‘Can I help?’
He didn't hear. It was repeated, louder. He kept staring at himself on the front page.
‘Sir!’
He wouldn't have registered that one at his best. No one ever called him that. He felt a nudge in his back and nearly pissed himself again. He turned to see a big guy in a luminous jacket.
‘It's not a library, hurry up; some of us have jobs to go too.’
Rawlins ordered vodka. Two bottles. And some tabs.
He dropped a few scrunched notes on the counter and turned away. The line parted like the red sea. All except luminous jacket who barred the way. Rawlins rounded him and made it to the door.
‘Hey!’ came a cry from behind.
Rawlins fought the door and finally won. Took off down the street.
‘He forgot his change,’ the shopkeeper said to the head of the queue. The head of the queue wasn't listening. She was staring at the front of morning paper.
***
It took a while for his icicle fingers to crack the seal. When they finally did he poured it in. It filled his mouth and burned. He could feel it nip his chin as it oozed from the corners of his mouth. It burned his throat on the way down and it burned his empty stomach as it settled there. It felt good. It felt even better as it melted into his system and glowed. Eased his body and mind. He poured some more in. Each time he felt better and better. A couple of old dears looked at him with disgust. Told him so. He told them where to go. They told him that they would have the police on to him. He staggered on.
He'd spent the morning in the car on a housing estate miles from Asda in amongst hundreds of other cars. He'd drunk himself to sleep with the supermarket vodka. Some kids had woken him, taking the piss on their way to school. He’d sat there for a while before heading for his dad's. He had no place else to go. No one else to turn to. Now there was no one left. Nowhere to go.
He made it to the top of Gateshead High Street where a couple of Community Support Officers were having a chat further down. They had fluorescent jackets like the big wanker in the shop and he didn't realise they were police until he was almost on top of them. Protected by half a litre of forty proof he kept on going, casually crossed the road and passed them on the other side.
He had staggered the length of the street when he stumbled across the TSB by accident and remembered the bank card. He fucked about for an age before the machine ate the card. It was all his dad's fault, the fucker, he had deliberately given him the wrong number, not the fact that he was blind drunk and might as well of been wearing boxing gloves to press the keypad. He didn't notice the people around him. The exchanged glances. The dawn of realisation on their faces. He pushed on through.
He had almost finished the first bottle of vodka when he reached Tesco's. A security guard watched him bouncing off walls and trolleys and barred the way. He escorted him back onto the street where he fell to the pavement, struggling as he was released. The guard was giving him a piece of his mind when a shout went up.
‘He's the bloke on the telly! The one you're looking for!’
The community coppers were on their way.
Rawlins scrambled to his feet and drunken momentum took him away down the hill. Horns blasted and the screech of brakes signalled his arrival at the bottom of the High Street where it converged with the town’s by-pass. A car swerved, narrowly missed him and he tumbled over the bonnet. Drivers hurled abuse. He kept moving. The road fed him down towards the river.
It was no use. He was done in. Pain sliced through his abdomen. He doubled up in pain. Threw up on his shoes. He dropped onto on all fours. He could hear them now. Their footfalls. Their shouts. He looked back. They were close. Coming fast. They were going to have him.
He crawled along the pavement but found the way barred before he could get back on his feet. Behind him the voices were becoming clearer. Closer. He grabbed hold of the metal and scrambled up it, his feet fighting for any hold they could find. He was oblivious as muscles he hadn't used in decades strained and his limbs banged and scraped the surface. Voices shouted up after him and he looked down to see the police only a couple of feet below, reaching for him. He clambered on into the sticky, black climb prevention paint. Once he was across it got easier. He kept going.
No one could get him now.
SEVENTEEN
Two tracks had thumped out before North found a car backing out, freeing up a space. He took the lift down to the main reception and got directions to pathology. Those examining tissue from the living would be able to direct him to the dead. Hospitals don’t exactly point the way to their mortuaries with arrowed signs in the corridors. Most patients and visitors have a harrowing enough experience as it is without being reminded of the worst possible outcome at every turn. They also have to make it difficult for the weirdoes.
North found his way into the hospitals bowels. He always attended autopsies, even if it was odds on to be a mere formality. As well as him being able to answer some of the forensic pathologist’s questions, they could lead to questions of his own. You just never knew. It also enabled him to get the results as quick as was possible. He entered a large lab that easily accommodated the additional people required at a forensic autopsy: the lab technician, forensic pathologist, forensic crime scene photographer and the police who had first been on the scene, in this case PCW Deacon and himself. PC Winter would also be in here before long, but would now be making his contribution to the enquiry from centre stage.
They all circled the cadaver that had been Denise Lumsden. The syringes had already been removed. Probably photographed, filmed, and carefully tagged, logged and bagged in situ. Not easy to zip away a body and cart it all the way across town keeping thirty-six hypodermic needles and their wounds intact.
Her body was laid out on a steel table, pretty much as it had been on her living room floor and North’s nose was pleased to find that, beyond the disinfectant, the rest of the current stockpile, refrigerated behind a wall of metal doors, was as fresh as Denise Lumsden. That would render the smell of the place no more unpleasant than the inside of a butchers shop once the evisceration got under way. When one of them was ripe it was a whole different matter. If the body being examined had been sat in front of the telly for a week, that was hard going on all of your senses.
North figured that if you were exposed to anything long enough you could get used to it, even cutting up putrid cadavers, but he could never get used to working in a room like this day in day out, like the lab tech’s did. He’d been stuck in an open plan office with floor to ceiling windows for six weeks and he had been going stir crazy. He couldn’t begin to imagine spending his days inside a windowless box, his light and air being fed into him. He had to be out and about. On the move.
The initial photographing, measuring, the cutting of skin tissue and drawing of blood samples took up most of the time. Once that was done it wasn’t long before a Denise Lumsden body suit was lying there, zipped open, the contents in a couple of steel bowls. North had been amazed the first time he had seen insides cut free, from neck to pubis, and removed in one huge piece, though they generally separated the intestines into their own bowl first.
He watched the pathologist work. He was chocka with self-importance. Had that look about him that made you want to punch his face without ever having spoken to him. The lab technician worked silently, efficiently; she had obviously suffered him before. The pathologist began a thorough, technical explanation. It might as well have been in Mandarin.
‘So her death was caused by severe blood loss?’ North cut in. It was the only part he thought he got.
The doc didn’t like being cut in on. His jaw tightened as his face flushed but he said nothing.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said North.
He gave North a contemptible eye.
‘Have you been listening to a word I've said?’
‘Tell me as if I was the Neanderthal you think I am.’
He looked at North like he would an unplea
sant specimen on a Petri dish.
‘How long do you think she was tortured for?’ North asked. He couldn’t give a shit what faces were pulled at him.
‘Several hours,’ the doc finally decided to play ball. How else would he get to show how smart he was? How superior. He pointed out some of the bruising. Some of the cuts. Some bruises were deep blue and some of the cuts had started their healing process. He showed everyone marks that had been made later. They were not as advanced. He explained how the earlier marks couldn't have been made by accident, by her simply walking into a coffee table before the killer arrived. He explained how they were all part of a long and sustained attack, inflicted by the killer or killers. She'd also been violated, vaginally and anally, with something sharp and wooden. There were splinters.
‘A broken chair leg?’ asked North, picturing the scene he had found.
Full of himself nodded. ‘That could match.’
‘Semen?’
He shook his head. Forensics hadn't found any externally either. No pubic hair, no hair period. Nothing. The chair leg could have been a replacement for sex. That’s what the shrinks would report. North had been there and got that tee-shirt. There would be DNA extracted, there was no way you could create that kind of mayhem without leaving plenty of DNA, but DNA without a suspect to match it against was a bit like having a degree in Art History: fucking useless. They’d check current records but North wasn’t expecting anything.
Time of death was sometime the night before last. Late. Midnight to early hours of the morning. She bled to death on her living room floor as a result of multiple lacerations, incisions, wounds and contusions.
‘So it is reasonable to expect that she would have made a lot of noise while all this was going on?’
He nodded. ‘When conscious, but there were traces of material in her mouth.’
‘He gagged her?’
‘I can only report the facts as I find them.’
Forensics would check the fibres. See if they could find what had been used. It might help. Finding out why something had been used would help more. A sadist or psychopath would fit a scenario where Denise Lumsden was slowly tortured to death and the heroin was ignored and no search was carried out for anything worth stealing, like twenty grand in a frozen chip bag - but he would want to hear her pain. To hear her beg. In North’s experience they wanted the full sensory experience and took them to places that allowed them to scream. Why hadn’t he? There was always something at odds with any one particular motive.
‘The hypodermic syringes were introduced post-mortem.’
That intrigued North. They hadn’t been a part of the sadistic act.
The doc went on.
There hadn’t been anything in them, they had been stabbed into the body, not used to inject anything into it. They were all old. Used. Some had taken more than one go to stay in, leaving additional point of entry marks and scores on the bones they had connected with. Several tips had broken off and were lodged in her body. There were also old track marks. The body was so mutilated it couldn’t be determined if she had recently been injecting herself but she had been in the past. There were no drugs found in her blood.
‘The alcohol level was point two. That may have offered some relief.’
My arse, thought North. Judging by the vodka bottles he’d seen she probably couldn’t get a buzz on until she reached point two.
‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ He felt stupid saying it but he had to ask.
‘No, Inspector. I have seen many violent deaths and many of the victims had been sexually abused, but nothing like this. I have seen hatred manifested in many different forms, but never so many at the same time. It is most interesting.’
That was one way of putting it, and North agreed with him. It just didn't sit right.
EIGHTEEN
Dave the Desk made a beeline for North as soon as he entered the station.
‘When did you last have a drink?’
‘Eh?’
He repeated the question. ‘And how much did you have?’
‘What's going on, Dave?’
‘You're being random tested for alcohol.’
‘What?’
‘And drugs. I have to make sure you go straight for testing and report if you leave without doing so.’
‘He needs reasonable cause to suspect...’ North faded out. ‘Okay, fair-do's on the grog, but drugs?’
‘He says your fair game for testing as you fall under both the safety critical and vulnerable post categories as you're licensed to carry firearms and work under cover.’
‘Not here I don't.’ That was in his real job.
‘Sorry. It's not just you,’ he tried to put a positive slant on things. ‘He'd probably have everyone tested if he could in light of Al Winter.’
‘He couldn't have had a PC like Winter random tested anyway unless he had cause to suspect he was a user and no one suspected him. When did they last random test anyone here anyway?’
Dave the Desk shrugged, ‘Long time. Definitely not for a couple of years.’
‘He's chasing his tail.’
‘You going to be okay?’ he seemed genuinely concerned. North stopped at the door leading to the stairwell.
‘I'll be right back.’
The Sergeant poked his head into the stairwell to see North legging it up, two at a time.
‘Hey!’
‘Just making sure!’ He ran all the way to the top and back down again as fast as he could.
‘Let's go find out,’ he said. ‘I had a bit of a skinful last night but I have had plenty of sobering moments since.’
‘What was that all about?’
‘Running up a couple of flights of stairs can take a quarter off a reading, but it doesn’t last long so I have to shift. Where is it at?’
Dave showed him the way.
North's blood stream passed waste matter into his lungs and he exhaled carbon dioxide and who knew what else into the spectrograph.
‘Oh dear,’ said the nurse. ‘The Chief won't be at all pleased.’
North stiffened. He had tried all he could but he was still over.
‘You passed.’
North breathed a sigh of relief, took the woman’s head in his hands and kissed her forehead. She returned his smile and took a swab for the drug test. Dave the Desk slapped him on the back and he was off down the corridor.
***
‘He is an ex-cop.’
North looked at Mason.
‘He worked over the river, left, no cloud, sound record, it just wasn’t for him.’
‘Why didn’t he say something?’
‘He doesn’t exactly want it known on the street. If some of his present clientele had found out the place would have been burned down with him in it before now. You know how it is, half of them have been inside at least once and the other half haven’t been quite naughty enough, yet.
‘I checked with his employer. He is currently the manager and licensee of the Pond House, has worked for the company for eight years, joined them straight after leaving the force. He seems to have been some kind of trouble-shooter for them. They picked up rough houses on the cheap, sent him in and he sorted them out, had a knack for it apparently, and then he got moved on to the next one. He’s been at the Pond House for a couple of years as they haven’t been taking any new ones on, just closing them down right, left and centre on account of the recession. He will be residing with his dear old mummy if we need him again.’
‘You don’t think he was earning a bit extra on the side, dealing drugs, or holding them, or something? Maybe coerced into it?’
‘I don’t think so. He admitted to selling cigarettes he buys from people who bring them over from the continent, evading duty and all that, it makes him a bit of pocket money. He also sticks his own bottle of vodka on an optic and doesn’t till the sales. All low level stuff, but let’s face it, he wouldn’t be owning up to drugs if he was involved after last night but I don’t f
ancy him for it.’
‘Well, they’ll know that he’s been in here and from what we’ve seen so far I’d bet that if he is involved they will take him out, whether they believe him saying that he kept schtum or not, so if he is still alive tomorrow I guess he was telling the truth.’
‘Have you got anything from Rawlins’ family or the autopsy?’
North gave him what he had.
‘Something will give before long,’ said Mason. ‘Right, I have to go meet with the Chief about Deacon, the Lumsden crime scene and her light fingered friend.’
He left and North went into the incident room.
‘What a jobsworth!’
‘Having fun, Just James?’
James stuck her hand over the receiver.
‘I'm onto the mobile phone company Denise Lumsden was using. The pub landline had one call to a mobile number at five-thirty yesterday evening. Denise Lumsden's phone had the same number in its memory.’
‘Then we need to get another warrant for that phone, too.’
‘Already sorted, your boss got it pushed through. I tried all the numbers from Lumsden's phone. They are all dead. The guy I'm speaking to confirmed that they were all unregistered mobile phones using the same network and none of them made or received calls to or from anything but other unregistered phones. The only exception is yesterday's call from the Pond House. They have all gone offline, probably destroyed, and so we can't get their current locations.’
‘Shit, every time we find a door to open it gets slammed right back in our faces.’
‘This guy is wasting my time,’ she indicated the phone. ‘The self-important ass keeps putting me on hold to deal with other, ‘more important’, business.’
North leaned over and pressed the mute button.
‘Keep wearing the mask and use his ego to our benefit.’
‘This nerd has got my mask slipping. His boss gave him instructions to co-operate and a copy of the warrant I faxed over and he’s still reluctant to give me any detailed info because I could be a pretexter.’
‘You could be the jealous wife trying to bust her cheating husband, eh?’
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