Lynda La Plante: Prime Suspect

“You little bitch! I knew you were in here!”

For all her weight, the landlady moved swiftly across the room and crouched down to grip Della’s exposed ankle. With her other hand she threw the bedclothes aside. Her mouth opened to scream, but no sound came; she lost her balance and fell, landing on her backside. In a panic she crawled to the door, dragging herself up by the open drawer of a tallboy. Bottles and pots of make-up crashed to the floor as her scream finally surfaced. Mrs. Salbanna screamed and screamed…

By the time Detective Chief Inspector John Shefford arrived the house in Milner Road, Gray’s Inn, had been cordoned off. He was the last on the scene; two patrol cars were parked outside the house and uniformed officers were fending off the sightseers. An ambulance stood close by, its doors open, its crew sitting inside, drinking tea. The mortuary van was just drawing up and had to swerve out of the way as Shefford’s car screeched to a halt just where its driver had intended to park. Shefford’s door crashed open as he yanked on the handbrake. He was on the move, delving into his pocket for his ID as he stepped over the cordon. A young PC, recognizing him, ushered him up the steps to the house.

Even at two thirty on a wintry Sunday morning, word had got round that a murder had been committed. There were lights in many windows; people in dressing-gowns huddled on their front steps. A couple of kids had appeared and were vying with each other to see how close they could get to the police cordon without breaking through it. Five Rastafarians with a ghetto-blaster were laughing together on a nearby wall, calling out remarks and jokes, as if it was a street party.

Shefford, a bear of a man at six foot two, dwarfed those around him. He had been notorious on the rugby field in the late seventies, when he played for England. With his curly hair standing on end, his crumpled shirt and tie hanging loose he didn’t look or feel in a fit state to start an investigation. He had been hauled out of the celebration bash at the end of a long and tedious murder case, and he was knackered. Now he was about to lead the investigation of another murder, but this one was different.

Many of the officers in the dark, crowded hallway he had worked with before. He scanned the faces as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. He never forgot a face, and he greeted each man he knew by name.

At the foot of the stairs he hesitated a moment, straightening his tie. It wasn’t like him to shrink from an unpleasant duty, but he had to force himself to mount each step. He was sweating. Above the confusion of voices a high-pitched wailing could be heard. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the basement.

Hearing Shefford’s voice, Detective Sergeant Bill Otley stopped pacing the landing and leaned over the banister. He gestured for his guv’nor to join him in the darkness at the far end of the landing. He kept his voice low and his eye on the men coming and going from the victim’s room.

“It’s Della Mornay, guv. I got the tip-off from Al Franks.”

He could smell the booze on Shefford’s breath. Unwrapping a peppermint, he handed it over. The boss wasn’t drunk; he probably had been, but he was straightening out fast. Then Otley shook out a pair of white overalls for each of them. While they struggled to put them on, their dark recess was lit at intervals by the powerful flash of a camera from the efficiency.

As Shefford dragged on a cigarette he became aware of a familiar low, gruff voice that had been droning on all the time he had been in the house. He moved towards the door and listened.

“… She’s lying next to the double bed, on the side nearest the window and away from the door. She’s half-hidden beneath a red silk eiderdown. The window is open, a chest of drawers in front of it. We have a sheet, a blanket, a copy of the Sunday Times dated December 1990… Looks like it’s been used to wrap something in. She’s lying face down, hands tied behind her back. Wearing some kind of skinny-rib top, mini-skirt, no stockings. The right shoe is on the foot, the left one lying nearby…”

“She been raped?” Shefford asked Otley as he fastened his overall.

“I dunno, but it’s a mess in there.”

Mrs. Salbanna’s hysterical screaming and sobbing was getting on Shefford’s nerves. He leaned over the banister and had a clear view of DC Dave Jones on the basement stairs trying to calm the landlady. An ambulance attendant tried to help move her, but she turned on him with such a torrent of mingled Spanish and English with violent gestures that he retreated, fearing for his safety.

The pathologist was ready to talk, so Shefford and Otley were given the nod to enter the room. Shefford took a last pull at his cigarette, inhaled deeply and pinched it out, putting the stub in his pocket. Then he eased past the mess of broken bottles of make-up and perfume, careful where he put his size eleven feet, to stand a little distance from the bed. All he could see of Della was her left foot.

The brightly lit room was full of white-overalled men, all going about their business quickly and quietly. Flashlights still popped, but already items were being bagged and tagged for removal. The bulky figure of Felix Norman, the pathologist, crouched over the corpse, carefully slipping plastic bags over Della’s hands. He was a rotund man, oddly pear-shaped with most of his weight in his backside, topped off with a shock of thick, gray hair and an unruly gray beard. Rumor had it that his half-moon spectacles had been held together by the same piece of sticking plaster since 1983, when a corpse he was dissecting suddenly reared up and thumped him. But it was just a rumor, started by Norman himself. It was his voice Shefford had heard muttering into a tape recorder.

He looked up and gave Shefford a small wave, but continued dictating. “Obvious head injuries… possible penetrating wounds, through her clothes, her neck, upper shoulders… Lot of blood-staining, blood covering the left side of her head and face. Room’s damned cold, about five degrees…” Norman broke into a coughing fit, but he didn’t bother turning the tape off. He bent over the lower end of the corpse, but Shefford could not see what he was doing. Then he glanced at his watch and continued, “Say two to three degrees when she was found, the lights and everybody tramping around must have warmed the place.” He winked at Shefford, still talking. “Window half-open, curtains part-drawn, no source of heat… Door to landing giving a strong draft, front door had been left open…” He felt the corpse’s arms and legs, examined the scalp, then began checking for a weapon or anything lodged in the clothing that might fall when the body was removed, without pausing for breath. “Complete absence of rigor, no hypostasis visible…” Again he bent over the body, then sat back, waving a thermometer. He squinted at it. “Deep rectal temperature… Can’t bloody read it for the life of me… Ah, time is two thirty-eight a.m., thirty-five point eight degrees, so assuming she started at thirty-seven that puts it back to…”

Shefford shifted his weight from foot to foot and swallowed hard. As Norman gently rolled the body over he could see the blood matted in the blond hair, and he had to turn away. It wasn’t the sight of the blood, he had seen enough of that in his time, but how small she seemed, small and broken.

Two white-clad men moved in to examine the carpet where the dead girl had been lying. Norman had another coughing fit and Shefford took the opportunity to ask how long she had been dead.

“Well, my old son, she would have cooled off pretty quickly in here, with that window open an’ no heating on… Any time between midnight, maybe a little later, and… at a rough guess, twelve thirty.”