Bolton, J. - Now You See Me

Curious, I followed. I heard the sound of something heavy landing on soft ground, as though he’d jumped from a height. He reappeared just as I arrived at the rear door.

‘Shed key?’ he asked, holding out one hand.

Knowing there was no point arguing, I told him where he’d find it, tucked away on the shed roof. I watched him walk up the path, open the shed and disappear inside. In my head, I was counting, ten, nine. At six he came out again, staring straight at me, his hands raised. The word was hardly necessary, but he said it anyway.

‘What?’

‘Keeps me fit,’ I replied. ‘Davina McCall swears by it.’

I didn’t give him time to point out that Davina McCall probably didn’t dress her punchbag as a man. I turned and walked back through the flat. He’d seen everything. From the living room, I heard him lock the conservatory door. Then he reappeared. He stopped in the archway between living room and bedroom.

‘First of all, I have never seen a woman’s flat like this in my life before,’ he said. ‘Christ, Flint, don’t you even have a teddy?’

He was a senior officer, we were now officially part of the same team and, in his eyes at least, he was doing me a favour. I was going to stay calm. ‘Goodnight, DI Joesbury,’ I replied. ‘Thank you for your help.’ I was standing in front of the hearth. I wasn’t moving till he was out of there.

He wasn’t moving either. ‘Second, you can’t stay here by yourself,’ he said. ‘Tully will have my innards for breakfast.’

Stay calm. ‘I’ve lived here quite safely for five years, the doors will be locked and, in the circumstances, I’d rather you didn’t talk about innards,’ I said.

Joesbury’s lips twitched again. He held up his left hand and with his right started counting off splayed fingers. ‘One, there is a gate leading directly into the alley outside,’ he said. ‘I managed to get over it with a buggered shoulder. Two, the conservatory door has half rotted away and a good push would send it flying. Three, your front door has a Yale lock that I could open with my credit card in ten seconds. You don’t even have a chain on it.’ He stopped, dropped his hands and shook his head at me. ‘This is south London,’ he went on. ‘Even without a maniac on the loose, do you have a death wish?

Probably, was the nearest I could get to an honest answer, but not one I was about to articulate. ‘I’ll put a chair against the door and I’ll sleep with my phone,’ I said. ‘Now, will you please excuse—’

‘I’m going to need that phone,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort you out with a new one tomorrow. Right, have you got a blanket?’

‘What?’

‘I’m sleeping on the sofa.’

‘Over my dead … no, absolutely not, get out of here.’

He crossed to the sofa and began pushing his fists into the cushions to plump them up. ‘Tully can probably have you transferred to a safe house tomorrow,’ he said, picking up two loose cushions and arranging them to act as pillows at one end of the sofa. ‘At least until we can get some decent locks installed here,’ he went on. ‘We can get an alarm rigged up to the station.’

‘Do you not understand the English language?’

‘Any chance of a spare toothbrush?’ he said, pulling off his jacket and sitting down. He was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt and had the faintest vaccination scar just below his right shoulder. Heavily muscled arms.

‘You’re not staying here.’

‘Flint, I’m tired.’ The bastard was actually taking off his shoes. ‘Stop wittering and go to bed.’

‘I can’t sleep if you’re in the next room,’ I snapped back, before I had a second to think about the consequences of admitting something so … oh my God.

Stalemate. Joesbury looked up at me. Then he stood. I took a step back and almost fell over the hearth stones. Oh no. Of all the men in the world, not this one .

‘Any point suggesting I don’t have to be in the next room?’ he asked me in a voice that was barely audible. I wasn’t even going to think about it. I shook my head.

Joesbury continued to stare at me for a moment. Then he looked at his watch and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘Didn’t think so,’ he said.

Fifteen minutes later, a woman police constable was ensconced on my sofa, watching television with the volume turned low and drinking coffee. I was in bed, still wet from the shower and wondering when I’d stop trembling.

33

Sunday 9 September

CLASSICAL PIANO MUSIC WAS PLAYING SOFTLY IN the mortuary of St Thomas’s Hospital. The room was modern, but there was something about the arrangement of so much gleaming steel, the careful placement on the counters of jars and dishes, that looked timeless. For all its grim purpose, it felt like a calm room. And given what we were about to see, calm felt good.

The pathologist, a Dr Mike Kaytes, looked at us across the central worktop. ‘Not too much I can tell you,’ he said. ‘They normally send me a bit more to work with.’

As well as Kaytes and his technician, a boy who couldn’t be much more than twenty, there were four police officers in the room: Dana Tulloch, Neil Anderson, Pete Stenning and me. This was my first post-mortem, Stenning’s too, he’d confided on the way over. Anderson and Tulloch must have attended others but they didn’t seem any more at ease. Didn’t have to guess why. The small piece of flesh lying in the centre of the polished steel worktop looked obscene.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on the music for a second. I’m not a great music fan, I’d never think of listening to classical, but there was something about the delicate precision of the notes, the clarity of the sound, that helped.

Kaytes was a tall, barrel-chested man in his late forties. He had thick grey hair and bright-blue eyes. On the third finger of his left hand, beneath the surgical glove, a sticking plaster had been wrapped around where his wedding ring would be. He leaned forward and poked at the upper corner of the specimen. ‘It’s definitely human,’ he said. ‘Look here. See what we’ve got on the fallopian tubes.’ He was pointing to gunmetal-grey, pea-sized objects. ‘These are filshie clips,’ he went on. ‘Not even chimpanzees are that advanced yet; this woman’s been sterilized. And it’s a fresh specimen,’ he finished.

The pianist played a series of notes, pure and clear, interspersed by long silences.

‘Fresh as in …?’prompted Anderson.

‘Recently harvested,’ said the pathologist. ‘We’re running tests to see if we can pick up any of the more common preserving solutions, such as formaldehyde, but, frankly, you can invariably smell the stuff. And this has barely begun to deteriorate. I’d say it’s less than twenty-four hours old, fresh as they come.’

As the music started to build in volume and tempo, I imagined the pianist’s fingers running up and down the keys. And I really hoped Kaytes wasn’t going to use the word ‘fresh’ again.

‘Can you tell us anything about the woman it was taken from?’ asked Tulloch.

Kaytes nodded. ‘Adult,’ he said. ‘From the size of it, I’d say she’d had at least one pregnancy of twenty-four weeks or over.’ He stepped away from the worktop and arched his back. ‘The uterus enlarges in pregnancy as the fetus develops,’ he went on, ‘but then very rarely shrinks back completely to its pre-pregnancy size until some time past the menopause. So this woman wasn’t elderly. She’d also given birth.’

He beckoned us closer and re-angled one of the lights so that it shone directly on the organ.

‘What you’re looking at now is the cervix,’ he said, extending a gloved index finger. ‘And this little hole here is the external os of the cervix, basically the escape route for the emerging infant. Can you see that it’s slit-shaped and a bit distorted?’