6
‘I was cagey about discussing this in the field.’ The pathologist stood next to Ben and Zoë at the dissecting table in the hospital mortuary, looking down at Lorne Wood’s remains. The room was closed, a uniformed officer sitting outside the door, just one mortician and the photographer in attendance. ‘In my experience, a case like this? You limit the spread of information. Limit the people who know the details.’
The photographer moved around the body, taking it from every angle, coming in close on the tarpaulin, which was still drawn up to Lorne’s chest. Just as she’d been found. Zoë watched, her lips pursed. She had been here before, in this room, with this pathologist, but they’d always been straightforward murder cases. Horrific and tragic all of them, but uncomplicated – the victims, mostly, of bar fights gone wrong. Once a shotgun victim – a farmer’s wife. Of course, this wasn’t going to be anything like those cases.
When the photographer had taken all the necessary shots, the pathologist stood next to Lorne’s head, using a torch to look up into her nose, lifting both eyelids and shining the light into them.
‘What’s the blood?’ Zoë asked. ‘The stuff coming from her mouth.’
The pathologist frowned. He peeled back a tiny part of the tape and stood back so Zoë could peer down at it. The skin at the edges of Lorne’s mouth was stretched around the tennis ball. And the corners had indeed split – two bloodied cracks each about a centimetre long. Just as the CSM had said.
Zoë gave a small nod. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly. She straightened and took a step back.
‘I think the ball’s dislocated her jaw too.’ The pathologist put both hands under Lorne’s ears and felt it, his eyes on the ceiling. ‘Yup.’ He straightened. ‘Dislocated.’ He glanced up to get the photographer’s attention. ‘Do you want to get some shots of this while I’m holding the tape back a bit?’
There was silence in the room while the photographer worked. Zoë avoided looking at Ben and she guessed he wouldn’t be meeting her eyes either. Neither of them had said anything on the drive over, but she was sure his head would be full of the same things hers was – like, what was going on under that tarpaulin? The pathologist seemed to take an agonizingly long time with the photographer and with taking samples from Lorne’s hair and nails. It was an age before he went to the tarpaulin.
‘OK?’ he said, his eyes on Zoë and Ben’s faces. ‘Ready?’
They nodded.
He drew the tarp back slowly, and crumpled it into an evidence bag the mortician was holding out. Zoë and Ben remained motionless, staring at what was in front of them. Taking it all in.
She was dressed from the waist up in the grey Banksy T-shirt. Below that she was completely naked. Her legs had been opened and positioned in a frog shape, knees out to the sides, soles together. At first Zoë thought her abdomen and thighs were covered with red slashes. Then she saw they were marks made in a waxy reddish-orange substance. ‘What is that? Lipstick?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ The pathologist pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned in, frowning. ‘It says something. Maybe you should – uh?’
‘“All like her …”’ Ben inclined his head sideways, reading the letters that ran up the inner thigh. ‘“All like her”? Is that what it says?’
‘And this?’ The pathologist indicated her abdomen. Letters running across it below her ribs, spanning her navel. ‘Very clear to me.’
‘“No one”?’ Zoë murmured. ‘No one.’ She glanced up at Ben. As if he might have an answer. He shook his head. Shrugged.
‘The other thing that struck me when I was in the field was this.’ The pathologist bent and looked under Lorne’s buttocks. ‘He’s rolled up all her clothes – her jeans, her socks, her underwear, put them under there. And, unless I’m very much mistaken, they’re not torn, not ripped.’
‘She let him take them off?’
‘Depends by what you mean by “let him”. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she was beyond struggling at that point.’
‘You mean he raped her when …’
‘When she was unconscious,’ Ben said quietly. ‘That he knocked her out and then got on with it. Which is why no one on the canal heard anything.’
‘I’m not saying anything. What I’m doing here is pointing out the areas of interest we could pay attention to during this postmortem. Which …’ he pushed the spectacles up his nose and moved the gooseneck lamp so it was shining directly on Lorne’s face ‘… is going to take a long time. I hope you don’t have dinner plans.’
7
Sally stood in David Goldrab’s utility room, the iron forgotten in her hand, his words going round and round in her head. Twenty quid an hour – off the books. No tax. Six hours a week. A hundred and twenty pounds every week to add to her pay packet? At the moment she and Millie were just squeaking by after food, utilities, council tax and interest payments. An extra four hundred and eighty a month would mean she could begin to pay off the loans. Buy Millie a new school dress, new jeans. But working for David Goldrab? Here on her own, with all his rudeness and bluster? She wasn’t sure.
Since Julian had left, it seemed that every day there had been a new obstacle, a new impossible predicament. And there was never time to think it through properly. Back in the days before Sally and Zoë had been separated from each other and sent away to different boarding-schools, Mum used to watch old films on TV on Saturday. There was a character in one of her favourites who liked to say, ‘Morals? We can’t afford morals.’ That was what happened at the bottom of the pile: you let ideals, like not stealing other people’s work, sink to the bottom of the list – somewhere beneath the electricity bill and the school uniform. You learned to swallow the things you really wanted to say.
She put down the iron, slid its plastic heat-cover closed and went into the kitchen. David was standing in the breakfast room, scratching his chest, idly clicking through the channels on the big wall-mounted TV screen. Danuta was crouched next to the sink, her back to them, sorting through the cleaning equipment. When Sally came in David raised his eyebrows, as if he was surprised to see her. ‘OK, Sally?’
She nodded.
‘What can I do for you, darling?’
She made a face – nodded fiercely at Danuta, who was still rummaging in the cupboard.
‘Sorry?’ David said politely, glancing uncomprehendingly at Danuta’s back. ‘Beg pardon?’
Sally swallowed hard. ‘Mr Goldrab, have you got a moment? There’s something I need to ask you about.’
David gave a small smile. He turned away from her and went back to clicking through the channels. Sally waited. She watched as he calmly passed news channels, channels where everyone seemed to be under water or on a mountain ledge, one with a woman lying on a bed, dressed in nothing but a pair of bright orange pants and cheerleader socks, staring at the camera with her finger in her mouth. When he’d got to the end he clicked all the way back again. Then he turned to Sally. Again, he seemed surprised to see her still there.
‘OK, OK.’ He sounded impatient. ‘Go to the office and I’ll be there in a bit. Don’t give me a headache over it.’
The office was on the ground floor and was filled with computers, shelves of recording equipment, and cabinets of golfing trophies. On the walls were framed pictures of David looking proud with horses, his arm round girls in bikinis, grinning in a bow-tie next to a variety of celebrities that Sally recognized from programmes like The X Factor. She sat down and waited. After five minutes he appeared, closed the door and sat opposite her. ‘Sally. How can I help? Something on your mind?’
‘The agency will think it’s strange – if suddenly I’m not available two afternoons a week and you cancel the agreement with the three of us at the same time. They look out for things like that.’
He grinned. She could smell the alcohol on his breath. ‘See? What did I say? Told you you’ve got the smarts. It’s OK. I’ll call the agency, tell them I want to cut down the hours so yo
u and the Polish tarts don’t come so often – say, every ten days. We’ll let that situation cruise for a couple of months, then I’ll cancel with them. It’s win-win for you, darling. And anyway …’ He smiled and bent towards her. For a moment she thought he might put his finger under her chin and raise her face to his. ‘… It’s not like I’m asking you to strangle someone. Is it?’
She didn’t smile.
‘So? Day after tomorrow, then, Princess?’
‘Just one thing.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘A request? Nice.’
‘Yes. Please – I don’t want you to call me a tart.’
He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and chuckled. ‘Know what, girl? I’ll do you a special introductory offer – I won’t call you a tart and I won’t call you a cunt either. OK? I won’t call you a cunt. Unless, of course, you act like one.’
8
Some cops disliked post-mortems. Others were fascinated by them and could talk about them for hours, reeling out lists of technical terms like a doctor. Zoë found that once you convinced yourself to look at the body as a piece of meat – as long as you saw it as nothing else – the most overwhelming thing, sometimes, about a PM was how tedious it was. It was full of recording details, taking photos, weighing even the tiniest organs, the most insignificant glands. And the human body in death wasn’t pink and red, but yellow. Or grey. It was only the initial cut – the thoracic-abdominal Y cut – she found difficult. The zipper, the cops called it. Most of them would stand away from the table during ‘the zipper’, avoiding the release of gases. Because she hated that part, and because it was in Zoë always to push herself, it was the part when she would stand the closest to the table. No masks or mints or smelly ointment to put up her nose. The most she would allow herself was a pinch of the nose and a squint. While Lorne’s body was opened Zoë stood next to her, half of her wanting to hold her hand, squeeze it while it happened, stop it hurting. Stupid, she thought, as the mortician wordlessly lined up the implements, rib spreaders and a range of cordless Stryker saws. Like she could change any of this shit.
Pathologists hated being pressed for conclusions before the examination was complete. Just hated it. Still, it was their job to resist – and the police’s job to persist, so from time to time Ben or Zoë would fire out a question, which the pathologist would answer with a disapproving click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and a few caustic comments muttered under his breath about the basic, unscientific impatience of the police, and why was it people couldn’t wait for a proper report instead of taking his words out of context and handing them on a plate to some jumped-up defence brief? But slowly, as the afternoon wore on, he began grudgingly to hand out small details. Lorne’s vagina and anus had tears to them, he remarked, but they hadn’t bled. Evidence that the rape could have happened just before or just after her death. He swabbed her, but couldn’t immediately see any semen in there, so maybe a condom had been used. Or she’d been raped using an object. There was an injury to the back of her head, probably the result of a fall. He guessed she’d been attacked from the front, which was consistent with the damage done to her face. And there’d been a blow to the stomach – a kick maybe – that had caused internal bleeding.
‘Is that what she died of?’
He shook his head, thoughtfully examining the inside wall of her abdomen. ‘No,’ he said after a while. ‘It would have killed her eventually. But …’ He pushed a finger into the thickened lump of blood that had gathered around her spleen. ‘No. There’s not as much blood as you’d expect with the artery to the spleen ruptured like this. She’d have died shortly after the injury.’
‘How?’
He raised his chin and looked at Ben steadily. Then, without expression, he pointed to the silver duct tape and the tennis ball, which had now been removed and sealed in a bag on the exhibits bench. ‘I’m not saying anything officially, and I need to look at her brain first, but if your nose looked like that and you had a ball jammed in your mouth, how do you think you’d breathe?’
‘She suffocated?’ said Zoë.
‘I expect that’s what my report will say.’ He clicked off the torch and turned to face them. ‘So? You want to know how it happened? He hit her like this – here across the zygomatic arch.’ The pathologist raised a hand and, in slow motion, mimed hitting his own face with a fist. ‘Just once. Her cheekbone’s broken, her nose is broken – she falls backwards. Then, probably when she’s on the floor, completely dazed, he forces the tennis ball and the duct tape over her mouth. The blood in her nose is starting to clot at this point and, before you know it, both airways are obstructed.’ Using the back of his wrist, he pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Fairly horrible.’
‘You’re not saying it was an accident she died?’ asked Ben.
The pathologist frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s important – the guy could say he didn’t mean to kill her. That he was just trying to keep her quiet. I’m picturing defence briefs and manslaughter pleas is all.’
‘He could have removed the tape. Even when she was unconscious her breathing response would have kicked in automatically if he’d taken the tape off and shaken her. He could have saved her.’
Zoë stood in silence, gazing down at Lorne. Now that the tape had been removed her jaw hung open in a slack grin. Her tongue was a swollen grey piece of gristle lodged among the white enamel of teeth. Earlier, walking along the canal path, Zoë had been excited, motivated and full of energy. Not any more. She glanced up, found Ben watching her and turned away quickly, fishing out her phone and pretending to be looking at something important there. She didn’t want anyone to think she wasn’t holding it together. Particularly not Ben.
Peppercorn Cottage was so remote. So completely isolated. It was one of the things Sally loved about it – that she didn’t have any neighbours overlooking, no one to stare and judge her, no one to say, ‘Look there. Look how that Sally Cassidy’s gone to rack and ruin. Look how she’s letting the place fall in around her ears.’ A little stone-built place set down quite alone amid miles of practical, unfussy farmland less than a mile from Isabelle’s house. It had a rambling garden and a view that went on for ever and it was called Peppercorn because, years ago, it had attracted a peppercorn rent. It was the most higgledy-piggledy cottage Sally had ever seen: everything went in steps – the floors, the roof, even the bricks were askew. Not a straight line in sight. In the last year and a half she and Millie had crammed it full of the craft they did in their spare time. The kitchen was stacked with things – the eggcups glazed and studded with paste gems, the little portraits of the pets they’d owned over the years pinned crazily to the walls, the boiled-sweet Christmas stars still hanging in the windows like stained glass, filtering the sunlight in coloured topaz dots. So unlike the house in Sion Road that they’d lived in with Julian.
The living room was at the back, looking out over flat fields, not another building as far as the eye could see. That night Sally left the curtains open to the night and sat curled on the sofa with Steve, sipping wine and staring in disbelief at the TV. Lorne Wood’s death was on the national news and the top story on the local news.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Sally murmured, her lips on the rim of her glass. ‘Lorne. Look at her – she can’t be dead. She was so pretty.’
‘Nice-looking girl,’ Steve said. ‘It’ll get more coverage than if she wasn’t.’
‘All the boys were crazy about her. Crazy. And on the towpath of all places. Millie and I used to go there all the time.’
‘It’s still a towpath. You still can.’
Sally shivered. She ran her hands up and down the goosebumps on her arms and inched closer to Steve, trying to steal some of his body warmth. She and Steve had been together for four months now. On nights like tonight, when Millie was at Julian’s, Sally would go to Steve’s or he would come over to the cottage, bringing armfuls of treats, cases of wine and nice cheeses from the delis
in the town centre. Tonight, though, she wished Millie was with them and not down at Sion Road. After a while, when she couldn’t relax, couldn’t stop the shivering, she swung her legs off the sofa, found her phone and dialled Millie’s mobile. It was answered after just two rings. ‘Mum.’ She sounded half scared, half excited. ‘Have you seen it? On the news? They murdered her.’
‘That’s why I’m calling. Are you OK?’
‘It’s Lorne they murdered. Not me.’
Sally paused, a little thrown off by Millie’s dismissiveness. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just I thought with the way you used to be so close to Lorne you’d—’
‘We weren’t close, Mum.’
‘She seemed to be with you all the time.’
‘No – you just think she was. But really she preferred her mates at Faulkener’s and, anyway, I like Sophie better.’
‘Even so, it must be upsetting.’
‘No – really, I mean I’m shocked but I’m not crying my eyes out. It was ages ago. I haven’t seen her for ages.’
Sally looked up at the window, at the lonely moon lifting itself from the horizon. Bloated and red. Millie was a proper teenager now. To her a year really was an age. ‘OK,’ she said, after a while. ‘Just one thing – if you want to go out tonight will you speak to me first? Let me know where you’re going?’
‘I’m not going out. I’m staying in. With them.’ She meant Julian and his new wife, Melissa. ‘Worse luck. And it’s the Glasto meeting tonight.’