Blood Work (13 page)

Kate waited for the laughter to subside and then
continued. 'A dead body will usually stay in full rigor
mortis for anything between twenty-four and forty-eight
hours. After that the muscles start to relax again
and secondary laxity,' she smiled apologetically at
Bob Wilkinson, 'or flaccidity occurs. And it will
usually follow the same pattern as it began.' She
gestured behind her. 'Not applicable in this case of
course. Another way of gauging how long a person
has been dead is by taking the core temperature. And
again we have to factor in the ambient temperature.
The unseasonably cold weather last night meant that
the woman's body will have cooled a lot faster than
if she had been murdered at home for example.
Wherever her home is.'

Kate glanced back at the mottled face of the
ravaged woman and wondered if anyone was waiting
for her at that home. A distraught parent or worried
boyfriend. She assumed she wasn't married as she
had no wedding ring, or indications that she had ever
worn one.

At the back of the room, meanwhile, Delaney was
watching Kate as she pinned different photographs of
the murdered young woman to the display board,
and talked about the forensic analytical techniques.
But those details washed over him, hardly taking in
what she was saying. She was discussing putrefaction
as another method of establishing time of death. But
again it wasn't strictly relevant as putrefaction didn't
take place until the second or third day after death
and Delaney had seen enough corpses in his time to
know about the telltale signs of green discoloration,
and the putrid odour that accompanied it. An odour
that told him they were already far too late for the
victim and had given the murderer a good few days'
head start on them. The first twenty-four hours were
often critical in a murder case and if the body was
putrefying before it was discovered it wasn't a good
omen.

Kate turned to the room. 'We know the victim is a
young female, we know she was murdered sometime
in the early hours of last night and we know we are
dealing with an extremely sick individual.'

A murmur went round the room again, sensing
that Kate had finished but she held her hand up for
quiet once again.

'One more thing.' She walked over to the display
panels again and pointed at a blown-up photo of the
young woman's neck. 'There is an unusual puncture
mark on her neck.'

'Vampire you think, Doctor?'

A laugh went around the room again. But a
nervous one. After all, the woman had been
murdered in the dead of night, under a full moon,
was dressed like someone out of Bram Stoker and
had a couple of pagan symbols on her belt.

Kate let the laughter subside. 'I have no idea what
to think.'

The previously recorded news highlights were playing
on monitors throughout the building. Melanie
Jones smiling at the camera. It was a practised smile,
full of hope, innocence and genuine wonder at the
world. A smile that belied the news that she had just
been reporting. A third teenager stabbed to death in
south London that week. An eighty-three-year-old
woman raped and murdered in Nottingham. The
foreclosure of a car works in the Midlands that was
putting five thousand people out of work. At Sky
News the policy was that the viewer should want to
kiss the messenger not kill her. And a lot of people
wanted to kiss Melanie Jones. The news is a bitter
pill, after all, and Melanie Jones provided the sweet,
sweet sugar that helped the medicine go down.

At the moment it was her line producer, Ronald
Bliss, that was going down. His head nestled between
her thighs as she sat legs akimbo on the toilet in the
ensuite in his office. She wasn't smiling now. She was
looking at her nails. There was a slight chip on her
left index finger. She looked across at her handbag
which was propped up against Ronald's knees. She'd
have loved to get her polish out of it and fix the nail,
but thought it might not go down too well. She
looked at her watch. He'd been at it for five minutes,
breathing heavily through his nostrils and sounding
like a St Bernard in labour. Bliss was five foot six and
several stones overweight and Melanie hoped the
heavy breathing wasn't a prelude to a heart attack.
She looked down at the top of his head; he was only
thirty-eight but already his hair was thinning badly.
She could see the pink of his scalp through the
strands of his ginger hair, and frowned slightly.
Someone should tell him about dandruff shampoo,
but that was his wife's job, not hers. She looked at
her watch again, she'd give him a couple more
minutes for form's sake then make a few whimpering
noises and give him a quick wank, which should keep
him happy for a week or so and her own promotion
prospects on line.

A buzzing in her jacket pocket and then her phone
rang. She took it out and was about to click it off
when the man below mumbled, 'Answer it, I like to
hear your voice.'

Melanie curled her lip at him and answered the
phone, suppressing a yawn.

'Melanie Jones.'

She listened for a while and then went very still.
'Call me back in fifteen minutes. I can't talk now.'
She closed her phone and patted her producer on his
head, just once and wiped her palm on the sleeve of
her jacket.

'Sorry, Ronald, I think I just came on.'

The man looked up, a shifty tremor in his glassine
eyes. 'I don't mind.'

'Next week, eh.' She shifted her thighs, squeezing
him backward and leaned over to pick her thong.
Silk, diamanté-studded, eighty-five pounds from
Agent Provacateur. She stood up and the man looked
at her hopefully.

'Could you at least leave me the knickers?'

The call she had just received could very well turn
out to be the best break of her career and so she was
suddenly feeling very generous. She tossed them into
his eager hand.

'I want them replaced.'

She closed the door behind her. The look of
gratitude in her boss's eyes was proof, if she needed
it, of just how weak men can be.

Kate walked down the corridor, wrapping the long
scarf around her neck and heading for the stairs. She
was happy to have put the briefing behind her, her
mind wasn't on it. Much as she felt for the murdered
woman, she had her own problems today. She
headed down the broad staircase and walked to the
police surgeon's room. She dreaded what she was
about to hear. When she had worked as a police
surgeon Kate had had to deal with many cases of
rape. She knew that the cases reported were just the
tip of the iceberg too. She'd been giving a lecture not
many weeks past addressing the issue. She'd been
horrified to look at the women against rape website
and seen that if anything the situation was getting
worse year by year. Ninety-eight per cent of domestic
violence goes unreported. Two women a week
murdered by their partner or ex-partner. One in six
women in the country has been raped and yet only
six per cent of reported rapes result in a conviction.
And now, most likely, she was one of the statistics.
She had no evidence that the man in her bed had
assaulted her last night; it was a gut feeling, and the
news that he had done it before just made her all the
more certain that she had been violated. The thought
of it made her feel nauseous again, her stomach
lurching as though she were on a particularly choppy
Channel crossing. She paused at the water cooler
outside the police surgeon's office to take a drink and
try and stop herself from hurling her lunch on the
smooth tiles of the corridor.

Melanie Jones was standing outside in the car park of
the London Apprentice. She was holding a large glass
of red wine in her left hand and a Lambert & Butler
Superking dangled from her perfectly painted lips.

'Shit,' she said looking at her mobile phone, which
was staying frustratingly quiet. 'Ring, you bastard!'
She sucked in a lungful of smoke and paced over to
look at the river.

The recent heavy falls of rain had sluiced mud from
the banks of either side of the Thames, and the strong
winds had stripped dead leaves and detritus from Eel
Pie Island, further upriver, to wash down and swirl in
the dirty, brown water. Melanie looked at it, her lip
curling. Bloody thing was like an open sewer. It was
a metaphor for London she thought, she couldn't
wait to put the stinking city behind her. The phone
call earlier though, if it was genuine, was a career-making
opportunity and could have her in America
sooner than you could say world exclusive. That had
been her ambition ever since she had done a
presenting course at Bournemouth University a few
years ago. She was born for Fox News. As a teenager
she had wanted to be a model, but she was too curvy
as an adult, too womanly. Her legs were long for a
woman but too short for a supermodel. She'd taken
Ulrika Jonsson as her inspiration. So she had started
off as a weather girl before being talent-spotted by a
Sky News journo at a fund-raiser for victims of the
Boxing Day Tsunami. She'd rogered him senseless
that night on a king-size waterbed and as a
consequence he had made the right calls for her and
just like that she was in with Rupert Murdoch. Not
that she'd ever met the man, but maybe all that
would change, and soon. The phone buzzed in her
hand and she almost dropped it, her palms suddenly
moist with perspiration. She already had the title of
her book in mind.
Intimate Conversations With a
Serial Killer
.

She took a deep breath and pushed the answer
button, her voice like gunpowder soaked in honey.

'Melanie Jones. Talk to me.'

Caroline Akunin was standing at her window drinking
a cup of white tea when Kate walked into her
office. She found herself standing a lot more often
these days, the baby was definitely making its
presence felt. Sitting behind the sturdy police desk for
any long periods of time was just not possible any
more. She ran a thoughtful hand across her stomach
and smiled sympathetically at Kate as she came in
through the open door.

'I hope I haven't kept you waiting?' Kate asked.

'Of course not.' The police surgeon's perfect teeth
flashed in a dazzling smile.

'I had a briefing to attend first. It went on longer
than I thought.'

Caroline Akunin gestured to the chair in front of
her desk as Kate shut the door behind her. 'Why
don't you sit down, Kate?'

Kate sat in the chair and gestured at the woman's
prominent belly. 'How's it going? The pregnancy.' It
seemed to her an inane thing to say but suddenly she
wanted to talk about anything other than the reason
she had come. Now she was sitting in the police
surgeon's office she didn't want to hear anything that
would confirm her worst fears. If you don't name the
bogeyman he can't get you, after all. That's what her
mother had always told her. But, as in a lot of things,
she had lied.

Caroline smiled again; Kate could easily see why
her Russian husband had fallen in love with her. 'You
know how it is. The first nine months are the worst.'

Kate forced herself to return the smile. The truth
was she had no idea how it was. Motherhood was
not high on Kate's agenda. Just thinking about the
modern world, the pollution, the global warming, the
disaffected hopelessness and the violence of youth,
the gun deaths and knifings, the rape, assault and
mutilation of women throughout the country, the
fear, as essential and as constant a part of London life
now as the Victorian smog used to be, and she didn't
think it ever would be. Who would want to bring a
child into this world? But as she looked at her friend
Caroline's beatific face, a living sculpture in maternal
happiness, she knew she could never convey the
darkness of her thoughts to her, so she changed the
subject back to what she feared the most.

'What can you tell me about what happened last
night?'

Caroline Akunin sighed and pulled another chair
across closer to her friend. 'I can tell you what our
tests have shown so far.'

'Go on.'

'There are no physical signs of rape. No bruising,
no abrasion.'

'I know that.'

'Of course, sorry.'

'Don't apologise, Caroline. Just tell me straight. I
need to know.'

'Okay. Well, there are no pubic hairs.'

'None at all?'

'Just yours, Kate.'

'And there are no traces of semen?'

'None.'

Kate blew out a sigh. 'Thank God for that, at
least.'

'I guess.'

Kate leaned her head back and looked at the
ceiling. 'Doesn't mean, of course, that nothing
happened.'

'No, it doesn't.'

'Any traces of lubricant?'

'Nope.'

'Lubricant- and spermicide-free condoms are
readily available.'

Caroline nodded. 'Let's face it, Kate, he could have
put a condom through a dishwasher before he used it.'

'Reused. Nice image.'

Caroline shrugged sympathetically.

'Don't tell me there's traces of Fairy Liquid power-ball?'
She tried to smile but couldn't manage it this
time.

'There's nothing, Kate.'

'What about date-rape drugs? Rohypnol, one of
those?'

'I'm still waiting on the blood work.'

Kate clenched her hand angrily. 'There must be
something he used, Caroline. Something has to show
up. If this was taken to the CPS they'd laugh in our
faces.'

'Let's see what the blood tests show.'

'You said he's already been charged?'

'Cautioned, charged, released on police bail and
due in court this week.'

'Can you give me the details?'

Caroline stood up and shook her head sadly.
'Sorry, Kate. You know I can't do that. Completely
against the rules. Client confidentiality and all that.
Not to mention that it could jeopardise the case.'

Kate looked up at her, sensing there was something
she wasn't saying.