Authors: Michael Robotham
‘What do you mean by a symbol?’
‘The letter “A”.’
My mind begins flitting through the possibilities.
‘It’s the fourth attack in eight months,’ says Cray, ‘but none of the others were fatal.’
‘The letter “A”?’
‘Yes.’
I swing my legs out of bed. ‘Send someone to pick me up.’
‘Bennie is waiting outside.’
I move to the window and pull the curtains aside. An unmarked police car is parked opposite the cottage. Bennie raises a gloved hand. Behind her, across the darkened fields, I notice a lone light burning at a farmhouse. Someone is awake, a farmer getting ready for work. The intricate machinery of the countryside has always been a mystery to me – the ploughing, planting, harvesting and husbandry – to feed people hundreds of miles away, living in cities, still snuggled in their beds. They, too, will wake and join a machine, rattling to work on buses and trams, gliding to offices on escalators or in lifts, producing and consuming in patterns that are as predictable as the dawn. And then one of them will do something entirely unpredictable, something violent or antisocial, and another assembly line will begin whirring – the police, pathologists, lawyers and judges. We are all part of a machine.
Moving through the cottage, I try not to the wake the girls, but the old floorboards creak and groan under my weight. Teeth brushed and face washed, I’m still groggy and misaligned when Julianne appears at her bedroom door.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I have to go.’
‘Who was on the phone?’
‘Ronnie Cray.’
The air seems to grow colder. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she watches me dress. ‘You said you were finished.’
‘Something has happened.’
‘I have my scan today.’
‘I’ll be back.’
I want to say something to reassure her but I’m still half asleep and I can’t think of anything that would assuage her disappointment. People sometimes say the three most powerful words in the English language are ‘I love you’, but they’re wrong. The three most powerful words are ‘Please help me’.
A dozen police cars and emergency vehicles are parked in the turning circle of the Holy Trinity Church, whose steeple is etched starkly against the lightening sky. Nearby gravestones are beginning to reveal the names of their dead and I hear birdsong in the branches of the trees.
The gates to the churchyard have been sealed off with blue-and-white police tape. More tape has been threaded between fence posts of an adjacent field where a newly erected white tent, lit from within, seems to glow in the dark.
Seventy yards away, police and volunteers have gathered in the parking area for a briefing. Fuelled by thermos coffee and tea, they listen to Ronnie Cray tell them to stay focused and not to leave anything behind. At 6 a.m. they move off, crossing the fields in a straight line with their heads bent, searching the long summer grass and unkempt hedges where the tea-coloured branches and holly look almost black in the low sun.
Cray lifts a plastic cup to her lips. The tea has grown cold. She spits it out.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she says, wiping her mouth. ‘The victim’s name is Naomi Meredith, aged twenty-nine. Her husband reported her missing last night. She’d spent the day in Weston-super-Mare, shopping and having lunch with her friends. She planned to catch the four o’clock bus and should have been home by five. Her house is three hundred yards from here, past that line of trees.’
‘Who found her?’
‘The husband. He arrived home around seven and expected Naomi to be there. He spent the evening phoning her friends and family. He talked to the bus driver, who remembered Naomi. Then he decided to retrace her steps. He discovered her just after 2 a.m. Her body was on the far side of the fence, partially covered with branches and an old sheet of corrugated iron.’
‘How did he know where to look?’
‘He found her handbag next to one of the gravestones.’
Cray ducks under the police tape and we walk to a splintered fence. On the opposite side I see flattened grass and nettles and the bent stems of thistles. Climbing over, we cross duckboards until we reach the white tent. Arc lights are throwing shadows against the canvas and a portable generator provides a throbbing backing beat.
The flap opens as a camera flashes. Twin white dots of light are left dancing behind my eyelids. My sight recovers. Amid the boxes of equipment and tripods, I see the body of a woman, who is no longer young or old. Wearing a skirt and blouse, she is lying on her side, with one leg bent beneath her and her head resting on her lower arm as though she’s curled up and gone to sleep.
The blood that covers her face resembles a mask. Something sharp – a scalpel or razor – must have opened up her forehead while her heart was still beating. Three lines – two longer than the other – intersecting to form the ‘A’. The cuts were not meant to be neat or precise, simply legible.
An image comes back to me – a young woman called Catherine Mary McBride lying in a shallow grave on the banks of the Grand Union Canal. It was ten years ago, opposite Kensal Green Cemetery in London, a Sunday morning, when I watched police recover her body. Ruiz was in charge of the investigation. He asked for my help and I said, ‘What do I know about predators and psychopaths?’
A decade later and I’m staring at another crime scene and asking myself the same questions. Who was this woman? What did she mean to the man who killed her? Where did he confront her? How quickly did he strike? Did they interact? The answers are important because they influence the much larger question of motivation.
A SOCO speaks to Cray. They’re ready to move the body. We’re in the way. Cray motions for me to follow and we retrace our steps across the duckboards.
Walking past the church and through the gates, I come to the main road. There are houses on either side with gaps in between. Somebody might have seen him following Naomi, but more likely he waited for her. Was it opportunistic or did he target her because she meant something to him, or represented someone else?
DCS Cray has followed me.
‘Was she raped?’ I ask.
‘Not according to the initial examination.’
‘What about the bleach?’
‘The paramedics could smell it on her fingers. It could be a coincidence.’
I don’t answer immediately. Walking into the churchyard, I stop at one of the newer graves – a husband and wife buried next to each other. He died in 1942, shot down over Germany. She lived for another fifty years.
Cray is itching to ask me about the symbol and its significance. First I want to know about the other attacks.
‘We know of three,’ she says. ‘The victims were choked unconscious and scarred with the same symbol – always on the forehead. Police didn’t link the crimes because they took place in different counties and were investigated independently.’
‘Did any of the victims know each other?’
‘No.’
‘You said there was an attack on the day of the murders.’
‘A thirty-one-year-old bookkeeper, walking on the coastal path between Portishead and Clevedon, was grabbed from behind in a chokehold and lost consciousness. When she came to she had blood in her eyes. She didn’t realise what he’d done until the paramedics gave her a mirror.’
‘How far is the footpath from the farmhouse?’
‘Less than two miles.’
‘Any sign of bleach?’
‘None.’
‘What about the other attacks?’
Cray rattles off the basic facts. The previous October, a radiologist working at a private hospital in Bristol was on her way home. Someone broke into her car and was hiding in the back seat.
‘Was she married?’ I ask.
‘Separated, but she was dating a married doctor at the hospital.’
The second attack was two months later in Newport, Wales, on the eastern side of the Newport City Footbridge. ‘The victim was married, aged forty, with two kids. He was trussed up like a Christmas turkey. If a security guard hadn’t found him he would have frozen to death.’
‘You said “he”?’
‘Male, a sales consultant, he wouldn’t give us a statement.’
I’m standing at the highest point of the churchyard, looking across the valley to where sheep are dotted on the distant pastures and a tractor moves in slow motion, pulling a trailer along a track.
Cray has spent enough time admiring the view. She wants my thoughts. I clear my throat.
‘Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a famous novel called
The Scarlet Letter.
’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘It’s about a woman called Hester Prynne who is found guilty of adultery and is made to wear a scarlet “A” sewn on to her dress as a sign of shame.’
‘You think this is about adultery?’
‘All the victims were married or separated.’
‘As a matter of routine we considered the possibility of infidelity as a motive, but apart from the radiologist the rest of them claimed to be happily married.’
‘Maybe they lied,’ I say.
‘OK, so let’s say you’re right – what has this guy got against adultery?’
‘Perhaps his wife left him or had an affair.’
‘Well, that narrows it down,’ says Cray, not hiding her sarcasm.
‘Where is her husband?’ I ask.
‘With Naomi’s parents.’
‘You should keep an eye on him.’
The DCS signals to Monk, pulling him aside for a quiet word. ‘I want you to bring Theo Meredith to the station. Keep it quiet. No fuss. Tell him it’s routine.’
Monk nods.
‘See if he’ll give us permission to search the house,’ says Cray.
‘You want me to apply for a warrant?’
‘We don’t have enough.’
Cray comes back to me with another question. ‘OK, let’s say you’re right and we’re dealing with some religious nutter or moral vigilante – the other attacks weren’t fatal. Why did he kill Naomi?’
‘It could have been accidental or part of an escalation.’
‘And the bleach?’
‘Shows forensic awareness and possibly a link to the farmhouse murders, but it’s not a strong connection. You need to look at the other cases and re-interview the victims.’
Cray puffs out her cheeks and exhales slowly. ‘The first two victims refused to make a statement and the bookkeeper withdrew hers a week later.’
‘But you’ll try again.’
‘Of course,’ she says sceptically. ‘I’m sure they’ll put the kettle on and open the Hobnobs.’
Built like a bunker beneath the coroner’s court, the mortuary at Flax Bourton has twelve pathologists doing fifteen hundred post-mortems a year. I know this fact because of the chart on the office wall.
A young lab assistant comes to collect me and I follow her along brightly lit corridors that reek of floor polish, disinfectant and a strange mixture of stomach acid, gall and faeces. It’s thirty years since I was in medical school, but I still recognise the smell.
‘If you’ll just wait here,’ she says.
The man I’ve come to see, Dr Louis Preston, has a downturned mouth, slumped shoulders and a Brummie accent that makes him seem eternally miserable. If Preston won the National Lottery he’d make it sound as if his dog had just died. Right now I can see him through an open door, surrounded by interns who have gathered around a cadaver on the slab.
‘This is Mr Norman Griggs,’ says Preston. ‘He spent sixty-two years on this earth and I want you to treat him with the same care and decency as you’d show your own grandfather. Am I understood?’
The interns nod.
‘Dr Earley will perform the autopsy. Watch and learn, people.’
Still peeling off his surgical gloves, Preston meets me in the corridor. ‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘I need five minutes.’
‘If I had five minutes I’d be taking my morning shit.’
‘Please, Louis.’
He grumbles and starts walking. ‘You want to know about Naomi Meredith?’
‘Was it a blood choke?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could he have miscalculated?’
The pathologist stops and turns, intrigued by the question. I tell him about the earlier attacks – none of which were fatal.
‘How much do you know about blood chokes?’ he asks.
‘I know the effect.’
‘Force is applied to both sides of the neck, constricting the carotid artery, decreasing blood flow to the brain. A short compression is relatively harmless, but if you deprive the brain of blood for four minutes we’re talking brain damage. Six minutes, it’s death.’
‘So in this case?’
Preston shrugs. ‘He didn’t let her go.’ He starts walking again.
‘What did he use on her forehead?’ I ask.
‘Best guess – a box-cutter with a retractable blade. Cut her skin to the bone.’
We’ve reached his office. He sits behind his desk and pulls a sandwich and a carton of juice from the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. ‘If I can’t shit, I’m going to eat,’ he says, tearing off a mouthful of sandwich and forcing the corners into his mouth.
‘You also did the autopsy on Harper Crowe.’
He nods, his mouth full.
‘Was that a blood choke?’
His jaw stops moving, recognising where I’m going with this.
‘Harper Crowe showed limited evidence of neck trauma.’
‘What do you mean by limited evidence?’
The pathologist is thinking out loud now. ‘She had some minor perimortem bruising on her jaw, which could have been caused by the small silver crucifix she wore around her neck … if it was pressed hard into her skin.’
‘By a forearm choking her?’
‘Possibly.’
Preston puts down his sandwich, more interested now. He quizzes me on the other attacks, wanting to know how long the victims were unconscious and how they were gripped. I don’t have all the answers.
‘What about the bleach on Naomi Meredith’s fingers?’ I ask.
‘Sodium hydroxide – your basic household cleaner. He tried to destroy his DNA. We managed to get one sample, but it’s highly degraded.’
‘Was it the same bleach used on Harper Crowe?’
‘It had the same chemical combination, but so do most household bleaches.’ Preston wraps his half-eaten sandwich, dropping it into the bin beside his desk. ‘So tell me, Professor, what’s this guy’s motive – power, jealousy, sexual gratification?’