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Peter Robinson: Aftermath

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Peter Robinson Aftermath

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Number 35 The Hill is an ordinary house in an ordinary street. But it is about to become infamous. When two police constables are sent to the house following a report of a domestic disturbance, they stumble upon a truly horrific scene. A scene which leaves one of them dead and the other fighting for her life and career. The identity of a serial killer, the Chameleon, has finally been revealed. But his capture is only the beginning of a shocking investigation that will test Inspector Alan Banks to the absolute limit.

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“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.

“How does it look to you, Ken?” Banks asked. “Gut feeling.”

“As if they surprised Payne down here, cornered him. He came at them fast and somehow struck PC Morrisey with that.” He pointed to a bloodstained machete on the floor by the wall. “You can see Morrisey’s been slashed two or three times. PC Taylor must have had time enough to get her baton out and use it on Payne. She did the right thing, Alan. He must have been coming at her like a bloody maniac. She had to defend herself. Self-defense.”

“Not for us to decide,” said Banks. “What’s the damage to Payne?”

“Fractured skull. Multiple fractures.”

“Shame. Still, if he dies, it might save the courts a bit of money and a lot of grief in the long run. What about his wife?”

“Way it looks is he hit her with a vase on the stairs and she fell down. Mild concussion, a bit of bruising. Other than that, there’s no serious damage. She’s lucky it wasn’t heavy crystal or she might have been in the same boat as her husband. Anyway, she’s still out and they’re keeping an eye on her, but she’ll be fine. DC Hodgkins is at the hospital now.”

Banks looked around the room again, with its flickering candles, mirrors, and obscene cartoons. He noticed shards of glass on the mattress near the body and realized when he saw his own image in one of them that they were from a broken mirror. Seven years bad luck. Hendrix’s “Roomful of Mirrors” would never sound quite the same again.

The doctor looked up from his examination for the first time since Banks had entered the cellar, got up off his knees, and walked over to them. “Dr. Ian Mackenzie, Home Office pathologist,” he said, holding his hand out to Banks, who shook it.

Dr. Mackenzie was a heavily built man with a full head of brown hair, parted and combed, a fleshy nose, and a gap between his upper front teeth. Always a sign of luck, that, Banks remembered his mother once telling him. Maybe it would counteract the broken mirror. “What can you tell us?” Banks asked.

“The presence of petechial hemorrhages, bruising of the throat, and cyanosis all indicate death by strangulation, most likely ligature strangulation by that yellow clothesline around her throat, but I won’t be able to tell you for certain until after the postmortem.”

“Any evidence of sexual activity?”

“Some vaginal and anal tearing, what looks like semen stains. But you can see that for yourself. Again, I’ll be able to tell you more later.”

“Time of death?”

“Recent. Very recent. There’s hardly any hypostasis yet, rigor hasn’t started, and she’s still warm.”

“How long?”

“Two or three hours, at an estimate.”

Banks looked at his watch. Sometime after three, then, not long before the domestic dispute that drove the woman over the road to dial 999. Banks cursed. If the call had come in just a short while earlier, maybe only minutes or an hour, then they might have saved Kimberley. On the other hand, the timing was interesting for the questions it raised about the reasons for the dispute. “What about that rash around her mouth? Chloroform?”

“At a guess. Probably used in abducting her, maybe even for keeping her sedated, though there are much more pleasant ways.”

Banks glanced at Kimberley’s body. “I don’t think our man was overly concerned about being pleasant, do you, Doctor? Is chloroform easily available?”

“Pretty much. It’s used as a solvent.”

“But it’s not the cause of death?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. Can’t be absolutely certain until after the postmortem, of course, but if it is the cause, we’d expect to find more severe blistering in the esophagus, and there would also be noticeable liver damage.”

“When can you get to her?”

“Barring a motorway pileup, I should be able to schedule the postmortems to start this afternoon,” Dr. Mackenzie said. “We’re pretty busy as it is, but… well, there are priorities.” He looked at Kimberley, then at PC Morrisey. “He died of blood loss, by the looks of it. Severed both his carotid artery and jugular vein. Very nasty, but quick. Apparently his partner did what she could, but it was too late. Tell her she shouldn’t blame herself. Hadn’t a chance.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” said Banks. “Appreciate it. If you could do the PM on Kimberley first…”

“Of course.”

Dr. Mackenzie left to make arrangements, and Luke Selkirk and Faye McTavish continued to take photographs and video. Banks and Blackstone stood in silence taking in the scene. There wasn’t much more to see, but what there was wouldn’t vanish quickly from their memories.

“Where does that door over there lead to?” Banks pointed to a door in the wall beside the mattress.

“Don’t know,” said Blackstone. “Haven’t had a chance to look yet.”

“Let’s have a butcher’s, then.”

Banks walked over and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. Slowly, he opened the heavy wooden door to another, smaller room, this one with a dirt floor. The smell was much worse in there. He felt for an overhead light switch but couldn’t locate one. He sent Blackstone to get a torch and tried to make out what he could in the overspill of light from the main cellar.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room, Banks thought he could see little clumps of mushrooms growing here and there from the earth.

Then he realized…

“Oh, Christ,” he said, slumping back against the wall. The nearest clump wasn’t mushrooms at all, it was a cluster of human toes poking through the dirt.


After a quick breakfast and an interview with two police detectives about her 999 call, Maggie felt the urge to go for a walk. There wasn’t much chance of getting any work done for a while anyway, what with all the excitement over the road, though she knew she would try later. Right now, she was restless and needed to blow the cobwebs out. The detectives had stuck mostly to factual questions, and she hadn’t told them anything about Lucy, but she sensed that one of them, at least, didn’t seem satisfied with her answers. They would be back.

She still didn’t know what the hell was going on. The policemen who talked to her had given away nothing, of course, had not even told her how Lucy was, and the local news on the radio was hardly illuminating, either. All they could say at this stage was that a member of the public and a police officer had been injured earlier that morning. And that took second place to the ongoing story about the local girl, Kimberley Myers, who had vanished on her way home from a youth-club dance on Friday evening.

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