The Art of Murder

Chapter 8

'Well, that went well,' Sergeant Turner said sardonically as the door closed behind Hedridge and Strinner.

Pendragon shook his head slowly. 'Turner, when you are a grown-up copper, you might, if you're very lucky, begin to realise that what seem like the worst interviews often yield the most useful facts.'

Turner raise his eyebrows. 'Sorry I spoke.'

'Good.'

'But Hedridge was obviously lying out of his arse,' the sergeant added.

'About?'

'His relationship with Berrick.'

'Of course he was. Though, actually, Strinner was right. It isn't strictly relevant.'

'You sure, sir? Couldn't Hedridge have killed Berrick after a lovers' tiff?'

'Oh, come on, Sergeant. How often does a "lovers' tiff", as you put it, end with one of the "lovers" boring a huge hole through the other's head and propping them up in an art gallery as the centrepiece to a Rene Magritte-style tableau?'

'Not often, I s'pose.'

'Try "never". Or perhaps Berrick committed suicide?' And Pendragon gave his sergeant a withering look. 'I think we'll find that the nature of their relationship was the only thing Hedridge was lying about. He was protecting himself – understandably. According to his file, he's married with two teenage children, and there's his political career to think about too. I knew he would clam up about his relationship with Berrick. I wanted to throw him off-kilter. Push him just far enough to let something slip.'

'Did he? I didn't notice.'

Pendragon was staring at the wall, lost in thought. 'No,' he replied absent-mindedly. 'No, he didn't. He's a politician, and a very clever one… Right, you can get busy, Turner,' he said, snapping back to the task at hand. 'I want you to check up on Silver Cabs. See if Mr Hedridge was telling us the truth about last night. I also want you to go through the entire guest list. Trace any connections between Kingsley Berrick and the names featured on that list, and then any links between Hedridge and those who were there last night. No matter how tenuous.'

'Well, sorry I criticised your interview technique, I'm sure,' Turner mumbled to himself as he walked off down the hall. By the time Pendragon emerged through the main doors of the station it was dark outside, and it felt as though the temperature had dropped at least another five degrees. It wasn't worth bothering with a car; a fresh layer of snow had fallen, making the roads even more treacherous. Instead, he turned up his collar, plunged his hands into his pockets and headed through the gate on to Brick Lane.

The human tide had turned. All those people who had headed west into the city for their daily labours were now on the homeward journey, back to husbands and wives, curries and fish and chips, TV and Sky Sports, the pub and the bottle of chilled Pinot Grigio in the fridge, phone calls to Mum and Dad, a snooze in front of the box or ten pages of a paperback before bed, a freezing cold quickie under the duvet perhaps, and then sleep; ready for tomorrow's action replay.

The Milward Street Pathology Unit was only two hundred yards away. It was a single-storey red-brick building totally devoid of character. Thrown up in the 1950s, it was a monument to post-war austerity. Inside it was a little less austere. The hallway was painted a warm cream shade, and contained a cluster of chairs, a table with some two-year-old magazines on it, and a plastic palm in the corner. Pendragon strode along, ignoring his surroundings. He had been here on dozens of occasions, and almost every time the visit had involved his staring down at a corpse and receiving distinctly unpleasant information as to how the recently living person had become a dead one.

Jones saw him enter the lab and nodded before turning back to the latest arrival on the dissection table. The lab was a stark affair: whitewashed walls, scrubbed surfaces, and the irremovable stink of offal. Visible through an open door stood a wall of morgue drawers – the 'sunbeds' as the staff called them.

Jones looked up from the corpse. 'You're tired, Pendragon,' he observed.

The DCI shrugged and stared down at the almost surreal form of Kingsley Berrick. He was naked, his body split and clamped open, red and grey, as dead as a carcass hanging in a butcher's window. He looked just like a thousand other corpses, except for the void where his face had once been, now backed by a circle of steel – the dissection table upon which his corpse lay.

'It's certainly a strange one,' Dr Jones said. 'I suppose you want the hows, wheres and whens.'

'The whos and whys would be good too,' Pendragon responded.

'Yes, well, that's your department. I've found a few answers to the obvious questions, though.' He pointed with a scalpel inside the huge hole in Kingsley's head. 'This all started post-mortem. He was killed by a needle thrust into the nape of his neck, here.' The pathologist turned Kingsley Berrick's body on to its left side and indicated a red dot on the back of the neck. He then rolled the corpse back and matter-of-factly lifted the dome of the dead man's head to reveal the brain. He removed this from inside the cranium.

'I've had a good poke around,' the pathologist went on. 'It's normal weight and in average condition for a man of Berrick's age. But look here.' He held the grey mass in his left hand and nudged a piece of tissue at the base of the organ. 'A hole,' he said. Placing the brain on a dish, he parted some folds. They could both see the red of a recent wound extending from the outer tissue of the brain almost to its centre.

'It was a fine needle, but a long one,' Jones said. 'Sank in at least fifteen centimetres. Passed through the cerebellum and on into the centre of the brain, coming to rest close to the thalamus. Would have killed him pretty quickly – massive haemorrhage. As you can see, here.'

Pendragon had never become accustomed to the offhand delivery style of pathologists, especially this one. But he had learned soon after meeting Jones that if he were to work with him, he would just have to blank out the man's seemingly ice-cold professionalism. Jones had mocked him for his squeamishness when they had worked together on their first case. After that, the DCI had developed a thicker skin.

'All right. Any thoughts on the hole?' he queried.

Jones returned the brain and closed the cranium. Then he ran the end of the scalpel around the inside of the opening in Berrick's head. 'It's a neat job. The hole is 12.1 centimetres in diameter, a fraction larger than a CD. It's more ragged at the back than the front, which implies to me that the killer used some sort of heavy-duty punch to smash out the centre of the hole. The head must have been clamped meanwhile. Look here, at the temples. Rectangular impressions in the shallow flesh. No bruising, which indicates it was clamped post-mortem.'

'Yes, but surely something so heavy-handed would have shattered Berrick's skull completely?'

'I thought precisely the same thing. But I learned two interesting things about the method our killer used. First, I found a few tiny specks of metal around the rim.' Jones walked over to a counter parallel to the dissection table. Returning, he held up a pair of microscope slides sandwiched together. With the light behind the pieces of glass, Pendragon could just make out a few particles of silvery material.

'This actually confused me even more for a time,' the pathologist went on. 'But then, as I was cleaning up the inside of the hole, I noticed a few dots of liquid oozing from the skin. Most of the interior of the hole here…' and he pointed to the opening '… has been cauterised. But a few bits have been missed. I tested the liquid.'

'And?'

'I was surprised to find it was hydrofluoric acid.'

'That's incredibly corrosive, isn't it?'

'You can say that again, Pendragon. But it makes sense.'

'Why. How was it used?'

'I'm not sure, of course, but the best scenario I can draw is that the killer placed a metal cylinder over Berrick's dead face and poured in the acid.' Jones placed his hands in a circle over the dead man's facial area to illustrate. 'This softened up the tissue, and, more importantly, made the bones of the face and skull malleable. This then enabled them to smash the hole through without shattering all the bones around the face. The hydrofluoric acid I found had leached out of the skin where the cauterising had not caught the flesh properly.'

'Good Lord!' Pendragon exclaimed, shaking his head.

'After making a crude hole, the killer would have tidied it up. There are a few marks… here and here.' Jones tapped the scalpel on the inside of the hole. Marks from a blade. The final task was to cauterise the opening.'

Pendragon felt a shiver of disgust pass through him.

'One very dispassionate murderer,' Jones added unnecessarily.

The DCI simply nodded. 'I can barely imagine what sort of person we're dealing with here.' He took a deep breath. 'Any more accurate estimate for time of death?'

'Can't be precise, of course, but I would say most likely between one and two this morning. It's impossible to be sure how soon after death the mutilation was performed.'

Pendragon was about to ask another question when his mobile rang. He pulled it from his pocket, recognised the number on the screen. 'Dr Newman,' he answered cheerfully.

'Chief Inspector. We're just finishing up at the gallery. Can you spare ten minutes?'

'Certainly. Have you turned up anything?'

'Best if I go through it with you here.'

'Okay.' He paused to think for a moment. 'Give me fifteen minutes.'

'See you then.' The crime-scene tape was still stretched across the entrance to Durrell Place and a constable in an overcoat stood in front of it, stamping his feet. Pendragon gave him a sympathetic smile as he passed under the barrier. Dr Newman was alone in the gallery, slipping out of her green plastic overalls as Pendragon walked in. Beneath them she was wearing a black knee-length skirt and a white blouse. Beside her on the floor was her case, opened out. Next to that lay a sheet of plastic with clear bags and a line of specimen bottles arranged upon it in two neat rows.

'You're on your own,' Pendragon observed.

'My team just left. They'll be back in the morning to finish up. It's been a long day.'

'Certainly has. So, what have you found?'

Dr Newman lifted one of the bags from the floor. The apple lay inside it.

'Ah, the Granny Smith,' Pendragon said, without expression.

Colette Newman tilted her head to one side and gave him a questioning look.

'Our friend Dr Jones. One of his little jokes. He made a point of identifying the apple before telling me anything else about the corpse.'

Dr Newman produced a half smile. 'We have a few prints on it, but I can guarantee they're from a local greengrocer. Anyone who could kill someone and set them up the way they did with Berrick wouldn't make such an elementary mistake.'

Pendragon nodded.

'That's confirmed by the fact that there are no prints on the chair and there was nothing on the body either. We managed to give it a thorough going over before it was moved over to Jones's lab. Has he turned up anything, by the way?'

'Berrick was killed by a long needle plunged into his brain. But Jones believes the victim's head was mutilated later, possibly using some kind of press.'

'Yes, I noticed the mark on the neck before the body was removed.' She lifted a bottle from the plastic sheet. In the bottom of it lay a tiny fleck of grey. 'The press idea makes sense. We found this, a sliver of steel. It's either from a knife used to tidy the hole or a punch of some sort. Before you ask, it's too small to help much, but we'll put it under the 'scope at the lab.'

'I don't suppose our killer left anything of themself behind?' Pendragon asked, without much hope.

'Sadly, no. I think they must have been wearing some sort of plastic suit.' She bent down to return the sample bottle to the sheet. 'But I've got at least one thing to show for eight hours' work.' Newman turned and walked towards the archway leading to the reception area. Pendragon noticed for the first time that a series of marker flags had been placed seemingly at random close to the centre of the room. He followed the Head of Forensics over to the first flag. Crouching down beside her, he could just make out some black marks on the wooden floor.

'Rubber,' she said without looking up. 'There's a line of these marks across the floor all the way from reception. They stop here.'

'From a tyre?'

'Correct. Or, more precisely, the tyre of a wheelchair.'