Luke Delaney - Cold Killing

I moved quietly to the front door. I took the plastic bags off my shoes and looked through the peephole. Nobody about. Just to be sure, I listened at the door, careful not to let my ear press against it and possibly leave a mark, like a fingerprint, which I hear can happen.

When I was totally happy, I slipped out of the flat, leaving the front door open so as not to make any more noise than necessary. The statue of the Indian and the ice pick I threw in the Thames as I headed north to my hotel. The thought of the police wasting hours searching for weapons that wouldn’t help their investigation in the slightest pleased me.

When I reached my hotel I slipped in through the side door next to the bar, generally used only as a fire exit. I knew it could open from the outside and had no CCTV camera trained on it. I already had the key card for my room, having checked in earlier that day. I took a long shower, keeping the water as hot as I could bear, scrubbing skin, nails, and hair vigorously with a nailbrush until my entire body felt like it had been burned by flames. I had removed the plug cover to allow any items washed from my body to flow easily into London’s sewage system. After the shower I took a long steaming bath and scrubbed myself again. Once dry I lay naked on the bed and drank two bottles of water, at peace now. Satisfied. Soon sleep came and I dreamed the same beautiful dream over and over.

Thursday, late afternoon

Sean and Donnelly walked along the corridors of Guy’s Hospital, heading for the mortuary. They were accompanied by Detective Constable Sam Muir, who would be acting as exhibits officer-taking responsibility for any objects the pathologist found on or in the body during the postmortem. Sean wondered if he would bump into his wife, Kate, one of the all too few doctors attending to the never-ending flow of patients through the Accident and Emergency Department-the sick and injured from the surrounding areas of Southwark, Bermondsey, and beyond. Some of London’s poorest and most forgotten, living in public housing projects where violence and crime were seldom far away, all of their degradation and suffering going unnoticed and unseen by the swarms of tourists wandering around Tower Bridge and Tooley Street. If only they knew how close they were to some of London’s most dangerous territory.

His mind returned to the victim’s parents. He and Sally had called at the small town house in Putney. A desirable neighborhood on the whole, but boisterous on weekend evenings. Sally had done most of the talking.

Daniel had been their only child. The mother was devastated and didn’t care who saw her fall to the floor screaming. Her despair was a physical pain. When she could speak, all she could say was the name of her son.

The father was stunned. He didn’t know whether to help his wife or collapse himself. He ended up doing neither. Sean took him into the living room. Sally stayed with the mother.

They knew their son was gay. It had bothered the father at first, but he had grown to accept it. What else could he do other than push the boy away? And he would never do that. He said his son worked as a nightclub manager. He wasn’t sure where, but Daniel had been doing well for himself and had no money problems, unlike other young people.

He hadn’t met any of his son’s friends. Daniel hadn’t kept in touch with his old school friends. He came home quite often, almost every Sunday, for lunch. If he had a boyfriend then neither he nor his wife knew about it. Their son had said he wasn’t interested in anything like that. They hadn’t pressed him.

The father had asked what they were to do now. His wife would be finished. She lived for the boy, not him. He knew it and didn’t mind-but with the boy gone?

He wanted to know who would do this to his boy-who would do this to them? Why? Sean had no answers.

As the three detectives entered the mortuary they could see Dr. Simon Canning preparing for the postmortem. A body lay covered with a green sheet on what Sean knew would be a cold, metal operating table. Water continually ran under the body to an exit drain as the pathologist did his work, so that the whole thing resembled a large, shallow stainless-steel bathtub.

Some detectives could detach themselves from the ugly reality of postmortems, bury themselves in the science and art of the procedure. Unfortunately, Sean was not one of those detectives. For days to come images of his own postmortem would blend with the memories of his shattered childhood. Meanwhile Dr. Simon Canning was busy arranging his tools-bright, shiny metal instruments for torturing the dead.

“Afternoon, Detectives.”

“Doctor. Good to see you again,” Sean replied.

“I doubt that,” said the pathologist. Canning was pleasant enough, but businesslike and succinct. “I hope you don’t mind, Inspector. I’ve started without you. I was just having a bit of a cleanup before continuing. Right then, shall we get on with it?”

The doctor pulled back the sheet covering the body with one quick movement of his arm. Sean almost expected him to say, “ Voilà! ” like a waiter lifting the lid off a silver platter.

The hair on the back and side of the head was matted with blood-it looked sticky. Sean could clearly see the gashes in the side of the head and the small stab marks all over the naked body.

“Seventy-seven,” Canning told him.

Sean realized he was being spoken to. He glanced up at the doctor. “Sorry?”

“Separate stab wounds. Seventy-seven in total. None in the back of the body. All in the front. Made by some form of stiletto knife, or an ice pick, but it’s the first blow to the head that killed him. Eventually.”

Dr. Canning pointed to the head wound. Sean forced himself to lean closer to the body. “One can see the ear is missing. Not cut off, but more a case of the victim being hit so hard that whatever he was hit with crushed the skull and still had enough energy to tear the ear away as the swing of the object carried through.”

“Nice” was all Sean said.

“And the victim was on his knees when the first blow was struck,” the doctor continued. “We can see the cut to the scalp is angled downward, not upward. The killer swung low, not high.”

“Or he was hit from behind?” Sean offered.

“No,” Canning told him. “He fell backward, not forward. Look at the stains from the flow of blood. They run to the back of the head, not toward the face.”

He looked at the detectives, making sure they were concentrating on what he was saying and not what they were seeing. He had their attention.

“But that’s all straightforward. The interesting thing is the angle of the stab wounds. Bearing in mind of course that our friend here has wounds from his ankles to his throat, I can be almost positive the victim was already prostrate on the floor when he was stabbed. That in itself isn’t unusual.” The doctor paused to catch his breath before continuing his lecture. “The interesting bit is this-most of the stab wounds are at the wrong angle of entry. You see?”

“I’m not quite with you, Doctor.”

“It’s like this.” Canning looked around for a prop. He found a pair of scissors. “First, I know the killer is probably right-handed. The angle of the stab wounds tells me that, as does the fact the victim was hit on the left side of his head. Now, imagine I’m the killer. The victim can play himself. In order to stab somebody from head to toe, the killer would have to be at the side of the body. Not on top, as you would first imagine. If he sat astride the body then it would have been difficult to reach around and stab the thighs, the shins.” The doctor twisted his body back toward the victim’s feet so as to give a practical demonstration. His point was well made.