Skinner's mission

23

McIlhenney pressed the Muirhead/Medina button and waited. After a minute, he pressed again. The speaker remained silent.

‘Maybe he’s turned up at St Leonard’s,’ said the Sergeant at last, more in hope than expectation.

‘No,’ said Donaldson. ‘We’d have had a call on the mobile if he had arrived.’

‘Then let’s get in and have a look.’ Simultaneously, McIlhenney pressed three other buzzers. A few seconds later an elderly lady’s voice quavered from the tinny speaker.

‘Yes?’

‘Gas Board emergency,’ said the Sergeant, quickly. ‘Let us in, please.’

‘Oh! Oh. Yes.’

There was a hum from the lock and he pushed the entrance door open. ‘Where is it?’ he asked Donaldson.

‘Two floors up. Level three, flat C. This way.’ He led the bulky McIlhenney towards the stairway, up the steps at a trot, two at a time.

When they reached flat 3c, the door was closed. The Sergeant, slightly out of breath, rapped the letterbox knocker, hard, shouting as he did. ‘Mr Medina, are you in?’

The door swung open with the force of the knock. To his astonishment McIlhenney saw that its frame was splintered and that the keeper of the Yale lock was hanging awkwardly and loosely. He stepped into the gloomy hallway.

Carl Medina was in.

He lay on his back, a few feet from the doorway, slack-jawed, his dull glazed eyes staring at the ceiling with an expression of pure astonishment. At first McIlhenney thought that the man was wearing a particularly garish red tee-shirt, until Donaldson, behind him, switched on the hall light and he saw that the once-grey garment was saturated with blood, and until the stink of violent death attacked his nostrils.

‘Ahhh, you bastard!’ the Sergeant hissed. ‘What’s this about, then?’

Hardened to such scenes, he took a deep breath, leaned over the body and looked, professionally and dispassionately. He counted four large stab wounds in Medina’s chest and abdomen. One of them had ripped open his belly, and several feet of twisted intestine had spilled out from the gash, like glistening, gory intertwined snakes.

He stood up and, as he did, he felt the bloody carpet squelch under his feet. ‘Want to take a quick look round, sir?’ he asked.

Donaldson shook his head. ‘No. Let’s play it by the book. I’ll call the DCS, then the scene of crime team and the ME. We don’t want to contaminate the site. Let’s just wait outside until everyone else gets here.’ He backed out through the front door.

As McIlhenney turned to follow, his eye was caught by a number of rusty brown marks on the beige carpet of the entrance hallway, and by a black plastic object lying in a corner.

‘Mind your feet, sir,’ he barked. ‘Those marks on the floor look like bloodstains. And what’s that?’

As Donaldson froze and stood stock-still, the Sergeant, wary himself of leaving fresh marks, tiptoed around the stains on the carpet and, carefully, picked up the black plastic sheet. At once he realised that it was a binliner. As he lifted it a number of smaller bags fell out, crumpled up together and streaked with drying blood.

‘What the hell!’ he exclaimed, holding the binliner at arm’s length and turning it inside out. Holes had been cut in the top and in the sides. ‘The clever bastard. He’s worn this thing like an overall and the supermarket bags over his forearms and his feet, to keep the blood off his clothes and his shoes, and to avoid leaving any trace of himself.

‘Once he was done, the bugger just stripped them off and walked away.’

‘Maybe the plastic bags will give us a lead,’ said Donaldson.

‘Maybe,’ muttered the Sergeant, with an edge of irreverent sarcasm in his tone, ‘if we start by lifting everyone that’s shopped in Safeway over the last few months.’

The Superintendent shot him a look which was intended to be reproving but failed, then produced his mobile phone from his pocket and dialled DCS Martin’s direct line number.

McIlhenney listened as he described their discovery. ‘No, sir,’ he heard him say. ‘It doesn’t look as if the man had a chance. Somehow the killer got into the building and knocked on Medina’s door. As soon as he started to open it he smashed his way in and attacked him.

‘From the looks of it, any one of these wounds would have been fatal.’

He paused. ‘No, sir, we haven’t gone in any further than the front door. Yes, we’ll wait for Arthur Dorward’s team, and for you to get here.’