Four Below (21 page)

The stench streaming from the room caught in Fairfield’s throat. She swallowed hard and ducked her head to bury her nose in her scarf. The small front room was knee high in garbage, raw,
festering, giving off a penetrating sweet odour, laced with urine. There were whole cellophane-packed loaves of bread turned blue with mould, countless packs of pizzas and ready meals, layers of
rotting fruit. ‘Looks like they’ve been skip-diving,’ Fairfield said from behind her silk scarf. ‘It’s all the stuff supermarkets chuck out. And they used it as a
toilet as well. Someone will have to go through all that lot.’

‘I can see needles from here.’

‘Close the door, Jack, or you’ll see puke from there.’ Over her shoulder she said: ‘You could have warned us, Constable.’

At the bottom of the stairs, she passed a jumble of electric cables hanging from the wall where the electricity meter had been bypassed. The cables snaked up the stairs. There were two bedrooms
and a bathroom upstairs. The bathroom door was closed. The smell coming through the door explained why some had preferred to piss in the front room. The duty doctor had long finished with the
corpse. He was merely here to pronounce the man dead. ‘Heroin overdose is what it looks like to me. That’s the third in two weeks I have attended personally. When will they get the
message?’

‘This
is
the message. And he got it.’ Sorbie looked beyond the doctor to where the slumped body of the dead man lay half on, half off a much-stained mattress. ‘The happy
dead.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Heroin kills. Sooner or later. Everyone knows it. If you do heroin, then that’s what you’re looking for, death on a stained mattress.’

The doctor frowned at Sorbie, wondering whether it was worth continuing the conversation. ‘That’s not the message I meant. It’s probably the pure heroin batch that killed him.
They must have heard about it by now. Why they can’t go easy on the stuff until they know what they bought is beyond me.’

Fairfield put a hand between Sorbie’s shoulder blades and pushed him into the room, then leant against the door frame. She thought she’d give a month’s wages not to have to
look at another dead junkie. ‘Once you’ve started using heroin, you’ve crossed a threshold somehow. You’re no longer rational; the drug makes the decisions,’ she said.
‘How old was he?’

‘Young.’

‘Forever young, Doctor.’

‘It’s what I said,’ Sorbie said from inside. ‘The happy dead. Hey, there’s someone in the back yard.’

Below the window, beyond the snow-covered roof of the kitchen extension, lay a small, lifeless yard, half choked with broken furniture and more garbage. Sorbie watched as a man in his thirties
appeared through the jumble of vegetation that grew over the tattered fence. With difficulty he got the sash window to open. ‘Hey, you, stay right where you are! Police!’

The man stopped in his tracks and looked up. Above the upturned collar of his leather jacket and his scarf, only the eyes and forehead were visible. He wore a leather cap over what had to be
very short hair. Their eyes met only briefly before the man turned and ran back the way he had come.

‘Stop, police!’ Sorbie hesitated only a fraction. ‘Bugger.’ Then he squeezed through the window and lowered himself on to the roof of the extension below. His quarry had
fought his way back through the fence; he could see glimpses of him as he ran along the narrow passage that divided the backs of the houses from those in the next street.

Fairfield pushed herself off the wall and had launched herself towards the stairs when she heard a crash and a sound of dismay from Sorbie. The doctor got to the window before her. ‘Are
you okay?’ he called down.

‘Just dandy. Someone get me out of here.’

It took the PC and the doctor five minutes of pushing and pulling to free Sorbie from where one of his legs had gone through what turned out to be a tarpaper-covered roof of woodwormed boards.
His trousers were torn, revealing a raw, bleeding gash in his leg.

‘Why did you go after him?’ Fairfield wanted to know. ‘You haven’t seen enough of junkies?’

‘He didn’t look like a junkie. Yeah, ouch, thank you, Doc,’ he added as the duty doctor dabbed at his bloodied leg.

‘What did he look like?’

‘He looked too sorted for a junkie. Didn’t move like one. About thirty. Broad shoulders, fourteen stone, five eight. Blue eyes, I think, light eyebrows. Heavy biker jacket, not
cheap. Black scarf, leather gloves and a leather cap on his head. Probably shaven head, or very short, anyway. Couldn’t see much of his face because of the scarf.’

A few SOCOs had arrived, purely routine where drug deaths were concerned, but with the search on for the suppliers of two types of lethal heroin, they showed more animation than usual. One of
them held up a half-empty heroin wrap inside an evidence bag. ‘It looks like the same type of wrap, very small resealable polythene. One day we’re going to get lucky and get the
guy’s DNA and fingerprints.’

‘One day. Unless he wears gloves, because it’s bloody freezing. I got to go and get into a new pair of trousers,’ said Sorbie.

‘Okay. Thanks, Doctor. Let’s go, Jack.’

In the hall, they squeezed past two crime-scene officers, in full protective gear and dust masks, contemplating the immensity of the garbage heap in the front room through the narrowly opened
door. Fairfield ducked back behind her scarf.

‘CSI Bristol,’ Sorbie offered. ‘The glamour of it.’

McLusky always thought he could smell it. He knew that no odours penetrated the viewing screen of the autopsy room, but ever since he had caught the stench of his very first
decomposing corpse, even a photograph could trigger the memory. A brief delusion of smell, like an echo, triggered somewhere in his brain. The same way it sometimes happened with coffee, he could
smell it when it wasn’t there. Once it had happened with roses when the word had been mentioned.

‘So you haven’t suddenly developed a taste for it, then?’

‘DS Austin has taken to his bed with a cold. So have scores of others.’

‘Has your heating been restored at the station?’

‘Not yet, but I’m told that if it hasn’t by tomorrow, we’ll shut up shop until it is.’

‘I hope the temperature on your side of the screen is adequate?’

‘Tropical.’

‘Then we’ll proceed, shall we?’

Roses
. McLusky tried to conjure up the smell of roses as Dr Coulthart started his examination of the mutilated body.

‘I usually shy away from any conclusions until after the examination is complete, but I can tell you right now that you have a murderous sadist to catch.’

‘I have already come to a similar conclusion.’

‘These wounds, we’ll count them later, are, how shall I say …
gratuitous
. His teeth have all been shattered. So have both testicles. He would also probably have lost
sight in both eyes had he lived. The X-rays’ – Coulthart indicated a quartet of them on the computer screen behind him – ‘show broken feet, elbow, collarbone, ribs
…’

‘Could he have been tortured to extract information?’

Coulthart considered it briefly. ‘Anything is possible. But if you wanted to inflict pain as part of an interrogation, you wouldn’t do this. A torturer who interrogates assumes a
role that allows him to inflict pain and then take pain away again. Tell me everything and the pain will stop. Can’t do that once you’ve broken the chap’s teeth and testes,
Inspector.’

‘Could torture have been its own motive?’

‘I doubt that, too. Both this victim and Wayne Deeming were eventually killed by having their heads bashed in. I think you are looking for a killer or killers who
also
enjoy
inflicting pain. But killing was the objective. The injuries weren’t inflicted over any great period of time.’

‘So who is he?’

‘I’m afraid we got no useful prints off his severed hand, and there are no lab results yet; everything has slowed down because of the weather.’

‘Not everything. People are still happily mugging and murdering each other. Exhibitionists prefer not to ‘exhibit’ in bad weather, but, I’m happy to say, that’s not
my department.’

‘I can tell you he lived pretty well; he was relatively fit, for his age, which was mid-fifties. His skin … mainly his arms and what remains of his face were once tanned quite
deeply. The skin there, though relatively pale, still remains several shades darker than anywhere else.’

‘Just face and arms. Not due to sunbathing, then. Worked outside, perhaps. But we just had a lousy summer; he wouldn’t have got much of a tan here. Probably got it abroad
then.’

‘Quite possibly.’

‘Deeming was a small-time drug-dealer. And user. Any sign of drug use here?’

‘None at all. He carried a bit too much weight round the middle, so probably liked a drink.’

‘All his teeth were bashed in; is it possible that they did that to make identification more difficult? From dental records?’

‘I doubt it. He swallowed half of them. And he was buried with his hands, remember? They wouldn’t have left those if they were trying to conceal his identity. If they were,
they’ve been very incompetent.’

‘Perhaps they are. The burials weren’t very good. Not deep enough for a start, especially the first one. A bit sloppy, if you ask me. You go through all the trouble of grabbing
someone, taking him to a dark spot and murdering him, and then you can’t be bothered to dig a decent grave.’

It was getting dark fast when McLusky drove away from the mortuary. He hadn’t learnt much about the victim, but he had come away with that one new thought: taking Deeming
from his house to Leigh Woods and killing him had been an effort. So presumably had been the murder of the second victim. But the graves had been shoddily dug. There was more than one person involved, that was almost certain.

And the one with the shovel was a lazy sod.

The concrete jungle thing, there was some truth to it. The thing about the jungle was that it was full of stuff. One thing growing through another and on top of the next. The
city streets were like snakes or vines: too many houses meant you couldn’t see very far; people crawled all over the place like ants. You had to decide what kind of jungle animal you wanted
to be. In the jungle it was eat or be eaten. Well, come to think of it, it was really eat
and
be eaten. Eventually. And the
eventually
made all the difference.

The important thing was a safe burrow. If you were rich, you made yourself one your enemies couldn’t get into. If you were poor, you made one they couldn’t find. He had slimmed down
his possessions, had made himself light on his feet; he had moved to this obscure place, a bedsit next to a hardware store on a non-descript road. It was noisy and the stairwell smelled damp, but
he was allowed to park his van out of sight behind the hardware store, and when the big man paid up, as he would have to, he’d soon find himself more salubrious digs. It would have to be far
away, of course. Might even have to be Spain. The big man wouldn’t pay up and forget about it; he’d hunt him for ever. He would have to disappear; he’d be an obvious suspect, even
though he was in hospital when the photograph was taken. He had found the date on the file information. But alibis would not cut any ice. The big man would send Ilkin to strike first and ask
questions later. And Ilkin’s kind of methods often meant that questions were left unanswered.

He had sent narrow strips of the picture to the big man’s house. He had added a printed note, telling him that identical strips would go to the
Bristol Herald
. He had made no
demands yet. Let him wonder about it, let him worry about it. Let him have sleepless nights about it. He could take his time. Safe in his new burrow, he could let his plan ripen.

The dangerous bit, the part that gave him the biggest headache, was the handover. That was where they would try to get at him. He had made a list of possibilities and scenarios, and every day he
thought about it for hours. There was no point in making a move until he had sorted it out, found a foolproof one. Yet one by one they revealed their flaws. He couldn’t afford any flaws. Even
the tiniest would prove fatal.

Chapter Fifteen

‘They think they’ve done it,’ was how Sergeant Hayes greeted him as McLusky carried his custard Danish past the front desk. Hayes, whose double layer of
thermal underwear was straining his uniform buttons, tried to look convinced, but McLusky knew bad acting when he saw it.

‘Then why can I see my breath in the lobby? We’re staying open for business, then?’

‘Looks like we got a reprieve.’ It hadn’t taken long for the rumour to spring up that the latest round of cuts in police funding meant that Albany Road station, which was
crumbling and in need of constant repair, would not reopen once they had closed it down because of the broken heating. It sounded far-fetched to McLusky, but there was no doubt that many police
stations around the country would close and not reopen.

Coats, scarves, gloves and an assortment of hats were worn by everyone in the building not in direct contact with the public. The hot-drinks machines at the ends of the corridors had run dry and
not been refilled. The kettles, deemed by health and safety to be too dangerous for police officers not trained in their use, had made a comeback everywhere and were being kept busy. The
temperature on McLusky’s floor still appeared the same, but he noticed that the mere promise of warmth and the reappearance of the kettles had lifted the mood. He had planned to breakfast on
coffee and Danish in his office before tackling anything else, but a bellowing sneeze as he passed the CID room made him stop in the doorway. Austin was at his desk, wiping the sneeze off his
monitor with a crumpled tissue.

‘I thought you were bedridden,’ McLusky said by way of greeting.

Austin’s nose was red and flaking from constant tissue use. He looked like the ‘before’ shot of a flu remedy commercial. ‘Much better, thanks,’ he said snottily.
‘Couldn’t face another day in bed.’

‘Sneeze in my direction next,’ called French. ‘I could do with a day off.’