Birdman

41

Susan Lister was unconscious and still in Intensive Care when they arrived. The paramedic who brought her in, Andrew Benton, a fresh-faced young black man with a buzz cut so short it looked like only a day's growth, was shaken by the experience. They talked in a small room next to the nurses' station.

'Fucking hell, you know, I've got to tell you, I've seen some things in my time, but this—' He shook his head. 'This has really done my head. And as for him, her husband—'

'He found her?' Maddox said.

'Can you imagine? Finding your lady in that state. She was in the dustbin in the front of their house. That's the value this wanker put on her. A human life, no better than rubbish.'

'What time did you respond?'

'Eleven. I was told it was a purple plus.' He looked from face to face. 'You know, Mr Lister thought she was a goner when he called the services. The guy, the animal, had dumped the lady head down in the wheelie bin, left her for dead.' His face creased. 'God. If I won't sleep tonight — just think how he feels.'

'Tell me about her. Was she dressed?'

'Not dressed. She was wrapped up in a binliner. I think some of your lot took it in for evidence or whatever. They were trawling the whole place. Before I even got her out of there they were taping it off.'

'We like to protect a crime scene.' Maddox was embarrassed. 'Prevents contamination.'

'Yeah, I know. I didn't mean no offence.'

'None taken. Her injuries?'

'Bad. She's so cut up she'll probably die from blood loss, if not septicaemia. Consultant says she's got bronchial pneumococcal and renal failure; they've hooked her up to the ECMO. She was in and out when I got to her.'

'Where are the cuts?'

'On her breasts.' He rubbed his face. 'She'd been stitched up. First thing I thought was she might have been in for surgery, I don't know, some cowboy thing. But then her husband's wailing about how she'd disappeared and then I got her on the gurney and—'

'And?'

'I'm no genius, you know, but even I could see there was something wrong.'

'Something wrong?'

'It was so infected it was difficult to see, but the sutures were all, you know, crazy.'

Caffery looked at his hands. He remembered similar words coming from a CID officer's mouth at North's yard that first Saturday night. 'How about her head?'

'She's been smacked a couple of times, on the side of the head, and she was covered in make-up, like a tart. Hubby reckons she had a haircut too. He kept saying it over and over again. ''Why'd he cut her hair? Why'd he cut her hair?'' like that was the most important thing in the world.'

'No wig. He chose this one,' Caffery muttered.

Benton shot him a look. 'What was that?'

Caffery stood up and pulled on his jacket. 'Nothing.' He looked at Maddox. 'I'm going to have a look at Mrs Lister. Meet you at the scene in, what? Two hours?'

'Where'you going?'

'I won't be long. I've got an idea — just let me speak to someone at Lambeth first — see if I'm on the right road.'

She lay on a blue pillowcase, on her back with her arms opened outwards, her face turned to the door just as if she'd been expecting a visitor but had got tired waiting and had dropped off to sleep. The hair fringing her bruised eyes was almost white, the colour of sun-bleached sand. Someone had made a rudimentary attempt to clean her, but the mouth was still stained red with lipstick and her hands and nails were grimy with, Caffery realized, dust.

His breath fogged up the window. He pulled his shirt cuff over his fist and rubbed a hole. A nurse had appeared in his eye line, and stood checking the drip lines, obscuring his view. Jack stepped back from the door. He'd seen all he needed to see.

'It sounds just like the others?'

'That's right, Mr Caffery.' Krishnamurthi at Jackson's autopsy. 'Identical to the others.' Identical to the others.

Now he thought he understood what was happening.

It was getting dark by the time he parked outside the Forensic Science Laboratories in Lambeth Road — the windscreen of the Jaguar was speckled with midges. The foyer lights cast long shadows of potted yuccas across the mosaic in the corridor: Catherine Howard, patiently clutching her rosary in the shadows.

The security guard roused himself from the desk and handed Caffery a pass. 'I'll tell her you're on your way up but we're closing in ten minutes, sir — you'll need to be out in ten minutes.'

She met him at the lift. She was wearing marl-grey jogging pants, a green sweatshirt and Reeboks, and was carrying an opened Coke can. With her grey hair cut in a neat bob, her long body almost shoulder to shoulder with his, Jack found Dr Jane Amedure oddly beautiful.

'I'm sorry, Inspector Caffery.' She led him through hushed corridors lined with neat rows of Audubon prints, past security guards making last-minute checks, technicians pulling off disposable lab coats. 'I'm sorry about the news, and I'm sorry I had to pass it on through a third party. I tried to call you, but—'

'No — don't worry. Thanks for your help but it's not why I'm here.'

She looked sideways at him. 'Well, sadly I don't believe you're here to ask me for a date. So my astute scientist's mind concludes that you're here about Operation Walworth?'

He smiled. 'Brilliant.'

'Come on, then.' She held her office door for him. 'We've had everything from you lot today — Harteveld's samples — a hair that interested me—'

'Maggots.'

'Oh yes. Those too, horrible little buggers. They've already been forwarded to the Natural History Museum, thank God. Dr Jameson'll run a test batch — match the environment they were in and see them through to pupation.' She pushed a chair in his direction and squeezed behind a desk dotted with piles of paperwork, Coke cans, ashtrays. A desklight was pulled low over the working surface and, propped in the window behind Dr Amedure, a Nigerian shrine mask stared shark-eyed down into the office. 'From a glance everything looks OK, you know, a couple of anomalies but otherwise it looks exactly the same as the others.'

'I know. That's what Krishnamurthi said. It's what's worrying me.'

'Worrying you?'

He pulled his chair closer to the desk. 'Just explain to me — the flesh flies, the ones that laid eggs on the wounds—'

'No, no. Not eggs. Our little friends the Sarcophagidae don't bother laying eggs. They lay larvae.'

'Always on a wound?'

'Yes.' She lifted a Coke can and shook it. Empty. She moved to the next — trying to identify the one she had just abandoned. 'Now, from the little I understand of entomology, it goes like this: the blowflies lay their eggs on the mucous membranes, that's the mouth, the anus, the vagina, eyes and nostrils et cetera. With your common or garden violent deaths there are wounds, blood — so at the same time as Diptera are doing their work, the flesh fly homes in on the wounds.'

'But this didn't happen with Jackson?'

'Nor with any of your victims. Although Sarcophagidae were larval, like Diptera, the flesh fly doesn't go through instars: so we knew they were a much more recent arrival. That was the flashing light for us: we sussed then that the wounds were postmortem. The serotonin levels in the wounds helped us narrow it down.' She had located the full Coke can. She took a swig and looked up at him. 'You're probably looking at a sixty to seventy-two-hour gap.'

'Sixty? That's the minimum?'

'I'm only estimating.'

'OK — but what's the earliest they could have laid?'

'Ball park? With the widest cover-my-arse margin in history? I'd say — oooh — Wednesday morning? Like the others — about a three-day gap.' Dr Amedure paused and lowered the can. 'Mr Caffery? Something interesting to you?'

'Yes.' He put fingers to his temples.

Surveillance was watching Harteveld from Tuesday afternoon. By 10 a.m. on Wednesday he was dead.

'Dr Amedure—' He dropped his hand. Looked up. 'There was cement dust recovered on all the victims.'

'I know. I think with the others we all assumed, didn't we, that it was picked up in the aggregate yard. Some red faces, I suppose — but we're onto it. We've started an X-ray diffraction. When that's complete we'll get the CCRL database in Gaithersburg to run a trade examination.'

'There isn't a database in the UK?'

'Maryland's got the best one — they can work with a diffractogram or a phase analysis printout and compare chlorates, metakaolinite, sulfates with their exemplars.'

'How long would it take?'

'Our end? Less than twenty-four hours. But Maryland — I don't know. They're usually pretty quick.'

'Can you start it tonight?'

'Ahem, Inspector Caffery.' She smiled at him over the top of the can. 'I don't think we need to be reminded how much AMIP'd be charged for an overnighter.'

'You don't know, do you?' He shifted, uncomfortable. 'Something happened in PL tonight that's chucked all the cards back in the air. We don't know for sure but we might've got someone else out there.'

Dr Amedure's face changed. She put the Coke can down, picked up the phone and dialled. 'I'll speak to the duty manager. If we've got the staff we might be able to fit you in.' Waiting for the line to connect she fumbled under the papers and pulled out a spectrograph. 'The hair I was telling you about. Same colour and length as the wig hairs but a nice round cross-section — Caucasian, bleached. And it fell out naturally.'

'From one of the other victims?' Caffery leaned over and took the paper. 'Transferred from his furniture, maybe?'

She shook her head. 'It doesn't match any of them — not even superficially. And all we can get from it is mitochondrial DNA and some pointers on the owner's life style. You see that handsome peak in the middle? It's the metabolite of marijuana.'

'And this one?'

'Aluminium.'

'Aluminium?'

'Well that' — she shifted the phone to the other ear — 'that could mean almost anything. One I saw went off the page almost, turned out to be an OCD patient — obsessive compulsive — their compulsion was antiperspirant.'

'Which might mean another victim we don't know about yet?'

'Exactly.'

Caffery put the paper on her desk and got to his feet. 'Dr Amedure, this trade examination. Whatever it costs, OK?'

'If you say so.' She put her hand over the receiver. 'If AMIP's got the money there's nothing we can't do.'

One a.m. and the summer night had turned chilly. Greenwich had supplied a floodlighting unit and cordoned off the road; the press, who earlier had swarmed the area, had headed off to the hospital, hoping to smell Susan Lister's blood more closely. Caffery and Maddox sat in the Jaguar, under a streetlight just inside the roadblock.

'Dust,' Jack told his superintendent. 'Cement dust.' He twisted round on creaky leather, draped his arm over the back of the seat, and looked at Maddox. 'Let me explain.'

Carefully he laid out his ideas — his bare suspicions — the first sketchy pegging-out of what he believed was happening. Raw and half-formed — but he thought he had the right germ. He explained each link, justified each small jump of his imagination.

'I dunno, Jack,' Maddox said after a long silence. 'I'm not convinced…' He tapped his fingers on the dashboard and stared off into the street. DI Basset stood outside the cordoned-off area, under a floodlight, drinking coffee and watching as Quinn, unmissable in her luminous white suit, mixed dental stone in a small plastic container. After a long time Maddox straightened and began buttoning his jacket.

'I need to think about it. Let's catch a few zs. Get back to Shrivemoor for — what? Six? You can run it by Essex and Kryotos before the meeting — see how it hits them.'

After Maddox had gone Jack rolled one last cigarette and wandered a few yards back down the road. The gardens smelled strongly of jasmine. He stopped and stared up at a yellow rectangle of light over the roof of a low garage. It was then that he realized where he was.

Malpens Street was a sharp right off South Street. They'd come at it from a different direction, but now he saw he was only four or five doors down from the junk shop. A low wall bordered the gardens in the main street, and the angle allowed him to see the rear bays, sliced diagonally by a garage roof. One lit window was opened a crack to the night air.

Rebecca's kitchen.

He backed up and leaned against the car, away from the streetlights, pulling his mobile from inside his jacket. He could hear Rebecca's phone ringing from over the roofs.

'Hello?' But the line clicked for a beat and he realized he was talking to an answerphone.

Joni's voice: 'Sorry you've gone to all the trouble and expense of calling, when we haven't the decency to be in for your call.'

Caffery swore under his breath. 'Look, I know someone's there. This is Jack, DI Caffery. Answer the phone.' He waited. Nothing. He sighed. 'Look, Rebecca, Joni, if you're listening I want you to be careful, this thing isn't over yet. Just — just keep your windows and door locked, OK? And, Rebecca—' He paused. 'Give me a ring. When you have the time.'

He hung up and stood in the dark looking at the window. A few moments later the light in the kitchen went off and a figure came to the window and closed it. Caffery couldn't see who it was. He put his mobile in his pocket and got back inside the Jaguar.