bolt-cutter in that kit of yours.’
Fennimore gave her a pained look. ‘Bolt-cutters are for Neanderthals.’
He opened his shoulder bag, and snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves, then took out a leather tool wrap and slid two items from it.
She gazed at him, astonished. ‘You have lock picks in your scene kit – what are you, a scientist or a criminal?’
‘It’s a pen top clip and a hairgrip,’ he corrected. ‘You could hardly call that going equipped. However if it offends your moral sensitivities, you might want to look away now.’
Clamping the Maglite between his teeth, he slid the bent pen clip into the bottom of the key slot and held it under tension; the hairgrip followed. Kate Simms’s eyes widened; she looked as if she might try and stop him, then she let out an exasperated sigh and turned her back. Fennimore jiggled the hairgrip up and down, forcing the tumblers to drop; seconds later, the lock gave and he popped open the U-bolt and pushed the door wide.
‘Black and white tiles,’ Simms said. ‘This is it, Nick. We’ve found it.’
That remained to be seen, but he didn’t want spoil the moment for her, so he stood in the doorway, silently appraising the room.
Beneath the grime, the walls were plaster, painted pastel green. The flooring was indeed laid to chequered tile, coved, hospital-style, six inches up from the floor.
‘Furnace room,’ Fennimore said, spotlighting stubs of service pipes, still bearing faded colour codes – green for water and brown for oil. They continued the survey of the room; Kate Simms bouncing her torch beam from floor to ceiling and back along the walls, Fennimore tracking more slowly and methodically.
A minute later, she nudged him and he followed the cone of her light. There were two ring mounts on the wall, both rusted and tarnished. She took a breath, exhaled slowly.
Fennimore swept his torch beam over the ceiling. Towards the centre of the room, bolted to an exposed joist, a large metal hook.
‘Any signs of footwear impressions on the tiles?’
She followed his line of sight. ‘Not that I can see.’
‘Nor me.’
He stripped off his overcoat and stepped inside but she hesitated at the threshold, glancing uncertainly over her shoulder down the long, debris-strewn passage.
‘See something?’ His voice boomed back at him, bouncing off the tiles.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Just thinking how scared she must have been.’
On the wall below the ring mounts he found tiny outward-splayed teardrops, typical of blood travelling at speed. ‘It’s not a huge quantity, so not arterial spray, but there’s enough here to suggest whipping.’ The plaster finish was remarkably good, and he sighted along its flat plane. ‘I see small indentations here.’ Either side of the ring mounts were a series of lines, four to six inches in length, each of which broke down into ridges and troughs, only visible when he shone the torch almost horizontally across the surface.
‘It looks like the attacker struck the crop against the wall to clean it, or to terrorize his victim.’
‘Victims,’ Simms corrected, reminding him that there were others who might have been tortured here.
‘Victims,’ he repeated, tracking up the wall to the single hook bolted to the joist near the centre of the room. Its shadow slashed across the ceiling in the movement of his flashlight. ‘Think of all the blood evidence that might have accumulated from three or more victims.’ He dropped to his knees and sight-lined the lay of the tiles, his right ear and cheekbone grazing the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Looking for the lowest point, and there it is.’ Using his hands as a springboard, he bounced to his feet and crouch-walked to a spot a couple of paces from the side wall. On his knees again, he shone his torch along the line of grouting. ‘There’s a dark stain,’ he said, air-sketching three sides of one of the tiles with his pinky finger. ‘Can you give me more light?’
She followed him inside at last and crouched beside him, bringing her own torch into play.
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Could be blood. Kit, please.’
She gave him a look that said she wasn’t about to become his technical assistant, but went back to the door and passed him his rucksack, and he stripped off his gloves, pocketing them before pulling on a new pair of nitriles and taking out a Kastle-Meyer kit. He set out the items he needed on a half-sheet of A4 paper, folded a small disc of filter paper in four, and scraped the point along a half-inch-long section of grout. He opened the filter paper and added a drop of alcohol to the centre. He capped the alcohol and took up the Kastle-Meyer reagent. In ideal lighting conditions it would be a very pale coral pink, but in the torchlight it merely looked dun-coloured. He unscrewed the cap with the little finger of his right hand and held it there, added a couple of drops, replaced the cap, then switched to the final reagent – hydrogen peroxide.
‘Can you angle your lamp directly above the paper?’ he asked. ‘You really need good light to see the change.’
‘Oh. Hang on—’ Simms flicked a switch on the Smartlite and he was instantly blinded.
‘What the hell is that?’ He shied away, screwing his eyes shut, and she turned the torch towards the floor.
‘That?’ she said. ‘Oh, that’s a million candles-equivalent.’ Was that a smirk on her face?
‘So I see, or I will, when after-images fade from my retinas.’
He blinked rapidly to clear his vision and added the hydrogen peroxide. Within seconds, the dot of matter he had scraped from the tile grout turned shocking pink. ‘That’s a positive,’ he said. He bagged and labelled the sample before turning his attention to the floor again. The grout was degraded and the tile had lifted slightly at one corner. ‘Pass me the tool wrap, will you?’
He scraped away the grout with a sharpened spatula until he could insert the flat of the blade under it and prise up the tile. Beneath it was a patch of dark, brownish stain, beginning to flake at the edges.
‘More blood?’
‘Pooled and dried.’ He sat back on his haunches, Simms beside him, the Smartlite loose in her hand, its light skimming the surface of the tiles. Fennimore tilted his head to forty-five degrees. Something didn’t look right.
‘What?’ she asked eagerly, and he was acutely aware of her shoulder pressing against his.
‘The tiles are uneven.’ He placed his hand on hers, applying light pressure so that the light skimmed the floor. ‘See how it seems to mound, a couple of yards from us?’ As the beam moved, the vaguest hint of a shadow appeared on the far side of the mound.
He edged forward at a crouch, immediately putting the area in shadow, but Kate quickly dodged to the side and lit up the tiles again. He guided her hand from the mound to an area of tile a short distance away, then back again. ‘Different grout,’ he said. ‘The grout in the mounded section is lighter.’
He stared into her brown eyes and for a second they both held their breath.
‘A dodgy repair,’ she said, her voice stretched tight with tension.
‘Could be, but why the mounding?’
‘They dug up the floor to repair service pipes. Someone botched re-laying the concrete.’
‘They certainly did some digging,’ he agreed. ‘But in this kind of facility all pipes, conduits and electrical services are in the undercroft, not buried under the floors. You only have to look into the passageway
to see that. Which only leaves—’
‘A body.’ The words exploded out of her. ‘Oh, Jesus, Nick, there could be a body under here.’ Unconsciously, she moved back, staring at the ground.
Fennimore reached for his phone.
‘Woah, wait a minute – who are you calling?’ she said.
‘Doctor Steve Dearborne – an old colleague who is always up for some sleuthing.’ He stepped out into the passageway. It was just after 7 a.m., and the first glimmer of light filtered through from the holes in the ceiling; here he might have a better chance of finding a signal.
Simms followed him. ‘No, Nick. This ends here – we call in Humberside Police, let them do the rest.’
He stopped his slow rotational search and dropped his hand to his side. ‘As I said before, we need to be sure before we call in the police. Kastle-Meyer is only a presumptive test – it says blood is present, but that doesn’t mean it’s human blood. The archaeology department at Hull University happens to own state-of-the-art ground-penetrating radar equipment; they could provide the evidence we need.’
Simms set the big, blocky torch down on the floor and crossed her arms in front of her, her hands hugging her shoulders. For two minutes she didn’t move, but simply stared through the open door at the tiles. Fennimore wasn’t the best at reading body language, but he knew Kate Simms better than most people and he could tell she was doing battle with her conscience. If she walked away from this, there would be no explanations to make – except an excuse for her late arrival in the office. If she followed this lead all the way, it was bound to end up messy no matter what.
He checked his mobile. He had a signal – only one bar, and it might vanish any second. ‘Come on, Kate,’ he said. ‘It’s GPR – with a bit of luck we won’t even have to touch the floor.’
She closed her eyes for a second and made a low choking sound at the back of her throat. ‘All right,’ she said.
He spoke briefly into his mobile, then disconnected. ‘He’ll be here in ninety minutes.’
‘That’s fast,’ she said, eyeing him suspiciously. ‘Almost as if he had the van all packed and ready to go.’
He chuckled dutifully.
But Simms wasn’t joking. ‘He did have the van packed, didn’t he?’
‘Field trip, I expect,’ he said airily. ‘I didn’t really ask.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘“Didn’t really”? I’ve got to say, Fennimore, for such a devious bastard you are a crap liar. You warned him, didn’t you? When was that? After we spoke to Tanya? Before?’
‘I’m not clairvoyant, Kate. How could I have known what she would say before we’d even met her? I rang from your car after we separated. Tanya’s account was convincing, so it was a fair bet we’d have a crime scene, and we do.’
Unable to argue with his logic, she fell back on the personal. ‘You went behind my back.’
‘I made a judgement,’ he said. ‘Tanya was convinced her attacker was going to kill her, and he probably came damn close. I had to consider the possibility that this was his killing field. But was I supposed to tell you there and then? Tanya could barely stand to look at the place as it is – if she’d known what was in my mind—’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’ She landed a surprise punch to his shoulder.
‘Ow! What was that for?’
‘Don’t lie to me, okay?’ Her eyes sparked amber light. ‘Everyone is lying to me, Nick. I need to know you’ll always tell me the truth.’
34
At 9 a.m., Dearborne announced that they had found a void under the furnace room concrete. Simms should have been back at base an hour since, but like Fennimore, there was no way she could let this go until she was sure what they were looking at. So while they got on with the geophysical survey, she called Sergeant Renwick and asked for an update.
‘If you need family time, I can handle things here,’ he said.
He was fishing – too wary of her to ask outright where she was and why she’d missed the briefing. For once, Simms was content to let him make the obvious assumption that a female officer with a young child must be at home, mopping up baby sick. She wasn’t about to share this with anyone on the team – including Spry – until she had something more definite than a hole under an old factory floor.
It took another hour, but at last Dearborne was sure enough for them to call Humberside Police.
Nick Fennimore made the initial call, to a local DI – one of his operational contacts from his Crime Faculty years – the machinery was set in motion, and Simms was interviewed by the on-call DCI. Simms gave him an abridged version of the chain of events that had brought her to the discovery of a woman’s body under a condemned factory on a derelict estate well out of her own jurisdiction. He seemed relaxed enough; as he pointed out, it wouldn’t exactly be the only prostitute murder Hull had on the books.
Fennimore was known by reputation, and in scientific circles at least, that didn’t seem to count against him. The forensics team welcomed his input; they even invited him back down to the basement to point out some of his observations. Simms herself had been banished to the outer cordon, beyond the fence, but she hung around anyway.
She leaned with her back to the Mondeo and stared through the chain-link at a CSI, suited, masked and gloved, climbing into the unmarked crime scene van parked inside the perimeter.
A second CSI came through the scarred green access door and exchanged a few words with the much shorter man, who had stepped down from the van with a piece of equipment. The taller man pulled back his hood and dragged off his mask, taking a gulp of air as if he’d been suffocating in the protective Tyvec. It was Nick Fennimore.
He saw her instantly, quickly stripped off his oversuit, gloves and booties, dumped them in a black bin liner at the side of the van, retrieved his overcoat and backpack and strode towards her, taking the common approach path marked out by two parallel lines of police tape. The path led to the section of wire that Fennimore and Simms had crept through two hours earlier. An opening wide enough to allow the crime scene van had been cut to one side, the gate being cordoned off and treated as a secondary scene. Along the common access and outside of the cordon, the snow was trampled and had compacted into ice; the sky pressed down, dull and off-white. The temperature had dropped another couple of degrees and the forecast said a fresh band of snow was heading in from Scandinavia.
Fennimore skirted past a huddle of uniformed officers on the far side of the burnt-out car wreck, walking fast, his gaze focused on her. His face was serious, but she could see a shimmer of light in Fennimore’s blue-grey eyes that she’d seen many times, poring over crime scene photographs and lab results and witness statements, discussing their meaning. They could be having a conversation about what to eat for lunch and that light would be in Fennimore’s eyes, as if he was still thinking – as if he never left off thinking – and thinking gave him joy.
Simms rushed to meet him at the cordon tape. ‘Is it a body?’ she said. ‘It is, isn’t it? What state is it in? Is it identifiable? Come on, Nick, will it tell us anything?’
‘Hey, slow down,’ he said.
But she couldn’t slow down; she felt locked out, ostracized, and there were things she needed to know. ‘Nick, I’m going to have to account for my actions.’ Electricity seemed to spark under her skin, and the muscles in her hands and arms jerked spastically.
He stared at her. ‘What do you mean, account for your actions? You found a body, Kate – you don’t need to justify yourself to anyone.’
She snuffed a laugh. ‘I found a body by conducting a search out of my jurisdiction, without informing the local police authority or consulting my next-in-command. I’m pretty sure Superintendent Spry will say I have a lot of explaining to do.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk on the way back.’
She stepped away from his guiding hand. ‘I’m not ready to leave yet.’
He stared at her and, after a few moments, he shook his head and dropped his hands
to his sides. ‘The victim is female. She’s buried in a shallow grave – it’s a crouch burial – she’s curled in the foetal position under a thin layer of concrete.’
She rifled mentally through course notes and review sessions with Nick Fennimore at the Crime Faculty, but couldn’t recall the facts she needed. ‘I know concrete draws out water, but does it dissolve flesh? Is it mummified – I mean, does concrete preserve body tissues, or destroy them? We need to know if the injuries match our—’
Fennimore lifted his chin sharply, reminding her of the group of uniforms standing twenty yards away.
‘Concrete gets hot as it sets,’ he told her. ‘Very hot. And the body’s in plastic, so it wouldn’t be desiccated, it’d be cooked – the DNA is destroyed.’
‘Shit!’
‘Kate.’ He glanced again at the huddle standing near the burnt-out car wreck.
‘What?’ she said.
Fennimore caught hold of her arm at the elbow, steered her a few steps down the road. ‘You do not want uniform cops to be the first to hear what we’ve both been thinking for the past hour.’ His eyes flashed angrily. ‘Because once they have it, they’ll spread it like a virus.’
Neither one of them had spoken the words out loud; they didn’t need to. A Manchester Met police officer in charge of a murder investigation had yomped over the Pennines to Hull at the suicide hour, in secret, and just happened to stumble across a body – it didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to think there must be more. But while police like a major crime for the overtime and trips out on expenses, ‘serial killer’ had implications. ‘Serial killer’ said police at various levels hadn’t been doing their jobs, crimes had gone unnoticed or, worse, ignored.
He let go of her arm and they turned their backs to the cops who were now blatantly earwigging the exchange.
‘I need answers, Nick.’ She spoke quietly, keeping her frustration locked down so tight she could hardly breathe. ‘This might be their jurisdiction, but it’s my investigation, and I can’t do it blindfold.’
Everyone Lies Page 27
