by Helen Fields
Chapter Seventeen
The inevitable call came in the small hours. It was 3 a.m. when the phone on Callanach’s desk began to ring, at exactly the same moment as Ava picked up the landline on her desk. Four minutes later, MIT had mobilised its squad from their homes, and Scenes of Crime officers were leaping from their beds and running for the vans that would transport everything needed to do all they could for Lorna Shaw. Too little, too late, Callanach knew, as he walked to his car, wondering who would phone the mother and baby unit, and if Tansy was sleeping soundly in her cot or crying for the mother who would never return to hold her.
Bankhead Avenue was west of the city centre and at the top of the Sighthill area. That was the killer’s stamping ground, then. Not all that far from where Zoey’s body had been found. Not far at all from where Zoey had actually gone missing. The road itself was industrial, a departure from the deserted, rural stretch where Zoey had crawled her last. So much more of a risk, Callanach thought, as he drove there. What luck they’d had avoiding press interest at the first crime scene had been more than made up for by the startling presence of cameras in Bankhead. Whoever had found Lorna’s body had made more than the one phone call by the look of it. Callanach could see outside broadcast vans, and a few newspaper reporters he recognised. If the site wasn’t sealed off quickly there would be helicopters, too. He could only hope that no one had been callous enough to have snapped any pictures with their mobile while waiting for the police to arrive.
Ducking the crime scene tape, he flashed his ID badge and went to suit up. Ava was in the process of snapping gloves on.
‘How did the press get here so fast?’ he asked her.
‘Social bloody media. No pictures, thank God. There’s a lot to process, so it’s only the two of us allowed to see the body in situ. Jonty is on his way. They’re erecting a canopy, as the Met Office says rain is imminent, and to ward off any eyes in the sky,’ Ava said.
‘Is it definitely Lorna?’ Callanach asked.
‘Scenes of Crime officers have compared her face to our photo. It’s a positive match, not that there was ever any doubt.’
They walked together in silence the thirty metres up the hill to the body. Street lighting cast an orange hue over the area and illuminated the fine mist that hung at the tops of nearby trees. There was a good view down into the valley and across the large non-residential buildings that lined the road. At the top, approaching a bend, a large area of white sheeting had been laid over a central mass. Sporadic photographic flashes brightened the air, and from below the scene echoes of shouted questions from press to police officers could be heard. Callanach and Ava blanked them out. This was Lorna’s time. The SOCOs stepped back to allow them access to the corpse as Dr Spurr arrived from the opposite direction carrying a camera and thermometer. Carefully peeling back the protective sheeting, they revealed Lorna’s face.
If Zoey had chosen to stop and allow death to steal her, Lorna had fought it with every ounce of strength she had left. Her mouth was open as if mid howl. Hands scrunched into tight fists, she seemed to have fallen to her side as she crawled along the middle of the road. Flared nostrils indicated the struggle to take in air at the end, the blood loss depriving her brain of oxygen. Deep markings on her wrists edged in purple bruises showed the level of restraint that had been necessary to keep her still. Part of her hair had been roughly clipped away. Her eyes were sunken and dull. She might have been fed enough to keep her alive for the last week, but it hadn’t been enough to keep her healthy and properly hydrated. Perhaps she’d refused nourishment, but Ava thought it unlikely. Lorna had a reason to survive. She’d have known that keeping up her strength was the sensible option.
Ava sighed, saying nothing as she pulled the sheet further down to reveal a bloodied, once-white hospital gown clinging wetly to the young woman’s body. Jonty took over, peeling the sticky blackening material away from Lorna’s abdomen millimetre by millimetre to reveal what Ava had been dreading.
Medical packing fell from the wound, revealing a perfect doll shape. They didn’t need to roll her over to know the same damage had been done to her back. The amount of blood and debris on Lorna’s clothes and along the road was evidence enough. She was slightly shorter than Zoey, and skinny in spite of having recently given birth. As a result, the doll cut-out appeared even larger on her body, leaving arrows of skin pointing into the centre of the wound. Jonty took a tape measure from his pocket and held it against the wound, first length then widthways.
‘The measurements are precise in every detail,’ he said. ‘The distance from the arms to the sides, the split of the legs. The killer has used a template. There’s no question that it’s the same person as inflicted the wounds on Zoey.’
Callanach stood up and looked at the trail of body fluids Lorna had left from the pavement to the centre of the road. ‘Lorna was trying to make sure she was found,’ he said. ‘If she’d stayed on the pavement in the dark, a passing vehicle might not have spotted her. She took a huge risk trying to survive.’
‘Why here?’ Ava asked, joining him in staring down the road as Jonty continued his work. ‘The killer might easily have been seen. It’s an industrial area. Stopping a vehicle along this road late at night could have attracted attention.’
‘Let’s walk up the road a bit,’ Callanach said. They moved past the body to a bend in the road where a turning facilitated access to a college. Down a lane forking to the right, surrounded by high metal fences, was the recycling centre.
‘Her killer was dropping off the rubbish at the dump,’ Ava said, plunging her hands deep into her coat pockets. ‘It’s the ultimate insult. Lorna’s just a piece of trash to this person.’
‘Why not drop her right at the gate then? The attacker stopped short of their mark,’ Callanach said, as Ava gave up on her pockets and began furiously huffing warm breath onto her fingertips. ‘Do you ever remember to keep gloves in your car? Your hands turn blue every time we’re at a crime scene.’
‘I always lose them. Government ownership of the recycling site means there’s security,’ Ava said, pointing into the air. A CCTV camera pointed at the gates. ‘This can be a dangerous area, and some of the metal loads dropped are high value. The attacker wasn’t going to risk getting their licence plate caught on camera.’
‘Which means the driver knew in advance where the camera was. They’ve recced the area, probably at roughly the same time of night as they dropped Lorna off tonight, to figure out how much traffic they were likely to encounter,’ Callanach said.
Jonty joined them, stripping off his gloves and shoving them into a bag. ‘She’s been dead about an hour and a half. There would have been a period before that when she was unconscious, but even so, her killer took a risk that she would be found and give details away that could lead to arrest. He or she must have been confident before they left her that she was close to death.’
‘Have you noticed anything substantially different to Zoey’s body?’ Ava asked.
‘The marks on her ankles, like those on her wrists, are much more pronounced, and the surrounding bruising extends further along her limbs. I suspect she fought harder. A greater amount of her hair has been cut off, and there’s an empty piercing hole in her left nostril with a scratch, which suggests the jewellery was recently and forcibly removed.’
‘It’ll be on the doll,’ Callanach said. No one disagreed with him. ‘Do you think she was drugged to kill the pain, like Zoey was?’
‘I won’t know until I’ve got tox samples back, but logic dictates that she was given pain relief. Without it, I doubt she’d have been able to crawl even the short distance that she did. She’d simply have passed out where she was dumped from the vehicle and bled out right there,’ Jonty said.
‘So he wanted to get her here alive,’ Ava said, looking back down the road to where the press had blockaded the area. ‘He packed the wound well enough to stop her from bleeding to death in the place where he cut her. So what’s his maximum journe
y time before she dies in his vehicle? That must have been factored into the calculation. The killer wasn’t driving from the Borders, or down from Aberdeen. Lorna would have died en route. What’s your best guess, Dr Spurr?’ she asked.
‘The killer’s sticking to the west side of the city,’ the pathologist said. ‘I doubt he wants to run the risk of getting stuck at numerous traffic lights or roundabouts. It would have to be reasonably local. Just the act of getting her in and out of the vehicle would increase the bleeding. It’s the length of a piece of string, and not particularly scientific, but I’d say the killer wouldn’t have risked driving for more than fifteen minutes.’
‘Fifteen minutes driving radius from here, then – call it twenty for a margin of error. We need to draw a circle around this point and figure out the distance,’ Ava said. ‘That’s better than nothing.’
‘We also have fingermarks,’ Jonty said, ‘which is new. Zoey was remarkably unharmed, given the horrific nature of her death.’
‘Show me,’ Ava said.
They walked back to the body. A white gazebo now created a ceiling over Lorna’s corpse, and electric lighting brought fresh vigour to the blackening blood, giving texture to the clots over her wound, revealing the detail of the exposed muscles and vessels. Lorna’s remaining skin had paled into a waxy pallor. Jonty donned a fresh pair of gloves and pointed to the top of Lorna’s left arm. On the inner skin, just below the armpit, was an oval print a little over an inch long, black in the centre and red around the edges. A slim line of yellow highlighted the outer edge of the mark. Turning her arm to show the outer section more clearly, it was possible to make out two further marks, each slightly shorter than the one on the inside of her arm.
Callanach snapped a glove onto his right hand and knelt as close as he could get to Lorna’s body without disturbing it, reaching out to put his fingers over the top of the marks.
‘It’s a left hand,’ he said.
Jonty leaned down to get a better view of the overlay of Callanach’s fingers against the bruises. ‘The bruising is slightly larger than your fingers. I’d say the hand that caused the bruises is most probably male. Slightly larger hands than yours, Detective Inspector, which makes it likely he is also slightly taller than you.’
‘He’s over six foot one then,’ Callanach said. ‘Which accounts for the ease with which he seems to have been able to physically dominate both Zoey and Lorna.’
‘If that’s where his left hand was, then where was his right?’ Ava asked, angling one of the lights so that it shone across Lorna’s torso with minimal shadow.
Jonty got onto his knees, turning Lorna’s right arm around to check the skin for discoloration. ‘Nothing here,’ he said. Tipping Lorna’s head back he inspected the underside of her jaw. ‘Ah, yes, got them.’ He pointed to the soft area where her neck met the underside of her jaw. ‘Easy to miss and less obvious because the pressure was applied to very pliable tissue but there are marks either side of her lower jaw. It would have made it difficult to breathe, and Lorna would have felt ill from the oxygen deprivation. She might even have passed out. I’ll have to let you know what internal damage was done after the full post-mortem, but there are no broken blood vessels in her eyes. A serious attempt at strangulation would have caused petechial haemorrhaging. This looks more like an effort to restrain, frighten or silence her.’
‘When she was first taken?’ Ava suggested. ‘Perhaps getting her into the car?’
‘I’d say more recently than that. There is a rim of yellow around the bruising, but still central blackness. Two days ago, maybe three. Some event occurred while Lorna was restrained that Zoey escaped,’ Jonty said.
‘If she was tied on her back, it would have been awkward for him to have his left hand on her arm, with his fingers in those positions, and his right at her neck,’ Callanach said.
‘Not if he was on top of her at the time,’ Ava muttered. ‘Dr Spurr, I want Lorna checked for signs of sexual assault as a priority. I appreciate that you’ve been called out in the middle of the night, but do you think you could start examining her tonight?’
‘Of course,’ Jonty said. ‘I won’t be getting back to sleep in any event. Might as well put the insomnia to good use.’ He disappeared in the direction of the Scenes of Crime van to oversee the processing of the body as Ava and Luc wandered to the roadside, overlooking the dip in the valley below.
A scattering of lights shone from the windows of early risers. Thousands more residents were still asleep, blissfully unaware of the tragedy unfolding just streets away. The morning news would be full of it, though, and the panic would start to spread. A second body. A man preying on vulnerable young women. It was every despicable cliché in the book.
‘We’re going to have to handle the press now,’ Callanach said. ‘One body could have been a deranged boyfriend or an impromptu attack, but this is organised. It’ll be international news within the hour.’
‘I don’t care about the press,’ Ava said. ‘Get the media office to put out a brief statement. No one from MIT is to comment. I only care about one thing.’
‘The doll,’ Callanach finished for her.
‘And which young woman it’s going to be exchanged for this time.’
As Ava took her car keys from her pocket and made her way back to her car, the final stitches were being pulled into place. A new doll was ready to find a home.
Chapter Eighteen
Callanach, Tripp, Lively and Salter stared at the screen in the incident room, watching as the young actress tasked with playing Lorna Shaw could be seen pushing a pram towards a distant row of shops. She paused as a car pulled up. The driver lowered his window and called out to her. She left the pram and walked across to speak with the driver.
Salter tutted.
‘Something wrong?’ Callanach asked.
‘I don’t believe she’d do that,’ Salter said. ‘It’s not natural. Your hands would be glued to the handle of the pram. You don’t just walk away and leave it in the middle of the pavement, even if you’re only moving a couple of feet.’
‘He had to get her to the vehicle, though,’ Tripp said. ‘He didn’t drag her there in daylight.’
‘I understand that, but the reconstruction goes against everything we know about Lorna. She’s had a troubled past, fought to get away from the dealers who got her addicted and misused her to pay for drugs. I reckon she’s the last person who’d walk up to a car window. If anything, she’d have been even more protective of the baby. After all, she’d spent the last few months knowing little Tansy would be taken away if she put a foot wrong,’ Salter said.
‘All right,’ Callanach said. ‘Let’s suppose he parked close by and approached her on foot.’
‘That would be less threatening. The question is how he managed to persuade Lorna to get into the car, and then pushed the pram into the alleyway to be found later,’ Salter said.
‘Or he had a knife to Lorna’s back and they pushed the pram together, then he put her in his car,’ Lively said.
‘Still doesn’t feel right. Lorna’s streetwise. She’d have known that once she was inside the vehicle, there was a chance she’d never see her baby again. I’d have sooner risked a stab wound and screamed blue murder than have got in that car, thinking I might never see my child again,’ Salter said. There was a long silence, the loss of Salter’s own baby hanging in the air. ‘So that’s it?’ she said. ‘You’re all going to go quiet whenever I say the word baby from now on?’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ Callanach said. ‘It doesn’t fit with what we know about Lorna.’
‘Aren’t we making assumptions?’ Tripp said. ‘What if there’s more than one person involved? It would make sense. One of them gets Lorna into the car, the other pushes the pram into the alleyway.’
‘You know the statistics on cooperative killers,’ Ava said from the doorway. ‘And the cutting is particularly specific, designed to fit to one person’s vision. Killers working closely with other p
eople make up fewer than 0.1 per cent of cases globally.’
Callanach pulled a chair across from another table and moved his own back to allow Ava to join them. She sat down.
‘Unless she knew her abductor,’ Lively said. ‘Perhaps she’d called a dealer for a quick pick-me-up, or was meeting up to pay off an old debt. Any number of scenarios are possible.’
‘Taken on their own, they are,’ Salter said. ‘But not following on from Zoey’s death. Perhaps Lorna did have some debts and know some dangerous people, but it’s a far cry from there to dumping a body with a doll shape cut from the skin.’
PC Biddlecombe appeared at the door, looking flushed. ‘Ma’am,’ she said to Ava. ‘I was told you’d want to see these straight away. Sorry.’ She walked in and dumped a stack of newspapers on the desk before scurrying back out.
‘Let’s see what the damage is,’ Ava said, unfolding the first front page. Half the space was a photograph of the crime scene, showing the gazebo and lights with white-suited workers at all angles. Ava and Callanach were standing at the roadside, huddled together. Blue lights strobed from emergency vehicles, and the crime scene tape fluttered out of focus in the foreground. It couldn’t have been more dramatic if the photographer had staged the scene themselves.