Everyone Lies (18 page)

Cooper shook his head. ‘SIA is a specialist lab job. There’s only one decent lab in the UK I know of – it’ll take weeks.’

‘The lab is in Dundee,’ Fennimore said. ‘I happen to know the head honcho. I’ll have a chat with him, see if we can do better than that.’

Cooper looked from Simms to Fennimore and back again. ‘And who did you say is going to pay for all this – not that I’m bothered, so long as the bill doesn’t land on my desk, and I get my Home Office Post-mortem fee.’

‘You make a start,’ Simms said. ‘I’ll work out the logistics.’

17

‘I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections, flaws and frailties.’

HUGH MACKAY

‘What do you make of Cooper?’ Simms said.

Fennimore and Simms were at the back of the hotel where the body had been found. All that remained to mark it as the final resting place of their anonymous victim was a tangle of blue-and-white crime scene tape, fluttering from a wheelie bin. Cobbles showed through the tarmac like blisters on a burns victim. A sheer, windowless wall formed one side of the alley, the rear wall of the hotel the other. Four giant wheelie bins were lined up against the hotel wall, two either side of a steel door. The alley stank of bins and urine and – incongruously, wafting from the hotel kitchens – fresh bread.

‘He’s all right.’

‘Spoken like a man.’

‘All right, he’s an oddball, but he does cut up dead bodies for a living,’ Fennimore said. ‘Why d’you ask?’

‘Just wondering why he was so keen for me to take the case.’

Fennimore smiled. ‘Your paranoia is showing. Have you got those photos?’ Cooper had printed off the crime scene photos before they left the mortuary. They stood shoulder to shoulder, studying them.

‘Here.’ Simms pointed to a patch of scabby tarmac a few feet from the rear wall of the building.

Fennimore oriented the printout so that they could both picture how the body had lain in relation to the hotel. He took a step back and looked up. ‘I count ten windows,’ he said. ‘All with frosted glass, all of which are probably sealed shut, anyway.’

‘I’ll find out,’ she said.

They walked on, past the stream of crime scene tape fluttering like a banner from the dumpster, the stink of rotting fish and decaying cabbage sharp in their nostrils. Fennimore crouched, peering closely at the pits and potholes, noting a splash of white paint on the cobbles about ten yards from where they were standing.

Simms turned three hundred and sixty degrees. ‘It’s a good place to dump a body: access both ends, no observation points from above, wide enough for a bin lorry to fit through, but not so wide you’d park your car and leave it while you shopped in the town centre. Enough cover from the bins, so anyone passing the end of the alley wouldn’t see her. Bastard had local knowledge.’

‘And you wonder why Cooper wanted you on the case.’

‘Make sense, Fennimore,’ she said.

‘I thought I was the one who’s supposed to be clueless about these things,’ he said, a small smile on his face.

A van turned in from the main road and stopped short behind Simms’s Mondeo. The driver leant on the horn. Simms flashed her badge and ID, still waiting for an explanation.

Fennimore stood up, brushing street grime from his hands. ‘Okay. You’re thorough. You’re not satisfied with the obvious explanation. You cared enough to treat a routine review with the seriousness it deserves – you thought about it, and you asked questions and you found out the truth.’

She puffed air between her lips. ‘You seem to be implying that he actually cares.’

‘Of course he cares. Who spotted the link between your drugs deaths and StayC? Who smoothed the way for you when you had to go back to the hospital pathologists and tell them they’d missed the actual cause of death on close to a dozen cases? They could easily have closed ranks on you, but Coop massaged egos and persuaded them to go back and check their findings – he made it possible for you to establish penicillin as the common cause. And today, he could have sent in his report and shrugged his shoulders at the laziness and incompetence of the senior investigating officer, but he didn’t. He called you in – again. Why? Because he knew you’d do the job right.’

‘Hm.’ It didn’t seem to register. She stared past Fennimore to the steady flow of traffic on the main road forty or fifty feet away.

‘And of course he fancies you something rotten.’

She nodded and turned one hundred and eighty. Now he knew she wasn’t listening – a comment like that would usually warrant a sharp rebuke and possibly a dead arm.

She was looking towards the far end of the alley, another thirty feet distant, where her car was parked. ‘This is what – eighteen feet wide? Our killer could just roll in here, dump her, and roll out—’ She stopped. ‘What are you staring at?’

You, Kate. You.
He said quietly, ‘I’ve missed you, Kate.’

‘Nick, stop it. I’m married, and I want to stay that way.’

He should have grasped the chance to clear the air; they needed to talk about the real reason he had left without a word four years ago, and she needed to explain why she hadn’t told him about her four-year-old son. But Fennimore did what most men would do in his position – he changed the subject.

‘How are you going to square this with your boss?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got half a dozen reasons why this isn’t a stranger rape, Nick. Added to which, I’ve got a direct link to the tainted deals in my case, and the similarity between the whipping injuries. I’ll square it.’

‘Look, Kate,’ he said, ‘If I’m brutally honest, I can’t lose. Even if this goes no further, I’ll have a new case study for my lectures, some good stats, a few photographs. But you—’ He wasn’t sure how to say it without sounding patronizing. ‘You have to be sure you want this, because—’

‘I know.’ Her eyes sparked, but he could see the uncertainty behind them. ‘If I mess this up, there’s no coming back.’ She stubbed her toe against a loose cobblestone. After a few moments, she looked into his eyes again; this time he saw defiance and determination. ‘But I want this, Nick. I feel like I’m being played for a mug. All of this is connected – I know it is. I want to find out how, and I want to catch whoever did those things to the girl in the mortuary.’

The ripple of emotion he’d seen in the Post-mortem Room again disturbed the stillness of her brown eyes. ‘He didn’t just kill her, Nick – he annihilated her.’

18

Detective Superintendent Spry was not easily convinced. He just wasn’t sure he wanted the added complication of supervising Kate Simms in her first Category B murder investigation, especially coming straight after the short-lived glory of solving the penicillin deaths. His instinct, he said, was to quit while they were ahead. Someone else had already been tasked with the murder; he could arrange for them to talk, Kate could pass on her thoughts. It wasn’t that he believed she couldn’t do it, he told her, but she still had a lot on, what with the paperwork and this being her first major investigation flying solo.

Simms reminded him that she had spent three years at the National Crime Faculty, and
he
reminded
her
that her stint with the boffins hadn’t exactly ended in bouquets and accolades. He added with a pitying smile that things had moved on in the four years she had spent cooling her heels on community partnership committees.

Simms argued that it was because of her that the excess overdoses in the review had been reclassified as manslaughter; that she had made the link between the drug deaths and the faceless corpse.

‘In fairness,’ Spry said fastidiously, ‘it was the pathologist who made that connection.’

‘The pathologist called me because the DCI tasked with the investigation wasn’t listening and he knew I would,’ she said, echoing Fennimore’s words. ‘It was obvious the body was dumped, and the level of violence goes way beyond an opportunistic attack.’

Spry gazed at her with weary patience. ‘Yes, well, now the investigating officer is aware, and if you leave it with him I’m sure he will—’

‘Sir,’ she interrupted. This was her work – she wasn’t going to just leave it with a stupid lazy dope who couldn’t find his own arse with both hands. ‘How’s it going to look,’ she said, ‘when it comes out that Greater Manchester Police failed to investigate the fact that the murder victim had the same drugs inside her as StayC and the rest?’

Spry bristled – ever since the embarrassing confrontation, news programmes had played clips of StayC’s mother at the press conference, shouting, pointing her finger at Gifford, Spry beside him, alarmed, a cartoonish grimace on his face, fingers gripping the edge of the table. The same footage was shown when StayC’s cause of death was given as penicillin allergy, and again after the arrest of Newton, the dealer.

‘Your tone is offensive, Chief Inspector,’ he said, flushing angrily. ‘Moderate it.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, ‘but the conspiracy theorists are still muttering about the death threats against StayC. Ignore the drugs link to a violent murder and they’ll start screaming “cover-up”.’

The colour seeped from his face as he thought about it. He agreed to talk to the investigating officer. He wasn’t keen to share – even less keen to give the investigation away – but after two days of wrangling, a box file of case notes appeared on her desk and Kate Simms got the call to say that she had been allocated a Major Incident Room. An hour later, Dr Cooper emailed her his full postmortem report with his good wishes.

Details of the investigation would be logged onto the Home Office Large and Major Enquiry System – HOLMES2. Every ambitious young detective relished their first HOLMES investigation – that word ‘Major’ stood out as a career landmark – it was their opportunity to be noticed.

HOLMES had been in use across the UK for over twenty-five years, evolving to make best use of twenty-first-century computer technology. It was designed to organize, cross-reference, index and interrogate the many thousands of lines of inquiry that major investigations and disasters could generate.

‘But the system is only as good as the information you put into it,’ Simms said, for the benefit of the newbies who didn’t know better and the old hands who thought they did. ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ She got nods of approval from the techs; her team of twenty included a HOLMES2 receiver, document manager and four indexers. ‘With good information, HOLMES2 can do a lot of things – it can narrow down a list of suspects, establish links between events and individuals, suggest new lines of inquiry.’ She spread her hands. ‘It can practically make you a nice brew after a hard day’s canvassing, but
only
if you feed it clear, accurate, detailed information.’

‘Bear that in mind when you’re knocking on a stranger’s front door at the end of a long day, with your shoes soaked through and freezing cold rain dripping down the neck of your overcoat.’

She waited a few more moments, allowed herself the first smile of the briefing. ‘Lecture over – let’s get to work, shall we?’

She called up her first PowerPoint slide and projected it onto the screen behind her. In five minutes, she took them through the penicillin deaths and the arrest and confession of Anthony Newton, the dealer.

‘Is it right he sold StayC the heroin that killed her?’ someone asked.

‘That’s what it says in his confession.’

She went on to summarize what they knew about the body found behind the city-centre hotel. Josh Brown had narrowed down the number of restaurants in the area serving seafood and meat combos to four. She wanted CCTV from the streets around all of them, and at both ends of the alley where the body was found. She set out a timetable for morning and evening briefings, and outlined the processes for reporting and task allocation, establishing Detective Sergeant Mark Renwick as their first point of contact. Renwick was trained in the use of the HOLMES system and had fifteen years’ experience – the last seven on the drugs squad. He would double up as her HOLMES Room Action Manager and Office Manager. It would be his job to allocate tasks and make sure they were entered into the system promptly – which meant DS Renwick would have the overview of everything going on in the Incident Room.

‘Stable Isotope Analysis gives the victim’s country of origin as the Baltic States,’ Simms said. ‘Toenail and hair grow-out suggests she’d been in the UK eight to twelve months. She had DNA under her fingernails, but it doesn’t match anything on the DNA database – so whoever it belongs to, they’re either new to the UK or they have no criminal record.’

This information had come minutes earlier from Nick Fennimore; he was back in Aberdeen, but ready to take her calls, anytime, he said. Reading his notes again, she remembered something.

‘Ella, wasn’t Rika from the Baltic States?’

Ella Moran checked the paperwork on her desk. ‘Yes, Boss.’ Ella sat side-on to her desk, plump in a plain white blouse and a dark grey trouser suit: the trousers wide to give her thighs room if she needed to run; the jacket boxy. Her hair, mousy brown and too fine to hold a barrette, was combed behind her ears.

Simms clicked to a post-mortem photograph of Rika’s face. ‘Rika – we don’t have a surname – died of a genuine overdose, so she’s not on our list of penicillin deaths. She’s linked to the murder because she’d submitted to some nasty S&M in the months before she died.’ The next slide showed the whip marks on Rika’s buttocks, and there was a collective hiss from the team.

‘I know,’ Simms said. ‘It’s not pretty.’ She clicked to the next slide, a photograph of the murder victim, showing the same angry, painful-looking web of stripes. ‘This criss-cross pattern of injuries is highly unusual.’ She flicked back and forth between the images of Rika and the murder victim. ‘So unusual, in fact, that they were probably inflicted by the same person. Now, the whip marks on our murder victim were perimortem – she was flogged during the assault that killed her – which means whoever inflicted the injuries on Rika is probably our killer.

‘Our murder victim had drugs in her even though she wasn’t an addict. She may, however, have been a sex worker, like Rika. The composition of heroin in the murder victim was the same as we found in the penicillin deaths, which were all around Cheetham Hill – so she probably lived in the area. Maybe she knew Rika, maybe they worked together, or at least for the same massage parlour. Our killer could be a regular at one of the salons – maybe Rika even introduced our vic to the killer.’