Captives (3 page)

    

    

    

    They had pulled three bodies from the wreckage.

    The fourth they had found at the roadside, obviously thrown clear when the Metro first crashed.

    The car was on its roof, a tangled mass of metal that looked as if it had been attacked by a gang of thugs wielding sledgehammers. The field in which it had finally come to rest was strewn with pieces of metal that had been torn from the chassis as the car had cartwheeled into oblivion. Other objects were also scattered around.

    A high heeled shoe.

    A handbag.

    A couple of cassette tapes.

    A watch.

    A severed hand.

    Wally Hughes gathered them all up, moving slowly round the wreckage, dropping the personal effects into a plastic bag. They might help with identification when the time came. The occupants of the car certainly couldn't. So bad were their injuries it was even difficult, at first glance, to tell which were male and which female. The driver had been impaled on the steering column. It had taken Wally and two of his companions over twenty minutes to remove the corpse, one of them vomiting when the body came in half at the waist as the torso was finally freed. Whoever had been in the passenger seat had fared no better. The head had been practically severed by broken glass when the windscreen had shattered. Portions of skin still hung from the obliterated screen like bizarre decorations.

    Christmas decorations?

    Wally shook his head and sighed, stooping to pick up a blood-flecked wallet. Death at any time of the year was a terrible thing, but at Christmas it seemed even more intrusive. In his twelve years as an ambulanceman he had noticed how the public seemed to take on an almost lemming-like mentality. Despite warnings every year not to drink and drive, to take more care in dangerous road conditions, men and women (sometimes children too) were pulled or cut or lifted piece by piece from car smashes. Huge pile-ups or single-vehicle accidents. What did it matter? Death was death, whether it happened to one or twenty at a time.

    This time there had been four.

    The car had come off the road at speed, obviously, hit a grassy bank, ploughed through a low stone wall, cartwheeled and ended up on its roof. How had it happened?

    That was always the first question that came into Wally's mind as he approached the scene of an accident. He didn't even consider things such as, 'Will the victim be alive? If so, how bad will the injuries be?' Besides, it was usually simple to tell, on first glance at the scene of carnage, how likely it was that there would be any survivors. In this particular case he had taken one look at the wreck and decided that the ambulance would be driving straight to the morgue, not the emergency wing of the hospital.

    He picked up a glove, dropped it into his plastic bag and straightened up, wincing slightly at the pain from his lower back. Rheumatism. The cold weather always exacerbated it and tonight was cold. There was a thick coating of frost on the grass and the road was icy, especially on the bend.

    Perhaps that was what had happened. The driver had lost control on the slippery road. Perhaps he'd been going too fast. Perhaps he'd been drunk. Perhaps he'd been showing off.

    Perhaps. Perhaps.

    None of that seemed to matter now. They wouldn't know why it had happened, not for a few days. In the intervening period, Wally and his companions would have countless other accidents to deal with. At Christmas time the ambulance service in Greater London alone dealt with upwards of 3000 emergency calls a day.

    Merry Christmas.

    By the roadside two ambulances stood with their rear doors open, the blue lights turning silently. The glare of their headlamps cut through the blackness of the night, one set pointing at the wrecked Metro. In the gloom Wally continued with his task of recovering personal effects. He noticed that blood had sprayed over a wide area around the car; it glistened on the frosted grass, appearing quite black in the blinding whiteness of the headlights. There was little talk among the other men as they went about their tasks. There was a weary familiarity about the whole thing. It wasn't the first time they'd seen it and Christ alone knew it wouldn't be the last.

    The head of one of the passengers in the rear of the car had hit the back of the driver's seat so hard they had found three teeth embedded in the upholstery. Now, as he flicked on his torch and shone it over the ground, Wally found two more teeth. He picked them up and dropped them into the bag.

    A police car was also parked close to the bend, and one of the officers was making notes. As soon as identification of the victims was made it would be the job of the police to notify the next of kin. Wally was glad he didn't have to do that job. It was one, thing to pull a man from a car, a man who was still screaming despite the fact that he had no face, but it was something else to sit calmly opposite a mother and inform her that her son was dead. To tell a father his daughter had been crushed beneath a lorry, that it had taken twenty minutes to scrape her brains up off the road.

    Wally shone the torch over the ground once more, then headed back towards the wall, stepping through the gap the car had made on its fateful passage.

    He was heading towards the closest ambulance, glancing across at two of his companions lifting the fourth body on a stretcher, when he heard the shout.

    'This one's still alive.'

    

    

    'We drew the short straw again.'

    Detective Sergeant Stuart Finn fumbled in his jacket pocket for his Zippo, flipped the lighter open and lit the Marlboro jammed between his lips.

    As the lift slowly descended he glanced across at his companion who was gazing distractedly at the far wall.

    'I said…'

    'I heard you,' Detective Inspector Frank Gregson told him, his eyes still fixed on a point on the wall.

    Finn looked at his companion then across to where his gaze seemed fixed. He noticed a fly on the wall, sitting there cleaning its wings.

    The lift bumped to a halt and Gregson glanced up to reassure himself that they were at the right floor. As he stepped towards the door he swung the manila file he held, squashing the fly against the wall, where it left a red smudge.

    'I know how he feels,' murmured Finn as he stepped from the lift. The doors slid shut behind him. 'Flies eat shit, don't they?'

    Gregson didn't answer.

    'I certainly know how he feels,' the DS added wearily. 'Well, come on, Frank. Any ideas who this joker might have been?'

    'How the hell am I supposed to know?' Gregson said. 'They drag the bloke out of a fire after he's been chased halfway across the West End. By the time they get him out he's so badly burned his fucking mother wouldn't even know him. If he's got one.'

    Their footsteps echoed dully in the long corridor as they approached New Scotland Yard's forensic labs. Signs proclaimed: PATHOLOGY. Gregson looked down at the file again, glancing at the number in the top right-hand corner. That was all the man was to them at the moment. A number. No name and certainly no face. That had been burned away along with most of the rest of him. But he had to be identified and that job was to be done by the Yard's forensic pathologists.

    Once identification had been made it was the task of Gregson and Finn to find out why the man had run amok.

    Finn took a drag on his cigarette and swept a hand through his thinning hair. He was twenty-nine, a year younger than his superior but his bald patch (which worried him) made him look older. Gregson was greying at the temples but, he told himself, the light hairs were the result of stress and not the onset of more mature years. Both men were thick-set, Finn perhaps a little slimmer, although his belly strained unattractively against his'shirt. He'd put the weight on a few months ago when he first tried to give up smoking.

    Gregson opened the door of the pathology lab. The two men walked in.

    'Where's Barclay?' the DI asked a man in a lab coat who was fiddling with a microscope slide.

    The man nodded in the direction of a door marked PRIVATE: NO ENTRY BY UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL.

    Both policemen made for the door. Gregson knocked and walked in without waiting for an invitation.

    It was cold inside the pathology lab.

    The cold and the smell were two of the things that always struck him. The acrid stench of death and sometimes decay. He had seen things inside this room that others only saw in nightmares. Call it an occupational hazard.

    The chief pathologist, Phillip Barclay, had his back to the men as they entered. He glanced over his shoulder and nodded a greeting. Behind him banks of cold cabinets stood like huge filing drawers. A storehouse for sightless eyes. Freezers containing bodies or awaiting them. On one of six dissecting tables lay a body covered by a sheet. It was towards this table that the two policemen walked, their footsteps echoing even more loudly in the high-ceilinged room.

    'If you've come looking for answers I'm going to have to disappoint you,' said Barclay, turning to face them.

    Gregson looked challengingly at him, watching as the pathologist swung himself off the stool on which he'd been sitting. He walked across to the dissection tables and pulled the sheet back.

    'Shit,' murmured Finn.

    The shape beneath the sheet was little more than a blackened skeleton. Flesh, crisped and blackened by the fire, still clung to the bones but it looked more like a coating of thick ash ready to fall off at the slightest touch. A few teeth gleamed whitely through the blackened mess, but much of the skull had been pulverised on initial impact. Finn could see tiny fragments of brain, also blackened, welded to the inside of the shattered skull.

    'I've examined what there is of him, obviously,' said Barclay, pulling the sheet further back and stepping back, arms folded. 'But it's going to be a long job identifying him.'

    'What about dental records?' Gregson wanted to know, his eyes never leaving the corpse.

    'As you can see, most of the head is gone. Obliterated. He hit the window head first when he went through it. Actually, that's the strange thing. From the extent of the damage to the head and upper body I'd say he was leaning forward when he hit that window.'

    'Meaning?' Gregson wanted to know.

    'He intended to do it. He was making sure he killed himself.'

    'Looks like he did a pretty good job,' Finn remarked, sucking on his cigarette.

    Barclay looked disdainfully at him.

    'Don't smoke in here, please,' he said.

    Finn looked aggrieved.

    'Why? It's not going to bother him,' he said, nodding towards the corpse.

    'It bothers me,' the pathologist said, watching as Finn nipped out the cigarette, burning his fingers in the process. He dropped the butt into his jacket pocket.

    'You could identify him from dental records, though,' said Gregson.

    'Like I said, it won't be easy. It'll take time but it's not impossible.' There was a long silence broken again by Barclay. 'How many did he kill?'

    'Including the baby, five. Six more are in hospital, one on the critical list. It doesn't make sense,' Gregson observed, shaking his head. 'The whole thing was clumsy. He robbed a bank, but he left with no money and in a way which almost guaranteed he'd be caught. Then, when he could have escaped, he killed himself.'

    'Bit elaborate for a suicide, isn't it?' Finn mused.

    'Couldn't you take any prints from the guns?' Gregson asked.

    Barclay shook his head. 'He was wearing gloves.'

    The DI chuckled sardonically. 'Gloves but no mask. He didn't care if we got a look at his face but he didn't want us identifying him by his fingerprints.'

    Again the silence.

    'Can you get a report to me as soon as possible, Phil?' Gregson asked.

    'I told you, it will take time.'

    'Just do it,' the DI snapped.

    'If he isn't in our records it's going to take even longer,' Barclay reminded the policeman.

    'You're the expert,' Gregson remarked and headed for the door, followed by Finn.

    As soon as they'd left the lab, the DS lit up another Marlboro. They headed back towards the lift.

    'Why did he kill himself?' Finn muttered, sucking on the cigarette.

    Gregson could only shake his head.

    'Perhaps when we know who he is, we might know why!'

    'You don't sound too hopeful.'

    Gregson jabbed the
Call
button on the lift.

    'You saw the body. Would you be?'

    

    

    It was probably part of the motorbike.

    Perhaps even a fragment of the shop floor. The dead man had certainly hit the floor hard enough. Barclay didn't rule out the possibility that part of it had been embedded in the pulped skull upon impact.

    The pathologist held in his tweezers the small piece of melted matter he had taken from the pulverised remnants of the killer's head. He gazed at the tiny melted fragment gripped between the prongs.

    The intense heat had melted it, leading him to believe that part of it was some kind of plastic - incredibly hard plastic.

    Barclay considered the fragment a moment longer, then dropped it into a petrie dish.

    It would need closer analysis.

    He reached for the phone on his desk.