Friend of the Devil ib-17

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Friend of the Devil ib-17 Page 9

by Peter Robinson


  According to the rec ords, Karen’s car had been hit by a driver losing control and crossing the center of the road six years ago. She had been in a coma for some time and had had a series of operations and lengthy spells of hospitalization, until it became apparent to every medical expert involved that she wasn’t going to recover, and that the only real option was full-time care. She had been at Mapston Hall for three months, as Grace Chaplin had said. That wasn’t very long, Annie thought. And if Karen couldn’t communicate, she could hardly have made any enemies so quickly. Passing psychopaths aside, it seemed all the more likely that the reason for her murder lay in her past.

  Medically, the report suggested, there had been no change in her physical condition, and there never would be. When someone is as limited in self-expression as Karen Drew was, the slightest hint of progress tends to be hailed as a miracle. But nobody had really known what Karen was thinking or feeling. Nobody even knew whether she wanted to live or die. That choice had been taken out of her hands now, and it was up to Annie to find out why. Was it a mercy killing, as Naylor had hinted at, or did someone benefit in some way from Karen’s death? And if mercy was the motive, who had given it to her? These were the questions she would like answered first.

  One thing Annie noticed about the files was that they told her very little of Karen’s life before the accident. She had lived in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but there was no specific address listed, nor any indiF R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

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  cation as to whether she had grown up there or moved from somewhere else. Her parents were marked as deceased, again without details, and she apparently had neither siblings nor anyone especially close, like a husband, live-in partner or fiancé. All in all, Karen Drew hardly appeared to have existed before that fateful day in 2001.

  Annie was chewing on the end of her yellow pencil stub and frowning at this lack of information when her mobile rang shortly after nine o’clock. She didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway. In the course of an investigation, she gave her card out to many people.

  “Annie?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s me. Eric.”

  “Eric?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten so quickly. That hurts.”

  Annie’s mind whizzed through the possibilities, and there was only one glaringly obvious answer. “I don’t remember giving you my mobile number,” she said.

  “Well, that’s a fine thing to say. Something else you don’t remember, I suppose, like my name?”

  Shit. Had she been that drunk? “Anyway,” she went on, “it’s my work number. Please don’t call me on it.”

  “Give me your home number, then.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then how am I supposed to get in touch with you? I don’t even know your last name.”

  “You’re not. That’s the point.” Annie ended the call. She felt a tightness in her chest. Her phone rang again. Automatically, she answered.

  “Look,” Eric said, “I’m sorry. We’ve got off to a bad start here.”

  “Nothing’s started. And nothing’s going to start,” Annie said.

  “I’m not proposing marriage, you know. But won’t you at least allow me to take you out to dinner?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “All the time?”

  “Pretty much.”

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  “Tomorrow?”

  “Washing my hair.”

  “Wednesday?”

  “Tenants association meeting.”

  “Thursday?”

  “School reunion.”

  “Friday?”

  Annie paused. “Visiting my aging parents.”

  “Aha! But you hesitated there,” he said. “I distinctly heard it.”

  “Look, Eric,” Annie said, adopting what she thought was a reasonable but firm tone. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to play this game anymore. It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to be rude or nasty or anything, but I’m just not interested in a relationship right now. End of story.”

  “I only asked you to dinner. No strings.”

  In Annie’s experience, there were always strings. “Sorry. Not interested.”

  “What’s wrong? What did I do? When I woke up you were gone.”

  “You didn’t do anything. It’s me. I’m sorry. Please don’t call again.”

  “Don’t ring off!”

  Against her better judgment, Annie held on.

  “Are you still there?” he asked after a moment’s silence.

  “I’m here.”

  “Good. Have lunch with me. Surely you can manage lunch one day this week? How about The Black Horse on Thursday?”

  The Black Horse was in Whitby’s old town, on a narrow cobbled street below the ruined abbey. It was a decent enough place, Annie knew, and not one that was frequented by her colleagues. But why was she even thinking about it? Let go with both hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll be there at the noon,” Eric said. “You do remember what I look like?”

  Annie remembered the young face with the slept-on hair, the stray lock, the night’s growth of dark beard, the strong shoulders, the surpris-F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

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  ingly gentle hands. “I remember,” she said. “But I won’t be there.”

  Then she pressed the end-call button.

  She held the phone in her shaking hand for a few moments, heart palpitating, as if it were some sort of mysterious weapon, but it didn’t ring again. Then a very unpleasant memory started surfacing into the light of consciousness.

  She had only had her new mobile for a week. It was a Blackberry Pearl, which combined phone, text and e-mail, and she was still learn-ing all its bells and whistles, like the built- in camera. She remembered that Eric had the same model, and he had shown her how to work one or two of its more advanced features.

  Hand trembling, she clicked on her recent saved photographs.

  There they were: her head and Eric’s leaning toward each other, touching, almost filling the screen as they made faces at the camera with the club lights in the background. She remembered she had sent the photo to his mobile. That would be how he had got hold of her number. How could she be so stupid?

  She put the phone in her handbag. What was she playing at? She ought to know she couldn’t trust her judgment in these matters. Besides, Eric was just a kid. Be f lattered and let go. Enough of this crap.

  Why did she even let her behavior haunt her so? She picked up a slip of paper from her desk. Time to go and talk to the social worker who had got Karen Drew placed in Mapston Hall. The poor woman had to have had some kind of life before her accident.

  D R . E L I Z A B E T H WA L L A C E ’ S postmortem approach was far less f lamboyant and f lippant than Glendenning’s, Banks discovered in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary late that Monday morning.

  She seemed shy and deferential as she nodded to acknowledge Banks’s presence and made her initial preparations with her assistant, Wendy Gauge. They made sure that the equipment she would need was all at hand and the hanging microphone on which she recorded her spoken comments was functioning properly. She seemed to be holding her feelings in check, Banks noticed, and it showed in the tight set of her 7 2 P E T E R

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  lips and the twitching muscle beside her jaw. Banks couldn’t imagine her smoking the way he and Glendenning had, or making bad jokes over the corpse.

  Dr. Wallace first performed her external examination in a studied, methodical way, taking her time. The body had already been examined for traces and intimate samples, and everything the doctor and the SOCOs had collected from Hayley Daniels and her clothes had been sent to the lab for analysis, including the leather remnants that had been stuffed in her mouth, presumably to keep her quiet. Banks glanced at Hayley, lying on her back on the table, pale and naked. He couldn’t help to bu
t stare at the shaved pubes. He had already been told about it at the scene, but seeing it for himself was something else entirely. Just above the mound was a tattoo of two small blue fishes swimming in opposite directions. Pisces. Her birth sign.

  Dr. Wallace caught him staring. “It’s not unusual,” she said. “It doesn’t mean she was a tart or anything. It’s also not recent, not within the past few months, anyway, so the killer can’t have done it. Tattoos like that are common enough, and a lot of young girls shave or get a wax these days. They call it a Brazilian.”

  “Why?” said Banks.

  “Fashion. Style. They also say it increases pleasure during inter-course.”

  “Does it?”

  She didn’t crack a smile. “How would I know?” she said, then went back to her examination, pausing every now and then to study an area of skin or an unusual mark closely under the magnifying lens and speaking her observations into the microphone.

  “What’s that brown discoloration below the left breast?” Banks asked.

  “Birthmark.”

  “The arms, and between the breasts?”

  “Bruising. Premortem. He knelt on her.” She called to her assistant.

  “Let’s get her opened up.”

  “Anything you can tell me so far?” Banks asked.

  Dr. Wallace paused and leaned forward, her hands on the metal rim of the table. A couple of strands of light-brown hair had worked their F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

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  way out of her protective head cover. “It certainly appears as if she was strangled manually. No ligature. From the front, like this.” She held her hands out and mimicked the motion of squeezing them around someone’s neck.

  “Any chance of fingerprints from the skin, or DNA?”

  “There’s always a chance that some of the killer’s skin, or even a drop of blood, rubbed off on her. It looks as if he cleaned her up afterward, but he might not have caught everything.”

  “There was something that might have been semen on her thigh,”

  Banks said.

  Dr. Wallace nodded. “I saw it. Don’t worry, the lab has samples of everything, but it’ll take time. You ought to know that. Fingerprints?

  I don’t think so. I know it’s been done, but there was so much slippage in this case. Like when you open a doorknob, your fingers slip on its surface and everything gets smeared and blurred.”

  “Did she struggle?”

  Dr. Wallace glanced away. “Of course she bloody did.”

  “I was thinking of scratches.”

  Dr. Wallace took a deep breath. “Yes. There might be DNA in the samples the SOCOs took from under her fingernails. Your killer might have scratches on his forearms or face.” She paused. “Frankly, though, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope. As you can see, her fingernails were bitten to the quicks.”

  “Yes, I’d noticed,” said Banks. “And the bruising?”

  “As I said, he knelt on her arms, and at one point on the center of her chest, probably to hold her down while he used his hands to strangle her. She didn’t have a chance.”

  “You’re sure it’s a man?”

  Dr. Wallace gave him a scornful glance. “Take it from me, this is a man’s work. Unless someone’s girlfriend did the strangling after the boyfriend raped and sodomized her.”

  It had been done, Banks knew. Couples had acted in tandem as sexual predators or killers. Fred and Rosemary West. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Terry and Lucy Payne. But he thought Dr. Wallace was probably right to dismiss it in this case. “Were all the injuries inf licted while she was alive?”

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  “There’s no evidence of postmortem maltreatment, if that’s what you mean. The bruising and tearing in the vagina and anus both indicate she was alive while he raped her. You can see the marks on her wrists where he held her. And you can see her upper arms, neck and chest for yourself, as well as the bruising on her thighs. This was a rough and violent rape followed by strangulation.”

  “How did he restrain her while he was raping her?” Banks mused out loud. “He couldn’t have done it with his knees on her arms.”

  “He could have had a weapon. A knife, say.”

  “So why not stab her? Why strangle her?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. He may simply have used threats to control her.

  Isn’t it often the case that rapists will threaten to kill their victims if they don’t cooperate, or even to hunt them down later, harm their families?”

  “Yes,” said Banks. He knew his questions might sound crude and insensitive, but these were things he had to know. That was why it had always been so easy with Dr. Glendenning. Working with a woman pathologist was different. “Why kill her at all?” he asked.

  Dr. Wallace looked at Banks as she might a specimen on her table.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “To shut her up, perhaps. Maybe she recognized him or could identify him. That’s your job, isn’t it, to figure out things like that?”

  “I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud. Bad habit of mine. I was also just wondering if there was any evidence that the strangulation was part of the thrill, rough sex gone wrong?”

  Dr. Wallace shook her head. “I don’t think so. Though he was certainly rough with her. As I said, it very much looks as if he had one knee pushing against her chest as he strangled her, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, in that position to perform a sexual assault on her. I’d say in this case that he strangled her when he’d done with her.”

  “Dr. Burns estimated time of death at between midnight and two a.m. on Sunday morning. Do you agree?”

  “I can’t find anything that would argue against that estimate,” Dr.

  Wallace said. “But it is just an estimate. Time of death is—”

  “I know, I know,” said Banks. “Notoriously difficult to establish.

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  The one thing that can sometimes help us most. Just one more of life’s little ironies.”

  Dr. Wallace didn’t respond.

  “Anything odd or unusual?”

  “All perfectly normal so far, for this sort of thing.” Dr. Wallace sounded weary and too old for her years, as if she’d seen it all too many times before. Banks stood back and kept quiet to let her get on with her work. She gripped the scalpel and started to make the Y incision quickly and precisely and Banks felt a shiver run up his spine.

  A N N I E TO O K Ginger with her to Nottingham to talk to Gail Torrance, Karen Drew’s social worker, while Tommy Naylor held the fort back in Whitby. Annie liked Ginger’s company, felt at ease with her.

  She was irreverent and funny, chewing gum constantly, talking a mile a minute, complaining about the other drivers, and she always seemed cheerful. Perhaps because of her rather butch appearance, many of the blokes at the station had first thought she was a lesbian, but it turned out that she had a stay-at- home husband and two young kids. For a moment, as Annie drove and listened to the hilarious tirade about the kids’ weekend with a bouncy castle, she thought that Ginger might be someone she could talk to about Eric—there, he had a name now—

  but she realized it wouldn’t be appropriate, that she didn’t really know her well enough, and that she didn’t want anyone to know, at least not right now. What did she expect? Advice? She didn’t need any. She knew what to do. And if she talked to anyone about it, it would be Winsome, though they hardly saw each other these days.

  Annie was driving because she didn’t feel safe with Ginger behind the wheel. And Ginger knew that. Though she had somehow got her license, driving was simply one of the skills she hadn’t truly mastered yet, she apologized, and she was due for yet another training course in a month’s time. But by the time they got lost in an area of desolate industrial estates, Annie was wishing she had handed the wheel over to Ginger, who was proving to be an even worse navigator than she was a driver.

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  They finally found the social services offices in West Bridgford. It was almost lunchtime when they arrived, and Gail Torrance was more than happy to join them in the nearest pub. The place was already busy with office workers, but they found a table cluttered with the previous occupants’ leftover chips, salad and remains of Scotch eggs, along with empty lipstick-stained half-pint glasses with pools of pale warm lager in the bottom. The ashtray, too, was overf lowing with crushed pink-ringed cigarette ends, one of them still smoldering slightly.

  Ginger took the orders and went up to the bar. By the time she got back with the drinks, a sullen teenage waitress had cleared away the debris, then brought knives and forks folded in paper serviettes. Annie and Ginger drank Slimline Bitter Lemon and Gail sipped a Campari and soda. She lit a cigarette. “Ah, that’s better,” she said, blowing out the smoke.

  Annie managed to smile through the smoke. “As you know,” she said, “we’ve come to talk about Karen Drew.” She noticed Ginger take out her pen and notebook. Despite her size and her f laming red hair, she had the knack of disappearing into the background when she wanted to.

  “You’re probably wasting your time,” said Gail. “I mean, I can’t really tell you very much about her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know anything.”

  “But you

  were her liaison between the hospital and Mapston Hall.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything. I mean, I handle all sorts of similar residential care cases all over the county.”

  “So tell us what you do know.”

  Gail pushed back her hair. “About four months ago,” she began, “the administration at Grey Oaks, the hospital where Karen had been for almost three years, got in touch with me—I’ve worked with them before—and told me about a woman they had been treating who needed special care. That’s my area. I went out there and met Karen—

  for the first and only time, I might add—and talked to her doctors.

  They had assessed her needs, and from what I could see, I agreed with them—not that my opinion on the matter was required, of course.” She F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

 

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