Unti Peter Robinson #22

by Peter Robinson

  Annie remembered the scene—­the glistening intestines of animals burst out of black bin liners, the human body cut in half longways, the dreadful smell—­and shivered. It was something that would blight her dreams for a while. And it wasn’t information she was going to pass on to Alex Preston. But why would Michael Lane assume that the body parts mixed with the fallen stock in a Vaughn’s ABP van should belong to Morgan Spencer? Did either of them have a connection with Vaughn’s, with Caleb Ross? She made a note. “Did Michael give any explanation for assuming these rumors were about Morgan Spencer’s body?”

  “No. He never even really said that. Just that it was all connected.”

  “Connected how?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “We think Morgan was killed at the hangar, Alex.”

  “Michael would never do—­”

  “I’m not saying he did, but you have to understand that until we find him and talk to him, he’s still a suspect. Thinking about what you’ve just told me, I’m guessing that Michael may have witnessed Morgan’s murder, and then he drove off in a hurry. Whoever did it knows he was there, knows who he is and where he lives. That’s why that man came here last night asking about him. He could easily have been the man who killed Morgan.”

  Alex paled. “Here, in my home? With Ian in bed? But how could they know who I am, where I live? These ­people? These killers? How could someone like that know about Michael’s life?”

  That was a question Annie had discussed earlier with Banks. She had a few possible answers of her own, but none that Alex would like.

  But Alex wasn’t stupid. “You’re saying that he worked for them, aren’t you? That he did criminal jobs for them with Morgan. You’re saying Michael was involved.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Annie. “What I would say is that it’s possible that Michael might have been about to get involved. On the fringes, perhaps, on the threshold. You say he wanted a new camera—­”

  “He wouldn’t do that. Not Michael. You just don’t understand. You don’t know him.”

  “No, I don’t,” Annie said softly. “And that’s what I’m depending on you for. But there’s no point arguing. This won’t be settled until we find him and talk to him ourselves.”

  “You’ll put him in jail.”

  “Don’t be silly, Alex. Why would we do that? I think it’s time you realized that he stands a far better chance with us than he does with whoever’s after him. ­People who would break a woman’s finger and threaten her child. What do you think they’ll do to Michael if they find him?”

  Alex put her hands over her ears. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”

  “Be realistic, Alex.”

  “I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know any more. I would if I could.”

  “That’s OK. I believe you. It’s late now, but what I want to do first thing in the morning is get this man’s card checked for fingerprints. If he’s a habitual criminal, there’s every chance we have his prints on file. I’ll also need you to come in and give us your own prints for elimination purposes. Then we’ll see about the sketch artist. I’ll come over early and drive you to the station after we’ve taken Ian to school. And we’ll fix it with your boss. Will you do that? Maybe you can help us with Morgan Spencer, too? We don’t have any photos or good descriptions of him.”

  “OK.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get a family liaison officer to come over right now—­”

  “No. I don’t want a stranger in my house. Why can’t you stay? It’s a let-­down sofa. You’ll be comfortable. Or you can take the bed, if you want. I’ve even got a spare toothbrush. Never been used.”

  “I can’t do that, Alex.”

  “Why not?”

  “I . . . just . . .” Annie could think of no real reason, except that she wanted to go home and be alone. She realized how selfish that was. Here was a young woman in need, and all that Annie had to do was agree to stop the night and settle down on the couch. Besides, she knew she had drunk a bit too much wine to be driving safely. She could always get a taxi home, but that would be expensive.

  Alex refilled their glasses. “Seriously,” she said. “I’m really scared. It’ll make me feel a lot better if you’ll stop. I don’t want to be a victim anymore, but I need help right now.”

  Then the hall door opened, and a little boy stood there in his striped pajamas rubbing the sleep from his eyes, his hair tousled. “I can’t sleep,” he said in a pathetic little-­boy-­lost voice. “I had a bad dream. Can I sit up with you and watch TV?”

  8

  IT WAS FAR TOO EARLY IN THE MORNING FOR A POSTmortem, Banks thought as he walked down the high green-­tiled basement corridor of Eastvale General Infirmary.

  It would always be too early in the morning for a postmortem like this one, he thought, when he entered Dr. Glendenning’s recently modernized domain and saw the pieces arranged on the stainless steel autopsy table: two sides of a human being, like two halves of a pig in a butcher’s cold room, roughly aligned. The arms had been placed where they should have been joined to the body, and the head, which had been found after dark under a split bin bag containing a stillborn lamb, sat on top. Between the eyes was a ragged hole.

  “Ah, Banks,” said Dr. Glendenning. “Glad you could come. Decided to have a lie-­in, did you? You almost missed the show.”

  “Pity,” said Banks. For a moment, he longed for the old days, when Dr. Glendenning bent over the body, a cigarette dangling from his lips, spilling ash in open incisions. The days when he could enjoy a cigarette himself, anything to mask the smell of decayed flesh and take his mind off violent death.

  No chance these days. Both he and Glendenning had stopped smoking years ago, and a lit cigarette would probably set off every alarm in the building. It was almost unthinkable today how much they used to be able to get away with. Dr. Glendenning didn’t believe in a dab of Vick’s under the nose, either. He thought anyone who did was a sissy, and you didn’t want to be thought a sissy by Dr. Glendenning. Still, this time there wasn’t much of a smell at all. At the crime scene, most of the stink had come from the dead animals, not from Morgan Spencer’s butchered corpse.

  “You look a bit pink around the gills,” Dr. Glendenning went on as they approached the body. “Been sitting around brooding and boozing again?”

  “Not sleeping very well,” said Banks. “Or not enough.”

  “It’s the demon drink. I thought so. Plays havoc with your sleep patterns. Now, what do we have here?”

  “A jigsaw puzzle?” Banks suggested.

  “I’m not normally a fan of TV crime dramas, but did you ever see that Swedish program—­or was it Danish—­the one about the body on the bridge? That was in two halves, but in that case, it was top and bottom. This is much more unusual. And see how clean the cuts are. Look at those arms, taken off right at the shoulder joints, just like chicken wings. What does that suggest to you?”

  “A chef?”

  “Be serious, man.”

  “A professional?” Banks ventured.

  “But what kind? What kind?”

  “Doctor, perhaps? A surgeon?”

  “Hah. Apart from the personal insult implied, you couldn’t be more wrong. The body’s been jointed and split, Banks. Now, why on earth would a surgeon do that?”

  “I don’t know. A butcher, then?”

  “Possibly.” Glendenning scratched his bristly mustache. “Closer, at any rate.” He bent over the remains and poked and prodded for a while, at one point lifting up the right arm and examining it from various angles. He then put it down and picked up the other arm. “No sign of defensive wounds, but there’s some light bruising on the arms,” he said. “Premortem.”

  “Somebody held him by his arms?”

  “Well, laddie, he might not want to just stand still and get shot. Some ­peop
le would take objection to that, you know.”

  Banks noticed as he looked at the naked body that there were no genitals. “Was he castrated?” he asked.

  “The genitalia were certainly removed,” said Glendenning. “As were all the internal organs and viscera. He was also exsanguinated. But all that was carried out postmortem. There are no incisions on what’s left. Each part is intact in itself, except the head.”

  “Be thankful for small mercies,” Banks muttered.

  “Aye.” Dr. Glendenning pointed to the head. The eyes were closed. “That’s what killed him, I’m almost certain. That bloody great hole in his head, to be technical about it. And you can see if you look carefully that the throat was cut before the head was severed. There are signs of two different incisions.” He selected a scalpel from the tray of instruments on the side table. “Now, let’s see what else we’ve got here. There’s no sign of lividity, no blood settled in the muscles or tissue.” He put down the scalpel and conferred with his assistant quietly for a few moments, then he turned back to Banks.

  “The victim was shot in the forehead. And I’m glad you haven’t asked about time of death, because I’m afraid it would be very hard to tell.”

  “We think it probably happened on Sunday morning.”

  “Now look at this.” Dr. Glendenning pointed toward the ankles, where Banks could see the deeply cut groove of some sort of binding.

  “Rope?” he asked. “Leather? Metal?”

  “We’ll settle that later when we check the wound for fibers. For the moment, though, I can tell you that the throat was cut and the body was drained of blood, most likely while hanging upside down. The arms were expertly removed at the shoulder joints—­no cutting of bone involved—­and finally, the body was sliced in half by a very sharp blade and eviscerated. Scraped out. Look at the cleanness of those cut lines. There’s little tearing, no raggedness.”

  “What was used? A chain saw or something?”

  “Certainly something.” Glendenning nodded toward his assistant. “But probably not a chain saw. At least not an ordinary one. There would be much more tearing. Karen over there has a theory. Tell DCI Banks your theory, my dear.”

  Karen gave Dr. Glendenning a daggers-­drawn look at the sexist endearment. Not that it would do any good, Banks thought. Glendenning loved to tease and play the politically incorrect male chauvinist pig, and he was too old to change now. “Taking everything together,” Karen said, “it very much looks to me as if this body was dressed in a working abattoir.”

  “An abattoir?” Banks repeated.

  “Yes.” Karen glanced at the remains, then back at Banks. She was a petite, serious brunette, most of her hair hidden under the surgeon’s cap, and she looked far too young and innocent to know such things. “That’s my opinion, DCI Banks. Your victim was shot first, and then taken and cut up in a slaughterhouse.”

  “Of course.” Banks scratched his head. “Goes without saying. And the gunshot wound, the cause of death?”

  “I just said shot,” Karen explained. “I did not say gunshot.”

  “Christ,” said Banks. “No Country for Old Men.”

  Dr. Glendenning gave him a surprised glance. “It certainly isn’t,” he agreed, “but this is hardly the time or place for a discussion of age and society.”

  “It’s a movie,” said Banks. “The killer uses a bolt gun.”

  “Give the man a cigar. I’ll bet you a grand to a bucket of slops that when I go inside I’ll find the frontal lobes scrambled, and no stray bullet. It’s rare in human murder cases, but as you can see it does the job. The way it usually works is a gas cylinder is used to power the bolt, which enters the skull to a certain point, causing massive and irreversible brain damage, then the bolt retracts back into the gun. Used on a cow or a pig, you couldn’t guarantee that death would ensue—­the animal may just be stunned—­so you’d probably have to be prepared for exsanguination on the spot, but with a human being . . . well, our skulls aren’t as thick, no matter what some of us might think. This man was shot with a penetrating bolt gun, the kind that a professional slaughterman would use.”

  “So he would have died on the spot?”

  “Most likely,” said Glendenning. “Though he might have survived for a short while, as his system was shutting down. Death is not always immediate from such wounds. Though he would most certainly have been incapacitated.”

  “And the loss of blood?”

  “Apart from the amount he lost at the scene—­there’s usually a lot of blood with head wounds—­the rest was drained later. Judging by the straps and the split carcass, I’d suggest that he was hung upside down and his throat was slit. All you need to bleed out then is gravity’s help. It doesn’t even matter if your heart’s stopped. After that, he was cut up, disjointed, eviscerated, and from what I can gather packaged up like a stillborn lamb and shipped off for incineration. No one would be any the wiser.”

  Banks looked at the gruesome remains of Morgan Spencer on the steel table and felt the taste of hot acid bile in his throat. Christ, he wondered, what, and who, were they dealing with here?

  ANNIE FELT disoriented when she woke early on Wednesday morning, and for a moment she experienced that terrifying sensation of not knowing where she was or how she had got there. It didn’t last long, thank the Lord, until the dry mouth and the throbbing headache told her she was on Alex Preston’s let-­down sofa and she had a bloody hangover. It was the strangest sensation, she reflected as she sat up and stretched, that split second when you don’t recognize the place you’re in. Maybe that’s what you felt when you woke up dead, she thought, then chided herself for being so stupid as to think you could wake up dead. It must be the hangover thinking.

  It was just starting to get light outside, and nobody else in the flat was up yet. Then she heard an alarm ring and stop suddenly. A few moments later, Alex padded down the hall in her dressing gown and, without stopping to check on Annie, went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Annie lay on her back and pulled the blanket up to her chin. When Alex came back, she stopped in the half-­light by the sofa and looked down at Annie.

  “You’re awake,” she said. “I wasn’t sure. Mind if I switch the light on?”

  Annie rubbed her eyes. “Not at all.”

  “The kettle will come to a boil in a minute. Stay where you are, if you like, and I’ll bring you a cup of tea. Right now I have to go and get Ian up. Believe me, it can be quite a job.”

  She seemed far too brisk and chirpy for so early in the morning, thought Annie, not at all a morning person herself. Especially a morning after the boozy night they’d had. At least it was quiet in the flat. No kids screaming next door. No domestics from upstairs. Maybe Ian would be quiet. And a cup of tea in bed. Now, that was a rare treat.

  She checked her watch. Half past seven. She had better get a move on; there was a lot to do today. Banks would already be at the postmortem. Then she remembered last night’s conversation, the card with the number on it. She still had it in an envelope in her bag. She would have to get it fingerprinted as soon as possible. And Banks would want to know everything Alex had told her. She reached for her handbag and checked her notebook. Thank God she had written it all down. Then she realized another thing. From this moment on, she couldn’t leave Alex and Ian alone. Until she could organize a shift of watchers, she would have to stick with them herself, or get someone else to do it. Her unexpected visitor didn’t sound the sort who would stop at a broken finger.

  When Alex came back, Annie asked if she could use the bathroom.

  “Of course,” said Alex. “It’ll take Ian half an hour to get out of bed, and I’ve got breakfast to make. Take your time.”

  Annie luxuriated in a hot shower and then brushed her teeth so long that she probably wore off most of the enamel. She had forgotten to do it last night, so she was making up for it now. Luxury. When she looked fo
r some paracetamol in the bathroom cabinet, she noticed a strip of contraceptive pills. So there were to be no more children, at least not for the time being. It was none of her business, and she felt vaguely guilty about even finding them. But it was her nature to pry, and when she did, she found nothing more of interest. No prescription drugs. No illegal drugs. No guns.

  She hated dressing in yesterday’s clothes, but she had no choice. She thought of asking Alex for a loan of clean underwear but felt too embarrassed. The best she could do was turn her knickers inside out and pretend they were fresh. The bra was fine, and her jeans, but she could do with a different top, and she had no time to go home before she went to the station.

  Things progressed slowly through tea, cornflakes and toast and marmalade, and eventually they were all ready for off. Though she felt she was perhaps being paranoid, Annie went out of the door first and glanced up and down the landing. Nobody around. She held her breath as they went down in the lift, half expecting the doors to open at six or four and for some heavies to get in. But they had it to themselves the whole way down.

  She had been a bit anxious the previous evening about leaving her car parked in the street, expecting the wheels to be gone, or worse, but Alex had told her not to worry, and it was just as she had left it. Though Ian’s school was hardly more than a ­couple of hundred yards away, they dropped him off there first and made sure he was through the doors before driving to the station. If Winsome, Doug or Gerry noticed that Annie was wearing the same clothes as yesterday when she entered the squad room, they were too polite to say anything. She remembered once in her early days she had turned up at the station in yesterday’s clothes, and all the blokes had nudged one another and whispered and smirked. They wouldn’t let her forget for the rest of the day. And if she had compounded the error by turning up with an attractive female civilian in tow, their imaginations, and comments, would have known no bounds. Annie introduced Alex to her colleagues, then took her over to the annex.

  She could see Alex’s eyes wandering everywhere, an expression of intelligent curiosity on her face as they walked among the lab-­coated techies and the various machines and computer stations.