Cass raises his hand, his fingers seeking out the familiar shapes of his nose and mouth. There is nothing there. He reaches further, his hands sinking into a sticky warm mess. He turns for help, but Freeman has vanished. The seat is empty. Cass leans forward and taps on the plastic division between him and the driver. His heart pounds and his skin suddenly feels terribly cold.
The cabbie turns round. He has no face either, just the torn fleshy remains where one has once been, sitting in a concave half of his head. He raises a hand and slowly wiggles his forefinger from side to side, as if Cass were a naughty child. There is something cold and heavy in Cass’s lap and he finds he doesn’t need to look down or feel it to know what it is.
Finally, he screams.
Cass awoke with a start and his confused eyes focused on the curve of the steering wheel and the grey sleeve of his sweatshirt. They were both very close up. His arm was tucked between the wheel and his head, and it was numb. His car. He was in his car.
He sat up slowly, every joint in his stiff body screaming at the movement, and looked down at his arm. A blossom of blood stood out in the gloom of the dawn. He peered into the rear-view mirror and saw the crust of red that circled his right nostril. Great.
Outside, the delivery truck that had woken him completed its manoeuvre, the screeching wheels thankfully falling silent, the brakes hissing in relief. Cass leaned his thumping head back against the seat. His mouth was dry and the inside of his nose burned as he breathed in the cold morning air. The jigsaw pieces of the evening came together in his mind. The picture they formed wasn’t pretty.
One line had turned into two and then three, and on until he’d done at least a gram and a half; he remembered that. He’d driven; for how long he wasn’t sure. The street lights and the people who wandered in the night had glowed and he’d been entranced by them, he remembered that. He sighed with the memory, and forced a dry swallow. He must have tripped out on the gear. Finally, he’d pulled into the twenty-four-hour Tesco car park not far from the estate in Newham where Carla Rae had died. He was going to get cigarettes and then petrol.
That
he remembered. He yawned and peered around at the cup holders and side pockets. There were no cigarettes in the car that he could see. He must have just parked up and passed out. The day was not starting well.
He was frozen. He turned the key that was still in the ignition and set the heater to blast. He shivered as the vents and what was left of the drugs in his system blew any last cobwebs away. The clock glared at him. It was five a.m. He groaned and put the car into gear. No rest for the wicked.
In the morning light that glared through the slatted gaps in the blinds he stripped off and stuffed his clothes in the washing machine, turning it on before heading up to the shower. He didn’t use the en-suite bathroom. In the bedroom he pulled fresh clothes from the cupboards as quietly as he could, although he was sure Kate was awake. She lay on her side facing away from him, and there was a stiffness in the slim line of her back that betrayed consciousness. He wondered how she would react if he ran a finger down that line and whispered how sorry he was for everything. For a moment he thought he might do it, but instead he found his legs carrying him to the spare room to get dressed. There wasn’t enough time for that kind of apology, and anyway, it would be like sticking a plaster over a bullet wound.
In the end, he left the house without speaking. Their marriage worked better that way.
Chapter Four
‘
Y
ou’ll be pleased to hear that this is definitely number four.’The ME pulled the sheet back from the body on the metal table with brisk efficiency. Cass peered into Carla Rae’s face and felt nothing. Displayed on the slab like this she was simply evidence. The dead woman in his memory, trapped in the crime scene photographs, she was the victim, not this cut-open, soulless corpse.
‘Oh yeah, that’s cheered me up no end.’ Blackmore stayed slightly behind Cass and he wondered if it was just that he didn’t want to get any trace of death on his crisp apple-green shirt. He was warming to the sergeant’s ironic tongue, though. He’d give him that.
‘It should do.’ Cass didn’t look up. ‘It means that at least we don’t have to worry about a copycat as well as a serial.’
‘Remember,’ Farmer said, ‘serial is a taboo word on this case. We don’t want the press hearing a whisper of it.’
‘Like we can stop that! They have better informers than we do.’ Cass folded his arms across his chest. ‘So, what have we got?’
‘Cause of death is the same as the other three. A lethal injection of pentabarbitone, delivered intravenously into the arm here.’ He highlighted the small bruise on the inside of her elbow.
‘Were they all injected in the right arm?’
‘Yes - and pretty much in the same spot.’
‘Would it be painful?’
‘No, not at all. Quite the opposite in fact. Pentabarbitone is a barbiturate - a tranquilliser. It’s called Nembutal in the US.’ Farmer smiled, grimly. ‘It’s the euthanasia drug of choice.’
‘And currently the drug of choice in Hollywood,’ Blackmore added. ‘Often the cause of accidental suicide when taken with alcohol.’
‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ Farmer said approvingly before turning his attention back to Cass. ‘Your sergeant’s right - although our killer isn’t actually using Nembutal. He’s using veterinary pentabarbitone. It’s what they use to put animals down.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Very little really. Nembutal also contains propylene glycol, and there are no traces of that in any of the victims.’ He paused. ‘The drug works by slowing down the body’s respiration until breathing stops altogether. The woman died quickly and painlessly. They all did.’
Cass frowned. ‘How hard is it to get hold of this drug?’
‘Not that easy. Veterinary surgeries and their suppliers will all stock it. Any pharmaceutical company that makes drugs for vets will also have it.’ He shrugged. ‘But sales and usage will all have to be recorded.’
The feel of the morgue’s cool air on Cass’s skin was keeping his brain firing, and he was grateful. He was going to need as much help as he could get today. His bones ached, from sleeping in the car and the cocaine comedown. ‘Is it difficult to administer?’
‘Not overly. If it’s injected too quickly then the sudden cessation of respiratory functions can cause a heart attack. But that wasn’t the case with any of our victims.’
‘So he knows what he’s doing.’
‘It looks that way, yes.’
Cass logged the information in his brain to mull over later. Why hadn’t the killer just used coke or crack or H- something that would be much easier to come by and much harder to trace? All of those would be equally lethal if injected in the right quantities.
The profiler was coming in later. Maybe he’d be able to shed some light on that. Cass looked up. Farmer looked tired. Blackmore looked slightly bored. Cass didn’t care. Maybe he could have read all this in the files, but if they wanted him up to speed he preferred to see for himself, and to actually hear the information. That was how he worked best; that way he could ferret out all sorts of nuances he might miss just reading the report.
‘What else?’
‘As with the others, there’s no evidence of any recent sexual activity.’
‘And yet he strips them naked?’
‘And why he does that is your job to find out,’ Farmer pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s a kinky thing, or maybe it’s just practical. He doesn’t want to leave any evidence.’
‘Maybe.’ Cass looked at the corpse and for a moment saw Carla Rae reanimated, her weighed and analysed organs back in her torso, all functioning perfectly. He could see her in that grimy Newham flat, terrified, slowly peeling off her clothes with trembling fingers and hoping that whoever it was standing watching in the shadows would just get it over with, do what they wanted with her and leave. Unfortunately, he did.
‘And her eyes?’
‘Ah. Here is the very interesting bit.’
Blackmore suddenly stood upright, his attention engaged.
‘I found the eggs, right in the corners of her eyes. The tricky little bastards were slipping round to the back . . . although if I’d left them another couple of hours they’d have come wriggling out all by themselves.’ He waved Cass over to his microscope.
‘Musca domestica eggs. The common housefly. The eggs are like tiny grains of rice when they’re laid, one and a half to two millimetres in length at most. They normally hatch within six to eight hours - that’s when they turn into the maggoty larvae we all know and love. In two or three days they begin the transition to pupae, developing a harder, browner shell, and then they finally hatch into flies. Obviously all this is weather-dependent. The hotter it is, the quicker the process.’
The doctor stopped, looked at Cass and smiled wryly. ‘Trust me, I already knew quite a bit about the common or garden maggot before this bastard showed up, but over the past two months I’ve become a world-class expert. Once you’ve had time to take a good look at the other three case files you’ll see this vic is the first one we’ve found so early. Jade Palmer had been dead approximately one week, Amanda Carlisle six days, and Emma Loines three days - some of the larvae were turning into pupae when she was found. Have you seen the photos?’
‘Only in passing. I’ll take a proper look after them when we’re done here. Carla Rae’s the freshest - that makes her the most important if I want to catch this fucker.’ Cass couldn’t help feel a twitch of disgust as he pulled away from the lens. He wasn’t keen on flies, but maggots revolted him, and knowing that these little white grains would soon be wiggling around in the poor woman’s eyeball was enough to turn his fragile stomach. ‘So what was the interesting bit?’ he asked once he’d gathered himself.
‘The eggs I found in her eyes were perfect. Any damage done to them was by me, I’m afraid to say.’
‘And?’ Cass wasn’t sure what the doctor was driving at. ‘Spit it out, man.’
‘It looks as if they were laid there. I have absolutely no idea how someone could have placed them so perfectly without damaging a single one.’ The ME frowned. ‘I’m going to have a go at it this afternoon, when my irritating little shit of an assistant gets his act together and brings me some eggs, but I wouldn’t lay bets on me to succeed.’
‘Maybe he
did
get a fly to lay them there,’ Blackmore said.
Both Cass and Farmer turned to look at him.
‘I’ve heard of flea circuses too, Mat, but they’re like Santa. They don’t exist. It’s all just a trick.’ Cass looked over at the ME. ‘Figuring out how he did that is down to you. Maybe get that assistant of yours—’
‘—Eagleton. Josh Eagleton,’ Farmer interrupted. ‘I suppose we can’t go on referring to him as “that little shit” for ever. And I fear he’ll probably be around for a while. Under that thick layer of stupidity he’s surprisingly clever. He’s started to use his initiative too. Had the swabs done on this one before I’d even got my scrubs on.’
‘Then maybe get Eagleton to pick you up a few flies to play with too. See if you can find a way to get them to drop the eggs so precisely.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘I’m sure for a man of your capabilities it’s child’s play.’
Farmer’s perma-tanned skin was like worn leather, and with his long grey curls he looked like an ageing hippy, but Cass reckoned he could see the ME’s colour fading as they spoke, as if his body knew it wasn’t going to be going near a sunbed or swanning off on a quick weekend to the Costa del Crap any time in the near future.
He sighed and returned to the subject at hand. ‘And the writing on her chest? That was done in blood, yes?’
‘Ah, “Nothing is Sacred”,’ Farmer said, ‘although I can’t see what was possibly sacred about this girl to begin with.’
Cass’s irritation with the doctor rose again, but he bit it back and let the man continue.
‘Yes, it’s written in blood and it’s a DNA match with the others. It doesn’t belong to any of the victims - not the ones we’ve found thus far at least.’ Farmer shrugged. ‘It could be his own, of course, but it’s not on file so I can’t give you anything from that. We’re still running a comparison against trace evidence found at the scenes, but he’s not exactly leaving these girls in clean environments. There are hairs and body fluid residues all over the squat this one was found in, from dozens of people. But we’ll do our best.’
‘Maybe next time he’ll fuck up and leave us something. In the meantime, do what you can with what you’ve got and stay in touch.’
‘You think there’ll be a next time?’
‘That’s why they call them serial,’ Cass said, dryly. ‘Because they just keep on coming.’
By the time they got back to Paddington Green the profiler was waiting for them. Cass took the case files and sent Sergeant Blackmore to make copies for the profiler to keep. He grabbed two coffees from the machine and strode along the corridor towards the far end stairs up to the third floor, where there were a number of small conference rooms.
As he passed the Incident Room -
his
Incident Room, now - it looked like everyone was working. Officers at both ends of the room were on the phones, and bits of paper and files were being passed around. He hadn’t expected anything less. Murder Squad officers were not known to be slackers - aside from the passion for the job most of them shared, the official bonuses were too good if they actually scored a conviction. And it wasn’t as if the two units didn’t have enough to be working on.
The Miller and Jackson team were using the new information in the grainy film to build a more accurate timeline of events. That would help them piece together Macintyre’s movements, as well as the two boys’. They still desperately needed to find out how the shooter had known Sam Macintyre would be in Formosa Street at that precise time. Someone must have grassed him up, but getting any information from anyone Macintyre associated with would be like getting blood out of the proverbial. No one wanted to look like they were in on the hit, but nor were they wanting to be seen talking to the filth. Sorting that timeline was going to be a long and painfully slow process.