by Peter Helton
McLusky waited until she had disappeared towards the canteen before lifting the briefcase to his face as if listening for a ticking bomb. The case radiated gentle warmth against his cheek. Making sure first that no one else was near, he snapped it open. It contained a hot-water bottle with a Peter Rabbit cover. He delivered it to the superintendent’s secretary as casually as though the delivery of hot briefcases was an everyday police matter: ‘The super’s briefcase from the canteen.’ Lynn Tiery, gently irradiated by a slightly smaller halogen heater than the one her boss enjoyed, accepted it in the same spirit.
Noisily slurping at the vaguely mushroomy gloop, sending unheeded drips of it into his keyboard, McLusky sifted through papers and clicked ill-temperedly through the items flagged up on his computer screen. The BMW in the hedge had once been a BMW on a drive, it said, not far away in Cheltenham, from where it had been stolen six months ago. It had been cloned with an identical model in London. Traffic police had long been looking for it, since the owner of the properly licensed car could prove she had not been driving recklessly around the West Country clocking up speeding fines and parking tickets. So Mr Whoever-he-was with his Beretta, heroin and strange traces of gold plate on the window frame really was as stupid as Austin had classified him. No doubt the man had thought of himself as a successful criminal, with his gun and his flash ripped-off motor. But clocking up speeding tickets and parking fines was as good a method as any for getting your car pulled over, whether cloned or not. It never failed to amaze McLusky how many career criminals got caught because they flagged up their criminality by not getting an MOT, or some other trivial driving offence. Sooner or later the BMW driver would have been stopped by the police. The question was: would he have pulled his Beretta on the officers doing it? And where was the damn thing now?
McLusky balanced the empty soup cup on the teetering mound of rubbish rising above the rim of his bin, then dived for a pile of files on the floor. Everything else was being held up by snow and sniffles, and he never had finished reading the accident investigator’s report on the crash or the PM report on the driver. He dug them out from the ever-growing heap behind his desk. After a moment’s hesitation, he slid the file under his jacket, clicked the computer off and left the office.
Upstairs at the Revival Café, armed with a large cappuccino and a doorstep slice of coffee cake, he took possession of a table and let himself sink on to the chair. For a while he just sat and enjoyed the warmth and sanity of it. The café was busy, but the place was big enough to absorb the bustle. He opened the file, sipped frothy coffee, speared some cake. Who said all police work had to be done in neon-lit offices with a view of the bins?
Reading accident reports was tedious work at the best of times. Estimates on time and speed, braking distances, the road and light conditions at the time, the roadworthiness or otherwise of the vehicle, all was there in detail. Probable cause of the accident was an excess of speed and a puddle of red diesel on the road. Tax-reduced red diesel was used by farmers for farm machinery and vehicles not operated on public roads, and one little puddle of the stuff had done for Mr BMW as he took the bend too fast, without wearing his seat belt. McLusky remembered well what the result had looked like. Bringing back to mind the hand of the dead man, stretched up towards the window, he wondered how long after the crash he had still been alive, broken into pieces, twisted, shattered. It made him reach for more cake and turn the page. The next paragraph arrested his own hand in mid-air, coffee cake balanced precariously on his pastry fork.
The rolling car had scored the road surface and deposited mud on the tarmac as it travelled out of control towards its eventual resting place in the hedge. Those deposits contained tyre marks made by a motorcycle travelling in the same direction some time after the accident.
McLusky clamped his lips around the cake and savoured the gooey layer of coffee-flavoured cream. There was another witness after all. And therefore another candidate for Beretta- and drug-ownership. A biker … The report went on to suggest that the tyre size indicated a motorcycle of 350cc or more, belonging to a large trail bike. The tread pattern was so common, it failed to narrow down the possible make.
It was something, albeit a pretty hopeless something. Taking that as a basis for a search was like looking for a car with a medium-sized engine, possibly a hatchback. McLusky’s eyes lifted off the page and focused on the desultory snowflakes dancing above Corn Street outside the windows. The weather had magicked motorcycles off the roads. Even before the snow, the exceptional cold had forced all but the most determined motorcyclists to switch to alternative transport. Who was left? A few fanatics, and those who had no choice. The accident had happened early in the morning, in mist and darkness. The biker could be a commuter. Someone who didn’t have a car or a car licence and who had little choice but to use his bike because bus services in the country were few and far between. Where was he now that the roads had disappeared under five inches of snow? Standing at a bus stop with a Beretta and a kilo or two of smack? Probably not for long.
His mobile chimed; the display told him it was Albany Road. ‘I think your radio is turned off, guv,’ said DC Dearlove at the other end.
‘Oh? Oh yeah, so it is; now how did that happen?’ Airwave radios had built-in GPS, allowing control to establish the whereabouts of the officer. Or at least the radio. Which was why radios tended to mysteriously go off air from time to time, apparently all by themselves.
‘Just calling to say, the mortuary sent word earlier; the PM of the second Leigh Woods victim is scheduled for one hour from now. And with DS Austin off sick …’
With a moistened finger McLusky dabbed at the last crumbs of cake on his plate. ‘Thanks, I’ll attend.’
Fragile. That was how she would have described herself. Feeling a bit fragile today. To another woman, anyway. To a woman friend, she further qualified the thought. She wouldn’t have told a colleague, female or otherwise. You kept your private life out, almost secret, especially if you were hoping to one day be elevated above their rank. If you got too chummy with them, you’d only store up problems for later. Rumours could chip away at reputations. And fragile was not a good word to be mentioned in the same breath as detective inspector, not unless you were happy to stay a DI for all eternity.
Fairfield was thrown forward into the tightening grip of her seat belt as Sorbie braked sharply, having driven too close to the back of a delivery van. ‘Jesus, Jack, watch what you’re doing. That’s no way to drive a woman with a hangover.’
‘That bastard has no bloody brake lights on his heap. Am I pulling him over?’
‘Not unless you want to go back into uniform. Permanently. Just drive.’ Hangover, now that was fine with colleagues, though certainly not superiors. You could come in, grunt, make a show of taking Alka-Seltzer and say Bit of a sesh last night, and then get on with things. That was the accepted way of drinking too much and being one of the lads. But not fragile, not on the verge of throwing up all day or feeling faint because the thought of food made you want to retch.
Sorbie grudgingly adjusted his driving style; there were no more sudden jerks or stops. The call about the drug death had been anonymous, from a mobile. One that had been reported stolen, naturally. He pulled up in front of the address as smoothly as a limousine chauffeur. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.
‘Hideous.’ Fairfield got out and took in the side street with as little head movement as possible. These were tiny, blunt-faced houses stubbing their noses on the litter-strewn pavements. Besides the one they had stopped in front of, she could see two more that were boarded up. Everything in sight had been covered in graffiti and tags, walls, doors and cars, in red, blue or black. Uncollected rubbish had been piled into two great heaps, someone’s valiant effort at making this stretch of pavement walkable. The small car in front of number eleven had no rear window and was full of snow. The one next to it had a flat offside front tyre. Most of the cars parked in the street were so old that they made the brightly liveried poli
ce car, the doctor’s Audi and even Sorbie’s Golf look futuristic; gaily coloured visitors from an unlikely future. An unhappy-looking constable outside number eleven straightened up as Sorbie pointed to him.
‘I’m glad he’s there to keep an eye on my motor. Jesus. If I woke up one morning and found I was living in Easton, I’d just walk out of the house and keep walking until I found people who’d never heard of the place.’
‘If only it were that easy.’
‘It is that easy.’
‘And what if you had children, Mr Sorbie?’
‘Why would I have children?’
‘People do have them, you know.’
‘Yes, of course. I would look out of the window, see this shit and think, hey, let’s have children, they’ll love it here.’
‘Yeah, well, stop being a smartass for a bit, I’m not in the mood.’ She walked past the officer guarding the house as though he were invisible, followed by Sorbie, who merely noted that the man had a shaving rash.
Okay, find out like I did, the PC thought, and sniffed at the cold city air.
The house was a shell. It had been condemned, boarded up, then broken into and squatted. In the hall, the temperature was the same as outside. There were only two doors off. The one at the back gave on to a gutted kitchen. The nearer one was closed. The smell of damp decay was strong. Sorbie pushed open the door. It opened reluctantly. ‘Jesus.’
The stench streaming from the room caught in Fairfield’s throat. She swallowed hard and ducked her head to bury her nose in her scarf. The small front room was knee high in garbage, raw, festering, giving off a penetrating sweet odour, laced with urine. There were whole cellophane-packed loaves of bread turned blue with mould, countless packs of pizzas and ready meals, layers of rotting fruit. ‘Looks like they’ve been skip-diving,’ Fairfield said from behind her silk scarf. ‘It’s all the stuff supermarkets chuck out. And they used it as a toilet as well. Someone will have to go through all that lot.’
‘I can see needles from here.’
‘Close the door, Jack, or you’ll see puke from there.’ Over her shoulder she said: ‘You could have warned us, Constable.’
At the bottom of the stairs, she passed a jumble of electric cables hanging from the wall where the electricity meter had been bypassed. The cables snaked up the stairs. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The bathroom door was closed. The smell coming through the door explained why some had preferred to piss in the front room. The duty doctor had long finished with the corpse. He was merely here to pronounce the man dead. ‘Heroin overdose is what it looks like to me. That’s the third in two weeks I have attended personally. When will they get the message?’
‘This is the message. And he got it.’ Sorbie looked beyond the doctor to where the slumped body of the dead man lay half on, half off a much-stained mattress. ‘The happy dead.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Heroin kills. Sooner or later. Everyone knows it. If you do heroin, then that’s what you’re looking for, death on a stained mattress.’
The doctor frowned at Sorbie, wondering whether it was worth continuing the conversation. ‘That’s not the message I meant. It’s probably the pure heroin batch that killed him. They must have heard about it by now. Why they can’t go easy on the stuff until they know what they bought is beyond me.’
Fairfield put a hand between Sorbie’s shoulder blades and pushed him into the room, then leant against the door frame. She thought she’d give a month’s wages not to have to look at another dead junkie. ‘Once you’ve started using heroin, you’ve crossed a threshold somehow. You’re no longer rational; the drug makes the decisions,’ she said. ‘How old was he?’
‘Young.’
‘Forever young, Doctor.’
‘It’s what I said,’ Sorbie said from inside. ‘The happy dead. Hey, there’s someone in the back yard.’
Below the window, beyond the snow-covered roof of the kitchen extension, lay a small, lifeless yard, half choked with broken furniture and more garbage. Sorbie watched as a man in his thirties appeared through the jumble of vegetation that grew over the tattered fence. With difficulty he got the sash window to open. ‘Hey, you, stay right where you are! Police!’
The man stopped in his tracks and looked up. Above the upturned collar of his leather jacket and his scarf, only the eyes and forehead were visible. He wore a leather cap over what had to be very short hair. Their eyes met only briefly before the man turned and ran back the way he had come.
‘Stop, police!’ Sorbie hesitated only a fraction. ‘Bugger.’ Then he squeezed through the window and lowered himself on to the roof of the extension below. His quarry had fought his way back through the fence; he could see glimpses of him as he ran along the narrow passage that divided the backs of the houses from those in the next street.
Fairfield pushed herself off the wall and had launched herself towards the stairs when she heard a crash and a sound of dismay from Sorbie. The doctor got to the window before her. ‘Are you okay?’ he called down.
‘Just dandy. Someone get me out of here.’
It took the PC and the doctor five minutes of pushing and pulling to free Sorbie from where one of his legs had gone through what turned out to be a tarpaper-covered roof of woodwormed boards. His trousers were torn, revealing a raw, bleeding gash in his leg.
‘Why did you go after him?’ Fairfield wanted to know. ‘You haven’t seen enough of junkies?’
‘He didn’t look like a junkie. Yeah, ouch, thank you, Doc,’ he added as the duty doctor dabbed at his bloodied leg.
‘What did he look like?’
‘He looked too sorted for a junkie. Didn’t move like one. About thirty. Broad shoulders, fourteen stone, five eight. Blue eyes, I think, light eyebrows. Heavy biker jacket, not cheap. Black scarf, leather gloves and a leather cap on his head. Probably shaven head, or very short, anyway. Couldn’t see much of his face because of the scarf.’
A few SOCOs had arrived, purely routine where drug deaths were concerned, but with the search on for the suppliers of two types of lethal heroin, they showed more animation than usual. One of them held up a half-empty heroin wrap inside an evidence bag. ‘It looks like the same type of wrap, very small resealable polythene. One day we’re going to get lucky and get the guy’s DNA and fingerprints.’
‘One day. Unless he wears gloves, because it’s bloody freezing. I got to go and get into a new pair of trousers,’ said Sorbie.
‘Okay. Thanks, Doctor. Let’s go, Jack.’
In the hall, they squeezed past two crime-scene officers, in full protective gear and dust masks, contemplating the immensity of the garbage heap in the front room through the narrowly opened door. Fairfield ducked back behind her scarf.
‘CSI Bristol,’ Sorbie offered. ‘The glamour of it.’
McLusky always thought he could smell it. He knew that no odours penetrated the viewing screen of the autopsy room, but ever since he had caught the stench of his very first decomposing corpse, even a photograph could trigger the memory. A brief delusion of smell, like an echo, triggered somewhere in his brain. The same way it sometimes happened with coffee, he could smell it when it wasn’t there. Once it had happened with roses when the word had been mentioned.
‘So you haven’t suddenly developed a taste for it, then?’
‘DS Austin has taken to his bed with a cold. So have scores of others.’
‘Has your heating been restored at the station?’
‘Not yet, but I’m told that if it hasn’t by tomorrow, we’ll shut up shop until it is.’
‘I hope the temperature on your side of the screen is adequate?’
‘Tropical.’
‘Then we’ll proceed, shall we?’
Roses. McLusky tried to conjure up the smell of roses as Dr Coulthart started his examination of the mutilated body.
‘I usually shy away from any conclusions until after the examination is complete, but I can tell you right now that you have a m
urderous sadist to catch.’
‘I have already come to a similar conclusion.’
‘These wounds, we’ll count them later, are, how shall I say … gratuitous. His teeth have all been shattered. So have both testicles. He would also probably have lost sight in both eyes had he lived. The X-rays’ – Coulthart indicated a quartet of them on the computer screen behind him – ‘show broken feet, elbow, collarbone, ribs …’
‘Could he have been tortured to extract information?’
Coulthart considered it briefly. ‘Anything is possible. But if you wanted to inflict pain as part of an interrogation, you wouldn’t do this. A torturer who interrogates assumes a role that allows him to inflict pain and then take pain away again. Tell me everything and the pain will stop. Can’t do that once you’ve broken the chap’s teeth and testes, Inspector.’
‘Could torture have been its own motive?’
‘I doubt that, too. Both this victim and Wayne Deeming were eventually killed by having their heads bashed in. I think you are looking for a killer or killers who also enjoy inflicting pain. But killing was the objective. The injuries weren’t inflicted over any great period of time.’
‘So who is he?’
‘I’m afraid we got no useful prints off his severed hand, and there are no lab results yet; everything has slowed down because of the weather.’
‘Not everything. People are still happily mugging and murdering each other. Exhibitionists prefer not to ‘exhibit’ in bad weather, but, I’m happy to say, that’s not my department.’
‘I can tell you he lived pretty well; he was relatively fit, for his age, which was mid-fifties. His skin … mainly his arms and what remains of his face were once tanned quite deeply. The skin there, though relatively pale, still remains several shades darker than anywhere else.’
‘Just face and arms. Not due to sunbathing, then. Worked outside, perhaps. But we just had a lousy summer; he wouldn’t have got much of a tan here. Probably got it abroad then.’
