Third Degree

by Claire Rayner

  ‘What?’ she said, lifting her head to focus her eyes on him. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said,’ he repeated patiently, ‘I’ll get my notes typed as soon as possible.’

  ‘No. After that.’

  ‘What?’ He gaped at her, for suddenly she was very excited.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said and jumped up. ‘I did hear you. You said you wanted to get your hands on fibres from more chopped-up stuff – oh my God!’ She stared at him in horror. ‘I told Danny to get rid of it!’

  ‘Get rid of what?’ he cried almost despairingly, but it was thrown at her departing back. She had shot from the room and was heading for the stairs to the mortuary and the PM room as fast as she could move. He followed her.

  ‘Danny!’ she bawled as she reached the basement. ‘Danny, where are you? Don’t say you’ve gone already, dammit! I need you. Danny? Danny!

  There was a moment’s silence and then slowly the door to the men’s lavatory at the far end of the corridor opened and Danny came out, still buttoning his flies. ‘Cor, Dr B. you don’t give a bloke a chance, you don’t,’ he said, glaring at her. ‘I meantersay, if a bloke can’t even –’

  ‘Danny! That piece of animal. The piece Sergeant Slavin brought in. What’s happened to it?’

  ‘You said to shove it,’ Danny said. ‘Incinerate, that’s what I thought best. No need for no undertakers for that, thank Gawd. More trouble’n they’re worth, they are.’ He had spent half the day having one of his battles with a couple of severe undertakers who disapproved of Danny’s cavalier attitude to bodies as much as Danny despised what he regarded as their sentimental claptrap.

  ‘Oh, shit!’ George said and put both hands up to her head. ‘Oh, shit and damnation and –’

  ‘Well, you said.’ Danny was aggrieved. ‘So I got it all set ready to go. First thing in the morning.’

  George lit up like a sodium flare. ‘You – you haven’t done it yet?’

  ‘I bin busy,’ Danny said, more aggrieved than ever. ‘I can’t be everywhere, can I? You said to take them photographs and I did. And then I set the thing aside to get on with more important things.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘Like dealin’ with those bleedin’ undertakers, God rot ‘em.’

  ‘Danny,’ George said fervently. ‘You’re a wonder. Come on, Jerry, we’ll go and find it. Where is it exactly, Danny?’

  Danny watched her go belting down the corridor towards the big cold store room. ‘Drawer seventeen,’ he shouted. ‘The one on the end. I wish you’d make up your bleedin’ mind.’ But he said that so quietly she could not have heard it. For all his bravado, Danny knew how far he could go and get away with it, and more importantly, when to take care.

  George was oblivious. She had found the relevant drawer and was staring down at the wrapped bundle in it with relief.

  ‘Thank God for polythene,’ she said. ‘There shouldn’t have been any interference with any fibres that might be there.’

  ‘I wish you’d explain,’ Jerry said a little plaintively. ‘Is this another bit of the body the leg came from? If it is, you’ve kept it very quiet.’

  ‘No,’ she said almost absently. ‘It’s a dog. Probably. Could be a wolf escaped from a zoo, but I wouldn’t like to swear. It’s skinned, you see.’

  Jerry gawped at her. ‘Oh, yes, I see,’ he said weakly. ‘It’s as clear as flipping mud.’

  She laughed, and then explained. As Jerry listened, his face slowly lifted.

  ‘Another cut surface,’ he said. ‘Somewhere to look for more fibres.’

  ‘You got it.’ She was almost bubbling with pleasure. ‘More fibres. We can do some comparing.’

  ‘Well, let’s get ’em,’ Jerry said. ‘I’ll change,’ and turned to go.

  ‘Now?’ She stared at him.

  ‘Well, I thought –’ He stopped. ‘I dare say you’ve got a date.’ He sounded flat suddenly.

  ‘Not till around midnight, I haven’t,’ she said. ‘If then. You’re right. We’ll do it now. Danny! Can you spare us another hour or so? Overtime, Danny! How about that!’

  She reached Gus’s flat at half past eleven. The bag of hot salt beef and pickled cucumbers and rye bread was warm in her hands, and she felt more cheerful than she had for a long time. She had never worked late to such good purpose, she told herself, thinking affectionately of Jerry as she ran up the stairs to the third floor, rather than waiting for the lift. If Jerry hadn’t insisted she’d have had nothing better to do all evening than sit about and glower over Dudley’s blocking of her and her schemes for getting hold of Gus. Instead, she had found plenty of fibres in the cut surface of the dog’s carcase, enough to make Jerry’s eyes gleam as he collected them, and announce greedily, ‘These’ll keep me going for days yet. But you watch me! I’ll have ’em sorted and reported and the case half solved for you in a quarter of the time it’d take anyone else.’

  She had laughed at that, but let him burble on. It was a real pleasure to work with him, she decided. She’d have to deal with Alan Short’s probably hurt feelings, because she had once again set him aside in favour of a technician’s help, but that was something she could soon sort out, she’d told herself optimistically. And it was worth the effort of soothing a few ruffled feathers to get stuff like this about the case. She whistled softly through her teeth as she slid her key into Gus’s front-door lock and went in to wait for him. He’d hear all this, and see at once that it was a case that needed top-rate skills to be solved. Skills far in excess of Rupert Dudley’s.

  She felt very content as she went round the flat doing a little tidying and then organized his supper, ready to heat as soon as he walked in the door. Thank heavens for little microwaves, she sang softly, glancing at her watch. He’d be here soon after midnight, sure to be. Lovely.

  10

  Not only did he not return at twelve o’clock; he did not return at all. She woke stiff, fully dressed and deeply weary on his sofa, and blinked at her watch. Eight-thirty a.m. The flat looked tired and dusty in the morning sunlight, as bedraggled and unwanted as she felt herself to be, and she dragged her aching muscles to the shower and spent ten vigorous minutes there trying to restore some of her sense of wellbeing.

  It wasn’t any use. She was irritated with Gus for not coming home, even though she knew she had no right to take it for granted that he would: on difficult cases it was not all that unusual for him to stay at the nick all night. He had a sofa in his office that he could use for catnaps when he was working full tilt. Maybe he had one in the incident room on the top floor, and had used it last night; why shouldn’t he? It was his right after all.

  But it’s the weekend, she thought mulishly as she rubbed herself dry and then had to climb back into the creased and tired clothes she had worn all day yesterday. He ought to have been able to get away on Friday night; and suddenly she remembered his description of Fridays as Poet’s day. ‘Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,’ he’d cried joyously one Friday last year and they’d gone off to spend two blissful days in Brighton, shopping and sleeping and swimming and making love. She could have wept now at the memory of it.

  She spent the morning in a ridiculously housewifely fashion. She cleaned his flat thoroughly, doing her best to restore his bedraggled houseplants by soaking them in the bath (and they did perk up remarkably well, to her surprise) and hoovering everywhere before going home to her own flat to do exactly the same jobs all afternoon. She showered again, bone weary, at nine o’clock, and went to bed early after one of the dullest Saturdays she could remember, but at least with the faint glow that comes from knowing that everything around her was squeaky clean. That made her remember her mother talking of the sheer pleasure that housework could bring, and she felt bad again. Vanny in Buffalo, and she here. Shouldn’t she be there with her mother? But if she were, what difference would it make? Bridget had been clear on that point. None at all.

  She slept tolerably well, to her surprise, and promised herself she would do nothing about contacting
Gus. When he did come home he’d see the clean flat, know at once who was responsible and would surely want to call her. So, she went to the swimming pool in Grange Road, just this side of the Old Kent Road, and swam a vigorous half-mile; ate lunch in a cheerful Afro-Caribbean restaurant she found in Jamaica Road and then went home to watch an old black-and-white film on Channel Four. And still he didn’t phone, and somehow she managed not to ring him.

  But come eight o’clock she could bear it no longer, and dialled his number. All she got was the answerphone and she didn’t say anything, just hung up and sat and stared into the street outside her shiny clean windows, which no longer gave her any pleasure whatsoever. She felt sorry for herself. It wasn’t much fun.

  Monday came as a relief. She went in early to find that Jerry was already there, his head bent over his favourite old microscope and with a pile of textbooks beside him, all of them open at pages showing enlarged pictures of different types of fibre. She brought him coffee and leaned over to see how he was getting on.

  ‘Can’t you do the identification without these?’ she said looking at the top textbook. ‘I always thought you were rather a whizz on fibres, could spot them at twenty paces for what they are.’

  ‘I can,’ he said shortly. ‘I’m just making sure because these are such a mishmash.’

  ‘Such a what?’

  He straightened his back and stretched and she looked at him with sudden anxiety; his face was drawn and his eyes bloodshot. She had never seen him looking so tired. ‘Jerry, for heaven’s sake, are you sickening for something?’ she asked. ‘You look lousy.’

  ‘Oh, ta ever so,’ he said. ‘Makes a guy feel really great, that does. Of course I look lousy. Been working all the hours God sends, haven’t I?

  She frowned. ‘Not over the weekend, surely?’

  ‘Over the weekend very surely,’ he said, yawning. ‘I was on duty officially on Saturday anyway, for the usual morning sessions, and then Jane asked me to swap with her – she had the weekend on call for emergencies, but she wanted to do something special, and I didn’t mind. Gave me a chance to work on this stuff. There weren’t any emergencies – maybe someone up there actually does like me after all – and I’ve done very well.’ He managed one of his familiar leers at her, and looked rather better. ‘Wanna hear?’

  ‘Does the cat want the kippers?’ she retorted. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Well!’ he said, gesturing with both hands, like a child about to tell a very important story to his teacher. ‘I’ve found a positive rag bag of stuff.’

  ‘In the dog’s carcase?’

  ‘In the dog’s carcase, yes. Look at this list.’ He pushed a sheet of paper over to her.

  She read it with increasing bewilderment. ‘Wool,’ she said aloud. ‘Cotton, silk, felt, hemp, rayon, nylon, terylene, flax … What is this? A list of all the fibres there are?’

  ‘Do me a favour, that’d be miles long. No, that’s what I found in the stuff we dug out of that carcase on Friday night.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Every flaming one, cobber!’ he said with a sudden access of gaiety and a richly phony Australian accent. ‘Beats the search for the amber nectar, this does. I’ve found a draper’s shop in a dead dog. Magic? Course it is!’

  She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘What on earth should they be doing – Hey, have you compared them with the stuff we found in the leg?’

  He looked at her owlishly. ‘This’ll really get you,’ he said. ‘I have and not a one of them matches.’

  ‘Not one?’ She gaped. ‘You must be kidding.’

  ‘I kid you not. Not one matches. Like a shop girl’s trousseau, hmm? Nothing matches …’ And he began to hum softly beneath his breath.

  ‘It’s time you got some rest,’ she said. ‘You’re behaving as though you’re punch drunk. You must have missed one. There has to be some overlap, for pity’s sake, with all this stuff…’

  He sobered and shook his head. ‘Honestly, Dr B., I checked and checked. No two fibres are quite the same. I mean, one bit of hundred per cent cotton can look very different from another bit, even though they’re both pure cotton. When it comes to the artificial fibres – nylon and terylene and rayons and so forth –it’s even more tricky. If there was a match, I’d have spotted it. Not one of the fibres in the human leg matches the fibres in the animal carcase.’

  They were silent and she shook her head. ‘I can’t work out what this means,’ she said slowly. ‘There has to be an explanation.’

  ‘Maybe the carcase was wrapped in something before it was chucked in the river,’ Jerry offered.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A patchwork quilt, maybe? You know the sort of thing. Made out of odds and ends. Or a rag rug. We used to have one on the kitchen floor when I was a kid. Made out of old dresses of my mum’s, and Dad’s gardening trousers and so forth. Very tasteful, they were.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible,’ she said. ‘But it’s not really much help, is it?’

  ‘Well, I dare say the boys in blue’ll find an answer,’ Jerry said and stretched. ‘Look, if it’s all right with you, now you’re here, I’ll pop home for a while, get some sleep, have a shower and a bite. I’ll be back around – shall we say, two? Can you cope if I do that?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said absently, and then more strongly, ‘Yes, yes, yes. And you needn’t worry about getting back at all today. Not if you’ve worked the whole weekend, for pity’s sake. We can manage.’

  ‘Oh, no. I want to come back.’ He began to clear his work station, tucking his slides and books away carefully. ‘I’m enjoying this job. Thanks for letting me do it.’ And he grinned at her and turned to go. ‘Oh! Good morning, Alan.’

  Alan Short was standing beside his desk in the corner of the lab, pulling on his white coat. His jacket he had already set over the back of his chair.

  ‘Morning, Alan,’ George said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘No,’ Alan said. ‘You were so busy talking. I didn’t want to disturb you. Good weekend?’

  ‘Very nice, thanks,’ they both said, and then laughed, again together. It was as though they were doing everything in chorus.

  ‘Mine was very dull, actually,’ George said. ‘I spent it doing housework and watching rubbish on the box.’

  ‘And I was working,’ Jerry said. ‘I’ll be off then. ‘Bye, both.’ He grinned at Alan, winked at George and went stumping away.

  ‘Working all weekend, was he?’ Alan said casually. ‘Was there something really urgent, then, after I went?’

  George shook her head. ‘It was forensic, Alan. It’s all right. Not your department at all.’

  ‘Oh, I just wondered.’ He was looking down at the papers on his desk in a very casual way as he spoke, fingering the pens in his breast pocket. ‘You do a lot more of that here than I’d have thought. I mean, forensic stuff on fibres … I was always told that that sort of detailed examination is done in police forensic labs.’

  ‘It is usually,’ she said. ‘But I made a sort of special deal.’ She laughed softly as she remembered. ‘I was supposed to send all the samples to the police lab, but I’m a Home Office pathologist in my own right so there’s no reason, legally, why I shouldn’t do the work I want to do myself. And I’ve trained Jerry over the past few months to do more of it – so I made a deal, as I say, to do more of it here. It makes life more interesting and the work more solid, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Makes the department busier, too, I suppose,’ Alan murmured.

  She looked at him sharply. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I put the forensic work before the hospital’s.’

  He opened his eyes wide. ‘Of course not! It was just a statement of fact. Most hospital labs don’t do any forensic work, that’s all.’

  She relaxed. ‘That’s true. It was just that when I came here, Gu – the DCI I work with most, Inspector Hathaway, and I agreed that doing some of the forensic detail here would save time. And money. It
’s cheaper than when they send it to the big police lab. We only do that for really major stuff for which we haven’t enough gear.’ She waved her hand comprehensively at the lab, its agitators and centrifuges, ovens and fridges. ‘Not that we’re too badly off. I get some extra money for Old East because we use the premises and the police get a better job on account of they’ve got me.’ She grinned at him. ‘But don’t fret you, Alan. No hospital patient suffers at all. Because they’ve got you as well as me, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Alan said. He nodded and sat down.

  ‘I’ll make coffee,’ George said handsomely as the door opened and Jane came in, carefully not looking at Alan. He equally carefully didn’t look at her, and George was amused. Poor kids, she thought indulgently as she went out to make the coffee in her own office instead of in the little kitchen area behind the lab, so as to give them a few moments of privacy. This is a hell of a place to run a courtship. Not easy for them.

  Any more than it is for me, she thought, and made a face. That was not a subject to be thought about, and she wouldn’t. So she made the coffee, took it to the lab, making a rattling sound with her tray before opening the door to give them fair warning, and then went back to her own office to settle to her day’s work.

  Ellen Archer found her there at eleven o’clock. ‘Nearly ready?’ she carolled as she came in. ‘We’d better get a move on. They said they’d probably reach us by about eleven-fifteen.’

  George stared. ‘Who said they’d reach us for what?’

  Ellen almost tutted. ‘You haven’t forgotten, Dr B.? The Board! We’re going to talk them out of hiving off our path. services in favour of St Dymphna’s.’

  George’s face cleared and she got up with alacrity. ‘Of course! It’s this morning. I had forgotten, but I’ve sure as hell remembered now. Lead me to the fray.’

  They walked over to the main part of the hospital through the courtyard, dodging other staff and patients as they went and talking hard all the way.