The Borgia Ring (18 page)

‘Ah, Pendragon. Just in time,’ said Jones as the DCI walked into the morgue and the pathologist switched on the electric autopsy saw, a misshapen metal cylinder that nestled in the palm of his hand. ‘An amazing piece of kit, this … the SF-4000. Weighs only a few kilos, but the blade rotates at 200 revolutions
per second
. Can cut through bone just like that … fantastic.’

Pendragon knew Jones was trying to intimidate him, so he ignored him and walked calmly over to the body lying on the stainless-steel table. For perhaps the tenth time this evening he asked himself why he was going to put himself through this. The answer, he knew, was two-fold. Although he trusted Dr Jones’s expertise, he wanted to make sure nothing was missed. But the second reason was personal. The pathologist’s comments about his squeamishness a few days earlier had hit a nerve. It was true, he had always found the chopping up of dead bodies hard to deal with. It was about time he faced up to his phobia. It was part of his job. It was never going to go away, or not at least so long as people killed each other.

As if he had read his mind, Jones put down the electric saw. ‘So, why are you here exactly, Chief Inspector?’

Pendragon shrugged. ‘It was that or writing up a report.’

The pathologist held his eye. ‘You wouldn’t be checking up on me now, would you?’

‘No,’ Pendragon replied emphatically.

‘Then the only other reason would be that you’re using me as a therapist. I charge extra for that.’

Pendragon exhaled through his nose and shook his head. ‘Charge the Met. They’re keen on educational courses.’

‘I suppose I should be flattered,’ Jones replied. ‘Here, put these on,’ He tossed a gown and mask to Pendragon.

Tony Ketteridge’s was certainly not a beautiful corpse. Under the severe lights of the lab his skin was a bluish-white and his copious jet-black body hair merely accentuated his pallor. It gave the term ‘as pale as death’ a whole new meaning, Pendragon thought to himself. And then there were the red eyes.

‘Not an especially fine example of
homo sapiens
,’ commented Jones, removing a digital recorder from the pocket of his lab coat. Turning it on, he shifted into officialese. ‘Subject: male. Anthony Frederick Ketteridge. Age: 54. Weight: 115 kilos. Height: 1.65 metres. Time of death: approximately 8 p.m., Wednesday 8 June. External examination: subject is obese, borderline morbidly obese. Small, recent laceration to the throat and fresh, superficial bruising to thoracic region. No serious contusions. No fractures or breaks. Both corneas are coated in blood; presumably from rupture of retinal vessels.’ He leaned over the body and turned Ketteridge a few inches on to his right side, then lifted his left arm. ‘There is a small puncture mark in the left axilla with surrounding haematoma. Appears to be a fresh wound.’

Jones placed the recorder on a side table. ‘Take a look,’ he said to Pendragon.

The DCI walked round to Jones’s side and the pathologist handed him a magnifying glass. Pendragon looked closely at the small red hole in the soft flesh of Ketteridge’s armpit.

‘Exactly the same as Tim Middleton,’ Jones said from behind him. ‘This is looking more and more like a carbon copy of the first poisoning.’ He picked up a scalpel and Pendragon returned to the other side of the table as the pathologist leaned over the corpse. ‘Let’s take a look inside.’

Jones sank the scalpel into the dead man’s flesh. There was a thick layer of fat to cut through but the blade was exceptionally sharp and sliced through tissue, fat and blood vessels with ease. The metal made a squelching sound as the tissue parted. Blood slithered down the side of the corpse and into the run-off drains along each side of the table. It was thick and congealed, acting solely under the effects of gravity. Jones brought the blade down across Ketteridge’s chest, stopping just below the breast bone. He then repeated the action, starting from the other side and meeting the end point of the first incision. To complete the procedure, he then sank the scalpel deep and made a straight vertical cut to Ketteridge’s navel.

With experienced fingers, he parted the flesh, folding back skin and tissue to expose the ribs. Picking up the electric saw, he set to work, slicing through the bones at 200 revolutions per second. With the cuts made, he then buried his hands deep inside the dead man’s chest and prised the ribs apart. Placing a chest clamp into position, he turned the large nut on the side of the device and, slowly, Ketteridge’s body opened up like a sea clam to reveal the cluster of reddish-grey internal organs.

In less than a minute, Jones had Ketteridge’s liver on a dish beside the corpse. It was black and degraded, very similar to Middleton’s.

‘As I expected,’ Jones said, and prodded it with the scalpel. ‘Severe necrosis.’ He turned back to the corpse and poked around inside the abdominal cavity with a narrow
stainless-steel tube. ‘Pancreas all but obliterated. Spleen ditto,’ he remarked. ‘I’ll run all the tests, of course. But it’s pretty obvious what killed him. Looks like you’ve got yourself a serial killer, Pendragon.’

Stepney, Thursday 9 June, 7.10 a.m.

Jack Pendragon was shaving when he heard his mobile ring, telling him he had a text message. He made a final sweep of the blade up his neck, washed and dried his face then walked over to the kitchen counter where he had left the phone charging. The text was from Colette Newman: ‘Have findings that should interest u. Can u call in lab. Would 10 b ok?’ He winced at the mangled English. He would never get used to texting shorthand and was a little surprised that someone like Dr Newman would stoop to it. Then he realised he didn’t actually know how to send a reply and so he punched in Dr Newman’s number instead.

Brick Lane Police Station was a hive of activity. There had been a pile-up on Whitechapel Road involving at least one reported fatality and it seemed as though half the force at the station was rushing to the scene. Pendragon found Turner in the main ops room at a computer terminal.

‘I’ve finally got round to trying to find out something about the ring, guv. Problem is, I can’t get a good impression of it from the photos. I managed to track down Tim Middleton’s SIM card, but even taking the images directly from that, I can’t see much.’

Pendragon leaned over his sergeant’s shoulder and
peered at the image on the screen. ‘No, I see your problem.’

‘And that’s after putting it through image-enhancing software, best we have. All I can tell you is, the top is green!’

‘Okay, we’ll have to give up on that for the moment. I need you to get on to Bridgeport Construction. Arrange to interview the late Mr Ketteridge’s immediate superiors – this morning.’

Pendragon arrived early at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory on Lambeth Road. It was an impressive building, renowned as the biggest and best forensics lab in the world. It was odd to be looking at it now, so grand and important. It seemed like only yesterday, Pendragon mused, that he had been reading in his
Boys’ Own Book of Modern Science
how the whole science of forensics had come about by fluke. It had been the brainchild of a simple police constable named Cyril Cuthbert who, during the 1930s, worked in his off-duty hours with a second-hand microscope he had bought for £3. The Commissioner at the time, Lord Trenchard, heard about it and visited Cuthbert and the makeshift lab he had set up in his station broom cupboard. Trenchard was so taken with what he saw, he agreed to establish a proper laboratory at Hendon Police College with a budget of £500 a year. The rest, as they say, was history.

The morning was hotting up, and according to the front page of one of the tabloids that Pendragon had glimpsed in a newsagent’s on the way to his car, it was going to be the hottest day of the summer so far: ‘A Real Scorcher’, in fact.

Putting a police parking permit on his dashboard, he walked along the road towards the river. The rush hour was over. Workers would be at their desks and kids would be in school, longing for the break so they could get out of their stifling classrooms. He walked over Lambeth Bridge, the forbidding,
angular lines of Millbank ahead of him. Leaning on the red and grey balustrade, he looked downstream and took in the magnificent vista of London glowing in the freakish heat. To his left stretched the Houses of Parliament, its honey-coloured limestone discoloured by a century’s worth of car fumes. Directly ahead stretched Westminster Bridge with the buildings of County Hall at its southern end. Towering above it all was the London Eye, looking like an alien spacecraft that had lost its way and landed on the South Bank.

He suddenly felt the stab of an emotion he could not easily define. It was a mixture of things: nostalgia, regret, a sense of belonging, and, yes, a touch of loss. He knew he had done the right thing returning to London, but it was going to take him time to adjust. Although this was still the London he had grown up in, it was also a foreign land in so many ways, very different from the place he’d thought he would always know.

The vista of the Thames before him opened up a treasure trove of memories. He had looked out over the river from the old Docklands when he was a kid with his dad, a lifetime ago. He remembered his father telling him then that the river was the artery of the city. How in the olden days, as he’d called them, it was the fastest way to get through the city, and how during the fourteenth century the water often froze over and people set up market stalls on the ice.

And then there were the times when Pendragon had visited London with Jean and stood with her on the Embankment, enjoying the view of the water coursing through the heart of this great city. More recent still were the times they had brought the kids up here for the day. They usually ended up on the banks of the Thames then, too, admiring the view from Waterloo Bridge, the City, or St Paul’s – the building that once towered over everything but now looked like a broody hen surrounded by her post-modern chicks.

Returning to the forensics lab, he showed his pass at the reception desk and took the lift to the second floor. The receptionist had called ahead and, as he exited the lift, trying to figure out which way to go, Dr Newman appeared at the end of the hall to his left, swing doors oscillating to a stop behind her. She was wearing a pristine white lab coat. ‘Chief Inspector. Thanks for coming.’

‘Not at all. Your text implied some good news. I’m fond of that.’

She led him back through the swing doors and into a vast space. To one end, tall windows looked out over the road. The ceiling was high and striped with long fluorescent lights. Rows of stainless-steel benches ran across the room, crowded with glassware and equipment. At the far end, a long counter ran under the windows. A dozen or more monitors were placed a few feet apart on this, most of them responding to lab-coated staff tapping away at keyboards.

Pendragon followed Dr Newman through a sliding glass door into a smaller room beyond. It had the look of an expensive modern kitchen. A stainless-steel counter ran the length of one wall, a rectangular island bench stood in the middle of the floor, and to the left, backed against the wall, was a workstation with two computers, piles of papers and a pivot lamp.

‘We’re still trying to find a good DNA sample,’ the Head of Forensics said as she crossed the pristine, tiled floor. ‘Nothing yet, and no unusual prints.’ She lowered herself on to a metal stool in front of the counter and indicated Pendragon should take the one next to her. On the counter sat a glass dish containing three clumps of dried mud. Beside this lay an A4 monochrome print. Newman handed the photograph to Pendragon who turned slightly on his stool to study the picture.

‘It’s an enhanced image of the footprint we found on the path running under Tony Ketteridge’s kitchen window,’ Dr Newman explained. ‘It’s only a partial, perhaps seventy-five per cent of the footprint, but it’s enough to give us a clear picture of the shoes worn by whoever was on that path the evening the garden was watered.’

Pendragon looked intently at the image. ‘It looks very strange.’

‘It is. If it had been made by a boot it would have a much wider profile and there would be tell-tale troughs in the mud from the tread. There’s no tread at all in this sample. A bare foot would be equally as obvious, and it’s not that.’

‘What kind of footwear leaves this sort of impression?’ Pendragon asked, looking up from the photograph then peering at the mud sample in the dish.

‘A rather delicate shoe, I would say.’

Pendragon was silent for a moment and looked again at the photograph, pursing his lips as he concentrated. ‘So you’re thinking slippers … something like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Couldn’t it have been left by Pam Ketteridge?’

‘Far too big.’

‘Then, Tony Ketteridge? As he watered the garden?’

‘I thought the same. But I checked. Ketteridge had surprisingly small feet for such a big chap. Size seven. These prints are a size ten.’

‘So, let me get this straight,’ Pendragon said. ‘You’re saying whoever killed Tony Ketteridge was wearing size ten
slippers
? That would be a first.’

Dr Newman put her elbows on the counter, rested her chin on her interlocked fingers and looked down at the pristine metal surface. Then, tilting her head to one side, she said, ‘Don’t think I didn’t go through all the permutations myself,
Chief Inspector. I had visions of a neighbour finishing his cocoa and hopping over the fence to commit murder. Maybe it was a love triangle with the gorgeous Pam.’

Pendragon couldn’t help laughing.

‘But it’s even odder actually because the profile of the footprint is not that of a normal slipper, the sort you’d wear at home to put your feet up. It’s the shape of a fancy slipper.’

‘A fancy slipper?’

‘Yes, a dress shoe, something very delicate. Theatrical, really.’

Pendragon gave her a puzzled look.

‘Then, using a high-resolution microscope, I found this.’ Dr Newman led the DCI to the bench along the adjacent wall where a very large microscope with a huge, binocular-like appendage stood in the middle of the stainless-steel surface. ‘Take a look,’ she added, and showed him how to use the eyepiece.

‘If I’m not mistaken,’ Dr Newman continued, ‘
that
is gold thread. Extremely expensive, and not at all the sort of thing you find on slippers in the Summer Special bin at Tesco.’

Back at the station, the team was waiting for him. Jez Turner had put up the photographs of the latest murder scene alongside an enlarged snap of a smiling Tony Ketteridge taken earlier that summer.

Pendragon did not apologise for being late, but ploughed straight in. ‘Right,’ he said, surveying the room. They were all there: Towers and Grant, Sergeants Thatcher, Vickers and Roz Mackleby. Perched on the edge of the furthermost desk, was Superintendent Hughes looking distinctly unimpressed.

‘Let me bring you all up to speed. As you know, Tony Ketteridge was site manager at the Frimley Way construction
project. He was about to retire for an early night with his wife, Pam, when he was murdered in the kitchen of his home.’ He tapped the picture. ‘There seems to have been a struggle, but nothing too serious. There are bruises on the victim’s back, but no skin or hair under his nails. There’s a tiny cut to his throat. You can just about see it, there.

‘The most interesting feature, however, is a puncture wound in Ketteridge’s left armpit. It’s identical to one found on Tim Middleton’s body. According to Dr Jones’s initial findings, Tony Ketteridge was poisoned with the same, or very similar, blend of chemicals that killed the architect at La Dolce Vita, and it looks as though the poison was administered in precisely the same way – probably with a hypodermic.’

‘But how on earth could the murderer have used a hypodermic in the restaurant?’ asked Sergeant Mackleby.

‘To be honest, I have no idea at this stage,’ Pendragon replied.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ Thatcher said. ‘Nobody could be stuck with a needle and not know it.’

‘I agree, Sergeant. It’s another of your conundrums. Perhaps you should put your analytical skills to work on the puzzle.’

Turner looked over at Sergeant Vickers with a smirk.

‘What have forensics found?’ Superintendent Hughes asked. ‘Anything useful?’

‘I went to the lab in Lambeth this morning. They’re still trying to find a decent DNA sample, but it looks like the murderer was extremely careful. And, of course, there are no prints.’

‘Obviously.’

‘But they’ve unearthed one very important thing.’

Two of the officers who had been contemplating their feet
looked up simultaneously. Pendragon passed a USB drive to Turner and asked him to put it into a smart board to one side of the room, next to the whiteboard containing the pictures of Ketteridge. Turner slipped the tiny device into the slot and tapped at a couple of controls on the smart board before returning to his seat. A metre-square image appeared on the white surface.

Pendragon walked over to it. ‘This is a partial print that Dr Newman found in some wet mud on the path close to the Ketteridge’s back door. It’s been so dry recently it seems an unlikely find, but it’s clear our intruder got into the garden over a neighbour’s fence and unwittingly put their foot into a newly watered flower bed.’

‘But there’s a hosepipe ban!’ Jimmy Thatcher blurted out.

A couple of the policemen laughed and Jimmy’s cheeks flushed.

‘Bloody Brain of Stepney,’ Jez Turner murmured, and jabbed the sergeant in the ribs.

Thatcher pulled a face. ‘Fuck off,’ he mouthed silently.

‘Yes,’ Pendragon said to the room at large, keeping a straight face. ‘We got a lucky break there.’

‘Couldn’t whoever did the watering have left the print?’ Ken Towers asked.

‘Exactly my question to Dr Newman,’ Pendragon replied. ‘But this is an imprint from a size ten shoe and Ketteridge was a seven. Furthermore, this print is not from a boot or even a regular shoe. It’s from a slipper. And, even then, it’s not the print of a normal slipper. The shape is long and narrow, like a ballet shoe or dress slipper.’

‘But …’ Vickers began.

Pendragon raised a hand. ‘There’s more. Can you flick to the next image please, Sergeant?’

Turner had the remote for the smart board in his palm. He
pressed a button and the image changed to show a single wavy gold line.

‘Dr Newman found this in the mud sample. It’s gold thread.’

Jill Hughes was staring at the screen intently, hand on chin. ‘This is a break,’ she said to the room. ‘That’s expensive stuff. Can’t be too many shoes like that. We need to check out manufacturers, retailers …’

‘It’s in hand, ma’am,’ Turner interrupted. ‘DCI Pendragon called me from the car on his way from the lab. I’ve done an internet search. The best fit for the shape Dr Newman described is a ballet shoe. There are four manufacturers in London and twenty-six retailers, ignoring the cheap places that do five quid ballet pumps for beginners. I plan to follow them up after lunch.’

‘A good start, Sergeant,’ Hughes replied. ‘So, Chief Inspector. Any ideas about suspects?’

Pendragon shook his head. ‘We’ve nothing concrete. No witnesses, and only this single anonymous print.’