Down into Darkness (2 page)

Two, maybe three o'clock in the morning. But London was never still, never quiet, never dark. Street lights, evenly spaced. A car draws up by the tree. Do other cars go past? Probably. Are people still on the streets at this hour? Of course, but not many and not often in a street like this. Is someone looking out of a window, someone unable to sleep, someone with a restless child, someone in love or in grief?

Is she alive or dead? Let's say she's alive. Has he stopped because he lives near by? Or she lives near by? Are they lovers – does she feel safe with him? Or has he picked her up? Did they meet at a party, in a bar, did he offer her a lift home?

Hey, I'm going that way. I could drop you off
.

Is she a runaway, is she Ms Ordinary, is she a woman with a career, a cheating wife, a mover and shaker, a minor celebrity, a hooker from the Strip looking for a quiet place to get the business done?

They get out of the car.

Is she still unafraid, or is he forcing her, threatening her with a gun or a knife? Is she laughing with him or pleading with him? Either way, somehow, he strips her, and he strings her up. Is she already dead when he does that, or does she hang in the tree, the night-wind stroking her body as she writhes and chokes, a darkness descending on her that is deeper than the London half-dark, a darkness filled with the howl of blood in her head and the hard rasp of her own torn-off cries?

Stella walked through the Strip. Dealers were trading openly, and the whores were strolling the kerbside in their Spandex and boob-tubes, their heels and halters, on offer to the needy and the woebegone. Their pimps watched the action from black SUVs with wraparound sound-systems. The shebeens and casinos offered a three-day drunk or a five-day poker game. She knew the Strip, she knew some of the people, but no one paid her any attention; they were all too busy getting what they wanted: dope or sex or booze or fun. Or money.

Two streets away things were quieter, as if a truce had been called. She went into Nico's All-Nite and ordered a coffee. The owner was Turkish; he'd bought the place from whoever had bought it from Nico. He said, ‘It's too hot. For this time of year? Too hot.'

The place was empty. Stella sat at a formica table with cup stains and thought about the dead girl. What her name might be; who she was before she died.

She wondered what John Delaney had been going to say before her phone cut him off.

He was asleep when she got back: used to her sudden call-outs and erratic time-keeping. Sometimes she wouldn't go back to his flat but stayed, instead, at the place she had shared for five years with George Paterson; that was before she had met Delaney, and George had sniffed the air, getting the scent of betrayal.

She went to the freezer and took out a bottle of vodka. From the shelf, a shot glass; from the fridge, a single cube of ice. When she poured the vodka over the ice, covering it, a slight meniscus formed at the top of the glass, just this side of spillage.

Hey, I'm going that way. I could drop you off
.

No, she probably knew him better than that. Most murder victims knew their killers; it was the fiercest type of intimacy. But how did he hoist her up like that?

And why?

She drank a couple. A couple or three. Then she took her clothes off in the hallway, so she wouldn't wake him. The bedroom was completely dark, the way he liked it, blackout curtains blanking the London night-time glow. Delaney stirred as she got into bed and turned towards her; the heat from his body, and his earthy smell in the deep darkness, gave her a little erotic charge. Something to do with not being able to see him; something to do with anonymity. She let her hand slip across his belly, but he didn't wake.

The girl came to her in a dream. She was walking the Strip in lime-green Lycra and long diamanté earrings. A car drew up, and she went across, bending low to the window, showing the client the goods. They struck a deal, and she opened
the car door. Stella could see, on the back seat, his killing apparatus: rope, winch, a metal ladder. She moved forward, wanting to stop the girl, but it was like wading through heavy surf. She called out, and her voice distorted, the words jumbling and shuffling.

The girl turned her head to look at Stella. Her mouth was open, almost a smile; her eye-sockets were pools of darkness.

The constants in the
AMIP-5
squad room were cigarettes, chocolate, crisps, coffee and mild cynicism. The crisps were always salt-and-vinegar: squad-room rules. As for chocolate, Mars bars were making a comeback. Stella had quit smoking a while ago, though her secondary intake was the equivalent of a pack a week. DI Sorley was the squad's most dedicated smoker: his office, just down the hall from the main room, was under fog a lot of the time; the walls seemed to sweat nicotine. Sorley wasn't just a heavy smoker, he was world class, one of the all-time greats.

The squad white-board was decorated with a clutch of SOC photos: Tree Girl taken from the ground and from the scaffolding; all-angle shots of her as she lay on the green plastic sheet; images taken, later, at the morgue before she was put in a refrigerated unit and filed under ‘Female U-ID'. Stella had brought her coffee in from Starbucks, an early-morning treat to herself: the squad-room coffee doubled as stain-remover. The team listened as she ticked off a few facts and guesses.

‘A dead Caucasian female, age uncertain at this point but young, found hanging from a roadside tree in the Kensals. Significant predator damage to the corpse. We think she died sometime between nightfall on Sunday and dawn on Monday. We think she died of strangulation. We think she was killed by a man, because hauling her up into the tree took strength. We think we don't know what else to think.'

Maxine Hewitt said, ‘Dirty girl…'

Stella nodded acknowledgement. ‘Yes… Which makes you think what?'

‘Woman-hater.'

‘Women, or just prostitutes?'

‘It's an excuse. Remember the Yorkshire Ripper? “I was cleaning up the streets.”' Maxine gave a sour laugh. ‘They're filth, so it's okay to kill them.'

Harriman said, ‘Some guy who caught a dose, maybe. Classic Ripper motivation.'

Sue Chapman asked, ‘Is there any reason to think she was on the game?'

‘We don't know anything about her,' Stella said. ‘Nothing. So first move: run a check on all missing-persons reports that fit her profile. Start with the most recent.'

Mike Sorley was standing at the front of the room with Stella but a little way off, so that he didn't appear to be running the briefing. Like all DIs, he was a paper-pusher, not a street cop. He glanced over at the white-board photos and said, ‘Can we do something about her face?'

‘Repair job?' Stella asked. When Sorley nodded, she looked over towards Andy Greegan.

‘We can make a guess at the eye colour – brown or green given the colour of her hair – and we can do some retouching, sure. The shape of the eyes before the birds got at her… that's something else.'

‘Can we at least make her look human?' Sorley asked.

Stella thought the girl looked all too human: human and disfigured; human and dead. She said, ‘Let's think about this for a moment. He kills her; we don't know why. Maybe he's a woman-hater, maybe he feels free to kill prostitutes –'

‘We're back to the Ripper,' Maxine said.

‘Yes, sure, or maybe they were more closely connected than that, maybe she was a specific victim, and he killed her for a specific reason.'

‘And his chosen method was to hang her from a tree in a public place?' Harriman said. ‘Doesn't sound much like the
average domestic murder, does it – bit of a falling-out over the washing-up?'

‘Dirty girl,' Maxine said; ‘there's the clue.'

‘Doesn't mean she's a prossie,' Sue observed. ‘Cheating wife? Promiscuous daughter?'

‘No,' Harriman said, ‘the clue's in the method. It was premeditated: cold-blooded.'

‘People have been strangled to death in public places before,' Andy Greegan said. ‘A guy was strung up to some park railings, remember that?'

‘That was a race killing. They used his shoelaces. Idea was to make it look like suicide. Our killer went prepared: he had a rope, for Christ's sake.'

‘He also had a method.' Stella turned to the white-board and indicated some of the shots taken of the rope where it was secured to a branch some way beneath the hanging girl's feet. ‘Once he'd hauled her up, he tied the rope off to this branch –'

‘Belayed,' Sorley said.

Stella turned to him. ‘What?'

‘When you tie something off like that: it's called belaying. Nautical term.' He looked oddly pleased with himself.

‘Okay… So he knew he was going to be able to do that.'

‘He'd selected a tree,' Maxine suggested.

‘Pre-selected, yes. DC Harriman's right: it looks as if he'd prepared his ground.'

Furls of smoke rolled low in the room like wave-break, or hung in mid-air streamers. Stella took a deep breath: why fight it? She said, ‘I'd be very surprised to discover this was a domestic, but let's not rule anything out.'

The last time she had seen a hanging it was of two children who were dangling from a banister, four little white feet treading air. It was a revenge killing. Stella had kept the children's father in the lock-up all night, believing he had
murdered his wife. He hadn't. His sister had. His sister had also murdered the children.

Stella had found them, and the sight had stayed with her, awake and – worse – asleep, until it seemed to be permanently in her sight, like a projected image. A week or so later she got into her car and drove until driving became impossible, then holed up in a cheap hotel, not really knowing where she was, or how she got there, or what she might do next. George found her: the tirelessly patient, tirelessly loyal George Paterson. Very soon after that, she miscarried her own child. She sometimes wondered if that had been the real beginning of the end between herself and George.

‘So forget the girl for a moment,' Stella said, ‘and think about the man. Think about her killer.' She sipped her coffee. ‘He kills her and takes her clothes off, and writes on her and –'

‘Or takes her clothes off and writes on her and
then
kills her,' said Maxine.

‘Okay. We'll know more about that after the p-m. It's the stripping and writing… that, and stringing her up. Why? What makes him do that?'

‘A warning to others,' Sue suggested.

Harriman said, ‘You mean… what… he's a pimp?'

‘It did happen near the Strip,' Maxine reminded him. ‘Some of those girls are slave-imports.'

‘They run away,' Harriman agreed, ‘or try to, and they get beaten, but a pimp wouldn't kill one of his girls – waste of resources.'

‘Not always true,' Sue said. ‘Remember Trolley-Dolly?'

The lower half of a torso had been found in a supermarket trolley on the muddy foreshore of the Thames: a girl who had tried to run once too often. That sawn-off body, legs and pubis and butchered trunk, had been a plain message to the Bosnian and Romanian and African girls who were lured to
London with the promise of jobs but found themselves raped and terrorized and put to work in massage parlours and suburban brothels. The message was keep your head down and your ass up and don't think tricky thoughts.

Maxine said, ‘If he killed her just because she was a hooker, there'll be more.'

Sorley was lighting one cigarette from the butt of another. He said, ‘It's too early for that kind of thinking. Run a description through missing persons, take fingerprints, blood type, see if the p-m gives us anything. Let's get an ID on her and take it from there.'

Easily said, Stella thought. Her body naked, her face disfigured… She was anonymous but, thanks to the first editions of the tabloids, also famous. She was Body in Tree; she was Hanging Girl; she was Lynch Victim; she was Gruesome Find.

To the guys in the forensics team, who had been everywhere, seen everything, she was Dope on a Rope.

Stella stood at Tom Davison's desk in the forensics department and leafed through his report, while Davison looked over her shoulder. ‘Just the initial findings,' he said. ‘To get more, we need to tie up with the pathologist, cross-reference, stack up some facts. It's a fair bet that there'll be a bewildering amount of DNA on the ground. On the tree: who knows? Difficult surfaces. The rope is likely to be our best bet. One thing we do know: he hauled her up from the ground; there was a lot of scarring on the branch caused by the rope running over.'

‘Which tells you what?'

‘Strong guy. Also tells you she was probably dead when he did it.'

‘Go on.'

‘He dumps her by the tree, then climbs up to loop the
rope over a branch, then climbs down and does the business. She was either dead or unconscious. Think about it: her hands weren't tied.'

‘Weren't tied when we got there,' Stella said.

‘Ask the pathologist –'

‘Sam Burgess.'

‘Right, ask him, but I don't think there was any sign of a ligature on the wrists.'

‘What about the writing?'

‘Dirty girl?' Stella nodded. ‘Black marker pen, so far as we can tell. We lifted a sample: soaked it, you know. It's gone to a specialist unit, but I think you'll find it's the kind of thing you can buy in any newsagent's or stationer's.' He paused. ‘You'll be showing it to a handwriting expert? It's block capitals and written on a yielding surface, but there might be something.'

‘Okay,' Stella said. Then: ‘How old was she?'

‘Not very. Teens, early twenties. I can't be more accurate until we've had some material back from the autopsy.'

‘Material?'

‘Hair samples; bone samples.'

His office was little more than a cubicle, and he had been standing close to her as she read. Now she moved back a pace, though not just because he had invaded her body space; the uneasiness she felt went deeper than that. Stella had slept with Davison: a one-nighter, an impulse, a mistake; she had been angry with John Delaney, not sure about the relationship, and had given in to a whim.