Cold as Ice

Chapter 43

Harding was sitting at her office desk in one of a suite of rooms in the basement of the Whittington Hospital, which housed the mortuary and post mortem room as well as her laboratory. She looked across at Mark, who was fishing a brain out of formaldehyde ready for slicing into centimetre-wide slices, and wondered if tonight was the night she should make her move.

She phoned Robbo. It was very late – he could have gone home a few hours ago, but instead he had stayed to work on the case.

‘Results are through on examination of the ulcerated sites and necrosis on Pauline Murphy’s body. I’ll be over in a minute. I can’t get hold of Carter – his phone is switched off. I’ll come across and see Chief Inspector Bowie instead but I’ll send you the results first – they’re interesting. You may want to get researching.’

Harding got out of her protective work clothes and pulled on her fur-trimmed floor-length coat as she picked up her car keys.

‘I’m going across to talk to Chief Inspector Bowie. Will you be okay working late tonight?’

Mark looked up from his work and nodded.

‘You driving?’ he asked. ‘It’s really icy out there.’

‘I am driving, yes. I refuse to allow a bit of ice to stop me; plus I thought I’d pick up a couple of bottles of something for later, just in case we get thirsty.’ She waited for him to look up again from his work. He didn’t.

Harding parked outside Fletcher House and punched in her passcode at the door. She took the lift up to MIT 17 and arrived at Bowie’s office at the same time as Carter.

‘Doctor?’ Carter waited until Robbo and Harding were settled and ready to speak.

‘As you know we took samples from the ulcerated sites. Results are back.’

‘Yes?’ Bowie was looking as rough as he always did, thought Carter.

‘They’re caused by spider bites. Those were the needle-like wounds. They were spider’s fangs.’

‘Ordinary spiders?’ asked Bowie.

‘No, they’re not ordinary in this country. We have spiders that can bite but…’

She turned to look at Robbo, whose enthusiasm was unleashed.

‘Doctor Harding asked me to look into the types of spider that would be a match for the venom. There are a couple of possibilities, none of them native to this country. We do have spiders that can bite – even the house spider can nip you if cornered – but none of ours would be able to cause infection like this.’

‘We have now identified different sized fang bites on the victims,’ said Harding. ‘Hawk has more than one type of poisonous spider.’

Robbo started a slideshow of spiders on his laptop.

‘What happens when you’re bitten?’ Bowie asked as the images flashed up.

‘Within a couple of hours it starts to itch and swell,’ answered Harding. ‘And within a few days, left untreated, the ulcers form and start eating away at the flesh. There is no cure for that.’

Robbo clicked on images of bite wounds. There was a sharp intake of breath from Carter. ‘Christ.’

‘The wounds have been recorded at twenty-five centimetres in diameter,’ Harding stated. ‘Bacteria creeps in and then infection from these bites is common. Limb amputations are the only answer as gangrene sets in.’

‘There’s no cure?’ asked Carter. He stared at the photos of the wounds and his face paled.

‘There’s anti-venom.’

‘What about the antibiotics you found in her blood?’ asked Bowie. ‘If he knows a lot about these spiders he knows that he can’t cure the ulcerated sites with antibiotics. So he plans to kill them slowly, giving them small amounts of antibiotics just to prolong the agony. Is that what it looks like, Doctor?’

Harding nodded.

‘The antibiotics would only have prolonged life but not enough to halt the necrosis or prevent renal failure. All of the victims were about to go into kidney failure. Their organs were in a dire state from the poison in their systems.’

‘We’ll contact pet shops in North London and start asking for customer lists.’

‘There’s an exotic pet shop near me. I’ll go and ask some questions,’ said Carter.

Robbo closed his laptop. ‘It would be worth ordering in some anti-venom just in case we have the pleasure of meeting the man and his pets.’

Harding got back to the Whittington and found Mark still working. She had a bottle of wine in her hand and another in her bag.

‘Thought we could do we a little R&R?’ She planted the wine on the table and threw her coat over the back of the chair.

Mark looked worried. ‘Just realized I haven’t sent the debris from Emily Styles’ hair off for analysis.’

Harding’s expression instantly changed to one of annoyance.

‘Did you sift it?’ she said brusquely.

‘Yes.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Still in the fridge waiting to be sent to the lab.’

A flash of anger crossed Harding’s face. ‘You better call them now and you can get it across to them yourself.’

‘Yes, Doctor.’ Harding walked through to the specimen store, a room off the post mortem room, and opened the fridge. Inside were labelled bags and plastic pots and trays. She found the set of specimens belonging to Emily Styles and pulled out the packet labelled hair residue. She took it back to her desk and tipped the contents into a clean tray.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Mark as he came to stand behind her.

She was momentarily distracted by the nearness of his body. His leg was against hers as he watched what she was doing.

‘We may as well do the first part of the analysis ourselves to save time. I want to dry it off. We know so much more about our man now. I want to make sure we didn’t miss anything. I’ll just keep it thirty minutes then you can go.’ She turned to see if he was okay with that and found him so close that she couldn’t breathe. She turned back to the desk and began picking through the debris with tweezers.

‘What’s that?’ Mark pointed to a small silver object on the tray.

‘It’s a fish scale.’

‘No it’s not – it’s too big, wrong shape.’ Mark pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and Harding tapped the scale onto a slide. He took it across to the microscope.

Harding joined him as he looked at it then stood back for her to see.

‘Snake.’

She nodded. ‘Well done. What kind?’

Mark took a few minutes to look it up on the laptop.

‘It’s a python – a very big one. This size of scale you’re looking at, one over twelve foot.’

Harding sat down at her desk and brought the X-rays of Emily Styles’ neck injuries up onto the screen.

‘Here’s our tourniquet. So wide it crushed her neck, not just the vertebrae, severing her spinal cord but also her jawbone and her trachea. It pushed her jawbone back into the cranium.’ She phoned Carter. He was on his way home to get a few hours’ rest. He had the phone on speaker.

‘While you’re in the pet shop find out all you can about any owners of very large pythons in the area. We’ve found a scale in the debris from Emily Styles’ hair. There’s no doubt it’s what strangled her.’

Carter finished the call and pulled into his street, parked up and walked into his house. Cabrina had fallen asleep on the sofa and Archie was next to her. He picked Archie up as Cabrina opened her sleepy eyes.

‘Hello, babe – didn’t think you’d make it back.’

Archie didn’t stir. Carter took him upstairs and put him to bed. By the time he’d come back downstairs Cabrina was in the kitchen; she had poured him a glass of wine and was heating up some food for him. He came up behind her and put his hands around her waist as he nestled into her neck.

‘Sorry – do I smell like baby? Archie and I had a bath.’

‘Lucky Archie.’ He moved her hair away from her neck and kissed the soft line of her neck that he loved.

She closed her eyes. ‘I’ve missed you, babe.’

‘Good.’ He smiled and held her tighter. ‘Promise you’ll never stop missing me.’

‘Please. Please, I’ll do anything, don’t hurt me any more.’

Hawk stood over Danielle and pulled her upright by her wrists.

Danielle felt nauseous. Now that she could open her eyes she realized that her vision was blurred. Her heart was racing. The room was unbearably hot. She watched him move in a distorted fog around her. She listened to his speech from some distant place. She vomited bile; her stomach retched and strained and he turned up the music. He lifted her out of the coffin and held her close to him as he swayed to the music. He began carrying her towards the back of the room and he ducked his head under the rafters. Danielle could not stand. Her head was spinning. She felt herself being lowered. He held her under her shoulders as he dangled her in mid-air and she felt the cold and damp close around her. He dropped her into a pit.

He waited until she finished vomiting to speak:

‘Tracy messed up.’ He turned to Danielle. ‘You all mess up. Like mother like daughter – whores and bitches.’ The pain shot through her back as she lay on the bottom of the dug-out hole. She looked up to see him peering down at her over the edge of the hole, ten feet above her. He shone the torch at her and it reflected off the walls around her. She looked at the scratches. White flecks of nail and flesh were embedded in the earth.