by Tim Ellis
The other problem, of course, was Lucy’s broken right hand being in plaster. She couldn’t get it wet, so not only did he have to bath the twins, he also had to bath Lucy once he’d put the twins to bed. He recalled the conversation she’d initiated the previous night before she dragged him into the bath fully clothed.
‘I have one word to say to you, Quigg – steganography.’
He carried on scrubbing her back with the loofah. ‘You say the nicest things.’
‘I’ve discovered some secret messages.’
‘In your spaghetti alphabet? How nice. I’m overjoyed for you.’
‘You’re not taking this seriously, are you?’
‘Taking what seriously? Up to now, all you’ve done is swear at me.’
‘Steganography is hiding a secret message in a larger one so that nobody knows there’s a message there, or what the message contains.’
‘How do you know then?’
‘That’s like asking: Why is there air?’
‘Is it?’
‘And what do these not-so-secret messages say?’
‘I don’t know yet, but I will. I’ve written a program that’s working on the problem right now.’
He moved round to the front.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of using that loofah on my breasts?’
‘Sorry.’
He soaped his hands and began washing her front.
‘Jesus, Quigg! You’re the best bath-attendant in Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘Nice of you to say so.’
That’s when she dragged him into the bath.
‘What about the secret messages?’
‘Don’t worry about them. Sex first, secret messages after.’
The Chief’s voice dragged him back to the present. ‘What’s up, Quigg? Disappointed that DCI Blake isn’t here?’
‘Surprised that you are, Chief.’
‘Shut the door.’
He did as requested and sat down in an easy chair.
‘They decided that I wasn’t a team player. Me? Can you believe that, Quigg?’
‘No, I can’t believe that, Chief. I’m fully aware that you support Fulham Football Club – that’s a team, isn’t it?’
‘Well, that’s what they said.’
‘I think “flabbergasted” is the word I’m looking for, Chief. A man of your stature, far-sighted wisdom, political nous . . .’
‘You can stop now.’
He smiled.
‘They said I’d let the side down.’
‘I thought we were all on the same side.’
‘You know nothing, Quigg.’
‘Clearly.’
‘With each promotion you have to change sides.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’
‘That’s why nobody likes or trusts you.’
‘Don’t they? Is this something to do with the chart that I’m sitting at the bottom of?’
‘You know about that?’
‘I’m surprised that you knew about it and I didn’t.’
‘I know everything that’s happening in this station, Quigg.’
‘Yes, I should have remembered that titbit. Any coffee going, Sir?’
‘Stick your head out of the door and ask Cheryl . . .’
‘I think the strychnine is starting to have an effect on me, you know. I’ve started to notice hairs growing on the palms of my hands.’ He stuck his head out of the door, but Cheryl wasn’t there. ‘Missing in action, Chief. I’ll go without.’
‘What’s this about Sergeant Jones?’
He told him most of what had happened at the house, but he didn’t tell him that he’d taken a day out to visit Kent and bury Jones’ body in a wood with a bag of lime.
‘I thought I was past being surprised, but that surprised me. You can just never know about people. The detectives on the case think he might have murdered Monica as well.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past him. Out of all the people I’ve met in the force, he was the most distasteful.’
‘No idea what’s happened to him?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Chief.’
‘Mrs Bellmarsh and I are really happy that Duffy and the baby are fine. Congratulations.’
‘We received your card and the flowers. Thanks very much, and pass our kind regards on to Mrs Bellmarsh.’
‘Will do. Oh well, time for your next case.’
‘You’re back for good then?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘What’s this new case you’ve got for me?’
‘Bleeding Heart Yard.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s a cobbled courtyard between Chancery Lane and Farringdon tube stations so I’ve been reliably informed.’
‘And there’s been a murder?’
‘A milkman found the mutilated body of a woman early this morning. Her limbs had been torn from her body and strewn over the cobbles. Also, her heart was still beating and pumping blood when he found her. Perkins and his people are already in situ. Get over there and see if you can’t make some sense of it.’
‘Did the milkman see anybody?’
‘Are you expecting me to do your job for you?’
‘I’ll ask the milkman, shall I?
‘An excellent suggestion.’
At the door he turned and said, ‘I forgot to say welcome back, Chief. I missed you.’
‘I’m filling up, Quigg. Get the hell out of my office before you need to start building an ark.’
***
It was twenty past ten when he phoned Kline.
‘Yes?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Downstairs in the car park.’
‘We have a case.’
‘Let’s go then.’
‘Is my Mercedes still in one piece?’
‘I lost one of the rear wings and a front light. I had to jettison the gearbox and the rear seats, but you know what? . . . It runs a lot smoother now.’
‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Bleeding Heart Yard.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s in Farringdon. Find it on the satnav. I’m on my way.’
He put the phone back in its cradle and smiled. Kline liked her little jokes. She was certainly a lot different than Heather Walsh. In fact, she was probably Walsh’s complete opposite. He didn’t think he was going to like Kline much when he’d first met her, but she’d grown on him. The crazy hard exterior was as brittle as porcelain. Inside, she was just a damaged little girl. He scooped his jacket off the back of the door, shrugged into it and made his way down to the car park.
‘This is a lovely car,’ he said as he climbed into the passenger seat. All his stuff had been thrown on the floor in the back – she’d made the car her own, and suspended a hula-hula girl from the mirror by a piece of string.
‘Yeah! I got the keys off a pathetically gullible DI – gonna rip the guts out of it and then give it back to him.’
‘You do know this is my car and not your car, don’t you?’
‘Isn’t possession twelve-tenths of the law?’ She crunched the car into first gear and rammed the accelerator to the floor.
He had the feeling that the G-forces he was experiencing would pop his eye-sockets and make his ears bleed. ‘Not when I have the paperwork to prove it’s mine.’
She double-clutched through the gears and laughed like one of Lucifer’s harlots. ‘I eat paperwork for breakfast.’
‘No wonder you stay so thin.’
Chapter Two
‘Well, Perkins?’ he said while he and Kline squirmed into paper suits, boots, gloves and masks.
Kline had navigated through the cones and roadworks on the junction of Hatton Garden and Holborn Circus like a professional rally driver and they arrived at ten past eleven. While he was speaking to Perkins she wandered off to make sure the crime scene was secure and everybody knew what they were mea
nt to be doing.
Bleeding Heart Yard was exactly what it said on the tin – a cobbled courtyard surrounded by three-storey buildings. There was a restaurant that thought it was a bistro at one end, a tavern on the corner and a flower shop with its wares displayed on the pavement outside.
Perkins pulled his mask down. ‘A bit of a mess, I’m afraid.’
‘I take it you’re going to elaborate on that?’
He began pointing around the courtyard. ‘Torso there, arm over there, leg . . .’
‘I get the picture. Pathologist?’
‘On her way.’
‘Her?’
‘She’s new – Doctor Ingrid Solberg.’
‘Sounds foreign.’
‘Norwegian.’
‘What’s she doing over here?’
‘You’d have to ask her yourself.’
‘Maybe I will.’
‘You know about the history of this place?’
‘History was never my strongest subject at school.’
‘It’s called Bleeding Heart Yard for a reason.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Well, some say it was named after a sign dating back to the Reformation that was displayed on a pub called the Bleeding Heart in nearby Charles Street. The sign showed the heart of the Virgin Mary pierced by five swords.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why was her heart pierced by five swords?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe . . .’
‘I thought you knew the history.’
‘It’s probably to do with the five holy wounds of Christ.’
‘Okay.’
‘Can I carry on now?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Others suggest that the yard was the scene of a gruesome murder dating back to January 27, 1626. The mutilated body of the beautiful and wealthy Lady Elizabeth Hatton was found in the cobbled courtyard on the morning following her Annual Winter Ball. She’d been murdered and her limbs strewn across the ground, but her heart still pumped blood that dribbled onto the cobblestones and seeped into the ground underneath. From that time to this the street has been called Bleeding Heart Yard.’
‘You sound like a Blue Badge Tourist Guide.’
‘Thanks, Sir. If I ever get tired of doing forensic work . . .’
‘You’re not suggesting that two murders four hundred years apart are connected in any way, are you?’
‘Stranger things have happened?’
His face crumpled up. ‘No they haven’t. So, we’re talking about a copycat killer.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well, the story goes that a hunch-shouldered man with a clawed right hand entered the grand ballroom, danced Lady Hatton once round the room and out through the double doors – she was never seen alive again.’
‘Who was the man?’
‘Ah! Now, this is what’s interesting.’
‘I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be interesting at all.’
‘The Devil.’
‘Sometimes I despair of you, Perkins. You’re meant to be a man of science.’
‘If you don’t believe me, you’d better take a look at the torso.’
They walked over to where the woman’s torso had been covered over with yellow plastic sheeting.
Perkins pulled the sheeting away like a magician revealing his genius. ‘Cloven hooves,’ he said, as if he’d solved the case single-handed.
Quigg squatted and examined the armless and legless naked torso more closely.
‘Where are her clothes?’
‘We haven’t found any clothing yet.’
‘Handbag? Mobile? ID?’
‘Nothing.’
It was difficult to determine the victim’s age, but he guessed that she was probably in her late twenties or early thirties, pretty with dark shoulder-length hair. There were certainly indentations on her stomach and the left side of her face where the skin hung in shreds, which could have been construed as marks consistent with cloven hooves.
‘You’re making what appears to be an horrific beating fit your theory – the marks look nothing like cloven hooves.’
‘Admittedly, you have to use your limited imagination, but mark my words those impressions are consistent with cloven hooves. Once one of my people uploads the digital images, and then manipulates them in Photoshop, you’ll be able to see the cloven hooves much more clearly.’
‘You make it sound as though you’ve previously examined the imprints of a whole herd of cloven hoofed beasts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these were the first ones you’d ever seen.’
‘So, you do think they’re cloven hooves?’
‘I don’t think anything of the sort.’
Perkins outlined a set of marks on the female’s stomach with his finger. ‘And look at the size of them. These aren’t from a goat, a camel or a deer – they’re from something the size of a . . .’
‘. . . Devil?’
‘Exactly.’
Kline arrived. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Perkins thinks that our victim was killed by the Devil.’
She laughed. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘Let’s leave out the fantasy, Perkins. Explain what we’re looking at.’
‘As you can see, her arms and legs have been torn from their sockets . . .’
‘Before or after death?’ Kline asked.
‘I would say before death, but the pathologist will have to confirm that.’ He bent down and pointed at the jagged flaps of torn skin and muscle. ‘As you can see, we’re not talking about surgical removal here, each limb has been pulled and twisted out like a turkey leg. Do you know . . . ?’
Quigg interrupted. ‘You’re going to explain how difficult it would be for a man to pull out someone’s arm or leg, aren’t you?’
‘I could have been.’
‘But not impossible?’
‘I don’t know. The pathologist might know, but it’s not something I’ve ever attempted.’
‘It’s definitely a man though, isn’t it?’ Kline said.
‘Let’s not close any doors yet,’ Quigg said, shaking his head. ‘There are some strong women out there.’
Kline’s eyes narrowed. ‘If I thought that was a fucking underhand dig at how small and skinny I am . . .’
‘Put your paranoia back in its box, Kline. You’re beautiful just the way you are. I was referring to women who do bodybuilding, weightlifting, take steroids and so forth.’
She gave half a laugh. ‘Yeah, some of those bitches look more like men than some men.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Still,’ Perkins continued. ‘It would take a lot of effort from a man or even a man-sized woman to tear a leg from its socket.’
‘I hope you have not been touching my body,’ a woman’s voice with a foreign twang said as she approached.
They turned to look at another paper-suited figure who was slightly taller than Kline.
Quigg stood up. ‘You must be the new pathologist.’
‘And you must be the Detective Inspector Quigg I’ve been hearing all about.’
‘All good, I hope?’
‘None of it has been good, I am sorry to say. Do you have a first name?’
‘Yes, but I don’t use it.’
‘But you can tell me what it is.’
‘No, I never tell anybody.’
‘I see – a mystery. I like mysteries. Scandinavian mysteries are much better than English mysteries, but a mystery is a mystery all the same.’
‘I suggest you concentrate on the corpse Doctor Solberg. I’ve been here thirty minutes and all Perkins can tell me is that the devil is in the detail.’
‘Ah! He becomes defensive when we focus on him. I will have to get you on my couch, Inspector Quigg with the secret first name.’
‘I thought you were a forensic pathologist, not a . . .’
‘I am both. I like to counterbalance the dead with the livin
g, so sometimes I dabble in psychoanalysis. It seems to me that you are in desperate need of some therapy.’
‘I’m in desperate need of some answers to this murder, Doctor. You might want to focus on what you’ve been called out for, and leave my psyche to its own defences.’
‘I will do as you ask for now, but you and I are a long way from finished, Inspector Quigg.’
He didn’t like shrinks, he didn’t like Norwegians and he particularly disliked anybody who tried to wheedle his first name out of him.
‘What else have you got for us, Perkins?’
Perkins began walking towards a man with a white peaked cap and white coat on, and a green plastic carrying contraption at his feet containing bottles of milk in five of the eight available holes.
‘You must be the milkman who found her,’ Quigg said.
‘I’m astounded by your powers of deduction,’ the man said. ‘What gave me away?’
Quigg ignored the sarcasm. ‘What time did you find the woman’s body?’
‘Quarter to five.’
‘You seem sure.’
‘That’s because I am. I’m on the clock, you see – or at least I was. Did you know that in 1974 ninety-four percent of milk was delivered to the doorstep?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Have a guess what it is today?’
‘Hmmm . . .’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll never get it – eleven percent. Milkmen have been decimated. Next month – in an effort to remain competitive – the company is switching from glass bottles to plastic bottles. Can you imagine that?’
‘No, I can’t imagine that. People may as well get their milk from the supermarket.’
‘My point exactly. Re-usable is far more environmentally-friendly than recyclable, but they can’t see it. I’ve been a milkman for over twenty years, but next month I’m retraining as a Telesales Executive. You knew what you got with a Milkman, but can you tell me what a Telesales Executive does?’
‘I’m sympathetic, Mr . . . ?’
‘Bill Morrissey – soon to be late of The London Dairy, at your service.’ He clicked his heels together and saluted as if he was the right marker on the Queen’s Birthday Parade.
Quigg showed his warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector Quigg from Hammersmith Police Station.’ He introduced Kline as well, but Perkins had wandered off to talk to two of his people.
