One Under (4 page)

‘He thinks you’re extremely effective.’ Barber was watching him closely. ‘Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, he does.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘And bloody dangerous, too. That’s the bad news.’

‘Really?’ Winter dismissed the comment with a shrug. Dangerous, he thought, means nothing until you’ve lain on a hospital trolley, wondering whether you’ll ever see the light of day again.

There was a brief silence while Winter tried to decipher Barber’s scrawl. He seemed to be looking at a list of names. She helped him out.

‘That’s a first run at the Mispers. Faraday wants something on paper by tonight’s meeting. Six o’clock, whole squad.’ She gestured down the corridor in the direction of the Major Incident Room.

Winter nodded. Missing Persons were tallied on a national database. Anyone reasonably local fitting the victim’s description was an obvious starting point in an enquiry like this. There were five names on Barber’s list. Winter tucked the paper into his jacket pocket.

‘What do we know so far?’ he asked. ‘Age? Sex? Colour?’

‘White and probably male. That’s about it. You know what happens with trains. They’ll run out of bags. They always do. Faraday’s pushing for a post-mortem late tonight.’ She got to her feet and glanced at her watch. ‘You can imagine what a treat that’s going to be.’

 

Faraday met the pathologist in the early afternoon. Tim Ewers had spent longer in the tunnel than he’d anticipated, chiefly because the impact scene was such a mess, and now he was glad to be back in civilian clothes after the clammy embrace of the forensic suit. Ewers was new to the regional list and Faraday was surprised at how young he looked. It was rare to meet a pathologist who turned up in jeans and a T-shirt.

They stood around the bonnet of Faraday’s Mondeo in the bright sunshine as Ewers explained the state of the body and ventured a preliminary thought or two about what may have happened. Jerry Proctor was there as well, along with the Scenes of Crime photographer. Proctor was sweating in the heat.

‘Here -’ Ewers had drawn a rough diagram. ‘- The fella was chained lengthways along the rail closest to the tunnel wall. Let’s call it the nearside rail. His feet were pointing towards the oncoming train. That must have been bloody uncomfortable for starters but I also got the sense that his feet must have been tied as well, keeping his legs apart.’

Faraday caught a grim nod from Proctor. He wanted to know more. Ewers got busy with the pencil again, drawing a dotted line up the middle of the cartoon body.

‘In these situations, we’re talking reflex. Just think about it. A train’s coming at you. What do you do? It’s instinct. You twist away, bring your legs up, try and protect yourself. Like I say, pure reflex.’

Faraday could imagine the scene all too well. It didn’t bear contemplation. He tried to concentrate on the legs again, on the precise sequence of events to which flesh and bone held the key.

‘You’re telling me the legs would have been smashed? ’

‘Of course.’

‘And they weren’t?’

‘No. They were damaged, of course, terrible lacerations, but not as bad a mess as you might expect.’

Faraday’s eyes returned to the diagram on the bonnet. Then he felt a light tap on his elbow. The photographer was offering him a digital camera. Faraday took it, turning away from the brightness of the sunshine, and peered at the image on the tiny screen.

For a second or two he could make no sense of what he was seeing. Then he recognised the twisted remains of a human body. One leg was missing completely, the other hung over the clinker, oddly angled, attached by slivers of flesh and tendon. Above the leg, the naked torso had been split in two, navel to neck, not a neat, clean cut but a jagged tear that had ripped the body open. Faraday could see the glistening pit of the chest cavity, whitish blobs of what must have been lung tissue, and bulging loops of intestine, green and blue, trailing away into the darkness at the edges of the shot. There was no head.

The image was so bizarre, so macabre, so utterly unconnected with anything human, that Faraday found it curiously fascinating. Twelve hours ago this man would have had a life, a face, a tone of voice. Now, his remains belonged in one of the more cutting-edge London art galleries.

‘Flange damage.’ It was the pathologist. Faraday could feel Ewers’ breath on the back of his neck. ‘As I say, the legs were probably open, held apart somehow, and the flange on the wheel did the rest.’

‘We can evidence that?’

‘We found chain, certainly, and bits of rope, too. Here. You can just see … ’

Ewers pointed at a detail on the camera screen but all Faraday could make out was a curl or two of something that could have been metallic. The chain, it seemed, had been secured around the man’s waist.

‘What kind of chain?’ Faraday looked up.

‘Old, galvanised iron, quite substantial.’ It was Proctor this time. ‘About this long.’

Faraday looked at the space between his outstretched hands. Four or five feet, at least.

‘Padlocked?’

‘Presumably. We’re still looking.’

‘And the rope?’

‘Three separate lengths, all over the place. That would have been the train, of course. Chucked stuff everywhere.’

‘But we’re talking the same kind of rope?’

‘Yeah. Looked like sash cord to me. Quite old, brittle. And something else, too.’

The photographer obliged with another shot. This time Faraday was looking at a length of metal somehow wedged beneath the rail. He peered harder.

‘It’s an angle iron, sir. The kind you might use for fencing, little holes drilled for wire, stands about so high.’ The hands again, at the level of Proctor’s belly.

Faraday’s eyes were back on the screen. Then he glanced round at the pathologist.

‘So what’s the story?’

‘Hard to say but my best guess says he probably had an ankle tied to each end of the angle iron.’

‘Keeping the legs apart?’

‘Precisely. Look … ’

Ewers drew another diagram, two stick legs scissored open, the angle iron completing the triangle.

‘The train’s coming in this direction?’ Faraday drew a finger up through the triangle. ‘And takes him in the groin?’

‘That’s what it looks like.’

‘And he has maybe hours to think about it?’

‘All too likely.’

Faraday nodded. It sounded inconceivably sadistic.

‘But what if he was dead already? Is that something you’ll be able to tell us? After the PM?’

‘I doubt it.’ Ewers shook his head. ‘You’ve seen what the train did. We’ve got the torso, but most of what was inside is all over the place - on the track, under the train, even on the tunnel wall. Just think about the forces involved. Situations like these, the body explodes.’

‘And the head?’

As soon as he’d asked the question, the photographer was busy with the camera again. The head, according to Ewers, had been severed by one of the wheels and then sucked along by the passage of the train. Proctor had finally spotted it a further fifteen metres into the tunnel, lying between the rails on the other track. Faraday studied the proffered image. The face had gone completely, as if a child had daubed it with finger paints. The only thing that Faraday could be sure of was the colour of the hair. Blond.

‘Prints?’ Faraday was looking at Ewers again.

‘Unlikely. We might be able to recover a whorl or two but I wouldn’t bet your life on it.’

‘ID?’

Proctor shook his head. ‘Nothing on him at all, sir. Nothing in his pockets. Nothing in his jacket. No mobile. No wallet. He didn’t even have a bunch of keys.’

‘Tattoos? Rings? Piercings? Birthmarks?’

‘Birthmarks, we can’t be sure, not yet, but no obvious tats or danglies. Mr Ewers here thinks we might be in with a chance with the teeth but we’ll have to wait and see.’

‘Sure.’

Faraday stepped back from the bonnet and rubbed his face. Every particle of evidence from the scene told him that they were looking at a homicide. The lie of the body. The presence of chains and rope. The business with the angle iron. The total absence of ID. Someone had settled a debt or two and that someone had gone to enormous trouble to send a particular kind of message. You didn’t strip someone naked and then point his crotch at an oncoming train without good reason.

Faraday turned back to Ewers. Forensic procedure could be strangely comforting at moments like this. He nodded at the diagram on the bonnet.

‘No problem with DNA, I take it?’

 

By mid-afternoon, DC Paul Winter had boiled down Tracy Barber’s Misper list to just three names.

Missing Persons had become a bit of a pain over the last couple of years. With family ties loosening by the month and the city full of semi-feral kids, it was all too easy to attach undue importance to an anguished mum thrusting photos of little Connor at the Desk Officer, or a drunken twenty-five-year-old lurching in from the street to report the absence of her partner. In both cases, there was often layer after layer of subplot, and hard-pressed coppers were increasingly reluctant to enrol themselves in yet another drawn-out domestic. Far easier to fill out the forms, ping the names through to the duty Inspector, and get on with the next job.

Winter strolled down to the tiny kitchen at the end of the corridor and hunted for the biscuit tin while he waited for the kettle to boil. One of the names turned out to be an eighteen-year-old skate who’d allegedly jumped ship back in May. He’d been serving on HMS
Invincible
and had gone missing after a series of heavy mobile conversations with his girlfriend, up in Derby. The Naval Provost’s office had drawn the obvious conclusions, posted him absent without leave, and alerted Derbyshire Police. Winter had pressed the Provost’s office for more details and it turned out that the guy on the end of the phone had looked into the case personally. He’d seen a set of well-thumbed nude photos retrieved from the boy’s shipboard locker and had no doubts about their implications. The girl, he’d told Winter, was a cracker, and gossip amongst his shipmates had convinced him that the lad was alive and well and having the time of his life. No way would he have ended up under a train.

The second Misper was foreign, a Saudi engineer on attachment to a defence-related firm in Southampton. Winter had put in a call but once again it seemed clear that there were no real doubts about the man’s whereabouts. The engineer had been reported missing by his wife, who’d settled in a riverside maisonette in leafy Hamble. What she didn’t know about was her husband’s infatuation with an American divorcee he’d met on a training course in Massachusetts. According to the Human Resources executive, off the record, Mr Al-Ramedi was probably making quiet arrangements to smuggle the new love of his life back home to Riyadh.

Frustrated, Winter had turned to the third name. His name was Alan Givens and his employers - Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust - had supplied an address in North End. Givens, it seemed, had been employed as some kind of van driver, running medical samples around the city. He’d been at St Mary’s Hospital for the best part of a year, given nobody any grief, then suddenly disappeared. Calls to his mobile had gone unanswered. A personal visit to the North End flat had found nothing but a locked door, drawn curtains and a mountain bike with flat tyres locked to a drainpipe round the side. The police had made further enquiries and circulated Givens’ details, but seven weeks later, said the girl from Human Resources, the thing was still a complete mystery.

Intrigued, Winter had scribbled down the details. Givens was thirty-eight years old, unmarried, and had applied for the job from an address in Barnsley. From memory, she described him as medium height, thin, with a beaky nose and blond hair. His line manager, she added, had made a bit of an issue over the hair. Evidently Givens wore it longer than his employers would have liked. Meek as a lamb, he’d had it cut.

When the kettle began to boil, Winter decanted hot water onto a heap of Happy Shopper instant. He was still having trouble finding the biscuits when Tracy Barber appeared.

‘Cupboard by the window,’ she said. ‘Down by your knee.’

Winter helped himself to a plateful of chocolate digestives. Since the operation, he’d put on two and a half stone. Barber wanted to know about the Misper list. Winter brushed the crumbs from his mouth.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Coming along nicely.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’m making calls. Has anyone seen this body yet?’

‘Yeah, Mr Faraday.’

‘And?’

‘Exactly as we said. White, male. The blokes in the tunnel are still collecting bits.’

‘Nothing else to go on?’

‘Only the hair.’

‘Colour?’

‘Blond.’

 

Winter took a cab to North End. The area was a decent address, a grid of tree-lined streets that blunted the brutal impact of the rest of the city. Drive into Pompey this way, he thought, and you might even like the place.

Number 70 Meredith Road occupied the end of a 1930s terrace, a brick and pebbledash house with bay windows top and bottom, and a stained-glass fern motif on the front door. A pair of bells beside the door looked a good deal newer than the rest of the property, evidence that the place had recently been converted into a couple of flats, and he could just make out a name scrawled beside the top one. Petchey.

The bottom bell must be Givens’. Winter pressed it, turning his face to the sun, waiting for the response he knew would never come. He hadn’t felt so cheerful in months. It was almost like being a proper detective again. He gave the bell another poke, just in case, then took a step backwards.

The front bay windows, as the girl from Human Resources had indicated, were still curtained. Peering in through the crack in the middle Winter could just make out a table pushed against the back wall and a couple of chairs. There was some kind of vase on the table, or maybe a bowl, but it looked empty.