Slice

by David Hodges

  Fulton jammed the zip on his overalls and scowled when she stepped forward to help him. ‘He cuts off balls, love, not ears,’ he snapped, his agitation getting the better of him.

  Her face froze, her resentment towards him tangible, perhaps because she guessed who he was. ‘We thought it was worth a shot anyway, sir,’ she replied, her tone brittle. ‘Sorry if we’ve wasted your time.’

  ‘Pathologist arrived?’ Gilham put in, sensing the build up of hostility between the two of them.

  ‘Yes, guv. Doc Carrick, twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘So let’s take a look, shall we?’

  The familiar figure of Ed Carrick straightened when they entered the Nissan hut and he was shaking his head as they approached. ‘Most peculiar,’ he commented, ‘most peculiar indeed.’

  Fulton bent down to study the corpse and seconds later his sigh of relief was clearly audible. The woman was not Abbey Lee. ‘Thank God,’ he breathed without thinking.

  Sidhu was obviously put out. ‘Thanking God is hardly an appropriate sentiment under the circumstances, sir,’ she said. ‘The woman is dead.’

  ‘Oh, she’s dead all right, my dear,’ Carrick put in before Fulton could respond. ‘Been dead for about forty-eight hours, I would say.’

  Sidhu bit on the ‘my dear’, but chose to keep her own counsel. ‘And cause of death?’

  Carrick shrugged. ‘From my initial examination, I suspect that she died from a drug overdose and the track marks on her arms and thighs would suggest she was a heavy user, but only a post-mortem will be able to establish this for certain, of course. Quite why someone would want to cut off her ear though is most intriguing.’

  Fulton was pretty sure he knew why, but he was not about to share his views with those present and instead turned to Sidhu with a curt, ‘Do we know who the woman is?’

  The DI met his gaze without flinching. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, apparently now sure in her own mind as to his own identity, ‘but should you be involved in this case at all in your present situation?’

  Gilham winced, anticipating the other’s reaction, but as Fulton’s face hardened into familiar slab-like aggression and Carrick discreetly wandered away, the heat was taken out of the situation by a timely interruption.

  ‘Bloody hell, what’s she doing here?’

  No one had heard the speaker approach, but his outburst at Gilham’s elbow guaranteed him immediate attention. As all eyes focused on the scruffy-looking man with the spiky ginger hair staring down at the spot-lit corpse, Sidhu forced a frosty smile. ‘George Jarvis,’ she announced. ‘Just joined us from the drug squad.’

  But Fulton was not a bit interested in where he had come from. ‘You know this woman?’ he snapped.

  Jarvis gave a short laugh. ‘Should do. Name’s Janice Long. She was heavily into speed-balling and one of my more productive snouts – when she wasn’t spaced out, that is.’

  ‘And when did you last see her?’

  Jarvis stared at him. ‘Yesterday, as a matter of fact – on a slab in Middle Moor Hospital mortuary.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, she’d finally OD’d on bad coke. Always was a greedy bitch. Dumping her here must have been someone’s idea of a joke.’

  Gilham frowned. ‘But how come no one missed her corpse? There are no signs of the usual surgical examination, so she can’t have had her PM yet.’

  Jarvis shook his head. ‘PM was due for eleven hundred hours,’ he said, ‘but it was put back to fifteen-thirty, due to a break-in.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Can you credit it? Some lowlife breaks into a mortuary – not a bank or a good-class drum, but a mortuary – and nicks a bloody corpse!’

  Fulton grunted. ‘With not a single member of staff being any the wiser?’

  Jarvis frowned. ‘But that’s the other funny thing. They checked the fridges to make sure none of the stiffs had been interfered with and found they were all there, as recorded.’

  ‘As recorded?’ The colour literally drained from Fulton’s face and he pulled Gilham roughly to one side, drawing astonished glances from Sidhu and Jarvis. ‘Think, Phil,’ he breathed, ‘why is that the mortuary staff failed to notice that Janice Long’s body was missing? Because it wasn’t, that’s why.’

  Gilham looked confused and glanced past him at the corpse. ‘You mean the dead woman is not Janice Long?’

  But Fulton was in no mood to enlighten him. ‘What time is it?’ he rapped, suddenly realizing with a sense of frustration that he had left his watch behind.

  Gilham stared at him. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘The time, Phil? Never mind the crap, give me the bloody time!’

  Gilham glanced at his own watch, unnerved by the intensity of his manner. ‘Just – just after fourteen-thirty.’

  Fulton swung for the door at a run. ‘Come on, man,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘We may already be too late!’

  Gilham cast a helpless glance in the direction of Sidhu and stumbled after him, catching up with him in the SOCO tent as he tore off his overalls. ‘Too late? Too late for what?’

  Fulton half-turned, almost falling over as he tried to shrug himself out of the clinging plastic. ‘Should have sussed this out long ago,’ he panted. ‘Killer intimated as much when he rang me after kidnapping Abbey.’

  Gilham paused in the act of pulling off his own overalls. ‘The killer? For heaven’s sake, Jack, what are you talking about?’

  Fulton stared at him wildly as he tossed his overalls into a corner. ‘Bastard gloated that Abbey should feel completely at home where he had put her,’ he said. ‘Abbey’s a pathologist, isn’t she? So where would she be most at home? In a soddin’ mortuary, of course.’

  Gilham felt his skin crawl. ‘Good grief! You’re saying our man substituted Abbey for Janice Long?’ he whispered, cottoning on at last.

  ‘I’d put money on it.’

  ‘So you think she is dead then?’

  Fulton’s face had frozen into a bleak mask as he stumbled for the exit. ‘No, Phil,’ he threw back over his shoulder, I think she’s alive – no doubt sedated, but very much alive – and if we don’t get to the mortuary in time, she will be having Janice Long’s PM!’

  chapter 23

  THE YOUNG WOMAN lying face up on the examination table had been gutted like a slaughtered animal, that was the first thing Fulton saw when he burst through the double doors of the mortuary, and his shouted ‘No!’ only succeeded in raising echoes off the tiled walls as the pathologist in his green overalls cast him a keen glance over the top of his wire-framed spectacles.

  ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen?’ the latter said, clearly irritated by the noisy intrusion. ‘And what can I do for you?’

  Fulton leaned back against the door, panting heavily after his run from the car and focusing his gaze on the ceiling to avoid looking at the corpse. ‘Nothing now,’ he replied harshly. ‘It looks like she’s beyond anyone’s help.’

  The pathologist glanced at the corpse, then back at Fulton, raising a curious eyebrow as he nodded to the attendant to begin the grisly process of sewing her up again. ‘They usually are by the time they end up in here,’ he observed, a tart edge to his voice. ‘And you are who exactly?’

  Gilham produced his warrant card, his hand noticeably shaking. ‘Police,’ he said, trying hard to control the quaver in his voice. ‘We have reason to believe that—’

  But he never finished the sentence, for Fulton chose that moment to lower his gaze and his sharp exclamation cut his colleague off in midstream. ‘She’s got dyed hair, Phil, dyed hair!’

  Then the big man had pushed past him to the head of the slab, where he stood for a moment staring down at the face of the dead woman. ‘It isn’t Abbey,’ he said, filled with relief for the second time that afternoon. ‘It isn’t Abbey.’

  The pathologist leaned against the edge of the table and lit a cigarette. ‘Do you mind telling me what this is all about?’ he said, watching Fulton stride to the row of refrigerators an
d wrench one of the doors open.

  For answer, Gilham stepped across to the foot of the slab and picked up the edge of the label tied to the woman’s toe.

  ‘Deborah Slatter,’ the pathologist commented, his tone now so dry that his voice practically cracked. ‘Cause of death: fatal asthma attack. Anything else you’d like to know?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fulton grated, slamming the door of the furthest refrigerator shut. ‘You seem to be a stiff short.’

  ‘Janice Long, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The pathologist flicked the ash from his cigarette into the half-closed chest cavity of the corpse, watching with clinical indifference as the attendant continued to stitch up the rest. ‘Over there,’ he said inclining his head towards the far corner of the room. ‘She’s next. It seems someone dumped her out here instead of in the fridge. Most irregular.’

  For the first time, Gilham noticed the trolley, bearing the bulky plastic body bag, which had been shunted unceremoniously into an alcove under the single frosted window, but Fulton was beside it and jerking the zip down before he was halfway across the room.

  Abbey looked as if she were simply sleeping and although her pale body was very cold, it had a suppleness no corpse could ever retain. Fulton’s gently probing fingers found a tiny flicker at the base of her throat which told him all he needed to know. ‘She’s alive anyway, thank God,’ he announced with a sense of relief.

  ‘Alive?’ The pathologist dropped his cigarette in his rush to join them, pushing Fulton aside as he bent over the body to check for a pulse, then prise open one of her eyelids to peer into the immobile green pupil. ‘She seems to be comatose.’

  Fulton pulled the zip back over her breasts to preserve her modesty. ‘Yeah, she was probably injected with some kind of anaesthetic and/or sedative, like GHB, before she was wheeled in here to replace Janice Long.’

  The pathologist stared at him. ‘You mean someone deliberately did this terrible thing?’ he exclaimed. ‘But what on earth for?’

  ‘So she could enjoy a ringside seat at her own PM,’ Gilham replied.

  Fulton looked past him at the corpse on the slab and the ugly coarse stitches disfiguring the chest and abdomen like the drawstrings of some mediaeval doublet. ‘Could have worked too,’ he said grimly, ‘if you’d decided to do Janice Long first. Now, don’t you think you’d better call for an ambulance?’

  Fulton felt stupid carrying the bouquet through the hospital corridors. It was the only one he had been able to find already made up in its patterned plastic wrapping paper and pink ribbons and he had bought it without really thinking about the mechanics of delivery.

  He had assumed that by nine in the evening normal visiting hours would be over and he would be able to slip unobtrusively into the hospital, but that had been wishful thinking and lumbering through the place with the bouquet clasped awkwardly in one hand, he found the indulgent smiles of the passing nurses and departing visitors galling to the extreme. He couldn’t wait to get to the private observation room where Abbey had been accommodated so that he could lose his embarrassing ‘get well’ gift once and for all, but he soon discovered that actually handing over the bouquet was not going to be that easy.

  To be fair, the uniformed constable on guard duty outside the room did not seem at all interested in his bouquet and there was not even the suggestion of a smirk on the youngster’s freckled well-scrubbed face when Fulton stepped out of the lift. This was one bobby who took his duties very seriously, however, and he stepped smartly in front of the big man the moment he turned towards the door. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said with a firmness of tone that belied his years, ‘I can’t let anyone in without express authority.’

  Fulton glared at him. ‘Then you’ve got it, lad,’ he snapped back. ‘My name is Fulton, Detective Superintendent Jack Fulton, OK? I was the one who actually found the lady.’

  The officer stuck to his guns. ‘Perhaps I could see your ID, sir?’ he said.

  Fulton automatically went for the wallet in his back pocket, then froze, suddenly remembering with a renewed sense of frustration that his warrant card had been taken off him with his suspension, which meant he was totally stuffed. There was no way this eagle-eyed plod would be fooled by a Superintendents’ Association membership card, which was the only ID he had on him.

  ‘It’s OK, Constable,’ a familiar voice commented, ‘I can vouch for Mr Fulton.’

  Fulton swung round to see Detective Chief Superintendent Andy Stoller standing a few feet away, studying him analytically as he slipped his own warrant card back into his coat pocket. ‘Hello, Jack,’ he said. ‘Flowers for the patient, is it?’

  Fulton’s stare was blatantly hostile. ‘What are you doing here, Andy?’

  He was rewarded with a tight smile. ‘Same as you, I would think: visiting the sick.’ Stoller indicated the door with a wave of an arm. ‘Shall we go in together?’

  Abbey looked like a ghost; her beautiful green eyes were closed and her face, framed by the mass of jet-black hair, was almost as white as the pillow her head was resting on. Fulton winced when he saw the number of tubes and wires that had been connected to her, but the electronic monitor seemed to be issuing a steady ‘beep’ and the oxygen mask covering the lower part of her nose and mouth trembled slightly in time with the faint rise and fall of her breasts, indicating that she was at least still in the land of the living.

  ‘Doc reckons she should be all right after a few hours,’ Stoller said, reading his mind, ‘but she’s been injected with some sort of coma-inducing drug. They’re still trying to analyze the traces they found in her blood, but suspect that an overdose of gammahydroxybutrate may be partly responsible.’

  ‘Liquid Ecstasy,’ Fulton breathed. ‘GHB – I thought as much.’

  Stoller nodded. ‘And almost certainly something else on top,’ he said. ‘Apparently she would have been fully aware of what was going on around her, but unable to move or speak.’

  Fulton shuddered, thinking of the dismembered corpse at the mortuary. ‘That’s exactly what the bastard wanted,’ he retorted. ‘A PM carried out on her while she was alive. Thank God we found her in time.’

  Stoller shook his head. ‘According to the pathologist, Dr Kelly, there was no chance of that happening. He claims her vital signs would have been detected well before any PM had commenced.’

  Fulton grunted. ‘Then how come no one detected those vital signs when she turned up in the morgue? And how come this Dr Kelly didn’t know who Abbey was? After all, she is one of his bloody colleagues.’

  ‘Kelly wasn’t a member of the resident team, Jack. He was borrowed from another area and was only asked to fill in at the mortuary for this week. It seems Abbey Lee’s disappearance had resulted in a shortage of pathologists and the coroner was concerned that they were running behind schedule.’

  There was a suspicious gleam in Fulton’s eyes. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about what’s been happening in this neck of the woods.’

  ‘My place to know things – especially now.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Because I’ve been appointed Acting ACC operations, that’s why, which means the buck stops with me.’

  ‘ACC ops?’ Fulton echoed. ‘So where’s Skellet gone?’

  Stoller grimaced at his disrespect. ‘Mr Skellet seems to have had some sort of breakdown – probably due to overwork – and he’s been signed off for an indefinite period.’

  Fulton raised his eyebrows. ‘Breakdown? You mean poor old Norman’s lost his marbles?’

  ‘Not quite how I would put it, but he is certainly ill. This inquiry seems to have affected him badly. Something must have snapped.’

  Fulton whistled. ‘Well now, there’s a turn-up for the books. Good old Norman en route for the funny farm.’

  Stoller scowled. ‘Never mind, Mr Skellet, Jack,’ he snapped, starting to lose patience. ‘I want to know precisely what’s been going on here. This inquiry has already produced more stiffs than a TV crime dra
ma – including an AWOL police officer wasted in his hospital bed and a journalist slaughtered in our own bloody police cells. Now to cap it all, we have a Home Office pathologist kidnapped and stuck in a mortuary in place of a deceased junkie who just happens to turn up in a derelict asbestos factory, minus an ear!’

  Fulton nodded sympathetically. ‘All a bit confusing, I agree,’ he said. ‘But you’ll just have to speak to Phil Gilham about things. After all, he is your new boy on the block.’

  ‘I’ve already spoken to him – he’s only just left here after visiting the patient – but I’m damned sure you can tell me a lot more.’

  ‘Why should I know anything? I’m on suspension, remember?’

  Stoller closed his eyes for a moment, as if counting to ten. ‘Don’t piss me about, Jack,’ he said, a brittle edge to his tone. ‘You’ve been running around like a loose cannon ever since your suspension. You know a damned sight more than anyone about what’s been going on and you have a duty to tell me.’

  Fulton turned for the door. ‘Do I? Well, I’m sorry, Andy, but I can’t help you.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  The big man half-turned. ‘You’re a chief superintendent – sorry, acting assistant chief constable – aren’t you?’ he said, pushing the bouquet into his arms. ‘So I’m sure you can work that one out for yourself.’ And he left the door wide open as he left.

  The temperature in the car park seemed to have dropped by several degrees in the short time Fulton had been in the building, but he found the sharp freshness of the night air a welcome change after the stuffy atmosphere of the hospital. He stood for a moment in front of the glazed entrance porch, apparently trying to neutralize the nicotine in his lungs with deep breathing exercises.

  Stoller was right, of course. If he was in possession of information, then he had both a legal and moral obligation to pass it on, but what he actually knew would be of little real value in catching the Slicer, besides which, now that Abbey was out of danger and under close police protection, a lot of the pressure on him had been lifted and with that came an increased reluctance to co-operate with an investigation team he firmly believed to have become dysfunctional and untrustworthy. What he expected to achieve on his own with no police back-up and no leads, he hadn’t the faintest idea – especially as that vital snippet of information he had somehow picked up along the way, which had been bugging him ever since, remained buried in his subconscious, stubbornly defying every effort he made to retrieve it. Nevertheless, he was determined to keep chipping away regardless, in the hope that there would be a breakthrough of some sort before too long – but he was not holding his breath.