Mark Pearson - Hard Evidence

'After that. I left her at the gate.'

'But you normally walk home together, don't you?'

Carol didn't answer, and Delaney looked at her mother, the question in a bent eyebrow. Abigail Parks put an arm, defensively, around her daughter's shoulder.

'It's not far. They walk together. The school is only around the corner.'

Sally smiled at Carol again. 'But you didn't walk home together on Monday?'

Carol considered for a moment and then looked down at the ground, shaking her head.

'Why not?'

'She wanted to wait behind.'

'In the playground?'

Carol slid her eyes off to the left, not looking at Sally. 'Yes.'

Delaney stepped closer. 'Why, Carol? Why would she do that? What aren't you telling us?'

'Nothing. I told you, I don't know anything!'

She burst into tears and Delaney sighed. Kids were born liars, every single one of them. But they weren't very good at it.

Sally knelt down and took her hand.

'It's okay, Carol. It's just very urgent we find Jenny. We need to find her quickly and make sure she's safe. You do understand that, don't you?'

Carol nodded, but still wouldn't look at Sally, shaking her head as she gazed at the floor. 'I don't know where she is.'

Her mother patted her on the head. 'It's okay, poppet.' She nodded apologetically to Delaney. 'I'm sorry we couldn't be of any help.'

Delaney nodded back, frustrated, and handed her a card. 'Speak to her; if there's anything she can tell you, get in touch as soon as you can.'

'Of course.'

Delaney pulled the door behind him as he left and strode angrily to his car. DC Cartwright, following behind, knew better than to try and engage him in conversation. As he opened his car door he looked across at her. 'She was lying to us, Sally.'

'I think so too, sir.'

'About what, though?'

Sally shrugged. Delaney sighed and got into his car. If people just told them what they needed to know, their jobs would be a whole lot easier. Then again, if people just told the truth they would all be out of a job. A whole lot of people would be.

A short while later, Delaney pulled his car to a stop back in the White City police station car park and looked across to see Bonner watching Collier walk away from the building. He locked the door behind him and crossed angrily over to the sergeant.

'I thought I told you to hold him.'

'He insisted, guv. There was nothing we could do.'

'For now, maybe.'

'Did you get anything from the girl?'

'She said she left Jenny at the school. They didn't walk home together.'

'So our English teacher has been telling porkies?'

Delaney shrugged. 'Maybe.'

'Something else?'

Sally nodded. 'We got the impression that there was something Carol Parks wasn't telling us.'

Delaney watched as Collier walked through the front gates and out of sight.

Bonner shrugged apologetically. 'We had nothing to hold him on. Uniform have been all over his house.'

'And?'

'Like I say. Nothing.'

Delaney scowled. His instincts had Collier in the frame somehow but he couldn't pursue the thought further as Morgan walked up to the entrance with his brother Jake.

Sally gestured to the building. 'You coming in?'

Delaney looked across through the clear glass of the entrance doors to see Superintendent Walker plastering a look of concern and solicitude on his smooth face and shaking hands with the Morgan brothers with as much sincerity as a second-hand car salesman. His scowl deepened. 'I've got to be somewhere. Bonner, you're with me.'

Sally nodded and would have asked more, but Delaney had already turned and was striding purposefully away from the building.

There was something fitting, Delaney thought, about a pathology lab being housed in the basement of a large Victorian building. The Victorians' twin fascinations with death and science going together like a horse and carriage. A black horse, obviously, with black feathers dancing from its head, pulling in its wake a black hearse with a black coffin inside.

Delaney ran his hands along the cold surface of the original white tiles and seemed to draw some strange comfort from them. He looked across at the mortuary table. A place of steel and blood, a place of obscene evisceration and exposure. The human Rubik's cube of a body snapped apart and disassembled to discover its secrets.

Jackie Malone was laid out on the table. Her body violated in life on a voluntary basis was about to be violated in death. A penetration by steel that she neither profited from nor had any choice over.

Kate Walker picked up an electric rotary saw and nodded as Delaney and Bonner approached.

'Sorry to keep you waiting.'

'She's not going anywhere.' Kate flicked the switch and the loud burr of the saw filled the room, bouncing off its antique tiles and setting a resonant tremor in Delaney's bones. He threw a sardonic look at Bonner.

'You wondered what kind of twist likes to cut dead people up, Eddie.'

Kate fixed him with a defiant stare. 'I guess that's why you and me are different, Cowboy. I like to do things, you just like to watch.' She cut short any reply from Delaney by flipping down her goggles and lowering the blade of the saw. The throaty whine replaced by a keening whistle as it tore through flesh and sinew and bit into the bone of Jackie Malone's ribcage.

Delaney looked away. He'd been to hundreds of post-mortems but never to one where he had known the victim. Not like he had known Jackie Malone.

Time passed. Organs were removed, weighed, examined. The host structure that had once held Jackie Malone was rendered to its component parts. Flesh, blood, bone and sinew. If there was a soul once attached it wasn't there now, at least not one visible to scientific eyes.

Delaney looked across as Kate snapped off her latex gloves and dropped them in the bin. He didn't have to ask the question.

'Pretty much as I suspected at the murder scene. Death due to asphyxiation. She choked on her own vomit.'

Bonner cracked a cold smile. 'Whose elses would it be?'

'Give it a rest, Bonner.' Delaney was in no mood for graveside humour any more.

'Her injuries were received post-mortem in the main. The serious ones at least.'

Delaney nodded, the relief palpable. 'Any useful semen?'

Kate paused for a moment at his choice of words but let it pass; she didn't joke in front of the dead. 'Traces of lubricant in both the vaginal and anal passages. A lubricant consistent with those used in standard condoms, a hundred varieties.'

'Not unusual, then?' Bonner asked.

'No. Especially not given the nature of her occupation.'

Bonner shook his head, puzzled. 'Sex crime. All that passion, rage… yet they still have the control to put a condom on.'

Delaney frowned. 'I blame television.'

Kate looked across at him, but he wasn't joking.

'Everybody knows too much these days, don't they?'

Kate agreed. 'About everything.'

Howard Morgan's face filled the TV screen. The livid scar running from neck to eyeline on his left side made more lurid by the leaking colours of the old television set.

Abigail Parks thumbed the remote control so that she could hear his words.

'We just want you to come home. You're not in any trouble.' His voice was stiff, halting, his eyes skittering nervously to the left, where unseen by the camera DC Sally Cartwright mouthed the words to him.

Abigail looked across at her daughter, who was watching the television with restrained nervous tension.

'If you are watching this. Just call us. Please.'

Morgan's ravaged face was rendered both wide-and small-screen in department stores throughout the capital. But few people stopped to hear what the scarred man was saying. Few people cared.