A Traitor to Memory (9 page)

But he lowered his window in spite of these reassuring conclusions. His face spattered with the rain, he peered at the shapeless form on the ground. And then he saw the rest.

There
were
legs. There was a head as well. It merely hadn't
seemed so upon an initial glance through the rain-streaked window because the head was bowed deeply into the coat as if in prayer and the legs were tucked completely under the Calibra.

Heart attack, he thought in spite of what his eyes told him otherwise. Aneurysm. Stroke.

Only what were the legs
doing
under that car? Under it, when the only possible explanation for
that
was …

He snatched up his mobile and punched in triple nine.

DCI Eric Leach's body was screaming flu. He ached everywhere it was possible to ache. He was sweaty on the head, the face, and the chest; he had the chills. He should have phoned in ill when he first started feeling like crap in a basket. He should have gone to bed. There, he would have gleaned a double benefit. He would have caught up on the sleep he'd been missing since trying to reorganise his life post-divorce; he would have had an excuse when the phone call came through at midnight. Instead, here he was dragging his sorry shivering bum from an inadequately furnished flat into the cold, the wind, and the rain, where he was no doubt risking double pneumonia.

Live and learn, DCI Leach thought wearily. Next time he got married, he'd damn well stay married.

He saw the blue flashing lights of police vehicles as he made his final left turn. The hour was drawing on towards twenty past twelve, but the rising road in front of him was as bright as midday. Someone had hooked up floodlights, and these were complemented by the lightning-bolt hiccups of the forensic photographer.

The activity outside their houses had gathered a hefty collection of gawkers, but they were being held back by the crime scene tape that had been strung along the length of the street on both sides. Additional tape as well as barriers blocked the road at either end. Behind these, press photographers had already gathered, those vampires of the radio waves who continuously tuned in to the Met's frequency in the hope of learning that fresh blood was available somewhere.

DCI Leach thumbed a Strepsil out of its packet. He left his car behind an ambulance whose waterproof-shrouded attendants were lounging against its front bumper, drinking coffee from Thermos lids in an unhurried fashion that indicated which one of their services was going to be required. Leach nodded at them as he hunched his shoulders
against the rain. He showed his warrant card to the gangling young PC who was in charge of keeping the press at bay, and he stepped past the barrier and approached the collection of professionals who were gathered round a saloon car halfway up the street.

He heard snatches of neighbourhood conversation as he wearily trudged up the slight incline. Most of it was murmured in the reverential tones employed by those who understood how impartial the reaper was when he sauntered by to do his grim business. But there was also the occasional ill-considered complaint about the confusion that ensued when a sudden death in the open demanded police examination. And when one of those complaints was spoken in just the sort of pinched-nose I-smell-something-decidedly-unpleasant-and-it's-you tone that Leach detested, he turned on his heel. He stalked in the direction of the protest, which was concluding with the phrase “… one's sleep being disturbed for no
apparent
reason other than to satisfy the baser inclinations of the tabloid photographers” and found its source, a helmet-haired ghoul with her entire life savings invested in a plastic surgery job that needed redoing. She was saying, “If one's council taxes can
not
protect one from this sort of thing—” when Leach cut her off by speaking to the nearest constable guarding the scene.

“Shut that bitch up,” he barked. “Kill her if you have to.” And he went on his way.

At the moment, the crime scene action was being dominated by the forensic pathologist, who beneath a makeshift shelter of polythene sheets was wearing a bizarre combination of tweeds, wellingtons, and up-market Patagonia rain wear. He was just completing his preliminary examination of the body, and Leach got enough of a look to see they were dealing with either a cross-dresser or a female of indeterminate age, badly mangled. Facial bones were crushed; blood seeped from the hole where an ear had once been; raw skin on the head marked the areas where hair had been ripped from the scalp; the head hung at a natural angle but with a highly unnatural twist. It was just the thing to have to look upon when one was already light-headed with fever.

The pathologist—Dr. Olav Grotsin—slapped his hands on his thighs and pushed himself to his feet. He snapped off his latex gloves, tossed them to an assistant, and saw Leach where the DCI stood, attempting to ignore his own ill health and assessing what could be assessed from his position of less than four feet from the corpse.

“You look like hell,” Grotsin said to Leach.

“What've we got?”

“Female. One hour dead when I got here. Two at the most.”

“You're sure?”

“About what? The time or the sex?”

“The sex.”

“She's got breasts on her. Old but there. As for the rest, I don't like cutting off their knickers in the street. You can wait till the morning on that, I presume.”

“What happened?”

“Hit-and-run. Internal injuries. I'd venture to guess she's ruptured everything that could be ruptured.”

Leach said, “Shit,” and stepped past Grotsin to squat by the body. It lay a scant few inches from the driver's door of the Calibra, on its side with its back to the street. One arm was twisted behind it, and the legs were tucked beneath the Vauxhall's chassis. The Vauxhall itself was unblemished, Leach noted, which hardly surprised him. He couldn't see a driver hotly seeking a parking space and running over someone lying in the street in order to get it. He looked for tyre marks on the body and on the dark raincoat she wore.

“Her arm's dislocated,” Grotsin was saying behind him. “Both legs are broken. And we've got a bit of candy floss as well. Turn her head and you'll see it.”

“The rain didn't wash it off?”

“Head was protected under the car.”

Protected
was an odd choice of word, Leach thought. The poor sow was dead, whoever she was. Pink froth from her lungs may well have indicated that she didn't die instantly, but that was not much help to them and no help at all to the hapless victim. Unless, of course, someone had come upon her while she still lived and managed to catch a few critical words as she lay dying in the street.

Leach got to his feet and said, “Who phoned it in?”

“Right over there, sir.” It was Grotsin's assistant who replied, and she nodded across the street where for the first time Leach saw that a Porsche Boxter was double-parked with its hazard lights blinking. Two police constables were guarding this vehicle at either end, and just beyond them a middle-aged man in a trench coat stood beneath a striped umbrella and anxiously alternated his gaze from the Porsche to the broken body that lay some yards behind it.

Leach went over to examine the sports car. It would be a short night's work if the driver, the vehicle, and the victim were forming a neat little triad here on the street, but even as he approached the car,
Leach knew that this would not be likely. Grotsin would hardly have used the words
hit-and-run
if only the first term applied.

Still, Leach walked round the Boxter carefully. He squatted in front of it and examined its front end and its body. He went from there to the tyres and checked each of these. He lowered himself to the rain-washed pavement and scrutinised the Porsche's undercarriage. And when he was done, he ordered the car impounded for the crime team's analysis.

“Oh, I say. That can't be necessary” was the complaint made by Mr. Trench Coat. “I stopped, didn't I? As soon as I saw … And I reported it. Surely you can see that—”

“It's routine.” Leach joined the man as a PC was offering him a cup of coffee. “You'll have the car back quick enough. What's your name?”

“Pitchley,” the man said. “J. W. Pitchley. But see here, this is an expensive car, and I see no reason … Good God, if I'd hit her, the car would show the signs.”

“So you know it's a woman?”

Pitchley looked flustered. “I suppose I thought … I did go over to it … to her. After I rang triple nine. I got out of the car and went to see if there was anything I could do. She might have been alive.”

“But she wasn't?”

“I couldn't actually tell. She wasn't … I mean, I could see she was unconscious. She wasn't making a sound. She might have been breathing. But I knew not to touch….” He gulped his coffee. Steam rose from the cup.

“She's a fair enough mess. Our pathologist concluded she's a woman by checking for breasts. What did you do?”

Pitchley looked aghast at the implication. He glanced over his shoulder to the pavement, as if worried that the collection of onlookers standing there could hear his exchange with the detective and would draw erroneous conclusions from it. “Nothing,” he said in an undertone. “My God. I didn't do anything. Obviously, I could see that she was wearing a skirt beneath her coat. And her hair's longer than a man's—”

“Where it's not been ripped from her skull.”

Pitchley grimaced but went on. “So when I saw the skirt, I just assumed. That's it.”

“And that's where she was lying, is it? Right there by the Vauxhall?”

“Yes. Right there. I didn't touch her, didn't move her.”

“See anyone on the street? On the pavement? On a porch? At a window? Anywhere?”

“No. No one. I was just driving along. There was no one anywhere except her, and I wouldn't have noticed her at all except her hand—or her arm or something … white, this was—caught my eye. That's it.”

“Were you alone in your own car?”

“Yes. Yes, of course I was alone. I live alone. Over there. Just up the street.”

Leach wondered at the volunteered information. He said, “Where were you coming from this evening, Mr. Pitchley?”

“South Kensington. I was … I was dining with a friend.”

“The friend's name?”

“I say, am I being accused of something?” Pitchley sounded flustered rather than concerned. “Because if phoning the emergency services when one finds a body is grounds for suspicion, I'd like a solicitor with me when I—Hello, there.
Do
keep your distance from my car, would you please?” This last was directed towards a swarthy constable who was part of a fingertip search ongoing in the street.

More constables combed the area surrounding Pitchley and Leach, and it was from this group that a female PC presently emerged, a woman's handbag in her latex-gloved grip. She trotted towards Leach, and he donned his own gloves, stepping away from Pitchley with instructions to the man to give his address and phone number to one of the policemen guarding his car. He met the female constable in the middle of the street and took the handbag from her.

“Where was it?”

“Ten yards back. Beneath a Montego. Keys and wallet are in it. There's an ID as well. Driving licence.”

“Is she local?”

“Henley-on-Thames,” the constable replied.

Leach unfastened the handbag's clasp, fished out the keys, and handed them over to the constable. “See if they fit any of the cars in the area,” he told her and as she set off to do so, he took out the wallet and opened it to locate the ID.

He first read the name without making a connection. Later he would wonder how he'd failed to twig her identity instantly. But he was feeling so much like trampled horse turds that it wasn't until he'd read not only her organ donor card but also the name imprinted on her cheques that he realised who the woman actually was.

Then he looked from the handbag he was holding to the crumpled
form of its owner lying like so much discarded rubbish in the street. And as his body shuddered, what he said was, “God. Eugenie. Jesus Christ.
Eugenie”.

Far across town, Detective Constable Barbara Havers sang along with the rest of the party-goers and wondered how many more choruses of jolly-good-fellowing she was going to have to live through before she could make her escape. It wasn't the hour of the night that bothered her. True, one in the morning meant that she was already cutting critically into her beauty rest, but since even doing a Sleeping-Beauty wouldn't make an inroad into her general appearance, she knew that she could live with the knowledge that if she managed to get four hours' kip at the end of the night, she was going to be one lucky bird. Rather, she was bothered by the reason for the party, exactly
why
, along with her colleagues from New Scotland Yard, she'd been crammed into an overheated house in Stamford Brook for the last five hours.