by Bo Brennan
“Probably.” Dr Fisher spread his hands. “But don’t get too excited, my dear. Female genital mutilation is a global problem. An estimated one hundred and forty million women worldwide are affected, and sixty-six thousand of them live in the UK.”
India groaned, all hopes of narrowing the woman’s identity dashed. And then bent down to study the victim’s remaining hand. It didn’t look too burnt. “Any chance of getting prints off this, Doc?”
Dr Fisher crouched down beside her, lifting the scorched fingers to peer closely at the tips. “I can’t see why not,” he murmured. “The burning was last, a mere token gesture.”
India reached into her bag and pulled out a print pad. The medical examiner frowned at it. “Don’t you have a mobile scanner?”
“Nope,” India said. “Apparently, I can’t be trusted.”
“Very well.” With a lamentable shake of his head, Fisher took the print pad and immediately got down to business on the remaining digits.
India watched him as he worked. She’d never encountered female genital mutilation before, yet he spoke about it knowledgeably and with an enthusiasm she didn’t much care for. “If you don’t mind my saying, you seem to know a lot about this mutilation stuff, considering it’s so rare.”
“Ah, I didn’t say it was rare now, did I, detective? Just that I, myself, haven’t seen it too often.”
India chewed at her cheek, got the uncomfortable feeling that it was her turn to be mocked. “How’d you know so much about it then?”
“The joys of a workaholic wife who talks incessantly, my dear.” India huffed in surprise that Freaky Fisher even had a wife. “Mrs Fisher works for the Home Office. Female genital mutilation is her cause célèbre as it were. You’ll have to inform them, obviously. Honour killings are their domain.”
India and Firman looked to each other. “Honour killing,” they declared together.
“That’s my professional opinion.” He tossed a pad and pen on top of the corpse as though it were a coffee table. “Jot down your number and I’ll get wifey to call you. If someone is coming down from the Home Office to lecture you about the endless joy of honour killings and FGM, it might as well be her. Perhaps we’ll even get to spend a little mid-week time together for a change.”
Firman shuddered and thrust his hands in his pockets. Jutting his chin towards India, he said, “You heard the man. Jot your number down.”
India tutted. The woman was dead; it was a bit late to be worrying about the indignity of discussing her girly bits now. She snatched the pad off the cadaver’s belly, scrawled her contact details on it, and respectfully handed it back to Fisher. “Any insight into the missing hand and foot?” she said. “Is it significant they’re opposing limbs?”
“I’m a pathologist not a psychic. Maybe he ran out of steam.” He exchanged his specs for safety goggles and smiled. “Are you staying for the cruellest cut of all, Detective Kane, or do you have calls to field?”
Chapter 17
The Old Bailey, London
“You have got to be kidding.” DCI Colt rubbed a hand over his head. He’d spent the entire afternoon climbing the walls of the witness room, while legal arguments between barristers took place in the privacy of judge’s chambers. And now the trial had been stopped. The jury dismissed. “What the hell is going on?”
Crown Prosecutor Michael Moore raised his hands. “It’s complicated, but it’s saveable. Today is just a technicality.”
Colt diverted his glare to the open doorway where Commander Hussein hovered . . . and then he saw why. “They’re walking out of here on a technicality?”
“It’s temporary. Merely a minor glitch,” Michael said, positioning himself between Colt and the door. “Now’s not the time to discuss it. I’ll schedule a MASH meeting for first thing tomorrow.”
A Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub. What a joke. If all the interested parties had been doing their jobs in the first place, things wouldn’t have got this far. “First thing tomorrow you’ll deal with me and mine,” Colt said. “My office 9am. Then you can MASH to your heart’s content.”
He absently brushed the prosecutor aside and walked into the main court foyer to watch the defendants bustle past, laughing and joking with their legal teams. Mohammed Bashir, grinning like a Cheshire cat, stopped in front of him and extended his hand. “No hard feelings, Detective Chief Inspector.”
Colt felt the rage burning in his bloodstream. Over his dead body was this how things were going to end. Eyeballing the ringleader they’d worked so hard to bring to justice, he clenched his jaw and thrust his hands in his pockets.
Bashir laughed. Inclining his head, he whispered, “Those little kuffar whores are mine. I own them.”
As his hands balled into fists, Colt concentrated on his breathing, denying himself, as well as Bashir, the pleasure of the violent reaction he was foolishly attempting to provoke.
The arsehole looked him up and down, weighing him up one final time before his sneering barrister dragged him away. He walked out of the courthouse with Colt’s furious glare burning a hole in the back of his head.
“Don’t worry, guv,” Maggie murmured, following his gaze. “We’ll get the bastards.”
“Yes we will, but not today. It’s sortable, I promise.” Michael Moore squeezed his shoulder and handed him a sheet of paper. “Now, take a breath. The press are waiting.”
Colt ran a cynical eye over the hastily prepared statement as they headed for the door. He didn’t have a clue what the fuck had happened today, and the press statement gave him no insight. It was the usual bollocks, a bland bureaucratic script containing no words of wisdom and nothing of merit.
They stepped from the Old Bailey into a frenzy of flashbulbs, TV crews, and chanting protestors. The noise was deafening. Colt glanced around, surveying the police lines dividing communities and the placards of hate they waved. There was already plenty in the boiling pot for the press to stir, he wasn’t about to blindly season it for them.
“Sorry, Michael,” he said, turning to leave. “I’m not doing this.”
“Colt,” Commander Hussein spat through gritted teeth. “Where the bloody hell are you going?”
“Home.”
“What about the statement?” he hissed.
Colt crushed the sheet of paper in his hand into a ball and tossed it to him. It would do him good to be in the fucking firing line for a change. “Give it yourself,” he said. “Mags?”
Maggie fell silently into step beside him, strolling past the meat wagons and TV vans. As the commander prepared to speak, Colt could hear the gobby little blonde from the BBC over the quieting rage of protestors.
“In spectacular scenes at the Old Bailey today, the controversial trial of ten British Pakistani men accused of the sexual grooming and exploitation of vulnerable white girls, some as young as nine, collapsed,” Gobby was saying to camera.
Her overdramatic delivery did nothing to quell his ire. “Here comes the senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector AJ Colt, now. Detective Chief Inspector,” she said, thrusting the microphone under his nose as they passed. “What can you tell us about what went wrong today?”
The car in sight, he quickened his pace, loosening his tie as he went – desperate to get more air into his lungs, and more distance between him and the court house before publicly blowing a gasket.
“C’mon, Colt, give me something to work with here,” the irritatingly persistent woman jogging along beside him crowed.
“The only statement you’re going to get is the one the commander’s making back there,” Maggie snapped, pulling her car keys from her pocket.
“Since when did the great AJ Colt conform and let Hussein tell him when he could speak?” she jeered. “That’s a headline in itself.”
Colt stopped dead in his tracks and yanked his tie free of his neck. “Nobody tells me when to speak, Miss Ayres. You got that?”
Miranda Ayres grinned. “In that case, when you’re ready to talk, I’m re
ady to listen, honey.” She slipped her card into his top pocket and smoothed her hand down his chest. “Got my own show these days. You’ll get prime time, on your terms. What do you say?”
“I’ll think about it.” He had no intention of doing any such thing, just wanted the woman out of his fucking face before she invented a story.
Miranda winked at him as Maggie pulled the car alongside and honked the horn. “My personal number’s on there too,” she shouted as he slid into the passenger seat. “Use it!”
“Watch your back with that one,” Maggie said, almost mowing the woman down as she sped away. “You might’ve forgotten what the bitch did to you when she was at Channel 4, but I bloody well haven’t.”
Hampshire CID, Winchester
India angrily jabbed at her computer keyboard as Sangrin sauntered towards her desk, cup of tea in one hand, marker pen in the other.
“You gonna get that, or what?” he said as the phone on her desk rang for the umpteenth time.
India snatched it from the cradle, gritting her teeth as she listened to the caller.
Sangrin rapped his knuckles on her desk, drawing her attention to the leader board as he gleefully drew a big black cross next to her name and the Central Bank armed robbery. NP, he wrote in the update box. No Progress.
“Funny. Fuck off,” she said, and slammed the telephone down.
Sangrin glared at her. “What did you say?”
India continued jabbing at the keyboard. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said, while thinking that the sentiment was indeed the same.
“Then who the bloody hell were you talking to? Was that a member of the public on the phone?”
India shrugged, she had no idea. As far as she was concerned idiots came in all guises – Detective Sergeant Sangrin was testament to that. She glanced up at his long, loud intake of breath through flared nostrils. She already had enough grief with the computer system having a tantrum; she could do without him having one as well. “Is there a problem?”
He braced his hands on her desk as the phone rang again. “Damn right there is. If you just told a person who pays your wages to ‘fuck off’ – that’s a problem. In fact, that’s another warning. This is a murder investigation. You should be politely thanking them for their information and writing down the leads for follow up. Where are they?”
India pointed to the blank page in her pad. “There aren’t any.”
“That phone hasn’t stopped ringing all afternoon, and you haven’t written down one fucking lead?” Sangrin loomed over her, nostrils flaring, vein in his forehead growing more prominent with every trill of the incessantly ringing phone. “Answer that fucking phone!”
India did as instructed. “Hampshire CID. Thanks for calling.” She rolled her eyes as the caller said their bit. And then waited for the sniggers in the background to subside before she said hers. “Congratulations prank caller one hundred. You’ve won a prize! An all-expenses paid night in the cells for wasting police time. An officer will be visiting your address shortly to –” The line went dead. India scribbled ‘Disneyworld, Florida’ on her notepad, showed it to Sangrin, and said, “Who’s going, me or you?”
Sangrin stared at her, the vein in his forehead now throbbing. “What the fuck are you still doing here, Kane? What will it take to make you go away?”
India leaned across her desk until they were nose to nose. “Your job.”
His eye twitched as the phone on her desk rang again. Before India had time to react, he snatched it from the cradle like Quick Draw McGraw. “What?” he barked into the receiver.
India sat back in her chair, studying him as he spluttered a series of profuse apologies, his face going through every shade of the Dulux colour chart. “It’s for you,” he said quietly, holding the phone out to her. “Nisha Fisher from the Home Office.”
She shooed him away with a blasé hand, watching him slope back to his office as she took the call. “Detective Kane. Thanks for calling, Mrs Fisher.”
“Please, call me Nisha.” Her voice was as smooth as chocolate and utterly ageless. “Herbie informs me you have an honour killing, detective.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” India said, not returning the favour of first name terms. “We have a dismembered and burnt female with significant aged mutilations to her genitalia and missing body parts.”
“You have an honour killing, detective,” Nisha Fisher said dully. “I understand she had corrective surgery in the last four to eight months.”
“Apparently so,” India said. “According to Dr Fisher there are only a few places which carry out the procedure.”
“Herbie does listen after all, who knew?” she said, voice brimming with sardonic amusement. “There are fifteen specialist clinics nationwide that carry out deinfibulations.”
“Great, that’ll make life easier. Where can I get a type three patient list covering the timeframe Dr Fisher says the surgery was performed?”
“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.” Nisha Fisher sighed. So did India – it never bloody was. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a central register.”
India frowned. The police were getting pumped for crime information and statistics every second of every day. A couple of taps on a keyboard and someone, somewhere, could tell you something as mundane as how many shoplifters had tattoos. Could even tell you where and what of, if you asked. “I thought it was illegal.”
“It is. Since 1985, would you believe?” India raised a brow. No, she wouldn’t believe. This shit had been illegal most of her life and she’d never heard of it until today. “But we’ve only recently started collecting the relevant data sets from NHS trusts, and even that isn’t complete,” Nisha continued. “If it helps, current data suggests two women seek medical attention every day in the UK relating to FGM.”
India mentally totted-up what that equated to in an eight-month timescale – nearly five hundred. “Not really,” she said.
“Herbie said he managed to get a full set of right-hand prints from your victim. If you give me her name, I can make some enquiries.”
India rolled her eyes and propped an elbow on her desk. The ignorance of the Home Office was astounding. If she had a name, she wouldn’t need their help. “Not everybody’s prints are in the system,” she said irritably. “And NAFIS is currently down. I haven’t been able to run them yet.” The National Automated Fingerprint Identification System spent more time down than up lately. “It’s a long shot that she’s even in there.”
She stared at the picture of Pocahontas, pinned to the wall above her desk. “We received a report of an unknown female’s abduction on Monday night. We’re currently working on the proviso that they’re one and the same. Our murder victim doesn’t have a head, but we’ve got a pretty good witness sketch of the abducted woman and she’s of Asian origin. I’ve distributed the image to the media and received nothing back of relevance. Is it worth me touting the picture around the local mosques?”
“No, absolutely not!” Nisha snapped. “Under no circumstances must you approach a mosque, detective!”
“Then what the hell do you suggest I do?” India snapped back. “I can’t sit here and do bugger all, a woman is dead.”
“It’s a complicated and highly sensitive issue,” Nisha Fisher said evenly. “I have a gap in my diary tomorrow afternoon.”
India pursed her lips. If the Home Office weren’t capable of helping her identify the victim, she wasn’t inclined to let them waste her time with a lecture. “Mrs Fisher, I appreciate your input, but there’s no need –”
“There’s every need,” Nisha Fisher persisted. “I’ll be with you at 3pm tomorrow.”
Chapter 18
Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth
Gray Davies smiled appreciatively as he rested his spoon in the empty bowl. “That was a great meal, Caz. Thank you.” She’d cooked his favourite – steak and ale pie, not from a box either. Proper pushed the boat out, even made apple crumble and custard for afters. Another f
avourite of his. A bottle of wine stood breathing on the side.
“Here, let me wash up,” he said, helping her clear the table.
Cara smiled. “No need. I’ve got a dishwasher.”
She’d always wanted one; he’d never seen the point with just the two of them, especially considering they hardly ever ate together in the end.
As she expertly loaded the state of the art appliance, his eyes roamed the expensively furnished apartment. He wanted to ask how much all this cost, and how she could afford it on a shopworker’s wage, but then remembered she wasn’t the one still paying for twenty grands’ worth of non-wedding.
“Why don’t you make yourself comfortable in the lounge,” she said, passing him a couple of heavy, long stemmed glasses. “I’m going to freshen up. I’ll be through in a second.”
She looked fresh enough to him already. More than fresh – she looked amazing.
Gray’s eyes followed her to the bathroom, before returning to the bottle on the kitchen side. His stomach fluttered as he picked it up and read the label. Los Bermejos Rosado 2008. It came from the vineyard they’d visited in Lanzarote, same year too. She was recreating old times, invoking good memories. God only knows how she’d got hold of it, and Gray didn’t really care. All he knew was there would be no going back once they’d shared the taste together.
But that was exactly what he wanted. She was what he wanted.
He took the wine and glasses into the lounge and set them down carefully on the marble coffee table, next to the remote control, patiently awaiting her return before he poured. If they were doing this, they were taking each step from here on in together. Feeling like a king after a banquet, he slouched into the corner of the black leather L-shaped suite, running his hand over the soft thick hide as his eyelids grew heavy with contentment. The plush sofa screamed comfort and relaxation, and seemed to wrap itself around him, beckoning him to sleep.