Stop Dead (22 page)

‘Just the usual,’ he would say, and then he would have to explain what he wanted to another stranger behind the bar.

Maurice never stayed out late. It wasn’t that home was far away or a difficult journey, just a couple of stops on the bus, but he felt uneasy travelling after dark, wary of the gangs of youths who strutted around the streets at night, off their heads on alcohol or drugs. He would watch them as they staggered along the pavement, two or three abreast, shouting and jeering as though they owned the streets. Observing them from the safety of the bus as it rattled past he felt he should pity them, blasting their brains with a toxic cocktail of chemicals, their lives empty of purpose; but he envied them. They were a bunch of mindless followers, capable of committing acts of unspeakable violence, but at least they had a herd to travel with. He had gone through life doing no harm to anyone, yet he was alone in a hostile world.

A friend might have scolded him for self-pity, but it was hard to reproach himself when life was so unfair. As he stared through the bus window at a group of youths one of them happened to look up and catch sight of him watching. With a flicker of fear Maurice turned his head away and became aware of a woman sitting beside him. He wasn’t bothered about women. When he was much younger he had gone with prostitutes in an attempt to fend off his loneliness, but now he contented himself watching passers-by. Engrossed in gazing out of the window, he hadn’t noticed anyone sit down beside him, but sensing a body next to him, he half turned to see her looking sideways at him. She didn’t drop her eyes when he saw her but continued to watch him out of the corner of her eye. She looked nervous. Emboldened, he stared right back at her.

The woman had shoulder length blonde hair framing a face that was heavily painted with bright red lips and artificially thick eyelashes. He wondered if she was a prostitute or just out on the pull. It was difficult to tell with so much make-up on her face, but he guessed she wasn’t much over thirty. He considered speaking to her but bottled it and turned away. It wasn’t worth the bother. A woman like that would never be interested in him. Looking down he observed her raincoat had fallen open to reveal a tight short black skirt. Turning to look at him, she crossed her legs. With a slight shock he saw right up her thigh, before she pulled her coat closed. He licked his lips, wondering if she had deliberately displayed herself to him.

She leaned back against the seat as though resting. With a shiver of excitement he saw that her eyes remained fixed on his. Her expression didn’t alter, but he knew that she was conscious he was watching her. He looked away. As he did so he shifted sideways until his leg was touching hers. She moved away and he wriggled further across his seat so their legs remained in contact. It was a long time since he had enjoyed any physical contact with another person. As she stepped off the bus, she glanced back and saw that he was following her. She turned away, and he hobbled after her.

G
eraldine passed a restless night. She had gone to bed early, resolving to make a fresh start on Amy and her young lover’s files in the morning, but whenever she closed her eyes she saw George, a heavy figure seated in a dimly lit office, dark eyes staring at her from beneath unruly eyebrows. It irritated her that his image haunted her in this way. After all, she spent her life dealing with murder cases. There was no reason why this particular victim should trouble her so deeply. In his sixties, George was bordering on clinically obese, a heavy drinker and smoker who no doubt suffered from stress with his wife, his mistress, his business dealings and his mounting gambling debts. But the spectre of his living figure dogged her thoughts as she tried to sleep.

She tried to focus her thoughts on the case as a whole, but everything took her back to George. It seemed unlikely that Amy or her young lover would have inflicted such horrific injuries on him. It wasn’t the nature of the attack that Geraldine found disturbing. She had worked on cases with far more distressing victims: kids not yet out of their teens, frail elderly women, helpless infants. Nevertheless, every time she tried to sleep, George appeared in her mind, knocking back a tumbler of whisky while his other plump hand rested comfortably on his well-rounded stomach as he puffed on a cigarette, gesturing and smiling towards his young girlfriend, relishing the sensual pleasures in life. She hadn’t experienced this disturbance before, never having questioned other victims before they were killed. Such a clear image of him while he was alive seemed to turn his brutal death into something worse than murder. It was the end of a world.

She couldn’t sleep so she pulled on her dressing gown and went to the kitchen to brew a pot of tea, deciding that she might as well do some work as she was unable to sleep. But once her laptop was switched on she couldn’t focus on either Guy or Amy, both obviously in the frame for the first murder. If they did turn out to be responsible for George’s death as well, it would presumably be for financial motives, in which case it was hard to believe either of them capable of inflicting such vicious injuries. It was possible this had been a calculated attempt to show that both murders had been carried out by the same person. But that made no sense.

It was clear both murders had been committed by the same person, whether alone or with an accomplice. To begin with, the details of the attack on Henshaw hadn’t been shared with anyone outside the investigation. For that reason alone it was hard to see how Corless could have been the victim of a copycat killer. But that suggested the killer was one person who had known both the victims, and hated both of them enough to carry out such a gruesome assault. Geraldine went back to bed and tried to relax but felt restless and got up once again. Feeling peckish, she wandered back to the kitchen and opened a packet of biscuits she had bought for her niece’s next visit. Crunching miserably through the packet, she ate until she began to feel queasy. Finally she dragged herself back to bed where she lay, exhausted but irritatingly alert. There was something amiss with the whole investigation but she just couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong.

She woke up late the next morning with a pounding headache that felt like a hangover, only she hadn’t been out the previous evening drinking and partying, she had been at home on her own stuffing herself with biscuits she didn’t even particularly like. Her excess made her feel sluggish and slow. Thoroughly wretched, she pulled on a shirt and an old pair of trousers and didn’t bother to apply any make-up before hurrying off to the office, not even stopping to brew coffee. Once she got stuck into work, she would feel better.

Her first line of enquiry was to search for anything suggesting Amy might have had a personal grudge against George. Clearly she stood to gain financially from his death. If Amy had harboured a grievance against her husband’s business partner strong enough to account for her mutilating him as he lay dying, then the whole case would start to make sense. They had obviously been in contact through Patrick, and there were any number of ways in which they could have fallen out. But this was all speculation.

Geraldine grabbed a coffee from the canteen before she made her way to her office, planning her day as she strode along the corridor. All she wanted to do was sit quietly and mull over what she knew, but as she opened the door to the office, she saw Nick apparently having a clear out. His desk was covered with papers that had spread out across the floor. Files were stacked beside Geraldine’s desk. There was even a small pile on her chair. He turned and beamed at her, the hair sticking up on top of his head no longer striking her as comical, but intensely irritating.

‘Good morning.’

The cheerful greeting grated on her foul mood.

‘Most people would have asked before putting stuff on my chair,’ she snapped.

Nick looked surprised. He half opened his mouth as though about to reply, then turned away.

‘You weren’t here,’ he said, his tone frosty.

Geraldine looked pointedly at her watch.

‘It’s not even nine. I’m hardly late. It would have been courteous to wait until I arrived before spreading your papers around.’

‘This is because of DS Haley, gossiping behind my back, isn’t it?’ he demanded unexpectedly.

His face had tautened with repressed fury, but his voice was steady.

‘Sam Haley. She’s been spreading stories about me, hasn’t she? What has she been saying?’ He scowled. ‘I never should have let it go, that first time, when she gave me a roasting for a careless remark. Ever since then she’s been nothing but trouble.’

Geraldine was suddenly sick of the whole place. As if the stress and pressure of a murder investigation wasn’t bad enough, she now had to share an office with an irate colleague who was making an increasingly poor job of concealing his hostility towards her sergeant. It didn’t help to know that Nick’s grumbling was a knee-jerk response to her own bad temper. Much as she valued her job, she sometimes felt there must be more to life than the pursuit of those who ended it for others. But she knew she could never do anything else.

G
eraldine had been in the job far too long to be surprised by anything that came up, so she didn’t question being called to the scene when a body was pulled out of the canal near Highbury. It wasn’t immediately apparent how this victim was related to her current murder investigation. As she drove to the canal she couldn’t help worrying that the body was that of a dark-haired woman whose DNA matched that found on Patrick. Her concern was irrational; there was no reason why the body in the river should be the witness they were seeking.

They needed to find the unknown witness urgently. Without an opportunity to question her, they might never work out Patrick’s movements on the day he was killed. If that was the case, the identity of his killer might forever remain a mystery. They had all been quietly hopeful that questioning the woman who had been with Patrick on the day he died would help them to work out what had happened. But although the DNA sample gave them a profile, it remained worthless without a viable match.

It was barely light when Geraldine reached the canal, and early enough to be cold. She thrust her hands into the pockets of her thin grey jacket, pulling it more tightly around her as she walked along the deserted canal path. A fine mist lay on the waste ground alongside the water, lending the scene an eerie atmosphere which was intensified by the forensic tent looming ahead, a vast apparition dimly visible through the haze. As she approached, the silence was disturbed by a muted murmur of voices punctuated by an occasional shout.

‘Over here!’

‘Get a move on with that tape!’

‘Watch out!’

In keeping with the surreal quality of the scene, a tall dark figure materialised as abruptly as if he had stepped out from the wings of a stage. Already the sun was beginning to shine weakly through clouds, burning off the mist. Geraldine held up her warrant card, and the uniformed officer blocking her path stepped aside with a barely perceptible nod.

‘Morning. He’s in there. They only pulled him out of the water about half an hour ago, poor old sod. It’s a bad business alright, leastways for him. The pathologist’s with him now.’

Geraldine returned his greeting with a perfunctory ‘Good morning constable,’ and hurried on towards the tent, reassured to learn that the victim wasn’t their missing female witness.

Her fingers numb with cold, she fumbled as she donned her contamination suit, white face mask and blue gloves. Finally she approached the opening to the tent. Pausing outside to pull on her overshoes, she ducked her head to enter and blinked in the bright artificial lighting that had been rigged up inside. The dead body was lying on the ground, half concealed by the pathologist who was kneeling beside it, gently probing discoloured flesh with delicate gloved fingers. The victim’s drenched coat, shirt and vest had been neatly ripped open to reveal his mottled wrinkled skin. Gazing down at the dead man’s flesh, Geraldine felt like a voyeur intruding on an intensely private scene. The body was childlike; pitiful.

The pathologist twisted round on his heels and she recognised Miles Fellows. He smiled wearily up at her before clambering to his feet to tower over her.

‘Hi there, Geraldine.’

She nodded wordlessly, caught up in the suppressed excitement of her first viewing of a victim. She tried to focus on a factual analysis of the data in front of her, but was unable to distance herself from an instinctive response to the raw presence of death, as though her emotional reaction to George’s corpse had relaxed the self-control she had previously shown in similar situations.

Grey and shrivelled, the body looked shrunken, almost impossibly small, like a wizened child.

‘Did he drown?’ she asked, wondering why her presence had been requested at the scene.

‘I don’t think so. I can’t be sure until I’ve had a chance to examine his lungs but I’d say he was dead when he fell in the water.’

‘Did he fall or could he have been pushed?’ Geraldine enquired automatically, although she was still puzzled as to why she had been summoned.

Miles heaved a loud sigh.

‘It’s impossible to say how he ended up in the water. But I can tell you he’s been in the water all night.’

‘How many hours are we talking about, exactly?’

‘I’d say he’s been in the water for at least twelve hours.’

‘Since yesterday evening then?’

‘Sometime yesterday evening, yes.’

Geraldine took a step closer, her eyes fixed on the dead man.

‘So if he didn’t drown, how did he die?’

But she already knew the answer.

Miles pointed at a large purple area of bruising on the dead man’s left temple surrounding a deep laceration.

‘He was hit on the side of the head, here.’

‘The skin’s broken. Could he have knocked himself when he fell in the water?’ Geraldine asked, as a matter of form.

She didn’t need Miles to point out the nasty mash of bloodless flesh where the victim’s genitals should have been.