River of Souls (8 page)

10

Jude was awake when I returned to the hospital on Thursday morning. The light filtering through her window was grey as dishwater, and I could tell she was weakening. Last time her hands had gesticulated restlessly, but now she was motionless, only her head slanted in my direction, her eye circled by a network of exposed veins. I noticed again how beautiful her hair was, long strands highlighted with copper, gleaming on her pillow.

‘How are you today?’ I asked.

‘Living the dream. Can’t you tell?’ A laugh gurgled from the respirator, and I pictured her before the attack, upbeat and full of irony. ‘I’ve been watching Clint Eastwood movies –
Pale Rider
,
Unforgiven
,
Gran Torino
. Films make more sense to me than all this.’

‘I bet they do.’ Westerns had a clearer moral code, the baddies always caught and punished. ‘I’ve been interviewing some of your friends, Jude.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Natalie and Jamal.’

She flinched, but her ruined face was impossible to read. ‘What did they say?’

‘Jamal’s quite angry, isn’t he? Was he always like that?’

‘Not about personal things. Injustice upsets him, that’s why he chose social work.’

‘Was he ever violent towards you?’

Her hands twitched at her sides. ‘Of course not. His gentleness was one of the things that attracted me.’

‘Natalie thought he’d hit you. She said she came back once and your room was in a mess.’

There was a long pause. ‘I can’t talk about that.’

‘You promised to be open, Jude.’

Her voice was quiet when she finally replied. ‘It was me that lost control. He made me so angry I hurled things at him, then felt terrible.’

‘What had upset you so much?’

‘His defeatism. We never agreed about our future.’ Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘I wanted to stay with him, but he only saw obstacles.’

‘He thought your father hated him.’

‘That’s Jamal for you – he believes the world’s out to get him. Dad’s always let me make my own choices.’

‘He said that a family problem had upset you, something to do with your dad. Can you tell me about that?’

There was an interval before she replied. ‘It was nothing, just the usual chemistry. We’re so alike, we wind each other up sometimes.’

‘Jamal made it sound much more serious.’

‘He misunderstood what was going on.’

‘He still wants to visit you. Would you allow that?’

The monitors above her bed bleeped loudly, her heart rate soaring. ‘He can’t. Tell him to stay away.’

‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

‘Jamal never saw me like this.’ The noise from her machines gradually faded. ‘His conscience is too strong. If he’d known how bad it was, he’d have kept coming back, trying to help. I had to let him go.’

‘It’s your decision, Jude. I won’t try and change your mind.’ I sat back in my chair. ‘Natalie’s a loyal friend, isn’t she?’

‘The best ever.’

Jude talked about her exploits with Natalie in a shaky voice. They had taken a riotous skiing holiday, with so much booze and après-ski that they missed the slopes completely some days. The carefree friend she described didn’t match the tense young woman I’d met at Pembroke’s. Jude’s description of Natalie made me realise that her attack had caused a ripple effect, changing her friends’ lives irreversibly. She spoke of a life that had once been full of adventures, which matched the bravery she’d shown in cutting her boyfriend adrift. To have survived so long by herself in a sterile hospital room took more grit than I could even imagine.

‘A couple more tough questions. Natalie thought someone might have been violent towards you as a child. Is that true?’

There was no reply. All I could hear was the whisper of people chatting in the corridor, and the breathing apparatus pumping air into her lungs.

‘She gets confused sometimes. Take what she says with a pinch of salt.’

‘She seemed very clear-headed to me.’

‘Why would I lie?’

‘Jude, if we’re going to find him, you can’t hide anything.’

‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ Her tone was growing truculent. ‘There’s nothing more to say.’

I took a deep breath. ‘We’ll talk about it another time. I need to know everything about your past, including the secrets you’d like to bury.’ Her folded arms showed that she had no intention of opening up, so I had to move on. ‘I’ve been through the transcripts of your evidence after the attack. You said Jamal was the only serious boyfriend you’d had, but that’s not true, is it?’

Her hands twitched upwards again. ‘What makes you so sure?’

‘You were a gorgeous twenty-two-year-old girl. I can’t believe he was your first.’

‘Why? Did you have dozens of lovers at my age?’

‘Just three or four. Some lousy choices, actually.’

My candour seemed to unlock her defences. ‘There was one serious fling. I was crazy about him but it was a mistake.’

‘I need his name, Jude.’

It took ten minutes to wheedle it out of her: Paul Ramirez, one of her university lecturers, a married man. They’d had a six-month affair before she met Jamal, but apart from his name she wouldn’t yield a single detail. It seemed incredible that the police investigation hadn’t probed deep enough to uncover him. Their incompetence deserved a formal complaint, but I was beginning to suspect that Whitehall had warned them to use a light touch. Jude’s body language revealed that she was starting to tire.

‘Mum told me Father Owen had died, but she wouldn’t say what happened to him.’

‘You don’t watch the news?’

‘It’s too bleak most of the time.’

‘But you know his body was found by the Thames?’

Her hands froze in her lap. ‘You think it’s started again?’

‘It’s not clear yet. The police are looking at the evidence. Were you close to Father Owen?’

Her head shifted by a fraction on her pillow. ‘He used to visit me every month. He always said it didn’t matter that I’d lost my faith, he had enough to spare.’

Jude’s ruined face couldn’t reveal her emotions, but I was learning to interpret them from her gestures. The way she’d deflected every question about her childhood made me wonder which members of her family she was protecting. By the time I left, she’d shut down completely. She gave a single nod when I suggested that we try memory recovery techniques next time I visited. The gesture was more a dismissal than an acceptance. Despite her injuries, it was clear that her desire for privacy had survived intact.

I was dreading my next appointment. Now that I was officially included in Burns’s investigation of Father Owen’s murder, the coroner’s office had agreed to let me attend the post-mortem. Despite my squeamishness, the links between Jude’s attack and the priest’s murder had to be followed up. Burns would be witnessing the procedure too. The building loomed closer as I walked, a huge white edifice that looked brand new, dominating the western stretch of the Euston Road.

The mortuary was so well hidden in the basement that I arrived ten minutes late. A Latin inscription was printed above the door:
Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae
. There was no time to lament my lack of classical education; the pathologist’s assistant rushed out with a worried expression on his face.

‘Dr Lindstrop isn’t thrilled, she hates delays. DCI Burns is already here.’

The pathologist’s expression was thunderous when I entered her theatre. She looked around sixty, grey-haired with a portly figure, anger turning her cheeks scarlet.

‘Sorry I’m late. The Tube’s at a standstill.’

‘And so am I, Dr Quentin, because of your lateness. Do you know how many more autopsies I have booked today?’ I shook my head, aware that opening my mouth would increase her rage. ‘Three. I won’t get home till nine tonight. Stand by the wall, please, and reserve your questions until the end.’

Burns’s voice resonated behind me. ‘Calm down, Fiona. Remember your blood pressure.’

She dismissed his comment with a swipe of her hand. ‘And the same to you, Don. One more noise and you’re outside.’

Dr Lindstrop turned to survey the old man’s corpse and I nodded at Burns. He looked so ill at ease that I remembered the last post-mortem we’d attended together when he’d passed out cold. I watched Lindstrop circling the marble slab, but avoided focusing on the old man’s face, a raw mess of blue and red. His body was pitifully thin, skin sagging across his ribs, naked apart from a white sheet covering his pelvis, as though the pathologist was saving his blushes. I made an effort to steady my breathing and hoped that Burns was doing the same. It was evident that fainting in Dr Lindstrop’s theatre would not be tolerated. She was concentrating so hard that she seemed to have forgotten she had an audience.

‘You poor old fellow,’ she whispered to herself.

The pathologist shone her torch on the priest’s damaged face, then stepped back to examine each limb in turn, intoning a list of bruises and contusions into the microphone that hung from the ceiling. It interested me that she handled the man’s skin delicately, reserving her tenderness for the dead instead of the living. She examined the glass disc that hung from his left wrist, then cut the leather tie and deposited it on a tray. With an instrument small as a toothpick she scraped under the priest’s nails.

‘If he fought his attacker, skin or hair cells may still be under here,’ she muttered in our direction. ‘Even if he was submerged for hours.’

Her assistant labelled the specimen jar and placed it on the tray. Now that she was fully absorbed, Lindstrop seemed to have forgotten her outrage. When she leant down to examine the man’s skull more closely, I could no longer avoid looking at his wounds, my empty stomach churning in protest.

‘Category A craniofacial injuries,’ she told the microphone. ‘Total skin excision from mandible to zygomatic, left side. Soft tissue excision from nasal arch to parietal, right side.’

I listened to her reciting surgical terms, but even a layman could see that his entire face had been removed. Only his cloudy blue eyes remained, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Dr Lindstrop peered at the exposed flesh with a magnifying glass, then turned towards us.

‘The muscle fibres have been torn vertically, which means that the first cut was made under the chin, then the skin was wrenched upwards.’

‘Like removing a balaclava,’ I said.

‘Quite so.’ Lindstrop sounded amused, as though I’d attempted a joke.

Burns gave a muffled groan. He looked even worse than I felt, his face a pallid shade of green. For the next hour Lindstrop was too busy to speak, and my legs were refusing to carry my full weight. I had become intimately familiar with every organ in the priest’s body – his heart, lungs, liver and spleen had all been removed and weighed separately. Just as we were about to leave, the pathologist directed her attention to Burns.

‘How strong is your stomach today?’ The outline of her smile appeared behind her surgical mask.

‘I’m still standing, aren’t I?’ he replied gruffly.

‘Come here and I’ll show you something interesting.’ He didn’t move an inch. ‘What about you, Dr Quentin?’

A host of smells hit me as I approached the slab: blood, excrement and the dark pungency of tar. Lindstrop raised a measuring jug to the light, half filled with brown liquid.

‘This came from his lungs, which shows that he died from drowning. The body fights to breathe, even when semiconscious. The victim ends up inhaling water as a reflex reaction. If he’d died before entering the river, his lungs would have been almost empty.’

‘Would the head wound have killed him?’

‘That’s certain, judging by its depth. The circular bruise on his temple is consistent with a single hammer blow, heavy enough to render him unconscious, then the killer worked on his face and skull. The attack must have been quick for him still to be breathing when he hit the water.’ She peered down at the cloudy liquid. ‘Finest Thames water, by the looks of it. None too clean.’