Double Dealing (Detective Sergeant Catherine Bishop Series Book Two) (8 page)

  ‘The facts have already
been
established. Cameras picked Hughes up leaving Lincoln. He stopped for petrol near Newark, then joined the M1 somewhere between Nottingham and Leicester, where he stopped again. As you know, that’s where we think he met his murderer, or was abducted by him. Most likely there were at least two people - Paul Hughes was quite a big man.’

  ‘So I believe,’ Shea said, his eyes taking in Knight’s average physique. ‘And you weren’t able to identify a vehicle that might have been following Hughes, or obtain any CCTV footage from the services that was helpful?’

  ‘There was nothing. No witnesses, no suspicious vehicles. If they followed him from Lincoln, they could have changed cars. You
know
all this if you’ve read the reports,’ Knight sighed, frustrated. This was a waste of his time, and there was an undercurrent to the whole meeting that was making him defensive. He’d done nothing wrong and had run the investigation to the best of his ability, as always. What was going on here?

  Shea shuffled in the Superintendent’s chair and folded his hands across his belly.

  ‘I think that’s all for now, Inspector.’

Knight’s teeth itched at his condescending tone – they were the same rank, however important Shea seemed to think he was. He got to his feet, eager to be far away from the pair of them as soon as possible. ‘No doubt we’ll bump into each other around the station.’ Shea flashed Knight a false smile and lumbered to his feet. Allan also stood, smoothing her skirt over her thighs. Knight saw Shea’s piggy little eyes feasting on Allan’s backside as she stepped across to open the door and clenched his teeth.

  ‘Have a good afternoon.’ Allan smiled as he passed her. He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

19

Knight
went across to Catherine’s desk, where she was dunking another chocolate biscuit into a mug of tea.

  ‘Burnt my fingers now,’ she said, rummaging on her desk for a spoon.

  ‘Did you see them?’ he asked in an undertone. Catherine raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Pinky and Perky?’

He laughed, the tension broken.

  ‘That’s perfect.’

  ‘I caught a quick glimpse of them coming out of the Super’s office. What did they want?’

  ‘To accuse me of killing Paul Hughes.’ He waited as she choked on her tea.

  ‘They what?’ she coughed.

  ‘Do you know where the DCI is?’

  ‘His office. I think he’s avoiding them,’ she said, twirling a strand of hair around her finger.

  ‘I don’t blame him. I better go and have a word.’

  ‘They didn’t say that, did they?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but I didn’t like some of the questions.’

  ‘I’ve never heard anything so stupid.’ The image of the tattoo on Knight’s back crossed Catherine’s mind but she refused to dwell on it. ‘What about the post-mortem?’ she said instead.

  ‘Plenty of time. I want you to come with me.’

  ‘Well, okay.’ She didn’t look too thrilled at the prospect, but Knight knew that if the body was Lauren Cook, and there seemed a fair chance it was, the more information Catherine had first-hand the better. Lauren’s husband had spoken to Catherine first and she deserved a chance to prove herself again. Not, Knight thought as he crossed the room to Kendrick’s office, that she had anything to prove in his opinion, but he knew only too well how soon a good reputation could be destroyed. He hoped it wasn’t about to happen to him again here.

‘I’m not sure where they’re from,’ Kendrick said in a low voice. Knight had to lean forward to hear him, which was a new experience. Usually every sentence the DCI uttered was loud and clear, more often than not to people in the next county.

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘I presumed they were from HQ in Lincoln, but the Super didn’t say that, did she?’

Knight thought back to the meeting the previous evening. ‘No. No, I don’t think she did.’

What had Stringer said?
If there are any links, they’ll be investigated too.
What had she meant by that? After the questions he’d just sat through, he had to wonder.

  ‘They can’t think you’re involved, it’s just . . . ludicrous. Anyway, you wouldn’t still be here if that’s the way their minds were working.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much of an alibi they need. I was here at the station all day, then at the hospital most of the night.’

  ‘You’re looking at no less than an hour’s drive each way to get to Leicester.’

  ‘Plus all the time needed to inflict the sort of injuries Hughes suffered. It wasn’t a rush job, that’s for sure.’

Kendrick was pinching his lower lip again. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘I’m sure they can’t think you have anything to do with it, but why even give you that impression?’

  ‘No idea. Do you know anything about Shea, or DS Allan?’

  ‘Never heard of either of them. I should have realised when I didn’t recognise his name that he wasn’t from around here, and the same goes for her.’ He raised a hand to his face and scratched his cheek. ‘If I were you, I’d keep my head down and hope they either find who did it and sod off, or give up and sod off anyway.’

Knight glanced at his watch.

  ‘I thought I’d take Catherine to the post-mortem.’

  ‘Good idea. If this is how they’re playing it with you, I dread to think what they’d say to her.’

  As Catherine drove, she glanced at Knight, wondering what he was thinking. It had to hurt, another detective, especially an officer of the same rank, being sent in to mop up your mess. Knight was quiet, his face turned to the window most of the time. The sky was a heavy grey with ominous clouds hovering. Speeding along the lanes, Catherine flicked on the headlights, the flat Lincolnshire fields bleak and unimposing as the countryside turned in on itself before winter took hold.

  The turreted entrance to Lincoln Prison, which stood opposite the hospital, always reminded Catherine of the castle itself, down towards the city centre. Locking the car, she glanced across at the tall walls and panelled wooden gate. How many of the men inside were there as a result of operations she had been involved with? She turned to Knight, who was buttoning his jacket.

  ‘Which would you rather spend a night in?’ she asked. Knight followed her gaze.

  ‘Hospital. At least you can sign yourself out of there if you want to.’

  They set off, wincing as a shrieking ambulance flew past them towards the waiting doors of the emergency entrance.

  ‘They both sound grim to me,’ she said, glancing up at the main hospital building and thinking back to the night she’d spent here as a patient a few weeks earlier. She shook her head as she hurried to catch up with Knight.

In the corridor, Doctor Jo Webber was chatting to a couple of technicians. When Knight and Bishop approached they fell silent, Webber’s perfect features relaxing into a welcoming smile. Catherine grinned back and Knight gave a nervous nod.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see both of you.’

  ‘We thought it would be useful,’ Knight croaked. Webber raised her eyebrows but didn’t pursue it. They all looked up as footsteps approached and Mick Caffery joined them.

  Catherine emerged from the changing room first, adjusting the mask over her face as she entered the mortuary itself. Although it was an essential process and vital to any investigation into a suspicious death, being present at a post-mortem was not a pleasant experience. She had attended a few now, but the strange mixture of dread and wonder had never changed. As difficult as it was to stand as an observer as the pathologist went through each gruesome step, it was also intriguing.

  Early in her CID career, a DI had told Catherine that she should look at a post-mortem as a unique opportunity, not a horror show. However difficult it was to stand there, however intrusive the procedure was, it offered an unparalleled chance to pick up all sorts of information about the victim about what, and more importantly who, killed them. To Catherine, the stomach-churning sounds and smells were to be endured as stoically as possible, because in the end the only chance a victim had to tell their story was during the post-mortem, and if you couldn’t bear to listen, then could you do investigating their death justice? If you focused on the process and tried to forget, just for a few hours, that the subject had been a real person with hopes and dreams and wishes, then it was endurable.

  Endurable, but still terrible.

  Knight and Caffery shuffled into the room, as did the mortuary technician. The victim was on a trolley, still encased in a body bag. Catherine turned away. It was time to begin closing her mind, to focus on the body as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘her’. For the next few hours, the victim would cease to be a person and would just be a subject. It was the only way. Jo Webber strode in.

  ‘Are we ready to start?’ she asked. There was a general murmur of agreement.

   Webber bent over the body and removed more samples with swabs and tweezers. She also took the victim’s fingerprints, carefully setting the woman’s hands back on the stainless steel table beside her once the process was complete. Catherine took in a deep breath, then blew it out through pursed lips. The fingerprints could be vital in confirming the dead woman’s identity. Her stomach tightened as Webber bent towards the woman’s face, but the doctor just studied the ruined expanse of flesh. After a minute or so, she turned towards the wound in the woman’s midriff, studying it without touching. Then she turned away.

  Once the body had been photographed and washed, Jo Webber began to examine it in detail. She worked methodically from the top of the victim’s head over every inch of her body, recording a few small scars and any other unusual features she saw. She spent a long time examining and photographing the injuries the woman had sustained to her face, and then again focused on the stomach wound. Catherine was silent, standing beside Jonathan Knight. This part wasn’t so bad. The woman was still recognisably human. That she was naked and exposed to the eyes of five strangers plus a camera and video equipment was the only indignity so far. Catherine kept her gaze away from the woman’s face; the ruined flesh a constant reminder that she needed them, that they were the ones who had to provide answers. Catherine was not a religious person and she did not believe in an afterlife, but sometimes, in the presence of a victim of violent, unnatural death, there was a connection, almost a whisper, a promise or pact. Though she didn’t think to ‘rest in peace’ was an actual state of being, Catherine had to acknowledge that dead victims seemed to need an explanation, and their living relatives certainly did. They had no answer yet as to how this woman had died, but in any case, Catherine didn’t think for a second that she’d hacked her own stomach open. Someone, somewhere knew what had happened and Catherine intended to find them. She gave the woman on the table a tiny nod. It was a promise.

  They waited in Jo Webber’s office for the pathologist to reappear. She hadn’t said much during the autopsy apart from the observations she had to make, and both detectives were keen to hear her thoughts. The cloudy afternoon had darkened into a miserable evening, rain hammering on the murky window of the room. Knight had phoned Keith Kendrick for an update on the team’s activity that afternoon but it didn’t sound like much progress had been made. With no witnesses except the two teenagers who had found the body and no name as yet for their victim, progress was slow at best.

  ‘Has Jo Webber come up with any ideas about that gash to her stomach?’ Kendrick’s voice reverberated in Knight’s ear and he held the handset away from his face with a grimace.

  ‘Not yet. She’s getting cleaned up.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Your mates have left for the evening, by the way.’

  ‘Mates?’

  ‘Shea and Allan. Sound like a country and western act, don’t they?’ Knight waited while Kendrick had a chuckle at his own wit. Eventually the DCI said, ‘I’ll tell this lot to get off home then if you don’t have anything for us yet, then they can be in early for a full briefing. I’ll see you and Catherine in the morning.’

Knight slid the phone back into his pocket just as Catherine received a text from her brother
:
Going out with Anna. Don’t wait up
x

  ‘They haven’t wasted any time,’ she muttered.

  ‘Sorry?’ Knight asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ There was another text too that must have been received when she’d left her phone and other belongings in a locker outside the mortuary. It was from Chris Rogers; he’d sent her Ellie’s mobile number
:
Faye asked me to pass this on. Don’t kill the messenger Sarge
.
She smiled to herself and typed
:
Does Ellie know about this?

  In the chair beside her, Mick Caffery was scrolling through his emails. They all looked up as the office door opened and Jo Webber stuck her head inside.

  ‘Can I get anyone a drink before we start?’ she offered. Knight and Caffery both asked for coffee and Catherine got to her feet.

  ‘I’ll come and give you a hand.’

She wanted to ask Jo about another post-mortem she might have performed, this one a few weeks earlier, but she didn’t quite dare. Anyway, what good would it do her? The pathologist would never share any details, and she knew how Claire had died.

  A small staff room was located a few doors down from Jo Webber’s office. Its ancient-looking cupboards held the usual assortment of battered crockery and ill-matched cutlery. Webber filled the kettle from a dripping tap and flicked it on to boil as Catherine attempted to select the least grotty mugs from a motley collection. The walls were painted a sickly green and the beige carpet tiles needed replacing. Jo Webber, now dressed in a grey suit and a crisp white shirt, ran her hands through her hair.

  ‘Long day,’ Catherine observed, leaning against the wall.

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ Webber’s smile was tired.

There was a pause, the only sound in the room the kettle building up steam. Webber dropped tea bags into two of the mugs and took a jar of instant coffee out of a cupboard, then turned to Catherine.

  ‘So what’s the story with your DI?’ she asked.

Catherine stared at her in surprise.

  ‘Jonathan?’

  ‘How come he’s washed up in Lincolnshire?’

  ‘He told me he’d had enough of London.’

Jo pulled her hair back into a ponytail and then let it fall again.

  ‘I can understand that. I love visiting the place, but I wouldn’t want to work there. Is he married?’

Catherine hid a smile. Jo Webber was nothing if not direct.