by M J Lee
‘However, we are not going to be so lavish with our precious formula. The Americans think just 38 millilitres of formalin is enough to kill somebody. Lesley thinks 35 millilitres will be enough. I, however, think you are quite a strong young woman and have opted for the round figure of 40.’
Another pause. Did he have a problem breathing or was he just taking his time, drawing out the agony?
‘Already one millilitre should now be circulating around your system. The amusement for us will be watching how you die. Will it be from convulsions? Or vomiting? Will you go mad first? Or will respiratory failure gradually make you unable to breathe?’
The voice laughed. A sound like that of a man watching a hanging and delighting in the legs kicking beneath the trapdoor.
‘Our little experiment is to see how long it takes a person – in this case you, Sarah – to be embalmed alive.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
He had driven like a madman down the A34, running the gauntlet of roundabouts, slow drivers and roadworks. He no longer had a flashing red light or siren to clear his way so he had to rely on his driving skills.
Inevitably, as he entered Manchester, he was slowed down by traffic. Luckily most of it was heading the other way: commuters heading home to the comfort of the suburbs from their work in the concrete jungle.
He parked in front the mortuary on a double yellow line. Bugger it, this was far too important. He ran up the steps and through the entrance. A receptionist tried to stop him as he barged through the door into the working area at the back. He brushed her aside, pulling out his expired warrant card and shouting, ‘Police.’
He ran down a long green corridor, turned the corner and there he was, wheeling a gurney with a bright-green body bag placed carelessly across it.
Don Brown took one look at him and started to run, shoving the gurney across the corridor. Ridpath pushed it to one side and chased after him.
Brown glanced back over his shoulder and turned left past the chapel of rest.
Ridpath chased after him, narrowly missing a middle-aged woman coming out from saying her prayers.
Luckily, Brown was fat and out of shape – a diet of cigarettes, alcohol and salt and vinegar crisps not the best training for running away from a copper who was determined to speak to him.
He tried though, diving through rear double doors and jumping down steps where two men were having a quiet fag.
Ridpath jumped past them too, shouting ‘Stop, stop,’ as he did so.
Neither man moved, carrying on smoking their cigarettes as if nothing had happened.
Ridpath ran past a children’s nursery. Where else but Manchester would you find a mortuary next to a children’s nursery? Those just starting their lives and those who had already finished theirs in close proximity.
He turned another corner. Brown was just fifteen yards ahead now and slowing fast.
‘Give it up, Brown.’ Ridpath shouted.
The man glanced over his shoulder, eyes flaring wildly, but kept on running. Two other men in white coats looked across to see what was happening, but neither moved to stop Brown. Just another day in the life of Manchester Royal Infirmary.
They were both on the Boulevard now, the road that dribbled through the hospital buildings. Brown was just four yards ahead, then three.
He turned a corner just as Ridpath drove his shoulder into the man’s back, sending him sprawling along the pavement. Ridpath fell with him, landing on top of the fat man, placing his knee in the centre of the man’s back and dragging his arms round to be handcuffed.
Ridpath reached for his cuffs. Nothing there.
Keeping hold of the man’s arm and twisting it up behind his back, he dragged him upright.
‘You’re nicked, Brown.’
‘Me, I ain’t done nothing.’ Blood dripped from the man’s forehead where it had scraped along the ground.
‘Stealing a body is an offence.’
‘I didn’t steal nothing – it was O’Shaughnessy. It was him, I swear it.’
Ridpath eased his grip on the man’s arm, letting it drop to his waist. He could always twist it upwards again if Brown gave him trouble.
‘You’re going to tell me everything, understand?’
Brown nodded, hesitantly. ‘It wasn’t me, it was O’Shaughnessy.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
‘Boss, we’ve got a hit on the BMW.’
Dave Hardy passed his mobile phone to Charlie Whitworth.
‘It’s Chrissy. We picked up the white BMW going down Chester Road and turning right onto the ring road. The number is WF16 TUW. Kept to the main roads after it came off at Cheadle, but then we lost it. The roadworks have taken out all the cameras.’
‘Great work. Check the vehicle registration and get me an address straight away.’ DCI Whitworth started walking towards his car with his ear still glued to the phone, followed by a phalanx of detectives.
‘Already done, boss. The car’s registered to a Lesley Taylor at 83 Tarporth Road in Poynton.’
‘We’re on our way, Chrissy. Keep following the car on CCTV, find out where it went last night.’
‘We’re on it, boss. We’ve keyed in the number to ANPR and we’re following it through the system. I’ll let Dave know – he’s looking for it around the marina on the night before the woman with the swan tattoo was murdered.’
‘Chrissy, you’re a marvel.’
‘One last thing, boss. It looks like the witness was correct. We’ve blown up a picture of the driver and it’s a woman.’
‘Jesus. Well done. Put the picture on the system for me.’
Charlie Whitworth switched off the phone and jumped into the front of the car. ‘Tarporth Road in Poynton, Alan. Use all the bells and whistles.’
Immediately the lights on the police car began to flash and the siren whooped. The car accelerated away, followed by a two other cars packed with detectives.
Charlie Whitworth was on the phone straight away to his guv’nor.
‘John, we got a lead on the kidnapped officer, DS Sarah Castle. Could be tied into the murders of the toms. What?’ OK, I’ll make sure we’re as clean as my old mum’s knickers. Can you get the chopper onto it plus a firearms team? We don’t know what we’re going to face. The address is Tarporth Road, Poynton.’
The cars raced through the streets of Manchester, sirens echoing off the buildings. Ahead of them, cars pulled to one side as if scared by the noise, letting them pass. Alan, a trained police driver, slowed at red lights before accelerating through as soon as he knew it was safe. Past Princess Parkway, along the Airport Eastern Corridor and through the 1930s suburbs – all neat gardens, well-trimmed hedges and blossoming cherry trees.
Above, Charlie Whitworth saw the chopper hovering at 1,000 feet. ‘Get a move on, Alan, we haven’t got all bloody day.’
The car surged forward as the driver stomped on the accelerator, leaping through the traffic-slowing roundabouts in the centre of Poynton, the car’s tyres screeching as it took a sharp right into Tarporth Road.
‘It’s up there on the left. Switch off the siren.’
The noise ceased instantly and silence returned again to the car.
‘Stop here.’ Charlie Whitworth slammed his hand down in the dashboard and Alan jammed on the brakes. The police Vauxhall fishtailed to a stop, the other cars stopping behind it with a loud squeal of brakes.
Sixty yards ahead was the target house. A single-storey brick bungalow built with all the lack of style of the 1960s: a tiny garden in front, a Victorian shop-style bay window, and an attached garage almost as big as the house.
It was the blandness of suburbia personified. It didn’t look like the home of a serial killer. But then again, what did?’
The whirling blades of the helicopter were loud as it hovered directly above their car.
‘Are we going in, boss?’
Charlie looked at the front of the house. There was no BMW parked in front, but it could have been locked away in the garage
. Where would they keep Sarah? In the garage too? But surely the neighbours would have heard noises.
‘What’s the ETA of the firearms team?’
Alan asked the question on the police radio, ‘Twenty minutes, boss.’
Shit, they couldn’t wait that long. ‘Let’s go in. Dave and his team around the back. You, me and Harry’s team at the front. Come on.’
Charlie opened the door, signalled to Dave where he should go and placed the other team in front of the house. He strode calmly up to the front door, his heart beating loudly in his chest.
‘You want me to kick the door in, boss?’ asked Alan.
Charlie shook his head. Standing to one side, he pressed the doorbell.
No answer.
He rapped on the frosted glass.
Still no answer.
‘Kick it in.’
Alan took a leap at the door, hitting the latch with his boot. It burst open with a splintering of wood. Charlie charged in, followed by the other detectives. In front of them was a kitchen.
Empty.
A door to the right. Charlie rushed in.
An old lady was sitting in an armchair watching the television, a word search book on her lap. Slowly, she looked at them through rheumy eyes.
‘Where’s Lesley Taylor?’
The voice snapped back at them. ‘Who are you? And what are you doing in my house? I’ll call the police.’
‘We are the police, madam. Where’s Lesley Taylor?’
‘I haven’t seen her since last night when she made my cocoa. And there was no tea and toast for breakfast this morning and I had to get my lunch. If you see my ungrateful daughter, tell her I’m angry, extremely angry.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
A shiver ran the length of her body. Why was she so cold?
She pulled her left hand down against the manacle. Blood ran off her wrist, down the length of her arm, before dripping off her elbow onto the sodden carpet.
She was cold again.
And tired.
So tired.
She looked up. Another large drop of formalin had splashed into the saline above her head. She imagined the chemical surging around her body, seeking out her heart, lungs and brain. Its poison contaminating every cell.
She screamed once again, struggling against the chains holding her arms tight to the wall.
‘I’ve already told you, the more you struggle the faster your heart will beat. When your heart pumps more blood around your body, the formalin will circulate through your system, killing you even quicker.’ The woman’s voice was cold, clinical, heartless. She walked over to the camera and made another adjustment to the framing.
Sarah screamed again. Long and loud.
Somebody had to be able to hear her. Somebody had to come. They must have realized she was missing by now, mustn’t they? Sarah imagined the MIT office – all of them sitting behind their computers, typing away. Did they know she was kidnapped?
She had rung Ridpath, leaving a message. He would ring her back, looking to know what she had found. He would ring back, wouldn’t he?’
A surge of pain shot through her stomach and she vomited up yesterday’s cheese and tomato sandwich. Another surge of pain and her body jerked wildly, hanging by her arms from the chains.
‘I did tell you screaming would only increase the progress of the formalin, didn’t I?’
Sarah vomited again, her throat convulsing as the hot acid and bile from her stomach shot out of her mouth.
She breathed through her nose, desperately trying to suck air into her lungs, avoiding the vomit-stained lips.
Through her half-closed eyes, she watched as the woman strode to the saline drip and stared at it.
‘Twenty-three millilitres. It won’t be long now.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Ridpath escorted Don Brown back to the bereavement centre. The man was quieter now, subdued; all fight had left him.
‘Sit down here. You’re going to tell me everything you know about Alice Seagram.’ Ridpath passed over a handkerchief.
Don Brown dabbed the blood off his forehead.
Time to use the softly-softly approach. ‘You want a cup of tea?’
Don Brown nodded meekly.
Ridpath walked over to the machine in the corner and put in two pound coins, returning with something that looked and smelt vaguely like washing-up water, but at least it was hot and sweet.
Brown took the plastic cup with a mumbled thanks.
Ridpath sat next to him taking out his notebook. ‘Tell me what happened to the body of Alice Seagram.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything.’
Ridpath waited, pen poised over the notebook, as Brown took a sip of the warm tea.
‘I worked for O’Shaughnessy for five years. He weren’t a bad boss – paid well, on time and, unlike others, shared the tips from the family after the funeral. After three years, he took me aside and asked if I wanted to earn a few extra bob. Well, I was pretty broke at the time. All the nags had three legs, if you know what I mean?’
‘You had a gambling problem?’ Ridpath said softly.’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it. I owed money to some unsavoury Maltese who were threatening to break my legs.’ He took another sip of tea, grimacing slightly as it slipped down his throat. ‘Anyway, I jumped at the chance. And true to his word, O’Shaughnessy was generous with the bonuses.’
‘What did you have to do for them?’
Another sip of tea. ‘O’Shaughnessy had two scams going on. The first involved the coffins and the men at the crematoria. You know, they don’t fire the furnaces every day so they have to store the coffins and the deceased in the crematorium until they’re ready to set them alight.
‘So when the coffin vanishes behind the curtain, it doesn’t go straight into the furnace?’
‘In most cases, no. Anyway, O’Shaughnessy had the bright idea of simply reclaiming some of the coffins and reselling them to another family.’ Another sip of tea. ‘You know, some of these oak coffins cost up to three thousand quid. O’Shaughnessy was sharing the money with the men at the crematoria.’
‘So he was basically reselling the same coffin over and over again, making three thousand quid each time he did it?’ Ridpath made a note in his diary and then stopped. ‘But what did he do with the bodies?’
‘That’s where I came in. My job was to drive round to the crematoria and collect the coffin and the corpse before they were cremated. Now, we had two different places to take the corpses. The first was here. O’Shaughnessy had these forms where he showed the person had donated their body to medical science.’
‘So you used to bring them here to be operated on by medical students?’
‘Right. The anatomy classes are always short of bodies. O’Shaughnessy filled a gap in the market.’
‘That was good of him.’
‘But Alice Seagram was different.’
‘In what way?’
‘O’Shaughnessy was scared somebody would recognize her – you know, one of the medical students. So he told me to take the body to a place near Preston.’
Ridpath frowned. ‘Why there?’
‘It’s a place where you lot do your work.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s where your mob, the police, the pathologists, the forensics people, do their work.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘It’s where the animal farm is. Where they use pigs and cows to work out rates of decay, effects of heat and cold, larvae and insect activity, all that stuff.’
‘Sounds horrible.’ Ridpath scratched his nose. ‘But what’s all this got to do with Alice Seagram?’
‘That’s what I’m coming to.’ He took a last sip of the tea, staring into the bottom of the plastic cup. ‘You see, we only ever did the coffin switch on cremations – couldn’t do it if the body was being buried, could we?’
‘Impossible, the family would
see.’
‘But O’Shaughnessy came to me the evening before the burial. Told me not to put the body in the coffin but to add a few breeze blocks instead. So I asked him was he sure? And he said, “I’ve been told to do it.”’
‘Are you sure those were his words?’
‘I remember them like yesterday.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘As I was told. I cleaned the breeze blocks, felt I should treat them with some respect seeing as how they were replacing the body, and placed them in the empty coffin.’
Ridpath’s eyes widened. That’s where he had seen the breeze blocks before. The wall in front of O’Shaughnessy’s building. He was getting slow in his old age. Either that or the drugs he was taking did have side effects. He would ask Dr Morris tomorrow. He concentrated on the man in front of him who was staring into the bottom of his plastic cup.
‘What did you do with the body?’
‘I took it to the cold store and left it there, covered in a sheet.’
‘The following day, the funeral went ahead?’
Brown nodded. ‘It was a bit weird seeing the family crying over a few breeze blocks.’
Ridpath had to keep this man focused. The next question was key. He had to get him to confirm his account. ‘What happened to the body after that?’
‘O’Shaughnessy told me to drive it to a place near Preston. So I went off in the van the day after the funeral.’
‘March 22nd.’
‘Probably, if that was the day after the funeral. When I got there I realized it was the animal farm where they do forensic testing.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I delivered the body to the place and drove back. O’Shaughnessy was never the same. He sold up to those bastards, the Dalys, a year later…’
‘And you lost your job, and came to work here?’
Brown laughed ruefully. ‘Seems like my whole life I’ve been surrounded by dead people. I prefer them to the living, they don’t give you no problems.’
Ridpath closed his notebook. ‘You know I have to arrest you?’
Brown nodded.