by Neil White
There were small signs of affluence though. The streets were busy with workmen in overalls and young office girls heading out to work, calling in for newspapers or cigarettes at the grocer’s. There were porch extensions, gleaming double-glazing, new garden walls. The estate wasn’t just for lost causes. A private security van patrolled every thirty minutes, with bald men in black jackets who stared at Jack as they went past. Maybe Dolby wasn’t going to get the article he wanted.
Jack climbed out of his car and wandered towards the shop, looking for some local views. Outside the shop, a young mother stood over her pram with a cigarette in her hand, cheap gold flashing on each finger, her hair pulled back tightly.
Jack gave the door of the shop a push. It let out a tinkle as he went in, and he pretended to browse through the magazines until the shop became empty. He went to the counter.
The man behind it barely looked up. Middle-aged and with a cigarette-stained moustache, he was flicking through a newspaper and only stopped reading when Jack coughed.
‘Jack Garrett,’ he said, and tried a smile. ‘I’m a reporter, writing about the estate.’ He pointed towards the windows. ‘What’s it like for you, with the grilles and the bars?’
He stared at Jack, weighing up whether to answer or not. ‘The council ruined this place,’ he said, eventually.
‘How so?’
‘Because they turned it into a dumping ground,’ he said. ‘Have everyone in one place, so they said.’
‘Have you been here long?’
‘More than twenty years,’ he said. ‘I inherited it from my father, back when this was a decent place to live.’
‘What went wrong?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like people want to work anymore. The young girls get a house when they get pregnant, but the father never moves in. Or, at least, that’s what they tell everyone, but I see them leaving in the morning.’
‘I see people heading out to work,’ Jack said. ‘It doesn’t seem that destitute.’
‘There are still some people left that make me proud to live here, but it’s getting harder every day.’
‘Why is that?’
‘The kids,’ he said. ‘They hang around here all evening, circling customers on their bikes, asking people to buy their booze and fags for them, because I know most are too young. If I try and get rid of them, I get abuse. All my customers want is to come in and buy some milk or something, maybe some cans for later, but the kids put them off.’
‘Have you spoken to their parents?’ Jack said.
The shopkeeper gave a wry smile. ‘Drunk most of the time.’
Jack returned the smile and guessed his predicament. ‘You sell them the booze,’ he said.
‘They’d only go somewhere else for it. And they do mostly, stocking up on the three-for-two offers. They come here when they run out, or when they want to start early and don’t want to drive to the supermarket.’
‘Do the police come round much?’ Jack said.
The shopkeeper scoffed. ‘Hardly ever, and when they do, the kids treat it like a game, looking for a chase. They shout abuse and then starburst whenever the van doors open. Sometimes one of them trips and the police catch them, but nothing ever happens.’
‘Is that why the estate has private security?’ Jack said.
‘It makes people feel safer.’
‘Who pays for it?’
‘Whoever wants it.’
‘What about drugs?’ Jack said. ‘Could the police be doing more about that around here?’
‘No, not drugs around here,’ he said. ‘Maybe some weed, but it’s booze mainly. Always has been. I’m not saying that no one round here does drugs, but the kids that cycle around causing trouble aren’t on drugs. They’re pissed.’
‘You don’t paint a glowing picture,’ Jack said.
He nodded to the voice recorder in Jack’s hand. ‘And I bet you won’t either, by the time it makes the paper.’
When Jack started to protest, the shopkeeper jabbed his finger at the paper. ‘I read them as well as sell them, and I’ve seen the way the Telegraph has gone.’ Then he returned to whatever had occupied his attention before.
Jack turned away, frustrated, and left the shop. He watched the cars heading in and out of the estate. They were mainly old Vauxhalls and Fords, most driven by young men who didn’t look like they could afford the insurance. His phone buzzed in his pocket. When he checked the screen and saw that it was Dolby, he thought about not answering, but he knew he needed to keep on Dolby’s good side.
He pressed the button. ‘Dolby, what can I do for you?’
‘There’s been another murder,’ he said, his voice a little breathless. ‘A young woman.’
Jack paused as he tried to work out what he meant, but then his mind flashed back to the young woman found in a pipe by the reservoir on the edge of town a few weeks earlier, a gruesome find for a father and son on an angling trip.
‘Whereabouts?’
Dolby told him, and Jack realised that he was only half a mile away.
‘Do you want me to cover it?’ Jack said.
‘I’m not calling to spread the gossip,’ Dolby said, some irritation in his voice.
‘On my way,’ Jack said, and jabbed at the off button.
He gave the shopkeeper a smile, but there was no response.
Chapter Three
It was just after nine-thirty as Laura McGanity looked around at the scene in front of her and tried to shake away the nerves. Someone had died, and now it was for her to show that she deserved her sergeant stripes. Nine months in uniform, working in the community, but now she was back where she wanted to be, on the murder squad. And even though this was a tragedy, she felt a familiar excitement as she took in the blue-and-white police tape stretched tight around the trees and the huddle of police in boiler suits holding sticks, ready for the slow crawl through the undergrowth, looking for scraps of evidence – a footprint, a dropped piece of paper, maybe a snag of cloth on the thorns and branches. This was it, the start of the investigation, the human drama yet to unfold.
She had pulled on her paper coveralls, put paper bootees over her shoes, and now her breaths were hot against her cheeks behind the face mask. But Laura knew the excitement wouldn’t last long, because in a moment she would face the lifeless body lying in a small copse of trees behind the new brick of a housing development, just visible as a flash of pink in the green. Then the tragedy would hit her, but for now it was all about concentration, so that she didn’t miss something crucial.
Joe Kinsella came up behind her, poised and still, his face hidden, the hood pulled over his hair. His eyes, soft brown, showed a smile, and then he said in a muffled voice, ‘C’mon, detective sergeant. Let’s see what there is.’
Laura smiled back, invisible behind the mask. The title still felt new, but as Joe set off she realised that the back-patting would have to be put on hold for the moment.
The ground sloped down to a small ribbon of dirty brown water that ran into underground pipes that carried it under the houses. Sycamore and horse chestnut trees filled the scene with shadows. Ivy trailed across the floor like tripwire, but Joe strode quickly through it, crunching it underfoot, in contrast to the soft rustles of Laura’s suit as she trotted to catch up. Laura was grateful that it was dry, or else she imagined she would have found herself skidding towards the small patch of pink by the edge of the stream.
The body had been found by teenagers, looking for somewhere to do whatever they did in the woods, and since then the area had swarmed with police and crime scene investigators, the ghoulish and idly curious hovering on the street. There was a detective posing as a journalist, mingling with those craning their necks to get a view, snapping pictures of the onlookers, in the hope that the killer might be among them, having come back to marvel at his work. That had been Joe’s idea.
As Laura reached the body, she saw that her inspector, Karl Carson, was there. Karl was large and bombast
ic, shiny bald, no eyebrows, his blue eyes glaring from the forensic hood.
‘Looks like we’ve got another one, McGanity,’ he said, his eyes watching her, waiting for her response.
Laura sighed. That word, another. It made everything harder, because it meant that the murder wasn’t just a family falling out, or maybe a violent boyfriend faking it as a stranger attack.
Laura watched as Joe got closer to the body and kneeled down. She knew that he wasn’t looking for forensic evidence, but for those little signs, hidden clues that reveal motivation. That was Joe’s expertise: not the what, but the why. Laura was still new to the team, but she had worked with him before, and so he had eased her into the murder squad. It was good to be back doing the serious stuff. She had moved north a few years earlier, away from her detective role in the London Met, and had done the rounds of routine case mop-ups and a short spell in uniform to help grease the push for promotion, but this was where she felt most at home.
Laura kneeled down alongside Joe, and as she looked at the body, she saw that Karl Carson was right, that it confirmed everyone’s worst fear, that the murder three weeks earlier wasn’t a one-off. There were two now.
The victim was a young woman, Laura guessed, in her early twenties, more there than the skinny hips and ribs of a teenager but with none of the sag of the later years. There was a tattoo on her left wrist. A pink butterfly. The body had been hidden under bark ripped from a nearby tree, and when it had been disturbed, the kids who found her had been swamped by bluebottles. Laura gritted her teeth at the smell – a mix of vomit and off-meat, and even outdoors, with her nose shielded by a mask, the stench still made it through. As she looked at the floor, she could see the shifting blanket of woodlice and maggots spilling onto the ivy leaves, their work of turning the corpse into just mush and bones interrupted. The body’s stomach was distended by the gases brewing inside, and Laura knew that she didn’t want to be around when it was rolled onto plastic sheeting to be taken from the scene, because whatever was inside the stomach was going to come tumbling out of the mouth.
Laura peered closer to try and see the face, so that she could see more of the person and less of the corpse, but it was dirty and disfigured, and so they wouldn’t get a better idea until the post-mortem clean-up later. Laura tried to be scientific and dispassionate, but she knew that the sight of a healthy young woman who had been mutilated was something that would come back to her in quieter moments.
Laura took a deep breath, more heat through the mask, and tried to take in what she could.
The woman was naked, the clothes taken away, no sign of them torn up and thrown to one side. Just like with the other one. There were bruises on her body, grazes and scrapes that might have come from a struggle, along with small cuts on her stomach and legs, but it wasn’t those that drew her eye. It was her mouth. It was stretched, with soil and leaves jammed in so that it looked like the dead woman had choked on the ground, her cheeks puffed out. There were bruises around the neck, so Laura guessed that it was another strangulation case. Laura looked down at the woman’s hips, and she didn’t need to look too closely in order to see the dirt trails and scratches where soil and leaves had been jammed between her thighs.
It was the tears that made her angry though. The woman’s face was dirty, but there were streaks where her tears had run through the dirt as she choked on the leaves and looked up at the man who ended her life.
‘Is it another one of our own?’ Laura said.
Carson just shrugged that he didn’t know.
The first victim had been the daughter of a Blackley police officer. Gangland revenge had been ruled out, because her father was just uniform, seeing out his career patrolling in a van and doling out advice to young officers who would soon overtake him. Tales of the woman’s private life had made everyone think that it was a jealous ex-lover, or a frightened husband worried about his affair leaking out.
‘What do you think?’ Carson said.
Laura saw that his eyes were fixed on her, and she knew that it was a test. Carson was checking whether Joe had been right to ask for her to be on the team.
She took a deep breath and had another look along the body.
‘She was alive when all of that was jammed in there,’ Laura said, and pointed to the woman’s genitals.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Those scratches and scrapes along the woman’s legs have drawn blood,’ she said, and pointed towards trails of ragged skin that had since dried brown. ‘They will have been caused when he jammed the leaves and dirt up there, inside her, and so it must have happened when she was still alive. The dead don’t bleed.’
Carson gave a nod. ‘Why is that important?’
‘It makes it more likely that she was killed here rather than just dumped,’ she said. ‘And we might get some of his DNA from her thighs or face.’
‘Provided he wasn’t wearing gloves.’
Laura raised her eyebrows. ‘That goes without saying.’
Carson nodded. ‘What about the clothes?’ he said. ‘She didn’t walk down here naked.’
‘He’s got some forensic awareness, because he realised that his DNA would be all over her,’ Laura said. ‘He took the clothes away to stop him from being identified, which makes it more likely that he wore gloves, as a precaution. And he’s cool.’
‘What do you mean?’ Carson asked.
‘Look around,’ Laura said, and she pointed towards the houses that overlooked the scene. ‘All it would take is for someone to look out of their bedroom window, or even hear the struggle, and we would be down here. An eye-witness is the best we can hope for right now, unless he’s slipped up.’
‘Anything else?’
Laura looked at the body, and as she felt Carson’s stare bore into her, she tried to think of something she might have missed. Or maybe he was just trying to make her spout wild theories to use against her later. She wasn’t the only woman on the team, but she still felt like she had to prove herself for spoiling the macho party, and she’d heard the little digs that she was Joe’s new favourite.
Then it struck her.
‘If she was alive when he was filling her with soil, it meant that she wasn’t being raped when she died,’ Laura said. ‘If all of that was in there, he couldn’t have been, and so whatever he did afterwards was just to degrade her.’
Carson tilted his head and Laura saw the skin around his eyes crinkle. It looked like there was a smile there. Test passed.
Laura looked at Joe and saw that he was still staring intently at the corpse.
‘What is it, Joe?’ Carson asked.
Joe didn’t respond at first. That was just his way, quiet, contemplative, but then he rose to his feet, his knees cracking, and looked down.
‘This isn’t going to end,’ he said, his voice quiet.
‘Why do you say that?’ Laura said.
‘Because he has attacked before, and once you start, you don’t stop,’ he said.
‘We know he’s done this before,’ Carson said, his brow furrowed. ‘Three weeks ago.’
‘No, even before then,’ Joe said, and gestured towards the body with a nod of his head. ‘The signature is so fixed. The debris and soil in the vagina, the mouth, the anus. Too much like the last one. But why does he do it? No one just chances on that, the perfect method. Signatures grow and develop. This one? It’s a replica of the first.’
Carson sighed behind his mask. ‘This is sounding like a long haul,’ he said, almost to himself.
Joe shot worried glances at Laura and Carson. ‘We haven’t got the time for that,’ he said. ‘We need to catch him quickly, because the gap will shorten.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
Joe nodded. ‘These murders are three weeks apart, but identical methods were used. He’s found his style and likes it.’
‘Why is all that dirt in there?’ Laura asked.
Joe looked down at the body, then he looked at Carson, and then at Laura.
Chapter Four
Jack put his camera away as he watched the activity at the crime scene.
He had managed some shots of the white suits as they were bent over the body, knowing that Dolby would like those. And as he’d zoomed in, he’d recognised one of the white suits as Laura McGanity, his partner.
He smiled to himself. No, not partner. Fiancée. They had been engaged for a few months now, but things had changed since he’d proposed. Laura had thrown herself back into her career, and it seemed they saw each other only briefly in the house, pit-stops between her shifts. She complained that he was showing no commitment, that he was stalling about the wedding, but it was more that they didn’t have the time to talk about it. Laura wanted it low-key, because she had been married before, a marriage that produced a son, Bobby, the main brightness in their lives, eight years old now. Both of Jack’s parents were dead and so he had no one to offend by keeping it small, but it felt like it wasn’t the same big deal for her, because Laura had already had the big white wedding with all the trimmings.
As he watched her, Jack knew that Laura was the reason why Dolby had asked him to cover the story, hoping for an inside line, maybe a loose word over supper. But Jack knew better: Laura wouldn’t give anything crucial away. Having a reporter as her squeeze had caused her enough trouble before, hints and jibes that she was whispering secrets along the pillow. It would only take one lazy article, where he forgot what was official and what was secret, and Laura could lose her job.
The crowd around the police tape had grown, from the simply curious passing through, some with dogs straining on leads, the police blocking access to the usual dog-walking path, to the unemployed looking for a way to fill the day. Teenagers hung around on bikes, some just watching, others riding in tight circles, all in black, hoods drawn over their faces in spite of the warmth, laughing and talking too loudly. Young mothers smoked and gossiped, and two men at the end were drinking from a can of Tennent’s, which was passed between them as they watched the police at work. A police van drifted across the junction at the top of the street.
