‘You’ve got another visitor,’ he winked at Dom. ‘Popular today, aren’t we?’
Megan thought she saw a flicker of confusion in Dom’s eyes as he rose to leave. She wondered who this visitor was. He hadn’t talked about anyone on the outside; no one who mattered, other than his daughter.
* * *
Megan didn’t leave Balsall Gate straight away. She asked to see the governor, Malcolm Meredith, who was dunking a digestive biscuit into a pint-sized mug of tea when she was shown into his office. As she sat down he carried on without a hint of embarrassment. Nor did he attempt to conceal the newspaper that was spread on the desk in front of him, open at the crossword, which he had half-finished.
‘I’ve come about Carl Kelly.’ She said it baldly, with no preamble. She was damned if she was going to be polite when he didn’t even have the manners to offer her a cup of tea. Before he could gulp down his soggy biscuit she went on: ‘Someone gave him those drugs and I think you should start searching the staff. They should all be checked when they arrive for work. Bags, wallets – even their lunchboxes.’
Meredith eyed her over his rimless bifocals, which were steamed up from the tea. She knew he didn’t like her; that he resented her being foisted on him by the Ministry. He’d made his views about psychologists quite clear at their initial meeting. As far as he was concerned she was a namby-pamby academic looking to boost her own reputation by brown-nosing the likes of Dom Wilde.
‘Dr Rhys, am I labouring under some kind of misapprehension?’ She glared back at him. What did he mean by that? She kept silent. ‘I was under the impression that you were here to research the Listener service,’ he went on, his lips barely moving as he enunciated the words. ‘Is this some new brief from the Ministry? Something I haven’t been informed of? Because unless I’m very much mistaken, you’ve come marching in here trying to tell me how to run my own prison.’ She held his gaze, refusing to be fazed by this accusation. But she remained silent, a trick she had learned long ago when interviewing prisoners. It confused them. Gave you the psychological advantage. Meredith’s eyebrows knotted as he waited for a reply. ‘Well?’ His voice was shriller and his face was going red. ‘I don’t think searching the staff would do a great deal for the atmosphere in here, do you?’
‘I don’t expect it to.’ Her own voice was deadpan. ‘But if Carl Kelly died because one of your staff is bent I think we need to know, don’t you?’
He gave her a look that reminded her of the iguanas in the window of a pet shop she passed on her way to work; a narrowing of the eyes that could pass for a smile but was actually a prelude to gulping down some unsuspecting locust. ‘But what about the visitors?’ he said. ‘They’re a much likelier source of illicit drugs.’
‘Equally likely, I’d say.’ She stared back at him, unblinking. ‘I think it’s something you should seriously consider.’
‘Well, I’ll consider it, yes.’ Meredith was a lazy bastard; that much was obvious. He wasn’t going to institute staff searches – it was far too much hassle. So she tried another tack, something that would cost him no effort whatsoever; something he’d be tempted to say yes to in a bid to get her off his back: ‘I’d like to look at Carl Kelly’s records,’ she said. ‘He was using the Listener service. Using it fairly regularly, as it turns out. So I think my interest in him is quite legitimate from a research perspective.’ She paused as he took this in. The silence was broken by a soft ‘plop’ as the end of his biscuit fell into his mug. ‘I’d like to establish whether he had any visitors other than the girlfriend Dominic Wilde told me about. And I have an address for her that I’d like to check out.’
He nodded slowly as he fished around his mug with his spoon, trying to locate the lost lump of biscuit. ‘Shouldn’t the police be doing that?’
‘Of course they should, but as you know, they’ve shown very little interest in the case.’ She pulled the plate of biscuits towards her and took the last one, crunching it loudly before she swallowed. ‘I think inmates – even dead ones – deserve some respect, don’t you?’
Without looking at her he reached across the desk for a slip of headed paper. Scribbling on it he said: ‘Well, thanks for the Thought For The Day – I’ll bear it in mind for my retirement speech.’ He shoved the paper towards her. ‘Now perhaps you’ll allow me to get on?’
Balsall Gate’s office manager proved to be a lot more helpful than the governor. Once Megan had handed over Meredith’s hastily-written consent, it took only a couple of minutes for the records to arrive. She looked at the photograph in the top right hand corner of the file. So this was what Carl Kelly had looked like in life. Dom was right. He was a striking man who looked younger than his thirty-six years. The photo had been taken when he first entered the jail, but even so, he could have passed for someone in his mid-twenties.
She took out the letter Dominic had given her. The signature at the bottom was Jodie. Her surname was Shepherd. She was listed as visiting the prison the day before Carl Kelly died. A quick search revealed that she had made two other visits during the previous two months. Megan asked the office manager if there had been any calls from the girlfriend since the news of Carl’s death broke. Apparently there hadn’t, which Megan found odd. All the more reason to find her and talk to her, she thought.
The only other visitor Kelly had received during that time was an Anthony Greaves. Apparently he was one of the duty solicitors and a frequent visitor to the jail. Megan made a note of his office telephone number. It was not unknown for solicitors to smuggle drugs in for their clients.
When she left the main office she had to pass through the visiting room. To her surprise Dom Wilde was sitting opposite a petite, pretty girl with long, white-blonde hair. She was smiling at him and he was laughing. Megan felt a stab of jealousy. Who was she? She looked about twenty-five. Too old to be his long lost daughter. Was she a girlfriend? She certainly didn’t look like a lawyer or a probation officer. With a frown Megan checked herself. She was stereotyping the girl on the basis of physical appearance – something that irritated her intensely when it was done to her. Megan’s nose stud and her dark skin had led to all kinds of misunderstandings. She simply didn’t conform to most people’s preconceptions of what an academic looked like. Now, it seemed, she was operating the same prejudices as they were. Why should blonde locks and a pretty face equal no brain?
With a click of her tongue she told herself that it didn’t matter who Dom Wilde’s visitor was; that it was none of her business. But the bile of jealousy refused to subside.
As she reached the door a loud bell signalled the end of visiting time. She was suddenly at the centre of a throng of people, all pushing their way towards the gate. The smell of prison was swept away on a tide of perfume. The visitors were mostly women; mothers, wives and girlfriends. And they had obviously made a huge effort for their men. Some had small children with them. A toddler in a pushchair was screaming at the top of its voice; hungry, tired, bored or simply confused at being taken to see a father who was little more than a stranger. It must be difficult for Dom, she thought, seeing these children. They must be a painful reminder of his own daughter. He hadn’t said whether he had anything to remember her by. Probably not, if he hadn’t seen her since the day she was born. Megan wondered what he had done to cause the mother to cut him out of her life so completely.
She was shaken out of this speculation by the sight of the blonde-haired girl. She was a few feet from Megan and about to pass through the gate; somehow she had managed to worm her way to the front of the queue. Soon she disappeared from view. Where was she going? And what had been the purpose of her visit? For God’s sake, Megan whispered to herself, you don’t own him!
She left the clusters of visitors who were waiting outside the prison for buses or taxis and made her way to the churchyard. She tried to push Dom’s visitor out of her mind, focusing instead on the girl who had been to see Carl. She was what the lads in here would call very fit. Those were the words Dom had used
to describe her – as if he himself wasn’t in a position to judge such things. What had he meant by that, she wondered? Was it possible that he was jealous of Carl’s girlfriend but trying to cover up the fact? Perching on the end of a cracked stone bench she pulled the letter from her jacket pocket and unfolded it. It was very short; more of a note, really:
Dear Carl,
It was great to see you yesterday. I wish we could have had longer together. I feel as if we’ve got so much to talk about.
I’ve never met anyone like you before. You make me feel so special with the things you say.
Please don’t worry yourself about what I’ll be doing while I’m on holiday with Mum and Dad. You have to believe that I’m not interested in anyone else since I met you. All I want is for us to be together and I’m counting the days until you are free.
Love you babe
Jodie xxx
So the girl was on holiday. That explained why she hadn’t responded to the news of his death. Megan wondered how long she’d gone away for. She scanned the large, neat handwriting. The spelling was perfect. Not what she would have expected from someone writing to a prisoner. In her experience there were two kinds of women who corresponded with inmates they had not previously met. There were the better-educated liberals who took on prisoners as a good cause and then there were the very desperate, who tended to be at the lower end of the social scale and had given up on meeting men through normal channels. The former sometimes ended up falling in love with the men they campaigned for but it was not nearly as common as the tabloids liked to make out.
Megan stared at the signature. Dom had summed it up quite accurately with his comment that the women who courted prisoners tended to be older and sadder than the writer of this letter. Her eyes moved back up the page to the address: Linden House, Fitton Street, Bordesley Green, Birmingham. Bordesley Green was only a mile or so from the university. Linden House…her eyes narrowed as she stared at the name. Then she remembered: Linden House was one of the student halls of residence. A student writing to a convicted drug dealer? Why would a student want to form a relationship with a man like Carl Kelly?
There was no point going to Linden House if the girl had gone on holiday. There must be a mobile number, though: perhaps Carl had written it down somewhere. Dom would know where to look. She glanced at her watch. Too late to go back there now – Alistair Hodge was expecting her at the mortuary. Punching out the number of the prison on her phone she left a message for Dom with the office manager.
She rose from the bench with a shiver. The stone had made her buttocks and thighs go numb. She set off across the churchyard, unable to help taking a backwards glance at Moses Smith’s grave. As she did so something registered on the periphery of her vision. It moved in and out of sight so quickly she couldn’t even be sure she had really seen it. But she was left with the abiding impression that something bright and shiny had emerged from behind one of the stone angels. When she turned to look there was nothing there. She blinked, wondering if what she had seen was an after-image of the sun. It had been yellowy-white; not round, like a disc, though – more like a ghostly curtain swishing out. She frowned as she turned away. This place was making her imagination work overtime: just like poor Carl Kelly.
Chapter 9
The mortuary was housed in the basement of the university’s teaching hospital. To reach it Megan had to pass through a narrow corridor whose shelves were lined with large glass jars bearing some of the most grotesque remains she had ever seen.
Most of them were foetuses. Deformed or grossly abnormal, they had been pickled in formaldehyde and put on display for the benefit of successive generations of medical students. Megan always found it an ordeal to walk past them. She couldn’t help being reminded of the baby she had allowed to be destroyed. She wondered if the mothers of these poor creatures had any idea of their fate. Presumably they had miscarried while in hospital. She had a disturbing mental image of a doctor, shocked by what he saw yet secretly gleeful at the prospect of showing some bizarre new specimen to his colleagues. The foetus would be spirited off while the distraught mother was distracted with platitudes about Nature’s way.
And what of the medical students who were led down to the basement to see these sad relics of women’s hopes and dreams? To them it was little more than a freak show – something to giggle over in the Union bar after the lecture was over.
Megan thought about the mummified child she was about to see. Some might accuse her of the same questionable motives as the students; would say that there was no good reason for her to be here in person; that she was simply gratifying some distasteful urge for the sensational. But anyone who had ever attended a post-mortem would know that the reality of it was so grim that no one in their right mind would attend one out of choice.
She swallowed hard at the thought of what was to come. There would be no smell, at least, with this corpse; the mummification would have dried everything out. And the face was so changed it looked more like a doll than a human baby. But the knowledge that this was a child, a child whose life had been snuffed out before it had begun, was going to make this more traumatic than any post-mortem she had ever attended.
She had to be there, though. Had to watch Alistair Hodge’s every move. There was no good reason to doubt him; he was a professional of many years’ standing. But to him, this baby was just another lump of dead flesh. Confronted on a daily basis with the worst that human beings could do to each other, he was inured to it. And her fear was that it might just make him miss something.
If she were to tell him her thoughts he would say she was being overly sentimental; that empathising with the victim had nothing to do with performing a thorough job. But she would never tell him, because then she would have to give the reason why the sight of this dead child stirred up such a maelstrom of emotion. And that was something she would never tell a living soul.
When she opened the door to the mortuary Hodge was already gloved up. He hovered over the corpse of the baby boy, which was still zipped up in a body bag. It was a forlorn sight; a small bump in a black plastic shroud designed for a larger, adult body.
‘We’ve checked out the pillow case,’ he said, nodding at her by way of a greeting. ‘No moth holes.’
‘Oh,’ she said, frowning as she took this in. ‘So that means he wasn’t wrapped in it when he was concealed?’
‘No, he wasn’t, which is a shame: we could have dated the fabric by analysing the fibres. That might have given us a better idea of the time of death.’ He unzipped the body bag and called ‘Ready!’ A thin young man with lank black hair and a Meatloaf tattoo on his forearm appeared from behind a screen. There was a camera slung round his neck, and at Hodge’s command, he began photographing the body from every possible angle
‘Where’s Sergeant Willis?’ Megan glanced at the door.
‘Oh, he’s been and gone.’ Hodge glanced up at Megan as he began taking swabs from the baby’s dessicated flesh. ‘Said he thought his time would be better spent in the incident room. Seems he’s banking on someone coming forward.’
‘Hmm. He’ll be waiting for bloody Godot in that case.’
The pathologist gave her a wry smile. He had been around police officers even longer than Megan and had seen the good, the bad, and, like this detective sergeant, the purely indifferent.
‘There must be something about the body that can give us some clue, mustn’t there?’ She stepped sideways as the photographer pulled out a chair and stood on it to get a bird’s eye view of the corpse.
‘Well, there might be fibres stuck to the body. Remnants of whatever it was wrapped in originally. It’s unusual for these babies to be concealed naked. I’ll swab him all over, just in case. Shouldn’t take long.’
‘And what about the cardboard shoebox? Any progress on that?’
‘Well,’ Hodge said, pushing his glasses up his nose, ‘We’ve had one of the driest winters on record, haven’t we? We haven’t had really heavy rain since the
middle part of January – the sort that would make the cardboard begin to disintegrate, I mean.’
‘So the box could have been buried any time during the last – what – ten or eleven weeks?’
‘I would say so, yes. It’s hard to be more precise than that. Oh…’ He stopped suddenly, one hand on the baby’s left leg, a swab held aloft in his right. ‘What’s this?’
Megan and the photographer moved towards the body from opposite sides of the metal trolley, their heads almost touching as they leaned forward to see what Alistair Hodge was looking at. The flash bulb lit up a tiny fragment of something thin and yellow stuck to the lower part of a shrivelled thigh that was no thicker than a chicken drumstick.
‘I’ll have to turn him over.’ The pathologist picked up the tiny body and laid it face down on the table. The child looked even less human from this angle, his buttocks flattened by years of pressure from the surface he had been laid on and the flesh marked with creases from whatever he had been wrapped in at the time of his death. Megan blinked as the flash went off again. Then she saw what Alistair Hodge had noticed. It was a strip of what looked like newspaper, stuck to the back of the thigh like a second skin. She could make out letters, faded to a pale grey against the yellowed paper.
‘Hang on, I’ll get my magnifying glass,’ Hodge said.
Megan moved round the table as the pathologist retrieved it from his bag. The writing looked upside down. It was in capitals, like a headline. Her eyes narrowed as she strained to make them out. Then, as the magnifying glass glided over them, the letters jumped out : ‘M 6 FREE’. She said it aloud, slowly. Then again, looking from Hodge to the photographer. ‘M 6 FREE?’
‘Hmm,’ the pathologist pursed his lips. ‘Not much to go on, is it?’ He moved the magnifying glass this way and that, searching for other clues on the torn strip of newsprint. But there was nothing. No other lettering and certainly no date. They were all staring at it, Megan racking her brains for any news story she could remember about the M6 motorway.
The Killer Inside Page 7
