by Casey, Jane
‘Can you hear me?’ I couldn’t seem to get my voice to work properly. It came out thin and reedy. I tried again. ‘I’m a police officer. Can you hear me, miss?’
She made the low noise I’d heard before. I had taken a pair of blue protective gloves out of my pocket without even thinking about it, and now I slid them on and reached out to lift the hair off her face. Some of it stuck to the blood that had run across her cheek from a gash on her temple. Her eyes were swollen, her cheekbones puffy. Her face was so badly damaged that I couldn’t even guess at her age or her usual appearance, although judging by her clothing, she was in her mid-to-late twenties. Acting on autopilot I got on the radio, keeping my voice under control with an effort.
‘Lima Delta Two Six, priority. I’ve found a badly injured female outside a commercial premises on Filford Street showing signs of a serious sexual assault. I need ambulance and more units. And could someone notify night turn CID, over?’
‘Two Six, that’s received. What is the female’s condition, over?’
‘Two Six. Unresponsive, breathing, serious facial injuries. Aged in her twenties, over.’
I heard Chris arrive behind me, his breathing laboured. ‘I just heard it over the radio. What happened?’
‘Looks like a sexual assault. I think she crawled in here to hide.’ I leaned forward. I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, but I wanted to reassure her all the same. ‘It’s all right. There’s an ambulance on the way.’
‘Who is she?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t reach her to check for ID. I think she’s unconscious so I don’t really want to try to search her until the paramedics are here. No bag, though, as far as I can see.’
‘Shit.’ Chris spun around in a circle, the light from his torch skittering over the ground. ‘Looks bad.’
That was the understatement of the century.
Bad was enough to bring two other units immediately – four male officers. Barry Allen, Andy Styles, a quiet Scottish PC called Paul Fraser and Gary Lovell. I stayed where I was, crouching on the ground. I wasn’t sure my legs would bear my weight when I did stand up; I was shivering like a whippet. Besides, I didn’t want to leave the woman on her own. Chris directed the others to secure the scene and started searching for anything that might help us to ID her. I told him about the shoe I’d found. I told him about the clothes on the ground, and the rubbish, some of which could have come from a woman’s handbag if someone had emptied it out to paw through the contents.
Inspector Saunders got to the yards at the same time as the ambulance crew and watched, her face pinched, as the paramedics tried to squeeze behind the car to examine the woman on the ground. I managed to stand up to get out of their way and went to hover near the inspector.
‘We need to move this car,’ she said, tapping the roof of the courtesy car. It was a navy-blue Nissan Micra.
‘It belongs to the garage under the arches. I can try to get hold of an owner or whoever’s got the keys for the garage—’
The inspector put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. ‘Boys. Over here.’
They came at a run.
‘Move this car, will you?’
Gary Lovell took out his ASP, the weighted extendable baton we all carried, and swung it from his shoulder to his hip so it shot out to its full length. He looked to the inspector, who nodded. He hit the driver’s window square in the middle. The glass fractured into hundreds of tiny pebbles that fell like hailstones, mainly into the vehicle. Gary used his baton to knock most of the rest out of the window frame. Then he leaned in and released the handbrake.
‘We’re going to move the car,’ Inspector Saunders said to the paramedics. ‘Hold her so she doesn’t get run over.’
Barry and Andy leaned against the bumper and heaved, and Gary turned the wheel to steer it away from the wall.
‘That’ll do.’ Inspector Saunders’ voice was uncharacteristically quiet. Like me, she was looking at the ground, where the car had hidden the spreading pool of blood that came from our victim. The paramedics had turned her a little and I could see that her skirt hadn’t been red originally: it was soaked in what seemed to be her own blood. One of them unfolded a foil blanket and laid it over her. That was for shock, I remembered. My brain was moving sluggishly. I was struggling to form thoughts.
‘She’s moaning. Is she awake?’ the inspector asked.
‘No. Just in pain.’ The more senior paramedic was a tough, thickset man in his forties with the name DAVIS stencilled on his uniform.
‘What did he do to her?’ Inspector Saunders’ face was grim.
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’ He jotted a note on the back of his hand; they all used their gloves as notebooks. To the victim, he said, ‘Sorry about this, love, but we need to see where you’re bleeding.’
He lifted her skirt gently, his crewmate standing behind him to shield the woman from the rest of us. I heard him swearing, very quietly. ‘Give us a dressing, Laura. Where’s the doctor?’
‘On her way,’ his crewmate said. ‘Two minutes.’
‘I’m not moving her until the doctor’s had a look.’ He leaned back so he could see the inspector. ‘I’m no expert, but whoever did this used something to cut her.’
‘A knife?’
‘A broken bottle?’ I suggested, thinking of the one I’d see under the bin, and the glass on the ground.
‘Could have been.’
‘Is it bad?’ the inspector asked.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s been ripped apart.’
I turned away at that, breathing shallowly so I didn’t allow my body the opportunity to heave up everything I had eaten that day. I was clenching muscles I didn’t even know I had. For something to do I went to check under the bin, my torch between my teeth. I braced myself on my hands and the toes of my boots, trying not to touch the ground more than I had to. Looking at it directly, my torch shining right at it, I could see blood on the bottle.
‘Found it?’ Inspector Saunders asked.
I stood up and dropped my torch into my hand. ‘Think so.’
‘Leave it for the SOCOs.’
I hadn’t been planning to touch it, but I nodded. The other officers drifted towards us.
‘Stop. Stand back,’ Inspector Saunders said. She took the torch out of my hand and shone it on the ground at our feet, at the puddle of liquid I’d noticed before. ‘Look at that. What do you make of that?’
‘I thought it was from the bins,’ I said weakly.
She leaned down and sniffed. ‘That’s beer. And blood.’ The light moved towards my foot. ‘And these bits of meat – those are from the victim.’
‘From her—’
Inspector Saunders nodded meaningfully. ‘This is where he did it.’
Behind me, I heard the sound of retching and was too horrified to think of looking to see who had lost his composure.
‘All of you, you’re going to have to let the SOCOs check your boots. Clothes too, Maeve.’ The torch played over my legs, my chest. ‘Did you roll around on the ground?’
‘I was trying to reach her.’
‘Well, you’ve got bits of her all over you.’
I swayed as darkness slid up the side of my vision. Someone took my arm and gently drew me back away from the blood and the horror and the victim’s moans of agony, around the corner so I couldn’t see anything any more.
‘I’m all right,’ I said from a long way away. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Yeah, you are.’ Gary Lovell’s face was suddenly close to mine. ‘You’ll be okay. Just stay there. Wait for the SOCOs.’
‘All right.’
‘Don’t move.’
‘No.’
‘You did a good job.’
I nodded, staring at the corner of the building. I could hear Inspector Saunders giving orders and, in the distance, sirens approaching at speed.
‘This is going to be big,’ Gary said, before he loped off.
It took me a
second to understand that he was excited, which was almost exactly the opposite of how I felt. I wondered if that made me a better cop than him, or worse, or just the same.
3
I got over it, after a while. I stopped staring into space and started watching what was happening in front of me. It was a major incident, drawing in officers and resources from across the borough and beyond, and more quickly than I could have imagined. They descended on the yards like a very organised tornado, whipping the victim (still unidentified) away to hospital, gathering evidence, establishing the boundaries of the crime scene, beginning to reconstruct what had happened. Numbered markers littered the ground beside anything that could possibly be connected with our case – every scrap of rubbish, every drop of blood, every chip of glass.
When the SOCOs got around to me, they told me to give them my uniform, yes, all of it, and I had to hitch a lift back to the nick in a paper boilersuit so I could change into my spare kit. I got dressed in record time, not even allowing myself to think about having a shower, and got another lift back to the crime scene. I went and found Inspector Saunders, who looked strung out.
‘Have they found ID for her?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What can I do to help?’
‘I could use you on the cordon. I want to push back the public to the end of the street. I don’t want anyone with a view of the yards while we’re working.’
If I was on the cordon I would be too far away to see what was going on. I tried to think of a way of pointing that out without looking like I expected special treatment, when the inspector looked past me. Something in her expression softened.
‘Oh, here he is.’
‘Who?’ I twisted and saw a tall man in a beautifully cut suit walking towards us. With his prematurely silver-grey hair, blue eyes and jaw-dropping good looks he was instantly recognisable to me and everyone else: Superintendent Charles Godley. He was a media favourite, veteran of a hundred press conferences and the commissioner’s first pick for an awkward or sensitive enquiry. I knew he had just finished a run in organised crime that had caused serious trouble for a couple of major criminal gangs. The team’s arrest record had been the talk of the Met. I knew all that about him, and more, but I didn’t know what he was doing in Brixton at the scene of a sexual assault.
‘Lena, how are you?’ he asked, in a way that suggested he really wanted to know. His voice was deep and pleasant.
‘Sir.’ Inspector Saunders had moved to meet him. I stayed where I was, hanging back so I didn’t look too pushy. It wasn’t as if the superintendent would be interested in meeting a new PC anyway. All I had done so far was trip over the victim.
‘What have we got?’
‘At the moment, a victim with no ID. Unconscious, unfortunately, so we don’t know anything about her yet. We had reports of a fight or an assault in progress in this area and my officers came to have a look. They found her hiding behind a car.’
‘Raped?’
‘With a broken bottle. He carved her up. She’s going to need surgery, the doctor said. The doctor also said she had a possible fractured skull.’
Godley winced. ‘Any leads?’
‘Not really. Any ideas?’
The superintendent nodded. ‘It sounds a lot like two stranger rapes in Croydon that happened two or three months ago. One of the victims almost died.’
‘That’s why you wanted to be here.’ Inspector Saunders nodded slowly. ‘I wondered.’
‘I’m running the Croydon jobs. I want us to treat this one as the next in the series, if you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t,’ Inspector Saunders said slowly, ‘but are you sure it fits in with your two?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Have you got DNA?’
‘Not so far. He used foreign objects in Croydon as well.’
‘They might get something off the bottle.’ I hadn’t meant to say it out loud but I was so interested in the conversation that I found myself butting in. ‘It would have been easy for him to cut himself. Sharp edges, and all the blood would have made the glass slippery.’
Godley looked at me for the first time, just for a moment, his intense blue gaze making me quail slightly. And what I looked like with my hair fighting to frizz up in the humidity, I didn’t like to imagine.
‘We might be lucky this time,’ he said. ‘I can’t think he’s not on the system somewhere. He’ll have been arrested for something before. An assault at the very least. You don’t go out one day and start doing this to women for fun.’
‘Could explain why he started up all of a sudden,’ Inspector Saunders added. ‘If he was in prison, I mean.’
‘I’ve got people checking with probation officers across the south-east to see if the attacks ring any bells. No joy so far.’
‘Come and have a look at the scene,’ Inspector Saunders said. ‘Maeve, what was I going to do with you? What about some house-to-house?’
Better than the cordon. I nodded enthusiastically.
‘Go and see if you can scare up anyone who heard or saw anything suspicious.’ She turned and stared at the terrace of houses opposite, at the rows of blank windows and the one or two that were filled with curious faces. ‘Start with the ones who could have seen into the yards. Maybe we’ll get a break.’
* * *
‘I’ve already spoken to your colleagues.’
‘Yes, I know. Your neighbours said.’ I wasn’t the first police officer to trawl along the row of houses, as it turned out. The heavyset man in front of me who was currently glaring at me, his face puce with rage, was not the first person to be cross about it either. Number Thirty-Seven, also known as the perv Sadie Grey had dismissed as a potential witness. I was not going to get flustered and run away just because he was angry. I was doing my job. ‘I’m just following up to see if anything else has occurred to you.’
‘In the half hour I’ve had to myself since the last time you lot bothered me, no.’ He was wearing shorts and a striped short-sleeved shirt that was hanging open, framing a taut, grey-furred belly that I didn’t want to look at. It wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen all evening, but it was on the list.
‘I noticed you were upstairs when I rang the doorbell. I saw you in the front window. You must have a pretty good view of the yards from up there.’
‘So what?’
‘So if you happened to look out of the window earlier – around half past eleven or thereabouts – did you see anyone?’
‘I didn’t look out earlier. I was watching telly.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Did you hear anything unusual? Screams or noises that might have been a fight?’
‘Nothing. I had the sound turned up and it was noisy.’
‘Could you look at this e-fit for me and tell me if you recognise the man in it?’
Inspector Saunders had ordered a stack of copies of a photofit one of the Croydon victims had helped to create and they had arrived just as I started to work my way along the street. It looked a lot like a generic dangerous white male to me – down-turned mouth, long thin nose, small eyes and heavy brows – but at least I had something new to offer the neighbours. I handed one over to the man, who glanced at it.
‘No.’ He started to give it back to me, then stopped. ‘Hold on.’
I waited a few seconds. ‘Anything?’
‘I’m not sure. I couldn’t say.’
His anger was fading, I noticed, and with a sinking feeling I knew why. I had taken off my stab vest when the crime-scene technician was swabbing it, and left it in the back of the car. My white cotton shirt was so thin that it was practically see-through, especially on in hot weather. It clung, and revealed far more than I would have liked. And Number Thirty-Seven had just noticed.
He cleared his throat. ‘It was a martial arts movie. Thai. I spend a lot of time in Thailand now that I’m retired.’
I bet you do.
‘Okay. Well, thanks for talking to me.’
‘Sorry I was short with yo
u, love. All of this fuss and bother. Not what we’re used to round here.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Do you want to come in? Talk for a bit? Have a cuppa?’
‘I shouldn’t. I’ve got to knock on quite a few doors before I can have a break,’ I said. I flashed a smile at him to take the edge off it, and he looked encouraged.
‘Glass of water?’
‘No, really.’
‘Because I was just thinking I might have seen something.’
It was bullshit. I knew it was bullshit.
But still … he might have seen something and not realised it was significant. I wavered. Maybe it was worth checking.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. When I went for a p— when I went to the toilet. Got to go upstairs, you see. I’ve only got the one.’
‘Right.’
‘It wasn’t as late as you said. Not half past eleven. More like nine o’clock.’
When there would still have been plenty of light in the sky so he might have been able to see quite a lot. ‘Go on.’
‘I looked out the window and I seen a man walking around near the garage. Skinny chap. Hood up, which was why I noticed him because I was wondering if he was cold on a night like tonight.’
‘That doesn’t seem likely, does it?’ Look at us, all chummy together. I grinned at him and got a leer in return and felt like less of a person. ‘Can you add anything to that description?’
‘Jeans. White trainers. Navy hoodie.’ He jabbed the paper. ‘Face like that. Mean-looking. I didn’t recognise him. Hadn’t seen him before. I didn’t like the look of him, but the garage and the scrapyard have good security. I didn’t think he’d be able to break in.’
‘He didn’t try.’
‘Doing a recce, was he?’
‘So it seems.’ Looking for somewhere he could take an unwary victim. Which meant that he had probably been hanging around the area in general, near the commercial premises and bits of waste ground and unattended patches of greenery – anywhere there weren’t many neighbours and it wasn’t particularly overlooked. Anywhere he could control the woman he’d selected. Anywhere he could take his time and enjoy violating her. I made a note to mention it to the inspector, in case he’d been seen in other locations. If we could get a CCTV image of him, we’d have a far better chance of spotting him. As it was, I wasn’t altogether sure that Number Thirty-Seven had actually recognised him from the e-fit, but I was prepared to believe he’d seen someone wandering about the yards. And where the perpetrator had been, there was a chance of picking up forensic evidence. DNA, shoe-prints, fibres … it was worth a shot.
