rumpled brown sweater, the same clothes she’d been wearing when she’d picked Carol up the night before. ‘We were called in last night by Northern Division. The body of an as yet unidentified female was found in an empty warehouse on the Parkway industrial estate.’ She fixed two photographs to a whiteboard, one of the whole crime scene with the crucified body at the heart of it, the other of the woman’s face. ‘As you can see, she was nailed to a wooden cross then propped up against the wall. Upside down. Gruesome, but probably not enough to involve us on its own.’
She stuck three more photographs on the board. Two were identifiably tattooed human wrists; the other could have been any scrap of material with letters written on it. In each case, the letters spelled ‘MINE’. Paula turned back to face her colleagues. ‘What makes it one of ours is that it’s apparently number three. What links them is the tatt on the wrist. That and the fact that they’ve all been found on Northern’s patch, which isn’t necessarily where you’d expect to find dead sex workers.’
‘Why not?’ Chris Devine was the team member least familiar with the nuances of Bradfield’s social geography, having originally moved up from the Met.
‘Most of the street life happens around Temple Fields in the city centre. Also most of the inside trade,’ Kevin said. ‘There’s a couple of pockets on the main arteries out of town, but Northern’s pretty clean on the whole.’
‘My liaison at Northern’s a DS called Franny Riley,’ Paula said. ‘He told me they’ve had a hotspot lately round the new hospital building site. Half a dozen or so women working the area where the labourers park up. He thinks they’ve mostly been East Europeans, probably trafficked. But our first two victims were both local women, so maybe not connected to that.’ Another photo, this time of a worn-out face with sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones and lips tightly pressed together. Nobody ever looked good in a mugshot, but this woman looked particularly pissed off. ‘The first victim, Kylie Mitchell. Aged twenty-three. Crackhead. Five convictions for soliciting, one for minor possession. She mostly worked on the edges of Temple Fields, but she grew up in the high flats out at Skenby – which is bang in the middle of Northern’s patch, Chris. She was strangled and dumped under the ring-road overpass three weeks ago.’ Paula nodded to Stacey. ‘Stacey’s setting up the files on our network.’
Stacey flashed a smile so quick anyone who blinked would have missed it. ‘They’ll be available at the end of the briefing,’ she said.
‘Kylie’s the usual depressing story. Dropped out of school with no qualifications and a taste for partying. Soon graduated to sex for drugs, then moved on to working the streets to support her crack habit. She had a kid when she was twenty, taken straight into care, adopted six months later.’ Paula shook her head and sighed. ‘As far as the sex trade is concerned, Kylie was a bottom feeder. She’d got to the point of no return. No fixed abode, no pimp looking out for her. Easy meat for someone looking for the worst kind of thrill.’
‘How many times have we heard this story?’ Sam sounded as bored as he looked.
‘Too many times. Believe me, Sam, no one would be happier than me if we never had to hear it again,’ Carol said. The rebuke was clear. ‘What do we know about her last movements, Paula?’
‘Not a lot. She didn’t even have any of the other girls looking out for her. She was notorious for taking no care of herself. She was up for anything, didn’t care about using a condom. The other girls had given up on her. Or she’d given up on them, it’s not entirely clear which way round it was. The night of the murder, she was seen around nine o’clock on Campion Way, right on the edge of Temple Fields. We think a couple of the regulars there warned her off their pitch. And that’s it. Nothing, till she turns up under the overpass.’
‘What about forensics?’ Kevin asked.
‘Traces of semen from four different sources. None of them on the database, so that’s only going to have any value once we’ve got someone in the frame. Other than that, all we’ve got is the tattoo. Done postmortem, that’s why there’s no inflammation.’
‘Does that mean we’re looking for a tattoo artist? Someone with professional skills?’ Chris asked.
‘We need to get some expert opinion on that,’ Carol said. ‘And we need to find out how easy it is to get hold of a tattoo machine. Talk to suppliers, see if we can get a list of recent purchases.’
Sam got up to study the tattoo photos more closely. ‘It doesn’t look that skilled to me. But then, that in itself could be deliberate.’
‘Too soon to speculate,’ Carol said. ‘Who found her, Paula?’
‘Couple of teenagers. DS Riley reckons they were looking for a quiet spot to neck a bottle of cider. There’s an old stripped-out Transit van down there, the nearest the local kids have to a youth club. She was shoved in the front end. Where the engine would be if there was an engine left. No real attempt to hide her. Northern already did a door-to-door locally, but the nearest houses are a good fifty metres away, and it’s their back sides that face the crime scene. No joy at all.’
‘Let’s do it again,’ Carol said. ‘She wasn’t beamed down from outer space. Paula, sort it with DS Riley.’
‘Will do.’ Paula pinned another mugshot to the board. ‘This is Suzanne Black, known as Suze. Aged twenty- seven. Half a dozen convictions for soliciting. Not quite as far down the scale as Kylie. Suze shared a flat in one of the Skenby tower blocks with another sex worker, a rent boy called Nicky Reid. According to Nicky, she used to pick up her tricks in the Flyer—’
‘What’s the Flyer?’ Carol interrupted.
‘It’s a pub round the back of the airport, near the cargo area. An old-fashioned roadhouse kind of place. It dates back to when the airport was just Brackley Field aerodrome in the war,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s not a place you’d take the wife and kids for Sunday lunch, but it’s a couple of steps up from a dive.’
‘Nicky says she had a few regulars,’ Paula continued. ‘Cargo handlers at the airport, mostly. Like Kylie, she had a habit, though her drug of choice was heroin. Nicky says she’d been using for years, that she functioned pretty well. Also like Kylie, she didn’t have a pimp. He says she had a long-standing arrangement with her drug supplier – any trouble with anybody trying to muscle in on her business, he’d sort them. She was a good customer.’ A wry twist lifted one corner of Paula’s mouth. ‘And she put other custom his way too.’
‘When did Nicky last see her?’ Carol again.
‘Two weeks ago. They left the flat together. He went into Temple Fields, she was heading for the Flyer. Next day when he got up, she wasn’t there. No sign that she’d been back. He left it a couple of days, in case she was off with one of her mates or her regulars, though that would have been unusual for her.’ Paula shook her head, faintly bemused. ‘The way Nicky describes it, they had this really domesticated set-up.’
‘Who knew?’ Sam sounded contemptuous.
