This Body of Death (25 page)

She shooed them out of the information office, hung a sign on the door indicating to the nonexistent hordes of visitors that she’d return momentarily, and toddled into the cemetery. They followed. She took them to one of the trees that Isabelle had seen on her first visit to the place. Its trunk was carved with an elaborate design of quarter moon and stars with clouds obscuring part of the latter. The carving went all the way down the trunk of the tree, entirely baring it of bark. It was not the sort of thing one could have done quickly or easily. The carving measured at least four feet high and took up perhaps two feet of the tree’s circumference. The defacing of the tree aside, it was actually quite good.

“He’s done this everywhere,” the woman declared. “We been trying to catch him at it, but he lives over Listria Park, he does, and that backs onto the cemetery. I ’spect he just comes over the wall, so we never know he’s here. Easy as pie when you’re young, eh?”

Listria Park was not, as Isabelle had first supposed, an actual park. It was instead a street comprising a curve of buildings that had once been individual homes but now were flats with windows overlooking Abney Park Cemetery and gardens over the wall from it, as Mrs. Littlejohn had described. It took some doing to find the building in which Marlon Kay lived, but once they’d done so, they discovered themselves in luck as the boy was at home. So was his father, and it was apparently this individual whose disembodied voice replied when they rang the buzzer next to the name D. W. Kay.

He barked out, “Yeah? Wha’ you want?”

Isabelle nodded at Lynley, who did the honours. “Metropolitan police. We’re looking for—”

Even through the crackling connection from the street to the flat, they could hear the commotion Lynley’s words provoked: a crash of furniture, a pounding of feet, a “Wha’ the
bloody
hell …Where you think you’re …Wha’d you
do
?” And then the buzzer went to open the door, and they pushed their way inside.

They headed for the stairs just as a heavyset boy came storming down them. He ploughed towards them, wild eyed and sweating, making for the door to the street. It was an easy matter for Lynley to stop him. One arm did that much. The other secured him.

“Lemme go!” the boy shrieked. “He’ll murder me, he will!” while above a man roared, “Get your bum back up ’ere, rotten little lout.”

Little
was hardly an accurate adjective. While the boy wasn’t obese, he was still a sterling example of modern youth’s proclivity for victuals deep fried, fast, and loaded with various kinds of fats and sugars.

“Marlon Kay?” Isabelle said to the struggling youth being detained by Lynley’s grip upon him.

“Let me go!” he screamed. “He’ll beat me bloody. You don’ unnerstan!”

D. W. Kay came hurtling down the stairs at that point, cricket bat in his hands. He was swinging this wildly as he shouted, “Wha’d you fooking
do
? You fooking better tell me ’fore these coppers do or I’ll smack your head from here to Wales and make no mistake!”

Isabelle put herself squarely in his path. She said sharply, “That will do, Mr. Kay. Put that cricket bat down before I have you in the nick for assault.”

Perhaps it was her tone. It stopped the man in his tracks. He stood before her, breathing like a defeated racehorse—with breath, however, that smelled like teeth decaying straight up to his brain. He blinked at her.

She said, “I assume you
are
Mr. Kay. And this is Marlon? We want a word with him.”

Marlon whimpered. He shrank back from his father. He said, “He’ll bash me, he will.”

“He’ll do nothing of the sort,” Isabelle told the boy. “Mr. Kay, lead us up to your flat. I’ve no intention of having a discussion in the corridor.”

D.W. looked her up and down—she could tell he was the sort of man who had what pop psychologists would refer to as “woman issues”—and then he looked at Lynley. His expression said that as far as
he
was concerned, Lynley wore lace panties if he let a woman give orders in his presence. Isabelle wanted to smack
him
into Wales. What century did he think they were living in? she wondered.

She said, “Do I have to tell you again?” He snarled but cooperated. Back up the stairs he went, and the rest of them followed, Marlon cowering in Lynley’s grip. A middle-aged woman in cycling gear was standing at the top of the first flight of stairs. She made a moue that combined dislike, distaste, and disgust and said, “About time, you ask me,” to Mr. Kay. He shoved her out of the way and she said, “Did you see that? Did you
see
that?” to Lynley, ignoring Isabelle altogether. Her cry of, “Are you finally going to do something about him?” was the last they heard from her as they shut the door behind them.

Inside the flat, the windows were open, but as there was no cross ventilation, their gaping apertures did nothing to mitigate the temperature. The place itself was, remarkably, not a pigsty, as Isabelle had been expecting. There was a suspicious white layer upon nearly everything, but this turned out to be plaster dust, as they discovered that D. W. Kay was a plasterer by trade, and he’d been setting out to work when they’d rung the buzzer.

Isabelle told him they needed a word with his son, and she asked Marlon how old he was. Marlon said sixteen, and he winced, as if anticipating that his age was cause for corporal punishment. Isabelle sighed. What his age
was
cause for was the presence of an adult who was not police, preferably a parent, which meant that they were going to have to question the boy either in the presence of his glowering and explosive father or with a social worker.

She looked at Lynley. Appropriately, his expression said it was her call, as she was his superior. She said to the boy’s father, “We’re going to have to question Marlon about the cemetery. I take it you know that there’s been a murder there, Mr. Kay?”

The man’s face became inflamed. His eyes bulged. He was, Isabelle thought, a massive stroke waiting to happen. She went on. “We can question him here or at the local nick. If we do it here, you’ll be required not only to keep quiet but also to keep your hands off this boy from now until eternity occurs. If you do not, you’ll be arrested at once. One phone call from him, from a neighbour, from anyone, and in you go. A week, a month, a year, ten years. I can’t tell you what the judge will throw at you, but I can tell that what I just witnessed below is something that I will testify to. And I expect your neighbours will be happy to do likewise. Am I being clear or do you require further elucidation on this topic?”

He nodded. He shook his head. Isabelle assumed he was answering both questions and said, “Very well. Sit down and keep quiet.”

He skulked to a grey sofa, which was part of a sad-looking three-piece suite of a sort Isabelle hadn’t seen in years, complete with a tasseled fringe. He sat. Round him, plaster dust rose in a cloud. Lynley deposited Marlon in one of the two chairs and himself went to the window where he remained standing, resting against the sill.

Everything in the room faced a huge flat-screen television, which was featuring a cooking programme at the moment although the sound was muted. A remote lay beneath it, and Isabelle picked this up and switched the set off, which, for some reason, caused Marlon to whimper once again, as if a lifeline had been cut. His father curled a lip at him. Isabelle shot him a look. The man rearranged his features. She nodded sharply and went to sit in the other armchair, dusty like everything else.

She told Marlon the bare facts: He’d been seen emerging from the shelter next to the ruined chapel inside the cemetery. Within that shelter, a young woman’s body had been found. A magazine with one person’s fingerprints on it had been dropped in the vicinity of that body. An e-fit had been generated by the persons who’d seen him coming out of that shelter, and should an identity parade be needed, there was little doubt that he’d be picked from it, although because of his age, they’d likely use photographs and not require him to stand in a line. Did he want to talk about any of this?

The boy began to blub. His father rolled his eyes but said nothing.

“Marlon?” Isabelle prompted.

He sniveled and said, “It’s only cos I hate school. They bully me. It’s cos my bum’s like …It’s big, innit, an’ they make fun and it’s allas been tha’ way an’ I
hate
it. So I won’t go. I got to leave here, though, don’t I, so I go there.”

“Into the cemetery rather than to school?”

“Tha’s it, innit.”

“It’s summer holidays,” Lynley pointed out.

“I’m talkin ’bout school time, innit,” Marlon said. “
Now
I go th’ cemetery cos tha’s what I do. Nuffink else round here and I don’t got friends, do I.”

“So you go to the cemetery and you carve on the trees?” Isabelle said.

Marlon shifted round on his barrel of a bum. “Di’n’t
say
—”

“Have you wood carving tools?” Lynley said.

“I di’n’t do nuffink to that tart! She was dead when I got there, wa’n’t she.”

“So you did go into the shelter by the chapel?” Isabelle said to the boy. “You admit you’re the person our witnesses saw coming out of the shelter four days ago?”

The boy didn’t confirm, but he didn’t deny. Isabelle said, “What were you doing there?”

“I do the trees,” he said. “An’ there’s no harm in it. Makes ’em pretty is all.”

“I don’t mean what were you doing in the cemetery,” Isabelle told him. “I mean in the shelter. Why’d you go into the shelter?”

The boy swallowed. This was, it seemed, the crux of the matter. He looked at his father. His father looked away.

Marlon whispered, “Magazine. It was …See, I bought it an’ wanted to have a glance and …” He gazed at her desperately, casting a glance at Lynley as well. “It was only tha’ when I saw them pitchers in the magazine …them women …You know.”

“Marlon, are you trying to tell me you went into the shelter to masturbate over pictures of naked women?” Isabelle asked baldly.

He began to weep in earnest. His father said, “Fooking
twat
,” and Isabelle shot him a look. Lynley said, “That’ll do, Mr. Kay.”

Marlon hid his face in his hands, pinching his cheeks with his fingers, saying, “I jus’ wanted …So I went inside there to—you
know
—but there she was an’ I got scared an’ I run off. I could see she was dead, couldn’t I. There was bugs an’ things an’ her eyes were open an’ the flies were crawling …I
know
I shoulda done summat but I couldn’t cos I …cos I …Cops would’ve asked what I was doing, like you’re askin now, and I’d have to say like I’m sayin now and he
already
hates me and he would find out. I won’t go to school. I won’t go. I
won’t
. But she was dead when I got there. She was dead. She was.”

He was likely speaking the truth, Isabelle reckoned, as she couldn’t imagine the boy having the bottle to commit an act of violence. He seemed the least aggressive child she’d ever encountered. But even a boy such as Marlon could snap, and one way or another he needed to be eliminated as a suspect.

She said, “All right, Marlon. I tend to think you might be telling the truth.”

“I am!”

“I’m going to ask you further questions, though, and you’re going to need to be calmer. Can you manage that?”

His father blew a breath of air from his mouth.
Not bloody likely
would have been his words.

Marlon cast a fearful look at his father and then nodded, his eyes welling with more tears. But he wiped his cheeks—he somehow made this a heroic gesture—and he sat up straight.

Isabelle went through the questions. Did he touch the body? No, he did not. Did he remove
anything
from the site? No, he did not. How near did he get to the body? He didn’t know. Three feet? Four? He took a step or two inside the shelter but that was all cos he saw her an’ …Fine fine, Isabelle said, hoping to avoid another descent into hysteria. What happened then? He dropped the magazine and ran. He didn’t mean to drop it. He didn’t even
know
he’d dropped it. But when he saw he didn’t have it with him, he was too scared to go back cos “I never seen a dead person. Not like that.” He went on to say that she was all bloody down the front of her. Did he see a weapon? Isabelle asked him. He didn’t even see where she was cut up, he told her. As far as he could tell, it looked to him like she was sliced up everywhere cos there was so much blood. Wouldn’t a person have to be sliced up everywhere to have so much blood on ’em?

Isabelle redirected him, from inside the shelter to outside the shelter. True, it was at least a day after the killing itself when Marlon had come upon the body, as things turned out, but whomever he’d seen in the vicinity—whatever he’d seen in the vicinity—could be important to the investigation.

But he’d seen nothing. And when it came to Jemima Hastings’ handbag or anything else she might have possessed, the boy swore he’d not taken a thing. If she had a bag with her, he knew nothing of it. It might’ve been right there next to her, he avowed, and he wouldn’t’ve even known it was there cos all he saw was
her
, he said. An’ all that blood.

“But you didn’t report this,” Isabelle said. “The only report we had was from the young couple who saw
you
, Marlon. Why didn’t you report it?”

“Them carvings,” he said. “An’ the magazine.”

“Ah.” Defacing public property, buying pornographic magazines, masturbating—or at least intending to do so—in public: These had been his considerations, as had no doubt been the displeasure of his father, and the fact that his father seemed to express that displeasure by means of a cricket bat. “I see. Well, we’re going to need a few things from you. Will you cooperate with us?”

He nodded vigorously. Cooperation? No problem. Anything at all.