on the knuckles of the severed right hand that was all they had to show her. ‘Yes,’ she replied, then turned on her heel and walked out.
‘Thanks, Bella,’ I said, outside. ‘I know, from personal experience, that couldn’t have been easy for you.’
I was trying to be sympathetic, but she looked at me with disdain. ‘You know fuck all,’ she sneered.
I gave up trying. ‘But you know a fucking sight more than you’ve told us,’ I barked. ‘You can’t expect me to believe that Marlon didn’t tell you anything about his job with Manson. What was going on there? For that matter, you’re hocking your mutton to punters in the saunas. No prizes for guessing which ones or who owns them, so, how did a woman your age get taken on there? You’re not doing it to pay off drug debts. I can tell a serious user just by looking at her, and you’re not one. But you’re not a kid either; you’re about fifteen years older than the norm, even if you don’t look it. Come on, did you get the gig through Marlon, or did Manson take you on himself?’ I thought I saw the faintest twitch in the corner of one eye. ‘Hey!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’ve been shagging Tony, haven’t you?’
‘Fuck off!’ she shouted and stormed out of the building.
‘Well, well, well, Jeff,’ I murmured. ‘How about that for a connection!’
‘For sure,’ he chuckled. ‘How did you stumble on that?’
‘It wasn’t that difficult. Manson’s a famous sexual athlete. He owns those saunas, all fronts for brothels, and the girls that work in them are on call. He wants laid, he phones. My guess? Marlon asked him if his mother could work there, Tony had a look, and gave her the okay; almost certainly test-drove her himself. It fits, all of it. She catches Manson’s eye, and before you know it she has nice new furniture, she’s clothes shopping in Jenner’s, and her son goes from being one of the boss’s several message boys to being his personal driver. Tell me a part that doesn’t fit.’
‘I can’t,’ he admitted. ‘But what does it tell us, boss?’
‘Nothing for sure, but it makes me wonder. If Marlon’s death is down to a potential rival of Tony’s, does that make Bella a target too?’ I mused. ‘It might.’
‘What can we do about it if she is?’
‘We could pity the guys that go for her. If she’s not carrying a shooter in her handbag I’d be surprised. Of course we could find it and lift her for that, but it wouldn’t get us anywhere. No, I’m going to put her under surveillance.’
‘Who will you use?’
I looked at him. ‘I’ll need to think about that. She knows us, she’s seen Martin, and McGuire would stand out like a lighthouse. Macken and Reid? What do you think?’
Adam hesitated. ‘To be honest…’ he began.
I let him get no further. ‘Don’t ever be anything else. We’ll use new talent, then. I’ll take care of it. Come on, we’d better get suited up for Joe’s performance.’
By the time we took our places at the back of the autopsy suite, Marlon had been moved to the dissection table. ‘All present?’ the professor asked. ‘Then let’s begin.’ He beckoned towards him. ‘Before we begin, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I want you to take a look at these X-rays.’ Several images, covering the full length of the body, were set out on a long viewing screen. He didn’t have to tell me what he wanted us to see. There were obvious fractures of every limb, of several ribs, of the right collarbone, and of the skull.
‘Christ, Joe,’ I murmured, ‘he looks as if he’s been hit by a bus.’
‘Travelling at quite a speed. I’ve had the length of the drop from the diving platform measured: thirty feet and seven inches. That means that he would have hit the deck at just over twenty miles per hour. An anomaly, certainly.’
‘What does it say?’
‘Let me do a full examination,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll give you a wholly informed opinion. You go back over there and give me some breathing space.’
By that stage of my career I was a post-mortem veteran. They’d been a regular part of my time on the drugs squad. That doesn’t mean to say I was permanently inured to the gore, the exposed bone and organs, and the smell. I had a sell-by date, as I found out more than a decade later; I believe that every police officer has… or should have. Today, I cannot continue reading a novel in which the author goes into a detailed autopsy description that has no real bearing on the narrative, but seems to be there only to shock or to show off. Back then, though, in my mid-thirties, I was able to stay detached. That’s not to say what I saw had no effect. Years later, Alex told me that she always knew by my mood in the evening when I’d been to a post-mortem during the day. It was the only part of my job that I ever brought home even though I didn’t know it at the time.
Joe Hutchinson was famously meticulous. He had never been caught out in the witness box and he never would be. But even by his standards his examination of Marlon Watson took a long time. I’d hoped to meet Alison for a quick lunch, but by mid-morning I could see where it was headed, so I called her to cancel. As it happened she was busy too, unexpectedly. I wondered if Jay was giving her a hard time.
The professor broke for coffee after two hours, but wouldn’t give us a progress report. By the time it ended, the subject looked like a turkey on Boxing Day.
I was so relieved when we were able to peel off our suits and get out of there that I didn’t mind waiting another twenty minutes for Joe to get himself scrubbed and dressed. He rejoined us in the reception area, looking tired, but satisfied, having left his assistant to reassemble the jigsaw.
‘I would say, gentlemen, under oath of course, that whoever killed this man, they were very sadistic and very determined. I am not able to tell you how many times he was tossed from that platform, but it was, beyond doubt, more than once. You saw the X-rays for yourselves, but what they didn’t indicate was that there are fractures to both the front and the back of the skull; conclusive proof. They simply kept chucking him off until he was dead. Hell of a way to kill someone,’ he murmured, in a tone that almost sounded respectful. ‘After the first couple of falls, he would have had to be carried or dragged back up to the platform, and that of itself would have been excruciating. The body is massively damaged, but there is bruising to the wrists and ankles that’s consistent with him being gripped hard, lifted and tossed over the edge. In my view he was already dead, or dying, the last time this was done. He hit the floor of the pool skull and face first and there is no sign of any resistance to the impact on that occasion, but several of the fractures, to the wrists and arms for example, indicate that there was earlier. If it’s important for you to know how often he was dropped, you might have your crime scene team examine the pool for damage to the tiles. It’ll be there, it’ll be considerable, and it might give you an answer.’
‘It won’t tell us why, though, Joe,’ I pointed out. ‘Could they have been trying to get information from him?’
‘That’s not a hypothesis I could advance in evidence. You’ll have to catch the perpetrators and ask them.’
‘And we will,’ I said, ‘but can you say as a pathologist whether you’d expect someone to survive a thirty-foot drop on to a hard surface?’
He pondered my question for a few seconds; eventually he nodded. ‘A young, fit man, hands and feet unrestrained: yes, I would, but I’d expect fractures, even if he managed to land feet first.’
‘So what we’re dealing with here is a form of torture, not just an attempted murder that took a while to succeed?’
‘That’s one way of putting it, yes. To be frank, the only thing I can rule out is suicide.’
Five
Leggat, Martin and McGuire were all in the office when we got back. The two DCs were still on a late lunch break; not a great way to impress a new boss, and even less so on the first day of an investigation.
I let Jeff Adam give them the blow-by-blow of the autopsy. ‘They bounced the poor bastard off the swimming pool floor until he was dead,’ he summarised, as neat a description as I could have offered.
‘Somebody must have been seriously upset with him to do that,’ the DI said.
‘Or very keen for him to tell them something,’ I pointed out.
‘Could he have been double-crossing Tony over something? Or could he…’ he stopped, in mid-sentence.
