Shot Through the Heart: DI Grace Fisher 2
Page 10
The January term had begun two days earlier, and the atmosphere had been overheated and intense, with even the teachers appearing to encourage sometimes hysterical displays of grief. It had all been too much for Robyn, who longed to escape back to the peace and seclusion of home. Today, Wednesday, the school party had been asked to arrive and take their places early and, all equally immaculate in their sixth-form uniforms of grey or black suits, they processed in line up the path. Robyn looked to either side, hoping to spot her parents among the sea of faces, but she reached the knapped-flint porch without seeing them. Entering the church, her group was ushered to a pew right at the back of the nave and asked to squeeze up as tightly as they could. Rows of extra chairs had been placed behind them as well as down both aisles. As she took her place she was dimly aware of arches and high stone walls covered with marble memorial plaques.
There were massive arrangements of white flowers in front of the altar and around the pulpit to one side and the brass lectern on the other. The five coffins, three of dark varnished wood, one white and one draped with a dark cloth embroidered with some kind of crest, had already been brought in and lined up in a row. Each bore an identical floral arrangement of hellebores, also called Christmas roses. Robyn tried not to picture what they contained. She knew she was among the tiny minority of those here today who had actually seen the reality of gunshot wounds, who understood the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, or hard-point and soft-point ammunition. It was her father’s trade, so she had grown up with such knowledge, but in her world this was focused on killing animals and game birds in the most efficient and humane way possible. It was about lessening cruelty and suffering, not about . . . about this.
She was also well aware that none of her school friends agreed with her about shooting game. Once or twice she’d tried to argue that if you cared about animal welfare then eating a wild duck cleanly shot out in its habitat on the marshes was infinitely preferable to buying some intensively reared chicken pumped full of polyphosphates and water. But it was impossible to convince them that their mum’s roast chicken was more morally questionable, or that gutting and skinning a bird yourself was a whole lot more honest than paying a fortune for plastic-packed organic chicken breasts in Waitrose. And anyway they weren’t interested, not really. They went ‘Ew’ and ‘Yuck’ and started talking about who was going to so-and-so’s party at the weekend.
And why should they be interested? All the girls packed in alongside her on the pew were the daughters of people who worked indoors – lawyers, doctors, company executives. As was Angie. Robyn realized that her friend’s parents and older sister must be sitting somewhere in front, amid the rows of bent black-clad backs. Angie’s grandmother had also died, so presumably aunts, uncles and cousins must be here too, though Robyn didn’t know any of them. The organ was playing some quiet, soothing music, but neither it nor the background susurration of people crossing their legs, coughing, whispering to each other or rustling their orders of service could entirely drown out the few raw sobs coming from the pews nearest to the coffins.
To distract herself, Robyn looked up at the stained-glass windows, but there wasn’t enough light to illuminate them, and they looked pretty dull to her anyway. She had no idea who the saints depicted in them might be. Her family had never been religious. The natural world was enough for them – the big ever-changing skies, the stars at night, the beauty and power of the sea out beyond the estuary, the local birds, plants and animals. Their endless variety had fascinated her for as long as she could remember and was why she hoped to study for a degree in conservation biology. She wondered what Angie had believed in, or whether the faith contained within these stone arches and walls brought any comfort to her family, and where in heaven or earth the god symbolized by the big cross up on the altar had been hiding himself on Christmas Day.
Robyn had never lost anyone close to her before. Her dad seldom saw his mother, who lived in Canada with her second husband, and her other grandparents were infrequent visitors. One of Leonard’s friends had dropped dead of an aneurysm about a year ago, but while she’d been curious about her dad’s reaction to the news it had not really touched her. She could scarcely believe that Angie wasn’t about to throw back the lid of her coffin and come dancing down the aisle any moment, laughing at everyone for being so gullible as to think she’d vanish and leave them like this.
And of course she hadn’t vanished. Physically her body was here now. Lying there boxed up in her white coffin. It was horrific, intolerable, made Robyn want to push her way past her school friends and run out of the church, find her dad and hug him as tightly as she could. But she forced down her panic with the thought that everyone here must feel the same. That’s why the decision had been taken to hold one service for all five victims, so that no one need go through this alone.
The missing coffin was of course that of the gunman; she’d heard at school that he’d already been discreetly cremated after a very small, very private service. Robyn thought about how he had ended his life right outside this church, in a snowy corner of the old burial ground. In the two weeks since the shootings all visual traces had gone, either cleaned up and repaired or melted away. But Robyn had seen blood on snow many times. She loved working with the dogs on a shoot, and it was always cause for encouragement and praise when they dropped a bird they had retrieved at her feet. The mental image of fresh blood on snow – if she thought about it at all – brought sensory memories of blue skies and bluer water, fresh, sharp, invigorating cold, of the dogs’ bright eyes and steamy breath, of the camaraderie of a successful day’s sport. The catastrophic damage that a 7.62 x 51 mm soft-point rifle round could cause to a human heart or skull at almost point-blank range literally did not bear thinking about.
Robyn wished that she’d been able to be with her parents, who would follow the service with hundreds of others outside, but entry to the church had been tightly restricted. The place was full now, and the vicar in her cassock and gown was climbing up into the pulpit. After that the service took on the atmosphere of a school assembly, or some longer and more symbolic event like Founders’ Day, and Robyn stood, sat, sang hymns, listened to readings and eulogies, knelt and pretended to pray along with the rest, as required. Afterwards, only a few lines from a W.H. Auden poem that someone read stayed in her head: The truth is simple. / Evil is unspectacular and always human, / And shares our bed and eats at our own table. Something in them struck horror deep into her heart, and she was glad when at last the congregation stood and watched in silence as the five coffins were carried slowly out of the church and down the path to the flower-filled hearses.
By the time Robyn and her school friends came out into the misty air the first of the cars was already driving away. The police officers in their buttoned tunics who lined the road stood stock-still in eerie disciplined silence. As the hearse bearing Angie’s white coffin set off, one of Robyn’s classmates gave a wave of farewell and suddenly they were all waving and crying and hugging each other, simultaneously bereft and relieved that this part was now over and they could get back to school, back to a semblance of their normal lives. Never had a science lesson seemed more inviting.
Detaching herself, Robyn looked around one last time for her parents. At breakfast she’d begged them both to come, even though Leonard had barely known Angie, and Nicola had only stopped for tea a couple of times when picking Robyn up from Angie’s house. Robyn finally spotted her mother standing with a small group of people over by the brick wall that ringed the churchyard. There was no sign of her dad, but a familiar-looking overweight balding man in an ill-fitting black suit was introducing her mother to a tall, slim, serious-looking woman with neatly cut straight brown hair. As Nicola turned to shake the woman’s hand, she caught sight of Robyn and soon afterwards excused herself and came over to join her daughter.
‘Hello, love.’ Nicola looked at her anxiously. ‘You all right?’
Robyn nodded. ‘Who were you talking to?’
/>
‘They’re the detectives in charge of the case.’
‘Detectives?’
‘Yes. Have you never met Duncan Gregg?’ said Nicola distractedly. ‘We’ve organized events for him occasionally, for some police social club he’s involved in.’
‘He came last week to talk to Dad.’
‘Did he?’ said Nicola. ‘Well, they were probably doing the rounds of all the local firearms dealers.’ She sighed. ‘They have to do something, I suppose. Can you imagine?’
Robyn nodded, trying to remember what it was her father had said about the man who visited the workshop. ‘Where is Dad?’
Nicola looked down at the scuffed toes of her black boots. ‘He couldn’t make it,’ she said. ‘Look, is that your school coach? You’d better get moving.’ She pecked her daughter on the cheek and gave her a little push. ‘See you later.’
Robyn turned to follow her classmates, feeling suddenly as if each footstep was too heavy to take. She hadn’t realized how tightly she’d been clinging to the comforting thought of seeing her dad, hearing his voice and feeling his reassuring hand on her shoulder. Family, he always said. First, second and last. Right now she could really do with that impregnable little wall around her. If she had any kind of faith, then that was it: family.
18
At nearly two in the morning on a damp Friday at the end of the first week of January the commercial side street near the centre of Colchester was deserted apart from two squad cars parked either side of a taped-off area of pavement. On the corner, about fifty yards beyond the police barrier tape, was a late-night bar that Grace knew to be a popular gay venue. Usually it would be brightly and invitingly lit, but now the exterior was almost entirely dark and the bar didn’t look at all appealing. What light did emerge made the pavement look slick and greasy.
Grace left her own car a few yards away and went to join Dan Evans, the sergeant from the homicide assessment car, who stood rubbing his hands together in a futile attempt to keep warm. The original Victorian buildings had been rather messily adapted to current use, and she saw that the blue and white tape closed off a narrow entranceway leading to a small yard, now used as a parking area.
Waking her out of a deep sleep, a civilian call handler had rung forty minutes earlier to inform her, as duty DI, that there had been a suspicious death in Colchester. An IC1 male had been found with head injuries and taken to hospital, where he had been pronounced dead. The assessment car at the scene had requested MIT support.
‘Morning, ma’am,’ said Evans. ‘Sorry to drag you out at this hour, but we need a strategy for the scene preservation.’
‘No problem.’
‘There’s not much to see.’ He shone a torch over the barrier tape onto a red-brick wall that rose along one side of the entrance. ‘The victim was on the ground there. A couple of guys leaving the bar on the corner found him, a little before one o’clock. They called an ambulance, said he was unconscious and bleeding from pretty serious head wounds.’
‘Any other injuries?’
‘Not that we know of so far. But there was more than one blow to the head, apparently. It wasn’t simply a bad fall. When the paramedics got here, they reckoned he was already dead, but didn’t want to take chances so took him to hospital. I got them to bag his hands as a precaution and asked them, if possible, not to disturb his clothing until they heard from you.’
‘Good, thanks. The guys who found him, you’ve got their details?’
‘Yes, ma’am. They said he wasn’t known to them.’
‘Had he been at the bar?’ Grace looked around the deserted street. ‘There’s not much else going on around here this late at night. Unless he’s got a car parked nearby.’ She nodded towards the darkened yard. ‘Any vehicles in there?’
‘Uniform says one, a silver Audi, but I didn’t want to contaminate the scene. We weren’t called until the hospital had confirmed death,’ he explained. ‘I’ve already notified the coroner.’
‘Thanks. Where are uniform now?’
‘In the bar taking names and addresses, though I think most of the punters have left by now. Just as well that uniform decided not to wait for us and got stuck in. There’s never enough manpower these days, is there? Don’t know how the great British public expects us to run a half-decent service with all these cutbacks.’
Grace ignored the sergeant’s grumbling. ‘Who’s there now?’
‘The manager, if you want a word.’
‘Please.’
Their footsteps echoed in the empty street. Evans pushed open the door and held it for her to go ahead of him. The place was empty except for a burly man of about forty unloading glasses from a dishwasher behind the bar and, standing talking to him, PC Curtis Mullins.
Colin Pitman had organized for those who’d worked over Christmas to take different days off over the New Year holiday, and so Grace hadn’t crossed paths with Curtis since she’d searched the pub car park. She had welcomed the break and tried to push all her suspicions and concerns to the back of her mind – until the funeral two days ago. Then she’d felt such a terrible hypocrite watching Curtis Mullins at the front of the white-gloved bearer party carrying Mark Kirkby’s coffin past the honour guard to the waiting hearse. Poignant images of John Kirkby stepping forward to place Mark’s custodian helmet on top of the draped coffin had been beamed around the world and had adorned most of yesterday’s front pages. Mark Kirkby was a fallen hero and Curtis Mullins his grieving comrade.
‘Ma’am,’ Curtis addressed her respectfully. ‘This is Derek Slater. He’s been here all night.’
Avoiding eye contact with Curtis, Grace showed the manager her warrant card and introduced herself. Apart from three earrings in one ear, Derek looked to her like a former regimental sergeant major, the kind with a twinkle in his eye and a soft spot for the lads who might end up at the sharp end in some war zone. She doubted that much would go on in here unobserved by him.
‘Any reason to fear trouble tonight?’ she asked. ‘Notice any arguments that might’ve got settled outside later?’
‘Nothing.’ The manager nodded towards Curtis. ‘And I’ve said I’ll ask around the regulars tomorrow. Tell them to get in touch if they saw or heard anything, even if they didn’t realize at the time what was going on.’
‘We’ve got details of everyone who was still here when we arrived,’ Curtis told her.
‘Good, thanks.’ Grace recalled what Lance had said about sensing Curtis’s hostility at the Blue Bar before Christmas, but she could discern no trace of homophobia now, and the manager seemed perfectly relaxed in his company. But stuck in her head was a mental image of Curtis looking around a darkened pub car park before using his baton to smash the glass of the rear light of Russell Fewell’s van. She turned to face Derek. ‘Have you had any recent problems with harassment or homophobic abuse?’
‘Nah, not really. We get the odd scallywag once in a while, thinks it’s clever to show off his vocabulary. But we get on very well with our neighbours, on the whole.’
Grace turned reluctantly back to Curtis. ‘What was the victim wearing?’
Curtis consulted his notebook. ‘Grey suit and tie. Navy scarf. Black leather shoes.’
‘No coat, even in this weather?’
‘Not with him, no,’ said Curtis.
‘We often get people dropping in for a late drink after work, or whatever,’ said Derek. ‘I don’t remember noticing anyone in particular tonight, though. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t here. We were fairly busy.’ He shook his head, clearly upset by the night’s events. ‘Poor bloke.’
‘He may not have been in here,’ said Grace. ‘Hopefully tomorrow someone will be able to bring over a photograph of the victim. That might help jog a few memories.’
‘Of course.’
‘You can close up now, if you want to.’
‘Right you are.’
Grace followed Curtis and Dan Evans back outside. ‘Who was the first officer attending?’ she asked.
‘They didn’t see anyone else?’
‘No.’
‘Did you check out the car park area?’
‘Empty apart from a single car, registered to a company in London. The yard is surrounded by buildings. No way out.’
‘Any CCTV?’
‘Not here. There will be on the approach roads, though. Want me to get started on that?’
‘Please.’ Grace turned to Evans. ‘Have we got scene of crime organized?’
‘No, ma’am. Waiting for you.’
‘OK. Let’s see if we can get someone down here first thing. Meanwhile keep it taped off and put someone on duty.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Not too long before the town gets moving again. So what’s your view?’ she asked them both. ‘Robbery? Attempted carjacking? A sexual encounter gone wrong? Hate crime?’
Evans shrugged. ‘I never saw the body.’
‘There have been a couple of muggings in the past month,’ said Curtis, ‘but nothing to suggest a hate crime. And, as you say, we don’t know if there’s any connection to the bar.’
‘True,’ said Grace. ‘Well, I’d better get over to the hospital. See if we can get him identified. Thanks, both of you. I’ll catch up with you at the station later.’
As she walked to her car, wondering if she’d be able to get any drinkable coffee at the hospital, she heard footsteps behind her.
‘Ma’am?’ It was Curtis.