The Scent of Death

Chapter 26

I didn’t sleep well that night. Thoughts of the hit-and-run kept me awake well into the early hours, and if I drifted off it was to jerk awake again, still hearing the screech of tyres and the thud of impact. I got up early and took a long shower, finishing with an icy-cold spray. It left me shivering and more alert but no less at odds. Images of Oduya and Mears in the street alternated with Ward’s bombshell about Jessop. The enormity of what had happened was hard enough to grasp on its own, but realizing the cause was something so needless — so bloody mundane — made it worse. I’d felt some pity for the contractor before this, seeing that, for all his flaws, the man was suffering.

Not any more.

I badly missed Rachel. I wished I could call her, but that wasn’t possible while she was at sea. Instead, I tried to act as if it were just another morning, hiding behind the comfort of routine. I resisted turning on the morning news until I was eating breakfast, making do this morning with two cups of instant coffee and a slice of toast. I was expecting the hit-and-run to be one of the lead stories, and it was. It felt strange to hear Oduya and Mears spoken about in that context on the radio, difficult to reconcile that the activist’s huge personality had crossed over into the past tense. Mears’s condition was described as serious but stable, his injuries life-changing rather than life-threatening. That was better than it might have been, but still bad enough. Their role in the St Jude’s investigation was mentioned, along with the inevitable speculation and criticism of how it was being handled. Then came something I wasn’t expecting.

‘The Metropolitan Police are looking to question a fifty-three-year-old man in relation to the incident,’ the newsreader intoned. ‘The whereabouts of Keith Jessop, a demolitions expert believed to have been working on the hospital site, are currently unknown. Jessop is thought to be potentially dangerous and, if sighted, should not be approached.’

I put down the piece of cold toast, no longer hungry. So that was it, then: Ward had chosen the nuclear option of releasing his name. I guessed she’d be under pressure from Ainsley to demonstrate that the police were taking action, but I hadn’t anticipated it so soon. There seemed something irrevocable about it, like taking a blindfolded step in the hope that the ground was where you thought it would be.

Pouring my coffee down the sink, I got my coat and left the apartment. There was a bin liner of rubbish to take out, so I dropped it into the refuse chute on my way to the lift. The vandalized bins had been replaced, and the only sign of the fire was a cold odour of old smoke when I opened the hatch. Whatever I might think about Ballard Court, I couldn’t deny the place was efficient.

Early as it was, the traffic was already heavy as I drove in to the mortuary. Ward had asked me to go in again this morning before I resumed searching with the cadaver dog team. She wanted me to examine the skeletonized remains of Darren Crossly and the woman they believed was Maria de Souza, whose identity had still to be formally confirmed. This was the ‘other problem’ she’d mentioned. For all his posturing, it seemed Mears hadn’t bothered to let Ward — or anyone else — see his findings.

‘Christ knows what he’s been doing. He’s been promising to submit his report for days, but there’s always been some reason why it’s not turned up,’ she’d told me. ‘We sent him the de Souza woman’s dental records as well, so he could compare her chart with the teeth from the body, but he didn’t get around to that either. Or if he did, he didn’t tell anyone about it.’

‘Can’t BioGen access his files?’ I’d asked.

‘Not the ones that matter. For some reason he didn’t upload them on to the company system, and his laptop and cloud storage are password protected. Until he regains consciousness there’s no way of getting at them.’

Mears had grumbled in the pub that Ward wasn’t giving him the chance to finish one job before springing another on him. I’d guessed he was struggling with something, but I thought there’d be more to it than this. He’d already identified Crossly’s body, and comparing the female victim’s teeth with Maria de Souza’s dental chart should have been relatively straightforward.

Yet something had still derailed him again.

I’d been wanting to examine the two interred bodies ever since I’d first glimpsed them in the sealed room. There had been no time for more than a cursory look when I’d gone to help Mears, and ordinarily I’d have been keen for the opportunity to find out more. But not like this.

The road outside the mortuary was still cordoned off by police tape. I’d parked a few streets away, and as I walked towards it I felt a tightness in my gut. There was little sign of the previous evening’s carnage. The overnight rain had washed the tarmac clean of blood, and even the van hit by the car had been towed away. Except for the shards of plastic from its broken wing mirror and the fluttering strips of tape, I might have imagined the whole thing. People walked past the street without giving it a second glance. Someone had died but the world went on turning.

As it always did.

With the road closed, I used the mortuary’s side door. It wasn’t until I was inside that it occurred to me Oduya’s body might be there, lying in the dark of a storage locker. The sense of unreality grew stronger when I went to sign in and saw Mears’s name scrawled on the line above mine from the night before. Seeing it brought it home again. Not only what had happened, but how easily it could have been very different if the order of those names on the page had been reversed.

I signed in and went to change.

The lights of the examination room stuttered into brightness. Going to one of the cold-storage lockers, I took out the box containing the cleaned bones of the female victim. Mears had packed away both victims’ remains before he’d left, and he’d been as scrupulous about that as he’d been in laying them out.

Unpacking the woman’s disarticulated skeleton from the box, I began to carefully reassemble it, placing each individual bone on the table in its correct anatomical position. I had to concede it wasn’t as neat as when Mears had done it, but it didn’t need to be. This was about information, not aesthetics.

The yellow-brown burns on the bones looked like small smudges. Mears had already cut sections of them for examination under a microscope, and I was itching to take a closer look myself. But first things first.

Before anything else I needed to find out if this was Maria de Souza.

It was the same procedure I’d carried out for Christine Gorski. Once I’d reassembled the woman’s skeleton, I carried out an inventory of her teeth, noting any cavities or defects as well as detailing the positions of fillings, crowns and other dental work. That done, I turned to Maria de Souza’s dental records. Ward had told me they’d finally had some good luck, finding the missing woman’s dentist on the second attempt. As I went through the records my sense of puzzlement increased. When I’d asked Mears about the identification when I’d seen him in the pub — it seemed impossible that had been only the day before — he’d bitten my head off. Yet I couldn’t for the life of me see why. The comparison was even more straightforward than the one I’d carried out on Christine Gorski. The dead woman’s teeth were in a better condition than the young drug addict’s, suggesting that, whether she’d been dealing drugs or not, she hadn’t been in the grip of such a severe addiction. More to the point, every filling and crown in the cleaned jawbones was consistent with those shown in the dental records of Maria de Souza.

It was as easy an identification as anyone in my profession could hope to make. Mears must have seen that too. So why had he been dragging his feet?

I looked at the dead woman’s teeth again. The only new feature I’d found not shown in her records was that several of the molars were cracked. The damage was on both sides, upper and lower teeth, but there was no chipping or loosening to suggest it had been caused by any sort of blow to the face. The cracks looked more like the sort of damage caused by pressure, as though she’d clenched her teeth hard enough to crack them.

She was tortured and walled up inside a derelict hospital, strapped down and left to die in the dark. You’d grit your teeth as well.

But something was beginning to nudge at me. I thought about the lesions I’d seen on both victims, where they’d torn their flesh against the straps. Presumably struggling to escape, regardless of the damage and pain they were inflicting on themselves. As terrified as they must have been, it was probably a natural response, although…

I stopped. A natural response…

I picked up one of the woman’s ribs which showed one of the burn marks. It was the same dirty yellow as nicotine on a smoker’s fingers. Small, too, and unusually localized for a burn. My heart had started to beat more quickly as an idea began to form. Jesus, could that be it? Is that what this is?

Putting the rib down, I stripped off my gloves and pulled on a fresh pair from the dispenser. Going to another storage locker, I lifted out the box containing Darren Crossly’s deconstructed skeleton. Mears had packed away the bones with his customary care, and what I was looking for was close to the top. Taking out the skull and mandible, I carried them over to a desktop magnifying lens and switched on its lamp.

Crossly’s teeth were cracked as well.

The knock on the door startled me. I turned towards it, but before I had a chance to speak it had already opened.

It was Ainsley.

‘Morning, Dr Hunter. Mind if I come in?’

Since he already had, there was no point answering. The commander looked fresh and fit, wearing a navy-blue suit with a crisp white shirt and pale tie rather than a uniform. The jacket was cut to flatter his trim physique. Stopping short of where I was working, he raised his hands.

‘I know, I haven’t changed but I won’t touch anything. And I’m not staying.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘There’s been no more crises, if that’s what you mean. I just wanted to stop by and see how you were getting on.’

Even from where he was standing, his aftershave was potent enough to mask the examination suite’s other chemical smells.

‘I’m just getting started.’ I carefully packed the skull and mandible back in the box. I’d examine Darren Crossly’s remains in detail later, but I’d seen all I had to for now. ‘Any word on Daniel Mears?’

Ainsley considered the woman’s skeleton. ‘Not so far. You heard he lost the leg?’

‘DCI Ward told me.’

‘Terrible. You were there, I understand?’

I nodded, not wanting to go into it again. ‘It said on the news you’re looking for Keith Jessop.’

I wasn’t going to mention what Ward had already told me, that the police wanted to interview the contractor about the other St Jude’s murders as well. Ainsley’s mouth pursed, perhaps remembering how the contractor had hit him.

‘It wasn’t an easy decision to release his name at this stage, but we need him in custody. The man’s a danger to himself and everyone else. It’s a pity somebody didn’t realize it sooner.’

By ‘somebody’ I guessed he meant Ward. The scapegoating had already started.

‘So which one’s this?’ Ainsley asked, looking down at the reassembled skeleton. He might have been talking about car parts rather than human remains.

‘It’s the woman who was with Darren Crossly.’

‘Ah, yes. The one we think is his Portuguese girlfriend. Are you working on confirming the ID?’

‘That’s right.’

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a lie. The dental exam had proved this was Maria de Souza, but I’d still to check for healed bone fractures or any other identifying features to support the identification. I could have said so to Ainsley, but I hadn’t liked his implied criticism of Ward. Although he might outrank her, she was still SIO.

For now.

He nodded, not seeming interested in the answer. I knew then that he’d come here for more than a progress report.

‘I approved of DCI Ward’s decision to ask you to take over from Mears, by the way,’ he said, turning from the remains to me. The blue eyes were as impenetrable as a china doll’s. ‘BioGen wanted to send over someone else, but I felt we needed continuity. You’re already familiar with the case so you can jump straight in. And, without any disrespect to Dr Mears, I thought it would be better to have someone with experience.’

To hear him talk it might have been his idea all along. ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said neutrally.

‘I’m sure you will.’ Ainsley brushed a fleck of something off his jacket, too small for me to see. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the investigation’s under a lot of scrutiny. Frankly, it’s lurched from one disaster to another, and we can’t allow that to continue. Obviously, no one was aware it would develop as it has, but while I’ve the utmost respect for DCI Ward, with hindsight it was probably unfair to expect her to deal with this level of responsibility.’

Here it comes. Whelan had foreseen that the blame would be focused on Ward, and Ainsley wasn’t wasting any time. ‘Because she’s pregnant?’

He quickly backtracked. ‘No, of course not. But this is her first case as SIO, so it’s not surprising she’s been… overwhelmed.’

‘I thought she’d been coping pretty well.’

I wasn’t just speaking up for Ward out of loyalty. She was under a lot of strain, but she’d been forced to deal with fast-moving events no one could have predicted. And Ainsley was conveniently forgetting it had been his decision to bring in a private forensic company, the results of which I was having to deal with now.

He nodded slowly, as though giving weight to my words. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not sure events bear that out. Especially not after last night.’

I couldn’t see how Ward could have predicted Jessop’s attack, let alone prevented it. But I also knew there was no point arguing.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

Civilian consultants weren’t high enough in the pecking order to merit that sort of consideration. There was certainly no need for a Metropolitan Police commander to inform me personally if Ward was being replaced as SIO.

Ainsley regarded me thoughtfully. ‘I know you and Sharon Ward have a strong working relationship, but we can’t afford any more mistakes. Without apportioning any blame, I think it falls to the rest of us to ease the burden of pressure from her in any way we can. That’s why I’d like you to report to me from now on.’

‘You’re asking me to bypass DCI Ward?’

‘Not at all. She’s SIO and you should continue to report to her as usual. But I’d like to be kept appraised of your findings as well.’

So Ward wasn’t being removed. Yet. Just placed on probation, with Ainsley overseeing and no doubt micromanaging in the background.

‘Does she know?’ I asked.

‘DCI Ward’s a realist.’

I took that to mean she didn’t. Ainsley slipped a card from his wallet and set it down on the worktop next to him. ‘Do we understand each other, Dr Hunter?’

‘I think so.’

‘Excellent.’ He shot his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘I need to be going. The post-mortem briefing’s starting soon.’

‘For Adam Oduya?’ It hadn’t occurred to me that might be the reason for Ainsley’s visit.

‘Yes, it’s scheduled for ten o’clock. Not here, at the Belmont Road mortuary,’ he added, seeing me glance at the wall clock. ‘It was felt that was more appropriate when he was killed right outside. I just took a detour en route.’

He started towards the door, then stopped and turned again.

‘Oh, one more thing. I appreciate your bringing Gary Lennox to our attention, but please remember you’re a civilian consultant. Any operational aspects — certainly involving potential suspects — are best left to the investigative officers. That said, I can understand why it happened, and it was a promising lead. It’s just a shame it didn’t work out.’

I was trying to decide if he was thanking me or reprimanding me, so I was slow to pick up on that last sentence.

‘I’m not with you.’ From what Ward had said the night before, they were still waiting to check Lennox’s fingerprints.

‘I thought DCI Ward might have let you know,’ Ainsley said, a shade too smoothly to be convincing. ‘We managed to obtain sets of both their fingerprints. Lennox’s and his mother’s. Neither of them matches the ones from the crime scene, so all that time and effort was for nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Lennox is getting proper care now, which I suppose is something. But a simple call to social services would have been lot easier.’

The doll’s eyes held mine.

‘I won’t keep you any longer, Dr Hunter. You know how to reach me.’