Palmer had lived in something approaching squalor and it was hard to tell what had been moved by the intruders and what was part of his normal surroundings, but his sister had said the place had been ransacked. It looked as if he had moved none of his mother’s belongings after she died, just overlaid them with his own detritus. Small, ugly ornaments and arrangements of dried flowers fought for space with empty beer cans and mugs stained brown from tannin. The gas fire dated from the same period as the wallpaper, which was probably the last time it had been serviced. Out-of-date TV listings magazines, a brimming ashtray and dirty plates were stacked on either side of a red armchair that occupied prime position in the room. The rubbed, greasy patches on the back and the arms of the chair suggested it was his favourite place to sit. He had a large collection of videos – not even DVDs – and the boxes were thrown everywhere, the cassettes fractured, the tape spilling out in shiny brown-black coils. DI Derwent pushed past me and started turning over the boxes with gloved hands. I turned away, searching for something to distract me from what lay on the floor.
And found it in the signs of violence that jumped out at me once I started looking. Fractured glass was starry in the picture frames that still hung on the wall, lighter patches on the paper showing where others had hung. Blood spatter had dried dark on the biscuit-coloured tiles surrounding the fire. The drawers were pulled out of the sideboard, their contents scattered on the floor. Broken glass was mixed in with the tangle of cutlery and napkins and the stopper from a cheap decanter lay in the middle of it all. The carpet was violently patterned with brown, cream and red swirls and it was only when I looked closely that I could see where the blood had soaked into it, spreading out from the body, the meagre pile drying in tufts. Unwillingly, I followed the blood back to its source.
The body lay in front of the armchair, as if he had been sitting in it and pitched forward at the moment of his death. He was naked from the waist down, the skin blanched. Blood obeys gravity when it is no longer pumped around the body by a beating heart; the front of Palmer’s body would be patched with livid purple when Dr Hanshaw turned him over. His only clothing was an undershirt, yellowing with age, pulled up above his waist. His sparse hair was rusty-red from the blood that had soaked into it; it was impossible to tell what colour it should have been. One hand lay beside his head, his arm curved around as if he had been trying to shield himself from something or someone. I looked at the hand for too long, trying to work out what was odd about it. The shape was wrong, somehow.
‘They took three.’
I jumped, startled. Derwent was standing beside me, watching Dr Hanshaw’s careful examination of the corpse. The pathologist had just taken the internal temperature, a procedure that always made me feel embarrassed for the dead person. The public indignity of death was profound. Personally, I hoped for a quiet passing, no post-mortem required. ‘Sorry?’
‘Three fingers. Two from the right hand. One from the left.’ He pointed and I realised that there was a stump where the forefinger should be on each hand, and the middle finger was missing on the right side, dried blood crusted around the wound. ‘They weren’t messing around.’
‘I’m going to turn him.’ Dr Hanshaw said, looking up. ‘Give me a hand.’
To give Derwent his credit, he bent immediately and took a firm hold of the corpse’s legs, something that I wouldn’t have wanted to do even with gloves on. On the pathologist’s command, they rolled Palmer on to his back. A hiss of shock went through the room.
‘Significant damage to the genitals.’ Dr Hanshaw bent for a closer look. ‘He was castrated. After a fashion.’
Even Derwent was looking pale. He rallied enough to ask, ‘What did they use?’
‘Possibly the same thing they used on his hands. Heavy cutting equipment – garden shears, secateurs, that kind of tool.’
‘Might have been something they brought with them.’ Sean Cottrell was the senior SOCO who was managing the crime scene. ‘We haven’t found anything like that, and there’s no garden as such – just a concrete yard behind the house. Nothing to cut with garden shears.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me if they came equipped,’ Derwent said. ‘Whoever did this knew what they wanted to do here. They were straight into him as soon as he opened the door.’
‘But what did they want?’ I was pleased to hear how matter-of-fact I sounded. No one would have guessed I was struggling to keep my composure. ‘It doesn’t look as if he had anything worth stealing. And he served a reasonably long sentence for the child abuse. It’s not as if he was out after a few months and someone felt justice hadn’t been done.’
‘Vigilantes?’ Derwent suggested. ‘Maybe they thought prison wasn’t enough punishment. Or they wanted to get rid of him and discourage anyone with a similar background from moving in.’
‘Why now? He’s been living here for almost a year. Plenty of harassment – the neighbours certainly didn’t want him here – but nothing like this.’ I made myself look again at the body, confirming what I had already thought. ‘I’m not saying they didn’t enjoy doing it, but this looks like it had a purpose. They tortured him for a reason.’
Derwent raised his eyebrows. ‘You’d certainly hope it wasn’t for fun.’
Dr Hanshaw had been ignoring our back-and-forth, concentrating on what he was doing. ‘His face is badly swollen – some of that is post-mortem, but it’s fairly clear he was beaten severely. Whoever attacked him took their time over it.’ He probed the skull and gave a little grunt. ‘There was a significant blow to the head that caused a massive skull fracture. I’ll have a better idea when I look at his brain during the PM, but I’m fairly sure I’ll find this was the fatal injury.’
The victim’s face was a gargoyle mask, his tongue protruding from his mouth, one cloudy eye staring at the ceiling while the other was swollen shut. I made myself stare at it without flinching. Whatever they had wanted from him, they had made sure he suffered. And they had made sure he died once they were finished with him. I wondered if he had told them what they wanted to hear, in the end. I wondered if they had cared. The level of violence was extreme – it was overkill. And they had enjoyed it.
Judging that I’d spent long enough staring at the body to prove to anyone who cared that I was tougher than I looked, I turned to Derwent. ‘Mind if I have a look around the rest of the place?’
‘Good idea. Check it out.’ He sounded distracted, still focused on the body. I had found it hard to warm to the new DI, but that didn’t mean he was bad at his job. I might yet come to respect him, even if liking him seemed a long way off.
Threading a careful path through the forensic team, I made it to the kitchen and wished I hadn’t. Every surface was thick with months’ old grease and the windowsill was sprinkled with dead insects. The kitchen units were old, a white laminate that had peeled badly here and there, and the doors hung off the cupboards. Again, it was hard to tell what was recent damage and what state the room had been in before Palmer’s nightmarish visitors had arrived, but the drawers upended on the floor and the tins rolling everywhere suggested that the intruders had been in the kitchen too. An officer was painstakingly examining the tiles for footprints. Someone had opened the back door and I edged towards it on the pretext of looking at the yard outside, but really so I could get some air. The tiny concrete space smelled of wholesome exhaust fumes and stale beer from the pub, better than an alpine meadow as far as I was concerned after the ungodly stench in the house. I inhaled deeply and enthusiastically, staring up at a sky that was a cloudless clear blue stitched with vapour trails.
There was a limit to how long anyone could stare at a six-foot-by-eight yard, and I forced myself to go back through the kitchen, spilt sugar crunching under my feet, and into the hall, where I bumped into Sean Cottrell.
‘Mind if I go upstairs?’
‘Nope. Just watch where you walk – stay on the areas we’ve marked. And don’t run any water in the bathroom. We think they cleaned up in there before they left.’
‘I won’t touch anything.’ I headed up the narrow stairs. They were covered in thin brown carpet that was worn on the treads and I took it slowly, wary of slipping, careful not to brush against the handrail though it was already black with fingerprint dust.
Cottrell’s advice was unnecessary; I wouldn’t have been tempted to touch anything in the bathroom. It looked as if it had last been cleaned around the same time as the kitchen – in other words, months ago, if not years. The seat was up on the loo and I pulled a face at the brown streaks running down the sides of the bowl, the stagnant water a murky grey-brown that hinted at unspeakable things lurking below the surface. It would be some poor bastard’s job to sieve out anything that had been left in the bowl in case it helped to identify the killers, but not mine, thank God, not mine. The bath was grimy but suspiciously unused compared to the sink, which once had been white but was now dark grey. A reddish-brown tide-mark around the plug hole looked like dried blood and I could see why Sean was keen to preserve the room for examination. There was no soap or shower gel in the bathroom, as far as I could see. An ancient toothbrush lay on the sink, the bristles discoloured and warped, but there was no toothpaste. Personal hygiene did not appear to have been one of Barry Palmer’s priorities, any more than housekeeping.
The two bedrooms were bleak, small and cold. One had a stripped single bed in it and very little else. The stains on the mattress made my stomach heave, which surprised me given that I had seen worse – much worse – in that very house. Maybe it was just that I had reached my daily limit on disgusting things. I gave the other bedroom a cursory glance, taking in the rumpled sheets and blankets, the curtains hanging off their rail at the window, the clothes piled up on a chair in the corner. The room smelt of unwashed flesh and stale air. The mattress hung off the bed, as if someone had lifted it to check what lay underneath, and I had a sudden vision of the killers hurrying through the house after cleaning themselves up, searching it damp-handed for God knows what while Palmer breathed his last in the miserable sitting room below.
I retraced my steps and came down the stairs to find Derwent deep in conversation with Dr Hanshaw. Judging that he wouldn’t want to be interrupted, I slipped out of the front door and took off my paper suit with some relief. The smell of the house clung to my hair and skin and I was conscious of it as I went across the street to the small knot of neighbours who still stood there, arms folded. They were a fairly representative sample of the area’s diverse population; Brixton was a proper melting pot and this street was no different. The group seemed, as one, to regard me with suspicion as I walked up to them, but I gave them a smile anyway and introduced myself.
‘As you may know, we’re investigating a suspicious death at the address behind me. Did any of you see anything strange in the last couple of days? Anyone who didn’t belong in this area hanging around? Did you hear anything out of the ordinary?’
A plump black woman shook her head. ‘Sorry. I don’t think we’re going to be much help. None of us saw anything, did we, Brian?’
Brian was small and thin with a leathery complexion. He had a foul-smelling cigarette hidden in his fist, held between his forefinger and thumb, and took a long drag on it before answering. ‘Don’t believe we did, no.’
I looked around the small circle, seven of them, seeing the same expression repeated on every face. No one was going to break ranks – not in front of their neighbours, anyway. ‘Right. Names and addresses.’
It was like switching on a light in a cellar and seeing rats scurry for cover. The little group broke apart, Brian murmuring something about needing to get to work. I raised my voice.
‘It’s not a request, ladies and gentlemen. Names and addresses. Now.’
There’s a certain tone of voice that you learn to use during your years of street policing. Authoritative without being hectoring, it’s strangely effective on even the most recalcitrant members of the public. Meekly, the neighbours returned and dictated their details to me. We would be knocking on doors up and down the street anyway, but the ones who were particularly curious – the ones who would stand on the street for hours watching nothing in particular going on – they were the ones I wanted to talk to. They were the ones who would notice anything out of the ordinary. And behind closed doors, they might just not be able to resist telling us what they’d seen.
Once I had finished with the possible witnesses, I turned to find DI Derwent behind me. He did not look pleased.
‘Decided you’d had enough, did you?’
‘Just collecting some details.’
‘Is that what I asked you to do?’
‘No, but—’
‘No.’ He leaned in, a flush of colour in his cheeks, his voice hard. ‘Let’s get one thing straight, okay? I don’t like initiative. I don’t like people thinking for themselves. I don’t like having to search for a junior officer who’s taken it up on herself to wander off.’
‘I didn’t want to interrupt your conversation with Dr Hanshaw.’
‘Right. And you couldn’t wait for me to be finished at the crime scene.’
‘I didn’t think there was any harm in it.’
‘Well, your first mistake was thinking. You’re not here to think.’
I opened my mouth to argue and closed it again. What was the point? Derwent gave a short, sharp nod, as if he was satisfied at having put me in my place. I wondered if he had really been annoyed, or if he had engineered the little scene deliberately.
‘Fine. Let’s get out of here, then.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ve got another crime scene to visit but I want to see the sister first. She’s expecting us. She doesn’t want us there too late because we might disturb her precious kids.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Chislehurst.’ It was a long way east of Brixton and Derwent said what I was thinking. ‘It’ll take us a while to get there with the traffic like this.’
I trailed after him to the car, feeling dismal. Stand back and look pretty, he’d said.