The Deadly Embrace (8 page)

Lord Ainsley turned and saw Liza as she came toward them. Grinning, he removed his flight cap and said, “I’m not sure if you remember me, Lieutenant. I’m Nick Ainsley.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling up at him. “What is happening here?”

“Apparently, you’ve had a bit of thievery in the office,” he said.

Charlie was speaking to the military policeman in hushed tones.

“I know it sounds crazy, but someone broke the lock on my desk,” he whispered.

“Is anything important missing, sir?” replied the policeman.

“I don’t keep anything important in my desk,” he replied.

J.P. was applying lipstick in front of a compact mirror perched on her desk when Liza went inside. Going straight to her telephone, she dialed the number on Inspector Drummond’s card. As she waited for it to ring through, J.P. said, “Why would anyone break into Charlie’s desk? All he does is sit around and play chess with himself.”

Inspector Drummond came on the line.

“Yes, Lieutenant?” he said after she identified herself.

“I wanted to schedule the autopsy of Jocelyn Dunbar,” she said. “Major Taggart would like it to be done at the SHAEF hospital on Curzon Street.”

Liza looked up to see J.P. staring at her intently.

“I’m sorry, but they took her straightaway to Golders Green,” said Drummond.

“What is that?” she asked as J.P. continued staring.

“It’s a hospital in North London,” he replied.

“Why wasn’t she brought to the SHAEF hospital?” asked Liza.

“You will have to take that up with Colonel Gaines,” he said, apologetically. “He ordered the transfer of her body.”

“Do you know when the autopsy will take place?”

“I wasn’t told,” he said.

There was a burst of static on the line, and then silence.

“Are you still there, Inspector?” she asked as J.P. resumed applying her makeup.

“I’m here,” he said wearily. There was another pause before he added, “You should know that Golders Green is also the city’s largest crematorium.”

“Oh no,” she said.

“I will probably be fired for telling you this, but I would strongly advise you to hurry.”

As she headed toward the door, Nicholas Ainsley was standing at Joss Dunbar’s desk.

“Look here,” he called out to one of the military policemen in the corridor. “This desk has been jimmied, too.”

Joining him behind Joss’s desk, Liza could see that the metal lock bar on the right bank of drawers had been gouged away. Turning to the sergeant of the security detail, she said, “I want this room sealed off until I return. No one is to touch anything.”

“Under whose authority?” demanded the sergeant, looking at her with obvious skepticism.

“Major Sam Taggart,” she said.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

CHAPTER 7

T
raffic slowed to a crawl near Buckingham Palace and came to a complete stop at Green Park. British military police had blocked all civilian traffic to allow passage of another seemingly endless military convoy. Although Liza’s driver was a native Londoner and claimed to know several alternative routes to Golders Green, his efforts were to no avail. Most of the residential neighborhoods in the north of the city were choked with fire engines and rescue vehicles

“Please hurry…. Please hurry,” she kept repeating as they inched past scores of indistinguishable streets filled with identical row houses, many reduced to charred ruins from the recent bombing raids.

“I’m trying the best I can, Lieutenant,” he said, “but it is four bloody miles any way you slice it.”

Nearly an hour after they started, the staff car pulled up at the side entrance to what looked to Liza like a Charles Dickens-era prison. Twelve-foot-high soot-covered walls surrounded two enormous brick buildings. As she approached the entrance, Liza glanced up to see black, oily smoke wafting skyward from a circular brick chimney that towered over the roof of the second building.

When she stepped inside, her nose was assaulted by the overpowering smell of a bleach-based disinfectant. It could not mask the cloying odor of decaying corpses coming from a large holding room off to the left. Liza headed straight for the front desk, where an elderly woman with a white doily pinned to the front of her rose-colored dress was fanning her face with a folded newspaper.

“Sorry, dear,” she said, “but we just got another delivery from the raid two nights ago. Poor lads was trapped inside a ship they was unloading that took a direct hit.”

“I’m Lieutenant Marantz, and I’m here to participate in an autopsy,” said Liza, showing the woman her identity card. “The decedent’s name was Lieutenant Jocelyn Dunbar.”

“If it’s military, dear, you’ve gawt to see Captin Sleeves,” she said. “‘E’s down that ‘allway over there.”

“Thank you,” said Liza.

As Liza started down the hall, the woman called after her: “A piece of advice for a girl as pretty as you are, dear ...‘E’s got loose hands, if you know wot I mean.”

Liza smiled back at her and said, “Yes … thank you.”

An officer was standing in a shadowy doorway about halfway down the corridor. As Liza approached him, she saw that he was talking to the young scrubwoman who was mopping the floor of the office.

“Captain Sleeves?” she asked, coming up to him.

Over his shoulder, Liza could see that the girl’s blouse was unbuttoned and her cheeks were red with apparent humiliation.

“What is it?” he demanded without turning to look at her. Although he wore the uniform coat of a British Army officer, there were no badges or campaign ribbons on it.

“I am Lieutenant Marantz,” she said, holding out her military identity card, “and I am here to participate in the autopsy of Jocelyn Dunbar.”

“That autopsy has already been concluded,” said Captain Sleeves, his eyes still on the young scrubwoman as she backed away down the hall. “According to the family’s wishes, she is being cremated.”

“I need to examine that body,” Liza said forcefully, stepping in front of him.

The man had brown close-set eyes and a little upturned nose. A heavily waxed mustache extended across his upper lip like a propeller blade.

Seeing her for the first time, he stepped back as if he had received a jolt of electricity. After studying her identity card for several seconds, he looked back up at her and smiled, revealing a row of ferretlike teeth.

“Are you a licensed pathologist, Miss … Marantz?” he asked, his eyes dropping to her breasts.

“No, I’m not … and it’s Lieutenant Marantz.”

“Yes, I can see that,” he said, his body inching closer to her.

“Elizabeth Marantz,” he said, “very pretty name … beguiling, in fact.”

“Captain Sleeves, it is imperative that I see Lieutenant Dunbar’s body,” she said. “My orders are to...”

“Marantz … German, isn’t it?” said Captain Sleeves.

He had already moved close enough for her to smell the stale coffee on his breath. Liza decided to humor him for the last time.

“Yes … German,” she said.

His thick eyebrows rose to meet one another above his eyes like two caterpillars.

“I thought so,” he said.

Farther down the corridor, a young man came out through a pair of swinging doors. He was wearing a blood-smeared gray lab coat. Striking a match against the red brick wall, he lit a cigarette.

“German of the Hebrew persuasion?” asked Captain Sleeves.

“Yes, I am Jewish,” said Liza. “Now...”

“I thought so,” he declared again, with the hint of a smirk.

“Are you going to allow me to examine the body of Jocelyn Dunbar, or do I need to see your superior officer?” Liza demanded loudly.

“I am in full command here at the present time,” he said, as if holding the beachhead at Dunkirk. “Of course, you can always contact Major Faulks in Supply and Administration.”

“Where is he?”

“Haven’t the slightest,” said Captain Sleeves. “Probably on his rounds of the city facilities.”

Liza watched him glance at his wristwatch before his eyes swept over her again.

“If you’re trying to keep me occupied while they destroy Lieutenant Dunbar’s body, then know this,” she said, fiercely. “By allowing it to happen, you may well be compromising the security of Operation Overlord. I assume that even someone like you knows what that means. I am here at the direct command of General Ernest Manigault, the head of Military Security Command for Overlord,” she lied. “If I am not allowed to examine Lieutenant Dunbar’s body right now, I promise you, Captain Sleeves, that instead of your comfortable little post here in Golders Green you will be spending the next thirty years in a military prison.”

The caterpillar eyebrows began oscillating up and down.

“Corporal Moncrief?” he cried out as if calling for reinforcements.

The young man down the corridor dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with the toe of his boot.

“I’m afraid you’re too late, Lieutenant,” he said, coming toward them. “She went to the fire. Those were my orders.”

“From whom?” she demanded.

“From him,” he said, pointing at Sleeves.

The captain was slowly backing up into his office.

“Who ordered you to destroy her body?” demanded Liza.

“I must follow orders, even as you must...” he began.

“Who gave you the order?” she demanded.

“Colonel Gaines … called to say that Lady Dunbar’s family wanted her cremated as soon as possible after the autopsy,” he mumbled.

“It’s possible she could still be in the holding area over there,” said the young corporal. “They’ve had a lot of business today.”

“Where is it?”

“I’ll take you,” he said.

As she followed him down the corridor, Captain Sleeves retreated back into his office and shut the door.

“What do you do here?” she asked the young man as they rushed together through darkened hospital corridors to the crematorium building. He smelled like human ordure.

“I work in the pathology lab,” said the corporal.

“Were you present for Lieutenant Dunbar’s autopsy this morning?” she asked.

“I don’t know them by name,” he said.

“She was young and blonde … very pretty.”

“I was there,” he said, leading her down a set of stairs and out the door into an open courtyard.

“Did you hear any of the doctor’s conclusions?”

“I heard the doctor tell Captain Sleeves that she drowned,” he said as they headed into the next building.

Victims of the recent Luftwaffe raids filled the hospital rooms and lined the hallways on temporary cots. Many people with less serious injuries simply sat on the floor waiting to be treated. Their collective moaning sounded like an unholy dirge.

“The doctor said that there were air bubbles in her heart and water in her lungs,” said Corporal Moncrief as they flew down another corridor and came to the entrance of the crematorium.

“Who keeps the paperwork from the autopsies?” asked Liza.

“Captain Sleeves,” he said as they pushed through the door.

The smell of decomposing flesh almost made her gag as he led her through another door into a large, open holding area. Scores of bodies lay scattered across the bloodstained concrete floor. Some lay on rolling gurneys under soiled sheets. Others had simply been dumped on the floor, naked. Many of them were burned black. A number were missing heads and limbs. Liza began removing the sheets from the corpses on the nearest gurneys as the corporal skirted the room, briefly eyeing each body.

Two burly men in leather aprons came through a door off to her left and began transferring bodies onto what looked like a rolling coal car.

“Wait,” shouted Liza as they picked up a young female body she hadn’t had time to examine.

“I found her,” shouted Corporal Moncrief from across the room.

He was standing by a gurney next to the door that led into the coal-fired incinerator. As she watched, he covered Joss’s naked body with a sheet and began wheeling the gurney toward her.

“We’ll bring her back to the lab,” said Liza, following him out of the holding area.

When they returned to the pathology suite in the basement of the hospital wing, Captain Sleeves was waiting for them.

“That will be all,” he said, summarily dismissing Corporal Moncrief. Turning to Liza, he said, “I will allow you fifteen minutes to examine the body.”

From his renewed bravado, it was obvious to Liza that he had been in contact with Colonel Gaines again. Clutching the pathology notes from the autopsy, he sat down at a metal desk in the corner.

As she prepared to remove the sheet covering Joss’s body, Liza felt a familiar surge of pure adrenaline, just like when she was about to run a race back at Great Neck High School. This was what she had been trained to do, to use her forensic talents to help find out the truth surrounding a young woman’s death.

Joss was lying on her back, the thick blond hair covering most of her face. When Liza finished pulling away the sheet, it was all she could do not to recoil in shock. “Oh God,” she said softly as her eyes took in the condition of the young woman’s body. Liza had watched or participated in more than a hundred autopsies, almost all of them with experienced pathologists, but she had never seen a cadaver so violated in a routine set of autopsy procedures. Considering that Joss had suffered no traumatic injuries except to her left wrist, it seemed almost nightmarish, more like the work of a butcher than a doctor, and she wondered whether it might have been purposely done to prevent her from discovering the true circumstances surrounding her death.

“Who conducted this autopsy?” she asked.

“Not one of our regular chaps. Didn’t know him,” said Sleeves.

“Was he a doctor?”

“No idea, I’m afraid. He came in with the corpse.”

Seeing the anger in her eyes, he added, “We’re a bit overworked here, as you can imagine.”

“I would like to see his pathology notes,” she declared.

“I’m not authorized to give them to you,” he replied. “Colonel Gaines said that if you want a copy of the autopsy report it must be officially requested through him.”

For a moment she considered the idea of snatching the notes out of his fat fingers, but managed to suppress her anger. Whoever had performed the autopsy had incised the back of Joss’s head at the nape of the neck, and then pulled Joss’s scalp forward over the skull, covering her eyes. Instead of cleanly sawing off the top of her skull, he had apparently used some kind of chisel to cleave it open in order to expose the brain. The brain cavity was empty.