Blood Work Read online

  It wasn't the Hippocratic oath.

  Back in the scene-of-crime tent Delaney turned to Sally Cartwright. She had offered to go after the doctor but had been told her to stay where she was. 'I guess a lot of people ate something dodgy this morning,' Delaney had said.

  Sally looked down at the dead goth's mutilated body and felt queasy herself. 'I can't say I blame her.'

  But Delaney was puzzled. Kate Walker was a consummate professional, had seen more dead bodies than even he had. Something was clearly up with her and he couldn't help wondering if it had something to do with the confrontation he had witnessed in the car park of the South Hampstead Hospital just a short while ago.

  Kate Walker stood up. She took the bottle of Evian water she always kept in her handbag and took a swallow, rinsing the water around her mouth a few times and then spitting it out. She did it once more and then took a long swallow of the cold water. She poured a little more on a handkerchief and wiped her brow and lips and took a couple of deep breaths, willing her heart to slow down. She placed a hand against the damp bark of a tree and forced herself to breathe evenly.

  Since an early age ambition had been Kate Walker's middle name. At school she had come top of her year seven years running. Unlike many of her peers she hadn't been distracted by boys or music or become fanatical about sports, she wasn't obsessive about ponies and didn't have a crush on her French teacher, she didn't spend hours shopping for outfits, had no fascination with shoes or handbags or jewellery or make-up, she didn't take an interest in anything, in fact, that wasn't going to further her academic career. As a young girl in prep school she hadn't been like that, she was a bit of a tomboy. She was as interested in climbing trees or playing cricket as any of her boy cousins. Her favourite novel was Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons and a day cooped up inside on a fine summer's day was torture to her. All that had changed, however, one summer when she was eleven years old and her outer life became driven inward. It was a solemn-faced and earnest girl who went to St Angela's for Girls, keeping her dark thoughts behind her dark lashes. If the eyes were the window to the soul, Kate Walker's were tinted glass. St Angela's was for the wealthy and gifted children of the south London suburbs whose parents couldn't bear to send their daughters further south to Redean or west to St Helen's. Kate's studies became her life, and she quite literally lost herself in books. She might not have lost her love for Arthur Ransome but the adventures took place in her imagination now. As a fresher at university she ignored all entreaties to join societies that were about fun and not study. Most people went to university to play hard and work hard, a few went to party. Kate went to work hard and that was it. She got a first and went on to become an exemplary medical student. As a qualified doctor she wasn't content with the prospect of general practice. She took courses and the extra work as a police surgeon. It was while doing that, and working closely with the police, that she became fascinated with forensic anthropological science and the work of pathologists. One dealt with bones, the other with soft tissue. She had gone back to medical school, qualified and became a forensic pathologist. Overall it had taken over twelve years and it was all she ever wanted. And she was good at it, already targeted for the head of her department and beyond. Her future was as plotted out for her and as detailed as an Ordnance Survey map.

  Today, though, as she looked across at the blue lights that were flashing through the trees and undergrowth ahead like a carnival for lost souls, she put a hand on her sore stomach, aching with the cramps of throwing up, and thought about the ravaged body of a woman just starting out in life, an unfinished symphony cut tragically short, about the horrible waste and the madness of it all, and she realised suddenly that she was sick of being a pathologist. She was sick of the blood and the pain and the daily reminder of the absolute evil that mankind was capable of. She was sick of dealing with the hard-headed cynicism of people like Jack Delaney and his ilk. Sick of death, in fact.

  Sick to her stomach.

  As she walked back to the crime scene she realised she had already come to a decision. She was going to phone Jane Harrington to see if the general practice position in her clinic attached to the hospital was still available. She had been offered the post a few weeks before and this time she would take her friend up on the offer. She'd have her resignation in to her boss by the end of the day. She had one last case to deal with first, though. She didn't know who the young girl in the woods was. She didn't know how she had died. But she would give her all finding out how and why she had died. She gave the unknown woman her oath on that much.

  A blood oath.

  *

  Delaney tried to look sympathetic as the nurse, Valerie Manners, recounted the morning's events. 'I'm sure it was all very traumatic for you.'

  'Traumatic isn't the word. I'm used to traumatic. You work enough shifts on the accident and emergency unit at a large hospital and you get used to trauma.'

  Bob Wilkinson spoke out. 'What would you call it then?'

  Delaney threw a 'leave it out' look to the constable who was standing by Sally as she took notes.

  Valerie Manners was a bit taken aback by the question and had to think a little, giving up after a few moments of struggle. 'Well, very traumatic I would say.'

  Delaney nodded, again with sympathy. The trouble all too often with the public when they were caught up in a crime, was to make too much of everything. The answers to solving a crime were all too often in the everyday, mundane, prosaic details, not in the dramatic and the astounding. Many of the witnesses he had interviewed over the years had a tendency to vicariously sensationalise their own drab lives by way of someone else's tragedy. Memories became embellished with imagined detail. But Delaney was a seasoned enough copper to know how to winnow the wheat from the chaff. At least he hoped he was. 'Go back to the beginning, Mrs Manners.'

  'It's Ms Manners.'

  'Back to the beginning then please, Ms Manners.'

  'I had stopped to catch my breath, leant on the tree over there—'

  Delaney interrupted her. 'Before then?'

  'When I saw the flasher?'

  'Before that.'

  'Back to leaving hospital?'

  'Yes.'

  The nurse looked at him perplexed, like he was an idiot. 'Is it relevant?'

  Delaney sighed and looked at her, any sympathy he had for her draining fast. 'I'll tell you what, Ms Manners, let's make a deal. I won't tell you how to dress a wound or change a bedpan, and you let me decide what details are important or not in a particularly brutal murder case.'

  'All right, no need to get snitty. I can get that kind of attitude any day of the week, if I want it, from the consultants who think they're better than good God Himself.'

  Delaney ignored her. 'What time did you leave work this morning?'

  'I left the hospital about eight o'clock.'

  'And you always cut through this part of the heath?'

  'Yes. It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk home. And a bit of fresh air never hurt anyone. I've learned that much in my job.'

  Tell that to the woman in the scene of crime tent, thought Delaney, but didn't say it. 'And you didn't see anything out of the ordinary?'

  'I saw a man wagging his penis at me! I'd count that as a pretty unusual event, wouldn't you?'

  'Can you describe it?'

  'The penis, or the event?'

  Delaney sighed and Sally Cartwright and Bob Wilkinson had to try hard not to smile. 'Just tell us what happened?'

  'I was walking on to the heath—'

  Delaney interrupted her. 'You hadn't seen anybody earlier, somebody coming off the heath perhaps?'

  The woman shook her head. 'Not a single soul. Weather like this tends to keep people at home or in their cars, doesn't it?'

  Sally looked up from her notebook. 'And the man who exposed himself to you . . . ?'

  'He was in his late twenties I'd say, maybe thirties. Semi-priapic.'

  'I'm sorry?' Sally asked.

  Wilkin
son smiled. 'He had a hard-on, Sally.'

  'Yeah, thanks, Bob,' said Delaney.

  'Well, partly so, enough I guess for him to waggle,' added the nurse. 'It was early, and it was pretty cold, mind you.'

  Delaney held up his hand. 'Can we concentrate on the man, not just the member?'

  'He was about five ten, wearing a fawn-coloured overcoat, he might have had a suit on under his coat, he had dark trousers anyway.'

  Sally flicked back through her notebook. 'You called him a raggedy man earlier.'

  Valerie Manners nodded. 'Yes, it was his hair.'

  Delaney waited patiently, but when there was nothing forthcoming, said, 'And? What about his hair?'

  'It was raggedy, you know?'

  'No?'

  'Sort of wild, curly. A bit like yours.' She pointed to Delaney. 'Only longer and it hadn't been combed, it was sticking out.'

  'Like his cock,' said Bob Wilkinson, his smile suddenly dying on his lips as Delaney glared at him, the detective inspector's already thin patience finally worn through.

  At the mortuary Kate Walker scrubbed her hands, holding them under the hot water and rubbing the brush as if to scratch away the touch of Paul Archer. She felt like dipping them in acid.

  'Are you all right, Dr Walker?' Lorraine Simons had come into the room and was watching her, concern evident in her eyes.

  'I'm fine.' Kate finished her hands, drying them and slipping on a pair of latex gloves.

  'You had a phone call earlier. Dr Jane Harrington. She didn't leave a message.'

  Kate nodded. 'It can wait. She can't.' She walked across to the mortuary table where the body of the murdered girl was laid out in cold, clinical repose. Her naked skin pearlescent white under the bright lights, like a dead snow queen.

  Kate watched as her assistant joined her at the table, wheeling across the stack of instruments with which they would try and ascertain the manner of the young woman's death. Quantify it. Render a human life into its constituent parts. Why was she doing this? she thought to herself. Working with the dead? Maybe her friend Jane was right, she had always been so sure of herself. But suddenly everything was shifting for her, nothing was fixed. Her career had always been a focus, a constant. Now? Now she didn't even know who she was any more.

  She glanced across at her young assistant. 'What made you want to do this job?' she asked.

  Lorraine looked at her a little puzzled. 'Don't you remember asking me that in my interview?'

  Kate smiled apologetically. 'There were a lot of interviews. A lot of interviewees, all of them saying the same thing. I just wondered what it really was for you?'

  Lorraine picked up a scalpel and ran her thumb along the blunt part of it. 'All through medical school I wanted to be a surgeon.'

  'What changed?'

  'It was a gradual thing, really. But one night, I was an intern on surgical rotation and a couple of children were brought in. A ten-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. They had both been repeatedly stabbed. By their father.'

  'Go on.'

  'He was a manic-depressive. On a cocktail of antidepressants, booze and marijuana. He had an argument with his wife, picked up a carving knife and stabbed both his kids to punish her.'

  'Nice.'

  'The boy lasted an hour. We did what we could but he had lost a lot of blood. We worked on the girl through the night. There were multiple complications, she had been stabbed nine times. We brought her out of surgery and had to take her back in as she arrested in recovery. She arrested again on the table.' She put the scalpel down and looked steadily at Kate. 'When she arrested again we had to let her go. Even had she survived she would have been brain-dead. There was nothing we could do. We had to tell the mother she had lost both her children. Some hours later the mother jumped in front of a train on the Northern Line at Chalk Farm.'

  Kate shook her head sympathetically. 'It wasn't your fault. You did what you could.'

  Lorraine nodded. 'I don't blame myself. There's only one person responsible for their deaths. But I couldn't deal with it any more. I couldn't deal with the fact that whatever you do, however much you try, eventually someone will die. And if you are going to be a surgeon you have to be able to deal with that. You have to be able to detach emotionally. And I couldn't. And I didn't want to go into general practice.' She looked down on the cold body of the dead woman. 'At least in here you can't fail. Nobody pays a price for your mistakes.'

  'That's true . . .' Kate looked at the dead woman's face, at her neck, at the start of the first incision, but knew that she was lying to her young assistant. '. . . and at least you didn't say you had a crush on Amanda Burton.'

  'Who?'

  'Good answer.'

  Kate looked back at the dead woman's neck again and then bent down to get a closer look. 'What do you make of this?'

  Lorraine moved around the table to see what Kate was looking at. 'It appears to be some kind of puncture wound.'

  'Get the camera. Let's take some close-up shots.

  Jack Delaney took a big bite out of his second bacon sandwich that day and grunted with approval. 'You're an irritating bastard at the best of times, Roy, but you make a halfway decent sandwich.'

  'From anyone else I'd tell them to stick their head in a pig, but coming from you, Inspector Delaney, I'll take that as a big fucking compliment.' Roy smiled broadly, his teeth like an old piano with half the keys missing, and turned back to the book he was reading. A new science-fiction blockbuster by Peter F. Hamilton from whom he had nicked the name for his burger van.

  Delaney walked across to Sally Cartwright who was delicately eating a bean burger as she leaned against the bonnet of her car. Her small teeth made precise, uniform bites. Delaney leaned beside her on the bonnet finishing his sandwich and considered matters. Now that the body of the young goth woman had been removed to the morgue, the SOCOs and uniforms were conducting a fingertip search and dusting any suitable surface. Given the overnight rain Delaney doubted there would be any chance of lifting any prints. Kate Walker had barely said three words to him since returning to the scene-of-crime tent. He hadn't expected her to be sweetness and light to him but he had hoped she could keep a professional neutrality, at least. He knew he had hurt her, but they had only slept together once after all, and that hardly constituted a relationship. And the fact of the matter was he had only ended their affair because he didn't want to see her getting hurt. He knew his own failings better than anybody and he knew he wasn't in a place right now to be of any use in her life. He couldn't remember who said it but he remembered the quote about the eleventh commandment. 'Never sleep with anybody who has got more problems than you have.' He reckoned that between Kate Walker and himself that would be a close run thing. One thing was sure, though, she was certainly taking the case this morning a whole lot more personally than he had ever seen her take one before. Kate Walker had always been practically a byword for icy efficiency, but the dead goth had certainly got to her in some way, that much was painfully obvious.

  'Sir?'

  Delaney blinked out of his thoughts and looked at Sally. 'Sorry, what?'

  'I was asking about the raggedy-haired man. You think he's connected with the dead girl?'

  Delaney finished his sandwich. 'I don't know. I think we should find him, though.'

  'Do you think there is a sexual connection with the murder?'