Aftermath, page 22
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“Problems?”
“Typical breakfast chaos. I’m just trying to get out of the house.”
“I know what you mean. Look, about this identification—”
“It’s solid, sir. Dental records. DNA will take a bit longer. There’s no way it’s Leanne Wray. I’m just about to set off back to the house. The lads are still digging.”
“Who the hell can it be?”
“Don’t know. All I’ve been able to find out so far is that it’s a young woman, late teens to early twenties, been there a few months and there’s a lot of stainless steel in her dental work, including a crown.”
“Meaning?” Banks asked, a faint memory beckoning.
“Possible Eastern European origin. They still use a lot of stainless steel over there.”
Right. Banks had come across something like that before. A forensic dentist had once told him that Russians used stainless steel. “Eastern European?”
“Just a possibility, sir.”
“All right. Any chance of that DNA comparison between Payne and the Seacroft Rapist turning up before the weekend?”
“I’ll get onto them this morning, see if I can give them a prod.”
“Okay. Thanks. Keep at it, Stefan.”
“Will do.”
Banks hung up, more puzzled than ever. One of the first things AC Hartnell had instituted when the team was first put together was a special squad to keep tabs on all missing persons cases throughout the entire country—“mispers,” as they were called—particularly if they involved blond teenagers, with no apparent reasons for running away, disappearing on their way home from clubs, pubs, cinemas and dances. The team had monitored scores of cases every day, but none had met the criteria of the Chameleon investigation, except one girl in Cheshire, who had turned up alive and contrite two days later after a brief shack-up with her boyfriend, about which she just happened to forget to tell her parents, and the sadder case of a young girl in Lincoln who, it turned out, had been run over and had not been carrying any identification. Now here was Stefan saying they’d probably got a dead Eastern European girl in the garden.
Banks didn’t get very far with his chain of thought before his office door opened and DC Filey dropped a copy of that morning’s Post on his desk.
Annie parked her purple Astra up the street and walked toward number 35 The Hill, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight. Crime scene tape and trestles blocked off that section of pavement in front of the garden wall, so that pedestrians had to make a detour on to the tarmac road to get by. One or two people paused to glance over the garden gate as they passed, Annie noticed, but most walked to the other side of the road and averted their eyes. She even saw one elderly woman cross herself.
Annie showed her warrant card to the officer on duty, signed in at the gate and walked down the garden path. She wasn’t afraid of seeing gruesome sights, if indeed there were any left inside the house, but she had never before visited a scene so completely overrun with SOCO activity, and just walking into it made her edgy. The men in the front garden ignored her and went on with their digging. The door was ajar, and when Annie pushed gently, it opened into the hall.
The hallway was deserted and at first the house seemed so quiet inside that Annie thought she was alone. Then someone shouted, and the sound of a pneumatic drill ripped through the air, coming up from the cellar, shattering her illusion. The house was hot, stuffy and full of dust, and Annie sneezed three times before exploring further.
Her nerves gradually gave way to professional curiosity, and she noted with interest that the carpets had been taken up, leaving only the bare concrete floors and wooden stairs, and that the living room had been stripped of furniture, too, even down to the light fixtures. Several holes had been punched in the walls, no doubt to ensure that no bodies had been entombed there. Annie gave a little shudder. Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” was one of the more frightening stories she had read at school.
Everywhere she went she was conscious of the narrow roped-off pathway she knew she was supposed to follow. In an odd way it was like visiting the Brontë parsonage or Wordsworth’s cottage, where you could only stand and look beyond the rope at the antique furniture.
The kitchen, where three SOCO officers were working on the sink and drains, was in the same sorry state—tiles wrenched up, oven and fridge gone, cupboards bare, fingerprint dust everywhere. Annie hadn’t thought anyone could do so much damage to a place in three days. One of the SOCOs looked over at her and asked her rather testily what she thought she was doing there. She flashed him her warrant card and he went back to ripping out the sink. The pneumatic drill stopped and Annie heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner from upstairs, an eerily domestic sound amidst all the crime scene chaos, though she knew its purpose was far more sinister than getting rid of the dust.
She took the silence from the cellar as her cue to go down there, noting as she did so the door open to the garage, which had been stripped as bare as the rest of the house. The car was gone, no doubt in the police garage being taken apart piece by piece, and the oil-stained floor had been dug up.
She sensed herself becoming hypersensitive as she approached the cellar door, her breath coming in short gasps. There was an obscene poster of a naked woman with her legs spread wide apart on the door which Annie hoped the SOCOs hadn’t left there because they enjoyed seeing it. That must have unnerved Janet Taylor to start with, she thought, advancing slowly, as she imagined Janet and Dennis had done. Christ, she felt apprehensive enough herself, even though she knew the only people in there were SOCOs. But Janet and Dennis hadn’t known what to expect, Annie told herself. Whatever it was, they hadn’t expected what they got. She knew far more than they had, and no doubt her imagination was working overtime on that.
Through the door, much cooler down here, trying to feel the way it was, despite the two SOCO officers and the bright lighting . . . Janet went in first, Dennis just behind her. The cellar was smaller than she had expected. It must have happened so quickly. Candlelight. The figure leaping out of the shadows, wielding a machete, hacking into Dennis Morrissey’s throat and arm because he was the closest. Dennis goes down. Janet already has her side-handled baton out, extended, ready to ward off the first blow. So close she can smell Payne’s breath. Perhaps he can’t believe that a woman, weaker and smaller than him, can thwart him so easily. Before he can recover from his shock, Janet lashes out and hits him on the left temple. Blinded by pain and perhaps by blood, he falls back against the wall. Next he feels a sharp pain on his wrist and he can’t hold on to the machete. He hears it skitter away across the floor but doesn’t know where. He rears up and goes at her. Angry now because she knows her partner is bleeding to death on the floor, Janet hits him again and again, wanting it to be over so she can tend to Dennis. He scrabbles after where he thought the machete went, blood dripping down his face. She hits him again. And again. How much strength does he have left by now? Annie wondered. Surely not enough to overpower Janet? And how many more times does she hit him now he’s down, handcuffed to the pipe, not moving at all?
Annie sighed and watched the SOCOs shifting their drill to dig into another spot.
“Are you going to start that thing up again?” she asked.
One of the men grinned. “Want some earmuffs?”
Annie smiled back at him. “No, I’d rather just get out of here before you start. Can you give me another minute or so?”
“Can do.”
Annie glanced around at the crude stick figures and occult symbols on the walls and wondered how integral a part of Payne’s fantasy they were. Banks had also told her that the place was lit by dozens of candles, but they were all gone now, as was the mattress they had found the body on. One of the SOCOs was on his knees looking at something on the concrete floor over by the door.
“What is it?” Annie asked him. “Found something?”
“Dunno,” he said. “Some sort of little scuff marks in the concrete. It hardly shows at all, but there seems to be some sort of pattern.”
Annie knelt to look. She couldn’t see anything until the SOCO pointed to what looked like small circles in the concrete. There were three of them in all, pretty much equidistant.
“I’ll try a few different lighting angles,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe some infrared film to highlight the contrasts.”
“Could be a tripod,” Annie said.
“What? Bugger me—sorry, love—but you could be right. Luke Selkirk and that funny little assistant of his were down here. Maybe they left the marks.”
“I think they’d have been more professional, don’t you?”
“I’d better ask them, hadn’t I?”
Annie left him to it and walked through the far door. The ground had been sectioned into grids and the soil had been dug up. Annie knew that three bodies had been found there. She followed the narrow marked path across to the door, opened it and walked up the steps into the back garden. Crime scene tape barred her entrance at the top of the steps, but she didn’t need to go any farther. Like the anteroom in the cellar, the overgrown garden had been divided into grids and marked out with rope. Most of them had already been cleared of grass and weeds and topsoil, but some, farther back, remained overgrown. At the far wall, a large waterproof sheet used to protect the garden from yesterday’s rain lay rolled up like a carpet.
This was a delicate job, Annie knew from watching the excavation of a skeleton at the village of Hobb’s End. It was far too easy to disturb old bones. She could see the hole, about three feet deep, where one body had been dug up, and now there were two men gathered around another hole, taking off the soil with trowels and passing it to a third man, who ran it through a sieve as if he were panning for gold.
“What is it?” Annie asked from the top of the cellar steps.
One of the men looked up at her. She hadn’t recognized Stefan Nowak at first. She didn’t know him well, as he hadn’t been at Eastvale’s Western Divisional Headquarters for long, but Banks had introduced them once. Stefan was the man, ACC Ron McLaughlin had said, who would drag North Yorkshire kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Annie had found him rather reserved, a bit mysterious, even, as if he were carrying around a grave secret or a great weight of past pain. He affected a cheery enough demeanor on the surface, but she could tell it didn’t run very deep. He was tall, over six feet, and handsome in a clean-cut, elegant sort of way. She knew his background was Polish and had often wondered if he was a prince or a count or something. Most of the Poles she had ever met said they were descended from counts or princes at one time or another, and there was something regal and stately in Stefan’s bearing.
“It’s Annie, isn’t it?” he said. “DS Annie Cabbot?”
“DI, now, Stefan. How’s it going?”
“Didn’t know you were on this case.”
“One of them,” Annie explained. “Terence Payne. I’m with Complaints and Discipline.”
“I can’t believe the CPS will even let that one see the light of day,” said Stefan. “Justifiable homicide, surely?”
“I hope that’s how they’ll see it, but you never know with them. Anyway, I just wanted a look at the place.”
“I’m afraid we’ve made rather a mess,” said Stefan. “It looks as if we’ve just found another body. Want a look?”
Annie ducked under the tape. “Yes.”
“Be careful,” said Stefan. “Follow the marked path.”
Annie did as he said and soon found herself standing beside the partially excavated grave. This one was a skeleton. Not quite as stained and filthy as the one she had seen at Hobb’s End, but a skeleton nonetheless. She could see part of the skull, one shoulder and part of the left arm. “How long?” she asked.
“Hard to say,” Stefan answered. “More than a few months.” He introduced the two men who had been poring over the grave with him, one a botanist and the other an entomologist. “These lads should be able to help with that. And we’re getting Dr. Ioan Williams to come over from the university and give us a hand.”
Annie remembered the young doctor with the long hair and the prominent Adam’s apple from the Hobb’s End case, the way he had caressed Gloria Shackleton’s pelvic bone and leered over it at Annie.
“I know this isn’t my case,” Annie said, “but isn’t this one body too many?”
Stefan looked up at her and shielded his eyes from the sun. “Yes,” he said. “It is. Rather throws a spanner in the works, doesn’t it?”
“Indeed it does.”
Annie walked back toward her car. There was nothing more to be gained from hanging around The Hill. Besides, she realized, glancing at her watch, she had a postmortem to attend.
“What the hell do you mean, talking to press like that?” said Banks. “Didn’t I warn you about it?”
“This is the first I’ve heard we’re living in a police state,” said Maggie Forrest, arms folded over her chest, eyes angry and tearful. They stood in her kitchen, Banks brandishing the Post and Maggie in the midst of clearing away her breakfast dishes. After seeing the article at Millgarth, he had headed straight for The Hill.
“Don’t give me that adolescent crap about police states. Who do you think you are, a student protesting some distant war?”
“You’ve no right to talk to me like this. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Anything wrong? Have you any idea of the wasp’s nest you could be helping to stir up?”
“I don’t know what you mean. All I wanted to do was tell Lucy’s side of the story, but that woman twisted it all.”
“Are you so naïve that you didn’t expect that?”
“There’s a difference between being naïve and caring, but a cynic like you probably wouldn’t understand it.”
Banks could see that Maggie was shaking, either with anger or fear, and he was worried that he had given too free a rein to his anger. He knew she had been abused by her husband, that she was a bruised soul, so she was probably scared stiff of this man raising his voice in her kitchen. It was insensitive of him, but damn it, the woman irritated him. He sat at the kitchen table and tried to cool things down a bit. “Maggie,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, but you could cause us a lot of problems.”
Maggie seemed to relax a little. “I don’t see how.”
“Public sympathy is a very fickle thing, and when you mess with it, it’s like dancing with the devil. It’s just as likely to reach out and eat you up as anyone else.”
“But how would people find out what Lucy went through at her husband’s hands? She won’t talk about it, I can guarantee you that.”
“None of us know what went on in Lucy’s house. All you’re doing is jeopardizing her chance of a fair trial, if—”
“Trial? Trial for what?”
“I was going to say, ‘if it comes to that.’ ”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t agree.” Maggie put the electric kettle on and sat opposite Banks. “People need to know about domestic abuse. It’s not something that should be swept under the carpet for any reason. Especially not just because the police say so.”
“I agree. Look, I understand you’re prejudiced against us, but—”
“Prejudiced? Right. With your help I ended up in hospital.”
“But you have to understand that in many of these matters our hands are tied. We’re only as good as the information we have and the laws of the land allow.”
“All the more reason for me to speak out about Lucy. After all, you’re not exactly here to help her, are you?”
“I’m here to find out the truth.”
“Well, that’s all very high-and-mighty of you.”
“Now who’s the cynic?”
“We all know the police only want convictions, that they’re not overly concerned with the truth, or with justice.”
“Convictions help, if they keep the bad guys off the street. Too often they don’t. And justice we leave to the courts, but you’re wrong about the rest. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m very much concerned with the truth. I’ve worked day and night on this case since the beginning of April, and every case I work I want to know what happened, who did it and why. I don’t always find out, but you’d be surprised how much I do learn. Sometimes it gets me into trouble. And I have to live with the knowledge, take it into my life, take it home with me. I’m that snowball rolling down the hill, only the pure snow’s run out and I’m picking up layer after layer of dirt and gravel just so that you can sit safe and warm at home and accuse me of being some sort of Gestapo officer.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. And I wasn’t always safe and warm.”
“Do you know that what you’ve just done actually stands a good chance of warping the truth, whatever it may be?”
“I didn’t do that. It was her. That journalist. Lorraine Temple.”
Banks slapped the table and immediately regretted it when Maggie jumped. “Wrong,” he said. “She was only doing her job. Like it or not, that’s what it was. Her job’s to sell newspapers. You’ve got this all backward, Maggie. You think the media’s here to tell the truth and the police to lie.”
“You’re confusing me now.” The kettle boiled and Maggie got up to make tea. She didn’t offer Banks a cup, but when it was ready, she poured him one automatically. He thanked her.
