Still Waters (22 page)

Someone had moved fast. Already the section of Wilford Road that ran into Castle Boulevard had been closed to traffic and the footpath along Tinker's Leen had been roped off as far as the entrance to the new Inland Revenue buildings. Officers from the Technical Support team were rigging up lights. Jack Skelton talked to the uniformed inspector directing operations from above the lock, while Resnick followed Helen Siddons down the steps toward the water. She was wearing a stone-colored topcoat, loosely belted over her dress, and somehow she had found the opportunity to change into flat shoes. Two young PCs stood guarding the body, neither one looking as if they should legitimately have left school. They stood back and murmured “Ma'am” as the DCI approached.

Just as Resnick had done not so many months before, she lowered herself down and lifted back the plastic sheet. In the glare of artificial light, the face shone white, opaque as ivory. Borrowing gloves, Helen Siddons gently turned the head aside; a deep gash ran from behind the left eye to the inner edge of jaw, tissue and bone laid bare. She had not been in the water long, hours at most. Skelton was walking along the towpath toward them, the police surgeon in his wake. Siddons lowered the sheeting back into place and stood.

“You haven't got a cigarette, have you, Charlie?”

Resnick shook his head.

“Poor cow.”

“Yes.”

“How many's that now? No clothing, no ID. If anyone steps forward to claim the body, I'll be surprised.”

But Resnick knew that wouldn't be the case: he had recognized Jane Peterson the instant Helen Siddons had exposed her face.

Thirty

Hannah wept.

It was not that she and Jane had been so close, not close like sisters, but she had known her as we often do those we work with, socialize with occasionally, as though through a prism, so much else unknown, hidden. Hannah had seen Jane angry, exhausted, hurt, excited: alive. Now she had to think of her as dead.

Resnick made fresh coffee, toast. Sounds of life filtered in from the houses on either side. By now the official identification would have been made, the preliminary medical examination over and done, a post-mortem arranged; an official murder inquiry set up, with Helen Siddons as senior investigating officer in charge. By midmorning, a new database would be in place, linked through the national HOLMES computer to other similar investigations, importing and exporting information. Files, begun in the wake of the newly formed nationwide operation and examining the unsolved violent deaths of women, would automatically be accessed. Those instances where the bodies had been discovered in or near canals and waterways would be prioritized. In addition to the normal CID personnel, there would be a researcher, a receiver, an indexer and reader, an action allocator. Helen Siddons would supervise all of this activity, set parameters, and after consultation with the detective superintendent overseeing all three squads in the authority, decide policy. Murder was a Serious Crime.

When Hannah came down, she was red-eyed but alert. “Charlie, I can't believe you're not going to be handling this. It just doesn't make any sense. You were the one that knew her, after all.”

“I already had a quick word last night. I'll speak to Serious Crimes again today.”

“And that's all?”

“Hannah, it's all I can do. It's not my case.”

With a sign of impatience, she moved away.

“It'll be all right, you'll see,” Resnick said. “It'll get sorted.”

She turned slowly, the room not so dark he couldn't see her eyes. “Really, Charlie? Like all those others? That girl out at Beeston, like you sorted her?”

“Maybe I should go,” Resnick said.

“Maybe you should.”

Neither moved.

Resnick rang the Serious Crime Squad from his office at eight fifteen, eight fifty, nine, nine thirty, a quarter to ten, a quarter past. DCI Siddons was in a meeting, at a press conference, due to see Chief Superintendent Malachy, talking to BBC Midlands TV, plain busy.

Finally, he was able to speak to Anil Khan. Khan was wary, very much his nature, Resnick suspected, wary but not unfriendly. The medical report suggested that the cause of death was a blow or blows to the head, and that Jane Peterson had already been dead for some hours when her body was introduced into the water, although the water itself rendered establishing an exact time of death difficult, if not impossible. Preliminary estimates suggested she had been in the water for between six and twelve hours, possibly less. There was some evidence of recent bruising low on the right side, almost certainly dating from some time before the fatal injury. So far, none of her clothing or personal effects had been found. No witnesses had come forward, other than the dog walker who found the body; there was no information yet that filled in any of the time between the last known sighting of her on the previous Saturday and her death. No suspects.

“You've talked to the husband?” Resnick asked.

“I think we're talking to him again now.”

“But not as a suspect?”

A pause. “Not as far as I know.”

“And the bruising?”

“Waiting on more information, the post-mortem. I'm not sure.”

Resnick didn't want to place him in an awkward position, push him too hard; he thanked him and broke the connection. Almost immediately, the phone rang again. “Look,” Hannah said, “I think I'm going to drive over and see my mother. Spend a little time with her. I'll probably come back late Sunday night.”

“Okay, it sounds like a good idea.”

Resnick searched about in the kitchen until he found an aging scrubbing brush, some J-cloths, and a plastic bottle of Jif whose cap had broken off. After half an hour in the bathroom, he went down to the local newsagents and had a card put in the window:
Cleaning person wanted, hours by arrangement, must be good with cats
.

The only pub within easy walking distance of the Serious Crime Squad offices was a heavy metal hangout where the windows were routinely replaced every few days by sheets of hardboard. Which left two decent hotels and, at a stretch, the Playhouse bar. Helen Siddons was in the nearest of the hotels, still smarting from a session with Malachy, in the first minutes of which it had become clear that the superintendent imagined he was going to sit around and dictate the direction of the inquiry, leaving her to do all the running around, the majority of the work. It had taken all of her energy, everything from wide-eyed wheedling to stroppy insistence, to disabuse him of that, but in the end she thought she'd made her case. For the present, at least. As long as she was seen to be getting results, staying ahead of the game.

Now she was sitting at the first-floor bar, talking to her office manager and two other detectives Resnick could have put a name to if he were pushed. He went on past them to the far end of the bar, ordered a Budvar, and took it over to an easy chair by the window. A copy of the
Telegraph
lay open on the low table and Resnick turned to the sports pages and glanced from column to column as Siddons' voice rose above the rest. “Pressure,” Resnick heard, and “thirty-six hours,” “waiting for us to fall flat on our faces,” and “nail this bastard to the floor.” Bored by sport, Resnick scuffled through international news, business, obituaries. Helen Siddons picked up her drink, lit a fresh cigarette, and walked over to where he was sitting.

“Join you?”

“Please.”

She was drinking whisky, a double; aside from a certain reddening around the eyes, she could probably drink it without visible effect until it drained down to her toes.

“So how's it going?” Resnick asked.

“Checking up on me, that what this is?”

“Why ever would I do that?”

“Jack Skelton's boy, sniffing out the land?”

The bottom of Resnick's glass hit the table with a smack that made faces turn.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. Sit yourself back down.” Reluctantly, he did.

“Bastard of a day! Everyone from the chief constable designate to the
Sun
. And Malachy behaving like I was his little windup doll.” She breathed smoke out through her nose. “Well, he'll learn.”

It's what you wanted, Resnick said to himself, what you bought into. Maybe you'll learn something, too.

“How was the press conference?”

“A zoo. You know what they're like when they sniff serial killer on the air.”

Resnick swallowed another mouthful of his beer. “Is that what this is?”

The DCI stubbed out her cigarette half-smoked and lit another. “Three murders, no more than months apart, radius of thirty miles, what would you say?”

What Resnick said was, “Alex Peterson, you've had him in?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

Siddons turned her face aside and lofted smoke toward the ceiling, a perfect ring. “His wife was just found with her head bashed in. He was a mess, what d'you expect?”

Somehow, Resnick thought, not that. “He's clean, though?”

“What?”

“The bruising to the body …”

“He's not a fucking suspect. Charlie, get that into your head. Forget it.”

“But surely …”

“And this isn't your fucking case!” Back on her feet, she stared at him angrily, left the cigarette, took the drink.

Resnick watched her walk, tense, back toward the bar. Terse words and sullen laughter, heads turned momentarily in his direction. Resnick drained his glass, stubbed the smoldering cigarette out in the ashtray, and crossed toward the stairs. He was well on his way to Hannah's before he remembered she had left town.

Thirty-one

Helen Siddons thought about Peterson on the walk back to her office, the way he had held it together until one of the officers had bent low and exposed his wife's body, that was when he had lost it, catching hold of Lynn's arm and crying open-mouthed into her shoulder, Jane, Jane, the name, muffled, repeated again and again. After that, black coffee, aspirin, he had answered their questions cogently enough, told them nothing new.

Door closed, she brought the details of the other cases up on the screen. That Tasmanian girl out at Worksop, the still-unidentified body fished out of the Beeston canal; a woman with the tattoo of a spider's web on her left breast who had been dumped on the banks of the River Anker, where the M42 crossed it east of Tamworth; Irene Wilson, a known prostitute, whose partly decomposed body had been found in an allotment shed near the Trent and Mersey canal, south of Derby. Females aged between seventeen and twenty-five; all discovered in or near water with serious injuries to the head or upper body.

Don't get dragged too far down that track, Malachy had warned. Well, what the fuck did he expect her to do? Ignore it?

There was a knock on the door, deferential, and there was Anil Khan, blue plastic folder in his hand, studied concern marring his handsome face. “Post-mortem report, ma'am. I thought you should see.”

“Of course I should bloody see.” She slid the stapled pages from the folder, flicking them through without really looking. “Tell me.”

“Evidence of bruising …”

“Of course …”

“To the body, ma'am. Chest and abdomen. Some of it fairly recent, some quite old. Looks as if maybe she was being beaten fairly regularly.”

“Christ!”

“Of course, it doesn't invalidate what we've said, I suppose there needn't be any connection at all.”

“I know, I know.” Helen's mind was spinning. “Listen, get hold of Peterson, bring him in. There's been a development, tell him. That's all. No details, right?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And Anil?”

“Ma'am?”

“This report … for now, no one else need know about it, understood?”

Khan nodded and hurried off.

In her office, Helen pushed open the window and let in a raft of warm air. Cigarette on the go, she settled down to read the report. The clearest signs of bruising were at the back of the abdominal cavity on the right side, the presumed cause one or more heavy blows with a blunt instrument, possibly a fist. From the extent to which the bruises had faded, it was reasonable to suggest that the incident in which they had occurred had taken place not more than four, not less than two weeks ago. There were some faint signs, difficult to date, of residual bruising in a similar area but on the opposite side, as well as to the lower chest wall. What was certain was that at some point in the past year, one of the vertebrocostal ribs, the second from the top on the left side, had been broken and allowed to heal of its own accord.

What had Alex Peterson replied when she'd asked if he and his wife had ever argued? Sometimes, doesn't everyone? Well, yes, she thought, but there was argue and argue. She wondered what he would say now.

“We may have come up with something,” Helen said, soft-pedaling. Peterson was alone with Khan and herself in the room. “It may be nothing, at this stage it's difficult to tell …” She broke off to light a cigarette.

“You can tell me, though,” Peterson said, “what it is?”

“There is evidence of bruising, quite severe, on your wife's body.”

“Of course, the fall into the water, the …”

“This is different.”

“I'm sorry, I don't …”

“Some of this bruising is quite old, stretching back over as much as eighteen months, two years.” She stared at him through cigarette smoke. “Some is more recent, inside the last month.”

“What … what kind of bruising?”

“Oh, the kind that might result from being struck. Being punched. In, say, an argument. An argument that had got out of hand.”

Peterson stared back at her, expressionless now.

“You wouldn't be able to offer any kind of explanation as to how these bruises came to be caused?”

Peterson's blue eyes slowly blinked. “Perhaps she had a fall.”