She leaned back in her chair and gazed out of the window. From this perspective she could see the entire length of the garden: unkempt, overgrown but potentially quite attractive. She might spend some time out there later on, trimming the bushes with her secateurs. Perhaps plant a few nice flowers in the borders as well. And while she was at it, there were people who would come in and spring-clean the house. The wallpaper and paintwork were old-fashioned, to be sure, and the kitchen could certainly do with bringing into the twenty-first century with a new cooker, new refrigerator and new cupboards and work surfaces, but those were big jobs that would require careful planning. And they might not be necessary.
Once she had finished searching the house – and it suddenly occurred to her that she needed to take a quick look in the attic, just to be absolutely sure she hadn’t missed anything – Violet decided that she would take a wander down to the High Street. She could treat herself to a cup of tea and a steak pie and some new potatoes in one of the department stores, and then take a slow walk along the row of estate agents. What she needed was one slightly down at heel, one that specialised in lets and sub-lets rather than actual sales. And – although this might require some careful observation from a seat in a coffee shop – one that dealt more with what Violet thought of as the lower end of the social spectrum. Immigrants. Students, perhaps. If the rent was set low enough – and Violet wasn’t greedy, far from it – then she was sure that tenants wouldn’t mind an old-fashioned kitchen and some faded wallpaper. It was probably better than they were used to.
The best thing was, the estate agents would make all the arrangements, choose the tenants, collect the rent and just forward it to wherever she wanted, after taking their cut, of course. And Violet didn’t begrudge them their cut, considering the load they were taking off her shoulders.
Streamers of smoke drifted up past the window. Somewhere down below, on the concrete patio, Daisy’s clothes were burning away to ashes. Violet didn’t like using the word ‘evidence’ – it sounded so harsh – but she was comforted to think that soon the events of the previous day would have vanished into the air.
And soon, after the house had been sorted out and whatever assets were in the house had been converted to cash, so would Violet.
The drifting smoke drew her gaze up into the sky: a deep cloudless azure that seemed to go on for ever and ever. She wished that, when she brought her gaze back down again, instead of overgrown bushes and thin trees she might see a glorious stretch of turquoise water, with the wind blowing spume off the crests of the waves and distant container ships breaking the straight line of the horizon.
And she decided there and then that she’d had enough of the small towns she had been hiding in for so long. She longed for the seaside, and that’s where she would go next.
As she was descending the stairs, the telephone rang. Without even thinking, she picked it up off the table in the hall and said, brightly, ‘Hello. Daisy Wilson speaking.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The mortuary was located between a park and a fire station on the outskirts of Braintree: a nondescript two-storey building that looked as if it had originally been intended as a temporary measure but now just sat there, set back from the road, fading further and further from people’s minds. It was, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie decided as he pulled off the road and parked in one of the designated spaces, the closest thing to an architectural blind spot it was possible to get.
He wasn’t in the best of moods. The morning before, after Emma Bradbury had driven off from the forest where the body had been discovered, Lapslie had hung around, waiting for the forensic pathologist to arrive. The press had turned up in the early afternoon, just before Jane Catherall, tipped off, he suspected, by one of the paramedics. By the time he had dealt with them and spent half an hour on the phone to the Crime Scene Manager she had already departed with the bodies, leaving him furious. Some mix-up in the admin had resulted in most of the uniformed police being pulled away from the crime scene in order to cover a local football match. And Superintendent Rouse had not called back. All in all, it had been a frustrating day.
Emma’s Mondeo was two spaces across from his car. This time, it was empty. No strange men in the passenger seat, waiting for her to return and whisk them away.
The front door had a push-button combination lock. He’d known the combination once, but he’d forgotten it several times over the years, so he did what he usually did: buzzed the intercom. It was a good minute before anyone answered.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Mark Lapslie,’ he said, bending down to the level of the intercom. Why was it they were always installed by dwarves? Or did the installers expect lots of school parties to visit the mortuary unaccompanied?
The door buzzed, and he pushed it open.
Despite the summer sun outside, the building was pleasantly cool. The hallway was carpeted with tiles that had, over the course of the years, picked up so many coffee stains they were piebald. The walls were plastered and painted in a muted shade of blue. A young man wearing a white coat over jeans and a T-shirt was waiting for him.
‘DCI Lapslie?’
He handed his warrant card across. The man inspected it carefully, although Lapslie was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a proper warrant card and a Scotland Yard gym membership.
‘This way, please.’
He led Lapslie down a corridor and gestured for him to go ahead through a set of double doors. The temperature dropped appreciably as Lapslie pushed the doors open, and he became aware of a strong smell, like bleach that had been poured down a blocked drain and allowed to fester. The smell was so strong, so cloying that he could taste it at the back of his throat. His synaesthesia momentarily went into reverse; the taste of the disinfectant, or cleaner, or whatever it was, overlaid on the smell of decay filled his head with deep, sonorous chimes. It didn’t happen very often, and he staggered slightly, one hand to his forehead, disoriented.
‘Are you all right?’ asked an unfamiliar voice.
‘Fine. Fine. The smell just got to me for a moment.’ He blinked a couple of times, forcing the sound of church bells to the back of his mind.
The room he had entered was large, and tiled in white from top to bottom. Several large ventilation units had been fixed to the ceiling, positioned above stainless-steel tables that stood in the centre, as organised and as massive as ancient obelisks. Each table had a raised lip around the edge and a tap with an attached hosepipe and shower head, also in stainless steel, at one end. Two of the tables had shrouded bodies on them; one much larger and more irregular than the other.
The woman standing between the tables was smaller than him, with a stomach so pronounced and so rounded that it was almost as if she had thrust a basketball under her white coat, and bulbous blue eyes that gazed at Lapslie with disconcerting mildness. She smiled, and Lapslie thought that he had never seen such a sweet smile on a woman.
‘Polio,’ she said, her voice tasting of brandy and soda.
‘Pardon?’
‘I noticed you looking over at me yesterday, when I finally arrived at the scene of the crime. You were probably wondering what caused me to look like this. The answer is polio. I contracted it as a child. I was probably one of the last children in England to catch it.’
‘I’m – sorry.’ He wasn’t sure what she wanted him to say.
‘Six months flat out in a hospital bed, and several operations to fuse my spine together. It could have been worse. Of course, if I’d been born a year or two later, it could have been a lot better. Such is the uncertainty of life.’ She held out a hand. ‘We’ve not met. Doctor Jane Catherall. Pleased to meet you.’
She walked towards Lapslie with jerky steps and held out her hand. He shook it, noticing as he did so that she had double cuffs on her shirt, pinned together with delicate gold chains. A woman who cared about her appearance. ‘DCI Lapslie,’ he said.
‘I’ve been expecting you. Your
colleague is already here.’ She kept hold of his hand, and Lapslie had the absurd impression that she was expecting him to bend down and kiss it. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I always greet everyone with the unfortunate story of my health,’ she added. ‘I wanted to make the point that our bodies are a permanent record of everything that happens to us. Broken bones, illnesses, diseases … they’re all there, preserved in the flesh. And if all we have to work with is the flesh, then we can work backwards and recreate the person from the list of things that happened to them.’
‘Thank you for the lecture.’ He could feel her charm beguiling him, but he wasn’t going to succumb. ‘We didn’t get a chance to talk yesterday,’ he said tersely. ‘I was too busy dealing with the press when they turned up to deal with you when you finally turned up.’
Dr Catherall looked away. ‘I apologise for arriving so late. Alas, one of the physical effects of the polio is a weakness in the intercostal muscles. I have to wear a face mask connected to a respirator when I sleep. It maintains a positive pressure in order to ensure that I keep breathing but it does lead to a very disturbed night’s sleep, and I find it difficult to wake up in the mornings. I missed the first four calls on my mobile.’
‘Then buy a louder mobile,’ Lapslie said unsympathetically.
Dr Catherall gazed up at him with those disquietingly mild eyes. ‘The victim had been there for many months,’ she said. ‘Two more hours was not going to compromise any evidence on the body, and it ensured that when I did arrive I was not making any mistakes through lack of sleep. Let me do my job, Detective Chief Inspector, and I will provide you with everything you need to do yours.’
The long silence that grew between them was broken by the doors to the mortuary opening and Emma Bradbury entering the room. She didn’t look like she had taken her suit off since the day before. The mortuary assistant who had let Lapslie in was following her.
‘Boss,’ Emma acknowledged.
‘Sergeant. Been here long?’
‘Half an hour or so. Dr Catherall let me use her office to make a few calls.’
Lapslie nodded. ‘Well, shall we get on with it?’
Dr Catherall led Lapslie and Emma over to the first table and nodded towards the shrouded body. ‘Your crash victim,’ she said. ‘I took the liberty of conducting the post-mortem this morning, before you arrived.’ She glanced sideways at Lapslie. ‘As I understand it, he was the victim of a car crash, rather than of a suspected murderer. It occurred to me that you would not want to be stood around waiting while I fiddled about in his innards.’
‘Correct. Was there anything unusual about the body?’
‘Nothing that caused me concern. Bruises and abrasions caused by the crash, some burning from the airbag, and a massive trauma to his neck, cutting through his carotid artery. All consistent with what was found at the scene. I have, of course, sent blood samples off for testing. We may get traces of alcohol, or drugs. Happy?’
‘Ecstatic. What about the other one?’
With a flourish, she pulled the white cloth off the bulky, irregular shape on the second table. ‘Et voila!’
Seeing the corpse in the forest, a natural thing nestled amongst other natural things, had seemed almost normal. Seeing her here, laid out naked on harsh metal, surrounded by the plastic sheets that had been disinterred with her and crusted with dirt, Lapslie was struck by a sense of wrongness. Nobody deserved to be left like this. Death should have some dignity, surely.
What remained of her was mottled grey, and dry. Her hips and shoulders made tent shapes under her skin, and her stomach had decayed away, or perhaps been eaten away, to reveal the lumpy shape of her spine. Her face was dominated by the rictus-like grimace of her mouth, where the skin had pulled back to reveal black gums.
Framed in the plastic sheets, she seemed smaller than she had done in the forest.
‘Well,’ Dr Catherall said quietly as her assistant wheeled a stand supporting a tray of surgical instruments across to her. ‘With no further ado, let us commence.’
For the next hour, Lapslie and DS Bradbury watched from the sidelines as Dr Catherall painstakingly unwrapped the sheets and cut her way through the old woman’s cadaver, taking samples as she went and talking quietly into a minidisc recorder while her assistant took occasional photographs. Her work was meticulous and detailed, and her manner was more like a woman doing a difficult crossword puzzle than a medical expert slicing up a body.
Lapslie felt himself falling into an almost hypnotic trance as he watched, lulled by Dr Catherall’s effortless technique. He had expected her hands to be clumsy, based on her shape and her medical history, but her movements were precise to the point of minimalism. Every gesture was exactly what was needed, no more and no less.
Emma Bradbury, on the other hand, fidgeted endlessly. After a few minutes she found a laboratory stool and perched on it, but she couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Every now and then she would shift position, scratch her head, tug at her ear or search her pockets for something that she never seemed to find. She was plainly bored, and not very good at disguising it.
After twenty minutes or so, as Dr Catherall had penetrated to the last layer of plastic sheet around the body, she suddenly stood back. ‘Good Lord,’ she murmured. She leaned closer to examine something within the sheets. ‘Good Lord,’ she said again, and gestured for her assistant to move closer. He started taking photographs as Dr Catherall carefully removed a number of objects from between the plastic sheets and the corpse and transferred them to the third post-mortem table.
‘You might want to take a look at this,’ she said, turning to Lapslie. He moved to join her, but before he could get to the table his mobile rang. Dr Catherall cast a dark glance at him.
‘DCI Lapslie,’ he said.
‘Lapslie?’ The voice was familiar: dry, like grass cuttings, and slightly tinny, which probably meant that he had Lapslie on speakerphone. ‘Alan Rouse. You called yesterday.’
Dr Catherall gestured abruptly towards the door.
‘Sorry, sir – could you hang on for a moment. I’m in the middle of a post-mortem.’ He strode towards the door and out into the corridor. ‘That’s better,’ he said as the doors swung shut behind him. ‘Sir – it’s been a long time.’
‘Too long.’ Lapslie could imagine Rouse leaning back in his chair in his white, glass-walled office. ‘How’s Sonia?’
A stab of unexpected pain; an icy knife in his heart. Lapslie’s breath caught in his throat. ‘She’s – okay.’
‘And the kids?’
‘Fine. Thanks for asking.’
‘And what about your … ah, medical condition?’
‘Unchanged – which is why I was startled when I got a call from a young copper attending a car crash.’
‘Ah yes. She called me when your name popped out of the computer.’
‘That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Why was my name in the computer in the first place?’
There was a pause on the other end of the line: the aural equivalent of a shrug. ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Rouse said eventually. Lapslie found that his tongue was tingling, as if he’d dipped it in something mildly spiced, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. ‘Presumably something about the case resonates with some previous investigation you’ve been involved with. Some unsolved murder, or suchlike.’
‘I can’t say I can hear the sound of bells ringing.’
‘Perhaps it’s a glitch. Computers are the bane of a policeman’s life, these days.’
Another momentary silence, but this time Lapslie had the impression that Superintendent Rouse was waiting for him to make some comment. ‘I was under the impression that I was on indefinite sick leave,’ he said eventually. ‘You know that my synaesthesia makes it difficult for me to work in an office environment.’
‘I know that’s what we talked about, Mark, but you understand that we can’t have you off sick indefinitely. We’ve been looking for some kind of job you can do without being
in the office, but it’s not been easy. I know you’ve written a couple of reports for the Chief Constable, but there’s pressure from the Home Secretary to get as many people back in work as we can. So when your name was flagged up as someone who might be able to contribute to this case, well, I took it to be a sign. A sign that it was time you came back to us. I’ve arranged a desk for you here in Chelmsford, and you’ll have access to a Quiet Room if you need it. We’ll sort out something for you once this case is over.’
‘And until then I’m the investigating officer?’
‘Correct.’
‘As DCI? Isn’t that over-egging the pudding a bit?’
‘Look on it as a way of easing yourself back into harness.’
‘Nice talking to you, sir.’
‘Pop in, when you’re in the office. Let’s have a chat.’
Lapslie slid the mobile back into his pocket and took a deep breath. It looked like he was back on the job. Not entirely unexpected – he’d been waiting for something like this to happen – but not entirely welcome either.
Sighing, he entered the pathology lab again.
Laid out on the stainless-steel table were the objects that Dr Catherall had removed from the stomach of the dead body: five desiccated corpses of what were either field mice or voles, along with two rats and something larger that Lapslie assumed was a polecat, or a ferret, or something along those lines. The smaller animals looked to Lapslie like no more than matchstick bones in twists of matted fur.
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