Justice Delayed

by David Field

  ‘Laura tried to contact you for the best part of half an hour, but the tannoy’s on the blink, apparently. So the mountain had to come to Mahomet.’

  ‘I take it this isn’t a social call?’ Mike enquired.

  ‘In one sense it is. You and I go back a long way, and I’ve been told to carpet you formally for that outburst in front of the Chief before you went on leave. He wanted your arse in a sling, but I persuaded him that you’re more use to us inside the tent, pissing out, rather than the other way around. Hence your relocation down here, where “he” can keep an eye on you. Which means me, of course. Keep your mouth out of the red zone for a year or two, and your pension should be secure.’

  ‘I call the shots as I see them,’ Mike insisted.

  ‘I said something very similar to him,’ Willows replied. ‘I also added that you’re one of the best scum catchers at your level, and that you have an innate ability to get your team to give one hundred and ten per cent. Don’t let me down.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Mike replied softly.

  ‘I owed you that much, for dodging that bullet for me during the Bentwell wage heist. But the account’s squared now, so far as I’m concerned. Go off at the mouth again, and you’re on your own. Now, where have you got with this Giles murder? Have you got Petrie out of bed yet?’

  ‘I think he’s learned his lesson,’ Mike assured him, ‘and with a bit of tough love from me, we should have him functioning as a DS within a week or so.’

  ‘While drawing a DI’s salary?’ Willows complained. ‘Part of your rehabilitation with the Chief will consist of putting Petrie into overdrive.’

  ‘He and I go back almost as far as you and me,’ Mike reminded him. ‘And I’m beginning to learn what makes the man tick. Leave him to me.’

  Willows smiled.

  ‘When you first came back here, I seem to recall that I was the one who had to persuade you to work with him again. You really had the shits with him after that Jenkins fuck-up; he must have done well already, to get you converted this far, even.’

  ‘The man went up in my estimation when he refused to take crap from Van Morton. Most of the troops just collapse like empty bellows when she gets on her high horse.’

  ‘Oh, thanks for reminding me. While she’s on leave, Jill Bradbury’s acting up in her place – anything to do with “Delilah” will come direct to you from her. Then when DI Morton’s back, you resume overall responsibility for her team. I figure that two Homicide teams and Operation Delilah should be enough to keep even you out of trouble.’

  ‘What’s Team 1 working on? I haven’t even touched base with Pete Mansfield yet.’

  ‘No sweat – they’ve got a domestic snuff job on the Bidwell Estate. Very nasty, and heavily circumstantial and forensic. It’s currently with a far from grateful CPS, so you should be able to keep your full attention on the Giles case. Anyway, time I was at a briefing with God. This conversation didn’t take place, naturally, but consider yourself officially bollocked.’

  As he left, Mike opened the file Keating had brought him, and as usual began with the scene of crime shots. They weren’t pretty, but then again they never were.

  Giles’s body hung like a limp doll from a crudely-slung rope looped around a roof-beam. Mike mentally noted that it would have taken more than one person to hoist him up there, then looked automatically to the floor, where he expected to find the shoes that he had presumably been wearing. But they were not there, and only a pair of ridiculously pink socks graced his feet. The body was stripped to the waist, and the back view was only marginally more obscene than the front. Hanging around his bare neck, and ending at approximately each nipple, was a length of human skin that was red in parts and brown in others, as the blood had dried at different rates.

  The source of that skin was horribly obvious from the back view of the swinging corpse – it had been cut expertly from his back, leaving a well-defined ‘u’ shape in the subcutaneous fat. There were what appeared to be blood stains on the greasy floor, suggesting that this part of the gruesomely stage-managed operation had taken place in situ. But there were only a few of them, suggesting that – and one could only hope – the ritual skinning had taken place post-mortem. The shirt that had been removed for the process, and which had led to Giles being quickly identified, was just visible in a corner of the room, and a close-up shot of it confirmed the absence of blood stains.

  Mike scrolled down his computer address book, reached for his phone and dialled.

  ‘Good morning, DCI Saxby here, Central Homicide. Professor Gillies, please.’

  He smiled as the familiar clipped Edinburgh brogue confirmed that some things never change.

  ‘Morning, Maggie. Enjoy your leave?’

  ‘Visiting a senile geriatric aunt in a North Berwick nursing home is hardly Las Vegas during show-time, but yes it made a change from carving a scalpel through obese corpses, thank you for asking. Presumably you want to know all about Jeremy Giles, and thank you for making the call in person, and not leaving it to that drip-nosed misery who attended the PM.’

  ‘Yes, DI Petrie spoke highly of you, too,’ Mike grinned to himself. ‘Before I forget, have you got all the deceased’s clothes over there?’

  ‘Indeed we have, including his very distinctive pastel-coloured thong. Pursuing a curiosity of my own, I can confirm that he was gay, by the way.’

  ‘Any shoes?’

  ‘Hang on while I check the list. Let me see now, trousers, socks, said undergarment, shirt, but no - no shoes.’

  ‘How dirty were the socks?’

  ‘Surprisingly clean, bearing in mind their colour. The other clothes were fairly pristine too, from memory, but I’m told that he was discovered in an old factory, so I’ll leave you to join up the dots.’

  ‘He was done in somewhere other than where he was left dangling.’

  ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’ she replied with her trademark sarcasm. ‘And before you ask, you can add a mangled liver to the ruptured spleen, plus a cracked sternum and a subdural haematoma. My report – which you should get shortly – put it in medical language, but bottom line is “he was battered to death”. That sheet of skin round the neck was done almost professionally, by the way. If my second year students took a section that neatly, they’d get a high mark.’

  ‘Someone surgically trained, maybe?’

  ‘Possibly. But don’t exclude an enthusiastic amateur with a steady hand and a thin blade.’

  ‘So both the hanging and the skin removal were ritualistic?’

  ‘I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a profiler, but it looks like it. Certainly, neither of them was the cause of death, and I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that the skin excision was post-mortem.’

  ‘You’d have to hope so. Final question – have you ever seen anything like it before?’

  ‘Only in bad movies – never on my slab.’

  ‘OK, thanks, Maggie. Have I missed anything?’

  ‘As usual, nothing apart from when you’re going to invite me over for dinner again. Alison makes a wicked roast lamb.’

  ‘Only if you’re good. But you’ve given me the germ of an idea; do you currently have a social adjunct?’

  ‘If that’s a polite term for a regular bonk, I have to report a negative, with considerable regret. But if it means a dinner invitation, I’m sure I can prise someone out of their walking frame to accompany me.’

  ‘OK, keep that thought – I’ll get back to you.’

  He put the phone down and thought for a moment. Then he dialled a number he didn’t need to look up.

  ‘Hi, darling, only me,’ he said when his wife picked up at the other end. ‘Did I interrupt anything exciting?’

  ‘I was about to climb into the sack with George Clooney, if you call that exciting,’ Alison quipped back. ‘Seriously, I’m standing here with my hands covered in flour, so you can probably wave goodbye to half the Beef Wellington I was planning for this evening. Plus, you can clean the handset when you ge
t home. But to what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘How far did you get with that lamb souvlaki recipe that Irina gave you?’

  ‘About as far as buying the lamb, why?’

  ‘Fancy a dinner party sometime this coming weekend?’

  ‘We haven’t had company since Melanie went back to uni – what’s the big occasion?’

  ‘Just wanted to get a few people together, that’s all. Call it part of the new me.’

  ‘I’d rather keep the new you all to myself, but if you insist I could probably don a sexy apron and do a belly dance around the dining room, if you want all the Greek trimmings.’

  ‘I’ll order the belly dance for this evening, if I may. Just tell me that it’s not curry for dinner.’

  ‘Did that all-bran work?’

  ‘Like gelignite for the bowels. I’m thoroughly cleansed internally, let’s put it that way.’

  ‘All we need to do now is clean your mind the same way. In the meantime, I’ll look out some veils for the belly dance. But it’ll probably be some old bed sheets.’

  ‘Not after you’ve occupied them with George Clooney, I hope. See you around six.’

  Chapter Three

  Mike looked up absent-mindedly as he pushed his office door fully open, and was surprised to see a young female sitting in one of his visitors’ chairs.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ she enthused, slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m DC Cathy Norman, from the Homicide 2 Squad. The DI asked me to wait until you came in, and then request that you to sit in on an interview until he makes it in. He’s been delayed, apparently.’

  ‘It’s still only eight thirty,’ Mike pointed out drily as he glanced at the wall clock. ‘It’s a bit early for a DI, but not, it would seem, for a DCI. Who’s the interview with, what’s it about, and why so early in the day?’

  ‘He’s called Darryl Mooney, and he’s been here since two this morning, when we picked him up at a squat in Mornington. He was caught trying to use a credit card belonging to Jeremy Giles.’

  ‘That must have been cancelled a week ago, surely?’

  ‘DI Petrie asked the bank to keep it open, and programme their cash-line security CCTVs to take a snapshot if anyone tried to use it. They can do that, apparently.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind, the next time I lose mine,’ Mike replied. ‘So what’s this Darryl Whatshisname got to say for himself?’

  ‘Darryl Mooney, sir. And the only thing he’s said so far, apart from the usual “This is harassment”, “I want a solicitor”, and “Get fucked, you Fascist pigs”, is that he bought it from someone.’

  ‘I think I can guess who – or rather, I can offer you a choice of two. If he says either “Kevin Doughty” or “Troy Lesley”, you owe me a cup of that institutional bromide they call coffee downstairs. If not, the coffees are on me.’

  ‘Done deal,’ Cathy replied with an almost teenage grin, as she led the way to the lift, and down to IV 4 on the ground floor, where a dishevelled looking hippie type was sitting at a table with his hands wrapped around a mug of tea, shaking slightly in a giveaway sign that he was hanging out for his next fix.

  The uniformed constable who had been supervising him slipped discreetly out through the door, and Mike decided that ‘full frontal’ was probably as good an approach as any.

  ‘The man whose bank card you tried to use was murdered a week ago, Mr Mooney. You don’t need to be Einstein to know what I’m about to book you for.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘OK,’ Mike sighed, as he glanced down at the booking sheet on the table, ‘Darryl Brian Mooney, I’m charging you with ...’

  ‘Kevin Doughty,’ Mooney cut him off.

  ‘Once more for sound levels?’ Mike requested.

  ‘Kevin Doughty. That’s the stupid wanker what I bought it off.’

  ‘I think all the stupidity belongs on your side,’ Mike reminded him. ‘What on earth possessed you to try to punt a credit card belonging to a murder victim?’

  ‘I din’t know who the fuck ’e were, did I?’ Mooney protested. ‘As for Kevin fucking Doughty, he couldn’t murder a fart in a paper bag, the useless shit.’

  ‘When did you buy it, and how much did you pay?’ Mike persisted.

  ‘A fiver. Yesterday morning, down at the squat – Kevin were looking fer Troy the Boy, but we ain’t seen him for a week or so.’

  ‘Troy Lesley?’

  ‘No idea of his real name. We just calls him “Troy the Boy” because he rents his arse out sometimes.’

  ‘OK, book him for receiving and attempted fraud, then join me in the Dining Hall,’ Mike instructed Cathy. She smiled her acknowledgement and began to read Mooney his rights. Mike slipped out into the corridor and spoke to the uniformed constable who was hanging around the door to the interview room.

  ‘Go back in there and give DC Norman some moral back-up. She looks no older than my daughter, and she still believes in Harry Potter.’

  Back up in his office, he dialled Dave Petrie’s number in a sudden fit of optimism, but the call was intercepted by Geoff Keating.

  ‘He’s not in yet, sir,’ Mike was advised.

  ‘I’ll be in what we are encouraged to call the “Dining Hall” with DC Norman,’ Mike advised him. ‘While I’m down there, could you transfer that blue box from the DI’s office into my office? Let’s see how long it takes him to notice it’s missing.’

  ‘Will do,’ Keating confirmed with a chuckle, and Mike answered the call of free caffeine.

  Half an hour later, once Dave Petrie had joined them with a mumbled apology, Mike had supplemented his bacon sandwiches with a lecture on the importance of setting a good example to his staff, warned him that Cathy Norman was not to be exposed to anything physically dangerous until she stopped reminding Mike of his own daughter, Melanie, and was back behind his own desk, reading a somewhat dog-eared first manuscript of “The House That Screamed Injustice” that appeared to have been heavily edited by its author, Jeremy P Giles, but was still the same heap of crap Mike had read some weeks earlier. However, this time he was looking for some sort of clue to what had led to Giles’s brutal death.

  He speed-read the first two chapters, dealing with the allegedly unjust lynching of suspected witch Ursula Winthrop some five hundred years in the past, and the evil reputation that thereafter surrounded the area of the West Shire Wood known as ‘Ursula’s Grove.’ Likewise the early history of the Victorian houses erected on the site, one of which had finished up as The Pelican Club, the scene of the murder that had brought him back into Brampton in the first place. It had been unlucky before that, to judge by the number of bizarre, and usually horrible, deaths that were attributed to the building itself, and once he reached Chapter Four, which covered the past century or so, Mike began jotting down a few names.

  The three boarding school boys – Edwin Roper, George Pike and Herbert Goodall – who had died of food poisoning in 1917 had probably been exposed to nothing more malignant than the usual boarding school cuisine, and when the building had become a hospital for returning wounded from The Great War the two raped and murdered nurses, Emily Blount and Mabel Constance, didn’t quite fit the perversion profile of those who had done away with Jeremy Giles.

  The nightwatchman – Harry Pockridge - who had plunged to his death in 1938 from the third floor level of what was then a records store sounded a bit more hopeful, but then it was over sixty years in the past, and police records in those days were handwritten, and the files were recycled every ten years or so, so there was likely to be little reward in following that up. One of the vagrants who had died there in the seventies while it was lying vacant might hold the clue, if their names had escaped the shredder, but he wasn’t going to build up his hopes. As for the remaining years, when it had been a Greek church of sorts, before becoming a brothel, they were familiar enough to him from the Makitos case, and there you had it. Still, somewhere in there lay a connection with whatever else Giles had stumbled across that had cost him his life.
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  ‘I take it that the bran buds haven’t worked yet?’ Petrie enquired from Mike’s doorway.

  ‘They worked perfectly, but thank you for your concern,’ Mike assured him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I can only assume that the bollocking I got this morning was the irritable vocal end of an irritable bowel,’ Petrie replied. ‘Your nickname’s “Paddington”, by the way. You like to come across like a bear with a sore head – or, in your case, arse – but deep down we all know that you’re as sweet as marmalade.’

  ‘Don’t push your luck,’ Mike warned him, ‘and don’t make a habit of parking a DC in my office to monitor my arrival time every morning.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Dave mumbled, only slightly admonished, ‘but it was a good result. That Cathy’s a lot tougher than she looks, by the way, before you go all paternal over her.’

  ‘I cracked Mooney in ten seconds,’ Mike reminded him, ‘without which she might have been there half the morning, being verbally abused. She just doesn’t look the part.’

  ‘I don’t like the hairy armpit types,’ Dave advised him, ‘which is why I was happy to trade Sonia Kelman. But you wouldn’t believe how devastating Cathy can be on stakeouts for flashers and perverts.’

  ‘She won’t have much call for that particular talent in a murder squad,’ Mike objected. ‘But what brings you down here anyway?’

  ‘If you think like me, you’re probably planning a trip to the Carswell Estate. If Kevin Doughty had the credit card, he might have inherited the very piece of paper we’re looking for. I thought we might brave the Klondyke together – I assume you’ve had your annual tetanus shot?’

  ‘Best offer I’ve had since Cathy honoured her undertaking to buy me coffee. My car or yours?’

  ‘I’m not risking my car out there, and I suggest that you don’t either. You’d left here before the Carswell was opened, I seem to recall. April 5th, 2003, and by April 6th the fire brigade had been called out to the rubbish chutes three times. It still happens so regularly that they use it as a training exercise. Any car newer than five years old on that estate either belongs to a pimp with hired muscle, or has just been driven in by a joy-rider, and will be a burned-out shell by the next morning.’