Ready or Not (11 page)

             
Though her work had for years prevented her from spending as much time with him as she would have liked, Kate couldn’t bear the thought of her father not being there when she needed him. There was no one else she could talk to about the past, though the further away from her mother’s death they had got, the less her father had wanted to talk about her. Eventually, it was almost as though she had never existed at all and an invisible wall was built around her, separating the memory of her from the present.

             
The same was to be said for her brother. There was an invisible list of things they didn’t talk about, with Daniel and her mother forming its mainframe. The mention of her brother’s name made her father flinch and he would change the subject, leave the room; anything to avoid having to talk about him, and the absence of him. He had never forgiven himself, Kate told herself. But by not allowing her to talk about Daniel, her father distanced her from her missing brother. And she didn’t want to be distanced from him. She needed to remember him.

It was as though by refusing to say his name, her father could pretend he had never really existed at all.

              She couldn’t bear the thought that her father had died alone. She carried the guilt of his death with her like an invisible second skin and it was tightening its grip on her the more she fought against it. She couldn’t stand the fact that they had not been speaking; that she had never had the chance to say goodbye. Kate had tried forgiving herself for not being there. It hadn’t worked. 

             
Already it was becoming harder to picture her father. Occasionally she would remember his face vividly, as though in a confusing dream in which even on awakening, for a moment everything looked and sounded real, but these times were brief and infrequent and his face would fade until the details of it disappeared.

             
Kate needed to remember. Without the memory of her father, how would she recognise Daniel when she found him?

             
She knew what he would look like now. He would look like her. In her head, in her dreams, she had seen him a thousand times and knew what she was looking for and was sure she’d recognise him when she eventually found him.

The game that had been started all those years ago would never end until she found him. He was still hiding. She would keep seeking. 

Thursday

Fourteen

It hadn’t looked like a body at first. From a distance – and with his eyes not being what they used to – it looked more like a heap of discarded clothing, or a pile of rubbish bags that had been abandoned in the shadows beneath the line of trees. Bloody fly-tippers. If the dog hadn’t been with him he may even have walked on, not bothering to cross the grass and take a closer look.

             
The dog had become agitated and was whining uneasily by the time the old man had crossed the grass and the path that bordered it. The dog stopped a few metres from the heap on the path, digging her claws uneasily into the gravel; resisting her owner’s pull on the leash.

             
‘Easy, girl,’ the man reassured her, running his hand over the thick fur at the back of her head. ‘Easy.’

             
The dog growled, straining against its owner’s pull on the leash. The man squinted at the heap, saw what he thought were feet, and slowly realised he was looking at a body. He felt bile rising in the back of his throat and stopped in his tracks, suddenly uncertain and off balance, not wanting to go any nearer, but steeling himself he loosened his grip on the leash and stepped tentatively forward. He had lived through a World War, but despite this had somehow successfully managed to avoid any close encounters with a corpse. Given the choice, he didn’t want to change the habit today.

             
He could see the body was that of a man. He could tell this from the shoes he was wearing: shiny brown like conkers, lace-up, office-style shoes that belonged to the type of man who looked after himself; someone who had a bit of money and appreciated good quality.

             
The man pushed his scarf up closer to his throat. It was a bitter morning and the park was otherwise deserted, not even any early morning joggers braving the eerie chill of the park at that hour. He wondered if the man had been there all night. A miserable way to go, poor sod, he thought sadly, left out in the cold, alone, on a night like last night. Or maybe every way was as sad as the next, no matter what the time of year or the temperature outside. Maybe meeting death in a deserted park was no worse than dying in a warm bed with a husband or wife beside you in the darkness. How could there ever be a good way to go? The light gone forever, the day always night.

             
The man’s body had fallen – or been lain – at an awkward angle. His left leg was trapped beneath his right and his torso was twisted; his head lay face down, covered by a black woollen scarf. At first, the man could see no evidence of how the person on the ground in front of him had died. If he hadn’t been lying in such a distorted manner – and if the location had been other than a quiet suburban park at half past five in the early hours of a November morning – he could easily have believed he was just sleeping.

             
He nudged him with his foot. ‘Hey, mate. Are you ok?’ Stupid, he thought as soon as he’d done it. He cursed himself for kicking a corpse; what kind of disrespect to the dead was that?

It was only when he cautiously pushed aside the black scarf that covered the head
, and only when he saw the congealing mess of blood that the man’s was lying in, that he realised he was staring at murder. 

*

The day was dark and overcast again, not yet full light. Clouds of black and grey provided a suitably depressing backdrop to the scene that confronted DCI Chris Jones as he arrived at the park twenty minutes later. The area had been cordoned off. The body had already been shut away from view, with white tenting placed around it, yet already – even at such an early hour – a small crowd of morbid spectators had gathered; the usual rubber neckers, all eager to pass on hot gossip and rumours to friends and colleagues as soon as they got to work. By lunchtime, there would be something else to talk about and the events of the morning would already be yesterday’s news. Cynical world.

             
A team of scene-of-crime officers was already scouring the area for evidence. So far, Chris had received little information. Male, aged around 40, no ID. He had no idea yet how long the body had been lying there. The old man who had discovered it while out walking his dog was being interviewed by a uniform.

             
And now there was no question of the lack of coincidence. Michael Morris, now this. There was no chance on earth that the deaths of these two men weren’t connected.

             
‘Anything for me?’ he asked, crossing the grass and approaching a short-tempered female pathologist he’d been unfortunate enough to work with before and had been at the scene at Michael Morris’ house on Tuesday.

             
‘Blunt force trauma to the head resulting in extra dural haematoma,’ she replied, echoing her words of Tuesday evening. ‘If you want it in kiddy-speak, his head was bashed in. Late thirties, I’d say. No wallet on him. No ID.’

             
‘Mugging?’ Chris asked, clinging to the highly unlikely possibility.

             
She shrugged casually. ‘Possibly. I doubt it though. Too deliberate, and anyway, that’s your job. This area’s not exactly known for mugging, is it?’

             
Which would make it an ideal location then, Chris thought. He said nothing; he knew better. The woman had a fiery tongue and an opinion for all occasions; she was well known at the station for her acid mouth and ability to belittle grown men with a mere glance. Besides, she’d have to be an idiot not to connect the two murders.

             
‘May I?’ he said, gesturing towards the tent.

             
She said nothing, but took a step backwards, giving him room to pass.

             
The scene was something Chris would never become accustomed to. He had seen murder victims before Tuesday evening, had chased the clues left by criminals and had successfully seen three murderers convicted during his time with the division. But this was South Wales, not London and, fortunately, murder enquiries were still relatively few and far between.

             
During training people had mistakenly assumed that Chris would be thick skinned and less likely to fall into the trap of emotional involvement in sensitive cases. It was a presumption that had endured and one that he had learned to live with throughout his career with the police. He was six feet two inches tall with broad, rugby player’s shoulders and a face that looked as though it had seen a bit of wear. His appearance gave the false impression that he was some sort of macho man: able to switch on when he began work in the morning and switch off again when it was time to call it a day, leaving what he had seen at work back at the station. He was, nonetheless, only human and he carried all his experiences with him always.

             
He had been warned during training that the first body would be the most challenging and they hadn’t lied. Nor could they have predicted that the first case would have been such an uncommonly harrowing one. The first dead body Chris had seen was that of a sixteenth month old baby. The case had been a rare one, thank God – had made the national news – a child battered and tortured by his own mother; so badly abused that his tiny features bore little comparison to his earlier photos. The image of his little broken body had been seared onto Chris’ brain. He saw him still. The unnatural, unnerving smirk on the face of the boy’s mother as she was sentenced to life was a thing no one could forget.

             
What they hadn’t told Chris during training was that it wouldn’t become any easier. He had mistakenly presumed that after the first two, or maybe even three dead bodies he saw, each would become a little less difficult to deal with. He would become immune to the reality of death and would grow to accept these sights as part of his job description. It hadn’t become any easier and deep down he was still not entirely sure how he was supposed to forget each and move on without hesitation to the next.

He thought of Diane Morris crumpled on her sofa, her features distorted by her
heartfelt grief, and of the boy in the picture who would never get to show his father the man he’d become.

He put these thoughts to the back of his mind.

              ‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’ Chris asked.

             
The pathologist glanced up from where she crouched by the body; her mouth twisted, like a baby biting a crab apple.

             
‘Hard to tell with the temperature being so low,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a better idea later.’ Then, as though speaking for the benefit of a recording, ‘As I said, single blow to the head with a heavy object.’

             
‘Any other signs of a struggle?’

             
‘No,’ she said bluntly. ‘Single injury. Very efficient - probably did the job with immediate effect.’

             
Chris winced at her insensitive choice of phrase and wondered what had happened in the past couple of days to make everyone he worked alongside so lacking in tact and subtlety. He stepped back outside, relieved by the blast of cold fresh air. What was this man doing in the park on a night like last night, he wondered? He looked respectable enough: smartly dressed, clean shaven; expensive shoes. This was a respectable part of town, edged with popular residential areas. The missing wallet might have indicated a mugging, had it been any other time of day, had it not been so sickeningly violent, and had it not been for the death on Tuesday evening of Michael Morris.

Fifteen

The stati
on was chaos. News of the Joseph Ryan murder had spread quicker than a flame across petrol and the press, Kate’s favourite people, were already plaguing them with a bombardment of phone calls. One particularly resilient reporter had even been to the station trying to prise information from the desk sergeant.