Dear Departed (4 page)

When he had gone, Atherton said, ‘He can’t be our man, not in an Armani suit.’

‘No,’ Slider said. ‘I think he just happened by at the wrong moment. Like Chapman. But with Chapman, he was actually on the scene, so we’d better get fingerprints and a buccal swab from him for elimination purposes.’

‘What about the dog?’ Atherton said merrily. ‘Should we get his DNA as well?’

‘I’m glad you’re finding this entertaining,‘ Slider said.

The photographer was coming towards them. Old Sid had retired – not before time given his increasing misanthropy, which was ratcheted upwards by every scene he captured for posterity. The new man was David Archer, young, enthusiastic but with a nephew-like shy deference towards Slider and most of his team. He was a rather delicate-looking creature, so handsome
he was almost pretty, and didn’t look robust enough to cope with the things he had to photograph; but he was so passionate about his equipment and the wonderful things modern digital technology could do that Slider suspected the subject of his work didn’t impinge much on him.

‘Bob asked me to tell you you can go in now, sir,’ he said to Slider.

‘Finished your work?’

‘Yes, I’m going back to the van to have a look at it, but I’ll be on hand in case there’s anything more when the forensic biologist arrives.’

‘Do something for me,’ Slider said. ‘Take a long, slow pan around with your video camera at the crowd. All the onlookers. Try not to be obvious about it. Keep as far back as you can and do it on the zoom. Everyone who’s hanging around the scene. I want their faces.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Archer said. He was too polite to ask, but there was a question in his eyes.

Slider took pity on him. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the murderer came back for a look. He’d want to see who found her, what their reaction was, how baffled we were. That’d be part of the fun. He might be here right now, enjoying himself watching us running round after him.’

‘I’ll get what you want, sir, don’t worry,’ Archer said. ‘Would you like me to make a series of stills, so you can have them to study?’

‘Good idea. Thanks.’

‘He wouldn’t hang about all covered in blood, surely?’ Atherton said, when Archer had left them.

‘No, but he probably wore a protective garment, which he might have discarded somewhere before coming back.’

‘He might even live locally,’ Atherton went along with it. ‘Went home and changed and came back.’

‘You do think of them,’ Slider complained. They walked back to the gap in the shrubbery and clothed up, and then, conducted by Bailey, walked along the stepping boards that had been laid to make a safe path into the scene within the shrubbery.

The rhododendrons were massive specimens, some of them ten or fifteen feet high. They grew their leaves where the light reached them, so on the back side they presented bare trunks
and branches. What looked from the path like dense vegetation was in fact a series of hollow caves. With the thick mulch of bark on the ground, there was nothing to mar the uniformity of dark brown except the odd piece of litter. Blown in by the wind? It didn’t seem likely, inside the shrubbery. Left by kids playing, more like – or by someone hiding, lurking? Slider noted a cigarette packet (B&H), a torn strip of a Walkers crisps bag, and two wrappers from chocolate bars: one Picnic and one Double Decker.

‘We’ll have those,’ he said to Bailey. ‘There’ll probably be some cigarette ends, as well.’

‘There are,’ Bailey confirmed. ‘Quite a lot scattered about.’

‘Take them all,’ Slider said. Smokers were so used to throwing away the butt when they’d finished that they did it automatically, either not knowing, or forgetting, that DNA could be recovered from the saliva on them.

‘Thank God there’s no such thing as a non-smoking murderer,’ said Atherton.

In the heart of all this brown, in a clear space, lay the body. It was a young woman, dressed for jogging in knee-length black Lycra shorts, a sleeveless white shirt, trainers and short white socks. She was slim and fit-looking, with lightly tanned skin, and shortish, tousled blonde hair that gave Slider an unpleasant tug because it reminded him of Joanna’s. It was a shade lighter, though. Joanna’s was more bronze. The sunlight filtering through the leaves touched it here and there and made it gleam like true coin.

She was lying on her back, one arm flung out, the other resting beside her body. Her face was very pretty, heart-shaped with a short, straight nose and full lips, parted to show good teeth. Her skin was smooth and lightly tanned, her hands well kept with short, unvarnished nails. She had small gold studs in her ears and a thin gold chain round her neck on which hung a gold disc – a St Christopher, he supposed. Around her waist was a sort of utility belt of elasticated webbing, on which was hung a plastic water-bottle on the right, a CD Walkman on the left, and a small zip purse in the middle. The headset was hanging round her neck, the cord loose, pulled out from the Walkman socket. He noted that the Walkman had been switched off.

The warmth of the day was lifting a pleasant, woody smell from the bark chippings and birds were singing near and far off in the park. Broken by the gently moving leaves of a birch tree, sunshine was dappling the ground and the girl. She might have stretched out for a rest to gaze up at the patch of clear blue sky above, except that her T-shirt was spatched and blotted with blood.

‘Multiple stab wounds,’ Atherton said, breaking the silence. ‘Would that qualify as a “frenzied attack”?’ It was what police reports and the media always called it, a cliché there seemed no escaping. Atherton used it consciously, knowing Slider hated it.

The bark was scuffed in the immediate area, though not as much as Slider would have expected it to be. He hunkered down close to the victim, and now he could smell the clean odours of her shampoo and body lotion, and under them the reek of blood. There were defence cuts on her forearms and the palms of her hands, the blood resting in them, hardly smeared at all. There was definitely blood on the bark immediately around and under the body, but it was impossible to see how much, or to discern any spread patterns.

‘Is there blood anywhere else?’ he asked Bailey.

‘We haven’t found any so far, but it’s impossible to be sure without close examination,’ Bailey said. All I can say is that it looks as though all the action happened in this spot.’

Atherton, looking over Slider’s shoulder, said, ‘What’s that grey mark on the T-shirt? Sort of greyish-brown, a smudge?’

‘I think it’s a footmark – or a toemark, at least,’ Slider said. ‘He turned her over with his foot. She was lying face down and he turned her over. It’s the sort of dirty mark that could be left by a shoe.’

‘I suppose he wanted to check she was dead.’

‘We might possibly get a partial sole pattern from it,’ Slider said.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Bailey. ‘We have photographed it.’

Slider stood up and looked back towards the north side of the shrubbery. ‘I don’t understand why he dragged her in that way. Much easier the way we came in.’

On both his previous outings, the Park Killer had dragged his victim under cover, once into a shrubbery and once into a
rose garden, stabbed her to death, and escaped the scene without anyone’s seeing or hearing anything. Speed had to have been of the essence. Probably that was why he had not robbed or molested either of his victims. It was getting away with murder that interested him, it seemed.

Atherton considered. ‘The bushes give better cover on that side. If he’d lurked on the more open side, someone might have seen him.’

‘I suppose,’ Slider said. He looked around to fix the scene in his mind, and then again down at the body. She was out jogging, listening to her music, perhaps thinking about the rest of her day. He looked at her pretty face, all animation gone, her softly muddled hair, the yielding shape of her body against the earth, still warm and pliant, but pointlessly so now. He imagined the killer turning her over with his foot, thought how it would have felt, heavy and soft. In his country boyhood he had handled dead rabbits and knew that limpness. A dull anger filled him. Partly it was because she had reminded him fleetingly of Joanna, and he felt newly vulnerable about her. But the anger was for this girl as well, and especially. When she had got up and dressed in the morning, she had not planned to die this day.

The world was not safe. There were people in it who would do this hideous, hateful thing. Life, which was so strong and tenacious and filled you tight to the skin when you were young, could be taken from you so easily, slip away through a hole in you like a mist dissolving. The solid reality that you walked on was in fact no more than a thin sheet of ice, through which you might fall at any moment into the black water of oblivion beneath.

Everything this girl had, had been taken from her in the name of conceit. All Slider could do was to find the killer and hope to see him punished. He was glad now that Porson wanted it. It was his case now. He would find the killer. The really depressing thing was that even cornered, caught, accused, charged, tried and sentenced, the murderer would probably never really see the enormity of what he had done. What had they done to themselves as a society to have bred a person who would kill to get his name in the papers?

He pulled his mind back to the scene. ‘I wonder why there’s no blood on the footmark. You’d have thought with all this
stabbing going on he’d have stepped in at least some of it, especially as he wouldn’t have been able to see it.’

‘Just lucky, I suppose,’ Atherton said. ‘Our first problem is going to be identifying her.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said. ‘People don’t go out jogging with their passport and driving licence in their pockets.’

‘People don’t go out jogging with pockets,’ said Atherton.

The CID room was quiet, with most of the troops still at the scene, helping with the search for blood, bloodstained clothing, and a murder weapon. Speed was of the essence. There was constant pressure on the police to reopen a cordoned-off area.

Slider was in his room making a start on the paperwork when the gorgeous DC Kathleen Swilley, always known as ‘Norma’ on account of her machismo in the field, came in. She was an expert in martial arts, could kick the eyebrows off a fly at five paces, and bring a man to his knees by use of just a forefinger and thumb. Or, indeed, without them, Slider reflected.

‘Nothing so far, boss,’ she said. ‘Everyone in the park’s had a preliminary interview and they’re starting on the bystanders. And I’ve put in an enquiry to the traffic department about any parked car or MTI activity for this morning. The SOCOs are still going over the ground looking for more blood. The body’s been taken away now.’

‘Is that the deceased’s effects?’

‘Yeah. No help with her ID, though.’ She put them down on the desk and went through them with him. The little purse on the victim’s belt contained nothing but a Kleenex tissue and a set of door keys – one Yale and one deadlock – on a ring whose tag was one of those articulated metal fish. That, and her gold medallion, were the only personal items they had to go on.

‘We got some good lifts off the Walkman,’ Swilley said. ‘Presumably the victim’s. We’re waiting for her tenprint to compare. I’ve run them through records but there’s no previous.’

The medallion turned out not to be St Christopher after all, but St Anthony. An unusual choice,’ Slider commented. ‘It may help to confirm her identity once we know it.’

‘Ditto for the door keys,’ said Swilley. ‘So what’s a St Anthony medal for, boss?’

‘He’s patron saint of the poor and afflicted, I think,’ Slider said. ‘And lost things. And travellers.’

‘I thought that was St Christopher?’

‘It’s not exclusive. And some people think St Christopher didn’t exist.’

‘The things you know,’ Swilley marvelled.

Slider sighed. ‘What I don’t know is how to ID our victim without trawling through the neighbourhood with a mugshot. And I really hate doing that when the only mugshot I’ve got is taken from the corpse.’

‘It’s early yet. Someone may miss her and come forward,’ Swilley said. ‘The report of the murder’s going to be in all the noon bulletins. If someone hasn’t turned up to work …’

While Slider was contemplating this slender possibility, Atherton came in, back from the scene. ‘No clothes or knives as yet,’
he reported. ‘There were eight cigarette ends in that part of the shrubbery, but most of them are obviously not fresh.’

‘He might have staked out the area beforehand,’ Slider said. ‘Keep them all until we see what else we get, before having them DNA tested.’ There was always the budget to consider.

Atherton resumed. ‘Mackay and McLaren are on their way back with the first stack of statements to go through, and the photographs have arrived. Hollis is putting them up on the whiteboard with the stuff we got from Ealing.’ He looked at Slider’s desk. ‘Is that her Walkman?’

Slider smiled slightly. ‘It would hardly be mine, now, would it? I’m a dinosaur, didn’t you know?’

Atherton blinked, but let it pass. ‘What was she listening to?’ he asked.

‘She wasn’t listening to anything, if you remember. It was turned off and the headset was unplugged.’

‘It probably came unplugged in the struggle,’ Norma said.

‘Yes, but it does seem odd to me—’ Slider began, but Atherton interrupted him. He had picked up the evidence bag containing the CD.

‘Ah, now, look at this! This isn’t a commercial CD – it’s a demo disc. This could be something. It might give us a lead on who she is.’

‘How come?’ Swilley asked.

Atherton was always glad of an opportunity to impress her. Since he had got his new haircut, he had shown a renewed interest in Swilley, even though she was now married to the man she had lived with for years. Atherton, who was not one to let logic spoil a good prejudice, insisted that the husband didn’t exist – despite the fact that Slider had been at the wedding. He said nobody would really marry a man named Tony Allnutt. And anyway, even if he did exist, Norma would surely be regretting her folly by now, and be ready for Atherton’s sophistication and non-joke surname.