Songbird

by Peter Grainger

  Serena knew what he was looking for now.

  She said, ‘Rule it out? What makes you so certain?’

  ‘The victims of sexually-motivated violence usually have characteristic marks, both of the perpetrator’s actions and their own in self-defence or in their efforts to escape. I’m not seeing anything like those here. Of course, she might have been assaulted while unconscious or worse, but I don’t think so.’

  The anger that Serena felt earlier seemed to have disappeared – she watched as he probed and sampled the three areas of the body, and felt only numb. That was her own mind defending itself against attack, of course, against a vicarious violation of all the private spaces and places through which we engage with the world of others. But Robinson had said let’s rule it out, and he was the expert, wasn’t he?

  The intimate examination took fifteen minutes, and at the end of it, the pathologist said, ‘We’ll test all those samples thoroughly but I see no evidence externally or internally of a sexually-motivated attack.’

  He looked at Serena for a second or two, perhaps trying to gauge her reaction because he understood that if he was right, this was a significant moment in the investigation. We abhor rape and sexual assault but we understand them – we understand how natural drives and powerful passions can get out of control. We understand that some individuals are never able to fully resolve these things within themselves and that this can lead to tragedy. The question of motive, the reason for such crimes, is effectively taken for granted. But when an attractive woman is found strangled and semi-naked, and there is, in Robinson’s words, “no evidence…of a sexually-motivated attack” – what then?

  The pathologist took off his gloves, dropped them into a bin and put on another pair in a different shade of blue. He said to Olive Markham, ‘We’ll begin the T cut, then.’ The technician picked up the scalpel again, and stood ready with sample trays. Serena could only wonder at the intricacies and rituals of this process, and why one needed a different set of latex gloves before exploring the internal organs of a corpse.

  The body of Michelle Simms held one more surprise. Serena was labelling bags when she heard Robinson say, ‘Pictures of the liver, Fraser. In situ and then again when I’ve removed it.’

  Serena stepped closer to the body, which was now in an advanced state of dissection, and waited for Robinson to explain. The silver pen reappeared, this time pointing down at the organ in question.

  ‘You see these patches of discoloration and the apparent unevenness of the dorsal surface? That is alcohol-related liver disease, and I’d say at least stage two. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t experiencing some symptoms of alcoholic hepatitis.’

  Serena thought and watched as the camera flashed. She wouldn’t admit as much to Robinson but yesterday she’d spent part of her Sunday evening Googling autopsies and what we learn from them – it made a change from box sets. She had learned that after the brain the liver is the most complex organ in the body, as well as being one of the largest. After a few more minutes’ study, she had taken a walk around her flat, and in the kitchen she had stopped to consider last night’s empty wine bottles. She and Mike had had about one and a half each. What felt perfectly alright, perfectly judged at the time, now looked rather a lot. And now, not a day later, she was viewing a discoloured, misshapen liver in the corpse of a woman barely ten years older than herself.

  She said, ‘How long had she been drinking heavily? Can you tell?’

  ‘Oh, I’m no expert. You can get early symptoms of fatty liver disease from a few binges. She’s beyond that, though, so I’d say she’s been overdoing it for years rather than weeks or months. I’m going to remove the liver, weigh it and examine it further. It’s possibly not relevant to your investigation – and certainly not related to the cause of death – but I have to report things like this. Are ye done, Fraser?’

  Just occasionally the Scottish note sounded in Robinson’s speech. The discovery of the diseased liver seemed to have cheered him up, and she guessed that the brusque, surname-only exchanges between the pathologist and the photographer concealed considerable mutual respect if not friendship when there wasn’t a dead body in the room.

  Robinson said to her, ‘In view of the liver, we’ll order full bloods for alcohol and drugs. Do you want stomach contents, too?’

  ‘Yes. Everything. Why not?’

  ‘Why not? Because you have a budget with us, and it’s not open-ended. I wish it was. Every test costs you money, Miss Butler.’

  A management decision, then. She glanced at the body of Michelle Simms, barely recognisable now it had been split open. She wanted this over and done with, wanted them to put the pieces back and stitch the woman together so she could have a decent burial. This, she thought, has gone on long enough. But the man with big, strong, dangerous hands is out there this morning, getting on with his life.

  ‘Yes,’ she said to Robinson. ‘Everything.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  At the briefing early on the Wednesday morning, before he and Terek had set off on the long drive to Barnsley, Waters had listened to the uproar when DCI Reeve told them about the wait for test results, and thought to himself, we’re losing them too soon, the old guys who had done this job before the forensics fairy appeared and began waving her magic wand about. Only last month he’d gone to Charlie Hills’ retirement do, two years earlier than it needed to be. Charlie was uniform, not CID, but the point remained the same; Charlie had helped to keep the peace on the streets of Kings Lake for twenty-five years, and waiting for lab results hadn’t played a very big part in that. And Smith himself had used forensics, obviously, but somehow, in all those investigations in which Waters had been involved with him, there was never the sense he was depending on them – that was the difference. The police force had fewer and fewer people who could still catch the villains when the network crashed or the lights went out.

  Reeve had said, ‘You all know the situation. The public laboratories are chronically under-resourced and there’s nothing we can do about it. You could try writing to your MP, I suppose,’ and a few people laughed, the few who knew why she’d said that.

  ‘They have huge backlogs and we’re in the queue. We’re probably talking weeks for anything that requires chemical analysis or DNA.’

  A few more mumbles and muttered curses. Serena had been sitting next to Waters. She’d looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s just some woman who got strangled…’

  He didn’t answer her but she had come back from the autopsy on Monday looking more angry than shocked, and that’s when she was at her best. But she had to control it, too, and he, as her boss, had to watch out for the danger signs. As long as she kept those comments to herself or just within the team, he could allow her to express the bitterness she felt about the lack of resources in these years of austerity – Serena was only saying what they were all thinking.

  Reeve went on, ‘We don’t have to wait for prints but there aren’t any. Find me some and we’re in business. If you can give me a name, a specific individual, I can lean on the forensics people and maybe jump the queue. But there’s no way we can expect them to do our fifty mouth swabs by yesterday. We’ll also have to wait for everything that Serena told us about from the autopsy. The Cambridge lab is so chock-full they won’t answer the phone, everything’s going to Norwich.’

  Remembering that comment about the lack of fingerprints, Waters thought about the shoes again as they crossed the county border into Yorkshire. There were traces of prints on both shoes worn by Michelle Simms, but they were all smeared and smudged into untraceability. The second shoe had been sent from the mortuary to join its companion in Norwich but both were in the same condition, wiped clean of any usable prints. One would expect to find at least the prints of the person who had put them on, even if she had cleaned the shoes before going out on the Thursday evening. The obvious conclusion was that the man who killed her had taken the trouble to wipe the shoes, and
that was a careful and deliberate act. If she had been strangled on that patch of flattened grass near the road, had her shoes come off in the struggle? If not, would they have stayed on when he carried the body along the footpath to where he had concealed it? Almost certainly yes and then no were the answers to those questions from the female detectives; he must have picked them up, carried them and wiped them clean before he left the body. Had he even put one shoe back onto a foot and left the other one in the grass? Why would he do that?

  ‘So,’ Reeve had concluded, ‘it is what it is. We still have plenty to do. I’ve told you about today’s interviews and you’ll get feedback from those tomorrow morning. We still have a few gaps in the list of people who were staying on the Pinehills site – let’s have those filled today. A couple of you are going to show Michelle Simms’ picture around the bars in the town just in case she went there after she split up from her sister. John Wilson has the list of our local candidates who have history that might be relevant in this case. We’ll be paying them all a visit, starting today. Get back to John with any queries about that. I say this again – if you can come up with a proper suspect, I can use that to maybe do some queue-jumping in Norwich. Let’s get to it.’

  The modernised A1 is a fast road. It had taken them north as far as they needed to go in that direction, and the A635 had carried them west across the countryside of South Yorkshire. It was a part of the country that Waters didn’t know. The names of the cities and large towns on the signposts, such as Rotherham, Sheffield and Doncaster, had associations for him, associations of flat caps, grime and industrial decline, but the landscape they had passed through on the final leg of the journey had been surprisingly attractive at times. On the far western horizon were higher hills which he knew were the Pennines, but even here there were areas of moorland, escarpments and broad, wooded valleys. In an earlier time, he would have received a lesson in local geography, have been told about the underlying carboniferous limestone with its coal deposits, and how these had shaped the human history of southern Yorkshire since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But it wasn’t difficult to trace for oneself the former mines and spoil heaps, or to find evidence that the world’s steel had once been made here – on the edges of some of the towns, derelict factories still stood as mute monuments to those times.

  Detective Inspector Simon Terek was a relatively silent travelling companion. Waters had taken Reeve at her word and filled up the tank of his Audi A3, hoping that if Terek then suggested he might drive himself, there would be something of a counter-argument – Smith’s original account of the detective inspector’s way with a steering wheel had been in no sense exaggerated. Every speed limit sign was interpreted as an instruction to drive at one mile an hour below it and brakes were to be applied briskly and as often as possible. But there had been no such suggestion from Terek; he had welcomed Waters’ offer to drive and said it would enable him to get on with some work.

  After the initial good morning and a check to see that Waters knew where he was going – Waters had pointed to the satnav on the screen – Terek had spent much of the journey re-reading the papers and notes the case had already produced. When that was done, he moved on to his tablet, pausing occasionally to look out of the side window but making no comments about what he could see or what he was thinking. Once, as they passed a service station sign, he said, ‘Pull over if you need a break, Chris. I don’t mind doing some of the driving,’ but Waters had said he was fine, they might as well keep going while the traffic was in their favour. And if reading had to be done, best the DI did it; some people simply cannot read whilst travelling and Waters was one of them. The motion sensors in his brain flatly refused to allow it. Even as a child he hadn’t enjoyed swings very much.

  As they crossed the administrative boundary for the town of Barnsley, the satellite map zoomed in to show the road where William Donnelly lived. Terek put the papers into his briefcase and said, ‘Do you like Donnelly for this?’

  An unusual question – Terek generally preferred objectivity to opinions, and science to speculation. But Donnelly was the closest thing they had to a suspect; perhaps the pressure of that had got to the detective inspector.

  Waters said, ‘To be honest, sir, I think it’s too soon to say. We need to see him face to face – the DCI was right not to hand this over to the local force. The information we have about his previous offences, though, doesn’t make him an obvious suspect. Not to me, anyway.’

  Terek looked at his wristwatch, pulled an odd face of irritation and said, ‘Why not? I know this came up in yesterday’s briefing but go over it again.’

  Waters said, ‘He only has two victims that we know of and they were both young girls, that’s the first thing. Second, there’s no suggestion of violence in his record. In the first case, there was never any proof that he actually touched the girl. In the second, she’d got willingly into his car and admitted she’d taken her own clothes off. Those were both offences because of the age of the girls involved but it’s a million miles away from what happened to Michelle Simms.’

  Terek looked at the satnav then and said, ‘We’re early, almost an hour. Do you always drive this quickly? If you see a café, pull over and we’ll get some coffee or something.’

  Waters had his mouth opening to reply but thought better of it. When he joined the force, he knew that cars had five wheels – four on the road and one to steer with, and that was all. His first sergeant had given him a crash course – pun intended – in recognising the makes of vehicles so he could indicate something more in his reports than that a suspect’s car was a blue one or a red one. Since then, he had passed the Basic and Standard tests in police response driving with maximum scores, and his name was down for an Advanced training course.

  Terek said, ‘As for Donnelly’s record, I wouldn’t rely too much on it. There will have been other victims, there always are with sex offenders because it’s one of the least reported of crimes. Also, it’s common for offenders to escalate the severity of what they do over time. Up here on the left, there’s a McDonald’s.’

  In the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in Waters’ flat there was a T shirt, worn only once and now neatly folded inside its cellophane wrapper. It was too big for him, and Serena Butler had scolded him for that when he put it on that one time in the office. She had had it printed especially and gave it to him on the day he told them he had been made a detective sergeant – it was red with four black capitals printed across the chest: “WWSD?”

  He had blushed at the attention and the laughter, and others had understood the logo before him, but it was good-natured. Serena had put an arm around him shortly afterwards and said, ‘Save it for special occasions, the cases where you need a bit of divine intervention.’

  Was this such an occasion? What would Smith have done if he’d been told to drive to a McDonald’s restaurant? Wouldn’t he at least have considered defying a direct order, taking a wrong turn and ending up on a bypass somewhere in search of a truck drivers’ café? Might he have feigned a stomach ulcer or a minor heart attack?

  The door opened automatically, of course. The place was more than half full on a Wednesday morning, with lots of noisy children because it was the school holidays and where else would you take them for a treat in Barnsley? Terek pointed to an empty table, and Waters sat down. The detective inspector went to an automated ordering point and began pressing buttons. Good grief, said a voice somewhere, he knows his way around fast-food outlets. Who would have thought such a thing?

  They sat and waited for the order to arrive. Waters had played it safely and asked for just a tea, but it would come in a plastic cup. Or a paper one. Two small boys raced around the corner of their table, and one of them collided with Terek’s leg before running off again, shouting and laughing. The detective inspector didn’t blink behind the spectacles and Waters wondered about the Mrs Terek that no one had ever met and the two small children he had at home.

  After a time, Ter
ek seemed to decide that some conversation was in order. He said, ‘Do you eat out much, Chris?’

  ‘Occasionally, sir. There are some decent places in Lake if you know where to look.’

  ‘Good. And how is your girlfriend? I understand you’re going steady?’

  Who could have told him such a thing? Surely they hadn’t used that expression. Terek had never met Janey – or at least he had, once, but he wouldn’t remember her. Meanwhile, this conversation was edging its way towards the excruciating.

  ‘Oh, she’s good, sir, thank you. We…’

  His voice tailed away because he had no idea how to continue but Terek was undeterred.

  ‘It’s the girl you met on my first case at Kings Lake, isn’t it? When we went to see the people who found the body on the marshes, the seal-trip boat? The captain’s daughter?’

  This was the thing with Terek – you underestimated him at your peril, and it was easy to do. Sam Cole would have laughed at being called the captain – he was a skipper – but it was the same girl alright.

  ‘Yes, sir – Janey Cole, Sam Cole’s niece. She’s in Manchester on a job interview.’

  ‘So that’s almost a year. That is going steady. As police officers, and especially as detectives, I always think we have a duty to consider the people we have relationships with. Being the wife or the husband of a police detective isn’t an easy thing – I’m sure you’ve already realised that. I thought long and hard before I suggested to Mrs Terek – Maureen – that we should get married.’

  They had arrived at excruciating now. Terek was, as his line manager, giving him fatherly relationship advice. Waters couldn’t help for just a moment trying to picture Maureen and the moment when, after much careful consideration, the suggestion was made. And he had never been more relieved to see a waitress heading for a table.