Looking Good Dead (6 page)

The Weatherman walked round until he could see the screen. Rows of digits, all encrypted, ran down and across it. One group of letters was blinking. Studying the screen for some moments, he then carefully studied the other three screens. Then back to the first one, to the steady blink-blink-blink.

‘Um, there could be a number of reasons for this.’

‘There could be,’ the American agreed, impatiently. ‘But I’ve eliminated them. Which leaves us with just one possibility – someone unauthorized has gotten hold of a subscriber disc. So what I need you to do is provide us with the name and address of the subscriber who lost it, and this person who found it.’

‘I can give you the user ID of the subscriber – that will be on the login details. Um, the person who found it – er – um, might not be that easy.’

‘If he was able to find us, you’ll be able to find him.’ Mr Smith folded his hands, and his lips parted into a fleshy smile. ‘You have the resources. Use them.’

8

Roy Grace was in a muddy field, waist-high in rape, in a white paper suit pulled on over his clothes, and protective overshoes. For some moments he just stood in the rain-spotted wind and watched an ant steadfastly making its way across the female human hand that was lying, palm down, among the stalks of brilliant yellow rape.

Then he knelt and sniffed the flesh, flapping away a bluebottle. No smell came from the hand, which told him that it must be fresh – in this summer warmth probably less than twenty-four hours old.

Years back, as a fledgling detective attending a murder scene – a young woman found raped and strangled in a churchyard in the centre of Brighton – he had been approached by an attractive young red-headed journalist on the Argus who had been hanging around outside the police cordon. She had asked him if he felt emotions when he attended a murder, or whether he regarded it as just doing his job, the way anyone else did any other kind of job.

Although happily married to Sandy at the time, he had enjoyed his flirtatious chat with her and had not wanted to confess that this was actually the first murder he had ever attended. So, trying to be all macho he had told her that yes, it was a job, just a job, that was how he coped with the horror of murder scenes.

Now he was thinking back to that moment.

To that bravado lie.

The truth was that the day he turned up to a murder scene and it felt no more than just doing a job, the day he did not care deeply for the victim, would be the day he would quit the force and do something else. And that day was still a long way off. Maybe it would eventually happen to him, the way it had happened to his dad and the way it seemed to happen to many of the old sweats on the force, but right now he was feeling a whole bellyful of the same emotions he had each time he came to a murder scene.

It was a potent mixture of fear at what he was going to have to look at, and the awesome burden of responsibility that fell on his shoulders as Senior Investigating Officer – the knowledge that this dead woman, whoever she was, had parents, maybe siblings, maybe a husband or lover, maybe children. One of her loved ones would have to identify the body, and all of them, in a state of grief and shock, would have to be interrogated and eliminated from enquiries.

The hand was elegant, long fingers, well kept nails, the bright pink varnish contrasting vividly with flesh that had turned the colour of alabaster, except for a long strip of dark, congealed blood in a gash that ran along the leading edge of her thumb and into her wrist. It looked like a defence wound. He wondered who she was, what kind of a person she was, what had led to this.

The first twenty-four hours in a murder enquiry were key. After that, detection became increasingly slow and laborious. Over the following hours and days he knew he would have to drop just about everything else in his life for this enquiry. He would get to know as many details of her life and death that her body, her home, her personal effects, her family and friends could yield. It was likely he would end up knowing more about her than anyone who had known her when she was alive.

The enquiry would be invasive and at times brutal. Death alone did a pretty thorough job of stripping away human dignity, but it had nothing on a police forensic investigation. And there was always the haunting sense that this dead person’s soul might – just might – be watching him.

‘This is where we think the hand came from, Roy.’ The bulky figure of Bill Barley, the local Detective Inspector from East Downs Division, made even bulkier-looking by his white oversuit billowing in the wind, stood beside him, pointing a latex-gloved finger across the field which he had diligently cordoned off at a site where several SOCO members, also in white suits, were busy erecting a square white tent.

Beyond, at the edge of the field where he had parked, Grace could see yet another vehicle joining the cluster of marked and unmarked police cars, the dog-handler’s van, the photographer’s van and the tall, square truck-sized shape of the Major Incident Vehicle dwarfing everything.

The Coroner’s black van hadn’t been summoned yet. Nor had the press been notified, but it wouldn’t be long before the first reporter arrived. Just like the blowflies.

Barley was a true old sweat, in his fifties, with a bluff Sussex accent and a rubicund face lined with broken veins. Grace was impressed by the speed with which he had secured the area. The worst nightmare was to arrive at a murder scene where inexperienced officers had already trampled most of the evidence into the ground. The DI appeared to have this scene well under control.

Barley covered the hand with some heavy-duty sheeting, then Grace followed him, stepping carefully in his tracks to disturb the ground as little as possible, glancing every few moments at a police Alsatian loping gracefully through the rape in the distance, until they reached the area where most of the activity was concentrated. Grace could see immediately why. In the centre, flattening a small area of the crop, was a large, crumpled black bin liner, with torn shreds jigging in a gust of wind, and several bluebottles flying around it.

Grace nodded greetings at one of the SOCO officers, Joe Tindall, who he knew well. In his late thirties, Tindall used to look like a mad scientist, with a thatch of dull hair and bottle-lensed glasses, but had had a makeover since falling in love with a much younger girl. Now, inside his hooded white suit, he sported a completely shaven head, a quarter-inch-wide vertical strip of beard running from the centre of his lower lip down to the centre of his chin, and hip rectangular glasses with blue-tinted lenses. He looked more like a drugs dealer than a boffin.

‘Morning, Roy.’ Tindall greeted him in his usual sarcastic tone. ‘Welcome to “One Thousand and One Things to Do with a Bin Liner on a Wednesday Morning in Peacehaven”.’

‘Been shopping, have you?’ Grace asked, nodding at the black plastic.

‘You can’t believe the things you can get with your Nectar points these days,’ Tindall said. Then he knelt and very carefully opened out the liner.

Roy Grace had been in the police for nineteen years, the past fifteen of which he had spent investigating serious crimes, mostly murders. Although every death disturbed him, there wasn’t much any more that really shocked him. But the contents of the black bin liner did.

It contained the torso of what had been clearly a young, shapely woman. It was covered in congealed blood, the pubic hairs so matted he couldn’t tell their colour, and almost every inch of her flesh had been pierced by some sharp instrument, probably a knife he thought, in a frenzy of stabbing. The head was absent and all four limbs had been severed. One arm and both legs were in the bag along with the body.

‘Jesus,’ Grace said.

Even Tindall’s humour had dried up. ‘There’s some really sick bastard out there.’

‘Still no head?’

‘They’re looking.’

‘A pathologist’s been called?’

Tindall waved away a couple of bluebottles. Some more appeared and Grace flapped those away, angrily. Bluebottles – blowflies – could smell decaying human flesh from five miles away. Short of a sealed container, it was impossible to keep them away from a body. But sometimes they were useful. Bluebottles laid eggs, which hatched into larvae, which became maggots and then bluebottles. It was a process which took only a few days. On a body that had not been discovered for weeks it was possible to work out roughly how long it had been dead from the number of generations of insect larvae infestation.

‘Someone’s called for a pathologist, I presume, Joe?’

Tindall nodded. ‘Bill has.’

‘Nadiuska?’ Grace asked, hopefully.

There were two Home Office pathologists who tended to be sent to murder scenes in this area, because they lived reasonably locally. The police favourite was Nadiuska De Sancha, a statuesque Spaniard of Russian aristocratic descent who was married to one of Britain’s leading plastic surgeons. She was popular because not only was she good at her job, and extremely helpful with it, but she was wonderful to look at. In her late forties, she could easily pass for a decade younger; whether her husband’s craftsmanship had had anything to do with that was a matter of constant debate among all who worked with her – the speculation fuelled even more by the fact she invariably wore roll-neck tops, winter and summer.

‘No, luckily for her – Nadiuska doesn’t like multiple stabbings – it’s Dr Theobald. And there’s a police surgeon on his way as well.’

‘Ah,’ Grace said, trying not to let the disappointment show in his voice. No pathologist liked multiple stab wounds because each one had to be painstakingly measured. Nadiuska De Sancha was not just eye candy, she was fun to work with – flirtatious, a big sense of humour and fast in her work. By contrast, Frazer Theobald was, by general consensus, about as fun to be around as the corpses he examined. And slow. So painfully slow. But his work was meticulous and could never be faulted.

And suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Grace could see the man’s diminutive frame, all in white and clutching his large bag, striding across the field towards them, his hooded head not that far above the top of the rape.

‘Good morning, all,’ the pathologist said, and exchanged latex-gloved handshakes with the trio.

Dr Frazer Theobald was in his mid-fifties. A stockily built man a tad under five foot two inches tall with beady, nut-brown eyes, he sported a thick Adolf Hitler moustache beneath a Concorde-shaped hooter of a nose and an untidy, threadbare thatch of wiry hair. It would have not needed much more than a large cigar for him to have gone to a fancy dress party as a passable Groucho Marx. But Grace doubted Theobald was the kind of man ever to have contemplated attending something as frivolous as a fancy dress party. All he knew about the man’s private life was that he was married to a lecturer in microbiology, and that his main relaxation was solo dinghy sailing.

‘So, right, Detective Superintendent Grace,’ he said, his eyes fixing first on the remains inside the flapping sheets of the bin liner, then on the ground around. ‘Can you bring me up to speed?’

‘Yes, Dr Theobald.’ It was always formal with the pathologist for the first half-hour or so. ‘So far we have this dismembered torso of what looks like a young woman with multiple stab wounds.’ Grace looked at Barley as if for confirmation and the DI took over.

‘East Downs police were alerted by an emergency call made earlier this morning by a woman walking her dog. The dog found a human hand, which we have left in situ.’ The DI pointed. ‘I cordoned off the area, and a search by police dogs discovered these remains here, which I have left untouched, other than to further open up the bin liner.’

‘No head?’

‘Not yet,’ the DI said.

The pathologist knelt, set down his bag and, carefully folding back the bin liner, studied the remains in silence for some moments.

‘We need a fingerprint and DNA test right away to see if we can get an ident,’ Grace said. He stared downhill across the field to the streets of houses. And beyond them, a mile or so distant, he could see the grey water of the English Channel, barely distinguishable from the grey of the sky.

Addressing the DI, Grace continued, ‘We should also start a house-to-house enquiry in the area, ask for reports of anything suspicious in the past couple of days. See if there are any missing persons in the area – if not broaden that out to the whole of Brighton and then Sussex. Are there any CCTV cameras, Bill?’

‘Only in some of the local shops and some other businesses.’

‘Make sure they’re told to keep all tapes for the past seven days.’

‘Right away.’

Nodding down, Grace said, ‘Any idea how these remains might have got here? Any tyre marks?’

‘We have a trail of footprints. Heavy-duty boots of some kind, from the patterns. They look sunk in deep; I think she must have been carried,’ Bill Barley said, pointing along a narrow band of soil and rape between two strips of police tape stretching into the distance.

Theobald had his bag open now, and was carefully examining the bloody hand lying there.

Who is she? Grace wanted to know. Why was she killed? How did she get here? Anger boiled in him.

Anger and something else.

It was the awful knowledge, the one he refused ever to face, that this young woman’s fate could have been his own wife’s fate also. Nine years ago Sandy had disappeared off the face of the earth, and not a trace of her had appeared since. She could have been murdered and dumped somewhere. Killed and savagely butchered. If you wanted to get rid of a body and make sure it would never, ever be found it was easy – there were dozens of ways to do it.

And that was what bothered him now. Someone had gone to the trouble of butchering this girl and removing her head. But if they had really wanted to make it hard to identify her, they would have taken her hands as well. So why hadn’t they?

Why had they dumped her remains here in the middle of this field, where she was bound to be discovered quickly? Instead of putting her even in a shallow grave?

Could it be, he wondered, because whoever had done this had wanted her to be discovered?