Death Row

by Mark Pearson

  Kate didn’t doubt it, but she didn’t make any comment.

  DI Bennett pulled out his mobile phone and punched in some numbers. ‘Slimline,’ he said as his call was answered. ‘It’s DI Bennett here. I want you to send some uniforms round to …’ He held the piece of paper up and read out the address that the Dean had given him. ‘We’ll meet them there in half an hour. We’re picking up a skinhead recidivist called Matt Henson and we have good reason to think he may be carrying a knife. Thanks, Dave.’ He closed his phone and faced Sheila Anderson again. ‘We’d like to have another look around Jamil’s room. If that’s okay?’

  ‘Of course it is. I’ll show you up.’

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary. Just give us the keys I’ll return them when we’re done.’

  ‘I’m not sure—’

  ‘Jamil did give us his permission, Dean Anderson,’ said Bennett.

  The Dean shrugged, resigned. ‘Well, if it’s in his best interest … but you need to find the real person who attacked him,’ she added pointedly.

  ‘Of course it’s in his best interests.’

  ‘I’ll have Arthur show you up.’

  *

  The ancient caretaker muttered something incomprehensible, but Kate took it to mean, from some of the words that she could recognise, that he would be waiting for them in the kitchen to lock up after they had finished. He grunted a farewell and closed the door behind him as he left.

  Kate looked around the small room. It was in exactly the same state as when they had left it yesterday. ‘Did you really get his permission to search the room?’

  Bennett shrugged, smiling guiltily. ‘I’m sure he gave us tacit approval.’

  Kate snorted. ‘Extremely tacit. Must have been in sign language when he was asleep.’

  ‘So what was his cousin after, and why was he so agitated?’

  Kate looked around her. ‘Is there something on his laptop?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, we can’t take it with us. That would be going too far.’

  Bennett smiled again, swung the bag he had been carrying off his shoulder and put it on the student’s desk.

  ‘No need.’ He opened the bag and took out a thick matt-black object, about the size of a hardback novel.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A portable hard drive. I’ll just copy his data across.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘Not technically. I’ll ask his permission later.’

  Kate frowned. ‘If you are able to.’

  Bennett attached a USB cable to Jamil’s laptop and turned it on. While he was waiting for it to boot up he opened the small wardrobe standing against the right-hand wall. There were shirts and trousers hanging on rails and jumpers and T-shirts, arranged neatly. At the bottom of the wardrobe were a pair of running shoes and two other pairs of shoes, one casual moccasin type of shoe and the other a pair of black oxfords polished to a shine. He slipped his hand in between the jumpers and shirts and worked his way down the compartments.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said to Kate.

  ‘You know what I’m thinking?’ she replied.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Where’s his coat?’

  Bennett shuffled the coat hangers and pulled out a smart linen sports jacket.

  ‘Not that one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s too lightweight for this time of year. Where’s the coat he was wearing on the night he was attacked?’

  ‘He wasn’t wearing one.’

  ‘It was cold that night. He would have been wearing a warm coat. Where is it?’

  DI Bennett shrugged. ‘It’s not here, that’s for sure.’ He walked back over to the laptop and dragged the cursor to start copying files across. ‘Why don’t I see you back at the factory?’ he said to Kate. ‘I’ll let you know how we get on with Matt Henson.’

  ‘I’m not a civilian, Tony.’

  ‘I know. But you’re pregnant, and he may turn violent, and I don’t want Jack Delaney on my case, thank you very much.’

  Kate shook her head. People continually treating her like a piece of porcelain because they were worried what Jack might think was becoming very old. But Bennett had a point, she conceded to herself, she was indeed pregnant and while it was true that she was not exactly a civilian she wasn’t part of the armed response unit, either.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said simply. She looked again at the books above the young student’s desk and pulled out the copy of The Catcher in the Rye that she had noticed earlier. She thumbed through a few pages and then went to the front page of the book. Her eyebrows raised slightly as she read what had been written there and held it out for Bennett to see. The handwriting was feminine and graceful and it said ‘To my beautiful boy’.

  ‘Now that might be what you detectives call a clue,’ she said.

  *

  Doctor Derek Bowman took the lid off the refrigerated box and put it to one side. Beside him stood Lorraine Simons, Kate’s erstwhile assistant, who was now being seconded to different forensic pathologists until a permanent replacement could be found. ‘How was Doctor Walker?’ she asked.

  The doctor smiled. ‘Effulgent as ever. Glowing, almost. They do say that about pregnant women, don’t they?’

  ‘They do indeed,’ Lorraine conceded.

  The pathologist shook his head as if disappointed at the world. ‘Quite glowing. Why pretty women such as yourself and she ever wanted to get into the grim world of forensic pathology is quite beyond me. You should be out on the catwalks of Milan or gracing the covers of Vogue,’ he said, with a raise of one eyebrow.

  Lorraine blushed despite herself. She was a strawberry blonde with soft pale skin and a heart-shaped face that betrayed her emotions all too easily. She knew that Bowman was only pulling her leg but she frowned at him, mock serious. ‘I should report you to the politically correct police, sir.’

  ‘Please, Lorraine, there are no sirs here. It’s Derek, or “Bowlalong” if you prefer – that’s what everyone else calls me.’

  ‘Why “Bowlalong”?’

  The doctor picked up a pair of latex gloves and snapped his hands into them. ‘I had that epithet bestowed on me at school. Always in a rush to get there, that’s my trouble, never taking the time to just stop and admire the view.’

  ‘You’re a busy man.’

  ‘That I am. That indeed I am. And talking of busy … let’s see if this poor mistreated creature has any secrets to yield to us from beyond the veil.’

  He placed his hands in the box, lifted out the severed head of Maureen Gallagher and placed it on his examining table. The atmosphere in the room changed suddenly, a chill pervading the air as though someone had opened an industrial freezer’s door. There was no humour evident anywhere on either the doctor’s or his assistant’s faces now.

  Maureen Gallagher’s skin had become even more mottled, the flesh softer, even though the head had been kept in the cooling box.

  ‘The press are saying she might be a nun, sir.’

  ‘The jackals of Fleet Street have got wind of what we’re dealing with, then?’

  ‘Just heard it on the radio.’

  ‘It’s certainly a newsworthy item. I can’t blame them for that.’

  ‘Do the police know who she is, then? Was she a nun?’

  ‘Just a humble cleaning lady, apparently. A volunteer.’

  ‘And this is what she got for her sins.’ Lorraine looked at the woman’s head. Her eyes had been closed now and she looked like one of the wax heads that anthropological experts build up over discovered skulls to recreate what the person might have looked like. ‘How old do you think she is?’

  ‘Forties, fifties. Hard to tell just yet.’

  ‘Who would want to do something like this?’

  ‘Somebody very strong, somebody very disturbed.’

  ‘The news people are talking about witchcraft.’

  ‘Devil worship, maybe? Satanism, some kind of black magic sect, perh
aps … but not witchcraft. Wicca is a religion that celebrates the good, the forces of nature. Whoever did this is coming from an entirely different place.’

  Dr Bowman picked up his camera and started to take some shots. An hour later he had photographed the head from all angles, weighed it, measured it and taken samples for DNA testing should it be required.

  Lorraine had gone to get them both some coffee and Bowman sat at his desk, looking at the printed-out photos he had taken. He compared them with the ones that Kate had sent across to him and concurred with her diagnosis. The body had been chilled and the head separated from it at the neck with the use of a heavy-bladed instrument of some kind. He looked at one of the photos, a close-up of the side of Maureen Gallagher’s head, picked up a magnifying glass and studied the shot closer.

  Bowman opened his desk drawer and took out a small pair of tweezers. Then he crossed back to the head, pulling his chair across. Delicately, he put the tweezers into one of the ears and pulled something from the opening. He held the tweezers up to the light. They now held a rust-coloured fleck of some substance. He placed it in an evidence bag and leaned forward to look into the ear again. As he did so he heard a faint ticking sound. He leaned in closer, thinking he must be imagining things. But, sure enough, it was still there, a faint ticking sound which seemed to be coming from the head itself. He placed the head on one side and then with both hands attempted to open the jaw. Rigor mortis had set in, so it wasn’t easy. He grunted, pulled again and the jaw cracked open an inch or two. The ticking sound immediately grew louder.

  *

  Diane was standing in her customary position by the open window, smoking. She gestured to Jack to come in as he appeared in her doorway.

  ‘You want one?’ she asked, blowing out a smooth curl of smoke.

  Delaney shook his head. ‘I’m cutting down.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ She gestured at her desk. ‘Forensics are back on that bullet you found.’

  ‘Cartridge, Diane.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Delaney picked up the file. ‘What’s it tell us?’

  ‘Not a lot. No fingerprints, no DNA. Standard military issue. Pretty much as you said. A tiny bit of plastic in one of the grooves.’

  Delaney took the photos of the cartridge and flicked through them, looking at a magnified close-up of one of the grooves on the cartridge. A small transparent piece of plastic snagged on a minute nick in the brass casing. He flicked to the next photo: an even more magnified close-up of the piece of plastic. It was slightly transparent with a small circular crescent on the right-hand side of it. He flicked to the next photo: an even tighter shot of the crescent shape – it was uniform, regular, obviously not made by the tear. He flicked through the paperwork: a lot of words but adding nothing to what Diane had already summarised.

  ‘Not telling us a great deal, then?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘This piece of plastic? Is it significant?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, I don’t know, Jack,’ said Diane, tossing the stub of her cigarette out of the window. ‘We’re pissing in the wind here. And your girlfriend on Sky News isn’t making life any easier. We’re getting a thousand calls an hour, calling in with so-called information on everything from Satanic cults in Pinner being responsible to terrorist cells operating out of a pizza-delivery service in Stanmore.’

  ‘Don’t call her my girlfriend – it’s not funny, boss.’

  ‘Is any of this funny? We’ve got an attempted murder of a serial child killer and rapist, a boy abducted from the same street he took those children from all those years ago, and now we have the head of a bodiless nun placed on a church altar a scant hundred yards from where the boy was taken. What the hell’s it all about, Jack?’

  ‘She’s not a nun, she’s a church cleaner.’

  ‘She was as bald as a billiard ball, so she’s either a nun or the nutter cut off her hair before cutting off her head. Any way you slice this cake, Jack, it’s not looking too tasty.’

  ‘Some killers do take trophies, you know that, Diane.’

  ‘Yes, of course I know that.’

  ‘Especially if there is a sexual element.’

  ‘A sexually abused nun. Who in hell are we dealing with here?’

  ‘Lots of women shave their heads for all sorts of reasons.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. But their heads don’t turn up on the altars of Catholic churches, do they?’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  Delaney looked across as Sally Cartwright came into the room, her expression serious. ‘Sally, what’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘You are not going to believe this, sir,’ she said, her face as white as a snowdrift.

  *

  The Waterhill estate was a mile away from the Whitefriars Hall of West London University, but it might as well have been on a different planet. An ugly conglomeration of high-rise buildings centred amidst a sprawl of roads and tarmac car parks. A place where the elderly didn’t go out after dark and the sight of a burnt-out car was as commonplace as the sight of a Chelsea tractor in Fulham. It was an equal-opportunity estate, though: you were just as likely to be sold drugs, raped, mugged or murdered by a black gang as by a white. There were clear areas of demarcation and, on the drive in, Bennett had flagged several young kids strategically placed to send the signal that the filth had come to visit. Eight years old and they could already tell Old Bill just by the look of them. It was a ghetto, no other word for it, thought Bennett. Like many, many others in a city polluted by its own decay. Being born in a place like the Waterhill was like having your fate marked out for you by a vengeful god, punished for the sins of your forebears. Only it wasn’t God who brought misery and degradation to them and Bennett knew only too well who was responsible.

  He looked at the face before him and knew all he had to know about hate, fear, frustrated rage, and the wickedness that lives in some people like breath … like bacteria.

  Adam Henson was in his fifties, five foot six tall and as round as he was high, his body mass effectively blocking the doorway to his flat on the ground floor of Carnegie House, one of the six high-rise buildings that formed the nucleus of the estate. He was wearing shiny black slacks, a white shirt, a severe crew-cut and an expression on his face that would curdle milk. Bennett judged by the smell of him that he probably hadn’t washed for several days.

  The man crossed his arms and deepened the frown that was creasing his forehead in fat folds of skin. ‘I’ve told you, he’s not in.’

  ‘You won’t mind us coming in and checking, then,’ said DI Bennett, keeping his voice smooth and affable.

  ‘Yeah, I do mind,’ said the overweight man, the florid flush rising from his thick neck to his white face like a heart-attack warning, like the spread of red jam on rice pudding. ‘You ain’t got a warrant, you ain’t coming in. Especially him.’ He flicked his head dismissively towards PC Danny Vine.

  ‘Why? Because I’m black?’ asked the constable, an edge in his voice.

  ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle – ain’t that a fact, detective?’

  Bennett stuck a hard finger against the shorter man’s chest and pushed him back into his flat, following him in. ‘Not on the Waterhill estate it isn’t,’ he said.

  ‘You got no right.’

  ‘I got every right. Your son is at liberty on parole, he breaks the conditions of that parole and that makes him a wanted felon. So shut it and get out of our way.’

  ‘He hasn’t broken any conditions. He does his community service and shows up every week to his parole officer.’

  ‘He’s done something a little more serious than skipping a litter-picking trip,’ said Danny Vine.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like sticking four inches of steel into a young student’s chest. That’s something we rather frown on,’ snapped Bennett.

  Henson shook his head. ‘Oh, I get it. Another fix-up, is it? Not enough you put one of my sons down, you’re going to pin something on the o
ther. Never mind he’s innocent.’

  ‘Where was he Friday night about midnight?’

  ‘He was here with me.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Absolutely positive. I just said it, didn’t I?’

  Bennett pulled out the photo and shoved it under the man’s nose. ‘So how come he happens to be on CCTV footage from Camden High Street at the exact same time?’

  Adam Henson flapped the paper away.

  ‘That’s not my son.’

  ‘What, a doppelgänger, is it?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Someone else walking around who looks just like him and also happens to have B-minus tattooed on the back of his neck?’ Bennett held the photo up again.

  ‘Let me guess, this geezer who was stabbed, he wasn’t white, was he?’ Henson threw Danny a withering look.

  ‘He was an Iranian citizen,’ said Danny evenly.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘With dual nationality. He was born here.’

  ‘And now he’s died here.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Bennett pushing the man aside.

  It was a three-bedroom flat with a kitchen and bathroom. The first room on the left was a lounge: a three-piece suite that had seen better days, a coffee table strewn with copies of the Sun, a marked-up copy of the Racing Post, assorted lager cans, against the opposite wall a three-bar electric fire, all bars blazing, and beside it on a chrome stand a forty-two-inch state-of-the-art plasma-screen television. The sound off and the new Countdown assistant pertly placing vowels and consonants on the board.

  Henson nodded at the picture. ‘You got to keep your brain ticking, don’t you?’

  ‘Right. And you on benefits as well, Mister Henson,’ said PC Vine pointedly.

  ‘It was a gift.’

  ‘Sure it was.’ Bennett opened the door and passed on to the next room, slightly larger and with two single beds in it. It was neatly arranged, no clothes strewn on the floor. No Matt Henson, either. The bathroom and smaller bedroom also proved to be empty, the smell in the second bedroom pretty much making it clear to Bennett that it was used by Henson senior. He backed out of the room and gestured to Danny Vine. ‘Check under the beds.’

  The kitchen ahead was empty and windowless and Bennett turned the handle on the door of the last remaining room on the left. It was locked.