The Essence of Evil

by The Essence of Evil (retail) (epub)

  ‘Do you think we could come in to talk?’ Dani said. Chances were that Mary Grant had nothing of use to add to the whole situation, but they’d made the trip, so they may as well make the most of it. ‘We shouldn’t take much of your time.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, smiling, though it seemed forced. She stepped to the side and ushered Dani and Easton in. ‘Please leave your shoes at the door. I’ve just finished polishing the marble.’

  Dani resisted the urge to smirk at that instruction though she wasn’t sure why. She did as she was told, as did Easton. Mary led them through into a lounge whose key feature was a huge stone fireplace. She indicated to Dani and Easton to sit on one of the three brown leather sofas. There was no offer of a drink or anything as hospitable as that.

  ‘So Ethan was arrested again?’ Mary said, sitting on the arm of a sofa.

  ‘Last night,’ Easton said. ‘Drunk-driving. He was also in possession of a not insubstantial amount of cannabis.’

  Mary shook her head, in a show of distaste. Whether that was at her son or at the police, it wasn’t clear. Either way there was little real feeling in her reaction. She seemed almost detached.

  ‘So why are two detectives now out looking for him?’

  ‘He was released from the station this morning on bail,’ Easton said.

  ‘You didn’t know this?’ Dani asked Mary. ‘From what I understood, it was a lawyer who’s worked with your husband who filed the paperwork?’

  Mary threw her hands up in exasperation and shook her head. ‘It’s all news to me. Though it’s not altogether surprising. Ethan is always getting himself into stupid trouble. But you still haven’t explained why you’re now out looking for him again, if you had him in custody just this morning.’

  ‘Like we said, he was released on bail. But we’re actually here now on an altogether different matter, Mrs Grant. We’re from the Homicide team at West Midlands Police, and we’re investigating the murders of a Paul Reeve and an as yet unidentified female.’

  ‘Ah, I thought I recognised you,’ Mary said, and for the first time – at least the first time that Dani noticed – she looked up to Dani’s scar. ‘I saw something on the local news about that the other night.’

  ‘We believe your son knew at least one of the two victims,’ Dani said, hoping to steer the conversation away from what Mary may or may not know about Dani.

  ‘I remember reading about you a while back,’ Mary Grant said, clearly not as keen to let the subject drop. ‘When was it?’

  ‘It’s been over two years since…’ Dani trailed off, not quite sure that she wanted to say anything more.

  ‘Such a terrible thing to have to go through. I should know. You realise my husband is Steven Grant?’

  ‘Yes, I realise that. And the similarities between what happened to him and to me have been pointed out to me today already. Not meaning to be rude, but mine and your husband’s pasts have nothing to do with why we’re here.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine,’ Mary said, seeming to relax now that she’d found some common ground between Dani and her husband. ‘I’m sorry for bringing it up. Steven’s the same. He hates that people still recognise him for all the wrong reasons.’

  ‘Mrs Grant, do you know anything about Paul Reeve? Was Ethan close to him?’

  ‘I don’t recognise the name, to be honest.’

  ‘What about Jimmy Colton?’

  Mary paused this time, but still looked unmoved.

  ‘I’m sorry, detective, but the thing is, I really don’t know much about Ethan’s personal life anymore. For one very good reason. You can see the type of trouble he gets himself into. I don’t want any part of it. I have no idea who his close friends are but I do know that most of them are probably no good.’

  ‘Your son did that to you?’ Dani asked, indicating the black eye. Well, if Mrs Grant wanted to bring up sore subjects, then so would Dani.

  Mary hung her head in embarrassment.

  ‘He didn’t mean to. It was a misunderstanding. He’s never hit me before. He’s just… in a bad place.’ Her head shot back up again. ‘Wait, you don’t think that Ethan actually had something to do with—’

  ‘No, Mrs Grant. He’s not a suspect in our investigation at this stage. We have no reason to believe that at all. We just want to speak to him like we want to speak to all of the close friends of the victims.’

  ‘I guess the only thing I can do to help you then is to give you the last address I have for him, though who knows if he’s actually there or not anymore. He made me drop some of his things off there a few weeks back but I didn’t even go inside.’

  ‘That would be very helpful.’

  Mary disappeared and came back a few moments later with a Post-it note that she handed over to Dani.

  ‘I wish I could help more, but we’re not exactly on the best of terms right now.’

  That was clearly an understatement.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Grant,’ Dani said. ‘If you do think of anything else—’

  ‘You’ll be the first to know.’

  Dani and Easton were shown out, and no sooner had they stepped over the threshold than the front door was sharply closed behind them.

  * * *

  ‘Yet another interesting family,’ Easton said when he and Dani were safely inside his car.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘So we’re going straight there?’ he asked, indicating the Post-it that Dani was holding.

  ‘I’ve not got anything better to do. Have you?’

  Easton smiled and fired up the engine. Dani stared over at the Grants’ house. There was no sign of Mary at the windows. But as Easton swung the car back out onto the street, Dani found herself focusing on the house opposite, because in the upstairs window she could clearly make out a man, standing close to the glass, facing out. Ed Francis, most likely. The same man who’d called the police three days ago, according to Easton. Dani held his gaze. It seemed like he was staring right at her, his eyes piercing and… menacing.

  Francis stepped back from the window and his form disappeared into darkness. Dani shivered.

  ‘You ok, Dani?’ Easton said, snapping her from her thoughts.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She squirmed in her seat and focused her eyes back on the road ahead. ‘Why?’

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  Dani huffed. ‘No, not a ghost.’

  She didn’t believe in ghosts. Quite what she’d seen, though, when she’d looked into Francis’s eyes, she really couldn’t explain.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘What did you make of Mary Grant then?’ Easton asked as they drove back towards central Birmingham, to the address they’d been given in Handsworth.

  ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘Do you really think her son would hit her?’

  ‘I can’t see why she’d say so if he didn’t.’

  ‘You don’t think she’s covering for the husband? That’s what the PCs initially reckoned, though the Mr and Mrs both denied it.’

  ‘If she was covering for the husband, do you not think she’d say she walked into a door handle or something like that? Why get her son into trouble?’

  ‘Fair point. And he does sound like he’s out of control. Drugs, drink driving, assaulting his own mother. Yet on the face of it they seem like such a respectable family.’

  ‘Kind of like Paul Reeve’s family then, don't you think?’

  Easton nodded. ‘Do you think Ethan is more than just an acquaintance then?’

  ‘You mean do I think he could be mixed up in drug dealing too?’

  ‘No. I mean, do you think he could be the killer? It’s possible, isn’t it? A history of violence, mixed up with drugs…’

  ‘Or he could be the next victim. We can’t rule out that there’s a multiple killer out there.’

  ‘A serial killer?’

  Dani cringed at what Easton said. Serial killer. The words still sounded outlandish and ridiculous
, even though she was the one who’d first mentioned the possibility, and even though she knew only too well that such people really did exist. And the life and death of Natalya still worried Dani. Why had she been bound like that? And what had happened to Grace Agnew?

  Dani’s phone chirped in her bag. She lifted it out and saw the call was coming from a withheld number.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, answering it.

  ‘DI Stephens, it’s Jack Ledford.’

  ‘Jack, good news I hope?’

  ‘Good? Detective, I’ve been dissecting human corpses this morning. Young people whose lives were taken away from them quite cruelly. I’m not sure there’s much good about that.’

  Why did he always have to twist the meaning of her words like that?

  ‘But I do have some results for you.’

  ‘I’ll be there right away,’ Dani said, before ending the call. ‘I need to go to the mortuary,’ she said to Easton.

  ‘You want me to come too?’

  Dani looked at her watch. ‘No. You’ve got a lead here. Drop me at the mortuary then pick someone from HQ to accompany you and go find Ethan Grant. You’re happy handling that, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Sounds better than spending the rest of the afternoon with a stinking corpse, to be honest.’

  ‘DS Easton, that’s no way to talk about Birmingham’s finest pathologist.’

  Dani looked over at Easton and he gave a cheeky smile.

  The traffic was kind to them and not long after, Dani stepped from the car outside the mortuary. She took a deep breath of fresh air then headed inside, working her way through the corridors of the building to where she knew Ledford was located.

  With each step she took the air felt heavier and the smell of rot and death and decay grew. No matter how much bleach, industrial cleaner and air freshener was used, there was simply nothing that could be done to mask the grotesque smell of a morgue – a smell that infected every pore of Dani’s body whenever she visited.

  She’d only been a fresh-faced DC when she’d witnessed her first post-mortem. She’d felt queasy from the moment the procedure had started but had held firm, trying to be strong and to see the ordeal through. She hadn’t managed it. At the point the bone saw crunched its way through the dead woman’s skull, Dani had gagged. When the pathologist had then removed the skull cap with a sickly squelching and sucking sound, exposing the cadaver’s shrivelled brain, Dani had been physically sick right there on the spot, in the middle of the examination room. The thick lumpy vomit had covered herself, the floor and the pathologist’s trouser legs.

  That had not gone down well.

  Dani had been the butt of jokes for quite a while after that, and she felt like it had taken equally long to get rid of the smell. She’d showered as soon as she could when she’d got home, and three times more that day, but the godawful smell lingered for weeks.

  She’d never become used to post-mortems, and didn’t know how any person could willingly do that for a job, but as an experienced DI she could at least now bear the sight of someone’s brain being removed without spewing her guts.

  At least she had been able to at one time, but Dani hadn’t been to a mortuary for over two years, and as she opened the door to the examination room and spotted Paul Reeve’s dissected body on a metal autopsy table, the wave of nausea that passed over her almost took her off her feet. It was a good job Fletcher had assigned DS Langdon to attend the actual post-mortem that morning.

  ‘DI Stephens,’ Ledford said, turning around from where he’d been scribbling notes into a ledger. ‘You’re looking a little green.’

  ‘I’m fine. You said you had some results.’

  ‘You just missed Fletcher actually,’ Ledford said, looking at his watch. ‘I thought maybe she or DS Langdon would have given you the results, but I know you said you wanted me to talk through the findings in person. It would have been easier to brief you all at the same time, but so be it.’

  ‘Sorry. I was out on other business. And I didn’t know Fletcher was coming.’

  ‘But you told me I needed to speak to you both about this matter? So I called you both.’

  ‘Yes, that’s fine. So you’ve carried out procedures on both bodies now?’

  ‘I have. I don’t have full toxicology results on the male yet, but we do know a lot more. Come and have a look.’

  Ledford led Dani over to the autopsy table and she looked down at Paul Reeve’s now stitched-up body. His skin was as white as the sheet that was dangling off the end of the table. His glass-like eyes stared up at the ceiling.

  Now he was all cleaned up, the two knife wounds – one to his side, one to his belly – were clearly visible. The edges around them looked thick and protruded like they were plasticine wounds that had been stuck to him for special effect. Ledford reached across and swiped away the sheet that covered Natalya’s corpse on a metal gurney next to them, and Dani winced as she looked at the similarly cut-up remains.

  ‘Both victims died from, to put it into layman’s terms, massive blood loss.’

  ‘Exsanguination,’ Dani said.

  ‘Yes, very good, DI Stephens,’ Ledford said, clearly not that impressed with Dani’s knowledge. ‘Paul Reeve’s injuries were more severe, and it’s likely that he was dead within a minute or so of being stabbed. As well as massive blood loss from the two wounds, this wound here, in his gut, severed the abdominal aorta, which is what I mentioned to you about the young woman the other day.’

  Ledford poked and prodded at the wounds as he spoke and Dani held back the urge to gag. Ledford looked up at her and must have noticed her squeamishness. He gave her a clear look of disapproval.

  ‘As for the young lady’s injuries…’

  ‘Natalya,’ Dani said. ‘We think her name was Natalya.’

  ‘Ok. As for Natalya, she lasted a bit longer. Like Reeve, Natalya did eventually bleed to death, but the stab wound to her side didn’t sever the renal artery, just nicked it really. The blow actually caused quite a lot more damage to the kidney itself, and it was fifty-fifty as to whether she would have died from blood loss or from the effects of the lacerated kidney, which would have poisoned her from the inside. She was still alive when the killer was interrupted, I hear, and probably was for several minutes afterwards.’

  ‘Paramedics pronounced her dead on their arrival.’

  ‘They did, which was close to ten minutes after the 999 call.’

  ‘Would a quicker response have saved her?’

  ‘Possibly, but I’d say it’s quite unlikely.’

  ‘What about the other wounds on Reeve? Are they defensive wounds?’

  ‘I’d say some are. It will take me a while longer to properly analyse them all, but I can see that some of the bruises and cuts are probably two or three days old.’

  ‘So he was in a fight?’

  ‘Possibly. Or maybe he played rugby or some other contact sport. Martial arts. Who knows? But there’s definite evidence of a struggle in the lead up to his death too. This wound here…’

  Ledford lifted up Reeve’s right arm, revealing a long deep cut riding up to the elbow. Dani hadn’t spotted that back at the apartment.

  ‘…I’d say was inflicted by the same knife that killed him.’

  ‘He held his arm up to defend himself.’

  ‘Most likely. There’s also a rather nasty lump on the back of his head. The result of a blunt force blow.’

  Dani looked at Ledford. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I can’t be definitive. Perhaps he was hit over the head with an object, or perhaps he fell and smacked his head on something. Closer examination of the apartment may give the answer.’

  ‘There were no objects recovered that looked like they’d been used as a weapon.’

  ‘There is potentially some significance to that head injury.’

  ‘You think he was unconscious when he was stabbed?’

  ‘There’s no evidence of him trying to drag or move himself away, either in term
s of marks on his hands and fingers for example, or in relation to marks or blood trails in the apartment.’

  ‘And he didn’t try to raise the alarm either. But you said he would have died very quickly from the stab wounds?’

  ‘That’s true. But thirty seconds, a minute, is still plenty long enough for someone to fight for their survival.’

  ‘So you do think he was unconscious then?’

  ‘Whether he was stabbed in the gut first, then took the blow to the head, or the other way around, I can’t be sure. Although the result would be the same, it could tell you something about his killer, their motives.’

  ‘What about the dirt under his fingernails?’

  ‘Sent for analysis. I don’t know yet whether there’s any blood or DNA traces in there.’

  ‘And what about Natalya?’ Dani asked, looking over again at the corpse of the young woman. ‘The wounds on her wrists and ankles?’

  ‘Not much more to tell than what I said the other day. Those wounds look relatively new, so I don’t think they were more than a day or two old. But there were other wounds on her. Scrapes and gashes to her feet from having run barefoot. One hand was badly grazed and there’s a graze on her head too.’

  Ledford went over to Natalya and pointed out each of the wounds.

  ‘All wounds were very fresh. These happened in the moments before she was stabbed.’

  Dani tried to think about the sequence of events. Natalya running. Running away from her killer. The grazes. Then the stab wounds to her front.

  ‘Do you think she fell? That’s how the attacker caught her?’

  ‘Fell or was pushed. There were elements of grit and tarmac in the wounds so that would be my conclusion.’

  ‘What about sexual assault?’

  ‘No evidence of violent sexual assault, nor were any traces of semen found in her or on her.’

  Dani again flinched at the words, even though it was welcome news, of sorts. There was silence for a few moments as Dani tried to process the information and the significance of it all.

  ‘You look disappointed, Detective,’ Ledford said.