Past Mortem Read online

  EIGHT

  I expected someone older,’ said Inspector Collins of the Greater Manchester Police when they met at Manchester Piccadilly Station. ‘And bigger.’

  Newson and Natasha’s delving into the Police National Computer archive had unearthed three unsolved cases that Newson felt might fit the vague profile that had begun to form in his mind. The first had taken place a year earlier in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury. It was a peculiar murder featuring the same specific and repetitive attention to detail that had characterized the death of Adam Bishop. Inspector Collins had not been overjoyed to receive a request from the Metropolitan Police asking him to reopen one of his cases. He felt it cast a slur.

  The victim was an army warrant officer, a twenty-eight-year-old unmarried man who had been home on leave visiting his parents. Both parents worked, and on the day of the murder had left their house together in the family car at approximately seven forty-five a.m. Warrant Officer Denis Spencer had been asleep in the spare room. His alarm was set for ten thirty and he had an appointment to meet an old friend in the pub at one thirty. Officer Spencer never made that appointment, because at some point between seven forty-five a.m. and approximately eleven a.m. Spencer had admitted his killer into the house.

  ‘We reckon it couldn’t have been any later than eleven because of the estimated time of death and the time it would have taken to do the killing,’ Collins explained.

  The police presumption was that the person Spencer had allowed into the house must have been armed because he or she was able to persuade Spencer, who was a big, fit man, to go downstairs into the kitchen and allow himself to be secured to a chair with duct tape. The police had not ruled out the possibility that there had been more than one assailant, but apart from the corpse and the blood splattered around it very little evidence of any intruder remained. As in the Bishop case, whoever had attacked Spencer had expertly covered his tracks. And, most significantly, the victim had been subjected to a strange and unusual torment. He had been hit on the head repeatedly, with a soft flat object, perhaps like a large rubber mallet. Warrant Officer Spencer was killed not by the force or weight of the blows, but by the number and frequency. He had been struck many, many hundreds of times over a period of between five and six hours, causing the vertebrae in his neck to become impacted and his brain to be slowly mashed from being bounced back and forth in the skull.

  ‘The brain was massively bruised,’ the Greater Manchester police doctor explained to Newson when they met at Deansgate Police Station. ‘I remember the details well because it was such a very strange way for a man to die. I mean, I’ve dealt with any number of violently inflicted brain injuries in my time, but it’s normally about one or two big blows. The harder the man is hit, the more damage is done. Poor old Spencer wasn’t hit hard at all, not like with a hammer or a brick. The blows taken individually would not even have been particularly painful. I think of them as slaps rather than blows. The skull was hardly damaged, but the hair and skin on the scalp were completely worn away. I don’t mean knocked off or torn out, I mean worn away. Imagine how many times you would have to slap somebody on the head to wear their hair and skin away. The scalp bleeds copiously, of course, and the man’s face and shoulders were caked in it, as was the surrounding carpet. Eventually the man would have been in agony.’

  ‘Was the victim conscious while he was being beaten?’

  ‘Oh yes, conscious all right. The killer made sure of that.’

  ‘Smelling salts.’

  ‘Yes. Nasty bugger. Trying not to let him off until the final blow, although God only knows what sort of mental state he. would have been in by then. Completely tonto, I imagine. His brain was literally raffling around in his skull.’

  ‘And you have no idea what the murder weapon was?’

  ‘Well, if you really want to know, I think it was a telephone book. That would certainly fit the profile.’

  ‘But not the Spencers’ own?’

  ‘No, they were still intact. Besides, the killer would have needed more than a couple to do it. I conducted a little experiment at the time, whacking a Thomson’s Local Directory on my stair post. It only took about twenty minutes for it to start to disintegrate. My guess is that the killer would have needed fifteen or twenty.’

  ‘Twenty phone books? Not an easy murder weapon to carry about.’

  ‘No, and you can imagine the mickey-taking I took at the time when I stupidly mentioned my theory. Assault with fifteen or twenty deadly phone books. Oh yes, I certainly paid for that one.—

  ‘Maybe he wrapped one book up in the duct tape he used to secure the victim. That would’ve made it last.’

  ‘I didn’t find any trace of tape in the scalp, and there would almost certainly have been some microscopic residue.’

  ‘But there was a trace of fabric fibre, wasn’t there?’

  The doctor scrolled through the forensic notes that he’d taken at the time, punching up jpegs of the wound showing ragged bits of blood-caked skin and hair lying across the exposed bone of the skull. ‘The killer certainly did his best to clean out the wound, but of course he couldn’t get it all, no one ever can, and, yes, there were twenty or so tiny threads of fabric.’

  ‘Any ideas of what they might have been?’

  ‘I thought that perhaps they came from the sleeve of his jumper.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing that could help you.’

  ‘Nothing unusual at all?’

  ‘Well, apart from the funeral.’

  ‘You went to the funeral?’

  ‘Yes, I do try to attend them when I’ve had the deceased on my table, so to speak. Small gesture, really. I do it for the families. You see, they know where I’ve been.’

  ‘Where you’ve been?’

  ‘Inside their loved one. I’ve seen more of the person they loved than they ever did. I’ve been to every private place and looked at every little personal secret. I’m an intruder, another abuser, really, and I like to show that I always bear in mind that I am intruding on a fellow soul. Another human being who loved and who was loved.’

  ‘That’s an impressive point of view.’

  ‘It’s amazing how much they appreciate it. Never once has a family failed to thank me. Of course the funny thing about Spencer’s funeral, the reason I remember it so well, is that I don’t think he was loved very much at all, because I never saw a sorrier turn-out in all my life. Just me and his parents, his two brothers, the one surviving grandparent and the vicar.’

  ‘A bit embarrassing, I imagine.’

  ‘I’ll say. What’s more, I’d already agreed to do the sherry and sandwiches bit afterwards. I mean, what do you say?’

  ‘ ‘Lovely funeral,’ I suppose.’

  ‘Except it hadn’t been. There was a curious incident.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It happened as they were lowering the coffin into the grave. Suddenly from nowhere this young fellow in army uniform appeared and played the Last Post. He must have been hiding behind a tree.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite nice, isn’t it? Military man and all that.’

  ‘He played it on a kazoo, you know, those things that sound like a fly farting. Not at all sombre or dignified. I don’t think it was meant as a mark of respect.’

  ‘Didn’t anybody say anything?’

  ‘The Last Post isn’t very long, is it? I think we were all too taken aback. Anyway, the moment it was finished the man disappeared. Most embarrassing.’

  As Newson took his leave the doctor asked to be remembered to Dr Clarke. ‘We were at med school together,’ he said. ‘I always fancied her but she used to go with arty types.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Newson replied. ‘She ended up marrying a musician. A mandolin player.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Not a lot of money in that, I imagine.’

  ‘I don’t think she married him for money.’

  ‘Or the size of his instrument either. Ha ha. A mandolin, eh? Not very rock ‘n’
roll.’

  ‘In my experience very little in life is.’

  ‘Well, give her my love, will you? Lovely girl. Lovely, lovely girl.’

  Newson noted the wistfulness in the doctor’s voice. Youth was so very fleeting, but what an impression it left. It was as if the rest of a person’s life was merely a pale reflection of its promise.

  NINE

  The second case which Newson had discovered in the police database was one with which he was already familiar. Anybody who read the newspapers knew about this killing. It had been the stuff of tabloid dreams.

  Angie Tatum, ex-page-three stunner, current celeb status D list slipping to E, one of the growing number of damaged identifies of whom most people had heard but in whom no one was remotely interested. A woman who had briefly been the toast of a certain part of the town (notably Stringfellows nightclub) during the period in the eighties when page-three girls had been news. Now, nearly twenty years later, Angie was news only because she’d once been news, and had recently been lampooned in the press for being rejected by the producers of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, despite her promise to reveal again her once-celebrated breasts.

  A sad story of a sad life. A little girl with big fits who had dreamt of stardom and who now, having briefly touched the hem of its garment, was stumbling towards anonymity. Then suddenly, against all expectations, Angie Tatum became major news again, when her rotting body was discovered six weeks after her soul had departed it, the victim of a brutal murder and mutilation.

  The killing had occurred at Angie Tatum’s home, one of the smaller, cheaper but still desirable flats that make up the residential developments lining the river between Fulham and Chelsea. The crime notes taken at the time suggested that Ms Tatum probably paid for this accommodation from the proceeds of high-class prostitution. She herself would probably not have recognized what she did as such, but she was closely connected with a number of nightclubs, where she had many wealthy gentlemen friends. The CCTV surveillance cameras that covered the entrance to the block in which Ms Tatum lived recorded many comings and goings of these friends, and the police concluded that Angie Tatum’s ex-celebrity and thrice-remodelled breasts still carried a market value sufficient for her to live in some degree of comfort. One of these visitors, a man who had taken care not to present any identifying features to the surveillance cameras, had killed her.

  ‘She’d been dead a month and a half,’ Dr Clarke said, for by coincidence it had been she who attended the murder scene, the Kensington & Chelsea police pathologist being fully occupied at the time with a train crash at Victoria Station. ‘Obviously there had been a fair bit of damage to the cadaver. Six weeks is a fair time to rot.’

  ‘Amazing how maggots just seem to materialize out of thin air, eh?’ observed Newson.

  ‘Yes. Like wheel dampers.’

  Newson looked at the photographs of the dead woman, once such a cute, fresh-faced- teen whose sixteen-year-old breasts had simultaneously charmed and outraged the nation. He and Angie were almost exactly the same age. When she had first revealed her double Ds to the nation he had been in the lower-sixth form doing French, English, history and sociology. He could remember masturbating over her pictures when they appeared in the Daily Star. Now he was looking at Angie Tatum’s naked photographs again, pictures of a disfigured, maggot-infested corpse. It seemed to Newson that he ought to be feeling some sense of grave and dramatic irony about it all. Instead he shared with Dr Clarke the details of the Manchester murder.

  ‘So, similar to this case in that the victim was secured to a chair,’ Dr Clarke observed.

  ‘Yes. And to the Willesden murder in so far as Bishop was secured to a bed.’

  ‘But then murderers often tape up their victims,’ Dr Clarke pointed out.

  ‘Yes, sadly they do. By the way, the Manchester pathologist sends his regards. He says he was at medical school with you.

  ‘Not Rod Haynes?’

  ‘That was his name.’

  Dr Clarke reddened and smiled all at once. ‘Good heavens. Roddy Haynes. I always fancied him, you know, but he used to prefer idiots.’

  ‘He fancied you too.’

  ‘No, really? Why didn’t he say so? I thought he was lush.’

  Newson had never heard Dr Clarke use a word like ‘lush’ before, and it sounded almost as though she was speaking a foreign language. In a way she was, because it was a word from her past, and the past, as has been observed before, is another country…

  ‘How little we know, eh?’ Dr Clarke mused. ‘Rod Haynes wouldn’t have had to ask twice. I’d have had him like a shot.’

  ‘Well, he sends his best. You should look him up, you know, on Friends Reunited. Say hello.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I could be bothered doing that. It’s all so long ago. Besides, I always feel uncomfortable about puffing my details on the net.’ But Newson could see that Dr Clarke’s imagination was flying. The years had slipped briefly away and once more the past was in the room.

  Collecting herself, Dr Clarke brought out copies of all her case notes, which she presented to Newson in a neat folder. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much there. Basically, the killer tied Ms Tatum up, then disfigured her and disappeared, leaving her to die.’

  ‘Just the face?’

  ‘Yes, just the face. No skewer wounds.’

  ‘He split her lip.’

  ‘Yes, very nasty, that. Sharp knife, straight cut from the middle of her upper lip to her nose, then he folded one side of the lip across the other and stitched them together.’

  ‘Without an anaesthetic?’

  ‘Certainly without an anaesthetic. There was no trace of anything like that in her blood.’

  ‘And he wanted her to see exactly what had been done to her.

  ‘Well, that’s an inference which is your department, Detective Inspector, but it looks that way, doesn’t it?’

  It certainly did. The killer had secured Angie Tatum on her dressing-room chair, and had left her staring into the large three-sided mirror standing on the dressing table. Then to be absolutely sure that Tatum could not avoid seeing her reflection, no matter where she turned her head, he placed all the mirrors he could find in the house (and there were plenty) around her. He’d torn them from the wardrobe doors, brought in two large ones which had hung in the front hall, and prised the reflective tiles off the bathroom wall and attached them to the ceiling above her head.

  Then he had superglued Angie Tatum’s eyelids open.

  ‘Tell me how she died,’ Newson asked.

  ‘Dehydration, starvation, deprivation. He knew she lived alone. He knew she was estranged from that awful mother who used to trot round the chat shows with her. He knew nobody cared a damn about her. The CCTV recorded that a few people tried to visit, but when they got no answer they went away. The killer left her bound and gagged, chair screwed to the floor, staring at her mutilated face until she died.’

  TEN

  The last of the unsolved cases that had caught Newson’s eye was a kidnapping and murder in Stratford-upon-Avon. Newson took the train, which he always did when travelling outside London, because he preferred it to driving. This was another aspect of his character that his colleagues at New Scotland Yard found utterly baffling. On the journey Newson decided that he would enter his own profile on the Friends Reunited site. Perhaps Christine was doing as he had done, spying on the site without committing herself. He hoped that if he made an appearance it would flush her out. He took out his brand-new internet-connected mobile phone, opened up the tiny keyboard and began to type his message.

  Hi, everybody. It’s Period Head here. Yes, the Ginger Minge aka the Human Carrot Spewsome Newson and, on very rare occasions, Edward. It was nice to hear news from those of you who’ve already signed up. Hi Gary, sorry you hated school so much. Hi Roger, I’m in the police too, as it happens. Not what I expected when we were all young but sadly Queen decided not to replace Freddie Mercury with me and there aren’t many coal mines a
ny more, so I never got to take over from Arthur Scargill. I’m with the Met, a detective in fact, which sounds more exciting than it is. I’d love to get in touch with anybody who remembers me, so why not drop me a line?

  He considered adding a PS to say that he was single, but decided it might look a bit desperate, besides which the fact that he hadn’t mentioned a partner would probably do the trick.

  Newson had never visited Stratford-upon-Avon before. He’d expected an entirely half-timbered town filled with perfectly preserved Elizabethan buildings. Though there is much of this to be found in Stratford, it also has considerable modern developments away from the centre, and it was from one of these streets on a quiet Sunday afternoon that Neil Bradshaw had been spirited while walking home from the newsagent with his copy of The Sunday Times. From there he was taken to a seed shed on a farm two or three miles along the Birmingham Road, near a village called Snitterfield, and it was in this shed that he died.

  Newson met Natasha at the gates to the farm. She had driven up from London earlier in the day to talk to the local police.

  ‘They know when he was lifted because he’d been out to the newsagent and hadn’t come back.’

  ‘His family missed him?’

  ‘No, there was no family. He was divorced, three times. He lived alone, between girlfriends, I suppose. The neighbour said he knows Bradshaw never came back because he was in the front garden waiting for him.’

  ‘Sunday drink?’

  ‘Hardly. They were in dispute over a hedge. Our Bradshaw had been growing one of those things that do a metre every five minutes and the bloke next door was going to have it out with him.’