Fell Purpose (2 page)

She was slim and very young, as Hart had said, but with an enviable figure, with no puppy chubbiness around jaw or waist, and fine skin: not a spot in sight. She was wearing a mauve cropped top with spaghetti straps, and a black skirt, so short it was a mere nod to decency, which fitted round her hips, leaving her navel exposed. The navel sat curled and cute like a winkle-shell – but the winkle-shell of a particularly fashion-conscious winkle – embedded in the smooth honey-coloured mound of her belly. It was appallingly sexual. Why did girls want to dress like that, he wondered, with a background ache of alarm. His own daughter, Kate, bright and pretty as she was, was just getting to the age when she wanted to go out with her friends, all of them looking like hookers – and cheap hookers at that. They might as well have had placards on their backs saying: ‘Available for casual sex. No respect required.’

The victim’s legs were bare, and one strappy high-heeled shoe was on, while the other lay nearby, its straps broken. The heel had snapped off and was a little further away towards the road.

Hart indicated it with a gesture and said, ‘You can see it, guv, can’t you? She’s running away from ’im and ’er heel catches, down she goes, and he’s on ’er.’

‘You assume she was running away,’ Atherton said. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the movies? What about playful chasing and light-hearted gambolling?’

‘Gambling? What are you talkin’ about?’

‘There’s no reason to think she was running at all,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘She could just as easily have been walking, or even standing still—’

‘Yeah, standing still and struggling,’ Hart said.

‘The ground’s too hard for footmarks,’ Slider said, but without regret. Footmarks were time-consuming, and hardly ever helpful.

He looked last of all at the face. As Hart had said, she had been pretty, as far as one could tell – perhaps extremely pretty. Now the face was congested; the open eyes spotted with petechiae; the tip of the tongue protruding between the lips, a smear of blood on the chin. Around her neck was a pair of flesh-coloured tights. They were not knotted, just crossed over, but were kept in place by the ridge of swollen flesh on either side. There was also, he noticed, bending closer, a thin red line around the bottom of her neck: a fine cut, as if a wire had been tightened there.

‘Strangled with ’er own tights,’ Hart said bitterly.

Slider leaned forward. ‘You see what she’s wearing,’ he said, lifting the hem of the skirt back a little.

‘A thong,’ said Hart. ‘I ’ate those things. They’re dead un’ygienic. Give you thrush, and it’s a bugger to get rid of.’

‘The thong has ended but the malady lingers on?’ Atherton suggested.

‘Sometimes you’re really funny, Jim,’ Hart told him. ‘And then there’s now.’

‘The point I’m trying to make,’ Slider said patiently, ‘is that I wonder if she
was
raped. Would a rapist put the thing back on afterwards?’

‘Would he take it off in the first place?’ Atherton said.

‘But what about the tights, guv?’ Hart said. ‘I fink maybe I was wrong before.’

Slider got the point. ‘She obviously wasn’t wearing them. She had her shoes on bare feet.’ He was trying not to notice that the feet were cared-for and pretty and the toenails were neatly painted with clear varnish. The fingernails, cut short and following the contour of the fingertips, were unpainted.

‘So someone brought his own murder weapon with him?’ Atherton said. ‘That’s not so nice. That looks like someone with form.’

Slider sighed inwardly at the thought of a serial killer, but he said, ‘It gives us a line of enquiry, anyway. We’ll look at the offenders’ list and see who’s out and about. I can’t think of anyone obvious.’

‘At least it might misdirect the press,’ Atherton said. ‘What with the Scrubs being right next door, they’re bound to make the obvious misconnection. Finding out who’s in there that fits the bill might keep them happily absorbed while we get on with the job.’

‘We’ve got to identify her first,’ Slider said, straightening up.

‘Look at Mispers?’ Hart suggested.

‘If we can’t find the handbag,’ Slider said. ‘And there’s all these local people to canvass. If only we could take a mugshot, one of them might know who she is, but we can’t show them what she looks like now.’

‘Murderers are so inconsiderate,’ Atherton agreed.

Porson, their superintendent, arrived, wearing his summer tegument, an ancient beige mac: a wondrous thing of flaps and capes and buckles, concealed poacher’s pockets, and buttoned straps of unknown purpose. It was so vast and long it looked as if it was taking him for a walk rather than vice versa. His massive and strangely bumpy bald head shone in the muted sunlight, a beacon of hope and a symbol of courage in adversity. He had abandoned his wig when his adored wife died, but was still known by his old sobriquet of ‘The Syrup’.

He disappeared behind the screens, had a look, and came back to speak to Slider.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said, shaking his head at the general iniquity of things. ‘She’s only a kid. What, sixteen? Seventeen? It’s nasty.’

Slider had no argument with that.

‘The tabloids are going to be all over this one,’ Porson went on gloomily, pursing his lips and pursuing something round his teeth with his tongue. ‘Young girl, rape and murder. Whose tights are they? Not hers.’ The old man was quick, Slider thought. ‘Looks like some cyclepath on the loose. They’ll love that.’ He snorted. ‘No one ever lost money misunderestimating the press.’

In his headlong and tempestuous battle with crime, and with life in general, Porson’s way was to fling whatever words came first to hand in the general direction of meaning, and hope some of them stuck. It drove the language-sensitive Atherton mad; Slider, who was fond of the old man, found it almost endearing.

Porson snapped his head round and fixed Slider with a gimlet eye. ‘Got anything yet?’

‘We don’t even know who she is,’ Slider admitted.

‘Someone’ll miss her, nice girl like that. She’s not a prozzie.’

Slider agreed. Despite the clothes, she looked like someone’s daughter. Her skin and hair were well cared-for and well nourished, and her navel wasn’t pierced.

‘I’m going to go all out to get you resources for this one,’ Porson said, ‘even if it does jeropodise the budget. It’s going to be hell’s own job, though, getting the uniforms back, what with the Carnival.’ The Notting Hill Carnival, held every August Bank Holiday, sucked police out of the system like a black hole. ‘What a weekend to choose!’

‘I wonder if it was an informed choice,’ Slider said, thinking of those tights.

Porson shuddered. ‘If the villains are going to start getting smart, we’re out of a job.’ He glanced round and said, ‘I’m going to go now, before someone tries to interview me. Keep me up to scratch on this. I’ll get on with pulling in some extra men. Ask me for anything you want.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Slider watched him scuttle away, nimbly avoiding the TV cameras. Wise move, he thought. A closed mouth gathers no feet.

He was giving directions to the slowly increasing manpower – some to start the fingertip search, some to the canvassing of locals – when one of the uniformed extras, Gostyn, came up to him.

‘Just found this, sir.’ He held out something which Slider accepted into his plastic-gloved palm. It was an ornament about the size of a fifty-pence piece, an open circle with a Z inside it, all in diamonds on a silver-coloured metal. ‘It was just this side of the bushes, sir, lying in the grass. Think it could be hers?’

Slider remembered the thin red cut on the victim’s neck. ‘Could be. If it was on a chain round her neck—’

Gostyn got the point. ‘And he grabbed it while he was struggling with her and broke it,’ he finished for him eagerly.

Slider shook his head. ‘He must have grabbed it from behind. The chain cut her neck at the front.’

‘So he was chasing her, you reckon?’

‘Not necessarily. They might have been talking, then she suddenly got scared and turned to try to escape, and he grabbed her then. If she turned suddenly, that could have been when she broke the heel of her shoe and burst the straps.’

Atherton joined them. ‘What’s that? Oh, a letter Z. That’ll narrow the field.’

‘Could be an N, sir,’ Gostyn said, trying to be helpful.

‘No, look,’ said Slider, ‘here’s the ring the chain goes through. It hangs this way. It’s a Z all right.’

‘Zöe,’ Gostyn said. ‘Or . . .’ He racked his brains unsuccessfully.

‘Zuleika,’ Atherton supplied. ‘Zenobia. Zephany.’

‘Zebra,’ said Gostyn eagerly, and then blushed his confusion as Atherton’s eyebrow went up. ‘I was thinking of Debra,’ he muttered. Anyway, since when was Zephany a name?

‘Can I see?’ Atherton took it and tilted it back and forth. The stones caught the light and flung it back. ‘They look like real diamonds. Small, but not fake. Which means the setting’s probably white gold or platinum. Someone didn’t mind spending money on her. Pretty good going at her age.’

‘If it’s hers,’ Slider said. ‘Find the chain before you jump to conclusions.’

‘Yes, oh cautious one.’

‘Did you have something to tell me?’ Slider asked him.

‘Something important,’ Atherton confirmed. ‘The tea waggon’s arrived. Bacon sarnie?’

After a morning and most of the afternoon setting in train the involved and laborious routine of investigation, Slider was back at his desk ploughing through the paperwork when Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, rang. His cut-glass tones, as neat and dapper as his habitual attire, were as stimulating as a yellow waistcoat. He and Slider went back a long way, and Slider had never known him to be other than cheerful, even in the face of the most insalubrious corpses.

‘Hello, Bill! How’s life?’

‘I’m waiting for the movie. How are you?’

‘Always merry and bright.’

‘Even coming in on a Bank Holiday?’

‘The traffic’s a pleasure. Absence thereof. And the phone doesn’t ring so much.’

Slider smiled. ‘I firmly believe if you were being transported to Hades you’d be making cheery small-talk with the Ferryman.’

‘Of course.’ Freddie put on his unconvincing cockney accent. ‘I ’ad that Orpheus in the back of my boat once . . .’

‘Orpheus? Didn’t we have him up for luting?’

‘My God, that’s terrible! Let’s change the subject. I’ve got your corpus. Sorry business – poor little beast. Thought I’d give you a preliminary report.’

‘Thanks. Was it what it looked like?’

‘From external examination it certainly looks as though death was due to strangulation, and the tights fit the pattern on the skin, so they probably are the weapon.’

‘Well, that’s a start.’ Anything straightforward was a relief.

‘I’m a bit choked up with work at the moment with half my staff on holiday, so unless there’s a particular reason to hurry, I’ll have to put off the post for a day or two. I can’t see anything out of the way, though. No sign of drugs, but I’ll do the usual tests when the time comes. No sign of forcible penetration, or indeed of recent sexual activity – no semen or lubricant traces. But our young lady was not a virgin. In fact I’d say she was probably quite experienced.’

‘God, they start early these days,’ Slider said. ‘She can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen.’

‘How old were you?’ Freddie asked drily.

‘I was a country boy,’ Slider said. ‘We didn’t have anything else to do. Any defence injuries?’

‘Nothing visible. There might be some subcutaneous bruising. No blood or tissue under the fingernails, unfortunately.’

‘Her nails were cut short,’ Slider mentioned.

‘Yes, and she had strong hands, too – I wonder if she played the piano? Probably the assailant took her by surprise, and instead of hitting or scratching him she tried to pull the ligature away. Pity. But we may find hairs or fibres somewhere. Nil desperandum.’

‘I love it when you talk Latin to me. Time of death?’

‘I haven’t done a liver stick yet, but I doubt if the temperature is going to tell us much we don’t know already. I’d estimate she’d been dead about twelve hours when I saw her this morning, which as you know is give or take the usual eight-hour margin.’

‘Helpful.’

‘But I understand she was found at about seven?’

‘Six forty-five. Woman walking her dog.’

‘So that cuts it down this end. And I noticed—’

‘The dew on her hair?’

‘Give that man a coconut. Now, I’ve done a quick bit of research and dew point would have been at about two o’ clock this morning, so given that the ground underneath her was dry—’

‘She must have been put there before then. Was she killed where we found her?’

‘The hypostasis was consistent with it, though as you know that’s only an indicator, not proof positive. But given the trampled grass and her broken shoe and the way the body was lying, I’d say it most likely happened there.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Slider said. ‘It’s hard to make a body look natural once you’ve moved it.’

‘Oh, it was a trick question, was it? I’m supposed to tell you things you didn’t know.’