Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“Problems?”

“Typical breakfast chaos. I’m just trying to get out of the house.”

“I know what you mean. Look, about this identification-”

“It’s solid, sir. Dental records. DNA will take a bit longer. There’s no way it’s Leanne Wray. I’m just about to set off back to the house. The lads are still digging.”

“Who the hell can it be?”

“Don’t know. All I’ve been able to find out so far is that it’s a young woman, late teens to early twenties, been there a few months and there’s a lot of stainless steel in her dental work, including a crown.”

“Meaning?” Banks asked, a faint memory beckoning.

“Possible Eastern European origin. They still use a lot of stainless steel over there.”

Right. Banks had come across something like that before. A forensic dentist had once told him that Russians used stainless steel. “Eastern European?”

“Just a possibility, sir.”

“All right. Any chance of that DNA comparison between Payne and the Seacroft Rapist turning up before the weekend?”

“I’ll get onto them this morning, see if I can give them a prod.”

“Okay. Thanks. Keep at it, Stefan.”

“Will do.”

Banks hung up, more puzzled than ever. One of the first things AC Hartnell had instituted when the team was first put together was a special squad to keep tabs on all missing persons cases throughout the entire country – “mispers,” as they were called – particularly if they involved blond teenagers, with no apparent reasons for running away, disappearing on their way home from clubs, pubs, cinemas and dances. The team had monitored scores of cases every day, but none had met the criteria of the Chameleon investigation, except one girl in Cheshire, who had turned up alive and contrite two days later after a brief shack-up with her boyfriend, about which she just happened to forget to tell her parents, and the sadder case of a young girl in Lincoln who, it turned out, had been run over and had not been carrying any identification. Now here was Stefan saying they’d probably got a dead Eastern European girl in the garden.

Banks didn’t get very far with his chain of thought before his office door opened and DC Filey dropped a copy of that morning’s Post on his desk.

Annie parked her purple Astra up the street and walked toward number 35 The Hill, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight. Crime scene tape and trestles blocked off that section of pavement in front of the garden wall, so that pedestrians had to make a detour on to the tarmac road to get by. One or two people paused to glance over the garden gate as they passed, Annie noticed, but most walked to the other side of the road and averted their eyes. She even saw one elderly woman cross herself.

Annie showed her warrant card to the officer on duty, signed in at the gate and walked down the garden path. She wasn’t afraid of seeing gruesome sights, if indeed there were any left inside the house, but she had never before visited a scene so completely overrun with SOCO activity, and just walking into it made her edgy. The men in the front garden ignored her and went on with their digging. The door was ajar, and when Annie pushed gently, it opened into the hall.

The hallway was deserted and at first the house seemed so quiet inside that Annie thought she was alone. Then someone shouted, and the sound of a pneumatic drill ripped through the air, coming up from the cellar, shattering her illusion. The house was hot, stuffy and full of dust, and Annie sneezed three times before exploring further.

Her nerves gradually gave way to professional curiosity, and she noted with interest that the carpets had been taken up, leaving only the bare concrete floors and wooden stairs, and that the living room had been stripped of furniture, too, even down to the light fixtures. Several holes had been punched in the walls, no doubt to ensure that no bodies had been entombed there. Annie gave a little shudder. Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” was one of the more frightening stories she had read at school.

Everywhere she went she was conscious of the narrow roped-off pathway she knew she was supposed to follow. In an odd way it was like visiting the Brontë parsonage or Wordsworth’s cottage, where you could only stand and look beyond the rope at the antique furniture.

The kitchen, where three SOCO officers were working on the sink and drains, was in the same sorry state – tiles wrenched up, oven and fridge gone, cupboards bare, fingerprint dust everywhere. Annie hadn’t thought anyone could do so much damage to a place in three days. One of the SOCOs looked over at her and asked her rather testily what she thought she was doing there. She flashed him her warrant card and he went back to ripping out the sink. The pneumatic drill stopped and Annie heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner from upstairs, an eerily domestic sound amidst all the crime scene chaos, though she knew its purpose was far more sinister than getting rid of the dust.

She took the silence from the cellar as her cue to go down there, noting as she did so the door open to the garage, which had been stripped as bare as the rest of the house. The car was gone, no doubt in the police garage being taken apart piece by piece, and the oil-stained floor had been dug up.

She sensed herself becoming hypersensitive as she approached the cellar door, her breath coming in short gasps. There was an obscene poster of a naked woman with her legs spread wide apart on the door which Annie hoped the SOCOs hadn’t left there because they enjoyed seeing it. That must have unnerved Janet Taylor to start with, she thought, advancing slowly, as she imagined Janet and Dennis had done. Christ, she felt apprehensive enough herself, even though she knew the only people in there were SOCOs. But Janet and Dennis hadn’t known what to expect, Annie told herself. Whatever it was, they hadn’t expected what they got. She knew far more than they had, and no doubt her imagination was working overtime on that.

Through the door, much cooler down here, trying to feel the way it was, despite the two SOCO officers and the bright lighting… Janet went in first, Dennis just behind her. The cellar was smaller than she had expected. It must have happened so quickly. Candlelight. The figure leaping out of the shadows, wielding a machete, hacking into Dennis Morrissey’s throat and arm because he was the closest. Dennis goes down. Janet already has her side-handled baton out, extended, ready to ward off the first blow. So close she can smell Payne’s breath. Perhaps he can’t believe that a woman, weaker and smaller than him, can thwart him so easily. Before he can recover from his shock, Janet lashes out and hits him on the left temple. Blinded by pain and perhaps by blood, he falls back against the wall. Next he feels a sharp pain on his wrist and he can’t hold on to the machete. He hears it skitter away across the floor but doesn’t know where. He rears up and goes at her. Angry now because she knows her partner is bleeding to death on the floor, Janet hits him again and again, wanting it to be over so she can tend to Dennis. He scrabbles after where he thought the machete went, blood dripping down his face. She hits him again. And again. How much strength does he have left by now? Annie wondered. Surely not enough to overpower Janet? And how many more times does she hit him now he’s down, handcuffed to the pipe, not moving at all?

Annie sighed and watched the SOCOs shifting their drill to dig into another spot.

“Are you going to start that thing up again?” she asked.

One of the men grinned. “Want some earmuffs?”

Annie smiled back at him. “No, I’d rather just get out of here before you start. Can you give me another minute or so?”