Cold to the Touch

by Cari Hunter

  A mug of tea was waiting on her mouse mat, steaming hot, with a pair of chocolate digestives beside it. Nelson had judged the timing of her bollocking to perfection. He let her take a couple of mouthfuls of tea and start in on the biscuits before he spoke.

  “How’d it go?”

  “I’m still here.” She adjusted her grip on the digestive, where the chocolate was melting in her sweaty fingers. “Three-month improvement warning. I expected worse.”

  Nelson was watching her carefully. They had worked together for almost two years, and he was adept at gauging her moods. “Still feel like crap, though, don’t you?”

  She nodded, and felt less crappy for having admitted it. “I wish she’d yelled at me. I’d rather deal with that than with quiet disappointment.”

  He smiled in recognition. “Took the mum route, did she? My mum scarcely raised her voice, but she could set me on a guilt trip for a month.”

  “I think they must all go to some sort of course,” Sanne said. “Mine would never shout at us. She just had this way of making us feel awful for days after we’d done something wrong, whereas my dad would throw a tantrum, belt us one, and then go to the pub and forget all about it.”

  “That was probably down to the cider, San.”

  “Aye. One of the few advantages to having an alky for a parent.” She sucked the chocolate from her fingers and used the cleanest to switch her computer on. “Right. Roberts and Hussein. Are you still okay with Burgess and Harrison?”

  Her crisp return to their open cases made Nelson grin. “I should be able to get mine off to the CPS by this afternoon, and then I can take one of yours off your hands.”

  She was already double-clicking her first file. “Fabulous. I’m almost done with Roberts. If you get a spare hour, how about you read my summary through and I’ll crack on with Hussein?”

  Nelson licked the nib of his pen in readiness. “I love it when you organise me,” he said.

  *

  Sanne was midway through reading an interview transcript and tapping notes into a second document when she heard the footsteps approaching. She didn’t need to look up to know who was behind her. It wasn’t the shadow falling across her desk that gave him away—Duncan Carlyle was of average build, with a nondescript profile—but he wore the same pungent aftershave every day, and every day it made her want to stick her head in a bucket. He had obviously waited until Nelson had gone to fetch a late lunch, leaving her alone. She braced herself for the inevitable diatribe, for him to tell her that she’d have been bumped back into uniform if he’d had his way, and that it was only a matter of time before she fucked up again and made Eleanor regret giving her a second chance. Carlyle had been sullen and vindictive prior to the Cotter case, but his bitterness had ramped up to a whole new level in the aftermath.

  “Hey, Sarge,” she said, a polite greeting intended as damage limitation. When he didn’t answer, she minimised her notes to prevent him reading over her shoulder. His proximity was making her nervous, so she rolled her chair sideward, widening the gap between them and allowing her to make eye contact. She only saw the file as he dropped it onto her keyboard.

  “You’re up,” he said.

  She shook her head, reaching to pass the file back. “No, Scotty and Jay just closed theirs. We already have four open.”

  He shrugged, and a smile elongated the feeble moustache he had been growing since November. Something pink, possibly a crumb of jammy toast, was stuck to the edge closer to Sanne.

  “As of”—he made a show of checking his watch—“forty minutes ago, Scotty and Jay are helping me with a special project. Which means that you’re up. Dead smack rat in Malory Park. Enjoy.”

  “Right.” She straightened the file. She couldn’t argue with him. He would already have agreed to the allocation with Eleanor, so her only option was to play him at his own game by refusing to react. “No problem, Sarge. We’ll get right out there.”

  Her heart sank even as she forced brightness into her words. No one would give a shit about another dead heroin addict. There would be no cooperative witnesses and no media interest, the motive would trace back to the drugs, and securing a conviction would be next to impossible. The assignment was the equivalent of Carlyle giving her a rope and kicking her toward the gallows. She wondered whether she’d be able to keep her head out of the noose. On the plus side, she had to admit that even a small chance of pissing on his chips was attractive. She touched the side of her face.

  “Got a bit of something in your ’tache, Sarge.”

  He frowned and dabbed at the offending crumb, catching it on his finger and then floundering because he had nowhere to wipe it. As his face turned scarlet, he shoved his hand into his trouser pocket and strode away, almost colliding with Nelson in the narrow aisle between the desks.

  “Sanne Jensen, have you been upsetting the sarge again?”

  Nelson placed a paper bag in front of her, and she handed him the file in an unfair exchange. One look at its cover sheet told him everything he needed to know.

  “Sorry, mate,” she said.

  “Don’t be. It’s not your fault he’s an arse.” Nelson picked up the lunch bags again. “Come on. We can picnic at Malory. I’ve heard it’s lovely in the winter.”

  “You heard wrong,” she said, and caught the coat that he threw at her.

  *

  “Third left off Balan. Second right, first right.” Sanne traced the route with her finger, the map dog-eared by years of similar treatment. “No, second right, then second right,” she corrected herself, spotting another tiny street leading off the feeder road.

  “I hate this place,” Nelson muttered. He indicated before switching lanes, preparing to leave the bypass and turn into Malory Park. The sign for the council estate was a pock-holed, graffiti-strewn remnant that might as well have borne the legend: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

  Built six miles outside the city centre and encircled by concrete flyovers that seemed designed to trap its residents within its confines, Malory was a pit of crime and poverty, where Sheffield Council housed its least desirable citizens just to keep them away from everyone else. Sanne had grown up on a similar sinkhole estate, but compared to Malory, Halshaw’s residents had been model citizens, their houses almost palatial. Despite the efforts of community projects and social workers and schools in special measures, most of the kids raised on Malory stayed on Malory, and the cycle of alcohol, heroin, underage pregnancy, and chronic unemployment rarely got broken.

  In a rush to get to a crime scene reported more than three hours ago, Nelson and Sanne had eaten their lunch en route, and Sanne’s egg sandwich sat uneasily in her stomach as Nelson drove around Balan, the largest of the estate’s circular roads.

  “Third left,” she said, aware that he had the memory of a goldfish when it came to directions.

  “What is it we’re after, again?”

  “Twenty-six B Pellinore Walk. According to the file, it’s an upstairs flat.”

  She wiped the steam from her window, squinting through a mist of freezing rain to the houses beyond the slick pavements. Several were boarded up, bearing notices declaring that everything of value had been removed. Their doors had been smashed open anyway by enterprising or destitute residents distrustful of authority. A tiny proportion of the occupied houses were in a reasonable condition—their gardens not too overgrown, clean net curtains behind their barred windows—but most were verging on ruin, with a desperate air that made Sanne gnaw on the skin at the side of her thumb.

  “Three…four…” Nelson straightened fingers on the wheel as he counted. “Five, oh, and there’s six.”

  Sanne rolled her eyes. “Six sofas, or six mattresses?”

  “Both. I thought I’d go for the record. Ah, seven.”

  Wrecked furniture dumped in front gardens was as ubiquitous on this estate as the pairs of muddy trainers tied together at the laces and launched over the telephone wires. It was easy to understand why: people either had no tr
ansport to get to the tip or couldn’t be bothered trying to keep up appearances, and the council levied a charge for removing large items. Sanne remembered a tattered sofa sitting in her mum’s back garden one glorious summer while she and Meg made it into dens, battered each other with the cushions, and used it as an impromptu trampoline. Her mum had eventually chopped it into pieces small enough to carry, and given Sanne and her two siblings fifty pence each to carry it bit by bit to the local dump. Though she had left it in the garden for a while, she would never have kept it out the front where anyone walking past could have seen it.

  “There’s your eighth.” Sanne pointed out a mattress and caught a glimpse of movement around a hole where the springs had burst forth. “Ooh, do you get a bonus if it’s rat-infested?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think I should.”

  “I’ll let it count for double. Are you happy now?”

  He beamed at her, his target surpassed. “Delirious.”

  She shook her head in despair. “Meanwhile, back with our dead chap. Take your first right. That’s Pellinore, and the evens are on, let’s see, your side.”

  She counted down for him, stopping when she spotted the Crime Scene Investigation van outside the address. Rain hit her full in the face as she got out of the car. She bowed her head and hurried across to 26B. Blue-and-white crime scene tape fluttered around the tiny paved area where the wheelie bins were stored, one loose end of ribbon taking flight in the wind. A young officer, soaked through and visibly miserable, nodded at them as they approached. They entered their collar numbers and the time into his log and signed their names.

  “SOCO still up there?” Nelson asked.

  “Yeah, but I think they’re almost done. First on scene is at Twenty-two A, with the bloke who called it in.” The officer wiped a drip from his nose. “SOCO are waiting for you,” he added in a tone verging on petulant.

  Having both spent countless hours on similar thankless assignments, neither Sanne nor Nelson commented on his insubordination. Possibly grateful for the reprieve, he held the door to the flat open and then shut it again behind them.

  “Bulb’s gone,” a male voice called down almost at once, pre-empting any attempt to switch on a light. “We left you some clobber by the stairs.”

  Panning around with his Maglite, Nelson located Tyvek suits, booties, gloves, and masks. Sanne donned her outfit in record time. In the close confines of the entrance, even the air felt mucky. Avoiding a trail of crushed beer cans and what looked like ingrained dog shit, she led the way upstairs and through a single door that opened into the living room.

  In lieu of curtains, someone had covered the window with thick black paint. Even with her own torch, it took a moment for Sanne’s eyes to adjust, and her sense of smell rushed in to compensate. She put a hand to her face, pressing her mask inward to shut out the stink of faeces, rotting dog food, and clotted blood.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nelson said, sweat beading on his brow.

  “We’re in the bedroom,” the voice called. “Tread carefully.”

  Sanne looked down, noting the mess of foil wraps and needle-topped syringes glittering at her feet. There was only one piece of furniture in the room: a sofa with a single, mismatched cushion. On its arm, a Jif lemon balanced beside an overflowing ashtray.

  “Desperate times,” she said, tipping the plastic lemon with a gloved finger. She would balk at putting the juice on her pancakes, never mind mainlining the stuff, but addicts used it as a handy though dangerous substitute for pure citric acid.

  “It can make you go blind, you know,” Nelson said as they tiptoed through the detritus.

  “Yeah? No wonder! It tastes vile.”

  His mask twitched, and the shape of his eyes told her he was smiling. “From injecting it, not eating it, you pillock. I Googled the finer points after we took that lad in from Halshaw. Remember him?”

  “Gap-toothed Brian with the manky leg ulcers? How could I forget?”

  She made a beeline out of the room, relieved to see a bare but functioning light bulb in the hallway, not that it did anything to improve the ambience. A short strip of uncarpeted concrete led to a kitchen comprising a grease-covered oven and a bin stacked high with polystyrene takeaway boxes, a bathroom with a suite that might once have been eggshell blue, and a bedroom, from which a blond man poked his head.

  “Kept the place nice, didn’t he?” The Scene of Crime Officer shook their hands in turn. “Ted Ulverston, Senior SOCO. We’re not far from finishing up in here. I never thought I’d be glad to get outside and breathe the Malory air.”

  Sanne knew the feeling. As she stepped into the bedroom, the stench became even more pronounced, the air stifling. An electric heater still emanated warmth, having only just been unplugged, and a grotesquely bloated and discoloured body lay before it.

  “Vic’s name is Andrew Culver, thirty-five years old. First officer in here found a tattoo on his right forearm and got a hit when she ran it through the PNC.” Ulverston stooped and tapped the ink stretched taut across the swollen limb, leaving a trickle of brown fluid in his wake. “Three stab wounds to the chest, one to the abdomen, and one to the neck that severed the right common carotid. Weapon is a serrated blade approximately three inches in diameter, and the wound tracks are deep. We’ll know more after the PM, but I think it’s safe to say that our perp is one pissed-off individual.”

  “Any idea how long he’s been there?” Nelson asked.

  “It’s tricky to say, because the rate of decomp has been accelerated by the fire. He’s come out of rigor, though, so at least forty-eight hours.”

  Nelson grunted in assent. Sanne crouched by the body, trying to see past the decomposition. Blood had sprayed across the walls in gradually diminishing arcs, suggesting that the wound to Culver’s carotid had been one of the first inflicted. She imagined him raising his hands to try to stem the flow and leaving himself defenceless as his assailant continued to hack at him. His jeans and shirt were stretched taut across his distended belly, but their original size implied a man of slight build, which would fit in with chronic drug abuse. He probably hadn’t put up much of a fight.

  “Did he live here?” she asked. She pushed back to her feet, restoring some distance between herself and the black tongue lolling from Culver’s mouth. The bedroom was as Spartan as the living room, with a mattress taking up much of the floor space and a solitary comb sitting atop a cardboard crisp box. The price sticker still on the soles of his fake leather shoes revealed they’d been a bargain at £3.99, while a bin bag seemed to function as an improvised wardrobe, although he hadn’t had enough clothing to fill it.

  “According to the first officer, Culver’s been renting the flat for eighteen months,” Ulverston said, standing up with Sanne. “I think she’s already spoken to the landlord to confirm that.”

  “Right. I’ll have a word with her.” Tired of playing catch-up, Sanne put out a radio call to summon the officer back to the flat. Half listening to the affirmative response, she walked into the hallway and waited for Nelson to join her. “Front door’s the only way in, and there are no signs of forced entry.”

  “I’m guessing people around here lock everything up,” he said.

  She nodded, not mentioning that she habitually secured her own doors and windows even though she lived in the middle of nowhere. “The door had a security chain and a peephole. If we can establish that Culver normally used them, it would narrow our suspects down to someone he knew and let in.”

  “It’s unlikely to be random, San,” Nelson said, returning to the living room. “I can’t see it being a burglary gone bad.”

  “Me neither. I’m just trying to keep an open mind.” She sighed, and the warmth of her breath moistened her mask. “What would a burglar have pinched, though?”

  There were no marks or depressions in the grimy carpet to suggest that a television or other electronic goods had recently been removed, and the odds of Culver owning anything of value seemed slim. He must have exist
ed hand-to-mouth, or in his case hand-to-vein, his benefits exchanged for the best hit he could find and just enough food to keep him ticking over. Surrounding a boarded-up space where a fireplace would have been, a wooden mantelpiece—the landlord’s one concession to homeliness—stood bare. Culver had amassed no keepsakes or ornaments. Were it not for his body in the next room, the flat would have appeared abandoned.

  “Could’ve just pinched his stash, I suppose,” Sanne said. “We’ve seen people killed for less.” She wasn’t convinced, though. The violence meted out seemed too extreme somehow, too personal, not the result of a scrappy fight between two desperate users.

  “True,” Nelson said, but he sounded equally sceptical. He toed an empty metal bowl near the corner of the sofa. “I wonder where the dog is.”

  “Scarpered, stolen, or taken in by the bloke at Twenty-two A. Hopefully, the latter.” Sanne scribbled on her pad, adding the final touches to a sketch of the living room. “There aren’t any signs of a struggle, are there? I mean, it’s hard to tell when there’s so little furniture, but nothing’s scuffed or knocked over in here, and it was the same in the bedroom.”

  “No. Adds more credence to the theory that Culver knew the perp and was taken by surprise.”

  “Aye,” Sanne said over her shoulder. Her sketch complete, she was busy opening the kitchen units. “Hey, I found his filing cabinet.” She set the drawer on the countertop and riffled through the assorted paperwork. “He was three months behind in his rent, so the landlord needs looking at. Methadone prescriptions, gas bill and leccy bill, both well in the red…” Her summary trailed off as she lifted a set of photographs from the bottom of the pile. Two dated in the early eighties were small and faded. Both featured typical family scenes: a young boy riding a donkey on Blackpool beach, and the same lad playing football in a back garden. More recent photos were of an elderly couple—annotated Mam and Dad, silver wedding—and a thirty-something woman with a pretty smile. She returned to the beach shot.