by Jane Goodall
THE CALLING
JANE GOODALL
© Jane Goodall 2007
Jane Goodall has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2007 by Hachette Australia.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
London, summer 1976
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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10
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12
13
14
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16
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18
19
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31
32
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51
London, summer 1976
1
Briony’s office was on the side of the building that caught the afternoon sun and the heat had been building relentlessly over the past couple of hours. When she opened the window there was no breeze, only the backdraft from the passing traffic. She stood there for a moment, breathing in the petrol fumes, then returned to her desk and stared at the pile of CID reports.
As she reached for a large buff folder, her eye was distracted by the greeting card sitting on the desk next to it and she picked that up instead, smiling as she gazed at the French impressionist picture of sailing boats on a blue-green sea. It was a birthday card inscribed in Commander Macready’s italic handwriting, wishing her ‘every success in the coming year’. Just like him to make the personal gesture, choosing a card that promised scenes of happy escape, then to sign it like that. Macready could never escape his own professional formality.
Since his latest promotion, he had retreated to a glassed-in suite of offices on an upper floor at Paddington Green and those who had known him in his former incarnation as a working detective gossiped about the waste. And the irony. He’d always been so contemptuous of the paperwork approach in CID, keeping formidable amounts of detail filed in his head for immediate access at all hours of the day or night and maintaining an unstinting pace with his small, hand-picked team. Being in that team meant unrelenting stress but Briony missed it. Since she’d moved to her new job in Chelsea — BD division — she’d been getting paperbound herself.
She replaced the card and drew a pile of documents towards her with a sigh, but was relieved by a knock on the door.
‘Excuse me, ma’am. Have you a got a minute?’
Before she had a chance to reply, Denis came in and dropped a green folder on her desk, then plonked himself in the chair opposite her in his usual posture, arms folded and legs splayed in front of him. He was a few years older than her, somewhere in his mid-thirties, she guessed, and although she was starting to get better at dealing with older men as her juniors, she always anticipated difficulties. At BD she’d already encountered all their usual games of undermining, but Denis, to his credit, hadn’t been playing them. He had a relaxed, good humoured way about him — too relaxed for a detective sergeant.
‘Phew. Stuffy in here, isn’t it?’ He rotated his head and ran a finger round the back of his collar.
‘It’s stuffy everywhere, Denis. What’s this you’ve brought me? I’m drowning in reports already.’
‘Missing persons. See these — ’ He opened the folder and began to lay its contents out in front of her.
‘What about them? Missing persons is a job for the uniforms.’
‘Yes.’ He straightened up the papers, side by side. ‘That’s it, you see.’ Denis liked to place stress on some of his words, as if every trivial statement needed special definition. ‘I’ve been having a chat with the sergeant who keeps the files. He’s getting a bit concerned, you see, because there’s so many teenagers. He’s got three cases already this month of teenagers going awol after they left home to go to some rock concert or other down this way. He’s wondering if we’ve got a bit of an epidemic on our hands. He thinks the CID should be in the loop, in case there’s some particular reason for it.’
‘As if we haven’t got enough to do.’ She picked up one of the forms and looked at the photograph of a curly haired girl with too much eye make-up, then glanced through the notes: description of the clothes the girl was wearing (mostly black); schedule of her activities over the previous week; interviews with parents, teachers, school friends; lists of addresses checked. ‘Looks like they’ve done a thorough job,’ she said.
‘Last seen by a couple of her mates at the Triangle Club in the King’s Road.’ Denis pointed to another form. ‘Same with this lad here.’
Briony gathered up the forms. ‘The Triangle. How many people did they have there last Saturday night? 300? 400? We haven’t got time to go chasing after badly behaved rock groups asking them the whereabouts of their fans. But we’ll keep an eye on the situation.’
As she handed back the file, the phone rang.
‘Message from one of the rapid response cars, ma’am, Bravo 2. They’re following up on a 999 call, reporting a body by the Thames. Chelsea Embankment, a few yards west of the Battersea bridge.’
‘Has the coroner’s officer been called out?’
‘Yes. The divisional surgeon’s on his way too.’
She hung up. ‘Got a pair of wellies in your locker, Denis? You might need them.’
*
The river, or what remained of it, made a strange graveyard. Briony stared at the assorted garbage lodged in the mud, thinking — only one body in all this lot? It looked as though corpses might be spontaneously produced in there, black slimy things with tangled limbs and no faces, popping up to the surface in clumps.
Denis joined her, leaning on the wall. ‘Old Father Thames. Not doing much rolling along just here, is he? I’ll get the ladder.’
Glad she’d chosen her older canvas slacks to wear this morning, Briony pulled on the outsized Wellington boots and climbed onto the wall. She was contemplating the five-foot drop on the other side when the coroner’s officer arrived, accompanied by an improbably young looking doctor whom she recognised. He’d attended a couple of suicide scenes she’d dealt with in the past few months.
‘Don’t jump, ma’am,’ he said as he walked towards her. ‘You’ll find the world looks a lot worse from the other side of that wall.’ A broad smile and a hand held out in greeting showed the remark was prompted by a wayward sense of humour. He got up on the wall next to her and surveyed the scene. ‘What a god-awful mess! Well, we should look on the bright side, Inspector Williams. It might deter a few suicides. You wouldn’t want to jump off Battersea Bridge into this, would you?’
Denis set the ladder in place and they climbed down, with the coroner’s officer leading the way. As Briony stepped onto the foreshore, the sole of her boot broke the caked surface of the mud and she had to extract it from the sucking morass underneath. ‘Where’s the body, then?’ asked the doctor brightly. A uniformed officer was standing guard, but you couldn’t see what he was supposed to be guarding.
‘Well there’s no actual body, sir, as such. Just this.’ The officer pointed to a naked foot, lying at the edge of the water.
The leg w
as detached below the knee. Stranger things had been thrown up by the river, but this was the first time she’d witnessed the finding of an isolated body part. The coroner’s officer picked the thing up and laid it on a sheet of plastic, then turned it over.
He glanced at Briony. ‘Probably male, judging by the foot. Big boned. I wouldn’t say that was normal decomposition,’ he said, pointing to the blackened mess above the ankle.
She looked around. ‘Maybe not. But decomposition would be quicker in this heat, wouldn’t it?’
The coroner’s officer began to wrap it, but she noticed something. ‘Wait. Let me have another look.’ She crouched and turned it over again, brushing some of the mess from around the ankle. ‘What’s this?’ It was a ridge of black stuff, clogged with mud and oil, but she could discern ridges in the outline. Chain of some kind?
*
On the pathologist’s estimation, the limb was from a male body, probably aged eighteen to twenty-eight and it was less than thirty-six hours since ... Since what? Briony pulled her chair in closer and went back through the report. They couldn’t be sure the person attached to that leg was actually dead, but if he was they were looking at murder — or a very nasty accident. The upper end of the shinbone was badly disintegrated and blackened ‘in a manner consistent with burning’. Possibly, the pathologist suggested, someone had been trying to dispose of the corpse in an incinerator of some kind and failed to get it all in.
The thing round the ankle was in fact a piece of chain, but when they examined it closely, they couldn’t see how it might have served for restraint. It was a section of bicycle chain, cut to fit the ankle and fastened with a padlock — a cheap little thing, not even stainless steel.
‘Damn!’ she muttered to herself. There would have to be an investigation and one of the most difficult kind, just as her holiday was coming up. Had she been letting that influence her this morning? Was she getting slack like Denis? Should she have called the socos to the scene before the body part was removed?
Well, better late than never. And if this was a job for the forensics she must make sure it was in good hands. She reached for the phone, called the Lambeth laboratory and identified herself briskly.
‘I need to talk to Dr Pavantinandan. Can you tell me where he might be?’
‘Right here, ma’am. Just give him a minute to get his gloves off.’
She was rehearsing a persuasive opening when the even baritone came on the line. ‘Briony. How do I always know when you are going to ring me? What is it this time?’
Her rehearsed gambit went west. ‘A piece of charred leg. Found in the Thames.’
‘Funeral parlours getting careless with their cremations? Does no one do their job properly these days?’
‘There’s a sort of anklet attached to it. To the body part, I mean. Look, Pavan — it’s not the most glamorous case but as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, the Thames shoreline under Battersea bridge isn’t for an easy investigation site in this weather. Will you come down and have a look?’
He agreed to meet her there in an hour. In the meantime, she decided to walk down via the lower end of the King’s Road, where bits of old hardware were appearing as the latest fashion accessory. She liked walking. Since the uniforms did most of their patrolling in the cars now, there was often a lack of on-the-ground knowledge — the kind you got from going past houses on foot, overhearing snatches of talk, seeing the graffiti and the handmade bills pasted up on the telegraph poles, reading the body language of the groups hanging around in the street.
The notorious shop at number 430, which kept changing its name, but whose sign currently read SEX in massive pink letters, was surrounded as usual by hangers on, wearing mohair vests in the still clinging heat. They glowered at her, as they did at everyone, but it was possible she was recognised. She’d been around here from time to time asking questions, and she’d be having to ask more. As she approached she noticed the door was open. You never could tell when this place was going to be open. She steeled herself and went in.
They did their best to intimidate you in here. Apart from all the black rubber clothes and chicken wire decor, the attitude of the shop assistants was enough to make any normal human being turn tail and run. Briony went straight to the counter and showed her card to the girl with the geometric eye make-up and the hairdo that reminded her of an ice-cream sundae.
‘You again,’ said the girl expressionlessly. Her steady gaze made Briony acutely aware of her own limp hair and faded cotton jacket. ‘What you looking for now? Suspender belt?’ She rotated her hips suggestively.
‘What you got in the way of bracelets? Or anklets, to be exact?’
The girl slapped a box on the counter, full of what looked like dog collars. Some were just scraggy pieces of old cracked leather with a few studs on them, which might actually have been pinched off the family dog. Others were wider and flashier, made of new materials, the kind of thing normally associated with the S&M trade. ‘Run out of handcuffs?’ asked the girl, deadpan.
Briony kept her own face straight. Any of the people you see in here like to wear bike chain?’
‘Most of em. Not against the law, is it?’
‘All right,’ said Briony. ‘We’ll leave it for now. But I may have some more questions later. I appreciate your help.’
The girl smiled, artificially, as if for a camera. ‘Pleasure.’
Briony crossed the road and threaded her way along Milman’s Street, past the old burial ground to the river. It smelt worse than she remembered. The heat of the day must have seeped into the mud and set it festering — a forensic’s nightmare, even for someone of Pavan’s capabilities.
Pavan was another of Macready’s inner circle. He was prized for his expert knowledge — Oxford educated, and with an accent to match. Briony had worked with him on a few cases when she was based in Oxford, where the junior officers referred to him as Prince Pavan. He’d moved on Macready’s persuasion to a London posting, and was having to deal with all the hustle of the Lambeth lab. He arrived fifteen minutes late, wearing polished shoes and a double-breasted suit, but accompanied by Ken, the lab liaison sergeant, who was dressed for the dirty work.
*
‘I’ll get down there if I have to,’ said Pavan, ‘but I’m summoned to the commander’s office at four o’clock and would prefer not to go in wafting eau de Thames.’
Briony rolled up the legs of her slacks and went down herself, leading the way to the spot. She began to describe the grisly find, but Pavan interrupted from above.
‘We’ve seen it. We came here via the mortuary.’
‘Oh yes? Any observations?’
‘He was wearing ill-fitting shoes. There’s a blister on the heel.’ He drew a breath, but didn’t continue.
‘And?’ She was getting impatient.
‘It’s possible we may be able to get a fingerprint off the padlock if there was oil on it. The conditions of preservation are against us, obviously, but a padlock is typically held firmly between the forefinger and the thumb, so if the impress was strong enough, we may be lucky.’ Pavan placed one finely shod foot on the wall and leant over. ‘We’re looking for traces of rust from the padlock and chain, or charring from the end of the bone. If we find those in the surrounding mud it will give us an indication that it’s lain here for some time. Otherwise we can infer it’s recently been washed up from somewhere else.’
‘Any ideas about the owner?’
‘The owner of the leg? Male. Are you asking me to be more specific?’
‘Age,’ said Briony, ‘is what I’m wondering about. We’re dealing with more than our usual quota of missing teenagers in these parts.’
‘The usual quota being considerable, I imagine.’
‘Quite considerable. It’s getting a bit wild around the lower end of the King’s Road. They’re wearing chains and padlocks as personal ornaments, along with a lot of uglier stuff. Leather masks. Swastikas. Broken razor blades.’
Ken looked up from his
work, scooping the ooze into plastic containers with a spatula. ‘Swastikas? I saw a character only the other day with a swastika tattooed on the side of his head. He was hanging about near the lab entrance in Lambeth. Waiting to do some drug deal, no doubt.’
‘Let’s hope that was all he was waiting for,’ she said.
2
Sharon stared at the exam paper.
Write your name, centre number and candidate number in the space provided on the front of the answer book.
Sharon Kendall. You got two per cent for that, apparently — writing your name on the answer book. Two down, ninety-eight to go. The front page of the question paper was all instructions, with the words MUST and NOT in capital letters. Answers MUST be written in black. Do NOT use pencil or coloured ink. The world was full of people wanting to give you orders and make you answer questions about measurements and quantities.
She opened the answer book, picked up a red biro and wrote a question of her own:
What do you call a hole two miles wide and three miles long?
Answer, Watford. The next question wasn’t so easy:
Why am I sitting here?
Where else was there to go? That was the short answer, given she was living in a town that was a complete hole, and she didn’t have the money to go anywhere else or anyone to go with. At least tomorrow she’d be getting out of this hole for the day. Maths was the last exam for most of the class, so they were going on an excursion to celebrate the end of all the swotting and sweating. Not that Sharon had done much of that.
The excursion was Terry Kent’s idea, of course. Mr Popularity, with his long wavy hair and his velvet jacket, and his new red MG. He taught art — the only subject Sharon liked — but she was sceptical about Terry, as he let them call him. She could see his real aim in life was impressing the girls. Why else would he be the only male teacher in a private girls’ school?
Sharon had been there four years and she didn’t fit any better now than the first day she walked in the door. She remembered that day, because the minute she opened her mouth they started giving her funny looks. Wrong class of girl, wasn’t she?