Force Of Habit v5 (2 page)

The PC snorted. ‘Like going out mob handed onto the estates for a few hours here and there for a week will reassure the public on all the gang trouble.’

‘You go swap with Deacon, get out of the rain for a bit.’ North looked the maisonette door over as he wrestled his fingers into a pair of white latex gloves. ‘How long since the paramedics left?’ he called after the PC.

‘Not long. About fifteen minutes.’

North stepped inside.

Blood.

Lots of blood.

It had been trodden into the carpet the length of the hall. He examined the inside of the door. There were no marks that couldn’t be remedied with a lick of one-coat. The lock was intact. No one had forced their way inside.

An open door revealed the kitchen to his left. The stairs were on his right. The only other room downstairs was dead ahead at the other end of the trail of blood. She was on the floor. And something had definitely gotten lost in translation.

‘Jesus.’

The body was a macabre pin-cushion. North counted thirty-six hypodermic syringes driven into the torso, arms and legs, barrels and plungers at all angles, some lodged in firm, others dangling, the needle points clinging just beneath the surface, pulling at the skin. Some lay on the floor, their tips broken off when they had been rammed into bone.

She was naked, lying on her back, arms and legs spread apart. Most of her blood seemed to be on the outside. It was hard to tell her age as her severely battered face was cut, bruised, swollen and bloody. North squatted as close as he could to get a better look. Her nose looked broken. The hair, where it wasn’t matted in blood, was shoulder length, straight, dyed black, grey roots. Clumps of it were on the floor. Her legs also bore cuts and bruises. So did the arms. Both bore evidence of having been tied at some point. The torso was the same. There were several red welts that could have been made by scalds or burns.

Bloody clothing was strewn about the place, some of it clearly having been ripped from her with some force. A piece of wood lay in the blood near the body. It looked like a chair leg. There were splashes and trails of blood on the walls and paintwork. North skirted the thick, sticky mass. On one side the saturated carpet had been pressed flat by the medics where they had checked for life to confirm what their eyes had already told them. If the killer had left footprints to the door the paramedics had covered them. They couldn’t have avoided it. North called forensics. They would be in here for days.

He moved into the surroundings. The place was spartan. Cheap. A worn, leather sofa along the wall to his left, a pile of trash mags, a dining table in one corner and a TV in the other. There were no photos. No knick-knacks.

A chair was pushed slightly back from the dining table, just like it would be if the occupant had got up to go answer the door. Another was lying on the floor, a leg missing, clean wood showing where a recent break had occurred. The table surface was cluttered. There was a bottle of vodka on the left next to a McDonald’s bag. The booze was generic, supermarket saver. Some of it was in a glass. Directly in front of the pushed back chair was a set of kitchen scales, a pair of scissors, paper and rolls of foil and cellophane. A number of small wraps had been prepped. The scales and table were covered in specks of what looked like cocaine but that would be like the off-license down the road stocking up on Moet instead of White Lightning. It just wouldn’t make sense.

There were two open plastic containers. The kind you stuck leftovers in and stashed in your fridge. Both contained white powder. North dapped a pinky into the first and touched his tongue. It was some harmless concoction that was being mixed in with the active ingredient to increase profit margin on a product sold by weight. He tasted from the second container and couldn’t conceal his surprise. He hadn’t seen white heroin since the eighties. This place was being used to cut and pack drugs for sale to the end user. He opened the burger bag. It was filled with street ready wraps. North estimated a hundred.

He went upstairs.

Upstairs was as basic as down. There were no goods of any value and her clothes were old. Primark. There was also male clothing but the only name on all the paperwork he found was Miss D Lumsden. Denise. It was all utility stuff, no driving license, no passport.

She had a post office account with twenty-two pounds eleven pence in it, at the latest statement, the only transactions being regular monthly cash deposits that covered the outgoing rent and bills. The bulk of the drug money must be going elsewhere.

He moved back downstairs into the hallway. There was a coat hanging from the banister. Searching the pockets revealed a handbag beneath it. It had a long strap so you could sling it across your front, leaving your hands free for drug couriering. Inside was the usual paraphernalia: pen, paper, tissues, keys, phone, and purse, and there wasn’t much more in the purse than there was in the post office.

In the kitchen there was a pile of unused betting slips on the worktop. No vice had gone unexplored in here. Under the worktop an open black bin liner sat where a washing machine was meant to go. It contained a number of empty vodka and lemonade bottles, soup cans and fag packets. The diet of the addict.

A Take That calendar was pinned to the back of the door. The current month was displayed beneath a glossy of Robbie. Two of the days had two times written in each, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. There was a sequence of four crosses marked on consecutive days between these two days. He unhooked the calendar and leafed through. The same pattern went all the way back to January. Next month was blank. He took out his phone and dictated all he’d seen into an app. He was reciting information found in Denise Lumsden’s phone when the front door opened. PCW Deacon resembled a drowned rat.

‘Thanks a lot, North. If I catch cold out here -’

‘Relax, you can't catch cold just from being out in the rain. It's a virus. Chummy already has a virus so I had to get him to bugger off in case I caught it.’

‘You’re all heart. You rushed off before I could fill you in. I've been called out here a few times before, to this same flat. To domestics. The boyfriend used to get high or drunk on whatever he had gotten his hands on at the time and beat the crap out of her. Nothing remotely like this, though. I couldn’t even say for sure if that is her.’

Her own mum couldn’t have.

‘He was put away about a year back and this is the first time I've been called back since. The neighbour who called this in says that she is sure that she saw him legging it earlier. I guess he didn't get rehabilitated.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Rawlins. Terry.’

‘What was the MO of the domestics?’

‘We’d get here, she’d refuse to press charges and give us a load of abuse. A recurring theme round here. They fight each other then turn on us when we arrive to help and if I’ve been here a few times its odds on other shifts have been called out here too. We complete the forms, send them to the DVU, and while they piss about making further assessments and compare notes with the council its business as usual out here. This one, he got put on remand about a year ago. We had to batter the door in that night. We could hear him shouting and her screaming and the blows raining in. When we got to them she was pretty messed up. He’s out five minutes and she lets him back in and gets that. How are you supposed to help people who won’t even help themselves?’

‘And you say I’m all heart. What did you make of Rawlins, the times you saw him?’

‘He always struck me as a bit pathetic. He looks like a little weasel, nothing but an addict who took out his frustrations on a woman with no self esteem who’d probably been abused as far back as she could remember. Maybe this is what happens when an unhinged bully festers away for a year instead of getting to lay into you on the spur of the moment.’

‘Somebody was sure pissed about something, whoever they are. Or just plain nuts. Did either of them have any history of drug dealing?’

‘Nope, and I never saw anything that would have made me think they were at it the times I was here before, but you could easily fit all that stuff into any drawer or cupboard in here. We were just sorting out domestics. I saw her record once, when we had to put together information for the DVU. She was once a street prostitute, earning to keep the pair of them fixed up but she hadn’t been collared for years. She obviously moved into dealing at some point. You think that maybe Rawlins didn’t do this, that its drug related – that someone could be sending a message with that killing and the syringes and everything?’

‘A drugs war? Just what we need right now with all the gang trouble on the streets.’

‘Maybe it’s all related,’ said Deacon. ‘But whatever it is, it won’t be your problem. This is a million miles from light duties, North.’

Deacon was right. He had to get moving. Get ahead. He’d been caged up too long and was in no hurry to go back to it.

‘What about the neighbour?’

‘A bit of a busybody. An old dear who lives on her own and has too much time on her hands. I’ve been sent round there more often than I have here. She’s always calling in with complaints about this and that, you know what it’s like round here, and she generally made the 999 calls when it was going off in here. She probably saved the woman’s life last year. She says that she saw Rawlins leaving the flat, that he seemed to be in a bit of a state, barged her out of the way hurrying down the stairs, so she decided to check in here.’

‘Best I take a look at her while it’s all still fresh in her melon then, eh?’

Deacon shook her head, exasperated.

He stepped back into the rain. The four storey wall opposite was lit up, curtain twitching being too subtle for round here. If they had them they were flung wide. Faces peered towards him. He was back on the stage and had no intention of being an understudy. It felt good, even though he knew that the lights and faces would quickly become part of the night if he was seen to be moving in their direction.

THREE

‘It must have been quite a shock. Are you sure that you are alright?’ The old dear sure seemed alright. He couldn’t detect any signs of shock. She was one tough old bird. ‘Is there someone you’d like to be with you? Someone we can call?’

She returned from the kitchen with a laden tea-tray.

‘You want to be a bit more careful, Inspector. You’ll be getting the police force a good name,’ she chuckled and the tray rattled as she lowered it onto the coffee table between them. ‘At the risk of sounding like an old cliché, I was in the war, you know,’ she smiled. ‘I was a nurse in London during the blitz, Inspector. I’d probably seen as much as you ever have by my seventeenth birthday. I then worked for the best part of fifty years in hospitals up here.’ She smiled at his furrowing brow as the grey matter behind it did the mental arithmetic.

‘Eighty-four, Inspector.’

Now North was in shock.

‘I know, I don’t look a day over seventy-five,’ she laughed, ‘you smooth operator, you.’ She winked at him and started pouring. She was enjoying the company.

‘I do apologise Inspector,’ the old lady pulled a teaspoon from one cup and waved it in the direction of his feet before using it to stir the other, ‘but Tommy and Tuppence are the only ones allowed inside with their outdoor shoes on,’ she giggled. North glanced at the pair of Rottweiler’s at her side. They glared back and growled.

He looked down at the big toe protruding from his right sock and the tattered nail that had cut its way through. North shifted in the armchair. He hoped she couldn’t smell them too. He had no idea how many days he’d had them on.

She handed him his tea. The cup and saucer looked like part of a child’s tea set in his hand. ‘It is okay, Inspector, my Charlie would have been just as bad left to his own devices,’ she said, staring at his wedding ring. She clearly had an eye for gossip and a tongue for rooting it out.

North got back to business.

‘The constable says that you saw someone running away, into the stairwell? And when you got to Miss Lumsden’s the door was open?’

She nodded, ‘It was him.’

‘Him?’

She nodded again. ‘That brute of a so called man,’ she lifted the local paper from under the table. ‘They aught to make these judges live around here for a spell so they can see what life is really like for the people they are dealing with every day. Maybe they wouldn’t be so free and easy with people’s lives. These judges and politicians come from rich parents, go to posh schools and live in big houses miles from anywhere. They’re as guilty as the scum they set loose to do these things. It isn’t right, Inspector.’

North scanned the story next to a photo of Deacon’s weasel. The article was scathing. Despite previous convictions for more of the same spanning twenty years Terry Rawlins had been taken from prison to court that morning, having spent a year on remand, and had been spared further jail time by Judge Laurence Beech. He had handed out a two year supervision order and put Rawlins on an Aggression Replacement Programme as he had had plenty of time to think and reflect during his time already spent inside and he had promised to be a good boy from now on. The judge had taken him at his word despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The article was as punchy as its subject matter and elaborated on Deacon’s account. He had gone down for an hour long attack that could have resulted in his victim’s death had the police not intervened when they had. He had a history of alcohol related violence against his partners going back to High School. When police arrived he was foaming at the mouth, punching Lumsden’s face and when they tried to restrain him he bit into her and flesh came away in his mouth and part of her scalp came away in his hand. The old dear was right; it just wasn’t right.

‘Are you sure it was him?’

‘As sure as eggs is eggs,’ she nodded.

‘Was there anything else? Anything noticeable about him?’

‘He looked the same,’ she shook her head. ‘A bit cleaner but they’d have to keep you ship shape in jail or you’d be having outbreaks of this disease and that disease every five minutes. They’d have been looking after him better than he does himself.’