Suspect

by Michael Robotham

  It was time to take a risk.

  “You think you’re a woman, don’t you? You think you know how to manipulate men like me. Well, you’re wrong! I’m not a walking fifty quid note looking for a blow job or a quick fuck in a back lane. Don’t waste my time. I’ve got more important places to be.”

  Anger flared in her eyes and then disappeared as they misted over. She started crying. For the first time she looked and acted her age. The story came tumbling out, in between her sobs.

  Her stepfather, a successful businessman in Leeds, had made a lot of money buying flats and doing them up. He was a real catch for a single mum like Elisa’s. It meant they could move out of their council flat and into a proper house with a garden. Elisa had her own room. She went to grammar school.

  One night when she was twelve, her stepfather came to her room. “This is what grown-ups do,” he said, putting her legs over his shoulders and his hand over her mouth.

  “He was nice to me after that,” she said. “He used to buy me clothes and makeup.”

  This went on for two years until Elisa became pregnant. Her mother called her a slut and demanded to know the name of the father. She stood over her, waiting for an answer and Elisa glimpsed her stepfather in the doorway. He ran his forefinger across his throat.

  She ran away. In the pocket of her school blazer she had the name of an abortion clinic in south London. At the clinic she met a nurse in her mid-forties with a kind face. Her name was Shirley and she offered Elisa a place to stay while she recuperated.

  “Hold on to your school uniform.”

  “Why?”

  “It might come in handy.”

  Shirley was a mother figure to half a dozen teenage girls and they all loved her. She made them feel safe.

  “Her son was a real dickhead,” said Elisa. “He slept with a shotgun under his bed and he thought he could have sex with any of us. Wanker! The first time Shirley took me out to work, she was saying, ‘Go on, you can do it.’ I was standing on Bayswater Road wearing my school uniform. ‘It’s OK, just ask them if they want a girl,’ she said. I didn’t want to disappoint Shirley. I knew she’d be angry.

  “Next time she took me out, I did some hand jobs, but I couldn’t do the sex. I don’t know why. It took me three months. I was getting too tall for my school uniform, but Shirley said I had the legs to get away with it. I was her Little Pot of Gold.”

  Elisa didn’t call the men she slept with “punters.” She didn’t like any suggestion that they were gambling with their money. She was a sure thing. And she didn’t treat them with contempt, even if many were cheating on their wives, fiancées and girlfriends. This was purely business—a simple commercial transaction—she had something to sell and they wanted to buy it.

  As the months went by she became desensitized. She had a new family now. Then one day a rival pimp snatched her off the street. He wanted her for a one-off engagement, he said. He locked her in the basement of a house and collected money at the door from the men who queued up. A river of skin, of all different colors, flowed across her body and leaked inside her. “I was their Little White Fucktoy,” she said, as she stubbed out another cigarette.

  “And now you’re here.”

  “Where nobody knows what to do with me.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to be left alone.”

  4

  The first law of the National Health Service is that dead wood floats. It is part of the culture. If somebody is incompetent or hard to get along with, promotion is an easier option than sacking.

  The duty supervisor at Westminster Mortuary is bald and thickset with pouchy jowls. He takes an instant dislike to me.

  “Who told you to come here?”

  “I’m meeting Detective Inspector Ruiz.”

  “I haven’t been told. Nobody made an appointment.”

  “Can I wait for him?”

  “No. Only family of the deceased are allowed in the waiting room.”

  “Where can I wait?”

  “Outside.”

  I catch his sour smell and notice the sweat stains under his arms. He has probably worked all night and is doing overtime. He’s tired and he’s cranky. I normally have sympathy for shift workers—in the same way that I feel sorry for loners and fat girls who never get asked to dance. It must be a lousy job looking after dead people but that’s no reason to be rude to the living.

  I’m just about to say something when Ruiz arrives. The supervisor begins his spiel again, but Ruiz isn’t in the mood to be lectured by a low-ranking mortuary manager with delusions of power. He leans across the desk.

  “Listen you jumped up little shit! I see a dozen cars parked on expired meters outside. You’re going to be real popular with your workmates when we put a boot on them.”

  A few minutes later I’m following Ruiz along narrow corridors with strip lights on the ceiling and painted cement floors. Occasionally we pass doors with frosted glass windows. One of them is open. I glance inside and see a stainless steel table in the center of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling, alongside microphone leads.

  Farther along the corridor, we come across three lab technicians in green medical scrubs standing around a coffee machine. None of them looks up.

  Ruiz walks fast and talks slowly. “The body was found at eleven on Sunday morning, buried in a shallow ditch. Fifteen minutes earlier an anonymous call was made from a pay phone a quarter of a mile away. The caller claimed his dog had dug up a hand.”

  We push through double Plexiglas doors and dodge a trolley being pushed by an orderly. A white calico sheet covers what I imagine to be a body. A box of test tubes full of blood and urine is balanced on top of the torso.

  We reach an anteroom with a large glass door. Ruiz taps on the window and is buzzed in by an operator sitting at a desk. She has blond hair, dark roots and eyebrows plucked to the thinness of dental floss. Around the walls are filing cabinets and white boards. On the far side is a large stainless steel door marked STAFF ONLY.

  I suddenly get a flashback to my medical training when I fainted during our first practical lesson working with a cadaver. I came around with smelling salts waved under my nose. The lecturer then chose me to demonstrate to the class how to direct a 150mm needle through the abdomen to the liver to take a biopsy sample. Afterward he congratulated me on a new university record for the most organs hit with one needle in a single procedure.

  Ruiz hands the operator a letter.

  “Do you want me to set up a proper viewing?” she asks.

  “The fridge will be fine,” he replies, “but I’ll need an SB.” She hands him a large brown paper bag.

  The heavy door unlocks with a hiss like a pressure seal and Ruiz steps aside to let me go first. I expect to smell formaldehyde—something I came to associate with every body I saw in medical school. Instead there’s the faint odor of antiseptic and industrial soap.

  The walls are polished steel. A dozen trolleys are parked in neat rows. Metal crypts take up three walls and look like oversized filing cabinets, with large square handles that can accommodate two hands.

  I realize Ruiz is still talking. “According to the pathologist she’d been in the ground for ten days. She was naked except for a shoe and a gold chain around her neck with a St. Christopher’s medallion. We haven’t found the rest of her clothes. There is no evidence of a sexual assault . . .” He checks the label on a drawer and grips the handle. “I think you’ll see why we’ve narrowed down the cause of death.”

  The drawer slides open smoothly on rollers. My head snaps back and I lurch away. Ruiz hands me the brown paper bag as I double over and heave. It’s difficult to throw up and gasp for breath at the same time.

  Ruiz hasn’t moved. “As you can see the left side of her face is badly bruised and the eye is completely closed. Someone gave her a real working over. That’s why we released the drawing instead of a photograph. There are more tha
n twenty stab wounds—not one of them more than an inch deep. But here’s the real kicker—every last one was self-inflicted. The pathologist found hesitation marks. She had to work up the nerve to force the blade through.”

  Raising my head, I glimpse his face reflected in the polished steel. That’s when I see it: fear. He must have investigated dozens of crimes, but this one is different because he can’t understand it.

  My stomach is empty. Perspiring and shivering in the cold, I straighten up and look at the body. Nothing has been done to restore the poor woman’s dignity. She is naked, stretched out with her arms against her sides and her legs together.

  The dull whiteness of her skin makes her look almost like a marble statue, only this “statue” has been vandalized. Her chest, arms and thighs are covered in slashes of crimson and pink. Where the skin is pulled taut the wounds gape like empty eye sockets. At other places they naturally close and weep slightly.

  I have seen postmortems in medical school. I know the process. She has been photographed, scraped, swabbed and cut open from her neck to her crotch. Her organs have been weighed and her stomach contents analyzed. Bodily fluids, flakes of dead skin and dirt from beneath her fingernails have been sealed within plastic or beneath glass slides. A once bright energetic vibrant human being has become exhibit A.

  “How old was she?”

  “Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.”

  “What makes you think she was a prostitute?”

  “It’s been nearly two weeks and nobody has reported her missing. You know better than I do how prostitutes move around. They take off for days or weeks at a time and then turn up at a totally different red-light area. Some of them follow the conference trade; others work the truck stops. If this girl had a strong network of family or friends, somebody would have reported her missing by now. She could be foreign but we have nothing from Interpol.”

  “I’m not sure how I can help.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  Without even thinking I know I’m collecting details, although I can’t bear to look at her swollen face. What can I say? Her fair hair is cut short in a practical style that’s easy to wash, quick to dry and doesn’t need constant brushing. Her ears aren’t pierced. Her fingernails are trimmed and well cared for. She has no rings on her fingers, or any sign that she normally wore them. She’s slim and fair-skinned, with larger hips than bust. Her eyebrows have been tidily shaped and her bikini line had been waxed recently, leaving a neat triangle of pubic hair.

  “Was she wearing makeup?”

  “A little lipstick and eyeliner.”

  “I need to sit down for a while and read the postmortem report.”

  “I’ll find you an empty office.”

  Ten minutes later, alone at a desk, I stare at a stack of ring-bound photograph albums and folders bulging with statements. Among the pile is the postmortem report and results from blood and toxicology analysis.

  CITY OF WESTMINSTER CORONER

  Postmortem Report

  Name: Unknown

  Postmortem No: DX-34 468

  DOB: Unknown

  Death D/T: Unknown

  Age: Unknown

  Postmortem D/T: 12 December 2002, 0915

  Sex: Female

  Anatomical Summary

  1. Fourteen lacerations and incised wounds to the chest, abdomen and thighs, penetrating to a depth of 1.2 inches. They range in width from 3 inches to half an inch.

  2. Four lacerations to the upper left arm.

  3. Three lacerations to the left side of the neck and shoulders.

  4. The direction of the sharp-force injuries tends to be downward and are a mixture of stabbing and incised wounds.

  5. The hesitation marks are generally straight and accompany the deeper incisions.

  6. Heavy bruising and swelling to the left cheekbone and left eye socket.

  7. Slight bruising to the right forearm and abrasions to the right tibia and right heel.

  8. Oral, vaginal and rectal swabs are clear.

  Preliminary Toxicology Study

  Blood ethanol—none detected

  Blood drug screen—no drugs detected

  Cause of Death

  Postmortem X-rays reveal air in the right ventricular chamber of the heart indicating a massive and fatal air embolism.

  I scan the report quickly, looking for particular details. I’m not interested in the minutiae of how she died. Instead I look for clues that relate to her life. Did she have any old fractures? Was there any evidence of drug use or sexually transmitted diseases? What did she have for her last meal? How long since she’d eaten?

  Ruiz doesn’t bother to knock.

  “I figured you were milk no sugar.”

  He puts a plastic cup of coffee on the desk and then pats his pockets, searching for cigarettes that exist only in his imagination. He grinds his teeth instead.

  “So what can you tell me?”

  “She wasn’t a prostitute.”

  “Because?”

  “The median age of girls becoming prostitutes is only sixteen. This woman was in her mid-twenties, possibly older. There are no signs of long-standing sexual activity or evidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Abortions are common among prostitutes, particularly as they’re often coerced into not using condoms, but this girl had never been pregnant.”

  Ruiz taps the table three times as though typing three ellipsis dots. He wants me to go on.

  “Prostitutes at the high-class end of the scale sell a fantasy. They take great care with their appearance and presentation. This woman had short fingernails, a boyish hairstyle and minimal makeup. She wore sensible shoes and very little jewelry. She didn’t use expensive moisturizers or paint her nails. She had her bikini line waxed modestly . . .”

  Ruiz is moving around the room again, with his mouth slightly open and a puckered brow.

  “She took care of herself. She exercised regularly and ate healthy food. She was probably concerned about putting on weight. I’d say she was of average or slightly above average intelligence. Her schooling would have been solid; her background most likely middle class.

  “I don’t think she’s from London. Someone would have reported her missing by now. This sort of girl doesn’t go missing. She has friends and family. But if she came to London for a job interview, or for a holiday, people might not have expected to hear from her for a while. They’ll start to get worried soon.”

  Pushing back my chair a little, I lack the conviction to stand. What else can I tell him?

  “The medallion—it’s not St. Christopher. I think it’s probably St. Camillus. If you look closely the figure is holding a pitcher and towel.”

  “And who was he?”

  “The patron saint of nurses.”

  The statement concentrates his attention. He cocks his head to one side and I can almost see him cataloguing the information. In his right hand he flicks open a book of matches and closes it again. Open and then closed.

  I shuffle the papers and glance at the full postmortem report. A paragraph catches my attention.

  There is evidence of old lacerations running the length of her right and left forearms and inside her upper thighs. The degree of scarring suggests an attempt at self-suturing. These wounds were most likely self-inflicted and point toward past attempts at self-harm or self-mutilation.

  “I need to see the photographs.”

  Ruiz pushes the ring-bound folders toward me and in the same breath announces, “I have to make a phone call. We might have a lead. An X-ray technician has reported her flatmate missing in Liverpool. She matches the age, height and hair color. And how’s this for a coincidence, Sherlock? She’s a nurse.”

  After he’s gone I open the first folder of photographs and turn the pages quickly. Her arms had been along her sides when I viewed her body. I couldn’t see her wrists or inner thighs. A self-mutilator with multiple stab wounds, all self-inflicted.

  The first photographs are wide-angl
e shots of open ground, littered with rusting forty-four-gallon drums, rolls of wire and scaffolding poles. The Grand Union Canal forms an immediate backdrop but on the far side I see a smattering of well-established trees and the headstones in between.

  The photographs begin to focus down onto the banks of the canal. Blue-and-white police tape has been threaded around metal posts to mark out the area.

  The second set of photographs shows the ditch and a splash of white that looks like a discarded milk container. As the camera zooms closer it reveals it to be a hand, with fingers outstretched, reaching upward from the earth. Soil is scraped away slowly, sifted and bagged. The corpse is finally exposed, lying with one leg twisted awkwardly beneath her and her left arm draped over her eyes as though shielding them from the arc lights.

  Moving quickly, I skim over the pages until I reach the postmortem pictures. The camera records every smear, scratch and bruise. I’m looking for one photograph.

  Here it is. Her forearms are turned outward and lying flat against the dull silver of the bench top. Awkwardly, I stand and retrace my steps along the corridors. My left leg locks up and I have to swing it in an arc from back to front.

  The operator buzzes me into the secure room and I stare for a few seconds at the same bank of metal crypts. Four across. Three down. I check the label, grasp the handle and slide the drawer open. This time I force myself to look at her ruined face. Recognition is like a tiny spark that fires a bigger machine. I know this woman. She used to be a patient. Her hair is shorter now and slightly darker. And she has put on weight, but only a little.

  Reaching for her right arm, I turn it over and brush my fingertips along the milky white scars. Against the paleness of her skin they look like embossed creases that merge and crisscross before fading into nothing. She opened these wounds repeatedly, picking apart the stitches or slicing them afresh. She kept this hidden, but once upon a time I shared the secret.