‘Ah yes, the perks of being a civil servant.’ The coroner looked ready to launch into his usual bitter commentary on the state of Britain, the world and life-everlasting should he be given even the slightest hint of encouragement, but Cass, with little interest in politics and even less in Farmer’s particular viewpoint, refused to be drawn, forcing the ME to fall silent. Cass was too tired and pissed off to be a willing sounding board, and the stench in the room was such that surely they all wanted to be free of it as soon as possible.
He peered at the girl’s naked body. The poor cow’s ribs jutted upwards over her concave stomach in a way that suggested either poverty or an advanced eating disorder. Given the cheap dye job on her almost-ginger hair, perhaps an attempt at blonde, Cass figured the former. Her large nipples were now simply islands of pink on the tiny curves that were almost breasts. Would she be any less flat-chested standing upright? He doubted it.
‘What is this? Number four?’
The ME stood alongside him. ‘Yes - at least we can presume so. I’ll confirm when I get the toxicology results back after the PM. You’re going to have some catching up to do if you want half a chance of solving this one. I’ll send all my notes over to you. I presume your sergeant’s still getting
debriefed
by Bowman’s sergeant? So she should have a good idea of what’s going on. Or is that over now?’
Cass was surprised. Farmer wasn’t normally one for loaded remarks, at least outside of those that served to support his delicate left-wing sensibilities. For once, Cass would have preferred that; Claire May’s private life was none of Farmer’s business. He ignored the question, saying, ‘May’s staying on the Jackson and Miller case and I’m keeping Blackmore on this one. Stupid to switch them over as I’m working both. If I change them we’ll all be confused rather than just me.’
His fingers itched for the feel of a cigarette and a quiet space to just empty his mind and breathe. It had been a bitch of a day, and he figured Farmer’s hadn’t been much better. Resources were tight and everyone was overworked. The image of the smiling bobby on the beat had been murdered long ago. His unsmiling eyes scanned the bed’s contents.
The young woman’s skin was pale, with no hint of tan lines, either fresh, or the final fading memories of a holiday long gone. An empty ache touched the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t quite pity, but it was close enough. Neither he nor the doc had had as bad a day as the dead girl in front of them.
NOTHING IS SACRED
was daubed across the top of her chest, below her angular collarbones and above her poor excuse for breasts. Somehow that thick crimson splatter made her death even more pathetic than the dingy flat ever could.
Nothing is sacred.
‘You’re telling me, mate,’ he muttered under his breath, directing the words at the ghost of the stranger who’d stood where he was standing now, intently painting the letters onto the dead woman’s cooling flesh, no doubt thinking he was doing something profound. Cass Jones knew better. There was no message in murder; this was just some sick bastard making excuses for his choices.
‘How long’s she been dead?’
‘A few hours. He may have had her here longer, but I’d say he killed her around about midday or one o’clock.’
‘Who found her?’ Cass was surprised anyone had found her at all. Most of the flats in this block were either condemned, with squatters in, or inhabited by the kind of people that had no concern for their neighbours.
‘He wanted her found. There was a boombox on, playing some kind of thrash metal music; he must have put it on just as he left. It was loud enough to piss off the people on either side. They kicked the door in around four and then called the police. And here we are.’
‘And here we are,’ Cass repeated softly. A thin bracelet that probably wasn’t real gold hung from the wrist that flopped over the side of the bed, a miniature horse hanging from it. Her lucky charm? ‘What about her eyes?’ he asked. They looked normal enough, but he wasn’t the expert.
‘I’ll let you know once I’ve taken a look under the microscope. I can’t see properly in this light. She’s not been dead long enough for them to develop, but I’m presuming she’s the same as the others.’
Cass figured the doctor was right. ‘Who was she?’
‘Her name’s Carla Rae. Your lot have her purse and bag. Her ID card was in it. She’s twenty-five, unemployed, unmarried. She was a nothing. A nobody.’ On the other side of the bed, the ME gathered the tools of his trade together. ‘I’m done here. I’ll get the body-baggers in and get her back to the lab. Should have an initial report for you by end of play tomorrow.’
Crouched by the bed, Cass nodded slightly.
A nobody. A nothing
. For the first time in their long association, the DI realised that perhaps he didn’t like the ME all that much. He doubted Carla Rae would have either. A small bruise had bloomed around the tiny pinprick in her arm and he froze for a moment, wondering whether he could feel her calling out for answers.
Outside, street lamps flickered into humming existence. Cass sucked in a lungful of the woman’s death before standing up and stepping back so the paramedics could roll her into the black zip-up. He glanced at his watch, the numbers glowing naggingly back at him, and his heart speeded up; shit. He needed to kick his lethargy back into touch. It was just gone five-thirty and he had to be in Soho in thirty minutes’ time. It was his day to collect.
The dying embers of the day clung to the skyline, and peering blearily out through the windscreen Cass wondered if maybe the world might truly be in the grip of some insanity that was slowly hugging it closer and refusing to let go.
Things were going to get better
. That’s what the newspapers and perfectly presented newsreaders kept repeating. Cass couldn’t see it though. As far as he could tell, they were all sinking deeper and deeper into the shit, and no one had a rope to cling to, let alone a shovel big enough to dig them out. And as the world got crazier, so did the rules, leading to situations like this one, which had him heading into Soho for a transaction all the bosses over at Scotland Yard must know about but obviously preferred to ignore. Maybe they liked to pretend their shit didn’t stink the same as everyone else’s.
But then, he figured, lighting a cigarette as the traffic crawled towards the inevitable central London almost-gridlock, what did he know? He’d been wallowing in the brown stuff for longer than he cared to remember. Smoke filled the confined space and he grinned, enjoying it more because it was illegal to be smoking inside the car. Understanding the thrill of breaking rules was what made Cass Jones such a good policeman. Despite his disgruntled colleagues’ assertions that Cass was just lucky when it came to solving his cases, he knew luck had nothing to do with it. Cass was a good copper because he thought like a criminal, and that was all there was to it. He took another long drag before winding down the window, letting the smoke escape to join the other poisonous fumes belching out from the vehicles shuffling their way through the centre of town. The air reeked of life.
The heaviness he’d felt watching the dead woman’s body being bagged up finally lifted as the car filled with the earthy noises of the city. There wasn’t a place in the world to beat London Town. It was grimy and gritty and cold and damp, but it was a tough old place that had survived for centuries; the ghosts of the past lurked on every street in the shape of the buildings and the plaques that proudly declared their long-gone residents, bolstering the living with the solid anchor of their heritage. It would take a lot to bring London and her Londoners to their knees. They might be buckling under the recession, but the city would find a way to bring them all through. It always did.
He flicked the butt out of the window and thought of Carla Rae again. London’s residents now at least had the prospect of a serial killer to look forward to. There had been four dead women found in the same circumstances in the space of two months, and in these straitened times, where bad news of some sort or another filled the papers every day, the press wouldn’t pass up a juicy story like this once they’d joined the dots. At least once this was splattered across the pages of the tabloids it might distract the masses from their own misery for a while. Once they’d devoured the details of the deaths - the
murders -
of those less fortunate, then out of the woodwork would come everyone who’d ever known them, or dated them, or been in the same bar, or who’d just always had the feeling that fate would not be kind. Everyone loved the thrill of
it could have been me
. It made them feel lucky, when of course there was no luck. There were only choices.
Cass didn’t care that people would get a thrill from the death of Carla Rae; that was only human nature. What he cared about was that the press didn’t get hold of too much information. The words scrawled across the women’s chests,
that
they could have. But the eyes were different. They needed to hold back those details if they were ever going to weed out the crazies who would be lining up to confess as soon as the papers hit the stands.
It was nearly an hour after leaving the tower block in Newham that he finally edged the Audi out past a bus and pulled into Denman Street. The narrow street just off the Piccadilly end of Shaftesbury Avenue was a tiny vein almost lost in the heart of the city, but as with most things, appearances were deceptive. He left his car in the cramped and ridiculously overpriced NCP car park and walked the few steps in the cooling air to the discreet entrance to Money-penny’s, one of Artie Mullins’ nightclubs, and checked his watch again. He was still late.
Cass pushed the button by the door and then looked up at the small camera attached almost invisibly at the corner of the building. A moment later the buzzer sounded and he was inside, jogging down the stairs to the basement bar. Below the street it could be any time of day or night, and there was something about that which appealed to Cass. Time stood still away from the hustle and bustle of the city and the rise and fall of the sun, and that allowed a sense of freedom, even if it was only a short-lived flight of the imagination.
‘You’re late.’ Arthur - Artie to his friends - Mullins sat at the long bar, sipping beer from a tall glass. ‘If it was any other fucker I might think they weren’t coming.’ He grinned, one gold cap flashing against the tarred brown of the rest of his teeth. ‘Not you though, Jones. I think you’d collect even if some bastard had taken your kneecaps out.’ He stood up and pulled out a second stool. ‘Beer?’
Cass nodded and sat down. ‘Sorry. It’s been one of those days.’
‘Aren’t they all?’ Like most of London’s hard men, Artie had spent a lot of time body-building in gyms in the past and his thickset frame looked out of place behind the slick modern bar. As he bent over Cass could make out the start of a paunch under his polo shirt. Cass wasn’t fooled by it. Artie might be pushing sixty, with his gym days well behind him, but he was still one of the most dangerous men in the criminal underworld. Cass liked him, though. He couldn’t help himself.
Artie pulled a bottle of Beck’s from the row of illuminated fridges beneath the mirrored back bar and popped the lid off before handing it across. ‘Here you go. Same as normal.’
‘Thanks.’ Cass left the thick brown manila envelope on the marble surface. He wouldn’t bother counting it - Artie Mullins was no mug. He wouldn’t rip off the police.
‘It’s a funny old world we’re in, isn’t it?’ Artie’s face cracked into a grin that sent a shockwave of wrinkles across his leathered face. It was the same comment he always made on pick-up days, and as usual Cass couldn’t think of an answer. He clinked his bottle with Artie’s and took a long swallow. It
was
a funny world. There was no denying that.
Back in 2011, as the government realised that there was no way the country could financially sustain itself, the real no-holds-barred cutbacks began. They didn’t even bother trying to dress them up. The NHS virtually disappeared for all except the chosen few sectors of society. No state pensions for anyone over forty-five - and those that were already paying out were to be cut back to the minimum. Police pay became performance-related: the more arrests that led to convictions, the more you got paid. Although still running in principle, in reality that initiative worked for about a week, because the gap between arrest and conviction was often months, even years, and the paperwork took forever to fill in and keep track of.
They all still claimed it when they could, because of course arrests and convictions were still being made, but then someone came up with a more reliable way of getting paid. The police chiefs sitting in their ivory towers and dreaming up these half-arsed schemes chose to ignore the fact that it was much easier for the rank and file to take their performance-related pay in cash from men like Arthur ‘Artie’ Mullins, a tax-free cash bonus for simply not arresting certain people; in effect, for leaving the firms alone. Cass always thought of it as a non-performance-related pay scheme.
In the main, most coppers - Cass among them - were happy to take it. No one wanted to spend their days chasing low-life scum just so they could earn a decent wage. There would always be people out there selling drugs, and even more that wanted to buy them, and yes, they could drive themselves into early graves chasing them all endlessly, but what would be the point? There was always someone else more than happy to take over, and as far as Cass was concerned, they could carry right on with their business, as long as they didn’t start making things dangerous for mainstream society.
The world wasn’t fair. Instead, like Cass, it was just tired - but when those firms stepped across the line and let their business affect the ordinary world of the nine-to-fivers, then he felt his blood rise and the policeman in him came to life. And as long as that didn’t happen, the system worked just fine and everyone was happy.
‘Today’s been in a league of its own.’ The beer was cool and it left a refreshingly bitter after-taste at the back of his throat.