Strange Blood

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  Draping her coat on the banister she went straight to her study. Nothing on e-mail from Steve Foy. Just two messages from Patrick. One was about an academic reference he had been unable to track down in the library at Liverpool and the other simply said, ‘See you tomorrow.’

  Megan stared at the screen, frowning. He had e-mailed her yesterday to say his mobile phone had broken. There was no phone in his room at the hall of residence, so unless he went to a payphone, e-mails were the only means of communication.

  But his messages were usually longer and a lot more romantic. He’d always been into leaving little notes around the house for her to find and now he was away she had expected him to be, if anything, even more communicative via the computer. She had a nagging feeling something was wrong, but without being able to speak to him properly it was impossible to suss out what it was.

  Megan tried to put it out of her mind. They could have a long chat when he got back tomorrow night. She went downstairs and switched on the television, leaving the door of the living room open as she went to the kitchen to make a coffee. Just as the kettle boiled she heard the familiar opening sting of the local lunchtime news and she wandered back through to catch the headlines. A shot of forensics people in white overalls going up a path bordered by red and white police tape alerted her before the presenter had even opened his mouth: ‘Fears of a serial killer on the loose as the body of a second woman is found in Wolverhampton…’

  Megan sank onto the sofa, staring at the newsreader but taking in nothing as he announced job losses at a local car plant and news of a Birmingham woman giving birth to sextuplets. Then pictures of a Victorian house very similar to her sister’s came up on the screen and her brain ground back into gear as he picked up the lead story. ‘The discovery of a woman’s body at a house in Wolverhampton has sparked fears that a serial killer has struck again. Twenty-five-year-old Joanna Hamilton was found dead after police broke into her home this morning…’

  Pictures of scenes-of-crime officers flashed back onto the screen and the van transporting the body was shown driving away from the house. Megan’s mind was in a whirl. If the body was found this morning, she reasoned, the woman was probably killed last night. When Sean Raven was still in custody …

  ‘Police have refused to confirm reports that the victim was stabbed to death. They say there will be no official confirmation of the cause until a post-mortem examination has been carried out. But they are not ruling out the possibilty that the death is linked to the murder of mother-of-three Tessa Ledbury, who was stabbed to death at her home in the Wolverhampton suburb of Pendleton a week ago…’

  The shrill sound of Megan’s mobile phone cut across the newsreader’s voice and she ran into the hall to retrieve it from her bag.

  ‘Megan? It’s Steve Foy…’ He sounded breathless, excited.

  ‘I’ve just heard it on the news,’ she cut in, stealing his thunder. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Oh, our friend Sean’s not off the hook yet. Not by a long chalk.’ He sounded like a snake about to strike. ‘We’re waiting for official confirmation from the pathologist, of course, but the word is the poor woman’s been lying in that house for more than a week.’ He paused, waiting for the impact of his words to sink in. ‘I thought you might like to be in on the post-mortem,’ he said in the sweet voice she had heard him use when he was being deeply sarcastic. ‘Looks like it could be another case of overkill.’

  Chapter 10

  Megan’s fingers left trails of perspiration on the steering wheel as she battled to reverse into a space in the mortuary car park. She was still wearing the navy wool trouser suit she’d put on that morning and now she wished she’d changed into something cooler. As she straightened the car up she caught sight of a familiar-looking figure in the rearview mirror. It was Dave Todd. He was coming down the steps, hunched over, supporting someone much shorter than himself. As Megan watched, Kate O’Leary caught them up. They reached a black Ford Mondeo and Dave opened one of the rear doors. Now Megan could see that the person he was with was a young woman. Her face looked very red and she was holding a handkerchief a few inches from her mouth the way someone would if they were afraid they were going to vomit.

  Kate got in beside the woman and Dave jumped into the driver’s seat, pulling out in a single manoeuvre and picking up speed as he headed for the exit at the other end of the car park.

  Steve Foy was waiting for Megan in a small, sparsely furnished room. A pair of heavy, dusky pink curtains screened the window and there was a faded artificial geranium in a pot on the sill. There was a partition in one wall and through it she could see a long metal trolley covered in a white sheet. The sheet was wrinkled, as if something heavy had been lying on it. Now Megan knew why the woman she had just seen looked so awful. This was the viewing room. The place relatives were bought to identify a body.

  ‘Who was that?’ Megan jerked her head towards the car park.

  ‘Young lady by the name of Vicky Tomlins,’ Foy replied. He let out a sigh and shook his head. ‘Poor cow. Not a pleasant sight for anyone, but when it’s your best friend…’

  Megan sighed and shook her head.

  ‘It was her raised the alarm,’ he went on, ‘They were supposed to meet for lunch yesterday but Joanna didn’t show. Vicky said she phoned her a couple of times and kept getting the answering machine. In the end she went round to the house.’ He felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out a packet of mints, offering one to Megan. She shook her head. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, the mint making a bulge in his cheek, ‘there’s an alleyway down the side of the house and when she peered through the back gate she noticed one of the rubbish bins had been knocked over. An animal had dragged out a chicken carcass and made a right mess. That what made her suspicious.’

  ‘Why?’ Megan frowned.

  ‘She said Joanna was obsessively tidy. The sort who’d spot something like that straightaway and clear it up before she did anything else.’

  ‘But how did she know she hadn’t just gone away somewhere?’

  ‘Because she hadn’t put the bins out the front. Vicky said she would never have gone off without doing that.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Megan thought for a moment. ‘And there are no relatives? No one else who missed her, I mean?’

  ‘Well there’s an ex-husband but he’s in Australia. They didn’t have any kids. And according to Vicky there’s no boyfriend either.’

  ‘And she didn’t work?’

  ‘Oh yes, she was a freelance illustrator. She worked from home.’

  ‘So nobody missed her, apart from this Vicky?’

  Foy shook his head. ‘Frightening isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Megan said, ‘Didn’t the neighbours notice anything?’

  ‘They’re not really the type who would,’ Foy said. ‘On one side there’s an old lady who’s bedridden and the other side there’s a houseful of students. I don’t think they even knew her name. She’d only moved in a few months ago, evidently.’

  ‘Where exactly did she live? It looked like an old house. Too old for Pendleton, anyway.’

  ‘It isn’t in Pendleton,’ Foy said. ‘It’s in Stockhall. About three miles away, towards Wolverhampton town centre.’

  ‘Yes, I know where it is.’ Megan felt a cold sensation in her stomach. ‘My sister lives there. What street is it?’

  When Foy said the name, Megan wracked her brains, running a mental map of the area around Ceri’s house through her brain. No, it wasn’t a street she could place. But that didn’t make her feel any less anxious. She would have to look it up in the A-Z when she got back to the car.

  The door opened and a bespectacled man in a white lab coat appeared. ‘Doctor Laine says he’s ready for you now if you’d like to come through,’ he said.

  The smell hit Megan before she had even entered the room. It had drifted through the gaps under the doors and along the corridor like some invisible, malevolent spirit, assaulting her senses so that her hand shot involuntarily to h
er mouth.

  ‘Sorry about the stink,’ the pathologist shrugged as they stepped gingerly over the threshold. ‘We’ve got the extractor fan going flat out but it’s not making much of an impact, I’m afraid.’

  Slowly, Megan looked up, trying to prepare herself for the appalling sight she knew was going to meet her eyes. She had attended maybe a dozen post-mortems since she’d started working with the police, but never one in which putrefaction was this far advanced.

  It was the feet and legs she looked at first. This was deliberate. She would focus on those and work herself up slowly to viewing the rest of the body. The head she would try to avoid seeing until she absolutely had to. Without the head she could distance herself. Pretend that the pale green limbs with their dark marbling of veins were not real but some prosthetic creation borrowed from the set of a horror film.

  ‘As you can see,’ the pathologist was saying, ‘The putrefaction at the site of the wounds is considerably more advanced than for the rest of the body.’

  Megan’s eyes travelled up the legs to the trunk. The stomach was so swollen that an untrained observer might have mistakenly believed the victim to be pregnant. But she had anticipated this. Anything over a week, she knew, meant that the stomach gases would have expanded alarmingly, giving this characteristic bloated appearance.

  ‘This is consistent with trauma to the body,’ the pathologist went on. ‘The destruction of haemoglobin by bacteria means blood at the site of the wound or abrasion gives a blackened appearance to the surrounding skin.’

  Megan allowed herself to move slightly so that she could see the victim’s chest. The pale green skin of the neck gave way to a blackened mess of torn flesh.

  ‘Have you been able to estimate the number of stab wounds?’ Steve Foy bent closer to the body, apparently unmoved by its appearance.

  ‘It’s difficult to say until we begin the dissection, the pathologist said, ‘Because the extent of putrefaction tends to blur the boundaries between points of entry. We’ll get a better idea when we examine the heart and lungs although I’d say the majority of the wounds were superficial.’

  ‘Can you give a ballpark figure though?’ Foy pressed him. ‘I mean, is it less than say, fifty? More than twenty?’

  ‘At a conservative estimate, I’d say no less than a couple of dozen.’ The pathologist motioned to his assistant who produced an outline diagram of a human body. The chest area was peppered with red biro marks. ‘This is a representation of the surface appearance of the upper trunk,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm.’ Foy studied the diagram and passed it to Megan. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s very similar to the distribution of wounds on Tessa Ledbury’s body, isn’t it?’ she replied. ‘What about clothing? Was she wearing anything when they found her?’

  ‘Yes’ Foy said. ‘This one was fully dressed. She was stabbed through her clothes, like Tessa, but they weren’t removed afterwards.’

  ‘What about the weapon?’ She turned to the pathologist. ‘Has the flesh decayed too much to be able to tell what kind of knife was used?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘Again, we might get a better idea when we dissect the body but you have to take into account that the swelling of the internal organs will have altered the dimensions of any laceration to the tissue.’

  ‘And what about the head?’ Foy took a step towards the top of the steel trolley. ‘It’s a real mess, isn’t it?’ He addressed the question to the pathologist but his eyes were on Megan. She couldn’t put the moment off any longer. She had to make herself look.

  The face was hardly recognisable as human. The features were so grotesquely altered that it was impossible to imagine what the woman had looked like in life. The mouth and cheeks were swollen and discoloured and the skin around the eyes so dark and puffy that it looked as if she had been punched.

  ‘Don’t be misled by the appearance of the face,’ the pathologist said, as if reading her thoughts. ‘The only area of trauma is on the forehead – the rest is consistent with this stage of decay.’

  Megan allowed her gaze to inch up the woman’s face. Those eyes would come back to haunt her, she knew. Tonight, maybe. Or tomorrow, when she was lying in Patrick’s arms.

  ‘How on earth did her friend manage to identify her?’ she asked.

  Foy pointed to the corpse’s right shoulder. ‘Tattoo in the shape of a Chinese character on her back,’ he said. ‘Means “happiness”, evidently.’

  Megan shuddered. She glanced at the woman’s forehead, concentrating on that area of blackened flesh, about three inches square, which held the key to this killing.

  ‘You saw Tessa Ledbury,’ Foy said to the pathologist. ‘Could this be a similar type of injury, do you think?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say,’ he replied, shifting his position so that the scalpel in his hand hovered over the woman’s forehead. ‘There’s no way we can tell from the state of the skin. The only possible clue would lie in the bone immediately underneath.’ He waved the scalpel in a circular movement, as if stirring a cup of tea. ‘There’s a slim chance that the killer left an impression of his handiwork on the skull, although I have to say that was not the case with Tessa Ledbury. The mark on her forehead was a straightforward flesh wound.’

  ‘So you’re saying that unless the killer used more force in cutting the pentagram on this victim, there’d be no damage to the bone?’ Foy frowned.

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yes,’ the pathologist nodded.

  ‘What about the hair?’ Megan was staring at the long, matted, dark brown locks which stuck to the flesh at the temples. ‘Tessa Ledbury’s hair was held back from her face with a pair of tights…’

  ‘Sorry I didn’t tell you,’ Foy said quickly. ‘There was a hairband. A gold-coloured, beaded sort of thing. It’s been removed. Vicky Tomlins said it was one Joanna often wore.’

  ‘So you think she was wearing it when she was attacked?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. He could have found it and used it instead of tights.’

  ‘What about a gag?’ Megan glanced at the swollen mouth with its unnaturally dark lips. ‘Tessa’s killer left a dishcloth sticking out of her mouth.’

  ‘We haven’t opened the oral cavity yet,’ the pathologist said. ‘You could stay and watch the dissection if you want, but I warn you, it’ll be a long and very messy business. There were maggots on the body when it was found and I expect we’ll find more when we open her up.’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ For the first time, Foy’s face betrayed the fact that he was finding this every bit as distasteful as Megan. ‘You’ll phone me if you find anything.’ This was said in lieu of any goodbye as he made for the door, pulling off the surgical cap concealing his carroty hair. It looked even more startling than usual against the pallor of his skin and for a split second Megan had a vision of him lying in place of the woman on the mortuary trolley. It was terrifying, she reflected, to think that a living, breathing human being could be reduced to nothing more than a stinking parcel of bones in the space of just a few days.

  She left the place feeling, as she always did after such encounters, a mixture of emotions. On the one hand she felt a powerful urge to run away. To refuse to have anything more to do with the depravity whose end result she had just witnessed. She knew that the memory of Joanna Hamilton’s wretched body would be with her for the rest of her life, squeezing unbidden into her mind’s eye to curdle the moments of joy.

  She was in the car now, following Foy’s Audi to the car park exit. She didn’t have to follow him. She could drive to her sister’s instead, play with Emily and Joe; do the things normal people do. She hesitated at a junction as Foy turned left. And then a voice welled up in her head, drowning out the rest. If you chicken out now, someone else is going to die. Get whoever did this off the streets.

  *

  Ceri was sitting in the café at Pendleton. It was far more crowded than usual, but they had managed to get a table to themselves. She glanced around.
Thank God there were no other students in here. Under cover of the chequered tablecloth Justin was rubbing his knee against her thigh.

  ‘Are you sure you want this?’ The way he looked at her made her feel completely reckless.

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘Soon,’ she smiled, easing her foot from its shoe and rubbing her bare toes against his crotch. ‘He’s going away.’ She held his gaze, her private fantasy taking over, blotting out the sights and sounds of the café: The house empty. Justin naked in her bed. The feel of him on her skin as he took her in his arms. She closed her eyes.

  *

  As Megan followed Foy back to the police station she ran through the facts. The number and pattern of the wounds were the same for both women. Each had also had something incised on to their foreheads, and in both cases the hair had been drawn away from the face. But without hard evidence of the mess on Joanna Hamilton’s face being a pentagram, there were still enough differences to question whether the two women were victims of the same killer.

  Tessa was thirty-six and blonde while Joanna was twenty-five and brunette. Tessa’s body was naked while Joanna had been found with her clothes on. Questions crowded Megan’s mind. She needed to talk to Vicky Tomlins. Find out if there were any connections between the two women, however slight. What she most wanted to know was if Joanna Hamilton ever went to the precinct at Pendleton.

  Foy was waiting for her outside the entrance to Tipton Street police station. As they went in, a couple of drunks were shouting at the duty officer on the desk. Foy didn’t bat an eyelid.

  ‘Dave and Kate back?’ was all he said, raising his voice slightly above the din.

  ‘Incident room, Guv,’ the officer called back without looking up. One of the drunks had begun ripping a ‘wanted’ poster off the wall and the other was staggering towards Megan, looking as if he was about to throw up. Suddenly, three uniformed officers materialised from behind a door. Foy ushered her quickly away, shouts of abuse following them down the corridor.