Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘This article makes out that we, the police, are happy about junkies dying because each dead junkie means fewer muggings and burglaries. It is trying to suggest that we are dragging our feet about finding the source of the contaminated heroin because it helps clear the city of drug addicts. And you added weight to it by giving Warren a quotable sentence, however distorted. This on the day when we released a statement to warn drug-users about the anthrax contamination. The Herald barely gives that two lines! I will now have to arrange a personal appearance on the evening news to repeat that message.’

  ‘Junkies don’t watch telly; it’s the first thing they fog.’

  ‘It’s not about the bloody addicts, it’s about the public’s perception that we as a force don’t care about junkies dying.’

  ‘And do we?’

  Denkhaus took a deep breath. ‘No one likes a smartass, DI McLusky.’ McLusky was a good officer, but he spoke his mind rather too freely for a detective inspector. He was quite a successful detective, too, but his sense of commitment to the wider concerns of the force was woefully underdeveloped. He needed to learn that solving crime was just one of many responsibilities the police force was charged with. Denkhaus continued in a low, threatening rumble: ‘You know as well as I do that our job is to serve the entire community, whatever we think of them. You should also have learnt by now that these days half of a superintendent’s job is political. If you don’t understand that, then personally I don’t give tuppence for your chances of promotion.’ There was a pause in which Denkhaus folded the newspaper and laid it aside. ‘Admittedly you’ve run some successful investigations since coming here, but trouble seems to follow you around somehow.’

  ‘It looks like Warren is deliberately trying to cause trouble, sir.’

  ‘Trouble sells papers. But thankfully there’s an easy solution for this kind of trouble. Under no circumstances are you ever to speak to Phil Warren again. Not once. You will give her a wide berth, and if she approaches you, all you will say to her is no comment. That is if you want to avoid disciplinary action. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Go and find DS Austin and send him to me immediately. I think I’ll need to have an urgent talk with him as well.’

  McLusky checked his watch. ‘He’s due to attend the post-mortem of the cycle-path victim in a short while.’

  ‘Too bad. Send someone else. That’s all, DI McLusky.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘So now we got a double whammy,’ said Sorbie as he followed DI Fairfield into the mortuary car park. The car park hadn’t been cleared, and it was snowing again.

  ‘Yes, we’ll need to get out another press statement to warn them about this one,’ said Fairfield, turning up the collar on her coat. ‘For what it’s worth. Oh, look who’s paying a rare visit. That’s McLusky’s car, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hard to tell under all that snow. And it’s got ice blooms on the windows. Doesn’t that heap have any heating?’

  McLusky turned the Mazda off the road but didn’t fancy his chances of ever getting out again if he continued to the car park proper. He left the car by the entrance and was crunching through the snow towards the buildings when he spotted the reception committee. Eight months at Albany Road and he was only just on first-name terms with Fairfield. But not with her DS. McLusky suspected that even his mother called him Sorbie.

  ‘Stop press. DI Liam McLusky at the mortuary,’ Fairfield greeted him. ‘Can’t get the staff, is that it?’

  ‘Hi, Kat.’ McLusky checked his watch, then patted his jacket for cigarettes. ‘More drugs deaths?’

  She nodded. ‘The seventh.’

  He lit a cigarette and released a large cloud of smoke. ‘No sign of the anthrax source?’

  ‘None. But only four of them died of anthrax. Three were overdoses. There’s another batch around, not the usual brown stuff, it’s white as the driven. And we’ve just been told,’ she paused for effect, ‘it’s over eighty per cent pure.’

  McLusky coughed with surprise. ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You don’t care, by all accounts.’ Fairfield semaphored with her eyebrows while Sorbie turned away to hide his grin.

  ‘You read the article.’

  ‘Did you actually say that?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Didn’t sound like you. That’s the second time Warren’s dropped you in it. Whatever did you do to her?’

  ‘I’ll be sure to ask her next time I see her.’ He flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the snow, where it fizzled out. ‘Got to go.’

  Fairfield watched him walk to the entrance. ‘Perhaps it’s what you didn’t do to her,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What?’ asked Sorbie, who had made a snowball and pretended to lob it after McLusky.

  ‘Nothing, Jack. Give me the keys, I’ll drive.’

  He shrugged out of his coat. On Coulthart’s side of the screen the temperature was kept relatively low, but the viewing suite was well heated and McLusky was grateful for it.

  Coulthart beamed at him. ‘What an unexpected pleasure, Detective Inspector McLusky. I had expected your faithful sergeant. He hasn’t been taken ill, I trust?’

  ‘Just unavoidably detained, that’s all.’

  ‘Is it still snowing outside?’ Apart from the one giving on to the viewing suite, the autopsy room was windowless.

  ‘Yes, but it’s just flurries now.’

  ‘Good, I don’t relish the thought of getting snowed in and having to spend the night here.’

  ‘Not scared of ghosts, are you, Doctor?’

  Coulthart peered at him over the top of his glasses. ‘Hardly. I’m afraid I’m not a believer in the survival of the soul.’ He turned to the body on the table in front of him and without further ado made the first incision.

  McLusky’s eyes drifted elsewhere. ‘Not the survival of the soul. But you do believe in a soul, then? A mortal one? What would be the point of having one of those?’

  ‘Oh, plenty of use for a mortal soul, Inspector. Love, art, music … good food, fine wines.’ Coulthart prodded the dead man’s liver with a gloved finger. ‘You need a soul to appreciate them. Which is why I would like to get home tonight where I can sample some of these soulful delights. So let us get on.’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’ McLusky knew nothing of Coulthart’s personal life, but presumed that as a Home Office pathologist, fine wine, art and music would all be well within his price range. Love had been first on his list, so perhaps that too was waiting for him at home. Coulthart’s commentary on the proceedings of the post-mortem saved McLusky from examining too closely what was waiting for him at home.

  ‘Mm. Okay, we have an IC1 male, late fifties, perhaps older. Multiple traumas all over his body, concentrated on his face, the kidney area, genital area and abdomen. He was severely beaten. One of his knees was shattered, probably to keep him from running. Then someone laid into him. Ruptured spleen …’

  ‘Were his hands tied?’

  ‘No.’ He lifted both of them in turn and examined them closely. ‘They show signs of defensive wounds where he tried to protect himself.’ He gestured towards the row of X-rays on the wall-mounted computer screen. ‘Several bones broken there, too. There was a faint footprint on his left hand, from a training shoe. It’s now all but disappeared, but forensics have close-up images.’

  ‘Good. We have a database of training-shoe tread patterns now.’

  Coulthart sounded sceptical. ‘But have you managed to convict anyone with it yet?’

  ‘Yes, we have. The general pattern narrows it down to the brand, and once you have sufficient wear on the sole, it’s as conclusive as tyre tracks.’

  ‘Well I can tell you that our man here may of course have owned training shoes, but he didn’t use them to do any training. He was in quite bad shape even before he was set upon. His liver is in a shocking state, and I am quite certain that when we get to his kidneys, the picture will be just as bleak
.’

  ‘Heavy drinker?’

  ‘Well it wasn’t his love of rich foods that got his liver into that state. His last meal was probably some sort of cereal. I believe he threw most of it up. Probably during the beating he received.’

  ‘And the beating killed him?’

  ‘Yes. Internal bleeding.’

  ‘Was he drunk when he was killed?’

  ‘On the contrary. He had no alcohol in his system at all.’

  The next morning McLusky repeated a digest of the post-mortem findings to the detectives in the incident room. Photographs of the victim’s face were pinned behind him on the board. Some displayed his injuries; one was a reconstruction effort by the technical department, an approximation of what the victim had looked like before his death. Copies of these had been handed out to detectives and uniform alike and circulated to all stations.

  ‘His face was not a stranger to the pub, by all accounts. He was a heavy drinker, possibly a binge drinker. Somewhere a barman must miss him.’

  ‘Not if he drank at home,’ DC French objected. ‘A lot of people can no longer afford to go to the pub.’

  ‘Very true. Is it just me, or is it freezing in here?’

  A chorus of officers confirmed that it was freezing. Someone suggested bloody freezing. ‘The radiators are just lukewarm,’ said Dearlove, who was sitting next to one in a vain effort to keep warm in his polyester suit.

  ‘Maybe it’s an airlock. They might need to be bled,’ McLusky said. He tapped the photograph with the back of his hand. ‘No wallet, no ID, no mobile, no jewellery. M&S trousers and a cheap black jacket. Man-made fibres. M&S socks and underwear. No tattoos. One ancient scar on his thigh, three inches long. Right thigh. His hands were quite soft, so probably not a manual labourer. Apart from his enlarged liver, he looks like Mr Average.’

  ‘Perhaps he was long-term unemployed,’ French said.

  ‘I’ll leave the DSS enquiries to you, then. Anyone fitting our man’s profile who has missed signing on or any other appointments, training courses, et cetera. Of course, if he was unemployed he may have signed on in the past few days. So no one will miss him there for a couple of weeks. Right, let’s get to it.’ McLusky dismissed his troops but waved DC French over. ‘Claire, the shoplifter …’

  ‘Gareth Keep,’ she reminded him. ‘Report’s on your desk.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘He did say one thing; it’s in the transcript, about foreigners coming to Deeming’s f at.’

  ‘Foreigners. What nationality?’

  ‘He wouldn’t elaborate. Probably had no idea where they were from or he would have used the appropriate racist term. It was just a throwaway remark, but I got the feeling that he resented it, that he was made to leave when they arrived. But mainly it was no comment all the way, as you’ll see.’

  ‘Did he give a description?’

  ‘Gareth only knows two adjectives. He couldn’t describe a bowling ball if you dropped one on his foot.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to use bowling balls any more. Okay, ta.’

  In his office, he picked up the interview transcript and began reading it, but soon got distracted by how cold he felt. The radiator behind him was barely even warm. He put on his new jacket and hunched his shoulders, hands in his pockets. He sat like that, staring at the papers without reading, eyes unfocused, for several minutes. Then he turned off his desk lamp and left his office.

  The news was full of headline stories about the unusually early cold snap, pushing even murder from the top spot it usually enjoyed. Words like arctic, blizzard and whiteout were liberally sprinkled through reports by journalists who McLusky suspected had never seen snow before. Certainly a whole generation of southern English drivers who had seemingly never experienced it were advertising the fact by skidding into ditches or each other.

  The main routes through the city were cleared now, with long piles of dirty slush refreezing in the gutters and the margins of the pavements. He found a parking space within sight of Wayne Deeming’s house and sat for a moment, watching the quiet residential street. It looked a depressed, unloved neighbourhood. Snow-capped nests of uncollected rubbish bags sat outside nearly every house. Some of them had split or been ripped apart by scavengers, spilling their contents on to the pavement, where it got trodden into the snow.

  Despite scene-of-crime having long finished with the house, the front door had a police notice stuck to it, warning unauthorized persons to keep out. The blue curtains were still drawn. McLusky let himself into the cramped hall. When he had first entered the house days ago, the interior had been warm; now the place was as cold and lifeless as its last occupant. It already had an unlived-in, empty smell, though the furniture and some of Deeming’s personal effects were still here. He lit a cigarette, strictly against protocol, and went upstairs, where he pushed with his elbow at the half-open door of the main bedroom. There was mess everywhere, much of it created by the SOCO team. The decor was strictly masculine; there were no ornaments at all, and the only adornment on the walls consisted of two posters for the same violent fantasy movie. Deeming’s mother, who lived in Derby, where Deeming had been born, had been informed. She worked in a high-street baker’s shop where she made steak and kidney pies and sandwiches for the lunchtime trade. She had entertained different hopes for her son, McLusky had little doubt. While the causes of crime were complex, drug addiction was naturally the simplest route in. He took a last look around the room, and his eyes rested briefly on the gothic film posters. Wayne had not been an addict. In his case crime could easily have been a simple lack of imagination.

  He couldn’t have said what he was looking for in this house apart from some sort of handle on the man’s death. A few drops of blood on carpet and wall, turned nearly black now and easily dismissed as dirt, were the only indicators that the occupant had left the house to face a cruel and violent death.

  ‘Who did you mess with, Wayne?’ he said quietly as he opened the front door to flick his spent cigarette into the snow. On the other side of the thigh-high wall that divided the tiny front gardens from each other, a young man looked up, startled. He had just produced a key to let himself into the neighbouring house. ‘Hello,’ McLusky said. ‘You live there, yeah?’

  The man looked to be in his early twenties, with a Mediterranean complexion. He wore a bobble hat, scarf, jacket and gloves and appeared to be suffering from a cold. His nasal answer confirmed it. ‘Yes. Are you the police?’

  McLusky recognized the accent as Spanish. He nodded and showed his ID.

  The man looked at it without interest. ‘We already had the police here. Nobody saw anything.’ He inserted the key and unlocked the door.

  McLusky swung his legs over the wall. ‘So you made a statement? What’s your name?’

  Inside the house, a phone began to ring. ‘Michael. Miguel. I was not here when the police came but I did not see anything also. I’ll go and answer the phone now, sorry.’

  McLusky reached over the man’s head and pushed the door wider. ‘Would you mind if I came in for a moment? Just one or two questions.’ He could see the man was torn between arguing and wanting to answer the phone. The phone won and McLusky followed him inside. Miguel rushed to pick up the receiver on the wall in the hall. He talked earnestly in Spanish to the caller while keeping an eye on McLusky.

  A student house. It looked neglected, the paint work faded, the floorboards worn. Years of wheeling bicycles through it had left its mark. McLusky sniffed. He recognized the smell instantly from his own student days; it smelled of overcrowding, two-in-one oil, bad cooking and, in this case, cannabis. The door to the front room was ajar. He slowly pushed it open and nodded his head towards it for Miguel’s benefit. The Spaniard became more animated, as he had expected, so he quickly walked in. The cannabis smell was stronger here. Two short sofas and one armchair, none matching, were grouped around a coffee table buried under ‘what’s on?’ magazines, crockery and ashtrays. Torn Rizla packets, roaches and spent jo
ints identified it as the smoking room. He picked up an open packet of cigarette papers and fanned the air with it as Miguel came through the door.

  ‘It has nothing to do with me. I don’t smoke it. I swear it.’

  ‘I’m not interested in dope smoking. I don’t approve but I’m not interested. Mind you …’ He dropped the cigarette papers back on the table. ‘I could always develop an interest if I felt people were being less than helpful. So … You naturally don’t smoke, but someone around here does. Would they have bought their weed from the chap next door, I wonder?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Miguel folded his arms across his chest and tried to look at ease, leaning against the door frame.

  ‘But not for a while. Because Mr Weed next door hasn’t been around for a few weeks now. So these other people who smoke the stuff must have a new supplier.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And that man has a name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can send someone round to ask you that again. Someone with a lot of time to spare.’

  ‘It’s just another student, I think. At college,’ Miguel added.

  ‘And does that student offer other drugs besides cannabis?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, that’s something. Did you notice a van in the street a few weeks back? A van that doesn’t belong to anyone around here? Double-parked, maybe?’

  He shrugged, widened his eyes. ‘A few weeks back?’

  ‘What do you study, Miguel?’

  ‘Tourism.’

  ‘Nice job if you can get it.’ The next question proved more difficult, considering Miguel’s nationality. Had he seen any foreigners coming and going next door? ‘Non-British people, I mean.’

  ‘What, people like me?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘You suspect non-British people have killed Wayne Deeming?’

  ‘You remember his name.’

  ‘It’s in the news.’

  McLusky nodded. ‘Of course. What’s your name, by the way?’

  ‘Mine? Delrio.’

  ‘Okay, Mr Delrio. Thanks for your valuable time. Bye for now.’