by M K Farrar
As he ate, his thoughts went to the case. Two bodies, both most likely male, and so far unidentified. They’d need to go over any missing person’s cases from the past few months, though it would be near impossible to narrow it down with what they currently had. He hoped they’d get lucky and be able to match fingerprints or DNA to those they had on file.
Ryan finished his meal and then downed the remainder of his wine, and considered pouring himself another.
No, the one glass was all he’d allow himself to try to smooth out his thoughts before bed. There was nothing worse than lying there, trying to sleep, while his brain picked out all the things he might have missed before coming to bed. Had he checked the front door? Were the windows all shut? Had he turned off the gas to the hob?
If he wasn’t careful, he’d be at it all night.
Chapter Five
Joe Lorton tugged the woolly hat down over his ears and bent to pick up the black carrier bag of his belongings. His trousers were several sizes too large for him, and he’d used a piece of rope to tighten them around his hips, giving the impression that they might once have fitted him in another life, but that he’d lost a lot of weight recently due to his personal circumstances. His jumper had holes in the sleeves, and he used them to push his thumbs through, pulling the sleeves right down over his fingers to keep them warm during the nights. Even though it was summer right now, it still got chilly once the sun went down, and once he got cold, he couldn’t warm up again. The men and women he slept side by side with under bridges or shop doorways used cheap booze or drugs to stave off the chill, but Joe couldn’t do that. He needed to stay alert. If he wasn’t, he might miss something vital. It was important he remained watchful, listening to the conversations of those nearby.
He made his way up through Castle Park. The River Avon ran adjacent to the path, and the old stone towers of the castle rose into the sky. Beyond them were the far more modern glass-and-concrete blocks of the city. The bit of greenery in the middle of the city was more pleasant to sleep in than a shop doorway, and he was less likely to get hassled by any of the drunks leaving the bars and clubs at kickout time. He also knew there tended to be a small congregation of the homeless camped out here. Some preferred to keep themselves to themselves and stayed away from others, while others saw safety in numbers.
There was a little community here that he’d managed to integrate himself into. Some people had tents and sleeping bags that were given out by one of the homeless charities. Joe had a sleeping bag, but a tent wouldn’t help him at all. He preferred to be able to see what was around him. A tent only made him think that someone could be lurking outside.
Things could be dangerous on the streets.
He’d once woken to find someone pissing on his sleeping bag. Another time, a man tried to get into the bag with him. There wasn’t any malice in the actions. The men who’d done those things were wasted and didn’t know what they were doing, but that didn’t make the experiences any more pleasant for Joe. Trying to sleep in a sleeping bag wet from another man’s urine was not a fun thing to do.
He spotted a group huddled up against a stone wall. Several of them had put out one-man tents, while another had a Sleep Pod—a black-and-silver Toblerone-shaped tent that was only tall and wide enough to take a person lying down. With relief, he noted the wooden bench nearby had yet to be occupied. He could put his sleeping bag down on that. It was always better to be off the ground. The cold and damp leached through something terrible, even though it was the summer.
A couple of the people spotted him coming. Joe recognised them and lifted his furry chin in a nod.
“Joe, mate.” One of the older men who Joe knew as Richard, but whether that was his real name or not was anyone’s guess. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, you know, same old, same old.”
Joe flicked his gaze across the others, searching their faces for any new ones. There were probably a hundred people sleeping rough on Bristol’s streets, but the face changed night on night. Some were offered hostel rooms, others had friends take them in, some moved to different parts of the country. New faces showed up, and old ones vanished and were quickly forgotten about.
“Had a good run outside Wilko today,” Richard told him. “People were feeling generous for some reason.”
Joe pulled his sleeping bag out of the black plastic carrier and laid it out on the bench. “End of the month, isn’t it? Those with a regular job probably got paid.”
A younger man called Ash, who sported a shaved head and a nose ring and barely appeared to be out of his teens, snorted. “You did better than me, then. I had some dickhead chuck me some coins. I thought he’d given me a couple of quid, but then I picked them up and they were fucking euros. What the hell did he think I was going to do with some euros? It’s not like I’m going to be jetting off on holiday to Alicante any time soon.”
Richard sucked air in over his yellowed teeth. “Some people are just pricks.”
“There are some good ones, though,” Joe added. “People can be kind.”
Ash made a harrumphing noise. “Getting few and far between, if you ask me.”
Joe busied himself with organising his stuff but watched the small group from the corner of his eye.
There always seemed to be more men than women on the street. He didn’t know why that was. Maybe it was just that he saw them on the streets less because the hostels and social services were more likely to help women than men. Or the women made sure to wear baggy hoodies and keep their heads and faces covered so they couldn’t be identified as being female. The reasons behind people ending up on the streets differed between the two sexes, too. Veterans, returning from war, often had a multitude of mental health issues, and they were more often men than women. When marriages broke down, the women tended to get the houses with the children. But maybe it was as simple as women being more likely to ask for help when they needed it. Men often viewed asking for help as a sign of weakness, and they would never talk about how they actually felt about things, where women, in Joe’s experience, at least, would talk about absolutely anything.
Joe kept an eye out for them, though, just in case. And he listened to the conversations of the men as well. If a new young woman turned up on the streets, it was bound to get noticed, and the homeless community talked about it. The last thing a woman on her own would do was willingly join a larger group of men, but sometimes they hooked up with the younger, single men. They felt protected that way, even if the boyfriends ended up being worse than the strangers. The homeless women were more at risk from drunk men leaving pubs than they were amongst their own kind. At least there was a sense of camaraderie among the homeless, a way of watching out for each other.
“Where’s Kyle hanging out these days?” Richard asked. “I haven’t seen him for a while?”
“Maybe his missus finally took him back?” one of the other men threw in.
Richard chuckled. “Not likely. Apparently, the last time they saw each other, she said if he ever tried coming back again, she’d set the dog on him.”
“I thought that was his dog?” Ash commented.
“It was, but looks like she even managed to turn their poor puppy against him.”
Someone else laughed. “Poor puppy? I heard that dog was a five-stone German Shepherd.”
“I think you’re right,” Richard said. “It was.”
“No wonder he couldn’t risk going back there then.”
The men erupted, but Joe wasn’t so sure it was a laughing matter—not the dog part, but the Kyle going missing part. It was too easy for people to go missing when they had no one who’d really miss them, no job to be noticed no longer showing up for, no doormat that would become stacked with unopened post, nor neighbours who’d realise they hadn’t seen them for a day or two.
Joe climbed into his sleeping bag and pillowed the rest of his belongings under his head. He’d only manage a few hours’ sleep, but that didn’t matter. It was better that he liste
ned and watched, trying to learn what he could.
When morning came, and the others dispersed to return to their favourite begging spots, he’d slip back home for a hot shower and a sleep in a comfortable bed.
Chapter Six
Ryan was back in work by seven a.m., eager to make progress on the case.
The newspapers had got wind of the macabre discovery, and reporters hung around the outside of the station, hoping to get an interview from him. He’d put his head down and kept going, but he was going to need to do a press release with limited information soon to stop them speculating.
No more parts had been found, though the search had been stopped when night had fallen and would restart this morning. Several of his DCs were already out, canvasing the local area for witnesses and hunting down CCTV footage. He was taking the time to go through recent misper cases, though he knew he’d need more to go on before he’d have any idea who the bodies belonged to.
Mallory approached his desk. “Looks like the post-mortem reports have already come through on the body parts.”
“Great. You want to take a drive down there with me?”
She nodded. “Absolutely.”
Ryan grabbed his car keys and wallet. “I hope you ate breakfast already.”
She grinned. “You know me, boss. Stomach of steel.”
Mallory had everything made of steel, as far as he was aware. He hadn’t seen her affected by any of the numerous cases they’d worked on together. Either she wasn’t affected, or she was very good at hiding it. Eventually, it did become easier to not get emotionally involved with cases, but there were always the ones that were harder than others. For him, it was those that involved children, especially young girls. After what he’d been through, he struggled not to put himself in the place of the grieving parents, or, if the parent was the one responsible for the death or abuse of a child, he had to fight with himself not to want to beat that parent to a pulp. It was completely beyond him how someone could have the blessing of a child in their lives and for them to treat them with anything less than total love and adoration.
Those kinds of cases always set his issues off as well. He’d discover himself checking he’d locked the door over and over again, or convince himself he’d left the gas on, or hadn’t turned off a bathroom tap before leaving the house. He was self-aware enough that he knew his compulsions were all about control, and how he’d lost his tenuous grip on it when his daughter had been snatched out of his life. Most of the time, he could manage the intrusive thoughts and compulsions, but during those times when things flared up, they did worry him. What if, one day, it made it impossible for him to do his job. Checking and rechecking things probably wasn’t a bad thing in his profession, but it didn’t help much when those things were counting how many paces it took between his car and his desk, and having to redo the paces if they landed on an uneven number, or needing for everything on his desk to be arranged correctly. It took time out of his work rather than being of any use.
He hadn’t dared mention his issues with his boss. After he’d lost his daughter, he’d been offered counselling and time off, but he hadn’t taken up either. He didn’t want mental health issues to be on his record. It made him look weak, and talking about his feelings wasn’t something he’d ever been any good at. His ex-wife, Donna, would have attested to that. It was one of the things she’d always complained about, even before they’d lost Hayley. He’d much rather have pretended everything was fine, or avoid a situation, rather than have a difficult conversation.
Ryan was completely different in his work life. He was more than happy to bulldoze his way into a challenging situation, and didn’t shy away from upsetting people, even his work colleagues, if he felt it was needed. It got him in trouble on occasion, but as he was getting older, he liked to think he was growing more measured in his reactions.
They took Ryan’s car and drove to the public mortuary. It was a new, purpose-built facility about six miles outside of Bristol, and served as a mortuary for both the city’s hospitals.
They pulled into the carpark outside the single-storey building and climbed out of the car at the same time. Ryan led the way into the mortuary.
“I considered becoming a pathologist when I was a student,” Mallory said. “I even went and did work experience down at the hospital, when the pathology lab was still located down there. I thought it was going to be exciting stuff, like dealing with murder victims, but all they did was get me to put handprints on petri dishes to grown spores and show me an amputated toe. I think it was at that point that I decided to go into the police instead.” She paused and then added, “Well, that and realising I’d also have to go to university for a crazy number of years, and I was pretty much over school by that point.”
“You’d have made a good pathologist,” he said. “You’ve got an eye for detail.”
She smiled. “Thanks.”
“But you make a better detective.”
She seemed to consider it for a moment. “Yeah, more variety. I think I would have got bored in the end.”
“I think you’re right.”
They entered the building and approached reception. Ryan showed the woman behind the desk his ID, and she gestured for them to go down the hall to the pathologist’s office.
As he lifted his hand to knock on the door, it opened, the person inside leaving, her head down and frowning over something she had on a clipboard. They both jumped.
She clutched her hand to her chest. “Jesus.”
“Sorry,” he apologised, “didn’t mean to scare you.”
Nikki Francis was around his age. Her blonde hair was tied back at her nape, and her sharp blue eyes were framed by a pair of modern glasses.
Her alarm morphed into a smile. “DI Chase, and DS Lawson. Good to see you both again.”
They’d met Nikki Francis on several occasions now about various cases.
“I keep telling you to call me Ryan,” he said.
She held his eye just a moment longer than necessary, and he experienced that jolt, that flash of attraction. He was aware that he wasn’t a bad-looking bloke. His dark hair might be approaching more salt than pepper these days—damn his father’s bad genes; he was sure he’d found his first grey hair by the age of eighteen—but at least he wasn’t balding like many men his age. He wasn’t as thin as he’d been in his younger years either—too many microwave meals had seen to that. After they’d lost Hayley and the final threads of his marriage had frayed and snapped, he’d sought solace in food and booze. He’d piled on the pounds, losing his normally lean physique, and had become sluggish and knackered all the time. One day he’d woken up and something had clicked in him. He wasn’t going to be any good to anyone else if he carried on the way he was going, so he’d started to make some changes, using a set of weights he now kept in his living room to stay in shape. Six years on, he liked to think he was in a better place, at least physically. Mentally...well, that was a whole other story.
Nikki Francis led them down the corridor to where she stopped outside a set of double doors. Beside them, metal shelves on castors held boxes of protective outerwear, and she picked up a couple of sets and handed them over to Ryan and Mallory, before donning her own, hiding her blonde hair beneath the white hood.
“Ready?” she asked.
Ryan nodded in response, and she hit a keypad on the wall and opened the doors for them.
The autopsy room was a far cry from the dark and dingy basement he imagined people thought these events took place. The room was bright with artificial light. There were small windows at regular intervals, but they were positioned high on the walls and had frosted glazing—no one wanted to risk a member of the public peeping in. Stainless-steel tables were also interspersed with high-tech videoing equipment for each one beamed onto a large-screen monitor.
The odour was a more diluted version of what he’d experienced down at the river, the air extractors and filters doing a good job of keeping things tolerable.
Two of the tables were covered in sheets, and Nikki approached one and removed the sheet. She moved onto the second one and did the same. She stepped around the table, where the body parts belonging to one victim—an arm, a leg, and the pelvis—had been arranged as though trying to piece them back together, or in the hope that more parts would be found to fill in the bits that were missing. On the other table next to it, just an arm and leg were present.
“As you can see, you haven’t given me a whole lot to work with,” Nikki said.
Ryan pulled a face. “We’re aware of that. We’ve got an entire river and the local area to search. With tides to deal with, too, it means there are a lot of moving parts to this case.” He chuckled at his own joke.
Nikki surveyed the pieces that had been found and raised her eyebrows. “There are certainly lots of parts.”
Mallory appeared as though she was attempting to give them both a disapproving look, but a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“As you rightly assumed,” Nikki started, “these are body parts from two different victims. Both are male, though with only a handful of pieces, it’s difficult to get a precise idea of any of the usual things I’d normally derive from a victim. Using the length of the limb, I can estimate that both men were somewhere around the six foot mark. From the bones, I can take a guess that neither of them were much over fifty or younger than twenty, but I’m afraid that doesn’t give you much to go on. I can tell you that both men were Caucasian, and they both had ligature marks around the wrists, which suggests to me they were held against their will for some time before they were killed.”
“Any idea how long they were kept for?” Ryan asked.
“It’s hard to say for sure due to the effect of the water on the body, and in particular on the second victim because of the level of decomposition, but I’d say days rather than weeks. Though there are marks around the wrists, I can’t see any obvious signs of scarring where the skin might have healed in some places and then been cut open again.”