Michael White - The Art of Murder

Turner popped his head around the door and then came in. He was waving a print in front of his face. ‘Juliette Kinnear,’ he said, coming over. ‘Took some searching out.’

It was a professionally taken, posed photograph and showed a girl of about seventeen wearing a floral dress. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, parted to one side, a round, chubby face and thin lips. She was a plain girl. Her best feature was a pair of deep blue eyes, but even the effect of these was nullified by thick brows. At first glance she looked quite prim. It was only when he looked closer that Pendragon noticed the tattoo of a rose on one side of her neck, close to her shoulder. ‘Strange,’ he said.

‘What? The tat?’

‘Yes. Completely incongruous. She looks every bit the rather plain daughter of a wealthy businessman posing for a family portrait, except for that tattoo.’

‘Yeah, but knowing what we do about young Juliette, it’s not that weird, is it, sir? She obviously had a rebellious streak. I bet there was a right barney over her wearing a dress that exposed the rose tattoo!’ Turner concluded with a laugh.

‘Yes,’ Pendragon replied quietly, still staring at the photograph. ‘Maybe.’ Then he looked up. ‘Anything from the CCTV?’

‘Yep,’ Turner replied, suddenly remembering. ‘Grant’s found something.’ He withdrew a DVD from his pocket, slid it into the machine and pulled over a chair beside Pendragon’s.

The screen lit up with a frosty pre-dawn grey sky. At the top ran a line of trees. A narrow tarmac path wound through them and then followed a vertical line down the centre of the image.

‘That’s the park close to the church,’ Pendragon said. ‘What’s a camera doing there?’

‘It’s a Parks Department camera. They’ve just finished some maintenance work and put the CCTV up to deter vandals.’ As he finished explaining, a green vehicle appeared among the trees and drove towards the camera through the gloom. Its lights were off, and in the semi-darkness it merged with the landscape, taking shape only gradually. It was a boxy machine perched on four small wheels: a cherry-picker. Dominating the front of the vehicle was a rectangular metal cage attached to a concertinaed steel arm that was folded up tightly. Inside the cage lay a cylindrical grey object. At the rear of the vehicle was a small, low-roofed cabin. They could just see someone seated inside it, guiding the cherry-picker along. But in the dark, it was impossible to make out any further details.

‘Can you enhance that?’ Pendragon asked.

‘I’ll try,’ Turner replied, and ran his fingers over a control panel to one side of the desk. The picture vanished for a second. When it reappeared it was clearer.

‘Good. Close in on the figure in the cabin.’

Turner let the film run for a few seconds then rewound it, finally settling on the best frame. He pushed Pause again and turned a dial on the control panel. The image of the cabin grew larger, but as it did so it lost clarity. Turner fiddled with other controls and the image cleared a little. He zoomed in some more.

‘That’s about the best I can do,’ he said after a moment.

The image was indistinct. They could still see a figure in the cabin but it was completely featureless, little more than a grey blob.

Pendragon’s mobile rang. ‘Dr Jones,’ he said. ‘Yes. When would be a good time? Excellent. See you then.’ He stood up and pulled his overcoat from the chair back. ‘Come on,’ he said to Turner.

‘Where’re we going?’

‘The Forensics Lab in Lambeth. Jones and Newman have put their heads together and apparently have some interesting news for us.’

The traffic was appalling. Pendragon’s parking permit bought them a space but it was a hundred metres from the Forensics Lab along Lambeth Road. Even running through the freezing drizzle, by the time they reached the front of the three-storey modern building, they were wet and chilled to the bone.

‘Did you know, sir,’ Turner remarked, wiping his forehead and following the DCI to the reception desk, ‘there’s a theory that running in the rain gets you wetter than walking?’

‘Really, Turner? How incredibly fascinating.’ Pendragon turned to the receptionist and showed his ID. The girl printed them each a pass which she slipped into plastic wallets. The policemen attached them to their jackets. ‘Dr Newman is working in Lab B103,’ the receptionist said. ‘Probably best to take the stairs.’ And she pointed towards a row of lifts and a broad stone stairwell to their left.

One flight down, the stairs opened out on to a wide corridor painted a calming shade of green. Anaemic pictures of flowers and birds hung along one wall. The other was taken up by a row of double doors spaced about twenty feet apart. Each was painted dark green with a number at head-height; 103 was around the first bend in the corridor. Pendragon depressed a buzzer to the right of the door. A few moments later, Colette Newman appeared and ushered them into the lab.

It was a huge room, brightly lit and dominated by a large stainless-steel bench at its centre. The two policemen crossed the echoing floor. Pendragon nodded to Dr Jones who was leaning over the remains of Noel Thursk.

‘We use this lab for special cases,’ Dr Newman said. ‘And I think you’ll agree, Chief Inspector, that this is definitely a special case.’

Pendragon stared down at the flattened corpse. He had seen it in the grounds of St Dunstan’s and when it had been brought down from the tree, but here, in the harsh neon glare and placed on a square, steel-topped bench, it had somehow lost the last vestiges of humanity he had associated with it. That helped. Turner, meanwhile, was standing very quietly beside him, unable to take his eyes from the gruesome sight.

‘So what have you found?’ Pendragon asked the two experts.

‘Well, as you can see, the body has been reduced to something amorphous, which means any normal procedures are pretty redundant,’ Jones said, rubbing his beard. ‘But fortunately Dr Newman has some very sophisticated machinery which is perfectly suited to studying flattened bodies,’ he concluded.

‘We did a succession of hi-res X-rays,’ she explained. ‘And then used a type of MRI, similar to the procedure employed in neurology units in hospitals.’ She led the three men to the far wall, depressed a switch, and a panel two metres long and a metre high lit up. She then removed a sheaf of transparencies from a drawer and pinned them to the light screen. ‘These are the detailed X-rays,’ she said, pointing to a collection on the left. ‘And these are the MRI stills.’ She indicated a clutch of rectangles on the right.

Newman stepped back and Jones ran his fingers close to the images. ‘You’ll notice that although the body has been flattened to a thickness of a couple of centimetres, the arrangement of the internal structure has been retained.’ He pointed to an image of the entire corpse. ‘Here are the arms, legs and torso.’ The body parts were only vaguely recognisable, the bones shattered into hundreds of pieces or powdered completely, organs flattened and stretched obscenely.

‘So what does that tell us about the way it was done?’ Pendragon asked, turning first to Newman and then to Jones.

‘It’s clear from these images that the flattening was not done by a pounding machine or a large punch.’

‘How do you know that?’ Turner interjected.

Dr Newman pointed to the periphery of the image Jones had referred to. ‘There are no overlapping edges,’ she said. ‘Try to visualise someone placing a body on a punching machine — something like the devices they use in factories to knock out metal shapes from steel sheets, for example. Every time the punch lands, it makes an edge. We would see an irregular arrangement of those edges around the periphery, here.’ She indicated the extremities of the body with her finger. ‘It would be a bit like kneading dough. You’d get a repeat pattern around the edge. But this body was worked flat either by being passed through a set of rollers or by being run over repeatedly with a steamroller.’