Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  Rows with friends? No.

  Money worries? No.

  Relationship with Duncan seem okay? Seemed fine.

  Easy questions. Mary Blake gave her answers like someone ticking the box. Howard Blake said nothing; Howard had gone somewhere. Not that he’d left the room, but he had made a trip inside his head and either he’d found a place that seemed safe and had decided to stay there, or he’d got hopelessly lost. You couldn’t have told which by looking at his eyes; his eyes were as hard and reflective as the steel trim on the chairs they sat in.

  It was a short walk to Delaney’s flat and Stella had found a parking space. It was the kind of combination that made an automatic choice of ‘your place or mine’. Stella was still living in the basement flat in Vigo Street that she had shared with George Paterson. It wasn’t a good arrangement: even though George had been back and taken everything he owned, he hadn’t taken everything of himself. But some kind of inertia that Stella couldn’t properly explain kept her there. The idea that she and Delaney might live together was one of the great unspokens. Stella needed her own space; she also needed to keep her own company from time to time; and she assumed that Delaney felt the same. She told herself that any sane person would.

  He made them a drink and, when she reached for it, drew her in, sliding his hand under the waistband of her jeans at the back. His touch never failed. Hadn’t failed yet. They made love whenever they were together.

  Stella woke in the middle of the night; a sound had disturbed her. She walked naked out of the bedroom and into the living space: stripped floorboards, rugs, a galley kitchen, Delaney’s desk, a circular table where they ate, a big area sectioned off by two large sofas, an open fireplace, a television he only ever switched on to get the news. Good for one person; good to visit.

  The sound that had woken her came back: someone playing electric guitar in another apartment, a bluesy sound, long, weeping lines. She went to the tall casement window and the light from streetlamps seemed brittle, as if it had hardened as the temperature dropped. You could almost see the frost taking hold.

  Stella leaned against the window-frame, her naked body half in shadow, half in lamplight, a sketchy blue crosshatching by the underside of her breast, the crease of her thigh, the bevels of her cheekbones. She had dark hair and blue eyes, a combination that you noticed at once. She was in her early thirties and still slim enough and pretty enough to catch glances from men who passed her in the street, though when she looked in a mirror, she saw someone who could benefit by dropping a few pounds, fixing her hair and calling by at the gym. Someone had told her that, after forty, women became invisible. Three storeys below, some party-goers went into the All Nite to buy breakfast, or maybe for something to keep the party going.

  London is never dark – there’s always that luminous glow: the light-mix from storefronts, from cars, from streetlamps, from the windows of the city’s raw-eyed insomniacs. Over the rooftops, less than a mile away, Stella could make out a smudge against the skyline: the trees in Holland Park. She saw Valerie Blake’s pale body, down and lifeless; saw her own pale, naked reflection in the long window.

  The guitar wailed and rose, then bottomed out. A police siren took on the note and modified it. Stella went back to bed, shifting into Delaney’s warmth. He stirred and rested a hand on her flank.

  ‘So am I,’ she said, as if he could hear. ‘So am I – an only child.’

  3

  ‘It’s just another day,’ Stella was saying, ‘and you’ve done this before: put on your DKNY T-shirt and your sweats and your running shoes. You’ve probably got a few different circuits according to how good you feel or when you last went for a run. Do you always go out at the same time? Probably. Different at weekends, maybe. How often do you go? That depends on whether you get home from work early, whether you have a date, whether you think you need a drink more than you need exercise. Today, you’ll run. You put your mobile phone and your house key into a zipper pocket. You’ve already decided that you’ve got time to run through the park – time before it closes, that is. It closes at dusk: that’s what the sign at the gate says. So it’s still light when you set out. How much time do you allow? That depends on how fast you run. A slow jog – you’ll leave twenty minutes or even half an hour; if you’re an experienced runner, you could make it in ten to fifteen. These are things we’ll be asking about: how often she ran; what routes; how fast.’

  The team briefing was being videotaped: Stella’s idea. All briefings would be taped so they could be used to chart the investigation, the way it progressed. The essential factors in any briefing were clarity, shared information, inspired speculation, coffee, chocolate bars, salt and vinegar crisps and a thick, hanging pall of cigarette smoke. Stella had quit smoking some while back, which meant that, given the rough calculation that applies to secondary inhalation, she was down to a pack a day.

  In addition to Andy Greegan, Pete Harriman, Maxine Hewitt and Sue Chapman, the team had acquired an exhibitions officer in DC Nick Robson and a gofer in DS Jack Cuddon. Cuddon’s job was to act as Sorley’s bagman: an information officer, in effect, and a link between AMIP-5 and the people who controlled the budget. Stella thought he’d be good at that; he had the look of a bureaucrat about him – thinning hair, a narrow face, almost prim, a subdued tie. A couple of civilian computer operators would join the team in a day or so, though they would be doubling up on other jobs.

  ‘Just another day,’ Stella said, ‘just another run. Except you never get through the park. Someone stops you and kills you.’

  The stills of Valerie Blake were pinned to a whiteboard. She was dead from all angles. The DKNY T-shirt was pushed up and you could see that Valerie was still wearing her sports bra. Somehow, that detail made her near-nakedness all the more startling: the white torso, the thick pubic vee, long legs slightly bent at the knee. Her head was turned to one side, as if better to show off the line of bruising at her throat. Also on the whiteboard was the beginnings of a list of contacts and interviewees. Two carried a single tick: Valerie’s parents. There was provision for many ticks: many repeat interviews.

  ‘We’ll get uniform to put an incident board up in the park,’ Stella said. ‘There’ll have been other runners, walkers, people with kids, people taking a short cut either over the hill to the Avenue or down to Kensington. DC Harriman and I are going back to the parents. When we’ve got a list of the victim’s contacts, we’ll organize a division of work. In the meantime, someone had better organize a search team for Valerie’s flat. I don’t imagine they’ll find much, but we’d better take a look. Andy?’

  Greegan nodded. ‘Okay, Boss.’

  Maxine Hewitt was looking at the stills. ‘Five attacks in twelve weeks,’ she said.

  Delaney had offered the same statistic. Each of the AMIP-5 officers had noted the earlier killings and had kept track of the resulting investigations. Different teams were involved, although a single term kept cropping up to describe the murders: ‘thrill-kill’. Mostly it cropped up in the tabloid press. Sue Chapman had liaised with other teams, obtained the crime-sheets for each case and distributed them to the members of AMIP-5.

  ‘Same method,’ Harriman observed. ‘Attack with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, then the garrotte.’

  Maxine lobbed her coffee carton into a bin. ‘Wasn’t one of the attacks also a rape… or an attempted rape?’

  Sue Chapman said, ‘A girl on the towpath between Richmond and Kew. She’d been hit on the head too; then garrotted. And a couple of the others who died the same way were missing items of clothing.’

  ‘Okay,’ Maxine said, ‘Valerie Blake was hit and strangled. Possibly raped. This is our man.’

  ‘The others were more hurried,’ Harriman observed. ‘On one occasion, he was actually disturbed at the scene. No description, just the usual short, tall, fair, dark, twenty to fifty years old sort of thing. But he seems to be getting better at it.’

  Maxine said, ‘If he wants to spend time with them – i
f rape’s on his mind – he’d be thinking about how best to allow for that. He’d be doing a bit of forward-planning.’

  Stella used the term in her first report: first layer in the colour-coded strata that would build to a mountain of paperwork. Someone sitting down to think about how best to do the thing: someone choosing a time, choosing a method, choosing the killing-ground.

  Forward-planning.

  Harriman was smoking to keep warm and no one was going to persuade him that it was a lost cause. As they walked across the car park, Stella said, ‘If you smoke in the car, I’ll have to open a window.’

  ‘You sound like an ex-smoker.’

  ‘I sound,’ Stella advised him, ‘like your superior officer.’

  Harriman said fuck under his breath, then took a massive last drag and sent out a long plume of smoke and frosted breath that clouded his face as he walked through it. He was wiry-thin, a narrow gypsy face and dark, curly hair; there was more than one woman in his life and each of them knew that, and expected it.

  Stella drove, which gave Harriman nothing to do with his hands. She said, ‘Any worries about the parents?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think the parents are in the clear.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Despite the growing fashion for thrill-kill and death-by-stranger, most murders are domestic issues: a row on the stairs, a row in bed. Rows in the kitchen always gave scope – there are knives in the kitchen.

  ‘Listen,’ Stella said, ‘I don’t need to come back with you. Talk to the mother: she’s more or less functioning. Get a list of contacts. Did anyone locate the boyfriend?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  Mary Blake had told them that Duncan Palmer worked as a headhunter. Stella had conjured a picture of a man with a loincloth and a nose-bone.

  ‘You take it,’ Stella said. ‘You take the parents.’

  The traffic was slowing for a red light. Stella changed down and blipped the accelerator to pull away from the line of vehicles, then cut straight across three lanes to the nearside. A chorus of horns said Bitch in unison. When the lights changed, she turned into a side street and made a call to the morgue. She expected to hear Sam Burgess’s assistant but got the man himself.

  ‘I’m prepping,’ he said. ‘You can be first up if you like.’

  To get to Sam Burgess’s world of steel and tile and frigid air, Stella descended two flights of stairs, then, down below street-level, walked through a series of rooms that held evidence of the frailty of flesh: specimens, spare parts, the body’s leftovers. The rooms all had slap-flaps instead of doors, as if the trick was to get in fast and leave faster. She was always conscious, when she visited Sam, of how easy it was to die: a glitch in the machine; a bug in the system; foreign matter, like a blade or a bullet.

  Sam was a small man in his mid fifties with deft hands and a monk’s tonsure of white hair. He liked to work to music and today it was a symphony, Brahms 3. Sam’s assistant was called Giovanni; Giovanni smiled but didn’t speak. They seemed at ease in their underworld: the music, the tools of their trade gleaming and laid out for use, the body of Valerie Blake between them and waiting to be tended to. Sam had already made his preliminary, external examination. He’d taken swabs; he’d been into the secret places; he’d combed her hair. It was clear to see that she had been more than just pretty: the trim, toned body, the dark hair and pale skin, the clean planes of cheek and chin, the small, straight nose. It was possible, Stella thought, that Valerie had been beautiful, though with the life gone from her it was no longer possible to tell. In part, beauty lay in movement, in laughter, even in anger, and those things had left her; there was just a stillness, an absence.

  ‘He’s a big guy,’ Sam said. ‘Or so it seems to me.’

  ‘Who’s big?’

  ‘The killer. Strong.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Throttled her with a ligature: made a hell of a mess of her thorax. Small bones broken, ruptures… I could see that without cutting. No doubt about the cause of death: asphyxia by strangulation. Takes strength to kill that way, unless you hang your victim, of course.’

  ‘And he didn’t –’

  Sam shook his head. ‘Well, the abrasions and internal fractures don’t seem right for that, but I’m not saying didn’t until I’ve been in there for a better look. One thing…’ He beckoned Stella over and pointed to the ligature mark. When she nodded, as if to say, Sure, she was strangled, he said, ‘No, just there.’ He touched Valerie’s neck at the very edge of the bruising. Alongside that mark, almost, in its shadow, was another, thinner line.

  ‘More of an abrasion,’ Sam said, ‘nothing to do with the ligature.’

  ‘She was wearing a necklace?’

  ‘Something… Just a chain perhaps, given the configuration. Or something on a chain. They didn’t find anything at the scene?’

  ‘No. Forensics are still there but hoovering and dusting. We’d have found something as obvious as a chain. He must have taken it.’

  ‘Not robbery, surely.’

  ‘No,’ Stella said. ‘Keepsake, more likely.’

  Sam looked up and sighed. ‘I can deal with her as a clinical puzzle. When she becomes the victim, it gets tougher.’

  ‘She was found just after four o’clock,’ Stella said. ‘Do we know when she died?’

  ‘Not long before that.’

  ‘Not long, meaning...’

  ‘An hour, maybe ninety minutes. There was very little insect invasion: too cold. I’m relying on the doctor’s report to some extent: she was out of rigor mortis when found. Then there’s the pattern of blood-puddling and the postmortem developments in the trauma to the thorax and neck.’

  ‘Was she raped?’

  ‘Not sure –’

  ‘Why?’

  Sam had been talking while he worked: toothcombing Valerie’s body for evidence, going to places that even a lover might have been denied. He said, ‘Everyone knows about DNA these days. It’s tough to leave no evidence at all, but there’s no need to leave anything as helpful as semen.’

  ‘You mean he could have used a condom.’

  ‘Could have. I’ll take a swab: the laboratory people will look for traces of lubricant. There’s no real evidence of rape: no vaginal tearing, no anal trauma. Certain amount of bruising on the left upper thigh, but that could have happened in any number of ways. Of course, not all rape provides evidence of actual physical injury, but you know that.’

  ‘It depends on the level of intimidation,’ Stella observed; ‘how frightened the victim is, so how ready to comply.’

  ‘There’s another possibility.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s a significant trauma to the left temple and to the cranium over the left ear; bruising to the ear itself as well. It’s in the scene of crime report and it’s clearly visible. But there’s also bruising to the back of the head. She was struck down before she was strangled.’

  ‘Meaning he could have knocked her out, then raped her, then killed her.’

  ‘Yes, he could.’

  Sam picked up a scalpel and began the big ‘Y’-incision that would open Valerie from clavicle to pubis. Stella had seen it before, but that moment of awful drama never failed to bring a rush of giddiness. She watched as Sam worked, revealing Valerie for what she was – what we all are, Stella thought. Skin and bone, cuts of meat, a toothy smile and a hank of hair.

  The music hung in the air.

  Sam and Giovanni worked at the same rhythm, handling her with care. Now and then, Sam would speak into the mike, but the two men had no need for instruction or question: they were deft and practised, mechanics of the flesh. Sam was removing the thorax, the trachea, the lung-tree – all of a piece; Stella half expected to see a tap-root. He laid it out for inspection, then paused, looking back at the shell that had once been Valerie Blake. He lifted her hair away from the scalp flap and looked again at the ligature mark on her throat, then beckoned Stella over.

  ‘See tha
t? I hadn’t noticed before.’

  Stella could see nothing but spare parts and a semi-dismantled machine. ‘What?’

  ‘The ligature mark stops short on either side. And I’m thinking now about that bruising to the back of the head: less of an impact bruise than a pressure bruise.’ Sam picked up the SOC notes and found the place he was looking for. ‘There was a tree near by.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Stella said. ‘Inside the SOC tent.’

  ‘A silver birch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A tree with a narrow bole.’

  Stella waited.

  Sam said, ‘I think the bruising to the back of the head, the pressure bruise, is where her head rested against the tree. I could have guessed it from the way the eyeballs were turned in to the skull and from the pattern of blood suffusion, but I didn’t notice the difference. I can see it now. Her torso was upright when she died. I think he stunned her, sat her up against the tree, then garrotted her – a ligature put loosely round the throat and going right round the tree, then a short length of wood or whatever inserted into the loop to twist it, using the tree as the strangling pole.’

  ‘A method of execution.’

  ‘Or a method of torture.’

  ‘Except she was unconscious when he strangled her.’

  ‘Was she?’ Sam asked. ‘How do you know?’

  Stella was silent on that one.

  Sam continued, ‘I think it’s likely that Forensics will find grains of tree bark from my combings – on her hair, on her T-shirt, on her back.’

  ‘How long?’ Stella asked. ‘How long for her to die?’

  Sam shrugged. The music came to an end and the room seemed suddenly brighter, steelier.

  He said, ‘As long as you like.’

  4

  Stella entered the post-mortem information as bullet points on the squad room whiteboard and circulated Sam Burgess’s initial findings. Forensics had taken a first look at Sam’s combings and taken samples from the bole of the silver birch; there were grains and fibres that looked right. They hadn’t been fully analysed yet, but no one was in much doubt.