‘Can you enhance that?’ Pendragon asked.
‘I’ll try,’ Turner replied, and ran his fingers over a control panel to one side of the desk. The picture vanished for a second. When it reappeared it was clearer.
‘Good. Close in on the figure in the cabin.’
Turner let the film run for a few seconds then rewound it, finally settling on the best frame. He pushed Pause again and turned a dial on the control panel. The image of the cabin grew larger, but as it did so it lost clarity. Turner fiddled with other controls and the image cleared a little. He zoomed in some more.
‘That’s about the best I can do,’ he said after a moment.
The image was indistinct. They could still see a figure in the cabin but it was completely featureless, little more than a grey blob.
Pendragon’s mobile rang. ‘Dr Jones,’ he said. ‘Yes. When would be a good time? Excellent. See you then.’ He stood up and pulled his overcoat from the chair back. ‘Come on,’ he said to Turner.
‘Where’re we going?’
‘The Forensics Lab in Lambeth. Jones and Newman have put their heads together and apparently have some interesting news for us.’
Chapter 22
The traffic was appalling. Pendragon’s parking permit bought them a space but it was a hundred metres from the Forensics Lab along Lambeth Road. Even running through the freezing drizzle, by the time they reached the front of the three-storey modern building, they were wet and chilled to the bone.
‘Did you know, sir,’ Turner remarked, wiping his forehead and following the DCI to the reception desk, ‘there’s a theory that running in the rain gets you wetter than walking?’
‘Really, Turner? How incredibly fascinating.’ Pendragon turned to the receptionist and showed his ID. The girl printed them each a pass which she slipped into plastic wallets. The policemen attached them to their jackets. ‘Dr Newman is working in Lab B103,’ the receptionist said. ‘Probably best to take the stairs.’ And she pointed towards a row of lifts and a broad stone stairwell to their left.
One flight down, the stairs opened out on to a wide corridor painted a calming shade of green. Anaemic pictures of flowers and birds hung along one wall. The other was taken up by a row of double doors spaced about twenty feet apart. Each was painted dark green with a number at head-height; 103 was around the first bend in the corridor. Pendragon depressed a buzzer to the right of the door. A few moments later, Colette Newman appeared and ushered them into the lab.
It was a huge room, brightly lit and dominated by a large stainless-steel bench at its centre. The two policemen crossed the echoing floor. Pendragon nodded to Dr Jones who was leaning over the remains of Noel Thursk.
‘We use this lab for special cases,’ Dr Newman said. ‘And I think you’ll agree, Chief Inspector, that this is definitely a special case.’
Pendragon stared down at the flattened corpse. He had seen it in the grounds of St Dunstan’s and when it had been brought down from the tree, but here, in the harsh neon glare and placed on a square, steel-topped bench, it had somehow lost the last vestiges of humanity he had associated with it. That helped. Turner, meanwhile, was standing very quietly beside him, unable to take his eyes from the gruesome sight.
‘So what have you found?’ Pendragon asked the two experts.
‘Well, as you can see, the body has been reduced to something amorphous, which means any normal procedures are pretty redundant,’ Jones said, rubbing his beard. ‘But fortunately Dr Newman has some very sophisticated machinery which is perfectly suited to studying flattened bodies,’ he concluded.
‘We did a succession of hi-res X-rays,’ she explained. ‘And then used a type of MRI, similar to the procedure employed in neurology units in hospitals.’ She led the three men to the far wall, depressed a switch, and a panel two metres long and a metre high lit up. She then removed a sheaf of transparencies from a drawer and pinned them to the light screen. ‘These are the detailed X-rays,’ she said, pointing to a collection on the left. ‘And these are the MRI stills.’ She indicated a clutch of rectangles on the right.
Newman stepped back and Jones ran his fingers close to the images. ‘You’ll notice that although the body has been flattened to a thickness of a couple of centimetres, the arrangement of the internal structure has been retained.’ He pointed to an image of the entire corpse. ‘Here are the arms, legs and torso.’ The body parts were only vaguely recognisable, the bones shattered into hundreds of pieces or powdered completely, organs flattened and stretched obscenely.
‘So what does that tell us about the way it was done?’ Pendragon asked, turning first to Newman and then to Jones.
‘It’s clear from these images that the flattening was not done by a pounding machine or a large punch.’
‘How do you know that?’ Turner interjected.
Dr Newman pointed to the periphery of the image Jones had referred to. ‘There are no overlapping edges,’ she said. ‘Try to visualise someone placing a body on a punching machine — something like the devices they use in factories to knock out metal shapes from steel sheets, for example. Every time the punch lands, it makes an edge. We would see an irregular arrangement of those edges around the periphery, here.’ She indicated the extremities of the body with her finger. ‘It would be a bit like kneading dough. You’d get a repeat pattern around the edge. But this body was worked flat either by being passed through a set of rollers or by being run over repeatedly with a steamroller.’
Newman led them back across the room to a bench dotted with test-tube racks filled with coloured liquids. At one end stood a cluster of electronic devices. ‘We’ve also conducted a battery of chemical tests,’ Jones explained as they approached the bench. ‘Combining these with the images, we’ve been able to extract a few samples that may throw up some leads.’
On the bench lay three Petri dishes. In the first two were flakes of coloured material; the third contained a few threads of fabric.
‘We found these — paint in two different colours. The green we’ve narrowed down to what our universal palette catalogue calls “Cider Apple Green”. The other is plain white, but it comes from a metal surface. We’ve isolated traces of pressed steel. Almost certainly paint from a motor vehicle.
‘The grey fibres in the other dish are treated cotton. Under the microscope we can see a water-resistant wax coating on the threads. It’s most likely fibre from a tarpaulin.’
Pendragon looked admiringly at Dr Newman. ‘That’s very clever,’ he said. She reddened slightly.
Jones coughed. ‘There’s more, Pendragon.’ He picked up a sheet of paper from the counter and handed it to the DCI. Jones leaned in and pointed to a series of graphs. ‘The arrangement of spikes, there,’ he said, ‘indicates a large quantity of heroin.’
‘Heroin?’ Pendragon exclaimed, staring at the pathologist.
‘Even more interesting is this,’ Jones said, and handed him another sheet covered with a series of coloured lines.
‘What’s this?’
‘An analysis of Kingsley Berrick’s blood. Same spikes. An almost identical heroin level.’
‘You think the two victims were junkies?’ Turner asked.
‘A fair assumption, Sergeant, but no. These concentrations of heroin would kill instantly.’
‘So it was the means of dispatching them?’ Pendragon commented, studying the charts.
‘Remember the needle wound in Berrick’s brain?’ Jones said. ‘I thought he died from a massive haemorrhage. But it seems clear now that the hole was caused by the introduction of the drug. If Thursk still had a brain, or come to that a head I could study, we might find a similar mark.’ Then, after a moment, Jones added, ‘There’s one other interesting result.’
‘Oh?’ Pendragon said, looking from him to Colette Newman.
‘Dr Newman suggested we did a rape test on Berrick’s body.’
‘A rape test?’
‘It didn’t occur to me back at the Path Lab, but …’
‘It struck me as being prudent in light of, well … Mr Berrick’s sexual orientation.’
‘Okay,’ Pendragon said doubtfully.
‘Berrick had intercourse shortly before he was murdered. We ran DNA tests.’
‘And?’
‘We found traces of Noel Thursk’s DNA.’
Turner suddenly laughed, then put his hand to his mouth and rolled his eyes. Pendragon glared at him and turned to Dr Newman. ‘Wheels within wheels,’ he said, running his fingers over his forehead.
Chapter 23
The rain had stopped by the time they left the Forensics Lab. Pendragon tossed the keys to Turner. ‘You drive.’
They pulled out into the heavy traffic and almost immediately ground to a halt again.
‘It’s hard to imagine how anyone could actually have performed those murders,’ Turner said, glancing over at his boss. ‘I mean, to have a steamroller and nobody see you using it. And Berrick, you’d need some sort of electronic press to do that to his head, wouldn’t you, guv?’
‘Yes, I think you’re right, Turner. I’ve been wondering the same thing and I’ve just thought of someone who might be able to give me some answers.’
Turner dropped Pendragon outside the Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road. The rain was coming down harder now and the DCI made a dash for it between two market stalls selling knock-off saris and pirated Bollywood DVDs. Inside, the pub reminded him of a cave. There was subdued light from cheap plastic chandeliers fitted with green bulbs, dark wood panelling around the bar, heavily patterned wallpaper, and a carpet that had so much beer rubbed into it, it was impossible to tell what colour it might once have been. The place stank of alcohol and detergent.
The pub had just opened and he was one of only three customers. The other two sat at separate tables, each nursing a beer and staring silently towards the windows on to Whitechapel Road. Pendragon ordered a pint of bitter and sat in the corner furthest from the other patrons and well out of earshot. These days, the Blind Beggar was something of a tourist attraction. It had once been a favourite of the notorious Kray twins, who had run the most powerful crime cartel in the district back in the sixties and seventies. It was in this pub in 1966 that Ronnie Kray shot dead George Cornell, an associate of a rival gang, the Richardsons.
Pendragon saw Sammy Samson pass the window and enter the pub. He gave him a discreet wave. Sammy smiled and strode over to the table, extending one hand as Pendragon stood up. He was wearing an ancient double-breasted suit with stains down the front, the shoulders and elbows shiny with wear. His shirt was off-white with a ragged blue tie keeping the collar almost closed. He had shaved, but badly, leaving lines of half-shorn stubble here and there and a trail of bloodied nicks.
‘Pendragon, old boy,’ Sammy said. ‘It’s been a while.’ His voice was brandy-cracked and ravaged by tobacco and God knows what else, but Sammy still spoke the Queen’s English like the old Etonian he was. Pendragon indicated he should sit and called Sammy’s order to the barman before turning back to look at the man in front of him.
The Hon. Sammy Samson was the stuff of legend and Pendragon knew he should only take notice of a fraction of what was said about the man. What had passed through the DCI’s filter was that Sammy was a genuine aristocrat, the son of an earl who had lost the favour of his family decades earlier and been cut off without a penny. Back in the late sixties he had fallen into the drug culture, survived a spell managing a couple of bands, and then become a full-blown junkie. His father had expelled him from the family and none of his siblings would talk to him.
By that time, he was already enamoured with what had to him become a charming alternate reality: the East End and the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Even in his early twenties, he had felt more at home enjoying a pint of brown ale and a knees-up at the local boozer than back on the playing fields of Eton or at Royal Ascot. Rejection by his own family had strengthened these feelings, and with surprising ease he had become part of the Stepney scene. Later, he had fallen in with the gang lords, worked as an accountant for the Krays, spent five years in jail, and then simply turned to a life of wandering around the East End, day after day, week after week, decade upon decade.
As a boy, Pendragon had seen Sammy Samson around Stepney. Even then, the lapsed aristocrat had been a local celebrity. So it was perhaps not surprising that when Jack took the job at Brick Lane, Sammy had been one of the first people he had asked after. When he discovered the man was very much alive and an active police snout, he had reached out to him. Sammy always kept an ear to the ground, and what he did not know about the goings-on in the East End crime world was not worth pursuing. Now in his mid-sixties, Sammy looked seventy-five. He was pretty much broken beyond repair, surviving from day to day. Pendragon liked him a lot.
‘So what may I do for you, Pendragon?’ Sammy asked, knocking back his drink in one. ‘Might there be value in my enlightened observations on recent unhappy goings-on?’
‘I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Sammy. You always were an astute man.’
‘Ah, my dear boy, flattery will get you everywhere.’
Pendragon signalled to the barman, and a few moments later another brandy appeared at Sammy Samson’s elbow. ‘Very gracious of you,’ the old man said and raised the glass, downing only half its contents this time.
Pendragon looked around. They could not be overheard here. ‘To be specific,’ he said as Sammy eyed the rest of the brandy, ‘we’re trying to piece together a modus operandi for our local killer. I can’t go into details, but the murders don’t take place where we find the bodies. In fact, I’m looking for a large work space the killer is using. I don’t think it’s their home. I’m pursuing the idea our man is renting somewhere anonymous but near here.’
Sammy considered Pendragon with intelligent eyes. ‘An office? Something of that nature?’
‘No. Larger. More industrial.’
‘A derelict factory or school?’
‘Maybe, or a warehouse perhaps.’
‘I see,’ Sammy said slowly, leaning back in his seat and crossing his legs. Pendragon noted the holes in the soles of his decades-old handmade brogues. ‘I will have to give that some thought,’ he said. ‘Ask around. What … er … what sort of remuneration are we thinking of, Pendragon? Only, you understand, I’ll have expenses to consider.’
He gave the older man a brief smile. ‘Don’t worry, Sammy. I’ve always looked after you, haven’t I?’
‘Indeed you have, dear boy. Indeed you have. While we’re on the subject of Mammon, I may already have some snippets of information concerning the case under investigation.’
‘Snippets of information?’ Pendragon gave him a crooked smile.
Sammy nodded and a glint came to his eyes. ‘I should remind you I was once given the epithet “the eyes and ears of Stepney”.’
Pendragon laughed and shook his head. ‘Honestly, Sammy, you’re worth every penny for the sheer entertainment value.’
Sammy’s ravaged face broke into an indignant expression. ‘Well, I suppose I must consider that a compliment.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘That depends. How entertaining have I been?’
Pendragon sighed, withdrew his wallet from his inside pocket and pulled out a?20 note. Sammy took it and pushed his glass forward an inch. Pendragon nudged it back. ‘Let’s hear it first, Sammy.’
‘Well, how should I put this? Your first victim, the gallery owner … he was very friendly with the descendants of my former associates.’
Pendragon fixed the old man with his eyes. ‘Kingsley Berrick had gangland connections?’
Sammy Samson nodded.
‘What sort of connections?’
‘That’s the limit of my current knowledge on the subject, Chief Inspector.’
‘Come on, Sammy.’
‘God’s honest … as my local friends would put it.’ And he held his hands up, palms out.
Pendragon gave him a sceptical look. ‘So you’re telling
me you’ve just heard it through the grapevine? No details?’
‘You now know everything I do.’
Chapter 24
Brick Lane, Stepney, Saturday
‘All right, Jack. Let’s have an update.’
They were in the Super’s office. Jill Hughes sat at one end of the leather sofa, Pendragon at the other. Hughes was nursing a cup of tea. The door was closed, keeping out the noise from the station. The clock on the desk told them it had just passed midday.
‘Well, so far we’ve got a miscellaneous collection of facts. All useful, but none of it seems to fit together.’
‘Explain.’
‘First, we have the forensics and path reports. Turner and I had a thorough debriefing from Jones and Newman over at Lambeth this morning. Appears that both victims died from a massive heroin overdose. No,’ Pendragon added quickly, seeing the Super’s expression, ‘I don’t think either of them was an addict. The heroin was injected straight into their brains. That’s what killed them. They also found Thursk’s DNA in Berrick’s remains.’
Hughes looked suitably surprised. ‘So they were obviously well acquainted,’ she said dryly. ‘And Berrick’s business partner, Mr Price, reckons that Berrick and Norman Hedridge were a couple at one time?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re leaning towards this being a sexually motivated murder? A jealous ex-partner, perhaps?’
‘No, I’m not. I don’t think there’s anything in that idea at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘The murders are all too elaborate, ma’am. Too staged. I think the killer is clearly warped, but my gut tells me this has nothing to do with sex.’
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