Blood Work Page 11

  Riley hesitated for a moment, as if weighing up his options. Finally he said, 'Yeah, I knew him.'

  'He's on remand. He gets to speak to people. And the information is that you and he were buddy-buddy in here.'

  'Someone has to watch your back.'

  'You did a good job of watching his.'

  Riley held his skinny arms up. 'What good would I be? You know Norrell, he didn't need me riding on his wing.'

  'So what did you do for him?'

  'I've been here a while. I know who's who and what's what. I filled him in.'

  'What was he going to tell Delaney?'

  Riley pulled a face, so Skinner slapped him hard again. Sometimes he loved being a policeman. Riley yelped and the guard from outside looked in again. He grinned and nodded to Skinner with approval.

  'For Christ's sake, what was that for?'

  He flinched and pressed back against the wall as Skinner leaned in, but he didn't hit him this time. 'I'll ask the question again. What was he going to tell Delaney?'

  Riley shook his head, agitated now. 'I honestly don't know. His court case was coming up soon. Preliminary hearings. He told me he had stuff on Chief Superintendent Walker. Maybe he was looking to make a deal.'

  'He said it was about Delaney's wife.'

  'He never said anything to me about it. But if he wanted to see Delaney that was a sure-fire way of getting him in.'

  'What else would he want to see him for?'

  Riley shook his head. 'Fuck knows, you're the detective.'

  Some people just couldn't help themselves.

  Paul Archer strode angrily down the steps, shrugging into his overcoat. The woman behind the reception desk smiled at him but he ignored her. She wasn't his type and he had taken the afternoon off for more particular distractions than the kind offered in idle badinage with insipid blondes. Paul Archer had the kind of itch that could only be scratched by a certain type of woman. And he knew just where to find her.

  Delaney stood in front of the briefing room. On the board behind him were pinned the photographs taken of the dead woman they had found in the woods. Hampstead's very own Black Dahlia, he couldn't help thinking.

  'All right, listen up.' Delaney raised his voice above the chatter that filled the room and conversations died as they focused their attention on the detective inspector. 'Now, as yet we don't have any ID on the woman. We think she was murdered sometime during last night. We're placing her age, give or take a few years, in her mid-twenties.'

  'Was she killed in the woods, or dumped there?' Audrey Hobson, a uniformed inspector in her fifties, called out.

  'Best we can tell, she was killed where we found her.'

  'An opportunist killing, or was she taken there?'

  'We don't know, Audrey. It was lousy weather. It was cold, windy, raining. It's unlikely she'd be in the woods alone at that time of night.'

  PC Bob Wilkinson spoke out. 'It's possible. Like Sally said earlier. Maybe it's some witchcraft thing. She's dressed up as a goth. You know how some of them fruitcakes are. Lesbians and pagans, give them a full moon and they start believing all kind of bollocks. '

  Diane Campbell glared at him. 'Not very helpful, Constable.'

  Delaney stopped himself from smiling as he held his hand up to quell the beginnings of laughter in the room. 'Nothing's discounted. Most likely scenario is that she was taken there, though. Sex attackers don't usually hang around in rainstorms looking for victims.'

  Sally Cartwright held up her hand. She looked like she should still be in school, Delaney thought, but was glad she wasn't. She may look like a Girl Guide, but he knew beneath that pretty exterior was what his North American colleagues would have called a tough cookie. He'd had to depend on her more than once and she hadn't let him down. 'Yes, Constable?'

  'Is there anything in the database matching the MO?'

  'Good question. We're running it through at the moment. Until we get the detailed post it's all rather general. No immediate hits.'

  Diane Campbell stepped forward. 'What leads are you pursuing, Jack?'

  'A flasher was operating early this morning, near the scene of the crime.'

  'You think he was involved?'

  'Unlikely. But he may have seen something.'

  'You have a good ID on him?'

  'Pretty good. This isn't a run-of-the-mill flasher.'

  'Go on.'

  Delaney produced a couple of A3 sheets of paper. He pinned the first on the wall. It showed an artist's rendition of a wild-haired man in his late twenties, early thirties. 'This is the man we're looking for, and this . . .' He hesitated before putting up the second picture. 'This is his penis.'

  There was some wincing, some groaning and some laughter at the second picture that Delaney pinned on the board. An artist's rendition, blown up, from the nurse's description, of the man's scarred penis.

  'Is that life-size?' Bob Wilkinson couldn't resist it, and now the laughter rippled round the room like a rumbling sea at high tide.

  'All right, children, that's enough.' Diane Campbell's voice barked and the room fell silent. 'Have a look at the picture over there.' She pointed at the dead woman's mutilated body. 'Any one of you find anything funny in that?' She looked pointedly at Bob Wilkinson.

  'No, ma'am.'

  Delaney's phone chose that moment to ring. He looked at the caller and shrugged apologetically at his boss. 'I've got to take this. I'll be right back.'

  Delaney strode quickly from the briefing room before Diane Campbell could stop him and answered the call in the corridor outside. 'What have you got for me, Jimmy?'

  On the other end of the phone, DI Jimmy Skinner's voice sounded thin and echoing, the sound of men in the background telling Delaney he was calling from the prison. 'Hi, Jack. I'm at Bayfield.'

  'I gathered. Go on.'

  'Nobody's talking. I put the hard word on Neil Riley, Norrell's old oppo, and according to him Kevin Norrell was taken down because of the kiddie porn.'

  'You believe him?'

  'I don't know, Jack. Something feels hinky.'

  'You reckon it has anything to do with my wife?'

  'Maybe. But you know as well as I do that you can trust Norrell as far as you could throw him one-handed. Which is ruddy nowhere. The guy's a timeserving prick of the first order.'

  'Why lie about it?'

  There was a pause and Delaney could picture Skinner shrugging at the other end of the line. 'The guy was desperate. That much seems clear. Whether it was because he knew there was a hit out on him, or about the trial coming up, who knows? His mate reckons that he had something on Chief Superintendent Walker, perhaps. He was looking to deal. Maybe talking about your wife was the best way to get you in to see him.'

  'Maybe . . .' But Delaney wasn't convinced. Kevin Norrell had the brainpower of a fermented melon, but even he wouldn't be stupid enough to jerk Delaney's chain over his dead wife. Delaney glanced down at the stairs at the end of the corridor as the sound of high heels clicking rhythmically on the wooden steps grew louder. 'Keep on it, Jimmy.'

  Delaney snapped his phone shut and looked across as Kate came up the stairs and headed towards the briefing room, unwrapping her scarf from her neck and taking off her gloves. If she was a little taken aback to see Delaney waiting outside the door, she didn't betray it in her body language. Delaney watched her confident stride, the determined set to her jaw, but in her eyes he saw something that disturbed him. Something that went against her usual, poised exterior. Something that reached out to him in a primal sense. Something very much like fear.

  'Kate.'

  'Not now, Jack.' She sailed past him.

  Delaney hurried after her and took her arm. He was shocked to see the way she flinched away. 'I'm sorry.'

  She looked at him, anger flaring behind the fear that was still liquid in her deep, brown eyes. 'Sorry for what exactly?'

  Delaney hesitated. 'I didn't mean to startle you.'

  Kate nodded, as if his answer had confirmed her thoughts,
lessened him once again in her eyes, and he felt the shame of it like a creeping feeling on his skin. 'I need to get to the meeting,' she said.

  She opened the door and walked into the briefing room before Delaney had a chance to say anything more.

  Jimmy Skinner was heading down the iron staircase to be taken back through to the reception area when Derek Watters, the guard who had been posted outside Neil Riley's cell, fell into step behind him. He spoke quietly.

  'You want to know what was going down with Kevin Norrell?'

  Skinner turned back to look at him but the guard gestured him on.

  'Just keep walking. I'll talk to you about it, but not here and not for gratis.'

  'What are you after?'

  'A drink. A serious drink. I reckon Delaney's good for it.'

  'When and where?'

  They reached the bottom of the stairs.

  'Six o'clock. The Pillars of Hercules. Soho.'

  Skinner nodded, imperceptibly, as another guard approached.

  'All right, Derek. I'll take him from here.'

  Derek Watters slapped Skinner on the arm as the other guard led him away and back towards the entrance.

  At four o'clock in the afternoon, it doesn't matter what time of year, Soho is a busy place. But the White Horse pub, just down the road from Walker's Court, was relatively quiet today; as quiet as it was most days during the week, after lunch and before the workers came off shift. Later on it would be bustling with the regulars who preferred the scruffy traditionalism of a proper London boozer to the trendy bars that had recently sprung up around Soho like mushrooms in an autumn wood. Soho took its name, most believed, from the old hunting cry Soho, much like the Tally ho that still sounds from blue-blooded lips up and down the shires, hunting ban or no. Less fanciful, perhaps, was that the name just came from a shortening of South Holborn.

  The dark-haired man sitting on his own in the pub preferred the first version. As far as he was concerned, Soho was still a hunting ground. The best kind.

  The White Horse was a pub he liked to drink in and watch people. A spit-and-sawdust bar with a dirty, wooden planked floor and a look about it as faded as an old man's shirt. The man liked it because he could look at the whores as they worked the street outside, and watch them closer when they came in for a nip of cheap vodka against the elements. Their skinny legs sometimes encased in fishnet stockings and knee-length boots, sometimes bare and cold in red leather shoes, their painted smiles cracking in the sudden warmth like old varnish as they took a brief respite from the cold outdoors.

  At the moment, however, there were just a few tourists sheltering from the persistent rain and a couple of old men, seated separately and so far gone on strong beer that time meant nothing them. When they got up in the morning the pub was open and when they went home and collapsed the pub was open, and all that filled the hours in between waking and sleeping was the slow annihilation of thought, feeling and memory. Annihilation by the pint and shot glass.

  The man seated at the round table by the entrance door watched the old men with contempt undisguised in his eyes. His right hand caressed his left wrist.

  He looked up at the television set above the corner of the bar. He'd been watching the news now for over an hour. No mention of his own artistry that day on the heath. No mention at all. And that made him angry.

  The woman reading the news was young, blonde and very pretty. The man took a sip of his drink and watched her lips moving, not listening to the words she was saying. It was all irrelevant. Her lips were full, coloured with a soft, strawberry-pink lipstick. He licked his own lips, as if he could taste hers.

  He ran his finger around the circle of moisture on the cracked surface of the wooden table and something sparked in his eyes. Not anger, or self-pity, but desire. He looked up at the television screen again. At the face of Melanie Jones, the news reporter from Sky News, as she smiled at the camera and wittered on about the change in the weather and coastal erosion in some Norfolk village nobody had ever heard of.

  It was clear they had no knowledge of what he had done. And it was equally clear that the police had failed to grasp the significance of it. He needed to go to work again. Sometimes it took two pieces of the puzzle for someone to see the connection. Sometimes it took more. Well, if they needed another piece, he'd give it to them. Can you see what it is yet? Art is nothing without an audience after all. He smiled to himself taking another sip of his drink and looked at the elderly man at the bar who was watching him with a curious look in his eye, after a moment or two the man looked away and turned his attention back to his pint of Guinness. Some things you didn't want to look at too closely.

  Especially in London.

  Kate Walker looked at the photographs on the wall. Pictures of a young woman, once vital, now lying on a cold shelf in the morgue. Anatomy of a murder. She looked at the cold savagery of the slashes on the woman's body and felt sick for her race.

  Kate could feel the restlessness in the room behind her as she continued to look at the photos. But she needed a moment or two to collect herself. Her heart was racing, as it had been since morning, and her skin was clammy. She'd never felt like this before in one of these meetings. Some people were terrified talking to a large number of people, it was the top fear in the country, bigger even than spiders or snakes, but that had never been one of her phobias. She knew more than most people she ever met and didn't mind demonstrating it. It was a measure of just how rattled she was that she was nervous now. She took a breath or two and turned round and nodded to the assembled policemen and women. 'As you already know we're putting her age at mid-twenties. Time of death between one o'clock and two o'clock last night.'

  The young constable who had been guarding the body from the prurient gaze of the public earlier in the morning raised his hand.

  'Can I ask a question?'

  'Of course,' Kate said. 'What is it, Constable?'

  'How can you be so sure about the time of death? What are the signs?' Danny Vine asked, his notebook open and his pen ready.

  Amusement rippled round the room. Kate glared at them. 'All right. Some of you know as much about forensic pathology as I do – in your own opinion. But for the benefit of those who don't, there are a number of ways of determining time of death. It's a science but it's not an exact science. Rigor mortis usually sets in about three or four hours after death with full rigor about twelve hours later. Our victim hadn't reached that stage yet. So that's one thing. Ambient temperature plays a part though. Three to four hours is the norm with mild temperatures.'

  'It was brass monkeys last night, ma'am.'

  'Yes, thank you, Constable Wilkinson. You're right, it was bloody cold last night so that skews our calculations. But there are other factors we can use.' She looked across to see Danny Vine was taking copious notes. Keen to be a detective, she reckoned. She took a sip of water to allow him to catch up.

  'Other conditions factor in. The age of the body, how active the person was prior to death. If they were very active then rigor mortis can set in quicker. We don't know what this woman was doing prior to her murder but at that time of night we can assume she hadn't been jogging on the heath. So we look at other indicators.' She pointed to the photos mounted on the display panels.

  'The heart, as you all know, is a muscle that pumps blood around the body. Once that pump stops working, at the time of death, blood collects in the most dependent parts of the body. That is livor mortis. Then the body stiffens, which is rigor mortis, and then with no heat being generated post mortem, the body begins to cool and this is the algor mortis stage.'