The Murder Code (2 page)

The grids are a concentration of poverty. At their heart—in the bullseye—it’s mostly immigrants, many of them illegal. The streets there are a hotchpotch of languages and cultures: insular communities; smaller cities beneath the skin of the main. You look up and can’t tell how many people might be clustered inside the blocks. The graffiti is mostly second-generation kids daubing flags and staking territory, manufacturing meaning from the environment. A lot of the people who live there never leave even their own grid, never mind the estate as a whole.

But we weren’t in the heart now. The builds might look the same, but here at the edge, close to the river, they cost a bit more. It isn’t uncommon to find students living here, as the accommodation is rougher but considerably cheaper than they’d find south of the river, closer to campus. And someone like Vicki Gibson, working two jobs in order to keep herself and her mother indoors and alive—in grids terms, she was practically a respectable professional.

Why would someone want to kill her? Robbery was a possibility. A sexual motive? Slightly less likely, given the probability of being seen, but not impossible.

Too early to tell
…

Across the small lawn, the grass still felt spongy with dew, glistening slightly in the mid-morning sun. It was surprisingly well tended: trimmed down neat, so you could imagine spreading out a picnic in front of a tent very different to the one we were approaching now.

I lifted the flap on the side in time to see the flash of a camera: a SOCO was bent double inside, photographing the victim where she was lying in the shade.

I hesitated. Just slightly.

Vicki Gibson was lying on her back, one leg bent so that the right foot rested under the other knee. Both her red heels had come off and were stuck twisted in the grass; she was still wearing a red skirt and a black blouse, and a fluffy brown coat the gloom rendered as rust. Both arms were splayed out to her sides. Her hair was long: swirling black tendrils in the grass, like she was lying in an inch of water.

She had no face left to speak of.

A bad one.

‘Well,’ I told Laura. ‘You were right.’

I was still noting the details, though—a discarded red handbag rested beside her, the cord lying curled in the grass. Not robbery, then. And the clothes didn’t appear to have been disturbed. That left one obvious possibility.

‘Andy.’ Simon Duncan, the forensic liaison for our department, was standing by the body. He nodded at me. ‘Glad you could make it.’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

Simon was tall and mostly bald, with a climber’s build. Beside him, the pathologist, Chris Dale, who looked short and serious at the best of times, appeared even more so now, squatting down by his victim. He glanced up to acknowledge my presence, but only briefly.

‘I know it’s early days,’ I said, ‘but do we have anything concrete yet?’

Simon arched an eyebrow.

‘You’ve not got it figured out yet? You surprise me, Andrew. I thought that might explain the delay in your arrival—that you were already off arresting the perpetrator.’

‘I do have an idea,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you see if you can throw me off course, eh?’

Simon moved to one side, to allow the SOCO with the camera around to the head end of the body. In doing so, he gave us a better view as well. It couldn’t really be called the ‘head end’ any more.

‘There’s one very obvious injury,’ Simon said, just as the camera flashed across it. ‘Or rather, numerous injuries to one specific part of the victim. As far as we can tell, there are no other serious injuries. I think we can probably run with the damage to the head being the cause of death rather than postmortem.’

I nodded.

Whoever had attacked Vicki Gibson had beaten her about the head and face so severely that it was impossible to recognise her. Even dental records would be unlikely, I thought, trying to examine the injuries professionally. The front of her skull had been caved in. There was her neck, pristine and unblemished, and that hair swirled above, but everything in between was gone.

‘No defensive injuries?’

Simon shook his head. ‘Looks like the first blow was enough to incapacitate her. He either dragged her through the hedge or else the blow knocked her that way.’

‘Too early to tell,’ I said.

‘Yes. Regardless, he hit her many times, and continued to do so long after her death. As you can see, the entire front of her skull has been seriously damaged.’

Yes, I could see that all too clearly.

I squatted down and peered at the hands.

‘No sexual assault?’

‘Nothing obvious at this stage.’

‘And no robbery.’

‘Her credit cards and money are still in the handbag.’ He arched his eyebrow again. ‘I’m not throwing you so far, am I?’

‘I’m not telling you yet. Weapon?’

Simon shook his head. ‘Impossible to say for sure right now, or possibly at all. But since we’ve not found it, I imagine it would be something small and hard: a hammer or a pipe. A rock perhaps. Something hand-held anyway.’

I nodded. The weapon would need to be hard enough to inflict this level of damage, but light enough for the killer to be able to carry it away with him afterwards: something that could deliver the force of a boulder but not the weight. That was an awful thought, of course. A heavy boulder might cause this level of damage with only one or two blows. With something like a hammer, it would have taken much more time and effort; many, many more blows.

But it also meant this probably wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment crime. The attacker had most likely brought the weapon with him and taken it away again. And that degree of ferocity tended to indicate a personal motive. Not always, but usually.

‘Come on then, Sherlock Hicks. Let’s have it.’

I stood up.

‘Ex-husband.’ Then I corrected myself: ‘Well, ex-partner. She used to wear a ring, but doesn’t any more. It might have been an engagement ring.’

‘Never married.’ Laura inclined her head. ‘The IT guys are pulling her files now, though, so if there’s any previous complaints or restraining orders there, we’ll know shortly.’

‘There will be,’ I said.

Bizarre as it sounds, I felt a little brighter. As bad as this murder was—and it was bad—I knew it would also be explicable. Because, ultimately, they all are. I’m not saying the explanation is ever satisfactory or reasonable—I’m not saying it’s ever
enough—
but the reason is always there, and it always makes sense to the person who did it.

The fact is, most crimes conform to mundane statistical patterns. The vast majority of female murder victims, for example, are killed by somebody they know, and it’s usually a partner or recent partner. Countrywide, two women die every week at the hands of men who are supposed to love them, or once claimed to, or imagine in their heads they did. So—especially having ruled out robbery and sexual assault—an ex-partner was the obvious guess. Most DV murders happen indoors, but this was close enough: someone had known where and when to find her. And now that I thought about it, the fact that Vicki Gibson, at the age of thirty-two, lived with her mother also indicated an ex rather than current partner.

I was sure that the IT guys—if not Carla Gibson herself—would very shortly give us a man’s name. At some point in the past, either Vicki or her mother was likely to have called the police before, because these things rarely just explode out of nowhere. Gibson’s ex-boyfriend would have a string of reports against his name, and probably some charges. At some point, she would have dared to leave him. And because of the type of man he was, the resentment and hurt everyone feels in such circumstances would have been much blacker and more aggressive than most.

From some of the other domestic homicides I’d dealt with, I could almost picture the pathetic bastard. When we picked him up, he’d probably still be blaming Vicki Gibson for what had happened—even now. Still convinced she’d pushed his buttons, and that it was somehow her fault.

‘We’ll see,’ Laura said.

‘We will.’

I was confident. This was a textbook bedroom crime, in my own personal architecture of murder. Hideous and awful, but comprehensible and quickly tied shut.

It had to be that.

What else could it be?

‘S
HE WASN’T HERE WHEN
I got up,’ Carla Gibson said.

‘No,’ Laura said gently. ‘I know.’

The flat shared by two generations of the Gibson family—until this morning, anyway—was so small that it seemed cramped even with just the three of us inside.

We were in the front room, which doubled as the kitchen—built in down one side, but only in the sense that the room’s threadbare carpet stopped, leaving a stretch of blackened floorboards along the base of the counter. I was leaning against the wall, next to a rusted wall-mounted boiler and exposed pipes that ran out of the ceiling and disappeared down dirty holes in the floorboards.

Laura was sitting opposite Carla at a rickety wooden table. Like most of the furniture in here, it was ramshackle and cheap: just flimsy wood, held together by little more than four metal bolts and a prayer. Laura was sitting carefully, as though worried the chair would break beneath her.

‘I crept through to make tea. I always creep through. She works so hard, you see, all the time, and I wanted to let her sleep. But she wasn’t here.’

‘We know, Mrs Gibson. I’m so sorry.’

The old lady seemed calm on the surface now that the mild sedative the nurse had given her had taken effect, but was still obviously in pieces—frail and shivering. Her eyes rarely met ours; she kept staring off into the middle distance instead, focused on something out of sight beyond the drab walls. Of course, the drug didn’t repair the damage, just dampened its effects. It remained obvious that she had been crying long and hard, and that all she was doing right now was avoiding facing the horror of her loss head on.

Aside from this living space, there was a bathroom and a single bedroom, where Carla slept. Vicki Gibson had slept in here, on the settee. It was sunken almost to the floor, but still made up carefully for the night’s sleep Vicki had never reached. Blankets and pillows had been laid neatly over it, topped by a patchwork quilt that I suspected had been hand-sewn by Carla herself.

It hurt to see it—a visual reminder that although they lived in abject poverty, they were making the most of it. Vicki worked late and often early too: cleaning at an office block as and when; shifts at the launderette in the evenings. Every night, Carla made up her daughter’s bed on that settee; every morning, she folded those blankets away and a makeshift second bedroom was transformed back into a makeshift front room again.

Every morning except this one.

And all the rest now.

‘And then I looked out,’ Carla said, ‘… and she was there instead.’

Laura said, ‘We don’t need to talk about all that again, Mrs Gibson.’

‘No. No.’

‘Let’s move on to something else.’

‘Yes.’

As much as anything else, I knew Laura was trying to distract the woman from the fact that her daughter still
was
out there. We wouldn’t be moving the body for a few more hours yet, which was a logistical nightmare in terms of handling residents of this and the neighbouring blocks.

When we were done talking to her, I planned to have a sympathetic officer stay here with Carla Gibson and gently persuade her away from the balcony at the far end of this room. The sight of the tent down there, while far less horrific than the scene that greeted her this morning, would really be just as awful. The fact was, we were taking care of her daughter as best we could right now. To relatives, though, that doesn’t always necessarily appear to be the case.

‘That’s good,’ Laura said. ‘Shall we talk about Tom Gregory instead?’

‘Tom …?’

Carla stared back at her for a moment.

‘Vicki’s ex-partner.’

‘I know the name, but what does he have to do with this?’

‘Well,’ Laura said, ‘I understand that their relationship was quite volatile.’

‘I didn’t know about that.’

I folded my arms, still saying nothing, because volatile was an understatement. In the time since viewing the body, we’d had the relevant files through from IT support, and my hunch outside hadn’t been
too
wide of the mark. The violence between the couple wasn’t as extensive as I’d imagined—but all that really meant was that it hadn’t been extensively reported to the police. Given the power dynamics and threats that go along with domestic violence, the two are obviously entirely different things. For every reported peak of violence, there’s most likely a bunch of others that are only marginally smaller.

What we knew for certain, though, was that Vicki Gibson had called the police about Tom Gregory in connection with three incidents. Two of those were when they’d been together; the third occasion, six months ago, had been after they separated. Gregory had turned up at the launderette, drunk out of his mind, and a couple of the other customers had needed to physically restrain him.

For various reasons, all three cases had disintegrated at some point before charges were filed. Cases of domestic violence, like rape, carry a huge amount of what we call slippage. Sometimes it’s our fault; more often, these days, it isn’t. But it’s fair to say there have been many, many cases where I wish I could have done more. Wish more than I could say, in fact.

Laura said, ‘Vicki never mentioned it?’

‘No, no.’ Carla frowned. ‘And I don’t think Vicki would have stood for that. She’s such a strong person, you know. So protective: always looking after me. It’s very hard for her, I know, but she’s such a good girl to me.’

‘I understand.’ If Laura noticed Carla’s use of the present tense, she chose not to acknowledge it. Wisely. ‘Did you ever meet him? Mr Gregory?’

‘No. I know they were very close for a time, but that was before she moved back home.’

Home.

I looked around again. Peter Gibson—Vicki’s father—had died the previous year. Her parents had lived here for a very long time, and this was where Vicki had grown up. I imagined her crawling around on this floor as an infant, the sounds of neighbours’ televisions barely muffled by the thin panels on the walls. A bad place, maybe, but a good family. Sometimes that’s enough; usually it isn’t. Vicki had struck out on her own, tried her best, and eventually been pulled back to where she’d started by the inescapable social elastic of our city. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: so much of where people end up depends on where they start.