‘We’re not sure at the moment.’
‘But you people are looking into it, are you? Not the local division? So you think . . .’
‘It’s too soon to say, sir.’
‘Well . . . yes, that is a shock for you, Gilbey. Northcote Square is becoming quite a hotbed of crime, it seems . . .’ he regarded Kathy with a malicious glint in his eye,‘. . . despite the heavy presence of Special Operations.’
Kathy caught the sarcastic tone and noticed a thoughtful frown cross the face of DI Reeves in the background.
‘Well, anyway, I’m here now, Gilbey old chap.You need something to distract you, and our deadline is fast approaching, so let’s get on with it, shall we?’
The way he spoke to the painter reminded Kathy of the way Tait had spoken to Gabriel Rudd that first morning, as to a distracted child needing to be brought into line. And Gilbey seemed to accept it, giving a resigned sigh and shuffling across to his easel while Beaufort draped himself on the chair placed by the window. It was the same place where Betty had sat almost thirty-five years before, Kathy thought. She also noticed that the pose Gilbey had given Beaufort had his head facing towards the window, although his eyes were turned back at the painter, as if the sitter had just been caught looking out at something—the children in the playground, perhaps.
‘I will need to speak to Mr Gilbey again soon,’ Kathy said. ‘I’ll call back at eleven.’
Beaufort said, ‘Reeves, old chap, how about making us some coffee?’ and the Special Branch inspector followed Kathy down the stairs.
‘Talks to me like a bloody butler,’ he said when they reached the kitchen. He seemed more amused than annoyed. ‘Fancy a cup?’
‘A quick one, thanks. He is a bit of a pain, isn’t he? Is anyone really trying to kill him?’
‘Hard to say, but we don’t want anything to happen to him right now.’ Kathy caught Reeves’s glance at her, as if to see whether she’d followed the significance of the remark, but she hadn’t and he went on, ‘Did you ever see him in court?’
‘No.’
‘Worth reading his sentencing speeches. Venomous, they are—a pungent mix of sarcasm, self-righteous outrage and contempt. The barristers say they’re an art form and should be published.’
Kathy smiled, thinking that his vocabulary was different from that of most coppers she met, and wondered if he was a reader. She noticed what looked like paperbacks in a carrier bag, and supposed he’d have plenty of time for that in his present job.
‘I’ve no doubt that anyone on the receiving end of one of those must have spent a good part of their time inside dreaming of putting a bomb under his car, or something worse . . . You’re thinking this woman’s murder has something to do with the missing girl, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Must have.’ Reeves poured boiling water into the mugs. ‘Milk? Sugar?’
Kathy shook her head. He took a splash of milk.
‘Smoke if you want,’ he said. ‘Reg does.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Me neither.’ Kathy had the feeling she was being assessed.
‘They were setting up crime scene tapes closing the whole lane when we arrived.’
‘She was found in the building site.’
‘Really?’ He thought about that, sipping from the mug. ‘Have you seen how much they’re selling those flats for?’
‘No.’
‘Four hundred k each, off the plan, four in each house. I wonder how much they offered the mad woman. Or Gilbey, come to that.’
‘Mmm. Incidentally, did you tell Beaufort we’re from Special Operations?’
‘Didn’t need to. He’s come across Brock before. And then, of course, he has a particular interest.’
‘What’s that?’
Reeves lowered his voice. ‘He’s doing a review of SO for the Met.You didn’t know? No, you and I are too lowly to be told—strictly senior management only at this stage. I only know because I saw documents he was reading in the car and he dropped a few hints. Could be radical. He murmured ominously about amputations.’
‘Well, if he knows of Brock’s reputation, he should be kind to us.’
‘With Beaufort the opposite’s more likely to be the case. That’s something else he’s famous for—puncturing other people’s reputations.’
Kathy thought about the man upstairs and felt a sudden sympathy for the people who’d faced him in his court.
There was a roar from above. ‘Reeves! Where’s that bloody coffee? I can smell it! We’re dying up here.’
‘Promises, promises,’ Reeves murmured, and got reluctantly to his feet. ‘Funny thing . . . the morning after that bloke fell from the tower block, Saturday, his lordship had a session here. It was my day off and my offsider drove him. Afterwards he told me that Beaufort told him to drive here by way of the Newman estate, just to have a look.’
Another cry from above. ‘Reeves! Put that damn woman down!’
The inspector winced and picked up three mugs. ‘See you later.’
D
r Sundeep Mehta could usually be relied upon for a joke and a few wisecracks. When Brock and Kathy arrived at the autopsy room the pathologist was in the middle of a story about a man and a frog that he was relating to his unsmiling pathology technician and the bored photographer. For the benefit of the newcomers he quickly recapped, taking no notice of the grim looks on their faces.
‘Man walking down street, frog stops him and asks him to buy it a drink, takes it to a bar, frog also starving, man buys it sandwich, frog says it’s exhausted and could he give it a bed for the night? Man agrees, takes it home. Frog asks for goodnight kiss. Good Samaritan hides disgust, kisses frog, frog turns into beautiful princess. “And that, Your Honour, is how I came to be found in bed with an underage girl.” Ha!’
Nobody laughed.
‘Oh, come on you lot!’ Dr Mehta protested.‘What’s the matter with everyone this morning? Is it your dismal weather getting you down?’
‘Where did you hear that one, Sundeep?’ Brock growled. ‘The Dirty Raincoat Club?’
‘Ah, Brock, your other case, of course. How tactless of me. But still, if we can’t laugh in the face of life’s tragedies we have no business coming to a place like this. So, let’s get to work.’
Betty was laid out on the table just as she had been found, hands bound and face blindfolded. Mehta removed the strip of cloth from around her head and set it aside for examination. Kathy confirmed the identification.
They photographed the corpse, turned it over and photographed it again. Mehta cut the tape from around the wrists, clipped nail and hair samples, and took a number of swabs. Then the technician washed the body and Mehta began a detailed examination. A mood of dispassionate routine established itself as he tonelessly described the injuries. He began with the head, noting a small contusion behind the left ear.
‘Enough to knock her out?’ Brock asked.
‘Mmm, possibly.’ The pathologist stroked the area, parting the strands of hair. ‘We may see more when we look under the skin. It’s not a big bump.’
He moved on to the throat, which had a broad band of bruising and discolouration.
‘This is not a simple hanging,’ he said. ‘There are several overlapping rope marks. Notice the edges of the marks. No inflammation, no vital reaction. It looks as if she was hanged
after
she was dead.’
He peered more closely. ‘Difficult to detect external signs of strangulation beneath these rope lesions. Signs of petechial haemorrhages here and here . . . Now, these marks . . .’ He began to work his way over the body, peering closely at each of the small brown marks in turn. Then he asked for the plastic evidence pouch containing the electrical lead with the exposed wire, and placed it against several of the wounds. Finally, he straightened up and said,‘It’s not easy to interpret electrical burns, you know, and we don’t see them very often. Mostly domestic accidents, housewives poking about in the toaster with a fork, that sort of thing. There was one fascinating case I recall of attempted autoerotic stimulation by connecting a penile vibrator to a mains plug— what a silly man! But the direct application of an electrode to the body is more unusual than you might think. Certainly I’ve never seen anything like this before . . .’
‘Come on, Sundeep,’ Brock interrupted. ‘You have a theory.’
The man smiled. ‘A hypothesis, perhaps, yes. There is a characteristic mark for electrode burns . . .’ He pointed to a burn on Betty’s left breast.‘It comprises a central area of necrosis where contact occurred, surrounded by a ring of white, which in turn is circled by a halo of dilated blood vessels.’
Everyone moved in closer to see what he meant, and the photographer took a close-up picture.
‘I can’t see the halo,’ Brock said, peering through the half-lens glasses on the end of his nose.
‘Exactly. Now look at these other burns,’ Mehta went on, pointing generally across the abdomen and legs. ‘They all have the central brown burn, but none have the pink halo. Although I’ve never seen this before, it suggests to me that, as with the rope marks to the neck, there was no vital reaction. She was already dead.’
Kathy felt relief. She noticed the technician’s eyes widen behind her clear plastic visor, showing more than professional interest for the first time.
‘Why electrocute a dead body?’ Brock said.
‘Quite!’ Mehta beamed. ‘That’s for you to puzzle out, I think, Brock.’
There was silence for a moment, then Kathy said, ‘Would the electric shocks cause the body to convulse?’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, even after death?’
‘Yes, yes. Didn’t your biology teacher at school show you the trick where you attach battery leads to a dead frog’s leg to make it jump?’
Brock and Kathy exchanged a glance, both thinking the same thing.
Dr Mehta completed his external examination at the discoloured soles of Betty’s feet, then took up a scalpel and moved back to her throat, where he began carefully slicing into the flesh. ‘Yes, internal bruising, and both the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage have fractures, which suggests manual strangulation,’ he said. The technician moved in beside him with bone cutters to help open up the chest and remove the major organs. Kathy sat on a stool, barely paying attention to the familiar process while her mind returned to that room in the basement of the derelict house, trying to imagine what had been played out there.
Completing the routine of examining, weighing and slicing, Mehta was able to offer a closer approximation to the time of death. The cheese and onion pie Betty had eaten with Reg Gilbey around seven p.m. was found in the final stages of the small intestine, and this, together with the state of rigor mortis and the body temperature, led him to believe that death had occurred at around one a.m. Cause of death was manual strangulation.
The doctor sat back onto a stool, bloody gloved hands dangling between his knees. ‘Is that enough for you, Brock?’
‘Almost, Sundeep. Just let me be sure what we have. Betty has a bath and goes to bed around eleven p.m. About two hours later her neighbour hears noises from her house, perhaps the intruder. There is a scuffle in her bedroom, a vase is broken, perhaps she receives a blow to the head. Does he strangle her there?’
Mehta thought. ‘Seems probable, doesn’t it? There’s no indication of a struggle when he took her next door, no significant bruising or abrasions.’
‘That’s right. He had to take her downstairs, out into the yard, haul her over the wall into the building site and carry her down into the basement.Why?’
‘I’ve no idea. That’s your job, old chap!’
‘Humour me, Sundeep. I value your insight.’
The doctor gave a smug little smile and straightened in his seat. ‘Well,to avoid being disturbed, I suppose? Perhaps he didn’t want the neighbour to hear him, or people in the street to see a light—the basement next door had its window boarded up.’
Brock frowned, not altogether convinced.‘All right, let’s say he wants time with the body undisturbed. So he takes her next door, and presumably he already knows of this place and how suitable it would be, and there he prepares, in effect, a torture chamber for the corpse. He binds her hands behind her with insulating tape. There was no sexual interference?’
‘No signs of that. Perhaps he
thought
she was still alive and was hoping to get something from her. Information of some kind—where she kept her money and jewellery, perhaps.’ With Brock’s encouragement, Mehta was enjoying playing the detective.
‘But why the camera?’
‘If there was a camera.We don’t really know that.’
‘Well, he discovers that in fact she’s dead. So he hangs her anyway and administers—how many was it?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Twenty-three shocks to her corpse. Can we infer anything about his state of mind? I mean, if those were stab wounds you’d be telling us he was in a frenzy, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe . . . it would depend on the depth and pattern of cuts. In this case, I don’t see any evidence of a frenzied attack. Look at the pattern, Brock; not in a cluster, but rather evenly and thoughtfully distributed, wouldn’t you say? Here to an elbow, there to the calf, the thigh. Almost like an experiment to test the reactions of different limbs.’
‘And possibly photographing these reactions.’
‘Exactly! One might almost say that he is a serious student of pathology.’
‘Quite,’ Brock murmured. ‘Many thanks, Sundeep.’
‘Stan Dodworth,’ Kathy said as they emerged from the mortuary.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Brock took a deep breath of the street air, trying to vent the smells from his lungs.‘As if he’s started to make his own corpses.’
‘Why would he pick Betty?’
‘Because he likes older subjects, and he knew she lived alone, and conveniently next door to a place he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.’
‘Yes, he was down in that cellar with Gabe and Poppy and Yasher just over a week ago.’
‘That would mean he’s still in the area. And now every solitary old person is at risk.We have to find him quickly, Kathy.We’d better have another talk to the people he was closest to in the square.’
Kathy checked her watch. ‘I was going to take Reg Gilbey through Betty’s house to see if he might notice anything.’
‘You do that. I’ll see you later at the station.’