by Valerie Laws
‘Thank you, we can manage without your medical expertise for now.’ Will got up and walked around the room, stretching his arms above his head ostentatiously. He came back and stood over her, doing some more looming.
Hassan said, ‘That’s all for now. Thank you for your statement. The constable will read it back to you. We’ll get your shoes back to you as soon as possible. We may need to talk to you again - oh, and we’ll need your fingerprints and a DNA sample.’
Will turned suddenly as he walked out. ‘I’m sorry you had to find him like that.’
She wondered how much of Will’s DNA was still in her bedroom. Housework wasn’t one of her priorities.
Paul Lozinski wasted no time in buttonholing Sally Banner to ask about the atmosphere between Will and Erica.
‘Oh gan on man, woman,’ he said in his Geordie way, ‘give iz the dirt!’
‘They were involved in a big case together, THE big case, we all were, you can look it up, but the Guv saved that bitch’s life, straight up, all she did was interfere with the investigation, and then she binned him like a used rubber. He’s still cut up about it I reckon. And he should have been a DCI by now, but he’s not. I reckon she’s crushed his ambition.’
‘That Stonehead case? Fuck me!’
‘No, Paul, I won’t, you’ll have to use online porn as usual.’
‘Can’t you console the Guv, Sally? Get the feeling you’d be up for that.’
‘Sod off, Paul.’ Sally’s gamine freckled face and Peter Pan hairdo did nothing to disarm the anger in her light brown eyes. ‘But she’s bad news, and it’s no coincidence she’s mixed up in this. Mark my words.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Later, when Erica was home and alone in her beloved mews flat further along the coast, she found herself feeling sick. She took her constitutional remedy and lay down to meditate, but couldn’t concentrate on the mantra. All that filled her head was a picture of that obscene table and its load. The spikes, the impaled hands with their pathetically curled fingers. The crude stone hammer. The sheer primitive hatred that lay behind such a sustained attack on a human being. Was it some grim mockery of religion, the crucified hands, the crown of steel thorns? Was it a parody of a medical operation, using the table he used for examining his private patients, the deliberately clumsy methods a travesty of the surgeon’s delicate skill - the rock to the back of the head as anaesthetic, the bashed-in nails a crude surgical procedure?
How could anyone hate someone that much? And why?
It was no use. She had to get up and get out. She rolled off the bed, bundled up the borrowed clothes she’d shucked off and dropped on the floor, and pulled on a cropped top and lycra shorts. She tied back her hair and made for the gym on her bike, her legs going like pistons as she wove through the traffic, veins full of unused adrenaline. There was a high impact class on, and she was as late as they’d allow her to join in. She fell in through the door, took up a position near the mirror where she could study her muscle groups and check her stance and let the thumping beat of the music carry her as she began.
All thought stopped, there was no time for it, all was sensation, she reached, stretched, feeling her muscles and skin responding. She was in control, her strong heart filled her chest with its confident drum beat. That was her in the wall-sized mirror, her body small beside most of the others but strong, and not too thin at all whatever anyone said. Thin was good, thinner was better, thin enough to be safe from the danger of letting out the fat girl she’d once been, the girl who was still inside and needed to be starved into submission. Her hair lashed about, her eyes looking into their reflection. Her lips were parted, her face was flushed and her chest heaved, her breasts pressed almost flat under the tight lycra. Keep those buttocks clenched, the trainer shouted, and she did. Then she did a session on the weights and then on the stepping machine, climbing as if the devil was after her.
When the session ended, her body was shaking again, but this time like a horse that’s given its best in the race. The shower was hot and stinging like needles. She turned it to cool and felt the beginning of the blissful well-earned languor that follows hard exercise. She dumped the bag of clothes in her friend’s locker, glad she hadn’t told her who she was interviewing.
Erica had a sudden memory of asking her for the clothes, telling her she’d arranged an interview with ‘a hard man to pin down’. Somebody had managed it now. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
She headed home, where she pounded out and sent a full report to the paper, giving all the details she could remember, hoping that Gary Thomas had been kept at bay. She rarely switched her phone off but she’d kept it off since her police interview; it was acting like it had Tourette’s as emails, tweets, facebook messages, missed calls and texts flooded in as the day progressed into evening. Not many people had known she was interviewing Kingston, but Stacey Reed made up for them with a digital bombardment like some kind of Stalky McPsycho ex-boyfriend from hell. No way was Erica going to reply, she was too wrecked. Luckily it wouldn’t occur to Stacey to actually come to the flat. She would be furious to have missed being at Kingston’s today. The thing she was most passionate about, even more than sex or alcohol or food, was the media, being in or on it. She’d had a taste of it at Stonehead through Erica, which was why, rather than ‘work experience’ to keep the Job Seekers lot happy, she was sticking close to Erica as her best chance to get more.
The Evening Guardian had printed Erica’s name (‘our very own fearless health reporter’) in their write-up, so Erica had to deal with a worried call from her mother using her landline, and a few other friends who had that number, though she didn’t want to talk about dead bodies any more. At least until tomorrow.
All communication with the outside world off or silent, she settled down with a glass of claret and her current Patrick O’Brian novel, where doctors used leather-covered chains to hold down their fully conscious patients while sawing off their mutilated limbs. How did a person stand that much pain? Had Kingston really been unconscious, or just badly injured enough to be helpless? It was no good, her thoughts would not stay in the Napoleonic Wars.
Surgeons thinking they were Jesus Christ. She’d used those words. Now they stuck in her mind. She had certainly met some arrogant doctors... and many patients came to her after being fobbed off and patronised by some doctor who thought any ailment not curable by a prescription must be imaginary. But she knew a lot of good doctors too, and worked in cooperation with a few. And this one was now a victim. There was something at the back of her mind, something to do with Jesus Christ. Later in the night, she had strange dreams.
‘Pulsatilla!’ she said aloud, waking up for the third time. This time, she had had one of her homeopathic dreams, about Pulsatilla, the Pasque Flower, which was a common homeopathic remedy. Jesus was standing in front of her, and he was holding a sprig of the purple flower in his hand. It grew and blossomed around the nail sticking out of his palm.
CHAPTER SIX
At the morning briefing Wydsand Police Station was humming with excitement sporadically suppressed every time officers remembered somebody was horribly dead. This being north east England in a seaside town, he might well be somebody their mams knew. In fact being spotted at a crucial moment by someone your mam knew had largely been the reason for the traditional shortage of serious crime in the area.
Soon they’d be getting all the latest information, and there might be some surprises. Photographs of Kingston before and after his illegal operation were on display: a headshot of the handsome, confident doctor, the thick dark brown hair, dark strongly-marked brows, the healthy colour of the keen world-wide golfer and the white teeth courtesy of an expensive dentist friend. The ‘after’ pictures, of his bizarrely crowned, pale, bloodstreaked, uninhabited face made a sobering contrast.
Despite the carefully custom-made coffee handed to him by Sally Banner, Will Bennett was looking grim too, but Hassan knew this was not so much about sorrow for the dead as a
haunting fear that the case would be given to someone else further up the food chain. And speaking of food... Superintendent Russ ‘Golden Boy’ George hove into view like an oil tanker headed for scrap. Large, bedecked with stains and slow moving, he descended onto a chair like a local government planning committee on an unauthorised gazebo.
‘Coffee!’ he barked at Paul Lozinski, who jumped and dithered, but as no female officer rescued him he scuttled off to get some with all the courage of despair, as the Super added, ‘Three sugars, milk, not that skimmed crap though, and any biscuits?’
‘Er no sir.’ Paul rushed over, slopping coffee over the rim, to the Super who grunted, gave him a look that promised career blight, and balanced the dripping mug on his belly adding further to the detritus already there.
Sally and Hassan exchanged looks, then dared to glance at Will whose face was carefully blank. His contempt for his ‘superior’ was as legendary as the Super’s passion for food and his garden, in that order. It was Will who had originated the nickname of ‘Golden Boy’, by saying, ‘George could make masterly inactivity an Olympic event and win gold medals.’ It took all the will power he could round up not to show his utter disdain for the Super, to whom he had to kowtow. Erica had had no sympathy, pointing out ‘If you choose to work in a hierarchy...’
Sally might blame Erica but Will himself blamed Golden Boy for his lack of promotion. He should be a DCI by now, he’d worked hard for it, he was bright, efficient, and he had a good team. He’d brought the Stonehead case to a conclusion, made arrests, what happened after was not his fault. But mud had stuck. And so had George’s liking for keeping his budget down and getting Will to do a DCI’s work, ably backed up by Massum, who should have been at least a DI by now but determinedly put family first, as did his equally efficient teacher wife. They had an agreement to reach a certain level of promotion and then stop there. For the present anyway, while the children still needed so much of their time and energy.
After some audible slurping, George asked Will to lead the briefing. Will darted him a gimlet look under his long black lashes. Did this mean the case was his?
Will began by giving a summing up of the crime scene from the day before.
‘Surely some kind of sadist?’ suggested a PC, Kev Hodges.
‘Was Kingston into some kind of kinky stuff?’ put in Paul. ‘Anything dodgy on his computers?’
‘Pretty hardcore kinky, those nails, Paul, whatever you like doing on your nights off,’ remarked Hassan to general laughter and nudging of Paul. ‘And no, nothing of significance as yet reported by the geek squad, though they’ve got more to do yet of course. So far, no kiddy porn, no death threats, no organised crime connections, nothing you wouldn’t expect from a well to do, well-respected surgeon with a successful career. So far.’
‘Dr Johnstone’s doing the PM later this morning, and of course some tests will take a while to come back after that. But he was able to come up with some provisional info from a preliminary examination of the body.’ Will was all brisk business. ‘Major depressed fracture to the back of the skull, causing unconsciousness, in fact probably would have been fatal if left at that.’
‘Not really a lot of blood from that though Guv,’ Hassan put in.
‘No well I’ll come to that. Looks like that stone was the culprit.’
‘So Erica Bruce was right!’ Paul said, deadpan. Sally gave him a furious look, and Will’s face, beginning to be animated, closed again. ‘She said he was unconscious or dying when it was done.’
‘The nails,’ Will tried to carry on regardless, looking at the initial results of Johnstone’s examination, ‘were driven in with the stone, almost certainly after the injury at the back, and each of the seven pierced the skull and entered the brain. Death will have occurred during this process. There were also the two in the hands which may have been driven in before the skull spikes. Hassan, you’ve got info about the nails.’
‘Er yes. The seven spikes, or nails, or whatever you want to call them, are in fact surgical pins. They were used until relatively recently in external fixators, that is, used for fixing broken bones instead of plaster. Pins were screwed into the bones and bolted to bars which held the site still while healing got under way.’
Hassan put up on the screen a picture grabbed from Google Images of a patient bristling with spikes in left lower leg and arm. ‘Frequently needed for sports or road traffic injuries like tibia fractures.’ He looked meaningfully at the football-mad PCs who’d been miming vomiting at the description. ‘Nowadays orthopaedic surgeons tend to use Ilizarov Frames, with multiple thin wires instead of groups of two or four large pins, and a system of concentric rings as a frame. These can be used for leg lengthening as well as healing fractures.’
‘So how did the killer get hold of these old-fashioned thingies?’ asked PC Kev Hodges, trying to recover his credibility.
‘No help to us there, I’m afraid. Kingston had some on his desk, in the murder room, loose in a dish, as well as some of the newest kind. Perhaps to show patients, perhaps a souvenir. So ironically he was killed by his own instruments.’
‘Maybe a personal motive there then sir,’ said Paul.
‘Maybe.’
‘But did the killer know they were there in advance, or just notice them at the time, Guv?’
‘We don’t know, Sally. But good point to consider. Any more, Hassan?’
‘Well this is an example of the pins in Kingston’s skull.’ He held up a slim steel spike, like a six inch nail, with no head to speak of and a thin tracing of threading lower down where it would be screwed into living bone. ‘It’s a biggie, so most likely it was used or designed for tibia fractures. The tibia being roughly speaking the lower leg bone which forms your shin. Fractures at high speeds or with a shearing action can cause compound fractures with a lot of displacement, where the bone comes through the skin...’
‘Oh yes,’ Kev put in, ‘a mate of a mate tripped in a hole playing footie. You could see the bones sticking out my mate said...’
‘Yes well,’ Hassan kept going, ‘these look like tibia fracture pins, but whether they have any deep semiotic significance we don’t know.’
‘Semi what?’ The Super seemed to wake up suddenly. ‘Wossat?’
‘Erm semiotic sir, it means symbolic.’
Golden Boy muttered, ‘Bollix alright,’ and lapsed back into what may have been deep thought.
‘What about time of death Guv?’ asked Paul, still trying to mend fences.
‘Pathologist thinks during the night. Maybe he can narrow it down later.’
‘Break-in?’ wondered Sally. ‘Burglary gone wrong?’
‘Hit man?’ Kev was getting overexcited now.
Will chose to ignore his suggestion. ‘No signs of one. A break-in that is. No signs yet of any unexplained visitors, but there are reasons for that which we’ll go into in a while...’
Golden Boy George reared up again with a throat-clearing growl. ‘Release the kraken,’ whispered Paul to Sally who dug him in the ribs to shut up.
‘Right lads and lasses,’ GB announced. ‘No sign of break-in, objects used were at the scene, and I think we can go out on a limb and deduce,’ he waved a large hand with soil-blackened fingernails at the death scene photographs, ‘somebody didn’t like him.’
‘Er right sir.’ Will was wary.
‘And,’ GB went on, ‘we have a femme to cherchez. Viz, the wife, or ex-wife, or separated wife, wossername?’
‘Tessa Kingston sir,’ put in Hassan.
‘Yes her. So Massum, forget for now all that semolina bollix and let’s go for Occam’s Razor eh?’
‘Razor?’ Paul was confused.
Will was startled, yet again he’d been lulled into comfortable contempt for the Super’s vestigial stegosaurus brain, yet every now and then a flash of something, like a gold tooth in a tramp’s mouth, suggested a glint of quality peeping through the composting manure between his ears.
‘Yes laddie, Occam’s Razor,
ie, simplest explanation is usually the right one. I have every faith in Inspector Bennett, and I’m sure he’ll get her, erm or whoever’s responsible, in double quick time. And I’m sure he’ll be sending some of you children off to bring her in asap. Over to you, Will!’
Further along the coast, Erica Bruce was doing her usual morning mile swim, swooping up and down the lengths and playing David Guetta tracks in her head, even occasionally singing a few lines underwater, to while away the sixty-four lengths of the seafront pool. As often in water, stroked by infinite wet fingers, and out of it too come to that, she felt horny, and it was annoyingly natural for her to think of Will Bennett, as she’d been reminded yesterday that he was fit, in both senses of the word. There’d been chemistry between them, and quite a bit of biology too, to say nothing of physics... she pictured his dark head between her pale thighs, as the delicious ache in her groin under the seam of her costume throbbed in time with a Guetta choon... shame it hadn’t worked out, the sex was great and that would have been fine by her but a whole lot of relationship crap had somehow got in the way. Thought he had the right to input on her profession, her life. He was so full of himself... she wouldn’t mind being full of him right now... No, stop it Erica, time to get somebody else to train up. Anyhow, Will was too tall for her. You can’t get your feet over a guy’s shoulders if he’s a lot taller than you, flexible as you might be. And she was.
She tried thinking about the murder to get Will’s rather beautiful cock out of her head (and there was another image!) Who could have done that to Kingston? Well, of course forensics would be finding out all sorts of stuff CSI-stylee. A single hair, a single grain of a rare chemical, a single fag end in an alley, that sort of thing is what you saw on TV. In real life, there’d be detritus of all kinds tracked in on shoes, blown in on the wind, dropped from coats which had picked it up on the Metro or rubbing shoulders with rush-hour crowds, over random periods of time. Murder was almost as intimate as sex, and sometimes they occurred together.