Aftermath (3 page)

Maggie rubbed the back of her neck and kept watching. Seconds later, an ambulance pulled up. Then another police car. Then paramedics. The ambulance attendants left the front door open, and Maggie could see them kneeling by someone in the hall. Someone covered with a fawn blanket. They lifted the figure onto a wheeled stretcher and pushed her down the path to the ambulance, back doors open and waiting. It all happened so quickly that Maggie couldn’t see clearly who it was, but she thought she glimpsed Lucy’s jet-black hair spread out against a white pillow.

So it was as she had thought. She gnawed at her thumbnail. Should she have done something sooner? She had certainly had her suspicions, but could she somehow have prevented this? What could she have done?

Next to arrive looked like a plainclothes police officer. He was soon followed by five or six men who put on disposable white overalls before they went inside the house. Someone also put up white and blue tape across the front gate and blocked off a long stretch of the pavement, including the nearest bus-stop, and the entire side of the road number thirty-five stood on, reducing The Hill to one lane of traffic in order to make room for police vehicles and ambulances.

Maggie wondered what was going on. Surely they wouldn’t go to all this trouble unless it was something really serious? Was Lucy dead? Had Terry finally killed her? Perhaps that was it; that would make them pay attention.

As daylight grew, the scene became even stranger. More police cars arrived, and another ambulance. As the attendants wheeled a second stretcher out, the first morning bus went down The Hill and obscured Maggie’s view. She could see the passengers turn their heads, the ones on her side of the road standing up to get a look at what was happening, but she couldn’t see who lay on the stretcher. Only that two policemen got in after it.

Next, a hunched figure shrouded in a blanket stumbled down the path, supported on each side by uniformed policemen. At first Maggie had no idea who it was. A woman, she thought, from her general outline and the cut of her dark hair. Then she thought she glimpsed the dark blue uniform.
The policewoman
. Breath caught in her throat. What could have happened to change her so much so fast?

By now there was far more activity than Maggie had ever thought the scene of a domestic argument could engender. At least half a dozen police cars had arrived, some of them unmarked. A wiry man with close-cropped dark hair got out of a blue Renault and walked into the house as if he owned the place. Another man who went in looked like a doctor. At least, he carried a black bag and had that self-important air about him. People up and down The Hill were going to work now, driving their cars out of their garages or waiting for the bus at the temporary bus-stop someone from the depot had put up. Little knots of them gathered by the house, watching, but the police came over and moved them on.

Maggie looked at her watch. Half past six. She had been kneeling at the window for two and a half hours, yet she felt as if she had been watching a quick succession of events, as if it had been done by time-lapse photography. When she got to her feet she heard her knees crack, and the broadloom carpet had made deep red criss-cross marks on her skin.

There was far less activity outside the house now, just the police guards and the detectives coming and going, standing on the pavement to smoke, shake their heads and talk in low voices. The group of haphazardly parked cars outside Lucy’s house were causing traffic back-ups.

Weary and confused, Maggie threw on jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to make a cup of tea and some toast. As she filled the kettle, she noticed that her hand was shaking. They would want to talk to her, no doubt about that. And when they did, what would she tell them?

Acting Detective Superintendent
Alan Banks – ‘acting’ because his immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, had shattered his ankle while working on his drystone wall and would be off work for at least a couple of months – signed the first officer’s log at the gate, took a deep breath and walked into thirty-five The Hill shortly after six o’clock that morning. Householders: Lucy Payne, aged twenty-two, loans officer at the local NatWest up near the shopping precinct, and her husband, Terence Payne, aged twenty-eight, schoolteacher at Silverhill Comprehensive. No kids. No criminal record. To all intents and purposes, an idyllic, successful young couple. Married just one year.

All the lights were on in the house, and the SOCOs were already at work, dressed – as Banks was – in the obligatory white sterile overalls, overshoes, gloves and hoods. They looked like some sort of phantom house-cleaning crew, Banks thought: dusting, vacuuming, scraping up samples, packaging, labelling.

Banks paused a moment in the hall to get the feel of the place. It seemed an ordinary enough middle-class home. The ribbed coral-pink wallpaper looked new. Carpeted stairs to the right led up to the bedrooms. If anything, the place smelled a bit
too much
of lemon air-freshener. The only thing that seemed out of place was the rust-coloured stain on the cream hall carpet.
Lucy Payne
, currently under observation by both doctors and police in Leeds General Infirmary, just down the corridor from where her husband, Terence Payne, was fighting for his life. Banks hadn’t a lot of sympathy to spare for him; PC Dennis Morrisey had lost his struggle for life far more quickly.

And there was a dead girl in the cellar, too.

Most of this information Banks had got from Detective Chief Inspector Ken Blackstone over his mobile on the way to Leeds, the rest from talking to the paramedics and the ambulance crew outside. The first phone call to his Gratly cottage, the one that woke him from the shallow, troubled and restless sleep that seemed to be his lot these days, had come shortly after half past four, and he had showered, thrown on some clothes and jumped in his car. A CD of Zelenka trios had helped him keep calm on the way and discouraged him from taking outrageous risks with his driving on the A1. All in all, the eighty-mile drive had taken him about an hour and a half and, if he hadn’t had too many other things on his mind, during the first part of his journey he might have admired the coming of a beautiful May dawn over the Yorkshire Dales, rare enough so far that spring. As it was, he saw little but the road ahead and barely even heard the music. By the time he got to the Leeds Ring Road, the Monday morning rush-hour was already underway.

Circumventing the bloodstains and daffodils on the hall carpet, Banks walked to the back of the house. He noticed someone had been sick in the kitchen sink.

‘One of the ambulance crew,’ said the SOCO busy going through the drawers and cupboards. ‘First time out, poor sod. We’re lucky he made it back up here and didn’t puke all over the scene.’

‘Christ, what did he have for breakfast?’

‘Looks like Thai red curry and chips to me.’

Banks took the stairs down to the cellar. On his way, he noted the door to the garage. Very handy if you wanted to bring someone into the house without being seen, someone you had abducted, perhaps drugged or knocked unconscious. Banks opened the door and had a quick glance at the car. It was a dark, four-door Vectra, with an ‘S’ registration. The last three letters were NGV. Not local. He made a note to have someone run it through the DVLA at Swansea.

He could hear voices down in the cellar, see cameras flashing. That would be Luke Selkirk, their hotshot crime scene photographer, fresh from his army-sponsored training course up at Catterick Camp, where he had been learning how to photograph scenes of terrorist bombings. Not that his special skill would be needed today, but it was good to know you were working with a highly trained professional, one of the best.

The stone steps were worn in places; the walls were whitewashed brick. Someone had put more white and blue tape across the open door at the bottom. An inner crime scene. Nobody would get beyond that until Banks, Luke, the doctor and the SOCOs had done their jobs.

Banks paused at the threshold and sniffed. The smell was bad: decomposition, mould, incense, and the sweet, metallic whiff of fresh blood. He ducked under the tape and walked inside and the horror of the scene hit him with such force that he staggered back a couple of inches.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen worse; he had. Much worse: the disembowelled Soho prostitute, Dawn Whadden; a decapitated petty thief called William Grant; the half-eaten body parts of a young barmaid called Colleen Dickens; bodies shredded by shotgun blasts and slit open by knives. He remembered all their names. But that wasn’t the point, he had come to learn over the years. It wasn’t a matter of blood and guts, of intestines poking out of the stomach, of missing limbs or of deep gashes flapping open in an obscene parody of mouths. That wasn’t what really got you when it came right down to it. That was just the outward aspect. You could, if you tried hard, convince yourself that a crime scene like this one was a movie set or a theatre during rehearsals, and that the bodies were merely props, the blood fake.

No, what got to him most of all was the
pity
of it all, the deep empathy he had come to feel with the victims of crimes he investigated. And he hadn’t become more callous, more inured to it all over the years as many did, and as he had once thought he would. Each new one was like a raw wound reopening. Especially something like this. He could keep it all in check, keep the bile down in his rumbling gut and do his job, but it ate away at him from the inside like acid and kept him awake at night. Pain and fear and despair permeated these walls like the factory grime that had crusted the old city buildings. Only this kind of horror couldn’t be sandblasted away.

Seven people in the cramped cellar, five of them alive and two dead; this was going to be a logistical and forensic nightmare.

Someone had turned an overhead light on, just a bare bulb, but candles still flickered all over the place. From the doorway Banks could see the doctor bent over the pale body on the mattress. A girl. The only outward signs of violence were a few cuts and bruises, a bloody nose and a length of yellow plastic clothes-line around her neck. She lay spread-eagled on the soiled mattress, her hands tied with the same yellow plastic line to metal pegs set into the concrete floor. Blood from PC Morrisey’s severed artery had sprayed across her ankles and shins. Some flies had managed to get in the cellar, and three of them were buzzing around the blood clotted under her nose. There seemed to be some sort of rash or blistering around her mouth. Her face was pale and bluish in death, the rest of her body white under the bulb’s glare.

What made it all so much worse were the large mirrors on the ceiling and two of the walls that multiplied the scene like a funfair trick.

‘Who turned the overhead light on?’ Banks asked.

‘Ambulance men,’ said Luke Selkirk. ‘They were first on the scene after PCs Taylor and Morrisey.’

‘Okay, we’ll leave it on for the time being, get a better idea of what we’re dealing with. But I want the original scene photographed, too, later. Just the candlelight.’

Luke nodded. ‘By the way, this is Faye McTavish, my new assistant.’ Faye was a slight, pale, waif-like woman, early twenties perhaps, a stud through her nostril and almost no hips at all. The heavy old Pentax she had slung around her neck looked too big for her to hold steady, but she managed it well enough.

‘Pleased to meet you, Faye,’ said Banks, shaking hands. ‘Only wish it could be in better circumstances.’

‘Me, too.’

Banks turned to the body on the mattress.

He knew who she was: Kimberley Myers, aged fifteen, missing since Friday night, when she had failed to return from a school dance only a quarter of a mile from her home. She had been a pretty girl, with the characteristic long blonde hair and slim, athletic figure of all the victims. Now her dead eyes stared up at the mirror on the ceiling as if looking for answers to her suffering.

Dried semen glistened on her pubic hair. And blood. Semen and blood, the old, old story. Why was it always the pretty young girls these monsters took? Banks asked himself for the hundredth time. Oh, he knew all the pat answers, he knew that women and children made easier victims because they were physically weaker, more easily cowed and subdued by male strength, just as he knew that prostitutes and runaways made easy victims, too, because they were less likely to be missed than someone from a nice home, like Kimberley. But it was much more than that. There was always a deep, dark sexual aspect to these sorts of things, and to be the right kind of object for whoever had done this, the victim needed not only to be weaker, but needed breasts and a vagina, too, available for her tormentor’s pleasure and ultimate desecration. And perhaps some aura of youth and innocence. It was despoliation of innocence. Men killed other men for many reasons, by the thousands in wartime, but in crimes like this, the victim always had to be a woman.

The first officer on the scene had had the foresight to mark out a narrow pathway on the floor with tape, so that people wouldn’t walk all over the place and destroy evidence, but after what had happened with PCs Morrisey and Taylor, it was probably too late for that anyway.

PC Dennis Morrisey lay curled on his side in a pool of blood on the concrete floor. His blood had also sprayed over part of the wall and one of the mirrors, rivalling in its pattern anything Jackson Pollock had ever painted. The rest of the whitewashed walls were covered with either pornographic images ripped from magazines, or childish, obscene stick figures of men with enormous phalluses, like the Cerne Giant, drawn in coloured chalk. Mixed in with these were a number of crudely drawn occult symbols and grinning skulls. There was another pool of blood by the wall next to the door, and a long dark smear on the whitewash.
Terence Payne
.

Luke Selkirk’s camera flashed and snapped Banks out of his trance-like state. Faye was wielding her camcorder now. The other man in the room turned and spoke for the first time: Detective Chief Inspector Ken Blackstone of the West Yorkshire Police, looking immaculate as ever, even in his protective clothing. Grey hair curled over his ears, and his wire-rimmed glasses magnified his sharp eyes.