Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

‘Very funny. It’s true, though. You all know it. Liking hairy girls is actually counted as a fetish these days.’

  ‘You really have, haven’t you, you dirty devil?’

  Garry strolled over.

  ‘Have what?’

  ‘Baz’s just giving us the benefit of his extensive knowledge of contemporary hardcore porn,’ Stella said.

  ‘Apparently,’ Def said, ‘not wanting a girl with a shaven haven is a, what did you call it Baz, a specialist interest?’

  More laughter, the sound of cops bonding over an emotional coin-toss, tumbling and spinning in the air only to come down hard on a flat surface with a bloody queen’s head uppermost.

  ‘Baz’s got a point, though, hasn’t he?’ Stella asked the assembled detectives. ‘You’ve all read the PM report on Niamh Connolly, right? Right? The killer shaved her, post mortem. It might seem like a small thing to you, like, oh, I don’t know, toast for breakfast today, cereal tomorrow. But for these guys, it’s an article of faith. What else?’

  ‘The rape fantasy, boss,’ Camille said.

  ‘Go on,’ Stella said.

  ‘We know Niamh Connolly wasn’t. Raped, I mean. If that was Holt’s thing, and he had Niamh drugged up and helpless, well, he’d have raped her. Wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I think you’re right, Cam. And then there’s the choice of weapon. In Holt’s little story he uses a sword, whereas we know from Dr Craven’s report that the killer used something that created a scissoring action. It could add up, I’m just saying there are a few areas that don’t point to his being our man. I’m sorry, Rosin, but we’re out on a limb here.’

  Roisin clearly wasn’t ready to admit that arresting Holt had been a mistake. She turned to Stella.

  ‘He was carrying a placard with an explicit death threat against Niamh Connolly. He was one of the last people to see her alive. He had violent pornography in his bedroom. He wrote a story where he pretty much described what happened to her. And he hasn’t got an alibi.’

  This was the hard part. The part of the job Stella hated more than any other. She’d landed this plum role because she was a good detective, a fighter, a sharp operator. Despite, or perhaps because of her unorthodox methods, she had pretty much singlehandedly dismantled – OK, destroyed – a vigilante conspiracy high up in the English legal establishment.

  Was she a good manager? A shoulder to cry on? A team leader able to bring out the best in a disparate group of people with conflicting loyalties, ambitions, drives and goals? Sometimes she wasn’t sure.

  ‘All of which is true. But it’s also true that there is no evidence linking him to the crime scene. No fingerprints. No footprints. No CCTV. Nothing. And the search didn’t turn up rope or vintage sheep shears. Did you get him swabbed, yet?’

  ‘Yes. Sample’s with Forensics now.’

  ‘OK, good. We got epithelials and blood off the rope we found in the skip near the Connollys’ house. If they turn out to match Niamh’s DNA then we’ve got the murder weapon. And if the killer was dumb enough not to use gloves we might even have his DNA as well. So we better pray they match Holt’s.’

  ‘When will we get the results?’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘A week? What happened to the golden hour?’

  ‘I think it expired. I’m sorry. I talked to Callie but the budget’s under pressure. There are too many other strands we’re trying to cover. Get the sword down to Lucian. It doesn’t fit the wound signature, but he can check it for blood.’

  ‘He could easily have dumped the shears,’ Roisin said. She sounded defeated. Which Stella didn’t want. Forget her ambitions, Roisin was a great detective. She wouldn’t be working in the SIU otherwise. Stella needed her on top form and she needed everyone to see she was there to support them.

  ‘I’m not trying to rain on your parade, Roisin, but there are probably hundreds of blokes in London who fantasise about committing violent sexual attacks on famous women. At this point, it’s all circumstantial. We’ve got nothing. If Holt had anyone better in his corner than some bleary-eyed duty solicitor, he’d already have walked by now.’

  Roisin’s pale-blue eyes flashed.

  ‘Then let’s get at him.’

  30

  THURSDAY 16TH AUGUST 10.45 P.M.

  Roisin switched on the digital interview recorder, the DIR, in interview room five on the fifth floor of Paddington Green.

  ‘Interview of Isaac Holt, 10.45 p.m. Thursday 16th August 2018. Detective Inspector Roisin Griffin present.’

  Stella spoke next.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Stella Cole, present.’

  Holt’s solicitor leaned towards the machine.

  ‘Ibrahim Rahman, solicitor.’

  ‘What about me?’ Holt said, from a supine position in his chair, almost horizontal, legs spread wide.

  Roisin bestowed an icy smile on him.

  ‘Be my guest. State your name for the record. Please.’

  ‘Isaac Holt. And I never done nuffin!’ he added, shouting at the recorder.

  Rahman whispered in Holt’s ear.

  Yeah, Roisin thought. Go on. Tell him to keep calm. It won’t help. She placed her hands on the table, one on top of the other.

  ‘Isaac? Last Friday lunchtime, you were filmed carrying a placard calling for Niamh Connolly’s death. A couple of hours later, she was. And just like in your story, she’d had her breasts cut off. That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No. I was in my flat with Kim from WAGSARR, like I said before.’

  Roisin shook her head.

  ‘Until three-fifteen, you were. That’s what you told us. Then, who knows?’

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ he said, almost pleading. ‘Why won’t you believe me?’

  ‘You like it when women give you what you want, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Roisin smiled, a co-conspirator.

  ‘Come on, Isaac, don’t be coy. You’re a stud, aren’t you? Those frigid bitches at WAGSARR are gagging for it, you said so yourself. They just can’t admit it to themselves.’

  ‘DI Griffin, are you going to ask my client a question?’ Rahman said, looking up from the notebook in which he’d been scribbling frantically.

  ‘Of course. Isaac, did you write a story where you raped Niamh Connolly?’

  ‘You know I did,’ he mumbled, looking down.

  ‘I’m sorry, for the DIR, could you repeat your answer a little more clearly?’

  ‘Yes!’ he snapped.

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, I wrote a story where I raped Niamh Connolly. Happy now?’

  ‘And in that story, Isaac, apart from raping Niamh Connolly orally, anally and vaginally, did you also cut off her breasts with your samurai sword?’

  Holt clamped his lips together, forming a thin line. Rahman whispered again into his ear.

  ‘Isaac?’ Roisin prompted. ‘Perhaps Mr Rahman is giving you good advice.’

  ‘No comment,’ he said, staring defiantly back at Roisin.

  ‘No comment? Really? Because I would have thought, you know, most normal guys, if they were asked if they’d written down something like that, which is,’ she turned to Stella, ‘I don’t know about you, guv, but I’d definitely call it nonce territory, well, they’d pretty much jump at the chance to deny it.’

  ‘DI Griffin,’ Rahman said, ‘you asked my client a question, and he gave you an answer. I must insist you move on. It sounds to me like you’ve embarked on a fishing expedition. If you have any real evidence linking Mr Holt to Mrs Connolly’s murder, I think you should go ahead and charge him, otherwise, I respectfully suggest you let Mr Holt go.’

  Holt folded his arms across his chest. Stella had seen the move hundreds of times before. Is that your best shot, then? She decided to intervene. Not because she believed she was sitting opposite Niamh Connolly’s murderer, but because she wanted to tip the scales back in their favour. Even a little would be enough.

  Maybe there were other ways of creating th
e wounds Lucian had identified as having been made by shears. She’d had Becky do a little background research on Holt. She employed the findings now.

  ‘Isaac. Is it OK if I call you Isaac?’

  Seemingly startled that the second cop opposite him could speak, Holt straightened convulsively in his chair.

  ‘Whatever. It’s my name, ain’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Stella said, smiling sweetly. ‘What line of work are you in?’

  Holt shrugged.

  ‘This and that. All zero-hours now, ain’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. No security, no pension. Must be a real bitch to make a decent living.’

  ‘You said it, not me. Bosses are all in it for what they can get. They don’t give a shit about working blokes like me.’

  ‘So, what do you do to pay the rent, then? When you are working, I mean?’

  ‘Driving, mostly.’

  Stella smiled, as if encouraging a shy person to volunteer information about themselves at the beginning of a training workshop.

  ‘What, like Uber or something?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No. It’s all sewn up with the Afghans and the Pakis and the Somalis or whatever. Immigrants, anyway.’

  ‘What, then?’

  He looked at his solicitor, then at the ceiling, then at his hands, which were interlaced on the table top.

  ‘Deliveries.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘It’s a Muslim firm. Newham Market Limited.’

  ‘That’s nice. You working for a Muslim-owned company. Very,’ she paused, ‘diverse of you. Tell us, what do Newham Market Limited trade in? I mean, what’s in the van when you’re driving for them?’

  He muttered a short, one-syllable word into his collar.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ Stella said. ‘Can you speak up, please. You know, for the recorder.’

  ‘Meat,’ Holt said, glaring at her.

  ‘Oh, right. Like halal meat?’

  ‘I guess so. That’s what they eat, ain’t it?’

  ‘If you mean Muslims, yes, it is. So, do they ever get you to help prepare the meat before you drive it around? They bleed the animals to death, don’t they? Are you good at butchering, Isaac? Do you know how to cut up a dead animal? Useful with a blade, are you?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector!’ Rahman said, wiping a hand over a tired-looking face. Stella wondered if his day had started earlier than hers. Probably, poor sod, she thought.

  ‘You’re haranguing my client. One question at a time, please.’

  ‘Very well. Have you ever taken a knife to a dead animal, Isaac? I’ll remind you, you’re being interviewed under caution here. We can check your answers.’

  Holt scowled at her. She tried to imagine him mutilating Niamh Connolly. Found it remarkably easy. But then, she reproached herself, the gap between a copper’s imaginings and a CPS lawyer’s decision to charge could be wider than the Thames between Waterloo and Westminster.

  Holt nodded.

  Stella spoke clearly while looking directly at Holt.

  ‘For the DIR, the suspect nodded.’

  ‘So you know how to take a body apart using knives, saws, shears, things like that?’

  Holt didn’t need a whisper in his ear to answer Stella’s question. He looked her in the eye, held the glance for a few seconds. Then spoke.

  ‘No. Fackin’. Comment.’

  Stella looked sideways at Roisin and dropped her eyelids for a fraction of a second. The meaning was clear.

  ‘Interview suspended at,’ Roisin checked the time, ‘11.07 p.m.’

  Then she snapped the recorder off.

  Rahman spoke, startling Stella. The little man seemed to have dozed off during the last few minutes of the interview.

  ‘DCI Cole. My client is entitled to an eight-hour rest break. I don’t want him questioned again until at least,’ he checked his watch, ‘7.07 a.m. tomorrow.’

  Stella nodded.

  ‘Of course, Mr Rahman. We know the law.’

  31

  THURSDAY 16TH AUGUST 10.45 P.M.

  Craig Morgan had struck lucky when he married Fiona Weatherley. She was the daughter of a Labour peer, ennobled for his financial generosity to the party, made possible by the hugely profitable industrial plant hire business he’d founded as a young man.

  Fiona’s widowed father had died the week after they had announced their engagement and, amidst the grief, one shining shaft of light had penetrated the gloom.

  He had left the bulk of his two hundred-million-pound estate to his only daughter.

  At the time, Morgan had been a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Hackney. With his wife’s money and vocal support, he had parlayed that position first into a seat on the Greater London Assembly, and from there to the deputy mayor’s position under Remi Fewings.

  The couple, childless – ‘child-free’, Fiona would insist if questioned – lived in urban splendour a few streets away from Labour’s former leader, in a four-storey Islington townhouse built during the reign of George III.

  Fiona’s money was essential to him, and freely given, but Morgan had realised early on in their relationship that he needed more from her in the bedroom than she was prepared to deliver.

  Her attitude to sex, while not precisely puritanical, was, he thought, Victorian. Any position as long as it was missionary. A blow job on his birthday. And, if he made enough of a fuss, she’d roll her eyes before rolling a pair of stockings up over her shapely thighs.

  But the first time he’d asked her to hurt him, well, he’d known from her wide eyes and open mouth followed by the door to the spare bedroom slamming shut behind her that he’d have to look further afield.

  And further afield was precisely where he was on a scorching August evening.

  Though the well-heeled residents of Islington could give their counterparts in Chelsea and Hampstead a run for their money, their splendid Georgian residences were only a short drive from the less-salubrious environs of Stoke Newington.

  Here, among the council flats, run-down pubs, fried-chicken joints and payday loan shops, a man with money and determination could find what he was looking for. Pleading a late-night meeting with party officials, Morgan left Fiona watching TV and made his way to a flat on the second floor of a sixties tower block that loomed over what passed for ‘Stokey’s’ high street.

  Despite the heat, he wore black jeans and a black hoodie, inside which he was sweating profusely. When the young woman he’d called earlier opened the door he pushed past her and frantically pulled the hoodie down, raising his hair into damp spikes.

  ‘Awright, then, Tony?’ she asked when he’d smoothed his hair down and thrown himself onto the bed.

  He’d used Arianna, if that was her real name, before. It amused him to employ a nom d’amour of his own, and choosing that of Labour’s most successful prime minister added a certain, undeniable charge to his erotic encounters.

  ‘Fine, thank you, Arianna. How are you?’

  She shrugged her bony shoulders, over which black bra straps were looped.

  ‘OK, I s’pose. This wevver’s bad for business though. Too hot to fuck, that’s what me and the other girls reckon. You want the usual, then?’

  Morgan nodded. His penis was hard inside his jeans and he could feel the familiar ache for what she could give him.

  He let his eyes travel over her body. Not much in the way of tits, or arse, come to that. But strong, wiry muscles. A few tats here and there, including a crow perching on her right hip, which, for some reason, excited him.

  He did notice the scabbed pustules on her inner elbows and forearms, how could he not, but, reasoning that what he paid for wouldn’t leave him at risk of HIV, he ignored them.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said.

  She grinned as she reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra.

  ‘Well then, you’d better do what you’re fuckin’ told then, ’adn’t you? Now, get undressed, you piece of shit. Then bend
over.’

  While Morgan gratefully complied, Arianna strapped on an obscenely large black dildo.

  As her long red fingernails clawed into his skin, he groaned with pleasure, the sound merging with an exhaled hiss as she shoved a well-lubricated finger into his rectum.

  32

  FRIDAY 17TH AUGUST 7.45 A.M.

  Sarah Sharpe moved closer to the microphone in the BBC Radio 4 studio to deliver the closing lines of her two-minute, forty-five-second, ‘Thought for the Day’. It meant she could drop her voice but keep the same level of audibility. She’d used the trick when preaching and it worked superbly.

  ‘So although social media appears to offer us salvation, in the form of likes, retweets and followers, from the spiritual emptiness that plagues so many of us in today’s world of hollowed-out spirituality, this salvation is illusory. Jesus, of course, had his followers. But these were flesh and blood men and women, many of whom ended up laying down their lives for him. They knew the truth: that there are worse kinds of suffering than not being noticed.’

  She glanced up at the studio clock. The second hand was just sweeping from 9 to 10: she’d finished at 7.47 a.m. precisely.

  Through the glass screen the producer gave her a thumbs-up and a smile. She smiled back as she removed her headphones and laid them on the black, felt-covered desk in front of her. She ran her fingers through her thick mane of silver hair and pushed through the swing door to the outer office.

  The producer, an eager-faced woman in her early thirties wearing all black except for a startlingly bright pair of electric-blue loafers on her tiny feet, smiled warmly as she shook her hand.

  ‘Thanks, Sarah, that was fantastic. As usual. We’ll be in touch in a few months about another slot, OK?’

  ‘I’d like that. Thanks, Lottie.’

  As editor of the Church Times, a job she’d landed on her fiftieth birthday ten years earlier, Sarah was often called on to make speeches or contribute to debates on TV and radio. But Thought for the Day was her favourite. The chance to preach directly to the country’s elite on their favourite morning radio show was, she liked to joke to her friends, ‘manna from heaven’.