The Pact (9 page)

If you enjoyed
The Pact
you might be interested in
Bloody Angels
by John L Probert, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Bloody Angels
by John L Probert

1
.

At half past three on a chill morning in early February, the church of St Botolph’s should have been quiet. Situated in the well-to-do area of Clifton in Bristol, it was usually a haven of tranquillity and solitude in an area where the most disturbing thing to be seen at that time of the morning might be a fox overturning a dustbin, or a BBC Wildlife Unit filming that very same thing.

Instead, a light was burning on the church’s altar, and the silence was pierced by the screams of a half-naked girl being dragged up the aisle.

Both her jeans and the lacy black party top she had worn for her evening out had been slashed and tattered in her struggles with her captor. The exposed pale skin beneath was now streaked with blood and dirt from where her flesh had been scraped along the gravel path that led to the church’s entrance. She was still bleeding from the blow to the head dealt her by the man she had left the nightclub with, the man she thought she could trust. The sheer shock of his violence had served to keep her quiet during her journey in the back of the van, but once she was back in the morning air, the crisp chill bringing her round, she had begun to fight for her life.

It was no good, though. Her abductor was strong. The fingers of his right hand were now encased in black leather and enmeshed in her long blonde hair, holding it close to her scalp, his thumb digging into the wound he had made with a hammer in a further attempt to control her. She was dizzy from drink, and from whatever else might have been slipped into it, she was exhausted from fighting, and she was weak from loss of blood.

By the time she was beside the altar the only sounds she could manage to utter were tiny choked sobs.

She felt powerful hands lift her slim form onto the unyielding wood. In the dim light she tried to focus on the man’s face, but his features were in shadow. As he held her down with one arm she flailed at his face with her hands, trying to scratch him, grab something, anything.

When her hand came away with the dog collar she barely had time to register it before a gloved fist driven into the side of her skull made everything go black.

It was just as well she couldn’t see what happened next.

Satisfied that any real struggle was now beyond her, the man released his grip on her body and took the hammer from beneath his robes. There was a rattle as he emptied out the bag of six inch nails onto the altar.

The girl gave a low moan as he picked up the first and placed the point over the bridge of her nose.

The noise of the hammer coming down on it was nothing compared to her scream, and every time it struck the nail her howls got louder.

By the time he had put the third nail in her screams were starting to subside, and by the time he had finished she was silent.

*

It wasn’t often that Parva Corcoran was grateful that she slept alone, but this morning was one such occasion.

The call came through at just after four am. A brief description of the crime scene from DI Harry Marsden jolted her out of her half-awake state, and she gripped her mobile tightly as she told him, in a very calm voice, that his team was not to touch anything.

“We figured that,” said the detective in a voice that contained just the slightest hint of the Bristol accent. “My boys are under orders to keep the street cordoned off but if you could get here as soon as possible it will probably make my job a lot easier.”

Parva knew what he meant. It was still too early for most people to be up, and unless one of the few vans making early morning deliveries saw the commotion there was a chance the media wouldn’t know about it yet either. The quicker they could get everything tagged and bagged and clear out of the area the better it would be for everybody.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she reassured him, levering herself out of bed and into the shower, her mind already analysing the scant details she had been given. By the time she was dressed in her usual black (a Chanel sweater beneath a jacket from Next that she didn’t mind getting blood on, with trousers to match and shoes that didn’t have any special value for the same reason) she already had several theories as to why someone might have wanted to kill someone in the way that had been described to her. This, plus the absolute self-absorptive state she always fell into at the beginning of cases like these, meant that only the most understanding of partners would have been able to tolerate her. Unfortunately she had found to her cost that such individuals were thin on the ground. She pocketed her mobile, made sure she had her tiny black notebook with the needle-thin silver pen that slipped into its spine, and closed the door to her flat, knowing as usual that it could easily be another twenty-four hours before she saw the inside of it again.

*

It was still dark when Parva arrived at the crime scene. A police constable asked for her ID, and after a brief search Parva was relieved to discover she had remembered it. She flashed the officer a card that gave the bare minimum of information, including her medical qualifications, her membership of the Special Crimes Unit, and a picture that she kept meaning to have retaken when the card came up for its annual renewal. The constable, who looked young even to Parva’s twenty-six-year-old eyes, ushered her through to where a space had been left beside the church for her to park her black Mini.

As soon as she got out of the car she spotted Harry coming towards her, his pale grey raincoat flapping about him. Although he would never admit it, she knew he never did the buttons up because he thought it gave him more of an aura of ‘bedraggled charm’ like some of the gumshoes on the late night movies he loved. Certainly that charm, and the fact that despite being in his early thirties he looked as if he was fresh out of police training college, meant that there were quite a number of ladies back at headquarters who did their best to waylay him at every conceivable opportunity.

“You got here quickly,” he said.

Parva glanced over her shoulder. “I’m only minutes from here,” she said, “and I have to admit the idea of a killer on my doorstep was all the encouragement I needed to get down here asap.” She took a deep breath and sighed, the exhaled air steaming in the cold. There was no point delaying the reason she was here with small talk. “What have you got for me then?”

Harry grimaced. “Follow me.”

He led her onto the wet grass beside the path that led to the church door. The gravel had been scuffed and scattered, and the entire area had been closed off while forensics did their work. Harry and Parva squeezed around the cordon to get into the church, where lights had already been erected to display the areas of the aisle that had been marked with scratches and bloodstains. Parva took in the pattern of smears and was already building up a mental picture of how the victim must have struggled, when Harry interrupted her concentration.

“She’s on the altar,” he said. Not that he needed to.

Parva’s eyes flashed on the bloodstained body ahead of her. “Are you okay to leave me for a moment?”

Harry nodded.

Parva gave the bloodied corpse another glance. The reason she wanted to be left alone was so she could be left in peace to think. People, and especially police officers, frequently broke the silence at a violent crime scene, and silence was just what she needed right now.

“I’ll go and hurry the boys along outside,” said the detective, making his way back down the aisle.

Rather than go straight to the body, Parva sat in a pew. Third from the back on the right hand side - the one she had always sat in when she was a little girl, in a church far away from here, with a mother who had died many years before. Parva hadn’t been inside a church since the funeral, and she found herself experiencing an odd mixture of feelings. She was surprised to discover that the most prevalent was one of relief that she had a murder to distract her from other memories she preferred not to revisit.

Parva turned and looked at the inside of the church door, and then followed the marks made on the brick-red floor tiles and the scratches on the wood of the pews until her eyes arrived at the front of the church. A deep red stain dappled with darker clots had violated the usually white altar cloth. The body of the girl, lying prone and lifeless, had been arranged with her hands clasped on her chest, her feet together, her face looking heavenwards as if in supplication. On the white paint of the wall behind the altar had been daubed, possibly in blood, two words:

Ego tea

Parva got to her feet and made her way towards the body, looking around her constantly for any clues that would allow her to bolster the scenario she already had playing out in her mind.

It was only when she got to the altar that she realised that the dead girl had adopted such a serene posture for a reason. The hands were on her chest because of the barbed wire around the wrists, wire that seemed to disappear into the fabric of her garment. And quite possibly her flesh, Parva thought, but the verification of that could wait until the post mortem. The girl’s feet had been wired together as well, the sharp points digging into her ankles where her feet had been drawn together.

But the worst was her face.

It had been almost destroyed by the nails that had been driven into it. From the way the head was tilted Parva guessed the iron spikes had gone right through the girl’s skull to be embedded in the wood beneath. The girl’s killer has obviously been keen to drive each nail in to the hilt, making the top of each one flush with the skin. Parva grimaced. No doubt it was the final hammer blows to each that had made such a mess of the girl’s face. The nails formed an obvious pattern. There was a vertical line that started just below the hairline and terminated just above the upper lip, the final nail having been driven through the philtrum, knocking out the girl’s two front teeth. A horizontal line of nails ran just above her eyebrows, completing the bloody cruciform.

Parva turned away, biting back the urge to vomit. It wasn’t often that a case affected her in this way, and she put it down to the lack of sleep, the building in which she was standing, and a whole host of other factors as well as the grisly thing on the altar. She stumbled for the exit.

Outside, she almost fell into Harry’s arms.

“Hey!” he said, setting her back on her feet. “You okay?”

Parva coughed and pulled herself together. It wouldn’t be good to be seen to be almost fainting in front of Harry’s men.

“I’m fine, thanks,” she said with a smile. “I think the air in there just got to me for a moment.”

“Well you’ve done better than most of this miserable lot,” said Harry with a jerk of his thumb to the pale officers examining the path. “Most of them barfed as soon as they set foot inside.” He raised his eyebrows when Parva didn’t respond. “Think this is likely to happen again?”

Parva looked back into the church and didn’t respond. It was answer enough.