Mimic

by Daniel Cole

  ‘I …’ Chambers hesitated. He hadn’t fully organised his own thoughts yet. ‘There were dozens of footprints at the scene, not one of which was barefooted. I’ve had officers scouring the area all night and searching nearby rubbish bins. No shoes or clothing have been recovered.’

  ‘According to your report, he’d been there at least twelve hours. That’s plenty of time for footprints to be disturbed or fade entirely, including the warmest part of the day. Did it get above freezing at any point yesterday?’

  ‘Barely.’

  The doctor shrugged as if to say: Well, there you go then.

  ‘I can’t see him walking naked that far into a London park unnoticed.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Sykes, who seemed to be rather enjoying her role as Devil’s advocate.

  ‘OK. It’s possible.’

  ‘Could he have buried his clothing somewhere?’

  Chambers was about to dismiss the theory but then decided it was actually a very good point. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his weary face again, feeling as though he were fighting a losing battle.

  ‘OK. OK,’ said Sykes. ‘I’ll take a look at him this morning. Go home. Get some rest. Give me a call around lunchtime.’

  Chambers gave her an exhausted smile: ‘I owe you one.’

  Foolishly, Chambers had thought it a good idea to stop by his desk on his way out of the building, having failed to reach it all shift. He walked into the office to discover that someone had put the department’s tired Christmas decorations to good use by placing a five-foot snowman on his chair before covering his computer in a blanket of cotton wool. Expectant faces broke into communal laughter as he opened his top drawer to find it too overflowing with fake snow. Fixing a smile in place, he nodded along like a good sport, despite the extent of the mess feeling borderline malicious.

  ‘Duck. Duck. Duck,’ warned DI Graham Lewis, once his softly-spoken training officer, now one of the few friends he had left. ‘Boss’s looking for you.’

  Chambers crouched behind the tatty snowman while Lewis smiled pleasantly:

  ‘Morning, Boss.’

  ‘Don’t be such a kiss-arse, Lewis.’

  ‘Very good, sir … OK. He’s gone.’

  Stepping back out, Chambers gestured to his desk: ‘I take it you heard?’

  Lewis nodded: ‘You know this place: word travels fast.’ He hesitated, it seemingly always falling to him to be the bearer of bad news, experience pre-empting the bureaucratic shitstorm about to rain down on his friend. ‘You went up to check the body the moment you deemed it safe to do so. Whatever you do, don’t say “you thought he was dead” or “he looked dead” or anything along those lines. Heads are going to roll for this and Hamm will be swinging for yours. Now get out of here before he—’

  ‘Chambers!’

  ‘Shit,’ whispered Lewis.

  ‘Yes, Boss?’ Chambers called across the room, his colleagues wearing the same smirks of anticipation they had as he’d approached his workstation wonderland.

  ‘My office! Now!’

  ‘The moment you deemed it safe to do so,’ Lewis reminded him quietly.

  DCI Hamm had only been in the role for eighteen months, a short enough time to still be considered ‘one of the boys’ by his employ of close friends and former contemporaries, past loyalties deterring any criticism of his blatant favouritism and questionable promotion criteria. Hamm had, however, had the sense to ease up on his vocal dislike and offensive behaviour towards Chambers since assuming the position, which had only served to make his attacks less predictable.

  ‘Sit.’ Chambers did as he was told. ‘So … What the fuck?’

  ‘It’s all in the report, sir.’ Chambers winced, he hadn’t meant it to come out so sarcastic. ‘I arrived on scene, where the situation was explained to me. The moment I deemed it safe to do so, I climbed up to reach the victim.’

  ‘Victim?’ scoffed Hamm, chomping on the gum that seemed to perpetually reside inside his mouth. ‘“No sign of trauma” and just sitting there like that; he clearly did this to himself. That’s like me calling my fat arse a “victim” of my love of KFC.’

  ‘The “deceased” then,’ said Chambers. ‘I ascertained that he was still alive at that point and immediately requested an ambulance.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Hamm, eyes bulging as he watched his subordinate for any sign of weakness or doubt.

  ‘With all due respect, sir,’ Chambers winced again: he had to stop adding that, ‘I clocked off two-and-a-half hours ago. I’m spent.’

  After a childish attempt to stare him down, Hamm waved him away dismissively: ‘Go on then.’

  Getting up, Chambers reached for the door handle.

  ‘One last thing,’ blurted Hamm, stopping him in his tracks. ‘What was your opinion of this Constable Winter?’

  Chambers’ face dropped. Clearly the management wanted their pound of flesh.

  He forced an impassive expression and then turned back to his boss: ‘Who?’

  ‘Adam Winter. He’s named in your report as the first officer on scene,’ said Hamm, lifting the file off the desk.

  ‘Ah. Joint first,’ said Chambers. ‘He had his partner with him.’

  ‘Irrelevant. It was Winter’s job … So?’

  Chambers quickly considered his limited options:

  ‘Incompetent,’ he replied harshly. ‘I’ve a good mind to submit my own complaint about him. Typical wannabe detective – unable to get past his own ego long enough to even manage the basics. I strongly suggest you see he loses his job over this mess.’

  Hamm appeared a little surprised by his impassioned reaction: ‘Do you now?’

  ‘I do … sir.’ That one was intentional.

  ‘Well, I’ll certainly take your advice on board. You may leave now.’

  Chambers nodded and closed the door behind him, hoping that his damning opinion of a fellow officer might convince his chief to make the right call.

  At 10.35 a.m. Chambers stumbled through the door of his Camden loft apartment. An unfortunate but conveniently timed inheritance, providing him a helpful leg-up on the inflated London property ladder. He made his way into the kitchen, disorientated stomach rumbling with hunger, to find a note stuck to the fridge door:

  Had to go.

  Sleep well.

  EX

  He smiled and took the note down, pausing when he went to drop it in the bin, feeling irrationally guilty for destroying anything that Eve had given him, no matter how inconsequential. Opening a drawer, he tucked it beneath the instruction booklets for the microwave and answering machine, where she would hopefully never find it.

  ‘What’s happening to you?’ he chastised himself, raiding the fridge for leftovers before heading into the bedroom.

  He had only just removed his shirt and finished brushing his teeth when the phone started to ring. In his exhausted state, he’d forgotten to unplug it from the wall. Looking longingly at his bed, he walked back through to the hallway and picked up the receiver:

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Detective? This is Charlotte Sykes … from work.’

  ‘Oh. Hi,’ said Chambers, wondering how the medical examiner had managed to get hold of his number.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you at home. We can talk later if you’d prefer?’

  ‘No. It’s fine,’ he yawned, stretching his free arm up to grasp the wooden beam above his head.

  ‘I just thought you’d want to know sooner rather than later that you were absolutely right.’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Your hunch. Because there’s physically no possible way that this man could have killed himself … Someone did this to him.’

  Chambers rubbed his stinging eyes. He was so tired: ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Chambers had dozed off on the Tube and missed his stop. Frustrated with himself, he got off at Victoria and made his way on foot through the frozen city – streets sullied with dirty g
rit, the wind – river-chilled and lost amid a maze of grey buildings. After passing through security at New Scotland Yard, he was met with an enquiring look from Lewis, who rushed across the lobby to intercept him.

  ‘What are you doing back here again?’ he asked in exasperation. ‘Get out! Boss’s looking for you.’

  ‘Again?’ complained Chambers.

  ‘Yes. Again. Go home.’

  ‘Can’t. I’ll stay out of his way though.’

  Shaking his head, Lewis stepped aside to allow his friend past.

  In a tactical but energy-sapping move, Chambers had taken the stairs. It wasn’t only DCI Hamm he needed to avoid but his entire network of tattletale subordinates. Checking the coast was clear, he hurried down the forensic corridor and knocked on the door at the far end, his face dropping the moment he crossed the threshold.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Shit indeed,’ Hamm concurred, abandoning his conversation with Dr Sykes to square up to Chambers. ‘Got an overtime query through after you left. Apparently, two technicians were instructed to transport a non-urgent body across the city minutes before the end of their shift.’ Chambers opened his mouth, but Hamm cut him off: ‘At which point, I said: “That can’t be right. None of my detectives would be stupid or disrespectful enough to do something like that without my approval.” Right, Chambers?’

  ‘I didn’t design their rota … sir,’ he replied, lack of sleep shortening his fuse. ‘They have a job to do. I asked them to do it.’

  In a demonstration of his unsuitability for the position, Hamm gave Chambers a sharp shove. He then moved in uncomfortably close despite being half-a-foot shorter than the tall detective: ‘Do you want to get yourself suspended right here, right now?’

  ‘… No, sir.’

  ‘Boys! Boys! Boys!’ snapped Sykes, the matriarchal woman quite terrifying when she wanted to be.

  Still glaring at Chambers, Hamm stepped back: ‘Then, I find out you’ve got our head medical examiner working on your bullshit suicide case rather than the four murder investigations we picked up yesterday alone!’

  Chambers calmly wiped the spittle from his face: ‘… Five.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Five murder investigations,’ Chambers corrected him, glancing over at Sykes.

  ‘He’s right,’ the doctor backed him up. ‘And due to the … state of the body, we had to move quickly. Every degree it thaws, the more evidence we risk losing.’

  Hamm’s furious expression endured, but it was clear that the doctor’s assessment had smothered some of his fire. He turned to Chambers: ‘Go behind my back again, boy, and I’ll fucking end you … Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  On that note, Hamm stormed out, leaving Chambers and Sykes alone with the body. They moved either side of the metal table, the man’s icy glaze now replaced with mottled freeze burns, two fingers on the left hand blackened from the joint up.

  ‘Frostbite,’ Sykes explained when she noticed Chambers looking. ‘I suppose it goes without saying that he was suffering with critical hypothermia by the time you reached him, his organs barely functioning sufficiently to sustain life. Then the ambulance crew got involved, warmed him up far too quickly and his system couldn’t handle it.’ She huffed. ‘Probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. I need to show you something. Help me roll him over.’

  Donning disposable gloves, they struggled to lift the heavy corpse enough to reveal the red dot at the nape of its neck.

  ‘See the puncture mark?’ asked Sykes rhetorically, as she’d already given up supporting her share of the weight. ‘He’d been injected with something … a bit of an unpleasant cocktail from the looks of it. I’m still trying to sort out what’s what. What could be attributed to diet pills, protein supplements or steroid abuse. An admittedly judgemental but educated guess based on the sheer size of him.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ agreed Chambers.

  ‘One thing that most certainly shouldn’t have been in his system, however, was significant levels of pancuronium bromide.’

  Chambers looked understandably blank.

  ‘It’s used in surgeries where they require the patient alert but can’t risk the smallest chance of movement. It’s impossible to even estimate how much he was given without a definitive time frame and considering the extreme temperatures involved.’

  ‘He definitely couldn’t have administered it himself?’ asked Chambers.

  ‘There’s no mention of a needle or vial being found at the scene, and I don’t think he’d realistically have had the control of his limbs required to throw it any distance. It’s my impression that the victim would have been in an almost dreamlike state – awake but completely malleable, maintaining just enough residual muscle tone to hold whatever position his killer decided to put him in.’

  ‘Then walk away and leave him to freeze to death. That’s twisted.’

  ‘We don’t tend to get many happy stories down here,’ shrugged Sykes. ‘Know who he is yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Gyms and leisure centres seemed like a good place to start though.’ Noticing something, Chambers crouched down to more closely inspect the corpse’s right knuckle: the raw wound unlike the others adorning the frost-damaged skin.

  ‘Glue,’ Sykes told him, pre-empting the question. ‘Similar marks beneath the chin, on the left forearm, knee and both buttocks. Crude but …’ She trailed off. ‘So, first impressions?’

  ‘Suspect’s male … probably. Strong enough to move two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of this guy around anyway. Feels personal: shaming him, stripping him naked, placing him on display like that, the cruelty of leaving him there to suffer. It was premeditated … organised … and yet impassioned.’

  Sykes nodded in agreement: ‘Guess we can only hope he doesn’t have any other enemies out there.’ When Chambers turned to the doctor with a troubled expression, she smiled back awkwardly: ‘Just saying.’

  ‘The next station is High Barnet, where this train will terminate. All change, please. All change.’

  Chambers peered vacantly to his left and then quizzically to his right along the length of the deserted carriage: ‘Oh, cock.’

  Eventually emerging from the lift at Camden Town, Chambers looked down at his watch, dismayed to discover that he had only four hours and ten minutes before his alarm would be getting him up for work again. Feeling painfully hungry, he made a beeline for KFC; for some reason, he’d been having cravings ever since talking to the boss that morning.

  Armed with a Bargain Bucket, he found a park bench to dine on so that Eve wouldn’t smell it in the flat and lecture him again about his ever-increasing waistline. Halfway through his feast, he realised he’d been staring out over the frozen pond while his food went cold, mind still on the job, his thoughts in the company of thawing corpses and empty podiums. He glanced over his shoulder at the phone box, shook his head, and shoved some more chips into his mouth, resolute on not giving in …

  ‘I hate myself,’ he muttered, dropping a half-eaten leg back into the bucket as he walked over to squeeze into the cramped red booth. One-handed, he picked up the receiver, clumsily dialling the number for the department: ‘It’s Chambers. Put me through to whoever’s working on my iceman case today,’ he said, filling the ensuing pause with another mouthful of chips. ‘Yeah, where are we at with IDing our vic? … Uh-huh. Well, stick with it. Have we still got anyone at the park? … Good. Tell them to restart the search, this time looking for needles, vials, anything medical … I know. You can blame me. We also need to find anywhere that supplies a drug named pancuronium bromide … No, pancu— I’ll spell it.’

  With the phone in one hand, his Bargain Bucket in the other, he attempted to retrieve the notebook from his pocket, throwing the remainder of his chicken extremities all over the floor.

  ‘Bastard! … Not you. I dropped my breakfast … dinner? I don’t even know any more. It’s P.A.N.C.U.R.O.N.I.U.M. Got that? … Last thing, I need you to find out who looks after the statue
s in that park. Why was that base empty? Have they got the sculpture? Did the killer make off with it? We need to know … That’s it for now … Yeah, seven o’clock. OK. Bye.’

  Crouching down to scoop the Kontaminated Floor Chicken back into the bucket, he couldn’t help glancing at his watch again – three hours, forty-five minutes now.

  At 6.37 p.m. Chambers stepped off the Tube at Embankment as intended and set off on the short walk to New Scotland Yard. Having successfully negotiated the underground network this time, he was feeling particularly smug with himself but no more rested than when he’d left earlier in the day. Between forgetting to unplug the phone again, a fire alarm going off in the building opposite, and a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who came a hell of a lot closer to witnessing Jehovah than they’d probably realised, the impracticalities of resting through the daytime had got the better of him. Giving up, he’d sprinkled a few salad leaves across the top of the bin and, before leaving, written Eve a note which he stuck to the fridge – these scrawled clusters of words their only form of communication when he hit a run of nightshifts like this.

  ‘Henry John Dolan,’ a young detective constable announced as Chambers removed Frosty the Snowman from his chair. ‘Our victim. Fitness instructor, backing dancer, and minor celebrity. No doubt you’ll remember his turn as “Muscle Man Five” in that episode of Minder?’

  ‘Oh, that Henry John Dolan!’ replied Chambers, tongue-in-cheek.

  ‘I’m interviewing the girlfriend tomorrow. No luck on the needles or vials though.’

  ‘What about the statues?’ Chambers asked her, swearing under his breath as he stuffed a drawer-full of cotton wool into the bin.

  ‘Complicated. This one seems to come under Royal Parks and the City Council, who outsource the work to private firms.’ The constable handed him a scrap of paper. ‘Someone’ll be there until eleven, should you fancy paying them a visit.’

  Looking down at the address, Chambers nodded: ‘I might just do that.’

  From the outside, Sleepe & Co. Restoration and Conservation Solutions didn’t look the most fitting establishment to be housing some of the country’s most prized works of art – just an anonymous roller door built into the old railway arches off Hackney high street. Picking an arbitrary spot, Chambers knocked loudly to make himself heard over the radio blaring inside. He looked up at the obvious camera above the door and then noticed two others nearby as the music went quiet.