Born in a Burial Gown (6 page)

‘But surely you agree that child rapists should be hung?’ Ian said, clearly annoyed by Fluke’s dismissal of his new job and oblivious to the mental weather change. ‘In my humble opinion, if they knew they were going to be hung they would think twice.’

In Fluke’s world there was no such thing as a humble opinion. The people who used the expression were never humble and for some reason thought prefacing their stupid statements with it gave it more gravitas. He noticed Ian was also slurring. Was there anyone in the room who wasn’t drunk? ‘Hanged.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s not hung, it’s hanged. And no, I don’t.’

An attractive, short-haired woman, who, to the best of Fluke’s recollection, hadn’t said anything all evening, decided to speak. ‘Can I ask why, Inspector?’ she asked softly.

Fluke couldn’t sense any drunkenness or condescension in her question and calmed down slightly. ‘It’s simple actually. You’ve heard the expression “you may as well be
hanged
for a sheep as a lamb”?’

She nodded.

‘It’s the same principle. I don’t want every sex crime turning into a murder because the there’s nothing to be gained by leaving a living witness.’ Fluke wasn’t simply disagreeing for the sake of it, although the mood he was in, he would have. No one sensible in the criminal justice system thought the right-wing approach to crime was a good idea. The people who wanted hanging brought back were either too stupid or too ignorant to understand the subtle nuances of sentencing. Fluke really didn’t want every paedophile and rapist locked up for life. That was what would be risked if the sentence for murder and rape was the same. Tough on crime? The only thing it would be tough on would be the victims.

She said nothing in reply, and Fluke got the feeling she’d already known the answer and she was, in her own way, showing up the fools surrounding them.

‘In other words, not having capital punishment saves lives. It’s as simple as that,’ he added.

That seemed to kill the atmosphere, such as it was. The woman raised her glass to him and winked. Fluke noticed she was drinking water.

So, not everyone in the room is drunk.

The rest of the night passed uneventfully, with everyone, including the woman, leaving Fluke alone. By eleven o’clock, he was feeling sober again and had the beginnings of a headache. By half-past eleven it had turned into a full-blown hangover and all he wanted to do was go to bed and get ready for the post-mortem the next day. Michelle had other ideas.

‘We need to talk,’ she said, as soon as the last guest had left.

That was all he needed. Another row about the same thing. He didn’t like her friends and they didn’t like him. Sometimes he thought that Michelle had only tolerated him because it had seemed glamorous to go out with someone who investigated murder for a living. A year into the relationship, though, and she’d realised that there was nothing glamorous about the job or him. He was sure he’d let her down somehow. He just didn’t know how. And worst of all, he didn’t care enough to find out. ‘Can we do this tomorrow? I’ve had a bit of a day.’

She was strangely calm, far calmer than on the previous occasions they’d discussed his lack of social graces. ‘No, Avison, we can’t. I don’t think there should be a tomorrow.’

Fluke said nothing. He knew it had been on the cards. They hadn’t been getting on for a while now. Looking back, he wondered if they ever had. For her, he’d been a talking point among her friends; for him, it had been easier to say yes when she asked him out than think of a reason to say no. If he was honest, he felt relieved. ‘I’ll take the sofa, I’ll be gone by the time you wake up.’

She looked at him. The anger was there now, bubbling under the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. Perhaps she wanted one final argument. Perhaps she was angry he’d taken it so calmly, that he hadn’t wanted to fight for her. ‘Will you fuck,’ she snarled. ‘You think I want you in this house after you humiliated Ian like that? I want you out now.’

Fluke nearly replied that Ian had humiliated himself but instead reached for his coat and left without another word. It dawned on him that he hadn’t noticed Ian leave and wondered if it was the real reason why she was so keen to get him out.

‘And when were you
ever
here after I woke up?’ she screamed at his retreating back, before slamming the door.

Fluke had a dilemma. He’d drunk too much to drive and lived too far away for a taxi. He had no choice but to sleep in his car. He fumbled in his coat for his keys.

‘I hope you’re not planning to drive, Inspector?’

Fluke turned round. The woman from the dinner party was leaning against the bonnet of her car, smoking a cigarette and blowing thick plumes into the freezing night air. She was smiling.

‘Just getting something out the car,’ he replied.

She obviously recognised that as the lie it was. She raised her eyebrows. ‘And that was Michelle shouting, “Hurry back” before she slammed the door on you, was it?’

‘She’s just in a bad mood is all. She gets like this sometimes,’ he mumbled, embarrassed.

‘What, you thought you were just going to say sorry and make up did you? Have you not met her before?’ she asked.

For some reason he felt he should stick up for her. ‘She’s right, I was wrong. They’re her friends and I’m always rude to them. She’ll be all right in a couple of days.’

‘She won’t, Avison, you must know that. This was a make or break dinner for you tonight, and you, my grumpy friend, broke it.’ She was still smiling as she talked. ‘I wonder why you don’t seem too bothered. Is it because, apart from you and I, everyone in there tonight was an absolute arsehole?’ She held up her hand as Fluke started to protest. ‘Michelle’s the worst one. Anyone could see you were dead on your feet and upset about something. They deserved everything you gave them.’

‘Yeah, well, what’s happened has happened,’ he said, as if that was any sort of explanation. ‘Who are you, anyway? You don’t seem Michelle’s usual type of friend.’

‘I’m the person giving you a lift home tonight.’

Fluke was woken early by his hangover. He was drained but raring to go on the first full day of the investigation. Moving day, he called it. By the evening he hoped to have a sense of where they were going, whether they were in for the long haul, whether he’d need more resources or whether he could release some.

He brushed his teeth, rinsed and spat. He looked down into the sink. There was even more blood than usual. Probably due to excessive alcohol intake of the night before. The MedicAlert bracelet that Doctor Cooper had given him, and which he never wore, sat next to his toothpaste, mocking him. He checked the back of his hand and saw what he expected. It was heavily bruised where the cannula had been.

If his blood was that thin, he’d best avoid taking aspirin as well. He was going to have tough out his hangover.

He started his coffee machine then quickly showered. By the time he was out, the coffee was ready and Fluke poured himself a large cup, black. He took it back into the bathroom so he could drink while he shaved.

The late night and early start meant that the face he saw in the mirror was even more haggard looking than usual. He was only forty but his dark hair was already salted with grey. He rubbed his dark stubble before smothering his face with shaving gel.

He picked up his razor, looked at it and put it back down. He couldn’t risk getting a nick – it would take hours to heal. Perhaps he should have stayed for the plasma after all. He clearly needed it. He reached for facecloth and removed the gel. He picked up his electric shaver and pushed the on button. It buzzed into life and he looked into the mirror as he ran the whirring blades over his chin.

His most striking feature stared back in the reflection. Normal to him, fascinating to others.

Fluke had heterochromia. His eyes were different colours. One was a vivid blue; the other was multi-coloured, dark green from any distance over five feet. Sometimes he could see people looking at him uneasily, aware something wasn’t quite right but not able to put their finger on it. Subliminal unease, he called it.

Fluke was occasionally able to use it to good effect in interviews but most of the time he simply forgot about it. At school, an older boy, trying to impress some girls, called him ‘lighthouse’ once. Fluke had broken his nose and the nickname hadn’t stuck although ‘flat face’ had for the bully.

As he shaved he thought about the surreal ride home with the mystery woman. He’d accepted the lift readily, a night on the backseat of his car hadn’t appealed to him. Despite asking her, he still didn’t know her name although she seemed to know all about him. They didn’t discuss Michelle again or what had happened at the dinner party. Instead, they’d fallen into an easy conversation about their jobs. She was a solicitor specialising in international law and they both understood crime, albeit they approached it from different perspectives. Fluke’s job was to catch criminals and hers was to get them off, except her criminals tended to be countries. Although his head had been a little fuzzy, he couldn’t recall having had such a challenging and stimulating conversation for a long time.

It was only when they were about two miles from his house that he realised he hadn’t given her any directions. She seemed to know roughly where he lived and only asked for help when the small road they were on turned into a succession of dirt tracks.

‘Every time you see a smaller track, take it,’ he’d told her.

Eventually, Fluke had been able to point her in the direction of his own road and she’d pulled up next to his house.

He’d got out of the car but before he could ask her in for a nightcap, she’d smiled enigmatically, waved once and drove off. When her car got to the end of his track, she honked the horn and drove away. He stood and stared, bemused, wondering if he’d ever see her again. He watched the retreating headlights until they disappeared, then pulled out his phone and rang Towler to arrange a lift into town to collect his car first thing.

He finished shaving and drained his coffee. Finding something to wear that didn’t have mud on, he got dressed. Using his bedroom mirror, he fastened a cheap tie. Even he thought he looked unkempt. It wasn’t that he dressed badly, it was just that anything he wore immediately looked scruffy. Losing so much weight so quickly hadn’t helped. Towler used to call him a typical fat marine. He hadn’t been, of course, he’d been on the right side of stocky. As an ex-marine, an elite force trained to march huge distances with heavy loads, he’d been extremely fit. Now his clothes hung from him like he was a child playing dress-up.

Back in his kitchen, he filled his travel mug with the rest of the coffee, remembering to turn off the machine. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d forgotten and come back to a solid, coffee-smelling mess on the bottom of another ruined jug. He went through five or six a year. He was debating whether or not he had time to sit on his porch and drink it when he heard a car pulling up.

Towler. They had a post-mortem to attend.

For the second time in two days, Fluke found himself at the Cumberland Infirmary. He decided he’d go and see Doctor Cooper after the PM; he didn’t feel as though he could fob her off twice in two days. He stuck his head round the door in the ward to tell a nurse he’d be with her in a couple of hours. She promised to pass on the message.

Fluke walked down the stairs. The mortuary was in the basement of the hospital as most are. He flashed his badge at the elderly man in the office and was waved through. He’d been there enough times for all the staff to know him. Carlisle didn’t have a dedicated forensic mortuary – there wasn’t the demand for full-time specialist facilities like that in Cumbria – so one of post-mortem suites had to be adapted every time the coroner requested a forensic examination. It didn’t have the glass viewing rooms some did, so he would have to be in the same room as Sowerby.

The suite Sowerby was using was typical of all mortuaries. Fluke shivered. He could feel the air conditioning and hear the hum of the huge fridges that stored the cadavers. They were permanently turned on. Fluke knew bodies could be stored indefinitely at minus 20ºC, and as the only hospital for forty miles, it was never short of business.

The room had an unpleasant personality all of its own. It smelled of chemicals and detergents. There were large sinks, drains and sluices, a room that had to dispose of large amounts of liquid; liquid from disassembled bodies.

White-tiled floor and white-tiled walls; easy to keep clean and sterile, easy to hose down. Laminated notices on the walls detailed actions to be taken in the event of biohazards being discovered. Fluke knew that the PM would take roughly four hours, and by the end, he’d be staring at the posters wondering if bio-emergencies had ever happened here.

It was a room where preserving the dignity of the dead took second place to uncovering their secrets. Fluke hated them.

In the middle, under huge halogen lights, was the dissection table. The body of their victim was already on it, still in the golf bag.

Towler had gone ahead and was there, gowned and with protective coverings on his feet, laughing with Lucy. Fluke didn’t want to know about what. Sowerby was discussing something with the mortuary technician. Alan Vaughn was there to act as the exhibits officer, and a SOCO officer Fluke didn’t recognise was preparing sample swabs and tubes. Everyone looked ready.

Fluke finished putting on his gown and foot covers, and entered the suite.

‘We ready to go then?’ Sowerby asked everyone as he walked towards the body.

Sowerby was one of those pathologists who said everything out loud. Instructions, comments and observations were all recorded on the built-in digital system. After some standard introductions of who was present, what the time was and which hospital they were in, he began.

‘The body was recovered today at a building site adjacent to West Cumberland Hospital, in what I am told, was a foundation hole. Preliminary police enquiries suggest that the body had been in situ for no more than twelve hours. It is still in the golf bag it was recovered in. It is covered in mud, consistent with where it was found. Hopefully, whoever had put her in it inadvertently left the victim cleaner than she would have been than if she’d simply been interred without it. The golf bag was too big to go into a cadaver bag. I have observed the head only. The body appears to be female. Until I have had a chance to remove the body from the bag, I would not like to estimate age or make a statement on ethnicity.’