generous selection of blades. Help yourself time.
'What's this, then? DIY?'
'Don't ask.'
'I just did. So tell me. What happened?'
Pullen shook his head. It had been a game, one too many bevvies. He didn't want to talk about it.
'Whose game?'
'No way.' Another shake of the head, more emphatic this time.
'Tell me.'
'Fucking no way.'
'Was it the Scousers?'
'The Scousers} Shit, no. That's the whole fucking point.' His eyes had gone down to the tools beside the bed.
'What point? Whose point?'
'No, please, just get these fucking ties off me. Then maybe we'll talk.'
Suttle gazed down at him. A couple of nights ago this man had taken a billiard cue to Trudy Gallagher. In bed last night, on the promise that Suttle could keep a secret, she'd spelled it out for him, blow by blow. Pullen had said he was doing her a favour. He'd told her a smacking would mend her ways. This morning, outraged, Suttle had decided to administer a little correctional punishment of his own. Now this.
Pullen had started up again about the cable ties. He was stiff as fuck. He needed a wash. He had loads of stuff to sort out but absolutely no interest in making any kind of statement, official or otherwise. Wasn't that right up Suttle's street? Wasn't he doing him a favour, sparing him all that paperwork?
Dimly, Suttle was beginning to put it all together: the newly scrawled name on the speakerphone downstairs, the open door, the carefully recreated tableau in the bedroom, the hostage offered up and waiting, the shiny blades beside the bed, the open invitation to a spot of help-yourself revenge.
'Aren't you going to do anything, then? Just standing there?'
'Afraid not, Dave.' Suttle made a show of checking his watch. 'I've got an important meeting at nine. All kinds of shit if I'm late.
Listen' he began to back towards the door, away from the reeking magazine 'if I get a moment later, I'll try and pop back, OK?'
'Fuck you.'
'Yeah, and fuck you too.' Suttle smiled at him. 'Bye then, and, hey …' He raised a derisive thumb. 'Good luck.'
He left the room, pulling the door to behind him. A pace or two down the hall, Pullen began to yell. Anything, he said. He'd do anything to get these fucking ties off. Just name it. Anything. Suttle paused, let him plead a little longer, then returned to the bedroom.
Breathe through your mouth, and the smell wasn't quite so bad.
'Anything, Dave?'
'Yeah… Fuck you… Yeah.'
'So did Bazza do this to you?' He beamed down at the bed. 'Or is that too much to ask?'
The post-mortem on Daniel Kelly was scheduled to start shortly after nine, the first on the morning's mortuary list. Eadie Sykes had driven up to St. Mary's hospital half an hour earlier, keen to steal a little of the pathologist's time. She'd never attended a post-mortem in her life but she'd taped several surgical operations and knew the importance of a proper briefing. Miss the crucial cut and the impact of the sequence disappeared.
To her surprise, the pathologist was a woman. Martin Eckersley had mentioned a couple of names over lunch yesterday, promising to phone once permission came through from Kelly's father, but both had been male.
'Pauline Schreck.' She was a small, neat woman with dancing eyes and a light, dry handshake. 'My colleagues send their apologies. I'm the closest you'll find to a lo cum 'Bodies R Us?'
'Something like that.'
She led the way into a small, bare office and offered Eadie a seat.
Eadie produced a copy of the fax from Kelly's father. The pathologist barely spared it a glance.
'I've seen it,' she said. 'You wouldn't be here otherwise. So tell me … How can I help you?'
Eadie explained a little about the video. What she needed was graphic coverage of the post-mortem procedure, nothing spared. The more clinical and explicit the footage, the better it would serve the video she had in mind.
The pathologist nodded. She had no problem with any of that. The body in the fridge had become a parcel and it was her job to unpack it.
Vital organs brain, heart, lungs, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, bladder came out for inspection. Various fluids went off to an address in Kent for analysis. Afterwards, the mortuary boys would sew Mr.
Kelly back together again.
'End of story?'
'From my point of view, yes. It's a procedure, just like proper surgery. There are techniques you pick up, like tying off the stomach at either end to preserve the contents, but you learn it stage by stage. The only difference is that Mr. Kelly isn't going to get better.' She nodded down at Eadie's file. 'You've got a spare sheet of paper in there?'
Eadie obliged with the back of a flyer from the Stop the War Coalition.
The pathologist sketched the outline of a body and then talked Eadie through the sequence of cuts: the long central-line incision from the Adam's apple to the pubis, rib-shears to remove the breast plate and get at the tongue and neck organs, a smaller scalpel to draw a line from ear to ear across the top of the hairline.
'Why the hairline?'
'We have to take a look at the brain.' She tapped the diagram with her pencil. 'Sorry to disappoint you but that's more or less it.'
'And the stuff you take out? The organs?'
'We weigh them, measure them, then seal the lot in a plastic bag and pop them back in the body.'
'Whereabouts in the body?'
'Here.' She patted her own stomach. 'Abdominal cavity. Sealing the bag's important. We also pack the neck and mouth with tissues. Leakage is the last thing we need.'
'And that's it?'
'Afraid so. I'd love to tell you otherwise but it's not rocket science. Death is rarely complicated. Medically, we're talking the full stop at the end of the sentence. No more.'
Eadie made a note of the quote. It had a chill matter-of-factness perfectly in keeping with the effect she had in mind. After the chaos of Daniel Kelly's final months and the hand-wringing over his death, it all boiled down to this grey March morning in a provincial mortuary with a schedule of bodies to dismember and a pile of forms to fill in.
The full stop at the end of the sentence. Perfect.
Eadie glanced up.
'Would you mind me doing an interview? Just briefly.'
'With me?'
'Yes.'
'About what?'
'Daniel Kelly.' Eadie gestured down at the pencilled body shape. 'And this.'
'Of course I'd mind.' The pathologist was laughing now. 'How on earth can I talk about someone I never knew?'
Suttle rang Winter on his mobile. He was standing on the pavement outside Pullen's apartment block with line of sight to the communal entrance. Pullen himself was still upstairs, cable-tied to his bed frame.
Winter was at his desk in the Crime Squad office at Kingston Crescent.
The 9.15 meeting, he said, had been cancelled. Cathy Lamb had been summoned to a council of war in Secretan's office, along with every other major player on the drugs containment scene. With the News evidently planning a major feature spread on the erupting turf war, the time had come for some hard analysis.
'Hard analysis?' Suttle was lost.
