by Tony Black
‘Well, I agree that might be a good idea. Do you want me to flag it up with Donnelly and the others?’
‘No. I don’t want to start a whispering campaign – that might do more harm than good. Just keep your antennae up when he’s around.’
‘Okay, boss. It’s not like we haven’t had cuckoos in the nest before.’
As they pulled into the morgue car park, Valentine scanned the rows of vehicles but couldn’t see Davis’s car. It wasn’t essential that the DI was there to hear the post-mortem findings, but Valentine had hoped to question him some more about the Abbie McGarvie file, which he had continued to read after their call the night before. The file’s contents had been shocking, even for an officer of his rank with more than twenty years’ experience, but he worried about the rest of the team.
It had taken Valentine a long time to build up his outer armour. He had trained himself to ignore the emotional pulls a case made on a detective. It wasn’t because he wanted to become more brutal or harder, but because to give in to such instincts hindered an investigation. There was only room for the rational, for reasoning and judgement. All else was distraction, including the very parts that made him human.
He was a hunter, he continued to tell himself, and the hunt demanded a level of commitment that had taken him a long time to accomplish. He’d paid a dear price to operate the way he did, and he couldn’t expect others to understand that, or even appreciate the results, but that didn’t matter because he understood perfectly.
There would have to be some sort of briefing for the squad, he decided; the subject matter of Davis’s file had the potential to disturb those who weren’t warned what they were dealing with. Not everyone had his armour, after all. In fact, very few were even in the process of acquiring any protection.
In the pathology-department building Valentine and McCormack made their way to the morgue and suited up with gowns and gloves. It always seemed over the top to the DI – he wasn’t going to start poking about with a scalpel – but he abided anyway, for the sake of tradition more than anything. Wrighty was waiting in the centre of the room, arms folded over his green plastic apron, when they went in. ‘Morning, Bob.’
‘What have you got for us?’
He turned back to the slab, where the body of the girl was lying. In the bright overhead lights she seemed even paler than the DCI remembered her. Every point of her anatomy was stripped of shadow, revealing a new image of a girl that had previously been no more than an anonymous victim, lying prone on the dark, wet bitumen. Her face had been cleaned up now, the blood and dirt wiped away. Here was someone who had lived and breathed, whose delicate facial features had once animated a teenager’s joys and woes. A mother and father had gazed into those cold eyes – had their hearts filled with hope?
Valentine took in the Y-shaped incision running from her shoulders, joining over the sternum and running down in straight lines to the pubic bone. Neat black stitches looped over the red incision wounds.
‘You’ve been busy, I see,’ he said.
‘We never rest in here,’ said Wrighty. ‘There’s time enough for that when you’re dead.’
‘Touché,’ said Valentine. ‘Come on then, get your notes out.’
The pathologist reached behind him and withdrew a manila folder from the stark steel shelf. He took a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from the top of his head and balanced them on his shiny nose. ‘Right, some very interesting findings, Bob.’
‘Go on . . .’
‘Well, I’ll start with the cause of death, which was a catastrophic cervical fracture.’
Valentine raised a gloved hand. ‘For the cheap seats, please.’
‘She broke her neck. The X-ray indicates a base fracture and there’s spinal cord injury too.’
McCormack coughed into her fist. ‘Just what we thought, sir.’
‘Girl versus HGV only has one winner.’ Valentine shook his head.
‘She wouldn’t have suffered, if it’s of any consolation to her family,’ said Wrighty. ‘There’d have been immediate loss of sensation, paralysis . . . instant death, in other words.’
The DCI started to walk around the table, gazing at the victim he was now tasked with finding justice for. She was so young and delicate that her loss seemed even more grievous than he’d previously thought. He tried to omit the thought but found it forming with another: sympathy for the girl’s mother. He allowed himself these mental wanderings for a moment – they were natural; he was a father too – but then he banished them to the vault where he stored such interruptions to his detective’s reasoning.
The girl’s bruising and scratches were more visible after the clean-up, as were some other marks.
Valentine moved on. ‘Any other indications of wrongdoing?’
The pathologist started to leaf through the pages of the file. ‘Ah, here we are . . . I need to draw your attention to the lab report on the stomach contents. We have a positive reading for something quite unusual: barbiturates.’
‘Barbiturates are a sedative, right?’
‘They’re used to suppress the nervous system and, as they’re a heavy sedative, you very rarely see them used these days because most doctors won’t prescribe them.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re a serious overdose risk.’
‘Perhaps that wasn’t a consideration.’
‘Well, indeed.’
Valentine walked back round to the other side of the table. His mind was already working on a new range of possibilities. ‘Was there anything else?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ Wrighty pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘There’s some signs of sexual assault. Serious bruising and tearing to the vagina and vulva, and also rectal damage. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to encounter with a vicious gang rape. We’re talking about a prolonged and serious sexual assault of the most grievous nature.’
Valentine drew a deep breath. ‘Holy God. What the hell am I dealing with here?’
‘I’m sorry, Bob, but I’m not finished.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No.’ The pathologist paused. ‘I need to point out that you’re dealing with two victims.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This girl was pregnant.’
9
‘Chapel of Rest’ didn’t seem an appropriate name for the pathetically small room with a dais at one end and some plastic-backed chairs at the other. The pale walls might once have been beige, or perhaps butter, but could now be mistaken for bare plaster. Without a wall-mount or a single pane of coloured glass in the window the overall effect was soul-crushing dullness. It reminded Valentine of an old British Rail waiting room: a place with a purely utilitarian purpose. Surely the deceased deserved better, but then they weren’t the main consideration here. The room was designed to cause no offence to the living, because of course, causing offence is the greatest crime we are capable of.
‘Could they have done a worse job on this place?’ said Valentine.
‘It’s a bit grim. But then, a glitter-ball would only look out of place,’ said McCormack. She caught Valentine’s hard stare and retreated. ‘Sorry, I’m lowering the tone.’
‘Makes a change from me, I suppose.’ He crossed his legs and pinched the crease in his trousers. ‘What kind of contact have you had with the parents so far?’
‘I spoke to them yesterday. Alex McGarvie’s due in an hour or so, and Caroline Simpson should be here by now.’
‘How was she?’
‘Honest appraisal? She was broken.’
‘She’ll be a lot worse when she hears about the post-mortem.’
McCormack lowered her head, her face darkening. ‘God, how do we break something like that?’
‘Gently, Sylvia.’
‘I can’t imagine how it must feel to lose a child, but to be told you had a grandchild-to-be you didn’t know about and . . .’ She halted and turned to the window. ‘I shouldn’t let the job get to me like this.’
‘No, you shouldn’t.’
McCormack took her gaze from the window and focused on the DCI again. ‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you shut out the personal stuff that affects you so much.’
Valentine waited for the right words to form in his mind and after a few seconds realised they weren’t coming. The perfect response wasn’t coming because it wasn’t there, not in him anyway. ‘There was a DS I worked under years ago, a good copper but not one of those rank chasers. He told me that the best you can do is let the job wash over you, never let your outside become your inside.’
‘Wise words.’
‘Really? You think so? I tried to do that but found it only made me put off the introspection, to pile it up into one great heap that left you with a mountain of hurt to deal with in the end.’
‘Oh, right . . .’
‘I suppose the only advice I can give you, Sylvia, is that you learn to cope.’ He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘I don’t know how, or why. We’re resilient creatures, with enough exposure to the job and with a long enough pass-age of time, we learn to cope. I’m not saying we cease to be shocked or even appalled, but the impact lessens. The initial damage can only be done once, we heal, and the scar tissue is much stronger than the original wound ever was.’
‘I don’t want to be one of those cops that keeps their feelings behind a wall,’ Sylvia said, meeting his gaze. ‘I don’t want to become desensitised.’
‘Those cops were born that way; they always had walls around them. There’s millimetres between some cops and criminals on the same spectrum.’
‘You mean like the difference between a genius and a lunatic?’
‘Exactly, there’s only a cigarette paper between them.’
The chapel attendants entered the room, rolling a trolley from the morgue. They raised the trolley level with the dais before delicately lifting the victim’s corpse onto the platform. Valentine had asked for the body to be taken to the chapel for the purposes of formal identification, but after last night’s visitation he already knew he had found Abbie McGarvie.
It was all just another procedure, a legal requirement. He was sure the girl’s mother could do without the rigmarole, but the investigation could not.
As the DCI waited with DI McCormack, watching the chapel attendants adjust the over-bright lighting, he became aware of a mood change in the room. He got to his feet and turned to face the door, where he met Caroline Simpson’s gaze.
The woman was clutching a blue paisley scarf, twisting it between her fingers. There was a faraway glare in her eyes, like the look of a woman who had already received enough shocks in her life. She stood still, unmoving except for the fidgeting of her fingers around the scarf, and then she made her way towards the detective.
Caroline’s instinct was to offer a hand to shake but her nerves betrayed her and she snatched her hand away to her mouth instead. She seemed perched on the edge of tears.
‘Mrs Simpson, I’m Inspector Valentine and this is DI McCormack.’
‘It’s Miss . . .’ She sucked in her lips and quickly released them again. ‘I’m not married any more.’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Simpson,’ said Valentine. ‘Can I offer you a seat?’
‘No. I’m fine. Thank you.’ Her gaze had settled on the other end of the room, beyond the plastic-backed chairs, where the morgue attendants had laid out the corpse, beneath a blue-green covering. ‘Is that her?’
Valentine motioned to the dais. ‘I believe you spoke to DI McCormack on the telephone. Our information is very limited at the moment, but we found a girl who matched the description of your daughter. We’ve no means of definitively identifying her, which is why we called you here.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘It was a road traffic accident.’
She glanced at the detective and started to walk towards the dais. When she reached the other end of the room she touched the cloth covering the corpse and hurriedly withdrew her hand. ‘Did she suffer?’
‘It was instantaneous.’ He saw no reason to burden her right away with the details of the sexual assault. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered at all.’
Miss Simpson fiddled in her pockets and, with trembling hands, removed a small white handkerchief. She dabbed at the edges of her eyes as she moved around the prone figure in front of her. Her eyes, though glazed with tears, seemed still and peaceful now, scanning the length of the figure. Occasionally, she bit into her lower lip as if the act was helping her to compose herself, but her overall appearance was of a woman ready to crack open and reveal the misery inside.
‘I think I’d like to see her now.’
Valentine moved to the head of the dais and nodded to the chapel assistant standing nearby. He stepped forward and gently peeled back the blue-green covering to reveal the pale features of the dead girl. Her face seemed to have darkened a little, perhaps caused by the lowered lighting, and shadows sat in the hollows of her cheeks and beneath the eyes.
Caroline Simpson stared for only a few seconds before she turned her face away and screwed up her eyes. Her tightened eyelids weren’t enough to hold back the tears. She nodded briskly. ‘It’s Abbie.’
DI McCormack placed an arm around Caroline’s shoulders and led her towards the nearest seat. As they went, the chapel assistants took their cue to return Abbie McGarvie’s body to the trolley and start to leave the small room.
‘I’m sorry I had to put you through that, Miss Simpson,’ said Valentine.
‘She told me, you know, that she’d die like that. She said they’d kill her in the end because she wasn’t like the other girls.’
‘Other girls?’
‘There were dozens, she told me that. I told the police before, after I’d told the social services, though fat lot of bloody good it did me. No one looked out for my daughter. None of them. And that judge, the one that took her away from me . . . Oh, God, they still have Tyler. Is my son okay?’
DI McCormack was still comforting Caroline, rubbing her hands with her own. ‘Tyler’s fine, I’m sure. There’s been a weekly social services visit since Abbie went missing.’
‘Those idiots! Do you know what I call social services now? I call them the SS. They’re as bad as all the rest. They turfed out the only one who ever helped me. Jean Clark believed me and they sacked her.’
Valentine stored away the social worker’s name – it wasn’t one he had seen in Davis’s file. ‘Why did they sack her?’
‘Jean was the first and last one to believe me. Oh, I think your Davis fella might have been coming round, but he’s such a hard man to read, I can never tell. It’s not like you people would ever let on, anyway. But Jean knew what they were doing to Abbie; she believed her. It was all so horrific, and nobody else wanted to believe it was true. They just wanted to brush it under the carpet and then when the school got dragged in and some of the prominent names involved started to come out, they just put all their wagons in a circle. It was as if everyone with any power to stop it, to save Abbie, were sworn to do the exact opposite. Poor Jean didn’t stand a chance against them, so what chance did Abbie ever have?’ Caroline withdrew her hands from McCormack’s grasp and pressed her face into her palms. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed before the officers.
Valentine exchanged looks with McCormack and made to leave, but as he got up, the doors to the chapel of rest opened and a stooped, gaunt man in a navy raincoat stepped in. The man’s hair, thinning, was plastered to his crown by the recent downpour and made his head appear like nothing more than a skin-covered skull. It took Valentine a moment or two to realise it was Alex McGarvie standing before him. The DCI turned back to the others to gauge their reaction, which as he expected, wasn’t good.
‘You bastard!’ Caroline stood up and pointed at Alex. ‘You did this, you killed your own daughter!’
DI McCormack tried to hold back Caroline, as she clawed the air to get at her ex-husband. She continued firing accusations and insults as Valentine guided Alex back out the door.
In the corridor the DCI was challenged. ‘Wait a minute, if that’s my daughter in there, I’ve every right to see her.’
‘Of course, but if you’d mind waiting until we’ve cleared the way,’ said Valentine, wondering why the father seemed less interested in the fate of his child than projecting his wounded pride.
‘I’m the parent with custody,’ said Alex, jerking his arm away from Valentine’s grasp. ‘Why is my ex-wife in there?’
‘Mr McGarvie, you’re both parents.’
‘I have legal rights.’
‘Sir, if you don’t mind, please.’ The DCI directed Alex into the vacant waiting room, but he objected, instead turning around and heading down the corridor towards the doors. ‘I will need to talk to you, Mr McGarvie.’
He spun around. ‘What?’
‘If now’s not a good time, would you like to come in to the station when it’s convenient for you?’
‘On what charge?’
‘There’s no charges, sir. I’m conducting an investigation, it’s a matter of procedure.’
‘Like calling my ex-wife, I suppose.’ He stomped back down the corridor and barged through the exit to the car park, leaving the heavy doors swinging noisily on their hinges.
The DCI’s thoughts pooled as he wondered what he had just observed and what he was dealing with. He had a dead girl, who had been twelve weeks pregnant, and a mother and father in all-out war.
Outside, Valentine jogged back to the car, dodging the puddles and potholes, only to realise that he didn’t have the key to McCormack’s vehicle. He tried the handle but it was indeed locked; he was cursing himself and his stupidity when the rain started to fall again.
For a moment, as he stood looking back to the morgue, over the roof of the car, his vision started to blur, pushing the building out of focus. When his eyes cleared and he could see plainly again, he spotted a young girl standing in front of the closed doors of the morgue. She was watching him. Where had she come from? He hadn’t passed anyone in the corridor, and there was nobody stupid enough to stand out in the rain, except for him.
