Post Mortem (16 page)

‘And then blame you.'

‘That's right.'

‘So you must keep a record of the keys. Who has them, that sort of thing? That way you can prove it's not you who had them last.'

The civilian's head cocked to the side, suddenly careful.

Collins said, ‘Well?'

‘I do, yes.'

‘Do you mind if I have a look at it?'

The civilian hesitated only briefly. ‘Of course.' She went back to her desk, opened the drawer and handed Collins a hardback indexed book.

‘I'll leave you to it,' she said, moving towards the door.

‘Do you mind just hanging on a minute . . .'

The civilian looked at her warily and then moved away towards the franking machine. She showed her back, wrapped in green cardigan: she was busy with the registered post.

Collins opened the book to the day of the fall. She ran her finger down the entries. The key to the drying room. The key for the custody store. The master key for the men's lockers. There it was, the signature she had half expected.

The car was stationary, with the engine running and the heating fan on full. Collins' mobile was ringing. She was sitting with her head tilted back against the headrest and her eyes closed. With a sigh she opened her eyes and fished the phone out of her bag. DCI Baillie's name had appeared across the screen. She didn't want to speak to him, not now. She put the phone back in her bag, letting it ring to voicemail. She took a Marlboro out of its packet, lit it and pressed the button to lower her window. The smoke expanded into her lungs and the nicotine hit.

She was enduring the usual cold sensation that preceded postmortems. Once it got started, she told herself, she would be fine.
She would be busy. It was the anticipation that filled her with dread. She hated the reduction of a human being to its constituent parts, to bags of muscle and a jar of brain. Every time, it evoked an uncanny sensation. Warmth, desire, struggle, everything of interest to a detective reduced to the cold facts of biology. The heart that pumped, the body that acted, the grey sponge that desired and intended.

She called Jez and asked him to arrange for Inspector Shaw to come in. ‘Late afternoon, please. After the PM.'

Then she leaned back against the headrest, closing her eyes and conjuring the memory of the young female PC, pale and shaking on the roof, the boy in the bear suit on her lap. She recognized that she had got her priorities wrong: she should have spirited Lizzie Griffiths away then. It was in those moments that people talked. Perhaps Inspector Kieran Shaw had been ahead of her in realizing that.

There was the noise of a car pulling into the yard. Collins opened her eyes. Steve was parking up parallel to her. His passenger window slid down and he leaned over.

‘Have I got time for a fag?'

‘Sorry, no.'

‘OK, let me finish yours.'

She joined him on the tarmac and handed him her cigarette. He took a long drag and held the smoke in his lungs while he spoke. ‘They've got the posters up and the boss has done a press release. We've got some officers down there looking and the locals are on board.'

‘Great.'

‘Has the boss rung you?'

‘He's just tried. Why?'

‘Because he rang me looking for you. Wants an update.'

‘OK. I'll speak to him later. We'd better crack on. The pathologist's not going to be happy. We've kept her waiting. We'd better apologize.'

Steve took a last drag and threw the cigarette on to the ground, treading the stub into the paving.

‘If you'll just help me roll him to the side . . . Richard, you put two hands on the abdomen. Careful, we don't want him to split.'

The body was heavy and hard to manipulate. Dr Graham went to the head, Steve to the top of the thighs. Collins put both hands behind the pelvis to assist. Richard, the mortuary assistant, had the worst job, holding the stomach in place, but he seemed as indifferent to it as he was to all aspects of autopsy.

Dr Graham was a neat, thin woman in her fifties. Her hair, drawn back in a twist at the back of her head, was streaked with steel grey. Her motivation in picking her particular specialism would always be a mystery to Collins, but she was grateful simply that Graham was not only methodical and professional but also sparing with the jokes.

Collins watched carefully, hoping for the unexpected, the thing that would leap out and give her something to go on. They rolled Hadley on to his back. His front was a mess. The face was fractured, covered in dried blood. The jumper was split open, soaked in blood and intestine. Through the split a sheet of bulging yellow plastic showed.

Richard cut the jumper off with medical scissors and Steve bagged it up. Underneath, the shirt was also stained and split, wet with the blood that had spread and seeped like an ink stain across the back and under the armpits. Hadley's warrant card was in the top pocket. Dr Graham passed it to Steve. He flicked through its contents, making notes in his exhibit book and bagging each item. A ten-pound note. PC Matthews' emergency life-support qualification. He passed the warrant card to Collins and she flicked it open. The photo was a flashback to the late eighties. It was faded
through years of swiping, but she could still glimpse Hadley as a young man: whippet thin, shoulder-length hair, a moustache. He must have caught the tail end of Thatcher, when officers still patrolled in tunics. She pondered the fact that he had never had cause to change his original warrant card photograph. Twenty-seven years a uniform copper. That stood for something, even in her book: aching feet, cold crime scenes, early turns, late turns, night duties, fights and robberies, fatal traffic collisions, death messages – the whole catalogue of misery that was the lot of uniform.

She'd studied Hadley's record. He'd had a commissioner's commendation for an incident a few years earlier when a man had been threatening suicide with a razor blade. Another one pending for a domestic murder. He also had a couple of disciplinary incidents on his file. Two years ago, an allegation of improper use of force. Further back, another allegation of racism. He'd received warning letters for the two incidents but they'd both lapsed. And the man himself? One divorce, a successful second marriage. Three children, or four if you counted the one he'd raised that wasn't his. Three years from retirement and a full pension, and then he falls from a roof.

The trouser pockets were filled with loose change. Steve counted it out into an evidence bag: £8.30. He removed the notebook from the back pocket and passed it to Collins. It was wet with blood. She peeled back the pages, careful not to rip them. It was a neglected document; no date was even written in for the day he died. The assistant cut the remains of the shirt off. At the scene a yellow clinical-waste bag had been taped to the body to hold the stomach in place. Beneath this the intestine bulged, precarious, threatening to spill out in rolls. PC Matthews' underpants were predictable: comic or tragic, she couldn't decide which – large Y-fronts that fell to the side.

Then it was done and PC Hadley Matthews was naked on the slab. The bruised, smashed face. The hairs on his arms oddly real
in the waxy flesh. The bloated stomach still contained by the taped yellow plastic, the chest white and hairy. The penis grey and lifeless. Large white hands – the fingers stiff and claw-like in death. Here was the cadaver's usual enigma. The man himself, both here and not here. Collins had a strange urge to reach out and touch his arm. A fleeting desire to comfort.

The pathologist turned to her. ‘Officer, are you ready for me to begin the examination proper?'

Collins took a breath. They had to proceed, even though the cause of death was evident enough.

‘Yes, Doctor. Please go ahead.'

25

‘
F
amily?' Hadley had muttered scornfully as he bit into his toast. ‘Who on earth does he think disposes of the clothes after a stabbing? It's Mum running the washing machine or it's Dad with the bin bags.'

Lizzie was sitting with the foils in her hair. There was the pungent smell of chemicals and the radio was chirruping relentlessly. The hairdresser was back in her novel and the television was now safely showing a period drama. Women in Regency dresses walked through the countryside. Men rode horses. There was a dance: the women gossiped and wore gloves.

Lizzie's mind drifted: the first shift after her father's funeral. It had been a night duty. The team had been gathered in the canteen.

Radios were on the table, mugs of tea and crumpets. Calls were coming in. The news was unwinding only partially noticed on the canteen's plasma screen that had been taken off some handlers and recycled as an advert for the Proceeds of Crime Act. A politician was recommending the strengthening of the family as the key to reducing knife crime, and Hadley was holding forth.

A request to conduct a welfare check on a young woman believed to be suffering mental health problems had come over the radio. Lizzie looked at Hadley and he interrupted his speech and shrugged. ‘Yes, OK. Put us up for it.'

Kieran came in, late for supper as usual. He had had to stay behind in the parade room and deal with something. His shirt was
open at the neck, the police tie pulled through the cotton retainer stitched above his left breast pocket. He drew up a chair and Arif pushed a cup of tea towards him.

‘Crumpet, sir?'

Everyone seemed suddenly very interested in the table. Arif sniggered.

Hadley cleared his throat at the interruption and returned to his theme. ‘We did a warrant on a crack house: five kids, pikey mum handcuffed in the bedroom and Jamaican dad handcuffed in the living room. Auntie turns up to take the kids to school. Mum says to the little one, “You can't go to school in that shirt. It's not ironed.”'

There was an appreciative laugh around the table. Kieran caught Lizzie's eye and smiled briefly. She concentrated on her toast. A domestic call came out over the radio and was ignored.

Hadley resumed his disquisition. ‘Of course they
love
their children. Christ, you'd have to be an idiot not to see that. You can see it's completely genuine. Love isn't the issue. Or family, for that matter. Bloody politicians.
Family
. These people need
taking away
from their families, for God's sake. The kids are sweet enough right now, they look like the fucking Jackson Five, but if they stay with their mum and dad, don't tell me they won't be out dealing and robbing and carrying in a matter of years. Don't tell me anyone's got a believable plan to deal with that.'

The domestic came out again. No one was taking it. Hadley pushed his chair back. ‘All right for that, Lizzie?'

‘I put us up for the welfare check.'

‘Get us de-assigned, then. That one's an emergency.' He stood up and addressed the table. ‘And none of these lazy fuckers are taking it.'

Arif said, ‘You'll be sorry.'

Hadley shook his head. ‘You're probably just showing off, Arif, so I'll let you off this time, but please don't be learning bad habits from the others.'

Arif blushed and began to clear the table. Lizzie, by now also standing, pressed the transmit button on her radio and accepted the call. Other dispatches were coming out thick and fast. Chairs screeched across the floor as people got up and pulled on their Met vests. Hadley was already out the door and walking along the corridor towards the yard.

Lizzie settled into the passenger seat. The covers were frayed, the back collapsed. She opened the glove compartment, but it was stuffed with paperwork. She threw the breathalyser on to the back seat. Hadley slid the driver's seat back and turned the engine over. Lizzie tapped her code into the onboard computer, then opened her pocket book and began a new entry. She scribbled down the reference of the domestic and called up Control to send the dispatch to the computer. Hadley hit the siren and began to pull out of the yard.

‘You OK to work?' he said.

‘Yep. I'm better off working.'

‘I'd be the same.'

The yard's gate slid open. A car flashed its headlights to let them out. Hadley turned hard right and drove up fast between the lines of traffic. The oncoming headlights were bright in the city's fluorescent night. Lizzie scanned through the dispatch on the computer. Intelligence showed the property occupied by squatters. A female, Cosmina Baicu, had come to notice for a non-crime domestic at the address. No other details known.

‘No known risks,' she reported to Hadley. ‘It's a squat, apparently.'

‘Uh-huh.'

Hadley was driving fast, playing chicken with the oncoming traffic, bullying it into giving way. Lizzie pushed back into her seat and tried not to be afraid of the headlights that flared and turned away from them.

‘This fucking job saved me, you know,' he said.

‘What?

‘The job saved me.'

‘Saved you, what do you mean? Saved you from what?'

‘Well, no big deal, just from . . . you know, general fucking up. The job and my wife.'

‘Your wife?'

‘She saved me too. I was married before but it didn't work out. She took the house, left me with nothing. Women. What do you expect? But my new wife, I've got to admit she was exactly what I needed. Put me on the straight and narrow. We've raised four children together, one of mine, one of hers and two that are both of ours.'

Lizzie was running her biro over the computer screen, tracking their progress.

‘Left here.'

As they turned, she saw a young black man in jeans standing on the steps of one of the houses. He spotted their vehicle and ran down the steps and along the pavement towards the car. Hadley slowed and the man knocked on the passenger window. Lizzie opened it. Gesturing to the house behind him, the man said, ‘She's in there.'

‘It was you who called us?'

‘Yes. Joe Macintyre. She's in there. You'll have to get in. She's in a very bad way.'