Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

  ‘I heard that, too. But that was about all I heard that wasn’t one hundred per cent what any grieving husband would say. You want to know what I think? What my gut instinct is telling me?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Jerry Connolly knows. He said it.’

  ‘A serial?’

  ‘Yep. The hallmarks are all there. We’ve got a sex killer on our hands. The media are going to go mental.’

  11

  TUESDAY 14TH AUGUST 1.30 P.M.

  The sign for the house – a small slab of engraved slate – was discreet to the point of invisibility and Stella wondered why the Connollys had bothered.

  Garry parked on the side of the road and together he and Stella walked to the uniformed constable logging visitors in and out of the outer cordon. She looked hot in her uniform, stab vest, and heavy equipment belt, cheeks pink and forehead shining beneath her bowler cap. Stella introduced herself and Garry and both showed their Met IDs.

  The loggist noted names, collar numbers and the time on her clipboard, then lifted the blue-and-white POLICE tape to let them onto the drive.

  ‘At least the hedge means there’s not too much trouble with gawkers,’ Garry said as they approached the next cordon, more blue-and-white tape, this time printed CRIME SCENE – DO NOT CROSS. Another uniformed officer stood guard, a male PC this time, bulked out by his equipment belt and clearly as uncomfortable in the heat as his colleague at the end of the drive.

  Stella held out her ID.

  ‘Morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Taking over, are you?’

  Wanting as many cooperative officers around her as possible, Stella chose her words carefully.

  ‘Your DI Hellworthy invited us to take it on. We’re working closely with him and his team.’

  The PC gave her a look she translated easily. Whatever you say.

  Stella lifted the tape and she and Garry stepped inside the inner cordon.

  ‘Noddy suit time,’ Stella said.

  Garry grinned and nodded.

  ‘Gonna be sweating like pigs,’ he said.

  ‘Like we aren’t already.’

  She put her murder bag down and unzipped it. She pulled out the white suit and struggled into it, then the matching nylon booties, nitrile gloves and, finally, her face mask. The hood went up last of all. Garry was beside her doing the same.

  The Wandsworth CSIs had laid down a common approach path using clear plastic treading plates. Useful for seeing potential evidence beneath them, not so useful if you were on the heavy side.

  Stella had seen at least one overweight detective crack one of the plastic plates in their haste to get into a crime scene. The front door was only latched closed. She noted the high-tech security pad to the right of the door and winced. Didn’t do you any good, did it, Niamh?

  The CSIs hadn’t done a bad job of cleaning up after themselves, but Stella still noticed a few smudges of aluminium fingerprint powder on door jambs and dado rails.

  ‘We’ll look at the kitchen first,’ she said.

  Garry nodded as they entered the principal crime scene.

  Any experienced investigator knows that there’s no such thing as the smell of blood. It’s like the Inuit and words for snow.

  So, there’s the coppery tang of freshly spilled blood. The sweet aroma if the victim was a heavy drinker and the ethyl alcohol in their bloodstream percolates out into the air around the corpse. The butcher-shop smell when the claret’s been splashed around liberally. And the unmistakable charnel-house stink when not only has it been spilled in quantity but been given time to start drying out and decaying.

  Through her mask, Stella drew in the last of the signature smells of violent death. A heavy, meaty, organic stench that wormed its way into the mucus membranes of her nose and mouth and then stubbornly refused to leave.

  The source wasn’t difficult to identify.

  At the far end of the rectangular scrubbed-pine kitchen table, one of the matching chairs had been pushed back. Niamh Connolly’s. The table top at that end was spattered and streaked with blood. From dozens of minor arteries letting go, Stella concluded.

  But the real source of the smell was the archipelago of small pools surrounding the chair. Flies buzzed lazily over the blood, now dried to the colour of damson jam and with about the same consistency, landing at the periphery now and again to feed or lay eggs.

  Stella crouched beside the chair. She pointed to the floor just in front of it, beneath the edge of the table. Two long oval shapes cut into the otherwise smooth-edged curve of the largest patch of blood.

  ‘I think that’s where her feet were,’ she said.

  Garry straightened up.

  ‘Where next?’

  ‘Jerry Connolly said they had a summer house or whatever, a converted stable block, where she had her office.’

  Navigating the route on the treading plates, they made their way down the hall and out into the back garden. On their right, they found what they were looking for.

  The Connollys, though they had modernised everything else, had kept the original Elizabethan structure of the stable block more or less intact. Gnarled and blackened oak beams infilled with red bricks in a herringbone pattern. A densely perfumed white wisteria clambering up one wall. Double doors painted a soft shade of blue that reminded Stella of the hens’ eggs she used to collect on family farm holidays on the Welsh coast.

  A couple of CSIs in white suits were working inside. Stella knocked lightly on the glass before entering.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ she said. ‘DCI Cole and DS Haynes from SIU, Paddington Green.’

  They nodded, but neither spoke, clearly preferring to carry on lifting tapes from the various surfaces inside the immaculate office and flicking fingerprint dust from a magnetic wand onto the coffee table.

  The narrow slats of the Venetian blinds were closed against the sun, but the space was still overwarm. Stella and Garry stood against the wall to the right of the double doors.

  ‘According to Jerry, Niamh had an appointment at the house on Friday lunchtime. A potential donor apparently. He couldn’t remember much more, probably the shock. Said Niamh kept her whole life on her phone.’

  ‘How are we doing with that? Have they unlocked it, yet?’

  Stella shook her head.

  ‘Jerry said she used the fingerprint-lock on it.’

  ‘Touch ID. So we should be able to get it open at the PM.’

  ‘Yup. In fact, make a note. I want that phone. What with the case coming from Wandsworth to us I hope someone didn’t misfile the thing or we’ll never find it.’

  Stella inhaled deeply, thankful that the worst of the blood-stink had left her nose, though she could still register its presence somewhere in her brain. Then she let it out in a controlled exhalation and closed her eyes.

  What happened here, Niamh? You met him here? He dangled a big donation in front of you, charmed you into letting your defences down? Then what? How did he get you from here to the kitchen? Rohypnol in your drink? Bashed you over the head and carried you? What does it mean to him to cut your breasts off you? Sex, obviously, but why? Is he inspired by Jack the Ripper? You weren’t a tom, like the Ripper’s victims. Anything but. Respectable, upper middle class. Did you die for your stance on abortion? I thought the fanatics were all on your side of the debate. Was I wrong?

  She tried again, assuming the killer’s persona, something she was far, far better at than any of her colleagues, with the exception of Callie, could ever imagine.

  I hate you. I hate you with a passion. I’m going to make you suffer, and I’m going to enjoy myself. I’ve tricked you already and here we sit in your summerhouse. You think you’re about to score a major cash injection. But I know it’s not cash I’m going to be injecting. Once I’ve subdued you I’m going to tell you why I hate you so much. Then I’m going to take you back into the kitchen. And I’m going to cut your breasts off and display them for your husband to find. But I’m not going to rape you. Or bite you. Or leave a turd on yo
ur bed. I’m not into any of the perverted shit. I’m above all that.

  Over the years they’d been working together, Garry had learned to wait while Stella ‘did her thing’, as he called it. She’d stressed the very first time that she wasn’t some kind of amateur profiler, drunk on improbably prescient TV behavioural analysts. The way she’d explained it, without going into detail, was that she sometimes had a sense of why people killed.

  Now he took time to look around the smartly converted stable block. He took in the lurid posters mounted in sleek black frames. In unsparing detail, they depicted late-stage foetuses above headlines reading, ‘Some women pray for these: you KILL them!’ and ‘Don’t they have human rights too?’

  He had some sympathy with the questioner’s stance. Growing up in a fervently religious household dominated by his churchgoing mother, and augmented by older sisters, aunties and his paternal grandmother, he’d absorbed plenty of their fierce arguments for the sanctity of life. Although even as a kid he hadn’t been immune to the irony when they’d also prayed loudly for paedophiles and child-killers to be hanged, ‘like the animals they are, Lord’.

  But there was politics, or ethics, or whatever you wanted to call it, and then there was murder. And the big lesson he’d absorbed at his mother’s floral-dress-clad knee, Sunday School and church was the sixth commandment: Thou shalt not kill.

  As an adult, and then a police officer, he’d learned that there were subtleties. If thou art a soldier and acting within the Law of War then thou canst kill if thou has to. Half the guys in SCO19 were ex-military and they’d all killed. And if thou act in self-defence, and believe at the time that the force thou employest is proportionate to the perceived threat, then thou canst use lethal force. Subtleties, yes. But not many.

  Garry knew to keep his lip buttoned when the conversation at the station or in the Green Man turned to the abortion debate. The squad was fairly evenly divided between men and women and the latter were vociferous in their assertion of a woman’s right to choose. He’d weighed in once with what he thought was a mild and reasonable point about the child’s right to choose, or even the man’s, but been assailed by a barrage of counter-arguments that had left him nose-deep in his pint glass as he weathered the storm.

  Stella nudged him, bringing him back to the present.

  ‘I don’t see this as a pro-abortion thing,’ she said, clear now in her own mind that they were looking at an unknown-motive murder. ‘I think her views were secondary. She’d never have let one of her opponents into her home. I think it’s clear that the donor Jerry mentioned was her killer. Want to talk me out of it?’

  Garry shook his head. ‘I was only throwing ideas out before. We’ve got ourselves a serial. Question is, was she his first or are there others?’

  ‘Let’s save that until we’ve got a bit more information to go on. In the meantime, we need to get over to Wandsworth. I called Mark Hellworthy before we left the station. He’s expecting us at two-thirty.’

  They left the house, nodding an acknowledgement to the PC on duty before struggling out of their crime scene gear and stuffing it all back into their bags.

  12

  TUESDAY 14TH AUGUST 2.15 P.M.

  While Stella and Garry were making their way to the CID office at Wandsworth, a meeting was drawing to a close at City Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, hard by Tower Bridge.

  ‘Is there any other business? No? Good. Then I declare the July meeting of the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee closed at two fifteen p.m. As scheduled. We meet again in a month’s time. Thank you, colleagues,’ the chairman said.

  Having endured the committee’s toothless questioning of his new anti-knife crime strategy, the thirty five-year-old Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime stood, nodded at the room as a whole, while being careful not to make eye contact with anyone in particular, gathered his papers and left.

  His phone buzzed. He lifted it free from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, enjoying the way the movement made the Armani label flip outwards for a second.

  ‘Craig Morgan,’ he said in a clipped voice.

  ‘Hi, Craig, it’s Melissa. Roly Fletcher’s secretary? Just wanted to remind you of your meeting at three.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Melissa. I’m well aware of my meeting with Roly. Excuse me, I have to go.’

  He hung up, frowning. Bloody secretaries, always bossing us around. He launched Uber and sorted out a ride. Man of the people, that’s me. No chauffeur-driven limos for your future mayor.

  He walked through Potters Fields Park, a quirky little expanse of manicured grass – currently burnt to a crisp by the unrelenting sun – and picked up his Uber where Duchess Walk met Queen Elizabeth Street

  On the journey to the Labour Party headquarters in Victoria, he rehearsed his answers, or the appropriate attitudes underlying them, to the questions he imagined Roland Fletcher would be asking him.

  – How would you deal with the bankers in the City?

  – I’d acknowledge the contribution they make to London’s economy and that of the country as a whole, but remind them that financial capitalism was a failed experiment, and that they need to address the real investment needs of the country and, especially, the needs of the many not the few.

  – What would be your stance on a visit to Parliament by the prime minister of Israel?

  – As mayor, I’d make it clear I would ensure the safety of any foreign dignitary, but that I would not engage either politically or socially with the leader of an apartheid state during his visit.

  – London will always be a magnet for immigrants. What’s your stance?

  – I’d want to maintain London’s vibrant, multicultural atmosphere, and celebrate the massive contribution immigrants have made, while recognising that we need to strike a balance and protect jobs, especially where low-skilled migrants from Eastern Europe are concerned.

  With each answer, Morgan felt his confidence growing. He was going to nail it.

  The car jerked to a halt.

  ‘We are here, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said in over-enthusiastic tones to the driver, who, Morgan judged, had recently arrived in Britain from Afghanistan or Iraq. Another victim of Blair’s illegal war, he thought. ‘Five-star service.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ the man said in a bored voice. Or maybe it was lack of confidence. Completely understandable, Morgan thought as he slammed the black Prius’s door behind him. Just make sure you give me a decent review.

  He pushed his way into the building through the revolving door and sighed with relief as the cool air of the interior chilled the sweat on the back of his neck.

  He approached the receptionist sitting behind the shiny marble slab that constituted the front desk. Pretty. Nice tits. Let’s hope she doesn’t have one of those accents that sound like a crow cawing.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir. Welcome to Southside.’

  Aaand she does.

  ‘Yes, I’m here for a meeting at the Labour Party headquarters.’

  ‘Have you been here before, sir?’

  ‘Yes, of course I have! I’m Craig Morgan.’

  She smiled, raising her oddly squared-off eyebrows just a fraction.

  ‘Sorry, Mister Morgan. I’m new. How are you spelling your name? I’ll see if you’re on our database.’

  ‘I’m spelling my name, as you put it, C-R-A-I-G, and Morgan like Captain Morgan. You know. Rum?’

  She tapped on the keyboard in a rapid tattoo.

  ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t drink. Here we are!’ she said triumphantly, pointing a long, aubergine-painted fingernail on the screen. ‘Craig Morgan. Wait while I print your ID, please.’

  Morgan stood at the desk, quietly fuming at the young woman in front of him. What are you, twenty-seven, twenty-eight? Fucking Millennials. No respect.

  She folded the ID, from which Morgan’s face glared out of a postage-stamp-sized picture, and slid it into a plastic holder on a red lanyard.

  ‘Second floo
r,’ she said, already tapping her computer screen to feed another call into her headset.

  Morgan slid the ID across the sensor panel beside the nearest glass security gate, the one reserved for visitors, stepped through and walked to the bank of lifts. The two flights of stairs weren’t the problem. He wanted to check his appearance.

  Ensconced, alone, in the lift, he glanced at himself in the polished-steel wall. Dark-brown hair neatly in place. Suit jacket unbuttoned. Smart yet casual. Not overawed. If only my eyes were a little further apart.

  Almost before it had jerked into motion, the lift stopped and the doors opened. Morgan turned for the reception and, after repeating the same rigmarole with the Party functionary behind the pale-wooden desk, took a seat in the waiting area.

  He picked up that day’s Guardian. Relations with Europe. A planned far-right march against illegal immigration. Another stabbing on London’s streets. What a mess. We’ll certainly have our work cut out.

  He looked up at the wall clock. Five to. He tugged his shirt cuffs clear of his sleeves and adjusted them. Half an inch of white showing. The red silk tie was straight, retied that morning seven times until the point just kissed the top of his shiny belt buckle.

  ‘Honestly, you look fine,’ Fiona had said as she kissed him on the cheek in the hallway of their Islington house. ‘Now go or you’ll be late for work and you don’t want that.’

  And what, precisely, do you know about what I want? What I really want? Frigid bitch. Well, you’ll find out soon enough.

  The sound of footsteps made him look up, a smile already jacked into position.

  ‘Craig, good to see you,’ the woman said. Kendra Fawcett’s official title was Fletcher’s political private secretary. Morgan always thought of her as The Rottweiler. Blonde hair cut so short she could pass for a man if it weren’t for her figure. Acne scars disfiguring her cheeks and a visible pinprick in her right nostril. Keep the nose ring for the weekends, do you, Kendra?