Cause of Death

by Peter Ritchie

  27

  O’Connor looked around the room and saw that a few detectives were suffering from the night before, but hangovers went with the job, and they could handle it. He explained what they’d inherited – or what it looked like they were about to inherit.

  Maybe the gods were about to knock them down after their result with Billy Drew. O’Connor had realised when he’d read the details that this would be one of those cases that could end up in a swamp, sucking up resources and reputations in the dark world inhabited by the girls who worked the streets. Different detectives thought in different ways, but for O’Connor a risk to his CV and reputation concentrated his mind.

  Helen Stevenson had been a prostitute for years, and was well known to the uniforms. It was the same old story – she’d had a rotten childhood and everything had gone downhill from there. She’d been injecting by the time she was seventeen, and the only way she could pay for the misery was through walking the streets, summer and winter. For all her problems, she was liked by the other girls and the beat cops treated her well. Her looks were long gone; she hadn’t had a lot going to start with and struggled now for punters. Her life story wasn’t that far removed from Pauline Johansson’s.

  Somewhere along the line she’d disappeared from her beat for a couple of nights and that was enough to ring alarm bells. She’d been found by a jogger getting his morning air along an East Lothian beach, about ten miles from the city boundary. He’d done his early-morning run there a hundred times and never tired of the quiet and ever-changing scenery. Having overfilled his bladder with an earlier coffee, he had headed into the sand dunes rather than get a bad name for accidental flashing. He had been enjoying the relief when he’d noticed Helen Stevenson’s leg pointing at him from the base of a sea buckthorn. He’d no experience of bodies apart from occasionally watching CSI and had to suppress the instinct to run in the opposite direction. For a moment he’d thought about ignoring it, but he’d finally calmed himself and pulled back the branches. That’s when he’d really panicked and ran like a sprinter to get help.

  O’Connor asked Macallan to attend the post-mortem with him. She’d been at enough in Northern Ireland to get used to it, but there was always a knot in her stomach until it was over.

  The thousands of tourists who wander the dark medieval streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town would pass the small drab mortuary building and never guess at the activity inside. This was where unexplained death ended up. The air was always cool, with a background noise of power being pumped in to feed the fridges, and glaring lights exposed every dark corner of the human anatomy. It was a place of learning, science and the search for truth.

  For Helen Stevenson, there was an even bigger audience than usual: pathologists, mortuary assistants, detectives, forensic officers and the procurator fiscal all came to witness the final indignity of an undignified life. As post-mortems went, it was straightforward as to what had killed her. Like Pauline Johansson there had been massive trauma to the head, and the pathologist made an unscientific observation: ‘This boy didn’t mind the sight of blood.’

  By the end of the process, Helen Stevenson was more exposed than she’d ever been with a punter. She lay open, laid bare in the cruellest of ways, and the eyes in the room stared at what was left of a life that would have passed almost unnoticed but for the meeting with her killer.

  The pathologist removed her gloves and walked to a basin to scrub her hands clean as she gave an informal opinion to the assembled audience.

  ‘Not much to tell you apart from what’s obvious to the eye. Head injuries likely caused by a heavy blunt instrument. She died very quickly, and the killer would have blood and other material on him or her. I believe it was a man though, as whoever did this had considerable strength. There doesn’t appear to be evidence of semen, but of course she was sexually active and I can’t say whether the killer had sex with her or not. She was in poor health for a woman her age, she was malnourished and there are signs of intravenous injecting. Once we get the results from the lab I’ll be able to tell you a bit more about that, but I’m sure none of that is a surprise. One thing that might be of interest is that she appears to have been suffering from genital herpes. I’m sure you’re going to visit some of her customers so I’ll leave it to you how you deal with that one.’

  O’Connor thanked the pathologist and turned to Macallan. ‘Let’s get to work then.’

  28

  Across the city Helen Stevenson’s killer pulled on his coat and left his office for the day. He wanted to pick up the evening paper and read about his work in comfort. The news had broken and he felt elated. No panic – instead the media reports had sent a surge of energy through him that had lasted till late afternoon.

  He decided to go to the gym, work some of it off before studying the paper again with a drink. He’d let the police scrabble about for a couple of weeks before his next time. He’d accepted that somewhere along the line a mistake would be made or they might get a lucky break, but that was okay – he’d just play the game through and see where it took them all. He knew all he had to do was wait a few weeks and the police would drop their guard again – too busy with all their other problems.

  He also knew enough about the police and the public to recognise that the attention span of news junkies was considerably shorter where a prostitute was involved. Missing or abducted children could leave the readers of the Daily Mail quivering for weeks, but a junk-wrecked pro was just a casualty of their trade. He was interested to see who would be trying to find him and would follow every news source he could find, and the thought of some of the local plods trying to tie him down brought a smile to his face as he stripped in the changing room.

  When he walked into the gym the thirty-something woman was there again and gave him a full smile. He nodded and before they’d both finished their sessions they were on first-name terms. It just couldn’t get any better. She was a class act, wanted to get to know him and she would. She was pleasure; he’d enjoy playing with her for the next few weeks – or until he tired of the game.

  29

  O’Connor had decided they should start with the punters who used the area or anyone who’d known the two girls who’d been assaulted. There were other attacks that looked similar in other parts of the country, but they could end up as a distraction and he wanted to concentrate on what they knew.

  The team who’d worked on the attack on Pauline Johansson had covered a lot of ground already and had pulled in a number of her regulars. A big advantage when a prostitute was the victim was that her punters rarely caused the detectives any problems. When they arrived at the door and mentioned the word prostitute, the clients became very helpful indeed. The threat of exposure to wives, girlfriends and employers was usually enough to calm the worst of them. The suggestion that they might have taken a sexually transmitted disease home to ‘her indoors’ normally convinced them to do their public duty and help the police with their enquiries.

  O’Connor thought they’d be lucky to get the answer this way, but the routine stuff had to be done. It would help them build up a picture of both girls, and somewhere along the line, the clues would bubble to the surface. He wanted to concentrate on the working girls themselves, as they had an interest in warning each other if there was a dodgy punter on the go. They would remember cars, unusual characters and anyone who refused to pay or got a bit rough. It happened all the time.

  ‘Grace, I want you to go and see the Johansson girl. I know she’s in a bad way, but I want to be sure there’s nothing we can get from her. Apparently she’s conscious, but she keeps getting distressed and they can’t get anywhere with her. Speak to her doctor first.’

  Macallan nodded, wondering where she stood with O’Connor. He was all business now, and this was how it should be, but she wondered anyway. She wanted to know more about him but the question was whether he’d let her.

  She grabbed her coat and a set of car keys then headed for the intensive care unit.

 
The wind and rain slapped at the windscreen as Macallan started the engine. She leaned back in the seat and wished she had a cigarette but pushed the thought away. She’d been off them for months now but still had the occasional moment when she wanted to feel the poison being drawn into her lungs – that brief kick of guilt and pleasure. She shook her head. ‘No way, Grace, think of the price of those things now,’ she told herself, winking at her reflection in the rear-view mirror before she drove off.

  30

  Pauline Johansson’s doctor was irritated by the visit from Macallan. There was nothing new in that – doctors just got annoyed by anything that took them away from their patients. Macallan thought the job they did was priceless, but they did have a tendency to think they were gods among men, which made an awful lot of them the most arrogant bastards she’d ever met – and that was saying something.

  The doctor gave her the usual lecture that it was all a waste of time and she shouldn’t stress the patient, then Macallan did her bit of telling him she had to try and that it was going to happen. It was the same old ritual every time.

  She opened the door to the small, warm ICU room where she found a nurse leaning over Johansson and talking quietly to her. Macallan introduced herself and the nurse nodded.

  ‘Go easy, Chief Inspector. Pauline’s doing well, but she’s tired, so please keep it short. She can hear you and this girl’s a fighter, so you just need to give her time.’

  The nurse left and Macallan sat by the bed, studying the bandages covering the damaged half of the young woman’s head. One blue eye remained visible and lines of blonde hair splayed across the pillow beside her.

  Up until her visit, Pauline Johansson had been a hazy image in Macallan’s mind, a shadow walking dark streets waiting for the next creep who would provide the means to buy her drug of choice. What was exposed of the face showed she’d been a beautiful woman, and Macallan was annoyed at herself for forgetting that she was a person – someone who’d been dealt a shit hand and now had to live with half her face permanently disfigured.

  Johansson was looking at her without moving, and Macallan explained who she was and why she was there. She told her about herself, that she wanted to help and that she would come to see her as often as possible, but only if she wanted the visit.

  ‘If you can remember anything, Pauline, try and find a way to tell us. We have to find the man who did this in case he hurts someone else.’

  She’d decided not to mention Helen Stevenson, as there was every chance they might have known each other. Instinctively, she reached out and squeezed Johansson’s hand as lightly as she could, surprised when it twitched a moment later. Had she meant that or was it an involuntary spasm?

  ‘Pauline, can you do that again?’ The hand moved once more and Macallan smiled. ‘Good girl, Pauline.’

  A tear bubbled up in the corner of Pauline’s swollen blue eye and trickled across her cheek. The corners of her mouth moved – she was trying to make it all work and forcing the electrical signals to find new routes past the damage in her brain. Some of those circuits were permanently ruined, but Macallan knew from the shattered survivors she’d seen in Belfast that this amazing organ could reorganise and find a way to cope.

  The doctor walked into the room and told Macallan her visit was over.

  ‘Can I come back again tomorrow? It’s important.’

  ‘I could say no, but I’ve a feeling that you’d just ignore me so I think we’ll cooperate on this one – and it might be good for Pauline as long as we take it easy. She doesn’t get a lot of visitors.’

  The doctor smiled and Macallan decided to forgive him for being an arse at the start of her visit. She smiled over at Johansson and raised her hand. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Pauline.’

  The rain streamed down as she headed back to the car park, and she shivered as the damp soaked into the folds of her clothes, sucking the heat from her body. She pulled open the car door and jumped in, slumping forward in the seat as she thought about Pauline Johansson. ‘You poor cow – you poor fucking cow.’

  How could anyone do that to another human being? She’d seen too much death, too much damage and too many grieving families. She’d heard all the excuses, all the reasoned academic analyses, but in the end she just didn’t understand – and never would. The police just cleaned it all up, got little thanks for doing so and when they got it wrong – well, they were just written off as Keystone Cops. She asked herself the same question every detective asked a hundred times: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’

  She drove back to HQ and thought about cigarettes again.

  31

  When Macallan walked into the incident room, she headed straight for O’Connor, who was sitting with Harkins and going over the statements that were pouring in. This was the problem that affected all teams. The public wanted to help, but the vast majority of information they provided was useless, and could easily distract or mislead them. If there was an advantage with a prostitute murder, it was that there was less sympathy for the victim, which tended to keep it manageable, and not everyone wanted to admit knowing or having had anything to do with prostitutes.

  Harkins poured her a coffee without asking. ‘How did it go then? A bit of a struggle I guess?’

  She took the mug and warmed her hands on it. ‘She’s still in a bad way, not able to talk but conscious, and I think we might be able to get something going with her. There are only brief hand movements, and she can see, but it might take time. I had a lot of experience in Northern Ireland with badly injured and traumatised witnesses and there’s ways to do it. I know we don’t have the luxury of time, but it would be worth it. Anything interesting coming in?’

  O’Connor looked tired and had a right to be. The pressure was building and there was no rest for the SIO when something like this kicked off.

  ‘The main lines are talking to the street girls and the punters we can find. We’re going through CCTV to see what cars were in the area and whether any kerb-crawlers were pulled in by the uniforms. The analysts and researchers are going through the historical cases and possible matches in other forces. Nothing big but we just have to keep going through it until we get a clearer picture. Stick with Pauline regardless of time. She saw the guy, presuming it’s the same one. Anything she can give us might help.’

  He slugged from a can of juice and Macallan saw the look – that worry that this might be a whodunnit. The nightmare all detectives feared, especially the ambitious ones like O’Connor.

  ‘To top it all, some genius on the beat wrote down what he thought was a punter’s registration but got it wrong. Two of our heavyweights have been accusing a completely innocent haematologist of being a dirty little punter. Thank God the man isn’t taking it further. These things are sent to try us, Grace.’

  He squeezed the bridge of his nose and Macallan was concerned that this was far too early in the game for him to be showing signs of stress. She thought about Harkins’ assessment of O’Connor. Was this the test that would make or break him?

  About midnight, and around the time Macallan was able to finish and grab some sleep, Pauline Johansson was struggling to climb out of her dream. She was in a dark room and something was in there with her. She knew she was dreaming and tried to struggle towards the light, but it was as if she was trying to climb through mud. She woke sucking in air. The hospital room was the safest place she’d been for a long time – people were caring for her, and she couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Her vision was foggy but she could see the doctor standing next to the bed looking at her, and she wondered why he was wearing a surgical mask.

  ‘How are you, Pauline? I thought I’d just pop in to make sure you were okay. I was a bit concerned I’d not done enough to keep you quiet, but I think I can safely say that although you’re not a vegetable, you’re not far off.’

  The best she could do was moan quietly when she realised who it was. He pushed his face close to hers. She had lost her sense of smell and didn’t
catch the garlic on his breath. He was pleased at her lack of movement. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Pauline, and you should think yourself lucky considering what I’m capable of.’ She was screaming without a sound leaving her lips. ‘See you later and be good.’

  He blew her a kiss as he left the room and closed the door quietly behind him.

  Macallan was sitting at her desk the following morning, reading up on the information piling into the system, when the phone rang. She wanted to ignore it so she could catch up on her reading – there was never enough time to do it all – but she dutifully picked up the phone and took the call, which turned out to be from the hospital. The doctor treating Pauline Johansson was concerned about her condition, which had deteriorated – for some reason she had become distressed and upset.

  Macallan thanked the doctor and said that she would call in.

  32

  Pauline Johansson blinked several times when Macallan walked into the room and told the uniform guarding her he could go and fill up on caffeine. Johansson looked corpse pale and there was something in her one exposed eye that Macallan had not seen on her first visit.

  She walked over to the bed and put her hand over Johansson’s; it felt cold. She smiled down at the shattered face and sat as close to the bed as she could.

  ‘What’s up, Pauline? Did you have a bad night? Let’s do one blink for yes and two for no.’

  One blink.

  Macallan tensed but tried not to show it. ‘Good girl, Pauline. Do you remember me being here before?’

  One blink.

  Macallan sat closer. ‘Try squeezing my hand.’

  There was the briefest pressure on her hand.

  ‘Again, Pauline.’

  Brief pressure again.

  ‘You did it, Pauline. You did it.’

  Macallan smiled and wondered. ‘Has something upset you since I saw you?’