by Rob Ashman
‘I think it’s his skin,’ replied Mitch. ‘There are two circular burn marks on each temple, and the jugular vein on the right-hand side has been severed.’
Kray shifted her position to see the single stab wound to the victim’s neck and two circular blemishes stood out black against the colourless skin.
‘By the look of the blood spatter against the balustrade, he was stabbed when he was still alive,’ Kray said.
‘Yes, it looks like arterial flow.’
‘Do you have a cause of death?’
‘Exsanguination. Whatever happened to him beforehand didn’t kill him. He was alive when his jugular was severed. His heart was still beating and pumped his blood onto the floor.’
Kray looked around at the extent of the discoloured carpet. ‘I reckon it took more than nine pints and a full bladder to make this mess.’ She dabbed her index finger into pile and held it to her nose. ‘What’s the deal with him being stripped naked, apart from his socks?’ Kray tipped her head towards the ceiling.
‘Don’t know. Until we get him down and conduct a thorough examination, there are a lot of unanswered questions.’
‘The carpet on the stairs is wet but not from blood. Any ideas?’
‘Not yet. We’ve taken a sample away for analysis.’
‘Got a time of death?’
‘Best estimate at this stage is between eight pm and midnight yesterday. The first officer on the scene reported there was no sign of a forced entry.’
‘Does the maid have her own key, or does he leave one out for her?’
‘Wow there, Acting DCI Kray, I think you’ll find that’s your job,’ Mitch called over his shoulder as he walked out into the hallway.
‘Thanks for that. This is going to take a bit to unravel.’ Kray stood up and was about to retrace her steps when something caught her eye on the bannister. She clicked on her pen light and shone the beam onto the wooden handrail to her right. ‘Did you see this?’ She called after Mitch.
‘See what?’
‘Looks like blood on the bannister.’ The torch beam illuminated the dark red smear.
‘No, I missed that. Is it a hand or shoe print?’
‘Now who’s job are we talking about?’ Kray stared at the blood.
After what felt like an age, Mitch broke the silence. ‘What is it?’
‘Why would there be blood this high up?’ Kray muttered under her breath.
‘What? What did you say?’
‘Oh, nothing, I was just talking to myself.’
Kray negotiated her way out along the checker plates, through the archway and stood on the front step breathing in fresh air. Her mobile was pressed against the side of her head.
‘Hey, Duncan, can you get a team down to sixteen Farnham Close ASAP.’ She paused allowing space for the usual questions. ‘When you’re here, you can see for yourself. It’s not pretty.’
She hung up and marched back to the car to await reinforcements.
The scar on her right shoulder tingled.
What the hell is blood doing up there?
3
There was so much blood. I knew John was a big man but come on! He bled out so much, I thought I might drown. When I pulled the knife out of his neck a torrent hit the woodwork, which, I have to admit, was a relief because I thought I’d over-done it.
I had sat on the floor in front of him, turned the dial onto setting No.1, and he went berserk. Bucking wildly at the end of the chain. I slipped the pointer onto setting No.2, and he jack-knifed at the waist, nearly catching me in the face with his head. I was forced to duck out the way as he twisted and turned like a fish on a line. It was a good job he lived in a detached house, because the tea towel stuffed into his mouth was doing a shit job.
I shifted the pointer to No.4, and his body went as stiff as a board. I watched as the whites of his bulging eyes burst into crazy paving, the tiny blood vessels rupturing with the pressure in his head. Then something unexpected happened. I glanced up to see an erect penis jutting out above me. It was pulsing up and down.
That’s a bit rude.
After fifteen seconds, I rotated the dial to the off position and disconnected it from the wall. I returned to the kitchen to see if the gas rings had done their job. One by one, I carried the pots through and placed them on the stairs. His erection had thankfully shrivelled into a fleshy blob.
I squeezed through the gap between him and the banister to sit on the stairs. I pulled my knife from its sheath on my belt and plunged it into his neck.
He didn’t flinch.
That’s when I thought, Fuck it, he’s dead. But I needn’t have worried, when I yanked the blade free, his heart pumped a rhythmic stream of blood onto the stairs, the initial spurt hitting the balustrade.
My lovely reminiscence is shattered by the waitress banging my breakfast down onto the table along with a glass of tap water.
‘Order number seventeen.’ She smiles.
Seventeen other people have had breakfast here this morning?
I smile back.
Seventeen other people? But it’s a shit hole.
I remove the small Tupperware container from my coat pocket, flip the lid and line them up on the table – the round one, the white one and the yellow capsule. To be taken once a day with food. I pick them up in turn and pop them into my mouth swilling them down with the water. A daily ritual which I am still not used to.
I peel back the top of the croissant and give it a squirt of tomato ketchup. A bacon and egg croissant – French and English breakfast cuisine collide in a holiday resort on the west coast of Britain, how very continental. I squash down the pastry top and take a bite. Despite its appearance, it actually tastes quite good.
I stare out the window across the Promenade and out to sea. I know there is an array of wind turbines off the coast but the murk and mist cloaks them from my view. It’s October, and you don’t come to Blackpool for the weather in October. The illuminations are in full swing and the town is bouncing. The hotels are crammed full of families and the trams are bursting with people going ‘Ooo’ and ‘Ahrrr’. Children walk about with their necks permanently craned back looking to the sky, while the Pleasure Beech and piers are a buzzing hive of noisy activity at night. Well, when I say night, it gets dark at three pm.
I sip my second espresso of the day. I reckon I could drink ten of these and not get any higher than I feel right now. Though, there is one thing that is spoiling an otherwise perfect morning. The mouth of the road was cordoned off with yellow tape and guarded by a uniformed officer, sporting a pissed-off face and a high-viz jacket. I had fancied treating myself to a drive-by but it was not to be. The police were already on the scene and the street was in lockdown.
Hence winding up here, enjoying a mad fusion of continental cuisine for breakfast while gazing out of the window onto…well…fuck all, really. I check my watch. I need to get a move on.
I swallow the last of the bacon, drink the dregs from the cup and pay my bill. The young woman gives me the same smile as she had done earlier and wishes me a good day – if only she knew. I elbow open the door, stepping out into the cold wind. I don’t mind it, I find it exhilarating, but then, I am on such a high, I would find catching my bollocks in a drawer an exhilarating experience, to be honest. My car is across the street, and in ten strides, I am sitting behind the wheel with the hot air blowers warming my legs. I pull away into the empty road and head off.
The town soon melts away into the countryside as I drive over the chaos of the M6 heading for Inglewhite. I’ve never been there, even though I have travelled this route many times, because a mile and a half before the village, I take a sharp left onto a narrow lane. Soon, the road becomes a single track which winds its way between the hedgerows and dry-stone walls. The route becomes narrower and narrower with overhanging foliage grabbing at my car from both sides. Sections of tarmac have lifted away making the wheels bounce and scrape against the hardcore below.
After half a mile, I e
dge through a set of five-bar gates onto a derelict farm. I have no idea what type of business this farmer was conducting, but all I can say is, he can’t have been very good at it. The place has laid empty for years.
I park at the back of a large barn and snatch my bag from the footwell of the passenger seat. To the side of the building is the farmhouse, or more accurately, a collection of half walls and tumbled down roofs where the farmhouse used to be. I walk to the back of the barn to an underground storage facility that used to be house wood and coal.
I unzip the holdall and retrieve the white coverall suit, overshoes and gloves. I drop them into the old rusting brazier bolted against the wall and squirt a generous amount of lighter fluid on top. The match ignites on the third strike and the sweet smell of sulphur fills my senses.
There is a “whoofing” sound as the fluid-soaked material bursts into flames. I stare into the fire dancing in the bin and can see John’s eyeballs bursting in their sockets, the electrical current frying his brain. The clothes burn bright against the gloom - his skin is peeling away while his lifeless body hangs limp and white.
Pretty soon, the flames subside. I poke at the smouldering embers with a stick to mix them with the burned remnants at the bottom. I check my watch.
I got a few more things to take care of and I don’t want to be late.
4
Kray bounded up the stairs to her office. For a woman who smoked enough cigarettes to kill three people and only ate enough to keep a six-year-old alive, she was surprisingly spritely.
Detective Duncan Tavener had taken over the reins at the house which had allowed her to get back to the station to make a dent in the avalanche of paperwork that had descended on her. She reached her desk and her shoulders dropped. Stuck to her phone was a post-it note. ‘ACC Quade wants to see you as soon as you get in.’
Kray tore the note off the phone screwed it up and tossed it into the waste paper bin. She looked at the neat piles of correspondence stacked on the round conference table. How the hell did Jacko get through all of this and do his job? … Oh, but hang on, he didn’t do his bloody job, did he?
Kray did as she was told and sloped off to the third floor where the top brass lived, stopping first to arrange the pens in an orderly fashion at the right-hand side of her desk. She did the same with the pencils, on the left-hand side.
That’s better.
The third floor smelled of wax furniture polish and air freshener. Kray nodded to the gaggle of PAs busying themselves booking meetings and lunch appointments and made a bee-line for the end office. She knocked on the open door and walked in. ACC Mary Quade was the only person on the ACPO floor who made her desk look small. She looked up and smiled as if Santa had just walked in.
‘Roz, good to see you. Come in and take a seat.’
Kray gritted her teeth. She was so preoccupied with keeping her feelings in check, she missed the collection of pens and pencils sitting in the same pot.
‘I got a message you wanted to see me, ma’am,’ she said when her teeth had finally unclenched themselves.
‘Yes, messy business, I hear, at Farnham Close.’
‘It is. I have a team out at the house and we will know more when they do the post-mortem and get the forensics back.’
‘Good work. I wanted to say…’
Kray zoned out, she knew what Quade wanted to say - it was the same bloody thing she always wanted to say. Kray spun her wedding ring round and round. It wasn’t long ago that Quade had wanted to drum her out of the force, and now, since Kray had returned to work, she was behaving like a long-lost friend.
Kray zoned back in.
‘…so, you see, I wanted you to know that you have my full support. You must think of me as your…’ Quade was banging on.
Friend, trusted colleague, confidant? I don’t fuckin’ think so.
Kray had zoned out again.
When the full details surrounding the Jason Strickland case had emerged, Quade had gone into damage limitation mode. The officers from internal inquires and IPPC were all over them like a dose of the clap. Kray was on sick leave following the injuries she had sustained at the hands of Strickland, but she fully participated in their inquiry. After all she needed to know they were getting her side of the story.
Kray had found herself the main focus of attention for the initial part of the investigation, but then given her actions, that was hardly a surprise. Her vague recollections, coupled with her plea of self-defence, had carried the day.
It was not hard to convince them; after all, she had killed a man who had the faces of two dead women in his freezer, a dead man in his basement and kept a venomous snake in a fish tank. Kray didn’t need to pull off an Oscar-winning performance, the decision to believe her side of the story kind of made itself.
Quade had done a remarkable job of shifting the entire blame onto DCI Jackson. Despite the fact that she had been the one calling the shots, Jackson hadn’t stood a chance. After all, it would not have gone down well for such a senior officer to be found guilty of professional incompetence. Especially one who ticked so many boxes on the diversity scale. No, carrying the can was Jackson’s job, and Quade had made sure the investigation buried him. Hence, Jacko was now on the sick, no doubt talking to his Federation Rep on a daily basis, and Kray had been made up to Acting DCI.
To add to her woes, as head of CID, Kray now had the delights of DI Colin Brownlow to manage. He was knee-deep in a missing person’s case and making heavy work of it. Kray knew sooner or later she would have to step in, but for now, let him get on with it. Under normal circumstances their relationship before could best be described as distant distain. Now Kray had the acting role it was open hostility, from Brownlow’s side anyway. He thought he should have been given the job due to his seniority and length of service. The top brass felt “being good at your job” was a far better recruitment criterion and had given it to Kray.
Funny how things turn out.
Kray zoned back in.
‘…so, if there is anything you need, Roz, you come to me. You are a credit to the force and a brilliant detective. I’m proud of you and so is the chief.’
That’s funny, you weren’t saying that when you fucking suspended me.
‘Of course, ma’am,’ Kray responded. ‘It’s good to know you have my back on this one.’
‘Good. Anything you need, Roz, you know where I am.’ Quade heaved her ample frame from her chair to signal the meeting was over.
Kray nodded and left the office.
Know where you are? You block out the sun, how the fuck could I miss you?
Back at her desk, Kray had signed off the overtime rota and authorised a batch of expenses. Her unread emails stood at three hundred and eighty and she had switched off the inbox alert because it was driving her nuts. She leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms towards the ceiling, her mind drifted back to the house with the body suspended in the stairway.
Buried beneath her expensive make-up, the one-and-a-half-inch ridge that ran along her left cheekbone began to tingle. The dark red line made by Rampton’s Stanley knife was itching – telling her something wasn’t right. The more she wandered through the house, the more it yelled at her.
She gathered up her keys, snatched her phone from the desk and pressed two buttons.
‘Hello…hello, Duncan, are you there? Can you hear me?’ There was a pause on the line and the sound of someone talking under water. Kray bustled out of her office and down the stairs. ‘That’s better, yes, I can. Have they taken down the body?’ she said, hurrying from the building and across the car park. ‘Good. Don’t let them do it until I get there.’
She threw herself into her car and powered into the flow of traffic. The scars that criss-crossed her body weren’t tingling, they were on fire.
Kray swung the car into number sixteen and hit the brakes, skidding to a stop in the empty driveway. She jumped from the car, pulled on her forensic gear and ran to the front door only to meet Tavener c
oming the other way.
Tavener was a high flier, exhaustively keen and highly competent. He had a face that wouldn’t look out of place in any boy band, all clean lines and a ready smile, but he had the build of a second row forward. His soft Glaswegian accent completed the package. Kray didn’t believe in having favourites, but if she ever changed her mind, she knew he’d top the list.
‘I’m sorry, Roz. I went outside to take your call and when I got back–’ He blurted out.
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘The body, Roz. When I got back–’
Kray barged past him into the vaulted hallway. She looked through the archway to the bottom of the stairs. It was empty – no detectives, no crime scene investigators and no body.
‘Fuck!’ Kray said as she spun on her heels. ‘I thought I made myself clear.’
‘The signal in this house is shit. I had to go outside to take your call. When I got back in, they had already taken the victim down.’
‘Bollocks!’ Kray slapped her hands against her sides and turned away. For all his six feet three stature, Tavener looked like a naughty year-seven schoolboy. Kray regained her composure. ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have blown up like that.’
‘By the time I got back, it was too late, Roz.’
Kray took a deep breath. ‘You can help me walk through what happened.’ They stepped across the aluminium plates to the bottom of the staircase. ‘You go first. What do you think are the sequence of events?’ Kray asked.
‘Okay. The killer disables the victim strips him and hangs him upside down. Then, he tortures him by burning his skin and electrocuting him.’ Tavener pointed to the disconnected power source for the telephone. ‘I reckon the killer used that socket.’
‘Good, carry on.’
‘Then, when the killer has had enough, he or she slashes the victim’s neck and lets them bleed to death.’
‘If you were the killer, where would you be when you were electrocuting the victim?’