Turnbull’s head flopped forward, his breathing increasing.
‘If you’re going to be sick, the bathroom’s upstairs. Anywhere else and I’ll be fucking annoyed.’
Turnbull nodded and rose from the sofa like a Hammer horror zombie from the grave. He stumbled and staggered upstairs and soon Donovan heard the unmistakable sounds of vomiting. He smiled to himself, taking pleasure in the other man’s obvious discomfort.
Shame the coffee was still standing, though, he thought.
Nattrass looked around, wondering what colour to describe the building before her. It had once been 1980s beige with red trim but years of natural and man-made wear and tear had leached that to something more muted. Some kind of dirty yellow, perhaps: pub ceiling? Old computer monitor? She didn’t know. And didn’t want to spend any more time speculating. That wasn’t what she was here for.
The offices of the Blood Transfusion Service stood just off Barrack Road between the BBC Television Centre and a BMW dealership on the fringes of Leazes Park. The washed-out slab-fronted building was enlivened by appropriately blood-red lettering announcing what it was. A car park sat in front. And, on a lamppost in the car park, hung a body. Naked. Female. Mutilated. Dead.
Even without tests they all knew it was.
Jill Tennant.
DI Nattrass pulled her coat around her. She had showered at the station and changed into the spare set of clothes she kept there. She knew her unit were required to dress more smartly; suits and ties, as if the murder squad were a judicial accounting team for balancing the body count, but she had no option. She wore jeans and boots, a waist-length fauxfur-trimmed parka and a scarf. Her hair was pulled back and tucked down the neck of her hood. No one would say anything about her violation of the dress code. Just let them try.
That morning’s briefing never took place. Instead, a call had come through from a security guard at the Blood Transfusion Centre saying something had been left hanging on a lamppost. He had seen it on his CCTV screen from inside the building and thought it the work of students from the halls of residence nearby having a laugh. It was only after a sustained period of observation that he had decided to leave his cosy office and brave the cold night air to look at it and plan to take it down. On approaching he had thought it was very realistically done. On getting close enough to touch and smell it, he had thrown up, run back inside and called the police.
SOCO had cordoned the area off and, along with forensics, were trying to pick up what clues the security man hadn’t trampled away. They weren’t expecting to find many.
And yet …
There was something different about this one. The body just strung up and left. Not so carefully arranged. More hurried. Less planned. And if that was the case, if he was getting more slapdash, then he was more likely to make mistakes.
She gestured to DS Deborah Howe, the SOCO senior manager. She crossed over to Nattrass, a couple of vermilion and mahogany spikes sticking out from behind her white hood, and waited impatiently for her to speak.
‘Yes?’ Making it quite clear she was in the middle of something important.
‘You found anything?’
‘Not much, not so far.’ She looked around, anxious to get back.
‘From here it looks more rushed. Like he just dumped the body and ran.’
Howe nodded. ‘We’re checking for footprints on the bank side and in that mud up there. Don’t worry, whatever we find, we’ll let you know.’
‘Check for wheel marks,’ Nattrass said in response to an urgent hunch.
Howe was trying to establish an insulted look. ‘We always do.’
‘No, smaller ones. Like, like a pram. Or a wheelchair. On the path, the bank side, wherever.’
Howe nodded, walked back over to the rest of her team, resumed her work.
Nattrass looked around again. Questions were forming. Why here? Why now? He was sending a message, she was sure of it. Something to do with blood? Death, in some way? She didn’t know. She wished Turnbull were with her. He’d be good to bounce questions off. Admittedly he was an annoying bastard at times but a good copper and a loyal member of the team.
Or had been.
She looked again at the body. Wondered, not for the first time, just what would drive someone to do that to another living person. What horrors had been inflicted on an individual to make them see other human beings as just slabs of meat to be carved up. She shook her head. Those were dangerously liberal thoughts for a DI, and there was no Turnbull to temper them with his tabloid logic. She thought she had better keep them to herself in case they got out of hand.
Her train was broken by the hurried arrival of DC Stone. He was almost running in his haste to reach her.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, almost out of breath.
She turned, irritated. She hated being called ‘ma’am’. Made her sound like Jean Brodie. ‘Yes?’
‘We’ve got him, ma’am. We’ve got him.’ He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice.
He hurried back to the main building.
She didn’t need any invitation to follow him.
‘So to what do I owe this pleasure?’
Over an hour had passed. Philip and Fern were soothing the nation on the TV. Donovan was sitting in the armchair. Turnbull had followed his vomiting session with a shower. He had emerged, found the combats, T-shirt and fleece Donovan had left on the landing for him and, despite the fact that he was smaller than Donovan, had put them on. His own clothes were stinking and filthy. The gesture wasn’t completely altruistic: Donovan had deliberately dug out his old Kurt Cobain T-shirt just to see Turnbull wearing it. Turnbull seemed too semi-detached to realize he was having the piss taken out of him. He sat on the edge of the sofa regarding a replacement mug of coffee with suspicion.
Donovan turned the TV off. He didn’t feel that his life would be particularly enriched by hearing gossip from the set of Coronation Street. Turnbull wouldn’t have come to his house if it wasn’t serious. If it wasn’t the last resort. The policeman had the look of someone who needed to confess. Donovan, with no attempt at niceties, ploughed on.
‘I presume this isn’t a social call,’ Donovan said.
Turnbull’s eyes were downcast. He looked at the floor and when he spoke his words were mumbled.
‘I’m in trouble,’ he said quietly. ‘Big trouble.’ His voice sounded scratched and crackly; he took a sip of coffee, realized he wasn’t about to bring it up again, took another. Said nothing more.
‘What kind of trouble?’
Another mouthful of coffee, then he replaced the mug. ‘I nearly stepped over the line.’
He said nothing more. Donovan waited.
‘Michael Nell … I was gonna …’ He sighed. ‘Gonna have him.’
‘Did you?’
Another sigh. Turnbull shook his head. ‘I wanted to. I followed him. But I lost him. Looked everywhere for him, everywhere … But … I was pissed. Too pissed to see. I collapsed. Somewhere. A bus shelter, I think.’ He gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Lucky I wasn’t picked up, put in a cell for the night by one of my lot.’ Another sigh. ‘My lot …’
‘You sure you didn’t do something to Nell? Did it in a raging, drunken, blackout?’
‘That’s what I thought at first. I went over and over it. Checked me hands, me clothes, nothing.’ He looked up, briefly caught Donovan’s eye. ‘There would have been marks, believe me. Lots of them.’
‘So what happened next?’
Turnbull took another mouthful of coffee. ‘I was going to go back to work, turn up at the station and face the music, even if I got kicked off the investigation. But by the time I’d found my car and put the radio on, they were saying that Michael Nell had disappeared. Well, I knew I couldn’t go back then. Couldn’t go back anywhere.’
‘Why didn’t you go home?’ As Donovan asked the question he realized how little he knew of Turnbull outside of work. He presumed he had a wife, probably a family, but the subject had never been ra
ised.
Turnbull gave another humourless snort. ‘Home? What home? There’s nothin’ left there. The wife hates me, she’s turned the kids against me … What the fuck would I go there for?’
Donovan nodded, realizing now why Turnbull had never spoken about it.
‘I thought of going to Peta’s.’ He gave a quick, shifty glance at Donovan to see how he took that one. Donovan said nothing. ‘But I didn’t. Thought I’d get the same reception there.’
‘What about Di? Didn’t you contact her?’
‘I tried. Phoned her mobile. Got no answer. I knew she’d phone me back but I … didn’t know what to say. What I could do. So I turned the phone off. Bottled it. I had nowhere else to go. Nowhere.’
‘So you turned up here and let yourself in.’
‘I had nowhere else to go …’
‘And drank all my whisky.’
‘I’ll replace it …’
‘Yeah, with cheap shit, probably.’
Turnbull gave another sigh. ‘I’m fucked. Completely fucked …’
Donovan regarded the sad lump of humanity before him, left slumped and broken on the sofa like an old sack of decaying potatoes. He had always felt that underneath the right-wing, chauvinistic, alpha male bluster, Turnbull was a more fragile construct than he was letting on. But Donovan still hadn’t been prepared for the depth of self-pity the man was currently wallowing in. Drowning in, even.
‘So what you going to do now?’ Donovan asked.
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I can’t … I don’t …’ He slumped further down in the sofa, almost unrecognizable now. And then the tears started.
Donovan couldn’t leave him like this. Someone would have to do something, and if there were no other volunteers it would have to be him.
Oh, joy, he thought.
He mentally flicked through several approaches on how to talk to him, decided on one that was likely to work best.
‘And you can stop that feeling sorry for yourself shit right now,’ said Donovan.
Turnbull looked up. His eyes looked wet and startled, like headlamps in a muddy pool.
‘Pull yourself together. You’re no use to me like that.’
Turnbull frowned. ‘Use to you? Fuck you talkin’ about?’
‘You’ve got to move on.’
The tears were halting, drying on Turnbull’s cheeks. ‘Move on? Fuck you talkin’ about?’
‘I’ve got a job on. Need some help. Don’t know if I can pay you, though, might be on a volunteer basis.’
Turnbull seemed to be mulling over the offer. Then his head dropped, his face cradled by his hand. ‘I should be out there doin’ somethin’. I should be back at work … not this …’
‘Yeah, you should. But you’re not. And you can’t. And you can’t stay here and wallow in your own self-pity. So d’you want to help me or not?’
Turnbull looked at the coffee mug, at the near-empty whisky bottle Donovan had deliberately left on the floor as a reminder of the previous night. He swallowed hard, breathed out through his nose.
‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘What we doin’? What kind of job?’
‘Missing person.’
‘Who?’
‘Michael Nell.’
It took a few seconds for the name to sink in, but when it did Turnbull let loose a broad grin.
‘Lead the fuckin’ way,’ he said.
DI Nattrass bent over the desk, watching the screen intently.
It was grainy, blurry: the early-morning/late-night rain rendering the image a static-filled bad TV reception, any figures moving like ghosts.
‘There.’
DC Stone pointed. The machine operator pressed the pause button. The image on the screen froze. A blurred figure, a dark blob of grey against a slightly lighter background stood before them.
‘Now advance, slowly.’ DC Stone again.
The operator complied. The figure moved ahead in jerky slow motion. Like watching a flicker book with the pages missing.
‘There!’ Nattrass almost shouted. ‘Look!’
She could barely contain the excitement rising inside her. They watched: as eyes became accustomed to what was on the screen, the figure became more distinct. It was a man, dressed in a hat and a long overcoat.
Pushing a wheelchair.
‘Yes!’
Both the operator and DC Stone cast her a quizzical look. She was too pumped with adrenalin to give a coherent explanation, breathing too heavily to care if her words made sense.
‘Went through the witness statements. Found him there at every scene. Knew it. Knew it …’
The picture advanced, frame by frame. The overcoated figure pushed the wheelchair and its covered, seated occupant up to the lamppost, then looked around.
‘Get a frame grab of that, get it blown up. See if we can get some detail off it.’ See if it resembles Michael Nell, she thought.
Stone nodded. The picture advanced.
The figure, satisfied that no one was watching him, pulled the covering back from the prone, broken body of Jill Tennant.
‘That poor girl …’ said the CCTV operator. ‘Got a kid about her age meself. Makes you think, all this.’
Nattrass nodded, urging him to keep going. He did so.
Jill Tennant’s body had been rigged to hang and tied with rope. The hatted figure threw the coiled rope up and over the curving top of the lamppost, made sure it didn’t slide off and threw it around again to make a second loop. He pulled the rope tight, heaved down. Jill Tennant’s body left the chair and began to be hauled up. It was slow going; he didn’t seem to be very strong and the body looked heavier than anticipated.
‘Wimp,’ said Stone. No one argued.
He kept pulling until he had the body hoisted up.
‘Persistent wimp, though,’ said the operator.
Eventually the body hung there. He tied the rope off, stood back to check his handiwork, gave an admiring nod, turned and quickly made his way back up the street with the wheelchair. He was soon out of shot and gone.
Nattrass sat back, heaved a huge sigh of bitter vindication. She turned to Stone.
‘See if there’s any footage from other cameras in the area. Try to get a picture of where he came from, where he went back to. Get forensics on the moor over the road. Maybe he went that way, maybe he left tracks. Then if that’s the case start a door to door with the houses over the other side of the moor. We’ve got a description now, maybe a face shot. Someone’ll remember those clothes. Get him tracked down, get him found.’
She turned to the tape operator. ‘Thanks for your help. We really appreciate it.’
The man seemed to be in shock. He nodded numbly.
She looked again at the screen. At the figure, frozen before his victim. She tried to guess his features, see the expression on his face. She was still breathing heavily.
‘We’ll get you, you bastard. We’ll get you.’
34
Peta looked at the empty coat stand. No hat, coat and scarf. No sign of the Prof.
The seminar room had a dark, depressing atmosphere. Some might have said funereal, but not Peta. Funerals, in her experience, involved families consisting of relative strangers standing around in curtained living rooms eating curled sandwiches and making the smallest of small talk.
Perhaps that’s just me, she thought. Or perhaps I haven’t lost anyone who was really close to me.
This room was nothing like that. There was a space where Jill should have sat, some empty chairs and the remaining ones filled with students wearing numbed, fear-deadened expressions. Things like this didn’t happen to them. Or to their friends.
News of the discovery of a body was doing the rounds. Details were vague or non-existent but that hadn’t been allowed to get in the way of a good story. By the time the news had Chinese-whispered its way around to Peta’s group of Jill’s fellow classmates, the body was definitely that of Jill and all manner of unspeakable acts had been committed on her before she die
d.
Let them speculate, thought Peta. Can’t be any worse than what actually happened to her.
Peta felt like she had a rock inside her. Jill. She kept thinking of her. She hadn’t known the girl long but had come to really like her. And now she was gone. Peta knew that, felt it. The same way Donovan had known the body in Wales wasn’t that of his son. She had cried before coming to college, tears for Jill. Sadness had turned to anger, though, and now it sat like a knotted ball of razor wire in the pit of her stomach. She was going to use that anger. She was going to get payback for Jill.
The campus was awash on a sea of horror and revulsion, fear and excitement. And on a state of high alert. The extra security guards were still throwing their weight around with extra gusto; stopping any infraction of imagined rules and regulations, forcing people to take the most circuitous route possible, examining student passes with the same rigorous attention to detail that they would use if they were trying to stop terrorists entering the UN building.
Peta had seen the guard she had had the altercation with a few days previously. He was stationed at a different doorway from the one she wanted to enter. She looked at him and in return felt his eyes follow her across the quadrangle and into the main building.
Sad little bastard, she thought. Probably how he gets his rocks off.
She turned the corner, didn’t give him another thought.
In the seminar room, they all waited. Conversation peaked and troughed about Jill until the subject was just about exhausted. Peta tried not to join in, kept her feelings for the girl to herself. Then speculation turned to the no-show of the Prof. They were collectively building up to nominating someone to go down to his office and see if he was there when the door opened and in he came.
‘Apologies, apologies, one and all …’
He began the ritual of taking off his hat, scarf and coat.
‘Some … some other business which … demanded my attention.’
He sat down behind the desk. Normally he would have been removing textbooks from his antique briefcase but he made no effort to do so. Instead he looked out at his class. Individually. One by one his eyes fell on them, his lips moving silently as if making an incantation, giving a blessing.
Bone Machine Page 28
