A Long Time Dead

by Andrew Barrett

  Beaver said nothing.

  “Beaver? Well? What do you say?”

  “Fuck off, Pinhead. You’re just a wanker.”

  “You’ve got me in stitches, Beaver.”

  “You’re full o’ shit. You’re hot air. They want someone with guts, someone who’ll do what he’s told.” Beaver thought of the gun. But he kept his mouth shut. The fewer people knew the better, is what Jess had told him. “When I threaten something, I always see it through. Always.”

  Beaver slept for an hour. He dreamed of the crew, of having genuine comradeship for the first time in his life, looking forward to regularly seeing a friendly face that didn’t belong to a stuck-up parole officer. Beaver, as they say, was made up.

  He would never join the crew. And he’d see Pinhead again in less than a week.

  At 3am, Pinhead made the mistake of grunting again. Beaver’s eyes sprang open and he leapt off his bunk.

  “What you doing?”

  Beaver was putting on his trainers.

  “Where you going?”

  He almost replied that he fancied going for a walk. But he didn’t. He turned, lifted a leg and brought his foot down hard.

  Pinhead screamed.

  Chapter Six

  Monday 18th January 1999

  — One —

  In 1964, the management at Pinderfields General Infirmary had tucked the new mortuary well out of the way on what appeared to be little more than levelled waste ground. Buildings of a more acceptable nature surrounded it as though offering protection to those who couldn’t bear to think of death just yet.

  The mortuary was a single-storey building with moss-covered roof tiles; a rutted dirt track led up to the overgrown ‘delivery’ entrance; cracked windows at the back, and clunking refrigeration equipment slung up over that entrance on rusting metal girders. Old doors with flaking paint over chipped wood; chipped by equally old gurneys with stained frames and gnarled, squeaking wheels.

  It was wintry enough in the car park to nip Roger’s finger ends, but as he carried the tripod and camera case, and Chris carried the flash into the mortuary, it felt bitter, eye-wateringly bitter. They set their equipment down in the area where the freezers and fridges hummed directly outside the examination room’s double flap doors.

  Roger slung his waxed jacket over a gurney.

  A whiteboard, scribbled with names corresponding to the numbers on the fridge and freezer doors, glowed under bright fluorescent tubes. Above the board, an Insectocutor radiated ultra violet, and below it on a shelf, cans of fly spray and several whiteboard markers. Someone had used the markers on a girlie calendar nearby.

  He heard the detectives’ voices echo, and peeked inside the examination room before Chris pushed past him. Inside the examination room was a cupboard with stacks of protective clothing. The detectives were already suited and booted.

  White tiles and stainless steel, sluices, tubs of formaldehyde, handsaws, power saws, knives, scalpels and rib shears, the furniture and fittings of the Pinderfields General mortuary. Clinical waste bins stood in a row alongside floor squeegees; a stainless steel sink, a rotary floor scrubber for when things got really messy, and tucked under a bench was a small pile of cadaver head supports that looked like a nest of giant dead spiders. The smell of disinfectant was strong and the floor still shone from a previous hosing down; the grate in the centre and the gridded drains running to it were still wet with diluted blood.

  Roger and Chris donned flimsy blue elasticated over-shoes and green plastic smocks.

  They all awaited Shelby and the pathologist. Chatter among the detectives intensified as they began making preparations; clipboards were out, pens lay nearby, boxes of latex gloves, rows of plastic sample bottles, stacks of evidence bags, exhibits books and piles of yellow CJA exhibit labels were all on view. The second exhibits officer, DC Clements smeared Vicks across her top lip, and held the jar out to Chris.

  “No, thanks,” he grinned, nudging Roger. “We’re used to it, aren’t we, mate?”

  Roger raised his eyebrows, “You going to be okay?” he asked Clements.

  Just then, the doors swung shut. “Hiya, Chrissy.” Ann, the mortuary tech, blew a kiss.

  Chris turned away; his saggy cheeks lost the grin, and they reddened as the officers made fun of him. The more they teased him, the more he seemed to regress into the taciturn mood he adopted on their way here. He tried to smile, but was obviously desperate to be away from their attention.

  “Oi!” Roger shouted. “Enough, prick.”

  “Why? You gonna run to Mayers?” A detective leaned out of the group, smirk on his face, staring at Roger.

  “Leave it, Haynes,” someone whispered, could have been Firth.

  Roger peeled his eyes from Haynes, tied the green plastic smock over his waistcoat and finished setting up the camera equipment. Sally Delaney’s body craved his attention. White pallid skin. Stained red.

  Chris said, “You okay, Rog?”

  “Tired.”

  With a clipboard under his arm, Wainwright entered the room, pulling on his latex gloves. Shelby and the coroner’s officer, Jacob Cooper, followed, the voices hushed. “And just how professional do you lot think you sound? I could hear you from up the sodding corridor!” Shelby stared directly at Haynes.

  * * *

  Roger’s work consisted of photographing the features of the body as a whole and those of the wounds it had sustained to the abdomen and throat, before and after cleaning. Under Wainwright’s instruction, they paid particular attention to the depth of the cuts, the angles at which they were made and the damage each wound had caused. When Roger had taken all the external shots, he stepped away to the back of the room, avoiding Haynes’s occasional glances, and waited for Wainwright to take all the necessary hair samples and intimate swabs, keeping DC Clements busy with sealing up bags and noting down times and exhibit numbers.

  Using a scalpel, Wainwright made a ‘Y’ incision beneath the corpse’s throat, and slit through the soft skin between her breasts and down, through a constant and thin layer of fat, towards her pelvis, avoiding the stab wound just below her rib cage. It appeared that he was drawing with a thick red pen, leaving a crimson trail as the flesh parted. He peeled the skin aside, using the scalpel to sever the link between it and the flesh beneath. And that was when something more powerful eclipsed the smell of disinfectant.

  “Roger,” Wainwright said, “photograph, please?”

  Roger closed up to the body; felt the cold steel of the table against his thigh, felt the abnormal coolness of Sally Delaney’s blood-splashed arm against his plastic apron as he leaned over to where Wainwright’s bloodied glove pointed.

  “There,” he said, “the incision into the small intestine.” And then quietly, as if to himself, “Through into the ileum.”

  The smell was noxious, and Roger’s throat closed up. “Right,” he said, aiming the flash. Then the camera’s bellows floated outwards until the image of the wound was sharp on the ground-glass screen. Regaining his composure, he knocked the f-stop down to 5.6, pressed the shutter release, and then exhaled.

  “Thanks,” Wainwright said.

  “Another, with a scale?” Roger asked.

  “Please.”

  Later, Roger photographed the body’s organs to indicate the damage caused to them by the attacker’s blade or simply by over exuberant living, forcing himself to ignore the smell of the gutted corpse. They always said the only way to get used to the smell was to breathe it in deeply as you would the air in a rose garden or a freshly mown meadow. Never worked for him; they always smelled just like someone else’s shit.

  Wainwright collected blood samples for toxicology and forensic analysis by severing the femoral artery, and ran his hand along the inner thigh to force the coalescing blood into a plastic bottle, which he handed to DC Clements. Using a syringe, he took a urine sample from the bladder and filled another plastic bottle. DC Clements cringed each time a bottle of body fluid or a smeared swab came her
way.

  Firth looked away from the carcass and said, “Stinks like one of your farts, Roger.”

  “Strange that, Lenny, I was just thinking that about your breath.”

  Shelby looked on impassively, arms folded; there in the role of deputy, he gathered pertinent information for Detective Superintendent Chamberlain.

  Wainwright rinsed and dried his gloved hands and diligently updated his notes. Then, he stripped away the skin around the neck wound, scaled it, and called for more photographs. And then Roger watched as he carefully sliced away the surrounding muscle until—

  “There’s our fatal wound.”

  Shelby stepped forward, leaned in, and noted the partially severed artery.

  The flash fired. Mumbles among the CID.

  Much to Roger’s relief, Wainwright signified the end of the examination, and gave permission for Ann to dump the black plastic bag containing sectioned organs back into the cadaver’s abdominal cavity. She then packed the brainless skull with cotton wool, pulled the scalp back into position and began sewing. Quietly, she whistled.

  Roger took a deep breath and took the dead girl’s fingerprints. With fine particles of aluminium, he powdered each digit, rolled a strip of adhesive tape, called an Austin lift, across its wrinkled bulb and placed the lift onto a clear acetate sheet, about the size of a piece of A4. He turned the sheet over so the fingerprints were the correct way around, and labelled them ‘right thumb’, ‘right index’, ‘right middle’, and so on.

  She was cold and had become stiff again now. The skin of her abdomen that wasn’t streaked with blood, had a green caste to it; the colour of decay.

  He never got used to touching a human being and discovering its hands were not warm; that they lacked the ability to flinch when he cracked the fingers out straight so he could do his work, and how they were like raw chicken legs: how the skin, wrinkled and lifeless, slid over the gristle and the bone and the muscle—

  “You okay, Roger?”

  Roger smiled, “Looking forward to the full English.”

  Chris said nothing, just wandered away.

  Ann, whistling loudly now, threw the bloodied rib shears and other assorted tools into a steaming sink of detergent. Around the room, voices grew, laughter began. DC Clements wiped her top lip. Bags were zipped up, clipboards, pens and labels packed away ready for the next body.

  The fingerprints were now an exhibit, and for the sake of its integrity, Roger slid the acetate into a clear plastic bag, sealed it and signed over the seal before attaching a CJA exhibit label and a length of biohazard tape. And for the exhibit’s continuity, he made a note of the time of exchange, and handed the bag over to DS Firth.

  “You still want that breakfast I promised you?” asked Chris.

  “Mind if I cut and run? I’m knackered.”

  “Quite glad, really.” Chris moved in a little closer, away from the others, and whispered. “I’m a bit skint, actually. Can’t wait for pay day.” He stood there expectantly.

  That was the kind of comment, thought Roger, you might expect from Hobnail, who at least was upfront about his fiscal situation, but there was something about the way Chris looked at him furtively, as though he should be honoured to dip into his pocket and help him out. Roger closed the latches on the aluminium camera case, looked up at Chris and asked, “You want to borrow some?”

  “Get out of here,” he whispered, “I wasn’t...”

  Roger stopped the embarrassment; he was too tired and it would lead to the same conclusion as it did last time. And the time before. “If you’re really in a fix, I could run to twenty.”

  Chris’s mouth snapped shut at the offer. “You don’t mind? I’ll make sure you get it back. Promise. I think I lost some, you know, that’s why I’m skint.”

  Roger said nothing, but wondered on which three-legged horse Chris lost his money.

  * * *

  More rain accompanied Roger as he drove home with the heater fan on full and the wipers grating across the windscreen. Pink Floyd played Comfortably Numb on the stereo. Under his reddened eyes were dark bags; around his face the earlier five o’clock shadow had matured into a nine o’clock beard. He yawned constantly and sighed in between.

  Even as Roger pulled onto the drive outside his home, the scene at Turner Avenue continued to buzz with police activity. Two SOCOs, one upstairs and one down, brushed aluminium fingerprint powder over every suitable surface, and three gloved-up detectives pulled out drawers, read bank statements and love letters, lifted scraps of carpet, and searched in the loft.

  They were being thorough. Thorough enough to find eventually the late Sally Delaney’s diary in the dust up on top of the wall unit.

  — Two —

  After a thin and fitful sleep, Roger was back in the office, feeling as though he had never been away. His shift began at six o’clock in the evening, always a busy time. But by ten, the calls had dwindled, and when he closed his fingerprinting kit on the last burglary for the evening, he made straight for Weston’s house.

  He drove past at speed. Then he drove past slowly. Then he parked the van and walked past. Weston was at home, Roger saw him in his spacious lounge, with his feet up and what looked like a glass of whisky in one hand and the TV remote in the other.

  And that always dismayed him. Weston was running guns, and all Roger needed was to catch him just once; it would blow the death-dealing bastard right out of the water. In the last six months of improvised surveillance, he hadn’t even come close; never saw so much as an air pistol, never mind a Glock! He’d seen him go fishing once down at Bretton Sculpture Park, west of the city centre, saw him again twice more, just going for a walk there.

  Roger suspected there was something illegal inside the tackle box or the rod case, and if there wasn’t when he went down to the lake, there sure as hell would be on the way back. And so Roger had followed. For three hours, he had crouched by an oak and watched. But Weston was as good a fisherman as he was a diplomat. He had caught nothing and left with the same gear he’d taken.

  It was now midnight, the waxy smell of aluminium powder filled his nostrils and the clinical smell of detergent filled the SOCO office. From the exhibit store, he booked out the photograph he’d seized from Sally Delaney’s lounge floor, the one with a smudged footmark on it. And he stared at the picture: a smiling teenage girl and a small child in a blue woollen hat. Sad.

  The mark on the photograph was fragmentary, and it was in dust which meant any attempt to apply powder would destroy it. He shone the office torch across the mark and noticed even more detail than before. “Hush Puppies.” He decided to photograph it.

  It worked well, and half an hour later, he dropped an envelope containing the negatives, into the secure internal mail tray, and wrote his report.

  The last he heard, CID still hadn’t found Sally’s murder weapon, presumed to be a three-inch, single-edged, non-serrated knife – something similar to a penknife, something that everyone from Boy Scouts to bus-drivers carried. This nudged the morale of the investigation lower still because everyone knew that the chances of nailing a murderer declined rapidly after the first couple of days of a fruitless investigation.

  And then the press got hold of Sally’s details, her circumstances. Easy enough to do: throw a tenner to anyone on her street and you’d get an instant report of her being Mother Teresa if that’s what you asked for. They needed an angle that would sell papers and the one they chose described her as a lonely single mother attacked in her own home for no apparent reason. It sold more papers, but it also put the police under more pressure to catch the killer quickly before public apprehension increased, before the fear of crime gained more prominence than the crime itself.

  And fuelled by those newspapers, that apprehension manifested itself in the question most heard by officers on the beat: was this the beginning of another serial killer; a second Yorkshire Ripper, someone who targeted women because he was sick in the head. The police officers had responded with cautious
statements along the lines of it being highly unlikely something similar could happen now, twenty-odd years after Sutcliffe; technology and hard-learned lessons made that kind of thing almost impossible. But what frightened Roger most of all, was the word almost. Almost impossible. And since no one had been arrested for Sally’s murder yet, offering unofficial statements like that, though well-intentioned, seemed a little reckless.

  Even the reports on Shelby’s desk, of a white middle-aged man, well built and wearing a dark overcoat, seen at Sally’s door sometime in the afternoon, did little to raise Shelby’s optimism. He was heard to say, ‘Well that fucking narrows it down, doesn’t it!’ before slamming the office door on his way out.

  The Town Hall clock chimed twice. Gratefully, Roger switched off his mobile and pager, and shut down the computer and the office lights. He traipsed through the security gates to the staff car park, a yawn never far from his mouth and thoughts of bed comforting his mind.

  The security barrier was still open, and he drove straight out of the car park.

  Later he would recall this night, and others like it, and would wish he had gone home to bed.

  * * *

  In 1888, Wakefield matured into a City, stealing northern eminence from Pontefract, but lying blissfully in Leeds’ shadow. More than a century later it gained a reputation as a historical locale with a modern outlook. Wakefield blossomed. Socialising boomed.

  The club scene promoted Wakefield with the panache of a sledgehammer crushing a fly. A night out here was an event big enough to attract the youths of surrounding villages and even those of nearby cities. It promised an unrivalled array of pubs, each advertising an ‘Unrivalled array of beers’, ‘Happy hour, eight till eleven’, topless barmaids, ear-crunching ‘music’, stomach-crunching cuisine and all the flesh one’s bleary eyes could consume.

  Bass permeated the cold air, belched from dark doorways manned by large men who wore long black coats and dicky bows. Westgate alone boasted twelve such doorways, some marked with flashing neon lights, others more discreet, more choosy of their clientele.