A Tapping at My Door: A Gripping Serial Killer Thriller (The DS Nathan Cody Series) (11 page)

‘We hear you’ve spoken to Vernon’s family,’ says Dobson. ‘What sort of reaction did they give you?’

‘A better one than the one I’m about to give you if you don’t get out of my way.’

Cody hopes that does the trick. Hopes that Dobson will accept he’s getting nothing here and that he needs to try his luck elsewhere.

But Dobson can be a tricky bastard. Oh, yes, his sneakiness knows no bounds. His hack instincts have been honed to the point where he knows exactly how to separate out the weakest member of the herd.

‘I don’t think we’ve met before, Miss Webley. Are you new to the team?’

‘I joined this morning,’ she says. Cody would rather she gave them nothing.

‘Oh, really? Then you’ve never worked with DS Cody before?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’

Chris the photographer is right in front of her now, recording every reaction. His camera captures the puzzlement on her face.

‘This way, darling,’ says Chris. ‘That’s it. Nice.’ He clicks away. For some reason, each shot sounds to Cody like a hammer blow to his skull.

Says Dobson, ‘I just wondered what it was like to work alongside someone with his background. Someone who’s been through the things he has.’

Cody says, ‘That’s enough, Dobby.’

Webley tries to mask it, but the confusion is clear on her face. And the camera gets it all.
Bang, bang, bang.

Cody squeezes his eyes shut to cut out the noise in his head. When he opens them again it’s evident to him that the bombardment Webley is getting from both men is designed to throw her off her guard.

‘Whatever you’re referring to,’ she says to Dobson, ‘I’m sure it won’t be a problem.’

Dobby glances at Cody, a suggestion of triumph in his smile.

Bang, bang, bang . . .

‘You mean you haven’t heard? He hasn’t told you? You should ask him. It’s quite a story.’

Bang, bang.
The noises are getting louder. They are hurting now. I need to stop this, thinks Cody.

‘All right, Dobby,’ he says. ‘That’ll do. Now go off with your cameraman friend and take some photos of yourselves in compromising positions.’

‘A few more,’ says the photographer. ‘Come on, darling. Give us a smile.’

Bang.

Cody feels his skull split open. And then it’s as though he receives an electric shock that galvanises him into actions outside his control. He’s hardly even aware of what he’s doing as he leaps at the photographer, as he snatches the camera from him, as he wraps his free hand around the man’s throat, as he forces him back onto the bonnet of the unmarked police car.

He feels his hand squeezing, squeezing. The man is struggling, going purple in the face, clawing at Cody’s unyielding arm.

There is a roaring sound in Cody’s head. There are words in there, swimming below the surface, but he can’t make them out. He just knows he needs to put an end to things. He needs to squeeze out all the pain. Get rid of it, once and for all. It’s that simple.

‘CODY!’

Not that simple.

It never is, is it? Life doesn’t offer simple solutions. It’s always complicated. Always a mess. He decides it will never get easier. He can tell himself it will, but it won’t. Every time he imagines things have improved, he gets shown the truth. And it’s always a slap in the face. Always another nail in the coffin.

He should have learnt that by now.

He slackens his grip. His eyes see again. See the world as it really is. Reality invades in all its unwelcome colours. The roaring subsides too. He hears Webley shouting at him, the photographer coughing and spluttering.

He blinks. Something weighty in his hand. The camera. Webley tears it away from him and shoves it into the arms of the photographer.

Cody looks over at Dobson. He’s smiling. Immense satisfaction on his face. He sees a story here. Maybe not yet, but one day. He will keep coming back. Keep pushing buttons. Keep smiling until he gets what he wants.

‘Sarge!’ Webley’s urgent voice again. ‘We need to go.’

She manhandles him to the passenger side of the car. She’s not allowing him to drive. Sensible move. He would take them into the nearest lamp post.

She opens the door and feeds him into the vehicle, automatically putting her hand on top of his head, like she would do to a prisoner. Cody sits there, staring straight ahead, feeling numb. He hears her telling Dobson to ‘stay away from him’. Nice of her. Protective, just like Blunt.

The slam of a door. The gunning of an engine. A vague sense of motion.

She drives. She mutters. Swears once or twice. Looks his way several times.

He doesn’t look back at her. To look back would invite questions. She’ll have a million of those.

He thinks it’s a pity he can’t give her the answers.

14

By the time they find a parking space at the Royal Hospital, he’s recovered. Not completely, but enough to present at least a semblance of normality.

Shit!

No, it deserves more than that. At least a dozen ‘fucks’.

He went completely over the edge. No excuses, no attempts to dilute what he did. Unacceptable. And all in front of Webley, too – the person to whom he’s supposed to be setting an example. Christ, what must she be thinking?

Later, he’ll get depressed about this. He knows that. He’ll spend hours wondering whether he should still be in this job at all. He would plummet into the blues now if he didn’t have something even more worrying jostling for position at the forefront of his mind. And if DC Webley wasn’t sitting right next to him.

Okay, now. Deep breath. Act professional. As you were, Sergeant.

‘Are you okay?’ says Webley.

‘Sound as a pound,’ he answers. He realises his voice is unnaturally loud. Overcompensating.

‘So . . . Do you mind if I ask what all that was about?’

What to say? He can’t just dismiss it as nothing of consequence, because, let’s face it, that was a bit of a blow-up. It was a totally disproportionate response. On the other hand, he’s not about to tell her he’s lost his marbles either.

‘They pissed me off. The pair of them. Dobson is always pestering me. Always trying to get a story out of me. Press conferences are never good enough for him. He’s always got to sneak about, turning rocks over in the hope he’ll find something juicy for his scummy rag of a newspaper.’

‘It’s his job. You know that. I’m not defending him, but that’s what they do, isn’t it? I just don’t understand why it got to you so badly.’

‘It just did. They caught me on a bad day.’

She smiles. ‘PMS?’

‘Something like that. And I didn’t like the way that photographer was being with you either.’

Webley flutters a hand in front of her face. ‘Why, Sergeant Cody, I didn’t know you cared.’

Cody shakes his head at her. ‘I don’t. I was just defending one of my men.’

She deflates visibly. ‘Gee, thanks. In case you hadn’t noticed—’

‘I’m using “men” in a gender-neutral sense, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

Cody reaches for the handle of the door, but Webley’s not done.

‘What was that stuff Dobby was saying about your story? The things you’ve been through?’

Cody pauses for a moment. But only a moment. ‘We should get inside. We’re already late. The doc’ll be having kittens.’

And with that he’s out of the car and walking to the building. Glad to be in the open again, sucking in that fresh air and then breathing out his tension. But knowing that his day hasn’t finished yet. This day, like most of them, has more up its sleeve.

He leads Webley to the mortuary. They find Stroud in a small anteroom, a sandwich clutched in his sausage-like fingers.

‘You’re late,’ he tells them. ‘By nearly ten minutes. When I’m kept waiting, I get hungry. Luckily, I had the means to knock together some sustenance.’ He passes a hand over his sandwich, as if about to make it disappear. Which, in a sense, he is.

Webley grimaces. ‘What is it?’

‘This, not unlike yourself, young lady, is heaven in portable form. A deliciously thick helping of deep-fried root vegetables lovingly embraced between twin layers of baking perfection.’

‘You mean a crisp butty?’

‘If you wish to be so colloquial about it. May I offer you one?’

‘Er, no thanks.’

Cody stares as Stroud takes a huge bite out of his sandwich. The resounding crunch makes him feel sick. In fact, everything about this place is making him nauseated. He can feel the heat beginning to emanate from his body and envelop him beneath his clothing, the perspiration starting to bead on his forehead.

Stay calm, Cody tells himself. Deep breaths. You can do this.

‘We had a good one in here the other day,’ says Stroud, fragments of crisp dropping from his sandwich as he waves it at them. ‘Fellow cleaning the roof of Lime Street station. You know how it’s made from all those glass panels? Well, there’s one missing. Only our chap didn’t realise this. Went to clean the panel, fell straight through. The weirdest thing was the expression of utter surprise that was still on his face when they found him. Priceless.’

Stroud laughs uproariously at this, while Cody finds it a battle to dredge up a smile. He has always thought that coppers have a black enough sense of humour, but it’s often beaten into the shade by some of the comments that are traded in this place. Cody still remembers listening to one of the pathologists imitating the sound of a trotting horse by banging the tops of two skulls on a table.

Stroud puts the remains of his snack down and brushes the crumbs from his hands.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Nutrients restored. I’ll just get cleaned up, and then we’ll take a look at the body, shall we?’

He goes in search of a sink. Cody looks at Webley, hoping she hasn’t yet become aware of his discomfort. It surprises him that she looks even more nervous, biting her lip and not knowing what to do with her hands.

‘Are you okay?’

A nod, but not an emphatic one. ‘Like I said, this is different. I knew her.’

‘Would you prefer to stay out here?’

She thinks for a few seconds. ‘No. It’s okay. I’ll be all right.’

Cody isn’t sure he can say the same. He wishes it were the other way round – her asking him if he’d care to skip this one.

Crap, he thinks. We’re as bad as each other.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Don’t look if you don’t want to.’

They enter the autopsy room. A long row of steel tables stretches ahead of them. On one of the tables, a naked female figure, white and still. Even from here, the detectives can see that death is on that table. No actor could carry lifelessness off this well.

‘Gather round,’ says Stroud. ‘She won’t bite, and neither will I.’

Cody wonders whether Stroud has remembered that Webley was the one who reacted so badly at the crime scene this morning. For a moment he debates telling him, but then decides that Webley probably wouldn’t thank him for seeking special dispensation.

Reluctantly, the detectives move closer. From a distance they could kid themselves that Terri Latham was intact – perfect even in death. But as they approach they become aware of her unseeing stare through red, raw holes. And below, the third point of the macabre triangle is the wound in her throat, gaping open as if crying for help. Cody feels his senses being bombarded. The shiny steel and the intense white lights and the man wielding the scalpel and the chemical smells and the cold air and the unmistakable presence of death – all of these things alerting his brain to the fact that this body is about to be torn open to the world in the most gruesome manner imaginable.

And so it begins.

Stroud launches the operation with words he has intoned countless times before: ‘The body is that of a well-nourished female . . .’

For Cody, the words quickly fade into a meaningless drone. He can’t concentrate on what is being said, because he is trying too hard not to be here. In his mind he is on a beach, then swimming in the sea, then driving along a country lane. Anywhere but here.

The sweating starts up again. He knows it is cool in this room, but he feels like a boil-in-the-bag meal. His blood will soon begin to bubble and his skin will inflate with the steam, and it will balloon out and he will be on the edge of exploding, spreading his insides all over the—

No, he tells himself. Stop that. Don’t get all disgusting on me. Think nice things. Think of girls, and of having a pint in the pub with your mates, and going to the match on a Saturday. All the things you used to do before normality was cruelly interrupted.

But he can’t help it. Can’t help watching Stroud, and the way he’s cutting. That big fucking Y-shape of an incision they always make. Right down the body. Look at that. All the way down. Parting. Opening. Opening that fucking body right up. Jesus Christ. Look at that shit. All that stuff inside her. Ribs being parted. Organs being scooped out like the fleshy seedy pulp of a melon. All taken out as if this isn’t a human being in front of them. As if this is just some kind of inanimate object to be freely poked and prodded and sliced and damaged.

And if only that were all. The emptying of the cavity. That should be it. That should be enough devastation, enough carnage.

But now this is it. This is the part Cody was really worried about. The bit he dreaded. The bit that is making him hot and nauseated and on the verge of passing out. No, it’s more than that. It’s the bit where he cries. The bit where he screams his lungs out. Where his very soul is ejected from his mouth and his heart wants to explode with the strain it endures. This is it. Oh, God, this is it.

He would like to ask Blunt why she put him here. Wants to know what purpose it serves. Webley, too. They are the two most unsuitable detectives on the team to be at this particular post-mortem. Blunt knows that, and yet she put them here. What kind of sadist is she?

But it’s a test. He knows that. And he’s going to pass it with flying colours. Watch me, he thinks. I can do this. I can get to the other side of this.

So he stays put. Forces himself to stare. The beach and the pub and the girls and his mates are all out of reach now. They can’t help him any longer. Even Webley has gone, dissolved into the background. There is just the body and the man with the scalpel. It’s not even possible to discern the gender of the corpse anymore. This could be a man. Yes, he thinks, that’s it. A man. It was a man last time, too. He was there. He saw it all. Saw what happened, just as it’s happening now. The scalpel being lowered again. Down, down, down. And then the cutting. The cutting.