Oops, thought Eddie.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Eddie climbed into the van and crushed his knees into the dashboard. He screamed and pulled the seat release lever. “Short-arsed bastard woman!”
Then he climbed out again, knowing that it was better to check the van for stock now than to wish he’d done it when he got to the scene.
Twenty minutes later, as he shoved an armful of stock into the drawers and checked the camera flash batteries, Benson surprised him.
“You got your job back, then?”
“Until someone else has their eye on it.”
Benson was smiling at him, arms folded.
Eddie stopped loading the van. “What?”
“Bet you had to promise to be a good boy, eh? No more back-chatting, no more smart-arsing.”
“I’m back on my terms. Her arse is out the door.”
“On your own terms?”
“Yep.”
“Someone put in a good word for you?”
“Like I know anyone who’d do that.”
Benson chuckled to himself. “Yeah, well, luckily for you I’m with you on this one.”
Eddie closed his eyes and looked skyward. “Why? What have I done to piss off the gods today?”
“Charming!”
“All I want is some peace and quiet, not some bastard bemoaning the state of his marriage and eating Mars bars at me.”
“I ain’t saying a word, mate,” Benson said. “My lips are sealed. You won’t know I’m here. And for the record, I’m not keen on working with you on this one, either. I’d rather have had that Nicki woman, better looking—”
“She tried it once already.”
“Tried what?”
“The scene I’m about to go and work.”
“Really?”
“She hurled all over it. So I imagine it’ll be very pleasant.” He found a small tub of Vicks in a dashboard nook. “Here,” he said, “treat yourself.”
* * *
During the journey, Benson turned to look at Eddie. He opened his mouth to speak; as though expecting it, Eddie snapped his head around and glared.
Slowly, Eddie put a finger to his lips and blew a shush.
“What? I was only going to say—”
“I don’t care what you were only going to say. Stop. Now. I’m thinking.”
Benson turned forward again, and had there been an audience present, would have rolled his eyes for their benefit. As it was, he felt a little embarrassed at being told off for nothing; felt his cheeks flush. “His name is Sidmouth. John Sidmouth.”
Eddie stared at him.
“He lives with his mother.”
“Can’t you tell me all this shit when we get there? I like a surprise, okay?”
“I’m only saying.”
“Don’t. Just… just don’t.”
Benson shrugged. “You’re going to need to—”
“We’re half a mile away. It’ll keep, okay? I like to think while I’m driving.”
Benson laughed. “Yeah—”
“Do you feel that?”
Benson’s eyes widened, hands flat on the seat. “What?”
“That.” Eddie wobbled the steering wheel. “Feels like the front wheel’s coming off. I bet that stupid bitch kerbed it.”
Benson looked on, worried, as Eddie pulled over.
“Have a look.”
“What?”
“Take a look at the wheel. I’ll do this” —he shuffled the steering wheel again— “and you check the wheel.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.” Benson nodded. “Good idea.” He climbed out.
Before his feet had hit the pavement, Eddie drove away.
He watched him in the rear-view mirror, waving a fist. And had Eddie’s mind not been occupied by thoughts of a more serious nature, he would have found it hilarious; Benson was shaking his fist like a cartoon villain. Eddie resisted the temptation to laugh and contented himself with a quick shake of the head and a crafty grin.
What pulled at his mind now, as he wound through the estate toward the street in Morley, was Troy and his whereabouts. He could understand him not wanting to go back to his parents’ house – Christ, who needed parents like them? – but where had he gone? Where would he go? His dealer? He wondered just what kind of mental state the lad was in today.
As he stopped at the scene tape stretched across the road, he stared through the windscreen, focused on nothing at all, his mind miles away. Actually, not miles away; it was here, but it was hours away – hours in the past. “Nicki,” he whispered.
She can’t do scene work.
He sat there, eyes growing wider. Officers walked past the windscreen and peered inside as Eddie sat motionless, growing colder and colder. “No. Troy.” He reached for his phone, and called Weismann. “It’s me.”
“What’s up?”
“Where’s Nicki?”
“Look, if she messed up the scene—”
“Where the fuck is Nicki?”
“She’s upset, gone home—”
Eddie closed his eyes. “Listen to me very carefully. Find out where she lives and get a unit round there now. Now. Do not stop to pick your fucking nose. Just do it.”
“What’s—”
“Troy’s missing. I think—” The line clicked off, and Eddie knew Weismann was on it already. He sat there for a minute or two longer, hoping he was wrong, but the shiver skittering through his scalp told him he wasn’t. Who knew what Troy might do if he was pissed off at her – or even if she was just her usual arrogant self, provoking him, poking him, laughing at him. It was people laughing at him that Troy found the most disturbing, Eddie knew. That, and being without a job any more.
The scene through the windscreen began to coalesce before him, and eventually Eddie was back in some street in Morley that had grown temporarily famous. He spotted the press sixty yards away, behind a length of cordon tape, waiting for something to happen. Among them, no doubt, was Wilson – a man Eddie knew from a previous case.
In fact, it occurred to him that he’d had more than his fair share of press as friends. Oops, there was that word again – friend. Okay; he’d known his fair share.
The scene was in full swing: eight or ten officers from the Operational Support Unit in a straight line along the road, backs bent, each one scanning a shoulders-width strip of tarmac as they shuffled slowly across. The press had taken their shots and were busy chatting about who was shagging whom. Officers leaned against beat cars chatting, or doing work on their mobile devices – or playing games on their phones. Waiting. Everyone was waiting. And, he supposed, it was him they were waiting for.
He climbed from the van. Up and down the road, at the kerb edge, were rows of wheelie bins.
The OSU sergeant looked up and said, “Ooh, hello – CSI are here again to vomit all over the fucking place.” The rest of the line laughed.
Eddie looked at him.
The sergeant, enjoying his new status as ‘funny-as-hell, much-loved-sarge’, stuck his chest out and grinned. “Stinks round here.”
Eddie closed the van door and gazed skywards, as though in thought. “And yet, even over the top of the vomit, we can still smell your breath.”
The officers in line stopped scanning the road, straightened and laughed even louder. The sergeant stared daggers at Eddie, then shouted, “Alright, alright. Let’s get on with the job.”
Eddie watched them, still chuckling, as they inched their way across the road, shifting up a few yards before returning in the other direction. He looked from them, and the bins caught his attention again. Eddie peered into one; it was still full. Of course – the refuse wagons couldn’t get through because of all the coppers.
One of the officers who’d been engrossed with his mobile device lifted the cordon tape up and Benson stepped through, jacket hooked over his shoulder, scowl on his face. “You bastard, Collins,” he said. “I fucking hate you. No, I mean it. I really fucking hate you.”
Eddie refr
ained from smiling. “When you’ve composed yourself, you might want to ask the OSU sergeant to search the bins.”
Benson’s eyebrows rose. “Can’t help yourself, can you? Always got to be poking your nose in someone else’s business.”
Eddie thought about that for a moment, conscious that it was the same thing Troy had told him last night – how he couldn’t help being a good Samaritan. “Just thought—”
“Yeah, well, don’t. It was on my list. I’ve been doing this for a few years, Collins, and I’m not completely—”
“Stupid?” asked Eddie.
“Fuck off. Pull a stunt like that again and—”
“You’ll lose another two pounds?”
Benson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Shall we make a start on the scene?”
“What? You’re coming in there with me?”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
“It stinks in here,” Benson said, screwing his face up.
“I’m sure the dead will forgive you.” Eddie tore a scene suit down the leg. But Benson was right; there was a peculiar odour in this house, and not all of it was vomit. It seemed that Nicki had not only thrown up on the footpath a few yards from the OSU line, she’d hurled in here too, in the hallway, and Eddie already knew she’d puked upstairs on the landing.
“What the hell had she eaten?”
Eddie stopped himself from answering. He’d begun to think about Nicki again – and about Troy. He peered up the stairs at the precarious rows of stepping plates. “She trying to kill herself?” He pulled the plates up, handed them to Benson. “Stack them by the door.”
Before long, he reached the damaged step, the one with a gash through the carpet and splashes of blood that stretched up the walls. There was more blood in the torn wood; something had chopped right through flesh and into the step. An axe? Eddie pointed it out to Benson. “Don’t step here, okay?”
Benson nodded, and they reached the landing with its splashes of vomit across the carpet. Benson peered past Eddie into the bedroom, and Eddie saw his mouth fall open behind his mask.
“What did you say his name was?”
Benson didn’t take his eyes from the scene. “John Sidmouth. He’s a Probation Officer.”
“Is that supposed to mean anything to me?”
“What? No, no. It won’t mean anything to you because you ejected me from the bloody van before I could get to that part.”
“Alright, alright, keep your wig on.”
“Hello?”
Benson and Eddie looked back down the stairs as someone else wearing a white suit and mask similar to their own – except without the gash down the leg – entered the hallway.
“Kenny. Good to have you back,” said Eddie.
“Christ. What a stink.”
Benson glared a warning at Eddie.
“Yeah, Benson’s here; sorry ‘bout that.” Eddie winked at Benson.
“Not even funny the first dozen times you said it.” Benson shook his head. “I still hate you.”
Kenny climbed the stairs, automatically avoided the damaged step, and was standing at their side moments later. “Wow,” he said, “another angry one.” He looked at the dead man. “Christ, look at his heel. Bet that stung a bit.” He leant towards Eddie and whispered, “Where’s the mad cow?”
“You mean Kay Scarpetta? She threw up and left.”
Kenny laughed. “Is that like Eats, Shoots and Leaves?”
Eddie took a breath, hands on hips, and said, “Have you been drinking?”
“No, why?”
“What the fuck are you talking about then?”
He mumbled, “Doesn’t matter.”
“Correct. It doesn’t.”
“She left left, or she left, soon to return?”
Kenny had a knack for asking far-reaching questions without even intending to. “I don’t really know how to answer that,” Eddie said, the cold feeling crawling up his back again. “She’s not around any more – I have Weismann’s word on it.”
“Wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”
Eddie shrugged. “It’s as good as we’ll get for the time being.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
Eddie nodded over his shoulder. “Since you’ve been sitting with your thumb up your arse for the last few days, you can have the half-naked female in the bathroom.”
The creases in Kenny’s forehead smoothed out as his eyebrows tried to kiss the back of his neck.
Eddie smiled. “You can do her if you want, and I’ll do him.”
“On it.” Kenny almost skipped to the bathroom doorway. He took in the sight, and the eyebrows sprang back like furry roller blinds. He let out a disappointed ‘sheesh’. “You bastard. I thought she was gonna be a stunner with her tits out. This is like something from Saw.”
Eddie joined him and stared at the mass of blood across her bare flesh. “I did give that impression, didn’t I? Sorry. But on the bright side, she’s been letting off some cracking farts. You could have a competition with her.”
Kenny ignored him, folding his arms. “Not going to be a lot of scope for Low Copy.”
“I don’t think he touched them, Kenny.”
“Nah, maybe not. What we looking at, then? Footwear marks on the bathroom and bedroom floors?”
“Pretty much. Tape her if you can, bag her head, hands and feet, and then we’ll bag her out here on the landing. Okay?”
“Gotcha. Let me get the floor out of the way first though.”
“Yep,” said Eddie, “I’ll do the same in the bedroom.”
Benson nodded towards the woman on the toilet. Her head hung limply to the right, a slice of neck exposed down to the spine like the executioner had fucked up and missed. “What do you mean, no scope for Low Copy?”
“Locard’s Law, mate. If he touched her, throttled her for example – we can try to get his DNA from her throat, or from her arms if he grabbed her. But I don’t think there was any contact. I think he walked in here and took a swing or two.”
“Machete?”
“Gesundheit.”
“I mean, was it a machete?”
Eddie slid past him, ready to collect his kit from the front yard and begin his part of the scene. “Axe.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Eddie beckoned Benson into the room and closed the door. “I want to keep as much ambient light out as I can.”
Benson nodded, as though that would have been his suggestion too.
On his knees, Eddie laid the torch on the floor and arced it left and right a dozen or so times.
Benson watched him, fascinated. “Whenever I think about forensicating a scene like this, you know, looking for footwear, I always imagine fancy gear like they have on CSI Miami. Not a torch.”
“CSI Miami is television, Tom. And if you need a more accurate assessment: it’s shit television. This is real life. Okay?”
“Smart arse. I was only saying.”
“There’s equipment we could use to attract all the dust from the laminate onto a length of black foil. ESLA: Electrostatic Lifting Apparatus. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?”
“So why don’t you use it?”
“Like CSI Miami, it too is shit. It’s fine on really dusty floors, but on a well-used floor like this, all it does is ruin the footwear marks you’re looking for.”
“Okay.”
“And check your dictionary next time you’re trying to impress someone: forensicating doesn’t exist. Prick.”
“Instead of picking on me, how about you tell me what you know about Mr Sidmouth and his scene so far?”
“Christ, I’ve only just started.”
“See. Not as smart—”
“How about you finish telling me about him, and we’ll take it from there, huh?” Eddie turned off the torch. Blackness.
When the light goes, the sound amplifies to compensate. And sometimes, when there’s no sound and no light, your imagination fills in the gaps with something home-made, s
omething created especially for you.
Eddie saw Sidmouth running upstairs, fear pulling his eyes wide, driving his heart into the red zone. He saw the axe pinning him to the stair, heard him screaming his lungs into hot ragged strips, until the pursuer yanked it free from his heel and continued the chase. He saw Sidmouth limping in here, dragging his damaged foot into his room, where he felt safe – safe, that is, until this happened. Despite the shredded lungs, he’d still be screaming – who wouldn’t?
And then the axeman got to work.
Except there was more, wasn’t there?
“Sidmouth is an Offender Manager.”
“A what?”
“Probation Officer. Prisoners out on licence, you know…”
“Ah, yeah, you already said.” Eddie turned on the torch again, lighting the room, and swapping all of those grotesque home-made images for grotesque real ones. He paused. “You’re fucking kidding, right?”
“What? No, I’m not. Why?” Benson was squinting.
“You think Jessica Ripley did it?”
Benson tugged his mask off. “I have an open mind.”
“Is she on his workload?”
Benson huffed. “Even if she is, I’m not saying she’d do this.”
“She is, isn’t she? On his workload?”
“Yes, she’s on his workload.”
“So the first thing your open mind did was to check and see if Ripley—”
“But so are dozens of others. She went there yesterday, wanted him to sign off on another visit to see her son.”
“And?”
“He didn’t do it.”
Eddie sighed out of his mask. “He didn’t sign off on her request to see her son. Why not?”
“I don’t know, do I?” Benson went quiet, and then said, “He was supposed to. The man who’s taken over part of his workload said there was no reason not to agree to Jessica’s request without a second glance.”
“But he didn’t?”
“I just said that, didn’t I?” Benson looked across to Eddie. “Is that enough of a motive for her to do this?”
“No, probably not, but look at all that shit.” Eddie pointed his torch at the porn mountain. “That’s not something a rational man has. He’s a fucking weirdo, and he’s a fucking weirdo who still lives with his mum.”
The Death of Jessica Ripley Page 26