Aftermath

Dr. Mackenzie was a heavily built man with a full head of brown hair, parted and combed, a fleshy nose, and a gap between his upper front teeth. Always a sign of luck, that, Banks remembered his mother once telling him. Maybe it would counteract the broken mirror. “What can you tell us?” Banks asked.

“The presence of petechial hemorrhages, bruising of the throat, and cyanosis all indicate death by strangulation, most likely ligature strangulation by that yellow clothesline around her throat, but I won’t be able to tell you for certain until after the postmortem.”

“Any evidence of sexual activity?”

“Some vaginal and anal tearing, what looks like semen stains. But you can see that for yourself. Again, I’ll be able to tell you more later.”

“Time of death?”

“Recent. Very recent. There’s hardly any hypostasis yet, rigor hasn’t started, and she’s still warm.”

“How long?”

“Two or three hours, at an estimate.”

Banks looked at his watch. Sometime after three, then, not long before the domestic dispute that drove the woman over the road to dial 999. Banks cursed. If the call had come in just a short while earlier, maybe only minutes or an hour, then they might have saved Kimberley. On the other hand, the timing was interesting for the questions it raised about the reasons for the dispute. “What about that rash around her mouth? Chloroform?”

“At a guess. Probably used in abducting her, maybe even for keeping her sedated, though there are much more pleasant ways.”

Banks glanced at Kimberley’s body. “I don’t think our man was overly concerned about being pleasant, do you, Doctor? Is chloroform easily available?”

“Pretty much. It’s used as a solvent.”

“But it’s not the cause of death?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. Can’t be absolutely certain until after the postmortem, of course, but if it is the cause, we’d expect to find more severe blistering in the esophagus, and there would also be noticeable liver damage.”

“When can you get to her?”

“Barring a motorway pileup, I should be able to schedule the postmortems to start this afternoon,” Dr. Mackenzie said. “We’re pretty busy as it is, but… well, there are priorities.” He looked at Kimberley, then at PC Morrisey. “He died of blood loss, by the looks of it. Severed both his carotid artery and jugular vein. Very nasty, but quick. Apparently his partner did what she could, but it was too late. Tell her she shouldn’t blame herself. Hadn’t a chance.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” said Banks. “Appreciate it. If you could do the PM on Kimberley first…”

“Of course.”

Dr. Mackenzie left to make arrangements, and Luke Selkirk and Faye McTavish continued to take photographs and video. Banks and Blackstone stood in silence taking in the scene. There wasn’t much more to see, but what there was wouldn’t vanish quickly from their memories.

“Where does that door over there lead to?” Banks pointed to a door in the wall beside the mattress.

“Don’t know,” said Blackstone. “Haven’t had a chance to look yet.”

“Let’s have a butcher’s, then.”

Banks walked over and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. Slowly, he opened the heavy wooden door to another, smaller room, this one with a dirt floor. The smell was much worse in there. He felt for an overhead light switch but couldn’t locate one. He sent Blackstone to get a torch and tried to make out what he could in the overspill of light from the main cellar.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room, Banks thought he could see little clumps of mushrooms growing here and there from the earth.

Then he realized…

“Oh, Christ,” he said, slumping back against the wall. The nearest clump wasn’t mushrooms at all, it was a cluster of human toes poking through the dirt.

After a quick breakfast and an interview with two police detectives about her 999 call, Maggie felt the urge to go for a walk. There wasn’t much chance of getting any work done for a while anyway, what with all the excitement over the road, though she knew she would try later. Right now, she was restless and needed to blow the cobwebs out. The detectives had stuck mostly to factual questions, and she hadn’t told them anything about Lucy, but she sensed that one of them, at least, didn’t seem satisfied with her answers. They would be back.

She still didn’t know what the hell was going on. The policemen who talked to her had given away nothing, of course, had not even told her how Lucy was, and the local news on the radio was hardly illuminating, either. All they could say at this stage was that a member of the public and a police officer had been injured earlier that morning. And that took second place to the ongoing story about the local girl, Kimberley Myers, who had vanished on her way home from a youth-club dance on Friday evening.

As she walked down the front steps past the fuchsias, which would soon be flowering and drooping their heavy purple-pink bells over the path, Maggie saw the activity at number 35 was increasing, and neighbors had gathered in little knots on the pavement, which had now been roped off from the road.

Several men wearing white overalls and carrying shovels, sieves, and buckets got out of a van and hurried down the garden path.

“Oh, look,” called out one of the neighbors. “He’s got his bucket and spade. Must be off to Blackpool.”

But nobody laughed. Like Maggie, everyone was coming to realize that something very nasty indeed had happened at 35 The Hill. About ten yards away, across from the narrow, walled lane that separated it from number 35, was a row of shops: pizza take-away, hairdresser, mini-mart, newsagent, fish and chips; and several uniformed officers stood arguing with the shopkeepers. They probably wanted to open up, Maggie guessed.

Plainclothes police officers sat on the front wall, talking and smoking. Radios crackled. The area had fast begun to resemble the site of a natural disaster, as if a train had crashed or an earthquake had struck. Maggie remembered seeing the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, when she went there once with Bill before they were married: a flattened apartment building, three stories reduced in seconds to two; fissures in the roads; part of the freeway collapsed. Though there was no visible damage here, it felt the same, had the same shell-shocked aura. Even though they didn’t know what had happened yet, the people were stunned, were counting the cost; there was a pall of apprehension over the community and a deep sense of terror at what destructive power the hand of God might have unleashed. They knew that something momentous had occurred on their doorsteps. Already, Maggie sensed, life in the neighborhood would never be the same.

Maggie turned left and walked down The Hill, under the railway bridge. At the bottom was a small artificial pond in the midst of the housing estates and business parks. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. At least she could sit on a bench by the water and feed the ducks, watch the people walking their dogs.

It was safe, too – an important consideration in this part of the city, where old, large houses, such as the one Maggie was staying in, rubbed shoulders with the newer, rougher council estates. Burglary was rife, and murder not unknown, but down by the pond, the double deckers ran by on the main road just a few yards away, and enough ordinary people came to walk their dogs that Maggie never felt isolated or threatened. Attacks occurred in broad daylight, she knew, but she still felt close enough to safety down there.

It was a warm, pleasant morning. The sun was out, but the brisk breeze made it necessary to wear a light jacket. Occasionally, a high cloud drifted over the sun, blocking the light for a second or two and casting shadows on the water’s surface.

There was something very soothing about feeding ducks, Maggie thought. Almost trance-like. Not for the ducks, of course, who seemed to have no concept of what sharing meant. You tossed the bread, they scooted toward it, quacked and fought. As Maggie crumbled the stale bread between her fingers and tossed it into the water, she recalled her first meeting with Lucy Payne just a couple of months ago.

She had been in town shopping for art supplies that day – a remarkably warm day for March – then she’d been to Borders on Briggate to buy some books, and afterward she found herself wandering through the Victoria Quarter down toward Kirkgate Market, when she bumped into Lucy coming the other way. They had seen each other before in the street and at the local shops, and they had always said hello. Partly through inclination and partly through her shyness – getting out and meeting people never having been one of her strong points – Maggie had no friends in her