Lee Weeks - Kiss and Die

‘What did she look like?’ Mia was exasperated. Her frown line had gained extra depth. ‘Mann, talk to me. This girl you had back here last night, what did she look like?’

Mann shook his head. ‘I didn’t get a good look at her. She’d left by morning.’

‘That good, huh? Bloody hell, you’re a liability at the moment. You’re going out of your way to mess up. What the hell do you think you were doing getting blind drunk and picking up women when we are in the middle of a murder investigation and one, may I add, in which your operative, your officer, Tammy Wang, was killed? Does it mean shit to you, Mann?’ Mia was too fuming now to stay any longer. ‘Take the head down to Saheed. This is your baby, Mann. This is all yours. You messed up, you clean up and then I want you in my office with a full report on my desk. I want that girl found. I want her DNA off those sheets, Daniel. Mann, you are a walking disaster at the moment.’

The men said nothing after Mia left. Mann finished getting dressed. The whole of his flat seemed to be being taken for evidence. All he was left with was the piles of his father’s life-the one thing he didn’t want. Daniel came to find him in the kitchen. Mann was holding on to the edge of the sink, head bowed, trying not to throw up.

‘You can get this down for Saheed to look at now. He’s ready to do the autopsy. We’ll be a while longer here. It’s better that you leave us to get on with it.’

Mann nodded. ‘Where’s Sheng?’

Daniel Lu shook his head and shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. He hasn’t been seen since yesterday.’ He picked up his key to leave. ‘And you better get your locks changed, Mann. If it wasn’t your mysterious woman then someone else went to a lot of trouble to leave this here.’

Mann sat in the car park and rested his head on the steering wheel. The head was on ice in a box on the backseat. Kin Tak tapped on his window.

‘Inspector?’

Mann nodded, pulled his keys from the ignition and opened the door. ‘Sorry.’ He clutched his bottle of mineral water as if it were his leash on the world. He’d sat outside in his car until he felt ready. He hadn’t had the stomach for it ten minutes earlier. They crossed the gravel path carrying the box. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

Mr Saheed was business as usual. ‘Hello again, Inspector.’

Kin Tak unpacked the head and placed it in a stand on the autopsy table.

‘His name is Peter Thorne. He’s a forty-five-year-old businessman from the UK,’ said Mann.

Saheed made an incision in the scalp from behind the ear, around the back of the head to the other ear. Then he peeled the scalp away from the top of the head and placed it over Peter Thorne’s face. Saheed talked to Mann as he worked. ‘We have already established that the head was removed after death.’ He looked at Mann over his bifocals. ‘Moved to your apartment, I hear. You should try not to take your work home with you, Inspector. A fine-bladed chopper was used to sever the spine between the third and fourth vertebrae.’

Kin Tak fetched a small electric saw and pressed the button to start it. It buzzed and whined like a dentist’s drill but louder, much louder, as it cut through the bone. Mann clenched his teeth. The sound was like nails down a blackboard. The smell of burning bone filled his nose. He swallowed. He squeezed the plastic bottle of water without even realizing he had. It cracked as it popped in his hand as it expanded again. Kin Tak took a small hammer and chisel and dislodged the portion of skull that he had sawn through. There was a sound like a boot being freed from sticky mud. He laid the top half of the skull to one side and began stripping the membrane with a pair of pliers. Kin Tak reached inside and extracted the brain.

‘We will leave that cooking for a few days,’ Saheed said as he placed the brain in a bucket of formalin. ‘I can’t dissect till it toughens up. I will let you know what I find from the swabs in the mouth and the fluid tests. They will tell us whether there are drug traces. But I can confirm that the same blade has been used in this case as in the others. Inspector, are you listening? Are you all right?’

Mann shook his head, he took a swig of water. ‘I have to go.’

Mia was waiting for Mann when he got back from the autopsy.

‘Saheed confirms, it’s the same killer.’ He looked at her face and looked away. She was pale: angry, upset, disappointed, the adjectives went on and on. Mann knew that he couldn’t keep Lilly a secret, and he didn’t intend to, but first he had to work out what had happened before it was too late.

‘And the same killer that was in your bedroom. I am going to have a hard job from stopping Sheng breaking out the champagne. How do you think it reflects on the rest of us? We are supposed to be a team, Mann, have you forgotten that?’

Mann tried to focus on what she was saying but his mind kept coming back to the thing that felt more immediate, more gruesome than anything else right now. Was what Lilly had said true? Christ, could he have done it? Could he have had sex with Lilly? He shook his head. He didn’t remember. How had they ended up back at his flat? He didn’t remember anything.

‘You listening, Mann?’

Mann nodded.

‘Someone went to a lot of trouble to plant that head in your apartment, why did they do that?’

‘The perp gets off on that. She loves the thrill. She doesn’t care any more. For some reason she doesn’t care about her own life. She doesn’t use a condom. She doesn’t care about leaving her DNA. She’s left traces of herself everywhere.’

‘It’s all linked to you, Mann.’

Mann looked across at Shrimp and Ng. Mann could see by their faces that even they were beginning to wonder what was going on in his head.

‘Who was Peter Thorne to you?’

‘He was a man I met in a bar, the night I found Max Kosmos’s body. There is nothing more for me to say, Boss.’

‘Why you?’ Mia crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. ‘It has to be someone with a personal grudge against you for some reason. It could be a past girlfriend of yours, Mann.’

‘I’ve dated my share of nutters but I don’t remember one who had all the makings of a serial killer.’

‘The head could have been brought in by someone posing as your cleaner, Genghis. When we went to your apartment the other day the doorman said the cleaner had just left but she hadn’t cleaned, had she?’

Mann shook his head. ‘I’ve already talked to the man on the desk. He doesn’t know one cleaner from another and this isn’t his usual block. They work a rota. The way he described her it could have been anyone. Anyway, I cancelled my cleaner and I left instructions at the desk telling them not to allow anyone in to my apartment, not my cleaner or anyone else.’

Mia shook her head and ran her hand back through her hair to scrape back the few strands that had fallen down from their clasp. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny. I’m under pressure, that’s all. We all are.’ She turned to Ng. ‘Did Thorne have any connection to the Leung Corporation?’

‘No. He had never worked for them.’

‘Or to Mann?’

‘No.’

‘We know Victoria Chan is out to get you. She has the power. She has the contacts.’

Mann shook his head. ‘I certainly wouldn’t rule her out of this. But murder? I can’t see her getting her hands dirty.’

‘Oh, I can. I can see her bathing in virgin’s blood and using testicles for earrings,’ said Mia. ‘She’s as ruthless as they come. And you still don’t remember who she was you were with last night?’

Shrimp’s eyes darted back and forth and always back towards Mann. He ran the pencil through his fingers like a cheerleader’s baton, a nervous tic.