Painted Trust

by Elsa Holland

  Morrison took the blackened stairs two at a time.

  Two, four, six, eight, landing.

  Boarders slouched in doorways or peered through doors held ajar. People saw everything and nothing in places like this.

  “I assume you’ve questioned the residents?”

  Two, four, six, eight, landing.

  “Yes, Inspector, only a few who haven’t returned from shifts left to follow up.”

  “You interview them yourself?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Two, four, six, eight, landing.

  “Married?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Wife, kids?”

  Two, four, six, eight, landing.

  “With her mother, sir. I have the time to put into the case, if that’s what you are asking.”

  Two, four, six, eight, landing.

  Morrison turned at the top landing.

  “It’s bad, sir,” came the Sergeant’s puffed voice.

  Bad .

  Bobbies thought any crime that had sliced up flesh was bad.

  “Through here, sir.” A bobbie directed him down the hall.

  Even here in Manchester bad was what a body looked like after it got pulled out of the river Ink, a bubbling mass of green-crusted slime. Even a small amount of time submerged in that estuary of water changed the color of the body’s skin and ate away the hair making the Ink’s floaters look like something from a Shelly Frankenstein tale. Morrison doubted anyone at the scene had truly seen bad. The Ripper was bad, he’d seen that. They hadn’t. Most men, no matter how well trained, couldn’t see past the blood to see the facts needed to track and catch a monster. He could. Military service had given him that skill. You hold enough limbless and decapitated bodies and normal moves to an entirely different benchmark.

  For him, humanity was a term used to express an aspiration, not a reality.

  CHAPTER 6

  Morrison strode into the two-roomed lodging, the aging smell of death tainting the air, another sour smell, very faint, coming in and out of his senses. He steeled his gut and walked over to the doorway that led into the bedroom and stopped. Sergeant Briggs followed behind him, breathing harder than a man in his thirties should, but then again if you had to breathe Manchurian air every day, wheezing might be ordinary. The pup was yet to make it on the scene, fitness obviously not his strong point.

  The Sergeant went to step forward.

  Morrison held up his hand. “One. Moment. Sergeant Briggs.” The two of them stilled at the edge of the dimly lit room and his stomach tightened. The odor was strong, sickly sweet, and acidic. The usual metallic smell of blood was overpowered with the start of rot. Not a fresh kill then.

  “How long?”

  “We think about forty-six hours, sir.”

  His gaze moved methodically over the room, touching every surface, looking for things around the body. Looking for clues that would put the story together of what had happened, of how things were before it happened. A killer chose a place for a reason, sometimes opportunistically, but often by plan.

  The plaster on the far-left wall was rubbed off and chipped in the shape of a metal headboard – a bed had been up against it. The floor where the bed legs would have stood showed that the bed had rubbed and scratched the floor with its movements.

  There had been plenty of sex in that bed.

  A bed was a solid source of income. A private room with a bed spoke of good custom and higher than average prices. People paid well for ‘special tastes’. Had the killer used the services offered in this room?

  The bed was now absent, not in this room and not in the small entry and kitchen they had just passed through. Scrape marks led to a space where a chest of drawers or wardrobe might have stood. Lots of fresh scrape marks. Furniture in and furniture out.

  “The victim lived here?”

  “No sir, tenant moved out a week ago, no one moved in after. Neighbors said men would come and go at all hours, banging on the door and calling the tenant’s name, not realizing she’d moved. It was one of them men who found this one . . .” His voice trailed off. An understandable reaction to what lay before them.

  Had the killer paid the tenant to vacate? Or would there be a body surfacing in the river Ink?

  He nodded to the sergeant. They both edged into the room and its malodorous air, every step slow and considered. Careful foot placement ensured minimal disturbance to the scene, other than that which had already occurred when the body was found and when the first bobbies came on the scene.

  But the tentative steps and hushed voices of those assembled was more than professional conduct; it was a natural reluctance of the limbs born from the nature of the death they saw before them. The macabre tableau was all the worse for the wash of golden hair that spilled out from under the broadcloth covering the victim, a splash of the angelic as it lay on the floor in the center of the room in the dark complicit apartment.

  Deaths like this one made men like them feel they had failed. That their actions, no matter how diligent, had failed to keep the world safe for those that shined in it the brightest.

  The innocent.

  The unbearably beautiful.

  Sergeant Briggs lifted the broadcloth up and off.

  For a fraction of a second the breath froze in Morrison’s chest. The sergeant was right, it was bad.

  Brody, his newly acquired pup, came to stand next to him.

  “Move back, boy.” Fuck, he should have insisted the kid stayed in the cab.

  “I can handle it,” the youth insisted, in that odd voice that hadn’t yet broken. Then came the expected intake of breath as the pup staggered back, followed by the sound of him emptying his stomach in the room next door.

  Their golden hair girl was skinned. Her angelic face surrounded by those spun-sugar locks as well as her hands and feet from the ankle down were still dressed with skin. Skin that would have been pearl white when life flowed through her. The rest was a sore, ugly red of raw musculature, bone and organs. Intestines had spilled out onto the floor where the abdominal membrane had been sliced, the whole torso an emaciated parody of the human shape.

  A gold band of what looked like paint sat around the neck, wrists and ankles to cover the incision marks. Gold was also carefully painted over the eyes and lips, like a cosmetic.

  “Has the body been moved?” Morrison asked Briggs. “Was it found like this?”

  “Lads covered her.”

  Morrison swore.

  “What did she look like when they found her, anything covered?”

  “No, just as you see it but without the broadcloth.”

  “There is surprisingly little blood.” Morrison noted in the silence, then his eyes snagged on it. Under the table a large copper basin that would usually be used as a standing bath sat full of dark liquid.

  “The body’s been exsanguinated.” Brody spoke quietly from behind him.

  Exsanguinated, where did a boy learn a word like that?

  Morrison looked to the ceiling as the kid spoke again.

  “Rope marks on the beam, explains the lack of color in her skin.”

  The kid was fast. A mind that didn’t belong in the middle-class origins his reference letters stated. But the kid had hefty benefactors in the Hurleys, the reason he had to drag the kid about in the first place.

  “Sergeant, have your men look for rope, hook, and pulley—anything that could be used to hoist a body. He may have taken it with him, but I doubt it. It would have been difficult enough to carry the skin without being noticed, let alone more equipment.”

  “You think it’s a man, Inspector?” The sergeant asked.

  “Size nine-and-a-half feet,” the pup answered, pointing out the gold footprints on the floor. “Also, the strength needed to pull up her dead weight rules out most women.”

  Morrison turned to face the pup. “Perhaps I should step outside and let you proceed.”

  Crimson washed the youth’s face. What kind of a kid was he? Blushed li
ke a girl and yet dissected a crime scene like an old hand. The kid moved around the room and scanned the space as if he’d done it a hundred times. Morrison was not foolish enough to close down help when it was offered but the first thing any association needed to establish was who had the power.

  “Here’s what we’ll do. You stay quiet, write down your observations in the notebook I gave you. We’ll compare notes when we are done.” The kid nodded but the smartass knew he was being fobbed off; it oozed out of his puppy soft skin even if he was smart enough not to let it show in his face.

  Morrison turned his attention back to the room.

  “Do we have a lead on who she is?” Someone that beautiful belonged somewhere.

  “Not yet, sir, but we’ll have a rendition of her face out soon, and we’ll find who she is.”

  “Send it out across all cities in England and Scotland, focus on the major cities first. A woman like this would be expensive.” The thought hit him. “Where’re her clothes?”

  “Nothing here, Inspector.”

  “Go back through the residents and ask if anyone saw a woman leaving the room.”

  Morrison nodded then bent down and checked the hands, neck and feet. “Body, hung upright and,” his eyes flashed to the pup, “exsanguinated . . .”

  “A body is best bled from the neck and wrists upside down,” the sergeant noted.

  “The killer didn’t want blood on the face and hair.” Morrison responded.

  Across the room, the pup tripped as he bolted for the door and heaved again next door.

  Morrison walked over to the point the pup had run from. A bin full of yellow globules sat next to the table.

  Body fat. It had been scrapped from under the skin. The body had more fat than most people realized, the extent of which became evident when the skin was taken off. An uncleaned skin would have been too heavy to carry out, so the killer had cleaned the skin here on the old kitchen table.

  “Over here.”

  The pup said from the kitchen.

  Morrison strode over. A covered bowl sat on the counter. The pup lifted the plate that sat across the top of the bowl. An acrid stench filled the air as they looked at what was the killer’s stomach contents.

  The killer had vomited.

  Despite the ritualistic kill and the planning it had taken, the process had disturbed the killer enough for him to lose his food. A man used to killing, used to dead bodies, would not have had that response.

  “His first kill.” The pup said.

  “Yes.” Morrison didn’t underestimate what it would have taken for the killer to have completed this task. Even a man excited for the kill needed determination and conviction aplenty to do what had been done here.

  This was a man who was getting started.

  The Minotaur was out of the gate and in the labyrinth.

  CHAPTER 7

  Vaughn moved his rendering of the endocrine system closer to the lamp. Rough sketches he and his anatomy assistant, Thomas, had made over the last few days lay around him as he worked on the final detailed drawing.

  He rolled the pencil through his fingers, still not making a mark after a half hour at his desk.

  The glow in the day’s quagmire was stealing his thoughts, the prim and proper Miss Edith Appleby. All trussed up in her white smock like a dove bound in a large white handkerchief.

  ‘ You look like you dueled with death and won. ’

  God help him, those words had spiked through him like a blast of cocaine.

  Long ago, he’d been all hope and ideals, dreaming of becoming a surgeon. Back then he’d imagined himself unraveling the mystery of mortality. He’d develop the ideal combination of a perfect understanding of anatomy and a perfectly conducted operation, he thought they would be the answer to the soul-destroying death rates most surgeons dealt with as a daily reality.

  They hadn’t.

  In a surgeon’s private practice, survival rates were better than other options. Heaven help those poor folk who could not afford to pay for care and got whichever novice the charitable hospital thought needed the practice. A survival rate of one in twenty would be the best they could expect.

  Today he’d ploughed through bodies like a man driven, determined that none asking for his services would be relegated to that fate. It was why he had started surgery again, to try yet again to tip the scales. To have even a few successes to counter the work he did for law enforcement.

  That role had shown him that as hard as he worked to save lives, there were others diligently working to take them, as they played out their macabre and murderous fantasies.

  His chest tightened unexpectedly. ‘You look like you dueled with death and won.’

  Why would someone so young and fresh enter a world so gruesome when she could fly in sweet oblivion anywhere else?

  Vaughn leaned forward, his pencil gliding down the edge of the paper. The nape of a neck. The stiff starched collar of a white shirt.

  Six long months since he and Henrietta had parted ways.

  Now she was a woman who was his type, betrayer that she was. Someone who lived for the stage, a touch bawdy, full of life, laughter and frivolity. A woman focused on the pleasures of the body; exotic and hungry for the things life gave those who went after what they wanted. A woman totally removed from what he did and what he saw every day.

  He’d not taken a lover after their split.

  No doubt any ripples of awareness he experienced around his bright shiny Apple were simply signs of an overlong abstinence.

  The scotch burned as he swallowed, then burned again as he threw back the last of it, placing the glass back on the table. He should drink until the errant thoughts of the Apple slid away. Yet his hand drew a sweep of tightly coiled hair. Even the soft thick color of the lead as he shaded the image of her hair couldn’t capture the black shine he’d seen under the operating theater lights.

  Fool.

  He should take up Felix’s offer and go get laid till he couldn’t walk.

  Better still, he should lay Miss Appleby off, let her go. Be a humanitarian and save her hope and idealism for a better cause.

  A soft knock came from the door, then his man, Price, stepped in.

  “There’s a delivery, sir, coroner’s office.” Morrison handed him the large envelope.

  Vaughn broke the seal and photographs of a crime scene spilled out. He pulled out the report from the investigating officer along with the expected note from Mr. Felix Forester, Assistant Chief Commissioner for Edinburgh, drinking buddy and whore-mongering friend.

  Vaughn,

  I need a cause of death by the morning.

  Felix

  Felix rarely sent a body to the house, despite it being a far better place to determine cause of death. Here he had everything he needed to do the autopsy, the labs at the police station were sparsely stocked at best.

  Over the last year more and more of this kind of work; a medical opinion for investigative purposes, was requested of him, even if the forensic findings were still largely untried in the courts.

  Vaughn stood, the small sketch of Little Miss Apple staring back at him. He turned and went downstairs. As he reached the ground floor, the clock in the hall chimed a quarter past the hour of midnight. He would have five hours to get his report back to Felix.

  In the small cobbled courtyard out the back of the house, two men shuffled next to the covered carriage that held the emblem of the local enforcement. Wind still managed to find its way down the side drive and around the corner where they all stood, an icy wraith that whistled with foreboding merriment. The men slid a stretcher out from the back. Canvas covered the small body underneath.

  Vaughn walked over to the stretcher and lifted back the canvas. His jaw tightened. A child. He nodded to the men bearing the small load.

  “Usual place, Doctor?”

  His dissection hall was in the process of reorganization. Student tables were all broken down and those reassembled carried the contents of the display shel
ves, which were being re-varnished. More crucially, the gas lights were disconnected for cleaning.

  That left him with only one choice.

  “No, bring it through here.” Vaughn opened the back doors and proceeded to light the lamps that led through to one of the operating rooms in the house. The body was carried in and laid on the table in the ops room. He brought over a stool and set his notebook and pencil on the side bench, then washed his hands before pulling on rubber gloves.

  “Perhaps I can fetch Master Thomas?” Price asked from the door.

  Vaughn shook his head.

  “No Need.” By the time Thomas got here, Vaughn wanted to be wrapping up. He could ask for his new employee, she said she was expecting more along the lines on anatomical work. Vaughn cast a look at the small body on the bench. There were gentler places to start than the dissection of a child.

  “Head back to bed, Price. I’ll take care of it.”

  Soon enough she would see how little his efforts held back death, how in the end humanity cannibalized itself, the darker drives eating up the light.

  CHAPTER 8

  The cool of the plaster wall pressed against Vaughn’s forehead, seeping into the flat of his palms as they rested on either side of him. The dark corridor a pocket of obscurity, a smudged blackness that cloaked him in futile comfort.

  The autopsy was complete, and he felt one slice away from the abyss.

  The child had killed himself, had swallowed glass. How bad did life have to be for a child to grind down glass and eat it? An extensive examination gave some answers, burn scars, and the removal of genitals leaving the young boy a small hole for a urethra to piss from. An external examination of the skeletal structure indicated breaks that had knitted despite malalignment in places such as ribs and fingers.

  Felix would not have asked for a forensic report if he didn’t have a suspect. Had the boy eaten the glass knowingly, desperate to leave this world, or was it pressed on him by another? This was what Felix would want to know. Forensics couldn’t tell them with exactitude how the glass got into the boy’s mouth, into his gut and lacerated his intestinal tract to cause his death, all medical forensics could say with certainty was that those events had taken place.