Where the Devil Can't Go (6 page)

Janusz took the Northern Line south from Angel, the tube stop nearest his flat, to Bank, where he’d change for the Central Line east. He hated the tube, refused to use it in rush hour, and if there were a crush on the platform he’d head straight back up the escalator. But today he was too pushed for time to do the three-bus Islington to Leytonstone safari.

Sitting in the half-full carriage, he caught the eye of a little girl, aged about eight or nine, sitting across from him with her mother. He pulled the cross-eyed gargoyle face that used to crack Bobek up at that age. She grinned. Then he noticed the words picked out in sequins across her flat, pink t-shirted chest –
FUTURE PORN STAR
– and the smile dropped from his face like a theatre curtain.

As the woman and girl got up to get off at the next stop, the girl sketched a shy wave goodbye, but the mother shot him a searching look.
The cheek of it!
he thought. You dress your little girl like a trainee whore and treat
me
like a paedophile.

He emerged from the shelter of Leytonstone tube still wearing a thunderous frown, and headed for the high street, a raw wind wrapping the trench coat about his legs.

Leytonstone reminded him of how Highbury had looked when he first arrived in London. The greengrocers’ displays bloomed with strange foreign vegetables – the kind he’d only ever seen in a curry – and dark-skinned men wrapped in coats argued over glasses of coffee at pavement tables. He stepped into the road to let a young couple with a baby buggy pass, and they thanked him in broken English, their singsong lilt marking them out as fellow Poles. He found himself scanning the crowded pavements for Weronika’s high cheekbones.

The photographs on display in the window of Parry’s featured the usual suspects – wedding couples, aspiring models, obese children – but on closer examination, Janusz decided that the shots had a certain flair. Inside, a geeky-looking young man sat behind the counter reading Photographer’s Weekly.

Janusz had decided his best strategy would be to act the dumb
Polak
, just off the plane from Lodz, so he did a lot of smiling and nodding for openers, then showed the guy the photo. “You make this picture...?”

The guy took the bait, and as he studied the photo, a look of professional pride came over his face.

“Yeah, I remember – she was very beautiful, this girl.”

Janusz tapped himself on the chest. “My sister,” he said with a modest smile.

“Right,” said the guy dropping his gaze. He handed the photo back, as though suddenly keen to get shot of it.

Janusz pretended not to notice. “She came here with her boyfriend,” he said – a guess rewarded with a wary nod. “This man is my good friend,” he explained, his jaw starting to ache from all the grinning. “Today, he has to work, but he asks me to come because he likes to get more photos, to make her folio?”

“Her modelling portfolio,” the guy said, looking relieved. “Yeah, I did the shots two or three weeks ago.” He started leafing through a tray of folders behind the counter.

Don’t ask me for a name
, prayed Janusz.

“What’s his name again...?”

Kurwa.

“Ah, here it is. Pawel Adamski, yes?” – his pronunciation suggesting he was used to Polish customers. He spread a series of black and white photos across the counter like a pack of cards, and examined them, frowning, before selecting one and turning it round to face Janusz.

“I think this is the best one,” he said.

It was a startling image. Shot from above, Weronika lay on her back, eyes half-closed and lips parted, naked beneath a white sheet that reached from her feet to her chest. The lighting had been arranged to capture the subtly different shades of white in the scene - the chalky pallor of her face, the marble-like arms, the ivory sheen of the silk shading into grey where it fell into folds. Her hands lay loosely cupped, one within the other, on her stomach, lacking only a bouquet to complete the portrait of a virgin bride. Or a dead one – thought Janusz.

He shuffled through the rest of the shots, but couldn’t find anything that might explain the photographer’s earlier discomfiture.

“They’re good,” he said, then, taking a guess, leaned toward the guy. “But I think he meant the other ones,” he hissed. “How you call it? The ‘Page 3’ stuff?”

The guy hesitated for a moment, then turned to open a filing cabinet.

“Your friend directed these ones,” he said, his tone guarded, pushing a folder across the counter with the tips of his fingers. “All I did was set up the lights for him.”

Inside was a contact sheet of a couple of dozen shots, colour this time.

Wearing only a black G-string, Weronika struck a variety of unimaginative soft porn poses – sticking her butt out...pushing her smallish breasts together... reclining with legs spread. Not much
chiaroscuro
in this lot, thought Janusz. No wonder the photographer had panicked when Janusz announced himself as Weronika’s brother – he’d probably thought he was about to get a kicking.

The images offended and depressed him. The amateurish raunchiness of the girl’s pose jarred with the innocence of those rounded lips, and her eyes looked glazed, as though she were drunk – or on drugs. In that moment he decided he couldn’t keep his promise simply to pass on the couple’s address to Pani Tosik. No. When he found them he’d do his best to persuade the girl to dump her lowlife boyfriend and come home, and then he’d give Pawel Adamski a short sharp lesson in gentlemanly conduct.

Janusz tapped the contact sheet. “You can send him a copy in the post?” he asked the guy.

The guy checked the cover of the folder, said: “Sure, but I’ll need an address – he didn’t leave one, or even a phone number.”

That was a blow. After promising to telephone with his friend’s address, Janusz left.

Still, at least he had a name.

SIX

Wapping Mortuary was housed in a low, grey brick building encircled by a high wall, which made it look more like an industrial unit than anything remotely medical, thought Kershaw, as she buzzed the battered entry phone beside the big steel double gates.

A few minutes later, a mortuary technician with spiky dyed black hair and a bolt through her eyebrow was helping her into a blue cotton gown, the type surgeons wore for operations.

“First time?” she asked, her tone neutral.

Kershaw nodded. “I’m not squeamish, though,” she added, before realising she’d spoken with unnecessary forcefulness.

Goth girl ignored the comment. “If you do start feeling a bit funny, just let us know before you keel over, OK?” She waited while Kershaw pulled on blue plastic overshoes, then led the way through a tiled corridor and into the post mortem room.

Kershaw had seen the scene reconstructed a dozen times in TV cop dramas – the low-ceilinged tiled room, the naked bodies laid out on steel gurneys, some still whole, others already dissected. But it was a bit different when you knew it wasn’t all just an artful arrangement of wax models and fake blood. Anyway, television couldn’t prepare you for the smell – a terrible cocktail of chopped liver, body fluids, and bleach.

The Goth girl paused at the first gurney. “DB16,” she said. Spread-eagled on the shallow stainless steel tray, under the unsparing fluorescent lights, lay the girl with the Titian hair – or what was left of her.

“I’ll tell Doctor Waterhouse you’re here,” she said, leaving Kershaw alone with the body.

The girl was opened like a book from collarbone to pubis, revealing a dark red cavern where her insides had been. A purplish pile of guts lay between her thighs, as though she’d just given birth to them. The skin, and its accompanying layer of yellow fat, had been flayed from her limbs and torso, and now lay beneath her like a discarded jacket, and her ribcage was cracked open, each rib separated and bent back. Water tinkled musically, incongruously, through a drain hole under the gurney.

The good news, reflected Kershaw, was that she looked more like the remains of some predator’s meal on the Serengeti than a human being.

“DC Kershaw, I presume?”

Tearing her gaze away from the carcass, she saw a tall, silver-haired man in his sixties rinsing his gloved hands at a nearby sink. Shaking off the drops, he approached her, beaming.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said.

“Thanks for having me, Doctor,” she said.

“Not at all,” said Doctor Waterhouse. “I’m always delighted to see a new detective braving the rigours of a PM.”

He handed Kershaw some latex gloves with a little flourish, like he was giving her a bunch of violets, then spread his arms to encompass the cadaver lying between them.

“Our lady,” he began, in a plummy voice, “is an IC1 female who apparently enjoyed good health throughout her life, with no evidence of any chronic condition.” He spoke as though addressing a roomful of medical students.

“How old would you say she was?” asked Kershaw, wriggling her fingers into the second glove.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said with a tilt of his head. Then, seeing her enquiring look, “I’m afraid it’s no easier to estimate someone’s age from the inside than it is from the outside.”

Over Doc Waterhouse’s shoulder, Kershaw noticed the Goth girl at the next gurney along. Wielding a huge curved needle, she was sewing up the chest cavity of a big man with tattooed biceps. His face had such a healthy colour, that for a split-second Kershaw expected him to sit up and rip the needle from the girl’s hand.

Waterhouse was saying: “She was certainly of childbearing age.” He paused. “I found a foetus
in utero
that, by my calculations, would put this lady in the late stages of the first trimester of pregnancy at the time of death.”

Kershaw’s eyebrows shot up. If the girl’s boyfriend didn’t fancy being a Daddy, the pregnancy might have sparked an argument that ended in the girl’s death. She pulled pad and pencil from the pocket of her gown. “How many weeks is that, Doctor?”

“Between nine and twelve, judging by the foetus?” Waterhouse mused. “Perhaps you’d like to see it?”

“No, I’m fine, thanks,” said Kershaw, with a nervous smile. “Have you found anything suspicious? Any signs of violence?”

Looking at her over the tops of his half moon glasses, the smiling Waterhouse raised a latexed finger.
Patience.
“Since the body was recovered from the river, let us first examine the evidence for drowning as the possible cause of death,” he said, with the air of someone proposing a picnic on a lake, and started to stroll up and down the gurney, hands clasped behind his back.

Kershaw groaned inwardly – she was clearly in for the full lecture theatre treatment. At that moment, she happened to catch the eye of the Goth technician. The girl’s fractionally raised eyebrow said – yes, he was always like this.

“What evidence might we expect to find, post-mortem, in the case of a drowning, Detective?” Waterhouse went on.

“Water in the lungs?” said Kershaw, suppressing a note of bored sarcasm. She’d be here all day at this rate.

“But how do we know whether the water entered the lungs
post-
or
ante
-mortem?”

He stopped pacing and looked at Kershaw. She shrugged.

“You may be surprised to learn that we currently have
no means
of establishing the sequence of events,” said Waterhouse, as thought he’d only just discovered this extraordinary state of affairs himself. “If we allow that our lady was in the water six, perhaps seven days, by my calculations, then it is entirely possible that the copious quantities of river water, weed and sand present in her lungs and stomach found its way there
after
her death.”

“So how we do we find out if she drowned or not?”

“Well, we
could
run a raft of analyses, to find out whether any diatoms – a kind of river algae – have found their way into her organs.” He pulled a doubtful grimace. “But since none of it is the least bit conclusive I consider it an egregious waste of public money.”

No way of telling if someone had drowned
? All those TV series where brilliant pathologists solved tricky cases single-handed after the cops had failed were clearly a load of old bollocks, thought Kershaw. She realised that Waterhouse was looking at her like it was her turn to speak.

“So...if there’s no such thing as conclusive proof of drowning,” she said. “I guess all you can do is rule everything else out – a process of elimination?”

“Well done, Detective,” said Waterhouse with an approving nod.

“However, I must tell you I can find no evidence of foul play. The various injuries to the body are all
post
-mortem.”

Kershaw felt as though she’d been slapped. She wasn’t ready to see the girl demoted from murder victim to just another bridge jumper.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Subcutaneous dissection reveals no deep bruising or other injury.” Waterhouse waved a hand over the flayed body.” Nor could I find any sign of the pinpoint haemorrhages in the conjunctivae or mucus membranes that would suggest asphyxiation.”

He beckoned her over to a deep stainless sink where he plunged a gloved hand into a pile of what looked like offal, spread out on a large plastic chopping board.

“Here we are,” he announced. “The hyoid bone – from the lady’s neck.” He brandished a pair of tiny bony horns with bits of tissue still attached – which, to Kershaw, looked a bit like a truncated chicken wishbone. “When someone is strangled, more often than not, the hyoid gets broken. But this little fellow is intact.” With the air of a conjuror, he pressed his thumbs into the centre of the horns until they snapped. “
Voila
!”

Kershaw stifled a grimace. “So in your view,” she said, pencil hovering over her notebook. “She wasn’t beaten, stabbed, strangled or suffocated.”

“Correct.”

“How did she die then?”

“Well, the chalky residue I found in the stomach does suggest she had ingested drugs a few hours before death,” said Waterhouse.

“Suicide?” Kershaw didn’t try to disguise the disappointment in her voice.