The Retribution (7 page)
Carol crossed back to the whiteboards, where the rest of the team were gathering. She couldn’t help admiring the exquisite cut of Stacey’s suit. It was clearly bespoke, and expensively so. She was aware that the team geek had her own software business independent of her police job. Carol had never enquired too closely, believing they all had a right to a private life away from the shit they had to wade through at work. But it was clear from her wardrobe alone that Stacey had an income that dwarfed what the rest of them earned. One of these days Sam Evans was going to notice the almost imperceptible signs that Stacey was crazy about him. When Sam the superficial put
that together with her net worth, there would be no stopping him. But by the looks of it, Carol would be long gone before that happened. One drama she wouldn’t be sorry to miss.
Paula cleared her throat and squared her shoulders. There was nothing bespoke about her creased jeans and rumpled brown sweater, the same clothes she’d been wearing when she’d picked Carol up the night before. ‘We were called in last night by Northern Division. The body of an as yet unidentified female was found in an empty warehouse on the Parkway industrial estate.’ She fixed two photographs to a whiteboard, one of the whole crime scene with the crucified body at the heart of it, the other of the woman’s face. ‘As you can see, she was nailed to a wooden cross then propped up against the wall. Upside down. Gruesome, but probably not enough to involve us on its own.’
She stuck three more photographs on the board. Two were identifiably tattooed human wrists; the other could have been any scrap of material with letters written on it. In each case, the letters spelled ‘MINE’. Paula turned back to face her colleagues. ‘What makes it one of ours is that it’s apparently number three. What links them is the tatt on the wrist. That and the fact that they’ve all been found on Northern’s patch, which isn’t necessarily where you’d expect to find dead sex workers.’
‘Why not?’ Chris Devine was the team member least familiar with the nuances of Bradfield’s social geography, having originally moved up from the Met.
‘Most of the street life happens around Temple Fields in the city centre. Also most of the inside trade,’ Kevin said. ‘There’s a couple of pockets on the main arteries out of town, but Northern’s pretty clean on the whole.’
‘My liaison at Northern’s a DS called Franny Riley,’ Paula said. ‘He told me they’ve had a hotspot lately round the new hospital building site. Half a dozen or so women working the
area where the labourers park up. He thinks they’ve mostly been East Europeans, probably trafficked. But our first two victims were both local women, so maybe not connected to that.’ Another photo, this time of a worn-out face with sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones and lips tightly pressed together. Nobody ever looked good in a mugshot, but this woman looked particularly pissed off. ‘The first victim, Kylie Mitchell. Aged twenty-three. Crackhead. Five convictions for soliciting, one for minor possession. She mostly worked on the edges of Temple Fields, but she grew up in the high flats out at Skenby – which is bang in the middle of Northern’s patch, Chris. She was strangled and dumped under the ring-road overpass three weeks ago.’ Paula nodded to Stacey. ‘Stacey’s setting up the files on our network.’
Stacey flashed a smile so quick anyone who blinked would have missed it. ‘They’ll be available at the end of the briefing,’ she said.
‘Kylie’s the usual depressing story. Dropped out of school with no qualifications and a taste for partying. Soon graduated to sex for drugs, then moved on to working the streets to support her crack habit. She had a kid when she was twenty, taken straight into care, adopted six months later.’ Paula shook her head and sighed. ‘As far as the sex trade is concerned, Kylie was a bottom feeder. She’d got to the point of no return. No fixed abode, no pimp looking out for her. Easy meat for someone looking for the worst kind of thrill.’
‘How many times have we heard this story?’ Sam sounded as bored as he looked.
‘Too many times. Believe me, Sam, no one would be happier than me if we never had to hear it again,’ Carol said. The rebuke was clear. ‘What do we know about her last movements, Paula?’
‘Not a lot. She didn’t even have any of the other girls looking out for her. She was notorious for taking no care of herself.
She was up for anything, didn’t care about using a condom. The other girls had given up on her. Or she’d given up on them, it’s not entirely clear which way round it was. The night of the murder, she was seen around nine o’clock on Campion Way, right on the edge of Temple Fields. We think a couple of the regulars there warned her off their pitch. And that’s it. Nothing, till she turns up under the overpass.’
‘What about forensics?’ Kevin asked.
‘Traces of semen from four different sources. None of them on the database, so that’s only going to have any value once we’ve got someone in the frame. Other than that, all we’ve got is the tattoo. Done postmortem, that’s why there’s no inflammation.’
‘Does that mean we’re looking for a tattoo artist? Someone with professional skills?’ Chris asked.
‘We need to get some expert opinion on that,’ Carol said. ‘And we need to find out how easy it is to get hold of a tattoo machine. Talk to suppliers, see if we can get a list of recent purchases.’
Sam got up to study the tattoo photos more closely. ‘It doesn’t look that skilled to me. But then, that in itself could be deliberate.’
‘Too soon to speculate,’ Carol said. ‘Who found her, Paula?’
‘Couple of teenagers. DS Riley reckons they were looking for a quiet spot to neck a bottle of cider. There’s an old stripped-out Transit van down there, the nearest the local kids have to a youth club. She was shoved in the front end. Where the engine would be if there was an engine left. No real attempt to hide her. Northern already did a door-to-door locally, but the nearest houses are a good fifty metres away, and it’s their back sides that face the crime scene. No joy at all.’
‘Let’s do it again,’ Carol said. ‘She wasn’t beamed down from outer space. Paula, sort it with DS Riley.’
‘Will do.’ Paula pinned another mugshot to the board. ‘This
is Suzanne Black, known as Suze. Aged twenty-seven. Half a dozen convictions for soliciting. Not quite as far down the scale as Kylie. Suze shared a flat in one of the Skenby tower blocks with another sex worker, a rent boy called Nicky Reid. According to Nicky, she used to pick up her tricks in the Flyer—’
‘What’s the Flyer?’ Carol interrupted.
‘It’s a pub round the back of the airport, near the cargo area. An old-fashioned roadhouse kind of place. It dates back to when the airport was just Brackley Field aerodrome in the war,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s not a place you’d take the wife and kids for Sunday lunch, but it’s a couple of steps up from a dive.’
‘Nicky says she had a few regulars,’ Paula continued. ‘Cargo handlers at the airport, mostly. Like Kylie, she had a habit, though her drug of choice was heroin. Nicky says she’d been using for years, that she functioned pretty well. Also like Kylie, she didn’t have a pimp. He says she had a long-standing arrangement with her drug supplier – any trouble with anybody trying to muscle in on her business, he’d sort them. She was a good customer.’ A wry twist lifted one corner of Paula’s mouth. ‘And she put other custom his way too.’
‘When did Nicky last see her?’ Carol again.
‘Two weeks ago. They left the flat together. He went into Temple Fields, she was heading for the Flyer. Next day when he got up, she wasn’t there. No sign that she’d been back. He left it a couple of days, in case she was off with one of her mates or her regulars, though that would have been unusual for her.’ Paula shook her head, faintly bemused. ‘The way Nicky describes it, they had this really domesticated set-up.’
‘Who knew?’ Sam sounded contemptuous.
‘So on the third day, Nicky tried to report Suze missing. His nearest police station happens to be Northern Divisional HQ. To say they were not interested would be a profound understatement. Nicky had a come-apart in reception and nearly got
arrested himself. But no action was taken. The body turned up four days ago in the Brade Canal in the course of an angling competition. According to the pathologist, she’d been drowned, but not in the Brade.’
Paula clicked a button on the pointer in her hand and a video window sprang to life on the whiteboard. Dr Grisha Shatalov, the pathologist, smiled out at them in his scrubs. His warm voice with its soft Canadian accent was stripped to tinnyness by the cheap speakers. ‘When we have an apparent drowning, the first thing we look for is whether it really is a drowning. Especially if the victim is, like this one, a drug user. Because sometimes a drug overdose can look like a drowning, the way the lungs fill up with fluid. But I can tell you for sure that, although Suzanne Black was a heroin user, this was not a drug overdose.
‘So now we have to figure out if she was drowned where she was found. Have I told you about diatoms before? Doesn’t matter if I have, I’m going to tell you again. Diatoms are microscopic creatures, a bit like plankton. They’ve got shells made of silicate, and they live in open water. Fresh water, salt water. Lakes and rivers. Every body of water has different diatoms. They’re like a fingerprint, and they also vary according to the time of year.’ His smile grew wider. ‘You guys are fascinated, right? OK, I’ll cut to the chase. When you drown, the diatoms make their way into your tissues. Lungs, kidneys, bone marrow, that kind of thing. We dissolve the tissue in acid and what’s left is proof of what river or lake you drowned in.
‘Well, we did the analysis and there are no diatoms in Suzanne Black’s body. That means one thing and one thing only. She did not die in the canal. She died in tap water. Or filtered water, maybe. We ran some tests on her lungs and we found traces of soap, which to my mind narrows it down to a bath or a deep sink. I hope this little lecture has been helpful.’
Carol shook her head. ‘Smooth-talking bastard. One of
these days I’m going to get the prosecution to play one of his cheery little vids to the jury. However, this is really useful information. We’re not looking for a struggle by the canal, we’re looking for wherever he took her for a bath.’
‘Maybe he took her home with him,’ Kevin suggested.
‘He seems to be careful,’ Carol said. ‘I don’t know that he’d have risked that. We need to find out where she took her punters. OK, on you go, Paula.’
‘She was fully dressed when she was found,’ Paula said. ‘She wasn’t weighted down, but the body had snagged on the usual canal debris, so she’d been in the water a while. They didn’t catch the tattoo at first because the skin was so degraded.’
Carol winced at the word. No matter that it would have been used by Grisha himself; it still felt like an adjective that had no place being applied to a human body. ‘But there’s no doubt about it?’
Paula shook her head. ‘Dr Shatalov is clear. It’s a postmortem tattoo and it looks very similar to the ones on Kylie and our Jane Doe.’
‘If she drowned in a bath, there’s a chance someone saw her with her killer. He had to take her somewhere with a bath. A house, a hotel or something,’ Chris said.
‘That’s right. We need to get her photo on the local news, see what that brings out of the woodwork. Kevin, talk to the flatmate, Nicky. See if he has any photos of her.’ Carol frowned, considering. ‘Let’s keep a lid on the connection for now, if we can. Penny Burgess has been sniffing round, but Dr Hill sent her off with a flea in her ear. She talks to any of you, do the same.’ She gave Kevin a direct look, but he was ostentatiously scribbling in his notebook. ‘We’ll get DS Reekie to do the press call, keep MIT out of the picture for now, let the media think this is his. If our killer thinks he’s not caught our attention, it might provoke him into breaking cover.’
‘Any chance we could get Tony to take a look at this?’ Everyone froze at Kevin’s query. Sam stopped fidgeting, Chris stopped taking notes, Stacey stopped tapping on her smartphone and Paula’s expression was fixed at incredulity.
Carol’s mouth tightened as she shook her head. ‘You know as well as I do, we don’t have the budget.’ Her voice was harsher than they were accustomed to.
Kevin flushed, his freckles fading against the scarlet. ‘I just thought … since they’re winding us up anyway, why not? You know? You’re leaving us. What have you got to lose?’
Before Carol could respond to this uncharacteristic defiance, the door to the squad room burst open. On the threshold, hair awry, one shirt tail hanging out, jacket collar askew, stood Tony Hill. He looked around wildly before his gaze settled on Carol. He gulped air, then said, ‘Carol, we need to talk.’
There was no affectionate indulgence in Carol’s glare. ‘I’m in the middle of a murder briefing, Tony,’ she said, her tone chilly.
‘That can wait,’ he said, continuing into the room and letting the door sigh shut behind him. ‘What I have to say can’t.’