Jack Morgan 02 - Private London (4 page)

I had just finished a video conference with Jack Morgan. He was a material witness in a big case just coming to trial in Los Angeles. A Supreme Court judge charged with the murder of her lesbian lover. And so he would be off the radar for a while. The case was drawing more attention than the OJ Simpson trial, and, even if he could have done, Jack would never have walked away from the free publicity.

He couldn’t walk away, though. The judge was a friend of his, and the men in black suits had slapped a subpoena on Jack. Putting him in a hotel with a couple of FBI agents babysitting him. Monday morning he’d be in court or he’d be in jail for contempt of it.

But Private London had nothing that needed his attention. We’d had a good month, settled a couple of long-running corporate cases and had plenty more business lined up on the books. Nothing that needed drastic action. For once – once in a blue moon – Dan Carter had a work-free weekend lined up. And I intended to make the most of it.

That guy leaning out from the prow of the Titanic probably felt just the same kind of optimism I was feeling. I’d never seen the film but I’m guessing it didn’t work out too well for him, either.

The phone on my desk rang. I picked it up.

‘Dan, it’s Wendy Lee. I’ve got a problem.’

Chapter 13

Chancellors University London

A HALF-MILE ACROSS London from the offices of Private, heading south and east. A barman in his late twenties called Ryan pushed a tray of shot glasses filled with tequila towards a red-faced pair of students.

They carried them to a nearby table and handed them round to a group of equally flushed young men. They were all wearing the university rugby colours and were chasing pints with slammers. One of them dropped his glass into his pint of lager and shouted: ‘Depth charge!’

Contempt was too mild a word for what the barman thought of them. He was a postgraduate student who had worked two jobs while getting his first degree and was still left with a mountain of debt. This lot of braying jackasses wouldn’t know a day’s work, or debt, if it bit them on their privileged arses. He looked across at a pretty dark-haired woman who was standing further along the bar. Sometimes he hated his job. Sometimes he liked it.

Chloe Wilson didn’t even notice the barman looking at her. She was feeling hot.

And not in a sexy manner, but in a sweaty, giddy kind of way. The three of them had come out all heels, squeals and ready to partay! At least, that had been the plan. Her two friends, Laura Skelton and Hannah Durrant, had been knocking back the vodka and Red Bulls since six o’clock like they were going out of fashion. And why not? They were all twenty-something-year-old students in the heart of the fine city of London on a Friday evening in spring – what the hell else were they supposed to be doing? But Chloe had held back on the booze. She had to. Someone had to keep a clear head. London could be a dangerous place, after all. Even on campus.

Chancellors University London, also known as CUL or Chancellors, was spread throughout the capital – as were most London-based colleges. But CUL dated way back to the sixteenth century. It had been founded by Henry VIII’s Chancellor – Cardinal Wolsey. It had a central block or two of ancient residential buildings and lecture halls in a warren of inner connecting squares and passages. In the sixteenth century it had been a theological school set to rival Magdalen College at Oxford University.

Nowadays it had a more secular curriculum. After the Reformation the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin had been one of the first to go under the sledgehammer. All trappings of Catholic worship stripped out. Now it was simply the Chapel Bar. It was at the northern end of Chancery Square beneath the main rectory and was a stone-flagged cellar that on this evening was packed wall to wall with animated young adults.

Like the three beautiful young women near the busy bar – making hay while the May sun shone bright.

Ryan stepped over to ask if they needed any more drinks. The dark-haired woman he had been watching earlier shook her head. But her friends drained their glasses and held them out for a refill. Not so much as a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you’.

Some of them were coming to the end of their time at college, Ryan knew. Some of them were coming towards the end of their first year. All of them with a bright future ahead. Their confidence was evident in their loud voices, their designer wear and perfect teeth. The privilege that they had inherited would be passed on through generations to come, as it always had been.

Some of them, though, had no future.

They just didn’t know it yet.

Chapter 14

ADRIAN TUTTLE, A tall, gangly, floppy-haired man in his late twenties, pushed the passenger door of my car shut with a bit more force than he probably intended.

It slammed closed. The sound of it echoed all along the street.

‘All right, Adrian,’ I said. ‘Take it easy. You sign on for Private, you’re on call twenty-four seven. Love life always takes second billing. It’s in your contract.’

‘What love life?’

I looked at my watch. Adrian had had to cancel a date when the call from the Met had come in, but I had no intention of missing mine.

Adrian was Private’s forensic photographer. He had his own company car waiting for him but had failed his driving test six times. His luck with the ladies was equally as spectacular. Wendy Lee, his line boss, a five-foot bundle of Chinese energy and an ex-Forensic Science Service pathologist, had called in from Holborn. Her car had broken down so I’d agreed to drive Adrian to the crime scene and meet there. I didn’t fancy his chances taking a taxi through London traffic on a Friday night. Official business meant I could put the detachable blue light on the roof of my BMW 4x4, blast the siren and cut through the commuters like a hot knife through butter.

I could have got one of my operatives to take him, but I like to go out with my agents in the field regularly. Let them know we are a team at Private. Besides, if I’d wanted to be a desk-jockey manager shuffling paper I would have joined a bank. But that night I’d told Wendy I’d swap her taxi for my car and leave them to it. Forensic examinations were definitely not on my agenda for the evening.

Ahead of us the familiar blue lights of parked police cars flashed, and yellow tape blocked the public from the crime scene that lay beyond it.

‘She could have been the one,’ continued Adrian morosely as he unzipped a large carry-case.

‘You’ll get another chance,’ I said, slapping him on the back as he stepped into his scene-of-crime overalls. ‘There’s someone for everybody, you know. Even you.’

Most people assumed that the white-suited forensic photographers and videographers seen on the TV news photographing and recording crime scenes were members of the police force. And sometimes they were – but sometimes they weren’t. The Metropolitan Police, and the other forces throughout the country, also used independent companies. Like us.

The forensic division of Private London had a contract with the Metropolitan Police, purely in the photographic area. Forensic pathologists themselves were still under the direction of the Forensic Science Service, which was an agency of the Home Office working with the police.

Adrian’s boss Wendy Lee had been a popular and highly respected pathologist at the FSS before I recruited her to head up Private’s forensic unit. Some cases required independent forensic analysis before they came to court – and the resources that Private offered Dr Lee tempted her away almost as much as the far higher salary I dangled under her nose. We gave her access to the kind of superior technology that the Met could only dream about.

The detective in charge at the scene, DI Ken Harman, nodded to me as Adrian and I walked up. We’d worked together before.

‘Dan.’

‘Ken.’

We shook hands briefly. And he held up the tape for us to cross under.

POLICE – DO NOT CROSS THE LINE

Somebody had crossed the line, though, I thought ironically as I straightened up again on the other side of it. As ever, it was the smell that hit me first.

Someone had crossed the line big time.

Chapter 15

SCENE-OF-CRIME OFFICERS STOOD to one side, ready to start processing the site once it had been thoroughly photographed.

Bright lights had been mounted on tall stands, illuminating the area as if it were a film set. Adrian fired up the light on his hand-held HD video camera and started shooting.

I looked down at the body, wrapped in translucent plastic. The features just about discernible as a woman’s. Maybe.

‘Who found her?’ I asked.

The detective grunted in what could have been ironic amusement, could have been something stuck in his throat. ‘Little toerag by the name of Jason Kendrick. Fourteen-year-old one-man sodding crime wave. Raped and stabbed a teenage prostitute just two streets or so across. Scuttled here just like a rat when he heard the blues-and-twos. Then ran back out again as soon as he saw this,’ Harman said, pointing at the mutilated corpse.

‘Can’t say as I blame him,’ I said.

The detective grunted again. ‘He does. He ran straight into a police car.’ Harman smiled grimly.

‘And the girl?’

‘She’ll live. She fell on her own knife as she tried to fight him off but missed all her major organs. She was lucky.’

‘I guess, but that’s the kind of luck I can do without.’

‘I hear you.’

‘And the boy rapist?’

‘Again, he’ll live. Scrapes and bruises. Hit the side of the car and was winded, apparently. Couldn’t breathe and thought he was going to die.’ Harman twisted his mouth into something between a scowl and a smile. ‘Can’t say the world would have been the poorer if he had done.’

I didn’t comment. Seems to me there’s all kinds of bad luck in the world. The kind that gets you working the streets selling your body while you’re still little more than a child. The kind that gets you into trouble with the law when you are five years old and have been taught no different. The kind that gets you running into speeding police cars nine years later after upgrading to the sort of crime that means you’ll live out the rest of your childhood – and then some – in an institutional correction facility.

The kind of luck that gets you laid out on the cold floor of an old workshop. Being the centre of attention in a way that no one would have wished upon themselves in their worst nightmares.

I watched as Adrian put down the video camera, unzipped his case, took out his stills camera, screwed a lens onto its body, and stepped over to begin photographing the corpse.

He was using an MD180 which, according to Jack Morgan, was the best damn camera ever manufactured for the processing of crime scenes. He had insisted that Private London’s forensic unit should use the same and I reckon that Adrian would have kissed him for it. He certainly handled the camera as reverentially as he would a lover.

Wendy Lee stepped under the tape, suited-up but gloveless. I tossed her my car keys.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.

‘Boss.’

I looked down again at the dead body. Like I said, it had been wrapped in heavy plastic. But rats had eaten away the central section, exposing the torso, pelvic area and upper ribcage. Bones protruded and much of the soft inner flesh and organs had been eaten away. There was no pooling of blood around the area.

A uniformed constable suddenly held a hand to his mouth and dashed out of the room.

I followed him out.

Not the start to the weekend that I had planned.

Chapter 16

‘WHO’S BEEN ASSIGNED to processing the body?’ asked Dr Lee.

She was looking at the sallow-faced DI who was pointedly not looking at the horror show that lay at his feet.

Ken Harman gestured as a tall woman entered. Wendy nodded at her pleased. Doctor Harriet ‘Harry’ Walsh had been her assistant at the time she had left the FSS when she’d been seduced by Private. And Wendy had never regretted her change of employer. Sure, she may not actually process the bodies at scenes of crime any more, but that was just data collection, after all. And it wasn’t the collection that was important – it was what you did with it afterwards that mattered. And Wendy Lee could now crank that data faster than the FSS by an order of magnitude.

‘What have you got for me, Ken?’ asked the pathologist as she snapped on the obligatory latex gloves and walked over. She dipped her head forward and tied back a glorious tumble of red-gold curls, causing them to sparkle momentarily in the bright artificial light before hiding them under a protective cap. She stood up again and at five foot eleven in her flat-soled shoes she made Wendy Lee feel dwarfed, not for the first time that evening.

‘Looks like a Jane Doe,’ said the detective. ‘Hard to tell for a layman like me. Whoever it is has been feeding a family of Rattus norvegicus for quite some time, by the looks of it.’

‘You don’t look too well,’ said Harriet Walsh.

‘Just finished a large doner kebab when the call came in,’ he explained. ‘Wish I hadn’t had the extra chilli sauce now.’

Doctor Walsh gave Harman a brief sympathetic smile and nodded to Wendy Lee.

‘What do you think?’

‘Just got here, Harry. But female … looks to be in her early twenties.’

Doctor Walsh looked down at what was revealed of the body and sighed. ‘And out of hunting season, too.’

She gestured to a couple of her SOCO assistants who were standing by, waiting for the nod. Then she kneeled down to peel back the plastic sheeting that partially covered the dead body. Using a scalpel to slice the plastic and peel it back as delicately as possible.

Any evidence could be vital – the merest speck of fabric or mud or blood. Nothing could be taken for granted. The whole scene would be processed, photographed, recorded, analysed. And it all took time.

Some half an hour later the plastic sheet that had once wrapped the body now lay either side of it. The gruesome package opened up like some macabre gift.

Adrian Tuttle moved in closer, the flash mounted on his camera making the bright light intermittently even more glaring as he shot photo after photo. The white skin of the dead woman almost bleached in the flashes.