Peter Robinson: Aftermath

No, what got to him most of all was the pity of it all, the deep empathy he had come to feel with the victims of crimes he investigated. And he hadn’t become more callous, more inured to it all over the years, as many did, and as he had once thought he would. Each new one was like a raw wound reopening. Especially something like this. He could keep it all in check, keep the bile down in his rumbling gut and do his job, but it ate away at him from the inside like acid and kept him awake at night. Pain and fear and despair permeated these walls like the factory grime had crusted the old city buildings. Only this kind of horror couldn’t be sandblasted away.

Seven people in the cramped cellar, five of them alive and two dead; this was going to be a logistical and forensic nightmare.

Someone had turned an overhead light on, just a bare bulb, but candles still flickered all over the place. From the doorway Banks could see the doctor bent over the pale body on the mattress. A girl. The only outward signs of violence were a few cuts and bruises, a bloody nose, and a length of yellow plastic clothesline around her neck. She lay spread-eagled on the soiled mattress, her hands tied with the same yellow plastic line to metal pegs someone had set into the concrete floor. Blood from PC Morrisey’s severed artery had sprayed across her ankles and shins. Some flies had managed to get in the cellar, and three of them were buzzing around the blood clotted under her nose. There seemed to be some sort of rash or blistering around her mouth. Her face was pale and bluish in death, the rest of her body white under the bulb’s glare.

What made it all so much worse were the large mirrors on the ceiling and two of the walls that multiplied the scene like a fun-fair trick.

“Who turned the overhead light on?” Banks asked.

“Ambulance men,” said Luke Selkirk. “They were first on the scene after PCs Taylor and Morrisey.”

“Okay, we’ll leave it on for the time being, get a better idea of what we’re dealing with. But I want the original scene photographed, too, later. Just the candlelight.”

Luke nodded. “By the way, this is Faye McTavish, my new assistant.” Faye was a slight, pale, waif-like woman, early twenties perhaps, with a stud through her nostril and almost no hips at all. The old heavy Pentax she had slung around her neck looked too big for her to hold steady, but she managed it well enough.

“Pleased to meet you, Faye,” said Banks, shaking hands. “Only wish it could be in better circumstances.”

“Me too.”

Banks turned to the body on the mattress.

He knew who she was: Kimberley Myers, age fifteen, missing since Friday night, when she had failed to return from a youth-club dance only a quarter of a mile from her home. She had been a pretty girl, with the characteristic long blond hair and slim, athletic figure of all the victims. Now her dead eyes stared up at the mirror on the ceiling as if looking for answers to her suffering.

Dried semen glistened on her pubic hair. And blood. Semen and blood, the old, old story. Why was it always the pretty young girls these monsters took? Banks asked himself for the hundredth time. Oh, he knew all the pat answers; he knew that women and children made easier victims because they were physically weaker, more easily cowed and subdued by male strength, just as he knew that prostitutes and runaways made easy victims, too, because they were less likely to be missed than someone from a nice home, like Kimberley. But it was much more than that. There was always a deep, dark sexual aspect to these sorts of things, and to be the right kind of object for whoever had done this, the victim needed not only to be weaker, but needed breasts and a vagina, too, available for her tormentor’s pleasure and ultimate desecration. And perhaps some aura of youth and innocence. It was despoilation of innocence. Men killed other men for many reasons, by the thousands in wartime, but in crimes like this, the victim always had to be a woman.

The first officer on the scene had had the foresight to mark out a narrow pathway on the floor with tape so that people wouldn’t walk all over the place and destroy evidence, but after what had happened with PCs Morrisey and Taylor, it was probably too late for that anyway.

PC Dennis Morrisey lay curled on his side in a pool of blood on the concrete floor. His blood had also sprayed over part of the wall and one of the mirrors, rivaling in its pattern anything Jackson Pollock had ever painted. The rest of the whitewashed walls were covered with either pornographic images ripped from magazines, or childish, obscene stick figures of men with enormous phalluses, like the Cerne Giant, drawn in colored chalk. Mixed in with these were a number of crudely drawn occult symbols and grinning skulls. There was another pool of blood by the wall next to the door, and a long dark smear on the whitewash. Terence Payne .

Luke Selkirk’s camera flashed and snapped Banks out of his trance-like state. Faye was wielding her camcorder now. The other man in the room turned and spoke for the first time: Detective Chief Inspector Ken Blackstone of the West Yorkshire Police, looking immaculate as ever, even in his protective clothing. Gray hair curled over his ears, and his wire-rimmed glasses magnified his sharp eyes.

“Alan,” he said, in a voice like a sigh. “Like a fucking abattoir, isn’t it?”

“A fine start to the week. When did you get here?”

“Four forty-four.”

Blackstone lived out Lawnswood way, and it wouldn’t have taken him more than half an hour to get to The Hill, if that. Banks, heading the North Yorkshire team, was glad that Blackstone was running West Yorkshire’s part of their joint operation, dubbed the “Chameleon” squad because the killer, thus far, had managed to adapt, blend into the night and go unnoticed. Often, working together involved ego problems and incompatible personalities, but Banks and Blackstone had known each other for eight or nine years and had always worked well together. They got on socially, too, with a mutual fondness for pubs, Indian food and female jazz singers.

“Have you talked to the paramedics?” Banks asked.

“Yes,” said Blackstone. “They said they checked the girl for signs of life and found none, so they left her undisturbed. PC Morrisey was dead, too. Terence Payne was handcuffed to the pipe over there. His head was badly beaten, but he was still breathing, so they carted him off to hospital sharpish. There’s been some contamination of the scene – mostly to the position of Morrisey’s body – but it’s minimal, given the unusual circumstances.”

“Trouble is, Ken, we’ve got two crime scenes overlapping here – maybe three, if you count what happened to Payne.” He paused. “Four, if you count Lucy Payne upstairs. That’ll cause problems. Where’s Stefan?” Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak was their Crime Scene Co-coordinator, new to the Western Division HQ in Eastvale, and brought into the team by Banks, who had been quickly impressed by his abilities. Banks didn’t envy Stefan his job right now.

“Around somewhere,” said Blackstone. “Last time I saw him, he was heading upstairs.”

“Anything more you can tell me, Ken?”

“Not much, really. That’ll have to wait until we can talk to PC Taylor in more detail.”

“When might that be?”

“Later today. The paramedics took her off. She’s being treated for shock.”

“I’m not bloody surprised. Have they-”

“Yes. They’ve bagged her clothes and the police surgeon’s been to the hospital to do the necessary.”

Which meant taking fingernail scrapings and swabs from her hands, among other things. One thing it was easy to forget – and a thing everyone might want to forget – was that, for the moment, probationary PC Janet Taylor wasn’t a hero; she was a suspect in a case of excessive use of force. Very nasty indeed.