Shatter jo-3

by Michael Robotham

  ‘Here, have one too,’ he says, offering me one.

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Just do it.’

  The mechanic lights up. Meanwhile, Ruiz picks squashed cigarette butts from the tin ashtray and begins crushing the grey ash into a powder.

  ‘You got a candle?’

  The mechanic searches the drawers until he finds one. Lighting it, Ruiz drips wax into the centre of a saucer and pushes the base of the candle into the melted wax until it stands upright. Then he takes a coffee cup and rolls it sideways over the flame, turning the surface black with soot.

  ‘It’s an old trick,’ he explains, ‘taught to me by a guy called George Noonan, who talks to dead people. He’s a pathologist.’

  Ruiz begins scraping soot from the mug into the growing pile of ash and gently mixing them together with the point of a pencil.

  ‘Now we need a brush. Something soft. Fine.’

  Christine Wheeler had a small bag of make-up in the glove compartment of the car. Retrieving it, I tip the contents onto the desk- a lipstick, mascara, eyeliner and a polished steel compact holding blusher and a brush.

  Ruiz picks up the brush gently as though it might crumble between his thumb and forefinger. ‘This should do. Bring the lantern.’

  Returning to the Renault, he sits in the driver’s seat with the door propped open and the lantern on the opposite side of the window. Careful not to breathe too heavily, he gently begins ‘painting’ the mixture of soot and ash onto the inside of the glass.

  Most of it falls from the brush and dusts his shoes, but just enough of it clings to the faint markings on the interior window. As if by magic, symbols begin to form and then turn into words.

  HELP ME

  Thunder crumples the air above us, rolling together continuously. Something rattles deep inside me. Christine Wheeler wrote a sign in lipstick and pressed it against the inside of her car window, hoping somebody would notice. Nobody did.

  Arc lights balance on tripods at the centre of the garage, the square heads facing inwards creating a blaze of white that renders the eyes useless for the shadows beyond. Crime scene investigators are moving inside the brightness. Their white overalls seem to glow from within.

  The car is being disassembled. Seats, carpets, windows, panels and lining are being removed, vacuumed, dusted, sifted, scraped and picked over like the carcass of a metal beast. Every sweet wrapper, fibre, piece of lint and smudged print will be photographed, sampled and logged.

  Fingerprint brushes dance across the hard surfaces, leaving behind a layer of black or silver powder that is finer than Ruiz’s homemade version. Magnetic wands skim through the air, picking out details invisible to the human eye.

  The head of the CSI team is a thickset Brummie who looks like a white jellybean in his overalls. He seems to be holding a master class for a group of trainees: talking about the ‘transient physical evidence’ and ‘maintaining the integrity of the crime scene’.

  ‘What exactly are we looking for, sir?’ a trainee asks.

  ‘Evidence, son, we’re looking for evidence.’

  ‘Evidence of what?’

  ‘The past.’ He smooths his latex gloves across his palms. ‘It might only be five days old but it’s still history.’

  Outside the light is fading and the temperature is dropping. DI Veronica Cray is standing in the main doorway to the garage, an archway of blackened bricks beneath the railway viaduct. A train rumbles above her head.

  She lights a cigarette and inserts the dead match in the book behind the others. It creates a thoughtful pause as she issues instructions to her second in command.

  ‘I want to know how many people have touched this car since it was found. I want every one of them fingerprinted and discounted.’

  The sergeant has steel-rimmed glasses and a flat-top haircut. ‘What exactly are we investigating, boss?’

  ‘A suspicious death. The Wheeler house is also a crime scene. I want it sealed off and guarded. You might also want to find a decent curry house.’

  ‘Are you hungry, boss?’

  ‘Not me, sergeant, but you’re going to be here all night.’

  Ruiz is sitting in his Merc with the door open and his eyes closed. I wonder if he finds it hard stepping back from a case like this, now that he’s retired. Surely old instincts must come into play, the desire to solve the crime and restore order. He once told me that the trick with investigating violent crimes was to focus on a suspect, not the victim. I’m the opposite. By knowing the victim I know the suspect.

  A murderer isn’t always uniform in his actions. Circumstances and events will alter what he says and does. So will the victim. How did she react under pressure? What did she say?

  Christine Wheeler doesn’t strike me as the sort of woman who was sexually provocative or likely to draw attention to herself through her appearance and mannerisms. She wore conservative clothes, rarely went out and tended to be self-effacing. Different women present different levels of vulnerability and risk. I need to know these things. By knowing Christine, I am a step closer to knowing whoever killed her.

  DI Cray is beside me now, staring into the grease pit.

  ‘Tell me, Professor, do you always talk your way into police lockups and contaminate important evidence?’

  ‘No, DI.’

  She blows smoke and sniffs twice, glancing across the forecourt to where Ruiz is dozing.

  ‘Who’s your dance partner?’

  ‘Vincent Ruiz.’

  She blinks at me. ‘You’re shitting me.’

  ‘I shit you not.’

  ‘How in glory’s name do you know Vincent Ruiz?’

  ‘He once arrested me.’

  ‘I can see how that might be tempting.’

  She hasn’t taken her eyes off Ruiz.

  ‘You couldn’t leave this alone.’

  ‘It wasn’t suicide.’

  ‘We both saw her jump.’

  ‘She didn’t do it willingly.’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone holding a gun to her head. I didn’t see a hand reach out and push her.’

  ‘A woman like Christine Wheeler doesn’t suddenly decide to take off her clothes and walk out the door holding a sign that says, “HELP ME”.’

  The DI stifles a belch as though something I’ve said has disagreed with her. ‘OK. Let’s assume for a moment that you’re right. If Mrs Wheeler was being threatened, why didn’t she phone somebody or drive to the nearest police station?’

  ‘Perhaps she couldn’t.’

  ‘You think he was in the car with her?’

  ‘Not if she held up a sign.’

  ‘So he must have been listening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I suppose he talked her to her death?’

  I don’t answer. Ruiz has climbed out of the Merc and is stretching, rolling his shoulders in lazy circles. He wanders over. The two of them size each other up like roosters in a henhouse.

  ‘DI Cray, this is Vincent Ruiz.’

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ she says, shaking his hand.

  ‘Don’t believe half of it.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  He glances at her feet. ‘Are they men’s shoes?’

  ‘Yep. You got a problem with that?’

  ‘Not at all. What size you take?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I might be your size.’

  ‘You’re not big enough.’

  ‘Are we talking shoes or something else?’

  She smiles. ‘Aren’t you just as cute as French knickers.’

  Then she turns to me. ‘I want you in my office first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I’ve already given a statement.’

  ‘That’s just the beginning. You’re going to help me understand this because right now it’s beyond my fucking comprehension.’

  16

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I knelt down in the mud.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Darcy is in the
doorway, regarding me with a brief, disarming concern. I take off my shoes and leave them on the back step. Sugar and cinnamon scent the air. Emma is standing on a chair in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hand and a chocolate goatee.

  ‘Don’t play in the mud, Daddy. You’ll get dirty,’ she says seriously, before announcing, ‘I’m making biscuits.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  She’s wearing an oversized apron that reaches her ankles. A pyramid of unwashed dishes sits in the sink.

  Darcy brushes past me and joins Emma. There is a bond between them. I almost feel like I’m intruding.

  ‘Where’s Charlie?’

  ‘Upstairs doing her homework.’

  ‘I’m sorry I took so long. Have you all eaten?’

  ‘I cooked spaghetti.’

  Emma nods, pronouncing it ‘pagetti’.

  ‘You had a few phone calls,’ says Darcy. ‘I took messages. Mr Hamilton the kitchen fitter said he could come next Tuesday. And they’re going to deliver your firewood on Monday.’

  I sit down at the kitchen table and, with great ceremony, sample one of Emma’s biscuits, which are proclaimed to be the best ever baked. The cottage should be a mess but it’s not. Apart from the kitchen, the place is spotless. Darcy has cleaned up. She even straightened the office and replaced a light bulb in the utilities room that hasn’t worked since we moved in.

  I ask her to sit down.

  ‘The police are going to investigate your mother’s death.’

  Her eyes cloud momentarily.

  ‘They believe me.’

  ‘Yes. I need to ask you some more questions about your mother. What sort of person was she? What were her routines? Was she open and trusting, or careful and reserved? If someone threatened her would she react aggressively or be shocked into silence?’

  ‘Why do you need to know that?’

  ‘When I know her, I know more about him.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘The last person to speak to her.’

  ‘The person who killed her.’

  Her own statement seems to shrink her. A tiny speck of flour clings to her brow above her right eyebrow.

  ‘You mentioned an argument with your mother: what was it about?’

  Darcy shrugs. ‘I wanted to go to the National Ballet School. I wasn’t supposed to audition but I forged Mum’s signature on the application and caught a train to London by myself. I thought that if I could win a place she’d change her mind.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Only twenty-five dancers are chosen every year. Hundreds apply. When the letter came confirming my place, Mum read it and threw it in the bin. She went to her bedroom and locked the door.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The fees are twelve thousand pounds a year. We couldn’t afford them.’

  ‘But she was already paying school fees…’

  ‘I’m on an academic scholarship. If I leave the school, I lose the money.’ Darcy picks at her fingernails, scratching flour from the cuticles. ‘Mum’s business wasn’t doing so well. She borrowed a lot of money and couldn’t pay it back. I wasn’t supposed to know but I heard her arguing with Sylvia. That’s why I wanted to leave school, to get a job and save money. I thought I could go to ballet school next year.’ She drops her voice to a whisper. ‘That’s what we argued about. When Mum sent me the pointe shoes, I thought she must have changed her mind.’

  ‘The pointe shoes? I don’t understand.’

  ‘They’re for ballet.’

  ‘I know what they are.’

  ‘Someone sent me a pair. A package came. The caretaker found it at the school gates on Saturday morning. It was addressed to me. Inside were pointe shoes- Gaynor Mindens. They’re really expensive.’

  ‘How expensive?’

  ‘Eighty quid a pair.’

  Her hands are bunched in the pocket of the apron. ‘I thought Mum had sent them. I tried to call her, but couldn’t get through.’

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  ‘I wish she were here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I hate her for it.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  She turns her face away and brushes past me as she stands. I can hear her on the stairs. Closing the bedroom door. Falling on the bed. The rest is imagined.

  17

  The supermarket aisles are deserted. She shops at night because her days are too busy and weekends are for long lie-ins and trips to the gym rather than household chores. She is buying a leg of lamb. Brussels sprouts. Potatoes. Sour cream. For a dinner party perhaps, or a romantic dinner.

  I glance past the cash registers to the newsstand. Alice is reading a music magazine and sucking on a lollipop. She’s wearing her school uniform: a blue skirt, white blouse and dark blue jumper.

  Her mother calls to her. Alice puts the magazine back on the rack and begins helping her pack the groceries in bags. I follow them through a different checkout and out into the car park where she loads the shopping into the boot of a sleek VW Golf convertible.

  Alice is told to wait in the car. Her mother skips across the parking lot, head up, hips swinging. She pauses at a crossing and waits for the lights to change. I stay on the opposite side of the street and follow her along the pavement past brightly lit shops and cafes until she reaches a drycleaner’s and pushes open the door.

  A young Asian girl smiles from behind the counter. Another customer follows her inside. A man. She knows him. They brush cheeks, left and right. His hand lingers on her waist. She has an admirer. I can’t see his face but he’s tall and smartly dressed.

  They’re standing close. She laughs and throws her shoulders back. She’s flirting with him. I should warn him. I should tell him to skip the foreplay. Don’t bother with marriage and the messy divorce. Buy the bitch a house and give her the keys- it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

  I am watching her from the far side of the road, standing near a tourist map. The lights from a nearby restaurant illuminate my lower half leaving my face in shadow. A kitchen hand has come outside to have a cigarette. She pulls the packet from her apron pocket and glances over the cupped flame.

  ‘Are you lost?’ she asks me, turning her head away as she exhales.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Waiting for someone?’

  ‘Might be.’

  Her short blonde hair is pinned behind her ears. She has darker eyebrows, her true colour.

  She follows my gaze and sees who I’m looking at.

  ‘You interested in her?’

  ‘I thought I recognised her.’

  ‘She looks pretty cosy already. You might be too late.’

  She turns her head again and blows smoke away.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Gideon.’

  ‘I’m Cheryl. You want a coffee?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can get you one.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ She crushes the cigarette underfoot.

  I look back at the drycleaner’s. The woman is still flirting. They’re saying goodbye. She rises on her toes and kisses his cheek, closer to his lips this time. Lingering. Then she walks to the door, swinging her hips a little. A dozen garments in plastic sleeves are draped over her left shoulder.

  She crosses the road again, towards me this time. Six steps and she’ll be here. She doesn’t raise her eyes. She walks straight past me as though I don’t exist or I’m invisible. Maybe that’s it- I’m fading away.

  Sometimes I wake at night and worry that I might have disappeared in my sleep. That’s what happens when nobody cares about you. Bit by bit you begin to disappear until people can look right through your chest and your head like you’re made of glass.

  It’s not about love; it’s about being forgotten. We only exist if others think about us. It is like that tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. Who the fuck cares except the birds?

  18

  I once had
a patient who was convinced that his head was full of seawater and a crab lived inside. When I asked him what happened to his brain he told me that aliens had sucked it out with a drinking straw.

  ‘It is better this way,’ he insisted. ‘Now there’s more room for the crab.’

  I tell this story to my students and get a laugh. Fresher’s Week is over. They’re looking healthier. Thirty-two of them have turned up for the tutorial in a brutally modern and ugly room, with low ceilings and walls of fibreboard bolted between painted girders.

  On a table in front of me is a large glass jar covered in a white sheet. My surprise. I know they’re wondering what I’m going to show them. I have kept them waiting long enough.

  Taking the corners of the fabric, I flick my wrists. The cloth billows and falls, revealing a human brain suspended in formalin.

  ‘This is Brenda,’ I explain. ‘I don’t know if that’s her real name but I know she was forty-eight when she died.’

  Putting on rubber gloves, I lift the rubbery grey organ in my cupped hands. It drips on the table. ‘Does anyone want to come down and hold her?’

  Nobody moves.

  ‘I have more gloves.’

  Still there are no takers.

  ‘Every religion and belief system in history has claimed there is an inner force within each of us- a soul, a conscience, the Holy Spirit. Nobody knows where this inner force resides. It could be in the big toe or the earlobe or the nipple.’

  Guffaws and giggles confirm they’re listening.

  ‘Most people would opt for perhaps the heart or the mind as logical locations. Your guess is as good as mine. Scientists have mapped every part of the human body using X-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs and CAT scans. People have been sliced, diced, weighed, dissected, prodded and probed for four hundred years and, as yet, nobody has discovered a secret compartment or mysterious black spot or magical inner force or brilliant light shining within us. They have found no genie in a bottle, no ghost in the machine, no tiny little person madly pedalling a bicycle.

  ‘So what are we to draw from this? Are we simply flesh and blood, neurons and nerves, a brilliant machine? Or is there a spirit within us that we cannot see or understand?’