Fatal Act (18 page)

‘Not the state my wings are in,’ Stephanie grumbled.

Far below them traffic thundered past along the Farringdon Road.

‘Makes me dizzy,’ Lia said. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to look down there.’

She turned away from the railings and walked on a few steps.

A
ll at once she stopped in her tracks. As her companions stared down over the railing, chatting and laughing excitedly, a high-pitched scream cut across the hum of traffic. The others turned to look at Lia.

‘What the hell – ?’ Kirsty began.

She stopped speaking as Lia swung round and ran over to her friends. She was shaking visibly, and they could see she was trying to talk.

‘Oh my God, she’s having a stroke!’ Kirsty cried out.

They clustered in front of her, all talking at once.

‘Lia, Lia, what’s wrong?’

‘Lia, pull yourself together.’

‘Lia, Lia, speak to me!’

The stricken girl covered her mouth with one hand, gesturing wildly at the ground with the other. They looked down where she was pointing.

‘What is it?’

‘What the fuck is that?’

T
he passing glare of a car’s headlights illuminated a figure lying on the pavement. They fell silent. A woman’s face was staring up at them from the ground. In the shadowy light of the street lamps her complexion appeared bluish in colour. By themselves her blackish lips might have identified her as a Goth, but with bloodshot eyes she looked more like a character from a horror film.

‘It’s a mask,’ Kirsty whispered. ‘Her face is blue –’

‘What’s she doing there?’

‘Must be drunk.’

‘Or stoned.’

‘Look at her eyes… ’

‘This is really freaking me out.’

‘Do you think we should do something?’

They spoke in hushed tones, shocked by the sight of a stranger lying motionless at their feet.

T
rainee nurse Stephanie stepped forward and stooped down to examine the figure.

‘It’s a woman,’ she said briskly, ‘probably dead. Can you all step back so I can get some light here?’

It wasn’t a question. Automatically, her friends obeyed the authority in her voice. Lia began to cry. Kirsty watched Stephanie kneel down beside the prone figure, turn her head to one side, and listen to the woman’s chest. Sitting back on her heels, she reached out her hand, frowning as she disturbed the woman’s clothing to examine her neck. Finally she spoke.

‘You’d better call the police.’

Kirsty’s hands were shaking as she pulled out her phone.

‘Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?’ one of the girls piped up.

‘It’s too late for that,’ Stephanie answered.

‘How do you know? You can’t be sure.’

‘Do you want to come over here and see if you can find any signs of life?’

K
irsty dialled the emergency services and asked for the police. It felt awkward saying she and her friends had found a dead body on the street. She had to repeat her message before the woman at the other end of the phone seemed to understand what she was saying.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ she snapped.

It was beginning to sink in that her hen night was ruined.

‘We’re standing right here. We know when someone’s dead. That is, my friend Stephanie does. She’s a nurse, or at least she will be soon. Anyway, she knows what she’s doing and she said this woman is dead.’

Her voice rose in panic. She seemed to calm down as she listened again. When she spoke again she sounded impatient.

‘I’ve no idea who she is. We just found her. I don’t know what happened. We just found her here, dead.’

She hung up abruptly and burst out crying.

‘It’s my hen night,’ she wailed. ‘Everyone will be there.’

W
hile Kirsty had been talking on the phone, Lia had continued to sob quietly. Stephanie meanwhile had been observing the body. Having established the woman was dead, she was careful not to touch her again.

‘There’s definitely something not right about this,’ Stephanie announced quietly.

Taking no notice of Lia, who was moaning about wanting to throw up, Kirsty moved closer to Stephanie to hear what she was saying. The body gave off a stale smell. Even Kirsty was interested, her disappointment forgotten in her curiosity about the dead woman.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look.’

S
tephanie pointed first to the swollen tongue in the dead woman’s open mouth, and then to a dark brown ring that encircled her neck. On either side of it was a band, lighter in colour but still clearly visible. It looked as though something had been tied around her neck so tightly it had cut into her flesh.

‘Oh my God,’ Kirsty whispered, as she glimpsed the significance of the weal round the woman’s neck.

‘Something stopped her breathing,’ Stephanie said.

‘Or someone,’ Kirsty added.

G
ERALDINE
WENT
INTO
WORK
early the next morning, as usual. In London the roads could be unexpectedly congested at any time, but this Saturday morning her journey was relatively fast. Her easy drive didn’t improve her mood. The senior crime command centre was already humming with quiet activity. After checking her emails, she made her way along the corridor to find Sam who had a team of constables still looking for the missing van driver.

‘He must be somewhere,’ Sam insisted. Trying to appear decisive, she sounded plaintive. ‘People don’t just disappear into thin air.’

M
ost of the team were convinced it must have been Piers, his son’s alibi having checked out. No one could explain how he could have been driving the van and escaped from the crash alive. In the absence of any other information, they were working on the assumption that whoever had been driving the van had also committed the murder.

‘It seems highly unlikely that someone else appeared on the scene after the crash and killed Anna,’ Reg pointed out, ‘but we need to keep an open mind.’

‘You mean two people might have disappeared?’ Sam said.

T
he team were busy contacting every hospital and doctor’s surgery within a hundred mile radius, on the assumption that the van driver couldn’t possibly have escaped unhurt. If that drew a blank, they would widen their search area.

‘Whoever was driving that van must have been injured in the crash,’ Sam argued. ‘He’s going to be needing medical attention soon, if he hasn’t already checked into a hospital or consulted a doctor. No one’s seen him yet, but it can’t be much longer before he shows himself. We’re alerting every doctor and nurse who might have come in contact with a patient whose injuries could fit with our accident, and all the undertakers as well. It’s a massive undertaking, which –’

‘Which I’m sure you’re carrying out thoroughly and efficiently,’ Geraldine finished the sentence for her.

S
am gave Geraldine a grateful smile. Seeing that the sergeant looked exhausted, Geraldine suggested they go for a coffee.

‘Have you had breakfast yet?’

Sam shook her head and they went to the canteen where Geraldine insisted her colleague have a full breakfast. As she tucked into egg and beans on toast, she filled Geraldine in on their progress so far. The search had found several possible suspects who had turned up at accident and emergency departments in London hospitals displaying injuries consistent with serious car accidents. One by one they had been ruled out, after raising the hopes of the team. None of them could feasibly have been driving Piers’ van between two and three on the night of the accident.

G
eraldine agreed that it was impossible for the driver to have walked away unharmed. She actually found it hard to believe anyone could have escaped from the van alive, after such a serious accident. What had happened seemed impossible. The driver had not only survived, but had left the scene without being noticed or picked up on any CCTV film in the area. There were no shots of the van itself from the security camera covering that stretch of road. Only the back of the Porsche was visible, coming to an abrupt halt when the van hit it. The film was grainy and fuzzy, but helpful in pinpointing the time of the accident.

W
ith the van out of the sightline of the camera, it might have been possible for the driver to clamber out without being caught on film. But Bernard had driven up in his taxi just seven minutes after the accident took place, and was positive he hadn’t seen anyone leave the street where the crash took place. Sam’s constables had scrutinised CCTV film from both ends of Ashland Place. No one had left the narrow street in the seven minutes before the taxi drew up, or in the subsequent five minutes before the first uniformed police arrived, and no one had opened a door or window in the walls on either side of the road. There was no way the van driver could have walked away without being spotted. Yet he had.

B
ack at her desk, Geraldine was fed up. She had spent a whole week working in vain. She had checked through CCTV which had already been watched by a team of constables, studied Bernard Hallam’s statement for the tenth time, and gone over reports produced by scene of crime officers who had found no trace of the vanished driver. Expert car mechanics had discovered no evidence the van had been modified, and were adamant it couldn’t have driven into the Porsche without someone at the wheel. Rereading the post mortem report didn’t help. The investigation seemed to have hit a brick wall. All they could do was wait and hope a doctor or undertaker would come forward with information. On a previous case Sam had told Geraldine the team had complained that she distrusted other people. They said she found it impossible to delegate any work to others, and was determined to control every aspect of the case herself. In this instance no one had so much as raised an eyebrow about her going over what they had done, they were all so keen for someone to discover a lead to the van driver.

W
ith nothing new to do, and too dispirited to read through statements once more, the only sensible course was take a break and prepare to start again fresh. Ten minutes later she was sitting in the canteen with a half eaten bun and a mug of coffee, barely conscious of the food she was eating. Meanwhile her mind continued to race, thinking about Piers, his son, his neighbour, as well as the young stud, Dirk, and his new girlfriend. Somewhere in their statements there must be a clue to the identity of the killer. She was both irritated and relieved when Nick came over.

‘Mind if I join you?’

She gave a noncommittal grunt. She could hardly tell him to leave her alone.

I
n some ways she was glad of the distraction.

‘You look down in the dumps,’ he commented cheerfully.

She was tempted to retort, ‘Just because I couldn’t tell you not to sit here, doesn’t mean I want to talk to you.’ Instead she merely shrugged.

‘What’s on your mind?’ he asked again.

Geraldine gazed into his irregular eyes that seemed to be winking back at her. One strand of his light brown hair had flopped forwards over his wide forehead. Together with his striped scarf and sports jacket, she thought it gave him the appearance of having just stepped off a film set. Everything seemed to remind her of the theatrical people she was investigating.

‘What’s up?’ he repeated.

I
t was actually quite pleasant to be able to discuss the investigation with someone who would understand her frustrations without being directly involved in the case. With a sigh, she told him about the murder.

‘Yes, I heard about it. The disappearing driver. Some people get all the interesting cases. So, we’ve got one actress, and two men. That sounds like a recipe for trouble to begin with. Or the start of a bad joke. Is that the key?’

‘The key?’

‘She was sleeping with both of them, wasn’t she? That sounds like a recipe for trouble.’

‘Yes, although that’s hardly unusual. No, the real conundrum is how the killer managed to slip away without being seen. That’s what needs attention.’

‘You look like you could do with a bit of attention yourself,’ Nick said. ‘How about a spot of supper tonight? My treat.’

B
efore Geraldine could think what to say, her phone rang. Her heart raced at the thought that a lead might have been discovered, but the call wasn’t from a colleague. Instead, she was disappointed to hear her sister’s voice.

‘How’s your investigation coming along?’

‘Lots of hard work to be done,’ Geraldine replied, forcing herself to sound cheerful. With a nod to Nick to indicate she had to take the call, she stood up and left the table.

‘How about you? What’s your news? And how’s Chloe?’

‘She’s still disappointed you let her down –’

‘You know I couldn’t help it.’

‘Yes, that’s all very well, but she’s a child … ’

With solemn assurances that she would make it up to her niece, Geraldine made her escape from the second tricky conversation in as many minutes. She and Celia had grown up together, but they couldn’t be more different. Sometimes she felt they had grown up on different planets, and not under the same roof at all. In the meantime, she was grateful that Celia’s call had rescued her from a slightly awkward situation with Nick.

A
lthough she hadn’t enjoyed defending herself from her sister’s criticism, after she hung up she felt more lonely than ever, her sense of helplessness almost a physical ache. Returning to her office, she tried not to speculate that Nick’s invitation might have signified something more than a casual encounter with a colleague. Knowing he was married, she had never really given him much thought, although he was undoubtedly attractive, friendly and attentive. She wondered if he had made a similar advance to Sam, and if that was the real reason the sergeant found him so objectionable.

S
he didn’t hear Nick enter the office until she was startled by his voice close to her ear.

‘How about this evening, then?’

She turned and saw him leaning over her, his hand on the back of her chair in a proprietorial gesture.