Everyone Lies (16 page)

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You made a choice, and you don’t regret it. And I want you to know that I appreciated that – I never said it, and I should have. But I was a scientist – independent of police regulations – I knew they couldn’t touch me. And I knew what the consequences might be for you. I was nine-tenths out of my mind just then.’ In truth, he was so mad with grief that there were whole chunks of time he couldn’t remember.

‘Knowing that I might have saved them, if I’d been faster or smarter or tried that little bit harder, was more punishing than all those months of not knowing if they were alive or dead. I begrudged every coffee break I’d taken, every meal, every hour of sleep—’ He took a breath and it stuck in his throat. ‘But no matter how crazy I was, no matter how driven and obsessed, I knew that I had no right to involve you, and I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t think about how it would affect you, and I didn’t care.’ He placed his hand on the folded napkin, unable to look her in the eye.

‘You’ve got it all wrong, Nick.’ She dipped her head to look into his eyes. ‘You told me a thousand times to walk away. When Gifford found out what we’d been doing, you put yourself between me and him like some oldtime warrior.’ Her mouth twitched a little at the corners. ‘Which I did not need. Because, Nick, I’m a big girl. I make my own decisions, and I fight my own battles.’

‘You can’t fight the system, Kate.’

‘Screw the system,’ she said. ‘I made Chief Inspector. I moved on.’ She peered into his face. ‘Did you?’

‘Rachel is dead, Kate. Suzie is gone.’ He exhaled, realizing only then that he had been holding his breath. ‘I’ve accepted that.’

‘And yet you run your age-progressions and carry a picture of Suzie as she might look at fifteen, and you search every face of every teenage girl you see in the street.’

He stared into her eyes. ‘How did you know that?’

She smiled softly. ‘I know
you
. Does even a day go by when you don’t wonder where she is?’

‘Not a minute,’ he said. ‘Not a second.’

In truth, it took an act of will not to break those five years down and count every tick of the clock since he last saw his little girl; it took a conscious effort not to calculate all the instances of fear and pain and hopelessness she had experienced.

‘I’ve seen things,’ he said, starting cautiously, testing his voice. When he was sure it would hold out, he said: ‘I
know
things – terrible things – that make me wish …’ It was too awful to say, but he said it anyway: ‘… that Suzie
is
dead.’

She rested her hand on his and the warmth of her skin on his made him weak.

16

‘Most so-called anomalies don’t seem anomalous to me at all. They seem like nuggets from a gold mine.’

FISCHER BLACK

Fennimore stood beneath the giant screen on the concourse of Piccadilly railway station, his laptop and tote bags at his feet, watching StayC singing her heart out in mime on-screen. The news ticker below trailed her post-mortem findings:

‘Penicillin allergy killed StayC … Drugs peddler, Anthony Newton, confesses he “cut” heroin with antibiotic …’ The video cut to StayC’s weeping mother, hugging a framed photograph of her daughter. The tickertape read: ‘ … Police not looking for anyone else in connection with the inquiry.’

He waited, but the text-stream rolled round to the beginning again; there was no mention of the other twelve dead addicts. Fennimore gave a mental shrug.
That’s showbiz.

His mobile rang and he fished it out of his overcoat pocket.

‘Nick, are you still in Manchester?’ Kate Simms. Her voice was tight with contained excitement.

‘Just barely.’

The Tannoy bing-bonged and platform ten was announced for his train. He glanced up at the departure board. ‘I can give you five minutes.’

‘This will take much longer. D’you have to leave today?’

Today was Saturday, and in the three days since Kate had gate-crashed his lecture, Fennimore had addressed a seminar for senior officers and presented a paper at a Forensic Science conference in Manchester. ‘Depends on what you’ve got. I was planning to take the rest of the weekend off, head up to my place in the Lakes.’

‘Stay right where you are – I’ll pick you up.’

‘Uh, d’you want to tell me why?’

‘Look, I can be there in ten minutes.’

‘Kate, my train
leaves
in ten minutes.’ He watched passengers stream past him, heading for his train. ‘You might at least give me a good reason why I should miss it.’

She took a breath and he heard it catch. ‘We’ve got another body.’

He scratched his forehead and looked up into the arched glass roof of the building. ‘It’s tragic, and I’m sorry for the victim and their family, but Kate, you’re bound to have a few more while the tainted deals work their way out of the supply chain.’

‘This isn’t a drug death, Nick. This one is murder.’

Forensic Pathologist Dr David Cooper, already in theatre blues, met them at the door of the mortuary, trim and bearded, standing five foot four in his three-inch Cuban heels.

‘I should’ve known it was you when Kate told me you’d worked out the penicillin connection from the stats.’ Dr Cooper had lived the past fifteen years in the more refined air of Knutsford, twenty miles south of Manchester, but his vowels still carried the smoky tones of the city.

Fennimore grinned and offered his hand. ‘Kate’s tame pathologist.’

Dr Cooper squinted up at him. ‘Wild and free, mate – always will be.’

Kate Simms looked from Fennimore to Cooper. ‘You two know each other?’

‘We worked on a miscarriage of justice case, two years back,’ Cooper said.

‘Three.’

‘Still going all
Rainman
about the numbers, Fenn?’

‘Still wearing the lifts, Coop?’

‘I hope this isn’t going to turn nasty,’ Kate said, but lazily, like she might enjoy a scrap between two geeks.

Cooper angled his foot and gazed appreciatively at his boot. ‘These beauties’ve saved my deltoids from untold agonies. Adjustable tables are fine and good, but if it wasn’t for these heels, I’d be walking around looking like the Honey Monster’s short-arsed uncle.’

Kate stifled a laugh, which Fennimore guessed was what Cooper had been aiming for all along. ‘DCI Simms said you have a body we should see?’

‘Get yourselves booted and suited. I’ll walk you through my findings.’

He plucked a pair of elasticated booties from the shelves to the left of the post-mortem room and slipped them over his heels while they struggled into gowns, caps and booties of their own.

‘What makes you think this is linked to Kate’s deaths?’ Fennimore asked.

‘The victim’s urine smelled of penicillin,’ Cooper said. ‘CSIs found a cling film wrap near her body. Preliminary analysis of the contents suggested the same composition as StayC’s drugs stash – two key components being diamorphine and, yup, you guessed it, penicillin.’

‘So it
is
another anaphylaxis victim?’ Simms threw Fennimore an apologetic glance. ‘You said it was murder.’

Cooper smiled. ‘You missed the PM, but I thought you’d want to take a look anyhow.’ He pushed through the door and held it, releasing the unmistakable whiff of sanitized decay.

The body on the table was bleached white by the surgical lamps. There were bands of paler, shiny flesh on her fingers and toes. Reddish bruising showed on her ribs and abdomen. The T-incision – which Cooper preferred to the Y-incision popularized by TV pathologists – had been stitched closed with thick green thread, strong enough to bind the seams of a canvas duffle bag. Fennimore knew that the internal organs were packed in leak-proof bags under the stitching.

The face was almost gone.

Simms stepped around him to get a full view of the body. ‘My God,’ she whispered.

Impossible to guess what this woman looked like in life; her nose was mashed flat, bent to one side, her jaw, her cheekbones, the right orbit, all crushed. Whoever had done this had beaten her flesh to the consistency of ground meat.

For half a minute, they stood there like mourners around a coffin, breathing the cool air of the mortuary. The ventilation system’s downdraught dragged most of the smells away, but no ventilation system could ever completely eradicate the perfume of disinfectant and slowly putrefying flesh.

Cooper was first to break the silence. ‘Fingerprints came back negative – she’s not on the system and there’s no missing person report. Early- to mid-twenties, dumped in an alley at the back of a city-centre hotel, sometime Thursday night or early Friday morning. She was naked. The only item still on the body was a tongue stud – her mouth was so full of blood the killer must have missed it when he took the rest. As you can see, someone gave her a thorough going-over.’

Simms pulled her gaze from the woman’s ruined face. ‘Cause of death?’

‘Well, it wasn’t an overdose,’ Cooper said. ‘Among other injuries, she had a ruptured spleen, fragments of the orbital socket embedded in the brain, and her liver, kidneys and lungs had all haemorrhaged.’ He leaned back against the bench that ran along one wall; behind him, a whiteboard. ‘But my report will say she drowned.’ Simms crinkled her brow in question and he said, ‘In her own blood. It was in her stomach, trachea and lungs. I found clots of the stuff in her larynx.’

‘Pure rage,’ Simms breathed.

Fennimore doubted that rage could ever be pure. But he had seen enough of death to recognize the attack on this young woman as distilled, uncontrolled hatred – whether that hatred was for this one woman, or all of womankind, time would tell.

Cooper strode to the door, his boot heels clumping on the tiles despite the muffling effect of his booties. He bumped the door open with his backside and roared, ‘ALI!’

A few moments later, a middle-aged woman appeared, still fastening the back of her gown. ‘Will you stop bloody doing that?’ she said.

Cooper pointed left and right. ‘DCI Simms, Professor Fennimore.’ He turned to the mortuary technician. ‘Ali.’

She scowled, ignoring their guests. ‘Near gave me a heart attack.’

‘Can you give me a hand with this?’ Cooper said, returning to the far side of the table.

‘I’m only in the next room. I mean would it be too bloody much to just bloody knock?’ She continued muttering as they turned the body face down.

The buttocks were criss-crossed with fine wheals, white in the centre, with reddish lines either side, like a railway track. Where the tracks crossed, there were pinpricks of blood.

Fennimore winced.

‘A riding crop,’ Cooper said. ‘Or something similar, but I’d go with riding crop. It’s the instrument of choice in S&M interplay.’ He shot a look across the table at Kate Simms. ‘So I’m told.’

Kate fixed him with a stony stare. ‘I understand the bruising, but what caused the white lines?’

‘The blood gets forced to the sides by the impact of the rod – or whatever – so bruising occurs either side of the line of contact. The cross-hatching is particularly painful. The stripes are precise. The darker lines indicate slightly older bruising.’ He followed the line of one of the darker tracks with his pinkie finger.

‘How much older?’ Something about those marks niggled Fennimore.

‘Maybe an hour or two. She was also raped, choked with a wide strap and resuscitated several times,’ Cooper said. ‘Analysis indicates that the morphine was administered quite late on – whoever did this wanted her to feel every blow. Oh, and speaking of blow …’ He lifted the body’s right arm, turning it so that they could see a puncture mark on the inside crease of the elbow. ‘I found only one site of injection – and I was very thorough – nothing in the armpits or groin, in the finger knuckles, ankles or between the toes. I’d be willing to bet that hair analysis will confirm this young lady was not a regular user.’

‘A prostitute without a drug habit. I suppose it’s possible,’ Fennimore said, doubtfully.

Cooper set the arm down with surprising gentleness. ‘What makes you think she’s a prostitute?’

‘Small holes in both nipples, probably from rings or studs,’ Fennimore explained. ‘Slight chafe marks or indents on the third and fourth toes, indicating toe rings. And of the thirteen penicillin victims, all the women except StayC funded their habits with sex work – statistically, it’s likely she did, too.’

‘Except this one didn’t have a habit – at least not a drug habit,’ Cooper said. He bent closer to the corpse. ‘Here’s another interesting thing.’ He circled a small patch of skin an inch below the victim’s left shoulder blade, a faint red mark, slightly curved.

‘Bruising?’ Simms said. ‘A fingernail, maybe?’

Cooper picked up a small black box from the bench behind him. He pressed a button and it flickered for a second, then flooded the area immediately in front of it with bright light. ‘Ali, could you get the overheads?’

The technician moved to the light switches and, a second later, the room was in darkness, except for the violet-tinged light from the box.

Cooper played the light over the mark and the faint red blemish became a jagged circular outline in purple, as though the skin had been imprinted with dye. ‘Forensic light sources – you’ve got to love ’em,’ Cooper said, grinning like a schoolboy with a new Xbox. The saliva on his teeth luminesced yellowish-green.

‘The edges look crimped,’ Simms said.

‘A beer bottle top?’ Fennimore suggested.

‘Precisely. Funny thing is, the CSIs didn’t find anything like it at the scene.’ Cooper shone the light on the purple coronet of bruising again. ‘There was nothing under the body or within thirty feet of it that could have left that mark.’

‘So she was killed somewhere else,’ Fennimore said.

‘The investigating officer disagrees,’ Cooper said. ‘He thinks she’s just another druggie prostitute who went for a twenty-quid jump behind the wheelie bins with the wrong punter.’

‘One injection site, and we’re supposed to think she’s a hard-core addict?’

‘I didn’t say
I
believed it. If she
was
a prostitute, she was high class, so she wouldn’t need to sell it cheap in a filthy back alley. She was tortured and this is supposed to’ve happened behind a hotel on a Thursday night? Do me a favour – you’d’ve heard the screams from Piccadilly to Deansgate. Added to that, there was no blood spatter – in fact, there was hardly
any
blood at the scene. The hotel was the dump site.’