A Matter of Blood (8 page)

On the far side of the room he spotted Claire, hunched over a phone by the window. He’d told her to find the cabbie who’d dropped Macintyre off outside the Café de la Seine, and he imagined that was what she was doing. She probably had a name for him by now. He was most likely a daytime driver, so he could be anywhere in the city right now. By the time she got the man in, she’d have a file an inch thick on him, his life, his family, and whatever bad habits he might have imagined hidden from view. If he was in any way associated with Sam Macintyre’s firm, then his sergeant would know before the driver even realised he was getting pulled.

Cass gritted his teeth as coffee slopped over and burned his hand. Bowman’s lot had plenty to be getting on with too. First they had to dig around in Carla Rae’s life, get an idea of who she was and how she lived, and track her last movements as precisely as possible. After that, they’d have to cross-reference all the new information with what they had for the three prior victims. What they needed were links between the four. So far, all they had in common was that they were all female, relatively poor, and now dead. Hopefully, Carla Rae’s death would give them a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Time would tell. Unfortunately, in any murder case, time was the killer of conviction.

Blackmore spotted him and came over, pushing the heavy swing door from the other side. ‘Let me take that, sir,’ he said, reaching for the thick file that was wedged under Cass’s armpit. He added it to his own pile. ‘I’ll bring these up. Do you need me in with you, sir ?’

‘In an ideal world, yes, but in this one I need you in the Incident Room more,’ said Cass. He transferred one coffee cup to his other hand and led the way up the stairs. ‘I’ll tape what he says and give you a copy before we brief the team.

I want you on that pentabarbitone. I want to know where our killer scored it.’

‘I’m on it, boss.’

The first body had been found two months ago, and Bowman had already had the team on the phone to just about every vet, hospital and pharmacy in London chasing reports of stolen or missing barbiturates, but so far they’d come up blank. Now Cass wanted the search widened, starting with the greater London region, but going further if necessary. They knew fuck all about their killer - he could be a pharmaceutical rep or travelling salesman, or maybe a relief vet, stealing what he needed as he went. But it was more likely he’d have gone for one big steal, rather than risk getting arrested for something as ordinary as theft. Somewhere, someone was missing a substantial quantity of the drug. They just needed to find out who.

‘And keep on Forensics for anything the CSTs might have found in trace that links with any of the other crime scenes. You know how slack some of these techies can be - they’re not police, they’re paid by the bloody hour. Make sure they’re working.’

‘You got it, sir.’

As they passed under the bright strip lighting, Cass noticed the dark shadows under the sergeant’s eyes. Maybe Blackmore wasn’t sleeping so well either. Changing to a new DI in the middle of a case like this couldn’t be easy, especially when you were sleeping with - or at least intending to sleep with - the boss’s sergeant - and not just his sergeant, but someone the DI had history with. What a bloody nightmare that must be.

‘And thanks for the file,’ Cass added, ‘I’ll be up to speed by the end of the day.’

‘You seem pretty on the ball to me, sir.’

Cass silently wished he were. He could feel the fingers of the dead women and the two boys tugging at his clothes, demanding justice. Their touch brought a cold chill to his soul. Common as murder had become in these times when tempers were frayed and money was tight, Criminal Murders, as these they were now classified, were rare. Most killings were committed by civilians, ordinary people caught in a moment of madness, taking their frustrations out on those they loved or had grown to hate. Both these cases were different. These were calculated, beyond a quick fix. And somehow he’d ended up with both of them.

It didn’t come as a surprise. God, if he existed, had long ago stopped being a friend to Cass Jones.

He lifted one cup and sipped. He needed to concentrate on the here and now. His nose itched at the scent of cheap coffee. At least the dry soreness left by the strong powder was fading.

Although what was left in the wrap was too light to feel, Cass was suddenly aware of it, lying hot and heavy in his pocket as if it were truly the weight of his shame, all his guilt folded carefully into the shiny piece of magazine. As soon as he could, he’d get to the bathroom and tip it away. Enough was enough.
Until the next time
, a small voice in the back of his head whispered. Cass ignored it. Maybe there would be a next time, but it wouldn’t be until after these cases were done. The grip of those dead fingers was far too strong. They’d drown him in blood if he let them.

 

‘So you’ve got a serial on your hands,’ said Dr Tim Hask, the sentence a statement rather than a question. His green eyes twinkled out of his heavy face as he smiled and a network of fine veins crackled across his full cheeks to a kind of a purple peak on his nose. If the profiler’s body and face had been criminal evidence, Cass thought, they would reveal the sin of gluttony: a love for good food and good wine, and plenty of it. Cass wondered if his own face betrayed his sins in the same way. He hoped not.

‘How can you tell?’

Hask got to his feet with surprising energy for a man of his proportions. He was a few inches shorter than Cass’s six foot, and oval, his body expanding massively at the waistline and tapering down through almost womanly hips to his neatly shod feet. His full head of light brown hair was brushed to one side in an untidy parting, and there were no hints of grey in it. Cass reckoned Tim Hask to be no more than forty, but he didn’t believe that he was likely to see fifty. Morbid obesity was on a sharp rise in England and this man could easily be its poster boy.

‘Nothing clever, I’m afraid.’ He grinned warmly, causing his jowls to wobble alarmingly. ‘My services are rather expensive. It’s rare for the police to be able to afford me.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t afford decent coffee either.’ Cass passed him the cup. ‘So I apologise in advance to your taste buds.’

Blackmore had told Cass that Bowman had wanted to call in a profiler after the third body had turned up two weeks previously, but it took the fourth death, Carla Rae, to get the headshed to authorise the expense. Hask was considered top of his field in Britain, and was well respected across Europe and the United States; he didn’t come cheap.

He looked at Cass. ‘I occasionally help out the Feds, but much of my time recently has been spent psychologically evaluating employees for big companies, and being an expert witness in cases of fraud or industrial espionage. While I obviously deplore the need, it will be nice to get my teeth into something meaty again.’

‘The original pictures are in that folder.’ Cass passed it over. ‘There’s a copy here for you to take with you.’

The profiler shook his head, his eyes growing serious as he pulled the photos out. ‘Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. I’ve already had the file faxed over to me.’ His fat hands carefully arranged each set of photos on the table in the order of the vics’ demise, and then placed the secondary shots of the crime scenes above each pile.

‘Maybe we should have done this over the phone, then,’ Cass said, feeling a little put out.

‘Absolutely not.’ Hask moved the picture of Carla Rae’s abused body an inch to the left. ‘I so rarely get to work on something that actually means anything these days.’ A small shard of a smile twitched at his cheek. ‘And this is as much about your brain as mine, DI Jones.’

‘Call me Cass.’

‘Cass, then. My point is:
I
can’t catch the person who did this. I can only give you suggestions about the person and their motivations. If you get any hunches, then I will probably be able to tell you if you’re headed in the right direction.’ He spread his hands wide across the pictures. ‘These girls need your brain as much as mine - more so, in fact. We have the best chance of catching him if our minds work in some kind of synthesis.’ He paused. ‘Plus, I’ve been hankering after some time in London. I haven’t been back for a while, and all the better if it’s on someone else’s dime.’ He chuckled.

‘Well, any help you can give us will be greatly appreciated.’ The two men examined the pictures in silence. Cass had seen them before, briefly, when the case was still Bowman’s, and then in a hurried flick through of the file before heading home the previous evening, but this was the first time he’d really
looked
at them. Hask might already be seeking out clues, and evidence of method and similarities, but Cass wanted to see the people these bodies had been before their lives had been stopped so unexpectedly. He wanted to know them a little, to recognise them. He shivered, as if he felt the cold touch of their fingers on his.

Jade Palmer, twenty-two, was the first to die, a week before her body was found in a boarded-up repossession two streets away from her family home just off St John’s Wood Road. The derelict house was only a mile or so from where Cass was standing now, and part of him was wishing the killer had struck in Newham first, and made all this someone else’s problem.

Jade smiled up at him from the photo on the desk. Her thick shoulder-length hair was braided in cornrows, and the stud in her tongue glinted in the reflected shine of the camera flash. It was a healthy smile, full of life, but Cass thought he could see a hint of wary shadows creeping into the corner of her eyes where only a few months later a crazy man would plant fly eggs. Until her body turned up, found by some council housing officer inspecting just how much - or more probably how little - work needed to be done to make it habitable, no one had reported her missing. Apparently, she had a habit of just taking off, so none had been worried by her absence.

With no permanent job and few qualifications that meant anything, it appeared that pretty Jade Palmer’s life consisted of taking up with one unsuitable man after another, drawn, like so many others, to danger and excitement without realising that there was always some kind of price to pay. Even though she would now be forever twenty-two, Cass thought echoes of those exciting, dangerous men had already made tracks on her soul. Downstairs some unfortunate constable was trawling through lists and hunting all those men down. Maybe one of her boyfriends had suddenly turned psycho - but Cass doubted it. He knew how those gangsta-boys liked to work, and it wasn’t like this.

The photographs showed her decomposing body examined from all angles, her dignity stripped away by the flash of a camera. A close-up highlighted swollen eyelids, lips and tongue, not a result of any injury or beating but simply the efficient progression of nature. As soon as death had occurred, Jade’s silent body, already a busy little ecosystem, had gone into overdrive, the myriad tiny organisms working furiously inside her to recycle the nutrients contained within her carcass.

The silver stud in Jade Palmer’s tongue stuck out in ironic mockery: a final ‘fuck you’ to a world that had finally fucked her. It was the only thing really recognisable on a body that had lost both shape and colour. He looked back at the smiling face captured in the first photo. This would be the image that would haunt him, not the dead thing below.

Next to Jade was twenty-eight-year-old Amanda Carlisle. She was a curvy brunette with an unhealthy sheen to her skin. The photo had been taken in a pub and she had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other - some variety of lager or cider. Unlike Jade Palmer, she had a steady boyfriend, a truck driver, and a job as a waitress in an Islington café. She’d been there for the past two years and was known to be polite, friendly and punctual. Maybe it was the regular diet of fried eggs and chips that was responsible for the pale, greasy skin. Amanda and her boyfriend rented a small terraced house a street away from where she was found, naked and scrawled on and left to rot in forgotten dust just like the others. This time the empty building was not abandoned but up for sale, one of many around there. The estate agent had been making his rounds. He went to check everything was okay and found Amanda Carlisle lying on the sitting room floor.

In the period between her death and her discovery, the fly eggs inserted into her eyes had hatched successfully. One close-up focused on several well-developed maggots, in the third stage of their development, according to the fact sheet someone had thoughtfully inserted into the file. Cass grimaced and looked away.

At least Amanda Carlisle had been reported missing, by both her boyfriend and the café owner. She’d worked the late shift, closing up at ten, but had never made it home, a ten-minute walk at best. Cass didn’t have to meet her boss to know that he’d probably had a few sleepless nights over the past month since her decaying body had been found, even if there was nothing he could have done.

The third victim stared up at him. The picture looked to have been taken outside a pub on a summer’s afternoon. Emma Loines wasn’t smiling, but watching the camera thoughtfully, as if whoever had taken the photograph had caught her in the middle of a private dilemma that she hadn’t been able to resolve before the shutter released, capturing her like that for ever. Unlike the other three, Emma Loines wasn’t in her twenties; she’d died just two weeks before her thirty-second birthday. She was an office temp who had moved down to London from Manchester two months previously to take a full-time job. She had been living in a bedsit in King’s Cross. Cass thought it was no wonder she didn’t look happy. King’s Cross was a dodgy area at the best of times, all street prostitution and low-level crime, but as the country - and the rest of the world - took an economic nosedive, the streets of King’s Cross got even busier.

Emma Loines had been found two weeks ago, in a small flat almost as dingy as the one in Newham where Carla Rae had died. It was a rented property a couple of streets back from the station, vacant after the forcible eviction of the last tenants. The landlord found the body when he went to meet a John Smith, who’d called about the flat but never showed. Surprise, surprise. The number on the landlord’s mobile turned out to be a payphone in King’s Cross Station. Cass thought the landlord must have been pretty desperate to let the flat if he’d bothered to turn up for someone who called himself John Smith - or maybe he was used to having anonymous tenants. It was the right area for it.