The walker, p.2
The Walker, page 2
Julie already had the kettle boiling on the top of an old gas stove. The kitchen was long and narrow, with cracked lino on the floor. Nothing looked very clean. The sink was a stone laundry tub, containing a red plastic washing-up bowl packed tightly with mugs and cutlery.
‘Sorry.’ Julie picked out some mugs and rinsed them under the cold tap. ‘We’re terrible about the washing up. We were going to have everything all tidy for you, but somehow it didn’t quite happen that way.’ She spooned instant coffee into the mugs. ‘Get the milk out, would you?’
The fridge was huge and its heavy door opened with a handle that operated like a giant stapler. Besides the solitary milk bottle, Nell could see nothing in there except a small wedge of cheese and some very old looking butter.
‘We took a couple of days off work so we can show you around. Isn’t it fabulous weather? Rita wants to go to Biba’s. Don’t you, Rita? Their new store is just fantastic. You’ll love it. All the clothes are hung on these curved hatstands, with boas draped around them. After that we have to show you Mr Freedom — there’s this giant satin shoe right in the middle of the shop and all the clothes are satin — blue and red and green satin all mixed together. It’s brilliant. Then we could go to the ice-cream parlour in Kensington Church Street. They have these flavours you wouldn’t believe — like blueberry cheesecake and rocky road. Or you can even have a vanilla fudge sundae, which is to die for — but so fattening.’
Julie patted her flat stomach and handed Nell a mug of hot brown liquid. Nell’s hand shook slightly as she accepted it.
‘You okay?’ asked Rita. ‘You look a bit—’
‘Yes. I’m fine. Just jet-lagged, that’s all. I lost a couple of nights’ sleep on the way over here.’
‘Really? But that’s terrible.’
Rita led the way back to the sitting room, where there was an ancient and bulbous three-piece suite. The armchairs were covered with a swirling pattern of mustard and orange that made Nell’s head swim as she stared at it. She sat down carefully, so as not to spill the coffee. The twins sat on the sofa, which had been covered with a turquoise Indian bedspread. A wave of giddiness caught her and she put the mug on the floor just in time to prevent an accident.
‘So tell us about Australia,’ said Julie. ‘What’s it like out there? Is it really boiling hot all the time?’
‘Well, not at the moment. It’s winter, actually.’
‘Really? I can’t imagine that! Can you, Rita? Winter in August. How funny. So why couldn’t you get to sleep on the plane? Is it very noisy?’
‘Not exactly; just cramped. I find it hard to sleep sitting up.’
‘What? You mean they don’t even give you a bed on those long flights? You poor thing!’
Nell suddenly found the image of a dormitory plane unbearably funny and started giggling.
‘What? What’s so hilarious?’ Rita’s face had lit up, ready to share the joke. But Nell was too far gone to answer. She giggled till the tears streamed down her face and then she got the hiccups, which she tried to control with gulps of coffee.
2
Dressed and ready to go, Briony Williams was looking out over Camden High Street from her first floor flat, waiting eagerly for the sound of the police siren. It was now 7.20 am. If the car got here this side of half past, they’d just about make it to Gower Street in ten minutes, with the siren on. Shafts of sun were appearing on the pavement, glinting across the tops of the cars. It was going to be hot.
She heard the car before she saw it and was downstairs locking the front door as it drew up. Two uniforms were in the front seat and Detective Superintendent Macready was in the back, wearing a heavy grey overcoat. Briony wondered if it was because he hadn’t checked the weather, or because he always went out dressed like that.
‘Morning, sir. What a beautiful day!’
‘Morning,’ he huffed, before turning back to look out of his window.
Briony watched the road ahead, with the lines of Monday morning traffic parting in response to the siren. Had to be some job, and it was timed right for the start of the week, which was a bit too tidy, somehow. She thought of remarking on it, but glancing sideways at Macready got the distinct impression that he was not in the mood for remarks. Donna, one of her new colleagues at Vine Street, had warned her, ‘He’s tight with everything, including words. Typical Scottish.’
He’d been on the panel for Briony’s promotion and — well, talk about give nothing away! She’d prepared like a mad thing for that interview, researching late into the night. She’d compiled dossiers on six unsolved murders, going through every detail to identify possible neglected leads, and the rest of the committee were visibly impressed. Macready had said nothing, until right at the end of the interview, when he’d leant forward, clasped his hands together on the table and fixed her with a steady gaze.
‘Do you not think, DC Williams, that you might need to have flesh and blood knowledge of these cases in order to be able to contribute anything useful to the inquiry?’
She was convinced he’d voted against her, but she got the promotion. Then the next thing she knew, Macready had actually asked for her to be transferred to his new divisional team at Vine Street. Now here she was, barely a week after having started the new job, the youngest female DI the Met had yet assigned to a major investigation.
Gower Street was closed off at the Euston Road end and there were four police cars and an ambulance behind the cordon. Molly was poised to be out of the car as soon as it had drawn up, but Macready was of the slow and steady school and it was protocol to stay behind him. He brushed down his coat as he stood up, closed his door carefully, then spoke to the driver before proceeding up the steps into the building. The officers guarding the entrance to the laboratory saluted Macready and held the doors open. He strode forward into the room, ignoring the offer of a white mask from a female officer by the door. Briony accepted one and tied the tapes securely around the back of her head before going any further.
The lab was like a large hall, with its floor set about three feet below ground level, and long windows that stretched high above ground, flooding the whole place with light. The lamps around the gurneys set against the walls under the windows seemed superfluous. Bodies and parts of bodies, all variously opened up for examination, were lying on the gurneys. A detached leg was arranged with the thigh skin pinned back, cleanly revealing all the muscles. Waiting for attention on the neighbouring table was a plump male cadaver from which the head had been removed. Severed hands lay in a stainless steel tray of preservative, each attached to its identification label by a red thread tied around the index finger.
Between two of the tables was a small doorway that evidently led directly onto the street by some stone steps. Fingerprinting officers were at work on the door itself, painting the areas around the lock. That must have been where the murderer got in. Briony went to take a closer look. It was a fairly solid door, with metal bands around the top and bottom. The dry weather would have favoured the intruder, because forensics were going to have a lot of trouble getting any footprints off the flagged stone floor.
The victim was at the far end of the room, on a massive oval-shaped table that was obviously used for demonstrations. It was drawn away from the wall so that there was room for several people to stand behind it, and surrounded now by a silent audience of professionals. The photographer’s flash was going off with a steady rhythm, but Briony couldn’t see what the camera saw. Although a space cleared instantly for Macready when he strode forward, nobody moved aside for her.
‘Excuse me,’ she said through her mask, but produced only a muffled noise. When she tried to edge forward into what looked like a clearer space, a uniformed arm shot out to bar her way. Then the officer pointed to the floor, where there was a large tin vessel, like an old wash-tub, from which a trail of intestines led upwards to the table. That tub didn’t belong in the lab. It was a battered, domestic thing. Briony could now see the mid-section of the corpse, where the disembowelling had been done with an oversized knife, left protruding from the abdominal cavity. The knife was not a professional instrument — she could see rust on the blade and the crudely shaped wooden handle was marked with what looked like a bloody handprint.
Macready moved around behind the table, making a sign for the photographer to stop. Briony noticed that no one else was wearing a mask and wondered if she should take hers off. But it was too late.
‘Perhaps some of the officers would be courteous enough to move back a little,’ he said, ‘so that Detective Inspector Williams can get a clear view. And perhaps, Detective Inspector Williams, you would care to remove your mask, since this patient’s condition is unlikely to be adversely affected by your breathing on him.’
Briony could feel herself blushing as she fumbled at the tapes. As she pulled the mask away, she registered an unfamiliar chemical smell that hit the back of her throat and made her cough. ‘Formaldehyde,’ Macready remarked. She tried to suppress the cough, but it erupted again as she looked at the body on the table. For a second, it seemed as if the tiling were rearing its head to look at her.
This effect was due to a clamp under the base of the skull, which lifted the head several inches from the table with a very convincing turn. The jaw was dropped wide open. One eye was also open, hut the other had been scooped out with a fine bladed knife that was still wedged deep in the socket. A thick bolt was screwed through the centre of the forehead. The abdomen was a gaping cavern, with the large knife skewered in the liver.
‘This is Richard Godwin, FRCS,’ said Macready quietly, ‘Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. Aged fifty-eight.’
‘What’s FRCS mean?’ asked the photographer, in a distinct cockney accent.
‘Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons,’ answered Briony promptly; keen to take any opportunity to establish her credibility. ‘Who found the body?’
‘We’ll go into that later. I’d like this room cleared now while the pathologists do their work. And please keep the press behind the cordon. I don’t want any of them sneaking up to the building. All details of this are to remain strictly confidential.’
The photographer moved around the table to take shots of the tub, then began to pack up his camera.
‘Got a right one here,’ he said.
‘Are you referring to the victim or the perpetrator, Jimmy?’ Macready was wearing a half smile, the first Briony had ever seen on him. ‘There is no doubt that this was carried out by someone with a sense of theatre and a great deal of confidence. This cannot be our man’s first job and it will not be his last.’
‘What if it was done by a woman?’ The question had leapt out of Briony’s mouth before she knew it was there.
Macready studied her for a moment before replying. ‘Female murderers — murderesses,’ and his Scots accent enabled him to capture all four syllables of the word, ‘—do not exist outside the imaginations of fiction writers. Women do not commit murder. They are occasionally guilty of manslaughter, but that is invariably the result of carelessness or bad driving.’
Okay, thought Briony, rule number one: don’t get fazed. Rule number two: keep coming back. She looked him in the eye. ‘It’s Hogarth, isn’t it?’
The photographer, a slightly built young man with an impish expression on his face, turned and stared at her. ‘It’s what?’
‘Williams is keen for us to know she studied art history in her A levels,’ said Macready. ‘There’s an etching, Jimmy, by an artist named William Hogarth, upon which this work of mischief we’re looking at is undoubtedly based. Did they not teach you art history in your photography course?’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘Well — s’posed to. I thought it was a bit boring.’
‘Ah!’ Macready’s eyes lit up as if someone had just given him a vital piece of information. ‘We detectives,’ he said, ‘cannot afford to find anything boring. Can we, Williams?’
The team assembled in the incident room at Vine Street that afternoon was small, considering the nature of the crime: three assistant detectives including Briony, two detective constables for surveillance work (one of whom was Briony’s new friend Donna), Jimmy the photographer, and two other scene-of-crime officers who were in charge of the forensics. Macready had a reputation for running a tight ship with a handpicked crew. The same forensics team had been with him for fifteen years and he insisted on Jimmy as his photographer for every case. Steve Latham had been a controversial DI appointment six years earlier with a degree from Oxford, brought in because Macready had said he needed someone whose brains were bigger than his boots. Donna told her this and warned her that if you only worked once with Macready, it was a heavy mark against you. He picked carefully and expected you to be good. If you were, he didn’t let you go — so, if he did let you go…
‘I get it,’ said Briony. ‘My first job as a DI and I land up on a tightrope. Don’t fall off and if you can turn a couple of somersaults on the way, that’ll be fine.’
‘Something like that.’ Donna grinned. ‘That’s what you get for being promoted before you’ve done your time on the beat.’
Donna was one of two detective constables specialising in undercover work and on her fourth investigation with Macready. There’d be no fear of her failing to come up to the mark, thought Briony. She was as sharp as a tack — about people, anyway. And she could size up instantly what was going on in a room and change her tactics to suit: sometimes just blending in with whoever was there; sometimes attracting everyone’s attention with the way she looked and moved. She wore her long hair loose and came to work in an assortment of coordinated outfits from the best boutiques. Briony wondered how she looked on her days off.
Everyone fell silent as Macready came in. He had taken off the overcoat now and, sitting with his hands clasped together on the desk in front of him, he revealed a complex arrangement of cuffs and leather buttoned sleeve edges. The silence grew uncomfortably long as his gaze travelled the faces in the room, one by one, his expression unchanging. Then he took a gold fob watch from his jacket pocket and checked the time before starting his address.
‘This could prove to be a very difficult case or very easy. The murderer, in what may seem an excess of confidence, has left us no less than three weapons, on one of which he has apparently been considerate enough to leave a handprint. He is clearly someone familiar with the college, who had access to an external door of the laboratory with a key, and he is also clearly someone who has qualified himself in anatomy. However, this only means he could be one of several hundred students who have passed through the college in the last five years or so. He may have changed his identity since then.
‘There is a strong element of fantasy in this crime. It might have been inspired by hallucinatory experiences, but it was not executed under any such influence. Whoever did it knew exactly what he was about in every detail. It is almost certainly not the killer’s first murder, so we need to start the search through archives for any unsolved case that may have features in common. If we can find his earlier work, that will greatly increase our chances of finding him, at the risk of wasting time on extensive searches that are likely to produce red herrings.
‘For the time being, the priorities in this investigation will be tracing the murder weapons and interviewing all those students of the college who are at present in residence and may have valuable information as observers, witnesses or possible suspects. As I’m sure you are aware, this is not term time, so those who are around are mainly here to do research or to study for exams. We need a statement from every one of them, with an alibi and details of anything they have seen or heard about that could possibly be relevant.
‘There will be another briefing as soon as we have the autopsy reports. Now I would like to confer with the assistant detectives on this case — Latham, Palgrave, Williams — in my office, please.’
It was clear that the three men knew each other well, and it was hard for Briony not to both feel and look awkward. Inner circles were not easy to enter, especially when they kept reminding you that you were the wrong sex.
She wasn’t sure what to expect of Palgrave, who had cast a couple of stern glances in her direction during the briefing. Was her Marks and Spencer’s cotton jacket too racy for him? He had to be somewhere in his fifties, maybe even a few years older than Macready, and had obviously done his time in uniform, so might well resent the fact that she hadn’t. He showed a lot of wrist as he shook hands — the sleeves of his limp suit were too short, and the cuffs of his shirt too starched. He was tallish, say five foot eleven, but fine boned and somehow brittle looking. His thin hair was parted sharply and cut high over his ears, which stuck out slightly. It was the hair in his nose that needed trimming, Briony couldn’t help thinking.
Steve Latham, whom Donna had pointed out to her as Macready’s protégé, made a very different impression. He offered her a cigarette with a slightly shaky hand, which went to sweep his hair out of the way as soon as the pack was back in his pocket. ‘Nervy’ was the word Briony’s mother would have used about him, but at least he gave the impression of being a bit with it, which was more than you could say for the other two. His suit had a touch of Carnaby Street, and the fitted shirt he wore under it might have looked good if only he’d ironed it. Briony noticed that he hadn’t shaved, either. She guessed the call this morning had caught him still in bed, and that was no doubt why he wasn’t there when she and Macready inspected the scene. Well, good. If he was human and a bit rough around the edges, maybe she wouldn’t be the only one to fall short of the clinical precision the boss seemed to require.
Macready gestured for them to take seats opposite him.
‘Palgrave, you will be supervising the collection of statements and coordinating the searches as usual, including the weapons trace. Latham will be coordinating the work of suspect elimination and will be developing strategies with me. Williams…This is Detective Inspector Williams’s first case with us. I have decided to put a woman on this team because I believe that the female of the species has higher abilities in certain areas.’ He paused for a moment, like someone saving up a punch line, looking at the three of them in turn with one eyebrow slightly raised. ‘Namely, in interview work and in records.’
