Aftershock

Forty-six

Neil McIlhenney had been in the act of reaching for the phone when it had rung, beating him to the punch.

‘Yes,’ he answered, pressing the instrument to his ear for at least the twenty-fifth time that day. He almost added, ‘Becky,’ assuming that it would be another report on the Dean murder inquiry, and on the preparation for Weekes’s court appearance the following morning.

‘Neil?’ The voice was male, and very familiar. It was also on edge. ‘It’s Bob. I’m glad I caught you; I need someone to talk to. You will never guess in one thousand years of trying where I am.’

‘You’re at a crime scene,’ McIlhenney replied, without a pause for thought.

‘How the hell did you know that?’

‘Call it intuition. Or call it knowing the difference between you calling me on something job-related and to tell me you’ve just broken par round the pitch and putt.’

‘Clever bastard. Now describe it to me.’

The superintendent frowned. ‘This has nothing to do with Aileen, has it?’

‘No. She doesn’t even know about it yet. She won’t be best pleased either, when she finds out that I’m involved in another murder investigation.’

McIlhenney gasped. ‘Only you,’ he said. ‘Only you could go on holiday and stumble across something like that. Can you tell me about it? Are you able to, where you are? I can hear all sorts of noise in the background.’

‘That’s the sea. I’m on a rocky outcrop, facing my house. The Mossos d’Esquadra CID officers are on their way here from Girona. I’ll have to wait and give them a statement. But that doesn’t stop me talking to you.’

‘Who’s the victim?’

‘We don’t know yet. None of the officers who’ve got here so far recognises her.’

‘Her?’

‘Yes. She’s maybe around thirty, Spanish, I’d guess, from her hair colouring, skin tone and general appearance, but there’s nothing here to back that up. There are no clothes, no personal belongings at the scene.’

‘So it looks like she was killed somewhere else and dumped there?’

‘That may very well be so; but either way she must have been put here when there was nobody else around. She’s been lying in the sun all day, and she could have been here overnight, unnoticed until I spotted her. There’s a medical examiner here, and if my limited Spanish lets me understand him right, he’s saying that he’s not even going to guess at time of death. The sun’s been blazing down all day, so the rocks are fucking hot. It’s like she’s been lying in a pizza oven all this time.’

‘You mean she’s covered in anchovies?’

‘Jesus, Neil, spare me the crime-scene humour. The one thing I do know is what killed her, because I’ve had a look for myself.’

Call it a premonition, call it a second flash of intuition, but a wave of certainty seemed to wash over McIlhenney as he sat there. He was a thousand miles away from Skinner, but it was as if he had been teleported to his side in an instant, and could see the victim. He knew how the body was lying, he could picture the peaceful expression on her face. ‘A single wound to the back of the head,’ he said. ‘Small-calibre weapon.’

‘I can’t vouch for the calibre,’ the deputy chief constable replied, ‘but there’s no exit wound. It’s even possible that this could be a knife wound, but you get the picture. It looks as if she never knew what hit her.’

‘So what are you saying to me?’ the detective superintendent asked.

‘You know what I’m saying. I’m not familiar with the Gavin and Boras crime scenes, or the third girl, Amy Noone. I wasn’t involved in those inquiries, only in the aftermath because of Stevie’s death, but from the way they’ve been described to me, this one’s identical.’

McIlhenney sat silent for a while, thinking about what he should do next. In normal circumstances, there would have been no doubt, but the shock of the news that Skinner had just imparted made him hold back. Finally, he decided. ‘Boss,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have to talk to Mario. How long will you be there?’

‘As long as I have to. I’m sort of in charge here at the moment. None of the attending officers has encountered anything like this before, so I’ve been advising them. The team that’s on the way is being led by your equivalent. Once they get here and I’ve spoken to them, I’ll head back home. Let’s say I’ll be there in an hour. Meantime, I’d like you to email me the crime-scene photographs from the Ballester killings and from Sugar Dean.’

‘Okay, I’ll arrange that. Meantime, boss, if you can take a photo of your scene as it is, even if it’s only with your mobile, I’d like to see that too.’