by Andy Maslen
‘DCI Cole.’
‘It’s Camille, boss. We’ve got a body in Finstock Road. A weird one. CID put it straight through to us.’
Stella was still groggy from waking. First rule, get yourself sorted before talking, Stel.
‘OK, Camille. Can you call me back in five minutes?’
She hadn’t undressed before flopping onto her bed and falling immediately into an exhausted sleep, so spent the time splashing cold water over her face and grabbing a foil-wrapped sandwich from the fridge and making a flask of coffee. She stuffed them into her murder bag then sat at the kitchen table waiting for Camille.
‘A weird one. Is this number two? Are you getting into your stride now?’ she asked the empty flat.
She was pulling on her boots when her mobile rang again. She snatched it up.
‘Camille?’
‘Yeah. It sounds like Niamh Connolly’s killer just went for the double.’
‘Address?’
‘63 Finstock Road. It’s—’
‘It’s OK, I know it. Who else is in the office?’
‘Just me, boss. The others are all over the place. I think Garry’s down in Wimbledon again.’
‘Right. So you’re going to get to see the sharp end. Meet me at Finstock Road as soon as you can.’
‘You don’t want me to come and get you?’
‘I’ll take the bike, it’s quicker. Now go.’
Stella’s old bike had been totalled by an Albanian hitman. He’d paid for that particular crime with his life. Since then, she’d stuck with Triumph and her current mount was a metallic blue Bonneville.
She’d added leather panniers and a top box to the retro-styled bike, and the police garage, after consulting a protocol manual and pronouncing themselves satisfied it was legal, had fitted a siren and a blue flasher above the big, round headlight. The boys in Traffic had grudgingly admitted it was a nice piece of kit, and even if it wasn’t as fast as her old Speedmaster, it got her around faster than any of the cars the other detectives used.
Three minutes after taking Camille’s second call she was thumbing the starter and pulling away from her spot in the carpark beneath her apartment block.
Even though the rush hour had, technically, finished, it appeared nobody had told the drivers of the cars, vans and lorries sitting stationary on the Westway between Stella and the crime scene. She flicked on the blues and twos and carved a path between the two lanes of traffic, accelerating up the elevated section and westwards towards Ladbroke Grove. Ten minutes later she was turning left into Finstock Road.
Two marked cars had been parked diagonally at either end of Finstock Road, effectively blocking traffic from entering or leaving. Stella showed her warrant card to the uniformed cop standing next to the chequer-sided Ford Mondeo and he waved her through.
She pulled up just outside the blue-and-white tape marking the outer cordon, heeled out the sidestand and dismounted, pulling her helmet off and hanging it on the handlebar.
A small crowd of onlookers had gathered and were busy filming the activity outside 63.
A white CSI transit van was parked in the middle of the street. Two unmarked cars sat with their doors open, blue lights still flashing on their dashboards and from between the radiator grille bars. And she recognised Camille’s bright-blue Honda Civic.
Stella nodded to the burly uniformed PC manning the outer cordon and unbuckled the righthand pannier, from which she extracted her murder bag.
‘DCI Cole, Paddington Green,’ she said, showing him her warrant card. She waited for him to note down the details on his log. Then he lifted the tape.
‘There you go, ma’am.’ He nodded at the wide-open front door of number 63. ‘Nasty one. Been there a few days, and in this heat, you know, it’s pretty smelly.’
‘Thanks.’
Camille was talking to a youngish guy – mid-twenties, maybe, ginger hair – wearing a pale-grey suit and a look of irritation on his freckled face. Stella crossed the twenty yards between them at a trot. Camille turned as she arrived and held out a takeaway cup.
Stella slurped some coffee down, wincing at the heat but grateful she could leave her homemade instant in the pannier.
‘Thank Christ!’ Cam said. ‘Can you explain to DC McKay here that this is an SIU case, please? And that just because he’s got a dick doesn’t give him the right to patronise me?’
The male DC put his hands on his hips and jutted his chin at Stella, apparently not ready to give up whatever jurisdictional claim he felt he had without a fight.
‘And you are?’ he said, in an accent she recognised. It was the same, arrogant, well-educated tone Will Dunlop had arrived with, before realising in double-quick time that he ought to lose it.
Stella took a more cautious sip of the scalding coffee. Then she fished out her warrant card. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Cole. Special Investigations Unit,’ she said sweetly, showing him her warrant card. ‘Is there a problem,’ she paused, ‘Detective Constable?’
He coloured instantly, his pale cheeks turning a furious red. His hands drifted out from his hips, palms outwards.
‘No, ma’am. But I was not informed this wasn’t a straight CID job. And I don’t appreciate being sworn at, either,’ he added, glaring at Camille, whose posture had relaxed markedly: one hip cocked, one eyebrow raised as she waited for the inevitable.
‘Graduate fast-track?’ Stella asked.
‘Er, yes.’
‘Good university?’
‘York. I think that would count.’
‘Bath,’ Stella said, jabbing a finger at her own chest. ‘But here’s the thing, DC McKay. I appreciate that you weren’t informed to begin with. But I’m sure DS Sharpe here did, in fact, inform you. That right, Camille?’
‘Yes, boss. That’s what I was trying to tell him when you rocked up.’
‘Right. Well, believe it or not, even her lack of a penis doesn’t make my DC into a liar. And as for the swearing, I don’t, actually, care whether you like it or not. Now, as you clearly need some experience working with proper detectives, get yourself suited up and, if you’re good, you can come in with me and Camille. All right?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, failing to keep the sullenness out of his voice.
‘Right!’ Stella said. ‘Shall we?’
Fully enclosed in protective clothing, with Camille and DC McKay behind her rustling in their own white forensic suits, she walked towards the front of the house. Just as she’d done in Wimbledon, she negotiated the inner crime scene cordon and then entered the house.
Behind her, Stella heard Camille gasp.
McKay uttered a short, ‘Hell’s teeth!’
Arranged as if for a grotesque religious painting, two white-suited CSIs were on their knees at the feet of the naked corpse, which was suspended by its wrists from the bannister of the narrow staircase.
Inside her Tyvek CSI suit, Stella broke into a sweat that had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with the sauna-like conditions inside the crowded hallway. The heating in the small terraced house had clearly been turned up to high, which, coupled with the ferocious London summer temperatures, had combined to accelerate the decay of the corpse.
The skin of the distended abdomen was a dark, purplish-green, shading to black in places. The eyes and tongue protruded from the grossly swollen face, itself the same sludgy colour as the rest of the body. In terms of the stages of decay, she put it firmly at putrefaction.
The CSIs both wore rebreathers that covered the lower halves of their faces, the cylindrical twin filters giving them the appearance of scuba divers stranded on dry land. Stella and the two DCs were exposed to the full, awful stink of a rotting human body: the sickly sweet, heady smell of acetone overlaying the fetid stench of rotting meat and raw sewage.
A blackish-red liquid had pooled around the corpse’s feet, its shining surface alive with flies and the writhing white bodies of maggots.
Stella reached inside her suit and extracted a sm
all bottle of oil of camphor. Turning away from the body for a moment, she offered it first to Camille and then McKay. Gratefully, the two younger cops smeared the pungent substance on their top lips.
‘Thanks, boss,’ Camille said.
Camille turned to McKay, whose face had lost its earlier colour and now had a waxy sheen.
‘You OK?’ she asked.
He nodded, mutely.
‘This your first murder?’
He shook his head.
‘But your first Sloppy Joe?’
Another nod.
She leaned over and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Focus on your training. Try to think yourself into the offender’s mind. Look at the door. Was there forced entry?’
Gratefully, it seemed to Stella, McKay turned away from the hideous sight in front of him and went back to examine the front door.
‘That was kind, Cam,’ Stella said.
Camille shrugged.
‘Yeah, well. Even wankers need a little love now and then.’
Stella turned back to the corpse and began a methodical appraisal of what she could see.
36
TUESDAY 21ST AUGUST 8.29 P.M.
Though the abdomen had swollen grotesquely, breasts were still visible above the distended stomach. No cock and balls either, although on its own that single fact would not be conclusive. She’d seen the handiwork of killers who liked to castrate their male victims, ante- or post mortem as Doctor Craven would probably enjoy saying. Longish silver hair, though beginning to come away from the scalp, was tied into a loose ponytail.
She voiced her thoughts so Camille could hear.
‘So, we have a female victim. Correction, a second female victim.’
‘You reckon this is the same killer who did Niamh Connolly, then?’
‘Mm, hmm. No doubt in my mind, Camille. Too weird to be a coincidence.’
‘Shit! This is it. It’s a serial killer, isn’t it?’
‘Between you, me and the newel post, yes, I’m sure of it. But three’s the standard, so at the next press conference it’s going to be a second tragic death. Keeping an open mind. Blah, blah, blahdy-blah.’
Stella had seen corpses in this state of decay, and worse, before: she wasn’t immune to the horror, but it was neither the putrid smell nor the viscid appearance of the dead woman’s flesh that held her attention now.
She pointed at the left side of the torso, where a small three-pointed star like an orange Mercedes logo sat flush with the taut, glistening, black skin. Protruding from the centre for half an inch or so was a metallic-blue cylinder about the diameter of a pencil.
‘Look at that,’ she said to Camille. ‘Is that the end of an arrow?’
Camille leaned closer, paused for a few seconds, then nodded.
‘Shall we put out a wanted marker for Robin Hood, boss?’
One of the CSIs snorted inside their rebreather. Stella grinned.
‘Yeah, and tell Control he might be accompanied by a giant with a big stick and a fat bloke in a monk’s habit.’
The CSIs shook their heads as they carried on scraping up samples from the pool of blood and liquefying soft tissue.
Stella moved carefully around the body. She counted three more arrows embedded in the torso and one stuck through the right calf. Apart from the one in the lower leg, the arrows were all virtually invisible, as the bloating had pushed the flesh out and around the shafts.
‘Has the police surgeon been in yet?’ Stella asked the CSI to her left.
‘No, ma’am.’
Aha, you’re a woman. Couldn’t tell behind all the gear.
‘If he arrives and I’m not here, give me a shout, OK?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘DS McKay?’
‘Yes, ma’am?’ he answered, emerging from the kitchen.
‘What did the front door tell you?’
‘It’s not been forced. I checked the back door, too. Solid as a rock. Windows on the ground floor all secure. Same upstairs.’
‘So…?’
‘So no forced entry.’
‘And that tells us, what?’
‘She knew her attacker.’
‘You sure about that, are you?’
‘Oh, er, OK. No, wait, it means she let him in because she knew him or he convinced her he wasn’t a threat. Could have been posing as a market researcher or the gasman or something.’
‘Very good, DS McKay. We’ll make a decent detective of you yet.’
Stella turned back to the body. She wanted more. And for that she needed a bit more elbow room.
‘Camille, can you go and talk to the neighbours on each side? DS McKay—’
‘It’s Scott, ma’am. If that’s OK?’
Stella nodded.
‘OK, thanks. Scott, I want you to see if you can find out how long the police surgeon’s going to be. Oh, and one more thing,’ she shouted after his retreating back.
‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘OK, two more things. Please stop calling me “ma’am”. Boss, guv or DCI Cole are fine. And can you find out where the central heating controls are and turn them off?’
With the two DCs gone, and the CSIs almost invisible, so silently did they work, Stella stood facing the remains of the woman who had until very recently been the owner, or at least the occupier, of 63 Finstock Road.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said under her breath. ‘But we’ll catch him. I promise you.’
Something about the way the woman had been posed caught at Stella’s memory, but the stench, and the revolting sight of a body softening to the point it could flow out of the ropes holding it upright, obscured whatever tendril of an idea she was grasping for. She spoke to the killer.
‘You took Niamh Connolly’s blouse and bra off. But you stripped this one. Why? What are you doing? It’s a different MO but you’ve got a signature. I just have to find it.’
The brief silence was interrupted as two men entered the hall. Both in paper CSI suits, both over six feet tall. One portly, the other altogether a more athletic figure.
‘DCI Cole, Paddington Green,’ Stella said. ‘I’m the SIO. Is one of you the police surgeon?’
‘That would be me,’ the portly man said, extending his right hand. ‘Dr Howard Byatt.’
The other man didn’t bother with the handshake.
‘DI Hamlyn. I hear you’ve been offering one of my DCs some on-the-job training?’
Stella couldn’t tell if he was amused or angry. There was so little of his face on view behind the protective gear. She decided on diplomacy.
‘Yeah. Sorry about that. You know, chaos of the first few minutes on scene. I just grabbed whatever bodies I could find.’
The DI barked out a short laugh.
‘Please don’t apologise. Arrogant little prick could do with learning a bit more humility to go with his bloody PhD in criminology.’
Relieved that she’d not misread the situation, Stella turned back to Dr Byatt.
‘I need you to certify death, Doctor. I want her at Westminster Mortuary as soon as. And a time of death would be good. To the day would be OK at this point.’
Byatt peered at her through narrowed eyelids.
‘You know that—’
‘You can’t give a time of death before a forensic post mortem’s been conducted, yes. But please. Just a rough idea. I mean this week? Last week?’
He sighed.
‘The heat we’ve been enduring would have accelerated the process of decay but, even so, I suppose I wouldn’t be sticking my neck out too far, not so far as to risk my professional reputation, as it were, if I were to hazard that she may have been dead for three or four days, at least.’
‘Thank you, Dr Byatt. So, can you certify death, please, so we can get the body over to the mortuary?’
‘Steady on, DCI Cole. I need to examine the body in situ. And I’m sure my scientific colleagues would like to assess the situation for themselves. I really can’t permit you to remove it just
yet. Judging by the state of,’ he paused and scrutinised the corpse, ‘her?’ Stella nodded. ‘Yes, well, judging by the advanced state of decomposition, I don’t suppose a few more hours will make much difference.’
Stella had met Byatt before and considered him a competent but overly-fussy man, who tended to let his scientific curiosity obscure more operational priorities.
‘Which I totally understand. But as SIO, the decision on when to move the body is mine. And she’s going to Westminster as soon as you’ve pronounced her dead. Though I think we can all agree that’s a formality at this stage.’
Byatt favoured her with a three-second glare, which she merely returned. Then he turned to the corpse and began the rudimentary checks for pulse and breathing before pronouncing her dead. Hamlyn winked at Stella. She had no trouble interpreting the signal. Nice one!
Ten minutes later, the corpse had been cut down from the bannisters, the CSIs being scrupulous about leaving the knots in the rope intact. Then toe-tagged, placed inside a black, leak-proof, plastic body bag and lifted onto a wheeled stretcher.
Alec Stringer, the CSM, had called a firm of private contractors who had transported the bagged and tagged body to Westminster Mortuary in a dark-grey Ford Transit marked, in discreet white capitals on each side, PRIVATE AMBULANCE.
Free of her protective clothing, which she’d stuffed into a black bin liner and handed over to a CSI taking a water break by the van, Stella pulled out a digital recorder and made a series of short notes that she’d get her PA to type up for the policy book.
‘My first decision was to request the body be moved to the Westminster Mortuary. My rationale is that the continuing high outside temperature, plus the fact the central heating had been turned up to max, meant the body was decaying rapidly and I considered there to be a risk that further decomposition could hinder our attempts to gather useful evidence.’
‘Nice arse-covering, boss,’ Camille said, her rough-edged South London accent a welcome relief after the hushed tones inside the house.
‘Yeah, don’t I know it? I wonder how many combined hours SIOs spend recording this sort of crap just on the outside chance there’s an inquiry or a retrial and the defence want to crawl over our files looking for evidence of misconduct.’
