Hard Evidence (7 page)

'So our English teacher has been telling
porkies?'

Delaney shrugged. 'Maybe.'

'Something else?'

Sally nodded. 'We got the impression that there
was something Carol Parks wasn't telling us.'

Delaney watched as Collier walked through the
front gates and out of sight.

Bonner shrugged apologetically. 'We had nothing
to hold him on. Uniform have been all over his
house.'

'And?'

'Like I say. Nothing.'

Delaney scowled. His instincts had Collier in the
frame somehow but he couldn't pursue the
thought further as Morgan walked up to the
entrance with his brother Jake.

Sally gestured to the building. 'You coming
in?'

Delaney looked across through the clear glass of
the entrance doors to see Superintendent Walker
plastering a look of concern and solicitude on his
smooth face and shaking hands with the Morgan
brothers with as much sincerity as a second-hand
car salesman. His scowl deepened. 'I've got to be
somewhere. Bonner, you're with me.'

Sally nodded and would have asked more, but
Delaney had already turned and was striding purposefully
away from the building.

There was something fitting, Delaney thought,
about a pathology lab being housed in the
basement of a large Victorian building. The
Victorians' twin fascinations with death and
science going together like a horse and carriage. A
black horse, obviously, with black feathers
dancing from its head, pulling in its wake a black
hearse with a black coffin inside.

Delaney ran his hands along the cold surface of
the original white tiles and seemed to draw some
strange comfort from them. He looked across at
the mortuary table. A place of steel and blood, a
place of obscene evisceration and exposure. The
human Rubik's cube of a body snapped apart and
disassembled to discover its secrets.

Jackie Malone was laid out on the table. Her
body violated in life on a voluntary basis was
about to be violated in death. A penetration by
steel that she neither profited from nor had any
choice over.

Kate Walker picked up an electric rotary saw
and nodded as Delaney and Bonner approached.

'Sorry to keep you waiting.'

'She's not going anywhere.' Kate flicked the
switch and the loud burr of the saw filled the
room, bouncing off its antique tiles and setting a
resonant tremor in Delaney's bones. He threw
a sardonic look at Bonner.

'You wondered what kind of twist likes to cut
dead people up, Eddie.'

Kate fixed him with a defiant stare. 'I guess
that's why you and me are different, Cowboy. I
like to do things, you just like to watch.' She cut
short any reply from Delaney by flipping down
her goggles and lowering the blade of the saw. The
throaty whine replaced by a keening whistle as it
tore through flesh and sinew and bit into the bone
of Jackie Malone's ribcage.

Delaney looked away. He'd been to hundreds of
post-mortems but never to one where he had
known the victim. Not like he had known Jackie
Malone.

Time passed. Organs were removed, weighed,
examined. The host structure that had once held
Jackie Malone was rendered to its component
parts. Flesh, blood, bone and sinew. If there was a
soul once attached it wasn't there now, at least not
one visible to scientific eyes.

Delaney looked across as Kate snapped off her
latex gloves and dropped them in the bin. He
didn't have to ask the question.

'Pretty much as I suspected at the murder scene.
Death due to asphyxiation. She choked on her
own vomit.'

Bonner cracked a cold smile. 'Whose elses would
it be?'

'Give it a rest, Bonner.' Delaney was in no mood
for graveside humour any more.

'Her injuries were received post-mortem in the
main. The serious ones at least.'

Delaney nodded, the relief palpable. 'Any useful
semen?'

Kate paused for a moment at his choice of
words but let it pass; she didn't joke in front of the
dead. 'Traces of lubricant in both the vaginal and
anal passages. A lubricant consistent with those
used in standard condoms, a hundred varieties.'

'Not unusual, then?' Bonner asked.

'No. Especially not given the nature of her
occupation.'

Bonner shook his head, puzzled. 'Sex crime. All
that passion, rage . . . yet they still have the control
to put a condom on.'

Delaney frowned. 'I blame television.'

Kate looked across at him, but he wasn't joking.

'Everybody knows too much these days, don't
they?'

Kate agreed. 'About everything.'

Howard Morgan's face filled the TV screen. The
livid scar running from neck to eyeline on his left
side made more lurid by the leaking colours of the
old television set.

Abigail Parks thumbed the remote control so
that she could hear his words.

'We just want you to come home. You're not in
any trouble.' His voice was stiff, halting, his eyes
skittering nervously to the left, where unseen by
the camera DC Sally Cartwright mouthed the
words to him.

Abigail looked across at her daughter, who was
watching the television with restrained nervous
tension.

'If you are watching this. Just call us. Please.'

Morgan's ravaged face was rendered both wide-and
small-screen in department stores throughout
the capital. But few people stopped to hear what
the scarred man was saying. Few people cared.

Outside, people went about their everyday
business. Summer in the city and everything
looked bright, everything looked cheerful, even
the Japanese tourists. At Piccadilly Circus young
lovers had their photos taken on the steps beneath
Eros, red buses swung round the roundabout and
underneath the large neon advertisements, giving
snap-happy visitors the perfect photo opportunity.
A London as far removed from Delaney and
Jackie Malone and Howard Morgan and his
daughter as the moon.

And along the Mall, heading towards Westminster,
a sleek black car, its occupant another
space traveller, but then all worlds collided sooner
or later in the metropolis.

Superintendent Walker, fresh from the press
conference, held a mobile phone to his ear and
looked out at the passing tourists, making little
attempt to hide the boredom in his voice.

'I have a meeting with the Home Secretary in
half an hour.' He listened impatiently. 'I'm sure
you do have your difficulties, my dear, but I have
had problems with your people in the past.
Problems I don't need right now.' The hardness
slipping into his voice now like cold steel
unsheathed. 'If he's not up to the job, we can
always have him shipped back to Belfast . . . or
wherever the black bog is that he crawled from.'

He clicked the phone off and examined his nails.

Under the surface of the teeming streets, Kate
rubbed moisturising cream into her hands and
checked her own blood-red nails, clipped short.
Delaney crossed to stand in front of her, watching
as she massaged one hand with the strong fingers
of the other. Hands, Delaney couldn't help but
think, that should have been caressing the neck of
a cello, or holding a paintbrush, not a scalpel. She
looked up and caught his gaze, thrusting her
hands into the pockets of her green trousers.

Delaney gestured at the inert body of Jackie
Malone.

'Could you tell if intercourse took place at the
time, thereabouts, of the murder?'

Kate gestured at Jackie's ravaged body. 'I don't
think this was sexually motivated.'

'They wanted her dead.'

'They succeeded.'

'You saying she wasn't raped?'

Kate considered and shook her head. 'I'm not
saying that. I'm just saying I can't give you a
definite answer on it.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning that intercourse had certainly taken
place. Given the nature of her chosen profession,
it's hard to tell if it involved her killer, or killers.
Whether it was a voluntary or involuntary act.'

'Any indications?'

Kate walked over to the instrument table and
picked up another pair of latex gloves, easing her
fingers into them as she talked, flexing her hands
and looking back at Delaney.

'There was quite severe bruising around both
the rectal and vaginal orifices. This would indicate
a high level of resistance consistent with rape prior
to the murder. And it does fit into the time
pattern.'

'You can't be definite?'

'Like I said, her job involved a certain amount
of specialised activity.'

Bonner laughed. 'Stick and stones may break
my bones, but whips and chains . . .'

Kate flicked a look at Bonner. 'As you delicately
put it, Sergeant, she did work in a . . .' she paused
to find the right word, 'niche market. S and M.
Sadomasochism. There is scarring and bruising on
her body that pre-dates the fatal assault.'

Kate pointed to areas of bruising still visible on
Jackie Malone's body, made more distinct by the
cold whiteness of her skin.

Bonner grimaced. 'She was into being beaten
up?'

'I don't suppose she was into it, Sergeant,
although who knows? But I guess that was how
she paid the rent and put food on the table.'

'So the rough sex could have been part of a
sexual fantasy enacted by a client prior to her
being murdered?'

Kate gave Delaney an appraising look. 'Some
men like that sort of thing, Jack. Don't they?'

Delaney smiled back, a smile as cold and thin-lipped
as Jackie Malone on the mortuary table.
'Why don't you just stick to looking inside her
head?'

Kate broke the look first. She picked up the
circular saw again and lowered its screaming
blade on to the dead woman's skull. The saw
growled as it struggled through bone, the dust
flecking Kate's green top and spotting it red with
tiny bits of matter.

Delaney turned away. 'I've got an appointment.'

Kate watched him as he walked away and
turned to Bonner. 'What is it with him?'

'I don't think he likes your uncle.'

She looked after Delaney thoughtfully for a
second and then turned her attentions back to
Jackie Malone.

*

Outside in the cool corridor Delaney leant against
the wall to stop the earth sliding from his tilting
feet, laying both hands against the cool tiles and
sucking air into his lungs like a drowning man
rescued.

Gradually the pounding of blood in his ears
lessened and the world shifted back on its proper
axis. His breathing steadied, and straightening up,
he stumbled for the bright sunshine outside. Hot
enough to warm a planet but not hot enough to
burn the memories clean.

He looked across the road, through the crowds
of walkers and the slow flash of cars, to the kind
of modern bar he really disliked, all white wood
and chrome behind a big plate of clear glass. A
goldfish bowl with alcohol. And visible behind the
broad sweep of the counter, shiny steel pipes and
amber-coloured bottles that delivered oblivion by
the half-pint or shot. He looked at the people
standing there drinking, laughing, living in a
world removed from pain. And wanted to join
them. He wanted to throw down his badge on the
dusty tarmac like a sheriff in an old western and
leave the suffering and the responsibility behind.
He considered it for a long moment, tasting the
whiskey on his tongue, feeling the cold Guinness
anaesthetising not just his throat but also his
mind. The sensation almost willing his legs to step
out into the road, but a passing woman stumbled
suddenly into him. Slurring an apology, she
knocked him back from the road, back from the
bar, back to a missing girl and a murdered
prostitute. He stood thinking about Jackie Malone
for a moment, remembering her laugh. A deep,
throaty, entirely infectious laugh. The only
woman who ever made him forget his dead wife,
if only for a brief while. Then he walked across the
road for just one cold beer.

One and done.

Delaney nodded at Dave Patterson as he walked
back into police headquarters. 'Slimline.'

'Cowboy.'

Patterson looked like he was going to say more,
but Delaney quickly tapped in the security code,
opened the door and walked up the stairs, not
wanting to get caught up in idle chat.

The CID office was deserted. He hurried across
to his desk and sat quickly behind it, looking
around to see he wasn't being observed. He
reached down and opened the lowest drawer;
rummaging under the cluttered paperwork and
case files, he found the small black book he was
looking for. Jackie Malone's diary. He glanced
around again, making sure he was still alone and
flicked through the pages, looking for any other
mention of his name. He tore out the last ten
pages, flicked his cigarette lighter and set light to
them, watching the flames lick greedily up the
pages, devouring the writing on them. He held
them for a second or two and then dropped them
into his metal waste bin, watching until nothing
was left but feathery ash. Then he put the diary
into his pocket and threw some more papers into
the bin to cover up the ash.

He put the bin back in place and looked up at
the clock on the wall. Eight thirty in the evening,
and not a single response to Morgan's televised
appeal. Not one that checked out, anyway. He
despaired for the sad lives of people sick enough to
prey on other people's misery by making bogus
confessions and giving false sightings. As he
looked at the second hand of the clock sweep
around the dial, he knew that as every hour passed
the chances of finding Jenny Morgan alive
diminished. It had already been far too long, and
Delaney couldn't help wondering if she was soon
to be another candidate for Kate Walker's clinical
attention. And that was another mystery. Why a
woman like Kate Walker should be doing the job
she was. She'd had a privileged education, old
money behind her; she could have done anything
she wanted to do. What made a woman like her
choose to dissect people for a living? He stood up
and shrugged into his jacket. People like her came
from a different place to the likes of him. He'd
never understand them and he wasn't going to
waste any time trying to change that. Not valuable
drinking time anyway.

Howard Morgan sat alone in his front room. A
bottle of cheap rum stood on the low formica-topped
table in front of his chair, a glass full of the
coarse liquid gripped in his immense fist. He
raised the glass and swallowed half of it in one
gulp, the amber liquid trickling from one corner of
his mouth as it burned its way down his throat, a
tear leaking slowly from his scarred eye. He
looked at the photo of his young daughter that he
had placed on the table and swallowed hard. His
broken voice a croak. A valediction.

'I'm sorry.'

He downed the rest of the rum and poured the
glass full again.

'I'm so sorry.'

Night-time again on the river. The heat still hung
heavy in the air, like a blanket. The moon, covered
with a few shreds of clouds, threw a cold, hard
light on the ground below and bounced off the
water.

In the silt-covered reeds a lap of water swelled,
sucking the mud from the banks with a wet gurgle
and rolling a head that half floated and banged
against the bank. The lifeless eyes seemed devoid
of colour, the moon reflected in miniature in each
iris, the skin white with the texture of rain-soaked
cardboard. The mouth pulled back in a rictus of
death, the hands held with twisted-coat hanger
wire. Darkness fell across the river as the moon
was covered.

A girl's scream hung on the air and was muffled
suddenly. A few moments later the moon slid clear
of a tangle of clouds and lit the path by the river
once more.

'Come on, love, I've got to get the car back.
Move your bloody arse.' The words of young love,
post-coitus. A man in his early twenties picked his
way along the water's edge.

'Hold on a minute. I'm trying to find my
knickers.' She was young too, pretty and teetering
on heels built more for display than pedestrian
use. 'I can't bloody find them.'

'Come on. It's not the first time, is it?'

And then another scream, of terror now, as Billy
Martin leered up at the young woman from the
water's edge, like a grey voyeur trying to peep up
her all-too-flimsy skirt. The tilting, water-soaked
head of Billy Martin. Ex of the parish.

She ran, still screaming, into the arms of her
impatient boyfriend. Gasping for breath, she tried
to describe what she had seen, but words failed
her. She dragged him back to show him, but by
then Billy Martin had gone again. Dragged under
once more by the tidal flow, sucked back into the
cold and silent embrace of the water's depths.