Cold Sacrifice

by Leigh Russell

Even though there wasn’t much traffic, it took Ian just over half an hour to drive to work. He drew into the car park and ran along the corridor to the Major Incident Room. The rest of the team were already there, waiting for the detective chief inspector. Ian breathed a silent sigh of relief. The detective inspector threw him an icy glare which Ian ignored. He had arrived in time. The briefing hadn’t started yet. Detective Constable Polly Mortimer smiled at him.

  ‘You haven’t missed anything,’ she muttered, as she flicked her dark brown hair back from her face.

  Ian nodded gratefully. He wasn’t even late. But it had been a close thing.

  Seconds later the detective chief inspector strode into the room. Poker-faced, he brought the assembled officers up to speed, speaking in a rapid monotone. Ian had to listen carefully so as not to miss anything. Glancing around, he saw his colleagues all leaning forwards, intent on the senior investigating officer’s words. The body of a woman aged mid-to-late fifties had been discovered in a park, stabbed to death.

  ‘There’s no question we’re dealing with an unlawful killing,’ the detective chief inspector concluded. ‘So what we need to do now is establish the identity of the victim and nail whoever did this. Any questions?’

  ‘Wasn’t there anything on the victim to identify her?’ someone asked.

  The chief inspector shook his head.

  ‘She had no keys, no purse, nothing on her at all, which suggests it could have been a mugging that went wrong. Scene of crime officers are busy right now, so check with the duty sergeant, and let’s get started.’

  There was a sudden air of bustle. Everyone knew it was important to gather information promptly, before the trail went cold.

  6

  IAN STARED MOROSELY AT the back of the detective inspector’s head as they crossed the car park. Remembering his wife’s unfounded suspicions about his relationship with his attractive former detective inspector, he supposed he should be relieved his new inspector was a dour-faced middle-aged man. He wondered what Bev would say if he ended up working with a young female constable, like Polly. She would certainly be a more attractive partner than Rob. It wasn’t that Ian fancied her, but he appreciated her cheerful nature and wicked sense of humour.

  Rob sat in silence as Ian drove to the site where a woman’s body had been discovered earlier that evening. ‘Park’ was a rather grandiose name for a scrubby area of grass beside a lake. An overgrown copse of trees and reeds grew in unattractive disorder on an artificial island in the centre of the water. Empty bottles and cans floated on the surface of the scummy water, beside which a sign warned the public to: ‘Keep children and pets away from the water. The Environment Agency has advised that there may be blue-green algae present’. A white forensic tent stood on the path at the water’s edge, another blight on the scene. Even in the fresh night air, the breeze carried a foul stench.

  ‘It stinks here,’ Rob muttered, wrinkling his nose, as they pulled on their white protective suits and blue shoes before entering the tent. Ian shivered and wished he had thought to put on a coat before rushing out of the house. He shrugged and turned his attention to the job.

  Inside the tent, white-clad scene of crime officers had gathered in a huddle. Between their hunched backs Ian could see a woman lying on a bench. She could have been asleep were it not for a large blood stain on her T-shirt.

  ‘It looks like she was stabbed through the heart,’ one of the SOCOs said. ‘A doctor’s been and gone but he just stopped long enough to certify she’s dead. He said there was no point in his hanging around as there’ll be an autopsy.’

  Ian frowned impatiently. He wished he had been given a chance to speak to the doctor then and there.

  ‘Can we move the body yet?’ another SOCO asked. ‘The mortuary van’s waiting.’

  ‘Give us a minute,’ Rob said. ‘Was she killed here, do you think?’

  ‘There’s no sign she was moved after she was stabbed, but it’s difficult to say with any degree of certainty because there was a heavy downpour earlier on. The path in front of the bench slopes towards the lake, so it’s impossible to say how much blood could have been washed into the water.’

  ‘Surely there’ll be traces?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll find traces but it might not be possible to ascertain how much blood there was. If we find enough evidence to establish she was killed here, all well and good, but it could be inconclusive if we don’t.’

  Ian shivered again and thrust his hands into the sleeves of his protective suit. Despite the cold, he didn’t object to a few moments’ delay. Even though they couldn’t tell much before seeing a full post mortem report, it was useful to study the body at the site of the murder, to help them build an impression of what had happened there. He tried to focus on the victim. As far as he could tell, the dead woman had been slender and short. Her dark grey hair was streaked with chestnut brown that glimmered in the bright lights. Pulled back off her face, it gave her a severe appearance. Ian guessed her eyes were also brown but they were closed, as though she was sleeping peacefully. She had small neat features, well-proportioned, and must have been quite attractive when she was younger. In death her face looked ghastly, grey and somehow shrunken, as though her cheeks had collapsed inwards. Dressed in muddy white trainers, a navy track suit and white T-shirt drenched in blood, she was wearing a plain gold wedding ring. No other jewellery was visible, not even a watch.

  ‘Have we found a murder weapon?’ Rob’s voice broke his concentration.

  ‘Not yet,’ a SOCO replied. ‘We’re still looking.’

  ‘Have you come across anything that might point us in the right direction?’

  The SOCO shook his head. The body had been reported by a group of teenagers who had gone to the park to ‘hang out’. Several officers had queried what the youngsters had been doing, out on the streets so late at night. It was unfortunate there had been eight or nine of them, trampling around the area, destroying or contaminating any potential evidence. In addition, they needed a statement from a man who claimed to have arrived first on the scene, shortly before the gang of kids turned up. It was going to be a long night.

  Ian was still staring at the woman.

  ‘Was she lying on her back like that when she was found?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, but she wasn’t killed in that position,’ a SOCO replied. ‘The pattern of blood on her shirt and trousers suggests she was stabbed in the chest while she was in an upright position. It looks as though she was stabbed from directly in front, and then she fell onto her side. You can see the indentations from the bench on her face. She must have been moved onto her back some time after she died.’

  ‘So someone turned her over onto her back after she was dead?’ Ian repeated. ‘It’s quite possible whoever did that wasn’t the killer. Do we know for certain those teenagers didn’t disturb the body?’ He turned to the SOCO. ‘Or is it possible someone else turned her over?’

  The SOCO shrugged.

  ‘I can’t say if someone else came along.’

  ‘But why would they have turned her over and then just left her?’ Rob asked.

  ‘To see who she was, or maybe to get at her pockets,’ Ian mused aloud. ‘She could have been robbed after she was dead, by someone other than the killer.’

  ‘Or maybe her pockets were emptied to stop her being identified,’ Rob suggested.

  They discussed possible scenarios for a few minutes, but at this stage they could only speculate.

  There was nothing else the SOCO team could tell them. After staring helplessly at the dead woman for a few minutes longer, Ian followed the inspector out of the tent. They couldn’t walk around the park area, which was being searched for footprints or any other evidence the killer might have left behind. The group of teenagers who had stumbled on the body were standing together just outside the park, under the watchful eye of a female constable. Ian suspected the youngsters might have shifted the dead woman’s position in order to comb through her pockets, although they all st
renuously denied having gone anywhere near the corpse. Ian and Rob took their details and questioned them briefly on the pavement.

  One of the girls shuddered, while another squealed in horror.

  ‘I ain’t going nowhere near that old stiff. Catch me!’

  ‘He ain’t telling you to go near it, bitch,’ one of the boys said. ‘The pig wants to know if she was like that before or what.’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before we was there.’

  ‘Well, if we wasn’t there, how are we supposed to know what she was like? Them pigs is well thick.’

  ‘That’s why they’re pigs, innit?’

  ‘Hey, you,’ Rob interrupted sternly, ‘watch your mouth or you’ll be spending the night in a cell.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ The boy turned to his mates. ‘Is he threatening me? That’s police harassment, innit? You all heard it.’

  No one bothered to answer.

  They dismissed the group of teenagers. Now it was time to leave, Ian was unaccountably reluctant to go. He stood by the entrance to the park area, gazing around.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Rob asked.

  Ian shook his head. He wasn’t looking for anything specific. If there was any evidence to be found, the search team would discover it. He just wanted to get a feel of the place, to give the murder scene some kind of existence in his mind. But although the victim was real enough, it was impossible to visualise her killer without knowing anything more. They didn’t even know if she had been stabbed to death by a man or a woman.

  ‘Come on,’ Rob said, after Ian had been standing silently observing the sparse grass and withered bushes. ‘Let’s make a move. See if we can get some sleep tonight. We don’t want to be done in before we even get started.’

  But the investigation had already started, and so far it wasn’t going well.

  ‘An anonymous victim, no sign of the killer, no witnesses, and no murder weapon,’ Rob said grimly before he walked off with a constable who was driving him back to the police station.

  7

  ROB SET OFF BACK to the station to write up his report, leaving Ian to question the old man who had been in the park when the teenagers had found the victim. Ian sympathised with the witness. It was difficult enough for Ian to view bodies at a crime scene or in the mortuary with his colleagues, when he knew what to expect. It must be traumatic to see a body without any warning, when you were out by yourself. Ian thought back to the first corpse he had seen, spreadeagled on a table in the morgue. Horribly white, its chest neatly slit open, the body had barely looked human. The clinical approach adopted by his colleagues ought to have made the situation easier for Ian to deal with, but he had struggled to reach the toilet before he threw up. He had managed to get his reactions under control since that first embarrassing incident, and was fairly confident he had succeeded in keeping his nausea a secret from his colleagues. But he had to resign himself to his predicament. He would never feel comfortable in the presence of death, and he came up against it regularly in the course of his work.

  The streets around the park area had been cordoned off. The witness was standing just outside the park, beside a uniformed constable. Neither of them was talking. Old and frail, Frank Whittaker’s distress was evident. He was unnaturally pale and was smoking feverishly, exhaling out of one side of his mouth to avoid blowing smoke in the constable’s face. In his youth Whittaker must have been a hefty bloke, but his frame was bowed, as though aged by a serious illness. He looked up apprehensively when Ian went over and addressed him by name. The cigarette trembled in his hand, and he looked cowed, as though he had been caught out doing something wrong, although there was no reason to suspect he was implicated in the stabbing. Ian reassured Whittaker that he only wanted to ask him a few questions about what he had seen.

  Despite his nervous manner, Whittaker’s account was straight-forward.

  ‘I go out every evening, unless it’s really raining hard, and sometimes even then. My wife insists I need to get out of the house more, since I retired. She isn’t happy unless I go out for a brisk walk, twice a day, morning and evening. Doctor’s orders. But the truth is I don’t go as far as she thinks.’ He gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I only walk as far as the park where I can sit on a bench and have a quiet smoke. The wife doesn’t approve, you see. So I have a smoke in peace, she thinks I’m getting my daily exercise, and we’re both happy.’

  After taking a long drag on his cigarette, he chucked it on the ground, crushing it beneath his shoe.

  Although Ian hadn’t asked what he was doing there, he seemed to think he ought to account for his presence.

  ‘I come here because it isn’t far, and it’s usually quiet. There’s sometimes kids hanging around but they usually turn up later on. Apart from that there’s never anyone here in the evening, and there’s a bench to sit on, if it’s not wet. So I came here this evening, like I often do, and blow me if there wasn’t someone sitting on the bench in the rain. There’s never anyone there.’ He paused.

  ‘What do you remember next?’

  ‘I remember I was surprised, because I never saw anyone sitting there before, not in the evening. And who would want to sit on a park bench in the rain? So I took a look as I was walking by –’

  He hesitated.

  Ian looked up from his notebook and saw that the witness was looking down at his hands as he fumbled with his cigarette packet.

  ‘What did you see?’

  He waited for him to finish fidgeting with his lighter. The end of the cigarette made glowing patterns in the night air as Whittaker gesticulated while he spoke.

  ‘I was looking straight at her as I walked past, because, like I said, I was curious. I looked her straight in the eye as I went past. She didn’t even blink and I couldn’t help noticing she wasn’t moving. Then I saw a dark stain on the front of her jacket and went closer to see if she was all right. I think I already knew she was dead, really. She was so still. I mean, it’s not natural for a woman not to react in any way when a strange man approaches and stares at her, is it?’

  Concerned and curious, he had craned his neck forward for a closer look. As he did so, a cloud had drifted away from the moon, throwing a shaft of light down on the inert figure on the bench. When she didn’t respond to his calling out, he had taken a step nearer and tapped her gingerly on the shoulder. Still she didn’t react. As he dithered, he had heard voices and shouts of laughter from a gang of teenagers loitering nearby. There was no way back to the street without risk of being spotted, so he hid behind a tree trunk and waited for an opportunity to get away.

  ‘Why did you hide?’

  ‘I was scared of being mugged. And seeing that dead woman had me all shook up.’

  He had little else to tell. The kids had started jeering at the woman on the bench, then one of the girls started screaming and that set them all off. Next thing Whittaker knew, they were all on their phones, summoning the police.

  ‘Why didn’t you call us?’

  ‘I haven’t got my phone on me. Don’t tell my wife, will you? She’ll kill me if she knows I’ve come out without it.’

  8

  FROM THE OUTSIDE IT was a perfectly normal detached house in Canterbury Road, an ordinary residential street. Even now, when he opened the gate, he felt a tremor of apprehension in case he had come to the wrong address. It was hard to believe that behind its closed curtains this place was sacred. The property was reasonably well maintained, although behind a tall hedge the garden had been left to run wild. Grasses and brambles grew to waist height with here and there a flowering weed providing a bright splash of colour against an urban wilderness of foliage. The path, cracked and uneven, was barely visible between the encroaching plants. He approached the front door with a familiar sense of awe, knocked three times, paused, then knocked again. It was opened by a tall man dressed in black who gazed at him with a stern expression.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve come to see the
leader.’

  ‘Everyone wants to see the leader.’

  As the door swung closed behind them, a girl came running down the stairs. She had long fair hair and looked very young.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked in her turn.

  ‘I’ve come to see the leader.’

  ‘Everyone wants to see the leader.’

  He had hoped to be taken to the leader straight away, but he wasn’t going to complain about being greeted by a female disciple. It was better than waiting alone. Without a word he followed the girl upstairs to a small bedroom where she slipped out of her robe and welcomed him to the house. The bed was narrow and had a musty smell but the girl was sweetly perfumed and lithe.

  When she was getting dressed again, he repeated his request to see the leader.

  ‘Everyone wants to see the leader,’ she replied with a dreamy smile.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he protested. ‘I’ve waited long enough. Tell him I’ve earned the right to see him. I’ve done what he asked.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  The girl skipped away leaving him to pace impatiently up and down the narrow space between the small bed and a grey plastic chair in what was more of a box room than a bedroom. The walls were bare, apart from a picture of the leader who stared down at him with huge dark eyes. His skin looked white in the picture, but there was nothing weak about his expression. He remembered the first time he had met the leader in the street, apparently by accident. Since then he had studied the leader’s teachings and knew that nothing happened by chance.

  After a long time, the girl returned. Smiling, she held out a white robe identical to her own.

  ‘Put this on. The leader will see you now.’

  He stood up, experiencing an unexpected flicker of fear. Everything had seemed so clear the last time the leader had spoken to him. Having sent the other disciples away, the leader had put his request very simply.