The embalmer, p.3
The Embalmer, page 3
part #3 of Mullins & Sullivan Series
The withered brown pouch didn’t look like a human stomach to Francis, but he supposed the drying process must have discoloured and shrunk it.
‘How old do you think it is? Ancient or . . . recent?’ The latter didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Hard to say. I can’t date it in the normal way. I’ll have to run some other tests on it. But these jars clearly aren’t antiquities.’
Francis studied them. All four were clean, with no dents or scratches to suggest hundreds of years buried in a tomb.
‘And this? Is it salt?’ he said, pointing at the scattering of white crystals.
‘Probably,’ said Rose. ‘The Egyptians used a naturally occurring salt compound called natron for drying out their mummies. This lot certainly isn’t ancient Egyptian, so I doubt that it’s actually natron.’ She shrugged. ‘We’ll have to assess it in the lab to know for sure.’
‘And what about the mummy?’ He walked over to the glass case to give it a closer look.
‘I think we’ve got to accept the possibility that there’s a mummified body inside it. As soon as the crime scene team is finished, I’ll have it transported to the morgue.’
If there was a dead body inside the mummy, who the hell could it be?
And who put it there?
5
Wednesday, 1 November 2017
Gavin
Gavin had just sunk his teeth into the first bite of a Subway Meatball Marinara when Francis’s call came through. Tomato sauce squelched from the side of his mouth and onto his keyboard. Great. He answered with his mouth full and chewed his way through the conversation, finally hanging up with a new set of instructions, the first of which was to go and find Angie.
He finished the sandwich, and grabbed the cardboard cup of coffee from his desk. He’d been working through the lunch hour, typing up a statement on the disturbance at the Mullins house the previous evening. He was determined to keep on top of things and make a good impression with his new boss.
He found Angie in the canteen. She seemed to be lunching on a solitary packet of cheese and onion crisps, staring into the distance with a distracted look on her face. Not even eating the crisps.
‘Just had a call from the DI,’ he said, moving to stand in front of her so he could catch her attention. ‘Wants us to go and check out the home of . . .’ he glanced down at the note he’d taken, ‘Alicia Russell, director of the Booth Museum of Natural History.’
‘Sure,’ said Angie, her expression unchanging.
She stood up. Gavin towered over her – he was six foot three and she barely reached up to his shoulder. She crumpled up the half-empty crisp packet and dropped it into a bin as they left the canteen.
‘What are we looking for?’ she said eventually as they headed out of the station.
‘She’s missing from work and they think they’ve got some human body parts at the museum.’
‘Hers?’
‘Who knows? We’ve got to see if we can locate her.’
They took Gavin’s car this time. Although it wasn’t new, it was new to him and after a couple of years in marked cars, he was delighted with the slate-grey Audi he now got to drive around in.
‘We’re heading for Shoreham,’ said Gavin, as he pulled out of the police car park onto Kingswood Street.
They turned left onto Grand Parade, then circled Victoria Gardens to head north. Gavin could feel Angie watching him as he negotiated changing lanes. Her gaze fell to his hands on the steering wheel, taking in the wedding ring he wore on his left ring finger.
‘Is your wife pleased about your new job?’ she said, as they turned onto the main road that would take them out towards Shoreham.
‘Husband in fact – Harjeet.’ He glanced across at her with a grin. ‘I call him Harry. Yeah, he’s pleased for me. He knows exactly how much I wanted this. Are you married?’ He hadn’t heard any mention of a husband.
‘No.’ She didn’t expand her answer.
Gavin didn’t want to pry, so he changed the subject. ‘So, Francis Sullivan. I heard he’s good to work for.’
She brightened up at the mention of the boss. ‘He is,’ said Angie. ‘He’s done a lot for me. Especially since . . . what happened in the sewers.’
‘What exactly happened?’ said Gavin. The stories he’d heard about the chase for the Poison Ink Killer through Brighton’s Victorian sewer system had sounded horrendous.
She shook her head. ‘I’d rather not . . . It’s taking me a while to adjust back at work, and I really need to put the past behind me.’
That was fair enough. She’d lost her partner and now she was having to get used to working with someone new.
They reached Shoreham some twenty minutes later and located Alicia Russell’s house. She lived in a quiet 1970s estate called Greenacres, a few streets back from where the River Adur twisted on its path down to the sea. Hers was the left-hand property of a pair of semi-detached houses, with a neat lawn and a garage. There was no car on the drive, so Gavin parked across it and they got out.
Rather than being at the front of the house, the front door was set in the left-hand wall. They walked up to it, and after confirming they had the right house number, Angie rang the bell. They waited in silence, Gavin rehearsing in his mind what he would say when Alicia Russell opened the door. No one came, so Angie rang the bell again.
‘I don’t think she’s in,’ said Gavin. ‘We should check with the neighbours, when they last saw her.’
There was no one in at the adjoining house, and the woman who lived opposite her wasn’t much help.
‘A few days ago,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘Maybe at the weekend?’
‘Did you talk to her?’ said Angie.
‘Not that one,’ said the woman, looking across at Alicia’s house over the rim of her glasses. ‘Kept herself to herself.’
‘She lives on her own, right?’ said Gavin.
The woman nodded.
‘Did she have a boyfriend? Anyone who came round regularly?’
The woman’s face tightened into a frown. ‘I’m not a curtain twitcher and I don’t keep tabs on my neighbours, young man.’
‘No, I wasn’t suggesting you were . . .’
A telephone sounded in the woman’s hall.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, and she pushed the door shut, effectively expelling Gavin from where he stood on the threshold.
They went back to Alicia Russell’s house.
‘Let’s take a look round the back.’
‘Sure.’
There was a path running down the side of the house, with a gate at the end. They skirted past a row of dustbins and Gavin tried the gate. It opened, and Angie followed him through it into a small back garden, half paved, half lawn, with a couple of shrubs along the back fence. Gavin walked across to the double patio doors at the back of the house and peered inside.
‘I can’t see anyone.’ He rapped on the glass.
Angie came up beside him and looked in.
The ground floor was an open-plan kitchen-living room. The space was cluttered with furniture, and untidy. No, untidy wasn’t quite right. Something had happened here. There was a coffee table on its side, magazines splayed out on the floor beside it. A coffee cup seemed to have rolled, or been kicked, under the sofa. On the kitchen counter, there was a broken glass.
‘Does that look like blood to you, on that glass?’ said Angie.
It did.
A handbag hung over the back of one of the kitchen-table chairs. On the table itself, the remnants of a meal – a plate with knife and fork akimbo, and a glass half full of water. A meal interrupted? A black cat jumped down from investigating the remnants, disturbed by Gavin’s knocking. It came towards the glass door and as it got closer, they could hear its pitiful cry.
‘The cat’s distressed,’ she said. ‘No one’s seen Alicia since she left work on Monday, and something clearly happened here.’
‘But no sign of a break-in?’
‘Someone she knew, then.’
‘I’ll see if I can get in,’ said Gavin. ‘You might want to call the RSPCA.’
‘You shouldn’t,’ said Angie. ‘We haven’t got a warrant.’
‘Come on,’ said Gavin, ‘we’re saving the bloody cat. And she might still be in there.’ He tried the patio doors. ‘It’s not even locked,’ he said, sliding open one of the doors. ‘That’s strange.’
The cat rushed towards them and snaked around Gavin’s legs as he stepped inside.
Angie went straight to the kitchen area. There were two cat bowls on the floor, both empty, one overturned. She quickly filled one with water at the sink, then put it down. The cat ran over and drank greedily.
‘Looks like she’s been alone here for a couple of days,’ she said.
Gavin was inspecting the glass on the counter. ‘It definitely looks like blood. And it’s dried. Whatever happened, it was a day or two ago.’
Angie pulled a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and put them on. Then she took the handbag off the back of the chair and put it on the table.
‘Mobile phone, purse, keys,’ she said, pulling items out of the bag and placing them on the table. ‘Where would she go for a day or more without taking her bag?’
‘She wouldn’t. Come on, let’s check the rest of the house.’
There was no sign of Alicia Russell anywhere, and the upstairs – two small bedrooms and a bathroom – looked undisturbed, apart from a rank smell of cat’s urine in the master bedroom.
‘Something’s not right about this,’ said Angie, as they came back into the kitchen. ‘She’s been taken, hasn’t she?’
Gavin was looking in the cupboard under the sink.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Cat food.’
Angie nodded. ‘I’ll call the RSPCA. But first I’m going to call the CSIs. Alicia Russell is missing – which makes this a crime scene.’
6
Wednesday, 1 November 2017
Marni
Marni scrambled out of the car. For one horrible moment she’d thought Francis Sullivan was going to try to kiss her. But when he didn’t, she decided it wouldn’t have been horrible at all – and she leant towards him, her intention clear.
Their lips met. Kissing Francis was just as she remembered it. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was good. They broke away from each other, then neither of them knew quite what to say. So she scrambled out.
‘Bye,’ she said, slamming the car door. ‘Thanks.’
For what? For spending an hour with her in the pub while Thierry retrieved the last of his bags? How fucked-up was that? She approached the house with some trepidation, desperately hoping Thierry would be gone.
Francis wound down the window and leaned across to speak to her.
‘Dinner, maybe? Next week?’
She stopped and turned back to him, taking a deep breath. ‘I don’t know . . . Sorry, Frank, I’m not sure this is the right thing for me . . .’
Go away – was what she wanted to say. Bloody men.
She’d made him drop her at the corner – she didn’t need Thierry or the neighbours to see her being delivered home by Francis Sullivan. It was almost dark as she walked slowly down the street, thinking about the kiss. Did she want more than that? Did she want Frank Sullivan? They’d had something going on the previous year, after she’d helped him identify the Tattoo Thief, but it had fizzled out. Then Thierry had come back on the scene and things were good with him. For a bit.
‘Fuck,’ she said out loud, startling a piebald cat in one of her neighbour’s front gardens. She simply didn’t know what she wanted. Not Thierry, though. That had replayed itself like a broken record.
Because her side of the road was in deep shadow, she didn’t see that the front door was open until she was nearly upon the house.
Damn the man!
‘Thierry?’ she called, stepping inside.
As she slipped off her leather jacket, she heard a thud and a masculine grunt from the kitchen. The door was shut. So was the door to the living room and she heard Pepper launching himself at it, and barking, on the other side.
‘Alex, is that you? What’s going on?’ she called, hanging her jacket on its hook.
‘Marni . . .’
It wasn’t Alex’s voice. It was Thierry. But it didn’t sound right. At the same moment, she saw that Thierry’s cases were still lined up in the hall. Why hadn’t he taken them by now?
‘Marni, get out!’ There was a note of desperation.
She hurried to the door and pushed it open.
The scene that unfolded before her made her heart stop.
In the dark kitchen, two men struggled on the floor.
She knew them both. She knew them both far too well. But in the darkness, she couldn’t work out which twin was which.
A metal blade flashed, and fear struck like lightning.
It was happening again. Her past crashing forward into her present. But this wasn’t the past. This was here and now, in her kitchen.
Paul. Thierry. One of them had a knife.
She screamed. ‘Thierry, get away from him!’
She stood paralysed as they writhed on the floor in front of her. They were both grunting, arms and legs thrashing as each struggled to overpower the other. The hand holding the knife moved in a steep arc, only to be stopped by another hand catching it by the wrist. The knife clattered to the floor.
Marni lunged for it but a dark fist snaked out of the melee and grabbed it.
‘Thierry?’
‘Get out!’
She wasn’t going to leave him.
Another grunt. Whoever had been on top a second ago was now underneath. Then they flipped again. Which was Paul? Which was Thierry? She lunged for the light switch, but stumbled on one of their ankles. She heard a gasp, followed by a long moan. Blood spattered across her legs and her hand, hot and heavy. The men stopped moving and she could smell the ferrous taint of fresh gore. The floor was slick as she went towards them, a black pool spreading over the tiles.
One man was alive. One man was dead.
And in the dark, Marni couldn’t tell which.
7
Thursday, 2 November 2017
Francis
The house that Francis Sullivan called home didn’t belong to him. It was his father’s house. But Adrian Sullivan had chosen a new life in Thailand ten years ago, and now he had a second wife and a young son, leaving the ornate Tudor Gothic house abandoned like his family. Standing in a terrace on Wykeham Place, on the hillside below St Catherine’s Church, it had once been a refuge for former prostitutes, the irony of which wasn’t lost on Francis. Now, however, it was the spacious family home where he had spent alternate weekends through his teenage years, and which he’d moved into on his return to Brighton.
‘You up yet?’ he called, as he scooped ground coffee into the machine.
He was talking to his sister Robin who, after years of struggling with MS in a flat on her own, had finally taken up Francis’s offer to move in with him. She’d been there for three days – her presence in the house still a novelty for both of them.
‘Just about,’ came her voice from the hall. She pushed open the door and came in, still in her dressing gown and using a stick to help her walk.
‘Off to work?’ she said, dropping heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs.
‘In a minute. Coffee?’ It was good to have some company he supposed, but she’d already made her mark. Nothing in the kitchen was as he’d left it and his reassuring drift of post, bills, takeaway menus and newspapers that usually spread from the worktops to the kitchen table was gone. There was a vase of flowers on the table and a bowl of fruit on the counter.
‘Please.’
He put a cup down on the table in front of her. ‘But no more tidying, Robin.’
Robin grimaced, biting on her top lip. ‘It was a mess, Fran.’ She shrugged. ‘At least there are flat surfaces now to put things down on.’
It felt uncharitable to wish he’d never suggested the move, but it was his house. He took a breath, about to speak, and then remembered that it wasn’t, and that Robin had just as much right to live here as he did. And after the events of the previous summer, she needed his support – not least to help mend a broken heart and the crippling shame she felt over her involvement with a man who had turned out to be the Poison Ink Killer.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
‘Rory?’
‘Boss.’
There was an ominous pause. Francis turned his back on Robin and waited for Rory to continue.
‘Yes?’ he prompted.
‘There’s something you should know.’
‘Spit it out, sergeant.’
‘Marni Mullins is being held on suspicion of murder.’
‘What the actual . . . ?’
As the words tumbled into his ear, Francis gripped the edge of the granite counter, attempting to anchor himself in the reality of a moment ago.
‘What? Who did she . . . ? I’m coming right now.’
He heard Robin put down her cup as he bent forward to lean on the worktop for support.
Ten minutes later, Francis was intercepted by Rory in the corridor of the station’s custody suite. It wasn’t his intention to talk to Rory first – he wanted to get to Marni as quickly as possible. But his deputy effectively blocked him from going further. His expression was grim.
‘Hold up, boss. Let me tell you what happened first.’
‘Who is she supposed to have murdered?’ said Francis. He couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice.
‘Thierry.’
Francis stumbled back against the wall.
‘No. No way.’
‘Stabbed him, in the kitchen at Great College Street.’
‘No.’ Francis shook his head adamantly. ‘She wouldn’t have . . . She loved Thierry.’
