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Authors: David Lawrence

Down into Darkness

BOOK: Down into Darkness
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Down Into Darkness

In addition to being a critically acclaimed writer of crime fiction, David Lawrence is a successful screen-writer. His books are published in the United States and have been translated into fourteen languages.

Down Into Darkness
is the fourth novel in the Stella Mooney series, following
The Dead Sit Round in a Ring
,
Nothing Like the Night
and
Cold Kill
(all available in Penguin paperback).

Down Into Darkness

DAVID LAWRENCE

MICHAEL JOSEPH

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi –
110 017
, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2007
1

Copyright © David Lawrence, 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

EISBN: 978–0–141–90240–1

To Sean O'Brien

 

1

Someone looking up might have seen her hanging in the tree, but people don't look up unless something draws their attention, and she was almost completely hidden by broad green leaves. Now and then, a breeze caused the smaller boughs to shift and tremble, throwing on the body of the girl a dappled light which camouflaged her as effectively as the leaves.

Late spring in London and much too hot. It was shaping up to be a summer of drought. Newspapers carried long feature articles on global warming with artists' impressions of the deserts soon to take over the south. If you were in any doubt about those predictions, you could sniff the air for the unmistakable, scorchy smell of pollution hanging in the streets. The girls of London, leggy and stylish, had summer highlights in their hair; they wore crop-tops and micro-skirts and gold bangles that showed off their tans. The whores up on the Strip wore even less.

At eight in the evening it was still light and still hot. Couples strolled through the dusty streets arm in arm. There were people going home after a late shift at the office; people on their way to a bar or a restaurant; people with things on their minds. Bikers went by, and kids on roller-blades; traffic went nose to tail.

A boy sat with his girl on the back seat of the top deck of a bus. They were new as a couple: everything fresh and exciting and slightly feverish. Even in public, they found it tough to keep their hands off one another. He kissed her and, just briefly, put his hand to her breast. The bus was slowing
down, backed up in a line of vehicles waiting at a junction; as it came to a stop, its uppermost windows lightly brushed the leaves of a roadside tree. The girl smiled and touched the boy's cheek, then, for no good reason except that they had stopped, looked beyond him to the tree.

Sunlight glanced off the leaves, throwing jittery fragments of white light, and the girl saw what she thought, at first, was a fork in the tree-trunk; the leaves rustled and shuffled, and the shape became a broken branch twisting gently in the breeze.

Then, as the breeze quickened, she saw the naked torso as it turned and, a moment later, the face staring across at her, dark as a ripe plum.

2

Stella Mooney and John Delaney were eating at Machado's, a restaurant in a small square just off Notting Hill Gate. Tables had been set up on the edge of the square, and strings of white lights sparkled in the branches of ornamental trees. Candles on the tables shuddered, throwing buttery pools of yellow light in the near-dusk, and swifts were flying wall-of-death circuits, shrieking as they skimmed the brickwork.

Stella said, ‘Well, fuck you, Delaney.'

It was the end of a conversation that had gone like this: ‘Are you happy with us?'

‘With us?' Stella had been eating langoustine and, when Delaney asked his question, was holding the little creature between the forefinger and thumb of each hand and picking at it with her teeth. She wondered if the question had an edge to it. ‘Why wouldn't I be happy with us?'

‘No reason.'

‘So… Are
you
happy with us?'

‘Oh, yeah.' Delaney nodded and smiled at her like a man with a secret to keep.

‘Just a minute. You're not about to fetch a ring out of your pocket, are you?'

‘No.' And Delaney started to laugh. ‘A ring? Jesus Christ, no.'

Which is when she said, ‘Well, fuck you, Delaney,' then leaned across the table and stifled his laughter with a kiss.

He topped up their wine glasses and they ate in silence, his eyes on her. She said, ‘Then what –' in the same moment that her mobile phone rang.

Delaney said, ‘Don't answer it,' more suggestion than instruction, but she had already taken the call. For the most part she listened, and when she spoke, spoke softly. Then she got up, kissed Delaney again and walked across the square towards the side street where her car was parked.

One or two men at other tables paused to watch her go. Delaney noticed this and smiled, watching her also, making an inventory of his own. Stella was thirty-three: still young enough to use only a touch of make-up. Dark hair, blue eyes, tall and slim but not skinny; her mouth a little too broad, perhaps, and her nose a fraction long: little imperfections that made all the difference. Delaney stayed to finish his meal. He drank the rest of the wine, then ordered a single malt whisky with his coffee as the cut of sky above the square darkened to lilac. He sat back in his chair and looked up, as few people do, because the swifts had caught his attention. They circled at madcap speeds, shrieking, shrieking, shrieking.

Detective Inspector Mike Sorley had called Stella because he'd worked with her before and reckoned her the best detective sergeant in Area Major Investigation Pool operations. He had already second-guessed Stella's own choices for the team and had checked the availability of DC Pete Harriman, DC Maxine Hewitt, DC Andy Greegan and DC Sue Chapman. Sue wasn't a street cop; she was a systems coordinator with a tidy mind and an eagle eye.

AMIP-5
covered murder investigations over an area that included Notting Hill, Holland Park, the Kensals and part of Paddington; it took in some multimillion-pound mansions, a high rise, no-go, badass waste land called the Harefield Estate, and pretty much everything in between. North of Notting Hill, as you get to Kensal Green, was the Strip: a blaze of lime and pink and purple neon, shebeens and shanty-casinos, hookers working the kerbs, deals going down in alleyways,
music flooding from doors and windows with a beat so loud and deep that it shifted your viscera.

Stella drove the length of the Strip, then turned off into residential streets. The whole population was out, sitting on doorsteps, lounging in foldaway chairs, drinking beer; the smell of ganja drifted in through the open windows of Stella's car. Bust one, you bust the neighbourhood.

The white glow in the sky four streets away was halogen.

Andy Greegan's job was to create an uncorrupted approach to the body, which wasn't easy when it was hanging sixteen feet above the ground. Sorley and Stella discussed a game plan.

‘Portable scaffolding,' Sorley said, ‘and drape the tree.' They were staring straight up, like star-gazers. Pete Harriman joined them. ‘How did he get her up there?' he wondered.

‘Yes,' Stella said, ‘and when? There's traffic up and down this road all day. People are out and about, especially in this weather.'

‘He arrives with a body and a rope,' Harriman said; ‘no one sees him or, if they do, they notice nothing unusual. He strings her up… How does he do that? Throw her over his shoulder and shin up the tree?'

‘What makes you think he came with a body?' Stella asked.

Sorley's phone rang: a contractor with scaffolding and net-drape. He wandered off to take the call.

Harriman said, ‘You think he killed her at the scene?'

‘Easier for him in some ways: he hasn't got a corpse to deal with – deadweight. If she's alive, she's more portable.'

‘Or else, easier if she's dead. The killing's done.' They were still looking up. Stella's neck was paining her. Harriman added, ‘So – alive or dead, it must have been under cover of darkness, yes?'

‘Seems that way.'

‘In which case, she's been up there since before dawn.'

Stella lowered her head and massaged the nape of her neck. She was thinking of the way some birds of the air had with flesh.

3

Night had come in while they waited for the scaffolders. The tree was shrouded in green net, behind which lay a fretwork of steel scaffolding, and the area was lit like a film set. Men in white coveralls were walking the high platforms, taking samples from trunk and branch. They might have been botanists on a field trip. There were halogens at ground level; their harsh beams lit what they touched, leaving the rest of the interior dark and jungly. The warm breeze stirred a fetid smell.

Stella wasn't good with heights: the planking seemed to shift under her, like foreshore sand when the tide's out, and she felt a churning low in her gut. None of this was helped by the fact that she had started her period that morning. DC Greegan's photographers, one taking stills, one making a video record, were standing directly opposite the hanging girl. A couple of lights had been hoisted and roped to the steel in order to illuminate the body; they threw deep black shadows. The street was cordoned off, and the space around the tree held a cathedral quiet, so that the
clack-clack
of the shutter release and the whirr of the video camera seemed unnaturally loud. Stella didn't want to look at the girl.

Pete Harriman had made the climb with her, fast and nimble like a scaffolder. Stella's knuckles had whitened every time she shifted her grip, and she had climbed on her arches rather than on the balls of her feet. She and Harriman stood by the stills cameraman, who was shooting all angles. The girl was slim, and, despite the pull of her own weight, her back still held a curve. Across her shoulders, just
where a yoke might go, were two words written in black marker pen:

DIRTY GIRL

A small, warm gust shook the tree, and she made a lazy half-turn that brought her full-face.

‘Jesus Christ Almighty.' It was Harriman's voice: all he had to say on the matter. Oddly, the sight cleared Stella's head; she forgot about the queasiness and the false sensation of movement in the planking. The girl seemed out of focus, her face blurred for being eyeless, the faint pubic smudge sketched in; the blood backed up in her veins gave her body a dark blush like spoiled fruit. Stella called down to Greegan, who was one level below them.

‘How long now?'

‘They've got what they can, Boss. It's not easy, taking forensic traces from a tree.'

‘Can we bring her down?'

‘Okay.'

The rope holding the girl was tied off to a branch a little way below her feet. Stella watched as the forensics officers started to cut her down. One had attached a harness to the body; it fitted like a corset. He linked a winch hook to a steel ring set in the harness at the level of her shoulder blades, then held her round the waist, taking her weight, while another cut the original rope close to the branch, taking care to preserve the knot the killer had tied. People knot rope in different ways.

Stella stayed up on the gantry. She didn't want to be on the ground to witness that sad descent. She didn't want to see those white feet, blameless and bare, emerging from the leaf-cover.

The police doctor pronounced the girl dead at the scene
of crime, took rectal and vaginal temperatures, noted the lack of rigor mortis and gave a 36-hour time bracket for the moment of death. It was warm inside the SOC tent, and the girl was leaking fluids and odours. She lay heavy on the ground, as if she had fallen; her open mouth and the hollows of her eyes made a dark mask.

When the doctor had finished, paramedics moved in to lift her and take her to the morgue. Science hadn't finished with her yet. They each gripped a corner of the green plastic sheet she lay on and took her up tenderly, letting her body settle on to a collapsible gurney.

The doctor was a young man and hadn't long been seconded to police work. He stood close to Stella as the gurney was wheeled out. He said, ‘Who would do such a thing?'

Stella almost smiled. She said, ‘Someone. Anyone.'

The
AMIP-5
team would meet next morning: Mike Sorley had already requisitioned the basement of a police admin. building in Notting Dene. Stella left her car parked in the empty street and ducked under the blue-and-white police tape. Houses on one side, the railings of a children's play area on the other, the tree on the street side of the railings. She closed her eyes, the better to see how it might have happened.

BOOK: Down into Darkness
12.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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