The Burning (5 page)

Chapter Two

M
AEVE

It wouldn’t have been such a nightmare to get out of the hospital if the press hadn’t already picked up on the fact that we had a suspect in intensive care. They were on us like a pack of dogs as soon as the boss showed his face outside the back door of the building. A babble of shouted questions exploded from the far side of the road, where the media had been corralled behind metal barriers.

‘Superintendent Godley! Over here, sir.’

‘Have you got him?’

‘Is it true you have a suspect in custody?’

I slipped past the massed press, my presence unremarked, heading for my car. I’d be on the news, probably, but only my mother and her friends would spot me. I went out of my way to avoid seeing myself onscreen, as a rule. Untidy light-brown hair, a set expression, hunched shoulders: none of these things fit in with my image of myself, but undeniably they were what appeared on the TV every time I stalked across a cameraman’s field of vision. My mother’s voice was ringing in my ears:
Ah, Maeve, if only you’d remembered to stand up straight
. I bent my head, looked at the ground and kept going, hearing the slap of Rob’s shoes on the tarmac as he strode out to keep up with me. Not for the first time, I was glad to be out of the limelight, glad that Godley was the star of the show, even though he hated it. For such a high-profile senior officer, he wasn’t the sort to court attention. His statements were businesslike, his press conferences orderly, and if he had nothing to say, he said nothing. But everything he said and did was news, especially at the moment. The level of interest in the Burning Man was nothing short of hysteria. Godley spent a great deal of time on the phone to newspaper editors and TV bosses, begging them for a bit of sensitivity and responsibility in the way they reported on the case. We needed space to work in, but if they had the opportunity, they dived straight in. All in the public interest, apparently – and if they meant that the public was interested, they weren’t wrong. But I couldn’t see how conjecture about our lack of success helped anyone.

Today, I doubted Godley had much he wanted to share with the press. Particularly today, when all the news was bad. An hour earlier, he would have been planning his speech at the press conference where we were to reveal the good news.

Don’t worry, everyone. It’s all over. You can get back to enjoying the run-up to the festive season. Don’t mind us; we’re off for a pint
.

All of that was on hold, indefinitely. I couldn’t help feeling cold at the thought of where we were going and what we were going to find there. Another body. Another woman, brutalised and burned beyond recognition. And who he was – why he even did it in the first place – was as much a mystery now as it had been four bodies ago.

‘You OK?’ Rob had caught up with me at the pay station, where I was feeding an extraordinary number of coins into the machine. Surely I hadn’t been there for that long. I excavated the last few coins from the bottom of my bag, disentangling them from an old shredded tissue and pushing them bad-temperedly into the slot. The machine burped. I stabbed the button for a receipt and managed a smile.

‘Of course. All part of the job, isn’t it?’

‘It’s me you’re talking to, Kerrigan. You don’t have to pretend.’

‘Yeah, well. Bit of a shitter, isn’t it?’

‘You’re telling me. I thought we were done with this.’

We both spoke lightly, but I knew he was feeling the way I was. Somehow, it made it worse that we’d had a break from the sick tension that was now pooling in my stomach and clenching my jaw, the tension that had been turning my days into marathons, stealing my sleep, keeping me at work. I’d done my best – we’d all been doing our best – to make sure this didn’t happen again. And we’d failed.

‘Jesus. Good parking.’

The car was skewed across two spaces. ‘I was in a rush, OK?’ I unlocked the doors. ‘Get in, and less of the chat, or you’ll be walking to – where is it?’

‘Stadhampton Grove. It’s somewhere behind the Oval cricket ground. Part of an industrial estate.’

‘Do you know how to get there from here?’

‘Consider me your sat nav for the journey.’

‘Twat nav, more like,’ I muttered, shooting a grin at him before pulling out of my space. Well, spaces.

The traffic had built up in the time I’d been in the hospital, and the trip from Kingston to the Oval was torture. Rob got on the phone as soon as we were on the road, calling Kev Cox, who was at the scene already. He was head of the forensic team and had managed the last four crime scenes; if you wanted one person to keep everything under control, Kev was your man. I’d never seen him anything less than relaxed. I wasn’t even sure it was possible to upset him.

‘Who found it? Just walking past, was he? Did uniform get his details? Oh, he’s still there? Good one.’

I caught Rob’s eye and tapped my watch. He got what I meant straightaway.

‘What time was that, then?’

He had his notepad on his knee, balancing on a big London
A–Z
that was, I noticed, on entirely the wrong page. Some help he was. He scrawled ‘3.17’ on the pad in big numbers, tilting it to show me. That settled it. Not that there had really been any doubt in my mind about Victor Blackstaff’s innocence.

‘No sign of anyone there, I suppose? Nothing left behind? Yeah, he’s just not making any mistakes. How long is it since the last one?’

I could have told him that. Six days. And before that, twenty days. And before that, three weeks. Just over three weeks between the first and the second ones. He was speeding up, and that was bad news. The less time we had between killings, the more likely it was that more women would die.

On the other hand, he had to be killing more frequently for a reason. Maybe he was feeling agitated. Unsettled. Maybe he was losing control and he’d start making mistakes.

But he hadn’t made any so far.

Rob was asking Kev about who else was at the scene but I tuned out, concentrating on the traffic. When he finally hung up, he turned to me. ‘How much of that did you get?’

‘The important bits. Not the parts where you were finding out what the competition was up to.’

He had the grace to look ashamed. ‘I just like to know who else I’m going to be working with.’

‘Bullshit. You like to know who else is going to be trying to get the boss’s attention.’
And I know that because I am exactly the same
…

‘No sign of Belcott yet.’ He couldn’t suppress a grin of triumph. Peter Belcott was one of the more irritating members of the team: ambitious, ruthless, awkward if you gave him the opportunity. Much too keen. Omnipresent, usually. There was some comfort in the thought that he’d been caught napping this time.

I tapped the map. ‘Come on. Concentrate. Where do I go from here?’

He peered at the street signs, then down at the page, flicking frantically as he realised he was looking at Poplar, not Vauxhall.

‘Left at the lights. No, straight on.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure,’ he said, sounding anything but. I went with it anyway, and as far as I could tell, we didn’t double back on ourselves more than a couple of times on the rest of the journey.

Unencumbered by the media, we got to Stadhampton Grove long before the boss arrived, and flashed warrant cards at the uniform on the cordon.

‘At least we have a secure scene this time. That’s something,’ Rob remarked.

I nodded, pulling in to park behind a police car. ‘I wouldn’t like a repeat of the Charity Beddoes one.’

That had been a fuck-up of epic proportions. It was the fourth murder, the body dumped in Mostyn Gardens, between Kennington and Brixton. The responding officers had seen the hallmarks of the Burning Man straightaway. Unfortunately, one of them had a nice sideline in tipping off a tabloid journalist, who had turned up with a video camera before the forensic team got there. Scotland Yard had to move very quickly indeed to prevent footage of the body and crime scene from being broadcast on the twenty-four-hour news channels; it was on the Internet if you looked for it, though we did try to get it taken down wherever it appeared. The forensic evidence was hopelessly compromised. A woman had died and we’d learned nothing that helped in the hunt for our killer. All because some plod had been partial to making a bit of extra cash.

It was easy enough to spot where we needed to be; the forensic team were already there, moving screens and lights into position around a patch of blackened grass on some waste ground about a hundred yards from where we’d parked. A tall, lanky figure in a boiler suit was stepping delicately around the area that they’d marked off, his attention focused on the ground where the body presumably lay.

Rob was looking in the same place as me. ‘Glen’s here already.’

‘So I see. Godley will be pleased.’

Glen Hanshaw was the pathologist who had examined all four of the other victims. He was also one of the superintendent’s best friends. They were around the same age and had worked together for ever, including long hours on most of the cases that had made Godley’s reputation in the first place. We had standing orders to summon Dr Hanshaw to every crime scene. He’d been in Cyprus for one of Godley’s murders a couple of years ago and had come back on the next available flight, abandoning a family holiday with what appeared to be relief. I would not have been Mrs Hanshaw for any money, not least because I found the balding, beaky pathologist unsettling. He had a habit of looking past you while you were talking to him, as if whatever you were saying was so predictable and dull that he had already got to the end of the conversation in his own mind, long before you had stammered out your final question. I didn’t like being made to feel thick, and Dr Hanshaw managed it every time. Presumably Superintendent Godley was more intellectually secure than me.

Dr Hanshaw’s concentration was total, and he didn’t look up as Rob and I walked towards him, following Kev Cox’s instruction to keep to the common approach path the SOCOs had marked out through the lank winter grass. They’d put down a plastic platform where we could stand, the lead investigator had told us, and I stepped onto it carefully, feeling it flex under Rob’s weight as he joined me.

There was no point in saying hello to Dr Hanshaw. We might as well not have been there. His assistant, Ali, was standing nearby, scribbling notes as he spoke.

‘The body is lying face up in a shallow depression and shows signs of violence ante-mortem and post-mortem. It appears to be a female, but an estimate of her age will have to wait for the PM.’ He crouched. ‘Limbs drawn up and in towards the torso, but I’d suggest she was laid out flat originally; that’ll be muscle-contraction from the heat. Look at the pugilistic pose, the claw-shaped hands. Classic characteristics of exposure to high temperatures.’

The woman’s skin was blackened and split, disfigured with patches of red and white where the lower layers of the skin had been exposed. The fire had burned her but not from head to toe; it was hard, the experts said, to make a human body burn without other sources of fuel, but you could certainly do a lot of damage. She was wearing what looked like the remains of an expensive dress. The dress had been black, long-sleeved, cut diagonally across the neckline and high on one thigh (– she wore no coat, though it had been a cold night.) The fabric was folded and twisted into a rose at the waist that had stubbornly refused to burn. It was a miracle of design and tailoring that would have flattered the slender figure in life, and still clung tenaciously to it now, even though the dress was in shreds, burned and stained. She had worn high heels, black patent, tiny straps. One had fallen off and was lying on its side beside her. There was dirt on her insteps, damage to the thin skin that stretched over her anklebones. The hands Dr Hanshaw had commented on were hooked and blackened, held just under the woman’s chin as if she’d been trying to ward off the flames. I swallowed, my mind suddenly filled with fire, with fear, with pain. Ali – who was far too posh and pretty, you’d have thought, to be standing beside a dead body at that hour of the morning – was looking pale.

‘Was she dead when the fire started?’

He took out a tiny torch and shone it into the body’s mouth and nose, drawing down the jaw gently. ‘No sign of inhalation. I’d say probably, but we’ll have to take a look at the lungs under a microscope.’

The torch went into a pocket and his white-gloved hands stretched out, probing through the matted fairish hair on the victim’s head, teasing out knots so he could feel what lay beneath. ‘Skull fractures,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘All at the back of the head. No trauma to the facial bones or tissue ante-mortem. Marks on the face are caused by scorching.’

That was new. I leaned in, trying to see what he was indicating to Ali. The other victims had been battered beyond all recognition before they were set alight. The Burning Man had done his best to obliterate their features, breaking bones, cartilage, ripping flesh, so they were hideous and somehow interchangeable. He made them into something they weren’t before; he shaped them. Wanton destruction was part of the fun.

‘Maybe he was disturbed before he could go through the usual ritual,’ Rob suggested.

‘He still had time to set her on fire.’

The pathologist twisted around and glared at us. ‘Speculation might usefully wait until after the examination, don’t you think? Or would you like me to move out of the way so you can conduct your own assessment of the body?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. Rob mumbled something beside me. The sound of feet approaching was a welcome distraction.

Hanshaw looked past us and his frown disappeared. He raised a hand and sketched a salute. ‘Charlie.’

‘Morning, Glen. What have we got?’ The superintendent stood beside me, listening gravely as Dr Hanshaw ran through his observations. Ali was following him through the notes, ready to prompt, but the pathologist didn’t miss anything out. He never missed anything.

‘I’m going to presume you want me to compare this body to the others that we have attributed to your active serial killer,’ Hanshaw said, winding up. ‘Obviously, there are certain points of difference. Damage to the face is incidental. We also have no signs of restraint used on the hands. No ligature marks, no tape, nothing that he might have used to bind her. But we do have a mark from a stun gun – here.’ He lifted up her hair to show a small burn on her shoulder.