Authors: Michael Robotham
Some psychologists will tell you that the most important word a patient speaks is the first one. Once events are related, everything that follows becomes a version of the same theme or an attempt to redress a mistake.
I don’t agree. I expect people to lie. I expect them to hide things. The truth is a movable feast. It comes out over time or emerges from the static or the facts that people can live with. Augie looks like a bird on a perch, his head cocked towards the lone window.
“If I’ve done this thing they should just kill me,” he says, scratching at his bandaged hands. “But I haven’t done this thing and I can’t stay in here because I’ll die anyway.”
Victoria reaches out, but Augie pulls away, shuddering.
“Lots of sperm go into making a baby but only one sperm makes it through to fertilize the egg,” he says. “The other sperm are trying to get there first, but they die, you know, they all die.”
“You’re not making sense,” says Victoria.
“The egg splits. Two sperm. That makes us twins.”
He’s talking about his brother.
“… cells replicate, atoms fire, the brain forms…”
Augie turns to me. “I’m just trying to keep people from dying.”
“What people?” I ask.
“If I die, how will I save them?”
His eyes are darting from side to side, dancing in his head.
“I raped a woman. You should have listened.”
“You didn’t rape anyone,” says Victoria.
“I raped five girls at school.”
“That’s not true.”
He stops and stares at me. “Are you here to kill me?”
“No.”
“You’ll kill me eventually.”
“No, I won’t.”
Victoria looks at me, hoping I can help. But as soon as I speak Augie reacts with instant hatred, almost snarling at me. Victoria steps back, frightened. “Are you taking your medication?”
Augie looks at his hands. “You say I have a chemical imbalance. That I suffer from hallucinations. But you’re wrong. What I hear is real.” His shoulders are hunched and a tiny vein throbs at the side of his neck. “I think I killed her.”
“Who?”
“The woman on the road.”
“What woman?”
He whispers in a little boy voice. “What was she doing there? She was standing in the middle of the road.” He looks from face to face. “I think I ran her over. I must have done. I couldn’t stop in time.”
My eyes meet Victoria’s. She shakes her head.
“What makes you think you hit this person?”
Augie wipes a strand of spit from the corner of his mouth. “I tried to swerve, but I think I heard a sound. That’s why the car went in the ditch. When I got out I looked for her. I called out, but she was gone.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“My brother told me not to. He said I’d be blamed.”
“For the fire?”
“For running that woman over.”
He presses his chin into his knees. “I looked for her, but then I saw the snowman and I got frightened.”
“The snowman?”
“He came out of the forest covered in snow.”
“You saw him
after
you saw the woman?”
Augie nods.
“This woman, what did she look like?”
“She was beat up, you know, but it was weird. Her shoes.”
“What about them?”
“She wasn’t wearing any.”
L
ow gray clouds scud across a dirty sky and the dreaming spires are etched against the southern horizon like vague giants marching out of the mist.
The cab driver maneuvers deftly on the icy streets, keeping the needle around 20 mph and rarely touching the brakes unless he has no choice. Victoria Naparstek is no longer with me. The moment I mentioned visiting Drury she grew quiet and began making excuses.
“He has a family,” she said, as though that made a difference.
The cab pulls up outside a two-story house with a gabled roof. A lop-sided snowman is standing inside the front gate dressed in a flowery hat and a Tottenham scarf.
Drury is shoveling snow from his driveway. Working up a sweat, he’s peeled down to baggy chinos and a sweatshirt.
A snowball explodes at my feet. A young girl peers from behind a makeshift fort of rubbish bins and a toboggan.
“You missed,” I say.
She holds up another snowball. “That was a warning shot.”
Drury leans on his shovel. “Hold your fire, Gracie.”
“I think we should arrest him, Daddy, he looks like a bad’n.”
“Let’s see what he has to say first.”
Gracie is wearing a woolen cap with earflaps that make her look like Snoopy in a Peanuts cartoon. Her pale cheeks are dusted with freckles and glasses are perched on the end of her nose. Her younger brother is sitting on the front steps, pushing a toy bulldozer through clumps of ice.
“What are you doing here, Professor?”
“I have a question.”
“It could have waited.”
“I talked to Augie Shaw again.”
“On whose authority?”
“His lawyer and his psychiatrist.”
Drury sets the shovel aside, pulling off his gloves. “What’s your question?”
“Why would a woman go out in the middle of a blizzard without any shoes?”
“You talking about anyone in particular.”
“You have an unidentified female found in a lake.”
“What about her?”
“Augie Shaw said he saw a woman on the road that night. He thinks he might have hit her. That’s why he drove his car into the ditch.”
Drury doesn’t seem surprised at this. I try again.
“You found a woman’s body in a lake. I saw the crime scene from the train. How far is that from the farmhouse?”
Drury doesn’t answer. His wife has appeared at the top of the steps, her body framed in the doorway, standing with one hand on her hip. Pregnant. Pretty. Tired around her eyes.
“Is everything all right, Stephen?” she asks.
“Everything’s fine. This is the psychologist I was telling you about.”
She smiles. “You should invite him inside where it’s warm.”
“The Professor won’t be staying.”
She picks up the young boy and rests him on her hip before turning inside.
I notice the curtains moving at the front window. She’s watching.
Drury rubs at his neck. “Get to the point, Professor?”
“The woman in the lake—was she wearing shoes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she have any injuries?”
“I haven’t seen the post-mortem. Body was frozen solid. They can’t cut her open till she thaws.”
The DCI plunges the shovel deep into a pile of snow.
“I think she was at the farmhouse that night,” I say. “A dress was soaking in the laundry. Shoes were drying by the fire. Someone took a bath…”
“You’re like a broken bloody record.”
Gracie covers her mouth. “You said a bad word, Daddy. You know what that means.”
Drury roots in his pocket for spare change. Gracie holds out her gloved hand and her fingers close over the silver coin.
“Go put it in the swear jar,” he says. “Right this minute.”
She skids across the packed snow and runs up the front steps.
“Take your shoes off before you go inside.”
The door bangs shut. I can hear Gracie’s voice—telling her mother that her daddy swore.
“That swear jar earns more than I do.”
He turns to me, stretching his fingers against the cold.
“Dress it up however you like, Professor, but it doesn’t change a thing. Augie Shaw murdered those people.”
“What about the clothes on the bed upstairs and the broken window in the bathroom?”
Drury pinches one nostril and blows out.
“OK, let’s say you’re right and this woman was at the house. Maybe she ran off. Maybe Shaw hunted her down. I’m happy to charge him with a third murder.”
The detective gazes past me at his house where Christmas lights are twinkling behind the net curtains. His wife has gone.
“My father was a detective, Professor. One of the best lessons he ever taught me was to wait until the mud settles so you can see things more clearly.” The DCI glances at his watch. “We’re done here. Have a nice life.”
T
he mortuary supervisor at John Radcliffe Hospital has a face like a chewed pencil and less personality. Rising from his chair, he searches for his reading glasses, which are hanging around his neck.
“Only next of kin can view a body.”
“I don’t want to see the body, I want to talk to the pathologist.”
“That’d be Dr. Leece. Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“Are you a friend?”
“No.”
He blinks at me as though I’ve asked him to donate a kidney. Perhaps he’s unaccustomed to greeting visitors who don’t arrive in body bags. I try again, hoping that I’m giving a smile. I can never be sure with my Parkinson’s.
Grudgingly, he picks up the handset and punches a number. A brief conversation ensues. The supervisor cups the phone.
“Dr. Leece is asking what it’s about.”
“It’s a police matter. Tell him I’ve spoken to DCI Drury.”
It’s not a complete lie, I tell myself, as I sign the visitor’s book and look into the camera. My image is captured, laminated, hung around my neck.
“Through those doors,” he says. “Straight ahead, turn right at the end of the corridor. It’s the fourth door on your right. Not the storeroom, that’s too far.”
The wide corridor is empty except for a cleaning trolley and a cart full of test tubes and sample bottles. Glancing through an open door, I notice a stainless steel table in the middle of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling on retractable arms. Cameras and microphones are positioned above.
I get a flashback of my medical training. I fainted during our first practical lesson working with a cadaver. That’s when I realized I wasn’t equipped for a career in medicine. I had the memory, the steady hands and the patience, but not the stomach. It took me another two years to tell my father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting.
Dr. John Leece meets me outside his office. Mid-fifties, tall, with graying hair, he has eyes that seem to change size depending upon the angle of his bifocals. It’s like watching one of those magic 3D pictures that transform when you tilt them.
He has three pens in the breast pocket of his business shirt. Black. Blue. Red. I imagine the order doesn’t change. Every morning he straps on his wristwatch and puts the pens in his pocket, a creature of habit, a lover of order.
“A psychologist,” he says, a pulse of surprise in his eyes. “I didn’t know DCI Drury was so fond of the dark arts.”
“He keeps an open mind,” I say, remembering my last conversation with the detective.
The pathologist laughs and looks over his shoulder at me, assuming I must be joking. He taps a security code into a panel and the door clicks open. Around the walls are filing cabinets and whiteboards. He circles a desk and offers me a seat.
“You have an unidentified body,” I say, hoping to stop Dr. Leece from asking any more questions.
“We have four. The oldest has been here two years. We think she’s probably foreign but Interpol hasn’t managed to come up with a match.”
“What about the most recent one?”
“Yes, of course, the newspapers are calling her the ice maiden. Makes her sound like a character from a fairy tale or a Russian novel. What’s your interest?”
“A couple were murdered four nights ago at their farmhouse outside of Bingham.”
“I did their post-mortems.”
“A suspect in the case claims that he saw a woman on the road during the blizzard. He almost ran her down. He says she wasn’t wearing shoes.”
“Now there’s a coincidence,” says Dr. Leece, pushing his glasses further up his nose. “Our ice maiden was similarly unshod. Do you have a name?”
“No.”
“Pity.” He seems to make a decision. “Her body has only just thawed out. I’m due to begin the post-mortem. You can watch if you like. Some of my students are coming along.”
“I’m not really—”
“It’s an interesting case. I haven’t handled a frozen cadaver before.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
“Female. Caucasian. Five-five. There’s not much of her—I’d say no more than ninety pounds. Underweight. At the scene I put her at mid-twenties, but the freezing process had altered her appearance. I’ve since x-rayed her hands and done a comparison using the Greulich and Pyle atlas. Bone development puts her at seventeen or eighteen.”
“What’s the margin for error?”
“A year at most.”
He tilts his head. One of the lenses of his glasses catches the light and seems to wink at me.