Death Watch (18 page)

‘An' why's that?' Woodend demanded. ‘
You've
seen her, haven't you?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Well, then?'

‘But I don't have a daughter.'

‘I don't want to look at her,' Woodend admitted. ‘But I'm in charge of this investigation, an' I bloody
have
to, don't I? So let's get it over with.'

Beresford bent down, and gently pulled away the sheet to reveal the girl's head.

Woodend let out an involuntary gasp. Though he had not admitted it, even to himself, he had been praying this would turn out to be some
other
girl.

A girl he knew nothing about.

A girl he had not tried – and failed – to save.

But it wasn't some other girl!

It was unquestionably Angela's face – the mouth contorted with the terror she had felt as she died, the eyes looking up at him with sightless rebuke.

‘I need to see the rest of her,' he said.

‘You're sure?' Beresford asked hesitantly.

‘Just bloody do it!' Woodend told him.

Beresford stripped the rest of the sheet away, and beside him, Woodend heard Rutter moan, then say, ‘Dear God!'

The body was naked, and caked in a mixture of blood and dirt.

It had been slashed!

And stabbed!

And burnt!

It was hard to estimate how many times the poor child had been wounded, though some unfortunate soul – probably Dr Shastri – would have to count all those wounds eventually.

‘Cover her up again, Colin,' Woodend said. ‘Cover her up – an' make it quick!'

Beresford rapidly pulled the sheet over the girl again, but though the corpse was no longer visible to the eye, the image of it had been burned deeply into Woodend's brain.

‘There was a note, sir,' Beresford said.

‘A note!'

‘On a piece of cardboard which had been torn off a baked-beans box. It was written in block capitals, and it … it was pinned …'

‘Steady, lad,' Woodend said.

Beresford gulped in a fresh supply of chill night air.

‘It wasn't
pinned
to anything,' he said. ‘It was
nailed
to her leg. I … I … removed it, and had it sent down to the lab for analysis.'

‘You just did right,' Woodend assured him. ‘Can you remember exactly what it said?'

Beresford shuddered. ‘Oh yes, I can remember. It said, “This is a gift from the Invisible Man to all my fellow sufferers everywhere”.'

A gift? Woodend repeated silently. This poor mutilated child was, in the eyes of the man who had tortured and then killed her, a gift!

And what the hell did he mean by calling himself the
Invisible Man
?

The bastard was even sicker than he'd thought – sicker than he could ever have imagined.

He looked around him. At the edge of the circle of light which bathed the girl's body stood half a dozen constables.

‘Who found her?' he shouted. ‘I want to talk to whoever it was that found her.'

‘It was a couple of local lads, sir,' one of the constables said. ‘I've put them in my car.'

‘Bring 'em here now,' Woodend said. ‘No, not now! Wait until the body's been taken away.'

The ambulance men lifted the corpse onto a stretcher, and when they'd removed it, the constable shepherded the two boys forward.

One of the boys was around nine years old, the other one closer to eleven, Woodend guessed. They had thin pale faces, and runny noses. It was a long time since the clothes they were wearing had been new, and now they were almost threadbare. Both boys were shivering, but the chief inspector soon decided that it was not the cold which was having such an effect on them – though the cold was certainly bad enough – it was being ushered into the frightening presence of the big stranger in the hairy sports jacket.

Woodend forced a smile to his lips. ‘You look as though you think you might be in some kind of trouble,' he said. ‘Well, you're not. It's not every lad who would have reported what he'd found, like you two did. There's many that would have just run away an' tried to forget it. So you've been very brave. In fact, I think both of you deserve a medal for what you've done.'

The boys nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you, mister,' the older one said.

‘What's your names?' Woodend asked.

‘I'm Pete, an' this is Brian,' the bigger boy said.

‘An' what were you doin' here, on this path?'

‘Dad said he'd had a bit of luck on the horses today, an' he was goin' to treat us to fish an' chips,' Pete told him. ‘This is the quickest way to the chip shop from our house.'

That would certainly explain the flattened chips on the ground around the body, Woodend thought.

‘And how did you happen to find the … the girl?'

‘Brian … Brian fell over her,' Pete mumbled.

‘It was dark!' his brother said, as if he still felt he needed to find an excuse for making the discovery. ‘I didn't see her.'

‘Was it dark when you
went
to the chip shop?' Woodend asked.

Pete shook his head. ‘No, but it was startin' to
go
dark.'

‘If she'd been here on your way there, you'd have seen her, wouldn't you?' Woodend said.

‘Couldn't have missed her,' Pete replied.

‘An' how much later was it that you came back?'

‘Hours,' Brian said. ‘Hours an' hours.'

His brother grinned. ‘About fifteen minutes,' he told Woodend.

Not long, the chief inspector thought. But long enough.

‘Did you notice anybody strange hangin' about when you were on your way to the chip shop?' he asked.

The boys thought about it.

‘No
people
,' Pete said finally.

‘Then what?'

‘There was a car parked over there,' Pete said, pointing towards the kerb at the edge of waste land.

‘An' was anyone inside it?'

‘Yes, there was a man inside. He was smokin' a cigarette. You could see it glowin'.'

‘What did he look like, this man?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Was he as old as me, do you think? Or was he younger, a bit closer in age to the gentleman standing next to me,' Woodend said, pointing to Bob Rutter.

Pete shrugged his thin shoulders helplessly. ‘Like I said, it was nearly dark, mister. I couldn't really see.'

‘Do you know what kind of car it was? Was it like the one that your dad drives?'

Pete giggled. ‘Dad doesn't have a car. He says that honest workin' men like him—'

‘Our dad doesn't work,' Brian interrupted.

‘… that honest workin' men like him can't afford such a grand luxury,' Pete continued, ignoring his younger brother's naive honesty. ‘He says we'll all have to wait till the revolution comes before we get to drive around in big cars like the bloated boor … bour …'

‘Bourgeoisie?' Rutter supplied.

‘That's right,' Pete agreed. ‘Boor-jw-zee.'

If Pete had been a doctor's or a dentist's son, he'd have known about cars, right enough, Woodend thought – would have been counting down the years before he was behind the wheel of one himself. But why should these kids take an interest in something they'd been told by their own father that they'd never have any chance of owning themselves?

‘What colour was this car?' he asked.

‘I think it was brown,' Pete said dubiously. ‘Or it might have been black. Or dark blue.'

‘How big was it?'

‘Not
too
big, if you know what I mean.'

‘I'm not sure that I do.'

‘But not too
small
, neither. To tell you the truth, mister, I didn't really notice.'

It was hopeless, Woodend thought. He was never going to get a decent description out of these kids.

He closed his eyes and pictured the scene as it must have been an hour earlier.

The boys cross the waste land. They are hurrying – because fish and chips is such a feast to them that they can already taste it.

In the car – which may be brown, black, or blue – the man sits, smoking a cigarette and watching them. He waits a while once they've gone – to give the boys plenty of time to get away from the area, and to allow darkness to fall – then gets out of his vehicle and walks around to the boot. He does it in leisurely manner, as if he hasn't got a care in the world, because it is always possible that someone is watching him, and he doesn't want to raise their suspicions.

Once he is at the back of the car, he removes his key from his pocket, and looks carefully around him. There is nobody there. He's not really surprised at this. In the houses which surround the waste land, the television will be churning out its usual mindless pap, so why should anybody be out on the street?

He knows that the next part of his plan must be carried out quickly, so he takes a deep breath before opening the boot.

The dead girl is inside it. Perhaps he has wrapped her in a carpet or tarpaulin, on the off-chance that he will encounter someone before he has time to dump the body. Or perhaps she is as naked and vulnerable as she was when Pete and Brian found her.

He picks her up and throws her over this shoulder, then walks quickly towards the rough path. Ten or twelve steps, and he is halfway across the waste land. He drops the girl unceremoniously – for why should he be gentle with her now, after all that he has done to her in the previous few hours? – turns, and trots back to his vehicle. Once inside the car, the man inserts his key in the ignition, fires up the engine, and drives away.

The whole operation has taken just a couple of minutes.

Why do you keep calling him ‘the man', Charlie? Woodend found he was asking himself, as he lit up a cigarette with shaking hands. Because he wasn't just ‘the man', was he? He was the killer!

Which meant – because it simply
had to
mean – that the
other
man, the man he'd got locked up in a cell at headquarters and who he'd been convinced was responsible for all this, couldn't be the killer at all!

T
here was a layer of ice on the puddles in front of the morgue, and several sets of tyre-skid marks were clearly visible in the thick frost which had settled overnight.

Woodend had woken up shivering, that first morning after the discovery of the body, but – as in the case of the boys the previous night – he doubted it had much to do with the external temperature.

His coldness was deep, deep inside him.

Cold anger.

Or perhaps cold sorrow.

Dr Shastri was waiting for him in her lab. She looked totally exhausted, and did not even attempt to summon up one of her customary cheery greetings.

‘This is a very bad business, Chief Inspector,' she said. ‘A very bad business indeed.'

‘It is,' Woodend agreed. ‘What can you tell me about the body?'

‘The direct cause of death was suffocation,' the doctor said flatly. ‘But before she died, the poor child was tortured in a most horrible and merciless manner. I counted a hundred and twenty-seven wounds on her broken body, and most of them were inflicted pre-mortem.'

‘When did she die?' Woodend asked.

‘Since she was abandoned naked, on cold ground, and while the temperature was dropping, it is difficult to pinpoint the time with any great deal of accuracy,' the doctor said.

‘So what's your best guess?'

‘Some time between four and six o'clock yesterday afternoon.'

In other words, somewhere between half an hour and two and a half hours before her body was dumped, Woodend calculated.

‘I'm surprised the killer suffocated her,' he said.

‘And why is that?'

‘Because suffocation's a relatively painless death, an' this whole thing was about makin' her suffer.'

‘You have a point,' Dr Shastri agreed.

‘How many of the wounds were made post-mortem?' Woodend asked.

‘As nearly as I can tell, around thirty of them.'

‘An' that puzzles me too,' Woodend admitted. ‘Surely he would have got more pleasure out of inflictin' them while she was still alive.'

‘Perhaps there is some ritual that he has convinced himself he must follow, and this ritual involves both pre-mortem and post-mortem wounding,' Dr Shastri suggested. ‘But I am doing no more than speculating here. In truth, I can say very little on the subject, because I am far from being an expert.'

The phone on the wall rang, and Dr Shastri answered.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes, he is.' She turned to Woodend. ‘It's for you. The chief constable.'

Woodend took the phone from her.

‘I've been ringing round everywhere, trying to find you,' the chief constable growled. ‘What are you doing at the morgue?'

What did he
think
he was doing at the morgue, Woodend wondered. Shopping for the family groceries? Trying to get a sun tan?

‘I've been talking to Dr Shastri, sir,' he said.

‘About what?'

‘About the dead girl.'

‘Forget that for now,' Marlowe told him. ‘I want you back at police headquarters right away. You're going to meet the press.'

‘I'm not sure I'm prepared to give them a briefing on the investigation at the moment, sir,' Woodend said.

‘Did I mention a
briefing
, Chief Inspector?' Marlowe demanded. ‘Did I even mention your
so-called
investigation?'

‘No, sir, but …'

‘This has nothing to do with the investigation at all. You will be reading out a statement to the press that I've already drafted for you. You can put it in your own words, but you'll stick to the spirit of the text or – by God – I'll have your head on a silver platter.'