The injuries around her head and shoulders, chest and lower stomach, where she had been kicked, stamped on and punched, could still be seen in spite of the terrible scars left by the post-mortem itself.
Her head was an appalling, distorted mess, having been jumped on repeatedly by someone wearing heavy shoes. The dislodgement of her lower jaw, broken in many places and with terrific force, her facial features smashed beyond recognition, did not stop Henry from realizing this had once been a very pretty girl.
His eyes took in all these things. His imagination worked to recreate her last moments of life. He did not like what it saw.
Then he took hold of her left arm, cold like a twig in winter, and turned it gently outwards, to inspect the many needle marks on the inside of her elbow. An addict.
And probably a prostitute, the original investigation had concluded.
That meant an individual who took risks, put herself in possibly dangerous situations and maybe, Henry had heard whispered, got what was coming to her.
His nostrils dilated as he thought, ‘Screw that.’ No one deserves a death like this.
The technician stood back as Henry stepped around the gurney, taking in all aspects of the body. As he stood at her feet and looked up across the body, he saw that, with the jaw having been broken so badly, the girl’s mouth was skewed wide open, and with her head tilted back, Henry could see the top set of her teeth, right to the back of the mouth.
He frowned and had to peer to confirm what he saw.
Then, taking his time to walk back alongside the body on the opposite side, he came back to the head.
There was a dirty laugh behind him — the pathologist and his assistant chuckling about something inappropriate, probably.
Henry angled his head slightly to try and pick up what they were saying. He grinned and bent forward to inspect the dead girl’s mouth, carefully pushing back the frozen lips to expose the teeth with his fingertips.
They hadn’t been a good set to start with. Misaligned, discoloured, possibly from a deprived upbringing and a poor diet, several missing from both upper and lower jaws. Henry’s forehead furrowed as he racked his brain, thinking about the missing teeth, and what mention, if any, had been made of them on the file. He couldn’t recall anything, but that wasn’t to say it wasn’t there.
The thought dissipated as he honed in on the reason why his attention had been grabbed by the girl’s top set that he could see looking up from her feet. There it was.
He pushed her mouth further open, easy, but unpleasant. He heard broken bone scraping sickeningly against bone in her jaw.
He saw a gold filling in one of the molars right at the back of her mouth — juxtaposed against the poor condition of her other teeth.
Henry stood upright and pouted — though this could not be seen because of the face mask — then glanced thoughtfully across at the pathologist, who was still dissecting the old man’s brain and giggling at some shared joke with his assistant, making his thin shoulders wobble.
Steve Flynn was already regretting his hastiness in saying yes to a friend in need. Not because of the task, or the reason he’d said yes, but simply because of the weather.
In the five or so years he had been resident in Gran Canaria, the most southerly of the Canary Islands, Flynn had become a diehard sun bum. Whilst respecting the ferocious power of that hot ball in the sky, he loved being in it. He loved everything about the consistently high temperature in which he lived, from the early morning stroll to buy fresh bread rolls, to the often steaming midday heat when even he wasn’t silly enough to venture out unprotected, to the long languid evenings sitting outside, eating and drinking with friends or clients from the sport- fishing boat he skippered, when it wasn’t even necessary to put a thin jumper on at midnight.
It had been a long time since he had woken up shivering — since his last visit to the UK, actually. He tugged the sleeping bag more tightly around himself, not wanting to get up.
He could even see his own breath. A rare phenomenon in Gran Canaria, all too common in Britain.
But finally he knew he had to move, this being the first day of the new job he’d agreed to do. Temporarily, that is.
He kicked the sleeping bag off and sat up on the — supposedly — double bed and looked down the full length of the canal barge on which he had spent his first night back in England, following his early-hours arrival by air from Las Palmas.
He shivered and rubbed the goosebumps covering his arms, making his hairs stand on end.
It was a superbly appointed boat, however. Lovingly restored by his friend from just a bare shell. A friend now in hospital, ready to undergo surgery that day in relation to bowel cancer.
Flynn cringed at the thought. Poor guy, but at least it seemed the disease had been caught in time and a full recovery, minus a third of a bowel, was forecast.
Still feeling grimy from the travel, ducking his head he stepped into the tiny tiled wet room and showered until the hot water ran cold, then shaved and got dressed before making down to the galley where, as promised, there were bacon, eggs, bread and filter coffee.
At home, as he now thought of Gran Canaria, his usual breakfast was a croissant and strong coffee, but the bacon and eggs enticed him, so a fry-up it was. He worked hard at perfection at the gas rings: crispy bacon, fried eggs with just-right runny yolks, a nice filter coffee and two slices of buttered toast. Proud of his achievement he took the plate out to the seating area on the rear deck. Though it was very chilly, he wanted to eat al fresco, the hot food contrasting wonderfully with the weather. It went down well.
The canal boat was tethered about two hundred metres east from the actual start of the Lancaster Canal, which began at Glasson Dock. From where Flynn sat, sipping his second coffee, he could see all the way down that straight stretch of water to where the canal merged with the yacht marina at Glasson, beyond which was the sea lock. This lowered or raised vessels down to, or up from, the dock itself. From there the dock opened out into the estuary of the River Lune and beyond to the Irish Sea.
Flynn knew the area well. He was a Lancashire lad and had been a cop in the county until circumstances forced him to leave. He knew Glasson Dock from being a youngster, on day trips with his parents, and when he was a cop. In uniform, very early in his service, he’d been here during the 1984 miners’ strike, when Glasson came back to life as a working port, bringing in coal supplies from abroad. This had attracted striking miners and there had been a few confrontations that Flynn had been part of policing.
Then, as a detective in the drugs branch, he had once arrested a high-level drug-runner who had been using Glasson as a landing point for his imported contraband.
Now he was back to help a sick friend.
Henry Christie slouched against the outer wall of the mortuary building, sipping from a cup of coffee bought at the hospital cafe.
He was ruminating about the dead girl and what he would have to do to reinvigorate the investigation into her murder which, in more ways than one, had gone stone cold.
Obviously he had known about the murder, but at the time his mind had been on much more pressing matters — such as the fast-approaching death of his wife, Kate, from a particularly aggressive strain of breast cancer. Although he had ostensibly been at work throughout the fight for life, he might as well not have been as his head was firmly up his arse. The girl’s murder, although it had occurred in the geographical area Henry was responsible for covering, was taken on by one of the other SIOs in FMIT — Detective Superintendent Joe Speakman. But Speakman had suddenly retired not long after the girl’s body had been discovered, taking everyone by surprise, and the investigation had seemed to dwindle off to nothing.
Henry had also been considering ‘putting in his ticket’ — retiring — but Speakman had beaten him to it. This meant that the SIO team was now down to three detective superintendents. In terms of proposed budgetary cuts this was a ‘good thing’ and had been on the cards for a while. It also meant that the possibility of Henry quitting was now much more distant because whilst the force was happy to run FMIT with just three supers, and therefore increase their already crippling workload, they couldn’t manage with two because if Henry went there was no one in line to replace him.
Henry was amazed to have been approached by the chief constable, begging him to stay on — ‘Another year at least, eh, mate?’ — and, ‘Oh, by the way, you’ve just inherited all of Joe’s ongoing cases and his other responsibilities.’
Henry had said yes, even though he’d made the chief squirm just a little bit. He could have refused and
