Fell Purpose

But the action this time was evidently right over at the embankment, where the white-clad forensic support team was already in the process of erecting canvas screens to shield the site from view. Avoiding all eyes, Slider started off, with Atherton at his side, across the grass. He found himself walking over a patch of churned ground, pitted with stud-marks – baked in after a week without rain. This end of the Scrubs was marked out for football pitches, where amateur teams played at the weekends – the football season started in August these days, and he was crossing a goalmouth. He registered automatically the large brick building over to his right, which housed changing rooms, showers and lavatories for the teams, and paused to note its relative position. Was it securely locked, or could someone have lurked in there? Then he turned to take in the rest of the surroundings.

The high, blank wall of the prison was the most obvious feature, with the white-topped turrets of its towers just peeping above. The hospital also had a wall, not so high but just as blank. Beyond that was the stout link fencing of the school playing fields. At the eastern end of the Scrubs, almost a mile away, on the other short side of the rectangle, was another school, and beside it a patch of ground which the council let out from time to time to travelling shows and temporary exhibitions. On Bank Holidays there was always either a circus or a fair, and this time it was the latter: the familiar shapes of helter-skelter and big wheel stuck up from the surrounding circular tent-tops of the other rides and attractions. Public access to the fairground was from the far side, from Scrubs Lane. On this side of it was a dense but orderly collection of parked lorries and the living caravans of the staff. The hazy sunshine glinted off a windscreen or two, as if the fair were winking at him. Wouldn’t you like to know!

‘Too far away for anyone to have seen anything,’ Atherton said, noting the direction of his gaze.

‘We’ll still have to ask questions,’ Slider said.

‘That’ll make us popular,’ Atherton said. Fairground people resented, to put it mildly, any suggestion that they were more criminally bent than the rest of the population.

The fair was an added complication that Slider could have done without. ‘The press are bound to leap on it,’ he said. His frowning gaze returned to the prison’s blank facade, where there were no windows to wink. ‘Too much scope for speculation altogether.’

Atherton caught his drift, as he so often did. ‘But if anyone had got over the wall it would be known about. Meanwhile, there are hundreds and thousands of houses all around us that no one’s been watching.’

‘Ah, but you don’t think in cliches.’

The railway embankment ran the whole length of the Scrubs. It was tall and steep, and had once sported a dense shrubbery mixed with tree cover, but in recent years the track company had cut it back for safety purposes, and acid rain or some other modern blight had thinned the remainder naturally, so now only the lower part of the slope still had bushes growing patchily over it.

Reaching the site, Slider and Atherton passed two of the forensic team, who had just discovered that the screen they were erecting had somehow got torn since the last time it was used.

‘Why does this keep happening to us?’ one of them complained.

‘Awning has broken,’ Atherton explained. ‘Like the first awning.’

‘It’s not an awning,’ the man replied squashingly. ‘Don’t forget to sign the access log. And keep to the boards!’

‘Tell your grandmother.’

One of Slider’s own team, WDC Hart, met them, smart in a charcoal trouser suit and cherry-red shirt, her hair scraped up into a knob on top. She looked upset. They all tried to hide their feelings, but when you worked with someone for a while you got to know the symptoms. Slider gave her a steadying look.

‘It’s a girl,’ she said.

‘Yes, we were told,’ said Slider.

‘She’s just a kid, guv. Seventeen-eighteen tops.’ The emotion escaped her in a burst of anger. ‘Who does that? Bastards!’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Slider said. ‘Any identification?’

‘No, guv. No pockets on what she’s wearing, and we ain’t found ’er ’andbag yet.’

He went to have a look. The victim was lying on her back between the bushes on the lower slope of the embankment, her arms out to the sides, one leg slightly bent. It was a relaxed-looking pose, as if she had just flung herself down to rest in the heat of the day. She had thick corn-blonde hair, shoulder-length, and he noted the night’s dew was on it.

She was slim and very young, as Hart had said, but with an enviable figure, with no puppy chubbiness around jaw or waist, and fine skin: not a spot in sight. She was wearing a mauve cropped top with spaghetti straps, and a black skirt, so short it was a mere nod to decency, which fitted round her hips, leaving her navel exposed. The navel sat curled and cute like a winkle-shell – but the winkle-shell of a particularly fashion-conscious winkle – embedded in the smooth honey-coloured mound of her belly. It was appallingly sexual. Why did girls want to dress like that, he wondered, with a background ache of alarm. His own daughter, Kate, bright and pretty as she was, was just getting to the age when she wanted to go out with her friends, all of them looking like hookers – and cheap hookers at that. They might as well have had placards on their backs saying: ‘Available for casual sex. No respect required.’

The victim’s legs were bare, and one strappy high-heeled shoe was on, while the other lay nearby, its straps broken. The heel had snapped off and was a little further away towards the road.

Hart indicated it with a gesture and said, ‘You can see it, guv, can’t you? She’s running away from ’im and ’er heel catches, down she goes, and he’s on ’er.’

‘You assume she was running away,’ Atherton said. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the movies? What about playful chasing and light-hearted gambolling?’

‘Gambling? What are you talkin’ about?’

‘There’s no reason to think she was running at all,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘She could just as easily have been walking, or even standing still—’

‘Yeah, standing still and struggling,’ Hart said.

‘The ground’s too hard for footmarks,’ Slider said, but without regret. Footmarks were time-consuming, and hardly ever helpful.

He looked last of all at the face. As Hart had said, she had been pretty, as far as one could tell – perhaps extremely pretty. Now the face was congested; the open eyes spotted with petechiae; the tip of the tongue protruding between the lips, a smear of blood on the chin. Around her neck was a pair of flesh-coloured tights. They were not knotted, just crossed over, but were kept in place by the ridge of swollen flesh on either side. There was also, he noticed, bending closer, a thin red line around the bottom of her neck: a fine cut, as if a wire had been tightened there.

‘Strangled with ’er own tights,’ Hart said bitterly.

Slider leaned forward. ‘You see what she’s wearing,’ he said, lifting the hem of the skirt back a little.

‘A thong,’ said Hart. ‘I ’ate those things. They’re dead un’ygienic. Give you thrush, and it’s a bugger to get rid of.’

‘The thong has ended but the malady lingers on?’ Atherton suggested.

‘Sometimes you’re really funny, Jim,’ Hart told him. ‘And then there’s now.’

‘The point I’m trying to make,’ Slider said patiently, ‘is that I wonder if she was raped. Would a rapist put the thing back on afterwards?’

‘Would he take it off in the first place?’ Atherton said.

‘But what about the tights, guv?’ Hart said. ‘I fink maybe I was wrong before.’

Slider got the point. ‘She obviously wasn’t wearing them. She had her shoes on bare feet.’ He was trying not to notice that the feet were cared-for and pretty and the toenails were neatly painted with clear varnish. The fingernails, cut short and following the contour of the fingertips, were unpainted.

‘So someone brought his own murder weapon with him?’ Atherton said. ‘That’s not so nice. That looks like someone with form.’

Slider sighed inwardly at the thought of a serial killer, but he said, ‘It gives us a line of enquiry, anyway. We’ll look at the offenders’ list and see who’s out and about. I can’t think of anyone obvious.’

‘At least it might misdirect the press,’ Atherton said. ‘What with the Scrubs being right next door, they’re bound to make the obvious misconnection. Finding out who’s in there that fits the bill might keep them happily absorbed while we get on with the job.’