Substantial Threat (2 page)

‘Henry, I thought it was you. Result?'

‘Coughed it . . . court tomorrow.'

‘Well done,' Fleming said with genuine feeling. ‘Off home now?'

‘Yep.'

‘Can I just give you these before you go?' He held out his hands. ‘Bit of a pressie for the new kid on the block,' he added slyly. ‘A cold case I'd like you to review.'

Henry took the file and video eagerly. ‘Thanks, Bernie.'

‘Fancy a swift one at the Anchor before you hit the road?'

Fleming asked hopefully.

Henry declined with a sad shake of the head. ‘Love to.' He shrugged. ‘But y'know . . .?'

‘Yeah, no probs,' Fleming said with a trace of disappointment. Henry knew that the Chief Super did not have anyone to go home to and felt slightly mean at refusing the offer of a drink. Now that he did have someone to go home to, he was not going to jeopardize the relationship.

Fleming trudged back down the corridor towards his office and Henry watched him go. Then he glanced down at the thick package and video in his hands. Cold-case review was one of the functions of the SIO team, it involved looking again at unsolved murders and other serious crimes which came under their remit. This was the second one Henry had been given since joining the team two months before. The prospect of it excited him. He was very tempted to open the file there and then, sit down and start work on it. But that would have been as bad as going for a drink with the boss. That was another condition of the package with Kate: come home when you can.

He called her from the office phone and announced his imminent departure.

Twenty-five minutes later he was sitting next to her in the lounge of their house on the outskirts of Blackpool, sipping Blossom Hill red, discussing each other's day. They hit the sack at just gone eleven, both bushed. They cuddled and kissed for a while but did not make love and fell asleep quickly.

About 4 a.m. Henry woke up groggily, dying to pee. After relieving himself, sleep would not return. He tossed, fidgeted, began to sweat and could tell he was affecting Kate, though she did not wake up. Eventually frustration got the better of him: there was no point staying in bed. He slid out, wrapped his dressing gown tightly around himself and stepped quietly on to the landing.

He checked on his daughters, Jennifer and Leanne, soundly asleep in their rooms. Good kids, good to be back with them . . . almost back with them. He experienced that overwhelming sense of love he always felt when he was with them, then sneaked downstairs, knowing exactly why he could not sleep.

He had brought home the cold-case review.

It had been a frenzied attack. The girl had been mercilessly beaten, battered to death by an assailant who had lost total control. Blood had splashed everywhere around the dingy basement flat – floors, walls, ceiling – indicating she had been pursued relentlessly through the premises, desperately trying to defend herself from the onslaught.

Her life had come to an end in the tiny, grubby bathroom. Here, it seemed, she had been cornered by her killer. Trapped. Her head had been repeatedly smashed on the rim of the toilet bowl until she died from massive internal bleeding in her brain. Her face was a gory, unrecognizable pulp. The killer had probably continued to pound her head against the toilet long after she had died.

She had been found on her knees, slumped over the toilet, her head hanging into the bowl as though she might have been vomiting. It was estimated she had been there for forty-eight hours. And if that was not bad enough, rats had gnawed her buttocks, legs and feet.

Henry sighed. His nostrils dilated. He rubbed his gritty eyes. He paused the crime-scene video, holding it on a framed shot of the dead female's bare back – she was completely naked – which was latticed by a network of wheals, abrasions and cuts. She was thin almost to the point of emaciation, resembling an inmate of a concentration camp. Not that her gauntness had prevented her from being a prostitute. Semen from four different men had been found inside her during post-mortem.

Henry pressed the stop button on the remote control and the TV screen went blank. He had seen enough for the time being. He took his mug, stood and walked quietly through the silent household into the chilly conservatory. The house backed on to agricultural land and a pale dawn was approaching. He gazed across the field and jumped with pleasure when he saw a big dog fox bouncing through the grass. Then it was gone. Elated by the sight, he sat on one of the cane chairs, shivering a little and holding his hot mug of tea between the palms of his hands, drawing heat from it into his body.

He placed the mug down on the glass-topped coffee table, reached out and flicked on the fan heater, gazing unseeingly into the garden. He sighed again, interlocked his fingers behind his head, but did not allow his mind to go blank. His inner concentration was absolute as he tried to imagine himself as a fly on the wall at the scene of the particularly brutal and senseless murder he had been asked to review.

This thought process was a vital part of the job of the murder detective: making assumptions, constructing hypotheses to be tested, retested and most probably discarded en route to the truth. Then maybe one or two lines of enquiry eventually turning up information, facts, evidence, and then, hopefully, a suspect.

There was not much to go on here. The flat the girl had died in was located in a poor area of Blackpool's North Shore. It could easily be accessed directly from the street down a set of steps from the pavement. This, unfortunately, meant that visitors or customers, or the killer, could come and go without having to enter the main building above, which was a large terraced house converted into a warren of tiny flats. The main point about this, and what made it particularly frustrating from a police point of view, was that people could enter her flat unobserved and very quickly. All they had to do was slip in from the pavement.

At the foot of the steps the front door was almost hidden from view from anyone who happened to be passing. It opened into a tiny vestibule and from there into a bed-sitting room. This was meagrely furnished with a three-quarter-width camp bed, adequate in size for the business of prostitution, some cheap chipboard units and an old, but comfortable-looking settee. There was a portable TV in one corner of the room which looked quite new. The room was lit by a single bulb swinging on a bare wire from the damp ceiling and a lamp on a unit next to the bed. Curtains, worn and frayed, were drawn across dirt-streaked windows, giving the room, at best, a very grainy-grey light.

Also on the bedside unit were an empty wrap of heroin, a blunt, blood-filled needle and a packet of condoms.

The kitchen, reached through this room though an archway, was fitted with a two-ring electric hob and nothing else. No fridge, no kettle, no toaster. Just a brown-stained, germ-filled sink. A cupboard on the wall housed food supplies. Pot Noodles and a selection of instant soups, a bottle of curdled milk, little else. The boiling water required to make these delicacies had to be heated in a pan on the hob.

The cupboard under the sink was the route by which the rats had been able to infiltrate from the foundations. They had obviously been trying to break through for some time, having gnawed their way through the laminated chipboard from which the cupboard was made. Had the girl been alive, the rats would have come through anyway. As it was, they had found her dead and feasted on her.

Henry shivered involuntarily at the thought. It was ghastly enough to have been murdered so horrifically, but then to have been lunched on did not bear thinking about. In his time as a cop, he had been to several deaths, usually from natural causes, where the deceased had lain undiscovered for some time and their pets, driven crazy by hunger, had started to nibble them away.

Cats were the worst.

Henry's mind, distracted momentarily by these thoughts, flicked back to the crime scene.

Whether she had actually had four customers on the day of her death was difficult to determine for sure. It seemed to be a likely scenario, according to the scientists, and very likely that her last customer had been her killer.

She had had sexual intercourse with a man who had then pummelled and battered her until she died.

The assault had started in the bed-sitting room. She had been beaten while still on or near the bed. Blood splashes were all over the bed clothes, together with semen stains from another three men. Her assailant had smashed her head against the wall next to the bed, strands of blood-matted hair and indentations in the plasterboard confirmed this.

The grim fight had continued around the room.

She had either banged her head, or had it banged for her, against the sharp corner of one of the home-assembled units. The pathologist and forensic scientists had matched up the triangular point with the indent on the back of her skull.

At some point during the struggle, killer and victim crashed through to the kitchen and boiling water from a pan on the hob had been tipped up. A scald mark was found on the dead woman's back: more excruciating pain to add to the suffering she was already enduring at the hands of the person destined to take her life. From there the crime-scene analyst reckoned she had managed to escape, but only as far as the bathroom. She had locked the door, which had been booted down off its fragile hinges.

Henry's thought processes paused at that point. His mind's eye saw the moment when the door had been whacked down, splintering. He wondered if the woman had thought she had found some sort of sanctuary in the bathroom, a place of safety. But all she had found was that she had backed herself into a corner from which there was no escape.

Was she screaming as her assailant threw himself against the door? Or was she cowering, huddled down on the floor, whimpering, terrified as the door burst open? What was she thinking as the killer, breathless, red-faced and raging, stood in the bathroom doorway?

He had probably launched himself across at her in a flash of violence. Maybe she had already been on her knees by the toilet bowl, begging for mercy, and all he had done was grab her and started pound-pound-pounding her face against the porcelain.

Or had she fought him at that point? Did he have to wrestle her down, overpower her again, drag her to her knees and then murder her?

Henry finished his tea and walked back to the lounge. The sky was much brighter now, the sun not far away, spring in the air. He went to the TV and switched the video on again. He sat on the settee, hunched forwards, and watched intently as the tape continued from where he had left it. The camera drew back from the woman's spine then circled within the confined space of the bathroom, picking out the blood splashes on the wall, in the washbasin, in the bath, and the mass of coagulation in the toilet. The screen faded to black, then faded in a few seconds later. Now the body of the woman was laid out on a mortuary slab just prior to post-mortem taking place.

Henry's face was emotionless as the camera inspected the wounds on her head and face and the scald mark on her stomach. A commentary from the Home Office pathologist, Professor Baines, accompanied this footage. His latex-gloved hands came into shot, pointing out the various injuries, his voice describing and commenting on them with relish.

Henry stuck with it up to the point where the PM was about to take place, then switched off. He felt no need to watch her being hacked to pieces.

A sigh escaped from his lips. His toes tapped agitatedly in his slippers as he pondered and summarized in his mind what he had learned in the last hour about a crime that had been committed over eleven months before.

There were no particularly good witnesses. No one had been seen entering or leaving the flat, despite the investigation team having interviewed dozens of people in the area. Nor were there any fingerprints which matched anyone on record, and no forensic evidence other than the DNA profiles on the semen. Low copy DNA – DNA left by a person merely touching objects – had been tested too, but this very expensive process had been inconclusive.

The DNA profiles from the semen were crucial, of course. But only when they could be matched to a particular individual. As with the fingerprints, no match could be made to anything currently held on record. That did not mean that the men who had left their semen did not have criminal records. It might just be that they had not been arrested recently enough to have provided a DNA sample for the database.

Henry knew that new DNA samples were continually being checked against the database of outstanding crimes, but it was a slow process which might or might not bear fruit. He felt he could not sit back and wait and hope that something of that sort happened.

Still cogitating, Henry mused that he was looking for a man who was quite powerful and very handy with his fists, which, together with the rim of the toilet bowl, had done a lot of damage to the prostitute's face. It could be someone who had convictions for assaulting women, particularly hookers. It was an avenue that had been pursued in the original investigation. A lot of likely suspects had been pulled in and questioned without success. That was a line Henry intended to re-open and maybe fling the net more widely across the whole north-west region.

He bent down to the VCR and ejected the cassette. He would not have liked Kate or his daughters to see it by accident.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle faced by the murder squad had been that they had been unable to identify the victim. She was faceless and nameless. Either no one knew who she was, or they were not telling. No identification papers had been found in the flat and the landlord knew her only as Miss Smith. A media campaign, including an item on
Crimewatch UK
, produced no leads whatever. Her DNA, dental records and fingerprints were also dead ends. No one on the national missing persons register fitted her description.

Which was bloody amazing, Henry thought, because her age had been estimated at just fourteen.

No one had missed a fourteen-year-old girl. Fourteen. A prostitute. Now murdered. And nobody knew who the hell she was?