Frozen (6 page)

‘Have you seen them yet?'

‘No. I only got the call from the pathologist an hour ago. By the way, he's a new chap – haven't come across him before.'

‘Well, the first thing we need to know is the blood group of the anal semen sample.'

‘I know. The results hadn't come back from the lab when I spoke to him but he's promised to chase it up. They should have done the tests by now, so hopefully they'll phone us here with the results.'

He knocked on the opaque glass panel of the door, shuffling his feet impatiently as they waited. It was opened by a young woman with bad acne, who let them in without a word. Her overalls were spattered with an assortment of stains in varying shades of brown. As they followed her along the rows of dead bodies, Megan found herself wondering what this girl's friends and relatives had said when she announced that she wanted to be a mortuary technician.

Megan's mother had been a forensic scientist and her children used to tell their friends she was a medical version of Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes, after school, Megan would wait for her outside the big white doors of the laboratory, trying to imagine what was going on in the forbidden zone inside.

When she was finally allowed a guided tour of the place she had discovered it was nowhere near as gruesome as the pictures in her mind. Her mother spent most of her time peering down a microscope, quite detached from the bodies her samples came from.

But to choose to spend one's life surrounded by corpses – that was something Megan had never really been able to understand. She glanced again at the girl leading them through the mortuary. Perhaps for her it was a refuge. If she was embarrassed about her skin, this was one place she could work in peace, free from the risk of cruel stares or pitying looks.

‘Detective Superintendent Leverton!' A man's voice boomed from behind a screen and the girl scurried off like a beetle to a dark corner of the room.

The pathologist emerged, having apparently changed into a clean set of green overalls. He adjusted the cap on his head before shaking hands with Martin.

‘Ed Horrobin. And this is…?' He turned to Megan and she noticed how young he was. All the pathologists she had ever met had been at least fifty, and knowing how long it took to qualify for the job she was surprised to see someone who could easily have been mistaken for an undergraduate.

‘This is Doctor Megan Rhys,' Leverton cut in before she could answer for herself. ‘She's helping us build up a profile for the Natalie Bailey and Donna Fieldhouse murders – if this case proves to be linked she needs to see the forensic evidence as quickly as possible.'

‘Yes, I've been on to the lab and they've promised to call back with that blood group result before two o'clock.' He pulled back the elasticated cuff of his overalls, glancing at his watch. ‘So – that gives us twenty minutes to show you the bodies and get you back out on the trail!'

For one so new, he was remarkably cocky, Megan thought. He led them over to the corpse of a small, thin man. It was virtually impossible to estimate his age because most of the head was missing.

‘Right!' the pathologist went on in the same, almost theatrical tone he had used earlier. ‘This is Mr Dudley Jackson, aged 38 years. Cause of death is arrest of brain function due to a gunshot wound. The weapon was a double-barrelled shotgun fired into the mouth. Tests carried out since we took delivery of the body reveal that Mr Jackson could not have blown his own brains out because his arms weren't long enough.'

Horrobin perched on a nearby stool, legs apart, holding an imaginary shotgun between his knees. ‘You see, he was only five foot four, very slight build. We measured the barrel of the gun and the only way he could have done it was if he'd held the gun between his feet and pulled the trigger with one of his toes. As he had his boots on when your lot found him, I'd say that's pretty unlikely.'

He bounded from the stool across the room to the corpse of a woman, not waiting for any kind of answer from his audience.

‘Of course there's no way that
she
could have killed
him.
She was found lying face down on the bed and some of the shot from the gun had passed right through her body into the mattress. The entry wound confirmed that she'd been shot through the back while lying on the bed. Of course, we now know that the actual cause of death was asphyxiation and that she was already dead when the gun was fired.'

‘Why did it take you two days to work that out?' Megan could have made the question sound less like an accusation, but in the circumstances she was inclined not to.

‘Blame it on the ballistics boys, not me,' he replied, immediately on the defensive. ‘I had no reason to believe this was anything other than a domestic murder followed by a suicide. I was as surprised as everyone else when they told me he couldn't have fired that gun.'

‘What about the bruising on the neck?'

‘Didn't come up until this morning – people bruise at different rates depending on their skin type. This one was slower than most.'

‘But surely you checked for damage to the cartilage inside the throat?'

‘Not possible.' He pulled away the plastic sheet that covered the woman from the neck down, revealing an incision which ran from her chin to the exit wound in her stomach. ‘We only make a ‘V'-shaped incision in the trunk if strangulation is suspected from the start. That allows us to take the throat right out for a thorough examination. But this seemed such a clear-cut death by shooting that we went ahead with a straightforward longitudinal cut.'

Megan couldn't believe this. ‘So any evidence of pressure to the throat was destroyed by your scalpel.'

From the corner of her eye she saw Martin Leverton's eyebrows arch. Horrobin flushed, apparently lost for words for once.

He was spared further embarrassment by the loud ring of a telephone. Although the girl was on her way to answer it, he darted across the room, grabbing the receiver from her hand.

Megan took a closer look at the body of Tina Jackson. The marks on her wrists were almost identical to the ones in the photographs of Natalie Bailey. But although the manner of death was identical in both cases, this woman could not have been more different from tiny, fair-haired Natalie. Tina Jackson had long, dark hair that looked as if it might have been dyed. Much of her skin was mottled purplish-red from where the blood had settled after death, but from the unaffected portions of the body Megan could see that Tina was an olive-skinned woman.

She turned to Leverton, who was peering at the bruise marks on the neck. ‘How old was Tina Jackson?'

‘Forty.'

‘Any kids?'

‘No. The body was identified by her sister. I'm going to see her as soon as we've finished here – would you mind coming with me?'

Before Megan could reply the pathologist bustled over to Leverton, waving a piece of paper in his hand. ‘The results!' he boomed triumphantly. ‘First of all, let me tell you about the Jacksons: Dudley Jackson was blood group ‘O', as was his wife Tina. The semen sample on the swab came from a man with blood group AB, of a type present in only 2% of the population.'

Leverton took the paper from him with a gleam in his eye. Studying it, he muttered something under his breath. Then he turned to Horrobin, fixing him with a look that warned him not to botch anything else. ‘Right – let's get this clear. This AB blood group result came from an anal swab and there was no semen in this woman's vagina?'

‘Correct.' Horrobin cocked his head to one side, staring Leverton out.

‘Right. I think we've got what we came for, Megan.' With a curt word of thanks, Leverton turned his back on the man, his arm brushing Megan's shoulder as he ushered her out of the room.

‘What a balls-up!' Leverton shook his head as he paused in the lobby, putting on his coat and gloves.

‘I know. I've never come across a pathologist who was so – well –'

‘Cocky?'

‘Yes. To be so self-assured even when he knew he was in the wrong.'

‘Evidently this is his first week in the job. I suppose we should sympathise, really. I mean, it's got to be pretty tough luck to land a case like that on day one.'

‘Anyway, at least we've got pretty positive evidence of a link with the Natalie Bailey murder. How long before we get the DNA result on that semen swab?'

‘Tomorrow afternoon.'

‘Right, but until then we're working on the assumption that the same man had anal sex with both Natalie and Tina?'

‘Yes. Looks like your theory about two different killers was spot on. But I still can't work out why Natalie had semen from Donna's killer in her vagina if she was killed by the man who had anal sex with her.'

‘Could be two men working together.'

Leverton gave her an odd look. A mixture of surprise and confusion.

‘Remember the case of the Hillside Stranglers?' Megan didn't let him answer. ‘Killed ten women in the Los Angeles area in the late ‘seventies?'

‘Vaguely, yes. They went for prostitutes.'

‘At first, yes. Later it was any young girl they thought they could abduct without getting caught. Anyway, the point is that they did several murders together, but then one of them started killing alone.'

‘Go on.'

‘Well, imagine Donna Fieldhouse was killed by her pimp in a straightforward fight, like we said before. What if this pimp has a friend – some regular punter who likes kinky sex behind closed doors? What if Natalie Bailey was persuaded to participate in some sort of three-in-a-bed session which escalated into rape and murder? That would explain the presence of the two types of semen in her body.'

‘But what about Tina Jackson? She only had sex with one of them.'

‘That's the point. Imagine this punter gets a taste for murder and decides to do it alone next time. Maybe the sort of girls the pimp goes for are not really the punter's type. So he goes out searching for the right kind of victim.'

‘Which would explain why Tina Jackson looks nothing like Donna and Natalie.'

‘Exactly.'

Leverton was staring at Megan curiously.

‘What is it?' she asked, uncomfortable under his gaze.

‘Long, black hair, olive skin, age between thirty and forty…'

‘Yes – and?' she said, a note of impatience creeping into her voice.

‘Well, that's you, isn't it?' he said, a half-smile on his face. ‘You'd better be careful, Megan.'

Megan froze. Could it be? No – God, he was joking!

Before she could respond to this fatuous remark, his face snapped back into its customary expression of measured concern. ‘What do you think are the chances of either or both of them killing again?'

She looked at him, her pulse still racing. ‘We're dealing with two very different killers here. It looks as if the first one – let's call him O – killed Donna almost by accident. He might have played no part in the death of Natalie Bailey; he might have had sex with her before the other man arrived and then left him to it. Were there any fibres on Natalie's body like the ones you said were on the backs of Donna's legs?'

‘Yes, I was going to phone you to tell you just before I got the call about the Jackson case: there were tiny amounts of fibre on one of her heels. They've just done a comparison and it's identical to the stuff they found on Donna's body. They're trying to trace the manufacturer at the moment.'

Megan had a momentary vision of a small lifeless body being dragged across a faded carpet. Perhaps she'd driven past the very house where it happened. She remembered the dismal windows overlooking the car park where Donna Fieldhouse's body had been found. If someone was murdered in one of those derelict buildings, would anyone hear the screams?

‘As I was saying –' she forced her mind back to Leverton's question – ‘O might never kill again – at least not deliberately. But the other guy: well, he's a very different type. What he did bears all the hallmarks of an organised sex killer who uses women as vehicles to get even with society. This is a man whose violence has been triggered by some traumatic event in his life; probably something quite recent. He won't stop killing until he gets the nerve to confront the cause of his anger.'

Leverton nodded. ‘Let's go and see the sister,' he said, opening the passenger door of his sleek BMW. Megan climbed in. The scent of new leather filled her nostrils as he slammed the door. The car was immaculate, like its owner. So unlike her own car, with its dashboard littered with empty Malteser packets and discarded car park tickets, an orange-scented air-freshener masking the lingering smell of sick which she'd tried without success to scrub out of the upholstery after Emily, her two-year-old niece, had been ill on their last trip to Wales.

She wondered who cleaned Martin Leverton's car. She could hardly imagine him doing it himself. But neither could she imagine him entrusting this precious beast to his wife. Perhaps he paid one of those professional car valet firms to do it.

‘Take a look at these.' Leverton pulled a folder from the back seat and passed it to her before starting up the engine. Inside was a set of photographs showing the carnage in what had once been the Jacksons' bedroom. The first one was a shot of Tina Jackson lying face down on the bed. ‘This is how we found her after the lads broke the door down.'

Megan bit her lip. The dead woman might have been a slab of meat on a butcher's block for all the dignity the photograph afforded her. She was spread-eagled, naked except for a white lacy bra. Near its straps, the flesh was speckled black where casing from the shotgun pellets had scorched it. Her hands were stuck through the gaps in the iron bedstead.

‘No handcuffs, then?'

‘No.' Leverton pushed in the cigarette lighter and reached into his jacket pocket. ‘The killer took whatever he used to restrain her away with him. Nothing we found in that room matches up with the marks on the wrists. Want one?' He waved a packet of Marlboro under her nose.