by Peter Helton
‘Liam?’
Austin’s prompt and the impatient horn of the car behind brought him back to the task in hand. Ahead of them a long gap had opened in the traffic. He quickly caught up to the bumper of the car in front, already stationary again.
‘Sorry. That was Laura. My ex.’
‘Ex … girlfriend – you weren’t married, were you?’
‘No, none of that.’
‘I remember you saying she was studying here now. Was that the first time you’ve seen her since …’
‘Since we broke up? No. She came to see me once. In the spring. To tell me she’d be coming to study here. At least I think that’s why she came.’ Back then McLusky had briefly entertained hopes that they might see more of each other, but the meeting, if it could be called that, had not gone well. He hadn’t seen her since and he didn’t know where she lived. Of course it wouldn’t take much for him to find out, but he was sure that Laura would not take it kindly if he used his police powers to track her down. And there were other, less carefully thought out reasons why he hadn’t made an effort to get in touch. Louise Rennie, the chemistry lecturer, was one. A suspicion that one more unhappy meeting with Laura might make their separation absolutely final was another.
‘Archaeology, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Laura had always been good at digging up things from the past.
With the door closed, the blinds drawn and a dozen people inside, the incident room was warming up. It was the first time since getting up in the morning that McLusky had felt warm enough to take his leather jacket off.
‘This doesn’t of course come as a surprise to any of us.’ Denkhaus, who outside his office was never seen without his jacket on, hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the A4 mug shots of Wayne Deeming pinned to the board in front of which he held forth. ‘DNA results have confirmed it, it’s him. We knew after we put Ray Fenton away that it wouldn’t be long before the remaining groups started to fight it out between themselves. Nature abhors a vacuum. Out with the old, in with the new. Wayne Deeming, it appears, was the old. We know he was involved in drugs. We always thought he was part of Fenton’s chain. Perhaps he fancied stepping into shoes too big for him; perhaps he was simply too close to Fenton.’
‘Or it could be completely unrelated, sir,’ DC French suggested.
‘We’ll keep that in mind, naturally.’ That young DC was forever trying to show that she could think laterally. It hadn’t worked for her so far. ‘We all heard the rumours that outsiders have moved in to mop up Fenton’s old business, but that’s all they are so far, rumours. No one seems to know.’
‘It took us years to discover Fenton’s identity,’ French said. ‘He had time to make millions while we kept arresting replaceable people. Expendable people.’
‘Are you trying to cheer us all up, DC French? In which case, please stop.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
McLusky quickly jumped in. ‘The Ford Focus we recovered from outside Deeming’s house was pretty new. I checked, and he bought it two months ago from a dealer here in Bristol. A car dealer, I should add.’
‘When he was last arrested, he was driving a ten-year-old Honda,’ Austin supplied.
‘So he was definitely moving up in the world,’ McLusky continued. ‘But I had a swift dekko at the car, and apart from dealing, he definitely had a drug habit himself. It might only have been herbal – there were crumbs all over the place – but no one who smokes pot himself is going to get very far in the business.’
The room murmured agreement.
McLusky thought about it again that night at home as he cracked open a can of Murphy’s and sprayed froth across his laptop screen. Earlier he had eaten a bowl of spaghetti at the Barge Inn, opposite his flat in Northmoor Street, and washed it down with a pint. He was glad his stomach was back to normal, since it allowed him to sink a few pints of stout, the only form of relaxation he knew.
Brewers drank beer. Vintners drank wine. Alcohol was a drug, but here lay the difference: the drugs bosses, the ones with the real connections like Fenton, never touched drugs. They despised drugs and the wretches who bought them. McLusky wiped the beer froth off the laptop’s screen, double- clicked on Channel Four’s view-on-demand site and sipped frothy beer while he waited for it to load. The real drugs bosses drank vintage champagne and age-old brandies and ate at fine restaurants. The more successful they became, the further they moved away from the physical presence of drugs or violence. Their money was well laundered through legitimate businesses and they lived in houses far from drug-riddled city streets.
‘A quiet village in Cambridgeshire,’ said Tony Robinson on the screen, ‘is about to be invaded by Time Team’s finest and have its back gardens riddled with trenches. Why? Because last year, a local farmer ploughing his field came across this.’ The presenter offered up a broken piece of pot to the camera.
McLusky lay back on his sofa, perched the laptop on his stomach and adjusted the screen. It was high time he swatted up on some archaeology.
Chapter Eight
The first surreptitious snowflakes drifted down as McLusky set off for work. Mid-morning, as he looked up from his computer, a shift in the quality of light made him turn around. The view from his office window had changed: the roofs of the houses were dusted with snow. Below, it was settling on cars, bins and tarmac. High up in Leigh Woods, snow would quickly cover all the ground. Had they not found Wayne Deeming’s body, their chances of discovering it now would already have been slim. Come to think of it, the partial hand would probably not have been found at all had it snowed a few days earlier. The body could have remained undiscovered up there for a long time.
As it was, the remains had been removed to the mortuary. McLusky had dispatched Austin to be present at the post-mortem that was taking place this morning. He himself avoided the mortuary at all costs. Death – accidental, neglected, forgotten, unlawful – came as part of the territory. Observing the dead where they had died or been deposited was what he owed them as part of his job. It never got easier and he had yet to forget a single one of them. But the insides of the dead he gladly left to others. He was happy to read reports and look at photographs, but he had never learnt a thing at an autopsy that he couldn’t have gleaned from the pathologist’s report. Austin, he knew, would ask all the right questions and should – he checked his watch – be back soon with some of the answers.
In the meantime, he needed coffee. In the corridor he passed DC Daniel Dearlove. Despite his name, the detective constable had yet to endear himself to McLusky. ‘Deedee’ Dearlove didn’t have a lot to work with. His thin hair barely covered his scalp, his question-mark posture gave him a perpetual air of uncertainty and the static of his polyester suits seemed to attract every cat hair and piece of fluff in his vicinity. Normally McLusky gave him as wide a berth as was politely possible, but just then the distinct aroma of freshly brewed coffee made him stop in his tracks right next to him.
‘Snowing out,’ said the startled DC.
‘Seen it,’ said McLusky. ‘Why can I smell cappuccino?’
Dearlove sniffed and nodded. The inspector had an obsession with cappuccino, he’d heard. ‘DI Fairfield’s espresso machine.’
‘How come that’s not been confiscated by health and safety? We’re not even allowed a kettle.’
‘Something to do with it being properly wired into the wall, according to her.’
Just then, a little further along, Fairfield’s door opened to allow Denkhaus into the corridor, together with a fresh wave of coffee-house smells.
Or perhaps patronage was the answer. To Dearlove he said: ‘Properly wired may be right.’
Down in the canteen, coffee was served stewed, but at least it was real and hot and came in china cups thick enough to be useful in a brawl. Drinking coffee always made him want to smoke, but the chances of doing both at the same time had now become rare. McLusky covered his cup with the saucer in an effort to trap the heat and climbed the stairs to his seco
nd-floor office, taking two steps at a time while hoping not to meet anyone en route who might want to talk to him.
Safely shut up in his office, he produced a small ashtray with a flip-up lid and his cigarettes from a desk drawer. He opened the window a hand’s breadth. He sat the coffee cup back on its saucer and finally lit a cigarette. Civilization, as McLusky saw it, had at last returned to the workplace.
The knock on the door made him stab his cigarette into the ashtray, slam down the lid and sweep it into the drawer, all in one practised movement. ‘Come in.’ Relief as Austin entered the room and shut the door behind him. He rescued the now crumpled cigarette from the ashtray, straightened and relit it. ‘Out with it. What did Coulthart have to say?’
‘SOCOs say Deeming was killed right where we found him. Blood spatters recovered from the area around the burial site and on some of the infill seem to indicate that. The place had been raked over, according to them. Coulthart says he had more than eighty separate injuries on his body.’
‘The bastards really went to work on him. Is that what killed him?’
‘Brain haemorrhage. Blows to the head. Do you remember how stony the ground was around there?’
McLusky remembered thinking it as he knelt next to the body. ‘Don’t tell me.’
‘Coulthart says they definitely threw stones at him as well.’
‘Shit.’ McLusky thought for a moment. ‘Standing in a hole! They buried him up to his knees so he couldn’t run. But hang on, someone must have heard him scream; the locus isn’t that far from dwellings and—’
‘He was gagged and had the bag over his head,’ Austin interrupted. ‘They found bits of rag inside his throat where he must have chewed on the gag.’
‘The sadistic swines.’
‘Yes. They really worked him over before they killed him. And they didn’t bother to dig him out when he was dead, they just sort of dug behind and under him a bit; that’s why the burial was so rubbish, really.’
‘That’s why we found him so quickly.’ He closed the window against the icy draught. ‘A couple of days later and we wouldn’t have known a thing; look at it.’ Outside, from a darkening sky, snow was falling steadily. ‘Well, that gives us something to work with, especially the MO. I’ve not come across it before, but we’ll check if there’s a precedent.’
McLusky felt upbeat. The stranger the MO, the better. A blunt instrument was only one in a thousand other blunt instruments people cracked over each other’s heads each year. As a method, it said nothing much about the perpetrator. Often it was simply the first thing that came to hand when the red mist descended. More than anything, it pointed to a lack of planning. ‘It’s certainly different.’ He had a strong image of the victim, dug into the ground up to his knees, hands tied with wire and gagged under the bag over his head. The terror of it. He didn’t care that Deeming had been a thoroughly unpleasant individual who had dished out pain and suffering to others. No one should have to go through that. No one deserved to die like that. ‘Let’s go catch the bastards.’
City snow. Dirty, unwanted stuff squelched into brown mud by car tyres, trodden into grey slush by inadequately shod feet. Like her own, Fairfield thought. On the way, she had noticed that few people bothered to clear the pavements even in front of their own houses. She remembered helping her dad scatter salt and ashes from the fire on the pavement in front of the house. Not here, though; nobody was clearing snow here.
‘This is it.’ The narrow terraced house in Barton Hill was neither softened nor prettified by the snow. It stood grey and dispiriting, one in a row of near-identical neighbours with a view of several large tower blocks to remind the residents that life could yet be much worse. DS Sorbie, who had been driving, had squeezed his Golf into a space by the next corner since ambulance, patrol car and the surgeon’s Audi were blocking the narrow street. The ambulance was just leaving, soon to be replaced by the coroner’s van. The PC guarding the house was sensibly doing so in the hallway of number 11, the house where the body had been found.
‘The surgeon is upstairs with the body in the back bedroom,’ he informed Fairfield. ‘The sister, who found it, is in the kitchen. PC Purkis is looking after her.’ He nodded his head backwards towards the end of the narrow hall, where a door stood ajar. The door to the front room was open. Fairfield stuck her head in, quickly summing up the interior. A three-piece suite, framed pictures on the wall, hard-wearing carpet, an old-fashioned sound system. Tidy. It didn’t look too shabby, considering there was a dead junkie lying upstairs. To get to it required a quick shuffle of officers in the desperately confined space at the bottom of the stairs.
‘In here, Inspector.’ The surgeon’s voice guided them to the right bedroom, though it would have been hard to get lost. The bedroom was small and in twilight; pink curtains were drawn. There was little here apart from a 1970s dressing table, chair and bed. The woman’s body was kneeling and slumped face down on the bed. Fairfield guessed she had been in her late thirties. She was clad in a woollen dress. The furnishings gave out a strong scent of incense, almost masking the smell of escaped urine coming from the body. The air felt damp.
‘Cause of death?’ Fairfield asked.
‘I’d put money on an overdose. I’d say the needle had only just left the vein in her arm. You can see it under her body; she’s still holding the syringe with her right hand.’
Fairfield bent to take a look at it, then surveyed the paraphernalia on the bedside table. ‘Deliberate or accidental?’
‘I wouldn’t want to venture an opinion. We’ll leave that to the pathologist, shall we?’
‘Any sign she might have contracted anthrax, like our chap in the shopping centre?’
‘None at all as far as I can see. The autopsy will show it.’
‘I don’t see the wrap,’ Sorbie said, looking closely at the mess on the bedside table. He crouched down in what little space there was and searched the floor.
Fairfield made room for him. ‘Nothing’s been removed, has it?’
The doctor snapped shut his case. ‘Not by me. And not by anyone else while I was here.’
‘All right. What’s the story here? Did she live alone or with others?’
‘With the sister, I believe,’ the surgeon said, in the doorway. ‘I’m finished here.’
‘Right, thanks. Sorbie? Let’s have a chat with the sister.’
In the kitchen, Carole Maar sat dry-eyed and still, staring straight ahead at a spot on the wall between the calendar picture of a cat and a leaning mop handle. Her hair was a dull straw that matched her eyebrows. She was dressed in washed-out, unfashionable jeans and several layers of sweaters, the top one a light shade of charity-shop orange. She was thirty-nine but looked much older. PC Purkis, who had vacated the only other chair when Fairfield entered, had made her a cup of tea. It remained untouched.
Formalities over, Fairfield pulled the chair opposite the woman, who was still avoiding eye contact, and sat down. She signalled to the PC that she could leave the room. ‘Ms Maar … can I call you Carole?’
Maar shrugged. Why not.
‘I’m very sorry to have to ask you questions at a time like this, but it’s important we establish some facts. It was you who found her, is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And it was you who called the ambulance?’
Carole hesitated. ‘I didn’t know who else to call. I knew Pat was dead. I knew they couldn’t do anything. But who do you call? I didn’t know.’ Her voice was hard and flat.
‘You did the right thing.’ Fairfield looked around the cramped kitchen. ‘You were both living here together?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you use drugs yourself?’
A nod.
‘What exactly, heroin?’
Another nod.
‘And … do you inject …?’
A shake of the head. ‘I smoke.’
‘So what happened here today?’
It was a short and simple story. They had
quarrelled. They quarrelled a lot. These days mainly about money and drugs. Both had left the house independently in the morning, not speaking to each other, trying to score. Carole had tried and failed to raise money for a wrap and returned empty-handed. She had been home some time before discovering her younger sister in exactly the position she was in now. Her sister obviously had managed to score drugs. Enough to kill herself with.
Fairfield wondered about the arrangement. Two sisters, pushing middle age, living together, using heroin together, waiting for the inevitable to happen. And here it was.
‘Had she been suicidal? Was it deliberate, d’you think?’ Sorbie asked.
Carole didn’t even look up. She shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. But you can never tell, can you? It’s easy to get … tired.’
‘I’ll have to ask you to hand over the remainder of the heroin your sister scored today.’
‘What remainder?’ Carole asked.
‘The house will be subject to a drugs search anyway. And you’ll be searched, of course, so you might as well hand it over now,’ Sorbie said.
Carole dug the wrap from her jeans pocket and laid it carefully on the table.
‘Is that all there is?’ Fairfield asked. ‘It may be what killed your sister, so I think it would be very foolish to smoke it. You don’t know what’s in it. We have reason to believe there is contaminated heroin in circulation that could make you very ill indeed.’
For a moment the woman did not react. Then she produced another wrap from where it had been tucked into her sock.
‘That’s all of it now, is it?’ The wraps looked different from most Fairfield had seen recently. The bright white powder was contained in small rectangular resealable bags. She thanked Maar and let Sorbie drop the wraps into an evidence bag. ‘Is this what your usual supply looks like?’ she asked.
