Ash & Bone

by John Harvey

  The first two detectives from SCD1, Homicide, arrived some twenty minutes later. Lee Furness and Paul Denison, both DCs, showed their ID and spoke briefly to the uniformed officers before pulling on protective clothing. Not wanting to obliterate anything Forensics might find on the path, they scrambled down through the bracken some twenty metres further along.

  Losing his footing midway, Furness cursed as dark mud smeared the leg of his overalls.

  Denison reached the bottom first.

  'Jesus,' he said and crossed himself instinctively. The dead woman's eyes were open and he wished that they were closed. Curly-haired and round of face, at twenty-seven Denison was the youngest in the team, younger than Furness by a full year.

  The woman's skin was the colour of day-old putty, save where it had been sliced and torn.

  Careful not to contaminate the scene, Furness, wearing a pair of latex gloves, prised a pair of white cotton knickers from the brambles on which they had snagged, dropped them down into a plastic evidence bag and sealed it along the top.

  When they looked up, their DS, Mike Ramsden, had just arrived and was standing at the top of the bank, looking down. Burly, broad-shouldered, tall, wearing a scuffed leather jacket and tan chinos, tie loose at his neck, Ramsden epitomised the public's image, post-TV, of what a police detective should be.

  'Boss here?' Ramsden called.

  'Not yet,' Denison said.

  'Forensics?'

  'On their way.'

  'Time for you two to get it sorted,' Ramsden said. 'Make a name for yourselves. Just don't go trampling over everything.'

  His breath hung visible on the morning air.

  * * *

  Karen Shields, promoted to Detective Chief Inspector some twelve months before, was on her way to Hendon and a weekly meeting at Homicide West when the call came through. Over an excess of instant coffee and without too much rancour, she and other senior officers would review progress in the various investigations underway, pool information, prioritise.

  The murder of an Afghan shopkeeper at Stroud Green, attacked by a gang of youths armed with blades and iron bars, beaten and left for dead, was foundering amidst a welter of denial, false alibis and barefaced lies. The two fourteen-year-olds they were certain had been responsible for setting fire to an eighty-six-year-old woman after breaking into her flat, had been arrested and then grudgingly released for lack of evidence. The week before, a family in Wembley, a mother and three children under ten, had been found bludgeoned to death, two of the children in their beds, one on the stairs, the mother in the garden as she tried to raise the alarm. The father had hanged himself from the top of a brightly coloured climbing frame in the kids' playground of the local park.

  And then there were the young black men: investigations undertaken with DCC4, Racial and Violent Crimes. One man shot dead as he sat drinking coffee at a pavement cafe in Camden Town; another, possibly as a reprisal, gunned down as he came up the steps from Willesden Green station; a third, no more than seventeen, knifed outside the bowling alley in Finsbury Park. On and on.

  Karen knew the figures: the murder rate in England and Wales for the previous year was the highest ever, with shooting-related deaths up by some thirty-two per cent. The highest overall recorded crime rate was in Nottinghamshire, though violent crime, per head of the population, was more prevalent in London, with men under the age of twenty-six the most frequent victims. Gun crime aside, the biggest increases were in stranger violence, harassment and rape. And despite the growing prevalence of guns on the streets, the most popular murder weapon by far was still some form of sharp implement. Knife. Machete. Razor. Sharpened spade.

  She thought of this as, having turned her car around, she fought it back through the rush-hour traffic; single men in suits steering one-handed as they smoked cigarette after cigarette and snapped, illegally, into their mobile phones; smart young mums ferrying their children to school in SUVs.

  'When you goin' to settle down, girl?' her grandmother had asked when she made her last visit home. 'Have some babies of your own?'

  Home was Spanish Town in Jamaica, the progeny of sisters and cousins swarming round her like an accusation.

  'Girl, you not gettin' any younger.' As if, not so many months off thirty-nine, she needed reminding.

  At Crouch End Broadway, Karen steered wide past a car hesitating at the pedestrian lights, slid into the left-hand lane and accelerated up the hill. Incongruous, a giant totem pole outside the playground signalled the entrance to the lane, and she slowed almost to a halt before pulling in behind Mike Ramsden's Sierra.

  A quick glance in the rear-view mirror, a hand pushed up through her tousled, short-cut hair; by rights her lipstick could do with replenishing, but for now it would have to do. She was wearing a dark brown trouser suit and boots with a solid heel that brought her as close as damn it to six foot. Well, five ten. Her don't-mess-with-me look, as she liked to think.

  Removing his hands from his pockets, Ramsden walked towards her. Down below, she could see Forensics already at work, shielding the body from sight.

  'What have we got?' Karen said.

  Ramsden coughed into the back of his hand. 'White female, thirty-five to forty-five, multiple stab wounds; dead some little time. Last night at a guess.'

  'ME not here yet?'

  'Stuck in traffic'

  'Tell me about it.' Karen moved closer to the edge and looked down. 'That where it happened?'

  'My guess, she was attacked somewhere up here and then pushed.'

  Karen looked along the area to their left that had now been cordoned off, the muddied slope leading steeply down.

  'Marks you can see,' Ramsden said. 'That and the angle of the body.' He shrugged. 'Maybe he finished her off down there, who knows?'

  'Any ID yet?'

  'Not so far.'

  'No one similar reported missing?'

  'Early days.'

  Karen sighed and patted her coat pocket, hoping for a mint; since she'd stopped smoking on New Year's Day, she'd been committing dental suicide.

  'Any idea yet what she was doing here?'

  Ramsden told her so far they'd found a grey sports bra and matching vest, the vest dark with mud and what was almost certainly blood. A pair of grey jogging pants had lain nearby. One blue-and-white Puma running shoe had been discovered close to the body, the other amongst the trees at the far side of the old railway track, where presumably it had been hurled.

  'Out running,' Karen said. 'Chances are she'll live close.'

  Earlier in the year a woman had been attacked and killed while jogging in east London, Hackney. Stabbed. The investigation was still ongoing.

  Karen glanced round at the flats that ranged below. At the end of the lane, she knew, a path led down to a crescent of Victorian houses and the sprawl of another low-rise council estate at the far side of Hornsey Road. Before being assigned to SCDl, she'd run a missing-person investigation here, a three-year-old boy who'd gone missing from the nursery and been found forty-eight hours later, safe but cold, asleep in someone's garden shed.

  'Who found the body?'

  Ramsden pointed towards a thirtyish woman in a yellow Puffa jacket, standing with two others of similar age. All with cigarettes on the go.

  'Who talked to her?'

  'Furness and Denison.'

  'Talk to her again.'

  'But…'

  'Again, Mike. Do it yourself. I'm going down to take a look.'

  Her protective clothing was in the boot of the car. Changed, she made her way carefully down, not wanting to make a fool of herself by slipping. The DI in charge of the Forensic team was someone she'd worked with before.

  Inside the canopy, Karen bent towards the body. Some of the cuts looked superficial, others, she guessed, ran deep. There was bruising to the neck and face, another bruise - the result of a kick? - above the pelvis on the left-hand side. A fine spray of dried blood speckled the inner thigh, and something silver and crystalline trailed, snail-like, acros
s the curve of her stomach.

  Sexual assault?

  Until the post-mortem there was no way to know for sure.

  She stepped back outside and turned in a slow circle, trying to get a sense of what had happened, taking her time.

  Ramsden was on his way towards her, having taken the long way round.

  'The woman,' Ramsden said. 'Nothing she didn't say first time round.' He took a stick of chewing gum from his top pocket, removed the wrapping and put it in his mouth.

  Karen held out her hand.

  'Sorry,' Ramsden said. 'Last one.'

  She didn't know whether to believe him or not.

  'She recognise the victim?' Karen asked.

  'Not from what she saw.'

  'Get her to look at one of the Polaroids. Good chance, if they both use this place a lot, she'll have seen her before.'

  But now Denison was shouting something from above, altar-boy face shining and a canvas sports bag held high in one gloved hand.

  'Lucky bollocks,' Ramsden said, half beneath his breath. 'Fall in shit and he'd come up with a five-pound note.'

  They climbed back up.

  'It was there,' Denison said, pointing. 'Community centre. Pushed down below the steps by the door.'

  'You've checked inside?' Karen asked.

  Denison shook his head. 'Just a quick look. Sweatshirt. Towel. Socks.'

  'Then we don't know it's hers,' Ramsden said.

  'Let's see,' Karen said, reaching into the bag with gloved hands.

  The wallet was safe in an inner pocket, square and dark, the leather soft with use. She lifted it out and let it fall open in her hand.

  'Oh, shit,' she said softly. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

  'What?' Ramsden said.

  Karen held out towards him the warrant card with its small square photograph: Maddy Birch, Detective Sergeant, CID.

  'She's one of ours.'

  10

  The press conference was packed to the gills. Television cameras, tape recorders, a smattering of old-fashioned spiral-bound notebooks, ballpoints at the ready. On the raised platform, a technician made a last-minute check of the microphones. The noise in the hall ebbed, and flowed. Out front, a Press and Public Relations officer had a quick word with the reporter from Sky News. Bar a terrorist attack or a celebrity scandal, the timing should guarantee blanket coverage on all the terrestrial channels, plus satellite and cable. BBC Radio was taking a live feed into its five o'clock news. A curtain twitched to one side, a door opened and, stern-faced, they shuffled in.

  The platform was rich in seniority and rank. Assistant Commissioner Harkin took centre stage, to his right the Detective Chief Superintendent in command of Homicide West. Seated at the far left, Karen Shields was the only woman, the only black face amongst all those sober-faced and sombre-suited white men.

  Arguments that she'd be better occupied elsewhere had been brushed aside: Public Relations liked to get her on camera as often as they could.

  In her absence, Lee Furness was busy liaising with Forensics and overseeing the local area inquiries, while Mike Ramsden had travelled north to interview Maddy Birch's mother. Alan Sheridan, her office manager, was accessing the Sex Offenders Register, searching through computerised records of similar crimes. Only Paul Denison was temporarily idle, twiddling his thumbs in the car park waiting for Karen while she was stuck, unhappily, behind a microphone.

  Bald head shining a little in the lights, the Assistant Commissioner began his statement: 'We are, all of us, shocked and saddened by the death of a colleague in this tragic and senseless way.' Using his notes sparingly, he spoke of Maddy Birch as a resourceful and dedicated officer who had shown extreme bravery only recently in going up against an armed and dangerous criminal when she herself was unarmed. 'All of us within the Metropolitan Police Service,' he concluded, 'have a grim determination to bring Maddy's killer or killers to justice as soon as possible.'

  Flash bulbs popped.

  Harkin gave brief details of the circumstances of Maddy's death and went on to give assurances that the Homicide officers leading the investigation would be able to call on the support, as necessary, of other Operational Crime Units, as well as the facilities of the National Crime Intelligence Service. Karen, finally, was introduced as one of the officers who were, as he put it, dealing with the minute-by-minute, the day-to-day, the real nitty-gritty. No one, least of all Karen, had warned him that, because of its possible links to slavery, it might no longer be politically correct to say nitty-gritty.

  The first question was hurled almost before Harkin had finished speaking: was it true that Maddy Birch had been sexually assaulted prior to her death?

  'Until the post-mortem has been carried out by the Home Office pathologist,' he said, 'any such assumptions are purely speculation.' It was an answer guaranteed to increase such speculation tenfold.

  Numerous questions followed about the exact nature of the attack, most of which were either deflected or referred back to the initial statement.

  'Given the similarity of circumstances,' asked the reporter from CNN, 'do the police think there is a connection between this murder and that of the woman killed while out jogging in Hackney in February?'

  They'd been expecting that one.

  'Be assured,' Harkin responded, 'there will be the closest contact with officers conducting that investigation.'

  He did think, then, there was a connection?

  'As I say, we are exploring that avenue alongside several others.'

  'Nobody has yet been charged with the Victoria Park murder, is that correct?'

  That was correct.

  'And all three men arrested in connection with the murder have since been released?'

  That was so.

  Harkin sighed. 'If we could concentrate our attentions on the tragic death of Detective Sergeant Birch…'

  But the crime correspondent of the Guardian was already on his feet. 'The assistant commissioner alluded to the police operation in which Detective Sergeant Birch was involved, and which resulted in the death of a fellow officer and the fatal shooting by the police of William Grant - I wonder, can he tell us what progress is being made in the inquiry into those events presently being carried out by the Hertfordshire Force?'

  'I'm afraid I don't see that has any relevance here.'

  'But the inquiry is still ongoing?'

  'You have my answer.' Harkin's face was set in stone.

  'I think,' the Public Relations officer began, 'if there are no further questions…'

  'I have a question for Detective Chief Inspector Shields.' Eyes turned towards the Home Affairs correspondent from the BBC. 'As a woman officer, does this case have a special resonance for you?'

  Fuck, Karen said inside her head.

  Twenty cameras flashed in her direction.

  'As a police officer,' Karen said, 'all cases of this seriousness, especially where the deaths of fellow officers are involved, resonate equally.'

  Off to one side, the PR officer nearly wet himself with joy.

  'Gentlemen,' said Assistant Commissioner Harkin, rising to his feet. 'Ladies. Thank you for your time.'

  * * *

  Seeing Karen Shields approach across the car park in his rear-view mirror, Denison turned the key in the ignition.

  'How did it go, ma'am?'

  Karen slammed the car door closed. 'Stop ma'aming me and drive the fucking car.'

  Not too well, then, Denison thought.

  Karen buckled herself in and stared straight ahead. Hendon to Kentish Town, half an hour if they were lucky, three-quarters if not.

  Vanessa's commanding officer was waiting for them in reception. 'PC Taylor's in my office. You can talk to her there.'

  'Thank you.'

  Vanessa jumped to her feet when the door opened. She was wearing her police uniform, the top button of her tunic fastened tight at her neck; there was a slight but unmistakable smell of perspiration in the room.

  Awkwardly, Vanessa held out her hand and then,
before Karen could respond, let it fall by her side.

  Sitting, Karen introduced Denison and herself.

  'Maddy Birch,' Karen said, 'you knew her. You've got some information, I believe.'

  'Yes. As soon as I heard what had happened — I'm sorry, I still can't believe it — as soon as I heard, I went to my inspector here and asked to be put in touch.'

  Karen nodded. 'I'd like to record this conversation. I take it you've no objection?'

  'No, of course not.'

  Denison placed the pocket recorder on the desk between them and switched it on.

  'Very well, then, in your own time.'

  Vanessa told them about Maddy's growing fears that she had been watched and followed; her feeling that someone had been inside her flat.

  'She didn't report any of this?'

  'No.'

  'Do you know why?'

  Vanessa wriggled a little in her seat. 'It wasn't as if she had any proof. I think she was worried she might not be believed. That people might think she was, you know, imagining things.'

  'And you? What did you think?'

  'Did I believe her?'

  'Yes.'

  'Not at first. Not if I'm to be honest, no. Ever since the Grant business, that young officer getting killed, it had really shaken her up. You could tell. I thought maybe it was a reaction to that. Nervous, you know. But then, when she said someone had broken into her flat, I believed her then.'

  'And she didn't have any idea who this person - if it was one person - might have been?'

  'No, not really'

  'You don't seem sure.'

  Vanessa fidgeted with her hair. 'Well, there was this one time we were in the pub and Maddy thought she saw someone she knew. Her ex.'

  'Ex-husband, lover, what?'