by Jane Casey
‘We were just about to.’ She swallowed. ‘There’s a staircase that leads up from the warehouse floor to the office space in this part of the building. It’s got a window about halfway up, but not to the outside. It was the only source of natural light for the break room used by the warehouse workers. It’s practically the only unbroken window in the whole place, but it’s filthy with cobwebs and dust – you can hardly see through it.’
‘But someone did.’
‘Right. Yes. One of your team looked through and saw a body.’
‘On the floor? On a chair?’
‘She’s on a sofa. Wrapped up in a rug.’ Marla’s face crumpled for a second but she regained command of herself so quickly that I almost thought I had imagined it. ‘I’ll take you through to see her now.’
‘Not yet. I’ll wait for Glen.’ He spoke shortly, making it clear the subject wasn’t open for discussion. The chief inspector nodded as if she understood. Perhaps, like me, she could sense Godley’s reluctance.
‘Was the break room covered in the original search? Are you sure the body wasn’t there all along?’ Derwent demanded.
‘The room was searched. She wasn’t there. Not on Sunday, anyway.’
The superintendent turned on the spot, eyeing the gappy chain-link fence and broken doors.
‘Am I right in thinking this place was wide open? Anyone could have walked in at any hour of the day or night?’
She was instantly on the defensive. ‘We had done the forensic work and released the site. I don’t have enough pull to request the manpower that would be needed to keep it secure around the clock, and the owner is a bank that repossessed it about six years ago. They don’t care what happens to the premises. They’re just waiting for the land to be rezoned for residential housing and then they’ll sell up to a developer. In the meantime, the buildings can take care of themselves.’
‘Yes, but you do see the problem, don’t you? Now we have no idea when the body was dumped here, or by whom.’ I shivered at the cold disapproval Godley wasn’t attempting to hide, glad it wasn’t aimed at me.
‘I appreciate that, but—’
‘Do you also appreciate that we have no idea where the girl was in the meantime? We already knew she had been here, and that her abductor had access to the buildings too. The body being found here tells us nothing. And we had nothing to go on already.’
‘Then we’re no worse off than we were before.’
I could have told her answering back was a bad idea. Godley didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t have to. Pure rage was in every word, and at that moment, it was all focused on Marla Redmond.
‘Except that we have a dead body and we are no closer to finding the person or persons responsible. Except that I have just had to tell a father that his only child is dead. Except that we are now looking at a murder and hoping to God it’s a one-off.’
‘What else could I do? You know my hands were tied. You of all people should understand that this was completely outside my control.’
He didn’t answer her directly but the fact that he turned away made me feel he did understand, that his frustration was not totally with Marla Redmond but with the bosses who had let them both down.
‘Can you give Glen a call? Find out when he’s likely to get here?’
Derwent took out his phone and scrolled through the contacts. Godley stared into the middle distance and DCI Redmond whirled around, marching up a ramp that led into the building with her heels stabbing the crumbling concrete at every step. I felt sorry for her but I also knew that Godley was fundamentally fair. At some stage, he would calm down enough to acknowledge that she had done her best, even if her best had been catastrophically far from good enough.
I drifted over to the lads from the team. ‘Well, that was fun.’
‘You should have been here when Colin spotted the body,’ Harry Maitland said lugubriously. ‘The shit properly hit the fan. She started screaming about why none of them had noticed it, as if that mattered.’ He was pointing at the group from Brixton CID subtly with his thumb, not that any of them missed it. I nodded to Henry Cowell who waved at me. I would go and talk to him in a minute, I thought, wondering where Rob was. He had left with Marla Redmond; he should have been with the others. I edged around to Colin’s side. He was not emotionally literate enough to be suspicious if I asked, whereas Harry Maitland would have twigged that something was up immediately.
‘Is Rob around?’
‘In there.’ Colin pointed towards the building where the body lay.
Getting a head start, I assumed. I thanked him and crossed the unbridgeable gap between the Serious Crimes team and the local CID by exchanging pleasantries with Cowell, much to the irritation of our colleagues on both sides. He was as unconcerned as ever, inclined to shrug about the long odds of the body turning up where it had, and totally unmoved by the looks he was getting from my lot.
Dr Hanshaw hadn’t been far behind us, as it turned out, and he and his assistant Ali appeared before Cowell and I had exhausted the very small number of things we had to talk about. They walked across to Godley who had gone to meet them, and the three of them stood in the middle of the desolate yard, the wind lifting Hanshaw’s sparse hair and fluttering the folds of his raincoat. The pathologist listened as Godley explained the little we knew, his shoulders hunched, his head bent like a hunting heron. I found it hard to prepare myself for what I was about to see, now that he had turned up. I had secretly welcomed the superintendent’s reluctance to visit the scene where Cheyenne’s remains lay.
Godley walked back to us. ‘We’re ready. I want to limit the numbers of onlookers. If you’ve seen the body already or if you have no reason to be there, find something else to do.’
Everyone who had been there before us seemed to have taken the opportunity to have a good look and there wasn’t a rush to join Godley, Dr Hanshaw and his assistant as they walked up the ramp towards the door Marla Redmond had used. I hesitated, not sure that I could justify adding myself to the party, but Derwent gave me a tiny shove as he passed.
‘Stop standing around staring into space, Kerrigan. Are you going to come along or what?’
‘I didn’t want to assume—’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ He pushed open the door and I hurried past him into a dank white-tiled stairwell that smelled of damp and pigeon shit and the sweet foul mustiness of dried piss.
I could hear footsteps echoing in the distance and turned in that direction, hurrying to catch up.
‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ Derwent said conversationally, right behind me. ‘We get to go to all the fun places.’ He reached out and grabbed my arm, pulling me sideways with some violence. ‘Watch it.’
I looked down stupidly, seeing broken glass on the ground where I had been about to step. ‘Thanks.’
‘All in a day’s work.’
I rubbed my arm where his fingers had gripped me. ‘Next time you save me from hurting myself, can you try not to be so sadistic?’
‘The end justifies the means.’
‘I rarely find that’s true.’
Instead of replying, he favoured me with his big bad wolf grin. I took more care to look where I was putting my feet as we trailed the echoing footsteps around two more corners until we came up behind the others. Godley opened one side of a pair of double-doors and we filed through, finding ourselves in a long dark corridor with closed doors on either side. It was disturbingly reminiscent of a scene from a nightmare. Derwent reached out and flipped the wall switches, but the fluorescent lights stayed off.
‘No power.’
‘They used generators for the club,’ I reminded him.
At the far end, a door was propped open and some dim daylight filtered through, throwing a pale grey square against the wall. It darkened momentarily and a figure I recognised as Marla Redmond’s moved into the hall, looking down in our direction. She raised her hand.
‘Go carefully,’ Godley cautioned. ‘I don’t want anyone ending up wi
th a broken ankle.’
‘I’ll go first,’ Derwent volunteered.
Dr Hanshaw opened his bag and took out a torch. ‘This should help.’
We went in single file down the centre of the corridor. As my eyes got used to the lack of light I could pick out bits of rubbish littering the tiles, and old notices stuck haphazardly to the walls, abandoned along with the building. There was something unsettling about it, the building’s past life echoing through its current dingy reality.
‘You found us,’ the inspector said unnecessarily as we reached her. She pointed. ‘This is the break room.’
It was big and shadowy and infinitely unwelcoming. Dr Hanshaw, focused on what lay inside, slipped past DCI Redmond without acknowledging her. I hung back, allowing the others to go in before me. I never got used to this moment, the first shock of seeing violent death in all its reality, and the day I didn’t find it shocking was the day I would quit.
The pathologist had reclaimed his torch and was bending over the stained orange sofa that stood against the wall, inspecting what lay there before he did anything else. I stood beside Derwent and looked across to where Rob was standing. His face was grave. He was staring down at the girl’s body like an avenging angel.
‘You stayed with her,’ Godley said to him, his voice low so as not to distract Hanshaw or his assistant from their work.
‘I didn’t want to leave the scene unattended.’ Almost to himself, he added, ‘And I didn’t want her to be alone.’
I felt rather than heard Derwent react to that, stiffening to attention like a dog seeing a rabbit. ‘Nice of you, but I don’t think she’s likely to mind either way, mate. She’s dead.’
Godley turned to glower at him but Rob didn’t need anyone else to stand up for him.
‘You’re right. She is. And I’m going with DCI Redmond to meet her mother in about half an hour to tell her the news. I’d like to be able to tell her that we treated her daughter with respect – that we looked after her as best we could, even though we were too late to save her life. I like to think that it might be some consolation for her, at some point in the future, to think about that.’
‘Very caring of you. That’s the modern police force, isn’t it?’ Derwent corrected himself. ‘Police service. We can’t use the word “force” in case people think we might be aggressive.’
‘There was a reason I never let you inform relatives about their loved ones’ deaths, Josh,’ Godley said heavily. ‘I see you haven’t changed.’
Derwent didn’t look remotely abashed. ‘Not much.’
I moved sideways to get a better view of what Hanshaw was doing. He was still playing the torch over the body, peering closely, inch by inch. The point of light was startlingly bright, picking out details like chipped varnish on a fingernail, a gleam of eyeball between tangled lashes, an earring glinting in a dirt-smudged lobe. The rest of her disappeared into the darkness until I blinked, made myself look away from the dancing light, and looked again.
Bare feet stuck out from the bottom of a wool blanket that was wrapped around the body. The blanket looked old, scratchy, the material worn and dappled with faded stains that were not recent enough to be relevant to what had happened to Cheyenne. It was tied around the middle with a stretchy bungee cord, the kind used to keep belongings attached to a bike rack. I stopped looking at the blanket to look at what made the shape beneath it instead. The feet. The feet were small, a little plump. The toes were stubby, the nails painted with something that sparkled in the wavering light. It was hard to see the soles of her feet but they looked darker than the shadow would have made them; I thought they were dirty and wondered if she had been made to walk through the corridors behind me, if she had stepped on grit and broken glass and cast feathers and rat droppings before she died, if she had been hunted through the dark rooms, the endless hallways, the bricks-and-mortar nightmare of the derelict warehouse. I wondered if she had ever left the building at all, despite Marla’s confident assertion that it had been searched, every inch of it. Godley wondered the same thing, I guessed, glancing at his stern profile. That was why he had reacted so angrily in the yard. A job half-done; a girl very dead.
At the other end of the blanket, I could see her head and her hands poking out. Her hands were loosely wrapped around each other, the fingers curled in. I made myself look further, seeing honey-coloured hair that straggled limply, rat-tails instead of curls. Her face, bloodless, grotesquely white against the harsh orange of the sofa. The features were recognisably Cheyenne’s; she wasn’t bruised or bloated by decay. There was no need to lie to her parents in saying she looked peaceful, because she did. Bundled in a blanket, dishevelled, dirty and dead, but at peace.
Hanshaw gave the torch to Ali, who stood holding it up high to cast as much light as possible, angled so the beam went over the pathologist’s shoulder.
‘We can get lights in here.’ Godley said, and without turning around Hanshaw raised a hand in acknowledgement.
‘No need at present. I can work like this. When the body’s removed you might want a better view of the scene, but I’m not going to do much here. A quick examination and we’ll wrap her up.’
He started to peel back the blanket, his gloved hands working slowly.
‘Her forearms are tied with another bungee,’ he announced to the room over his shoulder. ‘Legs are not tied. She’s naked. Some bruising to the ribs and neck. Finger marks on the inner thighs and knees.’ He bent closer, probing. ‘Probable sexual assault. I’ll do a rape kit, obviously.’
Derwent leaned sideways to see for himself, then turned away quickly. I watched him stumble out of the room, cannoning off the doorframe as if he hadn’t seen it. Not so tough after all, maybe. Godley was as still as if he had been carved out of marble, and looked equally cold, equally remote.
Hanshaw was getting on with his job, shooting a quick set of pictures, putting bags around Cheyenne’s hands and feet to preserve trace evidence, taking samples of her blood and other body fluids. He was swift without rushing, careful but confident, and I knew that if there was anything the body could tell us he would find it.
Feeling that I had seen enough, I retreated to the back of the room. Aside from the sofa, it was almost empty. A coffee table was upside down in the corner, three legs pointing to the ceiling while the fourth was gone for ever. Someone had wheeled in an office chair that sagged drunkenly to one side, the seat teetering on the brink of falling from its base. It reminded me of Ivan Tremlett and I felt revulsion knot my stomach. So much blood had been spilt for nothing. John Skinner had achieved as little as any of us. He would find that just as hard to endure as the loss of his child.
A voice in my ear said, ‘Are you okay?’
I jumped. ‘You scared me.’ I looked reproachfully at Rob, trusting my expression to show my annoyance when I couldn’t raise my voice above a thread of a whisper.
‘Sorry. I was trying to be quiet.’
‘And succeeding.’ The scene in front of us was like a painting: the light and dark, the supine figure of the girl with her shadowy attendants. A Rembrandt, I thought, half-recalling something similar with a dissected body as the centrepiece that had featured in my art history textbook in school. I hadn’t liked to look at it, even then. I hadn’t known it would be my livelihood one day.
‘Creepy, isn’t it?’ Rob looked around the room much as I had done, eyeing the décor that was the last word in post-apocalyptic chic. ‘What happened to Derwent?’
‘Got the collywobbles.’ I saw his face twist into a grin and couldn’t stop myself from matching it despite the circumstances. It was just perfect that Derwent of all people had failed to keep it together. ‘He’s in the corridor, I think.’
‘Must go and ask him how forceful he’s feeling.’ He made as if to do so and I grabbed his arm.
‘For God’s sake, don’t provoke him. You warned me about that.’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t mean it should apply to me.’ The smile faded. ‘This is a turn-
up, isn’t it?’
‘It’s what we were expecting. She’d been gone too long.’
‘Mm. But I don’t think she’s been lying there all that time. It’s cool enough in here but there’d be some deterioration, wouldn’t there?’
‘I couldn’t say. Hanshaw will know.’
‘Ghoul,’ Rob said.
It was what I had often thought myself, but I felt it was a little unfair. ‘He’s just doing his job.’
‘Speaking of yours, how was Skinner?’
‘Before or after he heard Cheyenne had been found?’
‘After?’
I shook my head. ‘Not good. Broken. He’d already coughed to the murders. Not that he had much choice.’
‘Did he say how he knew who to target? And what they’d done?’
‘Nothing so helpful. He told us the bare minimum. Wouldn’t implicate anyone else, no matter how the boss approached it.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he? You know the rules as well as I do. Never plead guilty to conspiracy because it dumps your co-conspirators in the shit, and never point the finger at anyone else to try to save yourself.’
‘It’s a moral code of sorts.’
‘It’s a coward’s best hope of surviving prison unscathed.’
‘I don’t think John Skinner is afraid of doing time. He seems to have it all worked out.’
‘No doubt.’ Rob looked distant for a second, and grim with it. For once I could guess why.
‘Not looking forward to seeing Mrs Skinner?’
His eyebrows lifted a millimetre, which for him counted as surprise. ‘Got it in one. I can’t think it’s going to be pleasant.’
‘You won’t have to do the talking.’ We both looked at Marla Redmond who was chewing her lower lip mindlessly.
‘Right.’ Hanshaw straightened up, his gloved hands hanging from his wrists as if they didn’t quite belong to him. ‘That’s all I’m prepared to do here.’
‘Can you tell us when she died?’
‘You know better than that.’ Hanshaw never liked to hazard a guess about anything, particularly time of death. He would give an estimate once the autopsy was over, not before.