The Reckoning (17 page)

The body was lying across the bed, fully clothed in a white shirt, a navy cardigan and black trousers, though the shirt and cardigan were unbuttoned and the trousers weren’t fastened. Thick grey socks bulged over tartan slippers. His hands were laced over his stomach, silver rosary beads looped around them, as if he had been praying when he died. The hands were waxy, the nails long but well shaped, the fingers short. He had been a small man but not thin: his stomach was domed. It was hard to say much else about his appearance because his head was, to all and intents and purposes, gone. Bits of bone and brain matter had exploded across the bed, coating the coverlet and headboard in blood and unidentifiable mush. What was left was not readily identifiable as human.

‘Jesus.’

‘Yep. Being blasted in the face with a sawn-off shotgun won’t do much for your complexion.’

I had already noticed the holes in the bedcovers from stray pellets. ‘One shot, do we think?’

‘Shouldn’t have taken more.’

‘Risky, in a place like this, with neighbours all around. And not in character for our killer to be so direct.’

‘One shot isn’t that risky. People ignore that sort of noise because they don’t know what it is.’ Derwent stepped over to the window, peering out at the view of a blank wall. ‘And he did take a roundabout route to killing the not-very-good father.’

‘You said he was tortured. How?’

‘See the rosary beads?’ I nodded. ‘He was branded with them. Heated on the gas burner in the kitchen or the fire in the sitting room, I’d say. There was an oven glove on the floor in here. Looks as if the killer didn’t want to burn his fingers.’

Now that I knew what to look for I could see a chain of blisters in the shadow of the open shirt. I frowned. ‘That’s horrible, but it sounds a bit half-hearted for our guy. It’s a long way from castration and amputation.’

‘We don’t know what else occurred. He could have knocked out teeth, broken bones in his face – that sort of thing. Plenty of tooth fragments in this room – there’s just no way to tell whether they were shot out of his head or beaten out of it. It’s gone now, but they recovered a heavy wooden crucifix from under the bed. It had been hanging on the wall.’ He pointed at a large nail near the bed and now that I looked I could see a darker patch of wallpaper where dust had settled behind the cross. ‘It was a big thing, two feet long. Loads of trace evidence – blood, hair, that kind of thing, as if someone had used it as a bludgeon. You could do a fair bit of damage with that.’

‘Mm. It’s still not what you’d call an escalation. But then, Kinsella’s crimes weren’t as bad as those of the other two victims, arguably. If you accept that the killer is making the punishment appropriate for each of them based on their record, it sort of makes sense that he wouldn’t be as violent.’ I sounded abstracted even to myself.

Derwent was studying me. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Maybe that he’s losing interest.’

He looked sceptical. ‘Do you really think he couldn’t be bothered? Does this look like going through the motions to you?’

‘In a way. Maybe he didn’t like killing a priest. We could be looking for someone who is a Roman Catholic. Or was brought up as one.’

‘Could be.’

I stepped around the bed, looking everywhere but at what remained of the head. One glance had been enough.

‘Presumably the body wasn’t like this when it was found.’

‘You presume correctly. But Hanshaw didn’t disturb the corpse too much. There’s rigor mortis in the hands – he didn’t bother to break it. Said he’d recover the rosary at the PM. The angle of the body is a bit off. He wasn’t as much on the bed as that. And Hanshaw did the undressing.’

I looked up quickly. ‘Did he? So the shirt was buttoned up again after the branding?’

Derwent nodded.

‘Left him his dignity,’ I said, almost to myself. ‘He – or they, it could have been more than one – must have decided the victim didn’t know anything useful. He let Kinsella dress himself again. The killer even let him pray, though making him use the same rosary that was used to torture him is a sadistic twist, isn’t it?

‘He was sitting on the bed,’ Derwent said. ‘When he was shot. Sitting on the edge. Praying.’

‘He knew he was going to die.’

‘It was quick. And he was old.’ Derwent moved, suddenly restless. ‘Finished?’

I was. I went out of the room with a definite feeling of relief that I could leave the grim scene behind, but the details were still horribly vivid in my mind’s eye. I would never get used to looking at bodies, I thought dismally, which argued that a change of track might not be such a bad idea. I could leave the team – switch to financial investigation, maybe. There were very few bodies in fraud. That might kill two birds with one stone, because if Rob and I weren’t on the same team any more …

I clamped down hard on that particular train of thought. I had been thinking about Rob in a completely unguarded way – a hopeful way. And what a waste of time that was. It was over, I acknowledged, walking blindly down the narrow hall towards the door. He had moved on already, and so should I. There was no point in thinking about him any more, and there was no point in considering leaving the team. Not when I still cared passionately about my job, and wanted to do well. My thoughts went to Godley and as we stepped into the open air I turned.

‘Has the boss been here? Is he coming down?’

Derwent shook his head. ‘Too busy.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought he’d prioritise anything over a serial killer.’ Godley was as hands-on as his workload allowed and he had seemed so engaged with the case the previous night.

‘Keep your voice down.’ He took my arm and squeezed it, hard. ‘Do you want to give the game away?’

I looked around. The only civilians were miles away. ‘Firstly, you’re paranoid. There’s no one near enough to hear. And secondly, do you seriously think you’re going to be able to keep this under wraps for much longer?’

‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean I want it to come from you. We’re going to need to manage the release of information carefully. The media aren’t going to be easy to handle; don’t make it any harder for us than it needs to be.’

That was fair enough. And even if I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, a tactical apology might go a long way. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be careful. Look, I’ll go and talk to the neighbours. See if they heard anything.’

‘No need.’

‘You can’t have done it already.’ I hadn’t taken that long to get to the address.

‘Not me. Colin Vale. I asked the boss if we could have a bit of extra help and that’s who he sent.’

Colin was a good detective, beyond painstaking. I nodded. ‘We could do with the support.’

‘I thought you’d be pissed off.’ It was not my imagination that Derwent looked disappointed. He looked past me and I turned to see the lanky DC folding himself in two to duck under the crime-scene tape. ‘Here he is now. How did you get on?’

Lugubrious at the best of times, Colin was looking downright tragic now. ‘Not good at all.’ He pointed with his pen. ‘Next door to the left: out at work. They run the corner shop and leave the house at the crack of dawn, come back at God knows o’clock. I went along to the shop and checked with them anyway but they saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. Next door to the right: the lady is deaf as a post and practically mute as well. From what I can gather, she didn’t notice anything. Upstairs is empty and has been for months. Top left is being renovated and the builders were using heavy equipment all morning from about seven o’clock. They didn’t notice anyone coming or going but again, not easy to get through to them because of the language barrier. They’re Ukrainian.’

‘Top right?’

‘Claire Halperin is her name. She’s a nurse – works shifts. She was doing nights this week, off at seven in the morning, usually back here by eight. She ended up getting home a bit late today because she went to the supermarket on the way. Got here shortly after Mrs Driscoll called 999 and saw the first responders but that was her first inkling that there was anything wrong. She hadn’t seen anyone hanging around over the past few days, definitely didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary yesterday or this morning, and I’d say out of the lot of them she’s the best possible witness. Young lady, but the sort who notices things.’

‘Did she know the victim?’

‘She did. She looked in on him now and then. Mrs Driscoll called her once when Mr Kinsella took a turn and Miss Halperin checked him out, stayed with him until the paramedics arrived, that sort of thing. He was all right, she said – they didn’t even keep him in overnight. But he was quite frail and she got into the habit of dropping in every couple of weeks for a chat. She liked him. Very shocked to hear he’s dead.’ Colin looked at me morosely. ‘I didn’t give her too much information about the circumstances.’

‘That’s probably for the best.’

Derwent was looking annoyed. ‘He lived in a shoebox with twenty other people practically within arm’s reach; the walls are made of paper and nobody noticed a fucking thing. He was shot dead. No one saw anything suspicious. No one remembers anything useful like, say, a tall dark stranger covered in blood running down the street at nine in the morning or a car they didn’t recognise with the engine running. Any chance someone remembers overhearing an altercation? A cry for help? A fucking shotgun blast?’

‘Apparently not. But I haven’t done the premises across the road yet.’ Colin gave a deep sigh. ‘Not much chance, I’d have said. Not with the way the maisonettes are laid out. You’re basically hoping someone was in their kitchen looking out, or leaving the house, at the exact moment that your victim let their killer in. Because otherwise, you wouldn’t see anything. And there’s no sign of damage to the door or in the hall. It doesn’t look like it was a forced entry. You’re just hoping against hope that one of the neighbours was nosy enough to take notice when someone called to the door, basically, and I don’t like the odds. But I’ll ask them anyway.’

‘You might as well keep yourself busy that way as any other.’ Derwent paced back and forth. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

He seemed completely absorbed in his own thoughts. With anyone else, I would have gone off and found something useful to do. But with Derwent, I didn’t dare.

‘What’s the best thing for me to do?’ He looked at me blankly and I risked a suggestion. ‘You mentioned talking to Mrs Driscoll.’

‘Yeah. Sure. Why not. Go and talk to Mrs Driscoll. And then get back to the nick. I’ll go to the morgue. Make sure we didn’t miss anything on this one. It bothers me that there isn’t as much violence. It bothers me a lot.’

‘Not all killers escalate. They’re not machines.’

He didn’t look at me. ‘Maybe the priest was better at talking to the killer. Maybe he convinced him to put him out of his misery. God knows, he was better off dead.’

A fitting epitaph for a disgraced priest, but a cold one, I thought, as Derwent strode off to his car. I frowned a little. I was bothered too, but not about the violence. There were ready explanations for that; I had supplied a couple myself. What I couldn’t work out to my satisfaction was why the three victims had all died in such different ways. Barry Palmer’s skull was fractured, Ivan Tremlett’s throat was cut, and Fintan Kinsella’s head was blown off. I could understand using different means of torture, but I couldn’t imagine a killer who would be at ease with three such different methods of dispatch. Beating someone to death required brute force and a certain lack of finesse. A slit throat was the ultimate in neat efficiency. Shooting the priest was certainly violent, but it maintained a degree of distance between murderer and victim, and suggested a kind of fastidiousness that didn’t sit well with the other deaths. None of it made sense. It almost made me wonder if we weren’t looking for a single killer, but three, which was surely ridiculous. Still, it was worth suggesting.

And I had not suggested it. The idea had occurred to me as soon as I saw Kinsella’s body, but I hadn’t even hinted at it. It was almost as if I was keeping it to myself, so I could discuss it with Godley at the earliest opportunity. But I would never do a thing like that. I had promised the inspector the previous evening. I’d said I wasn’t interested in playing games. I’d never have
lied
. Not to him.

I watched Derwent drive away and I wasn’t aware of the slightest twinge from my conscience.

Somewhat against the run of play, things started to improve as the day progressed. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that DI Derwent was tied up all afternoon with the post-mortem. He would have been disappointed to realise that my interview with Mrs Driscoll was far from a chore. In spite of the circumstances I enjoyed every minute of it.

Mrs Driscoll lived on the other side of the road, not quite opposite the crime scene, in a ground-floor maisonette that was the mirror image of the priest’s. She was small and wiry with dyed blue-black hair that looked as if it would be coarse to the touch. She was probably in her seventies but still spry, and her pale, watery eyes missed absolutely nothing. As promised, she was garrulous, but also entertainingly opinionated. Before I managed to ask her so much as a single question, I got to hear all about the ex-priest’s neighbours and the Loughlins, who owned the flat where he’d lived.

Her living room was immaculately tidy, and I recognised the same take-no-prisoners attitude to dust that I’d noted in the victim’s flat – every surface was polished to a mirror-like shine. A vast squashy three-piece suite covered in vibrantly floral upholstery took up most of the space in the room, and the remainder was devoted to a huge flat-screen TV. The curtains were the same material as the sofa and chairs, but were tied back with elaborately beaded tassels. The carpet was maroon, as were the skirting boards and dado-rail, and the wallpaper was gold with a maroon swirling pattern. The effect was somewhat startling but the room was comfortable – or it would have been, had it not been stiflingly hot. On a day when the spring sunshine had the uniformed officers out in their shirtsleeves, it was heated with two radiators and an open fire. I sat as far away from the hearth as I could and sipped the glass of water she had provided, rationing it as sweat beaded on my upper lip and trickled down my back.