by J. F. Penn
Jamie had relented at her insistence and taken up tango, a dance with its roots in the sorrow of slaves and immigrants, those oppressed by society. Tango was performed with a serious facial expression, emotion held within the dance. To her surprise, Jamie had found in tango her own form of release, and now the nights she danced enabled her a brief escape.
“Yes, I went to the milonga last night, Pol. I wore the silver dress and my hair down with the comb you made for me. I danced with Enrique first and he spun me into a close embrace …”
So began the telling, the ritual they went through every day after Jamie could manage a night at tango. The erratic hours of her job made it difficult to go regularly, but she did find a sublimation of grief through the movement of her body. The late nights were worth the moments of clarity when focusing in the moment let her forget, albeit briefly.
Sometimes Jamie lied and told Polly stories of a tango night she didn’t actually attend, an imagined evening where she had spun on the dance floor in the arms of a strong male lead, when in reality she had been at home, eyes red with weeping. Some nights, Jamie dreamt of walking along a beach, the ocean sucked back and the sand exposed, leaving sea creatures high and dry. There was a moment of calm when the waters receded, a suspended time of complete silence and rest. But she knew the tsunami wave would crash towards her soon, destroying everything in its path. Right now, Jamie held back the grief, but when it broke, she knew she would drown in its choking embrace. Part of her almost welcomed it.
Did you dance with Sebastian? Polly tapped with impatience.
Jamie laughed at her daughter’s need for gossip. It was a marvelous moment of normality, although Jamie wished she was quizzing Polly about boys and not the other way around.
“You know I can’t ask a man to dance, Pol. It’s against the etiquette of tango. Sebastian was there but he was dancing primarily with Margherita. She’s very good, you know.”
Bitch.
“Polly Brooke,” Jamie scolded, “enough of that language!” But Jamie couldn’t help smiling, because the twenty-five year old Margherita was indeed a talented, beautiful bitch who dominated the London tango scene. Polly had seen her regular dancing partner Sebastian on YouTube and had become convinced that he should sweep Jamie off into a romantic sunset.
Polly’s face suddenly contorted in a grimace of pain and she started making choking noises, a grotesque parody of breath. Increasingly now, the secretions in her lungs became too much and she struggled for air. Jamie had heard it described as similar to drowning, the body fighting desperately for oxygen. The keyboard fell to the floor with a clatter as Polly’s fingers clutched at the air in grasping urgency. Jamie’s heart rate spiked and she banged the panic button on the wall, knowing that the alert would be triggered in the nurse’s area, silent so as not to alert the other children. She gripped Polly’s hand.
“It’s OK, my darling. I’m here. Try to relax. Shhh, there now, Pol. It’s OK.” Jamie couldn’t hold back the tears, watching helplessly as Polly convulsed in pain, trying to cough up the stickiness that was engulfing her. Rachel swept into the room with another nurse and Jamie stepped back, letting them inject Polly with a sedative. Tears streaming down her face, Jamie felt impotent and useless as she could do nothing to take away her daughter’s pain.
Rachel began to suction the fluid from Polly’s lungs, the noise a hideous gurgling, but after a few seconds, Polly’s tense body relaxed on the bed. Jamie stepped forward to take her hand, unclenching the fingers that had tightened in pain. She stroked her daughter’s skin, touch her only communication now. The body on the bed was her daughter, but to Jamie, Polly was not an invalid in pain, a wracked, twisted, physical self. She was a soaring mind, a beautiful spirit trapped here by mistake. Some days Jamie wished death for them both, to escape together into an untethered future. She picked up the cuddly Golden Retriever puppy from the floor where it had fallen. Polly had always wanted a pet but the soft toy was the best Jamie could do. Polly had named it Lisa and kept it near her ever since, grubby now from a lot of love. Jamie tucked the soft toy under her daughter’s arm.
Rachel stood close by, and gently brushed strands of hair from Polly’s face.
“I know you don’t want to have this conversation, hun,” she said, “but sometimes it’s better to let our children go. We can continue to keep Polly alive but her body is almost finished. You can see that, Jamie.” Her voice was soft and calm, a practiced tone that Jamie knew she used with parents and children alike. “It’s not something parents want to admit, but Polly’s pain will only be over if you let her die. In any other society, she would have died of natural causes by now. We’re just keeping this vessel alive, prolonging her pain.”
Although appalling on one level, Jamie knew it was entirely appropriate to have this conversation in front of Polly, sedated or not. She didn’t want to let her daughter’s hand go in order to step outside the room, but also she knew that Polly had expressed her own strident wishes about the matter. They had talked about death and she knew that Polly wasn’t afraid of it, only of the pain of passing. Jamie knew that Rachel talked about the end openly with the children and she understood the logic of that. There was an honesty at the hospice that cut through the crap of what was appropriate to discuss in polite society where the death of children was kept behind a veil of silence and denial. Here it was brutal in its regularity.
“I don’t want to say goodbye,” Jamie whispered. “I’m not ready yet.”
“But what if Polly is?” Rachel said quietly, her voice speaking a truth that lingered in the antiseptic air.
Jamie’s phone vibrated in her pocket, breaking the moment.
“It’s work, I’m sorry.” She pulled it out, seeing a missed call and a text. She scanned it quickly and felt her pulse quicken. Despite the desperation of Polly’s illness, work was her sanity. “There’s been a murder,” she said. “I’ve been assigned to the case so I have to go Rachel, but I’ll be back tonight. Just give me another day, please.”
Rachel walked around the bed and touched Jamie’s arm gently. “It’s not me you’re doing this for, hun. It’s for your little one.”
Tears pricked Jamie’s eyes again, but she brushed them away, pulling the veneer of police business around her shoulders. Her job gave her a psychological anchor as well as paying the bills. Jamie was good at detective work, and her ability to solve puzzles and right wrongs gave her a little piece of lucidity in the face of inevitable loss. Every criminal brought to justice was another point added to her karma balance that she begged the universe to give to Polly.
Chapter 2
The jet black BMW motorbike pulled up in front of the Royal College of Surgeons in the square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, an area renowned for the legal profession and dominated by Georgian terraced houses. Jamie tugged off her helmet and dismounted the bike, putting her safety gear and protective leathers into one of the panniers. She had traded in her old car when Polly had entered the hospice. She couldn’t stand to look at it anymore without feeling that her daughter had gone already. The bike was cheaper to run and the independence increasingly suited her. She wasn’t meant to use it for getting to crime scenes but today she needed the mental space even though it rumpled her clothes. She straightened the black crush-proof trousers and tucked in her white shirt, pulling the matching suit jacket out with her handbag from the other pannier. Dusting the jacket down, she put it on and her transformation was complete. Polly sometimes called her the ‘black work wraith’, but Jamie preferred to wear the equivalent of a uniform to separate her professional life.
Glancing around and seeing none of her colleagues, Jamie pulled out a pack of Marlboro Menthol. Lighting one, she looked up at the imposing classical entrance to the Royal College. She smoked quick and fast, her breath frosty in the air, cheeks red with the winter cold. The cigarette was a shot of delicious poison, her own private rebellion against what she would have preached to Polly. What did it matter anyway, Jamie thought. Life is poi
son, drip drip drip every day until we die of whatever addictions hold us. Everything she lived for right now hung over her head like the sword of Damocles, so what difference would another cancer stick make? Besides, she needed just a little fix before facing the body that lay inside. The cigarette was a chemical separation between her home life and the professional, a space where she could squash her emotions into the mental box she kept separate from her police work.
Jamie took another drag, enjoying the mint fresh aftertaste through the harshness of tobacco smoke. In the old-school tango clubs of Buenos Aires, smoke filled the air, an important part of the culture where life was often short and lived intensely. In these brief moments Jamie recaptured that sensation in the little beats of time between her dual lives in this crazy city. She relished the start of a new case and already she was glancing around, her mind posing questions about the area. Why was the murder committed in this elegant part of town?
A gust of wind blew leaves along the road, brittle reminders of autumn tumbling over each other and rustling in the gutter. The sharp breeze bent the branches of trees in the park, a few skeletal leaves hanging on against the grey. Jamie looked up at the early winter sun, the only color in a sky that was as washed out as the commuters who walked, shoulders hunched, into the Aldwych. Winter was almost upon them and soon the British would begin their annual vigil, longing for spring as the nights arrived ever earlier. Jamie’s thought ahead to Christmas, a time that Polly loved and she had always over-indulged. Would she be alone this year? Jamie pushed the thought aside, taking a final drag and pulling a small tin from inside her bag. She stubbed the cigarette out on the lid and carefully placed the end into it. The tin served as a way to monitor her habit but also to remove any evidence. She noticed there were already three inside, too many for this time in the morning.
Walking into the main lobby of the Royal College of Surgeons, Jamie gave her details for the crime scene log and put on protective coveralls and booties. A uniformed Officer directed her past the yellow tape of the perimeter to the first floor. The entrance hall was imposing, wide stairs with rich red carpet sweeping around in a curve, with marble balustrades to guide the way upwards. The hall was overlooked by extravagant paintings of the men who had once ruled this surgical empire. Artifacts from the museum were displayed in niches, drawing the eyes back through its illustrious history.
Upstairs, Jamie entered the Hunterian Museum, a place she’d never visited but vaguely knew of. It was one of those hidden treasures of London that few came to see but which changed those who did. She was partially glad of her ignorance, because she wanted to see it with untainted eyes before she polluted her instinctive impressions with fact.
Near the door, a uniformed officer sat with an elderly man, the Curator. He was agitated, wringing his hands and then rubbing his neck, repeatedly loosening his tie. Jamie recognized the body language of self-comforting and wondered if perhaps he had found the body. She would circle back to him in a bit. The officer looked up and Jamie nodded her head in a professional greeting, avoiding a smile.
She looked around, taking in the activity before her. Scene Of Crime Officers (SOCOs) were processing the area, and Jamie’s eyes were drawn to a central space surrounded by walls of glass shelving that contained thousands of body parts in preservation jars. Jamie had seen many bodies in various states, but usually they were recognizably human. This was a collection of the macabre, and a strangely appropriate place for another dead body.
Jamie felt a familiar surge of excitement at a new case, a new puzzle to solve and a way to distract her from thoughts of the hospice. She registered the usual guilt as well, because for her to feel this way, a human being had to die. But Jamie was a realist and there would always be murder, violence and death. It was endemic to the human condition. She had a short window of opportunity in her life to make a difference and potentially lower the body count and it made her remarkable for just an instant. This job was not some office function where busy work whiled away the hours, counting for nothing. This work could save lives, bring justice and occasionally equilibrium to the small corner of the world that was Jamie’s London. It was a chance to be extraordinary, the reason she had escaped her parents’ home on the Milton Keynes housing estate as soon as she could. She had known growing up there that she had to get out of that rut or risk being trapped forever in mediocrity.
Jamie walked into the central area where a female body was laid out on the floor wearing a scarlet evening dress that had been slashed open. Her beautiful face was calm but there was a deep wound in her lower abdomen, looking more like a surgical operation than the butchery it must have been. The woman’s blonde hair looked like an unnatural wig, the tresses freshly brushed and seemingly too alive to be attached to a dead body. Flashes of light from the crime scene photographer illuminated the corpse, her skin pale and posed like a model exhibit. Jamie stood still as she took in the scene. This was the moment when she knew nothing and her mind was filled with questions. Who was this woman and why did she die here last night. She noticed the red lipstick on the woman’s mouth and imagined her speaking. What would she say?
“Jamie, good to see you.”
Jamie turned to see Detective Sergeant Leander Marcus, his slight paunch extending the dark weave of his suit trousers, visible through the thin protective coveralls.
“Hey Lee, were you first on scene?”
Leander nodded, his face crumpled with lack of sleep.
“Keen to get off it ASAP. I’ve been up all night and this only came in a few hours ago. Cameron get you called in?”
Leander arched an eyebrow and Jamie gave a complicit half-smile. Detective Superintendent Dale Cameron was respected for his accomplishments but he also seemed to have Teflon shoulders, deflecting any scandal onto other ranking officers, so his cases came with a health warning. With his salt and pepper hair and a body kept trim from marathon running, Cameron had the looks of a Fortune 500 CEO and his star was on the rise within the Metropolitan Police.
He had been appointed Senior Investigating Officer for the crime, assigning Jamie to the case along with a small team of Detective Constables as an inquiry team. Jamie had clashed with Cameron before, receiving a verbal warning for acting outside of protocol. She knew that she needed to rein in her independent streak, it didn’t sit well with the rules and regulations of the Force. But she also knew that her exemplary investigation results meant she was given a little more leeway. Her methods might be unorthodox, but at least Cameron trusted her enough to get the job done and assign her to this case. She needed distraction, and losing herself in work was the best way, keeping her mind occupied while her heart was slowly breaking.
“So what have we got so far?” Jamie asked.
“The deceased is Jenna Neville,” Leander said. “Her handbag is missing but we got a list from security of people who entered in the last 24 hours and she was easily recognizable after we got the names. You must have heard of Neville Pharmaceuticals?”
Jamie’s eyes widened in recognition at the name.
“Of course, it’s one of the biggest British pharmaceutical companies.”
“Exactly. Her father is Sir Christopher Neville, the CEO, who mainly concerns himself with politics and media campaigning. Her mother is one of the top scientists for the privately owned company.”
“Any indication of why she was here?” Jamie asked.
“There was a gala event downstairs last night for alumni surgeons of the college. Jenna Neville attended the event, along with her parents, who are benefactors.”
Damn, Jamie thought. A medical style murder in the Royal College of Surgeons after a party filled with actual surgeons. No obvious suspects then. “How many people?”
“Around 90 guests, plus staff. The Museum was supposed to have been locked though, and it wasn’t used for the function.”
“Is a team on the statements already?”
Leander nodded. “There’s several officers starting on it now we have th
e guest list.”
“I don’t envy them,” Jamie said. “ That’s going to take a while.” She looked up at the glass walls surrounding them, stretching two stories high and lined with specimen preservation jars. “Cameras?”
Leander shook his head. “There aren’t any in the Museum itself and the ones downstairs show all those guests milling around. We need to go through the footage and see if any of them weren’t on the guest list, but to be honest, there are other entrances. This isn’t a highly secure building as it’s not considered a security risk. There are no drugs here, or money, only old bones and bodies.”
Jamie indicated a walled display of surgeon’s tools.
“And scalpels, knives, hacksaws and other equipment that could be used as murder weapons.”
Leander shrugged. “Of course, but the College says that these are historical objects and there are easier ways to procure knives around here. But they’re checking the inventory now.”
They stood in silence for a moment as a white suited figure finished examining the body. Jamie knew forensic pathologist Mike Skinner from multiple crime scenes but he barely strayed outside the boundaries of professional talk related to the case. He stood and stretched his back, then turned to them, inclining his head in a slight greeting.
“There’s massive blunt force trauma to the skull and her neck’s broken.” Jamie could see that the head was positioned at an unnatural angle, and the hair had been pulled back from the wound. Skinner pointed behind them to an open space at the bottom of a flight of stairs from the upper level of the museum, now surrounded by crime scene markers. “There are blood and bone fragments over there so it looks she fell and hit the post at the bottom of the stairs. I suspect that the way she landed would have forced her head into hyper-extension with sufficient force to cause a fracture at the C2 vertebrae.” Skinner demonstrated with his own neck, dropping his chin close to his chest. “It’s a classic hangman’s fracture and cause of death is likely to be asphyxia secondary to cervical injury. It only takes a few minutes. I’ll confirm in the post-mortem but those would be my preliminary thoughts. Her body was then dragged to this central area and postmortem lividity shows she was on her back here when the body was cut open.”