Hard Evidence (2 page)

Bonner shifted gear and his fifteen-year-old
Porsche Carrera growled slowly through the
traffic. Camden Town on a hot and busy Monday
night was not where he wanted to be, not on any
night in fact, but getting out of there quickly was
a different matter. The streets were clogged with
drunken people lurching from pub to pub to the
kebab shop and burger bars. The heat wave
London was in the middle of was showing no
signs of abating, and the world and his wife
seemed to be taking their pleasures al fresco.

Bonner cranked the window handle on his door
to let a bit of breeze in, and looked over at
Delaney, whose dark eyes glittered with the yellow
flash of the passing street lights. Christ, he looks
like a wolf, he thought, and shuddered it away.

'Where you been, Cowboy?'

'Here and there. You know . . .'

'No.'

'What happened to Jackie Malone?'

Bonner shrugged. 'Just got the call.'

Delaney nodded and looked away. Bonner kept
his eyes on him. 'It wasn't just her. Wendy was
looking for you too. And Siobhan.'

'I had things on my mind.'

Bonner nodded sympathetically. 'She told me it
was your anniversary.'

Delaney flashed him an angry look. 'Would
have been. It would have been our anniversary.
Four years and they're still walking around
somewhere with blood pumping in their hearts
while she rots to bones in her grave.'

'You can't blame yourself.'

'If I wanted to talk about it I would have gone
to confession, Sergeant.'

'Yeah. You'd go to confession and I'd cut my
penis off and call myself Madeline.'

'Could get yourself promoted that way.'

Bonner slammed the palm of his hand hard on
the horn as a couple of women stumbled in front
of the car. A blonde and a brunette, pissed. The
women peered through the windscreen and
cracked their lipstick in seductive appreciation, the
blonde raising a bottle of strong cider in a toast.

'You boys want to party?' Irish accent.

'One of yours, Cowboy. From the land of
Sodom and Begorrah. Want to stop and play with
the colleens?'

Delaney looked across at him without
answering.

'That's right, you're wanted in a murder investigation.
Murder, another thing your countrymen
specialise in.' He edged the car forward, spilling
the blonde to a laughing heap on the pavement.
The brunette helped her up and, slack-kneed and
laughing like donkeys, they linked arms and
headed into the nearest pub.

'Murder and prostitution. The Emerald Isle's
most popular exports . . . short of the black stuff,
of course.'

'One of these days, Sergeant Bonner, someone is
going to shut your mouth permanently.'

Bonner laughed, genuinely amused. 'I know
plenty of people would like to, and frankly I can't
say I blame them, but if you don't have a sense of
humour, how are you going to survive in this
wicked world?'

'Maybe you aren't going to.'

'Oh, I'm a born survivor, me. The original cat
with nine lives.'

'Jackie Malone thought she was indestructible
too.'

Bonner looked at him shrewdly. 'She tell you
that, did she? In an intimate moment.'

Delaney ignored him, yawned and looked out of
the window as the Porsche picked up speed and
headed west. Bonner flicked another sideways
glance at him, trying to read him. Failing. He
carried on anyway.

'Of course death can be an intimate moment,
can't it, Cowboy? She breathes out, you breathe
in. But she doesn't. Again. Ever. And that last
breath of hers . . . you can almost taste the
departing life. The smell of her. The heat leaving
her body. Her muscles relaxing.'

He shook his head and looked across again with
a dry smile.

'What do you reckon, Cowboy? Almost better
than sex?'

Ladbroke Grove. West London. Parts of it were
pleasant; upmarket professionals who couldn't
quite make Holland Park lived there. Tall
Victorian townhouses stocked with Jennifers and
Nigels. Vivaldi and Bruckner floating through the
still air on hot summer nights, with talk of options
and opera and immigration laws. Parts of it
weren't so pleasant. Flats and houses stocked with
students, drug-dealers, prostitutes, and script
editors who worked at the BBC's Television
Centre up the road in Shepherd's Bush. Delaney
got out of the car and wondered which of them
was worse.

Across the road the entrance to a large
townhouse converted to a block of flats was sealed
with yellow tape and guarded by uniformed
police. A young female constable with honey-blonde
hair stood more upright, flexing her spine
with an almost feline sensuality, and smiled as
Delaney approached. Her last day in uniform; she
was due to transfer to CID soon as part of her
graduate fast-tracking and was keen to impress.

'Good evening, Inspector.'

'Sally.' Delaney gave her a nod and a quick
smile. Time was he'd have stopped and chatted
with her. She was an attractive young woman and
he'd have flirted with her, as sure as sin, even as a
married man. Harmlessly of course; he'd loved his
wife. Before he was married, however, it would
have been an entirely different matter. A lot of
people on the force thought it a bad idea to dip the
pen in company ink. Delaney hadn't been one of
them. His pen had written far, far more than
custody reports over the years. But that was then.
Delaney was now in a world that had no joy in
flirting. He walked up to the front door, letting
out a long breath.

Time to go to work.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked into
the hallway, barely registering the curious gazes
and nods from the uniformed police who guarded
the crime scene.

'Upstairs, guv.'

'I know where she lives.'

'Bit of a nasty one.'

'They're all nasty, Constable. People are nasty.'

Delaney looked down at the geometrically
patterned mosaic on the floor. Reds and yellows.
Late Victorian, the only original feature left of
what would have been a beautiful townhouse. We
get what we are given, he thought, and then we
screw it all to hell. He walked up the stairs, stairs
he'd been up a lot of times before, stairs that had
seen thousands of people come and go over the
years, and the odds were that more than one of
those people were murderers. The last person, or
persons, to see Jackie Malone alive definitely was.
That was a stone-cold fact.

He paused at the landing and wondered what
the one-bedroomed flat had originally been. A
nursery, perhaps? A master bedroom? Had
children through the years played and laughed and
fallen asleep here to bedtime stories and nursery
rhymes played on musical boxes? Had they looked
out of the high Victorian window longing for
Peter Pan to fly in and whisk them off to Never-Never-Land.

Whatever it had been, it was a murder scene
now, and Jack Delaney wasn't about to start
clapping his hands. Truth was, he never believed
in fairies, but he knew evil existed, and he could
feel its presence hanging in the air like the cold,
damp touch of a corpse.

The burly constable stood aside deferentially
and let Delaney pass into the room, where his
practised eye immediately started looking for what
was familiar, what was out of place.

It was small. A sofa, a sink with a hot plate
beside it. An electric kettle, once white, now
yellowing with grease and use. A TV and DVD
player on a brown cabinet. Some DVDs on the
shelf beneath them. He flicked through the titles:
Head Girl, Sin Sisters, Crime and Punishment,
Spunk Junkies
. They hadn't come from
Blockbuster. Some cupboards. On the floor a
faded imitation Persian rug sitting on top of a light
oatmeal carpet. A telephone and an appointments
book. A basket with a couple of apples and a thick
rubber band in it, some magazines. It was clean,
tidy. Nothing out of order. Nothing out of place.

Except the smell.

Delaney looked across at the other door and
knew what lay beyond. Had he not been told, he'd
have known. The smell was unmistakable to him.
Death.

Death was particulate and it reached out to him,
assaulting his nostrils, invading his lungs. Her life
might have fled quickly, but her body was giving
up its essence slowly, and as Delaney stood in her
living room and inhaled Jackie Malone into his
soul, he felt a calm come over him. Displacement
activity, they called it. He couldn't bring the dead
back to life, but he could do what he could; he
could find those responsible and make them
suffer.

'Guv.' Snapping him out of his reverie.

Delaney nodded at the large uniformed officer
who stood by the door and went through to the
bedroom. Jackie Malone's office, her factory
floor, her operating theatre.

He quickly looked around. A medieval torture
chamber in black and red, with satin sheets and a
champagne cooler. The pain and the pleasure.
The agony and the ecstasy. Scene of Crime
Officers, SOCO, or whatever they were called
nowadays – Delaney could never keep up with
the ever-changing acronyms of the Met – white-plastic-suited
like very poor astronauts, were
dusting and photographing. One of them gave
him a pair of light blue latex gloves. He snapped
them on with a grimace. Jackie Malone kept a
box of the same on a cabinet by the door for
examinations of a thoroughly different nature.
The officer moved aside and Delaney looked
down, seeing the corpse for the first time, face
up, arms cruelly tied, lying on the floor like a
broken and discarded doll.

Corpse: such a cold word for such a warmblooded
woman. Except her blood wasn't warm
any more. It was cold and still, scored in brown
lines on her ivory face and puddled about her
mutilated body.

Delaney took a swallow as the acrid taste of
whiskey rose in his throat. As he remembered her.

Irish, of course. With those thick black curly
locks and bright blue eyes, she had to be. A
distant descendant of a lucky sailor who was
washed up from the wreck of the Armada on to
the rain-soaked fields of southern Ireland.
Stumbling into Cork or Waterford, and there,
from the eye of the storm and the lash of the rainfilled
wind, finding comfort in the welcoming
arms of an Irish girl. Love was, after all, a
universal language. Just like lust, the commodity
that Jackie Malone dealt in. Or loneliness. She
always did know how to make Delaney laugh,
mind, make him forget himself. He looked at her
eyes now. Lifeless, flat, and he remembered them
twinkling, remembered them flashing angrily,
full of life, just like herself. Thirty-two years old.
Several hours dead.

He looked across her ravaged body.

Naked. Hands and feet tied with coat-hanger
wire. Her body covered with knife cuts. With
stabbing punctures. Her sweet face slashed from
forehead to chin. A smile by Bosch carved into her
throat. The wound gaping, black-edged and raw.
Delaney swallowed again and looked across as
Bonner came into the room.

'You okay, guv?'

'Yeah,' Delaney lied. He was good at lying. He
looked away to Sally Cartwright, the young
constable, who had followed him into the
building. Her face was almost as pale as the body
on the floor. She had a notebook open and was
concentrating on that. Looking away from the
horror of it all.

'You've spoken to the neighbours?'

'Sir.'

'And?'

'Nothing. Across the way is empty and
downstairs is an old couple. They keep themselves
to themselves.'

'And they say there's no such thing as society.'

'Margaret Thatcher did, sir, but then her dad
was a grocer. The old folks downstairs know she
was a tom. They got used to people walking up
and down all hours of the day. They turned a
blind eye.'

'And a deaf ear.'

'Have their hearing aids turned off unless
they're watching
EastEnders
, apparently.'

Delaney grunted. They had that the wrong way
round. He pointed a finger at the young PC. 'I
want a full statement nonetheless. People see
things. They might not want to get involved, but
they see things.' He looked down at Jackie
Malone. 'Even when they don't want to. Even if
they don't know they have, people see things.'

'Guv.'

Delaney stood aside as the crime-scene photographer
moved in to take shots of the body. Across
the bed a forensic officer dusted a large rubber
phallus. Bonner nodded at Delaney.

'You think that's the murder weapon?'

Delaney turned expressionless eyes on him and
Bonner grinned, unabashed.

'What is it they say? When you've eliminated
the impossible, what's left, however improbable, is
the whatever. That thing looks damn improbable
to me, and I grew up on a farm.'

Delaney turned to Sally Cartwright.

'Why hasn't she been covered up?'

'We're waiting for the pathologist, sir.'

'Where the bloody hell is he?'

'She, sir. Dr Walker's attending.'

Delaney grimaced. 'What's the hold-up, then?
She waiting for the second act of
Rigoletto
to
finish?'

'I didn't know you were a fan of opera,
Detective.'

Delaney turned round as Kate Walker
approached. A tall, slim woman in her early
thirties, dressed more for fine dining than
forensics. Jet-black hair and a feral tint of green in
her eyes. Unamused eyes.

'Oh yeah. Opera and colonoscopies. Top of my
list.'

Bonner smirked. 'Ah yes, "The Ring Cycle".'

'Shut it, Bonner.' He turned back to Kate
Walker. 'Sorry to spoil your supper party, but
there's a woman here needs our help.'

Kate flicked a cursory glance at the dead body
of Jackie Malone. 'I'd say she was beyond that.'

Delaney held her angry gaze, meeting her fire
with his own. 'I think we can assume that this
wasn't a suicide. I want to know what happened.'

Kate smiled disarmingly. 'I can tell you when
she died. I can tell you how she died and I can tell
you what she had for dinner. You know why?'

'Why?'

'Because that's my fucking job. Now why don't
you give me a break with the attitude and let me
do it?'

Delaney dug in his pocket, fishing out a packet
of cigarettes, and flicked one into his mouth.

'You got a great sense of respect for the dead,
lady.'

'What is it with you, Delaney? You don't like a
woman doing a man's job? Or you just don't like
women?'

Delaney held her gaze for a moment and took
the cigarette out of his mouth.

'I just don't like you, Dr Walker.'

Bonner flashed Kate a sympathetic smile, but it
slid off her as smoothly as rainwater off a Chelsea
girl's gumboot. She looked down at the body on
the floor, her eyebrow lifting slightly. Delaney
picked up on it. 'Something?'

Kate shrugged. 'Something not quite right.'

'That an expert opinion, is it?'

Kate ignored him and bent down to examine the
body, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. 'Let's see if
the vitreous fluid can give us a rough time of
death.' She pulled out a syringe, attached a largegauge
needle and carefully stabbed it into Jackie
Malone's lifeless right eye.

Delaney had already turned away. Outside in
the corridor he opened the sash window at the
end of the hall, swearing as it stuck and grunting
as he forced it further open. He palmed the
cigarette back into his mouth, flaring a match and
drawing a long, abrasive cloud into his lungs. He
tensed his lips and let it flow back out in a longdrawnout
sigh. Bonner shook his head as he
approached.

'What is it with you and her?'

'Your point?'

'Come off it, Cowboy. You can't stand the
woman, or she you for that matter. Why is that?
She knock you back on the old Hampstead
hayride?'

'I don't like what she stands for.'

'Which is?'

'The Establishment.'

Bonner flashed his warrant card. 'I've got news
for you, guv. You're a fully paid-up member too.'

'And you're a fully paid-up prick.'

'I do my best.'

Delaney shrugged as Bonner put his warrant
card away. 'You and me, we live in a different
world, Eddie, my old son. That's a licence to catch
rats, is all. To pick your knees up, stick your
elbows out and dance to the tune of the likes of
her frigging uncle.'

The penny dropped with Bonner. 'Not a big fan
of the superintendent, then?'

'One of these days you'll make a great
detective.' Delaney threw his cigarette out of the
window and walked back into the front room,
watching as the forensics crew dusted a small
cabinet that stood beside the sofa. He turned back
to Bonner.

'Any word on Jackie's boy . . . Andy?'

Bonner shook his head. 'He's not been living
with her for some months.'

'Is he with his uncle?'

'Yeah, according to the neighbours. He's off
travelling.'

'That's something, I suppose.'

The forensics crew moved through to the
bedroom, and Delaney walked across and opened
the drawer of the small cabinet. He emptied the
contents and put them on top. Condoms. A
squeezed tube of lubricant. Cards with a phone
number and a cartoon picture of a rubber-clad
dominatrix. 'No Pain. No Gain.' A packet of
rubber bands. A box of brass drawing pins. At the
back of the drawer was a small black notebook.
Delaney took it out and flicked through. A diary.
Jackie Malone's spidery handwriting noting
names, numbers. He turned to the latest entry. His
own name, DELANEY, spelled out in capitals
with his work number below it.

Bonner called across. 'Anything?'

Delaney moved the diary out of sight and
looked over at the sergeant. 'You said she was
calling for me?'