Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

  Each of the teams, which were fluid and hand-picked by the Senior Investigating Officer, based itself at one of the clusters of desks, pulling them around until they found a configuration that suited them. Floor-to-ceiling whiteboards acted as a focal point for each investigative team.

  As Stella made her way to Callie’s office she glanced at the boards. Each one, in its own way, painted a depressing picture of people’s inability to leave each other alone.

  Here, a row of photographs of young men, some taken from school photos, others from holiday pictures or corporate websites, interspersed with their blackened, greenish-yellow or bloodied faces post mortem. There, photos of terror suspects, their faces bearded or clean-shaven, white or brown, but all with the fanatical stare of a zealot.

  Among the photos, crime scene reports, scribbled questions in red, blue and black dry-wipe markers, Post-its and all the assorted paraphernalia of an ongoing criminal investigation, Garry sat at his desk, reading documents enclosed in a brown folder. He looked up as Stella approached.

  ‘Hey, boss. Sorry to put the kibosh on your day off. Lovely day for it.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I was only going out for lunch with my best friend and then maybe a swim and some shopping and a nice evening in with a takeaway and a film on Netflix, so it’s not as if I had anything planned.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Lucky I saved you. You’d have been slitting your wrists by tea-time.’

  Stella looked over at Callie’s glassed-in office. The boss was pacing up and down, phone clamped to her ear, nodding and waving her free hand around. She had the look her team had learned meant her normal good humour had, temporarily, deserted her. Lips pressed together, eyebrows arching even more sharply than usual. Pale cheeks. ‘The wee lassie’s pure ragin’,’ the office wags liked to say, in a passable imitation of Callie’s Edinburgh accent. Though always well out of the wee lassie’s earshot.

  She spotted Stella and waved her in.

  Stella looked at Garry, who was standing next to her, straightening his tie.

  ‘Ready?’

  Stella knocked and entered: standard protocol, established years earlier when Callie had set up the SIU. ‘If my door’s open, come in. If it’s closed, knock,’ she’d said at the first team briefing. ‘If I can’t help you, you’ll know soon enough.’

  Callie mouthed a ‘sorry’ and waved Stella and Garry to the chairs pushed under a round wooden table in the corner of the office. They sat and listened to Callie’s end of the conversation.

  ‘Yes, commander, I do see, which is why—’

  …

  ‘No, commander, that’s—’

  …

  ‘No, sir, but with all due respect, I—’

  …

  ‘I’m putting my best people on it, so—’

  …

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  …

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  …

  ‘No, sir.’

  …

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Two alarming spots of colour had appeared high on Callie’s cheekbones. If she’d been overweight and a smoker, Stella would have been prepping to administer CPR. As it was, she merely readied herself for what was coming next.

  The call ended. In the ensuing moment of quiet, Stella could hear Garry breathing beside her. Finally, Callie spoke.

  ‘That bloody tadger will be the death of me. Commander Nick Bloody Hallwood wants this one clearing up toot de bloody sweet if you don’t mind. “Especially with the mayoral elections going on, Callie,”’ she added in a rough approximation of Hallwood’s voice.

  ‘Tadger, guv,’ Garry asked, winking at Stella. ‘Would that be any relation to todger?’

  Callie looked down at Garry, frowning, though Stella was relieved to see the ‘ragin’’ look was fading.

  ‘It means, prick, Detective Sergeant Haynes, as I’m sure you deduced. Low Edinburgh slang, if you must know. Now, forget Tadger Hallwood for a wee minute. Stella, you’re the last one in so here’s what we have.’ She sat at the table and looked at each of them in turn. ‘Niamh Connolly. Fifty-two. Chief executive of LoveLife, an anti-abortion group, though she liked to call it a children’s rights charity. She was found dead and mutilated in her home on Wimbledon Parkside, last Friday. Wandsworth divisional CID did some basic legwork then kicked it up to a South London MIT under a,’ she consulted a note in front of her, ‘DI Mark Hellworthy. He took one look at the crime scene report and handed the case to us.’

  ‘Garry said the killer removed her breasts and left them on the table,’ Stella said.

  ‘Yes. On a Royal Crown Derby dinner plate, if ye please.’

  Callie opened a slim cardboard folder and pushed a stack of 10 x 8 colour photos across the table.

  Stella and Garry leaned together the better to look at the topmost image. Stella inwardly steeled herself. Although she’d seen countless dead bodies, and had hardened herself to a degree, she’d always tried to retain that part of herself that was horrified by death. It helped her think of the victims as people and not just cases: vics, DBs, crispy critters or any of the other euphemisms cops used to anaesthetise themselves from the horrors they so regularly had to confront in the line of duty.

  The woman in the photograph was slumped in a chair at a scrubbed pine kitchen table. The killer had crudely removed Niamh Connolly’s breasts and placed them on a large dinner plate. The wounds had bled copiously, streaking her ribcage red.

  ‘Is that what killed her?’ Garry asked, wincing. ‘The mutilation? Blood loss?’

  Callie shrugged. She tapped the photo.

  ‘There’s a dark-red mark on her neck, look. Could be a ligature mark.’

  ‘Post mortem?’ Stella asked.

  ‘When DI Hellworthy passed it to us, he also halted the PM. Thought you might want to be there for it in person. He sent the preparatory photos their snapper took at the mortuary, though. Have a look.’

  Stella and Garry spread out the rest of the photos. Under the harsh, blue-white mortuary lighting, Niamh Connolly’s ravaged body looked almost as if a sculptor had created it, albeit a very sick sculptor.

  8

  TUESDAY 14TH AUGUST 10.30 A.M.

  ‘Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?’ Garry asked. ‘We’ve got a weirdo on the loose.’

  ‘Well, let’s not jump to conclusions,’ Callie said. ‘It might not be a weirdo. Although if it’s not then for the life of me, I can’t think what else it could be. But if it is some sadistic psycho then I want him caught and in irons before he does it again.’

  Stella glanced sideways at Garry, then down at the photos again. Then up at Callie.

  ‘It does look as though we’ve got a sexually-motivated murder.’

  She paused. Callie obviously caught the hesitation.

  ‘But?’

  ‘But, it doesn’t feel like a rapist taking a step up. Not to me, anyway. There’s something ritualistic about the way he’s placed her breasts on a plate like that.’

  Callie looked at Garry.

  ‘DS Haynes?’

  Garry ran a hand over the back of his neck. Stella could tell he was torn between loyalty to his guvnor and the desire to put his version across to the chief.

  ‘It’s OK, Garry,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Say what you think, I won’t be sad.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Stella’s insights into killers’ minds are off the scale, but I just think we should start at the obvious place. Start with the husband. Pull in any known violent sex offenders for a chat, put the word out with our snouts, ask Vice maybe if any of the toms have been having more than the usual amount of trouble from perverts wanting the rough stuff.’

  All three officers knew that the Vice Squad was one of many departments renamed in the Met’s furious drive to present a more PC face to the world. Sadly, for the committee animals who dreamed up Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command, everyone still called it Vice.

  Callie nodded.

&nbs
p; ‘I think you’re both right. Look, set the investigation up the way you want to, Stel, you know I trust you. I’m going to get onto the press office. Something like this we’re going to be getting a shitload of media attention and we need to get out in front of it. I’ll want you there with me. She was a high-profile victim and while we all know here that every victim counts, the media and the general public are going to be more,’ she paused, ‘exercised about Niamh Connolly than a dead tom or a smackhead single mum from a council estate. It’s just the way it is.’

  Back in the SIU incident room, which was humming with activity as various teams worked their cases, Stella turned to Garry.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, go on, cheers,’ he said.

  While she waited for the kettle to boil, Stella folded her arms across her chest and turned to him.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Like I said in there. We’ve got a sex killer. A bloke that does that to a woman has got a screw loose. No, make that a whole box of screws. Economy size. He hates women. Might have form for rape or sexual assaults. Might have started flashing his dick at schoolgirls and graduated to worse. Could be a knicker fetishist who got bored of stealing undies off washing lines.’

  Stella wrinkled her nose. She’d run through the same thought processes as Garry, but something was bothering her.

  ‘Could be. I mean, obviously there’s the sex angle. And he did kill her, but don’t you think there was just something, I don’t know, off about the whole thing?’

  Garry frowned.

  ‘What, you mean apart from leaving her tits on the table like a main course in a fancy restaurant? How much more “off” do you need, boss?’

  She shook her head. She knew she was struggling to articulate the feeling she had, deep down, probably what an old-school copper would call a hunch, that this was far from a straightforward sexually-motivated murder.

  ‘I know, I know. That’s not what I meant. Let me try again.’ The kettle clicked off as she said this and she made them both mugs of coffee, beckoning Garry back to her office. ‘Come on.’

  When they got there, Garry sat facing her.

  ‘Go on, then. Have another crack at it. I’m all ears.’

  She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out again.

  ‘OK. One, he did it at her place. Not in some deserted farmhouse out in the woods. Or a disused factory. This wasn’t a killing ground. So he found a way to get in. No signs of a struggle, either at the house or on the dead woman’s body. Either she knew him, or she was expecting him, or when he turned up unannounced he was sufficiently convincing that she let him in. Two, he took his time. He tortured her, strangled her, readjusted her clothes and posed her together with her breasts on the table. So either he’s the Lord Mayor of Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-Town or he knew she’d be alone long enough for him to do what he came to do. Three, the lack of a struggle, ’cos I’m sure you noticed there were no defensive wounds, means he probably drugged her. And four, there was something about the way he displayed her breasts.’

  Garry nodded.

  ‘It’ll be a new London Ripper for the media to get all excited about.’

  Stella scrunched up her face and tilted her head on one side.

  ‘It’s more than that, though. He butchered her all right, but why the plate?’

  Garry shrugged again.

  ‘Who knows? They’re all nutters, aren’t they? Otherwise they’d be doing normal shit like the rest of us and not cutting women to pieces.’

  Stella conceded the point with a nod. But she was thinking. When I was a nutter, I wasn’t doing normal shit. I took a CPS lawyer to pieces with an electric carving knife for God’s sake. Post mortem admittedly, but still. But that was for convenience: I needed to get her into the freezer. This guy, he displayed what he’d done.

  Stella spent the next twenty minutes sorting out a corner of the SIU office as her team’s operations area. The usual whiteboards dominated and she kicked off the ‘murder wall’, as it was known, with two photos of Niamh Connolly: one a LoveLife colour publicity photo of its diminutive yet charismatic CEO in one of her trademark power suits, the other an altogether more gruesome shot, taken by the police photographer at her house.

  She sat at her desk to compile a list of the people she wanted on her inner team.

  Arran first. That rarest of creatures, a happily-married cop. Fifteen years with the same woman, his childhood sweetheart at that. Kath Cox never seemed to mind his erratic hours. Despite the fact that those of inspector rank and above didn’t have to work shifts, Arran, like everyone else, Roisin and Stella included, and quite often Callie, could often be found burning the midnight oil at Paddington Green, whatever their contracts of employment might stipulate. Arran and Kath had two mid-teenaged boys as well, Fergus and Ewan, and Arran doted on them. Not as computer-literate as Roisin, Arran more than made up for it with formidable copper’s instincts honed over ten years’ service in the Met and an ability to cajole, caress and occasionally coerce people into going the extra mile for the sake of an investigation.

  Roisin – ‘It’s Rosh-EEN not ROY-sin’ – was the SIU’s longest-serving DI. No shortage of ambition from the thirty-seven-year-old, but with a backbone of dogged policework and a flair for the IT side of things, which was often where investigations ended up. Stella knew that when Callie had brought her back from the dead and into the number two spot, Roisin had had her nose put out of joint, but there didn’t seem to be any lingering ill feelings. The detective sergeants. Def, Barendra ‘Baz’ Khan and Garry. Where Def was all butter-wouldn’t-melt, Garry was more gung-ho than she was, always ready to rush into the middle of the action. Not as a fool while angels held back, more like someone who didn’t believe in backing down from a fight, either physical or intellectual, and had the integrity to go with it.

  Baz, the team’s intelligence specialist, was more cerebral. He managed the HOLMES team of collators. These were the people, police staff mostly, though a few uniformed officers, too, who entered the SIU’s data into the latest version of the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. Just as painstakingly, they interrogated the vast national database for the answers to the detectives’ questions, or for background information that might support, or sink, a line of enquiry, a hunch, or a wild 3.00 a.m. flash of insight.

  Rounding out the squad were the three ‘babies’: ambitious, talented and hardworking detective constables who’d been seconded to the SIU for six-month rotations to see whether they had what it took to go up against, and catch, Britain’s most dangerous criminals. DC Camille Wilde, a street-smart white girl from the black-dominated enclave of Brixton in South London. DC Will Dunlop, a psychology graduate from Surrey who’d arrived at the Met with a posh accent he’d worked hard to lose. And DC Becky Hu: her parents had left Shanghai for London in the 1980s and raised a family there. She spoke fluent Cantonese and Mandarin.

  Finally, the non-warranted police staff. Lucian Young, the chief forensic officer and a good friend; plus Alec Stringer, the crime scene manager, and a couple of former detectives, now freelancing as investigators.

  They’d have support from other commands as needed, but these were the ten key members of the crew she hoped would put Niamh Connolly’s killer behind bars. Before he kills again. Because that’s what was really niggling at her subconscious. What she didn’t, yet, want to say out loud to Callie. This looks like the work of someone who’s not going to stop at one.

  9

  TUESDAY 14TH AUGUST 11.00 A.M.

  With the detectives and investigators gathered around her, Stella took a moment to make sure she had their full and undivided attention. Then she made brief eye contact with each one of them.

  Show time.

  Stella slid forwards off the desk and went to stand centre-stage in front of the whiteboard, just to the right of the two photos of Niamh Connolly.

  ‘I’ve been in touch with the SIO who caught the case. A DI Mark Hellworthy—
’

  ‘Apt,’ Roisin muttered from her place directly in front of Stella.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m going over there later to have a chat. But he’s happy that we’re going to go back to square one on this. Roisin, can you and Will go over to Wimbledon and start interviewing the immediate neighbours? And get one of our POLSAs over there to sort out an extended search. The initial perimeter was only fifty metres and I want it doubling. I’ve noted that in my policy book. Reason being: I considered that in a sparsely populated road like Parkside, the killer may have gone further before finding somewhere to dump a weapon or something he used in the attack.’

  The POLSA – police search adviser – was a highly skilled officer who knew the best way to work outwards from the epicentre of a crime scene. Stella continued.

  ‘I’m sure the Wandsworth CSIs did a decent job but I want one of our teams going back to the house and—’

  ‘Doing it properly,’ Roisin finished for her.

  ‘Double-checking,’ Stella said, trying to smooth out a frown of irritation at Roisin’s second interruption. ‘Garry? Can you get hold of Lucian Young for me? I want him on standby.’

  Garry nodded and made a note.

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘OK, next up. Jumper, I want you and Def to look at LoveLife. For those of you who don’t already know, that’s the anti-abortion charity that Niamh Connolly set up. Finances, employee records, the usual. Maybe she pissed off someone badly enough they came after her. It’s not like it’s exactly an uncontroversial subject.’

  ‘How about her opponents? You know, the pro-choice lot or whatever they call themselves?’

  ‘Good idea. I know it looks like a sex killing but we can’t afford to make any assumptions. Baz, Camille and Becky: you’re our intelligence team on this one, for now anyway. Can you get the HOLMES team looking for unsolved sexually motivated attacks in the Greater London area over the last however many years you think we should go back – five?’ Baz nodded. ‘OK, for five years. Especially if there were mutilations. Plus, can you put together a list of known sex offenders – not the nonces, not at this stage, anyway – who’ve done time and are currently at liberty? Let’s say, their victims were twenty or older.’