The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (28 page)

Around them, officers buzz like flies, taping off areas, erecting tables—making an island of hi-tech in the mud. Over the body is a makeshift tent, not much better than the kind Tom had made as a kid, though then he’d used blankets and dining chairs and now it
was plastic sheets and metal struts. Over to one side three officers stand, puzzling over a laminated manual, trying to build a tent wide enough to cover the body and surrounding area. Tom watches them slowly turn the manual 180 degrees, scratch their heads and slowly turn it back the other way. Christ, they’re idiots.

“Could you?” he asks his efficient DI and points to the three stooges. She shrugs and trudges over to them, already barking orders. Tom knows she’ll get it built.

He closes his eyes for a second and the world around him slows and disjoints, moves out of focus. Then he moves to the covered body—there is only the victim. He pulls aside the plastic sheet … a dead young woman. The latest in a litany of lifeless young women into whose eyes he has gazed. Another young woman he will silently promise to avenge. He looks at her face—her eyes are open—staring. Gray-blue eyes and the palest skin. In life she may have been ruddy, healthy, but now her lifeblood was a part of the mud that lapped at her face.

“Guv,” Thorsen calls to him and he looks up to see the full tent ready to slide over the body. He nods and steps back, thinking it doesn’t matter much anyway—this rain has almost certainly washed away any really helpful DNA evidence. He sighs, watching his breath spiral up. It will be another long day. The SOCO team will start to gather evidence. Take photos, bag the clothes, take samples from the victim—trim her nails, swab her mouth, vagina, anus—nothing is private. Not today. And at the end of all this, Tom doesn’t expect there to be much more learned than he saw from a casual glance.

The body is Sarah Penn’s. She’s been missing for three days. He recognized her from photos. Her mum and dad brought the snapshots in the day she was reported missing. Holiday photos from Ibiza last year, though death has wiped away her smile, and the
rain has uncurled the bounce of her hair and left it smeared across the ground.

She’s naked—her clothes thrown all around. She has been beaten and sexually assaulted. She is without most of the skull above her left eye. Claw hammer is Tom’s opinion, based on twenty years of seeing death and on having seen the same injuries twice before—Heather Spall and Tracy Mason. Sarah Penn is victim number three.

“Guv?” DI Thorsen calls to him, miming a drink. He nods and she grabs a Thermos. He turns back to the body.

“I’m sorry, Sarah.”

He remembers thinking when he saw her photos, “what a pretty girl.” A tear runs down his cheek for all the pretty dead girls. It melts into the rain. Within an hour or two, he’ll be standing at the front door of her parents’ house about to tell them the news they’ve dreaded for the last three days, if not the last sixteen years. He knows there’ll be tears, maybe screams, denial, blame. All the while he will be there to share their pain. To show them that the police care about their loss, the country cares. That is what he does. He tells families they have lost someone they loved. He is the Sad Man.

Thorsen holds out the metal cup. He takes it from her with a nod.

“Same MO as Spall and Mason?”

He nods.

“I’ll send a FLO.”

“No. I’ll go.”

He doesn’t think of himself as much of a policeman; there are no
little gray cells
, no deductions and last-minute reveals. But what he is good at—what he is best at—is winning trust. Opening a dialogue with witnesses, family, their friends, and teasing out information. People look at him and trust him, especially the damaged
and needy. They see a kindred spirit in Tom. They see someone else in pain and they open their hearts to him. No family liaison officer has ever opened up partners, kids, parents or friends like he does. That’s why he’s the Sad Man and why he runs Operation Ares. He named the unit himself—Ares the destroyer, the god of fruitless violence, a coward who kills for the sake of killing.

Suddenly the tempo of the rain changes: more aggressive, faster and harder. Hailstones. The seventh plague of Egypt. Big chunks of ice slam into the plastic sheets. The officers buzz around more quickly. More plastic is stretched, arced over skeletons of metal. DI Thorsen yells, points—then men run for cover. Tom looks around the allotment. Any early buds are going to be smashed and splintered. Luckily there are no fruits yet, no tomatoes to crush, no strawberries to mash. Tom should get under cover too but he can’t leave Sarah. Something more than hailstones rained down on her. She deserves more than this, so much more than this. Little girl lost. Found in body, but forever lost. Tom waits out the storm, feels the ice bounce off his cap and splash mud over him, but he stands sentry over Sarah until the hail thins and is gone. Now it’s just rain.

“Bevans,” a loud voice booms out.

Tom looks up to see an idiot juggling a trowel, a watering can and a packet of seeds. It’s impressive juggling but it all makes Tom feel so tired. Were it one of his team he would scream at them to have some respect. Instead he waves a tired hand at his friend and pulls his shoe up out of the mud. It squelches satisfyingly, like a movie sound effect.

“You’re meant to set an example,” Tom hisses to the tall pathologist when he gets over to him.

“I am. This is work-life balance. See?” He throws the items even higher, catching the can and seeds, but the trowel spins out of control and shoots into the ground. It sticks in the mud, pointing
straight up like an arrow, sending a billow of muddy water up Tom’s leg.

“Whoops.” The pathologist laughs.

“Grow up, Dr. Keyson.”

Tom walks away, frustrated by the man who, he believes, doesn’t comprehend the concept of the chain of command. He seems to have no respect for authority. Tom wonders for a thousandth time if his new friend is autistic to some degree; brilliant people often are. And there’s no denying that Marcus Keyson is special; highly intelligent and charming, he’s the youngest pathologist working with the Met by ten years, but there is something a little odd about him, something cold and calculating, something that disconnects him from everyone else.

“Or is that just paranoia?” Tom asks himself. Or maybe even a little jealousy? Or is it just remorse? After being closed off for so many years, Tom had finally opened up a little to someone, and now he wished he hadn’t. It was stupid. Drunk stupid. Lonely stupid. Tom knows he shouldn’t drink, but his loneliness had got the better of him. He should have bought a hamster, not tried to have a friend. He’d gone so many years without one—why had he tried now? But of course that was the point, wasn’t it? It had been February 6—the anniversary.

“Why?” Keyson asked.

“No one is meant to drink alcohol on police premises.”

“They all do.”

“I don’t care about that. I’m the boss and I need to be beyond reproach, or at least look like I’m following the rules.”

With a shrug, the tall man pops the top off the bottle and takes a swig.

“Christ, Marcus.”

The pathologist pops another bottle and hands it to Tom, who takes it furtively and then sits at his desk and pulls out two mugs from the bottom drawer. He hands one to Keyson that reads
KEEP
’
EM PEELED
. The second he keeps for himself. They pour their bottles into the mugs, then Tom puts the empty bottles into his drawer.

“World’s Greatest Dad?” Keyson points at Tom’s mug.

“I. It … My …” Tom stammers.

“Nobody expects the Freudian Inquisition?” jokes Keyson.

Against his better judgment, Tom laughs. “Okay, Siggy. I bought it for my dad, when he was still with us. I was about twelve. Big fucking joke.”

“You kept it. Waste not, want not?”

Tom nods but it isn’t the case. He kept it to act more like a warning, something he would see everyday. Be careful who you raise to the level of a god.

Tom sits at his desk, Keyson opposite him in the bollock chair, so named as you only sat in it if you were getting a bollocking. The two men raise their mugs and drink in silence. As they drink, a tear runs down Tom’s cheek.

“Is this why they call you the Sad Man?” Keyson asks, pointing to the tear.

“Jesus.” Tom pulls a box of tissues out of his desk. He takes one and wipes his face.

“Sorry,” Marcus Keyson manages to make an apology sound more like an accusation.

“I have no control of my eyes. I just tear up …” Tom doesn’t finish the thought—“I tear up when I think of anything sad.” Tom knows full well what everyone calls him; he even thinks of himself as the Sad Man, but no one says it to his face. That’s the problem with Marcus Keyson—no off switch, no self-censor. Tom picks up
the beer and drinks the whole mug down in one go. The genie is out of the bottle.

“How old do you think I am?” Tom asks.

Keyson knows the answer, but remembers how surprised he’d been when he discovered it. He mimes supreme concentration. “Forty-eight?”

Tom smiles. “I’m thirty-nine.”

Tom knows that forty-eight is a kind guess. Most people say early fifties. And that’s now—even when he was thirty, people guessed he was fifty. The first three times he tried online dating he was accused of lying about his age on the form. Once it led to a stand-up row in a Pizza Express. After that he started putting down forty-eight. He didn’t change the age he wanted, twenty-five to thirty-five, and was amazed that he got more responses when women thought he was nearing his fifties.

Beer number seven slides down. Now, both men are lying on the floor, heads almost touching. The time is uncertain; all they know is that the building is mostly dark and out of the seventh-floor window there is nothing to see. No stars and no moon, all hid by brooding clouds. Tomorrow it will rain. And the next day.

“Don’t look that way. The wind’ll change and you’ll get stuck like that.”

Tom laughs, more a schoolboy snigger, really. The beer has taken twenty years off him. “My mum would always tell me that. I thought it was just more of her crap—but it turned out to be true. Dani died, I cried, and all the fun was over. I got stuck like this.” He laughs a touch hysterically, but truthfully. It feels good to tell someone.

“When?” Keyson asks.

“1989. She was twenty-one.”

“You loved her?”

The tears run sideways and pool in his ears. He can only nod.

“And that’s what made you join the police? You wanted to win justice for her?”

“No.” He feels the guilt rise in him. “I’d already joined.” He can hear them: his mum, teachers, Dani asking him, “Why, why?”

“Why?” She wasn’t angry; she just didn’t understand it. Dani could not comprehend why he wasn’t going to take the place at Cambridge.

“Explain it to me,” she asked. But he couldn’t.

“I left school and joined. It was for her, though—it was for justice. For Dani. Somebody had hurt her and—”

Tom holds the pint glass. It feels awkward in his hand. The alley smells of urine. It’s dark and he can’t see much except for the pub over the road, which throws rectangles of light into the black street. He’s in the perfect position to see the front door, see when it swings open and
he
leaves. Tom knows the man is in there; he checked it out. Bix was there. Lego-and-dogshit Bix.

Tom had walked into the pub, bought himself a pint, taken a few sips, then left with the glass and crossed over to the alley. He’d tipped the beer down a drain and settled down to wait. At 10:50 he heard the last-orders bell clang. Soon. He stretched his stiff legs. A few minutes later a group of lanky men came out, five of them all looking the same as each other. Floppy hair, black T-shirts and jeans, leather jackets, canvas bags slung over a shoulder. Individuality—three cheers for that. They slapped backs, arms or palms before each one peeled off, heading in a different direction. Tom nearly set out to follow the wrong man, but at the last minute one of them shouted.

“Tomorrow, Bix!”

“Right,” Bix replied, and Tom saw his mistake; he should be following the other lanky, arty bastard. He switched to following him. He slammed the glass against the wall and it sheared in half leaving a jagged edge, a nasty-looking weapon. In ten minutes it would cut through the young man’s face. Ending his pretty boy looks forever.