The Killer Inside (8 page)

She left the clusters of visitors who were waiting outside the prison for buses or taxis and made her way to the churchyard. She tried to push Dom’s visitor out of her mind, focusing instead on the girl who had been to see Carl.
She was what the lads in here would call very fit
. Those were the words Dom had used to describe her – as if he himself wasn’t in a position to judge such things. What had he meant by that, she wondered? Was it possible that he was jealous of Carl’s girlfriend but trying to cover up the fact? Perching on the end of a cracked stone bench she pulled the letter from her jacket pocket and unfolded it. It was very short; more of a note, really:

So the girl was on holiday. That explained why she hadn’t responded to the news of his death. Megan wondered how long she’d gone away for. She scanned the large, neat handwriting. The spelling was perfect. Not what she would have expected from someone writing to a prisoner. In her experience there were two kinds of women who corresponded with inmates they had not previously met. There were the better-educated liberals who took on prisoners as a good cause and then there were the very desperate, who tended to be at the lower end of the social scale and had given up on meeting men through normal channels. The former sometimes ended up falling in love with the men they campaigned for but it was not nearly as common as the tabloids liked to make out.

Megan stared at the signature. Dom had summed it up quite accurately with his comment that the women who courted prisoners tended to be older and sadder than the writer of this letter. Her eyes moved back up the page to the address: Linden House, Fitton Street, Bordesley Green, Birmingham. Bordesley Green was only a mile or so from the university. Linden House…her eyes narrowed as she stared at the name. Then she remembered: Linden House was one of the student halls of residence. A
student
writing to a convicted drug dealer? Why would a student want to form a relationship with a man like Carl Kelly?

There was no point going to Linden House if the girl had gone on holiday. There must be a mobile number, though: perhaps Carl had written it down somewhere. Dom would know where to look. She glanced at her watch. Too late to go back there now – Alistair Hodge was expecting her at the mortuary. Punching out the number of the prison on her phone she left a message for Dom with the office manager.

She rose from the bench with a shiver. The stone had made her buttocks and thighs go numb. She set off across the churchyard, unable to help taking a backwards glance
at Moses Smith’s grave. As she did so something registered on the periphery of her vision. It moved in and out of sight so quickly she couldn’t even be sure she had really seen it. But she was left with the abiding impression that something bright and shiny had emerged from behind one of the stone angels. When she turned to look there was nothing there. She blinked, wondering if what she had seen was an
after-image
of the sun. It had been yellowy-white; not round, like a disc, though – more like a ghostly curtain swishing out. She frowned as she turned away. This place was making her imagination work overtime: just like poor Carl Kelly.

The mortuary was housed in the basement of the university’s teaching hospital. To reach it Megan had to pass through a narrow corridor whose shelves were lined with large glass jars bearing some of the most grotesque remains she had ever seen.

Most of them were foetuses. Deformed or grossly abnormal, they had been pickled in formaldehyde and put on display for the benefit of successive generations of medical students. Megan always found it an ordeal to walk past them. She couldn’t help being reminded of the baby she had allowed to be destroyed. She wondered if the mothers of these poor creatures had any idea of their fate. Presumably they had miscarried while in hospital. She had a disturbing mental image of a doctor, shocked by what he saw yet secretly gleeful at the prospect of showing some bizarre new specimen to his colleagues. The foetus would be spirited off while the distraught mother was distracted with platitudes about Nature’s way.

And what of the medical students who were led down to the basement to see these sad relics of women’s hopes and dreams? To them it was little more than a freak show – something to giggle over in the Union bar after the lecture was over.

Megan thought about the mummified child she was about to see. Some might accuse her of the same questionable motives as the students; would say that there was no good reason for her to be here in person; that she was simply
gratifying some distasteful urge for the sensational. But anyone who had ever attended a post-mortem would know that the reality of it was so grim that no one in their right mind would attend one out of choice.

She swallowed hard at the thought of what was to come. There would be no smell, at least, with this corpse; the mummification would have dried everything out. And the face was so changed it looked more like a doll than a human baby. But the knowledge that this was a child, a child whose life had been snuffed out before it had begun, was going to make this more traumatic than any post-mortem she had ever attended.

She had to be there, though. Had to watch Alistair Hodge’s every move. There was no good reason to doubt him; he was a professional of many years’ standing. But to him, this baby was just another lump of dead flesh. Confronted on a daily basis with the worst that human beings could do to each other, he was inured to it. And her fear was that it might just make him miss something.

If she were to tell him her thoughts he would say she was being overly sentimental; that empathising with the victim had nothing to do with performing a thorough job. But she would never tell him, because then she would have to give the reason why the sight of this dead child stirred up such a maelstrom of emotion. And that was something she would never tell a living soul.

When she opened the door to the mortuary Hodge was already gloved up. He hovered over the corpse of the baby boy, which was still zipped up in a body bag. It was a forlorn sight; a small bump in a black plastic shroud designed for a larger, adult body.

‘We’ve checked out the pillow case,’ he said, nodding at her by way of a greeting. ‘No moth holes.’

‘Oh,’ she said, frowning as she took this in. ‘So that means
he wasn’t wrapped in it when he was concealed?’

‘No, he wasn’t, which is a shame: we could have dated the fabric by analysing the fibres. That might have given us a better idea of the time of death.’ He unzipped the body bag and called ‘Ready!’ A thin young man with lank black hair and a Meatloaf tattoo on his forearm appeared from behind a screen. There was a camera slung round his neck, and at Hodge’s command, he began photographing the body from every possible angle

‘Where’s Sergeant Willis?’ Megan glanced at the door.

‘Oh, he’s been and gone.’ Hodge glanced up at Megan as he began taking swabs from the baby’s dessicated flesh. ‘Said he thought his time would be better spent in the incident room. Seems he’s banking on someone coming forward.’

‘Hmm. He’ll be waiting for bloody Godot in that case.’

The pathologist gave her a wry smile. He had been around police officers even longer than Megan and had seen the good, the bad, and, like this detective sergeant, the purely indifferent.

‘There must be something about the body that can give us some clue, mustn’t there?’ She stepped sideways as the photographer pulled out a chair and stood on it to get a bird’s eye view of the corpse.

‘Well, there might be fibres stuck to the body. Remnants of whatever it was wrapped in originally. It’s unusual for these babies to be concealed naked. I’ll swab him all over, just in case. Shouldn’t take long.’

‘And what about the cardboard shoebox? Any progress on that?’

‘Well,’ Hodge said, pushing his glasses up his nose, ‘We’ve had one of the driest winters on record, haven’t we? We haven’t had really heavy rain since the middle part of January – the sort that would make the cardboard begin to disintegrate, I mean.’

‘So the box could have been buried any time during the last – what – ten or eleven weeks?’

‘I would say so, yes. It’s hard to be more precise than that. Oh…’ He stopped suddenly, one hand on the baby’s left leg, a swab held aloft in his right. ‘What’s this?’

Megan and the photographer moved towards the body from opposite sides of the metal trolley, their heads almost touching as they leaned forward to see what Alistair Hodge was looking at. The flash bulb lit up a tiny fragment of something thin and yellow stuck to the lower part of a shrivelled thigh that was no thicker than a chicken drumstick.

‘I’ll have to turn him over.’ The pathologist picked up the tiny body and laid it face down on the table. The child looked even less human from this angle, his buttocks flattened by years of pressure from the surface he had been laid on and the flesh marked with creases from whatever he had been wrapped in at the time of his death. Megan blinked as the flash went off again. Then she saw what Alistair Hodge had noticed. It was a strip of what looked like newspaper, stuck to the back of the thigh like a second skin. She could make out letters, faded to a pale grey against the yellowed paper.

‘Hang on, I’ll get my magnifying glass,’ Hodge said.

Megan moved round the table as the pathologist retrieved it from his bag. The writing looked upside down. It was in capitals, like a headline. Her eyes narrowed as she strained to make them out. Then, as the magnifying glass glided over them, the letters jumped out : ‘M 6 FREE’. She said it aloud, slowly. Then again, looking from Hodge to the photographer. ‘M 6 FREE?’

‘Hmm,’ the pathologist pursed his lips. ‘Not much to go on, is it?’ He moved the magnifying glass this way and that, searching for other clues on the torn strip of newsprint. But there was nothing. No other lettering and certainly no date.
They were all staring at it, Megan racking her brains for any news story she could remember about the M6 motorway.

‘Could it be something to do with the toll road?’ Hodge frowned. ‘When did that come in? Only about five years ago, wasn’t it?’

‘Less than that,’ the photographer shrugged. ‘2004 wasn’t it?’

‘I’m going to make a quick phone call,’ Megan said. ‘I haven’t got a clue what that headline’s about, but I know someone who might.’

She paced the corridor outside the mortuary with her mobile to her ear, waiting for Delva to return to her desk after reading the afternoon news bulletin. Megan kept her eyes firmly on the floor, avoiding the sight of the foetuses, whose liquid graves were lit orange by the rays of sun that pierced the basement’s high, barred windows. She was suddenly reminded of the jail. Images of the prisoners collided with those of the jars on the shelves. She blinked, sickened by the thought that the inmates of Balsall Gate were like the dead creatures that surrounded her; some, like Carl Kelly dead in reality; others dead inside. Dom Wilde was one of the very few who seemed to have bucked the system. Somehow he had managed to escape the pickling process. How had he done it? Was it through immersing himself in a degree programme? Or was it the Buddhism with its hours of meditation?

Her train of thought was brought to an abrupt halt by the sound of Delva’s laugh. She could hear her coming towards her office phone. There was a clunk as she picked up the receiver: ‘Hi Meg, any news?’

In a few sentences Megan explained what the post-mortem had turned up. ‘We were wondering if it was something to do with the motorway – the toll road or something?’

‘Hmm,’ Delva said, ‘It might be. Tell me something,
though – was there a gap between the letter M and the number six?’

‘Er, yes, I think there was. Why?’

‘Well, if there is, it might be nothing to do with the motorway. If it was a story about the M6 you’d expect the letters to be bang up against each other – no gap.’

‘Right. I’ll go and check.’ She darted back into the mortuary and grabbed the magnifying glass from the instrument table.

‘What are you doing?’ Hodge hissed.

‘I’ll tell you in a minute,’ she replied, the phone still pressed to her ear as she angled the magnifying glass against the newsprint. ‘Yes, there’s definitely a gap,’ she said into the phone. ‘That’s bad, isn’t it? If it’s not the motorway, the M must be the end of some other word. That’s going to make it much harder to identify.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Delva said. ‘Hang on.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m just writing it down. I think… yes, I think it could be…’

‘Could be what?’ Megan’s knuckles went white as she pressed the phone hard against her ear. The pathologist and the photographer were staring at her intently.

‘BIRMINGHAM 6 FREE.’ Delva said the words as if she was reading the news to an audience of thousands. ‘It was March 1991,’ she went on, her voice hesitant now, but excited. ‘It was the first big story I got to cover when I started at BTV. That was the date, wasn’t it? The date on Moses Smith’s headstone.’

‘God, yes, it was!’ Megan made a thumbs-up sign at Hodge and the photographer. ‘I don’t suppose you can remember the exact date, can you?’

‘I’ll check it out and call you back.’

Less than five minutes later Delva was back on the phone. ‘It was March the fourteenth,’ she said. ‘I looked up the
Evening Mail’s archives on the web: it was on the front page – the verdict came through that day.’

‘March the fourteenth,’ Megan flicked through the pages of her notebook. ‘That was the actual day Moses Smith died.’ She heard Alistair Hodge draw in his breath. ‘Can we get hold of a copy of the original newspaper? Compare it to what we’ve found, just to be certain?’

‘Should be no problem,’ Delva said. ‘We’ve probably got a copy in our own archives. Shall I bring it down? I’m off shift now.’

When Delva arrived at the mortuary any remaining doubts about the fragment of newsprint were dispelled. The letters were exactly the same size and style as the photocopy she had taken.

‘Of course, it doesn’t prove the baby died on the same day as Moses Smith,’ the pathologist said as he peeled off his rubber gloves. ‘The newspaper could’ve been lying around the house for months – years even. It doesn’t actually help us with time of death.’

‘But it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore, surely?’ Megan frowned. ‘I mean, to wrap a baby in newspaper suggests no premeditation. It implies to me that the body was disposed of in a hurry by someone who simply grabbed the first thing that came to hand to wrap it in. A newspaper lying on a bedside table would be an obvious choice; something that nobody else in the house would miss: not like using a towel or a piece of clothing. Which suggests it was that day’s paper, or possibly the day before.’

Alistair Hodge nodded. ‘Yes, I think you’re probably right. I’m thinking about that teenage girl I told you about – the one whose parents were very religious. She wrapped her baby in newspaper before she put it under the floorboards.’

‘You don’t think there could be some link, do you?’ It was Delva who spoke. She was staring at the piece of paper
in her hand.

‘What do you mean?’ Megan asked.

‘With the Birmingham Six.’ Delva’s eyes narrowed. ‘I mean, this guy dies the day they get out of jail. And a baby dies the same day or day after. Could we be looking at some sort of revenge thing?’

Megan blinked. ‘But Carl Kelly told one of the other inmates he’d killed Moses Smith in a row over money he was owed for drugs.’

‘How do you know he was telling the truth?’ Delva looked at her, her eyes gleaming like a dog scenting a fox. ‘How do you know the guy you spoke to wasn’t lying?’