Third Degree

by Claire Rayner

  ‘They’ve sent in a couple of their own blokes in the special gear. They’re in radio communication. It seems there’s someone in bed – the bed’s where the seat of the fire is – and they’re trying to get them out. Not easy, it seems.’

  ‘What did I say?’ Dudley said as though the idea was a brand-new one that had occurred only to him. ‘Another like that last time. Got to be arson and worse’n that. It’s murder by fire. Same MO, you’ll see.’

  George opened her mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. Insulting Dudley would only rebound on her; better to bite her tongue and look at Michael, which she did. He grinned at her and she felt better.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ snapped Dudley, intercepting the exchange. ‘Some of those bloody people have no decency – Treating people like so much butcher’s meat …’ With which shot hurled directly at George, he went away to stand beside the fireman conducting operations and to get an update on what he had discovered.

  ‘Couldn’t you just kill him?’ George murmured. ‘Pompous …’

  ‘Och, he’s just tired,’ Michael said. ‘He’s been at work most of the day, you know, and went home in time for his supper and a bit of wifely comfort and what happens? They get him out at four ack emma. Can’t blame the poor wee man for being a bit cranky.’

  ‘I can,’ she said shortly. ‘Listen, Mike –’

  But she could say no more for there was a sudden surge among the watchers, and some shouting too, as the dark, gaping doorway of the house shimmered and seemed to move. One of the firemen, swathed in protective gear, staggered out, carrying a figure across his back.

  The ambulance people were there at once, and between them they carried the shape away from the house. Two of them moved in a smooth synchrony to work on it, checking for life and reaching for their breathing apparatus, while another set to work on the fireman. George hurried over.

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  The ambulance man peered up at her, saw her identity badge and said, ‘Mornin’, doctor. Are you here to take over?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m the pathologist. I think they thought there’d be bodies.’

  ‘They were right.’ The other ambulance man, who had been working over the figure on the stretcher, straightened his back. ‘This one’s a goner.’

  ‘My department, then,’ George said, coming closer. ‘Let me get to her.’

  ‘Beats me how you know it’s a woman,’ he said, peering at the stretcher. ‘Unless you actually know her? Do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t know her,’ George said, sitting back on her haunches beside the stretcher. ‘I was just assuming … There was another fire a bit like this, a few days ago. That was a woman, so I suppose I … Let’s see, anyway. Shield me, will you? We don’t need these gawpers.’

  The ambulance man got to his feet and began to urge the watchers from the other houses to move away, while his partner came and stood behind George so that his bulk hid her and the dead figure on the stretcher from view.

  The body had been brought out draped in a duvet, or what remained of it. Singed and blackened in a great many places, and sodden with the water from the firemen’s hoses, it sagged across the body like a sheet of slimy weed. George picked gently at the edge with a gloved finger – for she had already opened her bag and started to prepare for her examination – and peeled it back carefully.

  The head, she could now see, was pulled right back so that the chin – or what was left of it – pointed to the blotchy sky overhead, the teeth glinting horribly through retracted lips which had been pulled back by the heat. The nose, like Lisa Zizi’s, had vanished, the neck was severely damaged too and the sinews looked like ropes. Below that there was less damage; the skin was smooth and, even in this fitful light, looked pale and young.

  George lifted the duvet further and saw the breasts and sighed. She returned the covering to its original place and said, unnecessarily, ‘It’s a woman. A fairly young one at that. Check with the Inspector and then take her to Old East, will you? To the mortuary. I’ll do the full examination tomorrow. She’s been moved already so there’s no need to do anything more here, although …’ She stopped, looked down on the body again and shook her head. ‘Actually, I think I’d like to get in there and look at the bed if I can. Cover her up. Then she can go –’

  ‘Not till I say so,’ growled a voice behind her. George looked up and saw the annoyance on the man’s face. It was up to him, of course, to say whether the body could go. She had overstepped her line of authority in giving such an instruction.

  ‘Oh, Inspector Dudley,’ she said quickly. ‘I asked them to check with you first, right, fellas?’ The ambulance men nodded like a pair of mandarin dolls in the back of a car. ‘I mean that I can’t do any more here. It looks similar to the other one. The seat of the fire was the head and face, I can’t tell you more than that until I do a proper job in the mortuary. There’s no light here and, anyway, what’s the hurry? We’ll get the facts soon enough.’ She scrambled to her feet and looked very directly at Dudley and, almost without taking breath, went on: ‘May I take a look inside yet? I may be able to pick up some information for the lab from the bedding – before it’s totally lost to the water and the fire. What are the chances?’

  He was distracted and looked over his shoulder at the leading fire officer. ‘Doc wants to come in and look round,’ he bawled. ‘OK?’

  The fire officer looked dubious. ‘Bit hot in there, doc,’ he said. ‘Mind you, the flames are down.’ And indeed in the short time that George’s attention had been distracted the fire fighters had won their battle. The house had stopped spouting flames and now sat sulky and wet and blackened in the light from the support vehicles.

  ‘May I have an outfit?’ she asked and he grinned.

  ‘There’s one on number three vehicle,’ he said. ‘Harry!’ Another fireman came up to him. ‘Get the doc a heat-protecting outfit, will you? And take her with you into the house. She needs to look round.’ He looked at Dudley then. ‘You too, Inspector?’

  Dudley blinked and almost took a step backwards, but, outfaced, he could do no more than agree, and the fireman yelled at Harry again, who came back with two sets of protective clothing.

  George pulled it over her jeans and shirt, leaving her coat draped over the door of the ambulance, and pushed her feet into the heavy heat-resistant boots. Too big but tolerable, like the helmet they insisted she put on. That seemed heavy at first but once on it was comfortable enough if a little hot. She began to sweat.

  The bedroom on the first floor of the little house was a pitiful sight. It had once clearly been very frilly; rags and tatters of broderie anglaise, in what had been crisp white, seemed to hang from every corner, and there were curtains draping one wall, where the dressing table was, that were of striped apple-green silk. ‘Gawd,’ said Harry the fireman, at her side. ‘Some people do go in for the fancy touch, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ George said absently, moving carefully across the sodden floor to the side of the bed. She could see now that this room wasn’t nearly as badly damaged as the one they had dealt with in the small hours of last Friday morning. There the ceiling had been about to fall in and the floor had gone except for the joists. Here the floor felt solid and intact beneath her feet and the ceiling above seemed to be untouched, except for the large black smudge immediately above the bed. She glanced up at it as she arrived at the bedside and tried to measure with her eye the angle between the smudge and the head of the bed. It seemed to be immediately above it. She bit her lip, and then turned her attention to the bed itself.

  This too had been heavily trimmed with broderie anglaise (and now she thought of it, there had been remnants of it on the soaked duvet over the dead woman in the ambulance outside). The lower sheet was taut and the corners were still tightly fitted over the mattress. Beneath the mattress a flounce of thicker and even more profuse embroidery stuck out in a sad parody of the way it must normally have looked, though now it was
badly bedraggled.

  The pillow at the head of the bed was little more than a shape of ash and half-burned fabric. The unburned parts were at the edges and in the very centre. Looking at it, George said aloud, ‘Under the head.’

  ‘What?’ She had forgetten Dudley was behind her and she jumped slightly.

  ‘I said, the unburned part of the pillow was beneath the head. See? It burned badly all round where the head wasn’t – if you see what I mean – and then started to lose its power as it got to the edges. It’s my guess that when I get to look at the body properly, I’ll see that there’s the same pattern of injury, if less severe, that there was in Lisa Zizi. Burned shoulders, upper arms, upper chest, running down to the trunk in rivulets. The legs will be hardly damaged.’

  ‘So?’ Dudley said.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘This woman’s head was deliberately set on fire. I can’t verify that till I’ve done the PM, but that’s how it looks to me. Something inflammatory poured over her face and head and then set alight.’

  George decided to go straight back to the hospital from the scene of the fire. There seemed little point in going home to catch up on the remainder of her sleep. It was almost five o’clock now and she could always sleep later. Maybe.

  Working alone, without Danny, had its drawbacks. No one to fetch and carry, no one to set up the necessary equipment. But she could manage, she was sure, although she told Dudley she had to have a police witness. No one could be expected to be there from the coroner’s office. Not at five a.m.

  ‘Can’t you do it later?’ Dudley asked as they stood in the cool air outside and climbed out of the protective gear. ‘When I’ve got more people on duty?’

  ‘I could,’ she said. ‘But wouldn’t you rather get the facts fast, and get to work on ‘em?’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘I suppose so.’ He looked at Michael. ‘All right with you, Mike?’

  ‘Sure. If you dinna mind the overtime, sir,’ he said cheerfully. Dudley grunted again and marched off, and Michael laughed. He told her quietly that for once she’d managed to put the Inspector in his place.

  ‘You shamed him into going into that room,’ he told her as she drove them both back to the hospital. ‘He’d never have gone otherwise – the last one got under his skin too much. Really upset him, it did. After that, he can’t come the acid with you. I enjoyed that.’ And he sat and chuckled to himself all the way back.

  It took her an hour and a half, probing the woman’s burns, outlining the areas that had third-degree burns and those that were second degree, and mapping the wide flamed areas on the rest of the body that had been merely reddened, burns of the first degree. In general, the injuries were a great deal less horrific than Lisa’s had been, but in one respect they were the same. Both faces had been almost totally destroyed.

  ‘You know what this adds up to, Mike?’ she said as at last she put a cover over the cadaver, leaving it for Danny to put away in a cold drawer when he came in. She collected up her samples and slides and then yawned, a great cracking yawn that startled her in its suddenness. ‘Have you worked it out?’

  ‘It’s not so difficult,’ Mike said. He had become more and more quiet as the work had gone on, listening to the description that George dictated of the woman and her injuries. Aged between twenty and twenty-five, judging by the epiphyses, notably in the neck of the femur. Non gravid. Pubic hair auburn. No other body hair. Legs and axillae shaved. No scalp hair remaining. Eyes green …

  She had clearly been a pretty young woman, and seeing her lying here like this did not encourage Mike to feel as relaxed as he usually was. But he tried to join in her conversation as though he weren’t at all bothered by what he had seen.

  ‘It’s not so difficult,’ he repeated. ‘Someone’s got it in for well-off women. Women who live alone. Maybe they’re on the game – the other one was – but we don’t know about this one. This one’s much younger, of course. Anyway, someone has it in for them and he – he pours something flammable over their faces and sets them alight? I suppose they’re dead or certainly deeply unconscious when he does it. Any sign of a cause of death apart from the fire?’

  ‘None,’ she said. ‘Like last time. Just a dead girl with a lot of burns and nothing in her lungs or available breathing passages to show she breathed after the fire started. I’ll check for drugs and so forth when we do the body fluids testing, and that may show something – a cause for the victim’s acquiescence in being set alight? There wasn’t anything in the other one apart from a fairly high blood alcohol. Not enough to cause coma, though, I’d have thought. We’ll have to wait to see if this one had been drinking too. But even if she had …’ She shook her head. ‘I have no evidence of any cause of death apart from the burns in either of these cases so far. It’s a total mystery.’

  ‘So,’ Michael said. ‘Maybe the work of a serial killer with a particularly nasty modus operandi? Could it be possible?’

  ‘Yes,’ George said. She stood looking down at the anonymous body under its cover on the slab. ‘I think it is. Very possible.’

  13

  George sent her report into Dudley at Ratcliffe Street before ten, and then sat in her office and thought. There would be no point, she knew, in trying to get herself any further involved in this case, or in the two earlier ones. She’d done as much as Dudley would allow her to do.

  But that didn’t mean, she told herself, that she had to give up. There must be some way of getting Gus away from his big case now. What could be bigger than a possible serial killer? It had to beat whatever he was doing, hands down. The job he was on involved money, she knew that much, but this one – or rather, these two – involved lives. If they could find the man who had set fire to these two women soon they’d prevent him from doing it to any others. There was no question, George decided, but she would have to take matters into her own hands and see to it that Gus was given all the facts. Once he knew, of course he’d take over.

  That was her thinking, and she was exhilarated by it. Until she began to think about how she would tell him. His phone was indeed switched off; she tried the number several times and got the maddening robotic voice that told her ‘the Vodaphone you have called may be switched off – please try later’ and without knowing more about where he was likely to be, how could she find him?

  It was Michael Urquhart who gave her the answer. He phoned from the nick at half past ten to check on a section of her report on Lisa Zizi’s post-mortem which had been smudged in the photocopier, and when she’d sorted that out she said on a sudden impulse, ‘Mike, have you any idea where the Guv might be?’

  ‘Here, in the office,’ Mike said. ‘Leave him alone, Dr B. He’s in as nasty a mood as ever I’ve seen him.’

  ‘I don’t mean Dudley,’ she said, her voice thick with scorn. ‘I mean our Guv.’

  ‘Ah!’ Mike was amused. ‘Not spending his nights at home, then?’

  ‘Mike, don’t you start!’ she said wrathfully.

  ‘Och, I’m sorry. I mean no harm, you know that. Look, all I can say is that he’s on a major situation over in Poplar and all points east. From what I’m picking up here, it seems there’s a network of different villains all got together, taking over the patch. Doing a new Krays scenario, you understand. It’s bookies and garages and car dealers and all sorts. From what Salmon said in the canteen yesterday to one of his fellas–’

  ‘Who?’ she interrupted.

  ‘Sergeant Salmon. He’s the senior bloke working with the Guv’nor, remember? Odd sort of chap. I can’t quite make him out. But he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s very busy on these cases, I’ll tell you that!’

  ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘Big. Smooth sort of guy. Bit full of himself. I wasn’t crazy about him, either.’

  ‘Well, as I say, he was telling one of his blokes that they’re having trouble working out who’s straight on the whole damned patch. Let alone bent.’

  ‘Poplar?’ she said. ‘A big area?’

  ‘Big enough,
’ Mike said. ‘Mind you, lots of it’s docks.’

  ‘Where’s he most likely to be in Poplar? In one of the nicks?’

  ‘Not if he can help it,’ Mike said. ‘Not when he can come to Ratcliffe Street to do his proper work. He’s verra attached to his own place and things around him, is the Chief Inspector, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling involuntarily. Indeed he was; normally he would never have let his flat get as unkempt as it had. That was why she had cleaned up: not because the mess offended her personally but because she knew how much he’d appreciate her care of his bits and pieces, as he always called his expensive and well-chosen furniture. And plants, of course.

  ‘So he’s on the streets somewhere,’ she said. ‘Driving around in that old car of his. Or will it be a police car?’

  ‘Mebbe,’ Mike said. ‘Or in a restaurant or a pub, more like. From what Salmon was saying he’s used them a lot as meeting places for the various snouts he’s got. He’s got a great list of informers, has the Guv’nor.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘He’ll be out eatin’ or drinkin’ with some of them, that’s where he’ll be.’

  ‘Will he?’ George said and a thought began to form. ‘Listen, Michael, when are you off duty?’

  ‘About four hours ago,’ Mike said cheerfully. ‘I’m into overtime at the present. But I’ll no’ get much more. I’ll have to be away soon, anyway, to get a bit o’ sleep. I’m dead on my feet after last night.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Mike,’ George said, letting her voice become a touch wheedling. ‘Dear Mike, you’ll help me find him, won’t you? Go home, get some sleep and this evening we’ll have a wander around Poplar – the restaurants and so forth – see if we can find out where Gus is. What do you say?’

  ‘Just wander around looking for – Dr B., it’s a great patch o’ ground wi’ a gey great number of eatin’ places and such like to cover!’ His Scottish burr had deepened in his horror at the suggestion. ‘It’ll take us a fair month o’ Sundays to do that! And he’ll no’ be pleased to be interrupted, I’m thinking.’