Slice (19 page)

FULTON WAS RUNNING A
bath and about to get undressed when the doorbell rang and he levelled a curse at the ceiling. A good five hours’ sleep might have gone some way towards helping his exhausted body to recharge its batteries, but it had done little to soften his bad humour. The battered settee he had been abusing for so many years could not have been a worse place to crash out on, especially in the contorted position in which he had ended up, and now even the chance of steaming away the pain eating its way through his locked back muscles had been denied him.

‘This better be important,’ he shouted, storming to the front door and wrenching it open.

‘It’s that all right,’ Phil Gilham said, his expression grim as he pushed past him into the hallway.

Fulton’s eyes narrowed and he nodded towards the lounge. ‘In there,’ he snapped, bending briefly to pick up the post from the mat. ‘And you’ve got exactly ten minutes.’

‘Have I indeed?’ Gilham retorted, following him into the room and turning to face him again. ‘Then answer me this, Jack, where the hell is Abbey Lee?’

Inwardly, Fulton jumped, but he was careful not to let his feelings show in his expression or tone of voice. ‘Abbey?’ he repeated, avoiding the other’s gaze and sifting through his post. ‘How should
I
know where she is?’

Gilham’s mouth tightened. ‘Well, you’ve been using her flaming car, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘I saw you drive it away from the nick when you left there this morning and it now seems to be parked in the lane behind your bungalow.’

Fulton threw him a swift glance. ‘And what makes you think it’s
her
car?’ he prevaricated. ‘There’s more than one Honda four-by-four on  the road.’

‘Because it happens to have personalized number plates.’

‘And how would you know that?’

Gilham hesitated. ‘Who do you think the old university friend was I’ve been over the side with?’

Fulton gaped for a second, then shook his head in disbelief. ‘Abbey Lee?’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve been shagging
Abbey Lee
? You dirty little bugger!’

Gilham gave a dismissive snort. ‘Only because you fancy her yourself, Jack – now, where is she? I’ve been round to her flat twice this morning, but the place is deserted.’ He held up a single Yale key to emphasize the point. ‘And her colleague, Ed Carrick, seems to think she has disappeared.’

Fulton tossed a bundle of junk mail on to the settee, keeping only the bulky envelope. ‘I’m her keeper now then, am I?’ he said, frowning when he saw that the envelope was addressed to him in bold block capitals, but bore no address or postmark.

‘Well, how do you explain the car?’

The big man looked up quickly, suddenly angry at the apparent inference. ‘She leant me the damned thing, OK? My Volvo would have attracted too much media heat every time I went out, so I started using hers.’

He crossed to a small bureau, produced a paper-knife from inside and went to work on the sticky tape sealing the envelope, relieved to have been provided with a convenient distraction.

But Gilham was not about to give up. ‘So how is she getting around herself, if you’ve got her wheels?’

‘How should I know? Because I borrowed her car doesn’t make me her personal confidant.’ Fulton glanced at him over his shoulder, a malicious gleam in his eyes. ‘Maybe she’s over the side with another DCI and is having an extra long lie-in.’

‘This is not funny, Jack.’

But the reproof was unnecessary, for Fulton was in no mood for laughing – even less so after seeing what he had just pulled out of the envelope. ‘Mother of God!’ he whispered, and stared at the grisly object in his hand with a kind of horrible trance-like fascination before suddenly recovering his senses and throwing it on to the flap of the bureau with a violent shudder as if it were a leper’s bandage.

Gilham was by his side in a couple of strides. ‘What is it, man?’ he exclaimed, peering at the plastic bag lying on the square of green leather.

‘What does it look like?’ the big man gasped, the colour draining from his face as he grabbed at the mantelshelf over the fireplace to steady himself.

Frowning, Gilham reached past him and picked up the bag to study the contents more closely – only to drop it even more quickly than Fulton when he realized what it was he was holding. Made of transparent material and neatly sealed at the top with what looked like Sellotape, the bag was not unlike one of those used in supermarkets to hold grapes, but there were no grapes in it this time – only a severed human ear! ‘Gordon Bennett!’ he breathed. ‘What kind of a sicko would send something like this through the post?’

Fulton gulped several times and pressed his chin into his throat as he belched repeatedly on the acid welling up from his stomach. ‘The same kind of sicko who likes to cut off people’s balls and slit their throats in front of a mirror,’ he choked. ‘And he has Abbey.’

‘He has
what
?’

Fulton jerked a folded note from the envelope he was still holding and shook it open, scanning the unsigned message at the same time as Gilham. It was only very short, but the warning was unambiguous.

Gilham snatched the note from him and read it again, his own face also deathly white as he turned to face him. ‘You
knew
he had her and you said
nothing
?’ he shouted. ‘You let him
mutilate
Abbey and told
no one
?’

Fulton’s legs started to fold under him and he made the armchair just in time. ‘Get me a drink,’ he said hoarsely.

Gilham bent over him, his eyes blazing. ‘A drink? You want a
drink
? You useless cretin! I’ll see you in hell for this!’

Fulton’s breathing became ragged and he clutched at the arm of the chair as a succession of fiery spasms ripped through his gut. ‘Don’t you think I’m already there?’ he rasped, his mouth twisted into a savage grimace. ‘Have been ever since he took her.’

Gilham hesitated, eyeing him narrowly for a second, then abruptly crossed to the cocktail cabinet and returned with a double whisky, thrusting the glass at him as if it were a closed fist. ‘So what happens now?’ he demanded. ‘You just going to sit here and wait for this filthy psycho to deliver Abbey to us piece by piece or are you finally going to let me in on your little secret?’

Fulton stared at the floor over the rim of his glass. ‘Haven’t got any bloody secrets,’ he muttered. ‘Just nightmares.’

‘Well you must know something.’

Fulton raised his head and glared at him. ‘He snatched her from her car in the hospital car park last night when she took me to see Derringer,’ he snarled, ‘and that’s it, OK?’

‘You went to see Derringer last night? But that’s when—’

‘Yeah, I know. He was dead when I got there.’

‘When you got there?’ Gilham turned away from him, running his hand through his blond hair and staring at the ceiling in total exasperation. ‘This gets worse and worse, Jack – quitting a murder scene, concealing a kidnapping, withholding evidence, taking and driving away a motor vehicle; is there any rule you haven’t broken? And all the time you’ve been quizzing
me
as a murder suspect. It’s beyond belief.’

Fulton downed the rest of his whisky and leaned forward in the chair to light a cigarette, his hands trembling so much that it took him three attempts to get his lighter going. ‘History for now, Phil,’ he retorted after a long pause, the combination of whisky and nicotine apparently restoring some of his former resilience. ‘First priority is to find Abbey.’

Gilham jerked his vibrating mobile telephone from his pocket and studied the text message that had evidently just come through. ‘Maybe we have already,’ he snapped, heading for the door. ‘That was control room. Woman’s body’s been found at a derelict asbestos factory just outside town. White, thirties, with long black hair –
and
she’s minus an ear!’

The scenes-of-crime tent had seen better days, but it fitted neatly over the door of the Nissan hut and was effective in keeping the reporters at bay. They were forced to huddle together in a dispirited group just outside the encircling blue-and-white crime-scene tape: a dozen or so phantom-like figures, wrapped in the icy skeins of autumn mist.

Gilham arrived in the temporary parking area in a swirl of gravel. Fury had directed his right foot all the way, fury and bitter resentment towards the unwelcome passenger who was slumped in the seat beside him. He had used every means of persuasion he could think of to deter Fulton from forcing his way into the car, knowing full well that to turn up at a murder scene with a suspended superintendent in tow was likely to finish his own career for good. But Fulton had been at his most determined and short of calling up the cavalry to arrest his old boss, which would have raised more than a few questions about his own conduct, Gilham had been left with no alternative but to let his personal Jonah aboard. But he had made it plain to him that, as part of the deal, he was to remain in the car out of sight of the press and anyone else who might recognize him – not that there was much hope of him sticking to his side of the bargain.

The local DI, Jaspreet Sidhu, was a willowy thirty-something-year-old, who would have been attractive but for the hard cynical turn of her mouth, and she was waiting for them by her car. ‘Guv,’ she acknowledged, apparently recognizing Gilham immediately he got out of the car, but reserving a curious wary glance for Fulton as he clambered out after him. ‘Corpse found around mid-morning by a couple of kids bunking off school. Took ’em a while to pluck up courage to ring the nick.’

She lifted the tent flap as the uniformed bobby manning the entrance quickly stepped aside. ‘One of her ears was amputated,’ she explained as she pulled on the pair of protective overalls and booties handed to her by a second uniformed constable inside the tent. She waited patiently while Fulton and Gilham did the same. ‘Thought there might be a connection with your so-called Slicer.’

Fulton jammed the zip on his overalls and scowled when she stepped forward to help him. ‘He cuts off balls, love, not ears,’ he snapped, his agitation getting the better of him.

Her face froze, her resentment towards him tangible, perhaps because she guessed who he was. ‘We thought it was worth a shot anyway,
sir
,’ she replied, her tone brittle. ‘Sorry if we’ve wasted your time.’

‘Pathologist arrived?’ Gilham put in, sensing the build up of hostility between the two of them.

‘Yes, guv. Doc Carrick, twenty minutes ago.’

‘So let’s take a look, shall we?’

The familiar figure of Ed Carrick straightened when they entered the Nissan hut and he was shaking his head as they approached. ‘Most peculiar,’ he commented, ‘most peculiar indeed.’

Fulton bent down to study the corpse and seconds later his sigh of relief was clearly audible. The woman was not Abbey Lee. ‘Thank God,’ he breathed without thinking.

Sidhu was obviously put out. ‘Thanking God is hardly an appropriate sentiment under the circumstances,
sir
,’ she said. ‘The woman is dead.’

‘Oh, she’s dead all right, my dear,’ Carrick put in before Fulton could respond. ‘Been dead for about forty-eight hours, I would say.’

Sidhu bit on the ‘my dear’, but chose to keep her own counsel. ‘And cause of death?’

Carrick shrugged. ‘From my initial examination, I suspect that she died from a drug overdose and the track marks on her arms and thighs would suggest she was a heavy user, but only a post-mortem will be able to establish this for certain, of course. Quite why someone would want to cut off her ear though is most intriguing.’

Fulton was pretty sure he knew why, but he was not about to share his views with those present and instead turned to Sidhu with a curt, ‘Do we know who the woman is?’

The DI met his gaze without flinching. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, apparently now sure in her own mind as to his own identity, ‘but should you be involved in this case at all in your present situation?’

Gilham winced, anticipating the other’s reaction, but as Fulton’s face hardened into familiar slab-like aggression and Carrick discreetly wandered away, the heat was taken out of the situation by a timely interruption.

‘Bloody hell, what’s
she
doing here?’

No one had heard the speaker approach, but his outburst at Gilham’s elbow guaranteed him immediate attention. As all eyes focused on the scruffy-looking man with the spiky ginger hair staring down at the spot-lit corpse, Sidhu forced a frosty smile. ‘George Jarvis,’ she announced. ‘Just joined us from the drug squad.’

But Fulton was not a bit interested in where he had come from. ‘You know this woman?’ he snapped.

Jarvis gave a short laugh. ‘Should do. Name’s Janice Long. She was heavily into speed-balling and one of my more productive snouts – when she wasn’t spaced out, that is.’

‘And when did you last see her?’

Jarvis stared at him. ‘Yesterday, as a matter of fact – on a slab in Middle Moor Hospital mortuary.’

‘
What
?’

‘Yeah, she’d finally OD’d on bad coke. Always was a greedy bitch. Dumping her here must have been someone’s idea of a joke.’

Gilham frowned. ‘But how come no one missed her corpse? There are no signs of the usual surgical examination, so she can’t have had her PM yet.’

Jarvis shook his head. ‘PM was due for eleven hundred hours,’ he said, ‘but it was put back to fifteen-thirty, due to a break-in.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Can you credit it? Some lowlife breaks into a mortuary – not a bank or a good-class drum, but a
mortuary
– and nicks a bloody corpse!’

Fulton grunted. ‘With not a single member of staff being any the wiser?’

Jarvis frowned. ‘But that’s the other funny thing. They checked the fridges to make sure none of the stiffs had been interfered with and found they were all there, as recorded.’

‘As recorded?’ The colour literally drained from Fulton’s face and he pulled Gilham roughly to one side, drawing astonished glances from Sidhu and Jarvis. ‘Think, Phil,’ he breathed, ‘why is that the mortuary staff failed to notice that Janice Long’s body was missing? Because it wasn’t, that’s why.’