by James Nally
As dawn broke and sleep finally came for me, so did a realisation. I’d been to two places connected to her death on Saturday – Brownswood Road and the Florentine Gardens.
Sunday, I’d only been to one. Brownswood Road. She didn’t die there.
Liz Little must have died at the Florentine Gardens.
Chapter 11
Hornsey, North London
Monday, April 5, 1993; 10.30
When my pager instructed me to attend Hornsey Mortuary in North London at 10.30am, I let out a little yelp of joy – it was bound to be livelier than the Cold Case Unit office.
The dismal beige bone shop sat at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac beyond a drooping traffic-barrier gate – truly the end of the road.
The receptionist saw my paged request from Dr Edwina Milne and raised me a striking, bespectacled blonde in her early 20s.
‘Hi Donal, Erika,’ she stated flatly, no hand offered. ‘This way please.’
I could’ve sworn I knew her from somewhere – no man would forget this voluptuous Viking in a lifetime. But I didn’t say so, for fear of sounding like some sort of weirdo knicker-sniffer.
‘What’s your role here, Erika?’ I asked instead, trailing her up a corridor reeking of bleach, working hard not to check out her arse.
She reached a door and held it open for me with an arched smile. ‘I’m an Anatomical Pathology Technologist,’ she said, ‘but mortuary assistant is fine.’
I made it past her into the starkly bare ‘consultation room’, only for my heart to trip over her honeyed fragrance. I’d always been a sucker for expensive scent. In a chemically flayed building like this, she smelt sweeter than a midnight meadow of jasmine.
‘Is Dr Milne going to see me here then?’ I said, my voice shaky and high.
‘She’s upstairs, on the second of seven post-mortems booked in for today, so you’ll have to do with me, I’m afraid.’
You’ll do just fine, Erika, I managed not to say.
‘Take a seat,’ she said, addressing her clipboard and perching on the chair furthest from mine.
‘Wow, seven post-mortems in a day.’
‘We perform about seven hundred here a year.’
‘Out of how many bodies?’
‘About three thousand, so I feel pretty inured to death. As I’m sure you do too, detective.’
‘If only,’ I said, and she threw me a quizzical look. Before she had a chance to speak, I hit her with the most clichéd question in modern history.
‘All this death must get you down sometimes though?’
‘I think working in a hospital mortuary would, where it’s mostly elderly and ill. But here we get jumpers, murder victims, traffic accidents. I know it sounds dark but it can be quite fascinating.’
‘So what does the average day entail for an Anatomical Pathology Technologist then?’
‘Helping with autopsies mostly. Releasing bodies to families. And the toughest part –’ she sighed ‘– viewings’.
‘I imagine that’s about as socially awkward as it gets, asking someone to positively identify a body.’
She laughed, but kindly.
‘Everyone says that now, thanks to American TV. “Positively Identify”. Like you could “Negatively Identify” someone.’
Jesus, no need to be pedantic, I thought.
‘Sorry,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m not very good around living people.’
‘Don’t you mean just “people”,’ I felt like saying, ‘as dead people don’t fucking know you’re there.’ But I’d been enjoying her frank insights into a very secretive world. ‘I disagree,’ I lied instead.
‘Thanks.’ She almost smiled. ‘Funnily enough, it’s a calm, predictable job dealing with the dead. It’s only when the living get involved that it can become … messy. Most British people don’t see death close up until they’re in no fit emotional state to deal with it. Grieving is not a good time to see your first dead body. We do our best to soften the blow, you know, we wire their mouths shut and put plastic caps under the eyelids so they don’t look sunken …’
‘Euugh, pulling open the eyelid of a corpse and sliding something in … I couldn’t do it.’
‘The caps are crucial: they have ridges around the edge which stop the eyelids popping open. Can you imagine that happening during a viewing?’
My laugh earned a dazzling display of her dentistry, which looked way beyond a mortuary assistant’s pay scale.
She went on: ‘But we don’t do hair and make-up, that’s funeral parlours, so when they come here, they see this grey, rubbery mannequin and freak out.’
‘Luckily, both my grannies looked like that alive.’
‘I persuaded Elizabeth’s parents not to view her,’ she said sadly. ‘We had her dental records. Why put them through the trauma?’
‘So a closed coffin then, for her funeral?’
She nodded.
I couldn’t imagine losing a loved one, and not seeing them one last time. No matter what state they were in.
‘Do they not say it’s better, psychologically, for grievers to see the person dead, you know, to help with closure?’
She tilted her head to one side defiantly. ‘Not on this occasion, surely?’
‘So what happens to her now?’
‘She’s in a body bag in a drawer downstairs, refrigerated to minus-8 degrees centigrade. She’ll stay there until after the inquest. As soon as the death certificate is signed, we’ll pass the body over to the family’s undertakers. You know the worst part?’
‘It gets worse?’
‘We have to invoice her family for the cost of her staying here. Fifteen pounds per week.’
‘After all that, I think this pathology report might actually cheer me up.’
‘I doubt that,’ she said, perusing her clipboard for a place to start.
‘Basically, what I’ve got here are extracts from Dr Milne’s full report which has yet to be released. She’s letting you have this because she’s a big fan of the Cold Case Unit. As she says, you’ve emptied a lot of our refrigerated drawers. I don’t know how much you already know …’
‘I’ll have it all, thanks Erika.’
She listed the injuries I’d seen Saturday morning, finishing with those mysterious gouges out of her flesh.
Her soft, secretive blue eyes shot up to mine. ‘Off the record, we’ll be briefing the coroner that these appear to have been made by some sort of small creature, but that won’t go into the report. It’s too lurid and sensational. The papers would go crazy.’
Her eyes shot back to business.
‘Now, internal injuries. Subject X-rayed for foreign objects inside her body. An A3 domestic battery had been inserted into her anus. Blunt trauma injury to rib cage, skull and upper right arm. Small amount of bleeding in the sub arachnoid space on the right side of the brain, consistent with blows to the head.’
She glanced up. ‘The truth is, in a case like this it’s impossible to isolate a single or even sequential cause of death, so we’ll be recording it as blunt instrument trauma to the skull, and pretty much making up a time.’
The clipboard lured her back.
‘Stomach empty so hadn’t eaten for at least eight hours prior to death. Microscopic samples of unidentified red matter found inside the wounds to her skull.’
My mind flashed back to Liz’s visit – that crimson-coloured liquid pouring from her head injuries.
‘What colour was this, exactly?’
‘Dark red it says here.’
‘Can I have a sample, to take to forensics?’
‘The report states it’s probably too small an amount to test.’
‘But it’s been isolated?’
‘I would think so, as it’s listed, most likely on sticky tape.’
‘Could I sign that out before I leave please?’
‘Er, yes, I suppose you can.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Last thing, a sample of hair found in the victim’s right hand.
Microscopic examination confirmed it to be human, damage to roots indicate it had been forcibly removed from the scalp of another person. And this is where it gets weird …’
She looked up at me, her painstakingly coiffured eyebrows arching in horrified fascination. ‘We were able to trace this hair to the original owner, because we carried out an autopsy on her just four months ago. We noted that the pigment distribution and the scale patterning matched. This was later confirmed by DNA. The hair in her hand belonged to a street prostitute named Valerie Gillespie.’
My jaw fell.
Erika looked surprised. ‘You know the case?’
‘I remember she was fished out of Wood Green reservoir in plastic bags. She was identified by her breast implants.’
‘Edwina’s a very smart lady.’
My mind reeled. How did Liz Little come to be clutching the hair of someone murdered four months earlier?
Erika shrugged, seemingly inured to even giving a shit.
Then I had an idea. Hang on a minute, I’m in the mortuary, why don’t I ask the lady herself?
‘Can I see Valerie’s body?’
‘She’s not here,’ said Erika. ‘I signed her out myself.’
‘Another closed casket, I suppose.’
She nodded. ‘It’s the implants that made her stand out, if you excuse the pun.’ She smiled. ‘Now I’ve really got to press on. Are you okay finding your own way out?’
I nodded and she bustled to the door.
‘I thought the bodies in unsolved murder cases are supposed to be kept for a year?’ I said, but she’d already gone.
Only my brain groaned and strained harder than the W7 bus back to Finsbury Park.
Why did Liz Little have locks of Valerie Gillespie’s hair clasped in her cold, dead right hand? Her killer must have planted it there. But why? The pathologist’s notes stated that the hair had been forcibly ripped from Valerie’s head – presumably during her violent end. No matter which way I looked at it, I kept drawing the same conclusions.
Whoever killed Valerie Gillespie had kept a chunk of her yanked-out hair as a trophy. He then killed Liz Little and planted Valerie’s hair on her body as a signature. He was letting us know that he’d murdered both women.
Why would Jimmy Reilly murder a crack-addict streetwalker like Valerie Gillespie, then boast about it by planting her hair on Liz Little? It made no sense.
I began to question why I’d been so convinced that Reilly had killed Liz in the first place. She worked at his seedy hostess club. So what? This fact alone didn’t implicate him. She’d met hundreds of rich, powerful men at the Florentine and, no doubt, maintained the more enjoyable/profitable of these relationships independently of the club. Any one of these men could have had her rubbed out, for any number of reasons.
Tammy, the Yank temptress, may have had toxic intel to spill Saturday night. How did I know if any of it splashed Jimmy Reilly? Maybe she was about to unmask another suspect – a member of staff or a regular john? At the last moment, she elected not to take that risk and disappeared. After the horrors that befell Liz Little, who could blame her?
As for my extended stay at the Florentine, no actual threats had been made or force used. Bernie had even stood me a couple of cans of lager – hardly a hostile action. If questioned by police, he’d insist I could’ve walked away at any time. His boss just wanted to know why I’d come to his club with my gutter-press brother.
I comforted myself that at least our brief, covert pursuit of Reilly had caused no real damage to the official and, no doubt, judiciously open-minded Liz Little murder investigation.
Straight-laced DS Spence and his crack team would be painstakingly piecing together her final hours, tracking down the last people to see her alive. They’ll be seizing the Florentine’s interior CCTV and receipts. This week, a lot of very influential men will be fielding awkward phone calls about their nocturnal assignations. How the Catholic/class warrior in me would relish such a task. Oh, squirm all ye Unfaithful!
As a cop, I’d learned that the rich need constant reminding that they aren’t above the law. So we’d leave messages with their suspicious, unfulfilled wives: make sure hubby calls the Liz Little incident room urgently, about her murder at the Florentine Gardens.
WIFE: What are the Florentine Gardens, dear?
HUSBAND: A restaurant, I think, darling. Don’t ask me, the PA books these things. I just get into the taxi and arrive.
WIFE (TO HERSELF): Another one for the divorce dossier, chump.
Spence’s squad will smoke out all of Liz’s enemies: lovers, embittered exes, stalkers, rivals – anyone with a grievance against her, petty or grave, real or imagined.
I felt confident that the weird stuff – the unexplained bite marks on her body, the inserted battery, the miniscule splashes of red paint, Valerie’s hair in her hand – would all fall into place once they narrowed down everyone who wished her harm. As my old boss Shep used to so often misquote: The light of lights always looks upon the motive, not the deed.
As the bus doors gasped open at Finsbury Park station, I took a belly-deep sigh of my own. Thank God I hadn’t charged into the Liz Little incident room with any of our wilder theories about Jimmy Reilly. Today’s follicular twist would have scalped me; what little reputation I had left ripped away more emphatically than Valerie’s limp locks. As I’d found to my cost in the past, the tag of ‘fantasist’ is a hard one to shake.
Of course, the whole pursuit of Reilly had been Walter Mitty’s idea. Fintan’s fantastical theories might score A-Stars in the tabloid ‘School of Skulduggery’ but, as a serving detective, I needed to wise up. Stick to the facts and consider only hard evidence.
Unless we found something irrefutably damning against Jimmy Reilly – Bernie/Slob/his DNA at the Liz Little murder scene, or the mysterious ‘T’ willing to testify – I wouldn’t be mentioning his name again. But these two leads still lived and demanded following up. As I slid two 20p coins into a public phone, I prayed that at least one of them had delivered. If so, that would surely book my ticket onto Spence’s squad.
I called Fintan first and relayed the Hornsey Mortuary headlines. After repeating the word ‘fuck’ several times, he hit back with news from Liz’s fruit-bat agent, Roger Alsop:
-No Americans on his books; he wouldn’t countenance such a thing.
-No women on his books called Tammy; he wouldn’t countenance such a thing.
-No women on his books matching Tammy’s appearance.
When Fintan asked if any of his female clients might also be moonlighting at the Florentine Gardens, the old queen exploded: ‘That tart Liz Little has completely besmirched my reputation.’
I next called Zoe, praying that she’d turned up something, anything. Of course, she couldn’t talk about her moonlighting for me over the phone, so I asked her out.
‘Yes, I think I can do that detective,’ she said stiffly.
‘Great. Lincoln Inn Fields in half an hour?’
‘Certainly shall. Speak soon.’
She arrived late, downcast.
‘You don’t need to tell me.’ I smiled, getting up from the bench.
‘I’m sorry, Donal,’ she said, slumping down on the seat, deflated, child-like.
I really wanted to give her a hug.
‘I got in at seven especially,’ she said finally, ‘with the worse hangover ever. I had to pretend I was under the weather.’
‘Can I get you something to eat?’
‘I’ve got to get back,’ she said, ‘sorry. My line manager’s a prick. A clever prick. He sensed I was up to something and he’s watching me like a hawk.’
‘Thanks so much for doing this for me, Zoe.’
She groaned. ‘I feel like I’ve let you down.’
‘That’s good actually,’ I said, letting her confused gaze survey me for a few seconds. ‘Now I don’t feel so bad about asking you for another favour.’
I slipped the transparent pouch out of my pocket and into her ha
nds. She studied it closely.
‘What is this?’
‘Not sure. They found it in Liz’s hair.’
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Tiny droplets on the sticky tape, between the glass.’
‘It’s virtually not there.’
‘Could you get it tested? It’s the only thing we’ve got left.’
‘What are you hoping it is?’
‘I don’t know. They found those bits inside her head injuries. It’s a long shot but maybe it’ll lead us to the murder weapon.’
‘I doubt there’s enough here to properly identify it,’ she said, hauling herself back up, ‘but I’ll do my best.’
She turned to me, her big eyes smiling.
‘I had a really good time last night, Donal. Thank you. It’s been a while since I’ve laughed so hard.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Hey, there’s some lovely pubs round here. Why don’t we do it again some evening, after you finish work?’
She beamed. ‘That’d be great.’
I remembered yesterday’s ‘seize the day’ pep talk from Fintan, squeezed my fists and blurted: ‘What about tonight?’
Her smile flicked to low beam. ‘It’s tricky. I’d have to make arrangements.’
I wondered what she meant by that.
‘Let me know, either way,’ I said, reaching into my pocket for a business card. ‘It sounds like you can’t really talk when I call. Maybe you can call me, you know, when clever prick isn’t spying on you.’
‘When is a good time for you?’
‘With you on the other end, Zoe, any time at all!’
‘I’m just going over to that bin now, to puke.’
‘Hey, that’s about as romantic as I get.’
‘Thank God for that.’
Her smile fell away. She lingered, opened her mouth and closed it again, like a singer who’d forgotten the words.
‘If it’s tricky …’ I started.
‘No, it’s fine, really,’ said Zoe, nodding uncertainly. ‘It’s just that there’s something I need to talk to you about actually. Before, you know, we decide if we want to … take things further.’
‘Well, as long as it’s not a venereal disease,’ I chirped, immediately regretting it.
