Post Mortem (2 page)

Collins left the PC sitting in an ambulance being assessed by paramedics. She noted the officer's name in her notebook: Police Constable Lizzie Griffiths.

The mother of the boy was waiting in the back of a marked car. Collins let go of his hand and watched the little bear running towards her. As soon as she saw him, she threw open the car door and ran to meet him. She flew him up into the air and then squeezed him tightly against her chest, pressing her face into his until he cried out: ‘Mummy!' She pulled the bear hood down and buried her nose in him. The uniformed PC who had been driving the car gave them a moment before ushering them both into the vehicle and away from the waiting bank of press. Collins watched it turn slowly away from the scene.

From then on, she knew, it would be a race not to lose evidence, like trying to gather up shells before the tide swept in and claimed them for oblivion. No, not just gathering the shells but also carefully cataloguing and recording the damn things. She looked up. The sky was grey. The weather was turning and the spring sunlight was already paling. They would have to work quickly. She went back to the car, grabbing a forensic suit and a decision log from the boot.

She met up with Steve on the edge of the crime scene. He lit two cigarettes and passed her one. They inhaled together as they stood watching the local officers struggling to erect the white tents that had arrived on blue lights.

‘Never find it easy, do they?' Steve said.

Together they allocated the many tasks that lay ahead. There was so much to do – informing the families, deciding the forensic strategy, door-to-door, CCTV, witnesses, debriefing the response team. Steve called the bus company and the local-authority CCTV office. He would go with another DC and see if he could grab
some footage before the operators went home. Collins checked her watch. People would be looking forward to leaving work. Soon they would struggle to get hold of the civilians they needed. As every moment passed opportunities were being lost to preserve evidence. Secondary-school children were traipsing home, walking along the perimeter of the scene with their scruffy bags and dusty shoes.

2

I
n the back of the ambulance, a paramedic was talking to Lizzie and filling in a yellow sheet fastened to a clipboard by a large bulldog clip. He leant over and slipped the cuff of the sphygmomanometer around her upper arm. She felt it inflate and constrict the flow of blood. It was as if everything was happening to someone else. The paramedic said something to her. She wasn't sure what it was, but it was definitely a question and he smiled as he spoke.

She said, ‘OK,' and smiled back.

She found herself very interested in the paramedic's clipboard – in the diamond hatching of the board and the dark bulldog clip. She wondered how hard it would be to press the butterfly of the clip open. Some of them were very stiff, after all. The door of the ambulance opened. Her sergeant was standing just outside, speaking into his radio. He nodded at her and she nodded back. ‘Sarge.' She dragged her bottom teeth hard across her top lip. It felt like she'd had an anaesthetic.

A skinny man with a crumpled face stepped into the ambulance. He was wearing a dark blue suit. He flashed a warrant card at the paramedic and sat down opposite her. She noticed nicotine staining on his third finger. The paramedic and the man were talking, but she couldn't make sense of what was being said. The man leaned forward and put his hand gently on her shoulder.

‘Lizzie. It is Lizzie, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Here's my card, Lizzie. DC Steve Bradshaw. Look, pass me your warrant card. I'll pop it inside there and then you'll know you've got it. That mobile's on 24/7 and it's always OK to ring me. We'll catch up with you when the medics give us the thumbs-up.'

‘Yes, thank you.'

He smiled. ‘OK, I'll leave you to it.'

Then he was gone. The paramedic reached over and attached something to her index finger. Another butterfly clip. She noticed that it had a red light on it. Her pulse, the beat of her heart. She closed her eyes. She felt as though she was lying on the bottom of a swimming pool looking up. She allowed herself to relax and look at the surface of the water, how it formed into shifting blue polygons. And then unbidden, and for just a brief moment, she had a sudden flash of the roof. Of the girl, Farah, and of Ben in his bear suit, the blue sky behind them, the clouds scudding past.

Lizzie shuddered violently, as if she had nausea. The paramedic, she realized, was offering her a bowl to vomit into. She could see his wide, kind, tired face. The comforting green of his uniform, those trousers with the side pockets. She had pockets like that, she remembered, but black, not green. She waved him away. ‘No, I'm fine, thanks.' With determination she brought her attention back to the clipboard. She thought about how old-fashioned they were. Who would have imagined that paramedics still used them?

Inspector Shaw stepped into the ambulance. ‘All right, Lizzie?'

She nodded. ‘Guv.'

She observed him. He was being efficient, she understood that. He was making arrangements for her. He was looking after her.

3

T
he ambulances and fire engines had gone and Collins had moved her car up into the outer cordon. She sat in the front seat working through the printouts of the linked dispatches that were the police records of the incident. Head down, she scribbled in her counsel's notebook.

There was a tap on her car window. Detective Chief Inspector Baillie was leaning down looking at her. His thin, intelligent face was dusted with freckles, and above his pale blue eyes was a shock of flaxen hair. He smiled, pleased to have caught her off guard. She flicked open the door lock so that he could join her on the passenger side. As he crossed in front of the car, she saw how his dark pinstriped suit hung off his coat-hanger shoulders. He slid the seat back to its full extent and stretched his legs into the footwell.

‘Bit of a problem, Sarah. Don't know whether you are aware? We've been looking at informing the families. Turns out that Younes Mehenni, the father of the dead teenager, is currently in police custody on remand to court tomorrow.'

Collins felt immediately wrong-footed: she should have known this. ‘I'm sorry, sir . . .'

‘It's OK, you've been a bit busy. I've appointed Alice as family liaison. She's at Farlow nick now, organizing bail on compassionate grounds. We're going to escort him to court in the morning and see if we can sort it out quickly. The advice is that legally there's no other way round it. It doesn't look like it's a particularly serious
matter – criminal damage with a linked malicious communications. We're just getting to the bottom of it now. What do you have about the dead officer?'

‘PC Hadley Matthews, sir. Fifty-two years old. Three years to go before retirement. Inspector Shaw, Matthews' line manager, is informing his family. Shaw was the duty inspector today.'

Baillie nodded. ‘Yes, I've come across Kieran Shaw.'

‘You've worked with him?'

‘No, not at all. Don't worry, no conflict of interest there. But from what I've heard, he's a good man.' Baillie stretched his arms behind his head. ‘All right, Sarah, I'll let you get on. We'll use Farlow nick as our base for the initial response. I'll see you back there for a more detailed briefing. How much time do you need? Shall we say twenty hundred hours?'

‘Yes, boss.'

Baillie nodded reluctantly towards the outer cordon, where the bank of press were loitering. ‘And in the meantime, I need to face that lot. Any suggestions as to what I might say to them?'

Collins turned in the direction he had indicated and saw a thicket of zoom lenses pointed towards the scene.

‘As little as possible as far as I'm concerned. We are still investigating. All lines of inquiry still open, that sort of thing?'

There was a brief silence. Baillie palmed his car keys and flicked the door lock open.

‘Well,' he said. ‘Our first job together, you and me, and it's a big one. I hope you're a safe pair of hands.'

4

T
he marked car drew up outside PC Lizzie Griffiths' flat. Arif was in the driving seat, Lizzie beside him. He switched the engine off.

‘Are you sure you're going to be all right?'

‘Yes, I'll be fine.'

Arif, like Lizzie, was young in service. In fact, because she had just a couple of months' more experience than him, Lizzie was even the slightly senior officer. She knew he had been first on scene, had probably even seen the fall. She wondered how he was coping. They sat together in silence.

‘I don't know,' Arif said finally. ‘It just doesn't feel right. Leaving you. I can sit with you for a bit if you want. We can have some tea.'

There was a pause.

‘Or something stronger.'

‘No, Arif. It's all right. I'll be fine. Thanks.'

She got out of the car. She was aware of Arif waiting, watching her while she walked down the driveway and then fumbled with her keys. She had a ridiculous sensation, as though she were pretending to unlock the door. When she had got it open, she turned and waved. Everything was hunky-dory. Still, he hesitated for a moment before nodding and driving off.

As soon as the door was shut, she crouched down on the floor and put her head in her hands.

Lizzie sat motionless on the edge of her bed. She didn't know how long she had been there and had no recollection of how she had navigated the distance from the hallway to her bedroom. Her mind felt like a wide-open blank. She picked up her phone and glanced at the screen. She had seven missed calls. She had been distantly aware of the phone ringing, but it had not crossed her mind to answer.

Tapping on the images application, she flicked through the pictures until she found a picture of herself with PC Hadley Matthews, his arm round her. She considered this for some time until the phone rang again, interrupting the screen.

Unknown number
.

Immediately she rejected the call. She could think of no one to whom she could speak. She could think of nothing.

She tried to pull herself together.

In the back of the ambulance, a female detective constable had seized her uniform and put it into brown evidence bags. Lizzie was sitting now in a white top, white tracksuit bottoms and black pumps provided by the detective when she took her uniform. Lizzie knew these clothes. They were the type given to prisoners in custody when their own clothes were seized for forensic examination.

Her mind scanned around like a slow computer system conducting a search that never resolved. Or like a freeze frame that wouldn't play. The edge of the roof, the wind blowing across. In spite of the futility, she kept on struggling to find a way to make it not true, to make it come right, like a dream dreamt again. She could almost see the rainbow wheel in her head endlessly whirring and reaching no conclusion. No results. Disk irretrievably damaged.

Suddenly she felt that the clothes she had been given were repulsive to her. She got up and changed into some of her own
jogging trousers and a T-shirt. She threw the clothes she had been given into her bin.

The small effort had exhausted her. She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She couldn't see any way forward beyond this present moment.

5

C
ollins stepped out of the scene tent that sheltered the body of PC Hadley Matthews. She peeled her forensic suit down to her waist, removed her plastic gloves and reached for her cigarettes. Both bodies were ready at last to be bagged up and moved.

At the outer cordon onlookers were still standing. What on earth, she wondered, could they be hoping for? There was nothing to see now except the tents, and the officers and SOCOs moving around in forensic suits. Nevertheless, it was the usual street party that accompanied catastrophe. Mixed-race and white boys in hoodies were fooling around and giving the uniformed officer on the tape a hard time. An elderly lady in a hijab and a cardigan was staring with fixed concentration towards the concourse. Collins would task one of the PCs to make sure this woman's details had been taken. A white man wearing the paint-splashed dungarees and boots of a decorator was filming it all on his phone. A TV cameraman was also still lingering, hoping probably for footage of the bodies being moved into the vans and driven out. She should warn the forensic team about him. They could back the van right up to the tents, obscure the body bags.

Collins lit her cigarette then moved over to her car. She pulled out her notebook and, leaning against the vehicle, glanced down at her list of actions. A box was inked and doodled around the words ‘PC Lizzie Griffiths'. The young female constable from the roof had to be the next priority.

Collins radioed Control and then waited on the spare channel while the operator checked the dispatch.

‘PC Griffiths hasn't gone to hospital, Sarge.'

‘Not gone to hospital?'