(1998) Denial (31 page)

The reek of this chemical was unbearable.

Hair! She shivered. She had fallen on some dead animal. As she jerked her hand back it touched something cold and rubbery. And this was unmistakable.

This was a human face.

Whimpering, she snatched away her hand, backed off, tried, desperately, to find the doorway into the other chamber, understanding now, remembering the smell, from the biology lab at school. The chemical that frogs and other animals were preserved in.

Formalin.

Then she fell over the second body.

She screamed her lungs out into the darkness.

But the darkness had no sounds to offer back, beyond those of her own terror.

Then the warm trickle of water between her legs. But she was beyond caring about that now.

Glenn Branson’s immediate boss was Detective Sergeant Bill Digby, who occupied a small office of his own across the corridor from the detectives’ room at Hove police station.

Mid-afternoon on Tuesday found him in a sour mood.

Digby was a quiet, deep man. Burly, with a narrow, military moustache and crinkly black hair, he looked old-fashioned in contrast with some of the sharp young turks of the detectives’ room. He acted in an old-fashioned manner too, always steady, methodical, rarely panicked, seldom rushing except on the dozen or so occasions a year when he was called to a murder scene; then he was out of the door at an altogether different speed. Digby, like most police officers, was as fascinated by murder as the general public; hardened, yes, but always hooked.

Some people thought that because he was slow Bill Digby was probably a bit thick; but those people didn’t know him well. His hobby was playing Scrabble, and he had won his share of regional tournaments. In his work he applied the same laborious, tortuous methodology with which he played that game. He never liked to make a move until he had considered the maximum possible value that could be gained from it.

The detective sergeant had clocked twenty-five years in the force. He’d been shot at, knifed, hauled over the coals for blowing the prosecution of a burglar by a breach of procedure, and he’d once had a brick with a dead cat attached to it thrown through his living-room window by the family of an armed building-society robber he’d just seen sent down for twelve years.

He was a survivor. A big part of policing was making
decisions that were tough, and not always fair. Every newly reported incident in the county requiring police action appeared on his computer screen; on an average day a new one appeared every sixty seconds. Almost five hundred thousand incidents had been logged last year.

Most were minor. With only limited resources, senior officers had to make decisions all the time about what should be investigated and what should be ignored. The police were judged on results. Statistics. Villains in court.
Convictions. Winning a better quality of life for the community
. Winning the war against crime. Stopping icebergs. Walking on water. Take your choice, Digby thought sometimes, when he became exasperated, they were equally impossible.

Most of the work of detectives was relatively small-scale: burglaries, robberies, assaults, fraud, but occasionally something big came along. And when it did, if you handled it right you could get yourself noticed for promotion – and on some substantial cases, you could end up making a significant contribution to the community.

Operation Skeet had had such potential. Detective Chief Inspector Gaylor, his direct boss at this station, had given him free rein with it, and believing in his abilities, Gaylor hadn’t even put a detective inspector over him.

Using a network of informers run by Glenn’s fellow detective, Mike Harris, Bill Digby had spent three years building a case file on a local ring of drug traffickers who were importing cocaine through Shoreham, the local commercial seaport. At night the drugs, in weighted packages and tagged with low-frequency lost-golf-ball transmitters, were dropped overboard, then collected, also in darkness, by divers.

The mastermind was a known paedophile Welshman, Tam Hywell, a creep whose cunning Digby respected but whom he put on the bottom rung of the social food chain, somewhere between a tapeworm and slime mould. With less charm than either.

Four weeks ago Operation Skeet, on a textbook-perfect dawn raid, had netted the entire ring. Digby had enough
on Tam Hywell to be confident of making him sing his heart out in court. Either Hywell came clean on his drugs operation, turned prosecution witness and gave them all they wanted to know, or he would be prosecuted on a charge of procuring small boys. Hywell knew that no one in their right mind would want to enter a British prison convicted of a sexual offence involving children.

Against all Digby’s entreaties, a smart-arse solicitor had convinced a dithering stipendiary magistrate to grant Hywell bail. And on this past Sunday morning, one of Hywell’s neighbours had reported an intolerable smell coming from the penthouse where Hywell lived alone. When the police broke in they found the bloody remains of the man. He had been hacked to death with a machete, his tongue had been cut out of his mouth and replaced with his genitals.

The detective sergeant was looking at the scene-of-crime photographs now, and trying to work out just how much damage Hywell’s death would have done to his chances of securing convictions on the others.

He looked up, his thoughts interrupted by a rap on the door. Before he could say anything, it opened, and DC Glenn Branson peered in. ‘Got a moment, Sarge?’

Digby gestured for him to come in, and Glenn sat down in the cramped space in front of his modest desk, then leaned forward, nosily looking at the photographs. ‘Tammy Hywell?’

‘Yeah.’ Digby smiled drily because, with all his pent-up anger, he couldn’t resist the line that had suddenly come into his head, and added, ‘Looks a real dickhead, doesn’t he?’

Glenn resisted the temptation to reply with a further wisecrack. He sat back. ‘Cora Burstridge,’ he said. ‘Last week?’

His sergeant nodded, with instant recall.

‘I’m not happy. I’m not at all convinced it’s suicide. I’ve done a little investigating –’

Digby interrupted him. ‘On whose authorisation?’

‘I did it in my own time, Sarge – I’m off today, I visited her flat this morning.’

Digby raised his eyebrows. Glenn was a good man, ambitious, he liked him, but sometimes the inexperienced DC got too enthusiastic. ‘OK, go on.’

Glenn told him his thoughts about the Babygro Cora had bought for her grandchild, and about the fire-escape door in the loft that had been forced open, and about the pathologist’s concern about the blowflies. Then he added, ‘I did a check on the flats in the block behind, which overlooks that fire escape. One lady I spoke to says she saw a man with a clipboard going down that fire escape one afternoon early last week, Tuesday or Wednesday.’

‘When did Cora Burstridge die?’

‘The pathologist can’t tell exactly. But he thinks, because it was first-stage maggots and blowflies, that she’d probably been there two days, which would be Tuesday. She was last seen going out shopping on Tuesday morning.’

‘Not a very precise tally with this lady witness,’ Digby said.

‘No, Sarge, but I talked to the managing agents of Cora Burstridge’s building to ask whether they had had any surveyor or workman in there last week, and they were categorical that no one had been there.’

‘Did the building have a fire certificate?’

‘Yes, current, issued November the nineteenth last year.’

‘So why was this exit padlocked?’

‘It’s a disused route. There’s a newer one, approached from the common parts of the building.’

Digby skewed his mouth to one side and briefly checked out the inside of his cheek with his tongue. ‘The safety chain was applied from the inside, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s my point!’ Glenn said. ‘The safety chain was on. The windows were all locked from the inside. If there was an intruder, then he had to have climbed up into the loft after killing her and escaped that way. In his panic he didn’t shut the hatch properly, he left the loft light on, and he had to break his way out.’

Digby scooped Tam Hywell’s photographs together and
tapped them on the desk-top to line them up, before slipping them into an envelope. ‘We searched her flat last Thursday. Why didn’t we find the loft hatch open then?’

Glenn shrugged. ‘I’ve been asking myself that. I can only think we must have missed it.’

‘Cora Burstridge was a very famous lady, Glenn. Her death has made big news in all the national press. Don’t you think some piece of scum might have taken the opportunity to break into her flat knowing it was empty?’

‘I don’t think anything’s been taken, Sarge. There’s jewellery, fine watches, beautiful art-deco ornaments all over the place. No burglar has been rummaging through there. It’s tidy.’

‘Unless you disturbed him when you went in?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘You’re assuming he came in through the front door of the flat and then left via the loft and fire exit. Are you sure he didn’t come in that way, Glenn?’

‘There are no marks on the outside of that door – but I’d need someone from SOCO to take a look to confirm that. I’d like to have a SOCO examination of the entire flat and loft, Sarge. I found some clothing fibres on a nail in the loft, which again indicates someone in a hurry. There might be a lot else for them.’

Bill Digby sat in silence, considering Glenn’s request. ‘You’re aware of the costs of a forensic operation, aren’t you, Glenn?’

Glenn was. Two hundred pounds per item of clothing or clothing fibre. Fifteen hundred pounds to process fingerprints. Putting the scene-of-crime team to do a thorough sweep of Cora Burstridge’s flat would cost a minimum of ten thousand pounds.

‘Yes, Sarge, I am. But I think the evidence justifies it.’

‘You were at the post-mortem. Did the pathologist find any marks on the body?’

‘No, Sarge.’

‘You haven’t seen the results of any tests on fluids yet?’

‘No.’

Digby shook his head. ‘We have a mountain of work on
Skeet now with Hywell dead. I just can’t justify this, Glenn. We have a doctor’s report saying the deceased was depressed, a suicide note, the door locked from the inside, nothing appears to have been stolen. I hear everything you’re saying, Glenn, but it’s not enough to convince me. She wasn’t an invalid – if someone had tried to kill her, she would have fought back. There would be some signs of a struggle, some marks on her body.’

‘She was elderly,’ Glenn said.

‘But capable of going out shopping on her own. The time to raise these points, if you think it appropriate, will be at the inquest, but you don’t have enough there to convince me we should be regarding this as a suspicious death. OK?’

Glenn shrugged, disappointed, but he knew better than to press his argument any further right now. In his own mind, though, he had decided he wasn’t just going to let it stop here.

‘Tomorrow, early – you got anything fixed?’

‘No, Sarge.’

‘Good. I want you to accompany Mike Harris to Luton to bring down an informer on the Hywell case – he’s doing time in Luton jail, so we’re getting him out on an overnight release to come and talk to us. You’ll pick him up at nine and you should be back down here by eleven.’

Glenn liked Mike Harris, and he enjoyed the more experienced DC’s company. And, he thought, he would be able to pick his brains on the way. Cora Burstridge’s daughter was arriving Thursday to identify the body. She was intending to stay in her mother’s flat.

If SOCO were to have any chance of finding anything, tomorow would be their last chance.

‘Have you washed your choo-choo?’

Tom-Tom in the oval pink bathtub, head sticking out of the foam. A special treat – he loved it when his mother tipped the bubble bath stuff in, and it was like snow, only even frothier, even lighter; he could scoop great armfuls of it up.

‘Yes, Mummy.’

Standing over him, her white satin dressing gown open at the front. He could see her breasts poking through, with their big red nipples. He could see the line down the centre of her stomach where she had been cut open
to let him be born
. And the thick straw bush of hair below it.

‘Let me see, Tom-Tom darling. Let me make sure you’ve washed him really thoroughly.’

Nervous now. Scold or treat today?

She leaned over him. One breast touched his cheek and rested cool against it. Her hands slipped below the froth, gripping a bar of Camay. He felt the hard slippery soap against the inside of his legs and it gave him a strange kind of excitement.

‘Good boy, darling, Tom-Tom, what a beautiful clean choo-choo. Mummy will clean it a little more now.’

Treat today.

Relief inside him. And the excitement building.

Now he felt her soapy hands working on his penis, massaging it, teasing the foreskin back, then forward again, covering the tip. She soaped her hands some more and teased his foreskin back then forward again, and he was hardening now, growing in her fingers.

‘Such a big choo-choo. Going to have such a big,
beautiful choo-choo when you grow up, aren’t you, Tom-Tom?’

He giggled excitedly. He loved it when she smiled, when she approved. He wanted, desperately, for her to smile at him all the time.

Slipping off the white satin gown now, she let it drop in a heap, like a pool of white liquid on the pink carpet. Naked in front of him, her huge breasts, the thick, straggly triangle of blonde hair; the flesh around her stomach a little loose. That was where he had been, in there, curled up inside her, behind that wall of flesh.

Hard as a rock now. He showed her proudly, knowing this made her pleased, and she rewarded him with a kiss on the forehead. ‘Good boy, Tom-Tom, I love you.’

He looked at her, wanting her to say it again. She didn’t, but she was smiling, and that was good.

She stepped into the bath, sat down facing him, knees sticking up through the froth. ‘How is your choo-choo now, darling?’

He wanted her to touch it again, wanted desperately that tight sensation that drilled through him when she held it. She reached forward, soaped her hands and held it again now, and it was harder than ever and he loved that feeling of the soapy hands playing up and down it.