Michael Robotham - Suspect

Turning on the car radio, she signals that she doesn't want to talk. I lean back in the passenger seat and listen to Phil Collins singing "Another Day in Paradise."

I first set eyes on Elisa in a grotty interview room at a children's home in Brentford in the mid-eighties. I had just been accepted as a trainee clinical psychologist with the West London Health Authority.

She walked in, sat down and lit a cigarette without acknowledging I was there. She was only fifteen years old, yet had a fluid grace and certainty of movement that caught the eye and held it for too long.

With one elbow propped on the table and her cigarette held a few inches from her mouth, she stared past me to a window high on the wall. Smoke curled into her unruly fringe of hair. Her nose had been broken at some point and a front tooth was chipped. Periodically she ran her tongue across the jagged edge.

Elisa had been rescued from a "trick pad"-a temporary brothel set up in the basement of a derelict house. The doors had been rigged so they couldn't be opened from the inside. She and another adolescent prostitute were imprisoned for three days and raped by dozens of men who were offered sex with underage girls.

A judge had placed her into care, but Elisa spent most of her time trying to escape from the children's home. She was too old to be placed with a foster family and too young to live on her own.

In that first meeting she looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. She was accustomed to dealing with men. Men could be manipulated.

She shrugged and crossed her legs, smoothing her hands along her thighs.

"How old are you now, Elisa?"

"You know that already," she said, motioning to the file in my hands. "I can wait while you read it, if you like." She was teasing me.

"Where are your parents?"

"Dead, hopefully."

According to the file notes Elisa had been living with her mother and stepfather in Leeds when she ran away from home just after her fourteenth birthday.

Most of her answers were the bare minimum-why use two words when one will do? She sounded cocky and indifferent, but I knew she was hurting. Eventually I managed to get under her skin. "How the hell can you know so little?" she yelled, her eyes glistening with emotion.

It was time to take a risk.

"You think you're a woman, don't you? You think you know how to manipulate men like me. Well, you're wrong! I'm not a walking fifty quid note looking for a blow job or a quick fuck in a back lane. Don't waste my time. I've got more important places to be."

Anger flared in her eyes and then disappeared as they misted over. She started crying. For the first time she looked and acted her age. The story came tumbling out, in between her sobs.

Her stepfather, a successful businessman in Leeds, had made a lot of money buying flats and doing them up. He was a real catch for a single mum like Elisa's. It meant they could move out of their council flat and into a proper house with a garden. Elisa had her own room. She went to grammar school.

One night when she was twelve, her stepfather came to her room. "This is what grown-ups do," he said, putting her legs over his shoulders and his hand over her mouth.

"He was nice to me after that," she said. "He used to buy me clothes and makeup."

This went on for two years until Elisa became pregnant. Her mother called her a slut and demanded to know the name of the father. She stood over her, waiting for an answer and Elisa glimpsed her stepfather in the doorway. He ran his forefinger across his throat.

She ran away. In the pocket of her school blazer she had the name of an abortion clinic in south London. At the clinic she met a nurse in her mid-forties with a kind face. Her name was Shirley and she offered Elisa a place to stay while she recuperated.

"Hold on to your school uniform."

"Why?"

"It might come in handy."

Shirley was a mother figure to half a dozen teenage girls and they all loved her. She made them feel safe.

"Her son was a real dickhead," said Elisa. "He slept with a shotgun under his bed and he thought he could have sex with any of us. Wanker! The first time Shirley took me out to work, she was saying, 'Go on, you can do it.' I was standing on Bayswater Road wearing my school uniform. 'It's OK, just ask them if they want a girl,' she said. I didn't want to disappoint Shirley. I knew she'd be angry.

"Next time she took me out, I did some hand jobs, but I couldn't do the sex. I don't know why. It took me three months. I was getting too tall for my school uniform, but Shirley said I had the legs to get away with it. I was her Little Pot of Gold."

Elisa didn't call the men she slept with "punters." She didn't like any suggestion that they were gambling with their money. She was a sure thing. And she didn't treat them with contempt, even if many were cheating on their wives, fiancees and girlfriends. This was purely business-a simple commercial transaction-she had something to sell and they wanted to buy it.

As the months went by she became desensitized. She had a new family now. Then one day a rival pimp snatched her off the street. He wanted her for a one-off engagement, he said. He locked her in the basement of a house and collected money at the door from the men who queued up. A river of skin, of all different colors, flowed across her body and leaked inside her. "I was their Little White Fuck-toy," she said, as she stubbed out another cigarette.

"And now you're here."

"Where nobody knows what to do with me."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want to be left alone."

The first law of the National Health Service is that dead wood floats. It is part of the culture. If somebody is incompetent or hard to get along with, promotion is an easier option than sacking.

The duty supervisor at Westminster Mortuary is bald and thickset with pouchy jowls. He takes an instant dislike to me.

"Who told you to come here?"

"I'm meeting Detective Inspector Ruiz."

"I haven't been told. Nobody made an appointment."

"Can I wait for him?"

"No. Only family of the deceased are allowed in the waiting room."

"Where can I wait?"

"Outside."

I catch his sour smell and notice the sweat stains under his arms. He has probably worked all night and is doing overtime. He's tired and he's cranky. I normally have sympathy for shift workers-in the same way that I feel sorry for loners and fat girls who never get asked to dance. It must be a lousy job looking after dead people but that's no reason to be rude to the living.

I'm just about to say something when Ruiz arrives. The supervisor begins his spiel again, but Ruiz isn't in the mood to be lectured by a low-ranking mortuary manager with delusions of power. He leans across the desk.

"Listen you jumped up little shit! I see a dozen cars parked on expired meters outside. You're going to be real popular with your workmates when we put a boot on them."

A few minutes later I'm following Ruiz along narrow corridors with strip lights on the ceiling and painted cement floors. Occasionally we pass doors with frosted glass windows. One of them is open. I glance inside and see a stainless steel table in the center of the room with a central channel leading to a drain. Halogen lights are suspended from the ceiling, alongside microphone leads.

Farther along the corridor, we come across three lab technicians in green medical scrubs standing around a coffee machine. None of them looks up.

Ruiz walks fast and talks slowly. "The body was found at eleven on Sunday morning, buried in a shallow ditch. Fifteen minutes earlier an anonymous call was made from a pay phone a quarter of a mile away. The caller claimed his dog had dug up a hand."

We push through double Plexiglas doors and dodge a trolley being pushed by an orderly. A white calico sheet covers what I imagine to be a body. A box of test tubes full of blood and urine is balanced on top of the torso.