Death Bed

by Leigh Russell

  ‘Shut up,’ he hissed. ‘Shut up!’

  Douggie wondered what the geezer was getting so worked up about. If he hadn’t been skint, Douggie would have been tempted to forget the whole thing. But two thousand quid was two thousand quid.

  The man relaxed his hold on Douggie.

  ‘Do you know Elthorne Road?’

  ‘Off Holloway Road?’

  ‘Yes. Walk along Elthorne and wait outside the art college, at one o’clock tonight. Got that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A black BMW will drive past and park at the end of Boothby Road. Don’t move until the driver has left the car. The keys will be in the glove compartment, with half the money.’

  ‘No problem. What about the rest of the money? You said half the money would be in the car.’

  ‘You’ll get the rest when the job’s done. And remember, whatever happens to the car, it’s nothing to do with me. My work’s too important for me to take any chances, but you - ’ He gave Douggie’s arm a sudden twist. ‘Remember, Douggie, I know where to find you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ Douggie babbled, ‘you’ve come to the right man.’

  Two thousand quid, he thought, although the job had to be done that night, which meant he’d have to torch it. That was a nuisance because it involved a long walk, but he couldn’t risk hanging onto the car until the scrap yard opened in the morning. There was something unnerving about this man. He wasn’t the kind of car thief Douggie was used to doing business with. Still, he stank of money. Two thousand for this job and there could be more where that came from.

  ‘Two thousand quid then?’

  ‘Two thousand.’

  At five to one Douggie was standing at the corner of Boothby Road as instructed when a black BMW drove up and parked on the other side of the street. He couldn’t be certain but he was pretty sure it was the same car his face had been squashed against earlier that evening. He touched his nose at the recollection, fingering the bruise. A dark figure in a long hooded coat jumped out of the driver’s seat and vanished into the darkness. Douggie caught a glimpse of the man flitting into view beneath a street lamp before he disappeared altogether.

  ‘Vicious bastard,’ Douggie muttered as he drew on his gloves and turned his attention to the car.

  He was looking at a 7 series 4 door auto saloon BMW, about four years old but well looked after. He ran his hand reverently along its smooth side, gleaming in the moonlight, before he opened the door. A faint sour smell of vomit ruined the pleasure and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. But cars could be valeted. He sat behind the wheel and stroked it, then leant across and checked the glove compartment. The key was there along with the cash, which he counted quickly beneath the dash board. He couldn’t see anyone, but you never knew who might be watching from the shadows. Satisfied, he turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred into life. He drove with the window open along deserted streets and out onto the waste ground of Epping Forest. The car ran like a dream. As always, the temptation to keep it was almost irresistible, but he remembered the man’s words.

  ‘Remember, Douggie, I know where to find you.’

  Reaching his destination, he glanced around. The place was deserted, as he had expected. A quick check of the car revealed that the boot was empty. Douggie shone his torch round the back seat. There was nothing there, not so much as a sweet wrapper. As his torch moved, his eye was caught by something glistening beside a dried up pool of vomit on the floor by the passenger seat. He leaned forward for a closer look and saw a gold chain with a shiny pendant attached. Douggie hesitated before reaching across to pick it up, but it was clean and didn’t smell so he slipped the trinket in his jacket pocket thinking it would make a fine gift for Mary. Then he turned to the business of torching the car.

  13

  SICK WITH WORRY

  Lily made a special trip to the shops for ingredients to make Donna’s favourite spaghetti supper. Donna had seemed pleased to discover that Lily enjoyed cooking and didn’t mind clearing up.

  ‘I thought you’d be great to have around.’

  ‘I’m not as good as my mum,’ Lily had replied. ‘She makes the most amazing spag bol.’

  But the weekend passed and Donna didn’t come home. Lily ate the spaghetti on her own.

  There was still no sign of Donna when Lily woke up on Monday. Following her usual routine, she ate breakfast in front of the television before going to work. As she stood up, she heard something that stopped her in her tracks. She turned round to look at the blonde newsreader who had just announced that the body of a young black woman had been discovered on Sunday near Tufnell Park tube station in North London.

  ‘…Police do not yet know the dead woman’s identity and are appealing for information.’

  A uniformed policeman appeared on the screen.

  ‘We need to establish the identity of the victim. Anyone who thinks they might be able to identify this young woman should contact the police immediately…’

  He described the victim as a black female in her late teens or early twenties, slim, wearing jeans and a sleeveless turquoise t-shirt. The blonde newsreader returned to introduce another item of news with a smile that revealed perfectly even teeth.

  Lily almost tripped over her feet in her haste to reach the phone. She gave her details and explained the reason for her call.

  ‘It’s about the dead woman they found. I think I might know who she is.’

  ‘Just a moment, caller, I’ll put you through.’

  It seemed to take ages before another voice came on the line. While she waited Lily tried to picture what Donna had been wearing on Friday evening but she couldn’t remember. Donna had so many clothes.

  ‘I just saw the news on the telly, about a black woman who’s been found dead somewhere in North London. I think it might be my flatmate. At least,’ she paused, suddenly uncertain, ‘my flatmate’s gone missing. We were at a bar and she just disappeared, and she hasn’t been home since and she’s not answering her phone and I thought maybe she’d gone off with, you know, with a bloke, but now… now I think she might be the one you found.’

  The woman on the other end of the line asked for her name and address.

  ‘When did you last see your flatmate?’

  Lily hesitated. She had been out with Donna on Friday night and it was only Monday morning now, but if she told the police how recently she’d seen Donna they might not take her call seriously. She thought she remembered reading somewhere that a person wasn’t officially considered missing until they had been gone for a week, but there was no point in lying.

  ‘Friday. We were in Camden, and she just disappeared.’

  She felt like crying and was glad the woman at the other end of the phone couldn’t see her. The woman asked a few questions then thanked Lily for contacting them with her information, and the call ended.

  There was nothing else Lily could do now but wait. She couldn’t face going into work so called in sick and then regretted it because at least work would have taken her mind off Donna. But she was genuinely sick with worry, and guilty about being so angry with Donna for not keeping in touch.

  Once Lily calmed down she decided she might have been jumping to conclusions. London was a big place, and nothing like her village in Norfolk. There could be lots of reasons why Donna hadn’t come home over the weekend. Maybe it was merely a coincidence that Lily had seen the report of a dead black girl just when her flat mate had gone off for a couple of days. If Lily’s mother was right, people were killed every day in London. The dead girl could be anyone. She wondered if she should contact hospitals to see if Donna was ill or had been in an accident, but instead made up her mind to carry on as though everything was normal. The chances were that Donna would walk through the door at any moment, and Lily didn’t want to look like a nervous fool.

  She fetched Donna’s clean washing and set up the ironing board in front of the television, carefully changing the setting on the iron when she p
icked up one of Donna’s silk shirts. When the news came on she leant forward, but there was no further mention of the dead girl. Every so often she picked up her phone and punched in Donna’s number.

  ‘Hi this is Donna. I’m not here right now but leave me a message and I’ll get back to you right away.’

  14

  WORDLESS RAGE

  Sam hesitated at the door to the morgue. Her face had lost its characteristic healthy glow and her expression was strained.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Geraldine asked with sudden understanding. ‘Not everyone can take it. My last sergeant was really quite squeamish and it’s OK - ’

  ‘I’m fine, really,’ Sam interrupted her. ‘I don’t mind the place. It’s all part of the job. It’s just the smell that I can’t stand, and when it’s in a confined space it gets me right in the stomach.’

  She pulled out a pungent nasal decongestant stick and applied it liberally before pulling on her mask and nodding to indicate she was ready.

  Geraldine gave her a sympathetic smile before slipping on her own mask. She hadn’t forgotten the horrible stench inside the forensic tent in the alley. Although she was prepared for it, when the door opened she was immediately hit by a sickening odour of putrefaction overlaid with antiseptic. Her face mask couldn’t completely block it out. She glanced back at the sergeant who was staring straight ahead.

  The round shouldered pathologist, Gerald Mann, was bent over the cadaver. He glanced up when they entered, eyes bright beneath wispy white eyebrows as he nodded in recognition. He reminded Geraldine of her childhood Father Christmases.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked as she approached the slab, trying not to breathe in too deeply, while Sam hung back.

  ‘This is not a pretty corpse, Inspector, and the circumstances of her death are frankly barbaric. We are looking at a woman in her early twenties at most, probably younger, who was beaten and left to die in her own excrement.’

  ‘She was chained by both her wrists and her ankles. Look here, the imprints of the links are clearly visible, quite large and made of iron not steel. There’s a residue of rust here, and again here. The flesh on her wrists was quite extensively damaged from chafing, so I’m guessing she was shackled for - ’ the pathologist broke off, frowning, ‘well, at least a couple of days, but probably considerably longer. It looks as though she tried to free her right hand, because the skin on that wrist is more severely damaged than the other and the bruising extends up her hand where she tried to force it through the manacle. She was lying flat on her back on a fairly soft surface, probably a bed. We found some fibres of white cotton in her hair and under her nails that could have come from bed sheets. They’ve gone off for analysis.’

  He was silent for a moment.

  ‘What can you tell us about the missing finger?’ Geraldine prompted him.

  ‘It’s impossible to determine whether the right index finger was cut off while she was alive, without examining the site where the injury was inflicted. There’s no blood on her clothes but she’s wearing short sleeves so that’s not conclusive, and there’s no way of ascertaining the extent of the bleeding, if any.’

  Geraldine studied the dead woman’s face, misshapen with swellings, one eye closed beneath an inflamed lid, the other seeming to stare straight back at her in wordless rage.

  ‘Can you be more specific about the beating?’

  ‘She suffered a powerful blow to the side of her head with some hard object, resulting in a fatal cerebral bleed. Her nose was broken, her cheek bones smashed. Her arms and shoulders suffered severe bruising probably from the same blunt instrument, or there may have been a series of impacts if she was thrown around, perhaps in the back of a van, or even dragged downstairs, before she died.’

  He pointed to the woman’s shoulders.

  ‘So it was the blow to the head that killed her?’ Geraldine asked after a brief silence.

  ‘Her skull was fractured by a severe blow. Cause of death was cerebral bleeding but the shock might just as easily have killed her anyway in her weakened state. She was severely dehydrated and her stomach was empty. There was nothing in the duodenum or the intestinal tract, in other words she hadn’t eaten anything for at least two or three days before she died. She was absolutely filthy, and soiled herself several times before she died.’

  He heaved a deep sigh.

  ‘So young.’

  ‘Was she raped?’

  ‘There’s no sign of any violent sexual encounter although she had recently been sexually active, and she had an abortion some years ago when she must have been quite young, possibly underage. She wasn’t raped, but it looks as though she was chained to a bed before she was battered to death.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain. She was left outside during the night but had already been dead for at least twenty-four hours before that. The plastic bin bag offered some insulation of course, but we don’t know the conditions she was kept in before last night.’

  He pointed at the greenish tinge that spread across the dead woman’s abdomen up to her chest and down her upper thighs.

  ‘Discoloration has spread but there’s no blistering. I’d say she’s been dead for two or three days, maybe longer.’

  ‘Can’t you be more specific?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I could hazard a guess at three days, but without knowing the circumstances under which the body was stored, and the temperature it was kept at, I can’t give you an exact time of death.’

  He turned back to the body.

  ‘She wasn’t wearing any shoes but the skin underneath her feet isn’t scratched or torn so it doesn’t appear that she walked anywhere barefoot. It looks as though her killer removed her shoes. And her finger, of course, which was sliced off with a small razor sharp saw.’

  Geraldine frowned impatiently.

  ‘This was presumably a personal attack, but until we know who she was that line of enquiry remains closed to us.’

  ‘Why not just kill her at once and be done with it? Why torment the poor girl like that?’ Sam asked, unable to hide her frustration. ‘It doesn’t make sense to tie her up then starve and beat her if he was going to kill her anyway.’

  ‘Unless he wanted her to suffer,’ Geraldine replied. ‘Or perhaps he never intended for her to die and it all went horribly wrong.’

  The pathologist shrugged and touched the dead woman’s disfigured hand gently.

  ‘It was certainly horrible.’

  Sam shuddered.

  ‘What are the chances she was still alive when her finger was cut off?’

  ‘As I said, I can’t form an opinion with any confidence as the body was moved, so there’s no way of telling if the wound bled.’

  The pathologist paused.

  ‘There’s another thing. Two of her molars were recently extracted, almost certainly after she died. There would still be traces of blood on her gums if the teeth had been removed while she was alive. Now, what would anyone want with a finger and two of her back teeth, I wonder?’

  ‘Maybe he started to remove her teeth and fingers hoping to conceal her identity but didn’t have time to finish the job,’ Sam suggested.

  ‘Or he could have taken them as a trophy,’ Geraldine said.

  She didn’t add that if that were true, they were more than likely looking for a multiple murderer - one who had already killed or would kill again, someone who found a perverse gratification in keeping ghastly mementos of his victims.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Sam said, and it occurred to Geraldine that, for all her bravado, the sergeant was still very young.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she replied softly.

  15

  MEMORY OF THE DEAD

  After visiting the morgue on Monday morning, Geraldine went back to her office in Hendon to spend a few hours gathering all her data together, before returning to the police station in Islington. It was annoying having to spend so much time travelling through London
traffic, but there was no help for it. At least she was learning to find her way around without Sam Haley to drive her. Islington was a large station very close to where she now lived. She hurried in the back entrance, and was directed to the conference room where the senior police officers were gathering to discuss the case. Detective Chief Inspector Reg Milton was already there, deep in conversation with an elegantly dressed black woman. Geraldine wished she had thought to go home and change. She could easily have done so, her flat was very near. She sniffed softly, trying to detect whether the odour of the morgue was still clinging to her clothes and hair, just as the memory of the dead woman haunted her thoughts.

  There was a flurry of activity at the door and half a dozen people came in together and sat down. Everyone introduced themselves around the table before the meeting opened. Geraldine knew the borough commander and head of Islington police station, Chief Superintendant Andrew Rogers, by reputation, and had met him briefly in the past. He nodded at her as she introduced herself. Geraldine knew they had to pay careful attention to the local community. At the same time, she couldn’t help thinking they might achieve more if the meeting were less formal, and restricted to police personnel. This felt like a publicity campaign rather than a briefing for a murder investigation. Also present were the Safer Neighbourhood Inspector, who would be familiar with local crime hotspots and villains. Finally, a woman from media and communications was there to draft a press release and keep them apprised of any press interest. So far the woman’s death had only been briefly reported in the news but it was just a matter of time before the papers caught hold of it and started ferreting around. There had been a lot of fuss in the media about police victimising black youths. Reporters would be quick to whip up a furore if the police were slow to find the killer of a black woman. The tone of the meeting seemed to suggest that failure in this case would be politically incorrect, as though the victm’s colour somehow made a difference. Geraldine wanted to cry out in protest. The victim was a human being. The colour of her skin made no difference.