‘Bloody ghouls,’ he grunted to Jools, who stood behind him, rustling in her Noddy suit. ‘Come on. Let’s get inside.’
Ford paused at the door. Looked up. The three-storey house must once have been a spacious family home. Since its conversion into separate flats, it had slid a few rungs down the social ladder.
The downstairs hallway retained its turquoise, rust and cream encaustic tiles with their intricate geometric pattern. But the surface was dulled through neglect and several were chipped, the missing corners filled in with dirty cement. A grubby radiator cover was piled high with takeaway menus.
The hallway was wide enough for them to stand side by side, but the stairs were narrower. Ford led them up to the first floor, where the forensic pathologist was pulling a hood back from a sleek bob of silver hair.
Dr Georgina Eustace was in her mid-fifties. Her base was Salisbury District Hospital, but she liked to come out to the more ‘exotic’ crime scenes, as she called them. In Ford’s opinion, she took the concept of gallows humour to a whole new level. But she was a damn good pathologist, which, he felt, allowed her some leeway.
‘What’ve we got?’ he asked, not reluctant to venture up to the main crime scene, just keen to get her initial impressions while they were still fresh.
‘I’ll go on up,’ Jools said. ‘Make a start.’
Ford nodded, then turned back to the pathologist. ‘Cause of death?’
‘From the bruises around her throat and the amount of blood, I’d say strangling and exsanguination will have played their part in the young woman’s death,’ she said. ‘Although it’s always possible the killer may have found some other method of doing her in.’
‘The boy?’
She shook her head. ‘No obvious sign of trauma. I emphasise the word “obvious”. He’s not bled, or not from the side you can see, so I’ll have to wait till I get back to SDH,’ she said. ‘They’re both at the very early stages of bloating so, making allowances for the extremely hot weather we’ve been having, they’ve been dead no more than a day or two.’
Ford appreciated the way Eustace would give him more than the usual litany of exasperated headshakes and tutting whenever he, a lowly plod, dared to ask a pathologist for ideas before the post-mortem.
He nodded. He was thinking that fresh corpses meant recent murders. And recent murders were easier to clear up. The clock had started ticking. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘I’ve signed the ROLE form on both victims, by the way,’ Eustace said.
Recognition of Life Extinct. It was one of the first steps in the sad, bureaucratic process through which a once-living human being, a person, became transformed into a thing. A body. A case. A PM report. The property of the coroner. A deceased and sadly missed. A body smashed by a falling rock. Then washed off a ledge and dumped on a Welsh beach. Oh, Lou! I wish you were still with me.
Stuffing the memory back down, he took a small, flat rectangular tin from his pocket, and extracted two filters for rolling cigarettes and a small bottle of oil of menthol. Knowing his ‘stink-busters’ wouldn’t help, but needing the ritual, he squirted a couple of drops of the strong-smelling mint oil on to each of the filters, then stuck them into his nostrils. A smear of oil of camphor on his top lip and he was ready.
He tugged his hood up, settled his face mask over his nose and climbed the final flight of stairs to Flat 3. He didn’t dread seeing corpses any more. Carrying one around with him at all times had dulled the shock to a constant, low-level ache.
If the first-floor landing was tight, the third-floor landing was like a crowded train compartment.
DAY TWO, 9.31 A.M.
White-suited CSIs bearing bagged samples moved in and out along a common-approach path of bright-yellow plastic tread plates. Jools was talking to a uniformed sergeant.
Kneeling beside them, the photographer worked at a laptop propped on a tall stool.
‘Backing up,’ he said, without turning away from the screen.
Ford stepped across the threshold, losing his balance as one of the tread plates shifted beneath his foot. He swore, causing those inside the flat to turn. The common-approach path led along the hall to the kitchen, tight to the left-hand edge of the corridor.
He picked out a set of bloody footprints leading away from the kitchen. Nat’s. He frowned with irritation. And then he thought of her instinct to try to save the little boy. And of his own wife’s desperate entreaty to him: You have to. If you stay here, we’ll both die. Then who’ll look after Sam?
He felt his throat clutch: he pushed on, steeling himself. And then he entered the crime scene.
It happened here. Obviously. You don’t murder somebody outside then bring the body back to dump it in their own kitchen.
Rather than barging into the centre of the working CSIs, firing off questions and asserting his authority, he observed from the edge of the room.
And he didn’t stare, either, or focus in so tightly on the heinous scene before his eyes – the intertwined bodies and the lake of blood – that he got tunnel vision and failed to see the bigger picture. Because that’s what he was there for: to see the scene as a whole. The CSIs and the snapper could pick up far more details than he ever could, or wanted to. One thing preoccupied Ford: the killer. Because Ford knew all about what it was like to kill.
He felt it on the back of his neck first. Fresh sweat chilling his skin. His stomach lurched. He slid a black plastic bag from his inside pocket. As the scene impressed itself upon him, and the wave of nausea rolled through him, he opened the bag and threw up, as quietly as he could manage, then knotted it and placed it a corner.
He noticed Jools watching him. Only her eyes were visible, but he’d seen that look before. The look that said, ‘I understand.’ No, Jools, you don’t. Not at all. He turned away from her and began to look. The nausea subsided to a background tremor. He knew where it was about to take him, was ready for the journey.
Three chairs hemmed the table. Groceries had spilled from one of the bags, but nothing had rolled or fallen to the floor.
Multicoloured paintings covered the fridge door, enthusiasm more in evidence than skill. They reminded Ford of Sam’s earliest artistic endeavours: plenty of finger paintings, a couple of stars that said ‘potato print’ to Ford, and a drawing of two figures. One a wobbly orange oval with two lines straggling down to the bottom edge of the paper, the other a smaller version, their ‘arms’ – more single spidery lines – linked. Dots and crooked curves that might have been faces were set within squashed circles balanced atop the bodies.
Underneath, in coloured crayons, someone had printed ‘Kai and Mummy’. No Daddy, then? Was your mum bringing you up on her own, Kai? Bearing all the weight on her own? Did your daddy come back? Lose his temper?
Coloured magnetic plastic letters held the artworks in place. None had been torn, swiped off-centre or knocked free. It meant ‘no struggle’ to Ford.
He viewed each of the four walls in turn – registering the grotesque graffiti – then moved on to the ceiling, and finally the floor. He let his gaze soften, blurring sharp edges, rounding corners.
He inhaled and, as he breathed out, pushed a little at that part of him that allowed him to inhabit the mind of a murderer. He felt the killer’s presence. Became the killer.