by Michael Kerr
An assistant held the cadaver, his hands clamped onto its left hip as Jane grasped the home-made spear, to twist and pull it as though she were removing a drain rod from a blocked pipe. With an undignified sucking, flatulent sound and the release of stinking stomach gases, the branch relinquished its hold, and Jane tottered back two or three steps, holding the gore-covered stake two-handed.
Placing the makeshift weapon on a steel tray next to a ruler, Jane called across to a young, white-coated forensic photographer who had been at another work station taking photographs of a black teenager’s body. The youth had been blasted in the face and chest by a shotgun, and as yet was still a John Doe. A group of school children had discovered the corpse, where it had washed up on the Thames foreshore in an advanced state of decomposition.
“Thanks, Brenda,” Jane said a couple of minutes later, as the girl went back to the faceless youth, having taken several shots of the stake. Jane then measured the limb and placed it into a transparent plastic zip lock evidence bag.
“It is sixty-one centimetres long, and six centimetres in diameter at its thickest part,” Jane said to Mark. “It had been inserted to a depth of thirty centimetres. This is almost identical to the stakes used on the other two victims.”
Putting the bag down, Jane moved back to the body and eased the buttocks apart to examine the entry wound. Her assistant lifted the left leg to the side to give her better access. “This is interesting,” she said, waiting for Mark to move into a position that afforded him an unrestricted view. “The first two victims were penetrated by way of the vagina. In this case, the point of the stake has ruptured the perineum between the anus and the vagina. And as the X-rays show, it broke through into the rectum and travelled up the alimentary canal into the stomach, causing massive haemorrhaging.”
Mark had attempted to remain detached, but lack of recent exposure to the procedure allowed emotion to permeate in his mind. A rich imagination was part of his psychological armoury, and he could almost taste the fear and imagine the unendurable pain that the young woman had suffered as the thick tree limb had been savagely thrust inside her.
“Thanks, Alan,” Jane said, and the assistant lowered the leg and turned the body on to its back, lifting the head off the cold steel to place a small, concave plastic block at the base of the neck, as if to give the corpse an angle of sight to watch its own imminent dissection. He then nodded and moved off to the far end of the suite, where yet another autopsy was in progress.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, Mark. But I hope you find something that will help you catch this maniac,” Jane said.
“We need a break,” he said. “If you’re to be spared performing a cut on number four in a few weeks.”
Jane scowled. “Natural death, accidents and suicides are all part of a day’s work,” she said, lifting a scalpel from the top of a wheeled trolley next to the table. “But to have to deal with the results of what one sick human being has purposely inflicted on another person, like this, is depressing. Only having to work on babies and children is worse.”
“It’s like a jungle out there: predators hunting prey below the veneer of civilisation,” Mark said. “These psychos hunt for the thrill of it, not for food. A wild animal’s only motivation to kill is for sustenance, or as a defence mechanism. The resulting fear and pain that is caused are by-products, not a conscious part of the equation. It’s only man that kills for the pure pleasure derived from the act.”
“This girl was attempting to escape,” Jane said. “She may have almost made it. I would imagine a scenario in which she fought and broke free after the initial assault, but stumbled and fell, resulting in her face striking the ground. The gravel and other debris in the lacerations to her nose, mouth and the palms of her hands point to that. Her assailant miscued with the branch, which indicates that she may have been moving, crawling away from him.”
Mark watched as Jane made the Y-cut from shoulder to shoulder and opened the torso from the sternum to pubic mound. The morbid fascination that he had harboured as a rookie agent – when attending his first few autopsies – was now reduced to a level just short of disgust. He knew the procedure well enough to have performed it himself, albeit clumsily.
Jane exposed the lungs and examined the gaping, clotted cavity that should have housed the heart. “The heart was literally hacked out in a hurry,” she said. “No finesse. Just cut and ripped savagely from the body, in the same manner employed on the other two victims.”
Mark watched as Jane excised the lungs, oesophagus and trachea, not surprised to be told that the compression damage and bruising indicated manual strangulation. Next, the liver, spleen, the adrenals, stomach, pancreas and intestines were removed. Each organ was weighed, examined and sectioned. Samples from the stomach and urine from the bladder was retained for toxicological analysis.
“I think I’ve seen all that I need to,” Mark said. “Barney can show me your write up and findings. I hope that we don’t meet up again under these circumstances.”
“Likewise,” Jane said, nodding to Mark; the shaking of hands out of the question due to the blood coating her gloves.
The removal of the brain would be last. And as Mark left the autopsy suite, he recalled the sound that the small circular saw made as it bit through the skull, once the scalp had been peeled back. He had no particular wish to witness the routine ever again.
Barney was in the waiting room with Amy. He was pacing as though caged, glaring at the wall-mounted NO SMOKING sign with undisguised hostility. “Are you all done here?” he said to Mark.
“Yeah,”
“Good, let’s go. These places give me the creeps, and I need a smoke.”
Leaving JC in an NCP nearby, Mark and Amy climbed into the rear of the unmarked police car, and the circuitous route that Mike Cook drove to the west London safe house would have made many a cab driver proud of him. All he needed was a meter racing greedily to click up an extortionate fare.
“This is a one-off meet with the woman,” Barney said. “Pearce okayed it. But we can’t make a habit of compromising her location.”
“No sweat,” Mark said. “But you should move her every week. The killer will home-in on her if you don’t.”
“I doubt that,” Barney said.
Mark smiled. “Doubt by definition is uncertainty; an inclination to disbelieve. I have no doubt whatsoever that when ready, the son of a bitch will run her down. It’s rolling stones that gather no moss.”
“You could be overreacting.”
“Better safe...” Mark countered.
Mike parked the car next to the kerb on an avenue that ran parallel to the one in which the safe house was located. He stayed at the wheel as the others got out, and Amy and Mark followed Barney down a narrow walkway that led to a back alley that afforded access to the rear of properties, including the bungalow that Caroline was ensconced in. A workman was ostensibly repairing a fence, but the briefest of furtive glances in their direction was enough to cause Mark to suspect him of being an armed undercover cop, which he was.
Once inside the compact bungalow, they were led into the lounge by another officer in civvies who, wearing a T-shirt and cargo pants, looked young and good-looking enough to be a member of a boy-band.
Mark almost had to reach out and hold the door jamb for support as the woman got up from a settee to greet them. She wore a red blouse and black skirt, and although looking tired and tense, with dark, crescent smudges under her eyes, her facial features bore an uncanny resemblance to Gemma, his late wife.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Introductions over with, Mark and Barney retired to the kitchen, closing the door to give Amy privacy to talk to Caroline. The young cop – who Mark thought had eyes that had seen far more of life and death than his fresh face betrayed – brewed instant coffee for them, then made a test call on his two-way before sitting to the side of the locked back door, his hand on the holster of his shoulder rig, absently finding tactile comfort from the
soft leather that encased a nine millimetre Glock 17.
“I take it you know why we’re here, Caroline?” Amy said, sitting and facing the obviously distraught young woman, who had her hands in her lap, nervously clenching and unclenching them.
“Yes,” she said. “DCI Bowen told me that Dr Ross is a specialist in this sort of thing.”
“He is. And the more information he has, the sooner you’ll be able to get your life back.”
“What more can I tell you, that I’ve not already told the police?”
“The way in which the victims were murdered suggests that we could be looking for a woman.”
“A woman!” Caroline said, astonished. “You think that some woman is terrorising me and killing people?”
“The crimes were sexual, in that vaginal penetration was made, though not by conventional means.”
“I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re implying,” Caroline said; a defensive sharpness to her voice.
“I’m not saying that you are,” Amy said. “Only that it may be a woman that has fixated on you. It could be a total stranger, but that’s unlikely, due to the correspondence you received. We can’t discount the possibility of there being a female colleague or supposed friend who feels that you have rebuked her in some way.”
“But I’ve never...” Caroline paused, and Amy saw a flash of doubt or recollection in her tired, emerald eyes.
“What? Tell me what you just thought or remembered, Caroline.”
“It can’t be relevant. It’s too long ago.”
“Please, let me be the judge of that. At this moment in time, everything and anything is relevant, believe me.”
Caroline gathered her thoughts, frowning, and with her eyelids screwed tightly shut as she plucked a distant, unpleasant and embarrassing memory from where it had lain buried in her psyche.
Amy found that she was holding her breath as she waited what seemed an eternity, watching the mental struggle play out on Caroline Sellars’ face.
“I was at university in Leeds,” Caroline said eventually, her voice triggering Amy into releasing her breath and taking another. “I shared a flat with three other girls. It was great for nearly a year. We were like family...sisters, you know, sharing chores, makeup, clothes and secrets. We went everywhere together, and boyfriends were only a passing and usually brief diversion that seemed to put a damper on the fun.”
Amy waited, but Caroline had gone glassy-eyed, presumably recalling an incident that had taken place up in Yorkshire, many miles and almost a decade away from the danger she now found herself in.
“What happened, Caroline?” Amy said in a low but firm voice.
“Uh, Judy and Fay were away one weekend. I remember it was late November or early December, and I was left with Ellen. We went out for an Indian meal, then on to a city pub. We both drank too much, and when we got back to the flat, Ellen got all maudlin over her mother, who had died that summer. I ended up cuddling her on the settee. Later, she didn’t want to be alone, so I let her sleep with me.”
Again, Amy waited as Caroline hesitated, biting her bottom lip as she tried to find precise words, obviously loathe to continue and divulge the details of an incident she had relegated to the part of her consciousness that stores memories of shame or guilt. She lowered her head, closed her eyes and continued without further prompting.
“I woke up, still a little drunk, and Ellen had her hand up my nightie, fondling my breasts. I don’t know why, but I didn’t stop her, and it got steamy. I kind of enjoyed it in a scary, weird way. I did things that I’d never done before or since with another woman. The next day I told her that I wasn’t like that. I asked her to forget that it had happened, but she kept pestering me, telling me that she loved me, and talking graphically about the things we’d done to each other. In the end I moved out. I even had to be really nasty to her one day in the university bookshop. I suppose I caused a scene. That’s it.”
“Did she ever threaten you, or do anything?” Amy said.
“No. She found out where I was living and sent me letters for a while, but I just ripped them up unopened. A few months later she dropped out, left uni, and I never saw her again. I’m sure it wasn’t related, though.”
“What was her surname?”
“Garner.”
“Describe her. Tell me what kind of person she is, or was?”
“She’s...She was stocky, back then. Not fat, but heavily built. She always wore her hair very short. It was mousy. Her eyes seemed a little small for her face. They were distinctive, very dark like polished jet. I suppose you’d have to say she was unattractive. A lot of the guys called her Miss Piggy, behind her back. She was very...butch looking. I have some photographs from those days. She’s in a couple of them. They’re at my flat.”
“That’s good,” Amy said. “Will you talk to Dr Ross now?”
“If you think it might help, yes.”
Amy went through to the kitchen and asked Mark to join them. She had broken the ice, and when Mark sat in, Caroline recounted the details of her singular sexual episode with Ellen Garner. Talking to Amy had helped her overcome the repressed shame. She was now more fluent and open, though felt extremely embarrassed.
“To your knowledge, did Ellen bear grudges?” Mark said, finding it painful to look at Caroline. Even her expressions; the way she pursed her lips, frowned, and looked up toward the ceiling when searching for words, was reminiscent of Gemma. He was almost distracted from his line of thought, near to being overcome by a surge of impassioned memories that crowded in and threatened to engulf him. He felt awash with pain; drowning in an ocean of self-pity. The past could always turn around and bite you in the ass when you least expected it to.
“She once fell out with a guy in the downstairs flat,” Caroline said. “He played grungy music, too loud and too late at night. When Ellen asked him to turn it down and show some consideration for other tenants, he told her to piss off and get a life. She seethed for over a week, and then lightened up. Her change of mood coincided with the guy having the paintwork of his car covered in brake fluid, and all four tyres slashed.”
“And did she do it?” Mark said.
“She never admitted it. But her smug, self-satisfied attitude was proof enough to the rest of us that she had.”
“Do you know where she came from? Or anything about her background?”
“She was a Yorkshire girl. I think from Hull, originally. But apart from knowing that her mother had died, she never talked to any of us about her past. I remember that her favourite saying was, ‘OTM’: Only Today Matters. Funny, she never even invited any of us to attend her mother’s funeral. I don’t even know if she went.”
“I think we’ve covered all the bases, Gem...uh, Caroline.”
“We’ll need to arrange for DCI Bowen to recover those photos from your flat,” Amy said.
“Do you really think that after all this time Ellen would do something like this?” Caroline said, directing the question to Mark.
“I believe that it’s more a possibility than a probability,” he said, wanting to leave, tortured by being in the same room with a woman who was unknowingly opening a scar on his heart, which now felt as if it was a fresh wound again, seeping grief-laced blood into his very soul. “But we obviously need to find her and determine it one way or the other.”
“I feel so terribly guilty,” Caroline said, her words heavy with self recrimination. “Those girls are being killed because of me.”
“That’s bullshit,” Mark said, reaching out and taking her hand firmly between his much larger, stronger hands. “The only guilty party is the maniac who is committing these crimes. You are not responsible for the actions of a psychopath. None of us have any control over what these deranged freaks do. You are a victim, Caroline, so don’t feel guilty, feel goddamn angry instead.”
Amy stayed with Caroline for a while as Mark left the room and relayed what had been discussed to Barney.
“I’ll have the photos lif
ted and get copies to you,” Barney said. “Is there anything else?”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “If you locate Ellen Garner, treat her as though she’s a rabid dog. Don’t underestimate her because of her gender. If she is the killer, then she will be extremely dangerous, and will kill again without hesitation.”
Later, back at Amy’s, Mark’s thoughts flitted, as a bee or butterfly would from flower to flower in search of nectar. Gemma, Caroline Sellars, Amy, the park murders and the possibility of a female serial killer all jockeyed for position in his mind. With a force ten headache and building frustration over the case, he showered, letting the needle jets of hot water wash away some of the tension and relax his frayed nerves.
Amy stepped in beside him, put her arms around his waist and said, “Are you okay?”
“I will be,” he said, turning to face her.
“I know what seeing Caroline Sellars did, Mark. I saw the resemblance, and I’ve only seen photographs of Gemma.”
“Sorry, honey, but I―”
“You wouldn’t be the man I love if you hadn’t been affected. Let’s try to back off the case for tonight. There’s nothing more we can do until Barney checks out the Garner woman and gets the DNA results on Tyler. We should rustle up a meal together, put some Lionel Ritchie on, and try to chill out with a few large Scotches.”
“Is that before or after?” Mark said, pulling her close.
“Before or after what?” Amy said, and then felt the pressure against her stomach, looked down and smiled. “No show without Punch, huh?”
“He’s got a mind of his own. A naked babe in the shower always gets his attention.”
“We’d better see to the little guy’s needs, then.”
“Less of the little,” Mark said, finding her lips with his as she tilted her face up.
At that moment, kissing and embracing Amy, he experienced a sense of closure; was hit by an overpowering sense of acceptance. Life is nature, and nature has cycles. It repeats. You have to move on and get past things. Close out certain phases of it. He truly believed that most lives were like books. If they were doing the job intended, they furthered the plot, developed, and ultimately came to a conclusion. Wheels within wheels. A certain feeling of having reached the end of some weighty tome and pausing before beginning the next, invaded him. He now felt that he could look back on what had passed and leave it behind, not carry the burden on his shoulders as unnecessary baggage. The yoke of keen, harboured sorrow dissolved from his heavy heart, and he knew that at last he could continue life’s journey unfettered. His phases seemed to be of ten-year periods, with subtle changes in priorities, and new perceptions. He could acknowledge the boy and young man he had once been, but in some way saw them as separate individuals, no longer a part of him, though he was obviously a product of all their experiences. For the very first time since Gemma’s death he felt a distance expand and transform her from what had been a consuming and bitter daily onslaught of loss, to a sweet memory. The love he had had for her was still intact, but encapsulated and set aside, disentangled from what was now corporeal. He was at once liberated to give fully of himself to Amy, with no sense of betrayal to a lost and irrevocable past.
