Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  The girl turned her head to look at Stella. Her mouth was open, almost a smile; her eye-sockets were pools of darkness.

  4

  The constants in the AMIP-5 squad room were cigarettes, chocolate, crisps, coffee and mild cynicism. The crisps were always salt-and-vinegar: squad-room rules. As for chocolate, Mars bars were making a comeback. Stella had quit smoking a while ago, though her secondary intake was the equivalent of a pack a week. DI Sorley was the squad’s most dedicated smoker: his office, just down the hall from the main room, was under fog a lot of the time; the walls seemed to sweat nicotine. Sorley wasn’t just a heavy smoker, he was world class, one of the all-time greats.

  The squad white-board was decorated with a clutch of SOC photos: Tree Girl taken from the ground and from the scaffolding; all-angle shots of her as she lay on the green plastic sheet; images taken, later, at the morgue before she was put in a refrigerated unit and filed under ‘Female U-ID’. Stella had brought her coffee in from Starbucks, an early-morning treat to herself: the squad-room coffee doubled as stain-remover. The team listened as she ticked off a few facts and guesses.

  ‘A dead Caucasian female, age uncertain at this point but young, found hanging from a roadside tree in the Kensals. Significant predator damage to the corpse. We think she died sometime between nightfall on Sunday and dawn on Monday. We think she died of strangulation. We think she was killed by a man, because hauling her up into the tree took strength. We think we don’t know what else to think.’

  Maxine Hewitt said, ‘Dirty girl…’

  Stella nodded acknowledgement. ‘Yes… Which makes you think what?’

  ‘Woman-hater.’

  ‘Women, or just prostitutes?’

  ‘It’s an excuse. Remember the Yorkshire Ripper? “I was cleaning up the streets.”’ Maxine gave a sour laugh. ‘They’re filth, so it’s okay to kill them.’

  Harriman said, ‘Some guy who caught a dose, maybe. Classic Ripper motivation.’

  Sue Chapman asked, ‘Is there any reason to think she was on the game?’

  ‘We don’t know anything about her,’ Stella said. ‘Nothing. So first move: run a check on all missing-persons reports that fit her profile. Start with the most recent.’

  Mike Sorley was standing at the front of the room with Stella but a little way off, so that he didn’t appear to be running the briefing. Like all DIs, he was a paper-pusher, not a street cop. He glanced over at the white-board photos and said, ‘Can we do something about her face?’

  ‘Repair job?’ Stella asked. When Sorley nodded, she looked over towards Andy Greegan.

  ‘We can make a guess at the eye colour – brown or green given the colour of her hair – and we can do some retouching, sure. The shape of the eyes before the birds got at her… that’s something else.’

  ‘Can we at least make her look human?’ Sorley asked.

  Stella thought the girl looked all too human: human and disfigured; human and dead. She said, ‘Let’s think about this for a moment. He kills her; we don’t know why. Maybe he’s a woman-hater, maybe he feels free to kill prostitutes –’

  ‘We’re back to the Ripper,’ Maxine said.

  ‘Yes, sure, or maybe they were more closely connected than that, maybe she was a specific victim, and he killed her for a specific reason.’

  ‘And his chosen method was to hang her from a tree in a public place?’ Harriman said. ‘Doesn’t sound much like the average domestic murder, does it – bit of a falling-out over the washing-up?’

  ‘Dirty girl,’ Maxine said; ‘there’s the clue.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean she’s a prossie,’ Sue observed. ‘Cheating wife? Promiscuous daughter?’

  ‘No,’ Harriman said, ‘the clue’s in the method. It was premeditated: cold-blooded.’

  ‘People have been strangled to death in public places before,’ Andy Greegan said. ‘A guy was strung up to some park railings, remember that?’

  ‘That was a race killing. They used his shoelaces. Idea was to make it look like suicide. Our killer went prepared: he had a rope, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘He also had a method.’ Stella turned to the white-board and indicated some of the shots taken of the rope where it was secured to a branch some way beneath the hanging girl’s feet. ‘Once he’d hauled her up, he tied the rope off to this branch –’

  ‘Belayed,’ Sorley said.

  Stella turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘When you tie something off like that: it’s called belaying. Nautical term.’ He looked oddly pleased with himself.

  ‘Okay… So he knew he was going to be able to do that.’

  ‘He’d selected a tree,’ Maxine suggested.

  ‘Pre-selected, yes. DC Harriman’s right: it looks as if he’d prepared his ground.’

  Furls of smoke rolled low in the room like wave-break, or hung in mid-air streamers. Stella took a deep breath: why fight it? She said, ‘I’d be very surprised to discover this was a domestic, but let’s not rule anything out.’

  The last time she had seen a hanging it was of two children who were dangling from a banister, four little white feet treading air. It was a revenge killing. Stella had kept the children’s father in the lock-up all night, believing he had murdered his wife. He hadn’t. His sister had. His sister had also murdered the children.

  Stella had found them, and the sight had stayed with her, awake and – worse – asleep, until it seemed to be permanently in her sight, like a projected image. A week or so later she got into her car and drove until driving became impossible, then holed up in a cheap hotel, not really knowing where she was, or how she got there, or what she might do next. George found her: the tirelessly patient, tirelessly loyal George Paterson. Very soon after that, she miscarried her own child. She sometimes wondered if that had been the real beginning of the end between herself and George.

  ‘So forget the girl for a moment,’ Stella said, ‘and think about the man. Think about her killer.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘He kills her and takes her clothes off, and writes on her and –’

  ‘Or takes her clothes off and writes on her and then kills her,’ said Maxine.

  ‘Okay. We’ll know more about that after the p-m. It’s the stripping and writing… that, and stringing her up. Why? What makes him do that?’

  ‘A warning to others,’ Sue suggested.

  Harriman said, ‘You mean… what… he’s a pimp?’

  ‘It did happen near the Strip,’ Maxine reminded him. ‘Some of those girls are slave-imports.’

  ‘They run away,’ Harriman agreed, ‘or try to, and they get beaten, but a pimp wouldn’t kill one of his girls – waste of resources.’

  ‘Not always true,’ Sue said. ‘Remember Trolley-Dolly?’

  The lower half of a torso had been found in a supermarket trolley on the muddy foreshore of the Thames: a girl who had tried to run once too often. That sawn-off body, legs and pubis and butchered trunk, had been a plain message to the Bosnian and Romanian and African girls who were lured to London with the promise of jobs but found themselves raped and terrorized and put to work in massage parlours and suburban brothels. The message was keep your head down and your ass up and don’t think tricky thoughts.

  Maxine said, ‘If he killed her just because she was a hooker, there’ll be more.’

  Sorley was lighting one cigarette from the butt of another. He said, ‘It’s too early for that kind of thinking. Run a description through missing persons, take fingerprints, blood type, see if the p-m gives us anything. Let’s get an ID on her and take it from there.’

  Easily said, Stella thought. Her body naked, her face disfigured… She was anonymous but, thanks to the first editions of the tabloids, also famous. She was Body in Tree; she was Hanging Girl; she was Lynch Victim; she was Gruesome Find.

  To the guys in the forensics team, who had been everywhere, seen everything, she was Dope on a Rope.

  Stella stood at Tom Davison’s desk in the forensics department and leafed through his report,
while Davison looked over her shoulder. ‘Just the initial findings,’ he said. ‘To get more, we need to tie up with the pathologist, cross-reference, stack up some facts. It’s a fair bet that there’ll be a bewildering amount of DNA on the ground. On the tree: who knows? Difficult surfaces. The rope is likely to be our best bet. One thing we do know: he hauled her up from the ground; there was a lot of scarring on the branch caused by the rope running over.’

  ‘Which tells you what?’

  ‘Strong guy. Also tells you she was probably dead when he did it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He dumps her by the tree, then climbs up to loop the rope over a branch, then climbs down and does the business. She was either dead or unconscious. Think about it: her hands weren’t tied.’

  ‘Weren’t tied when we got there,’ Stella said.

  ‘Ask the pathologist –’

  ‘Sam Burgess.’

  ‘Right, ask him, but I don’t think there was any sign of a ligature on the wrists.’

  ‘What about the writing?’

  ‘Dirty girl?’ Stella nodded. ‘Black marker pen, so far as we can tell. We lifted a sample: soaked it, you know. It’s gone to a specialist unit, but I think you’ll find it’s the kind of thing you can buy in any newsagent’s or stationer’s.’ He paused. ‘You’ll be showing it to a handwriting expert? It’s block capitals and written on a yielding surface, but there might be something.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stella said. Then: ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Not very. Teens, early twenties. I can’t be more accurate until we’ve had some material back from the autopsy.’

  ‘Material?’

  ‘Hair samples; bone samples.’

  His office was little more than a cubicle, and he had been standing close to her as she read. Now she moved back a pace, though not just because he had invaded her body space; the uneasiness she felt went deeper than that. Stella had slept with Davison: a one-nighter, an impulse, a mistake; she had been angry with John Delaney, not sure about the relationship, and had given in to a whim.

  Since then it hadn’t been necessary for Stella to talk to Davison; nor had she answered his little flurry of emails. Now he stood close enough to kiss, and she remembered that he had been a good lover. The air was thick with things unsaid.

  ‘Full report when?’ Stella asked.

  ‘We’re backed up.’

  ‘You’re always backed up.’

  ‘The world is full of nasty people doing nasty things, DS Mooney. Our workload is a sad reflection of a society in crisis.’

  She knew that addressing her by rank and surname was his method for pointing up the tension between them; calling her Stella would have been friendly and undemanding. Forget it, she thought; it was something and nothing.

  ‘As soon as you can…’

  He smiled. ‘Goes without saying.’

  She turned to leave, but he didn’t step back. Her arm brushed his as she passed. She felt him watching her out of the room and wondered whether she could have avoided that tiny contact if she’d really wanted to. She had promised herself that she would tell Delaney about that night, that one night, but she’d tell him when the time was right. Four months had passed, nearly five, and she hadn’t found the moment.

  She never would, and she knew it.

  5

  Up above the Strip, on the crest of the rise that looks down on the neon blaze, the whoring and the hustling, stood a long terrace of three-storey houses. They were faced in dark red brick and had little stone porticoes over the windows; a hundred years ago they would have been the town houses of respectable merchants. Now they were apartments – mostly rentals, mostly short let – with shopfronts at street level.

  The house at the centre of the terrace had caught fire a year back. The owner had made some basic repairs and sold it on to a company who needed a store for their product, which was safes of all strengths and sizes. The ground-floor window carried a display of their basic models. You could buy a safe that bolted to the cellar floor, thereby making it impossible for criminals to remove it. Instead, they would wait until you got home, then hold a knife to your child’s eye to encourage you to reveal the combination. Or you could buy a small safe that looked exactly like a power socket. In this you could store your most precious items: jewellery, for instance, or the combination to the big safe in the cellar. This item was generally referred to by criminals as the ‘crap power-socket safe’.

  The first and second floors of the building were storage space, but the uppermost floor had been let through an agency. It wasn’t much: a room with a living space, a sleeping space, a kitchen space and a bathroom the size of a phone box. After the fire, the new owner had done little more than replace unsafe floorboards. Since the room was at the top of the house, it had four exposed rafter-beams, and these showed the rough edges and fissures of fire damage. The walls had been stripped back to the bare plaster, which still bore scorch marks, and there was a persistent smell of charring that nothing could mask.

  Unsurprisingly, the rent on the place was pretty low. It wouldn’t have suited many people, but it suited Gideon Woolf. He hadn’t signed the rental agreement in his own name, but he paid cash and he paid on time, so he could have signed Mickey Mouse and no one would have cared. As a child, ‘Gideon’ wasn’t a name that had done him many favours, but he knew that Gideon meant ‘great warrior’, and it was a name that suited him now.

  Gideon had been renting the burned room in the burned house for a few months. He lived alone, and he liked it that way. He liked being up high, being able to look down. He liked the simple life he led: fast food, canned food, packet food; a good supply of whisky; his laptop and his computer games. He was crazy about his computer games. There was one called Silent Wolf; initially, he had bought it for the name – his name – but now he played it all the time.

  Silent Wolf was a man with a narrow face, heavy sideburns and a mane of coarse yellow hair that fell to his neck. The pupils of his eyes were yellow; his incisors were thick and took a slight curve. He wore a cloak like a pelt, beneath which he was all muscle and sinew. He wore a single glove to let people know that he carried a weapon; its fingers were cut short to just above the knuckle. He had a small arsenal at his disposal, but his weapon of choice was the knife.

  Silent Wolf’s history was what you might expect: abandoned as a child, brought up by canis lupus, lived in the wild until hunters spotted him, and his entire pack was killed in order that he might be rescued. That slaughter broke him, though he healed quickly, as an animal does. The problem was that he healed crooked. Attempts to tame him failed. Now Silent Wolf lived in the no-go areas of an unnamed city, the badlands and borderlands, where he stood for swift justice. His body, like his mind, bore scars, but he walked the city streets at night, alone and unafraid, ready to kill if there was killing to be done.

  The game was aimed primarily at pre-teen boys, but 26-year-old Gideon was both addict and aficionado. Like Silent Wolf, Gideon Woolf was on a mission.

  6

  In the post-mortem room of the morgue, there was music in the air along with ethanol and a faint underlying whiff of decay. Sam Burgess liked easy listening in the autopsy room, because looking was often far from easy.

  Steel tables, steel drains, steel instruments, blood on the slab, Grieg on the CD player. Sam had a monkish fringe of hair turning mottled grey, deft hands and a soft voice with which to describe death in all its forms.

  ‘People think that your neck breaks and you’re gone,’ he said. ‘That’s what the drop was for, or so they imagine. Those stories about the hangman secretly sizing up his victim, calculating height and weight, making the calculation… Truth is, no matter how you hang someone, they strangle. Death by strangulation. The effect of the drop is to sever the spinal cord and make things a bit more humane, that’s all: breaking the neck renders the person unconscious, so the strangulation takes place without a lot of jerking and writhing. It’s painless.’

  ‘Did her nec
k break?’ Stella was looking at the body of Tree Girl lying on the dissecting table. There was a stillness about her that was unlike any other: not the stillness of something inert – a rock, a piece of furniture, something that had never moved – no, this was an unnatural stillness, a kind of absence.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was she dead when he hung her up there?’

  Sam shook his head; his voice grew a little quieter. ‘No, she died of asphyxia. Clear evidence of that: facial congestion, swollen tongue, cyanosis as a result of constriction of the large blood vessels in the neck. The brain is gradually starved of oxygen; the technical term is anoxia.’

  ‘How long would she have taken to die?’

  ‘Brain death or whole body death?’

  It was a distinction that hadn’t occurred to Stella. She said, ‘Both. Either…’

  ‘A conscious person might take, say, two or three minutes before they start to close down. They’ll struggle during that time: kick, squirm, you know…’ Sam paused. ‘Is this need to know?’

  ‘Well, it’s not want to know.’

  ‘From that point to brain death… three minutes? Four? It depends. After that it’s just a slow, natural process: asphyxiation or maybe cardiac arrest. Anything between five to fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Fifteen?’

  ‘Could be. The person’s deeply unconscious, though.’

  ‘Oh, well…’ Stella looked again at Tree Girl’s dark, distorted face. ‘Oh, well… that’s okay, then.’

  ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ Sam said, ‘she probably didn’t know a thing about it. Look.’

  He moved to the top of the table, and Stella followed. A patch of hair, close to the crown on the right side, had been shaved from Tree Girl’s skull. Stella could see a cut, surrounded by a dark contusion.