Born in a Burial Gown

by Mike Craven

  Fluke’s spirits, already high, were lifted even higher. When cases broke, they broke fast. He knew Diamond wasn’t the killer but he was involved somehow. Nathaniel had as good as told him. He’d do the interview himself.

  ‘Right, Jo, listen to me carefully. Nobody interviews him before I get there. Nobody. And he doesn’t get to speak to a brief until I say so. We need to do this right.’

  ‘Won’t be a problem, boss.’

  A sixth sense stopped him asking why. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  Chapter 32

  Fluke arrived at Kenneth Diamond’s Stanwix address less than half an hour later, and parked at the side of the road. He’d dropped off Leah and promised to call in when he could. She hadn’t said anything about the forged letter and he hadn’t been able to read her expression.

  Police and SOCO vehicles were already there in abundance. In the dimming light and glare of the emergency lights, Fluke could see most of his team milling round, waiting for him.

  The crime scene was the house next door to Diamond’s own. The team that had gathered his DNA had been less than thirty yards from his corpse.

  Fluke took his bearings. Stanwix was a prosperous part of Carlisle and the houses on Diamond’s street were all detached and large. Mock Tudor, or similar.

  Towler was waiting for him at the drive entrance which had been set up as an external cordon.

  ‘How did he die, Matt?’ he asked as he signed in.

  ‘Screaming,’ was all he’d say in return.

  Fluke followed him into the house. The entrance vestibule had an umbrella stand and a coat rack. He could see a kitchen at the end of a long hallway. A middle-aged man was sitting at a breakfast bar, talking to a uniformed officer. The owner of the house he presumed.

  ‘Down there, boss,’ Towler said, pointing towards a door under the main stairs. It opened onto stairs descending to a cellar.

  Fluke walked down them carefully. Sean Rogers, who must have been regretting not taking his holiday that week, followed him down. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked into the room.

  The owner was using it as a wine cellar, gym and a workshop. The room was lit by a bank of fluorescent tubes and Fluke could hear the buzz of the starter motor as one of the lights flickered. The cellar had bare brick walls but seemed dry enough. A rowing machine sat in the middle of the floor. Tools were on a large shadow board on the far wall above a workbench with a vice and a bench drill. There was a half-full wine rack.

  He didn’t know much about the best way to store wine but was fairly sure that clean air was a prerequisite for any cellar. If that were the case, then the owner’s collection was ruined. The heavy stench of a decomposing body was oppressive and cloying. Fluke’s mouth flooded with saliva, the first warning of nausea. He swallowed and continued into the room.

  Towler hadn’t been kidding. Diamond had not died well. He had a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead but Fluke didn’t need a pathologist to tell him he’d also been brutally tortured.

  ‘Shit,’ Fluke said to himself, as he circled the body, not getting too close. The scene hadn’t been processed.

  Diamond was sitting on a high-backed wooden chair, probably taken from the kitchen. He was naked apart from a tea towel covering his groin. It was soaked in dark blood. A pool of blood had congealed on the floor underneath the chair.

  He’d clearly been there for some time. The corpse had swelled as bacteria dissolved bodily tissue. Fluid was leaking from Diamond’s orifices and the smell was worse, the nearer the body Fluke was. It seemed to get into the very mucus of his nose and he knew it would remain with him long after he left the room.

  Blisters had formed on his body and some had burst. Diamond’s eyes were sunken and milky grey. Despite that, they seemed to be staring directly at Fluke through the swollen eyelids.

  His torso was pale, almost translucent. Fluke bent down and looked at his legs. The blood, following the laws of gravity, had settled there and turned them purple. He made a mental note; Kenneth Diamond hadn’t been moved, it was where he died. In that room, tied to that chair, and by the expression on his face, screaming in absolute agony.

  A lone fly buzzed around and settled on some fluid leaking from his ears. Fluke knew that the body broke down fairly quickly and estimated it had been in situ for the best part of a week, possibly longer. When the pathologist got there, he hoped it was Henry and that he had Lucy with him. The corpse had been here long enough for her to find insect activity.

  His face was swollen but Fluke couldn’t be sure whether that was due to the decomposition process or the beating he’d been subjected to. Threads of drool and blood hung from his gaping mouth. The lips had stretched and he could see that some of Diamond’s teeth were missing. He looked down at the carpeted floor and saw white bloody fragments scattered around the base of the chair.

  Fluke walked round the back of the body and saw he’d been secured using wire coat hangers. The swelling of his wrists had enveloped the wire against his skin but he could see it joining his hands together. He thought he saw something and bent down for a closer look. Diamond no longer had any fingernails. He looked at the floor again but couldn’t see them scattered among the teeth.

  ‘Fingernails?’ he said to Rogers, who until that point hadn’t said a word.

  ‘Over there,’ he replied, pointing towards the workbench.

  Fluke looked up, squinted and walked over. On top of the bench was a pair of bloodied pliers. Even Chambers could have worked out what they’d been used for. Lined up in two rows of five, were Diamond’s fingernails. Fluke looked back in to check something and confirmed that his chair was facing the bench. Someone had been making a show of it, letting him see how many he had left to go.

  The bench had two other tools on it: a hammer and long bladed knife. Both were encrusted with dark blood. There was also a plastic bottle containing a clear liquid.

  It was easy to see what the hammer had been used for. Diamond no longer had knees. With tremendous force and accuracy, they’d been reduced to a pink, jelly like mush. Fluke forced himself to look closer. He could see the indent of the ball-peen end. He looked down at what had been his feet. They’d been reduced to same bloody pulp as his knees.

  What the hell?

  Fluke put on a pair of gloves and carefully lifted the tea towel covering Diamond’s groin.

  It wasn’t there for Diamond’s modesty. It had been put there to stem bleeding. His testicles had been smashed beyond all recognition.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said out loud. He knew he was looking at something that would haunt him for years to come but he had no choice but to continue. Fluke had thought the blood that had pooled on the floor beneath the chair was from the groin area but he realised that there was a deep smear of blood going from his mouth, down his bare chest and onto the wooden floor. His mouth or throat had suffered major trauma.

  Doubting having his teeth ripped out would have been the caused him to lose so much blood, Fluke took out his penlight and shone it into Diamond’s slightly open mouth. He bent forward and peered inside. It was filled with blood. Fluke angled his torch down and saw what had caused such massive bleeding. He dropped the penlight in revulsion and jerked back, gasping.

  His tongue had been cut out.

  After taking some time to compose himself, Fluke briefly considered why. Cutting out his tongue wouldn’t have stopped Diamond screaming. Screams don’t work that way. They come from a much deeper part of the body.

  Uneasily Fluke looked back across to the workbench and the bottle with the clear liquid. Not willing to believe it was possible, he forced himself to pick his torch back up and look into Kenneth Diamond’s mouth again. This time he looked past the gaping bloody hole where the tongue used to be. He angled his penlight further down the throat and saw what he was dreading.

  Diamond’s throat, including his larynx, had been completely destroyed by chemical burns. Fluke leaned forward and lightly sniffed, recoiling inst
antly from the strong smell. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work out what had happened. Kenneth Diamond had been forced to drink acid.

  Towler was wrong. Diamond hadn’t died screaming in agony. Diamond hadn’t screamed at all.

  Fluke felt the lurch in his stomach again and this time knew he wouldn’t be able to control it. His mouth filled with salvia and he raced up the stairs, found the kitchen and vomited noisily in the sink.

  He turned on the tap, waited until the water turned icy cold, picked up a mug from the drainer and filled it. He drank it all and poured another. He still felt queasy. He looked round, but the kitchen was empty. He washed his face and composed himself.

  Fluke had no doubt that it was the work of the same man who had killed Farrar, but he needed confirmation before he moved forward. He shouted for Towler, who’d stayed outside managing the cordons and making sure the pathologist could get through. He appeared within seconds and Fluke asked him for his opinion.

  Towler circled the scene slowly. He didn’t have the same reaction as Fluke, but he hadn’t expected him to have. Fluke had witnessed some bad things in the forces but knew Towler had witnessed worse. He’d be cracking jokes about it later while the rest of them were drinking to forget it.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Who found him?’ Fluke asked.

  ‘Mr Dawson. Came back today from two weeks’ sailing holiday. Him and his wife. Came down to get some wine and walked straight into this. Least he’ll have something interesting to tell the neighbours, I suppose. Probably for the first time.’

  Fluke said nothing. He guessed Diamond had been snatched from his own house next door and dragged here for privacy.

  He found himself staring at the corpse.

  Was it a punishment for the rape or for something else? Or was it just a plain and simple information extraction? If it was the latter, Fluke doubted Diamond had the information the killer wanted. No one could stand that much pain.

  In the Marines, Fluke had seen the results of sectarian beatings in Belfast on more than one occasion. They were invariably rushed, had little finesse and had no pattern to them. They tended to focus on kneecappings. Shotguns, electric drills, blow torches, they’d all been used for what became known as a signature punishment the world over. Hundreds of Catholics and hundreds of Protestants would never walk again because of the Troubles.

  Diamond’s ordeal had been different. It was methodical. No area had been wasted in the infliction of pain. The killer had taken his time. Diamond would’ve passed out and there is little point in torturing an unconscious man. Fluke was betting that he’d been tortured into unconsciousness, revived and tortured again.

  It wasn’t a simple punishment beating.

  It was a message.

  ‘You think it’s Dalton Cross’s handiwork?’ Fluke said.

  ‘Difficult to tell, the head’s swollen that much, but the bullet hole’s the same calibre. I’d bet me bollocks.’ He paused and looked down at Diamond’s groin. ‘Looks like he’s already bet his.’

  Scratch that, Fluke thought. Towler was cracking jokes about it already.

  Fluke let Towler supervise the forensic process while he went outside to think. He was starting with a headache. One of those that starts behind one eye but eventually feels as though someone is drilling their way out of the back of the head. The vomiting wouldn’t have helped. He pinched the bridge of his nose to alleviate the pressure. It made no difference.

  Someone arrived with a dozen cups of coffee and passed them round. Fluke took one. He didn’t want it, and it wasn’t going to make his headache go away, but it gave him an excuse not to talk to anyone while he drank it.

  Thankfully he was spared forced conversation by the arrival of Henry Sowerby. He got out of his old Jaguar. Lucy got out the passenger side. Despite the awful scene he’d just left, Fluke smiled. Although it had been less than a week since they’d all stood on that cold building site he was glad to see them again.

  ‘What have we got here, Avison?’ Sowerby boomed, causing a uniformed officer to spill his coffee. ‘“I’m hearing things,” I said to Lucy. “The great Avison Fluke back on the force and Cumbria has two murders in less than a week. Surely not,” I said.’ He left Lucy by the car and walked over.

  They shook hands.

  ‘What do we have?’ Sowerby asked.

  While Fluke briefed them on what he’d seen, Sean Rogers walked over, ready for the crime scene briefing. They agreed his team would go and in and record everything before anything else happened. Towler walked over as Rogers disappeared to start the video walkthrough. Fluke rubbed his temples.

  ‘Are you okay, Inspector?’ Lucy asked. She was standing slightly off from the group being briefed. She wasn’t formally part of the investigation and hadn’t been invited in. Fluke beckoned her over. They wouldn’t be where they were without her.

  ‘Bit of a headache, Lucy, that’s all. I’ll be fine.’

  She reached into her handbag, pulled out a box of paracetamol and threw them. He caught them and opened the box.

  Fluke pulled out one of the blister packs. And stared at it.

  It was a standard paracetamol box. Two blister packs to a box. Two rows of four in each. Sixteen in total. The maximum allowed in any one box in the UK. Part of the government’s suicide prevention strategy.

  There were five pills left.

  Neurons fired. Synapses transmitted electrical impulses. A memory stirred. Something that happened earlier at the hospital was forcing itself from the recesses of his mind. Something to do with pills. Something important.

  ‘What’s up, Inspector?’ Lucy asked.

  He held his hand up and said nothing. He continued staring.

  Sometimes Fluke could have answers to questions maddeningly out of reach for weeks. The harder he looked the deeper they hid. The answer to what had bothered him about the inventory from Samantha’s flat rushed out to greet him like an old friend.

  He knew what Samantha’s secret was.

  He knew what Nathaniel Diamond hadn’t been able to tell him.

  Chapter 33

  The expression ‘having all your ducks in a row’ sprang to mind. It was what he could do that HOLMES couldn’t do. It was what he brought to the investigation. Putting seemingly random bits of information together. Making the irrelevant relevant. Fluke sometimes called it the key code. Gather all the information and eventually, there will be something that makes it all make sense.

  ‘Lucy, why are there three tablets missing from this?’

  She looked confused. ‘It’s not a new pack, it’s just one I carry round with me.’

  ‘No, sorry, you’re not following. I mean why are there three missing? Why not two or four? I’ve never taken only one paracetamol in my life. They’re always taken in twos.’

  ‘My sister came over last night with my niece and the poor thing had a headache. She’s only eight, so she just had the one,’ she replied, still bemused.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘A child may be given one. But have you ever taken only one?’

  She thought for a while. ‘No, I haven’t actually.’

  Fluke directed the same question at Sowerby and Towler. ‘Have either of you ever only taken one paracetamol?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘And you never take more than two because it damages your liver, right?’

  ‘What are you getting at, old boy?’ Sowerby asked.

  ‘Something that’s been bothering me for a while, Henry. Didn’t even realise it was. I just knew there was something not quite right. I think I know what Nathaniel Diamond was hinting at. We’ve been looking at it all wrong. Farrar wasn’t a rape victim and that poor bastard in there isn’t a rapist.’

  They were silent, waiting for him to lead them through his thought processes. If Fluke had a fault, and he was prepared to accept he had several, it was that he sometimes left out links he thought were obvious and expected others to make the leap without assistance.


  ‘That bed-wetting alarm should have been enough of a clue but it was so random, so unexpected it threw us all. But put that together with a bottle of paracetamol with fifteen pills in it and it starts to make sense.’ He looked at them all. It was clear they hadn’t caught up yet. ‘I’ll bet everything in my pockets against everything in your pockets that those pills aren’t paracetamol.’

  ‘What do you reckon then, boss? Es?’ Towler asked quizzically.

  ‘Close, Sergeant, very close. I am betting they’ll turn out to be Rohypnol.’

  Nobody said anything. It wasn’t the embarrassed silence that sometimes follows a stupid thing the boss says. It was the type of silence that said ‘let me process that’.

  ‘Do you not see yet?’ Fluke said. ‘The stupid woman was drugging herself. She was drugging herself then crying rape.’

  Fluke left a Carlisle CID sergeant and Sowerby to manage the recovery of the body. It was against protocol but he and Towler needed to get back to HQ and start the new line of enquiry. He ignored the speed limit and it took him less than twenty minutes. Alan Vaughn, Jo Skelton and Kay Edwards were waiting for him.

  ‘We’re working on a new hypothesis. We think she was operating a blackmail scam,’ Fluke told them. ‘She targets wealthy men with no criminal record. Men with no DNA to match. Has sex with them somewhere. Goes home, takes her own Rohypnol then goes to bed. In the morning, she reports a drug-facilitated rape. Goes through the sexual assault process. Evidence is found and logged. No one doubts her, the Rohypnol is conclusive.’

  No one spoke.

  He continued. ‘I’m guessing the next part, but I think she then approaches her victim and tells them that she’s reported a rape. Presents them with the facts, that the police have their DNA, that there is an active rape investigation. That fifty grand makes her disappear. Fail to pay and she starts to remember little bits of information. Doesn’t have to be much. Just the name of the bar they met would be enough to lead us to them and the DNA result would do the rest. DNA and Rohypnol would make a conviction inevitable. How many rich men would pay? Particularly if they’re married.’