Aftermath (4 page)

‘Alan,’ he said, in a voice like a sigh. ‘Like a fucking abattoir, isn’t it?’

‘A fine start to the week. When did you get here?’

‘Four forty-four.’

Blackstone lived out Lawnswood way, and it wouldn’t have taken him more than half an hour to get to The Hill, if that. Banks, heading the North Yorkshire team, was glad that Blackstone was running West Yorkshire’s part of their joint operation, dubbed the ‘Chameleon’ squad because the killer, thus far, had managed to adapt, blend into the night and go unnoticed. Often, working together involved ego problems and incompatible personalities, but Banks and Blackstone had known each other for eight or nine years and had always worked well together. They got on socially, too, with a mutual fondness for pubs, Indian food and female jazz singers.

‘Have you talked to the paramedics?’ Banks asked.

‘Yes,’ said Blackstone. ‘They said they checked the girl for signs of life and found none, so they left her undisturbed. PC Morrisey was dead, too. Terence Payne was handcuffed to the pipe over there. His head was badly beaten, but he was still breathing, so they carted him off to hospital sharpish. There’s been some contamination of the scene – mostly to the position of Morrisey’s body – but it’s minimal, given the unusual circumstances.’

‘Trouble is, Ken, we’ve got two crime scenes overlapping here – maybe three if you count what happened to Payne.’ He paused. ‘Four, if you count Lucy Payne upstairs. That’ll cause problems. Where’s Stefan?’ Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak was their Crime Scene Co-ordinator, new to the Western Division HQ in Eastvale, and brought into the team by Banks, who had been quickly impressed by his abilities. Banks didn’t envy Stefan his job right now.

‘Around somewhere,’ said Blackstone. ‘Last time I saw him, he was heading upstairs.’

‘Anything more you can tell me, Ken?’

‘Not much, really. That’ll have to wait until we can talk to PC Taylor in more detail.’

‘When might that be?’

‘Later today. The paramedics took her off. She’s being treated for shock.’

‘I’m not bloody surprised. Have they—’

‘Yes. They’ve bagged her clothes and the police surgeon’s been to the hospital to do the necessary.’

Which meant taking fingernail scrapings and swabs from her hands, among other things. One thing it was easy to forget – and a thing everyone might
want
to forget – was that, for the moment, probationary PC Janet Taylor wasn’t a hero; she was a suspect in a case of excessive use of force. Very nasty indeed.

‘How does it look to you, Ken?’ Banks asked. ‘Gut feeling.’

‘As if they surprised Payne down here, cornered him. He came at them fast and somehow struck PC Morrisey with that there.’ He pointed to a bloodstained machete on the floor by the wall. ‘You can see Morrisey’s been slashed two or three times. PC Taylor must have had time enough to get her baton out and use it on Payne. She did the right thing, Alan. He must have been coming at her like a bloody maniac. She had to defend herself. Self-defence.’

‘Not for us to decide,’ said Banks. ‘What’s the damage to Payne?’

‘Fractured skull. Multiple fractures.’

‘Shame. Still, if he dies, it might save the courts a bit of money and a lot of grief in the long run. What about his wife?’

‘Way it looks is he hit her with a vase on the stairs and she fell down them. Mild concussion, a bit of bruising. Other than that, there’s no serious damage. She’s lucky it wasn’t heavy crystal or she might have been in the same boat as her husband. Anyway, she’s still out and they’re keeping an eye on her, but she’ll be fine. DC Hodgkins is at the hospital now.’

Banks looked around the room again, with its flickering candles, mirrors and obscene cartoons. He noticed shards of glass on the mattress near the body and realized when he saw his own image in one of them that they were from a broken mirror.
Seven years’ bad luck
. Hendrix’s ‘Roomful of Mirrors’ would never sound quite the same again.

The doctor looked up from his examination for the first time since Banks had entered the cellar, got up off his knees and walked over to them. ‘Dr Ian Mackenzie, Home Office pathologist,’ he said, holding his hand out to Banks, who shook it.

Dr Mackenzie was a heavily built man with a full head of brown hair, parted and combed, a fleshy nose and a gap between his upper front teeth. Always a sign of luck, that, Banks remembered his mother once telling him. Maybe it would counteract the broken mirror. ‘What can you tell us?’ Banks asked.

‘The presence of petechial haemorrhages, bruising of the throat and cyanosis all indicate death by strangulation, most likely ligature strangulation by that yellow clothes-line around her throat, but I won’t be able to tell you for certain until after the post mortem.’

‘Any evidence of sexual activity?’

‘Some vaginal and anal tearing, what looks like semen stains. But you can see that for yourself. Again, I’ll be able to tell you more later.’

‘Time of death?’

‘Recent. Very recent. There’s hardly any hypostasis yet, rigor hasn’t started, and she’s still warm.’

‘How long?’

‘Two or three hours, at an estimate.’

Banks looked at his watch. Sometime after three then, not long before the domestic dispute that drove the woman over the road to dial 999. Banks cursed. If the call had come in just a short while earlier, maybe only minutes or an hour, then they might have saved Kimberley. On the other hand, the timing was interesting for the questions it raised about the reasons for the dispute. ‘What about that rash around her mouth? Chloroform?’

‘At a guess. Probably used in abducting her, maybe even for keeping her sedated, though there are much more pleasant ways.’

Banks glanced at Kimberley’s body. ‘I don’t think our man was overly concerned about being pleasant, do you, Doctor? Is chloroform easily available?’

‘Pretty much. It’s used as a solvent.’

‘But it’s not the cause of death?’

‘I wouldn’t say so, no. Can’t be absolutely certain until after the post mortem, of course, but if it is the cause, we’d expect to find more severe blistering in the oesophagus, and there would also be noticeable liver damage.’

‘When can you get to her?’

‘Barring a motorway pile-up, I should be able to schedule the post mortems to start this afternoon,’ Dr Mackenzie said. ‘We’re pretty busy as it is, but . . . well there are priorities.’ He looked at Kimberley, then at PC Morrisey. ‘He died of blood loss, by the looks of it. Severed both his carotid artery and jugular vein. Very nasty, but quick. Apparently his partner did what she could, but it was too late. Tell her she shouldn’t blame herself. Hadn’t a chance.’

‘Thanks, Doctor,’ said Banks. ‘Appreciate it. If you could do the PM on Kimberley first . . .’

‘Of course.’

Dr Mackenzie left to make arrangements, and Luke Selkirk and Faye McTavish continued to take photographs and video. Banks and Blackstone stood in silence taking in the scene. There wasn’t much more to see, but what there was wouldn’t vanish quickly from their memories.

‘Where does that door over there lead to?’ Banks pointed to a door in the wall beside the mattress.

‘Don’t know,’ said Blackstone. ‘Haven’t had a chance to look yet.’

‘Let’s have a butcher’s, then.’

Banks walked over and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. Slowly, he opened the heavy wooden door to another, smaller room, this one with a dirt floor. The smell was much worse in there. He felt for a light switch but couldn’t locate one. He sent Blackstone to get a torch and tried to make out what he could in the overspill of light from the main cellar.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room, Banks thought he could see little clumps of mushrooms growing here and there from the earth.

Then he realized.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, slumping back against the wall. The nearest clump wasn’t mushrooms at all, it was a cluster of human toes poking through the dirt.

•

After a quick breakfast and an interview with two police detectives about her 999 call, Maggie felt the urge to go for a walk. There wasn’t much chance of getting any work done for a while anyway, what with all the excitement over the road, though she knew she would try later. Right now, she was restless and needed to blow the cobwebs out. The detectives had stuck mostly to factual questions, and she hadn’t told them anything about Lucy, but she sensed that one of them, at least, didn’t seem satisfied with her answers. They would be back.

She still didn’t know what the hell was going on. The policemen who talked to her had given away nothing, of course, had not even told her how Lucy was, and the local news on the radio was hardly illuminating, either. All they could say at this stage was that a member of the public and a police officer had been injured earlier that morning. And that took second place to the ongoing story about the local girl, Kimberley Myers.

As she walked down her front steps past the fuchsias, which would soon be flowering and drooping their heavy purple-pink bells over the path, Maggie saw the activity at number thirty-five was increasing, and neighbours were stood in little groups on the pavement, which had now been roped off from the road.

Several men wearing white overalls and carrying shovels, sieves and buckets got out of a van and hurried down the garden path.

‘Oh, look,’ called out one of the neighbours. ‘He’s got his bucket and spade. Must be off to Blackpool.’

Nobody laughed. Like Maggie, everyone was coming to realize that something very nasty indeed had happened at thirty-five The Hill. About ten yards away, across from the narrow, walled lane that separated it from number thirty-five, was a row of shops: pizza takeaway, hairdresser, mini-mart, newsagent, fish and chips, and several uniformed officers stood arguing with the shopkeepers. They probably wanted to open up, Maggie guessed.

Plainclothes police officers sat on the front wall, talking and smoking. Radios crackled. The area had fast begun to resemble the site of a natural disaster, as if a train had crashed or an earthquake had struck. Maggie remembered seeing the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, when she went there once with Bill before they were married: a flattened apartment building, three storeys reduced in seconds to two; fissures in the roads; part of the freeway collapsed. Though there was no visible damage here, it
felt
the same, had the same shell-shocked aura. Even though they didn’t know what had happened yet, people were stunned, were counting the cost; there was a pall of apprehension over the community and a deep sense of terror at what destructive power the hand of God might have unleashed. They knew that something momentous had occurred on their doorsteps. Already, Maggie sensed, life in the neighbourhood would never be the same again.

Maggie turned left and walked down The Hill, under the railway bridge. At the bottom was a small artificial pond in the midst of the housing estates and business parks. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. At least she could sit on a bench by the water and feed the ducks, watch the people walking their dogs.

It was safe, too – an important consideration in this part of the city, where old, large houses, such as the one Maggie was staying in, rubbed shoulders with the newer, rougher council estates. Burglary was rife, and murder not unknown, but down by the pond, the double-deckers ran by on the main road just a few yards away, and enough ordinary people came to walk their dogs that Maggie never felt isolated or threatened. Attacks occurred in broad daylight, she knew, but she still felt close enough to safety down there.

It was a warm, pleasant morning. The sun was out, but the brisk breeze made a light jacket necessary. Occasionally, a high cloud drifted over the sun, blocking the light for a second or two and casting shadows on the water’s surface.

There was something very soothing about feeding ducks, Maggie thought. Almost trance-like. Not for the ducks, of course, who seemed to have no concept of what sharing meant. You tossed the bread, they scooted towards it, quacked and fought. As Maggie crumbled the stale bread between her fingers and tossed it onto the water, she recalled her first meeting with Lucy Payne just a couple of months ago.

She had been in town shopping for art supplies that day – a remarkably warm day for March – then she’d been to Borders on Briggate to buy some books, and afterwards she found herself wandering through the Victoria Quarter down towards Kirkgate Market, when she bumped into Lucy coming the other way. They had seen one another before in the street and at the local shops, and they had always said hello. Partly through inclination and partly through her shyness – getting out and meeting people never having been one of her strong points – Maggie had no friends in her new world, apart from Claire Toth, her neighbour’s schoolgirl daughter, who seemed to have adopted her. Lucy Payne, she soon found out, was a kindred spirit.

Perhaps because they were both out of their natural habitat, like compatriots meeting in a foreign land, they stopped and spoke to one another. Lucy said it was her day off work and she was doing a bit of shopping. Maggie suggested a cup of tea or coffee at the Harvey Nichols outdoor café, and Lucy said she’d love to. So they sat, rested their feet and their parcels on the ground. Lucy noticed the names on the bags Maggie was carrying – including Harvey Nichols – and said something about not having the nerve to go inside such a posh place. Her own packages, it soon became clear, were from British Home Stores and C&A. Maggie had come across this reluctance in northern people before, had heard all the stories about how you’d never get the typical Leeds anorak and flat-cap crowd into an upmarket store like Harvey Nichols, but it still surprised her to hear Lucy admit to this.

This was because Maggie thought Lucy was such a strikingly attractive and elegant woman, with her glossy black, raven’s-wing hair tumbling down to the small of her back, and the kind of figure men buy magazines to look at pictures of. Lucy was tall and full-breasted, with a waist that curved in and hips that curved out in the right proportion, and the simple yellow dress she was wearing under a light jacket that day emphasized her figure without broadcasting it out loud, and it also drew attention to her shapely legs. She didn’t wear much make-up; she didn’t need to. Her pale complexion was smooth as a reflection in a mirror, her black eyebrows arched, cheekbones high in her oval face. Her eyes were black, with flint-like chips scattered around inside them that caught the light like quartz crystals as she looked around.