Dear Departed Read online

  ‘You’d have thought there’d have been more damage to the bushes,’ Slider complained. ‘There’s a few leaves on the ground, but no broken twigs or branches.’

  ‘I suppose they just bent and whipped back,’ Atherton said. ‘There’s better access for us round the other side. That’s the way SOCO’s gone in.’

  They walked the few yards to the junction and turned left down the north – south path. On this side of the shrubbery the growth was less vigorous, and about twenty feet along there was a good two- to three-foot gap between two of the bushes. The crime-scene manager, Bob Bailey, met them there. He was a tall, lean man with wiry fair hair and a stiff moustache that Slider always thought must be hell on his wife. The scene-of-crime officers were civilians who worked out of headquarters at Hammersmith. In the course of things Slider and Bailey had a lot of contact and got on pretty well.

  ‘The doc’s been and gone, sir,’ Bailey greeted him. ‘Pronounced at eight twenty-nine.’

  ‘Dr Prawalha? That was nippy.’

  ‘Well, he only lives round the corner,’ Bailey explained. ‘We’ve nearly finished with the photographs and the measuring. Then you can come in and have a look.’

  The modern trend was towards excluding even the senior investigating officer from the crime scene, and they were working on a 3D laser video camera that would create a digital version of the scene you could walk through on computer screen without ever getting near the real thing. But Slider had to see for himself. It was not self-glorification or thrill-seeking, it was just the way he was. There was so much he could glean from his own senses that he knew would not be the same in virtual reality. Bailey knew his preference, and since Slider was both polite and careful, he tolerated it. Not that he could do anything else, given that Slider seriously outranked him, but there was good grace and bad grace.

  ‘There won’t be much to be got from this bark,’ Slider observed. ‘No footmarks.’

  ‘No, sir. And blood patterns will be hard to spot. It’s either brown bark or dark green leaves. And everyone and his dog could have been in here. I hate outdoor scenes.’

  ‘At least it’s not raining,’ Slider said, to comfort him. ‘Well, let me know when I can come in. I’ll go and talk to the witness.’

  Michael Chapman didn’t have much to add to the story as told by Gallon. His dog, a small, jolly-looking terrier, was lying down on the path now, chin on paws, thoroughly bored. Chapman was obviously still upset. He was in his late fifties, Slider guessed, well dressed and neatly coiffed, with a worn look to his face that seemed to predate the present shock. Early and reluctant retiree, perhaps?

  ‘Yes, I do walk Buster here most mornings,’ he said, in answer to Slider’s question. ‘I take him out later for two or three longer walks, but I generally do the first turn here. I only live just down the road, you see, so it’s convenient.’

  ‘So, as a regular park user, have you seen this girl before?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I might have. I can’t really say. There are so many people exercising here in the mornings, jogging and so on. I don’t really notice them. Anyway, I didn’t really get much of a look at her in there,’ he said, with a jerk of his head towards the bushes. ‘Not to see her face.’ A thought came to him, and his eyes widened in appeal. ‘You won’t make me go and look again?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Slider said reassuringly. ‘You went in just there, I understand?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Between those two laurels.’

  ‘Did you notice those marks in the ground?’

  ‘Well, no. I didn’t really notice anything, except that Buster was barking his head off and wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘Did you touch the body at all? To see if she was still alive?’

  ‘No!’ he said vehemently; and then looked worried. ‘Should I have? As soon as I saw her I was sure she must be dead. I didn’t want to go any nearer. I just wanted to get Buster out.’

  ‘Did Buster touch the body?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. When I got in there he was jumping and barking but not actually touching her. She was lying on her back and her eyes were open and there was all that – all that blood – on her – on her T-shirt.’ He swallowed hard, screwing up his eyes as if to force the vision away. ‘I dragged Buster out the same way we went in, and then I saw that gentleman talking on his mobile phone and asked him to call the police.’

  The phone owner, David Hatherley, was a different kettle of fish from the shocked and patient Chapman. He was a tall, vigorous, expensively suited young Turk, annoyed at being kept from his turkery by bumbling officialdom. He turned on Slider as he approached, scanned him for authority, and demanded hotly, ‘Look here, how much longer am I going to be kept hanging around? Some of us have work to do, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do know, sir. We are doing our work at the moment,’ Slider said.

  The nostrils flared with exasperation. ‘Well, I can’t help you. I know nothing about it. I was just walking past when that idiot tried to grab my phone, and then started babbling about dead bodies. I had to interrupt a very important business call to dial 999.’

  ‘It was very public-spirited of you, sir,’ Slider said soothingly.

  Hatherley seemed to suspect irony and snorted. ‘So can I go now? Your man’s taken down every damned detail from me, address, telephone, right down to my shoe size. You don’t seem to realise, every minute I stand here I’m losing money.’

  Slider had used those minutes to look over Hatherley’s clothes, his face and hands, his manner. There was nothing there for them. ‘Yes, you can go. Thank you very much for your help, Mr Hatherley. We might be contacting you again.’

  When he had gone, Atherton said, ‘He can’t be our man, not in an Armani suit.’

  ‘No,’ Slider said. ‘I think he just happened by at the wrong moment. Like Chapman. But with Chapman, he was actually on the scene, so we’d better get fingerprints and a buccal swab from him for elimination purposes.’

  ‘What about the dog?’ Atherton said merrily. ‘Should we get his DNA as well?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re finding this entertaining,‘ Slider said.

  The photographer was coming towards them. Old Sid had retired – not before time given his increasing misanthropy, which was ratcheted upwards by every scene he captured for posterity. The new man was David Archer, young, enthusiastic but with a nephew-like shy deference towards Slider and most of his team. He was a rather delicate-looking creature, so handsome he was almost pretty, and didn’t look robust enough to cope with the things he had to photograph; but he was so passionate about his equipment and the wonderful things modern digital technology could do that Slider suspected the subject of his work didn’t impinge much on him.

  ‘Bob asked me to tell you you can go in now, sir,’ he said to Slider.

  ‘Finished your work?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going back to the van to have a look at it, but I’ll be on hand in case there’s anything more when the forensic biologist arrives.’

  ‘Do something for me,’ Slider said. ‘Take a long, slow pan around with your video camera at the crowd. All the onlookers. Try not to be obvious about it. Keep as far back as you can and do it on the zoom. Everyone who’s hanging around the scene. I want their faces.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Archer said. He was too polite to ask, but there was a question in his eyes.

  Slider took pity on him. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the murderer came back for a look. He’d want to see who found her, what their reaction was, how baffled we were. That’d be part of the fun. He might be here right now, enjoying himself watching us running round after him.’

  ‘I’ll get what you want, sir, don’t worry,’ Archer said. ‘Would you like me to make a series of stills, so you can have them to study?’

  ‘Good idea. Thanks.’

  ‘He wouldn’t hang about all covered in blood, surely?’ Atherton said, when Archer had left them.

  ‘No, but he probably wore a
protective garment, which he might have discarded somewhere before coming back.’

  ‘He might even live locally,’ Atherton went along with it. ‘Went home and changed and came back.’

  ‘You do think of them,’ Slider complained. They walked back to the gap in the shrubbery and clothed up, and then, conducted by Bailey, walked along the stepping boards that had been laid to make a safe path into the scene within the shrubbery.

  The rhododendrons were massive specimens, some of them ten or fifteen feet high. They grew their leaves where the light reached them, so on the back side they presented bare trunks and branches. What looked from the path like dense vegetation was in fact a series of hollow caves. With the thick mulch of bark on the ground, there was nothing to mar the uniformity of dark brown except the odd piece of litter. Blown in by the wind? It didn’t seem likely, inside the shrubbery. Left by kids playing, more like – or by someone hiding, lurking? Slider noted a cigarette packet (B&H), a torn strip of a Walkers crisps bag, and two wrappers from chocolate bars: one Picnic and one Double Decker.

  ‘We’ll have those,’ he said to Bailey. ‘There’ll probably be some cigarette ends, as well.’

  ‘There are,’ Bailey confirmed. ‘Quite a lot scattered about.’

  ‘Take them all,’ Slider said. Smokers were so used to throwing away the butt when they’d finished that they did it automatically, either not knowing, or forgetting, that DNA could be recovered from the saliva on them.

  ‘Thank God there’s no such thing as a non-smoking murderer,’ said Atherton.

  In the heart of all this brown, in a clear space, lay the body. It was a young woman, dressed for jogging in knee-length black Lycra shorts, a sleeveless white shirt, trainers and short white socks. She was slim and fit-looking, with lightly tanned skin, and shortish, tousled blonde hair that gave Slider an unpleasant tug because it reminded him of Joanna’s. It was a shade lighter, though. Joanna’s was more bronze. The sunlight filtering through the leaves touched it here and there and made it gleam like true coin.

  She was lying on her back, one arm flung out, the other resting beside her body. Her face was very pretty, heart-shaped with a short, straight nose and full lips, parted to show good teeth. Her skin was smooth and lightly tanned, her hands well kept with short, unvarnished nails. She had small gold studs in her ears and a thin gold chain round her neck on which hung a gold disc – a St Christopher, he supposed. Around her waist was a sort of utility belt of elasticated webbing, on which was hung a plastic water-bottle on the right, a CD Walkman on the left, and a small zip purse in the middle. The headset was hanging round her neck, the cord loose, pulled out from the Walkman socket. He noted that the Walkman had been switched off.

  The warmth of the day was lifting a pleasant, woody smell from the bark chippings and birds were singing near and far off in the park. Broken by the gently moving leaves of a birch tree, sunshine was dappling the ground and the girl. She might have stretched out for a rest to gaze up at the patch of clear blue sky above, except that her T-shirt was spatched and blotted with blood.

  ‘Multiple stab wounds,’ Atherton said, breaking the silence. ‘Would that qualify as a “frenzied attack”?’ It was what police reports and the media always called it, a cliché there seemed no escaping. Atherton used it consciously, knowing Slider hated it.

  The bark was scuffed in the immediate area, though not as much as Slider would have expected it to be. He hunkered down close to the victim, and now he could smell the clean odours of her shampoo and body lotion, and under them the reek of blood. There were defence cuts on her forearms and the palms of her hands, the blood resting in them, hardly smeared at all. There was definitely blood on the bark immediately around and under the body, but it was impossible to see how much, or to discern any spread patterns.

  ‘Is there blood anywhere else?’ he asked Bailey.

  ‘We haven’t found any so far, but it’s impossible to be sure without close examination,’ Bailey said. All I can say is that it looks as though all the action happened in this spot.’

  Atherton, looking over Slider’s shoulder, said, ‘What’s that grey mark on the T-shirt? Sort of greyish-brown, a smudge?’

  ‘I think it’s a footmark – or a toemark, at least,’ Slider said. ‘He turned her over with his foot. She was lying face down and he turned her over. It’s the sort of dirty mark that could be left by a shoe.’

  ‘I suppose he wanted to check she was dead.’

  ‘We might possibly get a partial sole pattern from it,’ Slider said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bailey. ‘We have photographed it.’

  Slider stood up and looked back towards the north side of the shrubbery. ‘I don’t understand why he dragged her in that way. Much easier the way we came in.’

  On both his previous outings, the Park Killer had dragged his victim under cover, once into a shrubbery and once into a rose garden, stabbed her to death, and escaped the scene without anyone’s seeing or hearing anything. Speed had to have been of the essence. Probably that was why he had not robbed or molested either of his victims. It was getting away with murder that interested him, it seemed.

  Atherton considered. ‘The bushes give better cover on that side. If he’d lurked on the more open side, someone might have seen him.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Slider said. He looked around to fix the scene in his mind, and then again down at the body. She was out jogging, listening to her music, perhaps thinking about the rest of her day. He looked at her pretty face, all animation gone, her softly muddled hair, the yielding shape of her body against the earth, still warm and pliant, but pointlessly so now. He imagined the killer turning her over with his foot, thought how it would have felt, heavy and soft. In his country boyhood he had handled dead rabbits and knew that limpness. A dull anger filled him. Partly it was because she had reminded him fleetingly of Joanna, and he felt newly vulnerable about her. But the anger was for this girl as well, and especially. When she had got up and dressed in the morning, she had not planned to die this day.

  The world was not safe. There were people in it who would do this hideous, hateful thing. Life, which was so strong and tenacious and filled you tight to the skin when you were young, could be taken from you so easily, slip away through a hole in you like a mist dissolving. The solid reality that you walked on was in fact no more than a thin sheet of ice, through which you might fall at any moment into the black water of oblivion beneath.

  Everything this girl had, had been taken from her in the name of conceit. All Slider could do was to find the killer and hope to see him punished. He was glad now that Porson wanted it. It was his case now. He would find the killer. The really depressing thing was that even cornered, caught, accused, charged, tried and sentenced, the murderer would probably never really see the enormity of what he had done. What had they done to themselves as a society to have bred a person who would kill to get his name in the papers?

  He pulled his mind back to the scene. ‘I wonder why there’s no blood on the footmark. You’d have thought with all this stabbing going on he’d have stepped in at least some of it, especially as he wouldn’t have been able to see it.’

  ‘Just lucky, I suppose,’ Atherton said. ‘Our first problem is going to be identifying her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Slider said. ‘People don’t go out jogging with their passport and driving licence in their pockets.’

  ‘People don’t go out jogging with pockets,’ said Atherton.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Close Enough for Jazz

  The CID room was quiet, with most of the troops still at the scene, helping with the search for blood, bloodstained clothing, and a murder weapon. Speed was of the essence. There was constant pressure on the police to reopen a cordoned-off area.

  Slider was in his room making a start on the paperwork when the gorgeous DC Kathleen Swilley, always known as ‘Norma’ on account of her machismo in the field, came in. She was an expert in martial arts, could kick the eyebrows off a fly at f
ive paces, and bring a man to his knees by use of just a forefinger and thumb. Or, indeed, without them, Slider reflected.

  ‘Nothing so far, boss,’ she said. ‘Everyone in the park’s had a preliminary interview and they’re starting on the bystanders. And I’ve put in an enquiry to the traffic department about any parked car or MTI activity for this morning. The SOCOs are still going over the ground looking for more blood. The body’s been taken away now.’

  ‘Is that the deceased’s effects?’

  ‘Yeah. No help with her ID, though.’ She put them down on the desk and went through them with him. The little purse on the victim’s belt contained nothing but a Kleenex tissue and a set of door keys – one Yale and one deadlock – on a ring whose tag was one of those articulated metal fish. That, and her gold medallion, were the only personal items they had to go on.

  ‘We got some good lifts off the Walkman,’ Swilley said. ‘Presumably the victim’s. We’re waiting for her tenprint to compare. I’ve run them through records but there’s no previous.’

  The medallion turned out not to be St Christopher after all, but St Anthony. An unusual choice,’ Slider commented. ‘It may help to confirm her identity once we know it.’

  ‘Ditto for the door keys,’ said Swilley. ‘So what’s a St Anthony medal for, boss?’

  ‘He’s patron saint of the poor and afflicted, I think,’ Slider said. ‘And lost things. And travellers.’

  ‘I thought that was St Christopher?’

  ‘It’s not exclusive. And some people think St Christopher didn’t exist.’

  ‘The things you know,’ Swilley marvelled.

  Slider sighed. ‘What I don’t know is how to ID our victim without trawling through the neighbourhood with a mugshot. And I really hate doing that when the only mugshot I’ve got is taken from the corpse.’

  ‘It’s early yet. Someone may miss her and come forward,’ Swilley said. ‘The report of the murder’s going to be in all the noon bulletins. If someone hasn’t turned up to work …’