Fifth Member

by Claire Rayner

  Then two things happened at the same time. The double doors through which all of them had come to reach this point swung open again and another crowd of people came out, clashing their trolleys, chattering at the tops of their voices and filling the space around the pick-up with a mini crowd. And Alice looked over her shoulder in a vague sort of way, directly at Margaret, who caught her gaze and immediately dropped her own, hoping Alice hadn’t noticed her stare. Almost simultaneously, she jumped horribly as a hand touched her shoulder.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mike said softly, looking at Alice’s back, for she had turned away again, apparently unaware of Margaret, much to that lady’s relief. ‘I guessed you’d be at the car. I was on my way there. Why haven’t you spoken to her? Something wrong?’

  Margaret, grateful for his swift understanding of the need for caution, spoke equally softly under the cover of the surrounding chatter. ‘She was met by a bloke who’s gone to fetch a car, or so I imagine, the way she’s waiting. And there’s someone following them. So I thought I’d wait and watch.’

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Mike, looking as casually as he could across the heads of the people around him to where Alice still stood beside her mountain of luggage on its trolley and then sweeping his gaze in an offhand way that deceived everyone but Margaret, rapidly identifying the little man who had alerted her interest. ‘We’d better move back a little.’ Obediently, she let him pull her gently back so that though Alice and the pick-up point where she was waiting were still in sight, there was far less likelihood that she would be aware of them if she turned to look.

  A few more minutes passed and then, as a large red Volvo came curving round from the other side of the car park towards the pick-up point, a battered little green van close behind it, Alice seemed to wake up and stiffen.

  The two vehicles stopped towards the back of the pick-up area, still very close together, and a third car, a few lengths behind, had to pass them both to cut in front to collect its passengers. There was a considerable bustle as boots were opened and people began to pull cases and boxes and floppy long suiters from their trolleys to load them, and suddenly Margaret gripped Mike’s upper arm and breathed, ‘Look at that!’

  Mike swivelled his head to see what she was showing him and then shook it. ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘He didn’t have any luggage,’ Margaret said. She stared through the crowds at the little man who now had a luggage trolley, clearly obtained from the straggle of those left behind by people who had already unloaded and left. He had set it precisely alongside Alice Diamond’s, who appeared to pay no attention at all; nor, as her companion loaded some bags into the back of the Volvo, did she show any interest in the fact that the little man had, in the coolest manner possible, slid one of the bags from her trolley on to his.

  Margaret started forwards. To watch robbery going on under her nose, being carried out with such smoothness and aplomb that apparently none of the people around had noticed it was happening, went completely against her grain, and Mike had to grab her to stop her. ‘No,’ he hissed. ‘Watch. I’ve got the Volvo’s number. Try and get the van’s.’ And he gave her a little push.

  Obediently she moved casually round to the far side so that she was behind the van and noted its number. ‘Bravo two, three, zero.’ she muttered to herself, getting it firmly into her memory. ‘Yankee, Mike, Lima. Bravo two, three, zero. Yankee, Mike, Lima.’

  The car that had been in front of the Volvo and the van at last filled up with all its luggage and passengers and set off towards the exit ramp, and another slid into its place and also began rapidly to fill up with baggage and people. There were fewer bodies around now, and a distinct risk therefore that Alice would see the police staring at her. And, surely, Margaret thought, watching carefully, would see that her baggage was being taken, because the little man had now moved two more sizeable cases.

  But Alice didn’t see; she pushed away her now empty trolley, quite ignoring the one so close to hers that now had on it three of her pieces of luggage, and climbed into the front seat of the Volvo. The man in the waxed jacket, still with the cap set forwards on his head so that his face was shadowed by its brim, got into the driver’s seat, revved the engine and pulled away. And, behaving as comfortably as though nothing at all unusual had happened, the little man pushed his trolley to the back of the green van, opened its door, shoved the bags in, then climbed into the passenger seat of the van which already had its engine running. Its driver had not got out at all, and could hardly be seen behind the streaked windscreen, and anyway was sitting well back so that his face was shadowed. But he had to lean forwards as he put the van into gear and moved off smartly and this time Margaret did get a glimpse of him. Not that it helped much. It was the sort of nondescript face that drove vans all over London, she thought, as she made a conscious effort to burn the image into her memory. He could be anyone. And she stood and watched the van go, as Mike came up to stand beside her.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘What an interesting little side show that was! And very unexpected.’ He pulled his handset out of his pocket and called the Control Room at Ratcliffe Street nick. ‘We’ll get those cars traced as fast as they can make it,’ he told Margaret. ‘And pick ’em up later. It’ll be worth it, I suspect. That was as smart a piece of double shuffling as I’ve seen in years. The question is, just what is it she’s smuggling? Because that’s what it has to be, doesn’t it? She gets the bags through Customs – though you’d think their fellas would take more interest in a pile of luggage that high for one passenger, wouldn’t you? – and then gets rid of it even before she’s out of the airport. Very nifty.’

  Margaret went pink. ‘Smuggling? Oh! I thought …’

  ‘Robbery?’ Mike glanced at her and then, not wanting to add to her discomfiture, away. ‘It could have been, but I used to work in Dover before I joined the Met. I got to know their tricks. You did well to keep ’em in sight.’

  ‘But what has it got to do with what happened to her husband, Sarge?’ Margaret said. ‘Or is it something entirely separate?’

  ‘That,’ said Mike as he set off for the ramp that led to the second level where their car was parked, ‘that is the question we’d all like answered, wouldn’t we?’

  Neither of them noticed the man from the Clarion leaning against the double doors that led from the main concourse of the terminal, apparently reading a paper as he waited for whoever he was waiting for. He, for his part, watched them go and then sprinted as hard as he could for his own car. He had one hell of a story for the old man this time.

  10

  George showered for almost fifteen minutes, scrubbing herself with great dollops of Badedas, which had the strongest scent of all the unguents she kept in the shower room at the mortuary. She shampooed her hair twice and then, when at last she stepped out and dried herself, applied a quantity of rose-scented body cream and a matching spray. She’d rather smell like backstage at a brothel, she decided, than risk any of the smells that the PM had released clinging to her.

  She had done some unpleasant tasks in her time but this had really been quite appalling. Once they’d got rid of the hysterical dog, who was scratching furiously at the ground on the other side of the far wall of the shed, where it abutted on to an adjacent alley, and got inside and found the body, it had been a continuous rush of work. She had made what investigations she could there inside the overgrown shed. Gus hadn’t wanted to pull down too much of the plant covering that kept out the light, in case that interfered with the collection of evidence, so she’d had to work by the light of Tilley lamps: never easy. But she had been able to see that, badly damaged though the body was by natural decomposition and the attention of wildlife, it fitted the modus operandi of the other two.

  The body was that of a man, rather older than the other two, she suspected, from what she could see of the hair and a thin remnant of a beard. Both were grey, though it was hard to be certain in the artificial light. The throat had been cut and the external genita
lia removed and displayed on the shoulder in what was becoming a familiar manner.

  But there had been some differences. She had noted them at the scene and now confirmed them in her careful post-mortem, through which Gus had stood, stony faced, fully gowned and masked, though she doubted that had protected him much from the unpleasantness. Tim Brewer stood there too, also gowned and blank eyed in his turn; it was not easy to watch.

  The blows that had almost severed the heads of Diamond and CWG had been assured. The perpetrator had clearly acted swiftly and with a certain degree of expertise. On this body, however, it was different. There were signs of attempted cuts made before the final one: tentative, almost superficial, wounds on the surface of the neck, particularly at the left. And the final cuts were not so savagely deep.

  The injuries to the genitalia had also been less assured; in fact, what with the appalling butchery the murderer had inflicted on them, and the inevitable attrition due to the time between the killing and the finding of the body, it had been hard to see the shape of the organs at all. All George had been able to ascertain was that the testes had long since shrivelled and lost all function – not all that unusual in very old men – and the penis was undersized. But it was the neck injuries that gave her most information.

  ‘As before, a right-handed killer,’ she said now. ‘He stood or knelt behind the supine body and swept his knife, which was very sharp rather than heavy, across the throat. I think the man was already dead, of course, as the other two were. He’d been strangled too. In consequence there was less blood when the throat and abdominal injuries were inflicted. This time the cutting missed the larynx and the hyoid bone is clearly fractured, almost certainly by manual pressure. No sign of a ligature, anyway.’

  ‘No signs of any weapon anywhere, either,’ Gus said fretfully, shifting his feet wearily. ‘How long has he been dead?’

  She shook her head. ‘Hard to say. We’ll have to wait for the evidence of the entomologist. He got all his samples from the ground under the body, as well as what he took from the body itself.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gus blinked over his mask, clearly thrown by the memory of the unpleasantness of the job they had had to do at the scene in Henriques Street, and she looked at him sympathetically.

  ‘It is a bit nasty to think of,’ she said. ‘But we have to face it. Flies and their behaviour do help date a death. She’ll let me know as soon as she can, she said. Meanwhile I’d hazard a guess at something over three weeks. It was pretty warm, wasn’t it, last month? Not like now, a bit cooler.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gus said. ‘Well, no need for details. Let us register the fact that this one died well before the other two.’

  ‘No question,’ she said at once. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. I think he was, well, practising for the others on this one.’

  ‘Eh?’ Gus stared, and Tim Brewer moved closer.

  ‘It’s not just the tentative nature of the injuries on the neck – they’re intention cuts – it’s those on the abdomen too. He didn’t make such a confident excision. He did a bit of other damage – I’d show you, but I don’t think it’s necessary.’

  ‘It most certainly isn’t,’ Gus said firmly.

  ‘But there’ll be the photographs. You’ll be able to compare them with the others. That’s what makes me say this chap was killed as a sort of dummy run for the other two.’

  ‘Which rather buggers up your Ripper theory, George, doesn’t it?’ Gus sounded disappointed more than anything else, as though he too had accepted the theory. ‘If this killing was really the first, and not the third, and –’

  ‘Not at all.’ George was thinking fast. ‘Maybe he used that shed for a different reason, and only realized afterwards that the Ripper case could be copied because of where the shed is? Or maybe –’

  ‘There’s no point in asking that. Not till we see if he does any more.’

  ‘And any more he does.’ Tim Brewer’s voice made them both stare at him. He had stood stolidly beside Gus throughout, gowned but bravely unmasked, his jaws set and his eyes fixed so firmly on George’s busy hands that he was obviously using massive willpower to enable him to be there at all.

  ‘Eh?’ said Gus.

  ‘We can’t assume he’s stopping at three, can we?’ Tim said. Now he did look at Gus. ‘How many of those Ripper murders were there?’

  ‘Five,’ said George.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Tim shook his head. ‘Do you know where they were too, Dr B.?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s all documented. Dorset Street, which was just south of Spitalfields Market. And Mitre Square, which is by Aldgate.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Gus said. ‘You’ve got a point, of course. And I dare say Roop’s thought of it too. He’s got a lot of people well spread out to cover the whole area by now.’

  ‘I’d have thought it’d be more sensible just to cover the two high-risk ones,’ George said as she turned back to the body, nodding at Danny to take over and see it back into its chiller. ‘It’s a waste of manpower to cover everywhere.’

  ‘George,’ Gus said, ‘um – Dr B. – stick to your pathology, will you? Let Inspector Dudley decide how to deploy his men.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of saying a word to him about it,’ George opened her eyes wide. ‘Only to you.’

  ‘Hmmph,’ said Gus and, relieved to see George strip off her gloves as she turned away from the table, turned to go too. ‘Then Gawd help me, I suppose.’

  Beside him Tim let out a little gurgle of laughter, due as much to his intense gratitude for the ending of the job as the conversation between Gus and George (which of course he would recount gleefully to the entire canteen the first chance he got). Gus glared at him.

  ‘And you can go and write up your report, Sergeant,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll be along later, with Dr B. On your way, now.’

  George, dressing now as she remembered, was a little ashamed of herself. It was too easy to make cracks about Dudley and too easy to rile Gus on the subject. She knew that much as she loathed him Dudley was a good copper and a very important part of the team, that Gus thought highly of him, and that he wouldn’t do so for small reason. To tease him about the man was wicked. She’d really try to stop it, she promised herself as she rattled the hair-dryer back into its socket and pulled up her hair to pin it on top of her head. Gus deserved better.

  She came out of the shower room into the chill of the mortuary corridor and ran up the stairs to her ground-floor office. She was feeling much more comfortable now. Her forecast about where they would find their third body had been correct (even though it had turned out that it had been in chronological terms the first) and that was very encouraging. It shouldn’t be all that difficult to track down the murderer, she told herself as she headed for her office door, behind which she knew Gus would be waiting for her as he’d promised. Not with such important victims as Members of Parliament. (And I’ll bet this one was too, she thought.) The toughest perpetrators to find were those who killed casually and suddenly and chose insignificant victims like drifters or one of the winos who hung around the back streets of this part of the East End. After dealing with several of those in the past few months, this, she told herself optimistically, should be a doddle. And very, very interesting.

  Gus was sitting in her chair, bent over her desk and leafing through some of the documents on it.

  ‘Nosy Parker,’ she said without rancour. ‘Those things are supposed to be confidential.’

  ‘They are with me,’ he said. ‘Who am I going to gossip with about’ – he squinted – ‘acromegaly? Whatever that is.’

  ‘And I’m not going to tell you. Gus …’ She hesitated. ‘I must apologize.’

  He leaned back, fanning himself with exaggerated gestures. ‘Oh Gawd, stap me vitals, the world’s about to come to an end. You, apologize?’

  ‘One more word out of you like that and you’ll get none out of me,’ she said. ‘And don’t make it hard for me, sweetie. I’m sorry I was rude about Roop.
’

  He remained leaning back, looking at her, his mouth turned down a little, then shook his head and sat forwards so that the chair which had been resting on its back legs crashed down. ‘Until tomorrow, huh? Or this evening if you see him then.’

  George perched on the edge of her desk and put an arm round his neck. ‘No, I mean it. I will try to be nice, it’s just that he’s so irritating. And he should be concentrating on Spitalfields and Mitre Square, you know. It’s simply a waste to be looking anywhere else.’

  ‘There you go!’ Gus shook his head. ‘If it wasn’t so funny I’d cry, I swear. Lay off the man, will you? He knows his job! Unless you really do promise me you’ll behave I won’t let you sit in on any of the briefings any more. And it’s getting very interesting. I’ve heard some strange things about Mrs Alice Diamond, for instance, that’ll give you furiously to think.’

  She was avid at once. ‘Tell me, tell me! And I will lay off Roop, I promise. As long as you help by keeping him out of my way.’

  ‘It’s up to you to keep out of his,’ Gus said. ‘And as for telling you, let me consider.’ He looked at her owlishly for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, I won’t tell you. No, I won’t, so don’t fuss. Not now. Tomorrow will be soon enough. It’s been a pig of a day, one way and another. I’ve been working flat out ever since this business started and I need a break. So do you. And good old Roop – yeah, yeah, good old Roop – has agreed to hold the fort tonight so I can have an evening off. So, we’ll go out to eat, my duck, and then go home and hang curtains.’

  She burst into laughter. ‘Hang curtains? Sweetie, what a treat! I can hardly wait. Do tell me, I’m dying to know.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to die, and I’ll get Alan to do your PM. I refuse to talk shop and that’s it. So, how about those curtains? What do you say?’

  She knew when to give up. It was obvious he’d not say a word about the case tonight, and somehow she’d have to swallow her curiosity till next day. So she thought about the house and the curtains and, almost to her own surprise, shook her head.