coffee – whatever their inbred little hearts desire, pay them and keep a record of what I’m forking out. Get my drift?’
‘Basically, you’re looking for a housekeeper?’
‘Yeah, well, don’t make it sound like “Basically, David, you’re looking for a dick-sucker.” I’m offering you twenty quid an hour – off the books. No tax. Six hours a week over two afternoons. Say, Tuesdays and Thursdays. After I give the agency my fifteen quid an hour for you, how much do you go home with – in your pocket?’
She lowered her eyes, embarrassed it was so little. ‘Four pounds an hour. They take emergency tax from me.’
‘See? You’d have to work five hours to earn what I’m offering you for one.’
Sally was silent for a moment, doing the sums. He was right. It was a lot of money. And she had free slots on both of those afternoons that she’d been wanting to fill for a long time.
‘Come on, Sally. Tell the agency you’re not available two afternoons a week and come to me instead.’ He tipped back his head and emptied the bag of nuts into his mouth. He crunched them up, swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You can wipe that look off your face. It ain’t a trick and I’m not proposing to you.’
‘What about them? Danuta and Marysienka.’
‘I’ll knob them off. Tell the agent I don’t need a cleaner. I don’t associate with common little slappers like them anyway, their tits lolling out all over the place.’
‘But – they’re relying on it.’
David shrugged. He pushed with his feet and sent the chair back across the floor, making it twirl and spin. He came to a halt, gave her a grin. ‘You know what, Sally? You’re a good Christian woman and now you’ve put it like that I can see the error of my ways. The dumb Polacks are relying on the money, so I’ll do the right thing.’ He stood and went to the door. ‘I’ll call the agent, renegotiate our contract. I’ll complain about your work – say I want
6
‘I was cagey about discussing this in the field.’ The pathologist stood next to Ben and Zoe at the dissecting table in the hospital mortuary, looking down at Lorne Wood’s remains. The room was closed, a uniformed officer sitting outside the door, just one mortician and the photographer in attendance. ‘In my experience, a case like this? You limit the spread of information. Limit the people who know the details.’
The photographer moved around the body, taking it from every angle, coming in close on the tarpaulin, which was still drawn up to Lorne’s chest. Just as she’d been found. Zoe watched, her lips pursed. She had been here before, in this room, with this pathologist, but they’d always been straightforward murder cases. Horrific and tragic all of them, but uncomplicated – the victims, mostly, of bar fights gone wrong. Once a shotgun victim – a farmer’s wife. Of course, this wasn’t going to be anything like those cases.
When the photographer had taken all the necessary shots, the pathologist stood next to Lorne’s head, using a torch to look up into her nose, lifting both eyelids and shining the light into them.
‘What’s the blood?’ Zoe asked. ‘The stuff coming from her mouth.’
The pathologist frowned. He peeled back a tiny part of the tape and stood back so Zoe could peer down at it. The skin at the edges of Lorne’s mouth was stretched around the tennis ball. And the corners had indeed split – two bloodied cracks each about a centimetre long. Just as the CSM had said.
Zoe gave a small nod. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly. She straightened and took a step back.
‘I think the ball’s dislocated her jaw too.’ The pathologist put both hands under Lorne’s ears and felt it, his eyes on the ceiling. ‘Yup.’ He straightened. ‘Dislocated.’ He glanced up to get the photographer’s attention. ‘Do you want to get some shots of this while I’m holding the tape back a bit?’
There was silence in the room while the photographer worked. Zoe avoided looking at Ben and she guessed he wouldn’t be meeting her eyes either. Neither of them had said anything on the drive over, but she was sure his head would be full of the same things hers was – like, what was going on under that tarpaulin? The pathologist seemed to take an agonizingly long time with the photographer and with taking samples from Lorne’s hair and nails. It was an age before he went to the tarpaulin.
‘OK?’ he said, his eyes on Zoe and Ben’s faces. ‘Ready?’
They nodded.
He drew the tarp back slowly, and crumpled it into an evidence bag the mortician was holding out. Zoe and Ben remained motionless, staring at what was in front of them. Taking it all in.
She was dressed from the waist up in the grey Banksy T-shirt. Below that she was completely naked. Her legs had been opened and positioned in a frog shape, knees out to the sides, soles together. At first Zoe thought her abdomen and thighs were covered with red slashes. Then she saw they were marks made in a waxy reddish-orange substance. ‘What is that? Lipstick?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ The pathologist pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned in, frowning. ‘It says something. Maybe you should – uh?’
‘“All like her…”’ Ben inclined his head sideways, reading the letters that ran up the inner thigh. ‘“All like her”? Is that what it says?’
‘And this?’ The pathologist indicated her abdomen. Letters running across it below her ribs, spanning her navel. ‘Very clear to me.’
‘“No one”?’ Zoe murmured. ‘No one.’ She glanced up at Ben. As if he might have an answer. He shook his head. Shrugged.
‘The other thing that struck me when I was in the field was this.’ The pathologist bent and looked under Lorne’s buttocks. ‘He’s rolled up all her clothes – her jeans, her socks, her underwear, put them under there. And, unless I’m very much mistaken, they’re not torn, not ripped.’
‘She let him take them off?’
‘Depends by what you mean by “let him”. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she was beyond struggling at that point.’
‘You mean he raped her when…’
‘When she was unconscious,’ Ben said quietly. ‘That he knocked her out and then got on with it. Which is why no one on the canal heard anything.’
‘I’m not saying anything. What I’m doing here is pointing out the areas of interest we could pay attention to during this postmortem. Which…’ he pushed the spectacles up his nose and moved the gooseneck lamp so it was shining directly on Lorne’s face ‘… is going to take a long time. I hope you don’t have dinner plans.’
7
Sally stood in David Goldrab’s utility room, the iron forgotten in her hand, his words going round and round in her head.
Since Julian had left, it seemed that every day there had been a new obstacle, a new impossible predicament. And there was never time to think it through properly. Back in the days before Sally and Zoe had been separated from each other and sent away to different boarding-schools, Mum used to watch old films on TV on Saturday. There was a character in one of her favourites who liked to say, ‘Morals? We can’t afford morals.’ That was what happened at the bottom of the pile: you let ideals, like not stealing other people’s work, sink to the bottom of the list – somewhere beneath the electricity bill and the school uniform. You learned to swallow the things you really wanted to say.
