Hard Evidence Read online

  Kate snapped the latex gloves tight to her fingers and looked down at the mortuary table. The young girl's body lay ready for her examination. Kate put her at about eleven . . . maybe twelve, maybe ten. Life hadn't been kind to her in that short span. That was evidenced by the scars on her lifeless skin and the fractures that were revealed in the X-rays hanging on light-boxes at the back of the room. Kate wished she could shine a light into the dead girl's brain and see what had happened in her life. But nothing was ever that simple. Certainly nothing in Kate's life. She picked up a scalpel, knowing that the little girl had already been through a world of hurt, but taking comfort in the knowledge that she was beyond pain now. She flicked the switch on the recording machine and began dictating as she went to work.

  Delaney hurried along the corridors and into interview room one. If anything, it was hotter than it had been yesterday, but he made no move to open the windows. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair next to Bonner, who was sitting across the table from Terry Collier, a slight ginger-haired man in his late twenties. Collier was about five-foot-nine tall and as thin as a fishing rod; dressed in an avocado-green moleskin suit, he held a pair of round rimless glasses which he was polishing nervously.

  Delaney smiled at him, but it didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. 'Sorry to keep you waiting.'

  Collier put his glasses back on and ran a finger under his shirt collar and loosened his tie. 'I don't understand why I am still here.'

  'You're still here, Mr Collier, because I want to talk to you.'

  'You can't hold me here. This is England, not Iran. I can leave any time I want to.'

  Delaney stared at him, letting the words hang in the air until Collier looked away.

  'You came in earlier to amend your statement, I believe,' Delaney prompted him.

  'That's right.'

  'We need to talk about that.'

  Collier hunched defensively and looked pointedly at his watch. 'Yes, I came in first thing. I told the woman at your front desk everything. She has all the details.'

  'People say God is in the details, Mr Collier. But I don't believe them. See, in our line of work the Devil is in the details. We get all the details and we always ferret the bastard out.'

  'I don't understand what you're talking about.'

  'You're an English teacher, aren't you?'

  'Yes.'

  'So I am sure you know what a metaphor is.' Delaney pulled the chair from under the table, the legs scratching loudly on the floor. He banged it into position and sat down heavily. Collier flinched instinctively back as Delaney leaned forward.

  'Tell us again, for my benefit.'

  'Tell you what?'

  Bonner smiled encouragingly, 'You were on playground duty at end of school Monday?'

  'It's all in my statement.'

  'Nobody's accusing you of anything, we just need to know all the facts.'

  'You could have fooled me.'

  The petulance in Collier's voice made Delaney want to reach across the table and slap him hard in the face, but he clenched and unclenched his fist under the table and let the moment pass.

  'You could have been the last person to see Jenny Morgan alive, you do understand that, Mr Collier?'

  Collier looked shocked. 'Are you saying she's dead?'

  'I didn't say that. Do you think she's dead?'

  'How would I know that? What are you implying?'

  Delaney let the words hang again, and looked down at Collier's statement. 'You were on your own. No other teachers were with you?'

  'Just me.'

  'And earlier you told our uniformed officers that you didn't see Jenny Morgan leaving?'

  'That's right.'

  'But now you remember that you did?' Delaney kept his anger in check. Either the man was a liar and worse, or he was a bloody idiot.

  'It came to me later. She left with a friend. Carol Parks.'

  'And you've only just remembered that!' Delaney couldn't stop his voice rising or his hand slapping hard on the table again.

  Collier jumped back in his chair. 'There are hundreds of children at that school. Am I supposed to remember every one?'

  Delaney pushed a picture of Jenny Morgan across the table to him. 'Just her.'

  'I know what you're trying to do here.'

  'We're trying to find a little girl who's missing, that's what we're trying to do.'

  'You're saying that I was the last person to see her alive. I know what that means. You've got me down as your prime suspect. You think I did it!'

  'Did what, exactly?' Bonner leaned forward, any friendliness long since drained from his eyes.

  'I just meant . . .' Collier shook his head, flustered, and Delaney brought his cold eyes to bear on him.

  Collier swallowed nervously, running his finger under his collar once again.

  Delaney stood up and pulled his jacket off the chair. He looked at Bonner. 'I'm going to see the girl.'

  Collier stood up. 'What about me?'

  'We haven't finished with you yet. Sit down and the sergeant will organise you a cup of tea.'

  'You don't want me with you, guv?'

  'I'll take Cartwright,' said Delaney. 'The feminine touch.'

  Kate Walker pulled off her blood-stained latex gloves and dropped them in the stainless-steel swing bin. She nodded to her assistant, who wheeled the remains of the young girl away. In life the child had suffered all sorts of indignities, and in death she had fared no better. Sharp steel was no friend to human skin or internal organs, and although in most cases Kate managed to do her job in a professional manner, in a disconnected way, to work on someone so young and so fragile and who had been so obviously in pain was hard. She ran a hand through her hair and composed herself. The morgue was no place for emotions, and for Kate that was a good thing. She picked up her schedule for the day and tried to put the image of the pretty, dark-haired, little girl out of her mind. They didn't even have a name for her yet.

  Primrose Avenue was the kind of name, Delaney thought, that belonged in Surbiton or Chelsea, or else some suburb that wasn't dominated by the high-rise reality of a Waterhill estate casting a shadow all over it. But Primrose Avenue was where Carol Parks' family lived, and if there was a smell hanging on the hot still air, it wasn't the sweet smell of spring.

  Abigail Parks, a modestly if smartly dressed woman, had been startled at first to find two detectives on the front doorstep of her small but immaculately kept home. She regained her composure quickly, though, and took them both through to the back garden, where her daughter, brought home from school to be interviewed, was waiting.

  Out in the sunshine Delaney smiled reassuringly at Carol Parks, who took hold of her mother's hand like a lifeline. She was a quiet, brown-eyed girl of twelve, with mousy blonde hair and crooked teeth being set straight with National Health metal braces. Delaney had brought Sally Cartwright with him, but her youthful, cheerful presence had done little to calm the young girl's obvious nerves.

  'You're not in any trouble.'

  'I haven't done anything.'

  'We know that. We just need to talk to you about Jenny. Your friend Jenny Morgan.'

  Carol shook her head, leaning into her mother. 'I don't know anything.'

  Her mother squeezed her hand. 'It's all right, nobody is accusing you of anything.'

  Sally crouched down a little, bringing herself to Carol's level. 'She's your special friend, isn't she?'

  Carol nodded.

  'What do you remember of the day before yesterday, when you left school?'

  'I didn't see her after school.'

  'Mr Collier said he saw you two together, leaving.'

  'After that. I left her at the gate.'

  'But you normally walk home together, don't you?'

  Carol didn't answer, and Delaney looked at her mother, the question in a bent eyebrow. Abigail Parks put an arm, defensively, around her daughter's shoulder.

  'It's not far. They walk together. The school is only around
the corner.'

  Sally smiled at Carol again. 'But you didn't walk home together on Monday?'

  Carol considered for a moment and then looked down at the ground, shaking her head.

  'Why not?'

  'She wanted to wait behind.'

  'In the playground?'

  Carol slid her eyes off to the left, not looking at Sally. 'Yes.'

  Delaney stepped closer. 'Why, Carol? Why would she do that? What aren't you telling us?'

  'Nothing. I told you, I don't know anything!'

  She burst into tears and Delaney sighed. Kids were born liars, every single one of them. But they weren't very good at it.

  Sally knelt down and took her hand.

  'It's okay, Carol. It's just very urgent we find Jenny. We need to find her quickly and make sure she's safe. You do understand that, don't you?'

  Carol nodded, but still wouldn't look at Sally, shaking her head as she gazed at the floor. 'I don't know where she is.'

  Her mother patted her on the head. 'It's okay, poppet.' She nodded apologetically to Delaney. 'I'm sorry we couldn't be of any help.'

  Delaney nodded back, frustrated, and handed her a card. 'Speak to her; if there's anything she can tell you, get in touch as soon as you can.'

  'Of course.'

  Delaney pulled the door behind him as he left and strode angrily to his car. DC Cartwright, following behind, knew better than to try and engage him in conversation. As he opened his car door he looked across at her. 'She was lying to us, Sally.'

  'I think so too, sir.'

  'About what, though?'

  Sally shrugged. Delaney sighed and got into his car. If people just told them what they needed to know, their jobs would be a whole lot easier. Then again, if people just told the truth they would all be out of a job. A whole lot of people would be.

  A short while later, Delaney pulled his car to a stop back in the White City police station car park and looked across to see Bonner watching Collier walk away from the building. He locked the door behind him and crossed angrily over to the sergeant.

  'I thought I told you to hold him.'

  'He insisted, guv. There was nothing we could do.'

  'For now, maybe.'

  'Did you get anything from the girl?'

  'She said she left Jenny at the school. They didn't walk home together.'

  'So our English teacher has been telling porkies?'

  Delaney shrugged. 'Maybe.'

  'Something else?'

  Sally nodded. 'We got the impression that there was something Carol Parks wasn't telling us.'

  Delaney watched as Collier walked through the front gates and out of sight.

  Bonner shrugged apologetically. 'We had nothing to hold him on. Uniform have been all over his house.'

  'And?'

  'Like I say. Nothing.'

  Delaney scowled. His instincts had Collier in the frame somehow but he couldn't pursue the thought further as Morgan walked up to the entrance with his brother Jake.

  Sally gestured to the building. 'You coming in?'

  Delaney looked across through the clear glass of the entrance doors to see Superintendent Walker plastering a look of concern and solicitude on his smooth face and shaking hands with the Morgan brothers with as much sincerity as a second-hand car salesman. His scowl deepened. 'I've got to be somewhere. Bonner, you're with me.'

  Sally nodded and would have asked more, but Delaney had already turned and was striding purposefully away from the building.

  9.

  There was something fitting, Delaney thought, about a pathology lab being housed in the basement of a large Victorian building. The Victorians' twin fascinations with death and science going together like a horse and carriage. A black horse, obviously, with black feathers dancing from its head, pulling in its wake a black hearse with a black coffin inside.

  Delaney ran his hands along the cold surface of the original white tiles and seemed to draw some strange comfort from them. He looked across at the mortuary table. A place of steel and blood, a place of obscene evisceration and exposure. The human Rubik's cube of a body snapped apart and disassembled to discover its secrets.

  Jackie Malone was laid out on the table. Her body violated in life on a voluntary basis was about to be violated in death. A penetration by steel that she neither profited from nor had any choice over.

  Kate Walker picked up an electric rotary saw and nodded as Delaney and Bonner approached.

  'Sorry to keep you waiting.'

  'She's not going anywhere.' Kate flicked the switch and the loud burr of the saw filled the room, bouncing off its antique tiles and setting a resonant tremor in Delaney's bones. He threw a sardonic look at Bonner.

  'You wondered what kind of twist likes to cut dead people up, Eddie.'

  Kate fixed him with a defiant stare. 'I guess that's why you and me are different, Cowboy. I like to do things, you just like to watch.' She cut short any reply from Delaney by flipping down her goggles and lowering the blade of the saw. The throaty whine replaced by a keening whistle as it tore through flesh and sinew and bit into the bone of Jackie Malone's ribcage.

  Delaney looked away. He'd been to hundreds of post-mortems but never to one where he had known the victim. Not like he had known Jackie Malone.

  Time passed. Organs were removed, weighed, examined. The host structure that had once held Jackie Malone was rendered to its component parts. Flesh, blood, bone and sinew. If there was a soul once attached it wasn't there now, at least not one visible to scientific eyes.

  Delaney looked across as Kate snapped off her latex gloves and dropped them in the bin. He didn't have to ask the question.

  'Pretty much as I suspected at the murder scene. Death due to asphyxiation. She choked on her own vomit.'

  Bonner cracked a cold smile. 'Whose elses would it be?'

  'Give it a rest, Bonner.' Delaney was in no mood for graveside humour any more.

  'Her injuries were received post-mortem in the main. The serious ones at least.'

  Delaney nodded, the relief palpable. 'Any useful semen?'

  Kate paused for a moment at his choice of words but let it pass; she didn't joke in front of the dead. 'Traces of lubricant in both the vaginal and anal passages. A lubricant consistent with those used in standard condoms, a hundred varieties.'

  'Not unusual, then?' Bonner asked.

  'No. Especially not given the nature of her occupation.'

  Bonner shook his head, puzzled. 'Sex crime. All that passion, rage . . . yet they still have the control to put a condom on.'

  Delaney frowned. 'I blame television.'

  Kate looked across at him, but he wasn't joking.

  'Everybody knows too much these days, don't they?'

  Kate agreed. 'About everything.'

  Howard Morgan's face filled the TV screen. The livid scar running from neck to eyeline on his left side made more lurid by the leaking colours of the old television set.

  Abigail Parks thumbed the remote control so that she could hear his words.

  'We just want you to come home. You're not in any trouble.' His voice was stiff, halting, his eyes skittering nervously to the left, where unseen by the camera DC Sally Cartwright mouthed the words to him.

  Abigail looked across at her daughter, who was watching the television with restrained nervous tension.

  'If you are watching this. Just call us. Please.'

  Morgan's ravaged face was rendered both wide-and small-screen in department stores throughout the capital. But few people stopped to hear what the scarred man was saying. Few people cared.

  Outside, people went about their everyday business. Summer in the city and everything looked bright, everything looked cheerful, even the Japanese tourists. At Piccadilly Circus young lovers had their photos taken on the steps beneath Eros, red buses swung round the roundabout and underneath the large neon advertisements, giving snap-happy visitors the perfect photo opportunity. A London as far removed from Delaney and Jackie Malone and Howa
rd Morgan and his daughter as the moon.

  And along the Mall, heading towards Westminster, a sleek black car, its occupant another space traveller, but then all worlds collided sooner or later in the metropolis.

  Superintendent Walker, fresh from the press conference, held a mobile phone to his ear and looked out at the passing tourists, making little attempt to hide the boredom in his voice.

  'I have a meeting with the Home Secretary in half an hour.' He listened impatiently. 'I'm sure you do have your difficulties, my dear, but I have had problems with your people in the past. Problems I don't need right now.' The hardness slipping into his voice now like cold steel unsheathed. 'If he's not up to the job, we can always have him shipped back to Belfast . . . or wherever the black bog is that he crawled from.'

  He clicked the phone off and examined his nails.

  Under the surface of the teeming streets, Kate rubbed moisturising cream into her hands and checked her own blood-red nails, clipped short. Delaney crossed to stand in front of her, watching as she massaged one hand with the strong fingers of the other. Hands, Delaney couldn't help but think, that should have been caressing the neck of a cello, or holding a paintbrush, not a scalpel. She looked up and caught his gaze, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her green trousers.

  Delaney gestured at the inert body of Jackie Malone.

  'Could you tell if intercourse took place at the time, thereabouts, of the murder?'

  Kate gestured at Jackie's ravaged body. 'I don't think this was sexually motivated.'

  'They wanted her dead.'

  'They succeeded.'

  'You saying she wasn't raped?'

  Kate considered and shook her head. 'I'm not saying that. I'm just saying I can't give you a definite answer on it.'

  'Meaning?'

  'Meaning that intercourse had certainly taken place. Given the nature of her chosen profession, it's hard to tell if it involved her killer, or killers. Whether it was a voluntary or involuntary act.'

  'Any indications?'

  Kate walked over to the instrument table and picked up another pair of latex gloves, easing her fingers into them as she talked, flexing her hands and looking back at Delaney.