Above Suspicion (2 page)

The victim lay on her back, her long, blonde hair splayed around her head. Her face was swollen, her eyes sunken and crawling with maggots, which explored her nostrils and fed in her mouth, squirming and wriggling: a sickening, seething mass. Around the girl’s neck was what looked like a black scarf. It had been knotted so tightly her neck was ballooning. The victim’s skin tone was bluish and puffy. Her arms were behind her back, her body slightly arched. Her T-shirt had been drawn up over her breasts, her skirt pushed up around her belly. Both legs were spread-eagled, one shoe on, the other close to her side. The knees were scraped and the bloody scratches were covered in flies and maggots, which clustered all around the body. Rising above it was the buzzing sound of bluebottles. Bloated by their feeding frenzy, they clung to the detectives’ white suits.

‘This weather’s got them out early,’ Langton said, swatting a fly off his suit.

Anna could feel her legs start to buckle. She breathed deeply, trying hard not to faint.

‘Let’s go.’

Langton watched Anna stumble ahead of him, desperate to get out of the tent. He knew exactly what was going to happen next. She made it as far as a tree and stood there retching. Her stomach heaved while her eyes streamed tears.

The other two detectives were stripping off their white suits and dumping them in a waste disposal bin provided.

‘See you back at the car park,’ Langton called out, but Anna couldn’t lift her head.

When she finally joined them, they were sitting on a picnic bench. Langton was eating a sandwich and the others were drinking coffee. Anna’s face was almost as blue as the dead girl’s as she perched on the edge of the bench.

Langton passed her a paper napkin.

‘Sorry,’ she murmured, wiping her face.

‘We’ll get over to the station. Nothing much we can do here; right now, she doesn’t belong to us.’

‘Sorry?’ she said.

Langton gave a sigh. ‘The little girl isn’t ours. The local police called in the murder team for this area, so by rights it’s their case, not mine. We’re not allowed to take it unless we prove a connection. Fucking red tape! The arsehole in charge is a right little prick.’

‘You still think it’s the same bloke?’ Lewis asked.

‘Looks like it, but let’s not jump to conclusions,’ Langton said. She noticed Langton could smoke and eat at the same time. He was chewing his sandwich while smoke drifted from his nose.

Lewis persisted. ‘Looks like the same bloke to me, way he tied her hands.’

Barolli chipped in. ‘I agree.’ Anna noticed he was still chewing gum. ‘They only found her last night. How did you call us here so fast? You get a tip-off?’

‘Heard the callout over the radio. Got here almost the same time as the SOCO lads.’

Lewis knew his gov wasn’t telling the truth, because he’d been with him at the station when he had received the tip-off. It was obvious he was protecting his source.

‘I’ve already had a run-in with DCI Hedges.’

Both detectives followed his gaze to the blond man getting coffee at Teapot One. Feeling their scrutiny, the man glanced their way before returning to his mug of coffee.

Anna wanted to say something, but felt too wretched even to attempt to string a sentence together. They drove towards the station. Queen’s Park was a good distance from Clapham Common. The police station local to the murder site would automatically be setting up their own incident room.

Anna had never been to the Queen’s Park station, so she had no idea where she was going when she followed Mike Lewis up one flight of stairs towards the incident room. The station itself was old and rundown; the walls of the stone corridors were painted in lavatorial green, as were the stone stairwells. The second floor had worn lino on the floors and paint peeling from the ceiling and walls. Numerous offices led off to glass-panelled doors, interview rooms, filing sections. There was a sense that things were up in the air, with filing cabinets left at various intervals down the corridor. It was all confusing and bore no resemblance to the training manual, nor to workshops she’d been in at the college.

Barolli had disappeared to the toilet; she had no idea where Langton had gone.

‘You’re replacing Danny, aren’t you?’ Lewis panted as he reached the top of the flight of stairs.

‘I think so,’ she answered.

‘He got some kind of stomach bug. One minute he was fine, next buckled up in agony. I thought it was appendicitis, but it’s some intestinal bug. Did you know him?’ Now Lewis was barging down the narrow corridor.

‘No,’ she said, trying to keep up.

Lewis reached double doors at the end and banged them open. The doors swung back and Anna would have been clipped if he had not grabbed a door in time.

‘Sorry,’ he said absent-mindedly.

Anna had not anticipated the number of people she found working on a case where the body had only just been discovered. Eight desks were lined up, four to four on either side of the room. The desks were manned by male and female uniformed officers and two clerical workers. There were stacks of filing cabinets, overflowing files and masses of paperwork. Running along the length of one wall was a whiteboard covered in dates and names scribbled with felt-tip pen by various hands. Besides this was the unnerving display of numerous mortuary and life shots of the different women.

On one desk was a missing persons file. Anna opened it and found herself staring at a photograph of a stunning-looking young woman, Melissa Stephens -age seventeen, last seen in early February. There was a list including her eye colour, clothes she was last seen wearing and other details.

‘Has the victim from this morning been identified?’ she asked Mike Lewis. He was sitting on the edge of a desk, talking to one of the female officers.

‘Not yet,’ he replied over his shoulder, then went back to his conversation.

Anna moved along to the board to look at the other photographs. Side by side were six photographs of victims. Beneath them were descriptions, locations and ongoing enquiries. These women’s faces were hard and old compared to Melissa Stephens, with tough-eyed stares.

‘Are these all ongoing cases?’ she asked Lewis.

He did not hear her as he was talking to Barolli, who had just arrived.

Anna continued reading. Each of the victims had been raped and strangled and their bodies dumped in various local beauty spots: Richmond Park, Epping Forest, Hampstead Heath. All of them had their hands tied behind their backs and they had all been strangled with their own tights.

‘The victim this morning and all these victims — are these ongoing cases? I mean, are they connected?’

Barolli came over to join her. ‘Hasn’t anyone filled you in on why the governor got us out of bed so early this morning?’

‘No. I was just called at seven to say I’d be joining Langton’s team. Nobody’s told me anything about the enquiry.’

‘You’re replacing Danny, aren’t you?’

‘Mike mentioned he was in hospital.’

Barolli indicated the victims’ photos. ‘This investigation has been going on for months; six months to be precise. Five of the cases are years old. Their cases were left on file, until the gov dug them up.’

‘Six months?’ she said, shocked.

‘Yeah.’ He jabbed the board. ‘This was our most recent victim and by the time she was found, she’d been dead over a year. We started grouping them together a few months back: they’ve got the same MO, as you can see.’

‘You mean it’s the same killer?’

‘We think so, though so far we’ve come up with fuck all. But if the stiff found this morning is connected, we might get some leads. There again, we might not and we won’t get the case. The gov is really wanting it as we’ll be bound to get more evidence with it being fresh.’

Then the swing doors banged open and all eyes turned towards Langton.

‘It’s Melissa. The dental records match.’ Langton moved further into the room, which fell silent. He looked haggard, his eyes sunken and his five o’clock shadow was now even darker. ‘They moved fast for us, but we’ll have to wait for any further results. I’m going over to the lab now. Until we get those details, I won’t know if I need to set up a strategy meeting with ACPO. Mike, you want to come with me?’

Feeling a bit like a schoolgirl, Anna raised her hand. ‘Could I come too, sir?’

Langton gave her a slow, studied stare. ‘You been to a post mortem before?’

‘Yes.’

‘You keel over on me and I’ll send you packing, understand?’ He pointed at Barolli. ‘You handle things for me here. Anything they get in, we need to know immediately. Start up a board.’

Barolli’s black stencil pen was in his hand as he looked at Melissa’s photograph. He made a note of the dental records on the board as identification, then he wrote Melissa Stephens in large letters, Victim 7, with a question mark.

Langton sat in the front seat of the car, head leaning on the headrest, his eyes closed. Anna wondered if he was asleep. She leaned back, intent on keeping her mouth shut. Finally, he spoke. ‘This will be a big media show. She’s young and she was beautiful. I’ve got to convince the commander in charge of Pan London Homicide to award me the case. What we’ve been working on isn’t exactly high profile - six old tarts, or old drippers as your dad used to call them, don’t warrant Crime Night specials or reconstructions - but if they give it to me, I’ll get the team I need and with the Holmes database to help, I’ll get a result.’ Anna nodded, still a little confused. ‘Thank you.’ Anna and Langton walked across the car park to the hospital. He knew exactly where he was going and walked fast, pushing doors vigorously without looking behind him, expecting her to make it through after him. Finally, they reached the mortuary, where Langton pointed to a door marked ‘Ladies’.

‘Gown up in there and then come straight through,’ he said.

Anna tied a mask around her head, slipped her feet into overshoes and then tied the green ribbons of her protective gown. She entered the morgue, shivering. It was freezing cold.

Though recently modernized, the morgue had retained its Victorian tiles, though the swill area and the steel tables and equipment were up to date. At one table a group of assistants cut away the filthy, torn clothes from the corpse of a junkie found that morning. The floor was white tiled and slippery. A second table was empty, being swilled down with a high-powered water jet. On the third table, or ’slab’, lay their victim, covered by a green plastic sheet.

While his assistant listed the victim’s clothes, the pathologist, Dr Vernon Henson, spoke quietly to Langton. Anna watched as a black T-shirt and pink skirt were placed in an evidence bag for the forensic lab.

‘No underwear?’ Langton said quietly.

‘No panties,’ said Henson. ‘But there’s a bra. You probably want to have a look at the way it was tied.’

Langton gestured for Anna to move beside him as Henson was removing the plastic sheet from the body. It was at this moment that a gowned-up DCI Hedges walked in, snapping on rubber gloves. He glared at Langton. ‘You still breathing down my neck, Jimmy? Or are you just here for the thrill?’

‘I’m here, Brian, because if this girl is mine, you’ll have to give her up.’

Hedges shrugged. ‘You’ll have to prove it first. Right now, this is my case. So, if you don’t mind, butt out of my way.’

Langton stepped to one side. Hedges moved closer to the table as the two pathologist’s assistants turned the body over gently to face down. The hands were held together with a white cotton sports bra. The bra had been wrapped tightly around the wrists, then tied with some considerable force. Henson stepped aside to allow photographs to be taken from every possible angle before attempting to undo the knot. It resisted his efforts.

‘I’m going to have to cut it free,’ he said, almost apologetically.

‘Go ahead,’ Hedges instructed.

Trying to cause as little damage as possible, the pathologist snipped the material from the corpse’s wrists. The hands stayed in tight fists. The weals around the wrists were a dark plum red. When the girl was carefully laid face upwards again, her arms were drawn out to her sides, but her fists remained clenched.

‘We have what I think are her tights; again, they’ve been pulled exceptionally tight round her throat, cutting into the skin, so I doubt I’ll be able to undo them by hand.’

More photographs were taken of the way the tights had been knotted. Langton and Hedges virtually nudged against each other to get a clearer view.

The tights were pulled so taut that it was almost impossible to remove them. Eventually Henson clipped the knot away from her neck. The swelling had made the girl’s neck almost twice its normal size. The marks around it were deep, breaking through the skin; the tights had been pulled so roughly around her throat that the bruises were black, vermilion red and a deep purple shade. It was hard to recognize the girl on the slab as the same one in the photograph.

‘We’ve sent a lot of the larvae from her eyes and mouth over to the lab; they will give us an indication of how long her body has been in the woods. The insect infestation is more like we would experience in summer, due to the extraordinary weather conditions. I’ve got roses blooming in my garden and a few days ago, they were snowbound.’ Henson had a low, deep voice. His tone seemed more conversational than deferential to the work at hand.

‘Can you clean her up? Just so her family don’t see her like this,’ Hedges suggested.

Langton’s eyes widened. Henson, offended by the suggestion that, as chief pathologist, he would allow any relative to see their loved one’s corpse without ‘cleaning it up’, changed the subject quickly. ‘Stand back, please. Once I cut her up, the swelling will be released. We’ll be drawing her eyelids down, so the relatives won’t see her empty eye-sockets. You’ll see the little buggers have invaded her gums and the tip of her tongue is missing; could have been bitten by a fox.’

He turned to Langton and took a spatula to indicate the chewed tongue. ‘Unless she bit it off herself. If she did we’ll find it in her stomach.’

‘Took quite a blow here to her right temple, just above the ear.’

The camera continued to flash, taking the close-ups as required: face, neck, eyes, mouth and nose.