Past Mortem (9 page)

TWELVE

D
umped you?’ Natasha asked. ‘So she was your girlfriend, then?’

‘Not as I recall it. I mean, she was my
friend
and I’d kissed her, but I don’t remember feeling that we were official in anyway.’

‘Had she let you grope her?’

‘We-ll.’

‘Aha. Thought so.’

‘Only once. It was the night Arthur Scargill was arrested outside the Orgreave steel plant and we were feeling very angry and emotional.’

‘Christ, I’ve heard some excuses.’

‘Well, we blamed Mrs Thatcher for everything in those days.’

‘Did she let you grope her upstairs, or upstairs
and
downstairs?’

‘Only upstairs.’

‘Inside or outside?’

‘I’m not answering this.’

‘Come on. It’s important.’

‘Oh, all right. Inside. Briefly.’

‘Only inside blouse or inside blouse
and
bra?’

‘I really don’t remember.’

‘Don’t be pathetic, everyone remembers.’

‘All right. Inside bra.’.

‘I have to say that letting a boy put his band inside your bra is quite a big thing at fourteen, particularly if you’re a serious, boring girl like this Helen sounds.’

‘She wasn’t boring. Just because your generation gave up on politics — ’

‘Were you pissed?’

‘We didn’t get pissed when we were fourteen.’

‘Shit, we did.’

‘The nineties were very different from the eighties. We blazed the trail, you reaped the benefits. Look, I was at her house and her parents were out. I’d gone round because we were planning to launch our own school magazine. We were having an editorial meeting.’

‘Just you and her?’

‘Yes. She was going to be editor and I was going to be principal feature-writer — well, only feature-writer, in fact.’

‘God, you two must have been right pains in the arse.’

‘We thought we were great. The only real people in the school.’

‘Exactly.’

Newson remembered the night quite clearly. He and Helen had been filled with wild dreams of creating a fabulously successful and influential fanzine. Then they had turned on the news and it was filled with footage of policemen fighting miners, and famine in Ethiopia, and they’d got upset and righteous about the iniquities of it all, and suddenly Helen had asked him to hold her.

‘She asked you to hold her?’ Natasha said.

‘I think that was how it happened, you know, like in fraternal solidarity, so to speak, and then one thing led to another, and…’

‘Suddenly you had her boobs in your hand?’

‘Exactly.’

‘If it was her who asked you to hold her, then she fancied you big-time.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Not rubbish.’

‘She just wanted a hug.’

‘No one ever just wants a hug.’

They had returned to Kensington and Chelsea, but this time they were north of the river, walking past the gracious, white-pillared Georgian terraced houses of Onslow Gardens.

There was a scrum of press on the pavement ahead of them.

‘It’ll be Dr Clarke again,’ said Newson. ‘The Chelsea pathologist is still on that rail disaster inquiry so please try to control your irritation.’

‘I don’t have a problem with her. It’s her who has a problem with me.’

The victim’s name was Farrah Porter, and until her untimely death she had been a rising star in the Conservative Party. Attractive, blond and still under thirty, she had been the darling of the previous year’s Brighton conference, living proof that Conservatism was youthful and dynamic once more.

‘The only youthful thing about Farrah Porter was her age,’ Newson remarked. ‘Politically she was a Neanderthal. Hang ‘em, flog ‘em, eat their children then send the bastards back to where they came from.’

‘I thought she was all right. I mean, at least she had a bit of style, didn’t she? And you have to admit she wore great shoes.’

Once more Newson was ashamed to recognize that observations he would have found downright silly in others he found cute and feisty when made by Natasha. Why was it,. he wondered, that having become attracted to a girl he ended up uncritically wallowing in every aspect of her?

‘I can’t take any politician seriously who works as hard on her tan as that woman did,’ he said.

‘It’s a media world. Presentation’s important. You’ve got to walk the walk, haven’t you?’ Natasha replied.

Farrah Porter had been famous for her tan; it was her trademark. When she won the Fulham by-election the
Sun’s
headline was TANFASTIC! She attended her victory party in a backless Versace mini-dress that was slashed at the front to below the navel, and at the sides from hip to armpit. Almost every square inch of her elegant, upright breasts was on full view, and it was quite clear that she sunbathed topless. Overnight, that dross turned Farrah Porter into the Conservatives’ greatest asset, a politician of real significance, far and away the most recognizable figure in the parliamentary party, more so even than the leader himself. Her gorgeous presence sent Labour Party talent scouts scurrying out into the provinces in search of personable activists with whom to counter the Porter threat.

‘She looked great and she was a laugh,’ Natasha insisted. ‘If I had the time and the money I’d probably have a tan like hers.’

‘Well, don’t. Your skin is just right as it is. You couldn’t improve on it.’

There was a slightly uncomfortable pause. Newson had, as usual, gone too far, allowing his secret infatuation a momentary public airing.

‘Thanks. That’s nice,’ Natasha said, looking at him quizzically.

The pause that followed lasted until they gained access to the building in which Ms Porter had lived and died. The victim was found by her mother, a woman who, having been married to a philandering cabinet minister, had spent most of her life dealing with painful public crises. It would be generally agreed later that she had risen to this most horrible of all her trials with real guts. Faced with the unspeakable sight of her daughter’s body, she had nonetheless been able to alert the police and the Home Office in such a manner and at sufficiently high a level that the crime scene had been sealed very quickly and none of the appalling details of what had occurred had so far leaked out. The press mob that had assembled on the steps of the building were there only because they could see that the police were there. They did not know what had happened, that Farrah Porter, media darling and, due to her daring dress sense, potential Prime Minister, was dead.

Newson knew that Porter was dead, of course, but he had no idea of the manner in which she had died and was not prepared for the macabre horror that awaited him in the ensuite bathroom of the dead woman’s bedroom.

‘Brace yourself,’ said Alice Clarke as they walked through the dressing room, past the many pairs of beautiful and beautifully ordered shoes. ‘She’s been bleached.’

‘Bleached?’

‘Well, I say bleached, because I think that was the’ intention. She’s been soaked in a combination of trichloric acid and Phenol BP. Two very nasty skin-whitening agents.’

Farrah Porter’s naked body lay in her kidney-shaped whirlpool bath, and she had indeed been bleached. Her famous rich tan had been replaced by a pale, redraw, blotchy nightmare of ruined skin.

‘He must have soaked her in it for hours,’ Dr Clarke remarked. ‘Probably sat on that toilet there and watched.’

‘How do you know he stayed to watch?’ asked Newson, mindful of the two cases he was looking at already in which the victims had been left to contemplate their fate alone.

‘Because he hadn’t finished with her.’

‘The hair?’

‘Yes, the hair.. If he’d done that before he bleached her it’d be white too, and as you can see it certainly isn’t white.’

Farrah Porter’s blond hair had been almost as famous as her gorgeous skin. Now all that was gone.

Her hair was dyed bright orange. Even the tiny soft tuft of pubic hair, all that in life Farrah Porter had allowed to remain upon her waxed, polished and pampered groin, had been turned a sickly, electric, chemical orange.

Newson could not remember a stranger-looking corpse. It was like something out of a Batman comic.

‘How did she die?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to get her on the table. I doubt that the acid killed her. It would if you soaked in it long enough, but that would have taken days and obviously the killer just wanted to ruin her skin. It would have been pretty unpleasant, but at the point when the killer drained the bath Porter would still have been alive.’

Newson and Wilkie walked back through the dressing room, pausing to peek into immaculately constructed drawers and cupboards that stretched from floor to ceiling on all sides. It was not only shoes that Ms Porter had in abundance. Her dresses and suits hung in deep, glittering rows, and drawer after drawer was filled with exquisite lingerie.

‘This was a girl who thought that matching bra and knickers were important,’ Newson observed.

‘I think most girls do,’ Sergeant Wilkie replied. ‘It’s just harder for some of us to keep up standards.’

Newson wasn’t sure Natasha was right about this. Shirley, his ex, certainly hadn’t been concerned with such matters. But even in the midst of the horror that should have been consuming him, Newson could not help but grasp greedily this tantalizing snippet of personal information that Natasha had revealed.

In the sitting room all was in perfect order. Books and
objets d’art
were scattered about on the polished surfaces, giving an impression of exquisitely managed disorder. Two vast white sofas stood on either side of a low, carved-mahogany coffee table, upholstered with big, luxurious, down-stuffed cushions, the type that need regular plumping by a maid. On each sofa was an indentation that had yet to be replumped. It seemed reasonable to assume that Farrah Porter and her killer had sat here, facing each other.

On the mahogany table stood a half-full bottle of white wine. Two glasses had been poured, but only one remained; the other had been wrapped in newspaper and crushed heavily underfoot, a simple and effective method of dispensing with fingerprints. The killer had left the crumpled paper filled with tiny shards on the table.

‘He’s getting cheeky,’ Newson remarked. ‘Wants us to know just how easy we are to beat.’

‘I
knew
the minute I saw her that you’d stick this in with the others,’ said Natasha.

‘Don’t you?’

‘I suppose so, but, God, I wish we could find some proof.’

‘I think that perhaps he’s getting frustrated too,’ Newson mused, leaning over the table to inspect the other wineglass, beside which stood a small bottle, its screw top lying next to it. He hovered over the bottle and sniffed. ‘No scent, but I think we’ll find this is Rohypnol,’ he said.

‘You think he raped her?’

‘Dr Clarke will check that out, but I doubt it. Rohypnol’s good for more than date rape — it’s a lot easier to restrain a person in preparation for torture if they’re unconscious.’

Having checked that the table had been photographed, Newson put on a pair of plastic gloves and carefully replaced the lid on the little bottle. He then lifted it by the neck with a pair of tweezers and put it in a plastic Ziplock bag.

‘Better check, although I imagine we can dust that bottle till it’s worn away and it won’t reveal any prints. Our man wants us to know how easy it is to kill and that we can do absolutely nothing about it.’

‘Ed, there’s no
he
yet,’ Natasha remonstrated. ‘We still have absolutely no proof whatsoever that the murders you’ve connected in your mind are connected in reality. We have five deaths. Don’t you think it’s strange that we’ve found no specific links?’

‘They’re connected, Natasha. The link is simply eluding us. Just look at what we have here: another effortless stalking followed by a grotesquely specific manner of death.’

‘You don’t know how this woman died yet.’

‘My guess is that he made her drink the acid.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He manages to make every form of torture fatal. It’s not always easy, but he puts in the effort. It’s obviously important to him that how they suffer is also how they die. In Willesden he was forced to use an anticoagulant to make the spiking fatal. In Manchester the clothbound books killed a fit young soldier after what must have been many hours of effort. Angie Tatum died contemplating the effects of her torment, as did Neil Bradshaw, although I don’t know whether it was the starvation or the fact that he was forced to stare up the skirt he had been made to wear that was the significant feature in the killer’s mind. Now we have Farrah Porter turned from a tanned blonde into a pasty redhead by means of dye and bleaching acid. The killer wanted her dead but he couldn’t simply slit her throat because slit throats weren’t part of the punishment required. It has to be
connected
. Hence my guess that he finished her off with some of the bleach that destroyed her skin.’