by Ali Gunn
Elsie wasn’t a religious woman, and yet the thought of a murder happening here left her feeling numb. Her initial task was a simple one – walk the perimeter, and make sure that the first officers on the scene had put the cordon in the right place. Best practice was to start wide just in case, and that meant tape running right around the perimeter of St Dunstan which would normally draw a lot of curious onlookers. This evening, the police had been lucky. Either the public had been chased off, or they were cowering from the December downpour. It felt like it had been raining for a week straight.
Looking up at the bomb-damaged outer walls, Elsie could see, touch and feel the very real damage that the Luftwaffe had inflicted upon London. Satisfied that the perimeter was in the right place, she approached the security cordon where the uniformed officer on duty, a man Elsie didn’t know personally, looked her up and down and then smirked as if to mock her for being overdressed. One of his eyebrows, which were thick like baby caterpillars, arched in the most comical fashion.
‘Do share the joke,’ Elsie said. She shot him a withering glare, and he averted his gaze.
Unperturbed, Elsie proceeded to duck under the security cordon. St Dunstan was split over two levels with sprawling palm trees that seemed to mock the cold weather simply by being there. The body was in the lower section of the garden. As Elsie walked, she messaged Raj with a short and simple cancellation.
Sorry, I have to work tonight. Duty Calls.
He had seen her dating profile which clearly advertised that she was a policewoman, and so he ought to understand that emergencies and cancellations were part and parcel of her career. He needed to be able to deal with that like a grown-up, a hurdle many men had fallen at in the past. She debated adding an extra line suggesting they reschedule and then decided against it. If Raj were keen, he could suggest another night. He might not have much luck. If this was another “Lady Killer” victim then Elsie’s schedule was about to get really busy, really fast.
There was a profound loneliness to the police life. In spite of all the activity around her, Elsie had nobody she felt she could always rely on except for dear old Dad. Where better to be lonely than in a crowded city whose inhabitants were so desperate to avoid each other that they’d walk past a person – or a corpse – sooner than they’d stop and help?
Stryker trailed in her wake. A goofy smile suggested he’d glanced at her phone while she was messaging Raj. When she looked over accusingly, he feigned nonchalance but there was a trace of a smile in the corners of his eyes. Once they were beyond the blue and white tape of the inner security cordon, they found themselves in the main courtyard. The total absence of a roof let the rain pelt down upon the courtyard, and the wind whipped through forcing Elsie to tuck her hair behind her ears to keep it out of her eyes. In the centre of the courtyard, eight wooden benches were set out in a circular pattern. Rubbish was strewn around the benches, especially cigarette butts, evidence of the thoughtlessness of the Londoners who came here to eat lunch. It struck Elsie as cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face. For those office lackeys who worked in the surrounding monoliths, St Dunstan was a respite from the concrete jungle, and so to despoil it with crisp packets and cigarettes was disrespectful and self-defeating. Tonight, the tranquillity of the place – an oasis between the hustle and bustle of Fenchurch Street a stone’s throw to the north, and the Tower of London humming with tourists just to the east – had been shattered. Engines stood idle, humming away just out of earshot beyond the church boundary.
Elsie couldn't remember the last time that Homicide Command had camped out in a church. Of course, she didn’t know much about what the other Murder Investigation Teams were up to at any given moment.
Working homicide investigation was exhausting. Whenever a case came in, she’d work every hour under the sun until it was solved. For a cop who suffered from debilitating tiredness, the night shift was living hell and it was almost a relief to find a body and start working more sociable hours. Her illness was properly called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis though the media always erroneously called it Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Elsie also called it CFS in her mind, not because it was the right term but because she could spell it.
As she was still on the graveyard shift, her new team would no doubt pull the same awful cases she’d been working on for years: the bloaters pulled from the Thames, dead sex workers and the sulphurous corpses of the homeless.
Nobody really cared if she got justice for them because they didn’t have family that cared enough to harass the police for progress reports, nor enough clout to go to the press. The bloody media didn’t give a crap unless the victim was famous, attractive or died in an unusual way, and ideally, they wanted all three.
The body came into view as Elsie approached the bench.
‘Told you that you wouldn’t like it,’ Stryker said.
She didn’t. Murder was always bloody and horrible but the death of someone so young, so innocent-looking, was as abhorrent as cases got.
This victim was a newspaper editor’s wet dream. She wore a long white wedding dress that would have been pristine if not for the rain which made her look a little like a drowned rat. Like the first victim, she had been posed on a bench facing south as if she were sleeping. She lay on her side, her arm under her head as if it were a pillow which caused her Chestnut-brown hair to cascade gracefully down her shoulders. At first glance, it appeared that she had simply stopped for a nap. It was the unnatural stillness which struck Elsie. She kept expecting to see the girl exhale, stretch and sit up with a yawn. Instead, her body lay exactly where the killer had left it, the movement of the rain contrasting sharply with the lifelessness of it all.
‘Looks just like the photos of the first crime scene to me,’ Stryker ventured.
Elsie wagged a finger in his direction. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This could be a copycat.’
The details of the first murder had made front-page news up and down the country. A young black woman had been stabbed through the heart, dressed in a black lace gown, and left on one of the three wooden benches at the heart of Chelsea Physic Garden. The press had been fascinated by the idea of a sartorially astute killer roaming the streets of central London, posing his victims in their Sunday best and leaving them on display in public places. Even just one known victim had been enough for the killer to gain notoriety. Nicknames sprang out of the woodwork in short order: The Dressed to Kill Murderer, The Poser, and The Lady Killer. The last one had stuck. It had even trended as a hashtag. Elsie hated the nicknames. They glamorised murder and made the crime about the criminal rather than the victim. The need for justice gave way to the need to sell as many newspapers as possible. No doubt the talking heads on breakfast television would soon be talking about this victim too. If it weren’t the same killer, Elsie needed to prove it post-haste before the rumour mill ran away with the facts.
‘Really?’ Stryker mocked. ‘Both women, both beautiful but lacking make-up while wearing an over the top dress and they’ve both been posed lying down as if they’re asleep. That’s oddly specific if it isn’t a serial, boss.’
He had been in London for all of five minutes, and he already thought he knew better than she did. ‘I’m not saying it isn’t,’ Elsie said. ‘I’m saying don’t jump the gun.’
Even as she said it, she privately had to agree with him. It was almost certainly the work of the same killer. The two crime scenes were strikingly similar. Both dump sites were quasi-public, both were leafy and picturesque, and both had wooden benches arranged in a circle at the centre, and as Stryker had been quick to point out, they were both part of the “young and beautiful” demographic that so often drew the attention of serial killers.
The girl on the bench was tiny, easily a foot shorter than Elsie, and her diminutive stature was almost childlike. Neither her head nor her toes touched the end of the oak bench upon which she lay. To be fair, nearly every woman looked like a dwarf compared to Elsie’s six-foot stature, but this victim
was particularly tiny.
Elsie stepped closer to the victim and then crouched down low. With porcelain-perfect skin, and wide-set cheekbones so sharp that Elsie could cut herself, the victim was bound to make the front page and stay there until the case was solved or went so cold that it ended the career of the Senior Investigating Officer in charge.
Serial murder was a far cry from the “simple” domestic violence kills, street brawls and overdoses she was used to investigating. If she could keep hold of this case, it was a golden opportunity to prove to everyone she’d earned her promotion, and prove to herself that she really was as capable as her peers.
That was ample reason not to immediately label it a serial murder. If she did, the Senior Investigating Officer for the first murder would probably take over, consigning her to a lifetime of looking at dead hookers.
‘No sign of the pathologist,’ Elsie said, eying Stryker accusingly as if it were his fault that neither forensics nor the pathologist were in attendance an hour after the first page had gone out.
Stryker held his hands aloft as if to defend himself. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘It is a Friday night.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Of course, it is.’
Not only were Friday nights the busiest generally, but Friday was also poker night. Top brass from Homicide and Serious Crime Command plus some of the boys from HOLMES, Forensic Services, and the Coroner’s Office met to gamble away the week’s overtime and trade war stories. It was almost exclusively an old boy’s club. There was just one female card sharp who played regularly, and she was one Valerie Spilsbury, arguably the Met’s finest forensic pathologist.
Spilsbury was the exception that proved the rule. She, together with the current commissioner of police of the metropolis, were held up as shining examples of women in the Met as if a couple of appointments undid years of discrimination. It was, in Elsie’s opinion, pure tokenism. Appoint a woman here, a black or Asian candidate there, and suddenly the Met’s publicity shots were filled with glossy photos of a diverse smiley little group.
Digging beyond the press photos the past quickly became the present. The Met’s men’s rugby team had an astonishing number of the top brass within its ranks. Virtually all the other Murder Investigation Teams were headed up by middle-aged white men. Despite having once played in the final of the World of Poker Championships in Paris, Elsie had never been invited to play in the Friday night poker game.
Elsie forced such thoughts from her mind; it was all unfair, but she could do nothing about it except prove that she was as good as any man, and that meant solving the crime right in front of her. Her eyes traversed the crime scene around the body. The victim’s clutch bag – an elegant but impractical silver Jimmy Choo affair – lay beside her. The fact that no one had nicked it was testimony to how few passers-by there were this evening. It was weird – St Dunstan was often busy, but tonight the combination of darkness, frigid weather with high winds whipping through, and a police perimeter, had seen off all but the most determined of gawkers. Sometimes the bystander effect kicked in too; nobody wanted to get involved, instead, they preferred to hustle along with their heads bowed against the wind. Nothing to see here, guv.
Stryker gestured at the bag. ‘Could be something useful in there, boss.’
He said it just as she was thinking it. It was odds-on that the bag would contain some form of ID and getting a jump on identifying their victim could be critical. They both knew they ought to wait for the pathologist. Standard Operating Procedure and all that malarkey. But SOP had already gone out the window. Spilsbury hadn’t bothered to show up as quickly as she ought to have and the Scene of Crime team wasn’t here yet either. The golden hour was slipping away and so too was the killer. The longer it took to start the investigation, the less likely it was they’d be able to find witnesses who could accurately remember what they saw, find CCTV before it was overwritten, collect samples that would otherwise be contaminated, or even find a criminal who had not yet left the area.
Caution was fine when there wasn’t a ticking clock. Today, deciding not to look in the victim’s handbag could mean missing a time-sensitive clue. If they did, it would no doubt still be Elsie’s fault later on. It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t choice, and Elsie hated waiting on other people.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘Full gloves and everything goes back exactly where it came from.’ No harm, no foul.
Once she had donned plastic gloves to prevent contamination, Elsie carefully picked up the designer bag and unclipped the fastening to look inside. There were house keys attached to a garish Gucci pearl keyring, an assortment of condoms, all ribbed for her pleasure, and an array of make-up (despite the victim’s unpainted face).
‘What’s she got?’ Stryker asked.
‘Nothing much of interest yet,’ Elsie said. ‘Apart from the designer gear, this could be any woman’s bag.’
Digging to the bottom, Elsie found a brand-new iPhone with its plastic screen protector still in place, and lastly, a handful of cards. They included a plastic photo card driving licence which clearly showed the victim’s face, two debit cards and half a dozen credit cards. That many cards seemed totally superfluous. Elsie’s own purse contained only one debit card she used for nearly everything and a backup credit card just in case. She tried turning on the phone. Nothing.
‘Dead?’ Stryker said.
‘Yep,’ Elsie confirmed. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got an iPhone charger with you?’
He was already delving into his pockets before she finished her sentence. He had no end of them, each filled with different knick-knacks that he placed on the ground at his feet. Elsie felt a twinge of jealousy; why didn’t they make women’s clothing with proper pockets?
‘Aha!’ he cried. ‘There’s the blighter.’ He handed over a small power bank which had an Apple lightning cable attached to it. Elsie cast a quick glance towards the archway where they’d entered in case the pathologist had appeared, and then tentatively plugged the phone in to charge. A neon-orange light began to glow immediately.
Elsie gestured at the phone. ‘How long will it take to charge?’
‘For enough juice to turn on? Less than ten minutes. The bank has enough power to charge it fully but by then the pathologist might have deigned to make an entrance.’
She nodded and turned her attention back to the bag. It was real, not one of the knock-offs she’d seen at the dodgy markets by Camden Lock, and had to be worth hundreds of pounds if not more. The debit cards inside indicated that the victim was one Layla Morgan and that she banked at SQ Private Bank.
‘She must be loaded,’ Stryker said, seemingly reading her mind.
While she waited for Layla’s phone to come to life, Elsie produced her own phone from her pocket and Googled to find the requirements to open a bank account at SQ Private Bank. The page took forever to load. When it did, she felt her jaw drop. That was a lot of zeros. She turned the screen to show Stryker.
His jaw dropped too. ‘Are they missing a decimal point?’
With a shake of her head, she locked her mobile. How the other half lived! She had thought she was doing okay in life – in charge of her own team, a homeowner (albeit of a small one bed flat a long way from the nearest tube station) and not yet a crazy cat lady at the ripe old age of thirty-two. If it weren’t for the chronic fatigue, she’d be winning at life. But seeing how much money this woman, this child, clearly had access to, made her mind boggle. She’d seen people like it wandering the streets of London before, touting their Harrods’ shopping bags full of designer swag and getting their weekly groceries from liveried footmen at Fortnum & Mason’s, but this dead girl made it all seem less abstract. It was almost as if she and the victim lived in parallel versions of London. They walked the same streets, took the same cabs, and yet lived lives that would never normally intersect. It seemed the victim had it all: youth, money, and looks.
‘Think she’d miss the bag?’ Elsie joked.
‘I’
m sure it’d suit you, ma’am.’
Ma’am? A little part of her died inside at the idea she was no longer a ‘miss’. ‘That’s boss ma’am to you, Inspector Stryker.’
He grinned sheepishly. ‘Sorry, boss.’
There was still no sign of the pathologist or crime scene manager’s team. This too was par for the course when you ran the least important team in London. Elsie was half-tempted to send her father a message. Despite the fact that he’d retired from the Met, he still had more influence than she did. One call from him would expedite things tremendously. She sighed. She needed the help but asking for it would only serve to reinforce the rumours that she had piggybacked his legacy.
The clock was ticking. Every minute was another minute that the crime scene was bathed in rain, trace evidence literally going down the sewer drains. It was just her luck. Whenever something good happened, there was always a fly in the ointment, a run of bad luck that had followed her ever since she’d come down with glandular fever as a teenager.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘I was saying,’ he repeated patiently, ‘d’ya reckon this’ll get punted over to one of the other teams, boss? If it’s a serial killer, shouldn’t DCI Fairbanks get first crack?’
He wasn’t giving up on the serial killer angle. Elsie wasn’t surprised that he knew of DCI Fairbanks. It was impossible to miss the old codger strutting around New Scotland Yard. Fairbanks looked like a column of flab with a face perched atop it. It was a travesty he’d let himself get into that shape. Elsie had seen pictures of his glory days up on his office wall, and he’d been a handsome man once. Worse still was his abysmal solve rate. He might have snaffled the first victim by luck but Elsie was damned if she’d let him get his paws on this case. She shook her head vehemently.