Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  ‘The head wound caused a hairline fracture of the skull; the bone is slightly depressed; I’m pretty sure we’re going to find a subdural haematoma.’

  Sam worked with an assistant called Giovanni, a man of smiles and little speech. He brought to the table a trepanning saw and a bone saw and set them down with a conscientious deftness: tools of the trade. He and Sam had already examined Tree Girl’s body, had combed her and swabbed her and touched her in places where even a lover would have hesitated to go. Now they would get to the heart of her – literally. As Sam prepared to make the great ‘Y’ incision that would lay her body open from clavicle to pubis, Stella turned away.

  Sam worked swiftly and surely as Giovanni sprung the ribcage to let him in among the delicate wet tubers and strange blooms: the lung-tree, the rich red pod of the heart which might, at some stage, have held all manner of secrets but now was empty and still. It was this that Stella turned from: the first long cut that made flesh meat and exposed the inner workings, the moving parts, the cogs and wheels, the plumbing. The human body as mere machine.

  ‘There’ll be some handwriting experts along; sometime this afternoon,’ Stella said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam nodded. ‘I saw the writing on her back. It’s in capitals. Will they get much from that?’

  Stella shrugged. ‘Who knows? Can you tell how old she is?’

  ‘Forensics,’ Sam said. ‘Bone –’

  ‘Sample, hair sample, I know. Take a guess?’

  ‘From the musculature, physical development, elasticity of skin and so on –’

  ‘I won’t hold you to it.’

  ‘Twenty or younger.’

  After that, Sam didn’t speak for a while: too absorbed in his work. He handed Giovanni the liver, which Giovanni took to a scales to be weighed, carrying the organ carefully, as if it were something rare. Finally, he said, ‘Okay. We’ll have her looking presentable by the time the graphologists arrive.’

  Stella said, ‘A couple of questions.’ Sam waited. ‘Evidence of recent sexual activity?’

  ‘Not sure; not unprotected, anyway.’

  ‘So, no semen.’

  ‘No semen.’

  ‘But she could have had sex –’

  ‘The swabs might tell us. I’ll get back to you.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stella said. Then: ‘The head wound… and how long before she died?’

  ‘Not sure yet. More to do on that.’ Sam was bent over Tree Girl’s body like a mechanic over a faulty engine. He paused and looked up. ‘You want to know whether he took her there conscious or unconscious.’

  ‘Might make a difference: potential witnesses, what they saw, what they didn’t see. If she was conscious, people might have noticed a struggle, something of that sort.’

  ‘Someone seeing a struggle would have intervened, surely,’ Sam observed. ‘Gone to help.’

  Stella smiled. ‘Would you?’

  Sam said nothing. Giovanni positioned a body block to elevate the head, and Sam made an incision at the back of the head and took the cut from behind the right ear across the forehead to the left ear; then he peeled back the scalp. Giovanni switched on the bone saw. A high, thin whine filled the room. He handed the implement to Sam, who made a cut line just where Tree Girl’s hair line would have been.

  Stella hadn’t expected an answer. There was no aggression in Sam’s world, no fear, no sudden cries for help, no moral dilemmas. When he cut the connection with the spinal cord and eased out the brain, Stella took a step forward, as if half expecting the face of Tree Girl’s killer to be found there, like an image on a screen, her last sight of any living thing.

  7

  The Harefield Estate is a war zone: sometimes guerrilla war, sometimes all-out war, but always war. The timid non-combatants walk the battle lines with their heads down and their hands full of bags from Primark or Shoprite.

  Between the land of civilians and the high-rise blocks of the estate was the DMZ, which, like all stretches of no man’s land, bore the scars and detritus of conflict. Everything out there was ripped up or burned out: stoves, fridges, cars, sofas, a lone bed; and, topping all that, a strewage of condoms, syringes, fast-food boxes. An enterprising art-dealer could have thrown a rope round the whole thing and claimed it as a vast installation.

  Alongside the tiny, wind-buffeted apartments of the innocents who prayed for a few days’ ceasefire were stills, casinos, armourers, whorehouses, drug factories, drug-distribution centres and drug-wholesale facilities. The blocks surrounded a circular area that locals called the Bull Ring, but to reach it you would first have to negotiate the maze of pathways that only those who lived there had mapped. You would also have to risk the walk spaces under each stilt-lifted block.

  On a day that was too warm, and in a way that was all too usual, drug deals were going down along the pathways, hookers were going down in doorways, and, in the walk space under Block C, one man was killing another. The killer’s name was Arthur Dorey, but no one called him that. He was Sekker: it was short for secateurs, because that particular garden tool was the method of persuasion he most often chose. Shake hands with Sekker, people said, and then count your fingers: after which they would laugh. Well, some of them would laugh. Just at that moment, though, Sekker wasn’t too interested in persuasion. He was getting a job done. It was a paid job, and Sekker needed the money because he was hoping to take his girl to Barbados before the hurricane season.

  The job involved ending the life of a man whose name, Sekker thought, was Barry. Barry or Gary: that sort of a jerk-off name. Barry or Gary owed money to some people who didn’t tolerate debt. The job wasn’t proving difficult. Some one had pointed Barry or Gary out in the pub, and Sekker had followed him out into the street and across the DMZ until he took the short-cut under Block C. Sekker’s method of execution was messy and somewhat gruesome, but Barry or Gary had upset some unforgiving people, and they were anxious that he should suffer before he died.

  Sekker was wearing protective clothing for the job, and he sweated freely. When it was over, he shrugged out of the heavy cotton overalls and put them into a small rucksack along with the rest of his equipment. This left him in just his chinos and a polo shirt. He sauntered across the DMZ and walked on for half a mile or so – far enough from the job site – and found a bar, where he ordered a long, cold glass of export lager. It had been hot work, and he needed to slake his thirst.

  The first mouthful went down without touching the sides. Sekker laughed at the thought. You couldn’t say that of the drink he’d just given to Barry. Or Gary. Sekker still had to set up his alibi, but he didn’t feel the need to get clear of the area. Even in warm weather there were too many competing odours on Harefield for the smell of a corpse to be distinguished from any other, and anyone going through that dank, dark space would take the dead man for a rough sleeper.

  *

  In fact, he had lain beneath Block C for a night and a morning when Stella and Pete Harriman parked in the Bull Ring. Or, rather, when their driver parked. No one who knew the place left a car unattended on Harefield.

  Stella knew it well. She had grown up on the estate.

  They were there because a missing-persons check had turned up a mugshot that could have been Tree Girl before someone had roped her and hauled her and left her for the birds. A picture of a girl taken at a party: she was looking into the camera and smiling a wide smile. The person in question was called Bryony Dean, and the place she was missing from was Apartment 1136, Block A, Harefield Estate.

  8

  Melanie Dean was a bird-boned woman with a worried look. Her daughter had gone missing, and that should have been enough to worry any mother, but her frown and the down-turned corners of her mouth had more to do with getting a visit from Stella and Harriman. Melanie was one of Hare-field’s non-combatants, but she thought in military terms: ‘collateral damage’; ‘codes of conduct’. One such code said don’t speak to cops. This rule could be extended to mean don’t speak to anyone. Or, simply, don’t spea
k.

  ‘I didn’t report her,’ Melanie said. ‘That was Chris.’ She said it as if Stella might know Chris and his gabby ways.

  ‘Can we talk to Chris?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t know. Gone.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For ever, I expect.’

  ‘No,’ Stella said, ‘how long since he left?’

  ‘Couple of months?’

  ‘Chris’s last name is…?’

  ‘Fuller.’

  ‘And Chris wasn’t her father?’

  Melanie looked at her as if she’d spoken in Swahili; then she laughed, a sour cough. ‘That bastard.’

  ‘She hasn’t been in touch with you?’ Harriman asked.

  ‘She’s seventeen,’ Melanie said. ‘Got her own life to lead.’

  ‘Is that how you see it?’

  ‘She’ll be all right.’

  ‘So… why did he report her missing?’

  ‘We got up one morning, she was gone. No letter or anything; no phone call. I suppose he was worried.’

  Harriman nodded. ‘And you?’

  ‘She’ll be all right.’

  Stella offered Melanie a retouched photo: Tree Girl with a cosmetic tweak, brown eyes wide. The woman studied it for a while. ‘Certainly looks like her, don’t it?’ She spoke as if Stella might know; as if she and Bryony had been friends.

  ‘But it’s not?’ Harriman suggested.

  Melanie shook her head. ‘Nah. It’s got the look of her, though. Specially round the eyes.’

  They walked the sky-high concrete rat-run that led from the row of front doors to the stairwell.

  ‘This is just a guess,’ Harriman said, ‘but I wonder whether Chris left at roughly the same time as Bryony.’

  ‘Not long afterwards,’ Stella agreed, ‘and with as little warning.’

  ‘He reported her missing –’

  ‘So that Melanie wouldn’t think Bryony’s disappearance had anything to do with his.’

  ‘But in truth –’

  ‘Melanie has put one and one together and come up with a happy couple.’

  Some of the front-door windows of the apartments in the facing block still had glass in the frame; others were boarded up or had been replaced with steel shutters. The dealers liked steel; their doors were backed with it, and some had steel hatches fitted, so goods could be exchanged for cash hand to hand and no faces visible. Just now, the dealers were doing high-volume business in Nazi crank, drug of choice for the DIY enthusiast; you could cook it up out of ingredients from any hardware store and your local pharmacy.

  A cloud moved away from the sun, and the light flashed like Morse on one of the windows, drawing Stella’s eye. As she looked, a man and a woman were about to enter one of the apartments. The woman turned half-profile to say something, then the man opened the door and they went inside.

  Stella was looking down a long, black tunnel, and her legs were folding under her. Harriman had taken three or four steps before he realized she wasn’t beside him. When he looked back, she was sitting on the walkway, eyes fixed and breathing hard. He went back and stooped to help her up, but without looking directly at him she lifted an arm to ward him off.

  She said, ‘Wait.’

  After a moment, her breathing slowed and she got to her feet. Harriman said, ‘What was it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Stella shook her head.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not nothing, Boss.’

  She had started towards the stairwell, taking long strides, walking with her head down and her hands pushed into her jacket pockets. Harriman kept pace. He said, ‘Not nothing: something. What?’

  Stella shook her head as if it were too trivial to mention. ‘I’ve got my period, I didn’t eat breakfast, my body-sugar levels are probably round my ankles.’

  ‘Ah,’ Harriman said, ‘women’s issues.’

  They clattered down the stairwell. You never left a car unattended, you never took the lift. The stairs carried graffiti tags and the dry stains of piss runnels. The smell was enough to ream your sinuses.

  ‘It’s a bastard,’ Harriman said, ‘all that monthly stuff…’ Stella looked at him; he seemed to have more on the subject. Harriman shrugged. ‘For guys?’ he said. ‘Very inconvenient.’

  *

  It wasn’t her, it just looked like her.

  Round the eyes – like Bryony?

  It looked like her, but it wasn’t her.

  How do you know?

  It couldn’t have been.

  How do you know?

  She lives in Manchester. She’s hooked up with some guy.

  Yes, the last you heard… How do you know where she is; who she’s with? You haven’t spoken to her in ten years.

  She hasn’t spoken to me.

  Stella arguing with herself: one voice, two opinions, shared anger.

  So you’re saying it was her double…

  Listen: ten years, right? She wouldn’t even look like that any more.

  Her hair comes out of a bottle, her face is courtesy of Avon, why would she look any different?

  Ten-year-old Stella sitting in her room high in the sky and watching the clouds roll by. Watching the lights of the planes as they drop into the Heathrow corridor. Watching the minutes tick by until the person social services liked to call ‘the sole responsible parent’ comes back from wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, whoever she’s doing it with.

  Little Stella Mooney: just like a motherless child.

  It can’t be her. She’s gone.

  Find out.

  I don’t need to.

  Are you sure?

  Sure.

  Go back. Knock at the door.

  No, she’s gone. Gone for good.

  Good.

  Stella emerged from the stairwell into the Bull Ring and walked through a group of kids in hoodies drinking alcopops and smoking. The air was rich with the scent of dope. They were engaged in a stare-down with the driver of the car. It was an unmarked vehicle, but might just as well have carried a sign that said POLICE in strobe neon. Someone had finger-written FILTH in the dust on the rear window.

  She dropped into the back seat and yanked the door closed. Harriman got in beside her. The driver was still eyeballing the kids as if he represented the long arm of the law, or some equally farcical notion.

  Stella said, ‘Get me the fuck out of this place.’

  Giovanni brought Tree Girl out of the freezer on a whisper of rollers and peeled the sheet back to the small of her waist.

  He had stowed her face down so the handwriting experts wouldn’t have to see the cobbled stitches that went from throat to groin, or the staples fastening her brow, or the eyeless face. The experts looked as if they had been hand-picked for contrast: one tall, one short, the tall one pale with wild hair, the short one coffee-coloured and bald. Tall and pale winced and swayed slightly as the sheet came off. After a moment they bent to their task, they made notes, they conferred, then they left, smiling and nodding at Giovanni as if that sort of thing was all in a day’s work.

  Giovanni turned Tree Girl right side up and slid her back into the dark.

  9

  John Delaney stood in the hallway of the Holland Park Avenue mansion and looked at the art on the walls: to one side, old masters; facing them, BritArt.

  A pastoral scene in opposition to a lino-swatch. A haloed virgin facing up to a grainy black-and-white enlargement of a female nude. The nude made him laugh, once he’d worked out what it was: at first he’d mistaken it for a tunnel on a mountain road.

  A secretary informed him that Mr Bowman would be happy to see him now. Delaney wanted to say, ‘Would he? How happy? Happier than he was to keep me waiting for twenty minutes? Well, tell Mr Bowman to go fuck himself.’ He didn’t say it, because he needed the interview: one in a series he was writing on London’s Rich List. Delaney was a journalist who had traded war-zone reporting for home-front features, and there wer
e times, like this, when he missed the sound of shell-burst and dust under the tongue. Just lately, he’d started to miss that a lot.

  The secretary took him up to the second floor, leading the way. She was two steps above him, which brought her ass to his eye line; it was a good ass, and Delaney decided to think of this brief encounter with it as a form of compensation.

  Stanley Bowman’s office was the size of the average London apartment. He smiled at Delaney but didn’t come out from behind his very large, very clear desk. He was a lean man in his late forties. He wore a little goatee and a moustache that trailed out towards the points of his jaw: gunslinger’s trim. In the course of the interview he spoke of taking scalps and making dawn raids; of shooting from the hip, of robbing the bank, of the cavalry coming over the hill, his soft Scottish burr at odds with the shoot-’em-up terminology. He got up to pour a couple of drinks, and Delaney caught his profile: sharp and clean, just the merest hint of slack under the jaw.

  Speaking of profit, Bowman said, ‘It’s not about making money. It’s about making money make money.’

  Speaking of bluff and holding your nerve, he said, ‘Not all trappers wear fur hats.’

  By the time the interview had ended, Delaney had started to like someone he had previously decided to despise. As they parted, Bowman said, ‘I read some of your stuff before agreeing to see you. Sarajevo, Rwanda, First Gulf War: you were there for all that.’ Delaney nodded. ‘And now this.’ Bowman raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I got scared,’ Delaney said.

  Bowman laughed. ‘Good reason.’

  The AMIP-5 basement was hot, and no one could find a fan. DC Sue Chapman had opened the window that let on to the street, but the down-draught of cadmium and caesium and carbon dioxide did nothing more than stir the room’s thick haze of cigarette smoke.

  Stella was reading through the preliminary report from Tall-Pale and Short-Bald.

  We have been asked to provide, so far as possible, a psychological profile of the person who inscribed the words DIRTY GIRL on the back of a female murder victim. Accordingly, we made a visit to the morgue and viewed the exhibit.